PLM Calls for Solidarity of the Poor Against Demolitions

“No to Sanctions Against the People of Iran!”

“No to US-EU-NATO Intervention!”

“Let the People of Iran Determine the Future of the Regime!”

“Philippines Must Take an Independent Stance from the US and Protect the Peoples National Interests!

We are extremely concerned about the escalating crisis in the Middle East as the US and its EU-NATO allies beat the war drums against Iran. While this has become a domestic campaign issue being exploited especially by Republican Party candidates in the lead-up to the presidential elections, Barack Obama, a Democrat President, is deploying thousands of US troops in Israel – around 9000 according to some reports – raising tensions in the region and signalling a threatening message of war preparations to Iran. Barack Obama has also agreed to fresh sanctions against Iran, including targeting the country’s Central Bank, with the EU following suit. Iran has responded in its defence by threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil transport hub.

The US charge is that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, despite Iran’s insistence that it is only developing nuclear energy capabilities and not nuclear weapons. Lest we forget, the US also falsely claimed that the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was building “weapons of mass destruction”, as a pretext for the US invasion of Iraq and the subsequent destruction of Iraqi society. Even the US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta admiited when he appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that Iran is not pursuing the ability to split atoms with weapons, saying it is instead pursuing “a nuclear capability.” In Panetta’s words: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability…” That “capability” falls in line with what Iran has said for years: that it is developing nuclear energy facilities, not nuclear weapons.

Ang Masa Magazine December-January Issue. Now available for download!

The Global Revolt of 2011: Not the Time to Make Peace with the System

In 2011 we experienced revolutionary upheavals and mass upsurges that have further deepened the crisis of global capitalism. The impact has been the deepening of the political crisis of the international capitalist system and the weakening of its ideological hold and legitimacy. The inequalities of the ‘American Dream’, for instance, are now almost household knowledge: that the top 1% get more than 20% of the national income. Perhaps the most telling figure is that one-tenth of the top 1% -- around 400 families -- earn as much as the bottom 120 million people.

It started with Tunisia, then Egypt and the Arab Spring, then spread to Spain and the Indignados movement, to Chile with the huge student mobilisation for an end to education for profit, to England with the student demonstrations followed by urban youth riots, to Athens with the wave of general strikes and massive mobilizations against the imposition of capitalist solutions to the economic crisis, or  neoliberalism ‘on stilts’, to the Occupy Movement in the United States: from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and beyond.

The Arab revolutions, propelled by demands for greater democracy against a backdrop of massive youth unemployment and increasing poverty, have ousted dictatorships propped up for decades by imperialism, especially in the case of Egypt and Tunisia, thus creating a political crisis in a  region of great strategic importance for the survival of the international capitalist system. The dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, a bulwark for imperialist intervention in the region, has also got its head on the chopping block with open speculation amongst imperialist circles about its inevitable and imminent downfall and the search for an acceptable pro-imperialist alternative. A key lesson of the Arab revolutions is that there can be no genuine democracy without revolutions: without revolutionary upheavals that overthrow old political regimes and systems of elite rule.