Lula wins, National strike in Italy, Growing anti-militarism climate sweeping the world

• Ben Norton: Huge news for Latin America, and the world. Lula da Silva has won reelection in Brazil, despite blatant electoral meddling by the US. Brazil is the biggest country in Latin America, a major geopolitical power, and a founding member of BRICS. The US empire wanted to put back in power the corrupt, far-right Bolsonaro dynasty, which is extremely pro-US and pro-Israel. The Bolsonaros vowed to minimize Brazil’s role in BRICS, serve the interests of Brazilian oligarchs and big landlords at the expense of the working class, uphold the global US dollar system, and let US corporations plunder Brazil’s natural resources — especially its rare earths and critical minerals, which the US wants to reduce its reliance on China. In contrast, Lula comes from a poor family and has always put the interests of the working class first. He has a non-aligned foreign policy, 100% supports Palestine, strongly believes in the importance of Global South integration and cooperation, and was a co-founder of BRICS. Lula will deepen Brazil’s partnership with China and the rest of the Global South. He will also continue to push for the transformation of the international financial system and will challenge the global dominance of the US dollar, which infuriates Washington.
•  Albanian students began removing and throwing cobblestones, to fend off attacks by police. The government’s response? Use an excavator to rip out the streets.

• Naked Capitalism: The US Is Quietly Ramping Up Its Troop Presence and Drone Capabilities in Latin America. With all that is going on in the world’s two main theatres of war, Ukraine and West Asia, both triggered principally by the US (alongside Israel in the latter case), it’s easy to forget that the US is also starting lots of new fires in its own “backyard”. Last week, the Trump administration announced the mobilisation of hundreds of Army soldiers to train local forces in the region as part of the Pentagon’s ostensible campaign to combat drug trafficking. Washington’s ramping up of its war on Latin America’s drug cartels — which began under the Biden administration but has intensified massively under Trump 2.0 — has precious little to do with stemming the flow of drugs into the US, or tackling the escalating violence of drug cartels across Latin America. No, this is primarily about what the US war on drugs has always been about: pursuing geopolitical and geostrategic dominance in key regions of the world while controlling and imprisoning for serious sums of money the restive populace at home. 

• Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkiye delegations arrived Monday in Tehran for talks with Iranian officials. The talks likely included a selection of topics including the KSA-Yemen war and upcoming US/Israeli war. Iran agreed to the meeting initiative strictly as the “Tehran Meeting,” not under the Mecca Pact framework. Iran discussed ending the war and reducing tensions, but Iran’s stance toward the US and its 7 conditions remained unchanged. Iran is willing to mediate, but AnsarAllah will continue fighting until Saudi Arabia accepts its conditions. Of course, there is no certainty that these negotiations will result in a positive outcome, but at least this message conveys that Iran is one of the main players in the region, and the project to push Iran aside and eliminate it with a full-scale Israeli hegemony has failed.

• Fars News: In response to Germany's escalating anti-Iran efforts, Iran has warned that if Berlin openly enters a military conflict against Iran, all German bases and related centers throughout the region will become legitimate and defensive targets of Iran.
• Yemen military: If Europe wants to stay warm this winter, it must remain silent and not provide any support to the Saudi Al Saud Zionists.

• On October 28, the world will vote to end the US blockade on Cuba for the 34th time. For 33 years, the UN General Assembly has declared that blockade a violation of international law by overwhelming margins, most recently 165 to 7 in 2025. The US has ignored every one of those votes. Now the blockade has intensified into something far worse. In January 2026, the US imposed a total energy blockade on Cuba, threatening any country that supplied the island with oil. Nine months later, doctors are performing surgery by cellphone light, neonatal incubators are failing during blackouts, and over 100,000 patients are waiting for surgery, 12,000 of them children. More than 70 people are dying of cancer every day. Infant mortality has risen 148% since 2018. Three hundred of Cuba’s 395 essential medicines are in shortage. From October 24 to 31, as part of the global #NoWarOnCuba campaign, we call on all friends of Cuba, and social justice organizations and movements worldwide to organize, mobilize, raise our voices, and show that the majority of the world is with Cuba. 

• Ecuador Arrests Left-Wing Opposition Leader Luisa González, President Noboa’s Former Rival Latin America’s shift toward the Donroe Doctrine’s right-wing authoritarianism is on full display in Ecuador. Under Washington-backed President Daniel Noboa,  leftist opposition leader Luisa González was barred from running and is now imprisoned under dubious, politically motivated charges. Amid growing anger over austerity and repression, Noboa’s government appears to turn toward dictatorship, weaponizing the justice system against political opponents. 

• Gulf News: British fighter planes will be deployed to help Saudi Arabia defend itself against increasing attacks from Yemen's Houthi rebels, the UK government announced. "The UK will fly defensive counter air missions to support the protection of Saudi cities and critical national infrastructure against aerial attack, using RAF Typhoon fighter jets," the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said in a statement. Britain will also deploy a military transport aircraft "to support the movement of defence material within Saudi Arabia alongside UK military advisers to support Saudi staff officers", the statement added. The Saudi capital's international airport has been targeted by strikes 20 times since the beginning of the month. The Houthis have imposed a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, hitting its tankers, seizing swathes of Yemen's Red Sea coast vital for oil exports and causing energy prices to jump, while also raining missiles on the kingdom. [This announcement comes as no real surprise considering it was the UK that created Saudi Arabia and supported the Saudi 12-year war on Yemen.]

• The Unione Sindacale di Base has called a general strike for all categories of public and private workers for Friday, October 30th, and is calling for a major day of protest across Italy. At stake is the soaring prices, especially fuel prices, which are weighing heavily on the meager wages of millions of workers, who can no longer even catch up with inflation. On the other hand, the inconsistency of the measures adopted by the Meloni government, which has openly sided with the oil companies and banks, is at stake. But the Meloni government has decided to allow the country to become poorer, enabling large corporations and banks to continue to speculate on our lives. Protests are raging across Europe, from Spain to France to Germany. Youth movements and trade unions are promoting large-scale demonstrations to demand social rights and defend living and working conditions. In Italy, the major trade unions are standing by and watching, even choosing to try to reach an agreement with employers' organizations on representation and wages when protests are needed. Several dockworker unions have launched an international strike for October 30th against arms trafficking, rearmament policies, and the militarization of ports. This historic event is gradually involving workers from more and more countries, extending beyond the Mediterranean to Northern Europe, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the US. Dockworkers are calling for mobilization against the war and the policies of aggression against peoples waged by the US and Israel, and against the complicity of European Union countries. The Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) considers the fight against high living costs and wage moderation to be closely linked to the fight against rearmament. The enormous public spending dedicated to the purchase and construction of new weapons, with a leap of tens of billions of euros in the state defense budget, clashes with the unwillingness to defend our wages and pensions. And instead of considering a real industrial policy for Italy, the government is dismantling what remains and focusing everything on armaments. In this situation, no one can think of saving themselves alone. We need to unite by the protests and build a general mobilization that unites all social and labor sectors to demand price controls, a boost to wages and pensions, and public spending directed toward social services and not weapons. Last year, a wave of protests shook the peninsula, protesting the Meloni government's complicity with the terrorist state of Israel. The government responded to those protests with security decrees and now with a law aimed at preventing criticism of the Palestinian genocide. 

Past campaigns: Catch the cruise missile

This is a chapter from my book entitled 'Come Together Right Now: Organizing Stories from a Fading Empire'. At the time of this I was working for the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice.

By 1986, the nuclear testing issue was hot in the peace movement and many activists would head out to the Nevada test site to protest the testing program. I was always looking for ways to make these same issues relevant in Florida.

We learned from the media that the Tomahawk nuclear-capable cruise missile was going to be flight-tested over the northwest Florida Panhandle. I remembered that Canada Greenpeace had organized a campaign to resist cruise missile testing in western Canada, and contacted them about a huge net they had used to try to “catch” the cruise. They sent me the 100 foot long net along with a “cruise catcher instructional video” that showed the net being hoisted by weather balloons. On the fifty-foot high net were large letters spelling out the words “Stop Nuclear Testing Now.”

When I got the net, I took it outside my Orlando office and stretched it out on the grass by the street to have a good look at it. A TV news reporter I knew drove by and stopped to ask what I was doing. I told him we were going to try to catch the cruise missile when it was tested over the Florida panhandle. I explained about the video. He asked me if I’d give him the exclusive on the story, and I said I would if he made me a number of copies of the video. We had a deal. He ran the story first, and it created a media circus.

Next, I took the net, all rolled up, to a well-attended news conference in Fort Walton Beach, my old high school stomping grounds near Eglin AFB. The cruise would be launched from ships in the Gulf of Mexico, would fly over the Panhandle into southern Alabama, circle around and then crash land on the Eglin bombing range. My plan was to say we’d catch the missile as it flew over the beach in Fort Walton. I handed out copies of the video to the TV stations.

The media loved the video which showed Greenpeace launching the net in the snows of Canada. Even though we never raised the net off the ground, the very TV image of the net being lofted with balloons somehow made people think that we were serious about the effort. Local Panhandle media ran the video footage on several TV news stations and the New York Times picked up the story. The media asked what I’d do with the cruise if we caught one and I responded that we’d split its belly open, clean out the insides, fill it with charcoal and have a fish fry on the beach. That statement made it into the press as well.

On October 19, 1986 we in the Florida Coalition organized a one day event in Fort Walton Beach called “First Strike! Gulf Coast Symposium on Preventing Nuclear War.” Our guest speakers were Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of Physics at the City University of New York, and the Rev. George Zabelka, the Catholic chaplain assigned to the 509th bomber group that delivered the nuclear death blow in Hiroshima. We met at a hotel in Fort Walton and began with a news conference. This was my first interaction with Michio Kaku, who would later become one of the founding members of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. At the news conference, I was awed by how Michio held the local reporters’ rapt attention as he recounted his own story about relatives in Hiroshima at the time of the U.S. nuclear attack. 

As Michio began to speak to the public at the conference, an old man from the local community approached him and yelled, “Give me liberty or give me death,” while hurling eggs at him. Luckily Michio was not hit. I escorted the would-be assailant out of the event.

Rev. Zabelka told the crowd of one hundred that, “In 1945 my change of heart began. I saw real war...and I want to expose the lie of all war—the absolute contradiction to everything our religion has taught us.”

Following the symposium, the assembled crowd moved outside for a four-mile march through the heart of Fort Walton’s “Miracle Strip,” past shops and restaurants and across the bridge over the Intra-Coastal waterway. We were led that day by Renee Williams of Fort Walton, whose husband was a colonel in the Air Force and assigned to Eglin. She was followed by a courtesy car carrying older activists who had less tolerance for the sweltering mid-day sun. It was topped with a mock cruise missile.

As we marched in one lane of traffic, a camouflaged convoy of troops passed us heading in the opposite direction. They were on maneuvers, practicing invasions on the local beach as part of a 12,000-strong “Operation Bold Eagle” exercise. Many of them waved and flashed peace signs to us as we passed so closely by each other in this military town where I had once lived. You don’t often get that kind of interaction in a peace march.

Earlier that day one of our speakers Shafea M’Balih, from the American Friends Service Committee in Atlanta, told us, “We need to talk with the unconvinced...we must go in the places where we are afraid.”   

Bruce

Why are leftists losing to the far-right on their own turf?

By Alexei Muratov

Look, comrades, what's going on. In France, Macron's rating has fallen to 15%, a historic low since 2017, and 82% of French people are dissatisfied with him. Against this background, Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen hold the first and second places among potential successors with 33% and 32%, respectively. Yes, they lost a few points after the anti-Semitic statements scandal, but they still dominate. And this is not because the French suddenly fell in love with fascism. But because the leftists could not answer the main question of the voter: how to fill up the car and pay the bills?

In Italy, the picture is even more revealing. In the south of the country, in Puglia, Calabria and Sicily, farmers and truckers are blocking ports and highways against diesel prices, which have risen due to the war in Iran. The average price of a liter of diesel in Europe has reached 2.11 euros, although a year ago it was 1.73. There was a shortage of goods in supermarkets and gas stations in the south, and in Milan the protests escalated into riots and clashes with the police. And here's the paradox: truckers and farmers in the South are traditionally close to Meloni's ruling right-wing coalition. In other words, the far-right is already in power, and now they are reaping what they have sown: their own electorate has taken to the streets because their incomes do not cover basic expenses. Meloni responds by sending five hundred soldiers to Milan and promising tougher penalties for rioters.

And in Poland, according to an IBRiS poll for Polsat News, the "Confederation" is gaining 12.7%, and together with the "Confederation of the Polish Crown" – almost a quarter of the votes. 16.7% of men support the "Confederation", and 37.4% of the youngest voters. Young people who should have voted for the left are going to the ultra-right. Because they promise to bring back cheap fuel, and the leftists promise "solidarity with Ukraine" and "European values."

And here the most unpleasant thing is revealed. The ultra–right does not "raise its head" - it occupies the vacuum left by the left. While the Social Democrats in Paris and Berlin are talking about high matters, their own electorate cannot fill up the car. Le Pen and Bardella are just talking: "We will return the fuel to you." It's cynical, but it works. And neo-fascist groups like CasaPound, who openly march through Rome with fascist greetings and demand "remigration," feel more confident because they see that the system is not coping, which means their time is coming.

For a citizen of the left, this must be an extremely unpleasant situation. Not because the right will win the election, but because the left has lost in its own field. The fuel crisis, inflation, and the collapse of the social contract are classic leftist themes. But the left is silent, and the far-right is shouting about it from the stands and at public rallies. And while European elites are looking for enemies all over the world, their own voters are looking for enemies in Brussels. Europe is weakening before our eyes, and those who were supposed to protect it are arguing about lofty matters, while their electorate is voting for those who promise at least cheap diesel. 

Kurt Vonnegut saw the future in 'Player Piano'

As Gen Z protests around the world I am drawn back to this 2011 blog post I made about the book Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. He saw the future way back in 1952.

During these "youth rebellions" my mind always returns to the book Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Published in 1952 (the year I was born) it is a book about mechanization/robotics and human alienation as a result of people becoming expendable to technology.

Today we have a corporate global economy that is doing everything possible to make people superfluous as profits come before people. We no longer have many telephone operators, we rarely use travel agents who are being replaced by airline web sites, and even in the grocery stores they've introduced self checkout (which I refuse to do). It's all about cutting jobs. There are zillions of other examples like auto manufacturing where robots and computers increasingly replace people. (AI is now going to replace millions of workers.)

In Player Piano we see conflict result as the younger generation gets the message that the existing society does not need them. The machines become more important than people. The displaced people begin to see the machines as their enemy - obstacles to their own future. In the end they revolt and try to destroy the enemy - the machines.

Vonnegut said this about his story, "Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs."

The social unrest around the world in recent months, has much to do with how the increasingly dominant corporate economy is structured. It is set up so the wealthy few get richer when they don't have to pay human beings, or they at least only have to pay them slave wages.

So is it really any surprise that the youth are tearing up their communities? What stake do they have in their own communities? Do they have jobs? Do they feel like they have a real future? Is their education really any good? Do they want their country to spend more on the military? Do they feel like bloviating politicians who threaten them with more police crackdowns have their interests at heart? No one listens to them now as they while away their seemingly useless lives playing video games or doing designer drugs which are most often supplied by the very elite that then puts them in jail for using. When these disaffected youth gather together and burn and pillage they not only feel a sense of power but the whole word "listens" to them and is forced, even for a moment, to consider them.

It's rather easy for people like me to say these youth need to develop more clear political demands. The bloviators will say they need to restrain themselves and bring their grievances to the "proper" political processes. But the political machine has no real intention, nor at this point any real capability, to deal with the fundamental problem at hand - and that is that global corporate society has written the masses of poor and working class people off the map. They have been expunged.....they don't exist.....and their numbers are growing everyday. The corporate elite have no intention of changing that fact. Here in the U.S. we see the whole program in motion as they attack with a vengeance programs of social uplift.

All the marginalized are left to do is to rattle their chains the best way they can. It's all very sad indeed.

Bruce

Sunday song

 

Request for financial support for GN space organizing

GN board chair Dave Webb speaking during space week in Oxford, England about the several US space war fighting bases in his country.

Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House members across from the Pentagon in Washington DC during space week. They have protested there every week for many years and have been pushed by the Pentagon across the street but many military personnel still park next to this spot or drive by.

Request for financial support for Global Network's space organizing work

Our goal: Building an international consciousness & movement to keep war out of the heavens

­Dear friends,

Pete Hegseth, 'Secretary of War', recently announced that the Pentagon has deployed weapons in space. Now more than ever your support to help us continue this work to prevent a deadly arms race in the heavens is critical.

I send you this letter from Southeast Asia where I am visiting my son and his family which now includes our 15-month old grandson. 

I've recently been in Bengaluru, India speaking at a Law conference at Reva University sponsored by the law school and the Global Network. The subject included Space Law and was hosted by Dr. Aruna Kammila, Director, School of Legal Studies and one of our GN board members. This was the third Space Law conference she has organized in her country. 

The aerospace industry has many Space Law events but they are always promoting the corporate agenda to grab celestial bodies for privatized space mining and military operations that would benefit mega-corporations. The Outer Space Treaty and Moon Treaty at the United Nations both declared that celestial bodies could not be owned by individuals or corporations nor be used as military bases. They are the 'province of all human kind'. 

First year Reva University law students made space issue posters and each team presented them during the space week conference.

So these three conferences inside India have been ground breaking for our perspective. And since India is a major world power, and a leading space power, it has been a huge gift to our movement. 

My next stop is to go to Kathmandu, Nepal where for the third time I'm being hosted by a Global Network affiliate group. They will have me speak at colleges and in a community event. The group is led by college professors and other local citizens.

Upon returning home near the end of November I will start work on our next Space Alert newsletter and will have much to share from these recent experiences.

All of this work requires resources for travel, printing and mailing our newsletter and covering very meager stipends for me and our Social Media Coordinator Lisa Savage. I can promise you we both work alot more than we are compensated because we so strongly believe in the important mission of the GN.

We hope that you can make a generous donation to the Global Network at this time. The new year 2027, which fast approaches, will be the 35th year of operation of the organization. It's amazing that we've been able to keep going and we intend to stay on task at this crucial moment as we see Trump declaring that the outrageously costly Golden Dome 'missile shield' will give the US the ability to 'dominate space and deny other nations access to space'.

Isn't it way past time that the US took seriously the annual Chinese and Russian proposal at the United Nations to ban all weapons in space?

Please use our secure website donation page to make a tax-deductible contribution here.

If your prefer to mail a check to the GN see just below for our mailing address in Maine.

All of us at the Global Network thank you for your support. We couldn't keep this space organizing work going without you.

Best wishes. 

Bruce K. Gagnon
GN Coordinator 

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
P.O. Box 652

Brunswick, Maine 04011

Space week protest at Bath Iron Works (General Dynamics) naval shipyard in Maine. They build Aegis destroyers outfitted with 'missile defense' interceptors which proved could serve as anti-satellite weapons (ASATS) during a test called Operation Burnt Frost in 2008 which destroyed a US failed satellite in space. 

the funnies