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
Mar 14, 2022
The scenes that we are shown coming from Ukraine are horrifying. Neighborhoods are being bombed, bridges and infrastructure are blown up by both sides in this war. Thousands of people are living in underground subways. Over two million people have fled the country to escape this war, adding to the refugee crisis in Europe.
The horrors of this war go well beyond the stories we are being shown on television. Two peoples, Ukrainian and Russian, who share a common culture and a common history, have been set against each other by this war. Ordinary Ukrainians are being killed, as well as Russian conscript soldiers.
And the effects of this war are extending beyond the borders of Ukraine to affect the ordinary working people of the entire world. Ukraine and Russia are the world’s leading exporters of wheat, as well as other basic foodstuffs. Capitalist speculators are using the war to bid up the price of wheat and other grains, which could lead to food shortages and starvation in those populations that depend on these grain exports, especially in the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia.
The oil corporations of the U.S. and Europe are using the cover of this war to continue what they had already started—raising the price of oil. Disrupting oil distribution out of Russia also allows U.S. oil companies to open more oil wells here. All of which means higher gas prices—with higher profits for U.S. capitalists and higher costs for U.S. workers. The economic dislocations caused by the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia could well lead to more shortages and add to the inflation, which is cutting into the standard of living of working people in this country and around the world.
The working class in Russia will also pay the price for this war. This war is not in their interests and thousands of Russians have been arrested for protesting against this criminal war—a war where Putin and the Russian regime were the ones who fired the first shot.
But Putin is not the only aggressor or even the biggest aggressor. The main responsibility for this war lies with the policies of the U.S. ruling class and the NATO military alliance, which the U.S. government organized in 1949 to threaten the Soviet Union. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO incorporated former Soviet bloc countries into its military alliance and stationed U.S. troops, military bases and missile sites all along the border of Russia. No different than if Russia had troops and military bases in Canada and Mexico, all along the border with the U.S.
Today the U.S. and NATO confront Russia by using Ukraine as a proxy to fight this war. The U.S. continues to ship more weapons to the Ukrainian military and paramilitary forces, extending a war in which Ukrainian forces are badly outnumbered against the stronger forces of the Russian army. Neither side has any regard for the Ukrainian population, which is caught between them, paying the price of the war.
But this war in Ukraine carries an even bigger threat to the whole world’s population—the threat of a larger war. The conflict today between the U.S. ruling class and their NATO allies and the Putin regime is the kind of conflict that can lead to a world war. Today the U.S. government, with the aid and complicity of the media, is using the war in Ukraine to carry out a nationalist propaganda against Russia designed to prepare the U.S. working class to support a war in which the U.S. would be directly involved.
This future of wars is the future which they are preparing for us. They have no other answer for our future. Just as Biden and NATO and Putin have no answers for the Covid pandemic, still ongoing after two years. Just as they have no answers for an economy that couldn’t provide enough jobs and a decent standard of living even before Covid. Just as they have no answers to the worldwide shortage of goods and inflation of prices. They have no answers for any of these problems. And history shows that when imperialism runs out of answers, their response is war—war that spreads to engulf larger regions of the world in a contest between all the major powers.
But the working class of the world, including the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia, can find better answers. We do not have to leave our fate in the hands of those who rule over us. The world working class has the power to fight for a different world—a world in which we determine our own future—a future in which we don’t have to pay the price for their wars.
Mar 14, 2022
In his speech announcing the U.S. ban on the import of Russian oil, President Joe Biden blamed the outrageous oil and gas price increases on Putin and the war in Ukraine.
These are complete lies. There has been no drop in oil and gas supplies on the world market since the war broke out. Nor will the U.S. ban on Russian imports have any impact on oil supplies in the U.S., since Russian imports into the U.S. represent less than one percent of all the crude oil processed by U.S. refineries.
No, the war in Ukraine and the U.S. ban on Russian oil are being used as an excuse for the big oil companies to impose price increases. And those price increases come on top of the price increases they already had imposed long before there was any war in Ukraine. In the last year, the oil companies had already jacked up prices by as much as 50%, according to the latest official inflation figures.
And the oil companies have laughed all the way to the bank. One study found that in the first nine months of 2021, the top 24 oil companies in the world, including Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, made 174 billion dollars in profits … after taxes!
Those profits were not reinvested in production of oil or alternative fuels—since the oil companies’ rate of productive investment is at record lows. Instead, the oil companies funneled almost all that money to their major stockholders through dividends, while expanding programs for oil companies to buy back their own stock—which is a way for companies to increase their share prices.
And while politicians like Biden shed crocodile tears about the price increases, oil company executives have bragged to their investors about the riches they are handing to them.
“I expect 2022 will be even better for cash returns to shareholders with another dividend increase announced this week and first quarter buybacks projected.… We’re optimistic about the future, focused on continuing to reward our shareholders ...” said Chevron CEO Mike Wirth to investors.
The chief financial officer of British Petroleum (BP), Murray Auchincloss, told investors in late February: “It’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with.”
This flood of money has led to enormous stock market gains. In the first two months of 2022, Chevron shares rose by more than 40%, ExxonMobil increased by about 35%, and Marathon Oil increased by 40%. As for Occidental Petroleum, a favorite stock of billionaire Warren Buffett, its stock price has doubled in the first two months of 2022! And once Russia invaded Ukraine, Occidental’s stock price rose by 50% in less than two weeks!
Other corporate sectors, besides the traditional oil and gas companies, have also benefited greatly. Oil tanker stocks, for example, have surged by double-digits in 2022. Companies such as International Seaways and Frontline have both seen their stocks rise nearly 40% since the start of 2021.
So, while the war rages and people die and flee, while working people all over the world struggle to pay their bills, the war will greatly enrich the capitalist class, as oil companies coin record profits and use those profits to fatten the wealth of their big capitalist investors.
Mar 14, 2022
Democrats in the House of Representatives agreed to drop 15.6 billion dollars in emergency spending for the Covid-19 pandemic from the 1.5 trillion dollars appropriations bill Congress just passed to keep the government running. The money would have gone to developing next-generation vaccines and for monoclonal antibody treatments for Covid-19. Despite their majority in both houses of Congress, the Democrats blamed the removal of the pandemic funding on Republicans’ insistence on more detailed accounting on where the money would come from.
At the same time, however, the politicians of both parties somehow managed to find 13.6 billion dollars for “military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and its Eastern European allies,” which was included in the same spending package.
Whether any humanitarian aid ever ends up in anyone’s hands remains to be seen. In any case, one thing is clear. To the politicians, spending money on war is more important than preventing further infections and deaths from Covid.
Mar 14, 2022
March 22, 2022 is the fiftieth anniversary of Congress passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This ERA was then sent to the states to ratify, but 38 states did not pass it in the ten following years, so it never became a constitutional amendment. Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the 50-year-old proposal, but only in 2020, and its passage is now embroiled in a legal dispute.
Ninety-nine years ago another Equal Rights Amendment had been sent to sympathetic U.S. senators by activists of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement had only been achieved for women, and in reality, only for white women, after a struggle of many, many decades in 1920.
In both the case of suffrage and the case of an Equal Rights Amendment, only struggles by millions of women, including some strikes, demonstrations, arrests and beatings achieved a change in the laws that had said women were second-class citizens, inferior to men and subject to their whims.
What is the reality in 2022? Women earn, on average, 80 cents to every dollar men earn. Women are in lower-paid positions, minimum wage positions, more often than men.
Legislation to fund some protections against violence is stuck in the non-functioning Congress. Some men still think it is their right to beat or rape women.
In six out of seven counties throughout the United States, politicians prevent women from having health care that provides abortion. Maternal deaths are on the upsweep again, and the U.S. statistics match those of some third world countries.
In a 1972 education bill, women’s funding for sports at schools was supposed to equal men’s funding. Anyone with children or anyone opening their local paper to the sports section knows how fake that is.
The laws on the books are not the reality on the ground. Young women today have a lot to fight for.
Mar 14, 2022
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a new report on February 28. Its conclusions can be wrapped up in one sentence: The potential disasters estimated in a 2014 report are happening now because nothing was done to prevent them.
We are on the road to the lack of clean water for four billion human beings, to the threat of famine, to more catastrophic weather events, to outbreaks of new diseases and recurrences of past illnesses like cholera, and to speedier extinctions of many plant and animal species. Heeding these bleak predictions, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said there is a “failure of climate leadership.” He added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.”
Between those two IPCC reports there were many meetings of heads of state of industrialized countries, symposiums of leaders of multinational corporations, conferences of bankers and investors, and endless promises that were as green-washed as they were empty. The richest and most powerful companies beginning with manufacturing, energy, and transport demanded and got public subsidies for their so-called green conversion. They promised to end coal mining, to use less oil, to pollute less, to rationalize transportation, to pour less concrete and plant more grass, and even to blend cities into the countryside.
Nothing was done, except tragicomedies just fleshed out enough to be rewarded with subsidies. The planet will be unlivable before those who run the world change their ways—if they ever do! In fact, capitalists are free as ever to try to maximize their profit, without worrying about the general welfare, the lives of workers, or the health of ordinary people. They face no consequences for industrial pollution. Each government continues to aid capitalists in general and its own homegrown capitalists in particular in their race for profit.
Capitalism profited by sending European children to their deaths in mines and spinning mills. It profited by snatching millions of Africans. Capitalism ravaged the planet, with colonial wars and world wars. Now capitalism melts sea ice to extract oil, destroys the last tropical forests, converts inner orbit space into a satellite junkyard, and multiplies war zones and slums on earth. And even before pollution and catastrophic climate change make the planet uninhabitable, it may become one giant battlefield.
Only a few months ago the IPCC report would have attracted headlines and politicians’ diatribes. Now it is eclipsed by the situation in Ukraine and the much more immediate stresses people feel.
In the words of the pre-1914 revolutionaries, this social system offers only endless horror and a horrible ending. Instead, let it give birth to a new world, as called for by the workers from around the world who opened up that possibility in the 1917 revolution.
Mar 14, 2022
The working class and poor neighborhood of Washington Highlands in Washington, D.C. is seeing its rec center swimming pool downsized and tennis court eliminated by a private company. Private charter school company KIPP D.C. leased the property including the closed Ferebee-Hope Elementary School from the city, and is building a charter high school and a new rec center only half the size of the old one.
The new facility “cannot accommodate children coming in the summer,” the former supervisor for area city pools says. “I didn’t expect the recreation center and pool to be smaller. They made it … almost nothing.”
The old rec center and elementary school opened in 1974 in the aftermath of the black revolt of the 1950s and 1960s. The school was described by a longtime resident as “one of the most-equipped.” But school officials closed the school in 2013 despite neighborhood protests and a lawsuit by activists, claiming the school was underutilized.
Just now the property is leased to a charter school operator. A longtime resident summed it up by saying that KIPP D.C. “is a corporation and so they’re making money off this.” Capitalist priorities!
Mar 14, 2022
A 17-year-old high school student was killed when his car collided with a commuter train at a crossing in Anne Arundel County, outside Baltimore. The former football star died, a tragedy for his family and friends.
This tragedy had been foretold 20 years earlier, when an area planning group pointed out that this light rail intersection and another nearby were accidents waiting to happen.
Anne Arundel County officials appear to have been waiting for the State of Maryland to take the responsibility, since they run the light rail, and come up with the funds to pay for this upgrade, and for many other intersections with the same problems, although Anne Arundel is one of the wealthiest counties in the country.
Likewise, the State of Maryland’s budget—in what has been called the wealthiest state in the country—always lacks funding for rail, buses, bridges, roads.
If this is the way funding is handled in a rich state, how much worse is the situation in poorer states, with even less tax money to begin with?
Mar 14, 2022
In mid-February the Navy suddenly rented hotel rooms for 350 Navy and Army medical personnel stationed at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. They work in the hospital known as the “flagship of military medicine” and “the world’s largest joint military medical center,” treating wounded and sick troops and top-level civilians including presidents. Bethesda is a rich suburb but these junior-grade troops live on base in one- and two-bedroom barracks where there has been no hot water for seven years. They had been filing repair orders, and for seven years base officials routinely ignored their requests. Troops also complained about air conditioners broken for three months of summer heat, broken fridges, and broken door locks in the mixed-sex barracks.
Finally at a townhall with base leadership on February 3 the low-ranking troops exploded. “I already work super-long hours in a high-demand clinic with a huge patient volume. We’ve been short-staffed for a long time and there’s no telework for us,” one exclaimed. Another protested, “They call Walter Reed the ‘corpsman (medic) killer.’ You come home after 10 to 12 hours and you can’t take a shower after working in a hospital with constant germs.” Another: “I’m a military kid and I lived in base housing, but this is just ridiculous.”
This neglect is happening in a barracks called Sanctuary Hall, which the Navy paid 63 million dollars to build in 2014. Another older barracks called Comfort Hall was “completely renovated”—but had cold water flowing into hot water pipes. And this “new” Walter Reed in Maryland replaced the notorious old medical center in D.C. The military paid nearly three billion dollars for the move to Maryland. But now Maryland politicians say Walter Reed’s fire house has untreated mold, asbestos, roof leaks, and electrical problems. A base spokesman tried to blame “limited resources and budgetary constraints” as if the Navy doesn’t get well over 160 billion tax dollars per year!
The treatment of working military personnel is a mirror of the society it is sworn to defend, a capitalist society that spends as little as possible on essential workers.
Mar 14, 2022
A three-alarm fire at a petroleum treatment facility killed one worker and sent black smoke billowing into the Curtis Bay neighborhood in Baltimore early on March 7. Only three months ago, coal dust exploded at a CSX coal terminal nearby, shattering windows in people’s homes and also filling the air with poisonous black smoke.
Curtis Bay was rated one of the most toxic places to live in America, “a lot more forgotten of an area,” as one resident said. It is made unlivable by industries including chemical factories, a medical waste incinerator, an animal carcass processing plant, and a sewage treatment plant, with poor people right across the street from them. “You have to live around here because you have nowhere else to go, and you don’t have the money to move,” one said.
State officials found the time to call Curtis Bay an “enterprise zone” and grant property tax credits and income tax credits to businesses operating there. Residents say the city and state need to inspect these operations more often and maintain higher standards when granting permits. The companies respond in a way to say "businesses exist to make profit, not to police themselves."
To get the most minimum safety measures taken, the neighbors and plant workers will have to organize a bigger fight.
Mar 14, 2022
On November 4, 2021, about 14,000 gallons of jet fuel and contaminated water leaked from the Red Hill fuel storage system into the drinking water well near Honolulu, Hawaii. Within days, 6,000 residents and military personnel and their families at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam began suffering nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, and rashes from contaminated tap water. Four thousand military families were moved to hotels.
But this is far from the worst jet fuel leak there. In 2014 nearly twice as much spilled. Around 180,000 gallons have leaked since the tanks were built after World War II—the equivalent of one or two large swimming pools every decade. The storage system holds 200 million gallons of jet fuel in underground tanks above the aquifer, with pipes regularly refilling warships and warplanes.
Finally on March 7, the Pentagon promised to permanently close the system, safely drain the tanks, and develop a safe new fuel storage facility. But why believe anything officials say? After the 2014 leak, the EPA, Hawaii’s health department, and the Pentagon signed confidentiality agreements pledging not to disclose information about work on the fuel system. After 40 million dollars in supposed upgrades last decade, Navy officials claimed they didn’t even know the faulty drain line existed!
Pearl Harbor-Hickam is a major base and dry dock serving the Navy’s biggest aircraft carriers. America’s firepower in Asia relies heavily on the base. But fuel spills and cover-ups are poisoning the residents on a regular basis. Finally, the workers and residents here are also victims of the products they are paid to produce to kill others in war. Troops and spouses spoke angrily at a December 1 town hall and protested alongside longtime island residents. The leak threatens 93,000 people in that area of the island of Oahu, with the soil and groundwater permanently tainted.
Mar 14, 2022
From a public meeting given in Detroit on February 6, 2022
Good Afternoon. Today we will be talking about inflation, something that affects everybody in one way or another.
Let me start with a disclosure—In case you did not know, I am not an economist. And I do not have a Ph.D behind my name. But what I can see is how the issue of inflation affects everyone directly.
Almost every time you listen to the news nowadays, some company announces that it is raising prices. Just a few days ago, Starbucks and Amazon Prime both announced price increases (Jeff Bezos, the founder and biggest stockholder of Amazon, has a net worth of 180 billion dollars, so apparently that is not enough money for him.) Even more disappointing, Hershey’s announced price increases on their chocolate bars on Thursday. (That one drove me over the edge.)
I don’t think I am telling anyone in this room shocking news, that inflation is here and inflation is up. Just go to the gas station. We have had higher gas prices in the past, but they were often just temporary. This time the high gas prices have stuck.
According to WWJ radio, gas prices in Michigan are 82 cents a gallon higher than last year at this time. Gasoline prices have always fluctuated a lot. They use any excuse to raise prices—refinery fires. Or a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Or a war in the Middle East. Or a snow storm. These events happen, and prices for gas go up and take a while to come down. But this time it seems different. Prices have gone up and stayed up.
And I am talking about the high gas prices affecting you, but that is assuming you have a car now. You don’t even want to think about buying a car now—new or used. The prices have gone up so much in the past year or so. Used cars are even worse than new cars. According to Edmunds.com, the prices for used cars and trucks went up over 30% last year. That is assuming you can find what you want to buy because the supply is scarce. The average price of a USED vehicle is now $29,000.
And if you do not own or lease a car and depend on public transportation, or train or air travel—this is not reliable. These are all still disrupted after 2 years of the pandemic. The Pandemic being ANOTHER problem that Capitalism cannot solve.
And what about food?—Prices at the grocery stores have gone up. Prices are rising at restaurants too. Everyone has to eat, so everyone is affected by the prices at the grocery stores or restaurants. (I will tell you in a few minutes what the chairman of Kroger’s has to say about inflation and their bottom line.)
And what about the other big requirement for everyone—a place to live. Housing prices, both rental and home ownership, are going up. In some parts of the country by a LOT. Florida, New York, Texas—are among some of the locations that rentals are going up the most.
According to most economists, they believe the higher inflation may be here for a while, so it is not just temporary. According to one prominent economist, the average family spent an extra $4,000 last year to keep up with price increases on food, housing, transportation, and more.
Back to inflation in general—the news media and the economists have excuses for why inflation is rising—the supply chain problems. The computer chip shortage. The ships sitting in Los Angeles harbor waiting to be unloaded. The extra money we were all given in the early days of the pandemic in the form of stimulus checks. All these are reasons given.
Regarding the supply chain issues and lack of workers—Is it truly, like the politicians say, that people don’t want to apply for these jobs? Or is it that wages are too low and management is doing their best to have as few people do the most work?
They tell us everything except the real reason for inflation—which is that companies are raising their prices, so that they can keep their profits up. We are going to come back to that in a minute.
So inflation is real and inflation is here. According to news reports, Consumer Prices have risen at the fastest pace since 1982.
Consumer prices in 2021, from January 1st through the end of November, officially went up 6.8%. Did people see their wages go up this amount? I don’t think so.
The Consumer Price Index that you hear quoted on the news does not necessarily accurately measure inflation. And there are advantages for businesses and the government to undercount inflation. Not just for lower Social Security payments, but, for example, how companies determine raises for their employees. Also—How deductions and exemptions on income tax are calculated. And more.
Inflation does not seem to bother the rich though. In fact just the opposite. Despite the inflation, the stock market has been at record highs over the past couple of years, despite inflation and despite the Covid pandemic.
There are MORE billionaires today than there were before the pandemic hit in early 2020. So SOME people are doing okay.
So who is profiting with the inflation? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not us!
Let’s look at corporate profits—they are at a record high. Two and a half trillion dollars for the most recent quarter, and even higher by some estimates. Corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices and make even more profits. Corporate profits are actually going up faster than the rate of inflation. They are going up faster than they were before the pandemic. So they are profiting from the misery of the pandemic.
Here are some quotes from top executives of big corporations. Here is a statement from the Chief Financial Officer of Kroger’s: “We’ve been very comfortable with our ability to pass on the increase that we have seen at this point. And we would expect that to continue to be the case.”
Or here is another one from the Chief Executive Officer of another big company, Colgate-Palmolive Corporation: “What we are very good at is pricing. Whether it’s foreign exchange fluctuation or raw and packing material inflation, we have found ways over time to recover that in our (profit) margin line.”
So they are bragging about it, actually. They are making more money, more profits, at our expense. They are NOT being hurt. Approximately two thirds of the largest publicly traded U.S. companies have reported BIGGER profits in 2021 than they did in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
The reality is that corporations are using the EXCUSE of inflation to raise prices and make even bigger profits! The capitalist class that is profiting from inflation, is the same class that pushes speedup in the work places. It is the same class that tries to make do with as few employees as possible to keep their profit margin up. And the same class that tries to make more permanent workers into temporary workers.
And the capitalist class which the government props up has raided the money from the government for their own benefit, which for example, left the public health system in shambles leaving everyone vulnerable to the Covid pandemic.
A minute ago I mentioned there are MORE billionaires now than there were in early 2020 before the pandemic. In the United States the number went up from 614 to 745 billionaires in that short two-year period. Here are some numbers to explain what that means. I’m not trying to bore you with numbers, but…. For these billionaires, their cumulative wealth has gone up by 70% just since the beginning of the pandemic, even while some people are losing their jobs or their homes or are dying due to the pandemic.
These 745 billionaires, 745 total people, have more wealth than the combined wealth of the bottom 60% of all American households. This 60% of households represents about 200 million people So a record amount of wealth is being concentrated in these few hands of 745 people.
I could keep quoting statistics on this, but it would either make your head swim or make you angry. So I will stop there with the numbers.
In the face of this, the only reasonable answer for us is to make our wages go up every bit as much as prices do, and every bit as fast, immediately.
But that is not what happens. For example, let’s look at Social Security. We are told it gets raised almost every year based on inflation. People may have heard that, right? Well, sort of. Two things to remember—as I said a few minutes ago it is not as if even Social Security goes up based on the REAL rate of inflation. And the second thing to remember is that there is always a lag time. So for example, inflation officially went up by 7% last year. It is not until THIS year that you see the rise in Social Security benefits, and even then it only went up 5.9% instead of 7%. So you are a year behind and not even then catching up with inflation.
If you are working it is the same thing. People have heard about COLA—the Cost of Living Allowance? Very few union contracts even have a Cost of Living Allowance anymore. And even if they did, because for the very reasons I said above with Social Security you would not keep up with the actual rate of inflation, and there would be a year or more lag in catching up. So you are always getting farther behind. (Remember the old saying “The faster I go, the behinder I get”?)
To use a real life example, I am going to use where I work. I am part of the Bargaining Team for our Union, for State of Michigan employees. We have generally negotiated small wage increases for most years. We do not have a Cost of Living allowance, but still we get small increases basically every year.
Late last year we negotiated a 5% raise to go into effect for later this year. This is the biggest one year increase we have gotten since the 1980s. Part of our argument with the employer during bargaining was inflation and we needed a raise bigger than the normal 2 or 3%. Our members were quite happy with the raise and the contract passed by the biggest margin, ever. But looking back now, we are still losing because not only has the raise not gone into effect yet, but when it does it will be less than the official rate of inflation. Like I said, The faster you go, the behinder you get.
As I said earlier, the only reasonable answer is to make our wages go up as much as prices do, and immediately. But this is not something that can be gained at just one company, whether or not there is a union. If Ford, for example, gave an immediate catch-up to inflation, but General Motors did not, Ford would look less attractive to the big banks who pour money into companies to buy their stock. Ford could not compete in the financial markets with General Motors.
So it has to be at every company, every employer, private and government.
And of course we cannot count on them telling us the truth about their pricing, their real profits, and the real rate of inflation.
To get that we need a different kind of bookkeeping, one that depends on working people to know what is going on in all of these companies. We need them to provide the information, we need workers who gather it from all the different places that we work at.
Obviously, to establish something like this would cut into profits. The people who are doing so well today would not like it. In other words, they will not give it to us. The only way we will be able to get something like that is with a massive social struggle. And not just at a few places, but the whole working class.
Some people might say that that does not seem possible. But before people went in the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, that kind of massive protest did not seem possible either.
The working class has the capacity to do this, as we are the largest class in this society and we make everything run.
So, we are not there right now. But this is what we need to discuss with as many people as possible. This is what the Working Class Party can discuss during the election campaign we will run this year, with as many candidates as there are people ready to be candidates, with all of them saying the same thing—We need wages that keep up with inflation, and we need a mechanism that working people set up to make sure it happens.
Mar 14, 2022
“Any Russo-Ukrainian war is likely to be bloody for the combatants, result in a wave of refugees, and further destabilize an already precarious regional security situation.”
This accurate prediction about the war in Ukraine came from John R. Deni, a research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal in December 2021, TWO MONTHS BEFORE the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
Deni further asserted: “If Russian forces enter Ukraine yet again, Kyiv is likely to lose the war and the human toll will be extensive.”
So, based on the compassion and sympathy U.S. officials and news media are professing for the Ukrainian families victimized by this horrific war today, you would think that Deni, and the Wall Street Journal, would have advised U.S. leaders to make every effort to prevent a war on the ground.
But no; Deni went on to advocate the exact opposite instead: “Nonetheless, as diplomatic efforts unfold, there are good strategic reasons for the West to stake out a hard-line approach, giving little ground to Moscow over its demand to forsake Ukrainian membership in Western institutions [including NATO, the Western military alliance] ... Rather than helping Russian President Vladimir Putin back down from the position he’s taken, the West ought to stand firm, even if it means another Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
In other words, being fully aware of the terrible human cost of the war, this expert in military matters and war was telling U.S. leaders to continue to push Putin into starting a war (which the Biden administration did), all in the name of strengthening a U.S. policy of expansion at the expense of Russia. An IMPERIALIST policy, that is.
This kind of frank policy discussion is very rare in the major U.S. media—and simply non-existent since the standoff between the U.S. and Russia has escalated into war in Ukraine. Instead, images of the human suffering caused by war have filled U.S. media reports at a level not seen in decades.
Yes, the number of refugees this war is generating—2.5 million and counting, according to reports—represents a terrible human disaster. But the same media that brings us this horror has been all but silent about the plight of the refugees from the wars the U.S. started in Afghanistan and Iraq. They number a staggering 14.5 million, according to a report by Brown University published in Sept. 2020. Yes, Putin is a war criminal—but then don’t George W. Bush, who started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and every U.S. president after him who continued them, also deserve the same title?
Yes, when U.S. media commentators tell us that the Russian media would not tell the truth about the war to the Russian people, we have every reason to believe it. But how much can you trust a media that shows Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s foreign policy advisor during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “is certainly against every principle of international law and international order,” with a straight face?
No, the U.S. corporate media is every bit a propaganda machine in the service of aggressive war-mongering as media outlets in countries run by open dictatorships are. The billionaires who own the U.S. news media are every bit part of a greedy, war-mongering ruling class as their Russian rivals (and business partners)—those greedy oligarchs behind Putin that the Biden administration and U.S. media are now teaching us to hate. And the Biden administration represents every bit the interests of our own “oligarchs,” the billionaire bosses who exploit us here in the U.S.
In the service of this greedy U.S. ruling class, every U.S. administration since the collapse of the USSR has expanded the military presence of the U.S. and NATO around Russia, threatening it. And now the current administration, with the complicity of the corporate media, is cynically trying to use the suffering of Ukrainian people to gain support from the American people for future wars of conquest.
To these henchmen and mouthpieces of imperialism, working people in Ukraine, Russia—and the U.S., for that matter—are just cannon fodder in their wars of expansion. We have every reason to try and stop the bloody, imperialist wars they keep starting in our name.
Mar 14, 2022
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is causing a human catastrophe, like the U.S.’s brutal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan did before. According to the United Nations, two weeks after the war had started, the refugees from Ukraine exceeded 2.6 million and might reach more than four million in a few weeks.
The United Nations declared this refugee crisis the largest in a century. But this is not true. The brutal civil war in Syria, which the U.S. helped fuel, created over 6.6 million refugees out of a population of 22 million. Most Ukrainian refugees are, according to the press, receiving a warm welcome in other European countries, unlike so many other refugees.
In comments made by the press, the chauvinism and racism against refugees from other countries affected by war, prominently Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, is glaring.
CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata, for example, stated on February 25th that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen."
On France’s BFM TV, journalist Phillipe Corbé said: “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We’re talking about Europeans [i.e., Ukrainians] leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”
In a British newspaper, The Telegraph, Daniel Hannan wrote on February 26: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations.”
Heads of states have also made similar types of comments. In Austria, Chancellor Karl Nehammer declared: “… of course we will take in refugees, if necessary. It’s different in Ukraine than in countries like Afghanistan. We’re talking about neighborhood help.”
These disgusting remarks illustrate the racism and nationalism that are used to divide the working class; to make us turn our backs on each other and weaken our mutual power. All refugees, Ukrainian, Syrian, Afghani, Iraqi, should be welcomed and treated with respect.
Mar 14, 2022
In Ukraine, 76,500 young people from other continents are students.
These North African, Congolese, Ivorian, Gabonese and Ghanaian students have until now been hosted in Ukrainian universities, specializing in science, technology and computer science.
Fleeing the bombardments like thousands of others, many of them had to face, in addition to the dramatic situation, the contempt and even violence of the authorities who supervised the passage of refugees leaving Ukraine. On both sides of the border, young African men and women were mistreated because they were black. Many testimonies of arbitrary treatment have been reported at the Medyka border post in southeastern Poland. "We can’t get water or food, we’re on our own," testified a young Ivorian, a computer science student. Others recounted the violent attitude, the beatings, coming from Ukrainian and Polish police officers, trying in particular to prevent them from getting on the buses or trains taking the refugees. Some had to walk several tens of kilometers, dragging their luggage, for lack of being allowed on a bus.
While many of them denounced the lack of help from the authorities of their country of origin, they frequently met with the solidarity of Ukrainians fleeing alongside them. "Volunteers posted on the road to the border offered water, food, Pampers, blankets" to all the fugitives. In the same way, some tell of having been welcomed by inhabitants on the other side of the border for one or more nights, before their return to their families in Africa is possible.
It was only on March 3 that a European directive dating from 2001 was activated to grant temporary protection in the EU to refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. The application of the measure to refugees who do not have Ukrainian nationality has moreover remained in abeyance, the Polish and Austrian authorities being opposed to it.
It is therefore a form of apartheid that some of the refugees had to undergo, because of their skin color.
Mar 14, 2022
Joe Biden approved 350 million dollars to send weaponry to Ukraine on February 26th. Within 48 hours, the first shipments of anti-tank missiles and other hardware had made the flight from Germany to bases in Poland and Romania. All of it was delivered within five days. The capitalist state can move fast, when it takes an interest. If they had vaccinated the world with the same energy, the pandemic might be over. This latest supply brought the total of U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine up to 650 million dollars just in the last year, alongside 450 millions kicked in by the European Union.
The U.S. had 17,000 anti-tank missiles warehoused in Germany, ready to move at 48 hours notice. Does anyone think this “just-in-time” stockpile was just for a rainy day? No, there was definitely a plan already in place to move all these arms. U.S. soldiers may not be fighting in Ukraine, but these massive weapons shipments show a couple of things. One, the war in Ukraine is most definitely the U.S. rulers’ war. And second, this war didn’t start just yesterday.
Mar 14, 2022
The war in Ukraine is a huge bonanza for U.S. arms manufacturers. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, the makers of the Stinger and Javelin missiles sent to Ukraine, saw their stock prices rise 16% and 3% since the invasion began. Both companies brought in around 17 billion dollars in 2021—they are huge companies that profit by making engines of death.
Raytheon’s CEO, speaking of the expected war in Ukraine, said “I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.” Moreover, while these shipments may slow down the Russians, the weaponry can only prolong the war.
The Biden administration’s intent appears to be to make Russia pay in treasure and lives—though a longer war means more death and destruction for Ukrainians and Russians. Slaughter of civilians and a threat of nuclear holocaust—that is what this escalation of war carries in its wake.
Mar 14, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of March 7, 2022.
Thousands of people have been killed, tens of thousands more injured, well over a million thrown into the world’s desperate pool of migrants—this is part of the human cost of two weeks of war in Ukraine.
Putin chose this war, a fratricidal war, pitting neighbor against neighbor, relative against relative. Ukrainians and Russians—who for centuries lived intermixed, occupying the same areas, communicating in each other’s languages, intermarrying—these two peoples, bound to each other by history, are now called upon to shoot each other.
As for Zelensky, he calls on Ukrainians to hate not just Putin, but also the Russian people. Both peoples—Ukrainians and Russians—are held hostage in a war whose price they will pay, perhaps for decades.
Others will also pay. Ukraine and Russia together provide one quarter of the world’s wheat. This war cuts production of a basic food staple. In a world already stalked by starvation, more people will die, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, which depended on Russia and Ukraine.
Putin may have chosen to start this war, but the grounds for it have been laid by decades of policies carried out by U.S. imperialism, supported by Britain, France, and Germany. Their goal had always been to strangle whatever remained of the Russian workers revolution of 1917.
The Soviet Union, produced by working class revolution, was invaded by 22 countries, including the biggest. It was limited by restrictions that cut the country out of the world’s markets, and harmed by a bureaucracy that grew up because of this isolation. It was invaded again by Germany in World War II. In 1949, the war’s winning imperialisms, led by the U.S., set up NATO as a military alliance directed against the Soviet Union.
And yet the Soviet Union was able to survive for 74 years.
In 1991, the bureaucracy sought to open a door for themselves into the world’s financial system. In an attempt to appeal to U.S. imperialism, the bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union into 15 parts, Russia being the largest and most important.
Ripped apart like that, the economic foundations of the country were destroyed. The Soviet Union collapsed. Its financial system was bankrupted. Russia’s ties with the nations surrounding its borders were torn up.
Like a pack of coyotes circling a wounded cow, NATO sought to rip apart the sinews binding the economies of these nations together.
In 1999, NATO, led by the U.S., began to gobble up countries with which Russia had once been joined. NATO troops and bases were placed in the countries on Russia’s borders, their weapons aimed at Russia’s heartland. In 2014, NATO announced its intent to integrate Ukraine—the last piece needed to finish the encirclement of European Russia with hostile forces. The U.S. “invested” three billion dollars in Ukraine’s military. Money poured into Ukraine to build up fascist bands whose roots went back to World War II. In 2019, the U.S. tore up the Intermediate Missile Treaty, which had banned medium range missiles from Europe. It was a statement that Russia would now be targeted directly by missiles.
The Russian people, whether in Ukraine or in Russia, will not be saved by Putin’s war. Nor will the Ukrainians be saved by NATO and the U.S., which shares responsibility for this catastrophe.
Today, we are called on to “stand with the Ukrainians.” The only meaningful way for us to do that is to take on the ruling class of our own country, which has pushed wars on the whole world. Our real solidarity is with the peoples of the whole world, including BOTH Ukraine AND Russia, including Africa and Asia as well as Europe, including the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Northern.
Mar 14, 2022
In honor of International Women’s History month, the book recommended is The Rebel Girl. It is about one of America’s powerful speakers and labor organizers, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. More history than autobiography, Flynn chose to describe the events, battles, strikes and the people in them in which she was involved in fighting the crushing and violent power of the capitalist class. She makes history come alive in her descriptions of the Lawrence Textile Strike and the Paterson Silk Strike. She aptly shows the courage and determination of the participants.
Flee, directed by Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Oscar nominated, available for free on Hulu, and on Amazon Prime for a small fee.
In Flee, the Grand Jury Prize winner at this year’s Sundance Festival, the director tells the story of a child refugee, “Amin,” who flees Afghanistan in 1989 and then perestroika-era Russia in 1991 and his and his family’s life and death struggles to find safety and a home. The story is told brilliantly through the use of animation necessary to protect even today the identity of the adult “Amin” as he looks back over his life, his and his family’s numerous traumas, his search for love, his acceptance of his identity as a gay man, and his quest to meet his sense of responsibility. The elegant digital animation is interspersed with live-action TV footage, making the animation even more chilling and real.
Mar 14, 2022
In January, prosecutors from 39 states and the student loan company Navient, formerly known as Sallie Mae, agreed to a settlement over accusations of fraudulent practices by the company. They made a big pronouncement saying the settlement was a win-win for both sides and that Navient had agreed to forgive 1.7 billion dollars in student debt. There’s more to the picture than meets the eye, however.
In 1998, Congress instituted a requirement that private, for-profit colleges obtain at least 10% of their student loans from private sources. That meant, in turn, they could receive up to 90% as federally guaranteed student loans.
Starting in the early 2000s, Navient and other lenders took advantage of this policy by providing both private loans and federally guaranteed loans. They knew full well that many of the students would never be able to repay the loans, but they were guaranteed to receive federal funds for 90% in cases where the students couldn’t pay.
Pennsylvania’s attorney general pointed to one type of loan that at its peak had an 87% default rate, and found that Navient increased the number of that type of loan it granted from 706 in 2000 to 54,000 in 2006. That’s in Pennsylvania alone! A document filed in court showed Navient’s former CEO Thomas Fitzpatrick said in a 2007 meeting, "If the borrower can create condensation on a mirror, they need to get a loan this year."
The prime beneficiaries of all these student loans were fly-by-night colleges, many of which wound up going bankrupt or closing their schools. The largest of the companies behind the for-profit colleges were Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute, Education Corporation of America, Education Management Corporation and the University of Phoenix. Collectively, these companies saddled hundreds of thousands of students with over a billion dollars in debt. Many of their students were never able to complete their degrees and many who did found their degrees to be useless in helping them to find employment that would allow them to repay their student loans.
Though Navient supposedly forgave 1.7 billion dollars in student debts in their recent settlement, they knew they would never receive that money when they made the loans. The company told its investors the true value of the forgiven debt was really only about 50 million dollars, or under 3% of what they and the state prosecutors said publicly.
The real kicker in the settlement, however, is that former students who have faithfully made their payments on their loans were not eligible to have their loans forgiven. Many of these students will continue to be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debts they cannot afford to pay.
In the end, under the guise of providing an education to students, both the lenders and schools carried out one giant rip-off of federal money and the taxpayers responsible for it, and left students holding the bag as well.
Mar 14, 2022
The U.S., the wealthiest country in the world, has the grim reputation for having the highest maternal death rate of any other advanced capitalist country, and higher, even, than many other very poor countries. And during the first year of the pandemic, maternal death rates went up by 14%, to 861 deaths in 2020, compared to 754 in 2019. That means almost 24 deaths for every 100,000 live births. And Black women experienced the most deaths: one third of the pregnant women and new mothers who died in 2020 were Black. Their mortality rate was nearly three times that of white women.
To understand how outrageous these numbers are, you have only to look at the maternal mortality rates in other countries as a point of comparison. In Norway and New Zealand, their rate was fewer that 2 deaths per 100,000 live births, or in Canada and France, it was less than 9 deaths per 100,000 live births
But in this richest country, that spends more on health care than any other country in the world, the poverty, the racism, and the lack of a quality national health care system are the reasons for the higher rates of maternal deaths.
Those problems existed before the pandemic. The vital prenatal and postnatal care that pregnant women need were already out of reach for many poor and working class women. And care got further out of reach. The responsibility for the care of children was already primarily on women, and became even more so, with children at home, putting further obstacles in the way of pregnant women getting to medical appointments. Pregnancy puts women at risk for more severe disease if they were infected with the coronavirus, but vaccines were not available for pregnant women in 2020. The list goes on and on.
A system that was not working for the vast majority of working class and poor before the pandemic, got more broken. And women and new mothers paid the price.
Mar 14, 2022
They make it sound like profit-sharing is a bonus that we get on top of our wages, a little something extra. But the truth is that when our contracts are negotiated, profit-sharing is figured in. We get profit-sharing IN PLACE OF higher hourly wages. The auto companies would rather pay profit-sharing than higher wages. It’s cheaper for them. But for the auto workers, we never know how much we are getting. Depending on profit-sharing to pay our bills is like depending on hitting the lottery.
Workers are supposed to whoop and holler when we get profit-sharing. But the real profit-sharing goes toward CEO’s big-ass bonuses and big dividends to the wealthy shareholders.
Profit-sharing isn’t going to pay for all the price increases we are being hit with now. We’d rather get raises and get our cost-of-living back. And if we got our money in increased wages, it means that temps, who now get nothing, would see higher wages, too.
There is another reason the auto companies want us to get some of our pay through profit-sharing. They want us to believe that our pay should be based on how much or how little profits they are making and not the work we do. They try to use this psychology against us. When the auto companies cried broke, they came hard after us to give up concessions. That’s how we ended up with 2-tier wages, no cost-of-living and no pensions for new hires. But more and more workers are seeing through their psych game and we need to be ready to fight them when they try it again.