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
Jan 31, 2022
Workers’ wages are going up—or so the news programs tell us! They also say—liars that they are—that employers are being forced to raise wages just to attract workers to fill key positions.
What a laugh!
There is no labor shortage. There are plenty of workers to do the work. The problem is employers organize the work to serve their own interests. Even before the pandemic hit, employers had a policy of not filling open positions. It was a lot cheaper and more profitable for them to force their existing workforce to work longer and harder rather than hire one more worker.
Now, supposedly, there is an economic recovery, and they are doing the same thing. Working conditions are so bad, workers are forced to take early retirement or quit because they are sick, injured or burned out. Or else, they leave their jobs out of necessity to take care of someone who is sick, or to watch their kids, who are not in school or pre-school.
We repeat—there is no labor shortage. The bosses simply cut the workforce to the bone.
All those essential workers leaving their jobs caused terrible disruptions. But companies took advantage of those disruptions to raise prices. They drove up the prices of basic necessities, such as food, energy, rent and insurance. Car prices have gone up so much in the last year, don’t even think about buying a new or used car!
Those price increases went straight into these companies’ bank accounts, increasing their profits even more. Last year, after-tax corporate profits hit an all-time high as a share of the economy. That means companies increased their profits by driving down the standard of living of the working class—in the middle of a pandemic.
So, don’t tell us wages are going up—our income is going down. When you take inflation into account, the workers’ real wages went down last year. That’s according to official government statistics. It is the exact opposite of what the news is reporting.
For workers to reverse the decline in real wages and their standard of living, they are going to have to take the money from corporate profits. That is, take it from the companies that stole the money from us in the first place.
The working class has the power to do this. After all, the pandemic made crystal clear just how much society depends on “essential” workers, that is, the vast army of workers who provide essential services and produce the goods that society depends on every single day.
Being essential gives that workforce a great deal of power when they decide to fight. Last year, some workers did exactly that. Workers at a few big companies, like John Deere, Frito Lay, Nabisco, Kellogg’s, as well as at some health care companies, mining companies and industrial bakeries went on strike. They couldn’t take the “suicide” shifts, low pay, rotten benefits, and horrible working conditions anymore.
They felt they had no other choice but to fight. In fact, millions more workers are finding they have no other choice, either. It’s in such fights that workers can begin to make sure to protect their interests.
Jan 31, 2022
The fire department in Knoxville, Tennessee has announced an arson investigation of a fire that destroyed the Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi on December 31. It took 9 units of firefighters to extinguish the blaze.
This was the second attack on this healthcare center. Almost a year earlier, on January 22—the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision—gunfire destroyed the glass front door of the building. No suspects have been charged.
On both occasions, no one was in the building and no injuries were reported.
In a Rolling Stone interview, the head of this Planned Parenthood explained that what had always been peaceful protest activity at this clinic changed after December 29, 2020. On this day, an anti-abortion minister from Spokane, Washington relocated to Knoxville. He called his newly founded “congregation,” The Church at Planned Parenthood (TCAPP). He delivered his first sermon from a tent across the street from the Planned Parenthood, saying, "We pray that every fire of heaven would come against this building, and would come against this organization and would come against this evil, in Jesus’s name." This same far-right minister did a TV news interview in front of the smoldering ruins, saying, among other things, "We just pray that nobody was hurt."
In 2020, the National Abortion Federation reported an increase in almost every category of threat of harm and death against abortion providers, compared to 2019.
In November 2021, the head of Mississippi’s last abortion clinic said in an interview that she has noticed a change in the behavior of anti-abortion protesters. "They have not only dead baby pictures. It’s gone way beyond that…. The men are clearly armed. You can see the guns in their pockets." She described how, lately, the local police will not come to her Jackson, Mississippi clinic when called for help. She said, "We are so lucky to have unbelievable women and men who stand out there to escort these women in and get them through this nonsense."
The head of Knoxville Planned Parenthood said the organization is not intimidated. "We are on the same track that we were on before the fire, which is, we are planning to expand in Knoxville."
The uptick in threatening behavior by anti-abortion activists comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to deliver a decision this summer to undermine or eliminate Roe v. Wade’s abortion rights protections at the federal level. This will, no doubt, further embolden the far right.
Defending the right to safe and legal abortion will be up to women themselves. Sooner or later, it will require a level of organization that previous social movements, like the Civil Rights and workers’ movements found a way to build. After all, we can’t look to the government, state, police, or courts. That, by now, is obvious.
Jan 31, 2022
Many hospitals in this country are operating with skeleton crews of nurses and other workers, pushed to the brink by the numbers of patients each one is expected to care for. But according to the New York Times, “in fact, there are more qualified nurses today in America than ever before." As nurses interviewed by the Times made clear, the problem is not that there aren’t enough workers, but that profit-driven hospitals fight tooth-and-nail to keep their costs down and profits up—employing fewer and fewer workers per shift, pushing those that remain to do more and more.
A legal battle in Wisconsin has illustrated the bosses’ calculations and the courts’ complicity in this problem. Healthcare workers at a ThedaCare hospital in northeast Wisconsin gave notice that they were taking jobs at another hospital, Ascension. One of these workers wrote that the job at Ascension was "not just (better) in pay but also a better work/life balance."
But when the workers took their grievance to their bosses at ThedaCare, they were told that “the long term expense to ThedaCare" of matching Ascension’s offer "was not worth the short term cost" of losing the workers, and so no counter-offer was made. Instead, ThedaCare sued—to stop them from quitting, and a Wisconsin judge granted ThedaCare a temporary injunction to prevent the workers from starting their jobs at Ascension! Only after who-knows-what behind the scenes, the injunction was lifted the following week, allowing the workers to begin their new jobs.
ThedaCare’s argument to the court was that patients would be hurt by their lack of staff. True enough, and it’s a problem entirely of the bosses’ making.
Jan 31, 2022
A company that received over $124 million in government funding to provide rapid COVID testing has been forced to shut its doors after former workers and patients exposed numerous fraudulent practices.
As demand for testing surged, the Center for COVID Control opened more than 300 test sites around the country, without allocating funds for the necessary equipment and staff. Why would they, when there was no regulation of these testing centers, and there was government money to be had?
Many tested patients never received the results. Others received results that were either too confusing to understand or too late to be useful. Often test results were sent to the wrong address. Former workers told of samples stuffed in trash bags and strewn across office floors. Other workers recounted finding samples in bags that were well over 48 hours old. They were then instructed to falsify dates of receipt and lie to patients about their test results, telling some patients they had tested negative when their tests had not been processed or were spoiled!
The whole company was a big scam to get federal money. Workers were directed to not even record insurance information when patients presented their insurance card, because owners found it most profitable to bill the federal government directly.
What did they do with all this federal money? One company executive bought a $1.36 million home and posted online about buying fancy cars—including a $3.7 million Ferrari. Another bragged he was able to buy luxury cars thanks to “covid money.” Their scam may have finally ended—but they still have the house and cars!
Jan 31, 2022
Hospitals and other health care settings are pressuring their workers to come to work with Covid! They claim because of Covid they are short-handed, and they are using the new CDC guidelines that reduced quarantine times from 10 days (already a reduction from 14 days) down to five days.
Florida nurse, Candice Cordera, still had a cough and a fever seven days into her breakthrough Covid infection. An employee health representative said she could return to work anyway, citing the newly updated federal guidelines. Cordera was told that she should have recovered by the five-day mark. She did not return to work after she no longer had a fever and was no longer worried about spreading the virus.
It is outrageous that health care settings would agree to endanger their staff and patients in this way. The health care bosses aren’t any different from the bosses in any other industries. Profit is their bottom line. They laid off people before Covid began. Closed hospitals before Covid began. All for the same reasons other bosses lay-off workers and close plants. It’s all about profitability, not saving human lives.
The CDC guidelines changed for the benefit of employers and their bottom line. Not at all to do with science and all to do with bosses telling the government what they need. Unfortunately, the virus does not follow CDC guidelines.
Jan 31, 2022
To deal with the many problems created by Covid, Chicago Public Schools has received nearly 3 billion dollars from the federal government. One billion was allocated to the district just for this school year.
But the students, who have much greater needs after a year and a half of “remote learning”, and nearly two years of pandemic chaos, have seen very little of this money in the schools. Of the one billion, schools have seen only $50 million to over 500 schools. That’s only about $100,000 for each school—about the salary of one teacher or full-time staff member. It raises the question, where’s the rest going?
The school district says it has plans for the money. Well, they need to do a detailed accounting. Because students need additional staff, PPE, computers, testing and remedial services. Anything else looks suspiciously like corruption!
Jan 31, 2022
California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) said it has stopped sending disability checks to 345,000 claimants because it “suspects” that some of these claims are fraudulent. So, hundreds of thousands of workers, who are disabled and can’t work, will not be getting the money they desperately need to survive.
If there is fraud targeting the EDD’s disability benefits system, it’s because the EDD’s underfunded and outdated computer system has never been updated.
The EDD has pulled the same kind of stunt before. About a year ago, the EDD froze 1.4 million unemployment claims because, officials said, organized scam artists were stealing billions of dollars from the system.
It turned out that Bank of America, which the EDD contracted to issue debit cards to claimants, had not even bothered to provide some basic safety features on the debit cards. But still, those who got punished for this mess were hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers. And these workers were not even able to prove the legitimacy of their claims because, after years of neglect, the EDD’s computer and phone systems could not handle the rush of claims and complaints.
Jan 31, 2022
The Prince George’s County public school system in Maryland outside Washington, D.C. proposes to close two small high schools and send the students to other schools instead. These schools have each operated for over 30 years. Community Based Classroom in Lanham/Bladensburg provides 12th grade only and regularly has fewer than 100 students. They had dropped out of other high schools but want to finish, but they have daycare or work arrangements that make it hard to attend normal schools. Tall Oaks Vocational in Bowie provides 11th and 12th grade only and regularly has under 100 students who were expelled, suspended, or referred from other schools.
Supporters of these schools, especially graduates, are collecting signatures opposing the consolidation. These schools serve a vulnerable population that would otherwise be left out in the cold. The county is trying to save money on these troubled students who can’t make it in regular public schools.
Jan 31, 2022
Crews from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department have been working to fix 75 water main breaks in the city in the last week. Over the past three years, there have been an average of more than 330 water main breaks during January and February, according to figures from the DWSD.
A spokesperson for the Water Department blamed the breaks on water from the Detroit River dropping below 36 degrees and entering the water system. They also explained in an advisory that extreme temperature changes, hot or cold, cause pipes to expand and contract, which leads to ruptures.
Who knew that temperatures in Michigan would drop below 36 degrees and change frequently?! Local residents have an expression, "If you don’t like the weather in Michigan, wait five minutes and it will change."
Water main breaks lead to whole neighborhoods experiencing flooded streets and sidewalks, electrical outages, and flooded basements every year.
The Water Department admits Detroit’s water pipes are 95 years old on average and some date back to 1854! A rational plan might be to replace water and sewer pipes more than once per century, but the City of Detroit is too busy giving tax breaks to the auto companies and wealthy people, like the Ilitches and Dan Gilbert, to replace the pipes before they break! And Detroit is hardly alone. It’s just like everywhere else under capitalism.
Jan 31, 2022
During the spring of 2020, 14 Chicago school bus companies pocketed 30 million dollars in pandemic relief funds funneled to them by Chicago Public School (CPS) district administrators.
A recent investigation found that bus drivers and bus aides were swindled. Funds were purportedly intended to keep drivers and aides employed during pandemic school closings so they were “mission ready” when school buildings reopened. Instead, owners used the cash windfall to inflate their profits, and proceeded to lay off over 600 bus drivers.
City officials sent the money to private contract companies without any instructions on how it was to be spent. Later, they explained that they “assumed the businesses would do the right thing for their people.”
One vendor pocketed the cash along with additional Payroll Protection Plan federal loan money, and then laid off all its drivers and bus aides within a week of school closures. This vendor spent only 0.5% of normal payroll costs that spring.
And it shows.
Bus transportation has been anything but “mission ready” for the school reopenings. During September 2021 over 3300 CPS students were left stranded without bus service or any other means to get safely to or from school. Instead of providing safe and efficient bus transportation, “alternative transportation options” like a patchwork of taxis and shuttle vans are hastily organized. Public school administrators implemented consultant-recommended cost-cutting measures, including a severe reduction of bus routes, making it much more difficult or impossible for working-class families to get their kids to school and organize their lives.
Drivers and aides are angry that school administrators have failed to provide a work environment that reduces COVID risk for both workers and student riders. Prior to the fall school reopening, 100 contract drivers quit, leaving the school system 500 drivers short of normal staffing.
This school bus crisis in just one aspect of the systematic dismantling of public education by Chicago’s city government.
Jan 31, 2022
Incandescent bulbs were supposed to be phased out two years ago. Yet over 30% of light bulbs sold in the U.S. in 2020 were incandescent bulbs (except California which phased out most incandescent bulbs in 2020). What’s more, the incandescent bulbs are sold in poor neighborhoods at dollar stores at a low price. Not only are LED lights less available in poorer areas, they tend to cost on average $2.50 more per bulb than LED lights sold in wealthier neighborhoods.
Incandescent bulbs are not actually cheaper in the long run than LED bulbs. A typical 60-watt incandescent bulb uses 12 times the electricity as a 5-watt LED that provides nearly the same amount of light. And LED lights last far longer. This adds up to lower electric bills and spending less on replacement bulbs. Over time the savings can add up to hundreds of dollars. Lighting accounts for as much as a fifth of the average U.S. household’s electricity bill, and low-income households spend a disproportionately large part of their income on utilities.
Using less energy also means that LED lights are better for the environment. Continuing to use incandescent bulbs dumps hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is emitted by fossil-fuel (coal, oil, natural gas) burning power plants. It is one of the main greenhouse gases behind climate change, which is making our planet warmer.
The world’s biggest light bulb makers stopped the law Congress established in 2007 and signed into law by George W. Bush, which would have eliminated virtually all incandescent bulbs by 2020. In 2017, the industry sued. This led the Trump administration to roll back the standards for new bulbs.
Signify, the Dutch multinational that makes Philips light bulbs, has larger profit margins for the inefficient, outdated light bulbs. That is partly because investment in manufacturing equipment has long been paid off (incandescent bulbs have been around for more than a century). On the other hand, the LED market has attracted new manufacturers and required an investment in new technology and equipment.
Signify is now requesting to keep manufacturing these outdated bulbs for another year followed by another open-ended amount of time to sell out stockpiled inventory. They argue the wasted bulbs will wind up in landfills. Of course, used bulbs also end up in landfills.
The big light bulb manufacturers’ strategy of delaying the implementation of the new energy saving standards has allowed them to keep their profit margins high on the backs of people who can least afford it and at the expense of the environment we all depend on for our lives.
Jan 31, 2022
Since November 3, 165 workers at the Jon Donaire Desserts plant in Santa Fe Springs, California, have been on strike.
The Donaire workers are mostly female, single mothers, and Latina. They make and decorate ice cream cakes that are sold at food chains such as Costco’s, Ralphs, Walmart, and Baskin-Robbins. They produce up to 13 ice cream cakes a minute, or one cake every four seconds, under freezing conditions, working up to 16 hours a day.
The company these women work for is owned by a major multi-national called Rich Products that sells more than 4,000 food products in over 100 countries. The company chairman, Bob Rich Jr., is said to be worth over seven billion dollars and is listed by Bloomberg News to be among the 500 richest people in the world!
These very low wage workers are demanding a dollar an hour increase per year over three years. They are also demanding an increase in paid sick days, since they only get three per year. And they want a change in how the company assigns overtime, since right now it is mandatory, and can be assigned right before the end of a shift. And they want to get rid of the point system that penalizes workers for taking days off from work, even with a medical excuse, or leaving a shift early.
Rich offered the Donaire workers no more than a $0.50 per hour wage increase, which doesn’t even keep the workers up with inflation. Hopefully, the workers will tell him where to stick his cake….
Jan 31, 2022
The following is translated from the journal of Combat Ouvrier, the revolutionary group active in Guadeloupe and Martinique.
In Guadeloupe and Martinique demonstrations, actions, outbursts follow one another every day against the sanctions linked to the vaccination obligation and employer exploitation.
The revolt of part of the workers and the population continues seven months after it began, and without weakening.
In Martinique, on Wednesday, January 12, the workers demonstrated in front of the CHUM in Fort-de-France. On Friday, January 7, trade unions and caregivers demonstrated in front of the ARS: the next day they demonstrated through Fort-de-France and in front of the prefecture.
On January 11, in Guadeloupe, hundreds of demonstrators opposed the forces of repression who had destroyed the picket of caregivers at the Pointe-à-Pitre University Hospital. The January 8 street demonstration in Pointe-à-Pitre brought together a thousand people. Workers are on strike in more than a dozen health establishments. At the Pointe-à-Pitre hospital center, on Tuesday, January 4, caregivers deprived of salary showed the extent of their anger to the director Gérard Cotellon, forced to be escorted by the police to leave his office.
At the same time, workers in several other sectors are on strike: those of the multinational ArcelorMittal for more than four months, those of the Post Office, the IME, health establishments.
Yes, the fight pays off: the organizers of the United G 128 association in Goyave, on strike against their dismissal, have won!
The workers who demonstrate and who go on strike are certainly a minority for the moment, but they constitute a combative minority who do not give up and who show the way to others.
The number of people at risk of being affected by the suspensions is very large. For example, at the Martinique hospital center, 3,800 letters of formal notice were sent to agents. The inter-union in struggle estimates at nearly 6,000 the number of people threatened by the suspensions in Martinique. In the two islands several thousand workers have already lost or will lose their wages.
These figures are added to those of the already massive unemployment in the West Indies. With the increase in prices, the absence of water in the taps, wages falling in relation to the cost of living, the suspensions are too much, overflowing the anger of a combative fraction of the workers! They ultimately have no choice but to fight. This is a battle for the reinstatement of suspended workers but above all a struggle for the whole working class—the class of those who have no choice but to be exploited to obtain a salary and who suffer all the violence of this society.
However, to win against the increasing onslaught against workers, the social revolt will have to go further. It must succeed in drawing the majority of the workers and the population in its wake. It is only if the state finds itself faced with a more general, collective struggle that it will give in. A general fight against the suspensions linked to the law on the obligation to vaccinate, but also for the increase in wages, for mass hiring, the cessation of layoffs, for drinking water everywhere, among others, will produce a greater balance of forces on the workers’ side.
Whenever a government made concessions to the workers it was because the ruling class feared the initiatives taken by the working class in struggle. Let’s create this balance of power!
Jan 31, 2022
On Tuesday, January 25, a boater spotted a man clinging to the hull of a capsized boat off the coast of Florida. He was the only survivor among the 40 people he reported had attempted to cross together from the Bahamas in a small boat that got caught by a storm. The Coast Guard found the bodies of five others and presumed the rest had also drowned.
While their numbers are dwarfed by those trying to cross by land—the border patrol reports 1.7 million “encounters” with migrants in 2021—the Coast Guard reports that the numbers of people trying to get to the U.S. by sea are also rising dramatically—they detained more than 3,200 in 2021. And for every person detained, who knows how many drowned at sea without a trace? Less than a week earlier, at least 31 people were rescued after their boat capsized on a similar attempt to get from the Bahamas to Florida.
Off the coast of Florida, most of these migrants are originally from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba. But even more have been detained off the coast of California, where many migrants come from Central America or even further away in South America, or even Africa.
U.S. officials blame the smugglers who profit by packing migrants into flimsy, unsafe vessels. But the smugglers are small fry.
In the last few years, people all over the world have been pushed into worsening poverty by the economic crisis and unending wars—this is why so many people are fleeing their impoverished home countries. U.S. capitalism, which loots the wealth of the poor countries, gun in hand, is the main force behind the decay in living standards for a large share of the world’s people. And U.S. border and immigration policies, enforced under Democrats and Republicans equally, drive desperate people to take these risky leaps into the water. They are the true killers.
Jan 31, 2022
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
What will result from the saber rattling by the Western camp and Russia over Ukraine? Tension keeps rising. It’s fueled by various proclamations on each side, but also by reports of multiple deliveries of Western weapons to Ukraine to help it respond to potential Russian aggression.
On January 21 Moscow asked Washington and NATO to commit in writing not to integrate Ukraine into NATO. Called by its initials, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also known as the Alliance, is a military alliance created by the United States in 1949 against the Soviet Union. Ukraine’s possibly joining is increasingly on the table. Russia’s request is not surprising, considering that NATO is still aimed firstly against Russia. But Russia and Ukraine have shared the same culture for more than a thousand years. They were part of the same country—the Tsarist Empire and later the USSR—starting in the middle of the 17th century.
And it must not be forgotten that 14 of NATO’s 30 member states which joined after 1997 had been part of the Eastern Bloc or even part of the USSR. No matter that American leaders had promised (verbally) in the early 1990s not to extend NATO to the countries that formed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and therefore not to deploy their military forces on Russia’s borders.
The Western camp replied to the Kremlin with a firm “no” accompanied by threats of immediate reprisal in the event of an attack on Ukraine. All of this was reinforced by a plethora of military measures.
NATO says it will “continue … to strengthen the eastern part of the Alliance.” This means militarily, of course. NATO has reserved this right for years. Washington put 8,500 troops on alert, ready to deploy to Ukraine and the Baltic countries, and the U.S. is planning for naval maneuvers in the Mediterranean by April. President Biden announced he is sending defense systems, small arms, and ammunition to Ukraine. He doesn’t say it, but this is in addition to the military trainers and American missiles already there.
NATO’s second stringers like Britain, France, Holland, Spain, Denmark, and several others, have promised to send warships, fighter planes and troops to support NATO on Russia’s border. In fact, ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and more so since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the imperialist powers guided by the United States and NATO never stopped pushing their pawns in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. These are regions that Russia considers its backyard.
Certainly, Russia does not hesitate to intervene in the region, asserting itself as a dominant regional power. This was evident in the Caucasus last year and more recently with quashing the mass uprising in Kazakhstan. But this must be seen in the light of the fact that imperialism has been strengthening its position relative to Russia’s in the region for three decades. And imperialism wants to keep doing this, reminding everyone that imperialism dominates the world and intends to lay down the law. Even if this means risking provoking a conflict in Europe, with Ukraine as the theater of battlefield and the pretext for war.
Self-proclaimed Kremlinologists pontificate that Putin wants to rebuild the Soviet Union whether voluntarily or by force. Everyone knows the Kremlin uses force. Whether Putin wants to rebuild the USSR is another matter. In 2005, Putin did describe the fall of the USSR as "the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." But in the same sentence he added that only a madman would believe the USSR could be reconstituted.
He would know! Firstly because Putin comes from the bureaucracy which caused the break-up of the USSR that it had led, in order to appropriate its wealth. But the USSR could only exist as the product of a victorious workers’ revolution—a phenomenon unique in history, so far.
Leading the Russian bureaucracy and having just sent his army to crush a workers mass uprising in Kazakhstan, Putin’s only concern is to defend his power and more generally the power of the looting, reactionary, anti-worker bureaucracy. This is exactly what led to the break-up of the USSR, and this is what makes the Russian, Ukrainian and other leaders incapable of rebuilding it, even if they wanted to.
The bureaucrats have torn the former USSR to pieces, and they rely more and more on nationalism to uphold their power, from Russia to Kazakhstan via Ukraine. They pit all the peoples against each other. But what alternative future can the great imperialist powers, including the so-called democratic ones, offer the peoples?
The Russian government in all its brutality and cynicism replied to NATO’s measures by organizing major maneuvers in the Crimea, which the Kremlin “recaptured” from Ukraine in 2014. The Western powers’ side displays no less cynicism and brawn. This current escalation in the war of words and posturing in which the two camps are engaged risks leading to clashes on a much larger scale one day between peoples that every circumstance should unite, and who were united for many years.
Jan 31, 2022
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
“We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That is the first line of the joint statement signed January 3 by the five permanent member countries on the United Nations Security Council: the U.S., China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France.
As a conference to re-assess the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons approaches, the leaders of the five great powers are far from being inspired by pacifism. They wanted to reaffirm their desire to continue to hold their monopoly over these kinds of weapons, or at least their control over them.
It doesn’t have to be proven anymore that nuclear war is a threat to the survival of humanity. It’s not very reassuring that the leaders of the states capable of triggering nuclear war are aware of the threat. The only times the atomic weapon was used, in August 1945 against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the U.S. leadership decided to use the bomb with full knowledge of the devastation it would cause.
But the leaders of the imperialist world do not control the mechanisms which will likely lead to more widespread and generalized conflicts, no more than they actually control the capitalist economy and its crises. After all, military conflicts are based on the economic war for markets and zones of influence. As for choosing what weapons to use in future wars, we can be sure that humanitarian considerations won’t matter.
Preparing for revolution and the overthrow of capitalism is the only way to take action to preserve humanity from a nuclear conclusion.
Jan 31, 2022
On January 25, the Williams Lake, British Columbia, First Nations reported finding ground-penetrating radar indications of 93 unmarked graves on the site of a former Indian Residential School.
This technology has so far revealed over 1,900 such sites across Canada, mostly in 2021. Such research lags in the U.S., but a radar study at a former Salem, Oregon school (they were called Indian Boarding Schools in the U.S.) indicated a few hundred likely unmarked graves. At a Genoa, Nebraska, school, records were found of 87 previously unknown deaths.
Only the persistence of the families, over long decades of official cover-ups, led to these few results, which simply represent many thousands more children, victims of government policies.
By the 1890s, after the near-extermination of Native American peoples, and after the few survivors were confined to small barren reservations, the U.S. government developed a new Indian policy called “assimilation.” Operating from 1816 through 1972, the policy was summed up in the favorite motto of Brigadier General Richard H. Pratt, commander of a “model” Indian boarding school opened in 1896: “Kill the Indian in the man, but save the man.” Native children would be taken from their homes, put in “boarding schools” far away, and forced to take on a new European Christian identity. The government subcontracted most of these 367 schools to churches, primarily the Catholic Church.
The newly manufactured “Christians” were supposed to “assimilate” into the main capitalist society, and as they did so, they would lose any claims on reservation lands. Then in a generation or so, the government could sell off the lands to ranchers, miners, or other bidders. Obligations to Natives would cease to be a government budget issue. In the words of Duncan Scott, who ran the similar Canadian policy: “… to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”
The methods used in these schools were militaristic and brutal. “Beat the Indian out of them” was the watchword. Children were assigned European names, European clothing, European haircuts. They were punished for speaking any word of their own language, for having any piece of Indian clothing or ornament, for holding on to any reminder whatever of their former lives. The suffering can hardly be imagined.
Schoolchildren were often rented out to local families for domestic or farm labor. Children lived in school barracks, generally unheated, without proper sanitation. Children would die of T.B., of malnutrition, of influenza. Children would freeze to death in their beds in the winter. The deaths might be reported to the families—or might not.
Knowledge of these atrocities stayed alive in memories of the schools’ survivors and their families, but they had little access to official records or to any sort of recompense. In 2011, for example, researchers gained access to some of the Catholic Church’s school archives in Canada. But in a few months, permission was withdrawn. Then in 2014, the property was sold, and the archives moved … to the Vatican. Canadian tribes have not yet been allowed access.
Similarly, in 2016 in the U.S., a tribal federation filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, for records relating to deaths at the schools. Five years later, they have had no response.
The attempted physical and cultural extermination of Native Americans had no justification other than the desire to take over their communally-used land, to convert it into plots individually owned and saleable, and to pursue the maximum possible profit from those privatized land sections and resources. The human cost did not count.
L. Frank Baum, author of the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, defender of Central Plains farmers, wrote in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, January 3, 1891: “… we had better, in order to protect our civilization … wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” It was a common and barbaric opinion, in a barbaric system, that still today pretends it can be civilized.
Jan 31, 2022
The Washington Post has created a database that lists members of Congress who owned slaves. It shows that more than 1,700 Congressmen (only one of them is a woman) owned slaves at some point in their lives.
This database is the first of its kind. It took long hours of painstaking work to put it together. The journalists who did the research investigated all of the 5,558 members of Congress born before 1840, meaning they were 21 or older before the Civil War. The researchers had to go through thousands of documents of all kinds, including handwritten birth certificates of slaves, newspaper ads placed by slaveowners looking for escaped slaves, or letters written home from Civil War battlefields. And the list is not conclusive—since the list’s first publication, for example, information provided by readers has added nearly three dozen names to the 1,715 that Washington Post researchers initially came up with.
This result should not be surprising. Until it was abolished, slavery was, directly and indirectly, the major source of the wealth owned by the richest families in this country. And not only have politicians elected to Congress, overwhelmingly, represented the interests of these wealthy families, often times these families have also sent some of their members into Congress and other governing bodies of the country.
And these same families have not stopped running the country after the Civil War either. To this day, the wealth created thanks to slavery continues to be the basis on which wealth in the U.S. rests, and multiplies. In fact, slavery remains the foundation of American capitalism.
The people who have ruled this country have had no interest in having this fact be publicly discussed. So, it’s also not surprising that, in this country, where very detailed statistics are kept in all kinds of areas of life—in sports, for example—no one had apparently published the kind of research that the Washington Post did.
But the descendants of former slaves did not need a database of slaveowners to know that wealth in this country was stolen, through violence, from those who created it—above all legally enslaved workers. And they also know that the theft—that is, the exploitation of the labor of Black people—did not stop with the abolition of slavery.
Jan 31, 2022
Three experienced Baltimore City firefighters were killed and a fourth seriously injured fighting a fire that broke out in a vacant three-story rowhouse at around 6 AM on January 24. The firefighters went into the burning building because they were told there might be people inside. Once they were inside, the burning house partially collapsed on them.
According to official figures, there are around 16,000 vacant houses in Baltimore, several thousand owned by the city. Firefighters say there are homeless people often living in them. And frequently they make small fires in them during the winter, trying to stay warm.
Instead of finding housing for these people and jobs for them—if they are able to work—Baltimore, like other cities, requires landlords to board up their vacant homes to keep homeless people out. But the homeless frequently get in anyway, one way or another.
The recent deadly Baltimore fire broke out in a house that had been vacant for at least 11 years in a neighborhood with many vacant buildings. There was a fire in this same house in 2015 that left three firefighters injured. The house was condemned by the city after that fire and put up for sale due to unpaid taxes.
The building was valued at only $6,000 and taxes for the current year were only $150. With taxes this low, many landlords simply hang onto such buildings for years waiting for an opportunity to sell them later when they hope to get a better price.
The whole situation reveals how many problems that working people face contribute to deadly fires like this recent one in Baltimore: High unemployment in some parts of the working class; low wages; lack of action by public officials to provide affordable housing to all who need it.
The banks, big corporations, the wealthy, and their politicians aren’t going to solve these problems. Only an upsurge in the working class can force them to act differently.
Jan 31, 2022
After more than twenty years of war, U.S. troops were finally pulled out of Afghanistan. Small numbers officially remain in Iraq and Syria—though who knows how many special forces and CIA drones really continue to operate in these countries.
But even without so many of their own troops involved in the fighting, the U.S. “forever wars” continue against populations across the Middle East.
During the last week of January, U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Hasaka, Syria battled to retake a prison complex from ISIS. 700 young boys have been imprisoned there for three years, because their parents had supposedly joined ISIS. In addition to providing the Kurdish forces with weapons and intelligence, the U.S launched air strikes in the middle of this city of one million, and the fighting forced tens of thousands of people to flee from their homes, joining hundreds of thousands of refugees this war has produced.
On January 21, Saudi air forces bombed a detention center in the neighboring country of Yemen, killing at least 80 people. This was part of a series of airstrikes Saudi forces inflicted on Yemen during the last two weeks of January, including in the capital city. Amnesty International reported that the strikes killed dozens of civilians, though the true toll is unknown, in part because the strikes knocked out the whole country’s internet. The entire Saudi war effort is carried out with U.S.-made weapons and is part of a proxy war with Iran.
And in Afghanistan, the march toward starvation continues for tens of millions of people. U.S. sanctions have completely destroyed the country’s economy, and the U.S. continues to block the Taliban government from accessing Afghanistan’s own money. Up to 90% of its people have been forced to rely on under-resourced international aid groups to get anything to eat. The U.N. reports that people have been reduced to selling their own children, selling kidneys and other body parts, just to survive, while the Wall Street Journal reports that what hospitals exist are filling up with dying babies, born prematurely as their mothers starve.
So no, the U.S. wars in the Middle East are not over. Even if the U.S. is committing a smaller share of its military to the region, these wars are as devastating as ever.
Jan 31, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK workplace newsletters during the week of January 24, 2022.
Democrats scheduled a vote on legislation that, they said, would protect the “right to vote.” With all Republicans opposed, Democrats needed the vote of every Democratic senator. They didn’t get them all. “Voting rights” went down to defeat.
Once again, the Democrats, in control of both Houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, couldn’t pull themselves together to fulfill a campaign promise.
Republicans are very clear on this issue. In states where they control the legislature, they have been passing measures to restrict the right to vote.
In some states, for example, Republicans passed a law requiring people who miss voting for two times to re-register before they can vote again. In other states, they passed laws reducing the amount of time polls can be open. They passed laws making it more difficult to vote absentee. They passed laws requiring two pieces of identification, one with your picture, when you show up to vote.
A common thread runs through all these state laws. They make it harder to vote. No matter how Republicans twist and turn, trying to justify such provisions, there is one clear practical result: they restrict the number of people who will vote.
And not just people in the abstract, but people who have to work for their living, people in lower-paid jobs, people whose boss doesn’t let them get off work to vote, people who work long hours, going to work before the polls open, stuck in work almost until they close.
All these measures show the disdain the Republicans have for democracy.
That doesn’t mean the Democratic Party defends democracy. Its “voting rights” bill doesn’t even guarantee the right to vote to everyone. People who have worked in this country for years, paid taxes for years, contributed to the wealth of this country through their labor still cannot vote if they didn’t go through all the steps to gain citizenship. It may seem obvious to some people that immigrants should not vote—well, for quite a number of decades in the earlier history of this country citizenship was not considered a requirement for voting. This is only one example.
But even if that bill would have made it possible for every single person in the country to vote every time, it still would not have guaranteed democracy.
Democracy, if it has any meaning at all for working people, must rest on those people having the possibility to choose representatives who actually represent their own class interests.
The majority of people sitting in the U.S. Congress are millionaires. That’s no accident. They are simply part of a class that benefits from the functioning of capitalist exploitation.
It’s no surprise that the legislation Congress produces reinforces the pursuit of profit—even when it supposedly is designed to help the population.
Take the recent “infrastructure” bill. The money to go for bridges, roads, dams, etc. will be funneled through the pockets of private companies that are guaranteed a certain level of profit before any road is built.
Look at all the money distributed by these two parties to deal with Covid. Much of it continues to go to big pharmaceutical companies that are left free to set the level of profit they want.
Look at Obamacare. The biggest beneficiaries of that law have been the for-profit hospital systems and the for-profit pharmaceutical companies. The respect such laws show for profit is a big reason medical care costs so much.
The Republicans openly show their disdain for the working population. The Democrats just do it in a different way: by playing politics with something like voting rights, making promises they know they won’t keep. Or they pretend to pass legislation to serve the population, but they write it so as to serve the pursuit of profit.
Democracy—like everything else both parties twist—is based on class. Their “democracy” is “democracy” for the capitalist class.
Working people need to build their own.
Jan 31, 2022
This is a true story, located in Akron, Ohio, where most worked in the rubber tire factories, at the mercy of the company’s speed-up, lay-offs, piecework and pay cuts. It depicts, through newspaper clips and short narration, a day-by-day commentary starting in 1932 and culminating in the sit-down strike of 1936. You see the lives of workers and the unemployed and the frivolity of the rich (the rubber companies made millions every year in the depression), and the growing tension between them that finally exploded in a great strike wave in 1936, and inspired the Flint Sit Down a year later. The growing divide between rich and poor of this time period and the hardship and despair people faced bears striking resemblance to the events we face today.
Mudbound, 2017, directed by Dee Rees, on Netflix. It is based on the 2008 novel Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. It stars Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund and Mary J. Blige.
If you haven’t already seen this award-winning film, you don’t want to miss it. It tells the story of two families in 1940s Mississippi, one white small land-owning farmer family, and a black sharecropping family. It shows the brutal realities of racism, farming and friendship, and the upending effect of World War II on all of their lives.
Jan 31, 2022
The Super Bowl is two weeks away, and L.A. officials have a problem: L.A.’s enormous number of homeless. These officials don’t want the sight of homeless people and their encampments to spoil the fun for all the partygoers attending the festivities surrounding the Super Bowl. And they certainly don’t want the aerial shots from the Goodyear blimp revealing all the homeless encampments right near their precious five-billion-dollar SoFi stadium.
So, the police are evicting homeless people left and right, and for the clean-up, the city hired a company called Planet Green, which specializes in emergency disaster cleanup and biohazardous waste cleanup.
Yes, homelessness is a disaster—caused by all the ways the super-rich rob workers through starvation wages and sky-high rents.
Jan 31, 2022
Former Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke is set to be released from prison on February 3. He’s being let off less than halfway through his 81-month sentence for shooting 16 bullets into 17-year-old Laquan McDonald’s body. No ordinary person in this society would expect a remotely similar fate if they had committed the same crime.
But Van Dyke is no ordinary person in this society. He is a former police officer—a position that tolerates and even insists on racist and violent activity so long as they continue to protect the interests of the ruling class.
If it weren’t for organized pressure from the population, cops like Van Dyke and George Floyd’s murderer Derek Chauvin would never have been convicted in the first place. So, it’s only right that activists are planning a rally in Downtown Chicago to protest his release.
Jan 31, 2022
Police in Virginia Beach, Virginia forged Forensic Science Department documents with faked DNA evidence in at least five cases between 2016 and 2020. The cops used the forensics department’s official letterhead and seal but made up the reports and a fictitious worker who “signed” them. An investigation was started last spring when a prosecutor asked the forensics department for a certified copy of a document, which turned out to be forged.
But no worries! The ruling was that cops must promise not to fabricate evidence….
What a crock!
Jan 31, 2022
The media and politicians in Michigan are making a big deal about GM’s announcement that it is planning to spend 7 billion dollars across four Michigan facilities to manufacture electric vehicles and that its investment will create 4,000 jobs and retain 1,000 jobs in the state.
GM’s investment is getting a lot of play. But how about the huge investment the State of Michigan is giving to GM? For these four new projects, GM is set to get $824.1 million in state incentives from the State’s General Fund. The proposed battery plant in Lansing is also set to be property-tax-free for 18 years, and the electric vehicle plant in Orion Township is set to obtain a 12-year tax abatement.
The State handing over public money in the form of tax incentives and tax breaks in exchange for promises of investments and good paying jobs? It’s an old story when it comes to the likes of multi-billion dollar corporations, like GM. But if you want to know the story’s outcome, you only have to ask the thousands of workers from Flint, Pontiac, Warren, Detroit, Hamtramck, and Lansing, who USED TO BE GM workers and they will tell you that over the years, grand promises were made, public money was handed over, and then plants were downsized or shut, with massive numbers of jobs cut, and good paying jobs replaced by two tier and temp jobs. You can also ask the GM workers who used to work at Lordstown in Ohio about GM’s promises. Some of them were forced to relocate to Michigan, and now find themselves wondering if the jobs they came to in Flint are also in jeopardy with this new round of promises from GM, that does not include Flint plants.
In this latest round of announcements, the public is led to believe that General Motors is “Generous Motors.” But the reality is, if anybody has been generous, it has been the State of Michigan, through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, that has essentially been the cash cow, with OUR money from the General Fund, for the likes of GM.
Jan 31, 2022
Most everyone saw pictures in the news of the bridge that collapsed in Pittsburgh on the same day President Biden was due to appear there. At least 10 people were injured, some cars were damaged, and a city bus was caught on the dangling bridge. It could have been worse, but it happened at 6:45 in the morning and the bus was heading to the suburbs and carried only the driver and two passengers, rather than people heading to work in the city.
This latest bridge collapse brought the conditions of highways and bridges around the country to the public’s attention. The American Society of Civil Engineers says that 42% of the country’s bridges are over half a century old, and 45,000 are "structurally deficient."
Biden used the opportunity to tout his recently passed 1-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. It remains to be seen how many roads and bridges actually get fixed with that money, much of which will be taken in profits for the companies given the contracts to do the work. And who knows how long that will take?
The U.S. government and the wealthy ruling class it represents has had plenty of money to spend for wars around the world and tax breaks for the wealthy but has little for providing safe transportation to its population.