BAYAN-USA Statement: Obama, NDAA

News Statement

January 2, 2012

Reference: Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson, BAYAN USA, email: chair@bayanusa.org

NDAA WILL NOT QUELL THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF DISSENT AS GLOBAL CRISIS ENSUES– BAYAN USA

Filipino-Americans across the US, under the banner of BAYAN USA, and their supporters condemn the last minute moves by President Barack Obama to railroad the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on New Year’s Eve 2011. In one fell swoop, the White House has not only played a key role in the intensification of political repression in the United States and worldwide, it has ruthlessly exposed its true character of being first and foremost a loyal representative of the ruling 1%.

Threatened by the upswing of class rage and social unrest over intolerable structural economic and political inequities, as recently exemplified by the resilience of the Occupy Movement, the ruling 1% believes that the authorization of the US military toconduct warrantless arrests and indefinitely detain anyone—including US citizens–on US soil or anywhere in the world under the guise of national security will somehow quell growing dissent in the US and internationally by invoking fear. However, history has continuously proven that oppressed peoples readily shed their fear, even in the midst of the state’s repressive apparatus, to fight for the basic right to livelihood and dignity amidst a crisis created by monopoly capitalism, or the over-concentration of the world’s wealth in the hands of a minority elite determined to maintain its hegemonic control.

The worsening of the protracted global economic malaise continues as monopoly capitalism’s crisis of overproduction has spawned the crisis of public debt through its scheme of neoliberalism. While neoliberalism, under the guise of “free market capitalism”, has long-forced semi-colonies such as the Philippines and other parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into chronic debt and abject poverty, it has now erupted mercilessly against working people in advanced capitalist countries such as the US, Canada, and the members of the European Union. Neoliberalism’s financialization of capital has produced an acute debt crisis in the US that has ushered in record-breaking unemployment, under-employment, housing foreclosures, lack of access to food, health care, education, and other social services for working people in order to pay off a debt not of their own making.

Amidst human suffering, the ruling financial oligarchy continues to tow the lie that it can recover from the crisis by siphoning trillions in public funds to bail out big banks and financial firms to stimulate economic growth, thereby justifying back-breaking budget cuts and austerity measures on working families. In order to seize control of overseas markets and cheap raw materials, the ruling 1% must act through its lackeys in Washington to beef up its military industrial complex by throwing in more public funds to wage endless overt wars of aggression, proxy wars, covert counter-insurgency operations, militarization, and other forms of intervention abroad. In fact, the NDAA was signed as part of a defense spending bill that would allocate over $600 billion more in US tax dollars towards the country’s war machine, now granting it unlimited powers to act domestically. This includes targeting US activists who express solidarity for national liberation struggles abroad against US intervention, as well as support for governments asserting national sovereignty.

The Filipino people got a taste of abusive expansion of military powers, warrantless arrests, and indefinite detentions during the period of martial law under the former dictatorship of US puppet Ferdinand Marcos. But not even martial law, including the illegal detention and torture of thousands of dissidents throughout the Philippines, could stop a growing and fearless peoples movement for democracy and human rights that was decisive in ousting the Marcos dictatorship, reviving civil liberties, and opening democratic space in the country. It was through the people’s fight against US-directed fascist dictatorship in the Philippines that BAYAN Philippines was born in 1985.

It is expected that the minority of monopoly capitalists, in order to survive the very crisis it created and prolong its inevitable demise, will consolidate itself to concoct schemes of political repression to subdue peoples resistance. But this tiny and fragmented front of monopoly capitalists is no match for the broadening united front of oppressed peoples around the world engaged in class struggle for a better alternative. The NDAA and all other forms of repressive legislation will not succeed in quelling the righteousness of dissent for as the long as the global crisis continues. BAYAN USA proudly links arms with working people in the US to build a movement through education, organization, and mobilization that will defeat the NDAA and all other assaults on democracy, human rights, and civil liberties. ###

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BAYAN-USA is an alliance of 15 progressive Filipino organizations in the U.S. representing youth, students, women, workers, artists, and human rights advocates. As the oldest and largest overseas chapter of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN-Philippines), BAYAN-USA serves as an information bureau for the national democratic movement of the Philippines and as a campaign center for anti-imperialist Filipinos in the U.S. For more information, visit www.bayanusa.org

13th Anniversary of AnakBayan with AB-San Diego and Los Angeles

Anakbayan San Diego and Los Angeles will be celebrating the 13th Anniversary of AnakBayan or N30, Sunday December 4th, 2011 from 3-6pm at Queen Bee’s Art and Cultural Center.

We would like to extend our warmest holiday greetings and invite your organization to share in the celebration. There will be reportbacks on the exposure trips that took place in the Philippines during this past summer and cultural performances.

Our Story:

November 30 (N30) has a historical significance to Filipinos. It was the birth of the worker peasant and young revolutionary Andres Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan, which led the Philippines first unified armed resistance against the Spanish oppressors.

In 1964 Kabataang Makabayan, a militant youth and student organization was established on November 30 on the 101st Birth anniversary of Andres Bonifacio with Jose Maria Sison as the founding Chairman. They recalled Bonifacio’s memory as a firm believer in National Democracy and freedom from foreign domination.

It was not until 1998 that another broad-based youth and student movement for genuine freedom in the Philippines was established. November 30, 1998, over 1200 youth from all over the Philippines and from different youth organizations, held the AnakBayan founding congress at the Tondo Sports Complex. AnakBayan was established to carry forward the ideas of Kabataang Makabayan, to uphold Philippine sovereignty, and to carry forward the unfinished revolution of 1896.

This evening is to commemorate these historical moments of Filipino resistance and celebrate together as a community the continuing struggle for our freedom.

In Solidarity,

Anakbayan San Diego and Los Angeles

LUMALAKAS, LUMALUWAK, LUMALABAN… ANAKBAYAN!

International Solidarity – Occupy Wall Street Movement – From ILPS US ICC Members

 

Statement in Support of “Occupy Wall Street” Movement

ILPS – US International Coordinating Committee Members, October 13, 2011

 

IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL

The International League of Peoples Struggle, representing hundreds of organizations in 43 countries, stands with the young workers, students and unemployed occupying Wall Street and city centers around the United States. You are fighting a battle that needs to be fought. You have a right to march and protest without fear of arrest or brutality.

MASS ACTION IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD

You are right to take to the streets in mass action rather than waiting for change from overpaid Republican and Democratic politicians who are on corporate payrolls. You are right to follow the militant path taken by people from Egypt and Tunisia to Greece and Spain, from Britain to Chile to Wisconsin. From Social Security and the 8-hour day in the 1930s to civil rights laws in the 1960s, mass action is the only way people in this country have won any rights from the corporate ruling class.

You are right to take the battle to the doorsteps of that class, the unelected tyrants who own the top 500 banks and corporations.  Every day, at electronic speed, they send trillions of dollars around the world in financial transactions while millions cannot find work or afford health care. Their decisions shutter factories, destroy jobs, throw people out of their homes and wreck the economies of communities and entire nations.

WALL STREET IS THE ENEMY OF ALL HUMANITY

These bankers and billionaires also rake in super-profits from murderous imperialist wars against people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine and elsewhere. In the U.S., they have created a monstrous police state-prison-industrial complex to lock up mostly youth of color, the children of generations of workers, whom they now deny the right to a job.

BLOOMBERG LIES, JOBS DIE

New York City Mayor Bloomberg, one of the richest men on earth, lies when he says that banks create jobs. His banker pals at JPMorgan Chase and Citibank have destroyed 7 million jobs since 2008. This billionaire parasite is closing schools, bus lines, clinics and libraries while increasing his personal fortune by billions of dollars since he took office.

WHERE DID THE BANKERS GET THEIR BILLIONS?

They stole them! And not just the bailout money they were given by both the Bush and Obama administrations. The fortunes of the top 1 percent are the unpaid labor of generations of workers not just in the United States but all over the world. It was created in farms and factories, mills

and building sites, mines and offices from the Nile Delta to the Mississippi Delta, from South Africa to South Korea to South Carolina, from Mindanao to Mexico to Michigan. Many of the biggest fortunes in the U.S were founded on the slave trade. This wealth belongs to all humanity.

IMPERIALISM IS THE SOURCE OF THEIR POWER

It is not a matter of making the rich pay their “fair share.” They have no right to even a penny from anyone else’s labor. We must smash their power over our lives. The source of that power is imperialism, the merger of finance and industrial capital that is plundering the entire world. To fight them we must take a clear stand against imperialism and racism and join hands with people all over the globe who are fighting the same enemy.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties represent Wall Street, we have to fight for ourselves. As ILPS Chairperson, Prof. Jose Maria Sison, pointed out in his Keynote Address to the 4th International Assembly this past July, “The Democratic and Republican parties in the US compete as do Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola in flagrantly carrying out the policy dictates of the financial oligarchy and the military industrial complex. Both parties agree on raising the US debt ceiling. And to blunt public protests, they promise to bring down the public deficit, with the Democrats wishing to reduce the tax cuts for the corporations and upper class and the Republicans demanding the further reduction of government social spending.”

Everyone on this planet has the right to a job, food, health care, education, a home and a peaceful life. The wealth is there! We created it! But to take it back, we must deepen our struggle, strengthen our unity and increase our organization and continue to fight!

A JOB IS A RIGHT! HEALTH CARE IS A RIGHT! EDUCATION IS A RIGHT! A HOME IS A RIGHT!             WE CAN GET THEM IF WE FIGHT!

 DARE TO STRUGGLE, DARE TO WIN!

The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) is an anti-imperialist and democratic united front of mass formations at the international, global region and national levels that represents the interests of the workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, youth and students, women, queer and questioning, the homeless, migrants and refugees.  It brings together and coordinates the people’s organizations according to common multisectoral and sectoral interests and purposes. The ILPS initiates and launches mass campaigns and various types of activities and seeks the cooperation of other anti-imperialist and democratic forces and at the same time, it joins and supports their initiatives. For more information, or link up with us at http://ilps.info/joomsite/

ABSD X OSD

FROM MIND TO MASSES
by Ivan Penetrante
All poems are broken poems unless they are kiss or a raised fist
For Something, Someone, A cause
So the slogan better be worth something
so that poems can be worth something,
But don’t worry I hear you
and I love what you say
I love those words from the wise to Decolonize you mind,
But mind you that your mind isn’t separated from your body
and the bodies of others
Not separated from the material world,
Materialism
Not materialistic
Don’t get twisted
You missed it
When your mind didn’t see
The shadow of the laborer,
In the products that you buy,
And the products that you walk by,
That even the time for this poem is underwritten by the labor time,
The labor time that produces
The racial time
The gender time
The sexuality time,
In the products that you buy
Lifestyles that you buy into
The consciousness that you craft
The objects around you
laced with the voice of laborers
and the shadow of the wealthy few,
Only capital
is transnational,
We’re their tools
My identity and yours, supposedly free to float?
The multiple identities in you and me: a Body-moving-and-grooving-dancing-disOriently-disrupting-discourse?
Multiple identities free and in flux?
In that logic we’re still fucked,
Because the masters master that,
Multiple identities is fine by them
They love their glass ceilings
and
their multiculturalism,
The fluid self and Diaspora-moving body doesn’t make you free,
Know the conditions of possibility,
So restart the engine or start where you’re at,
Because that rationale
Ain’t happening now
When the echoes from overseas
Oversee who we are,
Echoes of the (neo)colonized
Landless and urban poor
To severing of ties
And the severing of tongues
The Balikbayan box coffins
The U.S. in us
from Hamleting and the scorched-earth-tactics-water-board-trajectory
Scorched our eyes and skin through time,
And we come across
when coming across
oceans
Like conveyor-belted products
Readymade, Racialized-gendered-fetishized,
Readymade-wealth making-wealth becomes an upward gravity
Money hand-over-fist to capitalist,
Trickle-down fist becoming a downward strike
And your identity
Manufactured like this,
has meaning
as it basks in the light
Of an exploitive
working
day,
But don’t fret, don’t fret,
learn the contradictions emanating from the
Basss…e
…Fret
That structures your speech, expression, and consciousness,
learn the contradictions, learn the many dimensions of you
and stay on that decolonizing mind-grind,
Or better yet,
just decolonize,
from the mind
to
matter,
Not an individual practice, be called and call forth the masses,
The decolonizing mind-grind in service
of the
massline,
Unravel the stoppage in your speech,
To express yourself,
So that we express
Ourselves
Our grievances
Our list of demands,
So that this
broken
poem
finds finality,
So that a kiss
becomes upward gravity,
So that this fist
Becomes an upward gravity,
And press it against your flaws and your privileges, bourgeois mind-traps of internalized heteropatriarchy and white supremacy,
Take inventory
take aim
remold
And upsurge the insurgent heart
and assert the brave mentality,
Learn, practice, learn, practice, learn, practice
Rectify,
Internalize to the mind
and
Seize the time
Seize the time
Seize the time!

Fil-Ams on OWS– To Stand Against Economic Inequality Is Justified and Necessary

Press Statement

October 12, 2011

 

Reference: Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson, BAYAN-USA, email: chair@bayanusa.org

 

Fil-Ams on OWS– To Stand Against Economic Inequality Is Justified and Necessary

BAYAN-USA Statement on Occupy Wall Street

 

Filipino-Americans across the US, under the banner of BAYAN-USA, salute the historic Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in New York City and the surge of solidarity protests that have unfolded across the country and even globally. BAYAN-USA member organizations are amongst those who are proudly marching in the streets of downtown Manhattan as well as in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco, under the umbrella call of exposing and opposing the vastly unequal distribution of wealth between the American people and the tiny financial oligarchy of banks and financial firms Wall St. represents.

 

At a minimum, OWS raises the basic question of fairness and equality, and the fact that there are no such principles under the current state of the US economic system. At a maximum, OWS has the potential to qualitatively raise the level of class consciousness in the US that can contribute to the shaping of a broad anti-imperialist united front in the belly of the world’s number one imperialist superpower. Whatever direction it takes, the unraveling of the rotten character of capitalism and its irreconcilability with human prosperity continues to push the angry American people to the realization that to stand against economic inequality is not only justified, but necessary for change to happen.

 

The ongoing decline of the domestic US economy in the form of the liquidation of the public sector, the hyper-dominance of military and prison industries, and the massive multi-trillion dollar bail-outs of big banks such as JP Morgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs is the result of a protracted domino effect from the worsening global economic crisis. This crisis is attributed to the flawed and unsustainable character of monopoly capitalism, or imperialism. Imperialism’s neoliberal economic framework, with its reliance on finance capital, has transformed the global economy into a virtual pyramid scheme of transnational bank transactions and predatory lending, built on risk and speculation versus the real economy.  It is the same economic decline that moves the OWS protesters across the US because of rising unemployment and that is chronic to the Philippine economy, driving 4,000 Filipinos to leave the country everyday in search of jobs.

 

As a large immigrant group in the US, Filipino-Americans have a key role to play in exposing that the tyranny of corporate greed is rooted in the system of imperialism that not only impacts our communities here in the U.S., but is the root of the suffering of our people in our homeland and the cause of forced migration of Filipinos throughout the world. This is because of the Philippines’ particular experience as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial outpost for US imperialism, and how Third World poverty is manufactured out of this condition. This continues to be apparent under the regime of Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III, whose neoliberal economic agenda has turned the Philippine economy into one dependent on foreign investment rather than on its own domestic production as a nation. Without a Philippine economy that is nationally sovereign– including a genuine agrarian reform program that is equitable for the majority of the Filipino people who live off of it and a genuine program for national industrialization that can provide jobs so Filipinos don’t have to look for them abroad– the Philippines will remain tied to a rotten global economic system that is showing clear signs of decay, causing more burdensome misery for the Filipino people.

 

As with all other pyramid schemes, this one too is destined to collapse. But the timing of this collapse can be hastened by a broad mass movement determined to knock it down and build a better alternative. Just as the people’s movement in the Philippines for genuine national independence and democracy espouses a vision for socialism as a viable and pro-people alternative, as are governments in Latin America asserting their sovereignty by nationalizing their industries and natural resources, so must the American people fight for an alternative economic system that not only puts people’s needs over profits, but one that is not built on world hegemony and the destruction of other nations all over the world.

 

PEOPLE OVER PROFIT!

NO TO CORPORATE GREED!

DISMANTLE  FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY!

DOWN WITH US IMPERIALISM!

LONG LIVE OCCUPY WALL STREET!

 

###

 

BAYAN-USA is an alliance of 15 progressive Filipino organizations in the U.S. representing youth, students, women, workers, artists, and human rights advocates. As the oldest and largest overseas chapter of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN-Philippines), BAYAN-USA serves as an information bureau for the national democratic movement of the Philippines and as a campaign center for anti-imperialist Filipinos in the U.S. For more information, visit www.bayanusa.org

International Day of the Disappeared

STOP ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES NOW!
JUSTICE FOR ALL VICTIMS OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES!

 

Amnesty International USA article: Remember the Disappeared in the Philippines

Justice for Melissa Press Conference, Los Angeles

MEDIA ADVISORY
August 22, 2011

Contact: Kuusela Hilo
Justice for Melissa Roxas Campaign
Email: info@justiceformelissa.org
Website: www.justiceformelissa.org

What: Justice for Melissa Press Conference; Appeal to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

Where: Immanuel Presbyterian Church
3300 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90010

When: Thursday, August 25, 2011, 6 PM – 7 PM

*** PHOTO OPPORTUNITY ***

Los Angeles, CA. In commemoration of the International Day of the Disappeared, Melissa Roxas, a torture survivor who was disappeared for six days at the hands of the Philippine military, will file an official appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Professor Juan Mendez to help remove roadblocks to her pursuit of justice. Working with a team of world-renowned international human rights lawyers who have joined the Justice for Melissa Roxas campaign, Roxas will ask the Rapporteur to call on the Philippine government to fully disclose all information regarding Roxas’ case, cooperate with investigations, pursue charges against those responsible for her abduction and torture, and extend an invitation to the Rapporteur to conduct a visit to the Philippines to investigate the human rights situation.

On Thursday evening, human rights defenders and survivors of human rights violations from different countries will join Roxas for a special press conference to shed light on the continuing impunity in the Philippines and hope for justice for all victims of torture and disappearance worldwide. Victoria Don, Esq., Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris Hoffman & Harrison, LLP; Julie Gutman, Executive Director of Program for Torture Victims; Marvyn Perez, survivor of torture from Guatemala; and Rev. David Farley, United Methodist Church, with the Justice for Melissa campaign, will be featured speakers for this press conference.

In May 2009, while doing community health work in the Philippines, Roxas became the first American citizen under the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo administration to be abducted and tortured by members of the Philippine military. When she surfaced six days later, Roxas became one of only a handful of survivors who lived to recount her ordeal.

BAYAN USA, GABRIELA USA, Program for Torture Victims (PTV), Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), Habi Arts, Sisters of Gabriela Awaken, Filipino Migrant Center, San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, Babae San Francisco, Anakbayan San Diego, Anakbayan Los Angeles and other organizations are co-sponsoring this Justice for Melissa Press Conference.

U.S. Debt Crisis

Support Domestic Workers

Attention San Diego: Please show your support for domestic workers by signing this petition and joining this facebook page.

Also see http://cadomesticworkers.org/

The Introduktion

For more information and updates on performers and vendors visit introduktion.tumblr.com

RSVP on our event page: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=173712166032943