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
Nov 7, 2022
U.S. oil and gas companies raked in more than 200 billion dollars in after-tax profits over the last six months, according to an analysis published by the Financial Times. It was the most profitable six months on record and puts these companies on course for a record-breaking year.
These companies aren’t keeping that money. As Exxon CEO Darren Woods explained, “There has been discussion in the U.S. about our industry returning some of our profits directly to the American people. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re doing in the form of our quarterly dividend.”
Although, in many working peoples’ 401(k)s, they may get a few dollars out of this, about 99% of the dividends that the Exxon CEO is talking about will go to a tiny minority, the biggest owners of oil company stock, the capitalist class. These companies are turning all those profits over to the capitalists in order to enrich them ever further.
It’s no secret how these companies got those profits. They did it by ripping off the working population in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
The major oil companies are among the biggest, most powerful companies in the world. Their operations and the resources under their control span the entire globe. All that sheer power and muscle is being used to impose big price increases. And not just on oil, but on natural gas and other forms of energy.
Executives blame these price increases on shortages caused by the war in Ukraine and other supply disruptions—as if price increases are outside their control.
What lies!
The big oil companies themselves are deliberately strangling supply. They have slashed investment in oil production by two-thirds, guaranteeing a drop in production in the near future. And those cuts go well beyond oil production. Over the last two years, big energy companies permanently shut six oil refineries in the U.S., cutting fuel production by one million barrels per day. And they are planning even more oil refinery shutdowns over the next two years!
In other words, it is the oil companies that are deliberately reducing supply in order to impose big price increases. And it’s all to profit that tiny minority of bloodsuckers, the capitalist class.
Price increases on oil and other forms of energy have been like a tidal wave. Energy is a basic part of all production and distribution. So, higher energy prices have driven up all other prices worldwide. Food prices for billions of people shot up, and so did hunger as well. In this country, the price of electricity is rising at the highest rate in history. From Pakistan to Paris, billions of people are suffering a cost-of-living crisis fueled in large part by high energy costs.
And given how the oil companies have restricted productive investment, these shortages will get worse, which they will use to justify further price increases into the future—with catastrophic results at every level.
For the big energy companies are not only making inflation worse. They are not only impoverishing big parts of the global population. Their explosive price increases are destabilizing the economy even further and contributing to worsening economic and social chaos—which no doubt will also fuel more wars.
These oil companies might make use of some advanced science and technology on a massive scale. But under the control of the capitalist class, out for its own enrichment, all that technology and science are turned into nothing but weapons of mass destruction.
Nov 7, 2022
Hearing loss affects nearly one in nine people in this country. But for those who need computerized devices to help them hear, high prices make the condition all the more oppressive. Hearing aids can cost $4,000 or more per pair, which is why most health insurance policies including Medicare do not cover them or visits to the doctors who fit them for people.
In October, federal officials decided to let many more unregulated devices be sold without prescriptions. These devices basically make sounds louder, but they don’t adjust for different frequencies, as actual hearing aids do. They are a substitute for both real hearing exams and real quality hearing aids.
This new FDA policy was pushed by the bipartisan team of Democratic Senator Liz Warren and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. It was certainly a gift to industry, but not so much to those with hearing loss. What is so great about providing a device that supplies half the performance for half the money?
People need the health care service of someone trained in diagnosing hearing loss. It’s not just about a gadget for sale. With all the accumulated wealth of this society, Congressional leaders look to compromise the health of the population, and call that a win. We don’t need dummy-down hearing aids, we need real, top-quality hearing appliances!
You can bet that the multitudes of millionaire seniors who sit in Congress, and all the other governing bodies, state and local, will be keeping their insurance and their quality hearing aids, instead of rushing to get the newer, cheaper version!
Nov 7, 2022
In early October, a pregnant worker employed at the UPS Worldport package sorting plant committed suicide in the facility. Her co-workers told the Guardian newspaper that she committed suicide after she got fired for falling asleep on the job.
The giant UPS Worldport, next to Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, Kentucky, is the world’s largest automated packaging sorting facility. It spreads over 5.2 million square feet of land (90 football fields), with a perimeter of 7.2 miles, including 70 aircraft docks and 155 miles of conveyor belts. This plant employs about 11,000 workers and can handle 115 packages a second.
The conditions in this giant plant are awful. To decrease labor costs, UPS does not hire enough workers. Instead, they push the workers to the edge. For managers, workers going to the bathroom one too many times is an issue. The management constantly surveils and scrutinizes the workers and threatens them with termination. Nothing is enough for UPS. They squeeze out every bit of sweat from the workers.
Besides that, the plant environment is unclean and filled with dust. The equipment is worn out by overuse, leading to injuries. The workers have their hands and fingers smashed by heavy packages. Bruised toes and lost fingernails are common occurrences.
What these UPS workers are describing is not a modern civilized high-tech 21st-century facility benefiting all. UPS Worldport is like a 19th-century slave plantation fattening the capitalist slave drivers.
Nov 7, 2022
The biggest grocery chain in the U.S., Kroger, is buying the second biggest, Albertsons, for 24.6 billion dollars. But these are not just two chain stores—Kroger already owns a lot of other big brands such as Ralphs, Mariano’s, Food 4 Less, Harris Teeter and many others. Same with Albertsons, owner of Jewel-Osco and itself the product of a big merger in 2015, when the Wall Street firms that owned Albertsons bought Safeway for 9.2 billion dollars.
When Kroger and Albertsons announced the merger, they also announced that they would pay Albertsons shareholders a “special dividend” worth four billion dollars on November 7. The biggest of these shareholders are Cerberus Capital Management and Apollo Capital, two private equity firms, which specialize in buying and selling companies in order to bleed them dry.
The billions and billions of dollars these companies use to buy each other up are squeezed out of their workers. Pay for supermarket workers is so low, many of them can’t even afford rent. A survey of 37,000 Kroger workers in Colorado, Seattle and Southern California last year found that one out of seven had experienced homelessness during the previous year. And a big majority—three out of four—of the workers surveyed were found to be food insecure, meaning their wages did not allow for them and their children to be sure to have enough food every day.
And last year, Kroger acted like it was outraged when city governments in Southern California voted “hero pay” for supermarket workers for working during the pandemic. Rather than giving a $4 raise to their workers, who risked their lives during the pandemic, Kroger closed five stores in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, thus punishing the workers and the people in the communities who shop there.
The other way that these big grocery chains make big money is ripping off their customers by hiking their prices at a higher rate than their own costs are going up. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of food people eat at home has increased 13% just over the last year. After this latest merger, we can expect Kroger to increase prices even more, as it will face even less competition than it does today.
Kroger and Albertsons workers can only expect their bosses to get more rapacious. After such mergers, the combined companies close stores and warehouses that are near each other, and lay workers off. As for customers, mergers mean fewer stores to shop at—and sometimes none at all in working-class neighborhoods—as well as higher prices, as mergers eliminate what little competition there is.
Nov 7, 2022
This article is translated from the November 4 issue #2831 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France. Since this writing, Twitter has announced that it is laying off approximately half of its workforce.
Billionaire Elon Musk bought social network company Twitter for 44 billion dollars on October 27. He already owns auto company Tesla and spaceship launch company SpaceX. He claimed he bought Twitter “to try to help humanity, whom I love.”
His supposed love of humanity led Musk to immediately dissolve Twitter’s board of directors and make himself its sole leader! According to some American journalists, he has long-term plans to lay off up to 75% of its 7,500 employees.
By taking charge of Twitter, Musk claims to be defending freedom of expression. He appears to be concerned with those users whose Twitter account was suspended because of their racist, homophobic, misogynistic, or conspiratorial tweets. He wants to reinstate their accounts. The best known of these are Donald Trump, blocked from Twitter in January 2021 after the assault on the Capitol, and rapper Kanye West, whose account was suspended after he made anti-Semitic remarks, but was reactivated by Musk the day after he took over.
Musk is neither the first nor the last capitalist to buy a media outlet to influence public opinion. Jeff Bezos, owner of a fortune estimated at 210 billion dollars, owns many media outlets including the Washington Post. In France, the Bouygues family has owned television channel TF1 since 1987. Bernard Arnault and his luxury group LVMH own Les Échos and Le Parisien newspapers. Vincent Bolloré, owner of the Canal + television conglomerate, never shrinks from broadcasting his reactionary opinions all day long on his Direct 8 and CNews channels.
The capitalists constantly impose their economic dictatorship and their law of profit on all of society. It is only logical that they also dream of imposing their ideology and mindset as exploiters.
Nov 7, 2022
Kanye West (Ye) has been all over the news lately, cited for alleged antisemitic statements and actions. Often, the media obscures the details of what West actually said and did, under the guise of politeness and respectability. In the end many people are left wondering what it was really about and may even doubt if they’re being told the truth.
In the case of Kanye West, he carries a credit of respect in many people’s minds, which he had earned through years as a rapper who was outspoken about racism. Most famously, West spoke out shortly after Hurricane Katrina, denouncing the media’s referral to black people looking for basic necessities in Katrina’s aftermath as “looters”.
In his music, he spoke out against racist police brutality. He talked about Ronald Reagan’s attacks on the Black Panthers and society’s use of heroin and crack to keep the black population down. He spoke out against the low minimum wage and the government’s failure to address the AIDS crisis.
As a result, many people are not in such a rush to condemn West for his more recent statements and actions, especially when they aren’t given the details of what he’s done.
To be clear, Kanye West has made a series of antisemitic statements. Following an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News he used Instagram to suggest Jews were using control over the music industry to intimidate him, that Jewish people “toyed with him” and “tried to black ball anyone who opposes them.” On Twitter, he threatened violence, saying he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
West claims he can’t be antisemitic because black people are the original and real Jews and mainstream Jews are “fake Jews”. Even if one were to accept the notion that black people are Jews, it doesn’t mean they couldn’t be antisemitic, any more than it’s true that black people can’t be racist against black people. Some can and do. Malcolm X referred to this mentality as that of “house slaves”.
In fact, over an extended period of time, Kanye West has made it clear that he is ready to spout racist garbage about black people—to be used by the wealthy ruling class in this society. In 2018, West said slavery sounded “like a choice” in an interview. He later apologized to people offended by his remarks. In 2020, he said in an interview that George Floyd died from Fentanyl and that Derek Chauvin’s knee wasn’t even on Floyd’s neck. After pressure from the black community, West apologized for those remarks.
Antisemitism is, of course, by no means limited, nor does it have its source, in the black community. Nor are the other conspiracy theories and right-wing ideas that Kanye West has promoted. West is simply reflecting the ways in which the wealthy ruling class attempts to divide the working class and the poor and to deflect their anger away from the ruling class itself. But because of the status West has achieved, he has a podium. The stance he takes encourages others to take up these reactionary ideas themselves.
This divisive stance, repeating some of the oldest racial and ethnic slurs known to modern society, works against workers’ ability to unite their class in a fight against its real enemy, the ruling class.
Nov 7, 2022
In 1942, the murder of Jose Diaz, a 22-year-old farm worker, paved the way for a large trial in Los Angeles. Twenty-two young men aged 16 to 22, all Mexican-Americans except for one, were put on trial together as a group of “conspirators”. Seventeen of them were convicted and received various prison sentences, including life in prison for three of them. All guilty verdicts were overturned on appeal two years later.
Police swept through L.A.’s Mexican-American neighborhoods and rounded up more than 600 young men and women within a week of the murder. Some L.A. newspapers cheered the mass round-ups, telling stories about “zoot-suit hoodlums”, armed with clubs and knives, terrorizing neighborhoods. (The zoot suit was a style of clothing popular in American cities at the time, and not only among Mexican-American youth. Malcolm X, for example, wore a zoot suit in his youth.)
Such open racism against Mexican-Americans was nothing new in L.A. In fact, the round-up of hundreds of Mexican-Americans reminded people of police raids in Mexican-American neighborhoods a decade earlier. In the early 1930s, police rounded up tens of thousands of people, whom authorities then forcibly deported to Mexico. Many of the deportees were American citizens, and it took some of them years to be able to come back home to the U.S.
The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, as it was called, began in October 1942, and was a sham trial. The prosecutors had not even bothered to take the testimony of the two young men who had been seen leaving the birthday party with Diaz, the victim. And they did not present any witness testimony about the actual murder. Instead, the prosecution resorted to accounts of gang fights and openly racist talk, before a jury that had no Mexican-American members, nor members who had children in the age group of the defendants. For example, a written report used by the prosecution, signed by Ed. Duran Ayres of the L.A. Sheriff’s Office, said: “Total disregard for human life has always been universal throughout the Americas among the Indian population. … This Mexican element knows and feels a desire to use a knife or other lethal weapon … His desire is to kill, or at least draw blood.”
After the convictions, the efforts of anti-racist activists and lawyers resulted in a successful appeal of the verdicts. The judges of the appellate court criticized the prosecution and the judge for failing to provide evidence linking any of the defendants to the murder of Diaz, and for discriminating against the defendants. But as is usually the case in such situations, they did not bring charges against the judge or prosecutors.
Jose Diaz’s murder case was never reopened and remains unsolved. The authorities were never concerned with solving the murder of a young worker in the first place. Instead, the authorities and the press, acting as the mouthpiece of the big bosses, saw this murder as an opportunity to launch an openly racist attack on L.A.’s Mexican-American community, in order to turn white workers against Mexican-American workers.
After two years of incarceration, the Sleepy Lagoon defendants gained their freedom, but racist attacks against Mexican-Americans in L.A. did not end. Less than a year later in June 1943, hundreds of Navy draftees, joined by some white residents of L.A., descended on Mexican-American neighborhoods and randomly attacked Mexican, Black and Filipino people in the street for five days. Police and military authorities stood by. To this day, these five days of barbarism are referred to as “Zoot Suit Riots”—a name which, in itself, is a testimony to the deeply ingrained racism in L.A.’s history: it was not zoot-suiters who did the rioting. It was sailors, with the open encouragement of the press and authorities!
Nov 7, 2022
Hours after the provincial government passed a law making a strike illegal and unilaterally imposing a contract, 55,000 school employees voted to strike across Ontario.
The union represents school employees of many support types, including school secretaries, custodians, and cafeteria workers. The strike has shut down schools across Ontario.
On Thursday, after talks ended with no deal reached, the Ontario government passed a law imposing contracts on all 55,000 CUPE members and banning them from striking. Workers voted to walk out anyway. The union says the walkout will last until the law is repealed.
School employees represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) picketed at politicians’ offices starting Friday. Members of other unions, including the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, joined the pickets. About 8,000 workers from other unions have walked off their jobs in support.
CUPE workers are protesting proposed wage increases of less than 2.5%, when they are seeking increases of 11.5%. Currently, its workers make on average $39,000 a year, and are generally the lowest paid workers in Ontario schools. And, of course, inflation is much higher than 2.5%!
Strikers are potentially facing fines of up to $4000 per day of the strike; the union itself may be fined up to $500,000 per day.
But so far, these strikers and their union recognize that the only solution is to use their power where it is—shutting down the schools where they work and forcing the employer to deal with them.
So far, the striking workers have the support of parents. One said, “I think education workers deserve a living wage.” Another said, “I’m struggling, but I am one hundred percent in favor of the strike. I am willing to do whatever it takes to handle these short-term setbacks for our family in order to safeguard the long-term stability of the people around me and the society that I live in.”
The union says it will pay any fines imposed—but why should they? The law and fines are an obvious attack on the workers and their union.
The president of the CUPE Ontario, Fred Hahn, said workers “have the right to protest for their rights, to demand something better from a government that is sitting on a $2.1-billion surplus, a government refusing to actually invest in our schools.”
These workers have taken the necessary first step and have done so in the face of attacks from the State and its police force. Only a united working-class offensive can win.
Nov 7, 2022
On the same day during a heat wave in May, three elderly black women were found dead in their homes in the James Sneider Apartments in the Rogers Park neighborhood. Temperatures inside the building had soared above 90 degrees and autopsies determined all three deaths were caused by heat exposure.
After this tragedy, a city inspector found 11 building code violations including two for the building’s air conditioning system. Family members of the victims say the owner intentionally failed to turn on the air conditioning to keep down costs. Yet the City of Chicago just fined the building owner, Paul Roldan, only $1500!
Roldan is president of the “non-profit” Hispanic Housing Development Corporation. He was formerly the board chair of the Cook County Housing Authority and served as co-chair of Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Housing Transition Committee after her election in 2019. He built the complex with over 6 million dollars in low-interest loans from the city, supposedly to provide low-income housing.
In 2021 Rolden’s “non-profit” corporation scored a lucrative contract to manage 22 senior high-rise centers across the city. By May of this year, these buildings had been cited with 21 building code violations.
As the housing crisis deepens in working-class communities throughout the city, rents skyrocket and living conditions steadily deteriorate. While posing as protectors of the poor, the city government and local politicians know only one way to respond: funnel every tax dollar they can find to their greedy cronies, the banks, and the profit-hungry developers.
Nov 7, 2022
Parents and public school students in Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., rallied in late October, protested at public hearings, and gathered 2,700 signatures. They oppose the county’s plan to close several elementary schools and move students to other schools as far as seven miles away.
Maryland has money to pay for keeping these schools open—Covid recovery funds plus new tax money. The county expects over 9,000 new students in coming years because of new housing. Closing these schools makes no sense.
Nov 7, 2022
The Republican Party is leaning hard on the fear of crime in this election cycle. On the national level, Republicans have spent 157 million dollars on crime-related ads, compared to 105 million dollars on ads related to the economy and inflation.
The Republicans are playing the same game they’ve played for decades, portraying largely black, Democrat-run cities as scary centers of crime. This is an electoral strategy aimed at winning the suburbs back for Republicans, after many middle-class suburbanites voted against Trump in 2020, and it might work. In other situations, they appeal to black voters, who suffer more from crime, posing as “law and order” candidates.
In spite of the small reforms they have passed that the Republicans make a huge propaganda about, most Democratic-controlled cities like Chicago have, in fact, increased funding for their police departments.
All of this debate sidesteps the reality of crime, which is itself defined by a legal system that was set up to serve the wealthy. A mother who steals diapers from the corner store is a criminal. Corporations that don’t pay the wages they owe, or that dump toxic waste in rivers, or that cut back on safety and push workers to the point of injury or death—those don’t count as “criminals”. Not to mention the corporations that drive down wages and drive up prices, or steal money set aside for workers’ retirement, or the money for schools and health care—those crimes are just the ordinary functioning of capitalist society.
For the crimes this system does recognize, it is true that the murder rate has gone up sharply over the last few years. Murders spiked about 30% nationally between 2019 and 2020, and continued to rise in 2021, though they seem to be down slightly in 2022.
On every level, it is the working class that suffers the bulk of the crime. And the same people who are most likely to be the victims of every other part of this capitalist society are also most likely to be the victims of murder, particularly young black men. In Baltimore, for instance, black men between 15 and 39 made up about 10% of the population, but 60% of the homicide victims in 2021. In St. Louis, it was 7% and 58%. Ratios for many other big cities are similar, except that in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago with large working class Latino populations, they also suffer from a large share of murders. In L.A., for instance, between January 2020 and June 2021, 266 Latinos, 192 black people, and 40 white people were murdered, in a city where about half the population is Latino, and less than ten percent is black.
In spite of their rhetoric, Republican-led states have on average higher homicide rates. In 2020, murder rates were 40% higher in states where a majority voted for Trump than in states where a majority voted for Biden. And if all violent deaths are counted, rural areas of the country are considerably more dangerous on average than cities or suburbs. These areas are filled with white workers, who are on average much poorer than the white people who live in an expensive city like Los Angeles.
Underneath, these numbers show what it means to live in a class society. Poorer people are more likely to be victims of every kind of crime—whatever their race or ethnicity, whether they live in the inner city, or in a trailer park in a rural small town. This society’s roots in slavery, and its aftermath of Jim Crow, mean that poverty and violence fall most heavily on the black population.
But whatever the official crime rate, for working class people in particular, society feels increasingly like it’s falling apart. Homeless encampments have always been around, but now they seem to be everywhere. Young people have always been anxious about their prospects, but now they seem more hopeless than ever. In line at the grocery store, or getting gas, everyone seems to be angrier. People even seem to be driving crazier. It seems obvious that society is out of control. This is true wherever we live, and whichever party runs our city or state. And so, the Republican crime-mongering touches a nerve, and the Democrats’ arguments that crime isn’t really going up all that much, or that they haven’t reformed all that much, fail to convince anyone.
This society in decay can only demoralize and reject increasing numbers of people. That is the real driver of crime, for which this ruling class can give no answer, whichever party is in power. Repression is the only answer capitalist society offers in response to its own disintegration. Both parties say it, the Republicans openly, the Democrats by the policies they implement. More policing, more cops on the street, more immunity for those cops to carry out violence, longer sentences—these are the answers they hold out for the problem of crime. These policies have been proven time and again not to stop murder, and they certainly can’t stop homelessness, or rage, or hopelessness. Nonetheless, the politics of the two parties can only reinforce support for these policies, including among those most likely to be the victims of that repression.
There is only one answer in this situation—for the working class to put itself forward to run society itself, to address the problems of poverty, desperation, and the crime they produce directly, by taking back the wealth the corporations have stolen for centuries and using it to meet the population’s needs.
Nov 7, 2022
Extreme right-wing groups are threatening voters and election workers in states all around the country. In a widely publicized incident in Arizona, right-wing militia men dressed in tactical gear and carrying guns stood watch at an early voting drop box in Maricopa County, creating a threatening image for people dropping off their ballots. Other drop boxes were also staked out with pictures being taken of those using them.
While these Arizona incidents were well-publicized, they are far from the only ones. A report from the Brennan Center, a voting rights watch group, recently warned of threats to voters and election officials in ten states—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. The report found that over half of all election officials in these states feared for the physical safely of their colleagues. And even before the Brennan Center report came out, the FBI issued a press release warning that seven states continued to see unusual levels of threats to election workers.
Clearly extreme right groups, in support of former President Trump’s claim of wide-spread election fraud in 2020, are trying to undermine elections and create an excuse for right wing politicians to declare themselves winners of elections whether they were the winners or not. They don’t want the votes of ordinary people to count, if voters were able to cast their votes at all.
While Democratic politicians and their news media present this activity as a new development that threatens to bring down democracy, a closer look reveals that U.S. history is filled with the same violent activity. For decades following the Civil War and Reconstruction, armed vigilantes working for the Democratic Party threatened the public, the best-known being Ku Klux Klan terrorist activity against black voters in the South.
Both major parties’ histories are filled with examples, not just the Republican Party. And when Democratic politicians speak of a threat to democracy, they carefully avoid their role in bringing down governments in Central and South America, in the Middle East, imposing the interests of U.S. capitalism.
Just as it is foolish to believe that an Arizona federal judge, appointed by Donald Trump and a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, will stop vigilantes, it is a mistake to believe that the Democratic Party stands for protecting the rights of the working population.
Nov 7, 2022
Everyone’s sick of being inundated by political advertisements, whether on TV or through the mail. It’s frustrating being bombarded with ads filled with vicious personal accusations and deliberate misinformation. If it seems worse than ever, it might be because the politicians have more money than ever to spend.
Politicians will have spent 16.7 billion dollars on their 2022 campaigns. That will set a record for the most spent on a midterm election, compared with the previous record of 14 billion dollars. That was set, not surprisingly, in the last midterm election in 2018.
To look at where campaign money comes from, it’s easiest to look at money spent on federal campaigns, which will reach a total of 8.9 billion dollars, according to the New York Times. Billionaires will have contributed over 15% of that, and the wealthiest one percent of donors will have donated 38%.
While it’s true that Republicans have more billionaire donors, the Democrats have their share as well. Billionaires gave 20% of total donations to Republicans, compared with 14.5% of donations to Democrats.
While it’s certainly understandable that people want to hold on to the voting rights that those before them fought and died for, we need to keep in mind that we don’t have real democracy in this country, we have the most democracy money (mostly from the wealthy) can buy.
Nov 7, 2022
Republicans have been shouting to the hills that crime and fentanyl are pouring into the country across the U.S. border with Mexico, and that Biden’s policies are to blame.
This rhetoric is filled with lies. Every statistic shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S., and fentanyl is mostly brought into this country by U.S. citizens.
The Republicans are also lying about Biden’s immigration policies. After criticizing it on the campaign trail, the Biden Administration has extensively used Title 42, a legal loophole, giving the excuse of the pandemic to block people from entering the country, even to apply for refugee protection. In the face of a potential surge of refugees from Haiti, the Biden administration proposed sending people to a “third country”, like Mexico, or even detaining them at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The director of refugee protection at the non-profit Human Rights First summed up the current immigration policy: “The Biden administration is embracing the Trump playbook.”
On the campaign trail, Democrats try to play both sides. Some try to win immigrants’ votes by claiming to stand for, perhaps, some kind of immigration “reform”, maybe, someday. But Democrats are also embracing anti-immigrant rhetoric, with some Democratic candidates calling for more border enforcement, and even for “physical barriers where they make sense.”
None of this can stop the flow of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border, even if it was really intended to. The surge of refugees is being driven by the deteriorating living conditions for people across a whole swath of the world. This deterioration is in large part a consequence of U.S. policies: support for coups and dictatorial regimes in Central America and the Caribbean, sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba, and underneath it all, the vast sucking of wealth out of the poor countries of the world by the big corporations and banks based in the United States.
Neither party has an answer for any of this because both serve those corporations and banks, which profit by superexploiting workers in the poor countries as well as immigrants in this country.
That doesn’t mean immigration policy can never change. At a small forum in Chicago, Chuy Garcia, an Illinois Democrat in the U.S. House, let slip that maybe immigration reform could become a reality if “the labor shortage” gets bad enough. In other words, for these two parties, immigration policy has nothing to do with protecting migrants’ human rights, or with protecting workers here from crime. It is instead driven by the demand of the corporations for workers they can exploit.
Workers have a different interest. Workers are one class, in this country and around the world. Workers everywhere are exploited by the same bosses and banks. Workers are all victims of the same deterioration of capitalist society, even if it is today more extreme in the poor countries than here.
Workers are stronger when they unite across the lines that divide them—whether those be borders or immigration status. And workers have no interest in falling for the anti-immigrant rhetoric increasingly put out by both parties.
Nov 7, 2022
This article is translated from the October 22, 2022, issue of Combat Ouvrier (Workers’ Combat), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active on the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
U.S. and Canadian military planes landed in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince in mid-October to deliver armored vehicles for local police.
The next Monday, Haiti’s prime minister asked the U.N. Security Council to send even more powerful support, i.e., the intervention of a military force, to “stabilize this country gripped by chaos.” That day marked the 216th anniversary of the assassination of the revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, known as Haiti’s founding father. Notably, no grand commemoration was held.
But a demonstration headed toward the U.S. embassy. Its most repeated slogans did not condemn the high cost of living or rising fuel prices, but were slogans like, “Down with Ariel Henry”—the prime minister—and “No foreign intervention!” The politicians who organized the protest support proposals to re-arm the police to confront the gangs, instead of using a foreign military force.
The idea of landing U.S. soldiers is not rejected by workers in Port-au-Prince’s industrial zone and working class neighborhoods. The notion—rather, the illusion—that these soldiers could control or even completely eliminate the gangsters is gaining ground.
In the logjam Haiti has become, gangs hold the population hostage. They orchestrate the fuel shortage in Port-au-Prince, smuggle in gasoline from Santo Domingo, and profit by reselling it at seven to ten times the price.
Government offices are closed. Public services are non-existent. Small businesspeople in the informal sector try to keep going somehow. Public transport drivers strive to provide service, at prices elevated by the exorbitant cost of gas.
Added to this misery and unhealthiness is a rapidly growing cholera epidemic. The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reported more than 600 cases and 35 deaths from cholera in the first three weeks of October.
In this situation, working and poor people can only depend on their own organization and on their own numbers to resist exploitation.
Nov 7, 2022
The U.S. government has been using the war in Ukraine as a pretext to expand its military presence in Europe. Since February, the U.S. government has sent an additional 20,000 troops into Europe. The U.S. now has over 100,000 troops stationed in Europe, which is close to the total number of troops that Russia used to invade Ukraine.
In June, the U.S. government announced plans to set up a permanent military base in Poland. The U.S. Army will add another brigade in Romania and increase the number of troops in the Baltic countries bordering Russia. The U.S. Air Force will deploy two squadrons of F-35 fighter planes in Britain and station more air defense units in Germany and Italy. The U.S. Navy will increase the number of destroyers stationed in Spain.
The U.S. government has also pushed the other countries in NATO to expand their military forces. Today U.S. troops are part of the 2 million troops that NATO countries have stationed in Europe, far outnumbering Russian military forces. Tens of thousands of these troops are stationed in eastern Europe, threatening Russia directly.
All of the recent military moves by the U.S. government are part of a strategy, outlined in a recent Pentagon document called the National Defense Strategy. It was about planning for possible future wars, mainly focused on Russia and China.
The U.S. government is already using Ukraine as a proxy to fight a war against Russia. Since Putin ordered a brutal invasion of Ukraine in response to years of increasingly tight NATO encirclement of Russia, the U.S. government has been supplying the Ukrainian government with massive military aid and training Ukrainian troops. The U.S. has been providing battlefield intelligence to Ukraine and has even helped to plan their military operations.
Today the U.S. government wages war against Russia, with Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, as well as the Russian population, paying the price. Tomorrow, many more millions of people around the world would pay the price of a bigger war, a world war, that the U.S. government is already planning for.
Over the last hundred years, U.S. capitalism has expanded to envelop the world, with only a few nations remaining not completely under control. This expansion has been accomplished with a great deal of military force, sometimes directly in wars, other times through proxies like Ukraine, and sometimes by the threat of war. Everywhere, this military-backed expansion of U.S. capitalism has been in the interests of the U.S. capitalist class, not the workers here who provide the troops, or the workers in other countries those troops are sent to repress.
Today the U.S. military is making preparations for the next major war, threatening Russia, China, Iran, and in the process, all of humanity. The next war will no more be in the interests of the population than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. War after war has shown that, as long as the capitalist class remains in power, it will use whatever military force it can to expand the part of the world it can profit from—and consequences be damned.
Nov 7, 2022
This article is translated from the November 4 issue #2831 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
Sixty years ago, on October 14, 1962, American rulers discovered that the USSR had installed a nuclear missile base in Cuba, setting off a crisis between the two superpowers.
The anniversary of this crisis has been used to make Russia appear to be responsible for the threat of nuclear war. But in reality, the United States, which today condemns Russia’s reactions to NATO’s encroachment on its borders, was ready to start a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the USSR put missiles near the U.S. border.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet nuclear missiles were installed less than 129 miles from the American coast. For the American leaders, this was an opportunity to say that the USSR was creating a crisis that threatened to spiral toward a third world war. Yet, at this time, the United States possessed eight times more bombs and nuclear warheads than the USSR. A few months earlier, in November 1961, the U.S. had installed fifteen missiles in Izmir, Turkey, very close to the USSR, and thirty other missiles in Italy, some of which could hit Moscow in just sixteen minutes.
Four years earlier, Fidel Castro had come to power at the head of a popular revolt that overthrew the U.S.-sponsored dictator, Batista. Right after that, the White House’s National Security Council had decided to study strategies to “establish a new government in Cuba.” A year later, on May 17, 1960, Castro went even farther in defying the U.S. by implementing his agrarian reform, and expropriated American companies, starting with the United Fruit Company, that owned vast plantations in Cuba.
So, in April 1961, the U.S. government responded to this defiance by sponsoring an invasion of Cuba by 1,500 armed Cuban exiles, who landed near the Bay of Pigs. But the U.S.-sponsored invasion was a fiasco, and it was quickly defeated thanks to the immediate mobilization of soldiers, militiamen, and the entire Cuban population. This clearly showed that the Castro regime had broad support from the Cuban population.
So, the United States government set out to strangle the Cuban economy by imposing an economic embargo, an embargo that is still in force today, 60 years later. At the same time, the U.S. government secretly considered new operations to overthrow Castro.
In order to resist U.S. military and economic pressure, Castro turned to the USSR for support. As the threats of American intervention grew, these links steadily became stronger. It was in that context that on April 16, 1961, Castro proclaimed that the Cuban Revolution was socialist. Economic aid from the USSR consisted of buying Cuban sugar at a high price and selling Cuba oil at a very low price. This enabled Cuba to hold on, despite an ever-tighter embargo put in place by the U.S. government.
However, in 1962 the leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, decided to launch the operation dubbed Anadyr in which 50,000 Russian soldiers and 36 nuclear missiles were sent by ship to Cuba. Khrushchev did this without seeking Castro’s agreement first. Thus, the Russian bureaucracy used Castro as its pawn in the confrontation between the two great powers, the United States and the USSR.
For the leaders of the Russian bureaucracy, this operation was an attempt to take advantage of the influence that it had won in Cuba in order to demonstrate Russia’s own military strength.
After the U.S. military discovered the missiles in Cuba, the first option that President Kennedy considered, on the advice of some of the generals, was outright military intervention. In the end, Kennedy decided on a partial blockade of the island, accompanied by the threat of the U.S. Navy intercepting, controlling, or even sinking the Russian ships going to Cuba, if the Soviet leaders did not dismantle the missile bases. U.S. naval ships, with 40,000 Marines on board, surrounded Cuba. Meanwhile, a military force of 100,000 soldiers was deployed to Florida.
The USSR finally retreated, trying not to lose face. Russian ships were not ordered to break through the blockade. On October 28, Khrushchev finally agreed to a deal in which the Russians demolished the missile base, in exchange for the United States promise not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also made a promise to withdraw the U.S. missiles from Turkey. But this promise remained secret.
Of course, after the crisis, Kennedy was made to look like the leader who avoided the outbreak of a third world war. But these U.S. leaders were far from peace-loving doves. In fact, they were in the process of escalating the Vietnam War in order to demonstrate, through barbaric napalm fire bombings, razed villages and millions of deaths, that the mighty U.S. superpower was not about to let any country escape from its sphere of influence.
Nov 7, 2022
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of October 31, 2022.
The interest rate for the common 30-year mortgage shot up past 7%, the highest it’s been in 20 years. And mortgages are not the only thing with higher rates. Interest on car loans is up. So is the rate your greedy credit card company charges you.
Inflation on top of inflation. In this world where wealth collects at the top of the economy, stolen from those of us at the base who do the work, in this world, yes, we buy things on credit. We aren’t Elon Musk with 44 billion dollars to spare. Without credit, we can’t get a house, a car, or even school clothes for our kids.
Inflation is killing us. We face a sharp rise in prices for all the vital necessities: food, housing, gas for our cars, heating oil to get us through the winter, electricity to keep the lights on, water to keep things clean and cook and on and on and on.
It is a crisis, caused by this capitalist class with its manic striving after profit. They push up prices to make more profit. No one is spared from the inflation. Workers, retirees, those on disability, the unemployed, partially unemployed, the “self-employed,” Uber workers, contract workers, on-call workers, mom-and-pop store owners—we’re all hit.
And inflation is not the end of it. The same capitalist system that brought us inflation is also working in ways that guarantee unemployment. The chief banker for this system, the head of the Federal Reserve System, says it. He predicts his bank’s policies will bring about “some pain for households.” Unemployment is what he calls “the unfortunate cost of reducing inflation.”
Put in plain English, it’s an admission that this system cannot get rid of inflation without causing a big jump in unemployment. The fact is, we have both: scary inflation AND unemployment. Already today, this system of production cannot employ almost 38% of the working-age population. The economists call them people “not participating in the labor force.”
“Not participating”—it’s a statistical lie to hide the real, very high level of unemployment. In fact, 38% of the working age population has no place in the productive economy, and no wage.
This is the system we inhabit. And in this system, both parties, Democratic and Republican, accuse each other of causing the problems.
Yes, it’s true, Republicans helped cause the disaster. So did Democrats. But there is a much deeper problem, which is how this capitalist system works. And neither party talks about that.
Working people, facing only Democrat and Republican, have no choice in the election. To vote for one of those two parties means to choose between two henchmen for the capitalist class.
In three states, at least, there is another choice: candidates of the Working Class Party, who openly stand for the party working people need, which working people themselves will build.
In Maryland, it’s possible to vote Working Class for Governor and Lieutenant Governor.
In Michigan it’s possible to choose Working Class in the 1st, 3rd, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 13th Congressional districts, as well as for the 2nd, 3rd and 6th State Senate districts, PLUS everyone, everywhere in the state can vote Working Class for State Board of Education.
In Illinois, you can vote Working Class in the 4th Congressional district.
This election won’t change things. No election can. But by voting Working Class, you are planting a flag, letting it be known that there are people, some tens of thousands of people, even more, who are fed up with the disaster that the capitalist class has created for their lives.
Your vote says what you know to be true: that your own class, the working class, can do a far better job of running things. Your vote for Working Class is a down payment on the party the working class will organize and the future it will build.
Nov 7, 2022
If people were asked, when was America’s period of greatest repression, few would answer “1917 to 1921.” The award-winning author brings this troubled and tumultuous time to life.
It was a time of uprisings: people organized against World War I, exposing it as an effort to colonize and divide up Africa and the Middle East. Industrial workers felt their power and attempted to strike and fight for a decent life. Black G.I.s came home from the war and were ready to fight a war for a better life here at home. Women were fighting for the vote, for their rights, and to legalize birth control. And workers in the Soviet Union had just made a revolution, which kicked out the rich rulers. They began to build a worker-run society.
The book tells how capitalist society responded: terror, torture, killings, jailings, deportations, surveillance, and a general revoking of all the rights we think we have. It is an incredibly important tale, full of courage and betrayal, important as we today face again the threat of a repressive wave.
Loretta Lynn, the country singer depicted in Coal Miner’s Daughter, recently died at the age of 90. The movie is based on the book that is Loretta’s autobiography, of the same name. It was an incredible story: raised dirt poor in the hollows of Kentucky, daughter of a coal miner, married at 13, and mother of six kids by the time she was in her 20s. She started singing early on for herself and her family. Her husband bought her a pawnshop guitar for a wedding anniversary present. She taught herself to play, she started playing at local honkey-tonks, and she eventually rose to fame from there. Her music expressed her working class roots and its trials and tribulations, and her joy and pride in that culture.
Nov 7, 2022
Four top universities, including Harvard, published a study showing that hospitals and healthcare facilities go out of their way to avoid treating patients with disabilities. Doctors interviewed for the study commonly said that they lost money treating these patients, both because the reimbursement rate was set extremely low, and because the usual 15-minute appointment was not nearly enough time to treat patients with disabilities.
Patients with disabilities are kept from even making it into the office, by failures to provide access for wheelchairs. A demeaning side factor is the lack of access to scales that can accommodate weight, “so they had told patients to go to a supermarket, a grain elevator, a cattle processing plant or a zoo to be weighed, or they would tell a new patient the practice was closed,” according to the New York Times.
Doctors interviewed for the study also complained about communication issues with people with vision or hearing impairments, intellectual disabilities, or mental illness. One doctor stated about treating a deaf patient: “I took it upon myself to actually hire an outside service to do [sign language interpretation]. They billed the office. Their bill was higher than what we were making, so it was a losing venture. It cost me $30 per visit for that patient, out of [my] pocket.”
Hospitals and healthcare facilities are profit-making enterprises. These businesses force their doctors to derive profit from transactions with patients. If there is not enough money in it, these hospitals and healthcare facilities avoid treating patients with disabilities.
Clearly, a profit-making system is disastrous when human life depends on it.
Nov 7, 2022
Workers in jobs like UPS and Amazon know what tracking on the job is like. Cameras in the trucks and on the warehouse floors capture every move; GPS trackers spy on their locations foot by foot, second by second.
Tracking is extreme in office work too. Bosses can monitor what a worker is doing, keystroke by keystroke. During Covid, when so many began working from home, companies adopted even more extreme tracking and tied it to a worker’s pay.
At a company called WorkSmart, one salaried worker had to work 60 hours a week to make her 40 hours of pay, because any computer idle time was docked from her hours! No stopping to think, no working things out on paper, no conferences or phone calls off the computer. Even bathroom break time was deducted!
After an invention called a “mouse jiggler” hit the market, jiggling a computer mouse every so often to satisfy the snooping software, the software companies retaliated and developed screenshot captures. UpWork takes a screenshot of a worker’s computer every five or ten minutes, sent to a boss who can check if it’s idle or not.
Hospice chaplains working for Allina Health, a Minnesota health system, were graded on their “productivity” by how many patients they visited, disregarding how much actual attention each dying person and their family might require. Drug addiction counselors at UnitedHealth Group were charged with “idle time” because they didn’t use their computer while in intense counseling sessions or interventions.
Blue-collar workers have long faced the “efficiency” drives of bosses who time-study and stopwatch their every second. Advanced computer capacity can now push extreme exploitation on the white-collar work force as well. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers now track the productivity stats of individual workers.
Just as factory workers fought the “speed-up” on the shop floor, office workers fight the computerized speed-up. Amazon workers’ complaints and their unionizing campaigns made Amazon change its official “time off task” allowance (for bathroom breaks) from 10 to 15 minutes. Barclays Bank employees in England caused an “uproar” that stopped harassing emails accusing them of slow work.
If the tables were turned, and the bosses had to endure our oversight of their work, they’d never last. A designer of one spying program thought it was great—until he tried it out on himself. He experienced stress and anxiety that interfered with his work! He concluded that such programs were actually dangerous, and left the company—which, however, still sells the UpWork spyware.
Nov 7, 2022
Soaring water costs have hit low-income working-class Californians very hard, especially those in rural and semi-rural communities. It is not unusual for a family of four living off a $25,000-a-year income to pay more than $200 a month for water. As a result, more than 10% of all households in California have been falling behind on their water bills. And in several of these communities, the water is also undrinkable, since it is so filled with dangerous chemicals and pollutants.
But that hasn’t stopped water agencies and companies from increasing their prices much faster than the rate of inflation. As the Guardian newspaper found, the price they charge for water increased by an average of 80% between 2010 and 2018.
The state government of California boasts that it was the first state in the country to declare that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes. The human right to water extends to all Californians, including disadvantaged individuals and groups and communities in rural and urban areas.”
But aside from those high declarations, state officials have done little or nothing to alleviate the problem—leaving millions of people high and dry—and broke and in debt.