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
Sep 4, 2023
The United Auto Workers (UAW) union contract with GM, Ford and Stellantis expires on September 15. The demands the union put on the table—40% raises, eliminating tiers, restoring Cost of Living Allowance (COLA), restoring pensions and retiree health care—has excited a lot of workers. But getting these demands is not the same as what you really need.
The auto bosses have decades of experience in increasing their profits by taking from auto workers. Yes, the money pieces on the table are the flash and dazzle. But the real prize for the bosses comes in everyday production and in the everyday exploitation of the workers.
What has made the auto bosses rich, what has stoked their superprofits, has been their ability to get more work out of every worker for the cheapest wage possible and to get rid of the rest.
For decades, the UAW has made the biggest concession by accepting to work under excessive speedup of assembly plant workers. This alone has eliminated many thousands of jobs. As well, the auto companies have eliminated hundreds of thousands more jobs through the spinoffs of parts plants, plant closures and outsourcing. Today hundreds of thousands of auto workers produce the vehicle parts at low-paid, mostly non-union workplaces.
There is no proposal on the table to reintegrate all these workers back into the auto contract.
Auto workers’ attention is being directed toward the money that may be added to wages and benefits. And there is attention to equal pay for equal work, meaning getting rid of tiers.
Will the bosses pay for the demands set out by UAW President Fain and his team? In fact, they could well deliver on most of these demands just by rearranging the distribution of the pot of money the companies use to pay wages and benefits.
By the end of this current contract, a vast majority of auto workers will already be at top pay. The auto companies have the money to grant COLA, put all workers in first tier, and get rid of the temp system that workers hate. They could do that by moving around the money they currently pay auto workers. For example, the companies could negotiate a different formula for profit-sharing and reduce the various bonuses they currently pay and use that money for raises and COLA. By doing that, the bosses would be addressing the major issues that Fain has put on the table. They could also negotiate a longer contract, spread out the money over a longer contract, rather than a 4-year contract, which means any raises are less than they seem.
Maybe bigger wage increases and COLA will satisfy more auto workers. But a higher pay rate only helps for as long as you have a job. And it doesn’t guarantee a comfortable life.
The three auto companies and the Wall Street firms who own them have been busy formulating plans for the redesign of the auto industry in the future. This redesign includes a strategy of producing fewer vehicles, to phase out production of ordinary, everyday vehicles in favor of larger, high cost vehicles. They have told us already that this requires fewer workers.
And what about electric vehicle production? They already told us that the transition to electric will eliminate jobs in engine and transmission plants. And while the bosses are holding out the promise that there will be jobs in battery plants and that these jobs may even be union jobs, these jobs are not the same, or in the same location. These jobs currently are much lower paid with no way for any laid off auto workers to move into them.
But what about the overloaded jobs and the killing speedup? What about the terrible work schedules? What about the reduced break time? The working conditions in the auto plants are horrible.
To protect ourselves, to protect our jobs, is going to take a real fight. While some monetary gains may be made at a bargaining table, the real fight is a fight in the street. Workers have a choice in how far a fight can go, and how large and how militant it is.
If auto workers decide to take on the bosses, we need many more forces. It matters that we see that we are truly only the end of the car production line. It matters that we draw into the fight other workers, those who produce pieces and parts of vehicles—and the materials that go into the vehicle, like steel and aluminum.
Quite simply, UAW auto workers, by themselves, in our reduced numbers, don’t have the power we need to pull ourselves up out of the hole we have been put in.
The current UAW auto workers, plus all the parts plant workers, plus all the auto workers at the non-union transplant companies, could fight side-by-side and pull even more behind them. Auto workers have the numbers and the history of militancy that can start a fight and lead others to join them. With Wall Street plotting and scheming to take us on, we need the power of the working class united.
Sep 4, 2023
Abonesh Woldegeorges, a 73-year-old, was arrested for trespassing at Reagan National Airport. She was taken to the Arlington County Detention Center and held there for two weeks until she collapsed and finally died.
Her crime? She was mentally ill and homeless. She had nowhere to go. The airport may have seemed like a nice place to hang out with air conditioning and clean bathrooms.
Two weeks is a long time to be held for such a minor offense, especially when taking Woldegeorges’ mental illness and age into account. Homeless people have nowhere to go. Almost anywhere they go, they are trespassing. Arresting and detaining her, the police made it a crime to be homeless. Jails have become substitutes for shelters and hospitals.
Homelessness is a crime. But not of the person who is homeless. It is one of the many crimes of this rotten-to-the-core, capitalist society.
Sep 4, 2023
The news has been full of images of Trump being booked into Fulton County Jail.
What a bunch of bull. Trump will never spend a day there.
What barely got a mention from reporters was the jail itself. An outrage and an abomination that is a decrepit, rambling, rotting facility with a capacity of 1,125 while currently housing 3,000 real live human beings. A hell-hole where four prisoners died in one month and a fifth person died on July 31: Dayron Blake, 23; Samuel Lawrence, 34; Alexander Hawkins, 66; Christopher Smith, 34; Montay Stinson, 40, were found “unresponsive.” This word covers uninvestigated death by neglect or by guard brutality.
Forty-five percent of those held in Fulton County Jail have not been convicted. They are being held for months. Why? Because they are black, poor, working class, got caught up in the system, and can’t afford bail.
Is it enough for the Democrats to investigate, to promise to check into it, when Biden runs the damn Justice Department? They could process and relocate all these prisoners today and tear down this place! But they want to focus on Trump!
There are true criminals involved in this story and Trump is undoubtedly one, but those who run the so-called corrections facilities for the Democrats, the Republicans and the ruling class are the real criminals. Not those held prisoners at the Fulton County Jail.
Sep 4, 2023
On August 27, 1960, about 100 young people from the NAACP Youth Council planned a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter in downtown Jacksonville, Florida.
This sit-in followed several others that August at downtown businesses like Woolworth’s, led by the council president, 16-year-old Rodney Hurst. The young people chose a non-violent, passive resistance approach to their sit-ins. They had already been met with racial taunts and slurs from white people threatening them; they had pins and sharp objects stuck in their arms, had endured kicks to other body parts. Fortunately, they had black supporters who did not agree with non-violence, like a young man later quoted as saying, "If a cracker hits me, I’m going to try and kill him."
From the Youth Council there was Isaac Carnes, an 18-year-old student from Tuskegee Institute, who would later say, “We were stupidly unafraid." The vice president of the Youth Council, Alton Yates, recalled about that Saturday at the end of August, "Men started beating us as we tried to get seated [at a Woolworth’s]."
The Boomerangs, as the young men from the projects nearby were called, were young men not armed, not known to sell drugs, but they were known to fight. Some called them a gang. The Boomerangs had already escorted someone supporting one of these sit-ins out of danger and faced off another white crowd.
On that final Saturday in August, the plan was for a non-violent protest by sitting in at another lunch counter. The young people did not know that a group of white men from the KKK, although not wearing sheets, were preparing to attack them. The local sheriff’s office and police department for Jacksonville had been “given” a report by the FBI. The FBI clearly supported the Klan action and the police inaction, although the white informant said he did not. This white mob armed themselves with clubs and ax handles, bought from a local Sears. The police were nowhere to be found when the mob began threatening and then beating the young people from the NAACP.
Hurst himself only escaped a severe beating by running in another direction, being picked up by a black woman who drove him to safety, and later identified herself as a member of the NAACP.
Black youngsters and oldsters, even women with children, were threatened by the ax-handle and club-wielding white cowards. Again, some young men associated with the Boomerangs showed up at the battle and backed off some of the white attackers. When the police finally showed up, they didn’t stop the whites. Instead, they arrested black people in the area.
Young Carnes swore he’d never return to Jacksonville, because what was later called Ax Handle Saturday "exposed racism like it should have been exposed a long time ago."
Sep 4, 2023
On Saturday, August 26, Ryan Christopher Palmeter, a 21-year-old white man, shot and killed three people, all black, at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida. Palmeter had earlier scoped out nearby Edward Waters University, an historically black college.
When cops arrived at the site of the shootings, Palmeter apparently shot himself to death. He was carrying an AR-15 decorated with swastikas. He left behind what authorities described as several manifestoes. The manifestoes have not been made public, but Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said they "detailed the shooter’s disgusting ideology of hate" toward black people and that he wanted to kill them.
Coincidentally or not, the shooting came on the same weekend as the 63rd anniversary of the ax handle beatings of lunch counter protesters in the very same city of Jacksonville in 1960, and the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington in 1963.
This is hardly the first time a mass shooter carried out a racist attack in this country. One need only think back to the mass shootings at a Tops Market in Buffalo just over 15 months before, which killed 10 black people and injured three others, and the 2015 one at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, resulting in the deaths of nine black parishioners. Both shootings were carried out by young, white men who openly supported white supremacist ideologies.
The racism behind these shootings and others is of course nothing new. It’s part and parcel of the history of this country. But they are also not disconnected from a clear increase in the voicing of hateful ideologies, which also have been encouraged by the not very well hidden machinations of far-right politicians, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis, who has conducted a systematic effort to prevent any teaching of the history of racism in Florida schools, actually had the nerve to show up at a vigil held for the Jacksonville victims. One person there rightfully shouted, "Your policies caused this!" and after DeSantis made some short hypocritical comments, he was roundly booed off the stage.
The Jacksonville shooting also reflects the problem of mental illness in this society, as the killer had previously been detained and held for a mental examination in 2017 at the age of 15 and was involved in a domestic incident the previous year. A neighbor suggested he may have gone off medication shortly before the shooting. He was clearly suicidal when he chose to carry out this hateful act.
Putting a stop to these kinds of acts means getting rid of a system that encourages them. The working class has the power to do so, but will have to stand up against racism and all other means the wealthy ruling class and its politicians use to divide us.
Sep 4, 2023
On July 31st, 200 workers struck at Loretto Hospital, a small hospital in the Austin neighborhood, serving Chicago’s West Side. The workers, about one third of the total staff of the hospital, are members of SEIU Healthcare.
Loretto workers demanded better pay: a starting wage of $17 an hour for housekeepers and $19 for certified nursing assistants. Striking workers say the low pay contributes strongly to high turnover and is a big reason that the hospital is severely understaffed, with some departments running 35% short of the people they need to function.
Loretto workers, particularly those in its emergency room, often face violence—which comes with serving an area of the city wracked by very high poverty and drug addiction. One emergency room worker on the picket line had a scar on his arm from where a patient had bitten him two years ago.
Earlier this year, a patient died in the hospital’s ER waiting room, according to an inspection by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That night, there was only one nurse, staffing both the waiting room and the triage room. These striking workers rightly point out the human costs of this severe understaffing, both to themselves and their patients.
Workers at other hospitals face the same problems. Saint Bernard’s, in Englewood on Chicago’s South Side, settled a contract a couple days after the Loretto strike began. Roseland hospital on the Far South Side is still in negotiations. Saint Bernard’s, Roseland and Loretto are all so-called “safety net” hospitals, serving the poor and the working class, and getting most of their funding from Medicaid and Medicare. But the same problems exist even at hospitals that are larger and serve wealthier patients, including Northwestern.
Loretto workers ended their strike August 11th, winning some of their pay demands. The fundamental problem is that capitalist society treats healthcare as an engine for generating profit. This means that working class communities with less money to spend will have healthcare institutions that are understaffed and starved for funding. The conditions Loretto workers fought exist across the healthcare system. We will most likely see many more fights like theirs.
Sep 4, 2023
The Skid Row Housing Trust, a non-profit organization that ran more than 2,000 single-room-occupancy rental units for low-income residents in Los Angeles, has collapsed.
The Trust’s finances had been spiraling down for years. Already in 2018, the Trust had a budget deficit of more than 17 million dollars, and it was being sued by unpaid staff.
When an L.A. Superior Court judge finally put the 29 buildings owned by the Trust under receivership in April, more than half of the Trust’s units were empty, most of them due to code violations that had not been fixed. According to a class-action lawsuit filed by 67 tenants in two buildings last year, unfixed problems included pest infestations, damaged flooring, broken windows and doors, sewage odor, water damage, mold, and electrical problems. Tenants in other buildings have also reported broken elevators causing disabled tenants to be trapped in their rooms, as well as lax security and non-functioning alarm systems, which encourage crime.
The court-appointed receiver, a lawyer called Mark Adams, was supposed to secure bank loans to get the problems fixed, and then sell the buildings to new owners. But two months into receivership, nothing had been fixed, and Adams resigned under pressure from the city council that had initially recommended him.
So today, as months go by, the ordeal of the Trust’s tenants, many of whom are elderly and disabled, continues, without any relief in sight.
When the Skid Row Housing Trust was launched in 1989, its founders and local politicians touted it as a solution to L.A.’s chronic homelessness problem. But in reality, the funding scheme for the Trust, known as “tax credit financing,” had doomed it to failure from the beginning.
Tax credit financing is a complicated scheme, based on a 1986 federal program called Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Every year, the federal government dishes out nine billion dollars in tax credits to big corporations—supposedly to provide an incentive for corporations to fund housing for low-income people. But in reality, this program provides little affordable housing. And companies often pull out their investment after 10 years, when the tax credits expire. This eventually leaves operators like the Skid Row Housing Trust without enough funding to maintain their buildings.
In other words, under the pretext of helping low-income people, the LIHTC program is nothing but another scheme to offer big tax breaks to banks and other corporations.
No, in this profit-driven, capitalist economy, capitalists have no interest in providing housing for low-income people—which has created a permanent crisis of housing and homelessness for the working class. And for the politicians who run the government, this deep social crisis is just another excuse to hand out huge amounts of taxpayer money to big companies.
Sep 4, 2023
The August 8 fire that killed more than 110 people and wiped Lahaina, a town of 13,000 people, off the map was a disaster two centuries in the making.
Lahaina burned down so quickly because the area of western Maui surrounding the town was a tinderbox—covered with dry grass ready to explode once a fire started. That’s the exact opposite of how early European and American explorers described Lahaina and its surroundings in the 18th century: an area covered with abundant streams and lush wetlands.
But like many other parts of the world, big capitalists followed those explorers to Maui—in particular U.S.-based capitalists. By the middle of the 19th century, big agricultural companies had set up large plantations in western Maui, growing just two crops—sugar cane and pineapple—in very large quantities. These crops are real water-guzzlers—one pound of sugar, for example, uses up 2,000 pounds of water to grow. So, these big plantations quickly began to deplete Maui’s streams.
Having taken over much of the island’s land and water, the big plantation owners imposed their political order on Maui, as well as the other Hawaiian Islands, with the backing of the U.S. government and military. In 1893, plantation owners staged the overthrow of Hawaii’s government—for which, in fact, U.S. Congress issued a formal apology in 1993. When the U.S. annexed Hawaii in 1898, the first governor of the new U.S. territory was Sanford Dole, a member of the family that owned Dole Plantation!
After drying up Maui for nearly two centuries, the plantation owners left the island. They sold the land to real estate speculators, who started luxury resorts and other touristic facilities on the island. Today, 16 of the top 20 water users on Maui are such facilities, whereas the real estate companies have left vast amounts of land unused, covered with grass.
Under these circumstances, it was only a question of time for the ongoing drought to further dry out the grass, for hot weather to ignite it, and for high winds to spread the fire quickly—leading to the complete, deadly destruction of Lahaina.
Such weather events—the drought, high temperatures and tropical storms—are made more extreme by global warming which, in turn, is also a result of the capitalist system.
Yes, global warming is caused by human activity. But this description is also misleading. Relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels for energy, which drives global warming, never was a choice made by all human beings—it was a decision made by a very small number of big capitalists, behind closed doors, and only because it was highly profitable for them.
Another extreme weather event, another human catastrophe: brought to you by capitalism, every step of the way.
Sep 4, 2023
Suzanne Kisting-Leung’s doctor recommended an ultrasound because of ovarian cancer risk, but within seconds her claim for insurance coverage was rejected by CIGNA without even opening her medical records or considering her doctor’s diagnosis.
Suzanne is one of hundreds of thousands of CIGNA health insurance policy holders who fell victim to the company’s new digital claims system called PXDX. This new process systematically rejects claims in a matter of seconds without even considering the opinions of medical experts familiar with the details of patient cases.
PXDX uses an advanced software algorithm to speed up its process to deny coverage. Instead of investigating each claim individually, the algorithm reviews them in batches and broad categories. It flags discrepancies between a diagnosis and CIGNA’s corporate “standards” for “acceptable tests and procedures” for various illnesses. Those claims flagged by the algorithm are automatically denied.
During two months in 2022, CIGNA denied more than 300,000 claims, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each claim—all without a single review of patient medical records.
Of course, this process automation is all about jacking up CIGNA’s bottom line. The more often and more quickly claims are rejected, the faster the patient premium payments are logged in company ledgers as revenue.
Other insurance companies are doing the same. Google has released new advanced tools for health care claims that use AI to organize data and “expedite” decision making. Their AI tool is already in use at Blue Shield of California and Bupa, the British health insurance giant.
Under capitalism, the greatest achievements of science and technology will always first serve the tiny minority of multi-billionaires in their mad chase after profits. And the working class will always pay the price—at least until their self-organization and militancy can successfully turn the tables.
Sep 4, 2023
For over a year, the Republican government of Texas has been busing tens of thousands of migrants to Democrat-controlled “sanctuary cities” all over the country. About 13,000 of these migrants have arrived in Chicago in the last year. Almost 2,000 are still sleeping on the floors of the city’s police stations and airports, with others overcrowding the city’s woefully inadequate shelter system.
According to current law, asylum seekers like these have to wait at least six months before they can legally work. And it’s harder for them to work under the table than previous generations of immigrants because they are so tracked. As a result, many spend their days hanging out in front of police stations, relying on donations of food and clothing to survive.
Faced with this crisis, at the end of August, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and other high ranking Illinois Democrats held a press conference to ask the Biden administration to fast-track approval for work permits for recent migrants who have applied for asylum. They made their case while standing next to restaurant, hotel, and construction business owners who claim to be facing a labor shortage. In fact, this plan to fast-track work permits was written by the American Business Immigration Coalition, a club of business owners who want to profit from immigrant labor.
It’s true, there are not enough workers on many jobs. But the companies could get enough workers tomorrow if they paid enough. The companies’ interest is to get these migrants’ work permits—but keep them under the legal gun, so they can be superexploited, willing to work on a roof in the sun, or in a boiling kitchen, for little more than minimum wage.
Neither these companies nor the Democrats who serve them have made any proposals to make these migrants citizens with the same rights as everyone else. Instead, they want to give them a pathway, a limited permit, with all kinds of conditions.
That’s democracy in this capitalist country: dividing people into legal “tiers,” with some given full citizenship, and others—including the 500,000 or so undocumented people already in the Chicago area, along with the tens of thousands of people convicted of a felony—given a lower “tier” of rights.
As anyone who works in a workplace divided into tiers knows, creating a lower tier hurts those on the higher tier as well.
The only way to stop these migrants from being used against the rest of the working class is to demand that everyone here has the same rights as everyone else.
Sep 4, 2023
The U.S. Border Patrol has been keeping men, women, and children in an outside pen in Arizona for more than a year.
According to photographs obtained by The Intercept, dozens were kept in this pen at the Ajo Border Patrol Station in the cold last winter, when temperatures dipped below freezing.
This July, dozens more have been kept outside when the temperature hit 114 degrees. They barely even have shade—unlike the border patrol vehicles parked nearby.
This heat is deadly. Just during the month of July in Pima County, where this station is located, the Border Patrol found the bodies of 44 people who they assume were trying to cross the border.
In June, an eight-year-old girl, Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez, died in Border Patrol custody. How many more will die seeking refuge from unlivable conditions created by U.S. big business?
Sep 4, 2023
This article is translated from the August 25 issue #2873 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Human Rights Watch recently denounced the massacres by Saudi Arabian border patrols of hundreds of migrants trying to reach Saudi Arabia, mostly from Ethiopia.
Dozens of testimonies by survivors establish that between March 2022 and June 2023, several groups totaling 450 women, men, and children were killed, machine-gunned, or targeted by mortar fire on the mountainous border trails between Saudi Arabia and the northern border of neighboring Yemen.
Testimonies and videos describe scenes of horror: Some people cannot be identified because their body parts were scattered. Some people were torn in two. Some reported that Saudi border guards came down from their lookout posts and beat survivors. Along with beatings and humiliations, they also reported rapes.
Among the half of Ethiopia’s 123 million inhabitants who live below the poverty line, many try to cross into Saudi Arabia, where 750,000 of their compatriots already work. The grueling journey to this country involves a short but dangerous crossing of the Red Sea from Djibouti to Yemen and the Saudi border. But upon arrival in Saudi Arabia, in addition to despicable working and living conditions, the migrants face being hunted and imprisoned. Thirty thousand of them are already detained for lack of legal papers, according to Amnesty International.
Like politicians in other countries and continents, Saudi leaders claim they want to control the “migration flow.” The poorest people among the 37% of non-Saudis whose labor maintains the wealth of the ruling family are easy targets.
These testimonies about the atrocity of the situation can only arouse indignation. But this by no means absolves Western governments. They too treat desperate human beings trying to cross borders in order to survive as if they were intruders without rights. They too push them away with contempt for their lives. The leaders of the European Union, who pretend to be civilized, are equally culpable. They have cold-bloodedly decided both to erect ever tighter borders and to reduce search and rescue activities at sea. European leaders chose to block the land border between Turkey and Greece, using subsidies as threats. They chose to subsidize migrant concentration camps in Libya. They choose to negotiate with the president of Tunisia, who chases sub-Saharan refugees to death in the desert. They choose to criminalize the acts of humanitarian organizations helping migrants.
A columnist for Human Rights Watch put it plainly: “The politics of European Union leaders and member states can be summed up in three words: ‘Let them die.’”
Sep 4, 2023
This article is translated from the August 25 issue #2873 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Stellantis decided to invest $100 million in the U.S. to mine lithium, which is critical for electric car batteries. Stellantis was formerly Chrysler, Fiat, and other automakers.
The company claims its process will pollute less than other ways of getting lithium. But the company’s enthusiasm isn’t for the environment. Auto companies are not the best institutions to speak about saving the environment!
No, the reason is much more “capitalist.” The U.S. government has implemented many protectionist tariffs and incentive policies under the Inflation Reduction Act. To benefit from the gifts the government offers to companies which stay on American soil, manufacturers must prove that their resources were extracted in America and that their batteries are manufactured there. Stellantis expects its new investment to be profitable and to let it keep one foot in the U.S. market.
Overall, the growth of the electric car is happening without any real plan for the necessary raw materials, the production of charging stations, and the disposal and storage of used batteries. This is the anarchy of capitalism in all its glory. In this context, Stellantis hopes to guarantee its future profits by locking in its lithium supply.
So, with profit in mind, Stellantis aims to drastically attack working conditions in its vehicle factories and future battery manufacturing plants. Management wants to impose low wages, less leave time, worse medical coverage, and to use more temporary workers. Once more the company is rolling out an environmentalist justification to try to mask these attacks. Under the pretext that switching to electric vehicles is expensive, management tells workers to tighten their belts. But this year again the corporation anticipates reaping huge profits. In the first half of 2023, the company made 10.9 billion dollars in net profit, 37% more than in the first half of 2022.
American workers are right not to accept these attacks. The bosses’ money—generated by workers in all its factories—should be used for jobs and wages.
Sep 4, 2023
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owns the non-operating Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in northeastern Japan, has announced that, beginning on August 24, it is discharging millions of tons of radioactive wastewater from this nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean.
Twelve years ago, in March 2011, a powerful tsunami caused by the Tohoku earthquake heavily damaged three of the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima. When the cooling system in the reactors was disabled, these reactors’ nuclear cores, made of processed uranium fuel rods, melted. To cool down the molten fuel and prevent it from exploding, TEPCO began to pump ocean water into the reactors.
The water used to cool down the nuclear cores makes direct contact with molten fuel, fuel debris and other radioactive substances and becomes contaminated with 62 highly radioactive chemicals. TEPCO claims that the filtering system it built removes most of these radioactive chemicals. But the company has not really demonstrated how effective its filtering system is.
In fact, TEPCO admits that it cannot filter out at least two of the radioactive chemicals, tritium and carbon-14. TEPCO claims that, since these substances are in diluted form, it would be safe to dump them into the ocean. But in reality, nobody knows how much these radioactive chemicals, especially tritium, that’s particularly harmful, would affect the environment worldwide—or even how much tritium will end up in the ocean. The company says it will discharge the wastewater over the next 40 years. But since TEPCO continues to pump ocean water into the reactors, it will also continue to dump the wastewater into the ocean indefinitely—unless another solution for cooling is found in the future.
TEPCO, one of the world’s largest privately-owned utility companies, has a long record of unreliability. Back in 2002, for example, the CEO and four other top executives of TEPCO resigned after it was revealed that the company had falsified the maintenance documents of 29 nuclear power plants, including those of Fukushima. In fact, the 2011 nuclear meltdown at Fukushima would have been avoided if TEPCO had taken some very basic safety measures. For example, pointing to a similar earthquake and tsunami that had hit the northeastern coast of Japan about 1,100 years ago, experts had warned TEPCO several times that Fukushima’s wall to block waves from the ocean was not tall enough. TEPCO ignored all of these warnings.
Given TEPCO’s record of neglecting safety and getting away with it, we have no reason to believe this company’s claims today that the radioactive water it is dumping into the ocean is safe. But it’s not just TEPCO, of course. In fact, nuclear power plants all over the world are known to discharge radioactive tritium into rivers and oceans, along with other radioactive waste.
Even when it comes to highly radioactive, poisonous waste, capitalists have always chosen the cheapest way to deal with it—dumping it into the environment—in the name of profit. The capitalist drive for profit has made the world totally unsafe for all of us.
Sep 4, 2023
The following is a speech given by Gary Walkowicz in August at the SPARK summer festival.
I want to start by talking about this ongoing war in Ukraine. In recent days, the media and the Biden administration have been admitting what has been obvious for a while, that the counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops has not gone very well and the Russian forces and Ukrainian forces are in a kind of a stalemate.
This war has now gone on for over a year and a half. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side have been wounded and maimed. Tens of thousands have been killed. Civilians of both countries have been killed. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes and much of the infrastructure in Ukraine has been destroyed. Now we are seeing attacks by Ukraine against Russian civilians. This war has been a human catastrophe. And for what purpose? Why did this war even happen?
Ukraine felt that it had no choice but to defend itself when Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine. Russia felt that it had no choice when, year after year, the U.S. and NATO were stationing troops and setting up military bases right on the very border of Russia, threatening Russia.
But standing behind the scenes, orchestrating everything, was the government of the United States. On the one hand, the U.S. has been training and supplying and helping build up the Ukrainian military forces for years. On the other hand, the U.S. government has been directing the expansion of NATO forces to surround and threaten Russia. Since the war started, the U.S. has kept sending more and more weapons to Ukraine. This allowed the Ukrainians to hold off the Russian forces and keep the war going. The U.S. has also largely been directing the Ukrainian forces. They do battlefield planning with the Ukrainian generals and provide them with intelligence from the U.S. spying apparatus. In very real ways, this war in Ukraine has been a U.S. war waged against Russia, with the Ukrainians being the proxies, the pawns in this war; the Ukrainians are the ones doing the dying.
And what has been accomplished in this war? It has meant only death and destruction for the people of Ukraine and Russia, two peoples who have lived intermingled for decades. But for those people running things in the U.S., the war has accomplished a lot. The U.S. government has used this war to weaken Russia, which seems like it might have been the goal of the U.S. government all along. Meanwhile, U.S. military contractors who are producing the weapons have gotten much richer and more profitable by supplying the war. The U.S. has also been able to use Ukraine as a testing ground to see how all those weapons would work in a future war.
But more than that, the U.S. has been using this war as a cover to increase and build up its own military forces and weaponry. The money spent on the U.S. military budget was already more than the next 9 countries in the world spend, COMBINED. But now the U.S. military budget is growing even bigger. The U.S. government is using the war in Ukraine to prepare for a bigger war.
And it’s not just the U.S. government that is preparing for war. The NATO countries have also been increasing their military budgets. Other countries outside NATO, like Japan and South Korea and Australia, are doing the same thing. The major countries of the world, led by the U.S., are preparing for the next war, a bigger war.
Maybe the U.S. government will use the fact that Ukraine can’t push back the Russian forces as an excuse to send in U.S. troops, and that bigger war will start soon.
Maybe the war in Ukraine will have a ceasefire and there will be a negotiated settlement, for the time being. But even if that happens, it would not change the fact that this military buildup is going on; it would not change the fact that the capitalist world is moving toward a bigger war.
Capitalism is going down a road that the world has seen before. Since the early 1900s, the capitalists of the major economic powers of the world have been butting heads against each other. The capitalists of each country are competing for profits against the capitalists of the other major powers. This competition between capitalists is intensified when their economic system goes through another crisis. The capitalists of each country see that their only way out of these crises is to take from the other capitalist states. They want to take from each other—take access to more natural resources, take access to more markets to sell their products; take access to exploit the labor of more workers and farmers, all in the name of making more profits.
This competition between the major capitalist states was exactly what led to World War One. Tens of millions of people died in that war.
And just over 20 years later, it happened again. The capitalist system was facing another economic crisis, the great worldwide depression of the 1930s. Once again, the capitalist national states began to build up their military forces before the war even started because they were preparing for another world war. World War Two was the capitalists’ way of getting out of their economic crisis.
World War Two was even more destructive than World War One. It is estimated that as many as 85 million people, soldiers and civilians, died in World War Two. Three percent of the entire world’s population died. Much of Europe, Russia and Japan was destroyed, but the American ruling class profited from the war as the U.S. came out of it as the world’s dominant economic and military power.
Today the ruling class of this country and the capitalist rulers of the world are preparing for another big war, a global war. When there is a war, the U.S. will likely be in the middle of it, and they will not let the other capitalist countries stand on the sideline. That’s what they are building all these weapons for.
And there is also another clear indication today that the capitalists are moving toward war. Because they are preparing the population here to accept it.
How are they preparing us? Every day on the news, day in and day out, we are being told something about China being a threat to the U.S. You hear it, don’t you? Now the U.S. has soldiers and bases and warships and planes stationed all around China, right up to China’s border. China does not have any troops or any bases or any weapons in Mexico or in Canada or off the Pacific Coast, but somehow, they want us to believe that China is a threat to the people of the U.S. We are told similar things about Russia.
Why do they want us to believe that China and Russia are a threat, why do they prepare us for a possible war against one or the other or both countries? Well, China and Russia are two large countries with many natural resources and large working classes. But the American capitalists have only limited opportunities to exploit those two countries, because the governments of China and Russia control much of their economies and these governments limit access for capitalists from other countries to get in and make profits. China and Russia also stand as an alternative pole of attraction for poorer countries who want to take some distance from U.S. imperialism. Are the American capitalists preparing us for a war against China and/or Russia so they can get in there and make bigger profits? Certainly, this is a very real possibility.
Now maybe the sides in a coming world war will line up differently than that. Before World War Two started, it was thought that the U.S. was going to go to war against England; that was before they lined up together against Germany.
We don’t yet know how the countries will line up, who will be allies with who, and against who. But the history of capitalism tells us that another world war is coming. It might be this year, it might be 5 or 10 years from now, but war is coming.
And this war will be a war waged against us, against the working class in every country. The working class will be ones expected to fight and die and kill workers from other countries. The working class will be the ones expected to sacrifice for the capitalists’ war production.
But we do not have to accept this future. While the capitalists and their government are preparing for their war, the working class can prepare, too. We can prepare for our own war. Not a war against the working people of another country. We can prepare for a war against our exploiters. Those rulers who want us to go to war for them, they are the very same people who exploit us here at home every single day. These same bosses take away our jobs and reduce our standard of living; these same bosses take away from health care and take away from schools, they take away our children’s future, so that millionaires can become billionaires.
These bosses, this ruling class, these capitalists, these are our real enemy and our only true enemy. The only war that makes any sense for working people is a war against those people who exploit us.
Sep 4, 2023
Here are some strikes that are currently going on in the U.S. These strikes may remain isolated and separated today. But others could join them. New strikes arise almost every week.
Teachers from the Camas school district near Vancouver, Washington, went on strike on August 28. They were joined by Vancouver teachers in the Evergreen district on August 30. Teachers from both districts are focused on maintaining lower class sizes, redirecting funding for supplemental student programs like music and libraries, and providing better supports for special education.
“Teachers really want the district to focus on the things that will help their students,” said a representative for the Evergreen Education Association. “That’s what they’re most passionate about.” The school administrations prefer to issue press releases about the greedy teachers.
There are 460 strikers in Camas district and 1500 in Evergreen.
On August 30, teachers, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, and other support staff all went on strike and protested outside the central office of Washington Parish’s school district, in Louisiana, 50 miles north of New Orleans.
“This is the first time since I’ve been here 18 years that everybody, every department is represented here,” said one Washington Parish school bus driver. Another driver has worked for the system for nearly 47 years and only received one raise in his career.
A cafeteria worker said, “They give us a step raise every year which is $100 every year. You divide that by twelve, you take out taxes, you wound up with $6.42.”
Youngstown’s 400 teachers went on strike August 23 for a contract they can teach under. The State of Ohio took control of the district years ago and gave the administration total control over teacher assignments. Children’s skills have gotten worse, not better. The union wants teachers’ experience and seniority to be taken into account when decisions are made. “Our working conditions are their learning conditions,” say the strikers’ T-shirts.
Sep 4, 2023
TV Series: The Knick, 2014—2015, now streaming on Max
The Knick tells the story of medical practices in a fictionalized version of the actual Knickerbocker hospital in Harlem at the very beginning of the 20th century. The episodes depict so many issues of the day: ambulance drivers facing physical fights over patients, the fight for safe birth control and pregnancy care and the fight for access to health care for Black, immigrant and poor populations. And the arrogance of doctors and hospital administrators in the midst of this struggle. Looking at this history, you can say in some ways, we’ve come a long way. But in other ways, nothing has changed.
Book: The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos, 1930
This book is the first in his trilogy U.S.A. and tells the story of a number of fictional people from 1900 up to the beginning of WWI. His writing captures America in the violent throes of capitalist expansion. Dos Passos focuses on ordinary people caught in and chewed up by these tumultuous waves. He satirizes the underbelly of the great American dream, where everyone is out for a buck before “the whole thing goes belly up.”
Unemployment, injuries on the job, high costs of housing, racism, sexism, treatment of the elderly, rip-off scams and how to make a quick buck, and finally world war in all its horror are all laid out as everyday life in this modern America. The book has stood the test of time and even today raises issues that are still not yet solved: do we continue to put up with the chaos of predatory capitalism or do we build a society where our labor is used to meet our needs?
Sep 4, 2023
Flash floods rushed onto casino floors in the Las Vegas desert. Wildfires burnt up the tropical isle of Maui. Tornadoes ripped a path running from Oklahoma to Iowa to New Jersey and Delaware. Heat waves in Texas and Colorado brought daily temperatures in the 100s, even as high as 115. Rising oceans crumbled the foundations of houses from Florida to Maine. A wild summer storm turned the Detroit airport into an island, completely surrounded by water.
Different disasters, some more deadly than others, but behind them all is the same reality: average global temperatures are rising, causing weather patterns to become more chaotic and storms more intense.
It may be worse today, but it’s not a new problem. Average temperatures around the globe have been going up for more than a century. The causes for this increase have been known and documented for decades: the pollution that modern industry spews has become a blanket wrapping the earth in its own heat, forcing up temperatures.
Some people say, scale back industry. Some people call for regulation to limit pollution. Some people close their eyes, trying to ignore the problem.
None of these provides an answer. We don’t have to blindly keep suffering. We don’t have to get rid of the advantages that modern industrial production could provide for humanity.
But this must be done: the working class has to transform the way that industry is organized.
The main industries that produce pollution are today owned and controlled by a small number of capitalist groups, most of them located in a very few countries. Those capitalist groups are the ones that decide how industry will be organized. They decide to use the oldest, most polluting forms of energy because they require no new investment. They decide not to invest in systems to alleviate pollution. They decide to ignore regulations.
Regulation? Yes, governments can regulate. They’ve been doing it for decades. But no matter what they did, they never took away the capitalists’ right to decide how to run their industries.
Even when governments began to impose changes to alleviate pollution, they did it in ways that made the population, and not the capitalists, pay for it. For example, the electrification of motor vehicles. Last year’s “Inflation Reduction Act” offers enormous subsidies for electrification in a range of industries. The price for those subsidies will be paid for by the population in increased taxes, as well as in cuts to social programs, public services, and public education.
Another example: the shift away from coal and oil to so-called “renewable” sources of energy. The price for this shift is being paid in lost jobs—paid for by coal miners and oil-industry workers.
A government that serves the capitalists deals with the climate catastrophe by adding to the social catastrophe—that is, to the loss of jobs and to a spiraling fall in the workers’ standard of living.
The answer to both catastrophes is the same because the cause of both catastrophes is the same: the capitalists’ right to decide. The capitalists organize production in anarchic ways that create unemployment and rapid inflation. The capitalists organize industry in ways that make earth increasingly uninhabitable.
To save the planet, means that workers must use their position in industry to control what happens there. The people who carry out the work day-to-day are the ones best placed to know what really goes on in any workplace. They know what regulations are being violated. They can put their knowledge derived on the job to discover ways to overcome the problem of pollution.
Today, if workers reveal their boss violates pollution rules or worker safety, they can be fired for violating “trade secrets.” Thus, the capitalists’ right to decide has to be taken away from them.
To save the planet lies with those who labor on it—and in their hands alone. They are the only ones who, in dealing with their own immediate problems, can at the same time serve the long-term needs and interests of all humanity.