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
Jul 23, 2023
Much of the Earth is experiencing record-breaking heat. June was the hottest month since record-keeping began in 1850, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Arizona has been 110 degrees and hotter for over two weeks. And it’s not just hot here in the U.S., it is hot in Mexico, Southern Europe, China and India. All of these areas are having sky-high, triple-digit temperatures lasting multiple consecutive days.
The recent high temperatures are an indication that the earth is warming faster. The resulting disasters appear every day in newspapers around the world. We see heat waves, choking forest fires, devastating floods, and vicious tornados.
The planet has warmed about two degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution. This may not sound like such a big deal, but this is an average global temperature. And it has already translated into sea-level rise and the extreme weather conditions we are experiencing today.
Extreme heat is very dangerous. It can raise the core body temperature which will kill if it reaches 106 degrees. Heat is the number-one weather-related killer in the world. Over 62,000 people died last year in Europe’s summer heat wave. In the U.S., over 700 people die each year from the heat, plus it causes over 67,000 visits to emergency rooms, and over 9,000 hospitalizations.
It is not rich people who suffer when it is too hot. Maybe they can’t play golf at their country club for a day or two. No. It’s us. It’s workers. We suffer. We are the ones broiling in warehouses and factories that are not air-conditioned. Our children and our children’s teachers sizzle in schools that aren’t air-conditioned. Our elderly parents are more at risk for dying from heat.
Texas governor, Greg Abbott, just got rid of heat-rest breaks for construction workers who spend their days wearing hard hats and other protective clothing while laying down hot asphalt. And he signed this new bill when temperatures were over 100 degrees in Texas! And if workers follow this new rule, some will surely die.
Another solution bosses have to the heat: night work. Have construction workers build at night. Farmers can work at night. And so on. Anyone who works or has worked night-shift knows that is no solution because night work comes with its own dangers and health risks.
It is apparent to most people that the most important cause of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels in industry and transportation which emit gases. These gases trap the heat from the sun, turning the Earth into a giant greenhouse. This has an obvious conclusion. But the majority of the population is not in a position to decide together what to make and how to make it while taking into account the impact on the earth and life into the future.
Those in power today are acting as if nothing is happening. They continue to process and consume fossil fuels at breakneck speeds. Hundreds of millions of people still need to rely on cars to get around. The list is endless, but they have a common cause. Society is controlled by the big bosses and the big banks who only care about making bigger and bigger profits.
Moreover, they are in a life and death struggle with each other across nations. They continue to produce weapons which will inevitably be used on a massive scale with no attention to what this will mean for the planet.
Waiting for various governments to fix the problem won’t work because they are at the beck and call of the corporations. The only thing you can expect from governments is a lot of talk about making things greener and giving the bosses subsidies to pretend that they are making real changes.
Ending climate change means totally reorganizing society on a totally different basis—not to maximize profit but to meet human needs. This is do-able because the seeds for a new society already exist in this one. The working class of the world produces all the goods and services collectively already. Yes, today we are the ones who are victimized by global warming and the bosses’ drive for profit. But, and more importantly, we are exactly the ones, the working class, who have the power to change gears to turn things around and run the world for everyone’s benefit instead of for just a few wealthy parasites.
Jul 23, 2023
Duvan Thomas Perez died on the night of July 14 after getting caught in the machine he was cleaning at the Mar-Jac Poultry processing plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
This plant is notoriously dangerous: in 2020, a worker died from an injury sustained at the plant. In 2021, a worker lost part of her index finger. OSHA found the company liable after the second incident—but the fine was just $11,000, much less than it would cost to make the machines safer.
16-year-old Perez was a middle school student who had migrated to the U.S. six years ago from Guatemala. While it is illegal for anyone under 18 to work in the meat packing industry because it is so dangerous, Mar-Jac Poultry management claimed they didn’t know how old he was, and avoided responsibility by using a staffing agency.
This is standard operating procedure for more and more of U.S. industry. Child migrants, especially from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, arrive here needing to work to live. Companies have taken advantage, hiring children to work in plants making breakfast cereal and auto parts, processing beef, pork and chicken, doing landscaping, and cleaning offices, restaurants and factories after hours. Like Mar-Jac Poultry, many of these companies use staffing agencies to avoid legal responsibility for putting children in harm’s way.
If these children stay in Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador, their best possible outcome is even worse exploitation, in factories or plantations often owned by the same banks and corporations that exploit them in the U.S.
After all, the capitalist system will find a way to exploit any desperate group of people, children or adults, anywhere in the world.
Jul 23, 2023
The East Coast has been having more Code Orange days this week due to the wildfires in Canada. This is the second worst year for Canadian wildfires. It’s been very dry and very hot in Canada. But the smoke is able to travel very far south, into the U.S. This is because the Jet Stream—winds high in the atmosphere—is moving south. And that’s related to our planet getting warmer, very rapidly.
The bosses who run things, now, are wrecking the environment we need to live in. They are creating the conditions making all this bad air and heat possible.
We really can’t afford to let these big, wealthy bosses continue to run things and ruin our planet.
Jul 23, 2023
On June 29, the U.S. Supreme court threw out a 40-year-old program that aimed to increase enrollment of minority students in top colleges: Affirmative action. The court ruled that at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, race-conscious admissions policies violate the Constitution.
To support their opinion, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas declared that the U.S. Constitution is so-called “color-blind” since the word “race” is not in the Constitution. As if playing “word search” with the Constitution makes racism magically disappear!
Out of the 4,000 colleges in the U.S., only slightly more than 200 have very selective admissions policies. It was these colleges that had been using affirmative action in admissions.
In this society, it is the graduates of these “elite” colleges who tend to become future high government officials and business executives. Thus, affirmative action at these institutions helped diversify those at the top of this society. For example, eight out of the nine Supreme Court justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale.
The ending of affirmative action will not end preferential treatment in college admissions at elite universities. Something called “legacy” admissions continues at 100 of the most selective colleges, including the entire Ivy League! Legacy admission is preferential treatment given to wealthy students whose parents went to that school. It has always been a lie that top schools admit students simply on their own “merits.”
This Supreme Court ruling signals a further move to the right and a decision by part of the ruling echelons of this society to no longer redress inequality and past injustice. That is their decision. But a mobilized population could enforce a very different decision—one that pushes to end inequality and opens up quality education for all who want to learn!
Jul 23, 2023
As anyone with a car knows, it costs more and more to insure it. Car insurance rates officially climbed 17% over the last year.
The insurance industry gives several reasons. One is that cars themselves are getting more and more expensive—the average price of a new car is almost 50,000 dollars. And you can’t avoid rising car prices by buying used—the average price of a used car is almost 44% higher than it was five years ago. So insurance companies say that replacing a destroyed car costs them more.
Cars also have fewer parts that can be fixed, and more that need to be entirely replaced. Plus, they have more electronics that require expensive, specialized equipment to repair. This hurts the smaller, cheaper repair shops, and forces people to go to big chains or dealerships. All this is driving up repair costs, which shot up almost 20% this year compared to last year.
On top of all that, when people started going back to work after the pandemic, the number of accidents increased. We’ve all noticed people are still driving more recklessly than ever. So on top of the increased stress of driving on these roads, the insurance companies have another excuse to jack up our rates.
Because of all this, the big auto insurance companies claimed they lost billions of dollars in 2022. In case you were feeling sorry for them, remember, those losses don’t nearly eat up the extra profits they made in 2020, when so many people stopped driving and therefore stopped crashing and filing claims.
And the owners of the insurance companies are doing just fine: GEICO announced 1.2 billion dollars in losses in 2022. It is wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s giant company. He told his shareholders that despite GEICO’s losses, 2022 was a “good year” for the company overall, which made 30.8 billion dollars in profit!
We pay more—and companies profit more—when we buy a car, again when we pay to insure it, and yet again when we pay to fix it. It may be true that the extra we pay in car insurance doesn’t just go to the insurance companies, it also goes to the auto makers, the auto-parts companies, and the repair shops. But whoever gets it in the end, insurance rates are making our lives more unaffordable, for the benefit of the tiny rich class of people who own all of these companies.
Jul 23, 2023
Many medical offices and patients have been experiencing big shortages in crucial and widely-prescribed drugs recently. In June, 93% of academic cancer centers couldn’t find enough carboplatin and 70% couldn’t find enough cisplatin—drugs long used to treat cancer. The same month, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported 137 drugs were in short supply, mostly generic drugs. Pharmaceuticals also in shortage include blood thinners, antibiotics, and ADHD pills.
The wholesale companies and pharmacy chains that buy medications from manufacturers and sell them to hospital chains and health care systems say these drugs are in short supply because manufacturers make fewer of them. As these wholesalers have consolidated and merged into ever-bigger monopolies, they drive down the prices they will pay to buy these generic drugs. Average prices for generics fell by more than half from 2016 to 2022.
Given how hard inflation hits so many people, prices going down for certain products should be a positive change! But in this profit-driven system the result is that manufacturers—which are also highly consolidated—stop producing them. For example, Teva, which makes 3,600 drugs, said in May it will switch from lower-priced generics to high-priced brand-name drugs and higher-priced generics, such as specialty drugs.
These profit-based companies are part of the capitalist health care system, a system that cares only for the health of their profits.
Jul 23, 2023
High housing costs and low wages were identified as the causes of homelessness when University of California San Francisco (UCSF) interviewed more than 3,200 homeless people.
This study, commissioned by the State of California, shows that one out of three California residents are low-income working-class people. This is a very high poverty rate. Businesses cause this stunning poverty by paying their workers miserable wages. Six months before becoming homeless, the Californians surveyed made a median income of just $960 monthly, which, according to Zillow, would pay only one-third of the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in California!
One survey participant, Carlos, explained how someone can gradually descend into homelessness. He had to stop working after falling off a ladder and injuring his spine. The State of California decided Carlos was not eligible for workers’ compensation because his employer paid him in cash. Because he could no longer afford his rent, he had to move out of his apartment and rent a room in a new place. Carlos could not stay in this room very long due to conflicts with his roommates. After a brief stay with family, he was reduced to living in his truck until the city towed his vehicle due to unpaid parking tickets. Now, he lives in an encampment in a park.
California has spent an incredible amount of money, $17.5 billion, supposedly to combat homelessness in just four years, from 2018 to 2022. With this spending, the state could have just paid the rent for every unhoused person in California for those four years. Instead, the State of California officials channeled this money to their benefactors in the construction business. California paid such companies more than $1 million for building only one apartment per building. By comparison, the average price of one whole house is more like $750,000. For the real estate companies involved, selling homeless units to the state is more profitable than selling houses to people.
There are 170,000 unhoused people in California. This is 30% of the United States homeless population and 50% of the unsheltered population. Having or suddenly losing a low-income job and trying to pay skyrocketing rents become the primary reasons Californians end up homeless.
Jul 23, 2023
A recent report by the state attorney general explains that Hamed Ghourouni Delcheh was killed on July 20, 2022 by Montgomery County deputy sheriff Domenic Mash. The police knew Delcheh was mentally ill. The cops went to his Gaithersburg apartment in force. No mental health counselors accompanied this small army to serve a warrant. The Sheriff’s office does not employ mental health workers or send them out on arrests. The stated reason is because they aren’t making an evaluation.
No evaluation was needed! Delcheh had already been evaluated and diagnosed with schizophrenia. And his father told the cops he was off his meds.
The problem is, we live in a society that doesn’t help the mentally ill. As a result, the police are used. They have one way to respond, and it all too often ends in death.
Jul 23, 2023
An Illinois prisoner lost sight in his left eye while serving his sentence. Medical staff refused to provide him care. The prisons’ healthcare contractor, Wexford Health Sources, had a “one good eye policy” which allowed care to be denied if the prisoner could see out of his other eye!
A 24-year-old man with mental illness was refused treatment after he reported to medical staff that he swallowed two plastic utensils. He lost 54 pounds and complained of abdominal pains before dying from esophageal perforation caused by the plastic utensils.
In another case, Wexford medical staff discontinued maintenance chemotherapy for a survivor of brain cancer. After the cancer reappeared, it took months to schedule surgery. But by then it was too late and the prisoner died.
Since 2011, the Illinois Department of Corrections has shelled out over a billion dollars to Wexford Health Sources to provide medical care to nearly 28,000 prisoners.
Hundreds of prisoner complaints have resulted in lawsuits and investigations. In 2019 a federal judge acknowledged Wexford’s malpractice and abuse of prisoners, but failed to take any meaningful action against the company. Instead, it assigned a court-appointed “monitor” to reduce “abuses.”
Despite this monitoring, half of Wexford’s jobs remain unfilled. 53% of physician and medical director positions are vacant, and 48% of registered nurse jobs remain open. Three of the “doctors” on its staff are not even certified by the state. Patients requiring dental work are put on a two year waiting list.
Its contract with the state allows Wexford to strictly manage medical costs as an insurer would. So, Wexford profits by taking as much Illinois taxpayer money as it can get its hands on, and spending as little as possible on health care needs of prisoners. Expect this to continue as the Illinois Department of Corrections recently confirmed that a change in suppliers is not under serious consideration.
Any civilized society, one based on human need rather than profit, would ensure that high quality medical care is available to everyone. And that real justice be enforced, including the prosecution of “health care” murderers like Wexford’s top management and the state officials who are accessories to the crimes when they renew its contract.
Jul 23, 2023
When a heat wave hit the northwestern U.S. in May, schools in the region were not prepared to protect their students from the high temperatures. Many schools did not have functioning air conditioning (A/C) systems. Some schools did not even have A/C, like Adelaide Elementary in Federal Way, Washington, about 20 miles south of Seattle.
To make matters worse, Adelaide Elementary did not have a school nurse on duty either. Office workers tried to take care of children who were having nose bleeds, headaches and anxiety attacks.
The officials’ answer to this crisis was to send the students home—which of course is not a solution, especially for working-class students who don’t have air conditioning at home either, and whose parents have to risk losing their jobs to stay home.
Considering the stubborn heat waves and toxic smoke from forest fires this summer, this kind of scenario is likely to play out in many parts of the country when schools begin to open in August. The U.S. General Accountability Office found in 2020 that about 36,000 public schools (40% of all public schools in the U.S.) needed to replace and update their HVAC (heat, ventilation and air conditioning) systems. And as for school nurses, more than 40% of U.S. public schools don’t have a full-time registered nurse, according to a survey by the National Association of School Nurses.
We all know which schools those are—working class schools. For years, public schools in working class areas and rural communities have been experiencing a shortage of staff in all areas—teachers, maintenance workers, cafeteria workers, bus drivers—not just nurses. For years, large class sizes and deteriorating, unsafe school buildings have been making learning impossible for working class children. During the Covid pandemic things did not improve either—they continued to get worse, in fact—despite all the promises made by politicians and school officials.
So, what are the chances that the politicians and officials will fix HVAC systems and hire enough workers in all schools THIS year?
Zero. Improvements will only come from the grass roots activity of workers fed up with this unbelievably negligent administration of the schools.
Jul 23, 2023
Michigan has been sending out Medicaid re-certification notices for those who have Medicaid and are due to renew.
Because of the official Covid emergency ending, most who have been receiving Medicaid will have to re-qualify based on current income information. If a person doesn’t respond, their case will automatically close.
It seems as if the Federal government, which primarily funds Medicaid and sets a lot of the rules, is counting on being able to cut a lot of people off. In some states this process started earlier, and over 100,000 people have already been cut off.
In the wealthiest country in the world, why is healthcare-for-all not happening?!
Jul 23, 2023
The Hunter Douglas window coverings factory in Cumberland in western Maryland is closing after more than two decades, even while talking heads scream nonstop about how great the economy is. Almost 400 workers are losing their jobs at a plant which once hired closer to 1,000 people in this rural, mountain city. Hunter Douglas operates in more than 100 countries, with revenue around five billion dollars a year. It’s only closing this factory because it isn’t making enough profit there.
Even more condemning of this capitalist society is the previous history of the site. In 1995, Allegany County bought a huge complex from Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) for over three million dollars. Then Hunter Douglas got the land from Allegany County for almost nothing in 2000. PPG produced plate glass at the “ultra-modern” factory it built on the site in the 1950s, and for three decades contaminated vast amounts of soil with a number of toxic chemicals including tetrachloroethene (PCE), arsenic, and lead.
Companies and politicians don’t make decisions based on what’s good for working people or the environment. Their concern is maximizing profit for the rich.
Jul 23, 2023
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of July 16, 2023.
NATO met in summit last week in Vilnius, Lithuania. Government leaders from NATO’s 31 member nations came together, supposedly to make clear their support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. Of course, there were lots of speeches—these were politicians meeting, after all.
Armaments and money will continue to flow to Ukraine. But the most important discussions at this “summit” involved, not Ukraine, and not this war, but an agreement to bring a quarter of a million more troops onto the borders with Russia over the next two years. New bases will be constructed in eight countries bordering Russia—from the Arctic Ocean to the Baltic Sea and on to the Black Sea. Germany, France, several other European powers—and perhaps the U.S.—will pour their own troops into these bases.
Imagine if a gang of countries from elsewhere decided to position a quarter-of-a-million troops in Canada, Mexico and the Pacific Ocean islands that ring the U.S. Clearly, the U.S. would see that as an intention to attack the U.S.
Well, this agreement to position additional troops around Russia’s borders is a war threatened against Russia. It’s a war that would be much more disastrous than what is going on today in Ukraine.
Wars can never be understood by looking only at which country invades. Behind the scenes, a whole development carried out by several countries finally leads to the break-out of war. Right now, we are seeing a development to a more massive war.
Russia may have invaded Ukraine. But U.S. imperialism made the Ukraine war its own. Even before the war “started,” the U.S. provided training, logistics, and intelligence for the Ukrainian army. It armed and is arming Ukraine to the teeth, sending ever more deadly weapons systems. Just two days before the NATO summit, Biden announced that the U.S. would supply Ukraine with “cluster bombs,” vicious weapons that are designed to explode into thousands of bits just before hitting the ground. Civilians are the chief victims.
Constantly upping the ante, the U.S. has used this war to bleed and weaken Russia.
But U.S. plans go well beyond Russia and this war. First of all, the Ukraine war has been used as a live “exercise” in which many of the most deadly weapons can be tested. The Ukrainian defense minister was recently quoted as saying, “For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground.”
Furthermore, the U.S. has used the Ukraine war as the pretext to cover the enormous increase in its own military spending. The U.S. is now spending more on the military than at any time since World War II, more than during Korea and Vietnam, more than during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. And the U.S. race to amass more arms has forced other countries, including its supposed close allies, to do the same.
One reason for the armament race is the enormous profits that military spending provides for big military contractors. They are making a lot more weapons of destruction and death—to make up for profits the economy no longer produces for the capitalist class.
But the massive military build-up isn’t just about spending money and funneling profits to the capitalist class. It is the preparation for much bigger wars that U.S. imperialism envisions. Government officials say it outright. Watch them on television. They say they are preparing to fight much bigger wars. And they act like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
Working people of this country should take them at their word and prepare also. Such wars end up being a war against us, too. We will do the dying, while society disintegrates around us.
100 years ago, Eugene Debs said it. The only war worth fighting is the war of working people against the capitalist class that produces war. It’s still true today. Even more true.
Jul 23, 2023
This article is translated from the July 19 issue #2868 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Kremlin’s decision not to renew the Black Sea agreement on grain and oilseed exports, signed a year ago under the aegis of the UN and Turkey, is a new episode in the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The European Commission immediately described the decision as “cynical,” Washington as “inadmissible,” and Paris as “blackmail.” And the world’s rich countries, those that dominate the planet, were outraged that Russia was strangling Ukraine by depriving it of the 12% to 15% of its GDP generated by grain exports. What’s more, they claim, Russia wants to starve the poor countries they call “developing.”
As is always the case when the great powers flaunt their lofty sentiments, it’s time to look for a trick. Russia, for example, protests that the part of the agreement that was supposed to allow it to export its fertilizers and grain via the Black Sea did not work. There is undoubtedly some truth in this, at a time of Western economic sanctions against Russia. And when the European Union claims that 40% of Russian-Ukrainian agricultural exports went to countries that urgently need them for their survival, it’s a big lie.
It serves to mask the fact that, as confirmed by the chief economist of France’s Chambers of Agriculture on FranceInfo, only 3% of these exports went to poor countries, particularly in Africa. On the other hand, China and Turkey were the main beneficiaries for wheat, and Spain and Italy for corn. And let’s not forget the recent protests by farmers in the Eastern European countries of the European Union, who were furious to see that Ukrainian wheat, produced at very low cost, was literally throwing them out of business because, instead of transiting through these countries, it was partly sold there.
This is not just a question of one country against another, but of classes with opposing interests. Ukrainian wheat and corn are produced by very poorly paid farmers, but the profits go to the owners of the land, the Western companies that lease vast tracts at low prices, the agricultural brokerage firms, and the speculators who make everything move on the world agricultural exchange in Chicago. In fact, as soon as the agreement was announced, wheat prices rose by 4.2% and corn by 2.5%. And all this to announce that world food prices are set to soar even higher.
This agricultural and commercial war surrounding the military war in Ukraine will create millions of new victims, while doing the work of the big bourgeoisie, including the capitalists of global agribusiness.
Jul 23, 2023
This article is translated from the July 19 issue #2868 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Zelensky has just described his army’s counter-offensive as "very, very difficult." As for his staff’s communiqués, they only mention a few square kilometers recaptured from Russian forces since May.
This observation by the Ukrainian civilian and military authorities probably owes little to a sudden concern for frankness on their part. They are well aware that their Western sponsors, informed by their military advisors on the ground, their spy satellites, or even simple drones, know every detail of the real situation. Not only is there a relative shortage of ammunition, and even of equipment that the Ukrainian army can and knows how to use, but there is also a lack of motivation among a significant proportion of the population to risk their lives at the front.
In a new development, it’s the Ukrainian authorities who are saying so. A few days ago, the head of the Military Enlistment Office (MEO) in Lviv, the capital of the nationalist West, told the local media that only 20% of those who can be mobilized come forward of their own accord. The rest, four out of five, have to be “picked up” on the street. According to him, if the MEO give up these street “raids,” "mobilization could be compromised."
In Chernihiv, a large city in northern Ukraine, MEO employees are now equipped with body cameras, to record that they are handing out military summonses to those seeking to slip through the net. A few weeks ago, this region decided that men of military age should present themselves to the authorities without waiting to be summoned: obviously, this had little effect.
In Odessa, a port with a population of over one million, officials have reported to the online media outlet Strana that there are more cases of forced mobilization in their city. The same media outlet quoted a member of the Supreme Rada (Parliament) Defense Committee as commenting on the cases of "violent mobilization" increasingly reported on the net. Speaking of "human rights violations, beatings" of recalcitrant recruits, this gentleman, in order to exonerate the officer caste, accuses conscripts of "deliberately provoking such situations in most cases."
As we can see, these cases are increasingly numerous and recognized as such.
Jul 23, 2023
This article is translated from the July 19 issue #2868 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
On the same day that Ukrainian President Zelensky was received at the NATO summit in Lithuania, neighboring Poland was celebrating in grand style the 80th anniversary of a major event concerning Ukraine, which the Western media and leaders preferred to ignore.
And yet, as part of the price of Poland’s support for Ukraine’s NATO membership, Zelensky joined his Polish counterpart Duda in Lutsk Cathedral to commemorate the so-called Volhynia massacres.
Indeed, every year on July 11, Warsaw commemorates the massacres perpetrated between 1943 and 1945 by Ukrainian nationalists, auxiliaries of the German army, who claimed around 100,000 Polish victims in western Ukraine, where half a dozen nationalities lived side by side. Although less talked about, the same people also murdered twice as many Jews and tens of thousands of Russians and Communists.
Yet the pro-Western rulers installed in Kiev since 2014 praise these supporters of the country’s ethnic purity and have even crowned their leader and ideologue Stepan Bandera, who claimed to be a Nazi as early as 1939, a national hero.
A Polish daily, Rzeczpospolita, compared the massacres in Volhynia to a "giant Boutcha", in reference to the massacre of civilians perpetrated there by the Russian army in 2022, which the West describes as a crime against humanity. But Western governments and media are careful not to point out the bloody deeds of Bandera’s killers. And with good reason: this genocidal nationalist is the hero of a regime that is necessarily “respectable,” since it is armed and supported in many ways by the United States and its allies, including France, in their proxy war against Russia.
Jul 23, 2023
Two Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper-medics recently e-mailed their superior, complaining about the inhuman treatment of migrants attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico. The Trooper-medics’ complaint said that Troopers were ordered to deny thirsty migrants fresh water and to push migrants back into the Rio Grande if they reached the U.S. side of the river—even if this meant the migrants had to get past razor-wire on buoys that had been placed in the middle of some parts of the river.
Texas border officials publicly denied the allegations in the complaint, as did Texas Governor Greg Abbott. However, the two Trooper-medics also reported that in just one seven-hour period late last month:
•A four-year-old girl passed out in 100-degree heat after Texas National Guard personnel pushed the group she was with back toward Mexico.
•A man with a significant cut on his leg, suffered when he tried to rescue his child from razor wire placed on a deterrence buoy in the Rio Grande.
•A 15-year-old boy with a broken leg, suffered when he tried to cross a more dangerous part of the river away from the buoys.
•A 19-year-old woman was trapped in the wire while having a miscarriage.
The next day, the Trooper-medics heard that a mother and two children drowned trying to cross the river.
Clearly, abuse of immigrants at the Texas-Mexico border seems to have reached a new level of barbarity.
Jul 23, 2023
Israeli President Isaac Herzog got the full red-carpet treatment during his Washington visit: a meeting with Biden at the White House, a speech before the joint session of Congress, a Congressional resolution in support of Israel, etc. Biden even announced that he was ready to meet with the controversial Israeli prime minister Netanyahu later on in the year.
That’s because the U.S. government counts on the Israeli government and military to impose order in the Middle East for the U.S. The U.S. government provides Israel with 3.8 billion dollars in military aid every year, by far more than any other government.
But the problem for the U.S. is that the Israeli government itself is caught up in its own internal chaos. Not only have huge demonstrations been sweeping the country since the beginning of the year; often leading the demonstrations are top military and police officials, many of whom are threatening to resign. Top military reservists and specialists are also threatening to stop serving.
At a time when the U.S. imperialism is engaged in its own major military confrontations in Ukraine with Russia and its trade war with China, U.S. officials don’t want another huge crisis in the Middle East to boil over because of growing chaos in Israel.
Today, the Israeli government is under the control of parties of the extreme-right wing, Orthodox Jews (religious fanatics) and outright fascists. In order to solidify their control, these politicians want to “reform” the Israeli Supreme Court, because the court sometimes acts as a small check on their authority. So, there is a power struggle going on inside the government.
Of course, ordinary Israelis have their own reasons to demonstrate. They don’t want their rights to be taken away by the extreme right-wingers, religious fanatics and fascists, that is, they say they want to guard their democratic rights.
The problem, though, is that those rights were never for everyone. From its foundation 75 years ago, the Israeli government has been at war against millions of Palestinians. It has driven Palestinians from their homes, and carried out one massacre after another. Only a month ago, the Israeli army invaded the West Bank town of Jenin, with tanks, attack jets, drones and military helicopters in one of its biggest operations in decades.
That war has dug a ditch of blood, a ditch of hatred, between peoples and paved the way for the fundamentalists and fascists to come to power in Israel.
Of course, the fact that this war turned Israel into a garrison state also made the country the U.S.’s most reliable military partner in the Middle East, since the country was built on the basis of war against its neighbors from the very beginning. It’s why the U.S. government has provided Israel with so much military aid.
The situation in Israel is one more proof that, as the old saying goes, “A people who oppress another people can never be free.”
There is no simple solution to this. These wars come out of how the big imperial powers control the world by setting peoples against each other. Either the working population and poor, Arabs and Israelis alike, find a way to come together and overthrow their oppressors, including the imperialists, or the situation will continue to spiral toward more fascism, chaos and death.
Jul 23, 2023
The war in Ukraine has brought back threats of nuclear war between NATO and Russia. The film Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, opened this week, telling the story of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program in World War II to develop the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who led that program.
Nolan runs through Oppenheimer’s life, moving back and forth between his student days, his work as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the Manhattan project itself, and the McCarthy era of the ‘50s. The social movements of the ‘30s were a big part of campus life—many of Oppenheimer’s close friends, including his brother and later his wife, were active with the Communist Party.
Oppenheimer studied quantum mechanics in Europe as that new type of physics was just taking off. In that work, he got to know many famous physicists. During the ‘30s, with World War II starting, German physicists revealed that it is possible to split the atom to release energy. Many physicists immediately understood the potential to develop powerful new weapons: atomic bombs.
Leslie Groves, a general with the U.S. Army, recruited Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project. Groves, played by Matt Damon, understood that Oppenheimer wanted the prestige, and that he would be able to corral other physicists into the program. Oppenheimer recruited his brother Frank, who was surprised, because he was a Communist Party member. Oppenheimer replied, it shows how much they need him. Frank replied to him, “They need you, until they don’t.”
We are told that the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in order to end the war more quickly, and “save lives of American soldiers.” It is soon revealed that the true purpose was to demonstrate the power of the new weapons to Russia. Oppenheimer understood that the weapons would be used against civilians, but that did not stop him.
After the war, coming to terms with the power of the weapons he helped create, Oppenheimer made a turn and opposed development of the even more powerful thermonuclear bomb (also known as the hydrogen bomb). But this was the Cold War—the U.S. military wanted those weapons.
Opponents within the government engineered a hearing on Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, tried to get him to stand up for himself during the hearing—she did so herself, answering a prosecutor’s questions with the contempt they deserve. Oppenheimer refused to follow suit—he clung to the illusion that if he kept his head down, he would be allowed to hold onto his position in the government.
In spite of all of his “services rendered” in developing the bomb, the hearing board revoked his clearance, using his past associations with the Communist Party as a pretext. Oppenheimer was effectively removed from his position of influence.
The film shows the excitement of cutting-edge science. America’s imperialist government gathered together many of the greatest minds of the day and gave them immense resources to work with. Of course, this feat of science and engineering was put in service of killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese, as a means to intimidate the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Cold War. And with the murderous work done, that state had no problem at all with disgracing the scientist who organized the project. The weapons they created are still in the hands of this government—they still threaten all of humanity with destruction.
Jul 23, 2023
Book: Cold Millions by Jess Walter (2020)
In the winter of 1909—1910 in Spokane, Washington, it was hard to find work with so many unemployed. The few jobs that were to be had were doled out by “job sharks,” who charged you for the privilege and then fired you two weeks later. There was no unemployment pay or any kind of government assistance. Police and/or vigilante gangs routinely beat, harassed and/or arrested the “bums.” The Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies, were active in organizing workers, but the government and companies would allow no one to raise their voice in criticism.
So it was decided to organize a free speech protest: a worker would climb on a soap box and speak out against the rotten practices, get arrested and taken away, but then another worker would step up, speak out, get taken away, and then again, over and over, all over town. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a Wobbly organizer and speaker, the “Rebel Girl,” came to town for the protest and helped to publicize it. The book is an incredible window into the past and shares echoes with events of today.
Video: Matewan (1987) directed by John Sayles, available for viewing on YouTube
Matewan dramatizes the events of the Battle of Matewan, a coal miners’ strike in 1920.
The film is based on the actual events in a fight for a union in the dangerous coal mines of West Virginia. The company, Stone Mountain Coal, totally ruled the community: unsafe working conditions, no just compensation for death and injury, paying workers with company scrip that could only be spent at the company store, company housing. And when workers went on strike for a union, they faced ruthless, murderous thugs hired by the company. The company brought in Black and Italian workers to cross the picket line, and at first it was worker fighting worker. But finally, the old workers overcame their racism, and invited the new workers to join the fight, and they stood together against the thugs. It is a film worth seeing by all.
Jul 23, 2023
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week of July 2, 2023.
Shawn Fain, new president of the UAW, says the auto contract expiration will “see the defining fight of a generation.”
Sean O’Brien, Teamsters president, says that what happens at UPS will “set the tone, set the standard high for labor. Not just for Teamsters, but for the entire labor movement.”
It’s true, these are big companies, playing an important role in the economy. Both UPS and auto have been rolling up stupendous profits. In the last 11 years, UPS reported one hundred billion dollars net profit. The three auto companies, according to Fain, made almost one-quarter of a trillion dollars in ten years’ time. Trillion, not billion. And both Fain and O’Brien say they want to lead a fight.
They both say that the companies could afford to give something back to their workers.
Afford it? Sure they could. But the issue is not how much profit they make, it’s what this capitalist system requires them to do with the profit.
If it were just a question of money, UPS and the auto companies could well afford to bring every worker up to a decent wage, without anyone having to work overtime. They could get rid of all two-tier arrangements. They could guarantee jobs. All that and a lot more. And other companies would follow.
But none of them will do it just because they could! The goal of every company—in auto, trucking, warehousing, and every other productive industry in the country—is to make as much money as it can, more money this year than the year before.
The auto companies claim they need the money to invest in “electrification.” UPS claims it needs money to prepare for the next economic downturn.
It’s true, the companies need money—but to satisfy their “investors.” Last year for example, out of UPS’s 13 billion dollars in net profit, 9.6 billion went to its so-called “investors.”
Don’t think that this fancy word, “investor,” means your Grandma sitting at home, waiting for her small quarterly dividend check. Over 90% of all stock is owned by big Wall Street banks, the massive “private equity companies,” big insurance companies. That’s who the “investors” are.
So when Teamsters go up against UPS in a bid to transform part-time workers to full-time workers, they are going up against not only UPS, but against the big financial interests standing behind UPS.
When auto workers go up against Ford, GM and Stellantis to get rid of two-tier, it’s the same. Every company, in fact, is trying to roll up immense profits in order to pass most of it on to big finance, which pulls the strings of all the companies.
And, right behind big finance, is the government. Don’t forget what Biden and Congress did when railroad workers set a strike date in a bid to get more help on the railroads, trying to get rid of forced heavy overtime. The politicians passed a law making the railroad strike illegal.
Behind every company is the rest of the capitalist class—and its government.
These new union leaders say they want to lead a fight. And maybe they do.
But that’s not enough. Every worker has to have the perspective that when you go to fight, you don’t go alone. Companies you fight don’t go alone.
There is no reason to fight alone. It’s not one auto company, there are three big ones. And there are many more auto workers than that: 990,600 in the whole auto industry. The same thing is true in trucking: millions of workers. And there are all the other industries.
Fain says this can be the “defining fight of a generation.” It could be—if this whole generation of the working class is involved in it. Of course, it’s not enough to just call on everyone to come out and see millions rush out to join in the fight.
But someone who wants this struggle to turn into a real fight would aim at bringing out workers from other companies and industries.
That is the opposite of what the unions have done for years. But what the unions have been doing isn’t working. Time for workers to break the unions’ tired old habits!
Jul 23, 2023
Actors in the Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG—AFTRA) are on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and TV Producers (AMPTP). The strikers join the 11,500 Writers Guild of America (WGA) workers who have been on strike since May 2. Altogether the strikers number 76,500, against the combined entertainment giants of Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Warner Bros., Apple, Amazon, and Discovery.
These skilled workers need some guarantees of a living wage after years of being cheated and bulldozed out of the compensation they deserve for their work. The big entertainment producers change production practices and video-streaming systems in ways that cut out jobs, and block writers and actors from being paid for repeated use of their work.
A corporate executive was recorded saying that his strategy was to let the writers and actors “bleed out.” The workers say that on their low pay, they are already forced to have extra jobs to live on, so they know how to survive.
Meanwhile, the companies have to hope that advertisers keep buying time on old stale re-runs. The companies won’t get their next billion-dollar blockbusters written, and they won’t have star actors to promote their products.
Jul 23, 2023
This month marks the 10-year anniversary of Detroit’s filing for bankruptcy. Politicians and the media have lots to say about how much “progress” the city has made since the supposed “Grand Bargain” was made to settle the bankruptcy.
They point to indications like working street lights, a reduction in property crime, and increased high school graduation rates. But these glowing reports fade when you consider that while 71% of Detroit high-school students now graduate, for the state of Michigan as a whole, the number is about 80%. And fewer students from Detroit go on to graduate from college than those across the state. Or that 30% of the population makes less than $27,740 per year.
In the meantime, the population of the city continues to decrease. Mortgage lenders foreclosed on 65,000 homes following the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and the city foreclosed on another 73,000 homes between 2009 and 2015.
The report gets dimmer still when you look at who paid the price for the “Grand Bargain.” To ensure the banks could continue their plunder, state and city officials imposed cuts to city workers’ retirement benefits. City workers in the General Retirement System had their pensions cut by 4.5% in the deal. More importantly, they lost a 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), which over 10 years’ time means a 25% reduction that might have allowed them to partly keep pace with inflation.
Police and firefighters who had already retired did not suffer losses to their pensions, but they did not pay into Social Security, so their retirement income is based solely on their pensions. Both they and general workers had their retiree health care taken away. Workers were given a small stipend which paid for only a small part of the costs of their health care coverage, until they became eligible for Medicare. And future police and fire retirees will receive a considerably lower pension compared with their pay while they were actively working. To pay for retiree health care, many city retirees have had to return to work.
And while the city forced this rotten deal on city workers, it has found billions of dollars in corporate handouts for real-estate billionaires like Dan Gilbert and the Ilitch family. In short, the great “progress” being pushed by the politicians and corporate media is not being felt by most long-term residents of the city of Detroit, many of whom remain victims of financial wheeling and dealing simply designed to put more money into the pockets of the very wealthy.
Jul 23, 2023
Madera Community Hospital, the only general hospital in Madera County in central California, closed its doors at the beginning of the year.
Madera Community Hospital was absolutely vital for taking care of the health care needs of the 160,000 people who live there. In the first nine months of 2022 alone, the hospital recorded 23,783 emergency room visits.
The hospital was also an important lifeline for the county’s low-income residents in other ways. Most of the county’s public health programs were linked to the hospital. For example, Madera Community signed up patients for Medi-Cal (California’s version of Medicaid, the federal health insurance for the poor), and coordinated services with community clinics.
Now, with the closure of Madera Community, to get those services, people will have to drive long distances, sometimes hours.
A big part of the workforce in Madera County is very poor. But those workers produce enormous wealth. Madera County is part of California’s San Joaquin Valley, which is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, generating sales of 35 billion dollars. It is also a major producer of oil and natural gas.
But agriculture and oil wells also produce high levels of particulate pollution—a source of respiratory illness, heart disease and cancer. The rate of asthma among children in the San Joaquin Valley, for example, is twice as high as the U.S. average. And yet, the workers, whose labor produces all that wealth, not only live in poverty and get poisoned, but they won’t even have hospitals to go to when they get sick!
This problem is common for hospitals in low-income, rural areas. Across the U.S., more than 170 rural hospitals closed their doors between 2005 and 2020. The number of closures went down to 10 during the next two years, mainly thanks to the federal financial assistance during the Covid-19 pandemic. But, now that the Covid aid is over, more closures are likely. A recent study by the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform found that more than 600 rural hospitals—about 30% of all rural hospitals in the U.S.—are at risk of closing.
Under capitalism, profit comes before everything else, including human life and well-being. And it’s the working class and poor who pay the price.