DOCUMENTS: All the Depositions in the Tesla Shareholders Litigation case

[UPDATE (31 October 2019): We are now in the process of breaking out each of the individual depositions so you can just download whichever one you’re looking for instead of having to download the entire sets of depositions and then plow through 800 pages to get to what you want.]

Note by Iwpchi: Thanks to https://www.plainsite.org for obtaining and archiving these *very interesting* documents! They have a lot more if you’d like to learn more about the extent of the Tesla/SolarCity securities fraud case here:

https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/32atfyhh5/delaware-court-of-chancery/in-re-tesla-motors-inc-stockholder-litigation/

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Delaware Court of Chancery
Case No. 12711-VCS
In Re Tesla Motors, Inc. Stockholder Litigation

Document 328, Attachment 1

[Exhibits 1-7]

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Exhibit 1: Hayden Barnard (founder, Paramount Solar; former Chief Revenue Officer, SolarCity)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 1_Hayden Barnard

Relevant emails:

1.  Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Emails_Exhibit 19_Hayden Barnard (TESLA 3404-3405)
2. [Not located] (TESLA 412642)
3. Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Emails_Exhibit 44_Hayden Barnard (TESLA 8245-8246)

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Exhibit 2: Gregory Bilicic (Investment banker, Lazard Freres & Co., hired by SolarCity to represent them in the negotiations with Tesla, who were interested in taking over SC)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 2_Gregory Bilicic

Relevant emails and documents:

1.  [Exhibits 1-11 not located]
2.  Exhibit 12:  Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Emails_Exhibit 81_TESLA 1882_Exhibit 12_Gregory Bilicic  (Exhibit 81 TESLA 1882)

[Note: It appears that most of these documents have been withheld at the request of Lazard (presumably because they contain information that pertains to Lazard’s own confidential institutional communications which are deemed not relevant to the pertinent legal issues in the Tesla Stockholders Litigation itself (too bad because they would undoubtedly be juicy indeed). It’s important to remember that this proceeding is held under the jurisdiction of the Delaware Chancery Court system; it’s not a regular criminal court proceeding, so the rules of evidence and discovery are presumably not the same as in the latter.  If these emails and documents are included with the materials published so far by PlainSite, we have not been able to locate them. – IWPCHI]

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Exhibit 3: Brad Buss (former CFO, SolarCity; former CFO, Board of Directors, Tesla)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 3_Brad Buss

Miscellaneous documents:

1. Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Emails_Exhibit 73_TESLADIR 57808_Brad Buss (Brad Buss, “SolarCity Corporation Termination Certification”, 17 March 2016)

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Exhibit 4: Toby Corey (former Chief Revenue Officer, SolarCity)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 4_Toby Corey

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Exhibit 5: Robyn Denholm (Chairman, Tesla Board of Directors)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 5_Robyn Denholm

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Exhibit 6: Antonio Gracias (Lead Independent Director, Tesla Board of Directors)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 6_Antonio Gracias

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Exhibit 7: Donald R. Kendall, Jr. (Former member, Solar City Board of Directors)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 7_Donald Kendall Jr

 

Complete set in the original single document format from PlainSite:

Exhibits 1-7: Depositions of Brad Buss, Robyn Denholm et al

 

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Delaware Court of Chancery
Case No. 12711-VCS
In Re Tesla Motors, Inc. Stockholder Litigation
Document 328, Attachment 2

[Exhibits 8-14]

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Exhibit 8: Courtney McBean (Lawyer, in Charge of team from Evercore which had been hired by Tesla to advise/represent them on acquisition of Solar City)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 8_Courtney McBean

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Exhibit 9: Elon Musk Vol I (CEO, Tesla; CEO, CTO, SpaceX; co-founder, Chairman of Board, SolarCity) (Deposition given Saturday, June 1 2019)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 9_Elon Musk_Vol I

Relevant emails and documents:

1.  Exhibit 1: Elon Musk SolarCity Shareholders Litigation Deposition Vol I, pg 18_Exhibit 1_detail 10-Q 30sep2016
2.  Exhibit 2:

 

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Exhibit 9: Elon Musk Vol II (Deposition given Sat. Aug. 24, 2019)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 9_Elon Musk_Vol II

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Exhibit 10: Kimbal Musk (Elon Musk’s brother; Member, Board of Directors, Tesla)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 10_Kimbal Musk

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Exhibit 11: Lyndon Rive (Cousin of Elon and Kimbal Musk; co-founder, CEO of SolarCity)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 11_Lyndon Rive

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Exhibit 12: Tanguy Serra (former COO, President, and CFO of SolarCity)
Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 12_Tanguy Serra

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Exhibit 13: Ira Ehrenpreis

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 13_Ira Ehrenpreis

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Exhibit 14: Jason Wheeler

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Deposition_Exhibit 14_Jason Wheeler

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Complete set in the original single document format from PlainSite:

Exhibits 8-14: Depositions of Courtney McBean, Elon Musk et al

*******************************************

Delaware Court of Chancery
Case No. 12711-VCS
In Re Tesla Motors, Inc. Stockholder Litigation
Document 338, Attachment 4

[Exhibit 75]

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Exhibit 75: Radford Small (CFO, SolarCity; VP of Global Capital Markets, Tesla)

Tesla Shareholders Litigation_Depositions_Exhibit 75_Radford Small

U.S. Navy to Climate Change Deniers: “You’re In Denial” (Updated 13 October 2019)

[This page was updated on 13 October 2019; scroll down for the updated info – IWPCHI]

 

The next time you are told by some scientifically illiterate blowhard that global warming/climate change is #FakeNews, show them this:  the U.S. Navy’s “Arctic Roadmap 2014-2030”.

Published by the U.S. Navy’s “Task Force Climate Change”, it describes the strategic opportunities and threats that are emerging in the polar regions as the polar ice caps shrink due to… you guessed it! Climate change!  Even the most obtuse opponent of environmentalism will be hard-pressed to deny that maybe… just maybe… the climatologists and long-term defense planners working for the U.S. Navy know what they’re talking about.

Climate change is real; it’s been confirmed and reconfirmed by scientists – and military strategists – working for affected nation-states all over the Earth.  To deny this is to declare yourself to be beyond the reach of logic and scientific reasoning, period.  That doesn’t mean that we have to believe everything the most alarmist of the environmentalists say; it means we have to face facts no matter how unpleasant or counter-intuitive they may seem to be and prepare to face these challenges head-on as they are confirmed to be real and not merely normal and temporary fluctuations in climatic data. The capitalists are salivating over their fantasies of how to profit from the human misery and mass migrations sure to be caused as low-lying coastal areas are flooded over the next several decades. As US and NATO imperialist military planners strive to take advantage of global warming in order to find new ways to launch attacks against their opponents – threatening WWIII – workers must realize that there literally is no future for them under the capitalist system. We workers need to take power out of the hands of the capitalist greedheads and into our own hands so we can create a socialist future for the workers of the world, free from capitalist exploitation, needless human suffering and war.

— IWPCHI

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UPDATE:

We have found a few new sources of information on the massive, rapid warming trend in the polar regions of Earth, and the US Navy’s response to this phenomenon.

First, we researched the history of submarine surfacings at the geographic North Pole.  The first submarine to do so was the USS Skate, on 17 March, 1959.  Since that time, a number of surface ships and submarines have operated on the open surface waters at the North Pole.

The US Navy’s “Arctic Roadmap”, published in February of 2014, was, due to the rapidly warming conditions at the poles, updated again in 2017.  The update (which we found freely available online) is in the form of a slideshow entitled “The US Navy and the Arctic”; you can download a copy of it from our website by clicking on this link.

This is the slide we found to be most shocking as it reveals the rapid decline of the permanent sea ice present in the north polar region today, and the incredible rate of reduction in that sea ice which is expected to open up new trans-polar shipping routes for at least several weeks a year by 2025!

US Navy – Arctic Ice Coverage – 2012-2030.

As we obtain more information on this subject we’ll add it to this article.

100th Anniversary of the “Worst Racial Massacre in US History”: the Elaine, Arkansas “Race Riot” of 1919

The Arkansas Race Riot by Ida B Wells (1920) cover.  Source: The Internet Archive

We are very pleased to present to our readers Ida B. Wells’ account of what has been called “the worst racial massacre in U.S. history”: the 1919 mass-murder of the black citizens of Elaine, Arkansas, on the 100th anniversary of this horrific event.

Racism is an endemic part of the capitalist economic system and can not be reformed away. The capitalist classes of the world, in order to maintain the hegemony of their numerically tiny minority over the vast numbers of workers, utilize every method available to keep the working class forces fighting each other so that the capitalist class can more easily rob the workers blind. By dividing the workers against themselves along racial, sexual, religious and national-origin lines the capitalist class has for the most part successfully maintained their class minority’s domination over the working class supermajority. Only in a handful of countries have the workers successfully fought to emancipate themselves from capitalist class domination and exploitation: in the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Cambodia. In *every* successful workers socialist revolution in history a Leninist vanguard party (or an organization closely modeled on the Leninist vanguard party) was created to lead the struggle. Only through workers socialist revolution can the working class emancipate itself from the systematic economic exploitation of the capitalist class. In order to achieve that goal, the working class *must* create its own revolutionary working class vanguard party based on the revolutionary socialist political ideology of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.  Our goal is to organize such a party. All anti-racist workers are encouraged to contact us and join in this great work!  Workers of the World, Unite!

—- Iwpchi

The Arkansas Race Riot by Ida B. Wells (1920; 62 pages, .pdf – click on link to download)

Thanks to the Internet Archive for the copy of this original document.

Book Review: “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors”, by Edward Niedermeyer

Book Review:

Ludicrous, by Edward Niedermeyer. It will not take you 14 days to read this book! Not speed-readers, we knocked it off quite enjoyably in a few hours.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆  Three Red Stars – Recommended

“Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors”
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 2019 by Ben Bella Books, Dallas TX
275 pages, Hardcover
Review by Iwpchi

We were pleased to see at our local library what – so far as we know – is the first critical look at Tesla Motors and its truly “ludicrous” billionaire “visionary genius(TM)”-in-chief Elon Musk.  Edward Niedermeyer’s new book is a brief overview of the trials and tribulations of Tesla Motors from its founding in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning right up until 2018. Written in an easily-accessible journalistic prose, it’s a quick read – we knocked it off easily in a few hours without skipping through it and enjoyed every bit of it.  Unfortunately, for those of us who have been following the Tesla saga in real-time the past several years, the book has little that is new beyond what will be familiar to the thriving, well-informed and highly critical online #TSLAQ community.  For the Teslarati, who have been drinking the Kool-Aid spewing forth from Tesla’s well-organized and effective public relations office (via Reddit, Twitter, Tesla Motors Club and quasi-official Tesla fanzines like Electrek) the book will provide perhaps the first eye-opening glimpse of the grim reality behind the carefully stage-managed dog- and-pony-shows endlessly being presented to the public by Tesla and its P.T. Barnum-like con-man CEO Elon Musk.

Though the book is an entertaining read, it does have its shortcomings: first of all, it is not an exhaustive study of the company at all, either from an economics or any other standpoint.  Those books will undoubtedly be coming along later (we’re looking at you, Charley Grant lol!); this one is merely an introduction for the curious layman who wants a look behind the shaky walls and flimsy tents of Elon Musk’s Potemkin auto manufacturing debacle.  For instance: very little is said about the very poor and unsafe working conditions at Tesla’s various factories that were the direct result of billionaire Musk’s vast ignorance of and contempt for standard safety practices in modern manufacturing facilities.  Even the well-known and confirmed story that Musk would not allow the typical “safety yellow” paint to be used as warning markings for dangerous areas in his factories (which is the standard practice in factories throughout the USA and the world)  “because he doesn’t like the color yellow” was left out – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  The book also does not give us any hard data on the human cost of Musk’s disregard for safe workplace practices in terms of actual injuries and/or fatalities at his various manufacturing facilities – data that we imagine the United Auto Workers Union – busy trying to unionize Musk’s factories – would be only too happy to have provided.

We would also have liked to have seen a chapter on the other even more egregious examples of Musk’s much ballyhooed (and basically non-existent) “Visionary Genius(TM)”: his many silly projects and other corporate entities, like his asinine “Hyperloop” and his ridiculous “Boring Co.” boondoggle.  They’re mentioned, but only in passing.  Musk creates these phony companies and then promotes them in the manner of a classic American huckster whenever there is a need to distract the public from the latest torrent of bad publicity threatening to topple his rickety Rube Goldberg-like pyramid of financially co-dependent companies. To the general public, poorly-educated as it is by the vastly underfunded US capitalist public school system, these laughably improbable corporations and their idiotic and non-existent products – like Solar City’s fake “Solar Roof tiles” – seem like the products of a God-like visionary who thinks big and whose amazing scientific knowledge and engineering prowess will usher in the 22nd century 80 years early. To actual scientists and engineers, (and to us), all that Musk has demonstrated to the world is that he is – like almost all of his top capitalist class brethren – a personal-greed-motivated ass-clown who has *no* engineering experience or skills, a superficial understanding of basic scientific and engineering concepts (at best) and who just goes around making absurd shit up all the time – like his laughable, impractical and (at this time) technologically impossible plans to “colonize” and even “terraform” Mars.  Elon Musk is nothing but a con man who has erected one of the world’s greatest Ponzi schemes nakedly in front of the eviscerated US government agencies charged with enforcing laws against corporate fraud and the entire world; Musk’s bald stupidity when it comes to the brutal fundamental realities of basic capitalist economics will undoubtedly lead to the spectacular collapse of his cockamamie empire – including his one viable company, SpaceX.  Musk will probably walk away from the collapse of his empire with enough of his ill-gotten gains to maintain quite a luxurious lifestyle for the rest of his life; but the tens of thousands of workers whose hard labor under brutal conditions actually made him all his billions will be thrown out of work and their lives irreparably damaged because they had faith in this billionaire asshat to provide them and their families with long-term financial stability.  This we do not find to be the least bit amusing.  It is why we say that the capitalist system must be overthrown and replaced with a planned socialist economic system if the working class wants to be able to provide for their families for the long term – or even to survive at all, as the “visionary geniuses” of the capitalist class intend to replace as many workers with robots as possible the minute the technology comes available (which will begin to happen in earnest within our lifetimes).

Edward Niedermeyer was not out to bring down Elon Musk and his Chaplinesque car company when he wrote this book, although he tells us that as soon as he began writing critical articles about Tesla and Musk he came under a company-directed smear campaign orchestrated by Tesla and Musk (which is the standard operating procedure for that shameless “visionary genius(TM)” Musk and his co-conspirators). And his book fails to utilize all the currently available material that could bring Musk’s phony empire crashing down to Earth, or to develop any new material that is unknown to the well-informed #tslaq-ers. But for the general reader who has yet to explore the tawdry shucking-and-jiving going on behind the curtain at P.T. Musk’s sleazy corporate chicanery-factories, it will be a very informative and enjoyable read.

If the workers of the world want to find heroes, they need to look elsewhere than among the world’s greedhead capitalist classes, who are only out to rob the working classes of the world blind.  The heroes of the future who will save the workers from being phased-out entirely will either come from within the working class or they will not come at all.  Elon Musk is just the latest example of the tired cliche of the wealthy hero who so loves mankind that he utilizes all his wealth to bring about positive change for the entire human race.  That has always been a capitalist myth and will always be a capitalist myth; and it will continue to fool the gullible until the working class realizes that only we the workers ourselves have a vested interest in creating a better future for the entire human race.

– Iwpchi

1945 Anti-racism Pamphlet Issued by the U.S. United Auto Workers Union

We found this very interesting document on the website of the US National Archives.  Published in April, 1945 and entitled “A Bill of Rights for All UAW Members”, it’s a WWII-era anti-racism pamphlet published by the then-still-heavily-Communist-Party-influenced leadership of the UAW.  In 1945 of course, the US Communist Party was espousing full-fledged support of the USA’s war effort to smash Nazism (the better to defend the USSR).  Within a few years the Communists would be driven out of the AFL-CIO unions and replaced with even more nakedly pro-capitalist anticommunist leaders.

The CPUSA was in the forefront of the US civil rights movement from its founding just after WWI until the 1960s. Under the guidance of the then-Leninist COMINTERN, the fledgling CPUSA was ordered to organize black workers in the USA as an important vanguard of the US proletariat. They were to abandon any lackadaisical attitudes towards organizing blacks an an especially oppressed caste of workers in the racist capitalist USA and to intransigently fight politically against the then-prevailing black leadership of Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington who espoused what the COMINTERN denounced as an absolutely unacceptable program of “separate but equal” segregation of the working class.  This political intervention by the COMINTERN into the US political scene via the Communist Party of the USA split the civil rights movement into two camps; the integrationists, all heavily influenced by the Communist Party’s political leadership on this question, eventually prevailed (although, unfortunately, in a pro-capitalist reformist rather than revolutionary socialist form). The truly heroic and selfless work of US Communist Party workers in the 1920s and 1930s is vividly captured in Robin D.G. Kelley’s magnificent book “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression”.

With no further ado here’s the UAW’s anti-racist pamphlet from 1945.

—- IWPCHI

April 1945 – A Bill Of Rights for All UAW Members_United Auto Workers Union

 

 

Science: Canadian Wildfires Smoke Out Large Sections of North America

This past month a number of major fires have broken out in Alberta, Canada; these fires have grown to become among the largest wildfires ever observed in North America. The smoke from the fires is causing severe health crises in Edmonton, Alberta and in every location downwind of these fires, from Montana all the way to the east coast of the US and out into the Atlantic Ocean. If these streams of smoke haven’t already reached the coast of Europe and North Africa by now, they will by the end of this week.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires casting hazy skies across several states this morning and is clearly showing up on satellite. Look for the brownish color across Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan in this loop. @NOAASatellites pic.twitter.com/FMHXfXclap

— National Weather Service (@NWS) May 31, 2019

Here in Chicago we were made aware of this awesome phenomenon over this past week due ironically to our attempts to observe the awful results of one of multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s vanity projects: the initial deployment of 60 highly-reflective communications satellites of a proposed 12,000 satellite network called #Starlink.

Initially we noticed unusually hazy skies as we attempted to observe Musk’s recently launched #SpaceX #Starlink satellite “train” that has aroused the anger of ourselves and professional and amateur astronomers all over the world. This is what the initial #Starlink launch of 60 satellites looked like before the smoke from the Alberta wildfires made observation of them all but impossible in the eastern 2/3rds of North America:

If we continue to allow billionaires to launch vanity projects like this for-profit-for-military-use-only 12,000-satellite #Starlink boondoggle, pretty soon no one on Earth will be able to enjoy a night under the stars without seeing the endless distractions of literally hundreds of satellites passing overhead every hour. Look at how badly a mere 60 of a planned 12,000 #Starlink satellites interfered with a simple observation of Mars:

So we set out to observe how bad the #Starlink satellites would interfere with astronomical observations over Chicago, completely unaware of the vast column of smoke from the Alberta wildfires that had been blown across North America and were concentrated right over Chicago on the night of May 30/31. Looking up into a cloudless sky that night we could only see Mars clearly; major constellations like Cassiopeia and Ursa Major were completely unidentifiable even with binoculars! The entire sky had a milky appearance that looked like fog; but when we tried to use binoculars to identify major northern constellations like Cassiopeia or Ursa Major we could clearly see only a handful of the brightest stars. Fog this was not. Nor was this phenomenon  caused by clouds. We initially attributed it to an unusually heavy form of the usual haze that forms over major cities like Chicago thanks to car and truck exhaust and which is then illuminated by the horrible lighting systems in major US cities that stream light up into the sky instead of down on the ground where it’s needed.

Smoke from the wildfires in Alberta (upper left corner of red circled area) were already seriously impacting states and cities far southeast of that Canadian province by 31 May 2019. Grey area encircled shows the extent and density of the smoke; Chicago is the red dot in center of circled area. Source: NOAA.gov Enhancement by IWPCHI

When we were unable to even see Cassiopeia or Ursa Major on a clear, moonless night we knew something else was happening. The milky white appearance of the midnight and even post-midnight sky when satellite imagery showed little if any cloud cover over Chicago led us to search for the cause. We soon found out about the Alberta fires.

These photos taken from Des Plaines, IL show how profoundly the smoke from these fires in Alberta have been impacting the Chicago area.

Barely visible jet contrail over Des Plaines, IL_dusk, 31May2019. Photo by IWPCHI

31may2019 Clear sky over Des Plaines, IL looks cloudy due to smoke from Alberta, CA wildfires. Photo by IWPCHI

Sunset as viewed from Des Plaines, IL 31may2019 The only clouds were over far NW IL at least 85 miles away when this photo was taken. Photo by IWPCHI

Smoke density analysis by NOAA 31may2019_selection is right over Chicago, IL

Tonight, June 1st I observed one of the most astounding phenomena I’ve ever seen: a rainstorm was passing over Des Plaines heading north as the sun was setting in the west and coming out from behind a cloud bank 25-30 degrees above the horizon – a perfect setting for a rainbow in the east. But there was no rainbow because due to the intense scattering of light from the Sun caused by the heavy smoke over the Chicago area, even though there were no clouds obstructing the sunshine the diffusion of the sunlight prevented even a partial rainbow from forming! The shadows cast by the direct sunlight through very light rain showers reminded me of the kind of light given off by the Sun during an annular eclipse.

Direct sunlight so weakened by dense smoke from Alberta wildfires it can barely cast shadows and can’t create rainbow under optimal conditions_1 Photo by IWPCHI

1 June 2019, Des Plaines IL – Direct sunlight unable to cast sharp shadow on wall due to dense smoke from Alberta, Canada wildfires. Photo by IWPCHI

At the present time it is impossible to even observe the night sky over Chicago because of the dense smoke from the wildfires in Alberta, Canada – approximately 1800 miles away! That’s a huge fire!

We won’t be able to make an observation of Elon Musk’s Starlink vanity project until these wildfires are extinguished and the smoke clears out of our skies. In our estimation, it will be at least a week to two weeks before this occurs.

—IWPCHI

 

The US Capitalist Class is the #1 State Sponsor of Terrorism in the World; Defend Venezuela, Defeat US Imperialism!

As the criminal government of the US capitalist class reveals its latest sanguinary plot to overthrow the elected government of Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, we present the formerly “secret” US Special Forces manual on How To Overthrow Governments The US Capitalist Class Sees as a Threat to Its Continued Domination of the World.  OK that’s what its title *should* be, not what it is.  But seriously, this manual describes in detail the arrogant imperialist attitude of the numerically tiny US capitalist class that seeks to rule the world – in the name of “Democracy(TM)”, of course!  The US capitalist class, which lives in the same kind of endless fear of a workers socialist revolution that plagued the slave-owning “Founding Fathers(TM)” back in the day, can not allow the working class to take power in even the tiniest of nation-states.  They figure that if the workers ever prove to the world that they can run a country better than the capitalists can, and in a more egalitarian fashion, distributing the wealth of the nation better than the 85% (for the top 15%)-15% (for the “bottom 85%) “split” typical of capitalist states, then it will be the beginning of the end for them. So, every time a new government attempts to adopt even the slightest tinge of socialism, the US Government – wholly owned and operated solely by and in the interest of the richest 15% of Americans – immediately begins to plan the overthrow of that government.  But that doesn’t mean a simple invasion, like in the olden days; now it means a whole panoply of sub-military measures, ranging from propaganda campaigns and street thuggery against the “enemy” political party and its activists all the way up to economic sanctions, financing the political opposition and assassinating the leaders of the “hostile” political party or parties – which generally are working-class or pro-working-class parties.  Brutal military dictatorships and monarchies have always found friends in Washington; the working class has always found its most implacable enemies there. Of course, the US capitalist class aren’t Nazis! Not at all! They provide this service this all in the name of “Freedom(TM)” and “Democracy(TM)”! (That’s all part of the psychological warfare techniques they use: they scream about “Russian meddling” in US elections to cover up their own massive “meddling” in other nations – including “regime changes” a.k.a. “coups d’etat.”

To a capitalist, the only kind of “Freedom(TM)” that matters is the freedom of a capitalist to buy low, sell high and rob as many workers as possible for as long as possible. Anyone who dares to interfere in their wholesale robbery of the world’s workers has got to go!  Yesterday it was Castro and Qaddafi; today it’s Kim Jong-un and Nicolas Maduro who are being made to wear the “black hats”.  It’s not an easy trick to pull off while the US capitalist class – unlike Qaddafi, Kim, Maduro and Castro – has implanted its military forces in over 180 nation-states around the world and is busy slaughtering workers 24/7/365.  The use of mass media to keep the workers in a state of fear and confusion is all spelled out in this “unconventional warfare” manual, which should be called: “How to Overthrow Governments For Personal Profit While Making It Look Like You’re Doing the World A Huge Favor”.

Read this and see how many of these vicious and highly undemocratic techniques you can identify being used against governments all over the world; from Syria to Venezuela, Nicaragua to North Korea!  And consider the “democratic” nature of such nuggets of US capitalist class wisdom as “[Unconventional Warfare] is specifically focused on leveraging the unwillingness of some portion of the indigenous population to accept the status quo or ‘whatever political outcome the belligerent governments impose, arbitrate, or negotiate.'”

Don’t forget: this is “The Best of All Possible Worlds(TM)” – according to the US capitalist class!  Any worker or politician anywhere who dares to think that the capitalist status quo is *not* “the best of all possible worlds” is an “enemy” and a “traitor” (to the capitalists) and must be “neutralized” in the name of “Freedom(TM)” and “Democracy(TM)”!  Got it?

This manual comes to us thanks to the hard and self-sacrificing work of Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.  Thanks to them we get to see right straight through the disgusting hypocrisy of the US capitalist class and their repulsive worker-hating government.  It’s way past time the workers of the USA dumped the twin parties owned and operated by the US capitalist class and we built ourselves a strong revolutionary socialist workers party to lead the fight to seize power from the hands of the capitalist few and put it into the hands of the working-class majority.  Get off your asses and join us already!  What are you waiting for? World War Three?  By then it will be too late.

— Iwpchi

“Army Special Operations Forces: Unconventional Warfare” manual_us-fm3-05-130

Has the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala Been Supplying Protective Equipment for Motorcycle Assassins?

Uh-oh!  LOL!  WikiLeaks has done it again!  Source: WikiLeaks.org

Today the famous whistleblower website “WikiLeaks” released a new batch of documents, this time of US Embassy procurement requests from around the world.  It’s called the “U.S. Embassy Shopping List”; and of course we immediately took a look at it to see what we could find.

The list is conveniently arranged so you can select any embassy’s “shopping list” by clicking on the country name – and that’s what we did.  It was easy for us to select a country: the USA has a long history of involvement in brutalities against the workers and peasants in Guatemala; the CIA’s death squads are run right from the Embassies all over the world; and even once-believed-to-be-relatively-“harmless” organizations like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) – which also runs its operations from US Embassies –  have been exposed as having been involved in purchasing weapons for use by Guatemala’s murderous death squads and police forces.  So we figured there was a high likelihood that we’d come across something interesting among the easily-searchable 437 items listed for the US Embassy in Guatemala.  We weren’t disappointed.

Almost immediately we came across this item:

Very interesting. Source: WikiLeaks, “US Embassy Shopping List”

[NOTE: The documents we link to here are hosted on our own website; the links will *not* take you to the WikiLeaks site or any U.S. Govt website – IWPCHI]

DOCUMENT 1: https___gt.usembassy.gov_wp-content_uploads_sites_253_017Q0085-InvitationLetter-1

Interesting.  Why?  Because we know that there have been quite a few working-class and peasant activists and politicians who have been murdered in Guatemala… by assassins on motorcycles.  We looked it up just to make sure we were right about that and immediately found an article written in 2014 stating that “Armed motorcycle gangs have assassinated more than 1,100 victims in Guatemala since 2011”.

“Tico Times” published article from Agence France-Presse (AFP) on epidemic of motorcycle hit-squad assainations in Guatemala, 28 March 2014. Source: Tico Times

This all took place *after* the infamous “peace agreement” brokered by the US Government between Guatemala’s brutal ruling capitalist class and its death squad government and former rebels. The rebels foolishly agreed to disarm – and conclude the agreement so they could end the armed struggle and begin “peaceful” participation in local and national elections. Of course the settlement created a  “truth and reconciliation commission” that would look into the hundreds of thousands of death squad murders committed by the US-backed death squad government of Guatemala since the 1970s – guaranteeing no prosecution of the death-squad leaders or their members who had murdered thousands of workers –  if they would merely tell all they knew about the murders.  This “peace agreement” was in fact a disgusting betrayal of the workers and peasants whose families were made to suffer horribly at the hands of these hired killers of US imperialism!  And of course as with all such phony deals between the workers and their irreconcilable and mortal enemies, the capitalists, no sooner was the ink dry on the “peace agreement” than the death squad assassinations began once again, in earnest against the workers and peasants and their leaders – by gangs of motorcycle-riding professional assassins!

Of course just because the US Embassy is seeking bids on “motorcycle safety equipment” does not mean that it “must have been” for the use of these assassination teams. Maybe the Embassy has a few couriers who use motorcycles or something.  Perhaps some of the Marine guards like to drive motorcycles.  This document does not give any details of the number of sets of “protective equipment” or what the equipment is, so we looked to see if there might be any accompanying documentation to go along with this cover letter. And of course there was.

WikiLeaks has made it possible for those using this “US Embassy Shopping List” search engine to search for documents by purchasing order number. In this case it’s called a “Request for Quotation Number” and in this specific case it is number “SGT50017Q0085”.  We copied the number from the .pdf and pasted it into the search window and voila!  We got the 9-page list of the items wanted… 36 COMPLETE SETS! 

US Embassy Guatemala requests bids for the supply of 36 complete sets of protective equipment for motorcyclists, 14 September 2017. Source: WikiLeaks, “U.S. Embassy Shopping List”

DOCUMENT 2: https___gt.usembassy.gov_wp-content_uploads_sites_253_RFQSGT50017Q0085SOW

This is what brought us to ask if the US Embassy is up to its old tricks of supplying equipment to death squads in Guatemala.  What the hell would they need to supply 36 motorcyclists with this kind of equipment for?  Let’s look at the gloves: the Embassy has a very specific type of glove it wants – “similar or equal to Brand: HWI DLD100 for Motorcyclists.”  We looked up these gloves and found them on the HWI website: they are special tight-fitting tactical gloves – with a trigger-finger design apparently specifically for use with a firearm!

#DumpTheRepublicrats!  #BuildAWorkersParty! #FightForAWorkersGovernment! #NoFutureForWorkersUnderCapitalism! #FightForASocialistFuture!

— IWPCHI