the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 2, 2021
Biden—with Republican governors beginning to line up behind him, with the CDC riding shotgun alongside him—reproached unvaccinated people for causing the virus to spread: “...the unvaccinated are putting others at risk and endangering a fragile economic recovery.”
The media rushed to weigh in. The New York Times observed that the majority are “frustrated with the consequences of a minority that fails to get vaccinated.” The lead article in the Los Angeles Times more crassly joined the chorus: “Bring on the crackdown: The unvaccinated must be held accountable.” The Washington Post says those “selfish” unvaccinated are “hindering the rest of us from going back to live normal lives.” Even Fox News—which until very recently had characterized Covid to be little more than a cold—repeated Biden’s statement: “If, in fact, you are unvaccinated, you present a problem to yourself, to your family and to those with whom you work.”
It’s a holy crusade, an agreement among all those mouthpieces for the capitalist class to stir up the vaccinated part of the population against the unvaccinated.
To blame the unvaccinated shifts the focus of the problem away from where it rightly belongs, which is on an economic system that from the beginning made no effort to organize a collective response to a growing epidemic.
These new vaccines could be a step forward, something that might offer some protection to the population—if they weren’t produced by and under the control of pharmaceutical companies, which exist primarily to make profit. Today, the pharmaceutical companies control the vaccine patents, preventing their information from being openly shared. This is why there is no widespread production of them, no way to use them—other than by paying an exorbitant price to the companies. But opening up these patents so the rest of the world could be quickly vaccinated is the simple, obvious step that would be taken by anyone committed to stopping the spread of the virus, which cannot be controlled except on the scale of the world.
The incapacity of this system extends far beyond the vaccine. The CDC often seems to be running around like a chicken with its head chopped off, spouting contradictory messages, building people’s mistrust. No surprise. The CDC has been starved, deprived of the funds and facilities a real public health system would need, many of its functions assumed by private, for-profit pharmaceutical companies; by private, for-profit pharmacies; and by hospital systems run by private equity’s “day traders.”
Do people mistrust the CDC that pushes the vaccine? Yes, and mistrust runs deep—from black working people in Detroit and Chicago to immigrant workers in Texas and Los Angeles and the California fields, to white laboring people in rural areas in large parts of the country. But behind the vaccine, behind the CDC is a system, the capitalist system, which not only brought an uncontrolled pandemic, but brings new disasters each year: uncontrolled fires, uncontrolled floods, broken bridges and tunnels, widespread utility shut downs—and an economy that limps from one financial collapse to the next.
Today, the political class that stands fully behind capitalism is pouring blame on the unvaccinated, threatening to cost them their jobs or paychecks, making their work lives intolerable. The threat to make them pay is a weapon that will be used against the whole working class—and all the more easily if other workers fall in line in this latter day Salem witch-trial.
If there is anything working people should know by now, it is that we cannot organize to defend even our simplest gains if we line up with our enemies against our fellow workers.
Yes, someone needs to be “held accountable” for the disastrous spread of Covid. That someone is the capitalist class. Its continual drive to put profits ahead of the needs of the population is what creates disaster after disaster.
The working class has the numbers needed to weigh on the situation, when it brings those numbers together. Its position in the center of the economy, the fact that even today it makes everything run, means that it could put the collective interests of the whole population ahead of capitalist profits.
Key is the collective organization of our forces, and the common realization that we are one class, that we have the same enemy, and that this enemy is the capitalist class.
Aug 2, 2021
Executives from Waste Management, a $21 billion company, recently announced that they want to utilize more prison labor. Another company, Russell Stover Chocolates, recently hired prison workers for their two candy plants in Kansas. And the States of Michigan, Delaware, Texas, and Ohio recently announced new work-release programs for the restaurant industry.
These companies are saying that there is labor shortage. But the reality is that companies are looking to prison labor as a way of pushing wages down.
Prison labor is already an essential part of this capitalist economy. There are currently 1.5 million prison laborers. Over 600,000 prisoners work for manufacturing companies. Companies also use prison labor in agriculture, sanitation, food services, hospitality, construction. The average pay of prison workers is $0.63 an hour.
Companies are also using work-release programs to indirectly exploit the prisoners. These prisoners are released under the condition that they keep their job for a certain period.
Companies know these workers are under the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refuse to work. The bosses use this condition against these workers. Oftentimes, they are hired for the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs. In construction, employers hire these workers in “body shop” sites, where they work in the most backbreaking jobs.
While these companies get thousands of dollars a week in government subsidies for using these work-release programs, the workers themselves typically have to pay a fee just to participate. In El Paso, Texas, these workers pay $22 in daily fees to the Sheriff’s Department just to keep their job. What a racket!
Nothing about this is new. This barbarism has existed as long as society has been divided between the exploiters and the exploited.
Aug 2, 2021
On July 15, Gloria Richardson died, aged 99. Richardson came to public notice in the early 1960s when she stepped forward to advocate for black civil rights in the area of Cambridge, Maryland. Cambridge, a small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, was near the plantation from which Harriet Tubman brought people out of slavery using the Underground Railroad.
In Richardson’s youth, at least three men were lynched on the Eastern Shore. She returned to Cambridge after graduating from Howard University, where she took part in protests against segregated facilities in Washington, D.C. She could not get hired by the Maryland Department of Social Services, although she was a social worker, because racism in jobs and housing remained strong in Maryland. Cambridge and the Eastern Shore of Maryland were quite segregated—some black people still lived in shacks without running water. Black unemployment was over 30%.
Richardson, angry about the conditions for black people, was attracted to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee after her daughter participated in one of their local demonstrations; Richardson became one of the few women to lead a chapter.
After continuing protests by the black population in Cambridge, the governor of Maryland called out the National Guard and declared martial law. That didn’t stop Richardson’s activism.
Dorchester, the county where Cambridge is located, proposed a referendum on integrating public accommodations. Richardson urged voters to boycott the referendum, stating it was unfair to have to vote for “the constitutional rights of our people, [thereby] leaving it to the whim of a popular majority.” It took another 25 years before Dorchester County elected a black commissioner.
Richardson remained active after leaving Maryland for New York. In a 2018 book about her, she told the author, “If everything else doesn’t work, then I think you should make it uncomfortable for them to exist. You have to be in their faces til it gets uncomfortable for politicians and corporate leaders to keep opposing activists’ demands.”
Without the Gloria Richardsons of the civil rights era, the movement would not have changed the conditions of life for so many black people in this country.
Aug 2, 2021
Many people watched the Olympics, hoping to see Simone Biles perform. Biles is considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, women’s gymnast ever. She won 4 gold medals in the 2016 Olympics and has won 30 Olympic or World Championships. She has perfected routines that are so difficult that most other gymnasts won’t even attempt them. Biles’ skill and athleticism are breath-taking.
So when Simone Biles withdrew from some events of the Olympic gymnastics competition, it disappointed a lot of people, most especially Biles herself, who had trained for 5 years since the last Olympics for this moment. Biles talked about the pressure that she felt to perform and that “it certainly feels like I have the weight of the whole world on my shoulders.”
The weight that Biles felt on her shoulders was weight of a system in which every human endeavor and accomplishment becomes turned into something to make a profit.
Biles had been heavily promoted as the star of these Olympics by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the U.S. Olympic Committee and the TV networks that broadcast these games. The IOC expects to make about 3 to 4 billion dollars from these Olympics. NBC, which is broadcasting the Olympics in the U.S., has paid over 12 billion dollars for broadcast rights to these and future Olympics. NBC will get this money back, and much more in profits, from advertisers. And the companies that advertise on the Olympic broadcasts will make profits from all the products that sell.
The IOC, NBC and all of them are making money, not through any real work of their own, but rather they are profiting from the years of hard work and training of Simone Biles and the thousands of other athletes from around the world who are competing in the Olympics.
The pressure and the “weight of the world” that Biles felt comes from all those hyping her and promoting her and selling her to be the star of the Olympics ... so they can make money from her performances.
In a different system, a system based on developing the full potential of every human being, instead of the profits of a few, athletes like Simone Biles could compete purely for the love of the sport, for the joy of gaining the physical skills through hard work and training, for the satisfaction of excelling at something so difficult and for the thrill and excitement of competition. And the only pressure will be that which they put on themselves to excel.
Aug 2, 2021
At the end of July, millions of renters faced immediate eviction because the federal moratorium against eviction under the Covid pandemic has expired. The president says there is nothing he can do, putting the blame on Congress.
There is a critical lack of affordable housing in this country, which was a problem long before Covid appeared. During the pandemic, Congress promised 47 billion dollars in rental assistance. How much of it got to renters? THREE billion dollars. Just like the unemployment crisis, there were never enough people hired to answer questions or to help people with confusing paperwork, and there was a lack of Internet access or computers.
This 47 billion may sound like a lot but it is only a bandaid on a cancer. Renters were given a reprieve from paying their rent, but the rent was not wiped out. It is still owed. Meanwhile big owners of property, even some small landlords, got enormous loans or outright grants of money, thanks to the way Congress wrote the rules of the pandemic to ensure that the lords of the housing industry retained and gained wealth. They got richer during the pandemic while almost as many people were laid off as in the Great Depression, at some points.
Some 43 million adults are renting apartments or houses in the U.S. and about a quarter of them are considered low income.
Right now the federal definition of poverty level income is $26,500 or less for a family of four. The number of people receiving vouchers for housing due to low income is about two million. But in reality close to four million are likely facing eviction with no possibility of finding housing in their area that they can afford.
In California, an estimated 1.3 million renters are at or below the poverty level and cannot afford the average of $80,000 per year income needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment. In Georgia about 330,000 people are at or below the poverty level and cannot afford the average of $40,000 per year income needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment. In Maryland, about 200,000 renters are at or below the poverty level and cannot afford the average of $60,000 per year income needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment.
Human beings need shelter and food, and much more, all of which must be paid for with money earned. Yet even in the richest country on this planet, millions are made desperate. They may be among the millions out of work during the pandemic or they may be among the millions who actually work but don’t make enough money to pay for food and shelter.
It’s a disgusting indictment of this capitalist system.
Aug 2, 2021
On July 21, Chicago’s city council approved the creation of a new civilian oversight council for the Chicago police.
This new council is the latest result of a long struggle. In 2013, reformers got over 100,000 signatures to establish an elected civilian board to oversee the Chicago Police Department. This was in reaction to killings by cop, like the shooting of Rekia Boyd in 2012, and the police hierarchy’s repeated coverups and defense of brutal cops. At the time, the demand came to nothing.
Then in 2015, after another attempted coverup, the video came out of a Chicago cop shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times as he was walking away. In the wave of protests that followed, linked to those about police killings in other cities, including Michael Brown of Ferguson and Eric Garner of New York, activists renewed their call for civilian control of the police. Instead, in 2017, the city launched a new board with a new name—but no power.
Last summer, protests erupted on a much bigger scale after the shooting of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Once again, many protesters in Chicago demanded civilian oversight of the police, and repeated the demand after Chicago police killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo as the trial for Floyd’s killer was getting underway.
Advocates argue that the new oversight body will dramatically improve relations between cops and those they police by creating trust between cops and “the community.”
In reality, the new citywide council’s members will be chosen by a complicated system of electing local council members, who would appoint a nominating committee, which would itself nominate citywide council members—who could then be rejected by the mayor. The council will have the power to issue a vote of no-confidence in the Police Superintendent—but not to remove him or her. It can propose some police policies, but again these can be overridden by the mayor.
In other words, this council in no way gives control over the cops to residents of the working class and poor neighborhoods where police brutality is rampant, and no one paying attention actually thinks it will. It amounts to one more powerless board that can do nothing but give some cover to the city’s leadership by expressing outrage at the next police murder scandal, carrying out an investigation—and changing nothing.
The fact that it has taken such a long fight to get even a powerless oversight council shows that this city’s ruling class needs the violence of the police to keep under control that huge share of the population that this system leaves out. As this system falls further into decay, the ruling class will inflict more police violence, not less.
No new reform, no oversight board can alter the fact that the violence of the police is rooted in the basic functioning of this capitalist system in decay. To really take on police violence will require taking on that system.
Aug 2, 2021
The new California budget signed by Governor Gavin Newsom has allocated 7.5 million dollars to pay reparations to survivors of forced sterilizations that state authorities have carried out for many decades. Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, who introduced the bill that led to the reparation program, said that “there is a level of dignity that is bestowed on the survivors by the acknowledgment that this happened.”
Well, no. Not when only a few hundred victims, out of more than 20,000, are still alive. And the money California is offering, $25,000 maximum, is actually an insult, considering the amount of pain and trauma caused to the victims who forever lost their ability to have children.
California authorities used a 1909 law, which legalized forced sterilizations, on thousands of people, many of them still in their teens. All along, the perpetrators openly displayed their own racist and sexist views on record. For example, they justified the sterilization of a 14-year-old boy by calling him “high tempered, unreliable, an habitual truant and a bully,” whose parents were “of low-grade Mexican mentality.” The “reason” for sterilizing a 19-year-old woman was that she supposedly was a “mentally deficient, sex delinquent girl” from an “unfit home.”
These sterilizations were an open attack on certain parts of the population, coming from the highest levels of wealth and power. (Members of the Human Betterment Foundation, which pushed for sterilizations, included Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, Stanford University president David Star Jordan, and Stanford psychologist Lewis M. Terman, who developed the IQ test.) It was a systematic way of attacking certain vulnerable parts of the working class, in order to divide and terrorize the whole working class.
The proof is that forced sterilizations in California have never stopped—not after 1979, when the law was finally repealed, nor even after the state’s official “apology” in 2003. Between 2005 and 2014, at least 144 women, mostly Black and Latino, were sterilized in California prisons. And there are still reports about sterilizations of women in immigrant detention facilities, where the women who are being sterilized are lied to about the surgery they are undergoing, and coerced into signing a consent form they don’t understand the wording of.
None of the authorities, who physically harmed these women and lied about it on record, have ever been prosecuted—one more proof that behind this heinous crime is a policy devised at the highest levels of power, by people whose wealth is built on the exploitation of the working class.
Capitalism is their system. It can only exist thanks to violence and terror over the working class—until the working class overthrows the capitalist system and replaces it with a system based on the common interests and solidarity of working people.
Aug 2, 2021
Prince George’s County in Maryland agreed to pay 2.3 million dollars to settle a discrimination lawsuit filed three years ago by Black and Hispanic county police officers. Police testified that white cops used racist slurs, sent text messages saying to “reinstitute lynching,” and put a black face and Afro wig on a training dummy, among other disgusting abuses.
The county spent many times the settlement amount—nearly 18 million dollars—to try to fight the lawsuit, with most of the money going to pay expensive lawyers. This shows their priorities: defending abusive prejudice. No one should expect the department’s practices to change.
Aug 2, 2021
Emergency room patients at the private University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center outside Washington, D.C. waited nearly six hours on average in July before being admitted or discharged. The wait to be seen averaged over two hours. This newly opened facility’s performance is another example of cuts to medical service.
First, the hospital is 30 beds smaller than the old facility it replaced. Prince George’s County, where the hospital is located, has only half the number of hospital beds per resident as nearby Montgomery County, which is more affluent and white. The county has only one fourth the beds per capita as Washington, D.C. But no one listened to the public health workers who pointed this out.
As the region re-opened this summer and more people took to the roads, more car accidents happened and the number of trauma cases shot up. Thirty percent more patients came to the emergency room than had come to the old facility. Meanwhile many patients came for regular medical care they had put off for over a year.
Administrators claim to be scrambling to add 17 emergency room beds and hire 43 more nurses. Given their track record, these numbers are nowhere near enough.
Aug 2, 2021
On July 13 and 14, a total of 1,400 nurses at two USC hospitals (Keck Medicine at USC and Norris Cancer Center) went on strike in order to protest working conditions they say put both medical staff and hospital-goers at risk. These include severe understaffing, extremely long shifts, insufficient time between shifts and over-reliance on contract nurses, who have much less training and spend much less time in the hospital.
Nurses say they often work 18-hour shifts, or four to five shifts a week, to fill gaps in staffing levels, as opposed to the “normal” schedule of three shifts of twelve hours. “I get a call every week from my unit saying: ‘Please, can someone work; we’re short staffed,’” one nurse told the Los Angeles Times (July 14). It isn’t just a question of the nurses not having a life and working exhausted and sleep-deprived. It’s dangerous for the patients, especially since the two USC hospitals handle some of the most difficult and acute cases in the country.
Zeinoon Malaeb, a nurse in the cardiothoracic ICU, said that while the coronavirus pandemic overwhelmed hospitals with patients, USC publicly called Keck nurses “heroes,” using images of the nurses in press releases in order to publicize the hospitals.
But, beneath the surface, Malaeb described how USC management took advantage of the crisis in order to carry out a series of attacks. “They cut our sick time by two thirds, and [management was] disciplining and firing nurses for taking sick time to take care of themselves or their loved ones,” he said. “They were calling us heroes, and at the same time, they cut our retirement benefits. They marketed the nurses to the public. And, in private, they were disciplining us and giving us breakdowns...”
Nurses at several other hospitals have organized strikes over some of the same issues: understaffing and nurse and patient safety. In Massachusetts, St. Vincent Hospital nurses in Worcester have been on strike since March 8. Nurses at Stroger and Provident hospitals went on strike in late June.
Organizing together in order to fight is the only way that workers and employees have of defending their interests.
Aug 2, 2021
At this point in the summer, parents are asking “What will school look like this fall?” Working class students, and their parents, have been put through the wringer this past year and a half. At best, they lost out, learning what they could through Zoom. For thousands of Chicago students, the year was a total loss—many stopped attending any class at all.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announced in-person learning for fall for all students, and that all students and staff in city schools must be masked. For student safety, the CDC recommends students maintain at least 3 feet of social distance. That’s not possible at hundreds of schools! Not with classes of over 30 students, and all classrooms already in use.
The School Board still has not worked out how lunch will work. Cafeterias often serve over three hundred students at a time—needless to say, they cannot eat while masked. In fact, one measure that could go toward a safer and better education would be to increase the staffing at all schools. But instead of hiring, CPS laid off 443 teachers and staff in June.
The coronavirus spreads mainly by aerosols, so having good ventilation is vital to prevent its spread.
With a pandemic raging, the district acknowledged the importance of school cleanliness. The Board, faced with the question of how to oversee school cleaning, couldn’t find a way to do it, other than re-hiring Aramark, already found deficient, at the last minute!
Instead of laying off staff, they need to hire. Instead of leaving buildings untouched during nine months of last year during Covid, they should have worked on ventilation. They are updating ventilation at 17 schools, when they need to work on hundreds.
Of course, addressing any problem requires money. CPS is receiving $3 billion dollars from the federal government, from the three Covid relief packages. A little over one billion of that money is included for school spending this year. That sounds like a lot of money—in fact, it’s an additional $1,370 for each of the district’s 340,000 students.
Chicago Public Schools has always found ways to route money to the rich through contractors like Aramark, pandemic or no pandemic. Working class parents will need to organize, and in a big way, to even get some of the bailout funds for the students.
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The number of deaths from Covid in Indonesia exceeds 1,200 per day. This number is underestimated because many people die at home without being able to go to the hospital.
The Delta variant is not the only cause. The entire organization of society is. Access to the vaccine is limited. Under six percent of the population is vaccinated. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Indonesia has fewer than three intensive care beds for every 100,000 inhabitants. There aren’t enough oxygen tanks....
Capitalism is more dangerous than the virus.
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The CGT union at the hospital in the town of Montélimar north of Marseilles called for a strike on July 23 to protest French President Emanuel Macron’s mandatory vaccination rule. More than 150 protesters gathered, including many who don’t work there.
Caregivers pointed to hospital management’s hypocrisy in preparing to discipline workers who refuse to be vaccinated, while at the same time forcing workers who have been in contact with people with Covid to still come to work. The threat of losing their pay or even their job is a humiliation as well as a punishment.
Protestors also spoke out against the division set up between vaccinated and unvaccinated workers. This is one of the government’s goals: to pit workers against each other, while letting management eliminate more beds and make the working conditions worse. One protestor said, the real demand that must be imposed is for the hospital to hire all the workers sorely missing now, and to bring back the beds that were cut years ago.
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Since Macron’s announcement on July 12 of the compulsory vaccination of caregivers and the health pass, reactions are strong in Martinique.
A first spontaneous demonstration took place on the evening of Tuesday 13, just after the announcement of the reinstatement of the curfew by the prefect. About 800 people gathered in front of the prefecture of Fort-de-France to shout: “Nou pa kobay” (we are not guinea pigs).
Then, on Saturday, July 17, more than 3,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Fort-de-France. During the nights of July 17 and 18, riots broke out in neighborhoods of the city, in particular that of Terre-Sainville. Groups of young people attacked the police with stones, but also with guns. They took advantage of the climate of general protest to attack stores, burn some of them, and loot. They set up barricades, including with undamaged cars, and set them on fire. The fire has spread to homes. At least three houses have burned down in Terre-Sainville, poor people finding themselves homeless and having lost everything.
These young people who took over from the anti-compulsory vaccination demonstration also expressed their revolt against unemployment, poverty and a life without prospects. But the real arsonists are Macron and his ministers. It is they who, by their decisions, enrich the soil on which the revolt of young people grows. Not to mention the immense visible inequality between the mass of the poor and the minority of the big and rich “békés” who own everything. This is the source of the revolt and the riots.
Tuesday, July 20, it was the turn of health workers to march through the streets to the headquarters of the Regional Health Agency. Also accompanied by workers from other sectors, they numbered two thousand. And on Saturday, July 24, 300 people again demonstrated in Fort-de-France.
Other events are planned in the following days.
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
On Saturday July 24, 8,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre. All the unions had called to protest against the vaccination obligation and the health pass that the government wants to establish.
The meeting was set at 8 a.m. at the entrance to the Pointe-à-Pitre—Abymes University Hospital Center. Several thousand people were present very early, despite a torrential rain. The speeches followed one another at the microphone, including the intervention of a comrade of Combat Ouvrier, the Caribbean organization that is member of the UCI (Union communiste internationaliste), as is Lutte Ouvrière.
The parade was very important and dynamic, with the participation of a “gwoup a po”, a traditional carnival music group, and demonstrators chanting “Freedom!” In the procession of the CGTG, the slogans underlined the necessary solidarity of other workers with: "Si Macron lévé lanmen si swanyan i ka lévé lanmen si nou tout” (Yes Macron attacks the caregivers, he attacks us all).
Other mobilizations were already announced for the following days, including a meeting scheduled for the evening of Thursday, July 29 in Pointe-à-Pitre and a demonstration scheduled for Saturday, July 31 in Basse-Terre, the other large city of Guadeloupe.
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
On the night of July 25, Israeli warplanes bombed public buildings in the Gaza Strip. The pretext was responding to some incendiary balloons thrown, which damaged nothing.
Before the bombing, Israeli authorities had reduced the area of the Palestinians’ fishing zone off the coast of Gaza by half—enough to starve out, even more, any families living by fishing.
Similarly, in recent weeks, at the Karam Abu Salem checkpoint, Israel again blocked tanker trucks carrying fuel for Gaza’s only power plant.
The new government coalition of far-right Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, which includes almost all parties—right, left and even Islamist Israeli Arab—quickly showed that it pursues exactly the same policy toward Palestinians as Netanyahu: to continue settlements in the West Bank and to keep blockading the Gaza Strip with drastic results, along with regular destructive bombardments.
Aug 2, 2021
Politicians in the wealthier countries are busy imposing vaccine mandates and blaming the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the unvaccinated. These same politicians carry out policies that prevent billions of people in the poorer countries from receiving the vaccines, which in turn endangers us all.
Vaccinating 70% of the world’s population against the virus will require about 11 billion doses of the vaccines. So far, just over 3 billion doses have been administered, 80% of which have been in the wealthier countries. In the poorer countries, only about 1% of people have received even one dose. Countries like Haiti and almost all the countries of Africa have the lowest rates as of now, and many of them are experiencing massive COVID outbreaks.
Politicians in the wealthier countries made news by “pledging” to give doses of the vaccine to the poorer countries. The U.S. pledged less than 600 million, Britain 100 million, France, Germany and Japan a total of 90 million and China about 30 million. That comes to less than 1/8 of what is needed to reach the 70% goal, and these, as of now, are only pledges. All this, while the U.S. is sitting on three times the number of doses it needs to fully vaccinate its entire population.
The failure by the politicians of the wealthier countries to provide vaccines to the poor ones is not simply due to oversight. They carry out the exact policies demanded by the pharmaceutical companies and their wealthy owners to protect their profits.
These pharmaceutical companies used technology developed over years, much of it by companies in the underdeveloped countries, and only jumped into producing the vaccines when they received billions of dollars from the U.S. and British governments for advance orders. Since then they’ve received more than 10 billion dollars more from governments and non-profit organizations for further vaccine development.
In May, President Biden agreed to waive patent rights on the vaccines, in reaction to the other countries politicians anger at Trump’s “America First” policy. Biden’s policy granted only very narrow rights, however, so it will have very little meaningful actual effect on access to COVID vaccines for the people in the poorer countries.
Some of the poorer countries actually have the capacity to manufacture drugs. What they don’t have is the ability to pay for the materials needed to produce the vaccines, nor the ability to use the current crop of vaccines that require long-term cold storage to get the vaccines in people’s arms.
Finally, the ruling stratum of the upper class have no intention of investing their money in anything that doesn’t guarantee a return on investment. That would require a diversion from business and profit as usual. This will not be the first time they let poor people die.
They’re not even overly concerned about people in their own countries dying. Members of the wealthy class they serve have already been vaccinated, and will likely even receive third doses before most of those in the poorer countries receive even one.
People in the wealthier countries can’t wall themselves off from the rest of the world. When the pandemic is allowed to run rampant in poorer countries, it means new variants eventually develop. Three of the four variants common in the U.S. initially arose in poorer countries—South Africa, Brazil and India, where the current most common one, the Delta variant, was first seen.
The kind of chaos we’re seeing as a result is what capitalism at this stage has to offer. If we want a different result, we need to replace the system and build a society that puts the interests of humanity first.
Aug 2, 2021
Many of those yet to be vaccinated against Covid have raised concerns that the current vaccines have yet to receive full approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Kaiser Family Foundation, for example, recently found that three in ten unvaccinated adults say they would be more likely to get vaccinated if one of the vaccines the FDA has thus far only approved for “emergency use” would receive full approval.
The FDA “assures” the public that it is working hard to complete the approval process and officials claim the approvals haven’t happened yet because the FDA wants to make sure it has completed rigorous testing of the vaccines before granting them.
Really? This is the same FDA that just granted approval to drug giant Biogen for an Alzheimer’s drug its own advisors unanimously agreed does nothing to slow the disease. That drug, Aduhelm, will cost $56,000 per year for every patient. Because most of them are elderly, Biogen stands to reap huge profits on the drug, much of which will be paid for by Medicare.
Is it any wonder people mistrust the FDA and its delay in approving vaccines that have already been given to billions of people around the world?
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
A wave of protests against the shortage of water began on July 16 in the region of Khuzestan in southwestern Iran, and then spread to other parts of the country. Trying to limit the spread of the protests, the regime cut off access to the internet and carried out brutal repression. Some protesters were shot dead, and hundreds were arrested.
Rivers and lakes are bone dry. Water only flows through taps a few hours per week. Water tankers that could make up for the shortage are nowhere to be seen. These are the immediate causes of the revolt. Khuzestan is an oil-rich region near the border with Iraq. The population is mostly Arab instead of Persian there—but water scarcity affects most of the country. Demonstrations also took place in Iranian Azerbaijan as well as Isfahan, Tabriz, and other cities. Protestors yelled out, “Bakhtiaris and Arabs unite,” and “Azeris and Arabs unite.”
The government blames climate change, but that does not explain this case of drought and desertification. These are the product of the “water mafia,” who are VIPs and rich families with connections at the top of the government. For years they have been diverting water intended for residents on a large scale.
Many water pipes and treatment plants were built more than half a century ago under the Shah and are now totally run down. And they were built when the population was only a third of what it is now. After the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamist Republic, dams were built. They are controlled by big-timers who divert the water to irrigate lands owned by their friends—for water-intensive agriculture for export, for industrial complexes, and for cities far away. A number of wells were drilled which dry up the aquifers.
In Isfahan, tap water has become toxic, which forces residents to buy mineral water. The protestors denounce the “water thieves” and their benefactors: “We are thirsty!” “We want the fall of the regime!” and “Death to Khamenei,” who is Iran’s Supreme Leader.
The demonstrators oppose the government because aside from the drought there is inflation over 50% and shortages of many goods because of the U.S. embargo. And public and private employers often only pay workers after long delays. In Khuzestan also oil workers employed by temp agencies have been on strike since mid-June, trying to have the same pay and benefits as permanent workers.
The water protests and the strike involve both workers with a tradition of struggle and the rural working people on whom the Ayatollahs’ regime has relied for forty years. Their likely convergence represents a threat to the regime.
Some political cliques striving for power, like Ahmadinejad’s, try to use the protests by claiming to speak for the poor masses. Ahmedinejad suppressed the 2009 uprising. To change their situation, workers will have to be wary of any political leaders associated with the Ayatollahs’ regime, or even with the exiled oppositionists, whether pro-Western and monarchist or democratic. Truthfully the workers can only rely on themselves.
Aug 2, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Taiwan is presented as a literal island of democracy threatened by Beijing. But factories there making semiconductor chips for the world market have become penal colonies for their some 400,000 workers and especially for immigrant workers from neighboring Southeast Asian countries.
Under the pretext of fighting Covid, industry giants like TSMC, ASE and SPIL, which produce most of the chips used in electronic devices, cars, and so on, require women workers to sleep in the factories after working 12-hour day or night shifts. Dormitories were thrown up. Workers are only allowed to leave industrial sites one hour a day. Outings during the one day of rest per week are no longer allowed.
Taiwanese authorities allow and even encourage island residents, who are not under lockdown, to report the presence of migrants in the street and to threaten expulsion for anyone who doesn’t comply with the rule to stay confined in the factories.
Under the pretext of public health, Taiwan became the slave island of global capitalism.
Aug 2, 2021
The German women’s gymnastic team defied pressure and precedent at the Olympics when they decided to wear full-body unitards instead of the high-cut leotards that women gymnasts are expected to wear.
In the Olympics and elsewhere, women athletes are expected to dress in a way that has nothing to do with the sport they are competing in, nothing to do with respecting them as athletes, and has everything to do with selling them as sex objects. That’s what the TV networks and the leaders of the Olympics and other sports organizations (almost all of whom are men) expect the women athletes to do.
The German women gymnasts weren’t going for it. Maybe they were inspired by some Norwegian women athletes.
Recently, members of the Norwegian women’s beach handball team were fined for wearing “improper clothing” while playing in a tournament in Europe. The Norwegian women refused to follow the dress code that is spelled out specifically for women athletes—“midriff-baring tops and bikini bottoms with a close fit and cut on an upward angle toward the top of the leg, with a maximum side of 4 inches”. Seriously! The dress code is written exactly like that! But the Norwegian women decided they were athletes and not sex objects and they wore the same kind of shorts that the men are allowed to wear.
Good for them.
Aug 2, 2021
The U.S. Olympic Committee pays its athletes a few thousand dollars ... if they win a medal. For a gold medal, $37,000; for a silver medal, $22,000; for a bronze medal, $15,000. Based on the athletes’ many years of hard work and training, that probably works out to be maybe 5 cents an hour for those who win a medal. And it’s zero cents an hour for the vast majority of the athletes.
Certainly an athlete like Simone Biles makes money from endorsements. But many Olympic athletes have to rely on other jobs to live. Unlike those who don’t have to train at all, but make millions of dollars off the performance of the athletes.
Aug 2, 2021
Air Force veteran Daniel Hale was sentenced July 27 to nearly four years in prison. What was his crime? Did he kill a civilian? Did he enrich himself with government property? No, he was convicted of giving information about assassinations by drone bombings in Afghanistan to a journalist, who used it to make the Intercept documentary The Drone Papers.
Hale was in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013 and spent the last two years at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He says that in his experience the National Security Agency (NSA) and the military used bad information to decide who to kill by drone bombing, so some innocent civilians were killed. He also came to believe the U.S. actions in Afghanistan don’t serve either the American or the Afghan people.
The judge said he intends his sentence to deter others from doing what Hale did. In other words, from exposing the truth.
Aug 2, 2021
As they get set to pull the U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, Joe Biden and the military have made a big propaganda campaign to sell the idea that they’re making an honorable withdrawal. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said, “We have spoken many times about the moral obligation we have to help those who have helped us.”
When Biden was asked if there was any comparison to the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, he said, “None whatsoever. Zero,” and, “There’s going to be no circumstance when you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.”
What a crock of bull!
By making a big deal about how they’re helping their friends, these officials are trying to cover for the destruction done to the whole population of Afghanistan—“friend” or foe. In fact, it’s like Vietnam in more ways than one.
Just as in Vietnam, the U.S. invaded the country in order to defend its monetary and political interests. The U.S. did not bring peace, freedom or prosperity to Afghanistan, but ongoing war and chaos ruled over by corrupt officials who lined their own pockets at the expense of the population.
Just as in Vietnam, the Afghan government has no independent base of support in the population, having been created and propped up by the U.S. As the U.S. withdraws, the government’s control simply crumbles as other armed gangs, including the Taliban, take control of more and more of the country. The official government of Ashraf Ghani now controls barely more than the capital of Kabul itself—mere months after U.S. troops started to withdraw.
Surely, just as in Vietnam, many who were the face of the U.S.—translators, clerks, drivers and others—will be left holding the bag. But their number loses significance in the face of the millions of Afghanis who have paid the price for war.
At least 241,000 people have been killed in the war since 2001. Over 330,000 ordinary Afghan people have been displaced by the recent fighting, with 30,000 more fleeing every week. In addition to the over 3 million Afghan refugees living in Europe, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran.
And finally, a whole population thrown into grinding poverty by decades of war and economic disruption. According to the United Nations, HALF the country’s population is already in need of humanitarian aid—twice as many as last year, and over 6 times as many as four years ago.
Those who did the U.S. government’s bidding may be flown out of the country—but millions more are trapped in the hell created by the U.S. occupation AND its withdrawal.
Aug 2, 2021
Average life expectancy went down by a year and a half in 2020 for white, hispanic and black people in the U.S. This was the most rapid decline in life expectancy since World War II.
In the richest country in the world, life expectancy had been rising in recent decades. But that came to a screeching halt in 2014 when the opioid epidemic hit and life expectancy began to go down. The decline noticed in 2014 was worse for working class people.
Then, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, all of the problems in the society and in the healthcare system intensified. The healthcare system in the U.S. is described by more and more health care workers as broken.
During COVID-19, the working class has experienced deaths from poor quality health care once workers get sick, in addition to the deaths of front line workers with more exposure to the virus and less protection.
But part of lower life expectancy in 2014 and in 2020 came from what public health experts call “deaths of despair”—more opioid-related deaths, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver and homicide.
Scientists explain that measuring life expectancy helps to measure the general health of a population. They say it is a way to reveal a society in widespread distress.
This dropping life expectancy statistic shows that the pandemic accelerated the worsening standard of living that was already being imposed on the working class by the wealthy who control this society.
If the working class ever needed a reason to fight, the fact that capitalist society is killing us is a good place to start!
Aug 2, 2021
The following editorial appeared in the SPARK workplace newsletters during the week of July 26, 2021.
“It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks ... who are letting us down.” So said Governor Kay Ivey, when asked why so many people in Alabama were coming down with Covid.
Biden’s Covid co-ordinator, Jeff Zients, repeated the same idea: “We have enough vaccine. Now it’s up to each and every single American to do their own part.” Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s head of the CDC, added her voice to the refrain: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
It’s true, most new cases of Covid are concentrated in states where fewer people are vaccinated. Within states, it’s also true: counties with lower vaccination rates have higher infection rates, followed by hospitalizations and death.
The vaccines that have been developed are powerful weapons for controlling this pandemic. And the U.S. has more than enough vaccine to inoculate its whole population several times over.
Of course, it’s an illusion that any country can wall itself off from the world. The “Delta variant”—more contagious and more virulent—came from areas with less vaccine. So long as the vaccines are controlled by profit-making enterprises in this country and Europe, the whole world, including the U.S. is left at risk.
But this country, with all its wealth, with more than enough supply, hasn’t even been able to fully vaccinate more than half its population.
Politicians berate the unvaccinated to cover their own responsibility in this crisis. But there is a reality their blame-shifting can’t hide: something is seriously wrong in this system which was able to produce the means to control the pandemic, but was unable to put those means to use.
Why are so many people left unvaccinated? There were barriers, barriers created by the way the wage-system of capitalism works. Most people who were caught in those essential jobs—in food stores, gas stations, Amazon warehouses, delivery services—had low wages and no paid-time off. Taking a day off for the shot, another couple days off in case there are side effects, then repeating the whole thing for the second shot took money they needed just for their family to survive. If they weren’t working, they had to deal with childcare, given that schools and childcare facilities were closed. Vaccination facilities were often set up in places requiring a car to get to them; appointments required internet access to set them up. Tens of millions of people don’t have either. In this medical system built around the profit motive, millions of people have no regular doctor, no one who could answer their legitimate concerns.
Put all of this together, it comes as no surprise that the people with the lowest incomes had the lowest rate of vaccination. This follows on everything else that has happened in the pandemic. Deaths from Covid, from the beginning, have been concentrated in the poorest parts of the population.
In capitalist society, everything revolves around class.
It’s true that some politicians, for their own election purposes, spread rumors about the disease and the vaccines, advised people not to get a shot—while secretly getting one themselves. What kind of system would depend on a political apparatus cynically ready to sacrifice the lives of people?
Finally, what does it tell us about a system whose politicians berate the unvaccinated instead of searching for ways to overcome the problem?
This capitalist system long ago outlived its potential for making progress for ever larger parts of the population. A system that can produce vaccines, but not put them to full use, is a system that no longer has a reason to exist.
The system working people will build, when once again the working class mobilizes its full forces, will base itself on what has already been developed, but use it to serve the population.
Aug 2, 2021
Looking for affordable housing in Detroit? Well, good luck. Because when it seems things couldn’t get any crazier, then a million dollar condo offer jumps out when you open the Sunday Detroit newspaper. Advertised on a two-full-page spread. A million dollar condo.
This property is known as Willy’s Overland lofts. Well, Willy’s used to be the Willis Warehouse, a Detroit public school building that was a warehouse for school furniture. In a neighborhood that USED TO BE affordable for students from nearby Wayne State University, and city of Detroit residents. Now, what are known as the Midtown, Corktown and New Center districts—luxury properties are being featured, with studio apartments starting at $1,500 a month, going to $4,000 for a 2 bedroom, and condos, like Willy’s, in the half a million to million dollar range.
So what’s wrong with this picture? Everything. In a city where 30% of its residents live below the poverty line; in a city where the median income of individuals is less than $20,000 a year, affordable housing is already a huge problem. When the Big 3 shut down plants and people lost their jobs and their homes, neighborhoods crumbled. When the banks and loan companies offered subprime mortgages as their prime scam, thousands of people lost their homes. And for a number of years now, big developers have been buying up properties all over, and pushing Detroit residents out, whether by doubling and tripling rents, or condemning their homes, while making lucrative deals with the city of Detroit, to build their pet projects with high-end housing nearby.
There’s something drastically wrong with a society where it seems normal to feature million-dollar condos, while working class families are doubling and tripling up in apartments and bedrooms and basements in single family homes. Where more and more homeless are taking up residence under bridges.
Affordable housing should be a right. And this demand needs to be added to the list of things to come together and fight for. Where neighborhoods in which working people can live comfortably and affordably come first. Not glass houses for the rich.
Aug 2, 2021
On July 18, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), California’s largest utility company, reported that its equipment “most likely” had caused the massive Dixie Fire burning in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Earlier in the week, a repairman, checking on a local power outage, had found that a tree had fallen onto a power line conductor, blowing several fuses and sparking a fire that was burning below. By the time fire crews arrived, the fire was already burning out of control and spreading through remote wilderness.
Within two weeks, the fire had become the fifteenth largest fire in California’s history, having burned through 200,000 acres, an area a little larger than New York City. The fire was threatening more than 800 homes and buildings. Evacuation orders were given to surrounding rural communities, as dangerous columns of smoke and ash known as “fire clouds” hampered firefighters’ containment efforts.
The Dixie Fire was a disaster waiting to happen.
In the months leading up to the Dixie Fire, both a federal court judge and the Public Utility Commission, the state regulator, had issued scathing reports castigating PG&E for not clearing hazardous vegetation on its highest-risk power lines, not coming close in meeting its promise to trim or remove more than one million trees, and for relying on hired contractors to do the work rather than hiring its own tree-trimming force.
In other words, PG&E had barely lifted a finger to reduce safety hazards that plague its enormous system. This is nothing new. The company’s decrepit and rundown equipment has a long history of igniting some of the most deadly fires in Northern California. In 2017, PG&E equipment was responsible for setting 17 major wildfires that together scorched 193,743 acres in eight counties, destroyed 3,256 structures and killed 22 people. In 2018, the Camp Fire, the deadliest in state history, was set off by a 115,000-volt line that was damaged and dislodged from a century-old tower. PG&E later pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter. (Dozens of families that had been forced from their homes by the 2018 Camp Fire have resettled in small towns that are now being threatened by the Dixie Fire.)
And in Sonoma County, the district attorney has filed criminal charges against PG&E over the 2019 Kincade fire, which was also sparked by the utility’s equipment. The Kincade fire burned more than 75,000 acres, destroyed nearly 400 structures and forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 residents.
In response to the latest catastrophe, an outraged editorial in the Mercury News and East Bay Times stated, “With every passing day, it’s getting harder to tell which is worse for California’s forests, climate change or PG&E. The company’s negligence and incompetence during the last 10 years is directly responsible for killing more than 100 Californians and burning thousands of homes.”
No, these wildfire disasters are not caused by mere “negligence” and “incompetence,” but the corporate drive for profits and the enrichment of the capitalist class, which pushes companies to slash spending on safety ... guaranteeing ever-worsening catastrophes.
Aug 2, 2021
The images from the news videos that hit TV screens in July were too horrible to ignore. Flood waters, roaring through streets, swept dozens of cars with them in Belgium and Germany. Halfway around the globe in China, passengers trapped in a subway train, waist-deep in flood waters, captured their own horror on their cell phone cameras. Fourteen of the more than 500 people trapped in the subway tunnel in Zhengzhou, China, drowned in the flooded subway tunnel. Four more people died in their cars in a flooded highway tunnel nearby, with a total death toll of at least 58 in the province. In Belgium and Germany, more than 200 people lost their lives in the floods.
A European flood warning system had predicted the flooding of the Rhine and Meuse rivers four days before it happened. And yet, once the torrential rains hit, the rivers swelled so fast that authorities were still too slow in warning the population, and many people apparently failed to understand the severity of the flood, which was far beyond anything they had experienced in their lives. As for Zhengzhou, the area surrounding the city, a semi-arid region, got more rain in one single day on July 20 than what it gets on average in one year.
And there have been many more catastrophic floods in the northern hemisphere this summer so far. Floods in Nigeria, Uganda and India killed hundreds of people. And then there are all the other kinds of weather events—a massive drought and record-breaking heat waves in the American Northwest and Canada, followed by huge, fast-moving wildfires that have burned through more than 1 million acres and still raging. Even Arctic regions have not escaped the fires, including in Siberia.
Scientists predicted extreme, catastrophic weather events like these due to the steady warming trend of the Earth’s surface more than three decades ago. They pointed to the role of carbon dioxide emissions, coming from burning fossil fuels, in the warming of the globe. Faced with increasing publicity and awareness about global warming and climate change, governments agreed to meet to discuss ways to curb carbon dioxide emissions. But for decades so far, the only thing governments have agreed on has been just that: to meet. Several climate “conferences” and “summits” over the decades have produced only finger-pointing by the governments, which all basically say other countries should reduce emissions first, and/or more, and never meet their own promised emission limits either.
But how could anyone even expect these governments to act in unison, when each government represents the interests of the biggest companies based in their country? No, the response of the big capitalists to the climate crisis is the same as their response to every other global crisis, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: to ignore it, and to continue to focus on their own profits—especially since those who are hit by the catastrophic consequences of these crises are the poor, working-class masses in every country.
That’s how capitalism operates, and that’s why the environmental catastrophe only worsens. The kind of collective effort this crisis requires can only be realized by the working people of the world, reaching out across national borders, which bosses have proven themselves incapable of doing, over and over.