Anti-war protesters announce general strike in May 2026

Speaker Protesters gathered Saturday to say ‘No war with Venezuela.’ At the Federal Building Dec. 6, Sam Howard:

Sam Howard Hello, everybody. My name is Sam Howard. I am the political education chair of the UO Young Democratic Socialists of America. 

As others have said, we are currently experiencing a political crisis that is daily overstepping those great moral foundations which we are taught to see as the foundation of our country. 

Now it is, of course, astonishing to see a squeaky-voiced sociopath declare himself the secretary of war and endorse an airstrike, targeted at defenseless civilians, on national television. Yet we must remember that the present violence is not a unique exception to American foreign policy. Even in only Latin America, it is difficult to find a nation that has not been subject to regime changes and military offensives, that hasn’t seen American businesses squeeze sweat and resources out of its people. It seems that new title may be both a performance and admission.

The naked bloodlust that today characterizes Trump’s encirclement of Venezuela is driven by the same inhuman capitalist interests that have caused the atrocities of yesterday. But the openness, the aggression, the new level of compliance that Trump and the machine that supports him want from us is a new development. 

The monster of American imperialism is attentive. It has noticed its global hegemony shaking, shrinking, and as a response, it has begun to dig its claws deeper into our communities. Whether it’s our immigrant communities in Eugene who have to fear for their safety as ICE patrols our community, or the workers of Venezuela with warships on their coast, our struggle is the same. 

We must stop this war. But how? We know that we cannot reason with this administration, no matter how honest our dear secretary of war seems when he puffs out his chest and raves against narco terrorism, He still works for the unthinking mechanisms of profit and of domination.

And the Democratic Party, when it isn’t supporting imperialism, has shown no ability to meaningfully challenge Trump. It is at this point that Trump hopes we get stumped, not sure what to do.

Seventy percent of Americans, as have been said before, oppose the threat of this war. We can’t convince the ruling class to change its mind. We can’t simply tell them how displeased we are. Trump will only stop escalating this conflict, will only stop endangering innocent lives, when we build a power that can stop him. We must organize.

Only when we, the 70% of workers, fashion our isolated anger into a single lever, refuse to be complicit, and use our power to make a united demand will Trump ever stop this conflict. The escalation will stop when workers win.

So get organized. Trump knows that the institutions that brought him to power cannot stop him. The ruling class knows that it can get away with destroying lives and separating families, all for their mountains of gold, only if we do not believe that we can stop them, if we shuffle off responsibility and concern ourselves only with our little corner of the world. 

This fight must start now, and it must continue after this action is over. We have the power and they don’t think we are going to use it. Let’s prove them wrong. Thank you.

Speaker From the party for Socialism and Liberation and the Lane County Immigrant Defense Network, Rob Fisette.

Rob Fisette I really want to follow up on Sam’s comment, ‘where is the source of our people power,’ to note that coming up on Dec. 18, if you haven’t heard about this, the PCUN, the Oregon Farm Workers Union, has called for a series of days of visibility actions leading up to a general strike, a day of general strike in May of 2026. So if you don’t know about that and you need to be connected to that, connect with us later. 

This is the ultimate tactical weapon that we, as the working class, have to fight back, not just against the war in Venezuela, not just against the attacks on our immigrant neighbors, but against the entire agenda of the billionaire class that is coming for all of us and everything that we have. That is the tactic that we need to be working toward. And I appreciate PCUN for putting it forward, and we’re going to have an action here that day as well.

So I wanted to explore a little bit: Just what does it mean for the Trump administration to be engaging in what is obviously an extremely unpopular war on Venezuela? 

It means the reason that they’re doing this is because, among other reasons, one reason is the entire domestic agenda of the Trump administration is also extremely unpopular, even among the people who believed in it before. They are seeing their costs go up through tariffs and other things, their inability to afford housing and the continued drive to fund more and more war overseas. And so the domestic policy is extremely unpopular. 

So, attacking immigrants locally is extremely unpopular. People don’t, you know, ICE goes into Chicago, they get driven out. ICE just went into Charlotte last week, they got driven out. The domestic policy is extremely unpopular. And what better way, historically, to try to gin up support under the flag than a sparkly new war, okay?

This is all that we’re seeing in Venezuela. Whatever else they’re saying, we’re seeing an attempt to cover over the unpopularity of their domestic agenda behind nationalism, which has always proven useful, but they’re also finding out from the 70% that say no, the supermajorities that say no, that it’s no longer such an easy thing to do. And so that’s one of the reasons that we needed to stand up today, is to make it clear that we know that we see what’s happening and that we’re not going to take it.

We say: ‘Workers of the world unite.’ It’s that simple, right? This is where our power comes from. At the start of World War I in 1915, Rosa Luxemburg said that supporting your own country’s drive to war turns ‘Workers of the world unite’ in peacetime into ‘Workers of the world slit each other’s throats’ in wartime. 

We reject this. Yes. We say workers of the world unite against the war, both the war abroad and the war at home. Because they’ll try to confuse us. But we can’t be confused, right? They’ll try to confuse us. There’ll be 87 people killed, bombed in boats off the coast of Venezuela, people just doing nothing, going about their business. And they’ll look at one example and they’ll say, ‘Well, in this example, we bombed the boat. That was fine. But then there were people alive and we bombed it again. And maybe that was wrong. That’s a war crime.’ 

But we can’t be confused. War itself is a crime. The first bomb was a crime. The other 22 bombs are all crimes. Okay, but they’ll make us so confused talking about this second bomb being a crime and investigating. Well, did Hegseth know? Did Trump know? Did they all know about the second bomb? Everybody knew about the first bomb. The first bomb was a crime. Okay, we’re not confused, yes? Okay.

We also can’t be confused about who will be sent to kill and die for this war. It will be the children of working people, working-class young people sent to kill working class young people in Venezuela for oil and wealth that will accumulate only to the people sitting in their golden offices doing nothing. (Shame.) 

And they’ll use lies to hide the truth. But of course, anyone who’s looking especially at this extremely haphazard, very lazy collection of lies can see the truth. We’re talking about a war for oil. Like all war, for profit. That’s the truth.

We’re talking about a made-up pretext for war, based on the president of Venezuela being the head of a drug cartel which does not exist, which the U.S. government admits does not exist, so totally made up pretext for war. According to the U.S.’s own reports, public reports from the DEA, this cartel doesn’t exist. That’s the truth.

We’re talking about Venezuelan people being unable to work in Venezuela due to the economic crisis visited upon Venezuela by U.S. sanctions, and then migrating to America for the possibility of working and living and supporting their family and then being demonized, criminalized, labeled as criminals, and then deported back to Venezuela to be bombed there again. That— that is the truth. And the truth is that war itself is a crime. And so we need to be very clear about that. 

So we say, ‘No war in Venezuela,’ ‘U.S. out of everywhere.’ We know that’s right and correct. And finally, just to say that there’s no sense in knowing things, like we all know no war in Venezuela, we know this is wrong. No sense in knowing things, no sense in being right about things, if we don’t do anything about it. 

And so the things we need to do about it are, first and foremost, talk to everyone you know and make sure that they know that the war on Venezuela is a war based on lies, and that we do not want war. The people of the U.S. do not want war. Everyone you know needs to know this as well. We talk politics over the dinner table to talk about, ‘No war on Venezuela.’ We talk about politics with our coworkers to say, ‘No war on Venezuela.’ This is our responsibility when we have the right ideas, when we know what is right.

Come to our forum. So we’re hosting a forum next Saturday. We’ll get a little deeper into the history of Venezuela. If you are not in the Lane County Immigrant Defense Network Signal channel, be on the lookout for more information about the days of general strike coming up, sponsored by PCUN.

We’ll have local actions here as well. We’re asking people not to go to work, not to go to school, not to spend money. This is the power that we have as the working class. We run this society. We can shut it down when we want to say that this is our society, and it’s up to us to decide what happens.

Declan Zupo My name is Declan. I’m a student at the University of Oregon. I’m also a member of Fossil Free Eugene Coalition. In that capacity, I advocate for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Eugene. 

But the U.S. military machine is the biggest source—if it were to be a state—of these emissions. I’m also a political science student, which does tend to intersect with my environmentalism. My teacher of my class I’m taking right now, U.S. Interventions in Developing Nations, is here, and my final project for that course is to understand why the U.S. would choose to intervene in Venezuela. 

I decided what might be best is for me to read an abbreviated section of the analysis that I’m writing to explain how we’re going into Venezuela for the point of oil, not security. So I’ll read that briefly. I also just want to say, I think it’s important we all continue to talk about this and in our communities. Although I represent a university club, we’re a part of the community and I’d love to see more students out here. If you’re a student and you want to talk about this. We have a space for you. So thank you guys for being here. 

So this is from my PS 479 ‘Why the U.S. is going into Venezuela’ essay.

In 1922, the estimated 304 billion barrels of crude oil housed underneath Venezuela, driving our current U.S. intervention, was discovered catalyzing a race to the bottom of imperialist extraction. By 1929, the oil and gas giants—who today are dictating American politics domestically and who have manufactured our current climate crisis—had already seized control of 50% of all oil production in Venezuela—five years after the discovery of these reserves.

However, this was not simply a project driven by resource expropriation through unaccountable fossil fuel corporations. Since 1929, a revolving door between the U.S. government and these oil and gas giants has facilitated the realization of fossil fuel imperialism via our state apparatus. It was former State Department heads that wielded the massive influence required to enable U.S. foreign policy subservience to fossil capital since the likes of William Doyle and Jordan Stabler in the 1920s, who drove our first involvement in Venezuela.

A 1950 declassified document from the State Department reflects the same narrative we see today. As I quote, ‘All U.S. policies toward Venezuela are affected to a greater or lesser degree by our objective of ensuring an adequate supply of petroleum for the U.S., particularly in times of war.’ That’s the policy we’ve had since 1950. This goal has been clear, as I say, from the start. 

To our south exists the world’s largest supply of crude oil, which our processing facilities are calibrated to refine. It is part and parcel with the fascistic policies of this current administration to fall in line with the long American tradition of U.S. intervention in Latin America. Only now, as we saw in the case of Noriega’s ousting in Panama, the communist specter we used to intervene on behalf of has become this narcoterrorist. 

Today, the U.S. has attempted to throw every legal definition at the wall to justify our bluntly imperialist policy in Venezuela, in State Department communications and in public-facing rhetoric. Is the Venezuelan state exists as a centralized narcoterrorist state waging an irregular war on the U.S. southern border? (What up?)

Yet, perversely, the U.S. has claimed to be in a non-international armed conflict, meaning at the same time, Venezuela is controlled by a centralized narcoterrorist organization while we’re at war with a non-state organization. These two just really don’t square up. Every legal expert not subservient to the Trump regime has decried this insane policy justification. 

This is not a partisan issue. This is a unitary foreign policy being decried across the aisle. The question then remains if there’s no legal justification, no security threat, no narcoterrorist state forcibly sending citizens as our immigration officers have argued to the United States border, what is the justification for this illegal war?

The constitutional imperative of vesting war powers in our legislative body has been systematically eroded, and the balancing branches have given power to an unruly executive. Three forces in the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America have emerged, at least that we studied in our class: (1) Economic interest, (2) McCarthyist anticommunist mania, and (3) diversionary justifications. 

Although there’s an allure to just to imagine that this is a diversionary attempt by the Trump administration to starve off the bipartisan condemnation of his disgusting bromance with Epstein, I would argue for the first. This is once again U.S. intervention for fossil fuel imperialism. Our state is built on fossil fuel imperialism and the expropriation of resources through these same illegal and unconstitutional wars we see unfolding in the Caribbean.

Under Democratic administrations over the years, this tradition has been covered by human rights justifications and arguments for democracy building. This administration has no such reservations. Trump wants another Pinochet. He wants to facilitate the goals of endless fossil fuel extraction in service of these multinational corporations, and the revitalization of Cold War justifications for U.S. empire building. 

I want to end by quoting Simón Bolívar, who was one of my favorite enlightenment thinkers. I also learned about at the university and a champion of Venezuelan independence. Bolívar said, ‘When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is a right.’ Thank you all for being here. No war on Venezuela. Free Palestine.

Frank Harper Hello. My name is Frank Harper, and I’m stand here representing Veterans For Peace right here. And I’m so proud to see all of you here. And it makes me think about, as a Vietnam veteran, there are 58,479 names on the Vietnam Memorial wall. That was one of the last wars to end all wars. And here we are. 

It’s just impossible to believe that Donald J. Trump, 34 felon is here running this war. What is he doing in Venezuela? And we all have to stand up and and just make our voices heard. In Vietnam, the war probably would have drug on for who knows how long if it wasn’t for protest. You all have a voice. You all have a sign. You all need to just stand up there and be tough. Don’t give up. We’ve got to fight, and we’re going to win this against Donald Trump.

And I’m so proud to represent Veterans for Peace all over the country. I’ve been back to Vietnam 13 times just to look for forgiveness. And we don’t want—I don’t want—anybody to be in that position again. I help kids that have been affected by Agent Orange. I help kids in orphanages. And we can’t do that in Venezuela. They don’t deserve to be blown out of the water. 

So right now: All stand up, be proud, be strong, and tell your neighbors, tell your friends, tell everybody to get out there and protest and do your part.

Chris Case My name is Chris. I’m a member of the PSL, a statewide exec for SEIU, the local union and a member of About Face: Veterans Against the War. 

I want to thank everyone for showing up today and for raising your voices to express that. We demand that the Trump administration end its imperialist brinksmanship against Venezuela and end their occupation of the Caribbean. 

We are seeing history repeat itself from only a generation before. The U.S. government is peddling lies and misinformation, all to get involved for a war for oil and profits. The only people who will benefit from this war are the CEOs from Chevron, who have been involved in a multiyear dispute with ExxonMobil over drilling rights in Venezuela. 

Make no mistake: These attacks on fishermen in international waters and the stationing of warships and Marines off the coast of Venezuela has nothing to do with the flow of drugs into this country. The same government that tried to convince you that Saddam Hussein was involved in nine over eleven is now saying that Nicolás Maduro is the head of an international drug cartel. This same government, which is profiting from the genocides in Gaza, the Sudan and the Congo, by the way. 

So the way I see it, the gangsters and thugs and scumbags all seem to have places in the current U.S. administration, from slimy Stephen Miller to the Gestapo queen, Kristi Noem, these folks’ boss. You only need to look at who’s around the president to see who the real criminals are. 

Over 70% of Americans across party lines oppose this war. It is plain to anyone with eyes to see that we do not need a war on Venezuela. We need a war on poverty. We need a war on starvation. And we need a war on the brutal system that would allow masked men into our communities to kidnap children and lock up their mothers. 

Whether you are a veteran, a worker or a student, or just a member of the community, there is always a lane for you in the movement and we all need the help if we are going to stop this continued march towards barbarism. 

I would like to tell you all a very important story about a person named Smedley Butler. Smedley Butler was a United States Marine during the early 1900s. He was one of the most highly decorated Marines of all time. The man won two Medals of Honor for actions in Nicaragua and Haiti. 

And when he retired from the Marine Corps during the 1930s, he was tapped by Wall Street to lead a plot against President Roosevelt. The bankers, your Rothschilds, your Carnegies, all of these names that we’ve been taught to fear and hate, they wanted to overthrow the government of FDR, and they tapped Smedley Butler to do it. Well, when they asked Smedley Butler to do it, he went to Congress and he whistle-blew on him.

And after that, he wrote a book. And that book was called War Is a Racket. And in that book, to paraphrase, he said, a lot of these folks and politicians came up with a lot of pretty lines and a lot of pretty stories to get my friends to go march off to war and go kill people. And when we came back, we found out that all those pretty slogans and all those nice pictures were nothing but lies. 

So I leave to you today: Do not make the same mistake that this country has made from since it was founded. We demand an end to all imperialist wars, and we demand that all of the money that goes to fill CEO’s pockets to immiserated people around the world should be going to us, the people who make the world run. 

If you’re not involved with any organizations, you’ve heard from representatives from tons of them today, from Climate Justice League to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, to the Young Democratic Socialists of America, to the Veterans for Peace to About Face, there are nothing but groups that need folks like each and every one of you. Thank you so much today and God bless everyone. Hands off Venezuela. Free Palestine. Thank you so much.

Speaker At the anti-war protest Saturday, news of a nationwide general strike coming in May 2026. Field recordings by Todd Boyle for KEPW News on 97.3, Eugene’s Peaceworks Community Radio.