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
Jun 6, 2022
Biden is shouting about how wonderful the economy is now. But there are still 800,000 fewer jobs out there than before the pandemic over two years ago. And the measure of how much of the U.S. population is actually employed (the labor participation rate) stands at just 62.3%, only one-tenth of one percent higher than last month, and still lower than before the pandemic.
In fact, this is also well below the rate of employment that existed before the 2008 recession which stood at 66.2% of the working population. The U.S. economy has not recovered the 2008 recession, nor the pandemic recession.
Biden’s U.S. Department of Labor announced last week that the economy had added 390,000 jobs in May, and that the unemployment rate stayed at 3.6% for the third month in a row. This has been touted as a sign that the economy is roaring, that it is growing at an “exceptionally strong pace,” and that we are in a “tight labor market.” What BS!
But it benefits those Democrats in government, starting with Biden, to treat this as full employment. What they are really telling us is to accept our situation, that this is the best we can get.
Nothing is proposed to confront inflation, the highest in 40 years. We are supposed to “trust” the “labor market” to raise our wages to match the rise in prices. The idea being that if the employers are competing for workers, they will raise wages to attract them.
Really? Already, economists are saying that wages have topped out! Leave it to the employers to voluntarily raise wages and benefits to attract workers? What a crock! In what world?!
They expect us to ignore the fact that inflation is up 8.3% over the past year. On average, workers have experienced a wage CUT of 3.1% due to runaway inflation. And it gets worse with every new price rise.
They think we’re stupid! They think we can’t add!
Do they think we don’t know that we’re losing every time we go to the supermarket, or every time we fill our tanks at the gas station? Do they think we’ll be satisfied with good economic news in the media?
The corporations are making record profits. THEY are not hurting, in this inflationary economy. THEY are making money—off of us, while our wages effectively fall, even as the talking heads tell us that our wages are rising.
They expect workers to accept this level of wage rise as the absolute most we can get. They expect workers to pay the price for this rise in prices.
There is no reason why workers should accept being robbed through price hikes on top of being ripped off on the job every day.
ALL workers’ wages should be raised AT LEAST by the inflation rate IMMEDIATELY: We should ALL get an 8.3% raise right now. At a minimum.
And then, going forward, workers’ wages should be pegged to the prices—meaning, as the prices rise, so do workers’ wages. Immediately.
Workers can fight for this. Workers have fought for something like it before—Cost of Living Allowance, or COLA. We can demand it, and we can force our employers to accept it.
All workers are experiencing the same problems. We can all be united behind the same demand: an immediate, across the board wage increase, and the pegging of wages to prices.
Jun 6, 2022
Millions of people remember loved ones lost as soldiers in various wars on Memorial Day each year, some laying flowers on their graves. Many politicians mention how much we owe to all these veterans of foreign wars at this time of year, never mentioning anything about the policies that led to those wars.
Another war has entered its third year, and a million families lost a loved one—the COVID war. The milestone was just noted by the president, and a million people dying from COVID-19 is an undercount of those lost. Yet each family, each friend, each person lost is mourned individually as if the entire world is not in the COVID war together.
The wars that veterans have fought are military policies carried out by the different countries to gain an advantage over some other country. Plenty of people living today wish these wars were not being fought, not creating new deaths, not causing suffering and homelessness and displacement for millions, both veteran and civilian.
In the COVID war, somehow people think if they are isolated, if they wear masks in crowded indoor places, if they get vaccinated, they will be protected. Unfortunately, that’s not how viruses work. The world is so tied together, in so many millions of ways by humans, by airplanes, by ships, by the very air we breathe, that when a virus erupts in one place, it will without any relief travel to another place, to another group of people it may kill. COVID didn’t just affect one million families in the U.S. Millions more around the world died in this same war.
It’s past time to use the world’s resources in a way that will end the world’s wars.
Jun 6, 2022
The state of California is in the process of giving Kaiser Permanente a no-bid contract to provide care to Medi-Cal patients. (Medi-Cal is California’s health insurance program for the poor.) According to the proposed contract, Kaiser stands to not only increase its Medi-Cal business, but also pick patients according to its own rules.
California is giving Kaiser this lucrative contract despite two serious accusations against the company. The state of California itself has an ongoing investigation against Kaiser for not providing timely appointments to mental health patients. Already back in 2013, Kaiser had agreed to pay a 4-million-dollar fine and to provide timely appointments, but as late as 2019, state regulators found that Kaiser’s service still fell short of expectations. And secondly, the federal government is suing Kaiser for Medicare fraud—that is, for systematically falsifying patients’ medical records to overcharge Medicare.
This agreement between the Newsom administration and Kaiser, hashed out behind closed doors, has all the appearance of a sweetheart deal: Kaiser, one of the biggest health care organizations in the U.S., is also a big political donor to Newsom. So this deal has angered the state’s other Medi-Cal contractors, especially smaller local providers, who stand to lose part of their Medi-Cal business to Kaiser.
But the problem is bigger than the competition among health care companies. Kaiser, a “non-profit” company that made more than 8 billion dollars in profit in 2021 alone, is using its size and political clout to increase its Medi-Cal accounts and capture even more of the California health care market Kaiser already dominates. And under the capitalist system, this kind of monopolization generally means worse service for customers.
One reason California’s Medi-Cal program is important for Kaiser and other health care companies is because it’s so big. Medi-Cal covers 14 million people—which means more than one third of the state’s population falls under the poverty limit set for Medi-Cal! And that, in itself, shows how much the conditions have already worsened for the working class in the so-called Golden State, which likes to show off, and brag about, the fabulous wealth and luxury it offers to a handful of super-rich.
Jun 6, 2022
For several years, Los Angeles County officials have been accusing the University of Southern California (USC) of not assigning enough medical staff to provide care. Also, they charge that physicians are “double-booking,” claiming records show doctors working at County-USC hospital and USC’s own Keck hospital during the same time slots! USC runs the county’s 600-bed hospital near downtown L.A., known as County-USC.
The problem was apparently so serious that, back in 2019, county officials included in their contract with USC, worth 170 million dollars a year, the unusual provision that USC doctors would be required to clock in and out at County-USC and would be compensated based on the number of hours they actually worked. But still, by the winter of 2020, the county had reduced payments to USC by about 11 million dollars for not providing physician coverage as needed. Then, they formally accused USC of breach of contract in May 2021. County officials said that an audit in the cardiovascular division had showed hundreds of instances of double-booking or no physician coverage between Sept. 2019 and Sept. 2020.
USC has admitted to “routine” staffing issues—to short-staffing, that is. Still, USC said the county was making accusations so it could negotiate a less expensive contract. Maybe. But the levels of patient neglect appear obvious.
While these two big institutions fight over money, they both cut services to patients and divert money to the capitalists running the system. Finally, the price is paid by working-class and poor people, who don’t get the health services we need.
Jun 6, 2022
Ford recently made a big public relations announcement about expanded production of electric vehicles, and, supposedly, more jobs. At the same time, Ford said they would convert 3,000 temporary workers to full-time status—before the UAW contract required the company to do so. And Ford said that future new hires would get medical benefits on their first day, instead of waiting 90 days, as the contract says.
What the hell? Is Ford suddenly trying to treat workers better? Are they doing this out of the goodness of their heart? Hardly. The truth is that the pay and benefits for new workers and temporary workers at Ford has become so bad that the company has a hard time finding and keeping new workers. Young workers can find jobs elsewhere with the same or better pay and benefits—jobs that aren’t as physically and mentally taxing as working on an auto assembly line.
This goes to show how much the autoworkers organized in the UAW have lost during the past years of concessions. At one time, autoworkers had pay and benefits that made a job in auto something that many in the working class looked to get. It took many strikes over many years, but autoworkers gained a standard of living that put them at a level above most other working-class jobs. Autoworkers hired in at full pay for full-time jobs and a pension after 30 years. The UAW once led the way for other workers to fight for similar pay and benefits. But especially since the early 2000s, the auto companies, with help from the current union leadership, pushed through 2-tier wages, no pensions, and temporary work for new hires. Today getting hired at Ford, GM or Stellantis is no better, or even worse, than working for Amazon, Target or Uber.
What Ford is giving those workers today is just the minimum of what the company feels they need to do to keep workers around. It’s nothing compared to what autoworkers once had and what they still need. Autoworkers in the past found the way to fight for a better standard of living and they have the power to do it today.
Jun 6, 2022
Maryland’s suburbs south of Washington, D.C. are blowing up. The population has doubled in the last 25 years and is expected to grow by another quarter in the next 25 years. But what is really exploding in this former tobacco-growing countryside is commuter traffic and accidents. Bloomberg News calls it America’s costliest commute. More housing developments, more people rushing to work—but not more transportation.
For 25 years politicians have been proposing to put a bus or light rail route along the median of the main highway going south. They claim if it is ever built it would take around 25,000 drivers per day off the roads. Great. But the highway carries nearly 100,000 drivers per day now, and the population is going up by a quarter—which would add around 25,000 drivers! So they propose to spend tens of millions of dollars, to not solve the problem.
It’s the whole trap of government under capitalism. Taxing workers to pay for piecemeal solutions solves nothing. It would take controlling and organizing the resources of society, all the wealth workers have created, to build a real transportation system. That’s the road to travel.
Jun 6, 2022
Following the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Governor Greg Abbott said, "We as a state, we as a society need to do a better job with mental health." In part, politicians like Abbott point to the mental illness of mass shooters to deflect calls for gun control laws, such as stronger background checks, for instance, that might prevent the mentally ill from purchasing high-powered rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
It’s rather ironic for Abbott to point to the need for better mental health care, when his state of Texas ranks last among the 50 states in access to mental health care, according to the non-profit organization Mental Health America (MHA). Texas has had mass shootings before, such as at a high school near Houston in 2018, and another at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019. And what have Abbott and the other politicians done to correct the mental health care system in Texas since then?
Of course, many mass shooters would not fit currently accepted notions of mental illness. Nonetheless, information about some school shooters has indicated they suffered from mental health problems.
The case of the Uvalde shooter, Salvador Ramos, provides a pretty good example. Ramos’s friend, Santos Valdez, Jr., tells of how Ramos was bullied in school over a speech impediment. After he posted a picture of himself online wearing black eyeliner, others directed anti-gay slurs at him. When another close friend who defended Ramos in school moved away because his mother relocated for a new job, Ramos went downhill and dropped out of school.
Mental illness is a widespread problem in the U.S. and carries stigma and shame that make people shy away from seeking help from others. In 2020, about one out of five adults in the U.S. said they suffered from some type of mental illness in the past year, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The Centers for Disease Control found that anxiety and depression tripled in the first 10 months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yet mental illness often goes untreated. More than half of adults with mental illness do not receive treatment, according to MHA. Over 60% of young people with depression do not receive treatment. In Texas, the figure is nearly three out of four.
Mental health and physical health go hand-in-hand and the systems of health care for both are lacking in this country. Even with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), about 11% of Americans remain uninsured and over 20% of adults under age 65 are underinsured, according to the Commonwealth Fund. About 40% of Americans have deductibles of at least $1,000 and were much more likely to report they had problems paying medical bills.
The problem is even worse for mental health care coverage. Health insurers commonly avoid paying for mental health care, according to mental health advocates, public officials and government reports. In 2008, Congress passed a law requiring health care plans covering 50 or more workers to provide mental health benefits on par with other health care services. The ACA extended this coverage to individual and small group plans in 2010. Yet there are many reports that insurers still refuse to pay for mental health coverage, and investigations into such refusals by the Labor Department are slow or simply don’t happen.
All this in the wealthiest country in the world! A society that puts profits for the wealthy and their corporations over the well-being of the population is not about to solve this problem, particularly not in the U.S. where every attempt to cut into the profits of health insurers, medical systems and pharmaceutical companies is resisted to the core.
That’s not to mention that both mental and physical health problems are social problems and that this system based on exploitation, inequality, and division—in other words, capitalism—is not about to solve either physical or mental illness. It needs to be replaced.
Jun 6, 2022
The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution—what gets called the right to gun ownership—is constantly mentioned by politicians, the media and the firearms industry. Yet what is seldom mentioned is the historical fact that the second amendment became part of the Bill of Rights at the insistence of southern slaveholding states.
The U.S. Constitution was written coming out of the American Revolution at a time when slavery—the unpaid labor of black workers—was already generating massive wealth. Right from the start, the developing U.S. political system rested on compromises made between the representatives of wealthy interests. In the late 1780s, it was slaveholding interests in the South versus wealthy merchants and landholding interests in the North.
The U.S. Constitution that emerged was a document that first and foremost protected the property interests of the wealthiest in the North and the South. Yet ordinary people were expecting improvements in their lives from the American Revolution. One of the first acts of Congress was passing the Bill of Rights, hoping to build popular support for the new U.S. Government.
The history behind the second amendment in the Bill of Rights, which calls for a “well-regulated militia” and “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” has been largely hidden.
In a 2021 book by Carol Anderson, “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America", she researched the Second Amendment. She details how "Virginia’s Patrick Henry and George Mason expressed fears that the federal government would not help them defeat slave uprisings, and demanded that the Second Amendment be included so they could deal with such revolts" at the state level.
In other words, slaveholding “founding fathers” insisted on the Second Amendment to insure themselves a well-regulated militia—to put down rebellions of black people! Anderson says in summary, "The Second Amendment was really a bribe to the South to not undercut the Constitution."
When the Second Amendment was written, there was never any question of arming the black population. Soon after the Second Amendment was passed, most states passed laws barring black people from possessing firearms. Next, states passed laws removing “free” black people from the well-regulated militias in which they served during the American Revolution.
Later, clarifying the racist undercurrent running through the Second Amendment, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that black people were not citizens, because if black people were citizens, they’d have a constitutional right to firearms.
The Second Amendment’s talk of a “well-regulated militia” is unspoken code for the all-white slave patrols used to put down rebellion and to terrorize the black population in general.
The racist “compromises” that produced the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, whether acknowledged or not, wreak havoc on working people to this day. That is because these “compromises” baked racism and other oppressions into the U.S. legal system.
Jun 6, 2022
After an 18-year-old killed 21 people in Uvalde on May 24, the stock prices of big gunmakers shot up. By the end of May, Smith and Wesson stocks were up 12% compared to the day before the shooting.
This government is unlikely to do anything to rein in these highly profitable companies, no matter how many people are killed with their products. Just the opposite—gun sales tend to spike after mass shootings. Knowing all this, investors poured money into these companies.
For the parasitical capitalist class that runs this society, even the mass murder of children is a chance to make a buck.
Jun 6, 2022
Hundreds of students at working class high schools are enrolled in ROTC programs, that is, training programs for the U.S. military. The programs are supposed to be optional, but at five high schools, the City’s Inspector General found that all or nearly all freshmen were automatically enrolled in the program. All five schools are in low-income Black or Latino neighborhoods.
For years, Chicago has had the largest high school ROTC enrollment in the country—Daley and Lightfoot both highly tout the program. While politicians talk it up, Chicago Public Schools as a whole remain seriously underfunded.
ROTC programs, in a perverse way, help fill the gap. Students in an ROTC class do not need to take Physical Education. And the salaries for ROTC instructors are not paid by the school—the money comes instead from the school board and the military. So a principal who sends all of their students into ROTC is able to not hire a Physical Education teacher, and use the money they save elsewhere. The pressure to do this is highest at schools in poor neighborhoods—it’s not a coincidence that this happens at Bowen and Fenger, rather than Northside and Lane.
The practice encapsulates our society’s attitude toward education for the working class. The public school system is allowed to rot, and the military is brought in as a kind of “savior” to fill the gap. Working class students are left with an education that channels them to become cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism, and the wars it wages abroad.
Jun 6, 2022
At the start of the pandemic, gig workers in Michigan could apply for unemployment benefits. Some saved screen shots and UIA instructional video that proved how poorly worded agency instructions were. Thank goodness!
UIA officials got caught in a lie. They claimed to a judge, in writing, that there was NOT “UIA administrative or clerical error.”
A Detroit Free Press article on 5/22/22 explained that beginning in the spring of 2020 all the way until the fall of 2021, UIA instructions asked for “TOTAL pay” [which was understood as GROSS] instead of NET pay.
Said one attorney for the unemployed, "It’s a new law. It’s shocking that we’re dealing with agency misrepresentation, at this point. They are covering their tracks."
Public Pressure Plus Lawsuits = Resolution
Lawsuits filed by the unemployed brought the truth to light. The new UIA director made an announcement on 5/27/22 that self-employed and gig workers were only overpaid because of confusing instructions regarding NET and GROSS income. She said, "We won’t stop fighting until we’ve corrected past mistakes made by this agency so that not one innocent Michigander will face consequences as a result of asking for help they needed."
Jun 6, 2022
What follows is an editorial that appeared on the front of all of Workers Fight’s workplace newsletters, during the week of May 30, 2022. Workers Fight is a revolutionary group active in England.
This weekend the British people are meant to celebrate the 70-years-too-many reign of “their” monarch: the Platinum Jubilee of 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth, who has been head of state longer than any other British king or queen.
She is not just a figurehead. Even if, for over 300 years, no British monarch actually used his or her powers (for example, to declare war, refuse a law, or dismiss parliament), the queen still holds such “rights.”
But the main function of this gold-encrusted monarchy is as a lavish distraction from the brutal class system which it shields—and which in case of an emergency (like a general uprising of the working class!) it can defend by usurping power....
Of course the class rule which the queen presides over, is today not immediately under threat—and more’s the pity. But at least Liverpool football fans have the guts to remind everybody of the true nature of this system when they booed the national anthem, which they did again at the Football Association (of professional soccer teams) cup final at Wembley Stadium, unafraid to be labelled “unpatriotic”!
They are booing, not just because of their memories of Hillsborough in 1989, when 97 fans were crushed to death and no policeman nor FA boss was held responsible. And yes, it was a travesty, brought back vividly this weekend when police in France laid into fans (mothers and kids included), with tear gas and pepper spray, ahead of the Champions League final—showing that a cop is a cop, wherever you might be.
No, Liverpool fans refuse to idolize the Queen because they retain a consciousness which the working class in Liverpool built up through the very toughest times. It was no surprise, since Liverpool players openly supported the 1984—85 miners’ strike. And it is outside Goodison Park and Anfield stadiums that “The Fans Supporting Foodbanks” initiative was founded in 2015—and for good reason. They know all about poverty and its causes.
Today the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. Never mind the pandemic: the richest 250 saw their combined filthy lucre rise to about 900 BILLION dollars in 12 months! And while the Queen isn’t one of the 177 billionaires in the Sunday Times Rich List (her personal fortune is worth over 450 million dollars), the monarchy as a whole has a total net worth of 90 billion dollars altogether!
So it would be just as well if this archaic institution, which hides the ruthless exploitation and deep poverty in this country, dies with this Queen. But the final toppling of the rotten system she presides over will require a strong collective push by the working class: and the sooner the better.
Jun 6, 2022
The British monarchy is the symbolic head of an empire that once took over three quarters of the world, supposedly bringing “civilization” to 700 million colonial subjects. The wealth brought back to England’s royalty and politicians and business investors from centuries of empire actually make current billionaire fortunes look paltry.
The British rulers pretended they were bringing the rule of law to lawless people, a barely covered description of their own murderous, racist repression of millions of people, especially in Asia and Africa.
This current celebration of British monarchy and empire glosses over a long history that includes the enslavement of African people, whose lives were shortened by brutal exploitation while producing sugar and cotton in the Caribbean and the soon-to-be United States. It ignores 250 wars ignited by Britain, particularly during the reign of Queen Victoria. The celebration ignores the short war to force China to continue to buy huge quantities of opium produced under the British in India, to the great enrichment of the British crown and the British merchant class. It overlooks the British internment of hundreds of thousands in Malaysia in prison camps or a million Kenyans fighting to free their country of British rule after World War II. Britain could be said to have written the manual on national propaganda, dirty tricks, bold-faced lies and elaborate tortures during their colonial “glory.”
History is written by those who win, so British history books mention Indian soldiers rising up during the so-called British raj, that is, against British rule over India. But there is much less written of how the British raj destroyed Indian agriculture, so the population went hungry in order to produce raw cotton and opium pods for the British trade. Nor do history books talk much about the famine that killed or deported half the population of 19th century Ireland, caused by British agricultural policy.
When Queen Elizabeth II’s grandson William went to the Caribbean last month to celebrate her jubilee, he was greeted with protesters demanding apologies and reparations for what British rule meant to the peoples of those nations, now considered part of the British Commonwealth, the poor part.
Much of the world’s population could join these protesters. Leading the way could be the working class throughout the British isles under the current rule of Parliament and the City, which is what the British people call their Wall Street capitalists.
Jun 6, 2022
In Detroit, Michigan, numerous June events are planned for Remembrance and Rededication to honor the legacy of Vincent Chin and to expand the current struggle for Asian American civil rights.
June 19th marks the 40th anniversary of the horrific beating death of Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese-American draftsman, in Detroit, Michigan. Out with friends celebrating his upcoming wedding, he became the victim of a vicious hate crime. Instead of celebrating his June wedding, 400 friends and family members attended his funeral!
Vincent Chin was hunted down and beaten with a baseball bat by a supervisor from a Chrysler plant along with the supervisor’s stepson who had been laid off from Chrysler in 1979. The two had earlier yelled anti-Asian insults at Chin and his friends. They yelled, "It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work!"
As the U.S. economy slowed down in the late ’70s and fell into a deep recession during 1982, workers were battered by plant closings, mass layoffs, and wage and benefit cuts. The LIE was told that the import of vehicles manufactured in Japan was the cause of workers’ misery. The media, politicians, and companies all repeated these lies. These lies were also spouted by UAW officials. Some union officials even went so far as to organize workers to smash Japanese cars with sledge hammers at media events. The UAW distributed racist bumper stickers.
The murder of Vincent Chin was a kind of anti-Asian lynching. In this case, the UAW partnered with auto bosses in re-directing anger away from the responsibility of U.S. auto corporations. Most workers did not go out and murder someone. But the propaganda directed at auto workers, to place anger and blame for lost jobs on an ethnicity, hid the truth. As always under capitalism, it was the policies of the corporate drive for profits that destroyed jobs.
Today, there has been an up-tick in anti-Asian hate crimes. Covid—a pandemic where the first cases were reported in Asia—was followed by an increase in anti-Chinese statements made by politicians, far-right media and far-right organizations. This re-ignited the embers of anti-Asian hate that has a deadly history in the U.S. This time, lies channeled anger and frustration over a horribly handled pandemic onto the dead end of hatred toward Asian-American people. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism compiles hate crime data. They found a 339% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021 compared to 2020.
In past societies, rulers used all types of racial and national prejudice to divide the laboring classes. When rulers are a tiny number, vastly outnumbered by a population they don’t intend to share their riches with, all of the prejudices promoted allow them to divide and rule.
The U.S. ruling class, having risen to the heights of vast wealth, has learned that strategy well. They maintain and retain every prejudice to stay on top by dividing us. Those who look to stop this madness must work to destroy capitalism as they look to remove divisions.
Jun 6, 2022
U.S. students of higher education currently are in debt for close to two TRILLION dollars; yes, a two followed by 12 zeroes.
Unlike other wealthy countries, in which college tuition is paid when students show necessary skills, U.S. education depends on parents’ wealth. For the majority, college or university means debt. Even among those who achieve a bachelors’ degree, a large number end up in jobs like Starbucks or Amazon but still have to pay back loans for years.
The Biden administration in May wiped out about six billion dollars in debt from a for-profit college called Corinthian, helping more than half a million people scammed by this college. Corinthian used a lot of hard-sell tactics to gain students, promising them they would easily find jobs, pushing students to take expensive loans. Corinthian went bankrupt in 2016. Corinthian students waited for relief, but none came. Not from the Obama administration, which had already been sued over Corinthian, nor from the Trump administration. Not even in the first two years of the Biden administration did Corinthian students get the relief they had sought. But the Department of Education continues to allow for-profit colleges, and such colleges won’t make a profit if they don’t promise more than they deliver. In 2016 another for-profit college, ITT, a technical school, also went bankrupt. And it took another lawsuit to erase debt from 750,000 students scammed by ITT.
The Department of Education, an agency paid for by the U.S. taxpayers, has farmed out the arranging of loans for colleges and universities to several for-profit agencies. One called Navient was forced to forgive more than a billion dollars in student loans because of their shady practices. But others like it are still loan servicers, another layer of difficulty making it almost impossible for loans to be forgiven. The Department of Education has policies on the books to forgive loans but has made the processing so difficult, almost no students have had their loans forgiven.
That’s why millions of young and not-so-young adults are paying back student loans, even if they never finished college or never got a job in their field of study.
Jun 6, 2022
This article is translated from the June 3rd issue, #2809 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
European Union (EU) leaders announced a new batch of sanctions against Russia on May 30, after lengthy debates. This sixth batch targets some Russian oil exports but spares natural gas exports.
Along with blacklisting more oligarchs and banning a tenth Russian bank from the international payment system, EU leaders announced they will no longer import oil from Russia by ship. But the pipeline which supplies Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic will keep running.
Since February 24, European leaders have been proclaiming their solidarity with Ukraine, posing alongside Zelensky, and confiscating yachts and luxury properties owned by a few Russian oligarchs. But they avoid deciding on and enforcing economic sanctions against Russia. The reason is obvious. European leaders broadcast great democratic principles but first and foremost they defend the tough and sharp interests of their capitalists. European investors have been established in Russia for 20 years. They did good business there and bought plenty of cheap raw materials. But for three months now—much longer than their American counterparts—they have suffered the consequences of sanctions imposed on Russia. Only with great reluctance did French bank Société Générale, automaker Renault, and sporting goods retailer Decathlon pull out of the Russian market.
The stakes are even higher with oil and natural gas. Natural gas pipelines continue to supply Europe with Russian gas at full volume, and several cross Ukraine. There is a strong reason for this continuing flow. As the head of German chemical group BASF said in April, completely cutting off the supply of Russian natural gas could plunge the German economy into its most serious crisis since World War II. Germany is Europe’s foremost industrial power and imports more than half of its natural gas from Russia. It could not stop without drastically reshaping its industry at great cost.
As for oil, by slapping the embargo on sea routes only, EU leaders came up with a trick to avoid cutting off oil supplies to landlocked countries in central Europe. They gave exceptions to Bulgaria, which will still be provided by sea, and to Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. Their tankers may still deliver Russian oil outside the EU, so as not to leave the market open for Japan and Britain, which is no longer part of the EU. After all, the ground war in Ukraine intensifies the economic war between capitalists all over the world.
European leaders did not aim to avoid conflict with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, no matter what journalists claim. Nor were they trying to have sanctions hit the Russian population hard. Rather, they defended the interests of their home corporations against rivals, primarily American corporations. And whether the sanctions are heavy or light, employers and politicians will use the sanctions to impose new sacrifices on workers and to justify soaring energy prices. In war as in peace, capitalists and workers have opposite interests.
Jun 6, 2022
On May 16, the New York Times reported that the Biden administration is sending several hundred U.S. troops back into the African country of Somalia and expanding the bombing of that country. While officials acknowledged the decision, there was not even an official announcement of this rekindling of a 15-year U.S. war!
In the summer of 2006, a coalition of Somalis organized in a broad Islamic umbrella group finally seemed to have ended that country’s decades-long civil war when they kicked out CIA-backed warlords from the capital, Mogadishu. But six months later, the U.S. backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. This pushed Somalia back into a civil war, from which it has yet to emerge.
Just as the U.S. invasion of Iraq produced a cycle of radicalization that eventually led to the Islamist fundamentalist group ISIS, so the U.S.-backed war in Somalia produced the Islamist fundamentalist group al-Shabaab. In 2008, the U.S. designated al-Shabaab a “foreign terrorist group,” at which point U.S. air forces, drones, mercenary groups, and special forces began directly fighting in Somalia. They have continued to this day. Because few U.S. troops have been killed, this war has stayed out of the headlines—but thousands of Somalis have been killed, and their impoverished country has been further destroyed.
And while the U.S. is promising to spend countless billions more dollars accelerating destruction in Somalia, the population is facing a humanitarian catastrophe. The country is experiencing a severe drought, reducing local food production, as global food prices are skyrocketing. According to the U.N., six million Somalis or 40% of the population are facing severe food insecurity, at risk of sliding into absolute famine. But the relief agencies don’t have the money to respond effectively.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Somalia, “the funding we need to respond to a crisis of this magnitude has simply not come.” So, endless billions for war—but not even the pennies needed to feed starving people. This is the continuing U.S. policy in Somalia.
Jun 6, 2022
Astronomers in mid-May revealed their first-ever picture of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the galaxy where we live.
The picture is important to science because black holes are thought to exist at the center of most galaxies. Images like this will help explain how they all developed, which is what let us evolve. Black holes are celestial bodies that become so dense, they suck in all nearby matter and energy, including light. This means black holes cannot be directly seen. Albert Einstein’s theories predicted them. Galaxies are collections of millions of stars rotating around a center. This new picture shows how much darker the area of the black hole is compared to the surrounding area, which is filled with energetic material being pulled inward. The center of the Milky Way is very far away from us. Light from near the black hole has travelled 27,000 years to reach the earth.
It is impressive that a team of astronomers involved more than 300 researchers from 80 institutions around the world. They analyzed observations from eight telescopes in Arizona, Hawaii, Mexico, Chile, France, Spain and Greenland. This shows what can be accomplished when scientists around the world work together. But this is only the second picture ever of a galactic black hole. Under capitalism, cooperative work is rare. Look how pharmaceutical labs patent their research products instead of sharing them.
Black holes devour light, but capitalism devours the drive to cooperate.
Jun 6, 2022
This article is translated from the May 21st issue, #1286 of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of comrades in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean.
On June 11, Vote and Get Out the Vote for Workers’ Fight Candidates in the Legislative Elections!Candidates from Workers Fight are running in all constituencies in Martinique and Guadeloupe.
With the war in Ukraine, the threat of World War III has become more ominous. World leaders themselves have raised this as a possibility if necessary, to defend the interests of the big capitalists who are their masters. Humanity must get rid of these people with no delay!
So it is essential that we present candidates in the name of revolutionary communism in these elections. Our presence is intended to help in the revival of workers’ class consciousness. Workers must reconnect with the fundamental idea of organizing together, independently of all other social strata, to constitute their own political force, their own party. Such a party will allow them ultimately to overthrow capitalism through an offensive and conscious collective struggle.
Workers’ struggles are numerous today in Martinique and Guadeloupe, from fired health care workers to Carrefour supermarket strikers, and including those at the post office and ArcelorMittal. These battles must find a political outlet.
It is no coincidence that rumors of war spread as the economic and social crisis deepens. War is part of the very logic of the capitalist system. Capitalism allows a wealthy minority to accumulate ever more profits on the backs of the majority, who are condemned to exploitation and growing poverty.
The peoples of the Caribbean have been victims of systems of exploitation for centuries, exploitation in all forms, with violence and humiliation. From the genocide of Native Americans to the repression of 20th and 21st century labor struggles. By way of slavery, colonialism, and racism. Today some are more colonized than others. The “wretched of the earth” are the poor blacks, the workers, who suffer exploitation and oppression more than the wealthy strata of doctors, lawyers, and other VIPs.
In these elections, we will be the voice of all these workers, especially those who are fighting. We will also express the voice of young people from the working classes, who mobilized at the roadblocks during the social explosion of November-December 2021.
The economic and social crisis calls for emergency measures. We defend a program of struggle. With today’s high unemployment: distribute work among all with no loss of in pay! With the high cost of living: no wage, pension, or benefit less than $2,130 dollars (2,000 euros) net take-home per month! Given speculation and the rapacity of big capitalists: abolition of business secrecy and control by workers!
We take advantage of this campaign to warn workers of the danger of the rise of the far right. It is a political cancer growing among the working classes. National Rally, an anti-worker party full of racists, should not get the vote of any worker, especially Black or Indian. This party’s growth reflects the discouragement of part of the population. Each politician in power after the next is responsible for this demoralization—starting with the current one, President Emmanuel Macron.
On the other hand, voting for the candidates of Workers Fight opens the perspective of overthrowing this rotting capitalism and building a just and fraternal society—a communist society. Every vote for our candidates will affirm this inspiring perspective. It’s the only prospect that lets humanity move forward!
Jun 6, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of May 30, 2022.
The massacre of 19 young children and 2 teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas was horrifying.
An 18-year-old man used a military style semi-automatic weapon to shoot down 8-year-old and 10-year-old children. This slaughter was only the latest of many school shootings, on top of all the other mass murders, in this country.
After this latest school shooting, students at a number of schools around the country angrily protested and walked out of school, calling for more safety. But those supposedly in charge of the society, the politicians, had nothing new to say. Just as they have done following other mass shootings, the politicians from both parties had their usual debate about how to stop them.
One side says the answer is to have everyone armed to protect themselves. The other side says the answer is to limit access to these military-style assault weapons. They all go on TV to say how concerned they are. But none of the politicians had any real solutions to offer because none of them are addressing the real problems that lead to mass murders.
These problems are deeply ingrained in our society. Something is deeply wrong when we see 18-year-olds murdering 8-year-olds. All the pressures of living in this society are causing people to blow up. In just 18 years of life, this young man in Texas became deformed enough to snap and murder children. Just like the 18-year-old in Buffalo, who had absorbed enough racism to murder 10 black people in a supermarket.
True, most people don’t lose all their humanity to the point of committing mass murder. But the pressures of this society are leading to more and more violence. We see it every day. People are shooting and attacking people, most of the time people they know—in the streets and in their homes. We saw what happened during the Covid pandemic when people were locked in their homes. There was a big increase in spousal abuse and child abuse, much of it unreported.
This society provides no help for those people most at risk of snapping. The mental health system in this society is virtually non-existent. Everyone knows that. But the people running this system, and the politicians who work for them, do nothing about it because the lack of mental health care is just part of a much bigger problem that they themselves are responsible for—the absence of a good public health care system. They are not putting money into public health care. In fact, they are taking money away from public health care in order to pump up the profits of the banks and the corporations.
This capitalist system always puts profits before human need. That drive for profit is what puts the pressure on every working person and their families. That drive for profit means that there are never enough jobs for everyone. Our wages are never enough for everyone to have a decent standard of living. The capitalists increase their profits by raising prices and the pressure increases on us as we fall farther behind every day. The drive for profit means that public money is taken away from our schools and the roads and given to the wealthy, who don’t need it, or used to fight wars around the world. The pressures of this society are pushing down on every working person, every single day.
The pressure, and the problems we face, are not going away until the working class finds the way to fight this pressure, by fighting for what it needs. The working class has the forces and has the power to fight for a decent life for everyone.
Maybe people think that such a big fight is not possible because most of us haven’t seen it. But history has shown us that one group of workers can start a fight that spreads and leads to a much bigger fight. It has happened over and over again. When the working class fights as a whole class, we can make a fight that can even change the whole system and build a new society—a society where people aren’t living under all these pressures, a society where 18-year-olds aren’t killing 8-year-olds.
Jun 6, 2022
Film:
The documentary Meltdown: Three Mile Island recounts the events surrounding the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor in 1979 and the subsequent attempts to clean up the radioactive site. Numerous people involved in the events are interviewed: community activists, mothers, engineers, technicians, and company management. The interviews are interspersed with archival footage of that era and re-enactments of the tense drama unfolding.
The film reveals the full extent of the behind-the-scenes battle between the community demanding answers and accountability, the workers demanding safety, whistleblowers who risked all, and the company lying and covering up the mess, endangering the entire eastern United States, all in the name of profit.
Book:
This book is a fictionalized account of a “book woman,” a packsaddle librarian who would ride hundreds of miles of mountainous routes on a horse, donkey or mule in Appalachia in all weather delivering books to isolated homes, schools or communities between 1935 and 1943. The “book woman” brought recipes, sewing patterns, folk medicines, news, inventions, humor, and even put together picture books for children.
Bookwomen would follow long, mountainous routes, riding hundreds of miles each week in difficult weather and trail conditions, in dozens of rural counties where there were no libraries at all. Approximately 30 pack horse libraries served between 100,000 and 600,000 people, known as “patrons,” in the mountain areas.
This WPA project had a proven impact on uplifting people’s hard lives. This book is a testament to the positive impact of sharing knowledge and how it can lead to a better life for all.
Jun 6, 2022
This article is translated from the May 26th issue, #2808 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The planet today has more than 100 million displaced people, forced to flee far from their homes because of the increasing and protracted conflicts.
This is the first time that such a figure has been reached, denounces the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN agency which has been taking care of them since 1951.
In Ukraine, eight million people have had to seek refuge in other parts of the country. They are in addition to the six million who have taken refuge abroad. But this war is only the latest. Elsewhere, other conflicts have ravaged the planet for decades, and have thrown their share of men and women onto the roads. Ethiopian refugees are crowded into the camps in Sudan, driven out by the army of Abiy Ahmed, this Prime Minister who received the Nobel Peace Prize to the applause of the great powers. In Burkina Faso, more than a million people have left their villages under the combined blows of jihadist groups, ethnic militias, or abuses by the army of the regime supported by French imperialism.
A vast zone of instability covers the center of the African continent, from the Central African Republic to the Democratic Republic of Congo or Nigeria. International corporations plunder what they can of the national wealth, leaving it to armed gangs and predatory governments to terrorize the population.
To this must be added the refugees from the wars waged by the great powers in Afghanistan or the Middle East. Because, behind all these dramas, we find the hand of imperialism, its criminal ability to exacerbate opposition, to divide and conquer, supporting criminal regimes even if it means eliminating any possibility for the peoples to profit from the wealth of their country.
The number of displaced persons therefore continues to increase. More and more of them are crowding into UNHCR camps, or taking shelter as best they can where they find refuge. Few end up returning home, as ongoing conflict and ongoing instability prevent them from doing so. As for the borders of the rich countries where they could hope to rebuild their lives, they remain closed.
It’s a balance sheet that says a lot about the state of this world dominated by imperialism.
Jun 6, 2022
This article is translated from the April 17th issue, #484 of La Pouvoir aux Travailleurs (Power to the Workers), the paper of comrades in West Africa.
In western Africa as well as in the Sahel region, about 38 million people are facing famine. In the region where Chad, Nigeria and Niger come together, malnutrition has increased by 300% in the last four years.
In the face of drought caused by climate change, the COVID19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine (one of the countries exporting the most wheat in the world), the leaders in African countries and in the rich Western ones point the finger at one another. Of course all these factors play a part in the rise of wheat prices. But the real problem is the chase after profits among capitalists, some of whom are speculating in wheat. Their attitude is criminal because millions will die as a consequence; millions of people lack the money to pay for these brutal price hikes in necessities.
Before the colonial period, the peasants of Africa produced local grains that fed their populations. These peasant populations were forced by colonialism to give up growing such products in order to cultivate the crops sold for profit in the centers of the colonial countries, like peanut production in Senegal or cotton production in Chad. In today’s market economies, peasants cannot return to cultivating crops that sustained them in their local areas for centuries, not when faced with the pressures from financial markets manipulated by imperialist speculators.
That’s why workers and peasants in Africa have the same interests as workers or peasants living in the rich countries, all of whom face the same capitalist exploitation.
Jun 6, 2022
The world recorded a new peak for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this May, of 421 parts per million. Carbon dioxide is the main gas that traps the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, leading to global warming. Up until the late 19th century, the level in the atmosphere consistently peaked around 280 parts per million. By burning tons upon tons of coal, oil and natural gas over the last century and a half, humans have driven up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about 50%. The last time it was as high as it is now was 4 million years ago, scientists say.
More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has pushed average world temperature to about two degrees Fahrenheit higher than it would have been.
2021 saw the biggest amount of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere ever: 36.3 billion tons. The media always try to put this on us: that working people drive too much, eat too much, consume too much. But we working people have nothing to do with deciding how this society is organized right now. It is the capitalist class that runs this society at the world scale. It is the capitalist class which has done practically nothing to keep humanity from driving off of a climate cliff, even as more and more evidence floods in that screams of the need to reverse direction NOW.
The drive for profit will destroy this world—until the working class takes the wheel and slams on the brakes.