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
Feb 14, 2022
Truckers have been tying up transport services on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border. The protests have interfered with “business as usual” in the capital city of Ottawa in Canada. It began as a demonstration against vaccine mandates that were demanded by the Canadian government.
The mandates require that drivers, delivering or picking up goods in Canada, are vaccinated against COVID-19. The mandates mean that there are drivers on both sides of the border who cannot work because they are not vaccinated. And all this at the very point that supply chain problems are disrupting both economies, and the bosses are crying about a shortage of workers.
Drivers have grown tired of the delays and interruptions caused by the mandates. They understand better than the capitalists who employ them, that they are essential. So, they began parking trucks and vehicles, tying up transportation hubs. In doing so, they have shut down production in plants across Canada and the United States that require the parts and products they are moving. They have very quickly demonstrated the power working people have in an economy that depends on their willingness to work.
In their pursuit of profits, the capitalists on both sides of the border have done almost nothing to prevent the continuing pandemic from taking its toll on all of us. Their complete failure to move quickly to isolate and control the virus worldwide has resulted in a never-ending cycle of viral mutations that rises and falls in waves of infection. The price is being paid by the working class and poor worldwide. It is more than an inconvenience. Workers have been forced to remain on the job, getting sick and watching loved ones sicken and die while the capitalists’ political parties support policies created to keep profits rolling in at any cost.
While vaccines have proven to be a protection for individuals who seek them, they cannot substitute for the failures of the capitalist class to invest in a real public health system that would get rid of, and protect against, viruses on a world-wide scale.
There are no borders when it comes to viruses. And above all, there are no borders when it comes to the record profits Wall Street has pulled down for a handful of billionaire families. Profits that should have been directed toward massive efforts to fight the virus on a world-wide scale, to serve and protect the world population.
Like the majority of us, the truckers are sick of it! They are showing the power that we, the working population, have to say, “No!” “Enough!”
In the course of their protests, the truckers are finding other demands to put forward. Is it any surprise that these demands are mostly in the direction of their own individual interests, as truck drivers and owners?
In the absence of any real, militant leadership in the working class, is it any surprise that some of the truckers have adopted right-wing slogans and behavior? When the right wing appears militant, and the left wing supports the Democrats, who mumble, make excuses, and fail to fight against this disaster?
Until now, the working class of the U.S. and Canada, the core of production on this continent, has remained quiet, accepting a certain level of discipline that keeps us producing goods and profits while our own situation gets worse. But, as the working class, we have the potential to stand and fight and put forward real social demands that can take us out of this lousy situation we are in. We can build organizations that give all those oppressed by capitalism a real hope, a real perspective.
We can turn defensive fights against job loss and restrictions like mandates into a fight for real solutions, real improvements, not only for the working class but for all of humanity.
We should, by now, realize that the profits sitting in the banks are OUR earned income, OUR stolen pension and benefit money, the wealth WE produced from our labor. Money that has to be used to meet the needs of the majority, not the few.
As the truckers demonstrated, to hell with “business as usual!” Capitalism has to be gotten rid of to unleash the potential for a decent life for all of us.
Feb 14, 2022
When Brian Flores filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL (National Football League) for racial discrimination in its hiring of head football coaches, he was openly stating what has been an obvious truth.
Flores is the former coach of the Miami Dolphins, who was fired despite having a winning record in the previous 2 seasons. When Flores went to an interview for a job with the New York Giants, he found out that the team had already decided to hire another coach who was white. Flores was being given a sham interview only for appearance purposes—so that the team could say it was “considering” hiring a black coach.
What happened to Flores was a continuation of the NFL’s racist history when it comes to hiring black men as head coaches. When Flores filed his lawsuit, there was only one black head coach out of the 32 teams in the NFL, a league in which 70% of the players are black!
The NFL is the richest and most prominent sports league in this country. It is also the worst when it comes to the hiring of black head coaches. While black men were also being denied the chance to be hired as head coaches in pro basketball, and as managers in major league baseball, the NFL was the last major sports league to hire a black head coach. That happened in 1989, when Art Shell was hired as head coach of the Oakland Raiders. Since 1989, there have been 141 white men who have been hired as head coaches in the NFL and only 19 black men.
The lack of black head coaches has nothing to do with coaching ability in winning and losing games. In 2002, when civil rights attorneys threatened a lawsuit against the NFL, they presented a study that showed that those few black head coaches up to that time actually had more success than white head coaches.
In the 2007 Super Bowl, the head coaches of both teams, Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, were black. Other black coaches have had success in the NFL, including Dennis Green and Jim Caldwell. But all of these coaches shared something in common with Art Shell and Brian Flores—they were all eventually fired, despite their winning records.
This discrimination by the NFL is just part of the racism evident in the whole sports world. In the highest level of college football, where 60% of the players are black, only 14 out of 130 teams currently have black head coaches. And that is the highest number it has ever been.
Brian Flores said that he knew that he might be blackballed from ever getting another head coaching job because he filed his lawsuit and openly challenged the racism in the NFL. He talked about what happened to Colin Kaepernick, who kneeled for the national anthem as a protest against racial injustice and has been kept out of the NFL ever since. Flores, like Kaepernick, is to be applauded for taking a stand.
Feb 14, 2022
Whoopi Goldberg recently got into some hot water for stating that the Holocaust was “not about race,” since both the Nazis and the Jews were white. She quickly came back and said what she had learned—that the Nazis had indeed seen the Jews they oppressed as belonging to a separate, inferior race from them, even though both were white.
Which raises the question: what IS race?
"Race” does not actually exist in human biology. There is only one species, Homo sapiens, one race, fundamentally the same in all of its wonderful variations of skin color, facial features, and body sizes and shapes around the world.
"Race” as an ideology didn’t even exist until the Middle Ages started giving way to capitalism. Early capitalism developed in England and France. The early capitalists rationalized that they were more successful because they were of a superior “race": the English were superior to the Irish; Western Europeans were superior to Eastern Europeans and Jews. People were wealthy or poor because that was what they were naturally fit to be.
As capitalism expanded to the world, “race” was used as a way to justify why Western European capitalists were entitled to enslave, conquer and exploit Africans, Asians, and indigenous Americans. Other peoples were labeled as “Other Races"—inferior humans, or even not humans at all. Again, they were fulfilling their “natural” lot in life by being conquered and enslaved.
"Race” as an ideology continues today because we still live in a society where a great many people are exploited and oppressed by a very few at the top. The capitalist class has an interest both in justifying their position at the top, and of dividing the workers they exploit. Better for them to sell the idea that poor people are poor—and poor countries are poor—because those people are simply incapable of anything better. MUCH better for them, than to admit that they are rich because they have been stealing from the rest of us for so long! And if workers get divided among so-called “racial” lines, it becomes that much harder to unite against their true common enemy.
The ideology of “race” and racism will only disappear with the common fight of a united working class against the capitalist class and the capitalist system that exploits us all.
Feb 14, 2022
The average wholesale price of Xtandi, a very effective drug to treat prostate cancer, is close to $190,000 a year. Because prostate cancer is a disease of older men, Medicare can pick up most of the bill. Still, even Medicare patients fork out up to nearly $10,000 a year for this drug through deductibles and co-pays. This is a very expensive drug, particularly for a patient afflicted with a lethal disease.
Patients living in other countries also pay a very high price for this drug. For example, the healthcare system in Japan pays close to $32,000 a year. But this price is much lower than that of the U.S., indicating that the U.S. price is ridiculously inflated to $160,000 a year.
UCLA, a public university in California, developed this drug. The Federal Government paid for its development. So, the public has already paid for the development of this drug through their taxes.
Now, they have to pay again as Pfizer and Astellas superinflate its price.
Feb 14, 2022
Late last year, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) stopped production of its single-shot COVID vaccine at the only facility that makes the vaccine. In its place, J&J has begun to produce a much more profitable vaccine for another virus.
J&J says that it will resume the COVID vaccine production later this year. But J&J is already well behind its contracted deliveries. Since last summer, J&J had promised to deliver one billion COVID vaccine doses. Instead, it delivered only 400 million doses. This current production halt could easily reduce the supply by hundreds of millions of doses more. These badly needed but not delivered doses will cause countless preventable COVID-related illnesses and deaths, and increase the possibility of spreading another COVID virus variant.
The J&J vaccine has several advantages. It is a single shot. It is also easy to deliver, since it does not require ultracold refrigeration like Pfizer and Moderna’s two-shot mRNA vaccines. The J&J vaccine is also much less expensive. With the booster, the J&J vaccine provides strong and long-lasting protection against severe disease conditions across variants, including Omicron.
Because of such advantages, poorer countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure, medical personnel, storage facilities, and transportation prefer the J&J vaccine over others. And in some countries, this vaccine is the only option.
But, although significant populations critically depend on the J&J vaccine, the company halted its production without telling anyone. J&J vaccine’s most important customers, the African Union and Covax, the organization responsible for getting vaccines to poor countries, learned about this vaccine production stoppage from the New York Times’ reporters last week. It was reporters who told Covax, before the Times article was finished.
The J&J vaccine generated about 2.4 billion dollars in sales last year. J&J expects to generate 10 billion annually from the new vaccine not related to COVID. Because this new vaccine will be much more profitable, J&J singlehandedly decided to stop the COVID vaccine production. Capitalism at its worst!
Feb 14, 2022
The protests in Canada against vaccine mandates began on January 22, when a convoy of truck drivers was organized and left British Columbia en route to Ottawa, the capital of Canada.
Upon reaching Ottawa, hundreds of protesters used trucks and other vehicles to blockade and occupy the area around the Canadian Parliament and other government offices, effectively shutting it down to all traffic. They were joined in Ottawa by thousands of other protesters. As of February 12, the protesters have continued their occupation for over 2 weeks. There are more than 400 trucks still blocking the streets of Ottawa. None of the trucks have been removed because all of the towing companies in the city have refused the government’s orders to tow them. Meanwhile, truckers also held protests in other Canadian cities, including Toronto, Quebec City and Calgary.
These protests began over a mandate that truck drivers going either way between the U.S. and Canada must be vaccinated against Covid. So other Canadian truck drivers took their protests to the border crossings between Canada and the U.S. On February 8, truckers blocked the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Windsor, Ontario to Detroit. For 5 days, the protesters stopped traffic on this bridge, which handles over 25% of all the goods and products traded between the U.S. and Canada. About one-third of the trucks using the Ambassador Bridge carry auto parts and vehicles back and forth between the two countries. By blocking this bridge, the protesters began to immediately shut down parts of the auto industry in both countries.
GM had to cancel shifts and shorten shifts at assembly plants in Lansing and Flint, both in Michigan. Ford had to cut production at an assembly plant in Oakville and an engine plant in Windsor, both in Canada. Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) had to shorten shifts at assembly plants in Windsor and in Toledo, Ohio, as well as other plants in the U.S. Honda cut production at its plant in Alliston, Ontario. Toyota cut production at all 3 of its plants in Canada. The protest at the Ambassador Bridge even affected the auto companies as far away as Kentucky, where Toyota was forced to cut shifts.
Some of the auto companies tried to reroute trucks carrying parts over another bridge in Michigan, while other auto companies tried to move parts by planes and helicopters. But despite all these efforts, in just a few days, by blocking just one bridge, the protests had stopped a lot of auto production, costing the auto companies hundreds of millions of dollars.
There were also protests that periodically shut down other border crossings, including at Coutts, between Alberta and Montana, and at Emerson, between Manitoba and North Dakota.
The media has mounted a campaign to criticize these protesters by saying that they are hurting the economy. One of the protesters in Windsor said that he lost his job because of the lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic and hasn’t been able to get it back. When he was questioned by the media about the protests, he said, “when we do something, we’re hurting the economy. You guys have been doing it for two years? What’s the difference?”
Feb 14, 2022
Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity praised the Canadian trucker protestors on their shows but were very careful in the words they chose. These two hosts have garnered viewers and ratings by being against government-imposed vaccine mandates. To this date, neither host has questioned Covid requirements or mandates implemented by corporations.
In fact, the employer of these two, Fox News Corporation, has dictated requirements around testing and vaccination. In talking about Fox News workplace policy around vaccination, Tucker Carlson said on his show, "Now to be clear, we just have a show on this channel. That’s it. We don’t run the company."
A lot of what is going on with these two focusing on government-imposed vaccine mandates is political posturing. Those funding the right-wing in the U.S. and in Canada have hitched their political fortunes in this election cycle on narrowing the broad anger the population rightly feels about horrendous suffering during Covid onto vaccine mandates. The right-wing hopes this will win them votes at election time. The bungling of the Covid response by all capitalist governments makes this a reasonable bet on their part!
Carlson apparently takes it as normal and acceptable that capitalist society pushes and oppresses the working class. He said on his show about the Canadian Trucker protests, "It has been a very useful reminder to our entire working class that working men can be pushed, but only so far."
These Fox News hosts express no outrage over how capitalist society brutally pushes workers in order to maximize corporate profit. These two have never questioned government regulation when it comes to too-low minimum wage laws that hold down wages for the entire working class.
It is a masquerade that these hosts are against government restrictions on working-class life. But in the absence of a revolutionary working class party, these two buffoons—servants of the capitalist class—pretend they’re on the side of the workers.
Feb 14, 2022
The school board of McMinn County, Tennessee, banned the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman. The book, which was being used in eighth-grade curriculum, portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in telling about the experience of the author’s parents, Holocaust survivors, in Nazi Germany. Spiegelman’s mother later committed suicide.
The board said in a statement that it was not against teaching about the Holocaust. The reason for the unanimous, 10–0 vote then? The book’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide,” the board said.
Really? As Spiegelman, the book’s author, put it, the board is actually saying, “Why can’t they teach a nicer Holocaust?”
The Anti-Defamation League, NAACP and other groups criticized the ban and pointed to the recent rise of violent attacks on Jewish people by extreme-right groups, as well as a broader tendency to ban books that address racism.
In other words, this school board in Tennessee is jumping on the bandwagon of banning books in schools as a way of preventing people from understanding the long, violent history of racism in the world—and especially in this country.
Feb 14, 2022
The public libraries in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., used to have magazines on the shelves for people to come in and read—magazines like National Geographic, Nature, car magazines, a wide variety of journals and magazines. For many people it was a genuine pleasure.
When the pandemic lockdown started in March 2020, the library system terminated its print magazine subscriptions. But when the county libraries reopened last April, they chose not to renew print magazine subscriptions. The magazines are available online, but not everyone knows how to read magazines online. And it’s not the same. Reading magazines from the stacks in a library was a safe, socially distanced activity. But now—for whatever paltry savings—this pleasure is no more.
Feb 14, 2022
This past October, residents in Chicago’s West Garfield Park decried the closure of ALDI, which was one of the neighborhood’s last supermarkets with healthy, affordable food options. The billion-dollar company said that they had to close because of “consistently declining sales and the fact that we’ve operated this location at a loss for several years.” Surprise, surprise….
Earlier this month, the Save-A-Lot in the same working-class neighborhood temporarily closed down after failing a health inspection. It’s bad enough that the owners of this location never addressed its mounting health hazards, even after failing FIVE food inspections in 2021 alone!
Now there is not a single operating grocery store in West Garfield Park. Sadly, food deserts like this can be found in low-income areas throughout the country. It’s striking how something as basic as access to a reliable supermarket can be taken away from the population for the sake of profit.
Feb 14, 2022
"Let Michigan Kids Learn.” Who wouldn’t agree with this? Above all, given what parents and students have gone through in the past two years—it’s what every parent deeply wants for their children.
But beware: wrapped up in these nice words, under the guise of caring for Michigan’s kids, is a petition drive, impelled and bankrolled by wealthy conservatives. Former Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos gave $400,000, and a Washington, D.C. group called “Get Families Back to Work” gave $875,000, and the Conservative State Government Leadership Foundation gave $475,000, among others. This is not a grass-roots campaign, where parents and teachers are volunteering to improve public education in Michigan. No, it has teams of paid circulators, whose job is to collect 340,000 signatures to establish voucher-like scholarship programs for private schools. So, under the pretense of providing scholarships to needier Michigan kids, individual and corporate donors can receive massive tax deductions.
Nearly a quarter of Michigan’s personal income tax collections are earmarked for public education. If this law is enacted, it could cut state revenue for education by as much as 500 million dollars in the first year. It could cost Michigan a billion dollars annually by the fifth year, according to a Senate Fiscal agency analysis.
Twenty years ago, DeVos and the rest of the conservative establishment led a failed attempt to create a school voucher system in Michigan. That school voucher proposal was rejected by 69% of Michigan voters. Now the “Let Michigan Kids Learn” petition drive is another attempt to do the same thing. But this time, if the necessary signatures are gathered, the legislature can enact into law this attack on the public education budget. No signature of the governor nor a vote of the population will be required.
What is the old saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” It’s capitalist democracy in action: all the legislation you can buy!
Feb 14, 2022
Translated from Combat Ouvrier (Workers’ Combat), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the West Indies.
In Martinique and Guadeloupe some workers and young poor people are not giving up. They keep striking and demonstrating—firstly, workers who were fired for not getting vaccinated or were threatened with being fired. Workers in a number of sectors are fighting.
In Martinique, the strike has become contagious at the University Hospital of Martinique (CHUM) teaching hospital where management made threats. On January 18 management issued a memo that unvaccinated workers would soon be fired. The laundry workers struck immediately. They were joined a few days later by workers in the transport and pharmacy departments.
A number of other caregivers joined the picket lines to show their support for these struggling hospital workers. Every week, several actions and mobilizations take place to denounce the government’s mandatory vaccination law, which uses the pretext of the health crisis to crack down on workers.
And in Guadeloupe the protests are not weakening. Meetings, rallies, and demonstrations happen one after another almost every day. In some neighborhoods, residents regularly set up roadblocks. The government says it will end these protests through repression: curfews, tear gas, arrests, imprisonments.... A systematic smear campaign also was started, equating protesters with bandits. But these maneuvers have failed to kill the mobilization.
A major one-day strike took place in Guadeloupe on January 20. This allowed many workers to mobilize, and not only to support the suspended caregivers but also to make their own demands. There were strikes in hotels like Club Med and Créole Beach and at the Casino du Gosier. Two major shopping centers had to close: Carrefour Milénis and Leclerc Bas-du-Fort. At Leclerc, the strike was renewed the next day. This forced the management (the Parfait company) to make improvements in working conditions right away. The same happened at two gas stations in Gourbeyre and Les Abymes. At one, workers got temporary positions made into permanent positions. Workers also struck in social security offices, at the unemployment office, and in schools.
On January 20, municipal workers resumed their strike movement which they had suspended last June in most towns. They denounced management for not honoring agreements signed by their elected officials. For now, a strike continues in Port-Louis and could spread to other towns.
A strike has continued for several weeks at post offices, especially in northern Grande-Terre. And steelworkers at ArcelorMittal have held out for months against their racist, contemptuous boss.
Working people and young poor people suffer from the rise of gig work, price increases, and all kinds of attacks by the big bosses and their government to make them pay for the economic crisis of the capitalist system. The workers and everyone who fights and resists these attacks are an example to follow. They could inspire other workers and young poor people and rally them in collective struggle not only to defend themselves, but even to go on the offensive!
Feb 14, 2022
Translated and excerpted from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
[For Vladimir Putin], stopping the Western military alliance’s drive toward Russia’s borders depends only on Russia’s balance of power with the U.S. But the U.S. keeps raising the stakes. The U.S. sends ever more weapons and troops to Eastern Europe, while “informing” the whole world about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine—according to American secret agents, it is scheduled for mid-February.
It would just be political theater if there weren’t real people living in Ukraine and Russia. The residents do not appear in official press releases and hardly ever in television reports. This is not an accident. For Putin, Biden and Zelensky, the people do not exist in this showdown except as cannon fodder. This is already the case in Donbass, the separatist east of Ukraine, where clashes between pro-Russian and Ukrainian forces have already left 15,000 dead, caused the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people, and destroyed many places.
For the past eight years, on both sides of the front lines in Donbass, shells have never stopped falling. On both sides, the populations fear most of all that the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv will not remain limited to their region but will spread widely. Zelensky repeats that everything will be alright because of all the weapons the West is supplying Kyiv. The supporters of ex-president Petro Poroshenko and ultra-nationalist groups are calling for “heroic struggle” against “the Russian enemy.” But in many areas the authorities—who depend on powerful groups of oligarchs—are not sounding the war klaxon until they know which way the wind blows, or rather, how the balance of power is shifting.
Added to Zelensky’s discredit—there has recently been talk of his imminent overthrow—all this probably shows that the Ukrainian population is not as contaminated by nationalist propaganda as is claimed by the Kyiv government, its Western sponsors, and the French media. Among working people the threat of war might seem remote. In terms of geography, many live far from the Russian border. But above all, workers, retirees, and the poor have many other more immediate and vital concerns.
Last year, as for many years, 600,000 Ukrainians emigrated to find work in Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, or France—wherever they can hope to live better than in Ukraine. That’s not a tall order, because the standard of living is dropping as fast as the exchange rate for the national currency, the hryvnia. And even in the capital region, long electrical blackouts happen several times a week.
Blackouts are not rare in Russia either. After all, the government skimps on maintaining the network. And exporting the country’s abundant oil and gas matters more to the bureaucrats in power who control this black gold, than satisfying the population’s needs.
This same population has seen its standard of living drop sharply for years, so the authorities have every reason to fear their discontent.
Following an old script, Putin tries again and again to create a climate of a besieged citadel. He’d like to force ordinary people into closing ranks behind him. From this perspective, the strategy of tension chosen by the U.S. and its allies does a great service to the Russian bureaucracy. The tension gives Russian officials a pretext to bring its population into line. And the Russian regime does not shrink from creating a climate of reinforced police authoritarianism by banning organizations it dislikes.
None of this means the Kremlin has unanimous support. During his military intervention in Kazakhstan in early January—which Washington, Paris, London and Berlin approved of because it was aimed at suppressing the working class—Putin did not win massive support at home. Even claiming to defend Russian-speakers in Kazakhstan did not help. In the conflict over Ukraine, Putin might see his warmongering propaganda parroted by monarchists, by so-called communist party KPRF, and by government bosses. But not by workers.
Workers no doubt realize more and more that the government is with their exploiters. They also know that the permanent inflation of military budgets—necessary for the top brass, for arms manufacturers, and for those who run the government—is paid for by ordinary people. The price is more and more unbearable, in both Ukraine and Russia. These populations, whose standard of living is melting away, have no interest in fighting each other.
Feb 14, 2022
More than 35,000 residents of the central part of Japan’s Okinawa island sued the Japanese government for almost 800 million dollars in late January. They are subjected to intolerable noise from U.S. Air Force planes and helicopters operating at the U.S. Kadena Air Base which occupies most of the city of Kadena. Day and night throughout the neighborhoods where these tens of thousands live, the noise is as deafening as operating a vacuum cleaner. An agreement regulating night flights is routinely ignored.
In 1982, a suit by 907 residents won 5.6 billion yen, equivalent to five million dollars at the time. In 2000 a second lawsuit won over 50 million dollars. In 2011 a third lawsuit by over 22,000 residents won nearly 400 million dollars. But the noise pollution persists.
The U.S. regards its largest base in East Asia as the “Keystone of the Pacific,” with over 20,000 U.S. servicemembers, family members, and Japanese employees, and over nine square miles of ammunition storage area. The base was critical for airpower during the U.S. wars against Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Japanese courts aren’t allowed to let the residents sue the U.S. military. The U.S. formally gave Okinawa island back to Japan half a century ago, but with no intention to give up dominating the island.
The deafening drums of imperialism continue, night and day.
Feb 14, 2022
When the 2022 Olympic Games opened in February in Beijing, the athlete lighting the torch at the ceremony came from the Uighur minority.
The Biden administration announced it would boycott the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, although U.S. athletes were allowed to compete. The reason given was “genocide and crimes against humanity,” referring to the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uighur people. Uighurs, pronounced Wee-gurs, are a minority in China who practice the Islamic religion. The treatment of this minority has included death and detention in so-called re-education camps.
But, coming from the United States government, these words are more than a little hypocritical. The U.S. has a 400-year history of abuse against one of its minorities, black people, who first suffered slavery, then Jim Crow and lynchings.
To this day, the black population still experiences mass incarceration and murder by police out of all proportion to their numbers in the U.S. population.
Let us remember how a black man, one of the best in his sport, was treated 55 years ago by the U.S. government. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his World Boxing Association heavyweight championship title in 1967 when he protested the Vietnam war by refusing induction into the U.S. Army. Then, when that memory was decades in the past, who lit the Olympic torch at the 1996 Olympic Games? It was Muhammad Ali!
Feb 14, 2022
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Far from the unconditional love for sports and the fraternity among peoples in all the myths, the Olympic Games have always been the arena of diplomatic and commercial confrontations. The Beijing Olympics are no exception.
International rivalries and tensions are making the headlines. Some countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan didn’t send any official delegation. Other countries like France sent one but not for the opening ceremony. This was carefully orchestrated. Vladimir Putin was present as the main guest, since China is courting allies in its rivalry with the U.S. Russia’s president also wants allies in the heat of the Ukrainian crisis. China’s government symbolically chose a Uighur athlete to light the Olympic flame, reacting to international criticism which has thrown light on this minority’s treatment.
For China as for other countries, the Olympics are a pretext for a surge of nationalism. Each country praises the merits of “its” champions and counts “its” medals. While the tramping of boots echoes all over the planet, sports matches are one more excuse to line up behind national flags.
Obviously, these tensions don’t completely overshadow the enormous commercial stakes in the Olympics. NBC has paid 7.75 billion dollars for exclusive U.S. broadcast rights through 2032. And if the 2.75 billion dollar budget for putting on these Games seems relatively modest now, we will only know their real cost after several months’ time. Indeed, the Olympics motto, “Faster, higher, stronger,” applies equally to the budgets of the Games! It’s not uncommon for them to double or triple over initial estimates.
Feb 14, 2022
Drought has been hitting California hard for two years, and Big Agriculture’s relentless demand for more and more water has further aggravated the problem.
This drought is clearly one of the worst. For example, the most recent rain year, which ended in June 2021, was the third-driest on record in the Northern Sierra region, and the seventh-driest on record in Los Angeles. The water level in reservoirs is a near-record low. The mountains are dried out. Riverbanks are retreating.
But in the midst of this severe drought, large farms continue to drill wells and pump huge amounts of water for their crops.
Look at large almond farms in the San Joaquin Valley, for example. These farms not only produce nearly all of the almonds grown in the U.S., but also dominate the world’s almond production—which exceeded 3 billion pounds in 2021, with a total value above 6 billion dollars. But growing almonds requires huge amounts of water, and these farms’ thirst for water causes groundwater levels to drop continuously. Further exacerbated by the drought, this loss of groundwater has caused the ground to sink as rapidly as 1.5 feet per year in certain areas of San Joaquin Valley. The collapsing ground is, in its turn, affecting infrastructure, reducing California’s water-carrying capacity.
So, as the large farms are profiting enormously, living conditions for the majority of the people in San Joaquin Valley, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the state, are getting worse with each passing day. Small farms are not able to find enough water to sustain themselves. Shallower wells that supplied nearly a thousand family homes have gone dry in 2021 alone, forcing families to buy water from grocery stores for showers, cleaning dishes and cooking.
Combined with the drought, which is driven by environmental collapse, the endless pumping of water for the profits of big agriculture is nothing but a race to a complete disaster. California may be very rich in resources, but the profit-driven capitalist economy has been drastically depleting one of the most vital resources, water, threatening to make life in this very rich state unbearable for working people.
Feb 14, 2022
Five years ago, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the utility that serves about 16 million people in Northern California, was put on criminal probation after its conviction for six felony crimes from a 2010 explosion triggered by its natural gas lines that blew up a San Bruno neighborhood and killed eight people.
Over those five years, PG&E became an even bigger destructive force, causing over 1,500 wildfires, including 5 of the state’s 10 most destructive. These fires killed over a hundred people, destroyed thousands of buildings, burned hundreds of thousands of acres and amassed over $30 billion in damages.
PG&E even pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for the 2018 Camp Fire that wiped out the town of Paradise. And PG&E faces more criminal charges in two separate cases, for the massive Kincade Fire that burned in Sonoma County in 2019 and for the deadly Zogg Fire that burned in Shasta County in 2020. The company also faces potential criminal charges for causing this year’s Dixie Fire, the second largest blaze in the state’s history.
“In these five years, PG&E has gone on a crime spree and will emerge from probation as a continuing menace to California,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in a report reviewing his oversight of the utility—oversight which changed little or nothing and is now over.
Behind these disasters is a systemic policy to cut corporate expenses by not properly updating and maintaining its equipment. As Judge Alsup wrote, “A large part of the wildfire problem has been sloppy inspection and clearance work (almost exclusively outsourced to independent contractors).”
So, what actual consequences does PG&E face for causing all these disasters? The state of California has stepped in to bail out and shore up this company by forcing taxpayers and customers to bear the risks and pay the costs of future disasters. Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who received $280,400 in campaign contributions from PG&E, rammed a massive utility bailout bill (AB 1054) through the California Legislature, also dominated by the Democratic Party, this past July. This “Newsom Bailout” will allow PG&E access to the $21 billion fire insurance plan provided by the state, as well as to charge ratepayers for the cleanup of their wildfire costs.
One of the greatest beneficiaries of this state-sponsored bailout are 20 Wall Street hedge funds. These hedge funds speculated on the wild swings in PG&E’s stock price when a series of fires tore through Northern California in 2017. After the state-sponsored bailout was announced last year, the 20 hedge funds sold off most of their massive stockholdings, making a profit of over two billion dollars.
In fact, PG&E is an enormous company that uses its position and power to gain ever more profits for its largest shareholders in every way possible, that is, through murder and mayhem.
Feb 14, 2022
The Environmental Working Group (EWG), an organization that addresses clean water issues, says the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to keep its standards of dangerous levels of chemical contaminants in drinking water up-to-date, as well as to identify what should be a growing list of new contaminants. They point out the EPA has not set a new tap water standard in almost 20 years, with some of their standards more than four decades old.
The EWG has compiled a list of 56 new contaminants that have been identified in just the past two years, for example, and created a searchable database for every zip code in the U.S.
The Metro Times, a Detroit weekly newspaper, identified a long list of toxic chemicals in the drinking water of many communities all across the Detroit metro area. They point out that the list includes chemicals linked to cancer, brain damage, liver disease, birth defects, hormone and nervous system disruptions, among other serious health issues.
They determined the Detroit water system contains levels exceeding the EWG’s safety limits of contaminants like radium, which is radioactive, nitrate, hexavalent chromium, haloacetic acids, and trihalomethanes, all hazardous and cancer-causing chemicals.
Detroit is hardly alone, however. The Metro Times found that radium levels in most communities around Detroit were even higher than Detroit’s. At least 10 communities have higher levels of hexavalent chromium than in Detroit’s water. Even those living in more affluent communities are not immune from exposure to dangerous chemicals in their drinking water. And what is true for the Detroit area is true for just about anywhere else in the country.
It should not be surprising that municipal water systems have not updated their technologies to keep anyone’s drinking water safe, nor that the government agencies charged with the responsibility for monitoring water safety have failed to do so. The wealthy class and corporations that rule this society have pushed aside efforts to maintain every aspect of its infrastructure in its drive to deliver short-term profits, and the drinking water upon which everyone’s lives depend is no different.
It should not be the responsibility of individuals nor even individual communities to keep our water safe to drink, but it would be a pipe dream to expect a government run by politicians who serve that same ruling class to do so. There is no other solution than for the working class to take the power out of their hands.
Feb 14, 2022
It costs $500,000 to drill a well deep enough to tap groundwater in Cochise County, Arizona. Wells at 25 feet, that used to supply households, are dry. Only the largest of the agribusiness farms can afford to drill down past 1,000 feet to tap the groundwater in the failing, drying aquifer.
The drought and drying conditions are no news in southern Arizona. Phoenix, 100 miles from Cochise County, gets its water not only from the aquifer, but also from a 336-mile canal tapping the Colorado River.
Unfortunately for Phoenix, and for all those who don’t have half a million dollars to drill a new well, the Colorado River is also running dry. The river’s managers have decreed a 20-percent cut in Arizona’s share of the river’s water for 2022. Nevada’s share will be cut 7%, and Mexico’s cut 5%. California has senior rights, under a 100-year-old-law, and will not be cut back.
Yes, the Colorado River water is so precious, that four states plus Mexico have fought over access to it for over 100 years. A web of “allotments” now exists. Agriculture, industry, and real estate builders are all supposed to certify that new developments have “an assured water supply” for 100 years! Of course, promises are easy to make. But once the sale is complete, who will make sure the promises are kept? As an executive of the Arizona Cattle Growers Association said, “We don’t think wells should be metered at all.” Agribusiness and developers’ interests dominate the legislature. Loopholes in the original law have been provided for them, notably in 1993, when the 1,000-foot well was classed as an “assured supply.”
Meanwhile, the Colorado River reservoirs of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which supply south Arizona and also help to replenish the aquifers, are extremely low. Climate change has produced a 22-year mega-drought. It has reduced the winter snowfall that used to fill reservoirs in the spring. Experts speak of the day when the lakes will reach “dead pool” levels—too low to feed the canal pipes. The possibility is real enough to force this year’s allotment cutbacks.
Nor is this a recent emergency. Since the system was created, and agribusiness crowded into the area for its cheap land, more and more water diversion has dried the river. The river’s delta and outlet to the Gulf of California, in Mexico, has been almost entirely dry since 1963. No Colorado River water flows to the sea. The warning was always there.
But the promises went on. Just last year, a major chip manufacturer committed to building a $12-billion-dollar chip manufacturing plant near Phoenix. Chip-making takes a lot of water, 4.7 million gallons per day. How many more residential wells will go dry to feed this plant?
Big agribusinesses, owning thousands of acres, are there for the money. The land is worthless until it is irrigated. The big farms take the water and turn it into money, just as the big real estate developers do with industries and subdivisions. When there is no more water, no more money to be made, the businesses will simply move on, moving their money to wherever they find the next money spring. It’s the population that will be left high and dry.
Feb 14, 2022
The following article is the editorial from The SPARK’s workplace newsletters, for the week of February 6, 2022.
Today, most of us carry credit cards. You almost have to. But for some people, they’ve become a trap, pulling them into a deep hole.
How did they get there?
Sometimes it starts with something as simple as deciding that all your kids are going to get the Christmas gifts they want for once—and ouch, you didn’t know those basketball shoes cost so much, and the January bill came too soon! Sometimes it’s because, carrying a small amount of debt, you run into a sudden problem. You lose your job, or you go into the hospital and insurance doesn’t cover it all. Out comes that card. Sometimes it’s because, decades ago, you took out loans to go to school, believing all the hype that school would get you a great job and you could pay it all back, many times over. But the well-paying job didn’t materialize, and you still had the debt. You turned to credit cards to keep yourself afloat.
However it started, some people found themselves with a debt they couldn’t pay off—so they paid only part of it, then paid only the tiny minimum the credit card company pushed.
They were hooked. A big chunk of their payment went to pay interest, interest on which they began to pay more interest. They ran up more debt, maxed out cards, signed up for more cards.
Offers certainly kept coming in the mail. Did they ever wonder why? Your credit card account is an open book. When you pay interest year after year, every company wants a piece of you.
Decades ago, in small towns with only one employer, often there was only a “company store,” but it was always ready to extend credit. Of course! When you “owe your soul to the company store,” you don’t want to risk losing your job.
Today, there is a chunk of the working class that is “maxed out,” that is, they “owe their soul” to the credit card companies.
Visa and Master Card are fronts for the biggest banks, the titans of Wall Street. Those banks—Chase, CitiBank, Capital One, Bank of America and Wells Fargo—make up the very center of the very top of the capitalist class.
Year after year, those banks set new profit records. Year after year, their credit card divisions are their most profitable sector.
The laws—federal and state—as well as court decisions were changed to let them set the interest rates they want. Today, some of those rates are as high as 35 or 36%.
When you have a savings account with Chase or Capital One, you get less than 1% interest. But the bank that pays you less than 1% interest to hold and use your money, can get 35% interest when they loan out that money through credit cards.
The old loan sharks would have been ashamed to organize such a rip-off!
But these are the big banks, the center of capitalism today. They have no shame—just as there is no limit to what they will try to take out of the hide of working people.
U.S. credit card debt—which today totals over 800 billion dollars—is the proof that wages are too low and prices are too high. The capitalist chase for more profit is destroying the society we live in.
There is no individual solution for that. Credit extended to you with money the capitalists ripped off from someone else is no solution, just like going on to get more education is no solution.
Yes, we should be able to go to school our whole lives. We should be able to have a decent standard of living—including those basketball shoes! But when we try to get it individually, one by one, on the capitalists’ terms, according to their rules, we end up “owing our souls” to them.
Capitalist society has no solutions to the problems it causes: problems like unemployment, low wages, expensive medical care. Its only answers are individual ones, like credit card debt, putting us in a hole, tying us to our class enemy.
We can use our own intelligence as workers to see this scam for what it is. That is the first step toward resting on the strength of our own class. To act collectively to deal with our problems, we have to face up to reality.
Feb 14, 2022
Under the Thumb, edited by S.A. Cosby, crime writer of Southern noir, author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears.
This is an anthology of short stories, each by a different author. Each selection tells a story of people trapped in the American justice system. Though fiction, the stories read like real life, each showing in a different way the weight, unfairness and brutality of the system, and how there is no individual solution to the problems we face.
Showing in movie theaters now, this excellent documentary weaves together an engaging presentation by Jeffery Robinson, former ACLU deputy legal director, with interviews, videos of visits to relevant sites, and the presenter’s own personal narrative in his journey to understand what is racism and how does it impact every aspect of our history. Though many of us know much of this history, his presentation is powerful and challenging. He clearly poses how the history haunts us and drags us down and asks, where do we go from here?
Feb 14, 2022
Two doctors affiliated with a non-profit institute in Houston, Texas, and a team of 20 other scientists, developed a new Covid-19 vaccine that promises to make it easier for the governments in poorer, underdeveloped countries to vaccinate their populations. They did so with very little funding from the U.S. government or any of the other wealthy G7 countries, while these same governments gave billions of dollars to pharmaceutical giants like Moderna and Pfizer, which withheld their technologies from governments in the poorer countries. This restricted access to their vaccines to billions of people around the world.
The new vaccine, called Corbevax, is different from the mRNA vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer. It actually is produced through an older vaccine technology that has been in use for over 30 years, which was used to create the hepatitis vaccine, for example. To produce Corbevax, the scientists inserted sections of DNA from the Covid-19 virus, that only code for the production of the spike proteins on the new coronavirus, into yeast cells. The yeast cells are then used in fermentation that produces a soup of the Covid-19 spike proteins that, when injected, causes the human body to produce antibodies to the Covid-19 virus.
This fermentation process is easier to set up in poorer countries which lack the infrastructure for the more complicated process needed to produce mRNA vaccines. Also, the protein-based vaccine can be stored with ordinary refrigeration rather than the deep-freeze facilities needed to store the mRNA vaccines. This makes it easier to store in many of the poorer countries that are located in warmer climates. The new vaccine appears in clinical trials to be as safe or safer than the other Covid-19 vaccines.
The scientists who developed the new vaccine have agreed to keep it patent-free and to license it to governments around the world to allow them to manufacture the vaccine and to vaccinate people in their countries more quickly.
The governments of India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana have already begun to set up manufacture of the new vaccine.
The fact that these scientists were able to develop this vaccine on a shoestring budget is a clear demonstration of what could have been done to contain the virus on a world scale. The refusal by the wealthier countries to provide Covid-19 vaccines to the poorer countries is what led to the development of variants like Delta and Omicron now endangering people all over the world.
Their decisions to protect the profits of their pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the world population has allowed a pandemic to rage on that has already caused 325 million people to become infected and 5.5 million people to die.
Feb 14, 2022
Many hundreds of protestors have demonstrated in Minneapolis against the murder of Amir Locke by the Minneapolis police. A police SWAT team shot and killed the 22-year-old Locke immediately after quietly using a key to open the door to the apartment where he slept, and waking him up by kicking the couch he slept upon. They were carrying a no-knock warrant for an entirely different person and shot and killed him within nine seconds.
After Locke’s murder, every news source around the country defended the cops’ actions by pointing out practically in unison that Locke pointed a gun at the cops. Locke was licensed to own and carry the gun, was still completely buried under his blankets, and naturally was frightened by being violently awakened by unknown intruders when he barely had time to lift the gun to defend himself before the cops fired three shots into him.
It’s just the latest example of police brutality by the Minneapolis cops, highlighted most prominently by the murder of George Floyd. Now it has come out that two of the cops chosen to participate in the no-knock raid that resulted in Locke’s murder were already being sued for attacks on protestors demonstrating in Minneapolis following Floyd’s murder. They were among the riot cops sent around the city, told to take aim at protestors and "Fuck ‘em up." A police commander later described their actions as "goin’ out hunting."
One of those suing the cops over those attacks is Jaleel Stallings, whom the cops fired on with foam-tipped bullets without identifying themselves while driving around in an unmarked white van. When Stallings tried to defend himself against what he thought was a deadly attack by someone firing a pistol at him, they beat him while he surrendered. He suffered a fracture of his eye socket.
These are just some recent examples in a long history of police brutality that protestors in Minneapolis are voicing outrage against. Some have likened Locke’s killing to the no-knock murder of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville, Kentucky.
One of the recent demonstrations included many black mothers and called for the firing of the Minneapolis police chief and the cop who shot Locke. Another demonstration involved more than a thousand students from the city’s Central High School who marched to the Governor’s Residence in nearby St. Paul and demanded the resignation of the mayor and police chief of Minneapolis.
These protesters are absolutely right to speak out against yet another outrageous racist murder by the police. If they can continue their fight and spread it to others, it’s possible to push the cops back, though ultimately the fight against racism and police brutality requires an end to the capitalist system that depends upon them.