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
Oct 25, 2021
For several months, we have been flooded with news about President Biden’s social program and climate change proposals. The centerpiece of Biden’s election was this promise to “Transform America” and “Build Back Better.”
So, after watching the debates, what we now know is that the 3.5 trillion-dollar spending plan has been reduced down to a reported 1.9 trillion dollars. And that promises like free community college have “bit the dust.”
Biden’s original plan seemed to include any and everything “good” for workers. Like universal prekindergarten, child-care subsidies, an extension of the child tax credit, paid family leave, free community college, an expansion of Medicaid, adding dental, vision and hearing aid coverage to Medicare, as well as programs to slow down global warming and climate change.
Sounds great, right? All these things are desperately needed. But in fact, few really know what was included in the plan.
Where will the money come from to pay for whatever program is finally passed? Biden originally proposed a small tax increase on corporations, setting the corporate tax rate at 27%, back to where it was before the Trump administration cut it to 21%. Now they are only talking about a small tax increase on a few billionaires, which may not be implemented, given “loopholes.” Most of the money for any new social programs will come from public money, taxes that are paid mostly by the working class.
As this soap opera drama over the spending proposal plays out in Washington, D.C., the blame for cutting back the climate change and social programs and refusing to tax the rich has fallen on all the Republicans and on two Democratic senators, who get a lot of campaign contributions from the rich and the corporations.
That part is true. They do. But guess what? All the politicians in both parties are funded by the moneyed class, by the capitalist class. They all work for the bankers, the corporate CEOs and the Wall Street investors.
For decades, politicians from both parties have been giving public money to the corporate and the banking elite in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, grants and bailouts. The politicians write laws that help the capitalists exploit the working class, increasing corporate profits, while the workers’ standard of living goes down. The labor of the working class produces all the wealth of society. But many trillions of dollars of wealth have been taken from the working class and given to the capitalist class. All this stolen wealth could easily pay for all the proposed social programs that are needed. Better education, childcare, good medical care affordable for all, addressing climate change. Yes, the money is there for all of that. And much more! But it has to be taken back from the capitalist class that stole it.
The politicians who helped the wealthy steal this money are never going to be the ones to take it back. It is only the working class which has the reason to do that. And the working class has the power to do that.
In the past, the working class has made many fights to defend our interests, to defend our standard of living. But when the fight dies down, the capitalists always come to take back whatever they may have conceded to the workers. Their whole system is based on taking from the workers. It can’t ever be otherwise.
When the working class is ready to fight, we have power to not only take back the wealth that has been stolen from us, but we also have the power to use it. We can get rid of the system that exploits working people and build a society that provides for the social needs of all people, not just a wealthy few.
Oct 25, 2021
More and more poor women are being prosecuted if they have a miscarriage due to problems in pregnancy. When a Native American woman from Oklahoma was 19, she miscarried at 17 weeks. At the hospital, on her medical history, she said she had used marijuana and methamphetamine. Someone called the police. She was arrested and charged with manslaughter for her miscarriage. She was jailed for a year and a half because she didn’t have money for the $20,000 bond set by the prosecutor. Last week, this young woman had a jury trial in which she was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 4 years in prison.
Prison because of a miscarriage! When up to 50% of successful fertilizations end in miscarriage!
Since 2006, the anti-abortion movement has been working to change state laws to define fetuses as “people.” The National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) say that cases of pregnant women facing criminal charges for endangering fetuses has increased 400% in the past 15 years to 1,254 cases.
This past year a mother in Arizona who took medical marijuana under a doctor’s orders for pain before giving birth to her son was accused of child neglect for substance use while pregnant and placed on the state’s Child Abuse Central Registry for 25 years. She is fighting the charges. An upcoming decision by the Arizona Court of Appeals on her case could set a precedent for future moms.
Such prosecutions have increased because a well-funded minority of the population wants to be sure a pregnant woman has no choice over what happens to her or her fetus. Under the guise of giving “personhood” to fetuses, legislators and prosecutors deny “personhood” to the women who are pregnant. They will not allow a woman the right to control what happens in her own life—and they pretend they are being moral!
These disgusting attacks on women as human beings are not new. Many eras have treated women as less than human. Young women today will have to step up for their rights, as others did previously.
Oct 25, 2021
Puerto Rico has suffered rolling blackouts throughout August and September. Fed up, hundreds, then thousands of protestors took to the streets in the capital of San Juan, taking the issue directly to the house of the governor.
Power was completely knocked out by Hurricane Maria in the Fall of 2017—it took more than nine months to restore power across the island, then. In its wake, management of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid was handed to a private venture called Luma. The Luma takeover this June brought immediate problems—mass outages, with long wait times to fix them. Luma was supposed to make things better, but the opposite happened. “We don’t have any hurricane, and it’s worse now,” said one shopowner.
Luma forced all the existing power line workers to re-apply for their jobs. Only about 200 of the 800 workers took the offer. So there are many fewer line workers active on the island—with many of the most experienced workers leaving the job. Luma, wanting to make profits, will have every reason to skimp on staffing and service.
“The system is the worst. It’s like they hold it together with bubble gum,” says Antonia Cortes of Ponce, 58 years old and diabetic. In fact, many power lines in Puerto Rico hang on trees, rather than poles—jerry-rigging done in Maria’s wake remains. An earthquake in 2020 knocked out the largest power plant—it remains offline almost two years later.
Puerto Ricans already pay much more for power than most in the United States, with a typical bill coming in at $250 a month. Most of the power on the island is produced by burning oil, brought in by boat. That makes electricity production subject to the price gouging of the big oil companies—which saddled the power company with debt. This debt was then used as an excuse to privatize.
Puerto Rico is part of the United States, among the richest and most technologically advanced countries on earth. And yet its 2.8 million residents muddle through with electricity that goes out, or that is so inconsistent that it fries the wiring of refrigerators and other appliances. Power is a life and death question—diabetics need to refrigerate insulin; many recovering from COVID need power for oxygen treatment.
This is what capitalism can offer. In the wake of a destructive hurricane, the politicians shovel money to parasitic vultures like Luma, who talk about rebuilding but actually just line their pockets. Of course working people in Puerto Rico drove out one Governor, angry with his lack of action after Maria. They have every reason to mobilize, to make this current fight as powerful as possible.
Oct 25, 2021
Monthly payments of $300 per child to parents of children five and under, and $250 a month for each child age six to 17, have been sent by the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) since July 2021. Payments are due to end on December 15, 2021. The I.R.S. estimates that 88% of families with children qualified for at least some help from the American Rescue Plan Child Tax Credit program.
These stimulus payments were a temporary change in the previous $2,000 per child federal income tax credit. For one year only, amounts were increased to $3,000 each for older kids and $3,600 for kids age five and under. The total money was split in half. Half of the money paid up front in six monthly installments and the other half comes on the back end as a tax refund in 2022.
Research has shown this tiny increase to the social safety net has helped slash hunger rates among children. Yet negotiations aimed at passing the Build Back Better budget “deal” in Congress make it appear this program will be funded for one additional year only.
If you work for a living and your family got these monthly tax refund payments, this was your money to begin with. That is because the money the I.R.S. has to distribute comes from wages and not from corporate profits—from the tremendous wealth that workers’ labor produces, and companies take.
Essentially, the government repackaged workers’ same tax money in a slightly different way—but now is talking about taking that away!
Research in the U.S. shows that having money that subsidizes costs for preschool-age children increases the chance that mothers keep working. Compared to 17 other wealthy countries, the U.S. federal government ranks dead last on annual spending per preschool-age child.
While maneuvering politicians are planning to finalize the budget by robbing children of what they need, workers’ plans can be to create a whole new system that puts society’s wealth toward what children and the working class need!
Oct 25, 2021
Wall Street analysts toured John Deere picket lines and talked to workers across Iowa. To update “investors” regarding front line details, a report was sent back. An anonymous supporter who happened to see the report leaked parts of it to the media.
Wall Street analysts saw “The deep rooted anger these members have for what they perceive to be 25 years of granting concessions to Deere such that with Deere’s profits currently being so strong, they see it as time Deere workers share more in that success.”... Workers want to end “the 2-tier wage and benefits system instituted with the 1997 contract.” ... So when “Deere tried to add a 3rd tier with the tentative agreement the rank and file” rejected that. This “particularly angered members we spoke with at the union halls.”
The report saw the negotiations because “Rank and file want to hold their [UAW] leaders’ feet to the fire to achieve strong gains in this next agreement from Deere, showing their leaders they work for the rank and file, not ‘in concert with corporate management.’ ... Any agreement between the UAW leadership and Deere faces a higher hurdle for passage by the rank and file than one would normally expect.”
John Deere workers deserve the support of all workers!
Oct 25, 2021
On October 20, officials in Hamtramck, a city of 28,000 in the Detroit metropolitan area, announced that elevated levels of lead were found in the city water. The officials offered free water filters to Hamtramck residents.
Even though the filters were made available only from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the following day, 900 residents lined up to pick one up—and the city ran out of filters after distributing only 700 of them!
The officials should have known better. Lead contamination is not news to Hamtramck residents—the amount of lead in the city’s water has exceeded state and federal lead limits for 11 of the last 30 years.
That doesn’t mean Hamtramck’s water was safe during the remaining 19 years. Cities report test results if water in 10% of the tested households, often a few dozen, exceeds state and federal lead limits. And those limits themselves—such as the federal government’s standard of 15 ppb (parts per billion) of lead in water, or Michigan’s 12 ppb, to go into effect in 2025—are arbitrary anyway. Every expert in the field says that there is no such thing as a safe amount of lead in water. Any small amount of lead entering the human body, especially a child’s body, is known to cause serious life-long harm, such as brain and nervous system damage, and to slow down growth and development.
It’s not just Hamtramck. Since October 8, the city of Benton Harbor has been distributing free bottled water to all residents, paid for by the State of Michigan. In Benton Harbor, tests showed lead levels as high as 889 ppb in recent years. If state officials finally decided to pay for bottled water distribution in Benton Harbor, it’s only because the people of this mostly black, working-class city of 10,000 got organized and protested.
In fact, the whole problem of lead contamination made headlines six years ago only after residents of Flint, another mostly black, working-class city in Michigan, began protesting. City officials had not even bothered to let the people of Flint know about the poisoning of city water until residents themselves found out and began to speak out.
The source of widespread lead contamination in water, not only in Michigan but the whole country, is well-known. Lead pipes are used widely for distributing water to users, lined with a coating that prevents the lead from seeping into the water. But as pipes age and the coating gets corroded, lead starts to leak into the water.
The solution is to replace the aging pipes—starting with the service pipes that bring the water from the mains into houses. But officials everywhere tell people they don’t have the money to do it.
Really?? The non-profit American Water Works Association estimated that it would take 60 billion dollars to replace all lead service pipes in the U.S. That’s a small fraction of what the federal government spends in one year on the military alone, 778 billion dollars in the most recent budget.
And sure enough in Flint, where the population has been pushing the issue, the politicians “found” the money, and the lead pipes are being replaced. Once again, the people of Flint show all of us what it takes to turn the tide.
Oct 25, 2021
Maryland’s health department plans to close two public hospitals which provide acute, long-term care in rural areas: Western Maryland Hospital Center in Hagerstown and Deer’s Head Hospital Center on the Eastern Shore. The department says these two hospitals are expensively overstaffed, with above-average nurse-to-patient ratios. And officials say these two facilities built over 60 years ago need prohibitively expensive rebuilding. The state plans to find nearby private clinics where it would send patients instead.
The state paid a private company around three million dollars to manage Western Maryland Hospital Center for three and a half years. The private bosses laid off staff and ended the dialysis program, forcing people to use more expensive private clinics.
Currently patients at Western Maryland benefit from 3.5 hours of nurse time each day per patient on average, which is much higher than state and national averages. At Deer’s Head, patients benefit from just under five hours nurse time daily on average. All hospitals should have at least that! These are patients with traumatic brain injuries and other extremely debilitating conditions.
Instead of modeling these nurse/patient ratios for others to strive for, state officials look to outsource health services. Their premise is that these rural and poor patients are getting too much—and the 400 or so workers at these facilities are excessive in number! A theory based on profit, not health care!
Oct 25, 2021
The politicians in Congress continue to hash out how to slash the domestic spending proposal floated by Biden and the Democrats. Yet the politicians of both parties, Republicans and Democrats, had no difficulty in finding wads of cash to continue to dole out to military contractors.
The corporate media and politicians both for and against the Democrats’ proposal constantly refer to it as a “3.5 trillion dollar package.” But that 3.5 trillion dollars would be spent over 10 years, so in reality if it were actually passed as is, it would cost 350 billion dollars per year.
The U.S. House recently passed a bill approving a total of 778 billion dollars in military spending for 2022, with the support of 182 out of 220 Democrats. That’s 37 billion dollars higher than the budget for 2021, and it’s more than twice the amount in the Democrats’ vaunted domestic spending bill, which will most certainly be cut way back before it ever gets passed.
So while the politicians figure ways to cut back proposed spending for education, healthcare, clean energy and social programs, they had no difficulty finding 190 billion dollars to hand out to the top 10 defense contractors including the likes of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman. That’s despite the fact that investments in military spending produce many fewer jobs than the same amount of spending on education, health care, the environment, or social programs, according to a study by the Political Economy Research Center.
Nothing too shocking here. The politicians of both parties know which side their bread is buttered on.
Oct 25, 2021
Last month, after Labor Day, the enhanced federal unemployment benefits of $300 weekly stopped. And all during the time this benefit existed, many business owners and anti-worker politicians said that people were making too much money staying home and that is why they couldn’t get people to work.
But guess what? The benefit ended and workers didn’t come back. Today, there are about 226,000 fewer people employed in Michigan compared with February, 2020. And the state’s overall workforce is down 136,000 women compared to early 2020.
So let’s take a look at why many women are not going back into the workforce. Children weren’t in school for 18 months, and even now, schooling is haphazard, with COVID outbreaks, and teacher and staff shortages, so families don’t even know day to day whether or not their kids have in-person schooling.
COVID disproportionately affected seniors, and it ran rampant in nursing homes. So more women today, who carry the most responsibility for the care of the old and the young in this society, have to take care of their elders.
Many grandparents who used to take care of the grandkids, now can’t. If Grandma can no longer do it, Moms are going to stay home.
COVID exacted a heavy toll on kids and seniors, mental health-wise, because they were isolated, and unable to have social lives. So women have had to take on mental health care, as well.
When you factor in child care costs, a wardrobe for going into work, transportation, and food, given the 78 cents on the dollar Michigan women make, many can’t even afford to go to work. In many cases, their expenses are more than their pay!
Too many jobs that are primarily “women’s work” have dangerous working conditions, like in nursing homes, forcing women to put their lives on the line, while grossly underpaid for that work!
And just look at the exodus of women workers, working at places like Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Michigan, who were forced to work in-person throughout the pandemic, and found themselves unable to continue in their jobs, if they were to be able to take care of their families, and stay safe.
Undoubtedly, there are many more reasons.
So what would bring women workers back to work?
For starters, guaranteeing that the schools are safe, and with the full complement of teachers, bus drivers, nurses and mental health professionals.
Guaranteeing that nursing homes are safe and fully staffed, with well-paid workers, ranging from nurses to physical, recreational and occupational therapists.
Guaranteeing child care and family leave benefits for families.
Guaranteeing that there is more on-the-job flexibility for women workers that acknowledges the disproportionate responsibility women have for the care of their families.
But these guarantees are exactly what this capitalist system cannot provide because its Number #1 priority is profit first, and the care of human beings doesn’t even factor into its functioning.
In past social struggles in this country, whether the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912, or the Sit-down Strikes of the 1930s, or the Civil Rights movement, women workers played central roles in fighting for the rights of all workers. It remains true that women workers will have to play a key role in the future fight that is sorely needed to overthrow this system and replace it with one where the care of children and elders will be its Number #1 priority.
Oct 25, 2021
Recent efforts by the bosses’ politicians and the corporate media to blame the unvaccinated for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic ignore how it developed in the first place. Once the novel coronavirus hit the shores of the U.S., the U.S. quickly accounted for almost a fifth of the world’s COVID deaths.
The U.S. government certainly deserves part of the blame. It had plenty of warning about the possibility of such a pandemic. One hundred years had elapsed since the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. It’s easy to put the blame on Donald Trump and his administration and their willingness to play down the seriousness of the outbreak when it started, and their greater concern about getting Trump re-elected. However, both the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama discussed the need to put such a plan in place following earlier outbreaks in other countries of new diseases like SARS, yet failed to actually put any kind of plan in place.
At the outset of the epidemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control didn’t even have a clear policy on the benefits of wearing masks, even though masks were useful in bringing the Spanish flu epidemic under control 100 years before. In China and other East Asian countries, masks were readily available following their experience with SARS in 2003, and those countries managed to keep the COVID-19 relatively under control. The CDC didn’t change its policy to recommend the public wear masks until early April of 2020, months after the first cases appeared in the U.S.
This was not simply the result of incompetence. They couldn’t push for everyone to wear masks since they hadn’t done anything to stockpile them, just as they had done nothing to stock up on other personal protective equipment like gowns and gloves for frontline health care workers.
It is not simply politicians nor the government that are to blame for the rise of the pandemic. It’s also a result of the private, for-profit nature of the American health care system. With profit their constant concern, private hospitals not only let their stockpiles of masks and PPE dwindle down to zero, they wanted no empty hospital beds or ICU’s nor extra ventilators. They also cut staff to the bare minimum. Some even cut staff after the start of the pandemic!
When the CDC developed its first test for the new coronavirus, it turned out to be flawed and not useful. No private commercial or hospital labs initially stepped forward to develop a test, since before it was clear there would be a pandemic, they couldn’t be assured they could make a profit off of selling the tests. So companies waited precious weeks and months for the pandemic to spread and for the federal government and the insurance companies to promise them a guaranteed profit.
Even when better tests became available, the U.S. public health system was incapable of testing, tracing and tracking the spread of the virus. Public health labs couldn’t handle all the tests that were needed, so private labs were paid to do them. Even when they expanded, the system couldn’t coordinate the avalanche of results.
The pandemic exposed what is in effect a near total lack of a public health care system in the U.S. Instead, there are almost 3,000 separate public health agencies in states, counties, cities and small towns. Social spending has been slashed over the years. Public health departments across the country cut 60,000 jobs since 2008.
With the public health system unable to contain the virus, the working class bore the brunt of the pandemic. Most frequent outbreaks occurred at schools and colleges, in the prisons and jails, nursing homes, food processing plants and other workplaces, according to the New York Times. In just over a year of the pandemic, meatpacking plants were responsible for at least 334,000 COVID-19 cases, according to one study. Companies and institutions weren’t about to cut into profits and increase costs by spending the money necessary to provide proper ventilation, yet continued to keep workers, students, patients and inmates in crowded conditions.
Workers without the luxury of working from home were the most likely to contract the virus, especially those who had to commute to work. They were crowded into mass transit systems which had poor ventilation systems and never changed air filters. These workers then brought the virus home with them, and those who lived in the most crowded housing were also more likely to be exposed and expose family members. COVID-19 is most deadly among the elderly and those with compromised immune systems, and they were often infected by workers with no way to isolate themselves when they came home from work.
With the U.S. system of health insurance being primarily employer-provided, and often carrying high deductibles and co-pays, many workers delayed getting tested or seeking a doctor’s care when they got sick with COVID-19 and spread the virus to others in their workplaces. Workers in nursing homes both contracted the disease and passed it on to elderly patients with whom they had contact.
After years of budget cuts, hospitals that served the working class and the poor were ill-equipped to handle the huge influx of patients. In private hospitals that catered to the wealthy and those with the best insurance, patients got access to heart-lung bypass machines and specialized drugs like Remdesivir, while even non-COVID patients were denied care in community hospitals.
Even after vaccines against COVID became available, many people who wanted the vaccine couldn’t get one for several months. This despite the fact that the government financed their research and development costs. With few neighborhood health centers available after years of budget cuts, the government paid for vaccines to be distributed through private, for-profit drugstores, and many people had to sign up for long waiting lists before they could get one.
Many people remain unvaccinated due to “vaccine hesitancy,” for which many have quite understandable reasons. Even today, however, there still are many who want the vaccine, but cannot do so for a variety of reasons; lack of transportation, inability to get time off from work, and for some, fear of missing work if they were to have side effects from the vaccine.
The wealthy and the corporations, and the politicians who front for them, today call on workers to blame their unvaccinated co-workers and support vaccinate mandates that mean workers will lose their jobs if they don’t take the vaccine. They expect us to forget this history that shows it is they and their system that are responsible for how the pandemic reached this point.
Oct 25, 2021
Many companies have taken advantage of the global pandemic in order to mint enormous profits. One of the most profitable has been Moderna, which developed and marketed a COVID-19 vaccine. Wall Street analysts project that in 2021 Moderna will gain 14 billion dollars in profits on 20 billion dollars in sales—a profit margin of 70%! Based totally on the COVID-19 vaccine!
As a result, a handful of speculators have become incredibly rich very quickly. Moderna CEO Stephan Bancel is now supposed to be worth close to 11 billion dollars.
The development of this vaccine has been presented as some kind of supposed miracle of private enterprise. But it really is a classic example of how capitalists privatize publicly funded research and development. All told, the federal government supplied Moderna with as much as $10 billion in support. That includes direct research grants, rights to patents belonging to the government, and bulk purchases of doses. NIH (National Institutes of Health) scientists even designed the protein molecule that Moderna’s vaccine needed to trigger a human immune response against the virus—the key to making the vaccine work.
Once Moderna had its vaccine, it did not make it widely available all over the world. It sold the vaccine only to the governments of the richest countries, which were in the best position to pay. At the same time, Moderna prevented access to the vaccine to other parts of the world by jealously guarding and controlling the manufacture and sale of the vaccine. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that developed a similar kind of vaccine, has followed the same profit-based policy.
As a result, much of the global population, especially in the poorer countries of Africa, Asia and South America, has yet to have access to a vaccine and at this late date, nobody knows how long it will take to make the vaccine available to everyone—obviously because in order for this to happen, it has to fit into the Moderna corporate plans.
These profit plans have condemned tens of millions of people to sickness and possible death. And as long as the pandemic rages and the virus continues to spread and mutate in big parts of the world, it increases the chances that even those in the richer countries who have been vaccinated will be reinfected, and thus extend the pandemic’s human toll.
Early in the pandemic, there was the hope that once science came up with effective vaccines, those vaccines would be quickly available everywhere and that would be the end of the pandemic. But standing in the way of that happening has always been the capitalist control over science, medicine and society for its own profits.
The biggest danger to the population is not the virus, but the capitalists’ death grip over the entire society.
Oct 25, 2021
The City of Chicago imposed a vaccine mandate for all city employees as of October 15, and has suspended without pay those who haven’t uploaded their vaccine status.
The vaccines appear to be safe and effective, humanity’s best tool against COVID-19. Yet as of mid-October, only about 70% of Chicago adults have been fully vaccinated. The unvaccinated are overwhelmingly working class and poor: according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation in September, the biggest predictor of whether someone would get vaccinated was not political affiliation, but whether or not someone had health insurance. And in Chicago, those without insurance and those least likely to be vaccinated are disproportionately Black and Latino. Among these groups, only about half of adults are fully vaccinated.
To these parts of the population, the vaccine mandates can feel like a direct attack on their livelihoods and lives, forcing them to get something they have many reasons not to trust.
But by far the most prominent person in Chicago to express the anger of those whose livelihoods are threatened if they don’t get the vaccine is the far-right mouthpiece John Catanzara, the notorious, Trump-supporting leader of the police union. This is the same man who famously threatened to kick out of the union any cop who kneeled with protestors after George Floyd’s murder, who defended the January 6 rioters, and who called the cop who killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo “heroic.” He says that he does “not believe the city has the authority to mandate that to anybody, let alone that information about your medical history and change the terms of your employment so to speak on the fly.”
Most of the city’s unions are tied to the Democratic Party and have held back from speaking out against the mandates. With no working class organization able to call to account the government and big companies who are really responsible for the disaster of the pandemic, people like Catanzara are left to pose as the representatives of those who are most angry at the system. This, even though many of those who don’t trust the vaccine are also those most likely to be brutalized by the cops Catanzara represents, and by the far-right whose ideas he expresses.
Oct 25, 2021
When Mexico was hit by its peak of COVID infections last winter and spring, the country faced a severe shortage of medical oxygen.
Hospitals saw deliveries slow, even as they needed more oxygen than ever. Some hospitals in Northern Mexico even got letters stating that the oxygen companies needed to supply their U.S. customers first, before Mexican hospitals could get orders filled. And as many infected people stayed at home because they didn’t trust the overwhelmed medical system, families scrambled to get personal oxygen tanks. The price of oxygen more than tripled, with many scammers on the market.
There is a solution to the oxygen shortage—hospitals can build onsite oxygen plants. The World Health Organization even proposed to help hospitals in poorer countries pay for the costs. But this would cut into the profit margins of the multi-billion-dollar companies that dominate Mexico’s oxygen market, so it is not being pursued.
Most of Mexico’s medical oxygen is supplied by two companies: Praxair Mexico, a division of Linde, one of the biggest industrial gas companies in the world, or Grupo Infra, which is partially owned by Air Products, another giant, U.S.-based industrial gas company.
When one hospital in Guanajuato built its own onsite oxygen plant, Grupo Infra threatened to sue. The hospital had signed an “exclusivity clause,” meaning it could only get oxygen from that supplier. And even though the contract had expired, it had an “automatic renewal” clause. Other hospitals received similar letters. These companies also warned hospital administrators that onsite oxygen generation was unsafe—something they knew perfectly well was untrue.
Mexico has officially suffered 284,000 COVID deaths, though investigators think the real number might be triple that. Many of these people might have survived if they had access to the oxygen they needed. But in this society, the profits of multi-national corporations come before life.
Oct 25, 2021
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Rome on October 16 with the demand, “Fascism never again.” The appeal was launched by the leadership of the CGIL union confederation, the largest in Italy. It attracted the support of the other two major trade union confederations as well as political parties such as the (right wing) Five Star Movement and the current ruling Democratic Party, and more generally, the support of the government.
The demonstration followed an attack carried out the previous Saturday against the headquarters of the CGIL by a group of demonstrators who separated from the procession marching against the vaccination-or-test mandate and the extension of the vaccination mandate to all workers starting October 15. Led by militants of the neofascist group Forza Nuova, dozens of protestors forced open the CGIL’s doors and trashed the offices.
This attack on a symbol of organized workers aroused legitimate anger among union militants. Obviously it must be denounced by all worker militants. The motivations of its leaders were clear. Several fascist leaders of Forza Nuova explicitly made a link to atrocities committed a century earlier in 1920—1921, when fascist commandos systematically attacked union halls and socialist, communist and anarchist meeting places. And as for the spokesperson of the movement of small businesses and shopkeepers against the mandates—baptized “Me, I remain open"—they justified the attack on the CGIL by the need to fight for “freedom to work.”
It is also true that other demonstrators protesting against the expansion of the mandate either were drawn into this attack or supported it by yelling “Sold! Sold!” at the CGIL.
Among these protestors, some wanted to express their anger at the trade union leadership which seems even more complicit with the government because it supports the mandate of vaccine-or-test in workplaces without even speaking out against the disciplinary measures and the threat those who refuse to comply face: losing their wage.
The response the of CGIL leadership to the fascist aggression is not likely to dispel this confusion which the CGIL itself has helped to fuel through its policy of class collaboration. Nor does the CGIL’s response empower militant workers who are aware of the danger represented by fascist groups and more generally by the extreme right.
Our comrades in Italian revolutionary workers group L’Internazionale put it this way the day after the attack: "What was the response of CGIL leaders to the fascist aggression? Instead of calling for an immediate national general strike, they postponed any response to the following Saturday, calling for a large unitary demonstration ‘against all fascisms.’ The protection and defense of union offices has been reduced to a public order problem for the government to handle. Meanwhile Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s visit to the devastated CGIL headquarters has reinforced (...) the conviction that the unions are on the same side as those bourgeois elites—well paid and nobly thinking—from among whom the head of the government comes. It was not possible to send a more wrong message than this, a message that pushes these social strata even further into the arms of far-right groups."
Indeed, the demonstration on Saturday, October 16 had all the attributes of national unity, starting with Draghi’s administration’s support. Center-left Democratic Party Secretary Enrico Letta claimed it is necessary to come together: “All together behind the tricolor [Italian flag].” CGIL Secretary Maurizio Landini said opposition to political violence is necessary, and he demanded the dissolution of Forza Nuova, adding lip service to the effect that “more social justice in the country” is also needed.
Meanwhile, the second round of municipal elections took place on October 17 and 18 in 65 jurisdictions. There were high rates of abstention in lower-income neighborhoods, and a certain retreat of the right. But even if the exasperation of some ordinary people and workers was not expressed electorally, it is no less real. But the reformist political and trade union organizations give them no perspective. These organizations systematically replaced the class struggle with so-called social dialogue. They substituted the values of the workers’ movement with so-called republican values. They helped disarm the working class, depriving it of all confidence in the class struggle and in its own forces. And of course, the far right and the fascist groups rely on this circumstance to make them stronger.
On the other hand, to give a perspective to millions of workers, unemployed, and semi-employed people whom the worsening economic crisis throws into poverty, the workers’ movement will have to be reborn around a class policy. The future of society is not in the policies that Draghi pursues in the service of the bourgeoisie. The future depends on the ability of the workers to overthrow the power of the capitalist class.
Oct 25, 2021
The following text is translated from Workers Fight (Combat Ouvrière), the newspaper published by the revolutionary workers group in Guadeloupe and Martinique.
October 4 was a day of strike action in the urban area around Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Transport and businesses were disrupted; gas stations and schools closed, following the call by the union of public transport drivers. They denounce the insecurity and kidnappings perpetrated by the gangs that are rampant in the capital, in Delmas, Carrefour or Croix des Bouquets. They protest the shortage of fuel, the soaring fuel prices, and the increase in the prices of ordinary foodstuffs. They show their solidarity with the migrants who have been turned away from the USA and dropped off at the airport with no place to go. In the industrial zone, some companies only ran for half a day for lack of workers.
Those who are fighting are right, these strikers are raising their heads and opening the way for other movements.
Oct 25, 2021
The following text is translated from Workers Fight (Combat Ouvrière), the newspaper published by the revolutionary workers group in Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Since the assassination of the president, there has been an increase in emigration to neighboring countries.
Gang warfare has resumed in the area surrounding Haiti’s capital, after a pause following the earthquake in the south of the country. After having been subjected to the law of the army or the police under previous governments, the population of the neighborhoods is now under pressure from these armed bands.
When they occupy a neighborhood, the gangsters organize racketeering, and ransom the inhabitants according to what they think they can get. They demand a different amount from the merchant, the motorcycle driver or the shopkeeper, and threaten to seize everything or burn everything if the victim refuses. They dictate their law, and the inhabitants, watched, are forced to choose their side under penalty of reprisals.
This stranglehold expands, with the complicity of politicians—whether in power or in the opposition, and whatever they may say publicly.
To get out of this rotten situation there are many who hope to find elsewhere “a better way” and try their luck on frail boats to the United States. In the Caribbean region, in September, the Bahamian navy intercepted more than 1,000 Haitians on small boats; and the government of Cuba speaks of "an unknown number of Haitian migrants, hoping to get to the U.S. state of Florida, who recently arrived by boat on the coasts of the eastern and central provinces of Cuba."
Among those returning, some have traveled for years through Central America to Mexico before being stranded at the Texas border. They were exploited as agricultural workers, diggers, laborers.
The U.S. government blocked them at the Texas border and then organized the deportation of thousands of these migrants to Haiti. Some see no other way out than to leave, even if their emigration has not improved their situation.
More than 4,000 Haitians were repatriated from the USA to Port-au-Prince or Cape Town at the end of September. It is a cycle of mass deportations that has been initiated by the U.S. government.
More than 5,000 refugees were turned back by the military in the Dominican Republic in the space of three weeks.
The Bahamian government plans to return more than a thousand migrants. These migrants faced the same capitalist exploitation in other countries.
In Haiti, there are workers who come together to build a force capable of putting an end to this great misery and this inhuman fate. The future lies in engaging the exploited masses in order to change this barbaric society.
Oct 25, 2021
The following article is the editorial from The SPARK’s workplace newsletters, for the week of October 18, 2021.
More than 10,000 workers at John Deere walked out October 14. It was the largest walkout since the autoworkers’ strike at GM in 2019. Fourteen plants are involved, half in Iowa; the rest in Illinois, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia.
It follows on a series of strikes that rolled through different industries this fall. Thousands of workers at FritoLay, then at Nabisco and then at Kellogg’s hit picket lines in states running from Pennsylvania, through Michigan and Ohio, all the way out to Colorado and down to Georgia. Nurses and other medical workers in Buffalo, New York went out on strike; so did building engineers at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco and carpenters in Washington state. Over 1,000 coal miners in Alabama, along with 1,100 steel workers in Pennsylvania and 2,000 nurses in Massachusetts, have been engaged in long, bitter strikes for more than six months now.
Other workers voted to set strike dates: 24,000 nurses and other medical care workers at a number of Kaiser Permanente facilities in California and Oregon; over 7,000 maintenance workers at those same facilities; over 60,000 production workers who, among other things, build sets for films and TV shows at Hollywood studios. (The union for those Hollywood production workers subsequently announced it had arrived at a contract, which the studios up until then had refused to negotiate.)
Maybe it’s a resumption of the push to strike that the pandemic lockdown of 2020 interrupted. In 2019, almost half a million people—auto workers, truck drivers, teachers, and utility company workers—went on strike, with nearly that many during the year before.
Whatever specific problems pushed all these different workers to strike—in 2018/2019, as well as today—they faced common problems. Workers hired in today will never make a decent wage or have the possibility for a real retirement. Not enough people are hired to staff the workplaces. Too much work, too fast a pace of work and too many hours of work crush the life out of those left on the job. And everywhere—running from a teaching job at a private school to an assembly line in Kansas to a skilled line job at a utility company to the nursing floor to a retail check-out counter—workers speak of facing the same denigrating lack of simple human respect.
The problems we face don’t come from the shitty attitude of a few unreasonable bosses. They come from the irrational way capitalist society is organized. We are all pushed to work too hard—those of us with a job—at the same time there are too many who never get the chance for a job. It’s obvious that if enough nurses were hired, if enough teachers were hired, if enough auto assembly line workers were hired, if enough construction workers were hired, our work lives could be made tolerable. And the vast pool of the permanently unemployed could be put to work.
But no boss is willing to do that. No boss wants to be the only one offering a decent wage. Every boss competes with every other boss to make as much profit as he can—and profit comes from squeezing as much work as possible out of as few workers as possible, paying as little as possible.
These are problems that run all through capitalist society. To answer them requires struggles that run all through this society. It requires struggles that extend as far as possible.
If the problems are bigger than just our own workplace, or our own company or our own industry, doesn’t it make sense that we should make a common fight, face our class enemy together?
But—someone always says—we can’t do that. We can’t all strike at the same time. The way contracts are structured and the way laws are written prohibit that.
But why should we go on respecting laws and contracts that are written to hem us in? Why should we continue to go out, one group of workers at a time, depriving us of the forces we need?
During the pandemic, we heard that workers are “essential.” That’s true. All of us. We are essential, and our numbers make us the biggest force in society. But we have to use those numbers, bring them together, mobilize together for a common fight to solve our common problems.
Oct 25, 2021
A documentary and a miniseries, both released in 2021. The first is an HBO documentary by Alex Gibney called The Crime of the Century. It relates the crisis created by pharmaceutical companies pushing opioids, mainly Oxycontin, to treat “pain,” causing rampant addiction of millions and hundreds of thousands of deaths, and which continues to haunt us to this day. It relies on detailed interviews of experts and whistleblowers, leaked documents, company videos and damning testimony.
The miniseries, Dopesick on Hulu, is a dramatization of the same crisis and stars Michael Keaton. It personalizes the story by focusing on a small rural coal mining community, the same type of area Big Pharma first targeted when it started pushing opioids as a “non-addictive pain medicine.” Both films expose how Purdue Pharmaceutical and others got FDA approval to aggressively sell, for billions in profit, a heroin-like opioid pill by getting doctors to freely prescribe it.
Both films aptly demonstrate that this whole scam was a crime, and companies should not be able to just pay a fine and get off.
William Gardner Smith was an African American author and a journalist, and he used his life experiences as the basis for his novels. His novel The Stone Face tells of a young man who grew up in South Philadelphia, a working class neighborhood, and who, at the hands of racists, was attacked and lost an eye.
To escape the culture of racism, violence and hate in this country, in 1961 he moves to Paris, France. He joins a community of others who have escaped to Paris: writers, artists, those damaged by racism or Nazism, some famous such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Chester Himes.
While at first it was liberating, he can’t help but notice the pervasive social and economic racism of the French toward the Algerians, who did hard and undesirable work for low pay and lived in slums. He bears witness to a massacre of Algerians in 1961 in Paris, in which the French police massacred hundreds of peaceful demonstrators.
This novel poses the question: can one truly escape from the violence and hate of this world, or does one have to decide to fight? Reissued this year, it finally getting the acclaim that it has so long deserved.
Oct 25, 2021
President Biden recently announced that the Port of Los Angeles will operate “24 hours a day, seven days a week” as a response to an unprecedently-jammed port that handles 40% of products imported into the U.S., products which are worth one TRILLION dollars. With Biden’s announcement, things were supposed to gradually improve at the port. Yet, a week later, the crisis had only worsened, with the number of giant ships waiting outside the port to unload their containers increasing from 60 to about 100.
In fact, the entire port system into and out of Los Angeles was in no shape to handle the big increase in traffic inside and outside the port, nor did it have the means to suddenly handle any increase in hours of operation. This is because the operators of the Port of Los Angeles and the companies that use the port have invested very, very little, even less than in many other countries. Thus, investment in robotized crane systems, software, warehouses, roads, and rail systems, was minimized or neglected.
Second, they had also reduced their so-called “labor costs,” to a minimum. Even before the pandemic hit, there was already a shortage of dock workers—a shortage that was made even worse by the pandemic, as many dock workers were sickened and some even died. That dire shortage cannot be made up in a short period of time, since many of the port jobs require a high level of skill and expertise, and it takes a long time for new port workers to get the proper training and certification.
At the same time, transport of containers has also been crippled. Much of the cargo is transported by truck. But long ago, to reduce “labor costs,” trucking companies implemented an “Uber” style trucking system where the individual truckers owned or leased their trucks and were paid by the load. Under this system, truckers often earn less than minimum wage, after expenses. In other words, the companies have treated these truckers like indentured servants. Such a pulverized workforce, paid less than a living wage, basically fell apart after the pandemic hit, resulting in a severe shortage of truckers.
Transport by train is no better. Only one railroad company, Union Pacific, controls the rail transport of the Port of Los Angeles. Since 2015, Union Pacific has fired more than one-third of its workforce. So, the railway system cannot handle the currently sharply-increased number of containers, because Union Pacific does not have enough workers and rolling stock to move these containers.
So, the companies and their system run the Port of Los Angeles, and its operation rode the entire system into the ground to maximize their profits. They might have been able to make the entire system work before the pandemic. But once the reopening from the pandemic led to a big increase in traffic, the entire system fell apart, leading to an enormous crisis.
Now these companies are using the shortages that they themselves created as an excuse to exorbitantly increase the prices of their products and services.
The seven largest cargo carriers reported more than 23 billion dollars in profits in the first half of this year, compared with just one billion dollars in the same period last year. The gross profit of Home Depot, which is one of the largest companies that use the port, increased by 20%, 49 billion dollars, during the twelve months ending on July 31, 2021. Walmart’s gross profit was 142 billion dollars for the twelve months ending on July 31, 2021, a 6.3% increase year-over-year.
Of course, in the end, it is the consumer, that is, the working class, that pays the higher prices for products. Just like it was the workers who lost their jobs, both before and during the pandemic.
No, this crisis was not just produced by the pandemic and the reopening, but by how capitalism operates and controls the economy—where everything is just run for the profit of a tiny minority, the capitalist class. If workers could control and operate the economy collectively for the benefit of everybody, we could have prevented this dire result from striking us hard, considering that every modern technology is available at our disposal.
Oct 25, 2021
The Washington, D.C.-area subway system, Metro, suddenly withdrew over 700 of its newest railcars, over half its fleet, from service on the morning of October 18 and began operating with only a fraction of its usual number of trains. Half-hour or longer waits for most subway trains, workers late to jobs, children late to schools, commuter traffic even more congested!
A joint D.C., Maryland, and Virginia safety agency had ordered Metro to immediately stop using its 7000 Series Kawasaki railcars after one of them had partially derailed in a Virginia tunnel during rush hour on October 12. Federal investigators found the same car had temporarily derailed twice earlier the same day. Worse, Metro had found the same problem on 31 cars since 2017 and had informed the manufacturer, which had supplied nearly 800 such cars at two million dollars each. But no official held the manufacturer responsible, or did anything to end the problem. Kawasaki has a 3.7 billion dollar contract to provide cars for the New York City subway system. Information was never shared.
In this system, public transportation is seen as a way for public money to enrich private companies. Safety—or an efficient commute—is not the concern under capitalism.