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 30, 2021
Declaring himself "outraged as well as heartbroken" by the loss of civilian life, Biden denounced the terrorists who organized the suicide bombing at Kabul airport.
Yes, ISIS-K, which quickly claimed "credit" for the bombing, is an enemy of the population wherever it has gone. But Biden himself is nothing but a front for U.S. imperialism, which is the enemy of people all over the world.
ISIS-K "a militia of religious zealots" planned this latest bombing with complete disregard for the cost in Afghan civilian lives. Seeking to show it could damage the U.S. military, ISIS organized a deadly bombing in an area where civilians crowded around U.S. troops. It was ready to kill indiscriminately.
ISIS may have killed 13 U.S. military personnel, but it took perhaps 170 Afghan civilians along with them.
The pictures that streamed out of Kabul, just before and after the bombing, were grotesque. Thousands of people jammed up against the bottom of high concrete walls, pleading for a chance to get into the airport to escape from Afghanistan. Then the bomb went off. The bodies of men, women and children littered the sewage canal into which they were thrown by the blast, torn up by pieces of shrapnel.
As terrible as those few minutes were, replayed over again on TV, they give only a faint idea of the carnage inflicted on the Afghan population during the 20 years the U.S. military has been occupying the country.
The population has been the victim of other terrorist bombs, whether set off by ISIS, by the Northern Alliance, by the Taliban, by tribal warlords or by drug gangs. The goal of each group was to impose itself on the country, or at least to stake out part for its own fiefdom. So, yes, the Afghan population has paid dearly for the desires of these forces to establish their own dictatorship.
But, above all, the civilian population has been the victim of big power terrorism, the much more deadly violence dispensed by the U.S. military. Its high-tech bombs—filled with old-style shrapnel—rained havoc on the population. So did the drones and missiles, guided by sophisticated targeting systems. And then there were the nearly 800,000 U.S. troops who rotated in and out of Afghanistan. They carried out deadly, boots-on-the-ground, "seek-and-destroy" missions. How many civilians died from these missions, no one knows, because the U.S., which controlled Afghan governments during all these years, banned such reports.
Afghan civilians were "collateral damage," this term used by American generals to minimize civilian deaths. All told, upward of 200,000 Afghans died. Seven million people were driven from their homes out of a total population of less than 40 million.
Biden, in speaking of the U.S. troops who were killed at Kabul airport, said that they "died defending our visions and our values in the struggle against terrorism."
The values they defended were the values of this capitalist system, built on exploitation. They died in the service of U.S. imperialism, which rests on military force—state organized terrorism—to maintain its domination over the whole world. They died, as have so many other U.S. soldiers, so that U.S. corporations could go on draining oil out of the Middle East, lifting mineral wealth out of Africa, exploiting starvation-wage labor in Asia. The tragedy of the U.S. troops is that they volunteered to be part of the military, to be used by their class enemy against people much like themselves in other countries.
Whether they joined the U.S. military because they fell for claims of patriotism foisted onto them by schools, churches and politicians; whether they joined to get a training or to see something of far-off places; whether they joined because jobs were scarce in rural areas so many of them came from—in one way or another, they all became assassins for imperialism, used against peoples all over the world. In so doing, they dug their own grave, and along with it, the graves of so many people in countries just like Afghanistan.
The news media is filled with films of their caskets being brought back to full honors, with somber music or drumbeats played in the background. The flag is flying at half mast over post office and government buildings. Patriotism runs riot. The 13 coffins have been turned into props in a propaganda video.
This sickening patriotic show, built on the dead civilians in Afghanistan and the dead U.S. troops—these are the values of imperialism. It is a system that needs to be tossed on the junk heap.
People in other countries are not our enemies. What matters for them matters to us. We can start by turning our back on all the patriotic crap which today inundates us. In this world controlled by imperialism, that’s already a big step.
Aug 30, 2021
A demonstration that food insecurity is real and devastating in Southeast Michigan was made visible recently. Resembling soup lines from the Great Depression, lines were out the door and down the street at eight Michigan Dept. of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) offices between August 12 and 19.
Low-income residents of Wayne and Washtenaw counties could apply for federal Disaster Food Assistance if they were hurt by the June 25–29 catastrophic floods. Because the federal government required in-person interviews be conducted to provide this federal disaster food relief, people had to line up for help.
For years, Michigan has required applications be filled out on the internet for all kinds of help, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or food stamps. Internet-only applications meant no more crowds gathering at social services offices. This hid the poor from view.
A one-week bureaucratic change requiring in-person interviews, plus a powerful word-of-mouth campaign by those needing help, led to huge crowds showing up. Two extra days had to be added to allow all who showed up to have a chance to apply.
Out of 10 million Michigan residents, 1.25 million people were already getting food assistance as of July 2021. This one-week emergency program was for people not already getting SNAP help. During one week, people from 22,415 households lined up at eight offices to collect 11.5 million dollars in one-time help. The state said a total of 87,517 residents got the disaster food assistance.
State of Michigan workers from 60 offices helped in order to have enough staff to process benefits.
It is telling that the response to in-person applications was overwhelming. For one week, a bureaucratic burden of requiring the poor to have internet access to complete an on-line application was lifted. When a state worker was there to help a person fill out the application, look how many showed up!
If the feds had not required in-person applications, the depth of the need for food in the community would have remained hidden.
Aug 30, 2021
Over a thousand Nabisco workers walked off the job last month, starting in Portland, Oregon and now including bakeries and distribution centers in Chicago, in Aurora, Colorado, in Richmond, Virginia and in Norcross, Georgia. This is the first Nabisco strike in 50 years.
Workers have been pulling 16-hour, double shifts throughout the pandemic to bake Oreos, Wheat Thins, Triscuits, Ritz Crackers and Chips Ahoy. People stuck at home during the lockdowns bought more cookies and snacks. Corporate parent Mondelēz has profited handsomely off of workers’ sweat, raking in almost two billion dollars in profits so far this year.
But when their contract expired in May, Nabisco demanded workers switch to 12 hour shifts, and an end to weekend overtime pay, which together would cost workers thousands a year. Nabisco also proposed a second-tier healthcare plan for new hires. And they had already ended workers’ pension plan. As a forklift operator put it: “. . . they made record breaking profits, then they turn around and want to take everything from us.”
Workers’ response was to go on strike, starting in Portland on August 10th. They mean to push back on the company, to keep their pay, healthcare and pensions. They are following in the footsteps of 850 Frito-Lay workers, who struck for three weeks in July over many of the same issues.
In Chicago and Portland, Nabisco has tried to keep the lines running, using office workers and scabs. Chicago’s 24-hour picket line stayed spirited into its second week, and has been joined by workers from other unions, from the neighborhood and around the city.
Working people all over this country have suffered through this pandemic. Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers have chosen to fight back—certainly many more of us have reason to do the same. The fight by these bakery workers has every reason to spread.
A Chicago worker put it: "I feel that people should fight for what they believe in and be unified when doing so. If you don’t fight, you’ll crumble. . . They say ‘we care about you and your families.’ No you don’t, not when you’re forcing someone to work 16 hours and then double back and do another eight hours the next morning."
Aug 30, 2021
Overnight going into August 21, a storm stalled over the rural town of McEwen, Tennessee, about 70 miles west of Nashville. In a 24 hour period, 17 inches of rain fell. It was a Tennessee record according to the National Weather Service.
This rain fell at high elevations, meaning water flowed downhill and accumulated. Flash floods—a tidal wave of water—hit towns and villages at lower elevations in Middle Tennessee. Entire neighborhoods were washed away.
In the end, 20 people died. Among the dead were 7-month old twins, ripped from their father’s arms by flood waters, a 15-year-old girl and an Army veteran who died helping his wife and daughter escape.
A warning on television the night before had mentioned possible heavy rainfall. On the day of the floods, the Weather Service sent warnings directly to cellphones at 6:09am: “A FLASH FLOOD WARNING is in effect for this area.” A local emergency management director said people “received the notification on their phone at about the same time the water was at their door.”
Such a horrific disaster would normally mean Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) help might be available to residents. But under capitalism, an economic system with huge gaps between rich and poor, FEMA help will not be available to many of the low income victims of this flooding.
That is because FEMA will not help any low income community that “opts out” of the federal flood insurance program. That program comes with building codes that can be very expensive for poor communities to manage.
Humphreys and Houston County, hit by the flooding, opted out. These counties are so poor they do not have a tax base to administer building codes.
As climate change gets worse, more explosive rainstorms are going to happen.
While it is difficult to link any one event to climate change, the warming of the atmosphere is contributing to more frequent extreme weather events around the world.
A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, causing more powerful rain. When meteorologists launched a weather balloon to collect data in Middle Tennessee after the floods, they found moisture in the air was at record levels. Climate change has been predicted to hit poor communities the hardest. Add Middle Tennessee to the list of hardest hit.
Aug 30, 2021
Groundwater near at least nine military bases and installations near the Chesapeake Bay is contaminated with dangerous levels of PFAS chemicals and has entered the Bay itself, according to a recent report by the Environmental Working Group.
These chemicals are made up of a chain of linked carbon and fluorine atoms. This gives them the useful qualities of being resistant to water, oil, and heat. Starting in the 1940s, manufacturers used PFAS chemicals to make non-stick pots and flame-resistant clothing and carpets, and in automobiles, construction materials, and electronics. The military used them in firefighting foam.
More recently, oil companies mixed them with water pumped into the ground to force out oil or gas: “fracking.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved this use of PFAS in fracking a decade ago.
But the resistant qualities also mean PFAS chemicals do not break down in the environment. Scientists call them “forever chemicals.” They actually accumulate in the food chain, as plants are eaten by animals and then by people. And they are toxic, raising cholesterol levels and causing tumors, kidney and liver problems, and reproductive, developmental, and immunological effects in animals—and most likely in people too.
Over 41,000 industrial sites across the country could be leaking PFAS. More than half the people in the U.S. live over groundwater possibly contaminated by PFAS, especially in the Midwest.
The EPA knew the risks, as did many manufacturers. But for the bosses, there were profitable sales to be made.
Aug 30, 2021
On June 30th, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) raided a house in South L.A. that had a large number of fireworks and improvised explosives. The LAPD decided to detonate some of the explosives inside a special vehicle that was supposed to contain the explosion.
Instead of measuring the weight of the explosives, the bomb squad eye-balled it, and made a horrifying miscalculation. The induced explosion blew up the truck, blasted out windows, and badly damaged homes and businesses in the surrounding blocks. As a result, paramedics took 17 people to the hospital. Two weeks after the blast, two individuals died. The explosion officially displaced 88 people from their homes, who now live in hotels and motels paid by the city. There are untold others who are staying with friends and family.
Nearly two months later, many residents are stuck, struggling to rebuild their lives. Some have lost their family homes. Others have lost their jobs because of the stress of the blast or the fact the explosion has displaced them. While residing in hotels paid by the city, it is uncertain how long the displaced residents can stay.
The city has not made the necessary repairs. It has not even boarded up all homes, let alone repaired them.
City officials created a one-million-dollar relief fund and a one-time $10,000 check to households who need to repair their homes, but many residents are afraid to take the money. They fear accepting aid from the city will trap them from any further claims.
The residents of this working-class section of Los Angeles have good reason to have no trust in the authorities, who have a decades-long policy of keeping South L.A. deprived of services. The LAPD, on its part, acts like an occupying army. The actions of city officials and the LAPD regarding this blast are just one more example showing that they have no interest in addressing the population’s concerns.
Aug 30, 2021
At the end of August, 93 million pages of documents in the trial of Big Tobacco versus the rest of humanity are to be destroyed, although the pages were first turned into digital form.
The tobacco industry brought at least 18 appeals against lawsuits to prevent being held liable for smoking deaths. The industry continued all its advertising until the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. Yet the tobacco companies had scientific evidence from at least 1958 that smoking cigarettes killed smokers.
In the smoking lawsuit, brought by 46 states against four tobacco companies, the companies agreed to stop advertising and to pay billions annually to the states in reparations. A Mayo clinic doctor who testified during the trial said that cigarettes were “the most sophisticated drug delivery device that’s ever been invented to get nicotine to the brain within five heartbeats ... a product designed specially to do nothing more than to get [people] addicted and to kill them.”
Remember the Marlboro man? Or “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”? Or for younger people, there’s the exciting rainbow of colors offered with e-cigarettes.
All of these are death delivery systems, for the profit of large corporate stockholders, like Altria, the former Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, or British American Tobacco. The profits have rolled in since the earliest North American settlers brought in the tobacco crop in the 1600s.
But every single person who smoked was made to feel guilty for their individual choice to smoke, despite oceans of money the companies spent on advertisements to entice them to start smoking at a young age. The companies even pretended their “light” versions of cigarettes were less addictive, less deadly than their older versions.
At least 20 million people have already died from smoking in the U.S., with 400,000 more people in the U.S. dying of lung cancer every year. The World Health Organization says more than a billion people still smoke around the world.
No one is free to choose in a society that designs all sorts of addictions so that a tiny number of people can get rich.
Aug 30, 2021
The federal government is suing Kaiser Permanente for grossly overcharging Medicare with falsely inflated claims.
The Department of Justice joined six already-existing lawsuits against Kaiser, filed by Kaiser employees. These whistle-blowers say that Kaiser has been overstating the severity of some patients’ chronic illnesses so that it can get more money from the Medicare Advantage program.
These employees report a systematic culture of fraud at Kaiser, coming from the highest levels of the company. For example, they describe “coding parties” for doctors, where Kaiser management puts doctors together in a room with computers and tells them to change some of their diagnoses, sometimes months after a patient’s visit.
This is all the more striking as Kaiser is often held up as a model of how to deliver health care efficiently. But it’s certainly not just Kaiser. “It’s industry-wide and it’s of major proportions,” said a lawyer who represents whistle blowers. She added that there is even a cottage industry of companies that specialize in “advising” health care providers on Medicare filings—that is, showing them how to scam the system.
Sure enough, the DOJ has charged more than a few big health care companies with Medicare fraud. Two of the companies, Healthcare Partners and Sutter Health, have settled cases against them to the tune of 270 million dollars and 30 million dollars, respectively.
Another lawsuit against Sutter, as well as lawsuits against the two largest health insurers in the U.S., UnitedHealth and Anthem, are still going on.
The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2014 that almost 10% of the payments Medicare Advantage made were fraudulent—which today would mean 30 billion dollars a year in fraudulent Medicare Advantage payments pocketed by these greedy companies.
When multi-billion-dollar companies scam tens of billions of dollars out of the health care system like this, it is no surprise that health care is so extremely expensive in the U.S.—while tens of millions of Americans, mostly and especially working class Americans, can’t get health care when they need it.
Aug 30, 2021
A heavy rainfall of more than two inches often produces severe flash flooding in Chicago, leaving streets dangerously impassable and sewers overflowing.
Flooding has plagued the city for many years, but politicians proclaimed the final solution would be construction of a 109 mile “Deep Tunnel Project,” to capture over 20 billion gallons of rainwater and waste. Forty-eight years, nine mayors, and four billion dollars later ... it’s still not done. Its new “completion target” is 2029. Parts of the project have been in use since 1985, and the massive stretch of tunnel has been operational since 2009. So far it’s been totally insufficient—it can’t handle big storms.
Just last June, a 5-inch rainfall produced chaotic scenes, with frantic stranded motorists desperately seeking safety and a way home from work. Many arrived home to find raw sewage backed up into their basements.
During May 2020, 27,000 flooding complaints were lodged by residents. Hardest hit were the poor and working class communities of Auburn-Gresham and Chatham on Chicago’s South Side. Just a year earlier these communities were even more severely stricken. One resident described how her basement was flooded with human waste six times in the previous 10 years.
Researchers found that between 2007 and 2016, 75% of flood damage was in thirteen working-class zip codes, including the Gresham, Chatham, Austin, Roseland, and West Englewood neighborhoods.
These neighborhoods suffer horrible consequences. Flash flooding leaves sewage-laced water flowing into streets, alleys and basements. This septic goo carries waterborne diseases of all kinds. The filthy runoff spills into local rivers and Lake Michigan, the city’s source for drinking water.
The effects of climate change make things much worse. Lake Michigan will experience ever larger variations of water levels, ensuring the population will suffer even more extreme flooding and sewage overflow in years to come.
The “Deep Tunnel Project” was just one of several engineering projects launched over the years to “manage” flooding, but these were primarily designed to enhance capitalist profit-making while protecting downtown business interests and rich and politically connected neighborhoods. They intertwined with big money-making projects of the most powerful city developers. Huge government contracts were doled out to politically connected firms.
Effective systems to prevent flooding and dispose of human waste are among the most basic needs of society. Designing them is not rocket science! We have the resources and know-how to do this right, but the capitalist-run government has other priorities.
A system organized to create super-profits for capitalists, which cannot meet even the most basic needs of society, needs to be trash-canned and replaced by one that does.
Aug 30, 2021
Maryland is a good example of what is done by state, federal and local officials to avoid cleaning up pollution.
After 10 years of community protests, Bear Creek, next to a former Bethlehem Steel plant at Sparrows Point, is about to be added to the Superfund list for clean-up. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just got around to this action. Bethlehem Steel management had free rein to pollute the air, water and land for its more than 100 years of existence. And the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) also let Bethlehem Steel do whatever cost the company the least amount of money.
On Maryland’s Eastern shore, chicken processors, led by Perdue, have been allowed to handle their manure in ways that make it the largest single source of nitrogen polluting the Chesapeake Bay.
Over the past 3 years, the MDE conducted 2,000 inspections, but only found six companies that didn’t follow the rules on polluting the air, water and land. Yes, only six! Yet the Chesapeake Bay is full of dead zones; the air in summer around Baltimore is a polluted haze; the creek added to the Superfund is hardly the only dead one; and the water system is allowed to spill waste into rivers and streams after storms.
To add insult to injury, the MDE followed the recent trend and declared it would carry out its actions in a manner consistent with “environmental justice,” writing it would “implement environmental laws in a manner that reduces existing inequities and avoids creation of additional inequities.”
MDE supposedly has jurisdiction over Baltimore City as well, and has cited the trash incinerator called Wheelabrator multiple times. What did the city officials do? Extended Wheelabrator’s contract for 10 more years. A recent report points out that Baltimore recycles 2% of plastic, while Wheelabrator burns half of it, releasing carcinogens into the air, along with other toxins.
Whether it is the federal, state or local officials, talk is cheap, while pollution is deadly.
Aug 30, 2021
This article is from the August 23 workplace newsletters of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
One cannot help but be sickened and revolted by the images from Afghanistan. The fiasco of the American army and the collapse of the regime that it was defending caused a wave of panic in Kabul’s population. As soon as they knew that the Taliban were coming, thousands of Afghans rushed to the airport to try and flee the country. But the American soldiers denied them access to the airport. A number of people were killed, either shot or crushed in the stampede. The American army stopped them from embarking, abandoning those on whom it has relied for years but also all those who fear the infamous dictatorship of the Taliban.
Even more revolting is the war that has now lasted more than 20 years, waged on the pretext of fighting terrorism. The Afghan people were the first to suffer, as a result of the atrocities committed by the Taliban and by the American army.
The American army claimed to be fighting the Taliban, the armed reactionary groups that are again trying to impose their dictatorship over the Afghan people, particularly over women. But American leaders are responsible for bringing the Taliban into being. In the late 1970s, they funded and armed the Islamic militia who were fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The same militia turned against them and after gaining power were chased out. But the 20-year U.S. military occupation gave them time to regroup and now they are back in power once more.
The United States may well have spent trillions of dollars on this war but chose not to organize the saving of several thousand Afghans. How much would it have cost to airlift them to safety? A drop in the ocean when compared to the amount spent on bombs and other engines of war.
But we should hold no illusions: we can see that the United States chose not to help the population of Haiti, which is only a few hundred miles off the American coast and has just been hit by an earthquake. In the exact same way that they chose not to help when an earthquake hit Haiti ten years ago, killing 200,000 people and destroying the capital. Another situation where a tiny fraction of the money spent by the American army on killing, destroying and burning in Afghanistan would have been enough to rebuild the small country of Haiti, the poorest on the American continent. Something they still have not done, not even partially.
The French army and French imperialism have done nothing more than act as lackeys to American imperialism in Afghanistan. But we should not forget that the French army is leading the war that has been waged in Mali for years. A war waged using the same excuse of the war on terrorism, a war that has inflicted the same suffering on local populations and with the same predictable result.
This is imperialist domination of the world in all its horrific splendor.
Everything that happens in Afghanistan concerns us, the workers here, not least because Western leaders, those primarily responsible for the chaos over there, will use it against us. No sooner had the Taliban begun to enter Kabul than Macron and other political leaders began to raise the specter of another wave of migrants that must be stopped.
There is no border that will stop these human beings from fleeing death, from trying to save their own lives and their children’s lives. From a humanitarian point of view, they should be allowed to settle where they wish, including to join friends or members of their family who have already emigrated. But leaders like Macron prefer to deflect discontent by using migrants as scapegoats.
They hope to divide workers even further by stigmatizing those who migrate from Afghanistan, along with those who come from Arabian and Turkish regions or who are simply Muslims. Workers must not allow themselves to be fooled and they must recognize who their real enemies are.
Emancipating workers and breaking free of capitalist exploitation also means overthrowing the power of imperialism in France, in the United States and in all imperialist countries. These two tasks are one and the same thing.
Aug 30, 2021
The following editorial came from the Spark workplace newsletters during the week of August 23, 2021, before the bombing at the Kabul airport.
“Gut-wrenching”? The whole situation of the Afghan poor population is gut-wrenching. And U.S. imperialism is directly responsible for it.
In just this last year alone, 550,000 people were displaced by war, drought, and hunger. According to the United Nations food agency, one third of the population is going hungry every day. Two million children are malnourished. Tens of thousands of children are dying for lack of food.
This was the situation when U.S. puppets ran the country—before the Taliban took over.
In 20 years’ time, seven million Afghans were driven from their homes, one of the worst refugee crises the world has seen. Several million Afghans escaped the hellhole of war in Afghanistan—only to end up in the hellhole of refugee camps in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
In cold, dry numbers, this is part of the human cost of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
The mortal cost of the 20-year declared war was almost 200,000 Afghan dead, over half of them civilians. About 2,300 American troops and 1,200 troops from other NATO countries also died.
Over the war’s 20 years, nearly 800,000 U.S. troops circulated through Afghanistan. Added to them were no one knows how many “private security contractors,” i.e., mercenaries. Added to that were the hundreds of thousands in militias and drug gangs headed by Afghan warlords, paid with U.S. cash, plus a venal political caste which dispatched millions of U.S. dollars into their bank accounts outside the country. All of this bore down on the Afghan population.
The 20-year declared war was a product of U.S. covert action in the region over the 22 years before the “declared war” started. For almost two decades, the U.S. poured in money and weapons to build up fundamentalist Islamic militias. Its goal was to weaken the secular Afghan government, then supported by the Soviet Union. It was a typical “Cold-War” covert action, aimed at undermining the Soviet Union.
Afghanistan was drawn into a brutal 10-year war and the Soviet Union was undermined. And there was “blowback”—directly onto the American population. Among the “covert” operatives, through which the U.S. funded all these “black ops,” was a Saudi national by the name of Osama bin Laden. Among the fundamentalist religious militias was one which became al-Qaeda.
What started out as an attempt to create problems for the Soviet Union ended up bringing down the World Trade Center, and taking out a small part of the Pentagon. Three thousand U.S. civilians paid the price for U.S. covert actions.
In 2001, after 9/11, the U.S. declared war on Afghanistan, intent on demonstrating to the world that the U.S. had not been weakened. It expected to send troops in and bring them right back out.
Instead, U.S. troops found themselves fighting against militias the U.S. had helped create. Many were in gangs run by warlords. One of them, organized in Pakistan, became the Taliban. The U.S. caught its own army in a war of its own making.
The “gut-wrenching” catastrophe of Afghanistan was created not by any single U.S. administration, but by every one of them stretching back from Biden to Trump to Obama to Bush Jr. to Clinton to Bush Sr. to Reagan to Carter. It’s not a question of administrations, but of the imperialist system that every one of these American presidents served.
The war in Afghanistan is not the first and it won’t be the last war against peoples of the world. So long as capitalism continues there will be wars like this, many of which will “blow back” on the laboring population in the imperialist countries themselves. Catastrophes like Afghanistan will not stop until capitalism is ripped out all over the world, and especially in the big imperialist powers.
Maybe we can’t imagine the working class being strong enough to get rid of capitalism. But by denouncing imperialism and its wars, taking our stand with the peoples of the whole world today, we start down a road that can lead us there tomorrow.
Aug 30, 2021
Bangladesh is currently reporting a high number of COVID cases, mainly due to the epidemic spreading among the nearly 4 million garment workers, 80% of whom are women.
Bangladesh is one of the world’s largest garment exporters, and the industry is the foundation of the country’s economy.
As the latest COVID wave hit Bangladesh last month, the government mandated a strict lockdown of all factories, offices, shops, and transport. However, garment factories that supplied top brands in Europe and the U.S., like H&M and Zara, were excluded from the nationwide lockdown.
Fearing these brands would redirect orders to other countries, the owners of the garment factories demanded no COVID restriction measures in workplaces. On August 8, the government allowed all the country’s 5,000 garment factories to reopen without restrictions.
Hundreds of thousands of workers who went to their villages to sit out the lockdown had to race back to the cities. Many walked tens of miles only to face overstuffed trains, ferries, and buses. “It was a mad rush to get home when the lockdown was imposed, and now we are in trouble again getting back to work,” said one garment worker.
The lockdown did nothing but increase COVID cases as people migrated from the cities to the countryside and back, into factories with hundreds and thousands of workers.
Only one thing matters for the capitalist class—their bottom line. Their politicians are there to make it happen. All else be damned.
Aug 30, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Haiti has just experienced a new earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.2, in the south of the country. The provisional toll is terrible: more than 1,900 dead and 9,900 injured. More than 30,000 homes are destroyed, and thousands of residents are homeless.
This earthquake is less deadly than that of 2010 because it affected less urbanized areas and spared the capital, Port-au-Prince. In 2010, more than 280,000 people had been killed and more than 300,000 injured, for a population of nearly 10 million at the time. Les Cayes, the city most affected today, is the southern prefecture of the country.
However, it is clear that comparable earthquakes in Japan claim far fewer victims. Last February, an earthquake with an amplitude of 7.3 in Fukushima left around 100 people injured.
In a developed country, earthquake-resistant constructions prevent houses from crashing into inhabitants. Nothing is planned in Haiti. Worse, reconstructions rarely take earthquakes into account.
And once again, it is the inhabitants who, left to their own devices, organize solidarity, without state aid, and in the midst of gangs who extort. These are the inhabitants who cleared, often with their bare hands, to try to find victims under the rubble. There were many who did not even dare to enter the few intact houses because they feared aftershocks, even as a tropical storm approached.
In this situation, Western aid is for the moment non-existent. Only Mexico and Chile sent aid, medicine and food. However, American imperialism is very present in Haiti in the form of numerous industries of textiles, packaging materials, electronic components. The American state guarantees the profits by intervening with the Haitian government. The press has thus revealed that, to please textile bosses Levi Strauss and Hanes, the Obama administration, in 2011, pressured the Haitian government to maintain wages at 31 cents an hour while the latter wanted to raise it to 61 cents.
Imperialism has every interest in leaving the Haitian population in poverty to promote exploitation. It bears the responsibility for the backwardness of infrastructure, construction, and therefore ultimately for the deaths of the earthquake.
Aug 30, 2021
Currently, less than 10% of South African people are fully vaccinated. The excuse given is lack of availability of vaccines.
At the same time, under a contract by Johnson & Johnson, a South African company, Aspen Pharmacare, receives active pharmaceutical ingredients of Covid vaccines from Europe, then bottles, packages, and ships the finished product, millions of doses, to Europe.
Johnson & Johnson has a contract with the South African government to deliver 2.8 million doses to South Africa by the end of June. But South Africa received only about 1.5 million of these doses. So, although South Africa paid for these vaccines and can manufacture vaccine doses, the government cannot put its hands on these vaccines. South Africa’s population is left insufficiently vaccinated since it has no power over Johnson & Johnson’s decisions on who will get the vaccines and when.
Under capitalism, the profit-driven interests of the companies like Johnson & Johnson have power over vital decisions. The needs of vast populations are left unaddressed.
Aug 30, 2021
This article is from the August 16 workplace newsletters of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The epidemic has reached dramatic proportions in Martinique and Guadeloupe, overseas departments of France, known as the French Antilles. Contrary to the claims of President Macron and the French government, the insufficient vaccination rate of the population is not the only cause of the present situation.
For years, following in the footsteps of its predecessors, the government has refused to provide the means needed for the proper functioning of hospitals. Today, Macron is trying to pass off his own responsibility on the Antilleans who refuse to be vaccinated. These statements have rightly fueled anger among the population.
Yes, the vaccine constitutes a step forward from a scientific point of view. But it can’t replace healthcare providers organized to serve public health, for instance by encouraging vaccination when it is met with mistrust.
In the French West Indies, the mistrust is the result of the attitude of the authorities themselves, whose approach is often worthy of the colonial era. The chlordecone scandal is one of the most recent illustrations of this. For years, the state authorized West Indian planters to use this ultra-dangerous pesticide even though it was banned in the United States and France. This poison contaminated 90% of the population, causing multiple cancers and other pathologies.
Its danger was hidden by the authorities who lied knowingly. As late as February 2019, Macron himself made a statement denying the cancer-causing nature of this product. The population of the West Indies has every reason to distrust a government that claims to care about public health but has demonstrated the complete opposite any number of times.
Basically, it’s the same mistrust and anger, fueled by the same lies from the state, that have been expressed for several weeks in the streets of numerous towns in France. Just like in Pointe-à-Pitre and Fort-de-France, hospital workers found themselves having to fight the epidemic without resources, masks or gowns.…
Recently, the government dared to threaten those who had not been vaccinated with suspension or even dismissal! Many other workers eventually face the same threats because many employers will use this opportunity to increase their pressure, exert blackmail or fire them more easily.
The generalization of the health pass, with its controls and fines, will be a source of multiple complications for a lot of workers. Many families are worried about the start of the school year. As usual, the government is doing nothing but make declarations, threatening to exclude unvaccinated pupils instead of thinking of what resources are necessary.
A large part of those who joined the marches last Saturday wanted to show that this contempt and these authoritarian methods are not acceptable! We must continue to oppose the government’s health law by refusing to fall into the trap of the division between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. But we must not fall into another trap which would consist in denouncing Macron without attacking the social class he represents: the class of the capital-owners whose sole preoccupation during the pandemic is to make profits. The current government, like its predecessors, cuts the budgets of hospitals, nursing homes, education ... to finance hundreds of billions in all kinds of aid to the bourgeois class.
With the health crisis, big business has multiplied its attacks on workers, their jobs and their wages. Not to mention those who profit directly from the epidemic, such as the big pharmaceutical groups who dared to increase the price of their vaccines. As a result, the 40 biggest stock exchange companies raked in nearly 57 billion euros in profits in the first half of this year. A new record!
The only way for working people to fight for their rights and their living conditions is to attack the domination of the economy by the capitalists, who are totally irresponsible and parasitic. Without workers and their labor, society would come to a standstill. So workers are best able to run society in the interests of the greater numbers. By fighting for their interests, workers also defend popular interests at large and the future of society.
Aug 30, 2021
Karl Liebknecht, German revolutionary, was born 150 years ago to a political family. His father helped to found the German Social Democratic Party in 1863. Liebknecht was radicalized while a university student of law and political science, studying Marxist ideas.
Germany was expanding in the latter part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, in part due to huge military spending, as Germany tried to compete with Britain’s enormous empire. Factories were growing, banks were profiting, mining flourished.
Liebknecht chose to help push forward a party of the working class. He was among those opposing the likelihood of a war of imperialist competitors.
In 1912 he entered the German parliament as a representative of the German Social Democratic Party, but he was among its left-wing minority that spoke out against the German military/industrial complex led by Krupp, the weapons manufacturer.
When Germany and England’s leaders went to war in 1914. Liebknecht bravely declared himself against it and was the only member in the parliament not to vote for the war funding.
With Rosa Luxemburg and a number of others in the left-wing of German Social Democracy, Liebknecht left the party to organize a new party called the Spartacist League. He helped organize a newspaper appealing to the thousands of workers opposed to going to war.
Despite his position in the parliament he was twice arrested and threatened with being sent to one of the fronts of the war in 1915. He was sentenced and began to serve four years in prison.
Released in 1918, he went on to form the German Communist Party, along with Rosa Luxemburg in December 1919, following the example of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Liebknecht helped lead an uprising in Berlin and other parts of Germany in January 1919.
His former comrades of the German Social Democratic Party, then leading the German government, brutally put down workers’ uprisings all over the country and then arrested Liebknecht and Luxemburg, tortured and murdered them.
His comrade Clara Zetkin organized an enormous funeral for them in September 1919, a demonstration that still draws thousands every year in September in Germany to this day.
Aug 30, 2021
A tank broke off from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and flew around the earth in late March. The increasing numbers of disused satellites and rocket parts in orbit and cluttering space near earth pose a rising danger to spacecraft and astronauts.
The U.S. government says there are now around 23,000 such objects larger than a softball, half a million the size of a marble, and 100 million a millimeter in size. Even almost invisible paint flecks can cause crippling damage when they hit something because they orbit at great speed: 17,500 miles per hour, which is 10 times faster than a bullet.
When two objects collide, they shatter into many more pieces and compound the problem. The International Space Station has had to fire its rockets in a hurry to avoid space junk 29 times in two decades, including three times last year. The news rushes to avoid covering it!
There is no easy or cheap method to clean up space junk. Every government and company gets away with polluting space with debris from its rockets and satellites. As usual, the warnings of experts land on deaf ears … ears that don’t budget for cleaning up space.
Aug 30, 2021
The fish we eat are filled with bits of plastic, as are the oceans of the world. At least eight million tons, which is 16 billion pounds, of plastic waste goes into the oceans every year. One area of the Pacific Ocean is called the Great Garbage Patch, and it is an area twice the size of Texas! Fish take in little bits of plastic as they open their mouths to eat, and this kills millions each year. Plastic bottles and grocery bags and lost fishing nets make up this waste that kills marine animals.
Some environmentalists propose that the public switch to reusable bottles or bags to help clean up the ocean. But it is not our individual choices that have polluted landfills, rivers and oceans so heavily.
The real problem is that companies use the cheapest parts and packaging they possibly can. They mass produce what they need to package and sell their products, and to make their profits.
They care only about the bottom line. And they fill the world with their garbage.
Aug 30, 2021
This award-winning film, produced by Spike Lee and directed by Stefon Bristol, is a science-fiction film in which two engaging, loved, creative black teenagers discover how to time-travel and then try to use it to stop the horrific deaths of loved ones. It examines police brutality and murders and the dead end that society offers many young black men. The teens go back in time again and again to try and stop the violence, to no avail. The film offers no solutions, but perhaps that is the question, and the answer: there is no individual solution to the problems posed. The whole system needs to go.
This book is a damning catalogue describing how monopolies rule every corner of our lives. It clearly shows how this society seems to offer freedom and choice, but in reality all the choices are owned by huge multinational monopolies that fix high prices, constantly degrade quality, and take our very health and our lives.
The author presents a lot of detail to convince us, but he tells it in the form of real life stories, such as chapter titles like “Monopolies are Why a Woman Found Her Own Home Listed for Rent on Zillow” or “Monopolies are Why Teamsters Stormed a Podium to Tell One Another About Their Dead Friends and Relatives.” It is captivating reading. The only criticism is that the author presents this as a new problem when in fact it’s basic to the nature of capitalism; monopolies have been choking us for hundreds of years. No law or regulation will change the system that encourages and even demands their growth; only the working class that creates their wealth can sweep them away.
Aug 30, 2021
The federal government spent more than five years investigating corruption among some leaders of the UAW. The government used this investigation as a way to impose controls over the union. There will be a federal monitor inside the union for at least the next 6 years.
As part of the consent decree, the government also mandated that the UAW conduct a referendum for its members to vote on whether to change its constitution regarding how its top officers are elected. UAW members will vote on whether to keep the delegate process that the UAW has always used since it was organized, or to change to a “one member, one vote” process.
The following letter concerning the referendum was circulated by Gary Walkowicz, a long-time militant inside the UAW. Walkowicz was elected many times by his co-workers as a union representative, organized campaigns against concessions and ran 3 times for International UAW President, opposing the top leadership. Walkowicz has retired from Ford, but is still active in the union.
Aug 30, 2021
In a few months, UAW members will be voting whether to change the process by which we elect our top leadership. The UAW Constitution has always called for the President and the International Executive Board to be chosen at the UAW Constitutional Convention, elected by the delegates from each local union. As part of the consent decree mandated by the federal government, the UAW will conduct a referendum on whether to continue this process or to change to a “one member, one vote” process, where UAW members vote directly for the top leadership.
Why does the UAW have delegates elect the top leadership? If we look back at the early days of the UAW, we see a union that was organized by workers who built it to be a fighting organization. Making a fight meant bringing together auto workers who were spread across the country. The workers who started the UAW decided that the best way to organize a fight would be to have members in every Local elect delegates and then bring them together at a UAW Convention. These delegates would speak for what the members wanted. At the Conventions, the delegates discussed, debated and decided on a direction for the union. When the delegates elected the top leadership, that leadership reflected what the members wanted. That was when the UAW was at its most democratic and most militant.
I know UAW members have opinions about our top leadership today. Many members are angry at those top union leaders who recently pled guilty to putting money in their own pockets or using union dues to take privileges for themselves. We should be angry. These leaders betrayed our trust. We should not tolerate any corruption in our union. But the biggest problem I see in our union leadership is not the corruption of some individuals. The biggest problem is the policies of the whole top leadership.
During my years in the UAW, I always fought for a change in the direction of our union. I ran for International UAW President 3 times because I opposed our top leadership’s policy of “partnership” with the corporations, a policy that led to many concession contracts. I believe the only way workers can defend our standard of living is to organize a fight against the corporations. That is the reason why workers organized themselves in unions in the first place. A fight is never easy, but if we are not ready to fight, I believe that we will continue to be pushed backward.
Whatever UAW members decide in this referendum does not change that reality. Whether we continue to elect delegates or vote directly for our top leadership, the problem does not change. We need a union that is ready to fight.
I hope UAW members use this referendum as a chance to discuss and decide, not just how our top leadership is elected, but, more importantly, what kind of direction we want for our union. We can’t just think that voting for a union president is enough. A change in direction for the UAW has to come from the membership. If we want a union that is ready to make a fight, it is up to us to make it happen.
July 2021
Aug 30, 2021
During the federal government’s investigation of corruption in the UAW, the federal district attorney running the case claimed that they were working on behalf of the union members, trying to give them more control over the union. The feds mandated that the UAW conduct a referendum where the UAW members will vote whether to change to a “one member, one vote” process for electing the top union leadership. The district attorney promoted “one member, one vote” as a more “democratic” way for the union to function.
But in this referendum vote, UAW members will not be able to vote on the details of how “one member, one vote” would actually work. The federal monitor imposed by the government would have the right to dictate these details later. And the consent decree also dictates that the federal monitor has the right to decide whether or not any union member can even run for top union office.
Where the hell is the democracy in that? Is this democracy for UAW members, or a dictatorship imposed by the federal government?
Gary Walkowicz
August 28, 2021
Aug 30, 2021
When Los Angeles schools (LAUSD) opened on August 16, district officials said the well-being and safety of students and staff was their first concern. But less than a week before schools started, the district had thousands of vacancies for teachers, nurses, sanitation and maintenance workers, and other staff.
In other words, L.A. students went back to crowded classrooms and dirty school buildings in disrepair, guaranteeing the spread of the virus simply because of the enormous size of the district. And sure enough, about 3,000 LAUSD students had tested positive for coronavirus by the end of the first week of school, and another 3,500 were put on quarantine as well, for being in close contact with someone who tested positive. About 1,000 LAUSD employees also missed at least one day of work, either because they tested positive or were close contacts of those who did.
It’s not that the district is short of money. Look, for example, at the 350 million dollars the district is spending on the coronavirus testing required of students and staff who are physically at schools.
Even considering the district’s size, the price tag is huge. And it turns out, the tens of thousands of tests the district performs every day are not processed locally. Instead, the tests are flown twice a day, by jet, nearly 350 miles away to the Bay Area. The company that processes the tests, SummerBio, was given a no-bid contract last year by then-Superintendent Austin Beutner, who left the district on June 30. Founded just a few months before getting the lucrative contract, SummerBio had no credentials, except perhaps the business ties that Beutner has had in the past with the company’s founder.
Handing out big chunks of the district’s budget to contractors, while overcrowding classrooms and neglecting the maintenance of schools—that’s what LAUSD leaders did before the pandemic, and that’s what they are doing now that schools are open again.
Aug 30, 2021
For months, the Montebello School District in Los Angeles County boasted about how they were thoroughly preparing for the safe return of students to class. But as teachers in Montebello High School arrived a week before classes and started to prepare for the new year, they found rooms full of dead rats, with rats’ nests in cabinets, and droppings everywhere. Teachers could not enter some rooms because rats overran the rooms.
On top of the infestation, the district didn’t take the necessary steps to improve air ventilation, an essential step in preventing the spread of COVID-19. In fact, teachers complained the entire A/C system was not working in a building where many classrooms have no windows!
“Wonderful work being done preparing for a safe return!” posted one angry parent on the district’s social media page.
After 18 months, the district told the 2,600 students and their families that the school had to close for several more weeks.
The school district consists overwhelmingly of working class families; 80% of households are low-income. Parents now have to make the hard choice of choosing either to go to work or stay at home to take care of their kids.
Neither the rats nor the A/C systems were new. Teachers had been complaining to the school board for years. During summer school, teachers brought their own vacuums to clean the droppings.
Money was not even an issue. The district received over 8.5 million dollars, that is, 348 dollars per student, in last year’s stimulus bill to help maintain school facilities. This is in addition to a 300-million-dollar bond passed by taxpayers in 2016 earmarked for maintaining the school.
The officials continuously have shown that the last thing on their minds is putting the money to use in a way that benefits the students.
Aug 30, 2021
On August 13, Mexico’s Interior Department released some shocking figures: 5.2 million children under 18 did not even register for classes last year. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the obvious: children need to be back in physical classrooms, for social development as well as learning.
Just like in this country, Mexico’s government is putting the responsibility for kids missing out on school on parents.
But in reality, capitalist education in Mexico is like an exaggerated mirror of education in the U.S. Most middle class and wealthy parents send their kids to private school, while working class students are stuck in woefully underfunded public schools. At least 46,515 schools, almost a fourth, do not even have running tap water! And already before the pandemic, 80% of elementary students were below grade-level standards in reading and math.
Mexican schools were closed to in-person learning for 14 months during the pandemic. In a country where many people don’t have access to the internet, the government set up a “Learn from Home” program that used TV as a supposed surrogate teacher. In many schools, especially in poor and rural areas, students and teachers could not stay connected. TV school did not work!
Many families in Mexico were also already on the brink of poverty before the pandemic. How many have pulled their teenage children out of school—or those even younger—to help earn a few pennies? How many of those young people will never go back to school, now that their earnings are needed?
Schools are finally set to open again in-person at the end of August—even as Mexico is experiencing its highest surge yet in COVID infections. Experts think about 370,000 Mexicans have died of the disease—in a country of about 128 million people, that means a higher rate of death than in the U.S. In this situation, all the government offers to stem COVID spread in schools is a promise of bleach and disinfectant, and maybe some masks.
Kids need an education, and they need safety from the disease. Mexico’s government—and more fundamentally, its capitalist society—cannot provide either.