Politics & Government

NJ Socialists Protest Outside Army Recruitment Center In Newark

"It's up to the working-class people of this country to organize against the military industrial complex," protesters said.

NEWARK, NJ — A cohort of protesters with the North New Jersey Democratic Socialists of America held a rally outside a U.S. Army recruitment center on Broad Street in Newark on Monday.

The target? The military industrial complex, they said.

Protesters were reacting to the U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani on Friday, an action that’s inspired fierce controversy across the nation, including Essex County.

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American officials – including President Donald Trump – have claimed the general ordered assaults on U.S. citizens in Iraq and Syria and was planning a wave of imminent attacks.

Soleimani's death has raised fears about a war between the U.S. and Iran, which recently said it will no longer abide by a 2015 agreement to suspend uranium production. Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal in 2018.

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On Monday, dozens of protesters gathered on Broad Street in Newark for a “No War With Iran” rally.

Organizers offered a statement on Medium.com about the protest, blaming President Donald Trump – “with the assistance of a complicit Democratic Congress” – for escalating tensions with Iran.

Protesters wrote:

“The North New Jersey Democratic Socialists of America denounce this rush to war, which builds on the failed legacies of past U.S. imperialism… It is up to us, the working-class people of this country standing in solidarity with the victims of U.S. imperialism around the world, to organize against the military industrial complex.”

Organizers continued:

“Every bomb we drop in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, also explodes in Newark, in Paterson, in Camden, in East Orange, in Union City. We are often told, as socialists, that it is too Utopian to pay for the kinds of programs that make a better world — Medicare For All, Green New Deal, Free Education, Housing For All. Yet the same pundits and politicians who resist these policies never hesitate to fund endless war. We spend billions on bombs every year while we scrounge for dollars to get lead out of our drinking water. We spend trillions of dollars on war planes that we cannot use, and we tell people with disabilities their equipment isn’t covered by their insurer. Raytheon’s stock prices are up 4% in the three days since Trump assassinated Iran’s Qassem Suleimani in Iraq. What amount of profit is allocated to the hundreds of teachers that have been laid off and to the students who are packed 35 to a classroom with half as many desks and even fewer books? To whom go the dividends of war?”

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