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
Jan 6, 2025
When a truck exploded in front of a hotel in Las Vegas, politicians and the corporate media immediately proclaimed it to be an act of terrorism. They also talked about it as some kind of political act, since the hotel was owned by Donald Trump and the Tesla truck was identified with Elon Musk.
None of those sensational headline accusations of terrorism were true. It turned out to be something much more common and tragic. The explosion was another act of suicide by a U.S. soldier.
Matthew Livelsberger, the driver of the Tesla, was an active-duty Green Beret in the U.S. army. The U.S. government sent him to war in Afghanistan and also sent him to Ukraine, Africa and Asia. Just before he killed himself, he posted to his phone that he was mourning the “brothers I lost” and that he wanted to “relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took” in Afghanistan. After his suicide, it came out that Livelsberger also got a traumatic brain injury while in the army and was likely suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
The suicide by Livelsberger was done in a sensational manner and widely reported by the media, but there are few headlines about the average of 22 U.S. soldiers and veterans who kill themselves every day. Military veterans have a suicide rate that is 57% higher than the rest of the population. That certainly was seen in U.S. veterans after the war in Vietnam. Today, U.S. active-duty soldiers are nine times more likely to commit suicide than to die in combat.
What leads these soldiers and veterans to commit suicide? Being in combat brings horrors of destruction and the deaths of combatants and civilians alike. These are traumatic experiences that dehumanize soldiers and that many suffer from afterward. This is true for the soldiers who the U.S. government ordered into recent wars, be it in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. These were wars where the U.S. military brutally bombarded civilian areas. Then, U.S. ground troops were placed in the midst of a population that had been bombed. These were wars where U.S. troops massacred civilians, like Fallujah in Iraq or My Lai in Vietnam. Even pilots operating drones from U.S. Central Command and killing people from thousands of miles away end up committing suicide at a high rate.
Even those soldiers who were never in combat have suffered from some of their training experiences, like being exposed to repeated explosions, causing brain injuries. In combat or not, many soldiers suffer wounds, trauma, PTSD or exposure to deadly chemicals, like Agent Orange or burn pits. The U.S. government cynically places wreaths for dead soldiers on Veteran’s Day, but they refuse to give surviving veterans the treatment or the care to deal with what they suffered.
What these soldiers experience not only leads some of them to direct their despair inwards and kill themselves, but, in other cases, they have been dehumanized to the point that some have been turned into ticking time bombs and direct their anger toward other people. These soldiers have been trained to kill by the U.S. military, not ISIS. Some of them explode in their anger toward their own families. The biggest common denominator for people who commit mass killings in the U.S. is that they are military veterans. As many as one third of mass killers are military veterans, far exceeding their percentage of the population.
The man who just killed 14 people with a truck in New Orleans was in the military for 15 years. The man who used a gun to kill 18 people in Maine was also a veteran.
These mass killers are called terrorists. But the real terrorists are those who run the U.S. government. They commit a policy of military terror around the world. This government spends more money on the military than the next nine countries in the world, combined. The U.S. government stations troops in 750 bases in 80 different countries. The U.S. government sends this military into one war after another, usually far from the borders of this country. This military terror by the U.S. government is committed on behalf of the U.S. capitalist class, protecting their investments and profits around the world.
The working class has nothing to gain from this system that can’t provide decent jobs, exploits our labor and then wants to send us to war against working people from other countries. But when it uses its forces, the working class also has the power to get rid of this system based on terror and exploitation and replace it with a system based on human needs.
Jan 6, 2025
Sesame Street first aired in 1969 on the PBS public TV channel. It came out of the social upheaval of the 1960s, aimed at using television to help educate children in an entertaining way.
After being loved by generations, today it’s at the mercy of big corporations. HBO Max took over in 2016 and recently announced plans to cancel it. HBO has already removed whole seasons and says none will be available to stream as of 2027.
Sesame Street was designed to help children learn vocabulary, counting, kindness, and promote social development. After the pandemic, these lessons are more important than ever, as many kids are struggling with social skills. Yet the media corporations are instead focused on finding the next CoComelon, designed to keep kids hooked, rather than teach them anything. And so, Sesame Street is being sidelined in search of higher profits.
This capitalist system that puts profits before the needs of children belongs in the trash, right next to Oscar the Grouch.
Jan 6, 2025
One in seven of the 51 million Americans 65 or older who receive monthly Social Security benefits are people who depend on Social Security for at least 90% of their income. For 2025, Social Security benefits were increased by 2.5%. But what amounts to an extra fifty or one hundred dollars a month, if it’s even that much, is gobbled up by the increased costs of medicine, food, and housing. Hell, the 5.9% increased cost of Medicare for 2025 alone negated the cost of living increase on Social Security! So, seniors start out the year with less money than the year before.
Social Security benefits should increase—and those increases have to happen, not every year, but every week, to keep up with the real cost of living.
Jan 6, 2025
All around the U.S., pharmacies are closing. Small, independent, mom-and-pop pharmacies are shutting down. And the major chains—Rite-Aid, Walgreens, CVS—they’re closing stores too.
Walgreens announced plans to close a quarter of its 8200 stores in October. Rite-Aid has closed 400 of its 2100 stores, since it entered bankruptcy a year ago, and it plans to close 400 more. Rite-Aid closed its last pharmacy in Michigan in September and has almost completely shut down in Ohio as well.
Pharmacies, like everything else in capitalist society, are set up to generate profits for the capitalist class. That means places where people have less money—working class cities, Black and Latino neighborhoods, rural areas—are the first to lose their pharmacies.
A doctor’s appointment can be very difficult to set up. Many working people and retirees see their pharmacist much more often than their doctor. But this healthcare system, driven by its thirst for profit, steadily removes that possibility—that is, the possibility to get any healthcare at all—for millions.
Jan 6, 2025
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that more than one third of all hospitals in U.S. cities do not have maternity wards. This is the result of continued closures of maternity wards for more than a decade—and not just in cities but in the countryside as well.
Hospitals are closing their maternity wards because they consider them costly. They require specialists to be on hand 24/7 to attend to difficult births. At the same time, maternity wards don’t generate as much money as some other hospital departments.
In many cases, it’s working class and poor women, in cities as well as the countryside, who are losing childbirth services. The only choice women in labor then have is to go to an emergency room. But where hospitals have closed their ERs, women are forced to deliver at home, which endangers the life of the mother and the baby.
This lack of services is evident in the rates of death of mothers and infants. The rate of deaths at childbirth is especially high in the U.S., for both mother and child. The U.S. ranks 54th among all nations in infant mortality. (The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths per 1000 live births before the age of one). The U.S. is the worst among all developed, highly industrialized countries, and even worse than some underdeveloped countries.
Of course, the rate of maternal and child deaths is much higher among the working class and poor than in better-off parts of the U.S. population.
People have always celebrated the birth of a human being—it’s a celebration of life. The only people who can see a new life as a “loss” are capitalists and their managers, for whom the birth of a child is just another number in a ledger. Their first goal is to maintain and increase profit, which is a guarantee of poor quality of health care for women and children.
Jan 6, 2025
You deposit money electronically into your child’s school lunch account. Turns out you’re feeding a giant corporation instead of your child!
Heartland Payment Systems has contracts to manage digital school lunch accounts for students at 30,000 schools across the country. This means that the company’s MySchoolBucks program takes a cut from each child’s account. For poorer families on the reduced price lunch program, these fees are the highest: up to 40 cents for each dollar the family pays in! The company and its competitors suck in more than $100 million a year from these fees.
Heartland is a huge company with revenues over nine billion dollars a year. It also processes many other kinds of digital payments for more than 750,000 businesses nationwide, including lobbyists for both Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi.
Undaunted, families have sued Heartland and its competitors. Now the federal government says Heartland will eventually have to stop taking its cut from student accounts—but not before 2027. Families are falling behind, financially. Around the country, parents owe around $176 million in unpaid school lunch debt.
Capitalism literally steals food from children’s mouths.
Jan 6, 2025
From Blue Cross Blue Shield to AT&T, from Amazon office workers to Ford salaried employees, more and more major employers have been putting into place a return-to-the-office policy after the COVID work-from-home years.
Wait a minute! What’s missing from the equation, with this change back to brick and mortar? The work-from-home set-up saved people time and money on childcare, gas, wear and tear on their cars, etc. Parents have not had to worry about who is taking or picking up the older kids from school. Especially for layers of the laboring population whose wages really weren’t sufficient to cover the several hundred dollars or more in weekly daycare costs for each child; or more for infants and toddlers; or the after-school babysitter costs.
So now, how’s it supposed to work, financially AND logistically, just because employers have decided it’s time to come back?!
Well, if it’s time to come back, it’s high time that corporations either provide in-house child care centers, for free, if they want their employees to come into work. OR, it’s high time that corporations pay higher wages so workers can afford child care costs.
Jan 6, 2025
Recently, the Los Angeles Times reported that food manufacturers exploit a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) loophole to add potentially harmful ingredients to the products we eat. In fact, since 2000, nearly 99% of all food chemicals added to food products by the food industry have not been approved by the FDA as safe, according to an Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis done in 2022.
Under the FDA’s so-called “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) rule, food makers can declare whether certain novel ingredients are safe, without any oversight or independent scientific evidence. Because of this loophole, chemicals harmful to our health, including suspected carcinogens, are added to products such as cereals, yogurt, baked goods, ice cream, potato chips, and chewing gum.
In 2022, hundreds of people ate Daily Harvest’s French Lentil + Leek Crumbles and got sick. These consumers suffered severe abdominal pain, fever, chills, and acute liver failure. More than one hundred were hospitalized! Daily Harvest blamed an ingredient called tara flour, which the company added to this food product. Two years after the incident, the FDA finally declared this ingredient unsafe.
Also, under the GRAS loophole, when companies use novel ingredients, they can list them on food labels using generic terms like “flavors”, “colors”, or indecipherable acronyms. Under such guise, it becomes impossible for consumers to know that something new has been added to their food.
The federal government created the GRAS loophole so food manufacturers could freely exploit us for their profits.
Jan 6, 2025
After the November 2024 elections, Democrats were still the ruling party in Michigan. They held a trifecta—control of the State House, Senate, and Governor’s office. With Republicans taking control of the State House in 2025, this “lame-duck” period was a moment not to be wasted. Democrats had not been in full control since 1934!
So, what happened? A lot of drama and little else. On December 13, Republicans walked out in a huff. They wanted to block increases to the minimum wage for tipped workers. Later that night, a Democrat, Karen Whitsett, joined them. She said she agreed with blocking minimum wage increases for tipped workers. Spoiler Alert: Without enough representatives in seats, no legislation could pass!
Why the dramatics? Were tipped wages about to go up to $25 an hour? No! On February 21, 2025, the minimum wage for tipped workers will go up to $5.99 an hour. By February 21, 2028, the minimum wage for tipped workers will be—$11.98. Attempting to block tiny increases in tipped wages was the reason for the theatrics!
Before this drama, what “progressive” legislation DID get passed? A few ho-hum bills.
A new law was passed to block rental companies from discriminating based on source of income for renters. Yet this law does NOT block banks from discriminating based on source of income for buying a home!
A new law was passed providing the first increase in unemployment benefits since 2003. Whoopee! Because this increase will NEVER reach the weekly rate ALL unemployed workers got in 2020 during the pandemic!
And on the straight up “losses” side, new tax breaks for corporations got passed to lure data centers to Michigan. These data centers suck up astronomical amounts of water and energy from surrounding communities.
And in a bad encore, a new law was passed legalizing automated speed cameras with $150 and $300 fines! These cameras will start out in construction zones. During the summer, what roads in Michigan are NOT a construction zone!
Despite the political theatrics, here is a sneak preview of what lies ahead. Neither Democrats nor Republicans will ever fight like hell for workers. Even on the rare occasion of good intentions, both parties are on a short leash, a choke chain in the hands of the wealthy who control them. For workers to have what we need requires our own fight and our own political party that we control.
Jan 6, 2025
A huge swath of Africa was engulfed in war this past year. War touched at least 16 countries—the most at any time since World War II. While it’s impossible to know the exact number, hundreds of thousands have been killed, the vast majority civilians.
Already at the end of 2023, 32.5 million people were displaced from their homes by these wars. The numbers surely grew as wars expanded in 2024. These displaced people are vulnerable to all kinds of terror: famine has hit refugees in Sudan. Health workers estimate that 80% of the women in displacement camps in eastern Congo have been raped.
Civil wars are raging or continuing in Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, and Congo. And war has been spreading across a vast region called the Sahel, south of the Sahara desert. Taken together, these wars are vaster and touch even more people than those in Ukraine or the Middle East. But they are almost never even discussed in the U.S. media.
If it talks about these wars at all, the U.S. media blames ethnic conflicts, or terrorist extremists, or rogue military forces. But in fact, these wars are a direct consequence of imperialist maneuvers and rivalries aimed at dominating Africa—led today by the United States.
The wars in the Sahel can be traced to 2011, when the U.S. and its NATO allies overthrew the government of Libya, killing its dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. As Libya descended into its own chaotic civil war, arms and soldiers spread into the Sahel. As a professor at Georgetown University put it: “With the Sahel, it’s clearly a problem of Libya’s collapse … everything is on fire.”
Throughout this region, the U.S. set up its own bases and trained and supported local troops, supposedly as part of the “war on terror.” But in fact, this just added more violence, and more armed and trained soldiers. In Niger, for instance, one group of U.S.-trained officers just overthrew another group of U.S.-trained officers.
Even while colonialism and imperialism have kept most countries in Africa impoverished, many countries are rich in natural resources like oil or minerals. But instead of funding the economic development of these countries, for more than a century, the lion’s share of these resources have flowed out of the continent to benefit U.S. and European corporations. Whoever controls the local state gets a small piece of the money for helping the foreign corporations extract these resources. So instead of developing the local economy, the main way for rival leaders to gain wealth is to gain control of at least a piece of the state.
In this way, the imperialist extraction of wealth fuels civil conflict, like the coup in Niger, or the four coup attempts in Burkina Faso just since 2022. It is also at least part of what’s driving the civil war in Sudan, which has set two rival groups of generals against each other.
On top of that, the borders in the Sahel, as in the rest of Africa, were drawn by European colonizers, not by the local people. Across the region, different ethnic groups and people of different religions were thrown by these borders into a common country and were cut off by national borders from their co-religionists or members of the same ethnic group. Burkina Faso, for instance, is divided between Muslims and Catholics, with the largest native language spoken by only 40% or so of its people. Nigeria is divided almost in half between Christians and Muslims, with each living largely in different parts of the country.
These divisions, products of the legacy of colonialism, make it possible for local leaders seeking to gain control of the state to claim to be defending the interests of their local populations.
This is part of what has made possible the rise of groups claiming to represent Islam across the Sahel. The U.S. wars in the region have created a backlash, just like the U.S. war in Iraq led to the development of ISIS. U.S. military actions and its backing of these countries’ corrupt states added to the appeal of fundamentalist Islamic groups, who claimed to be leading the resistance to the U.S. These groups have spread from Mali to Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Benin, and Ghana. They find support among impoverished populations, especially those who are excluded from a share of control over the state and the small amount of wealth that might provide.
When these civil wars break out, different powers often back the opposing sides. In Sudan, for instance, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been backing one group of generals, while Egypt is supporting another group—even as both the UAE and Egypt are U.S. allies. Russia has sent mercenaries to Mali and the Central African Republic, and France just withdrew from a long-running military “intervention” in its former colonies in West Africa.
These wars across Africa are likely to continue to accelerate as the rivalries between the different imperialist powers grow more intense. The U.S. regularly complains about Chinese investments and links in Africa and has been moving to contain it. This can only lead to more conflict, as the U.S. and China back different local armies, with the population paying the biggest price.
Africa is just as much a part of the capitalist world as any other continent. It has about 1.5 billion people, more than North America and Europe combined. That its people are increasingly devastated by these wars, fought in the interests of none of them, shows once again how bankrupt this capitalist system is, on the level of the entire world.
Jan 6, 2025
This article is translated from the January 3 issue, #2944 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
For nearly fifteen months, the Israeli government has been spreading death across the Middle East. The deadly Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, was the prelude to a deluge of bombs on dozens of towns and villages, tens of thousands of homes, infrastructures and collective buildings in Gaza.
A veritable invasion of soldiers and tanks is taking place in several areas of the region, where the Israeli state wants to assert itself as the primary policeman.
After destroying numerous military bases in Syria, Israeli bombing raids have targeted Houthi-held sites in Yemen since December 26. However, attacks on the population of Gaza have not ceased. They have claimed the lives of over 45,000 men, women and children in Gaza alone, and left hundreds of thousands wounded and homeless. Netanyahu and the Israeli General Staff continue what they call “a siege within a siege”, driving out all Palestinian life in the north of the territory, turning it into a no-man’s-land under their control.
The latest ignominy was the outright destruction, on December 27, of the Kamal-Adwan hospital in the Beit Lahiya area, a few kilometers from Gaza’s northern border. Dozens of seriously injured people had to be evacuated as best they could after the army dropped warning leaflets. According to the WHO, sixty staff and twenty-five patients are in critical condition. A number of medical staff have been arrested—as has the doctor in charge of the hospital, Dr. Hossam Abou Safiya—accused of being “Hamas terrorists” operating from a “command center.” All that remains of the so-called “center” are ruins, having been burnt down by Netanyahu’s troops.
On two previous occasions, in November 2023 and October 2024, the Al-Shifa hospital, once the largest in the territory, was completely destroyed by the Israeli army. The Indonesian hospital, the only one still standing in the north, no longer has sufficient equipment to treat the wounded. Through this systematic destruction of the health system, the Israeli government has decreed a death sentence for the people of Gaza, while the survivors try to resist despite the famine, lack of water, care and shelter deliberately provoked by state terrorism and the obstruction of humanitarian aid.
An entire people is being systematically massacred in this way, with the complete support of U.S. imperialism which sponsors Netanyahu’s regime.
Jan 6, 2025
This article is translated from the December 7 issue, #1339, of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in Guadeloupe and Martinique.
“There will be no truce or celebration this year,” the criminal gangs’ spokesman said, when announcing the thugs’ assault to conquer the neighborhoods of Pétion-Ville, Haut-Delmas, Canapé-vert and Bourdon, the last territories in the West department that they didn’t control. But the residents of those areas inflicted a rout on the criminal groups on November 19, halting the thugs’ onward march, at least temporarily. For the exploited masses to halt the spiral of violence, they will have to figure out how to turn this single blow into the beginning of a conscious struggle.
On Tuesday, November 19, the popular masses once again gave a glimpse of what they can do when mobilized. The police intercepted a goods truck and two buses carrying dozens of bandits and combat equipment to Pétion-Ville. The bandits’ exchange of fire with the police immediately attracted the attention of people in several neighborhoods who were keeping watch in surveillance brigades at around 2 a.m. Panic-stricken and in disarray, the bandits fled, throwing themselves and their weapons into the midst of the local population. Angry, exasperated locals caught most of them, between 80 and 100, and put them out of action. Four days later, the population is still hunting down some of these thugs, who have taken refuge in bushes or empty houses.
If the population can be proud of having shaken the bandits, it would be pretentious to claim victory. The hardest part begins now. Residents of the Canapé-vert, Bourdon, Delmas and Pétion-Ville neighborhoods must maintain constant vigilance to ward off any attempt at revenge by the armed gangs.
But better still, since the best defense is an attack, they need to organize and step up their mobilization to enable displaced families to return to their neighborhoods. They need to manage to open up a few gang-held roads to give the popular masses a breather, and they need to impose further defeats on the gangs to make them back down.
The popular masses are fed up with being forced from pillar to post in their own country, living in camps, being slaughtered by bands of bloodthirsty barbarians. They’re tired of weeping and wailing. Recent events have shown that they are the strongest force, when determined and determined to fight for their lives and their dignity.
Bandits only feel strong when the population is apathetic and doesn’t decide to fight. The popular masses can make themselves feared by organizing to oppose the thugs. And they can.
Jan 6, 2025
David Harding, a leading member of the Spark organization, died at the end of December 2024, after a period of declining health. He would have been 80 years old in January.
Dave was a militant from an early age, politicized by the U.S. war in Viet Nam and by the struggles of black people against a racist society. When he moved to Baltimore to go to Johns Hopkins University in 1963, he became active against what he saw then as evils in this society. Eventually, he came to understand that the wars and the racism he hated were the products of a capitalist society built on exploitation of labor.
Like many other young people of his generation, he began to understand that it wasn’t enough just to protest the wars and the horrendous amount of organized violence against the black population. Dave came to understand that it was necessary to find a force able to take on the society that produced such outrages. Like quite a few others of his generation, he dropped out of school and “went to the working class.”
In Dave’s case, this meant getting a job at Sparrows Point, which was then the mammoth Bethlehem Steel complex near Baltimore.
Called by those who knew him then, “a lively person,” he quickly was active in the Steelworkers Union (USWA), becoming the editor of the local paper, The 09 Express. It didn’t take long for him to get a copy of a new bulletin that had appeared at the Point, “The Steeler,” put out by what was about to become the Spark organization.
He had been in and around other left organizations, but by 1972, understanding that this new bulletin was a way for people like himself to carry out political activity to the working class, and seeing that the working class had the potential of changing the society he detested, he joined the Spark.
Working at the Point, he suffered the same rounds of layoffs as other workers as the crisis began to squeeze industry, throwing millions of workers out in the street, for the first time in several decades. He picked up odd jobs, like house painting and driving a taxi. Finally, he ended up at a local community college, where he got training in the relatively new field of computers. From there he was hired into the State of Maryland Department of Health headquarters, along with thousands of other clerical and technical workers.
The new Spark bulletin at the State, which started in September of 1984, depended on Dave, as did the local AFSCME union that was organized at the State. He was president of his local union for 10 years.
In 2016, he ran as an independent for the City Council in Baltimore. Proud of his class, he described himself in this way: “I am a long-time worker at the Maryland Health Department and a former worker at Bethlehem Steel.” And he added: “One or two individual council members cannot change the basic direction of this society. That will require a fight to force the bosses to pay for the crisis they created, to take public money and use if for public purposes, to take their stolen wealth away from them—that will require a struggle by working people, a determined massive fight. The elections won’t bring about that fight. But we can use the elections to say we are fed up, to say we want to see that fight happen.”
In 2020, he was one of the early organizers of the new Working Class Party in Maryland. You could find him on a Saturday morning getting signatures from people who agreed that the working class needed its own party. Eventually, he ran as the WCP candidate for governor in 2022, getting more than 17,000 votes.
Like many other people, with few resources, he worked almost up to the day of his death. And he was always ready to join the struggles of working class people to organize themselves.
If you were a friend of Dave, you soon learned this about him: he loved hardware stores, he enjoyed tinkering and fixing things. He would try to figure out how to deal with almost any problem—electrical, carpentry, painting, even plumbing. He was generous with his time, helping other people deal with their house problems, with sheds, garages, and even with an old barn.
Dave was a revolutionary to the end, understanding that there is no way out for working people unless they organize, unless they use their capacity as the class that makes society run, to take control of that society and re-organize it in a humane way that will serve the whole population.
Jan 6, 2025
After Jimmy Carter died on December 29 at age 100, Joe and Jill Biden praised Carter as a man of “compassion and moral clarity.” The entire news media and political establishment followed suit in a massive public relations campaign, claiming that Carter was a champion of the underdog and the poor, and an advocate for worldwide peace and justice.
But the opposite is true.
When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he promised to drain the Washington swamp after the Watergate scandals. He promised to heal the deep wounds from the disastrous, decades-long Viet Nam War. He promised to alleviate urban decay and expand the social safety net.
But the capitalist economy was mired in its worst recession in decades. Factories and other workplaces slammed shut. Fake energy shortages caused long lines at gas stations. Energy prices spiked. Major cities, beset by decay and crime, went broke. Unemployment and inflation skyrocketed at the same time.
So, Carter moved to rescue the profits of big business and their capitalist owners from the crisis caused by their own economic system. Carter enacted big tax cuts and subsidies—for the rich. To pay for them, Carter slashed vital benefits, including for retirees on Social Security and the unemployed. He even made unemployment benefits taxable for the first time—a further cut.
Carter also slashed vital social spending across the board. For example, funding for public housing and housing subsidies for the poor were reduced from 517,000 units per year in 1976 down to less than 150,000 units in 1981 per year—a cut of 60%! (Habitat for Humanity, which Carter joined afterwards, built a few thousand units total, a drop in the bucket compared to the cuts that Carter carried out during his presidency.)
To boost corporate profits still further, the Carter administration supported the capitalist push to force down wages and jettison benefits, including pensions and health care. In 1978, for example, Carter invoked Taft-Hartley against the miners’ strikes, making the strikes illegal and arresting the strike leaders. In this case, the miners’ strikes were strong enough to beat back these attacks. But in 1979, the Carter administration successfully attacked auto workers, even getting Congress to pass a law dictating big wage and benefit cuts. When the UAW leadership, considered one of the most powerful unions at the time, completely caved in to these demands, the rest of the capitalist class generalized this push for big concessions.
Neither is Carter the advocate for peace that the news media and politicians claim. Carter might be credited with the Camp David Accords, in which the Israeli and Egyptian governments ended their state of war with each other. Obviously, this did not at all end the wars in the Middle East. All it did was realign the powers in Israel’s favor in these wars.
In a few cases, such as in Nicaragua and Iran, vicious dictatorships, which were clients of the U.S. government, because they catered to and defended U.S. business interests and investments, were overthrown by enormous social uprisings and revolutions. So, the Carter administration quickly moved to isolate, undermine and attack those new governments.
At the same time, the Carter administration secretly supported religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan in order to provoke the disastrous invasion and occupation by the Soviet Union, Afghanistan’s neighbor. In this war, the Carter administration considered the lives of the Afghan people as mere pawns in order to weaken and bleed the Soviet Union, in other words, to give the Soviet Union its own “Viet Nam,” as a Carter advisor later admitted.
Thus, the Carter administration’s foreign policy was marked by more wars, increased military budgets, and support of dictatorships. And they helped pave the way for the much bigger wars and rivalries that plague so much of the world today.
Given all the hardships that the Carter administration helped impose on big parts of the working population, he was booted out of office during the following election in a landslide defeat. But many of the attacks that Reagan, his successor, is blamed for, were actually initiated under Carter and the Democrats.
In reality, Jimmy Carter was simply doing his job. The man whom the politicians and news media today try to make it seem like a saint, was a run of the mill politician in the service of the American ruling class, against workers and poor people in this country and around the world.
Jan 6, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters during the week December 22, 2024.
Capitalism has two pillars that anchor its future today: economic crisis and global war.
The economy may not have collapsed in as extreme a way as it did in 1929—not yet. But the financial maneuvers carried out by the capitalist class to increase its share of the wealth are pushing the world in that direction.
Exploitation of labor—which is the basic factor of capitalist society—is unremitting and grows more extreme each passing year.
We measure its impact in our declining standard of living, our inability to buy what we once had. A quarter of the population pays rent and utilities that eat up their whole paycheck. Credit card balances go up. The number of decent paying jobs plunges. Younger people work two or even three jobs, just to survive. Young people no longer young still live in their parents’ homes, for lack of rent money. Older people work long past the age of retirement. Grandmothers, great-grandmothers, take care of children so parents can work more hours. All the public services useful for the population—schools, child care facilities, public health, public transit, roads, bridges, dams, levees, parks—are starved for funds, which subsidize business profit.
The interlocked side of the equation sees wealth rapidly accumulate in the hands of a small number of people, the capitalist class. Instead of investing back in production, they leech profit to put it into financial speculation.
Stock market indexes soar. But that’s only a small part of speculation. The capitalists buy countries’ currencies, then sell them, interfering with world trade. They tout the cryptocurrencies they create in order to push their prices higher. They buy land in order to sell it. They buy real estate, to sell it. They buy pharmacy chains and hospitals, only to put them into debt, then close them. All of this drives inflation. And all of it prepares for the next catastrophic collapse of financial markets, and with it the whole economy.
The answer the capitalists will have for this collapse is the same one they had in 1929: go to a global war, in which all the major powers line up against each other to re-divide the world’s wealth.
In one sense we are already in a global war. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are only a small part of it. There are wars throughout Africa. The Middle East is aflame. So is Western Asia. Eastern Europe is on the edge. If we measure by the numbers killed, we could already call this World War III. But the difference—so far—is that the major capitalist powers have not solidified their alliances. They shrink from sending their own troops. But they are involved, just as the U.S. is involved in the Ukraine war and the Middle East wars.
Today, the U.S. spends more on war than what the next nine countries put together spend. It has 750 military bases in 80 countries. In other words, it already has troops in far-flung places. Patrolling the world’s seas are 21 U.S. aircraft carriers, accompanied by battle ships.
The U.S. may use surrogates—like NATO, Ukraine and Israel—to carry out its big wars today.
But it is spending for, planning for, its next major war. And it is demonizing China today, preparing us to accept war against China tomorrow.
For more than a century, capitalism has produced only economic crisis or war or both. Face it! This will be our future until the working class rips power out of the hands of the capitalist class, until the working class uses its position in the very heart of the productive economy to reorganize society, to build and create a collective society that can benefit everyone.
Over 100 years ago, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg framed the issue this way: until the working class finds its way to build socialism, we will live—and die—caught in capitalist barbarism.
Jan 6, 2025
Tyler Perry takes on the true story of the 6888th Battalion. The film reveals a buried history of the only battalion of black enlisted women who served in Europe. They were given a seemingly impossible task: to sort through and deliver in six months 17 million pieces of mail, that had been literally rotting for years in warehouses, to and from soldiers serving in WWII. They had to work in horrifyingly miserable conditions, with no support from their racist military superiors. Yet they managed to do it in three months.
The film celebrates the essential and important role these women played, in spite of all the odds. What this film also shows is that the working class, when organized and faced with worthy goals, can accomplish anything it needs to do.
This book, winner of the 2018 Man Booker prize, is a courageous telling of life in 1970s Northern Ireland in the time of the Troubles in a neighborhood occupied by the British army. People, cities, factions and even countries are unnamed, but the narrator (who is called third sister) depicts a life that is stifling, scary, and pressure-filled. You see glimpses of the oppression imposed by the British forces. The occupied community’s fight-back is organized by people who end up adopting the same terroristic habits of the occupiers, imposing taxes and violent forced compliance and tolerating sexual assault by their leaders.
Third sister, however, resists all the pressures and the demands. Her rebellion is dramatic yet quite simple: she enjoys walking while reading. She goes for runs. She is not in a hurry to get married. She enjoys sunsets. This is the 1970s, so this is huge. Can she persevere in the face of the political pressures, her family, the church and her community? It’s a question we continue to face even today.
Jan 6, 2025
When the New Year came around, a lot of workers said Good Riddance to the dumpster fire that was 2024.
From the beginning of the year on, we were told constantly that the economy was doing better than it was—that inflation is low again, and the unemployment rate is down and average wages are up. What worker believed that?
But real wages kept dropping, even with pay increases that were sometimes called ‘historic.’
The last of the pandemic-era assistance ended in the fall of 2023, and many working people continued to feel the lack of that throughout 2024. No more expanded Medicaid or SNAP coverage, no more student loan moratorium, no more rent aid, etc. All things that people depended on, but that the government, Republicans and Democrats alike, thought was too expensive and frivolous to continue.
And the effects were seen in statistics: Housing prices and rental prices skyrocketed. Homelessness jumped 18.1% in 2024, to 770,000 people, a new record. This included 150,000 children, a 33% jump from 2023.
And what was the U.S. government’s answer to all of this? They increased military spending, of course, by 2.6%, to 842 billion dollars. Because no price is too high for the military and its corporate contractors!
They continued to support the slaughter in Gaza, and the war in Ukraine. Not to mention all the other regional wars they keep pushing.
But some people did do well this past year. Corporate profits are higher than ever. The stock market keeps going up, and dividends for shareholders are through the roof.
And then, we had the endless reality show that was the election, which dragged on from January into November. By the time it was done, over 5 billion dollars had been spent by both sides, second only to 2020.
Since the election, Democrats and Republicans began gathering in Washington, D.C., jockeying for position to line up at the trough, with all the corporate, tech and finance bosses whispering in the politicians’ ears for their pieces of that public money.
This past year was a very good demonstration of one very clear fact: These capitalist rulers of our society, and their government servants, are completely unfit to run a society! Certainly not a humane one, not one that can serve the needs of the vast majority of people in the United States or the world.
Jan 6, 2025
At least 18 newborns have been abandoned in 2024 in Texas, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. A decade ago, the number was seven.
A 28-year-old woman who gave birth next to a clothing donation bin, and left the baby there, had been living at a homeless camp. A 22-year-old woman whose infant ended up in a garbage truck told investigators she had passed out while showering, then awakened to find she had delivered. When she realized the infant was dead, she panicked and put the body in the trash.
Another woman from Guatemala, who also discarded her baby, said she didn’t know any English, never had any sex education. It wasn’t until seven months after she was raped by a family member that she even realized she was pregnant. She did not seek care because she heard about Texas officials deporting undocumented migrants. She had no idea what to do when she went into labor, much less after the baby was born.
These tragedies are happening in a state with one of the most restrictive abortion bans—no exceptions for rape or incest—as well as one of the nation’s highest birth rates. This is no coincidence.
On top of that, Texas ranked next to last for woman’s health and reproductive care, and state legislators have repeatedly cut funding for that care. The percentage of women without health insurance is higher in Texas than in any other state.
This year Governor Greg Abbott ordered Texas public hospitals to track the cost of treating undocumented immigrants, potentially deterring women from seeking care for fear of being turned over to authorities.
All of these things together have set women up to take these desperate and tragic actions of throwing their newborns in dumpsters. Texas officials are using these situations to make political propaganda. And they are prosecuting the women who are victims of these circumstances.
The real problem is the system, a system which could provide decent maternity and health care, but doesn’t. Capitalism is run by and for the wealthy. These politicians, who dare to condemn and criminalize women who never had a chance, are the ones who are responsible for these tragedies.