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 30, 2024
Speaking from the United Nations podium, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared war against Lebanon, and against much of the Middle East. The Zionist regime is carrying out a ferocious attack against Hezbollah forces and civilians inside Lebanon. First, they used exploding pagers and radios to maim and kill people. Then the Israeli military used missiles and airstrikes against Hezbollah bases and against apartment buildings in and near Beirut, Lebanon’s largest city and capital. They killed more than 550 people in one day in 1,600 strikes. At the time of this writing, the Israeli military has killed over 700 people in Lebanon, and wounded 1,800 others, including almost 100 children.
At the UN, Netanyahu not only justified these killings, he belligerently declared that the Israeli regime would continue to expand the attacks in Lebanon and would continue its wars in Gaza and the West Bank where over 40,000 Palestinians have already been massacred. Netanyahu went on to threaten Iran with war, saying his military will kill at will and not be interfered with.
So, who is going to stop the Israeli regime? Certainly not the U.S. government. While the Biden administration rattles on about a temporary ceasefire, the U.S. government gives Israel the means to carry out its wars in the Middle East. In the face of escalating war in Lebanon, the Israeli regime announced an additional gift of 8.7 billion dollars in military aid from the U.S. government. And the U.S. has sent 900 more troops to the Middle East, on top of the 40,000 already stationed there. The U.S. government is on the road to engage in war against Iran and its Hezbollah allies, declaring support for Israel, no matter the cost in human life.
The Netanyahu regime takes actions based on its own interests. Their interests don’t always align exactly with what the U.S. wants. But at the end of the day, the U.S. ruling class supports the Zionist regime and its wars because this regime represents and protects the interests of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
The Middle East, with its abundant oil fields and important trade routes, is a key area of the world for U.S. imperialism and its profits. The U.S. ruling class uses Israel as its cop on the beat in the Middle East. It is a cop they use against the millions of impoverished peoples in the region who have reason to rebel. Many have been displaced from their homelands. The U.S. also supports repressive Middle East regimes against their own populations. But those regimes are not always dependable for what U.S. imperialism needs. After the popular revolution in Iran threw out the Shah, the Israeli regime became the only regime the U.S. could rely on. And so the U.S. government armed the Israeli regime to the teeth.
With this backing from the U.S., Israel has been involved in one war after another in the Middle East. With the current Israeli onslaught, we are headed down a bloody path. When Netanyahu threatens to spread the war in the Middle East he gets no objection or pushback from the U.S. government.
The U.S. government is preparing for a widening war in Middle East, and elsewhere. A war that will directly involve the U.S. The U.S ruling class is preparing for this war with their accelerating increase in military spending, but also by preparing the population here for war with their daily drumbeat of propaganda against Iran, against Russia, against China.
The U.S. working class has no reason to fight a war on behalf of a ruling class that exploits us and is pushing us into poverty. The working class of the world has common interests and the power to stop this bloody madness. But only by organizing its forces to get rid of the capitalist system that is leading us to war.
Sep 30, 2024
Just before the Democratic National Convention opened, the Chicago Mayor’s office used “emergency funds” to install a ten-foot-tall ornamental fence near the convention site.
With a price tag of nearly one million dollars, the fence stretched 1,360 feet to surround an area of planted grass which had become the largest homeless encampment in the city. The mayor used “emergency funds” and illegally hid the exorbitant cost of one million dollars until the convention-goers left town.
But the mayor had cited “lack of funds” to reject the expansion of Chicago’s homeless shelters.
Clearly, under this system the housing crisis is less deserving of “emergency” funding than projects designed to hide it from view.
Sep 30, 2024
Hurricane Helene developed and strengthened quickly in the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to record hot water temperatures in the Gulf. By the time it hit land in Florida, it was a Category 4 storm. It caused at least 40 deaths and massive flooding across several states.
Helene was the eighth Category 4 or 5 storm to hit the U.S. (including Puerto Rico) in eight years. That equals the number of major storms that hit the U.S. in the previous 57 years!
It’s a striking statistic that shows just how much global warming is hitting ordinary people.
Sep 30, 2024
COVID has become a recurring problem for workers everywhere. The ruling class of billionaires saw no reason to mobilize to contain it and wipe it out, because that requires taking profits away from their quarterly bottom line.
The warnings were out there. If you let a virus like this invade the population, it will live and morph for decades. As advanced as medicine is, it is limited by an old outworn economic system.
Sep 30, 2024
Three out of every four women in the workforce are mothers, and a whole lot of them are finding it more and more impossible to pay for day care. In two-parent families, some have even chosen for one parent to stay home with the young ones, because they cannot find affordable day care.
In one out of six of the largest cities in the U.S., day care actually has an average cost higher than the average cost of rent. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, child care on average is $1,767 per month, while rent averages $1,622. Another survey found families paying $325 per week for day care. No wonder the surgeon general recently warned that “parental stress” is a growing problem.
Without two people to pay rent, or two jobs or more for a single parent, day care gets further out of reach in the richest country in the world. In other rich countries, governments pay thousands of dollars for young children to have public day care every month, but not in the U.S.
The U.S. government and local governments constantly skimp on decent educations, for both the youngest and the oldest children, both in big cities and in rural areas. That’s why day care providers on average only earn minimum wage! We deserve to have our children well-looked after, but our politicians claim, despite the largest military budget on the planet, that there’s not enough money to pay for child care or other education needs. Moms come last.
Sep 30, 2024
The recent public hearing on possible rate hikes for DTE brought out a number of angry people. Angry about the rate hikes, angry about power outages, and more.
The Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) which “oversees” utility companies recently published an audit from an outside company.
Based on audit results, no wonder there are power outages! The audit found that DTE has 100-year-old transformers still in use in Michigan! It also mentioned that 25% of DTE utility poles and 20% of its power transmission lines are more than 60 years old!
Sep 30, 2024
During this past school year in Michigan nearly 30% of K-12 students were chronically absent—that is, students missed ten percent—18 days or more during a 180-day school year.
It should come as no big surprise that poverty is a substantial “driver” of the highest absenteeism rates. Districts with the greatest percentage of poor students have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism and those with the fewest poor students have the lowest rates.
And when you throw test scores into the mix—the wealthiest schools districts, with the highest test scores, show a 16% absenteeism rate for their kids, while the 50 lowest-scoring districts, including cities like Flint, Muskegon and Pontiac, had chronic absenteeism rates of 40%!
People who work in the schools, understandably, want to do something to combat the problem of absenteeism. Could there be more counselors? Of course. More tutoring? Of course. But if the kids can’t even make it to school—those measures fall by the wayside.
If poverty is the driving force for the problems of absenteeism and school performance—here in Michigan, as well as all over the country, it is poverty that has to be eliminated. It’s going to take a social fight by the working class for the right to have decent well-paid jobs and a social system where resources support human needs.
Sep 30, 2024
Last weekend, at a homecoming dance at Warren Mott High School in Warren, Michigan, police responded to multiple reports of gunshots. As it turns out, what the students thought were gunshots were in fact balloons popping. But who can blame them for being afraid? Our children live in a time where school shootings are so frequent that many in the public are becoming numb to the news when it happens. The best the government can offer is to treat our children like they are inmates in a prison—with metal detectors and armed guards.
To make matters worse, this is not even the first time this month that students and their families had to deal with a terrifying situation. Earlier this month, the school’s lockdown system accidentally went off, sending kids running out of the school.
When will enough be enough? When will we as a society decide we are tired of our children having to learn in fear like this and decide to change it?
Sep 30, 2024
The Teachers Union’s House of Delegates called for public schools CEO Pedro Martinez to step down in a unanimous vote. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson then asked Martinez to resign. So far, CEO Martinez has refused to step down.
The union is raising the issue of the lack of funding for the public schools—a very real problem. Federal Covid money has run out, so the school system does not have money budgeted to pay raises this year. They have announced a nearly one-billion-dollar deficit for next year. The union says Martinez has not worked to get more money—perhaps not. But it’s not as if firing him will make a billion dollars suddenly appear.
For about a decade, the Chicago Teachers Union led major fights in the city to defend public education. Those fights held back some of the assaults by the ruling class and their politicians—school closings, privatization, and all kinds of other attacks. Those fights were important—they raised the problems in public education for working class families in the city. But they could not solve them.
The union leadership’s answer to that problem has been to get more and more involved in the electoral politics of the city and the state—supporting the campaigns of many aldermen and state legislators, and then, with Brandon Johnson, winning the mayor’s office. So far, though, teachers have not noticed any “transformation” in their schools.
What would it take to provide a decent education to every student in the city? Chicago is a rich city, the wealthy here have plenty of money—it only takes a short walk downtown to see that. But the ruling class in the city and in Illinois does not appear willing to part with any of their money to fund the school system. Ousting the school CEO won’t change that.
To fund the schools—and every other public service in this society—the working class would have to take hold of that money. The only way would be for the working class to take over the economy, itself, and run the society in its own interests. A tall order? Yes, but there is no other way.
Sep 30, 2024
“Forever chemicals,” PFAs, have been found in 36 out of 200 schools that were tested in Baltimore, Howard and Harford counties. The testing comes out of a new rule from the EPA, because the PFAs are so dangerous to our health. Some are linked to cancer, for example.
PFAs have been found in water systems all over the country. And the problem is not new. The manufacturers of TEFLON, the non-stick pans, knew decades ago about the dangers. But the government didn’t bother to regulate these carcinogens until last year.
Sep 30, 2024
At 6:10 p.m. on September 24, the State of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams.
Williams’ conviction for murder was full of holes. Experts concluded that DNA found on the murder weapon could not possibly have been from Williams. A juror was excluded because he was black, like Williams—which is not only racist, but is illegal.
Even the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney said Williams should not be executed.
Yet the U.S. Supreme Court gave the go ahead for the State of Missouri to execute him. In any reasonable society, they would themselves be tried as murderers.
Sep 30, 2024
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Mpox virus, already an epidemic in Africa, a “public health emergency of international concern” on August 14.
A more contagious variant has been circulating for about a year in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This country—where workers mine rare earth elements that make cell phones and electric cars possible—has seen 629 deaths so far. Almost 60% of cases have been in children. Pregnant women are reporting miscarriages.
The new strain is called Clade 1b. It can spread through simple skin contact. The variant has now spread to nearby African countries where it had never been before.
A vaccine has been produced since an earlier global outbreak in 2022. Most of the vaccines were bought up by the wealthy countries. To stop the spread, Africa needs 10 million doses. Up until now, the entire continent has only had 200,000 doses.
Since the emergency declaration, the donation of a few hundred thousand doses was quickly pledged by wealthy countries. This is a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed. And the actual delivery of vaccines has been less than that.
Vaccines are being produced by two companies—Bavarian Nordic of Denmark and KM Biologics of Japan. Plenty of vaccines exist for sale, but the countries that need them the most, cannot afford to buy them.
The capitalist system prevents humanity from effectively combating epidemics, which know no borders.
Sep 30, 2024
Every June, the U.S., British and French governments solemnly celebrate D-Day, the largest amphibious battle of World War II, and they pay homage to the soldiers killed. However, what is never mentioned is that more than a thousand soldiers were killed during the D-Day rehearsal, just months earlier. And for decades they kept the true story of this bloody disaster secret.
In 1944, Slapton Sands in Devon, England, was chosen for a series of military rehearsals, code-named “Operation Tiger.” The site was selected due to its resemblance to Utah Beach and Omaha Beach in Normandy. The operation involved around 30,000 American and British troops, simulating the conditions they would face on D-Day. But what was meant to be a routine exercise turned into a disaster.
On April 27, a fatal miscommunication occurred. A last-minute delay in the landing order was not received by all landing crafts, leading to a situation where troops came ashore during an active bombardment. Despite the presence of a designated safe zone, many soldiers were hit by friendly fire, resulting in the deaths of at least 300 Americans.
The following day, April 28, German boats intercepted a convoy of landing crafts. The convoy was supposed to be protected by two British ships, but one had remained in port for repairs. Worse still, American and British forces were operating on different radio frequencies, making communication impossible during the attack.
British forces detected the incoming German ships but were unable to warn the Americans in time. The chaos led to approximately 750 soldiers and sailors being killed. Rescue operations were delayed, and many soldiers drowned or died from hypothermia, as poor training in the use of life jackets left them unprepared.
The total death toll from this single training exercise reached over 1,000. (How many we will never know, since those numbers have been kept secret.)
One survivor, Master Sergeant Jake Larson, later recalled the horrific events: “Four hundred of us were laying on the floor vomiting and breathing through our wet handkerchiefs ... When we got out of that landing ship, a full bird colonel came up and swore us to secrecy that we wouldn’t say a word. We couldn’t talk about this even to our commanding officers when we got back under penalty of court-martial. Over 40 years this was a secret. My family didn’t even know about it.”
The military’s priority after the attack wasn’t the recovery of soldiers but securing secret D-Day plans carried by officers. The dead were buried in haste, and survivors were threatened with punishment if they spoke of the events.
For decades, this tragic rehearsal was hidden from public knowledge, buried under layers of secrecy. Only after an English fisherman found a lost tank at the bottom of the sea in the 1980s were investigations begun and former soldiers finally came forward with testimony about what happened.
Operation Tiger exposes the brutal truth that, to military leaders, soldiers’ lives are expendable. Like workers in factories exploited by their bosses, soldiers are treated as nothing more than tools, to be discarded when convenient. The military’s callous indifference to human life mirrors the ruthless disregard of capitalist employers.
Sep 30, 2024
While Israel’s military continues its invasion of Gaza, and expands its war in Lebanon, it is also sowing terror in the occupied West Bank. Under the pretext of raids against militants, Israel has been wreaking massive destruction. In the words of the governor of Jenin, a town of 350,000 in the North:
"We watched their bulldozers tear up streets, demolish businesses, pharmacies, schools. They even bulldozed the town soccer field, and a tree in the middle of the road … What was the point of all this?"
West Bank towns like Jenin have seen many raids by the Israeli military over the years, but those this month have lasted much longer—this raid in Jenin lasted nine days.
During that raid, 70 percent of roads were damaged or destroyed; internet, electricity and phone lines shut down. Eighty percent of the population is now without running water. In another northern town, Tulkarm, 90 percent of water and sewer lines were destroyed.
Israeli bulldozers have stopped Palestinian ambulances—which were already having a hard time on account of the roads.
Forty Palestinians were killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military in August—more than any other month since Hamas’ attack on Israel last October.
For Palestinians in the West Bank, it is a collective punishment, violently doled out by the Israeli state.
Sep 30, 2024
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib recently criticized Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for selectively prosecuting pro-Palestinian protestors at the University of Michigan. She was quickly condemned on numerous fronts for supposedly being antisemitic toward Nessel, who is Jewish.
CNN host Jake Tapper, in an interview with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, asked the governor what she thought of Tlaib’s comment that Nessel was “only doing it because she’s Jewish.” The Jewish Insider, a weekly paper in the Los Angeles area repeated Tapper’s assertion, which led Jonathon Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, to chime in, “When a congresswoman accuses the attorney general of prosecuting protestors simply because she’s Jewish, it’s bias.”
Governor Whitmer initially attempted to take a neutral stance when she responded to Tapper saying, “I’m not going to get in the middle of this argument they’re having.” After receiving criticism for her failure to defend Nessel, Whitmer reversed course, saying in a statement put out by Tapper, “The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic.”
Then a Detroit News columnist submitted a ‘cartoon of the day’ to the National Review depicting Tlaib as a Hezbollah member whose pager just exploded on her desk. While condemning the obviously racist depiction of Tlaib in the cartoon, Nessel doubled down on the claim that Tlaib’s comments were antisemitic.
There is one problem with all these attacks on Tlaib’s supposed antisemitism. She never said a word about Nessel being Jewish in her original criticism of Nessel’s decision to prosecute the protestors. Her original comment, which she made in an interview with the Detroit weekly newspaper MetroTimes, said, “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.” It was the writer from the MetroTimeswho mentioned Nessel being Jewish, saying “Tlaib also criticized Nessel, who is the first Jewish person elected Attorney General of Michigan, for what she believes is a biased approach to the protest.”
Rashida Tlaib was right to call Nessel out for her selective choice to charge the pro-Palestinian protestors at the university. The real issue is that Nessel chose to intervene as the state’s Attorney General overriding the decision of local Washtenaw County prosecutors not to.
Nessel and Whitmer are powerful players in today’s Democratic Party and with the elections not far off, they dutifully defend the policy of U.S. imperialism in its support of Israel’s murderous campaign against the Palestinians. They and their supporters in the corporate media use the false flag of antisemitism in an attempt to silence any dissent against continued U.S. support for Israel’s campaign of mass murder against the Palestinians.
And this is the real issue. It’s not the last example of such repression they are preparing.
Sep 30, 2024
On Monday, September 23, in one day of brutal carpet bombing, Israel’s air force struck more than 1,600 targets in southern Lebanon. This is about 300 more than the number of targets Israel had hit during the first three days of its bombing of Gaza a year ago, which experts had described as “unusually intense” at the time.
The Lebanese Ministry of Health reported that 558 people, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed in the Israeli air raids on Sept. 23. This, too, is an astoundingly high number for such bombing campaigns—a number that was not reached until the third week of Israel’s bombing of Gaza in October 2023. And even this enormous civilian death toll in one single day is certainly an undercount, given the difficulty of recovering bodies from under concrete rubble.
Even if not at the same brutal intensity as on September 23, Israel’s bombing raids on Lebanon have continued, raising the death toll to more than 700, with more than 1,800 wounded, according to official figures.
Clearly, Israel is targeting heavily populated areas with its most murderous weaponry. Officially, more than 90,000 people are said to have been displaced, but given the destructive power of Israeli bombings in heavily populated areas, the real figure must be much higher. And while some of the people fleeing the slaughter may have found shelter in schools and hotels, many still remain outdoors, without shelter.
After nearly one year of carnage in Gaza, turning more than one million people into homeless refugees, Israel is now doing the same to the population of southern Lebanon, with even greater barbarism. It’s an open declaration from Israel’s leaders, above all Prime Minister Netanyahu: “We’ll hit anyone, any time, more brutally than ever, and no one can stop us.”
One power that could stop Netanyahu, the United States, will obviously not do it. To the contrary, the U.S. continues to finance the barbaric wars of Israel, its top enforcer in controlling the strategic, oil-rich Middle East.
If Israel’s leaders are turning more and more of the region into hell, it’s hell made by the imperialist policies of the U.S. ruling class.
Sep 30, 2024
On Friday, September 27, a group of Michigan nurses dropped off three bankers’ boxes full of cards signed by thousands of registered nurses showing support to organize with the Teamsters Union. Cards came from all of the eight Corewell Health Hospitals in Metro Detroit and also from the Southfield Service Center.
The organizers aim to include all of the 9,600 registered nurses in the hospital system. Nurses interviewed by the press cited nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, job cuts, and wanting to bargain collectively for wages and benefits.
The nurses obviously understand the idea of “Go Big or Go Home.” This is evidenced by the fact that organizers pulled together signatures from nine separate locations. The driving distance between the two farthest hospitals is roughly 50 miles!
Historically, hospitals, insurance companies and other big businesses in the metro Detroit area have fought tooth and nail against union organizing drives by nurses.
A tough battle awaits these nurses when it comes to getting the government stamp of approval on their union and legal recognition. But guess what? The union IS the workers coming together to solve problems. Nurses fight every day to take control away from administrators with their cost-cutting decisions that could kill patients.
These nurses have already started to prepare themselves for the fights ahead with the stealth way they were able to organize under-the-radar and make their surprise announcement.
Sep 30, 2024
In Baltimore, Maryland this past March, six workers on the Francis Scott Key bridge died when a ship called the Dali hit the bridge they were paving. The bridge collapsed. The Dali is owned by one shipping company, Grace Ocean Private Limited, but managed by the third largest fleet manager in the world, Synergy Marine.
The U.S. federal government and the Maryland state government have launched investigations and lawsuits. But these will take years to resolve—if and when any money is paid, whether to the families of the dead men or the government entities that have to clean up the Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore or to rebuild the bridge.
Until accidents happen, few of us hear anything about world shipping. We only know that supposed “supply chain problems” stop products we have bought from arriving at our door. But we know nothing of this virtually unregulated industry. Regulators cannot even keep track of who owns ships, let alone how they can prevent annual deaths and injuries among crews, nor how many containers go overboard. Baltimore was not even the worst U.S. disaster for bridges falling down, killing people in cars going over them, when a big ship hits.
Synergy is a Singapore-based shipping manager with a fleet of over 600 ships in a country that makes business “easy.” That means more than 100,000 ships call in Singapore every year. Taxes are low and bureaucracy is super-fast compared to elsewhere. Taxes and regulations don’t bother thousands of companies that locate their headquarters in this tiny country between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
To give a few examples reported about just one ship Synergy managed, the Dali had non-stop vibrations, never fixed, so that bolts and cables constantly came loose or cracked. It was not using proper fuel pumps, nor did its back-up electric transformer work. The Dali lost power—twice—on the day of the Baltimore disaster.
Richer countries may inspect such ships in their ports, calling attention to defects or problems the crews have. Certainly there are dozens of deaths and injuries every year. But no country nor institution, not even the main marine insurer in the world, Lloyd’s of London, knows where ships are, what happens on them, or even who owns them. In poor countries, sailors report that whiskey and cigarettes are carried to bribe port officials.
Thanks to countries turning a blind eye, the shipping industry also pours thousands of tons of sewage over its sides on every ship every day in every ocean around the world. A recent USA Today investigation found ship captains were expected to cut corners to save money, to emphasize speed over safety, and to work their tiny crews very hard. Twenty-one men managed the Dali 24 hours per day, seven days a week, while it carried 4,700 containers into Baltimore’s port.
More such disasters are ready to happen every day around the world, thanks to the greed of shipping company owners and managers.
Sep 30, 2024
This summer, temperatures consistently exceeded 105 degrees in California’s farm fields, exposing farm workers to heat-related illnesses. But workers report that companies routinely ignore safety measures against excessive heat. In a University of California study two years ago, one out of six farmworkers surveyed had said that employers never provided shade, water and breaks as prescribed by California’s outdoor work safety law. And when companies provide breaks, there is often not enough shade for all workers, and break areas and water may be hundreds of yards away, farmworkers told Capital & Main this year.
Faced with complaints from workers, California politicians are now proposing another law—which they say would make it easier for farm workers to file workers’ comp claims for heat-related illnesses. Workers know how difficult it is to actually get workers’ comp, but regardless, what good is another law when laws are not being enforced?
Sep 30, 2024
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced in late September that it had opened five new clothing stores offering students facing homelessness a chance to shop for new clothes and shoes, for free.
According to the superintendent of the LAUSD, the number of homeless students in L.A. schools has increased from 13,600 last year to 17,000 this year, which represents about three percent of the students enrolled in K-12. But the real number is certainly much higher. These official figures are based on the housing questionnaire that parents fill out at the beginning of the school year, but many parents don’t tell the truth about their housing situation, either out of shame, fear of deportation or because they are afraid the government would take away their children.
In addition, tens of thousands of working class families are forced to share living quarters with other families, because they can’t afford the outrageously high rent on even the smallest and most run-down apartments in L.A. They also tend to move frequently.
All the disruptions, overcrowding and constant noise that come out of this situation prevent students from studying or sleeping. Thus, tens of thousands of young people in L.A. can’t even get the bare minimum of an education. This is part of the reason for not only the high absentee rate in L.A. schools, but also the high drop-out rate.
The LAUSD’s big announcement about the five new stores offering free clothes was, of course, a publicity stunt. Yes, due to some temporary extra federal funds provided by the American Rescue Plan, along with donations by name brands like Levi’s, Van’s and Adidas, some homeless students will get to wear some decent clothes.
But how does donating a new pair of jeans correct the failure to address the educational and social needs of this skyrocketing influx of students living in dire poverty? It does not!
So, in Los Angeles, one of the richest and supposedly most modern cities in the world, there is growing homelessness, and growing illiteracy as well.
Sep 30, 2024
So far this year, wildfires have burned about one million acres in California, matching the state’s five-year average already two months before the end of the fire season. But as wildfires become larger and more intense year after year, burned-out firefighters are fleeing the United States Forest Service (USFS).
The USFS has lost nearly half its permanent employees within the last three years. It’s no mystery why, given that the agency’s base pay is a miserly $15-an-hour, barely matching the minimum wage. Who can live off such a low wage, let alone keeping in shape to fight against deadly, explosive wildfires?
For the same reason, the USFS cannot recruit new firefighters either. So, the agency’s firefighting force is shrinking, and whoever is left behind is overloaded with more of this dangerous work. As Abel Martinez, a fire captain at the Angeles National Forest in Southern California, told The Guardian, overwork has increased accidents and injuries.
The United States government spends the wealth workers create on the wars it causes, and on further enriching already wealthy capitalists. This is the money taken from social spending, like firefighting, which is essential for our survival.
Sep 30, 2024
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of September 23, 2024.
Thirty-two thousand workers walked out of Boeing plants in Washington and Oregon. It was the biggest strike since last fall’s auto strike. But it is not the only important strike. 17,000 workers at AT&T had already been on strike for a month in nine southeastern states, with 8,500 workers set to join them in Nevada and California. Hotel workers in Boston carried out several waves of 3-day “rolling strikes,” focused on Labor Day. Workers at the Marathon refinery in Detroit went out, and they were soon followed by workers at Eaton Aerospace in Jackson, Michigan. Flight attendants were threatening to strike at American Airlines, as were port workers in East and Gulf Coast ports.
Working for different companies, in different industries, organized in different unions, going out separately, they nonetheless shared common grievances.
Right up front was the steady decrease in their standard of living, wages falling further behind inflation for years now. Boeing workers had been living under a contract last fully negotiated in 2008, with “wage re-openers” in 2011 and 2014, which barely moved the needle. American workers suffered under frozen wages for the last five years.
Even when workers gained minimal and inadequate wage increases—as they did in last year’s new auto contract—they were paid for by hidden cuts in pensions and medical care and, above all, by a mortal increase in the mad pace of work and worsening of other working conditions.
Many AT&T linemen had no set hours of work, starting at 8 a.m., often not going home until after 8 p.m., sometimes later than that—working until “the deck is cleared.” At Marathon, most workers had been dumped into an “alternating” schedule, working four 12-hour shifts, first on days, then on nights, reversing with each new turn—a killing schedule for human beings.
But the problems faced by workers at Boeing and Marathon and AT&T are not unusual. The big guns of the capitalist class have been carrying out a brutal offensive against the whole working class, for decades now.
Driving all these attacks is the capitalists’ ferocious push for greater profit. Wealth has rapidly accumulated at the top of the social ladder, paid for by the worsening of workers’ living and working conditions. Every company distributed a greater share of the wealth workers create to the parasites who own the companies—even companies like Boeing, which claim to have losses.
So, yes, it’s important that more workers are ready to strike. Wages have fallen so far behind, the intensity of work has reached deadly levels precisely because the working class has carried out so few fights for decades. The current strike at Boeing is the first since 2008, the one at Marathon is the first since 1994. If port workers go out, it will be the first East Coast strike since 1977—half a century ago!
But strikes at one company, even at multiple companies at the same time, cannot have the power needed to throw back the social war being carried out by the capitalist class against all the laboring people.
Workers are hamstrung by an organization of “labor relations” that leaves each group of workers to fight alone, that settles disputes one place at time, which even in many cases—as at Boeing today, or auto yesterday—leaves one class of workers on the job, even as others go out.
The capitalist class does not fight alone, in isolated fashion. It is waging a social war today as a united class, a war against the whole working class. It will not be slowed down, much less stopped, until there is a massive struggle by large parts of the working class, which aims not just to threaten the capitalist class, but to take away its control over the economy.
The working class needs to organize itself as the single, powerful class it can be. Such a fight will not succeed at a few workplaces alone, but it can start at some of those workplaces—IF there are militants in place, IF their primary aim is to spread the fight as widely as possible, IF their goal is to see the working class break free of the shackles created by the unions today, IF they push for the working class to organize itself politically, to take over control of the economy it already makes run.
Sep 30, 2024
For showtimes, see: unionthefilm.com
Brett Story’s new film Union is a tough and gripping new documentary about what it’s like to work at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island and about the fight to unionize it. Problems are laid out for us to see, like a divided and conflicted workforce, and the high turnover rate because of the difficulty of the job and how fast it must be done. And you see workers not giving up, attempting to win a better life for all.
This book tells in dual timelines what happened in Guatemala in the Reagan years in the war on the peasants and Indians. Simultaneously, it shows life in Los Angeles of Guatemalan refugees and of the many homeless. You see life from the point of view of the persecuted and also from one of the soldiers of the Guatemalan army, who is himself a refugee in Los Angeles.
This book is about finally standing up for what is right amidst the Rodney King riots (which occur in this period) and at the same time, standing against the brutality and murder in Guatemala.
Sep 30, 2024
Sometimes it’s hard to deal with the daily grind of using the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line to get to and from work. It’s hard to see the growing numbers of homeless people and poor seeking shelter on the Elevated Train. It’s obvious some need medical and mental health help. Many are without a safe place to sleep. Some of us are not far from being in that boat. The so-called “social safety net” they talk about is nowhere to be found in this city!
Sep 30, 2024
The Working Class Party of Michigan has nominated its candidates for the 2024 election. In 2016, when the party was formed, there were only three candidates. Today, there are 15.
Two candidates are on the ballot in every district in the state: MARY ANN HERING, running for State Board of Education, and SUZANNE ROEHRIG, for Wayne State University Board of Governors.
Seven candidates are running for Congress in districts where more than half the state’s population lives: LIZ HAKOLA in the 1st District; LOU PALUS, 3rd District; KATHY GOODWIN, 8th District; JIM WALKOWICZ, 9th District; ANDREA L. KIRBY, 10th District; GARY WALKOWICZ, 12th District; and SIMONE R. COLEMAN, 13th District.
Six other people are running for State Representative positions: MARK DaSACCO, District 2; LARRY DARNELL BETTS, District 3; LINDA RAYBURN, District 7; LOGAN AUSHERMAN, District 8; HASHIM MALIK BAKARI, District 13; and LINDA GREEN-HARRIS, District 16.
The Working Class Party of Illinois collected signatures to put ED HERSHEY on the ballot in Illinois. He is running in Illinois’s 4th Congressional District. This is the second time Ed has run as the WCP candidate for Congress in Illinois.
In California, where election law is so reactionary and restrictive that it is almost impossible for a new party to get on the ballot, people who want to see the working class build its own party have done the work to put JUAN REY on the ballot in California as an independent candidate, a worker running for Congress in California’s 37th District. Juan ran in the March multi-party primary and came in second, giving him a spot on the November election ballot.
Candidates for the Working Class Party have been on the ballot before, but did not gain the required number of votes to stay on the ballot. Supporters are currently collecting signatures to get back on the ballot. They are close to the 10,000 signatures required, but the volunteers aim to go over that to ensure that they will be accepted.
These candidates know that we won’t change a society so terribly destructive as this one through an election. For that, a social fight spanning large parts of the working class is necessary. But this election can show just how many people are fed up with the situation capitalism has created, it can show how many want to see their own class organize its own party.
Sep 30, 2024
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of September 9, 2024.
We are caught in the grip of a deadly capitalist system, ruled by its drive for profit.
This system creates inflation, driving down our standard of living—letting the corporations, banks and financial groups take an even bigger share of society’s wealth.
We are caught in the grip of a system which not only cheats our schools, roads and water systems to spend money on war; it is preparing to take us to more and bigger wars.
War today is a giant commercial enterprise. Military spending props up the profits of almost every big corporation in the country, depriving us of needed schools and services. But it’s not just money. Working people pay the full price for capitalism’s wars unless workers take control away from capitalists who head us to war.
Excerpts from the Program Issued by the Working Class Party