Unions covering more than 11,400 Walmart workers have shut down a strike after just six days while 28,000 US flight attendants at United will vote next month on approval to strike.
General Motors announced last Friday the shutdown of its manufacturing plants in Colombia and Ecuador, eliminating about 1,300 jobs, along with thousands more indirectly.
With Washington’s approval, the Ecuadorian ruling class has gone from granting Julian Assange asylum in 2012, to renouncing his asylum, and now storming a foreign embassy in Quito.
Teachers, aeronautical workers, river boat operators and others have launched strikes against Argentina’s soaring cost of living while 5,000 city workers in Edmonton have decisively rejected management’s “last, best and final offer.”
As recently as June 2022 and October 2019, Ecuador witnessed the same scenes of troops marching and tanks rolling into cities, killing dozens of demonstrators against social inequality.
Impermeable to mass sentiments for radical change, Ecuadorian capitalist politics vomited up the election of a man who personifies privilege and plutocracy.
While it is still unclear who was behind Villavicencio’s killing, it is evident that its effect will be to discredit the elections as a whole, creating the potential for their being overturned.
The official opposition leaderships are determined to suppress any struggles against Lasso’s measures by channeling them behind empty electoral promises.
Pilots at Southwest have voted by 99 percent for strike authorization, while 3,000 CN Rail workers have apparently ratified a new two-year agreement.
Extreme social inequality exacerbated by spiraling inflation, especially food and gas prices, triggered a social explosion in Ecuador.
Donziger, who won a $9.5 billion lawsuit against the oil monopoly Chevron in 2011 on behalf of Ecuadorian farmers and indigenous people, turned himself in to US federal prison authorities on Wednesday to begin serving a six-month sentence on a trumped-up contempt of court conviction.
Speaking in Quito as troops patrolled the streets, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “extraordinary moments” require “exceptional measures.”
Donziger, who exposed the decades-long contamination of the Amazon rainforest by the oil giant and won a billion-dollar settlement against the company, was sentenced on Friday to a maximum of six months in prison.
Plots of imperialist violence and assassination, once organised through accomplices, kept closely under wraps and strenuously denied, are now carried out in ever more open fashion.
The decision confirms that the January 4 ruling against extradition was only a tactical pause in an ongoing pseudo-legal manhunt, which is again proceeding apace.
Assange’s lawyer, Carlos Poveda, will appeal the “purely political” decision, which he argued was based on unsubstantiated allegations. He commented, “More than the importance of nationality, it is a matter of respecting rights and following due process in withdrawing nationality.”
The US indictment against Assange is based on fabrications concocted by American spies and a convicted Icelandic conman and pedophile who functioned as their stool pigeon.
That Johnson can tweet supposedly in defence of abused journalist Nicholas Watt while perpetrating the criminalisation of Assange speaks to the atrophying of any constituency for democratic rights within the bourgeoisie.
Globally recognised artist Ai Weiwei has said the decision by British visual arts organisation Firstsite to exclude an artwork invited from him is an attempt to silence his continued support for Julian Assange.
In addition to the Shiptons, the panel featured journalist Chris Hedges, prominent musician and Assange supporter Roger Waters, comedian Randy Credico as well as Aaron Maté from the Grayzone website.
