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
Feb 17, 2025
Donald Trump started his second term by deporting immigrants, trying to make them scapegoats for everything. But it was not only immigrants who he attacked. Trump, along with his billionaire buddy Elon Musk, are trying to take away the jobs of tens and hundreds of thousands of people who work for the federal government.
Trump got rid of the heads of many government departments and agencies. But Trump is just replacing them with his own corrupt cronies. The real attack is on the thousands of people who do the actual work in those departments. Trump and Musk say they will permanently eliminate many of their jobs.
Trump and Musk got rid of some government employees by threatening them, arrogantly telling them that if they didn’t take buyouts they would be laid off and fired without any money. About 75,000 already took the buyouts. Trump and Musk are firing almost all the newest employees, another 200,000-plus workers. Trump and Musk said that, in the future, they will replace only one in four workers who leave.
Nobody voted for Musk to do this. Nobody elected him to do anything. But Musk is the richest man in the world, who got even richer by cutting jobs at Tesla and Twitter. So Trump put him in charge of these massive job cuts as head of the newly-created DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency. Any worker knows what it means when a boss talks about “efficiency.” It means that he plans to throw some people out of work and then get more work out of fewer people. But in the case of the federal government, these jobs cuts will also mean cuts in public services that the population needs and depends on.
Some of the government jobs that Trump and Musk are trying to cut are people who are nurses and other workers in the V.A. Hospitals. They are people who do mental health care and social work and medical research, jobs that are already short-staffed. They are people who work in agencies that are supposed to monitor workplace safety and pollution and consumer protection—agencies that were already limited, but now will be cut to nothing. And they are people who work in the offices of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. These jobs have already been drastically reduced, as anybody knows who has waited for hours on the phone or whose check comes late. What happens when more jobs are cut?
Government job cuts didn’t start with Trump and Musk. They have happened under the previous administrations of both parties. Bill Clinton eliminated over 400,000 government jobs during his time as president. As a percentage of total jobs, the number of workers in the federal government today is the lowest it has been since 1940.
Politicians have been cutting government jobs in order to serve the needs and the profits of the capitalist class, the class that includes Trump and Musk. They may claim they are cutting bureaucracy and cutting jobs in order to cut government spending. But they are, in fact, preparing to hand more government money over to their fellow capitalists by lowering taxes on the wealthy. They plan to give the corporate elite even more subsidies and increase military spending.
Some government workers have organized demonstrations and protests against Trump and Musk’s job cuts. But what government workers are up against today is not just Trump and Musk, they are up against the capitalist class and its drive for profits.
Government workers are a small part of a big working class. Millions of other workers are facing the same attacks on their jobs and their standard of living and have the same reason to fight. Workers in the factories and all the other workplaces are in the very center of the whole capitalist economy. That gives the working class power. It is power enough to push aside the Trumps and the Musks and all their smirking arrogance. It is power enough to push aside all of their fellow capitalists and build a society that benefits everyone.
Feb 17, 2025
About a dozen black-clad neo-Nazis gathered on an overpass, early in the afternoon on a Friday in February. They wore red masks as they waved flags emblazoned with swastikas over I-75, right at the entrance to Lincoln Heights, a historic black suburb of Cincinnati. They carried a banner reading “America for the White Man.” A couple brandished rifles.
Dozens of black residents arrived quickly. The neo-Nazis ran off. The police who turned up appeared to be focused on protecting the Nazi demonstrators. They escorted a U-Haul truck through the community protestors to allow the Nazis to make a hasty escape.
Kachara Talbert, a community member, later told CNN: “I’ve watched black men all my life in this community being frisked and detained without probable cause. But I didn’t see any rubber bullets that day. I didn’t see anybody getting shot, like during Black Lives Matter protests. I didn’t see gas. The calmness of the police overall, the way they were standing in front of them, it made us very upset.” Lincoln Heights residents later set up their own armed patrol.
With Trump in office, we can expect the extreme-right to keep “testing” the waters for their vile, racist crap. Working people will need to be ready to organize their own response, as those in Lincoln Heights did. The capitalist state is not meant to protect us!
Feb 17, 2025
Maryland has a lot of income inequality and is becoming even more unequal, according to charts of 2023 income published by state legislative researchers.
More than two in five workers earned on average hardly more than the full-time state minimum wage. But the richest one and a half percent earned almost 20% of all the income in the state.
Worse, almost three in five people earned LESS in 2023 than the year before. But richer people earned MORE on average. The top half of a percent earned more than $20,000 MORE in 2023 than in 2022.
So our hard work doesn’t bring rewards. The rich gobble up the results.
Feb 17, 2025
And speaking of government contracts that have led to “fraud and waste,” on February 13 a State Department official said it was giving up a plan to purchase 400 million dollars worth of armored vehicles from Tesla, Elon Musk’s company.
Will the State Department official who made this decision still have a job next week?
Feb 17, 2025
Two children, a nine-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl, froze to death in a van in the parking structure of the Greektown Casino in Detroit. The kids, their mother, her two other children, and their grandmother were homeless and living in their mother’s van.
Their mother, Tateona Williams, had parked the van in the structure at 1 a.m. early that morning. They could park for free in the structure at that time of night because the casinos are open 24 hours and generally don’t charge to park there. The van’s battery apparently had died and the van stopped running and lost heat amid the frigid winter temperature.
Williams said she had called the city’s homeless response team several times back in November, but was told there were no beds available, and the response team never reached out to her in the nearly three months since. She says she kept calling individual shelters, only to be told repeatedly they had no beds available.
Williams is certainly not alone in experiencing difficulty getting help from the city. The city’s referral system for getting homeless people into shelters is run by a private religious non-profit group, Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries. The group’s own CEO, Chad Audi, openly admitted the system is broken following the tragedy. The mission has 650 beds and has been full up. Not surprising since estimates show that Detroit and its two enclosed suburbs, Hamtramck and Highland Park, had 1,725 homeless people last year, up 16% from the year before!
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan was quick to reassure the public the city was moving to provide more shelter for the city’s homeless, after news broke of the children’s deaths. City officials suddenly managed to find housing for the family after the children’s deaths, to which Tateona Williams rightfully responded, “Now that my two kids are dead, oh, all of a sudden you got beds available.”
The tragedy of these kids’ needless death hit home to many people. This will certainly not be the last tragedy to occur in the face of increasing homelessness, and Detroit is certainly not alone in facing this growing problem. It’s a symptom of a capitalist society that is falling apart in so many ways. It needs to go.
Feb 17, 2025
State Farm, the largest home insurer in California, is asking state regulators for a big rate increase, averaging 22%—even though State Farm already raised premiums in California by 27% in the last two years alone.
State Farm says it needs this rate hike because it has been losing money. It claims the catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles and other disasters in California in recent years will totally ruin the company.
But that’s a lie. State Farm is the largest insurer of homes, auto and business in California AND the rest of the country—and the property/casualty insurance industry has been rolling in the dough. In 2023, the industry made a whopping 88 billion dollars in profit—a record which didn’t even last a year. In just the first nine months of 2024, the profits further skyrocketed to 130 billion dollars!
The insurance companies are doing this by denying coverage to hundreds of thousands of people in disaster-prone areas and jacking up rates for the remaining customers. In Los Angeles County, for example, insurers dropped more than half a million homeowner policies between 2020 and 2022, according to the California Department of Insurance.
One couple who lost their home in the recent L.A. County fires, Jewlz and Terry Fahn, told ABC News that they felt betrayed by State Farm. For more than 20 years, the Fahns said, they paid their premiums and never made a claim. But State Farm refused to renew their policy last fall, just a few months before the fires.
For big capitalists, weather-related disasters are just another way to jack up profits—by squeezing the very people whose lives are being destroyed.
Feb 17, 2025
Almost immediately after Roe v. Wade was overturned, not only did births increase in states with bans on abortion, but infant deaths increased as well. This happened in the majority of the 14 states that first had abortion bans.
Two studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at births and deaths of infants in all 50 states since 2012. In the first 18 months after Roe fell, there were 22,180 more births in states with bans. The poorest layer of the working population saw the most births.
What that means is, some of the youngest and most vulnerable women faced enormous inequality in accessing abortion in states with bans. Poor women and women of color were already experiencing more birth complications and higher infant death rates before Roe fell.
In the first 18 months of abortion bans, there were 478 more infant deaths than when abortion was still legal. The death rate for infants shot up 6% overall and went up 11% for black infants in states with abortion bans.
According to one researcher, Dr. Suzanne Bell, “all but 94 of the additional 478 infant deaths were in Texas, which has a much larger population than any of the other states with bans.”
Some rise in deaths is because unviable pregnancies now come to term. In states with bans, the limits of medical science are ignored. More fetuses with irreversible developmental defects now die days or weeks after birth, increasing infant mortality.
The results are in. Abortion bans are killing babies.
Feb 17, 2025
“Too many children do not thrive in their assigned government-run K-12 schools,” says President Trump. And so, in late January, he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to prioritize “school choice” programs.
There is nothing new about schools of choice—a history that goes back 70 years, when there was a push to ignore the Brown v. Board of Education ruling on the desegregation of schools and give parents the “choice” to send their children to schools outside the districts where they live. Then and now, this has meant that per pupil funding followed the student—money from one school district to the other. It was, and is, essentially, a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation.
But this latest executive order ramps up the use of public funds to pay for programs supporting private, faith-based private, home school and other non-public educational alternatives.
For example, in Michigan, one in four K-12 students attend school at a charter or in a school choice district. That translated to nearly 200,000 students who left their district to attend another one during the 2023–2024 school year, and another 150,000 attended a charter school.
Why? Because there are real problems in many school districts. For example, in the 1970s, there were 370 public schools in Detroit. Today, there are 100. So for many families, there are NO public schools in their neighborhoods. And where there are, the schools may be crumbling; the class sizes may be out of control; there may not be enough teachers.
But when you break it down, public education has been in the process of being dismantled for years—where private interests have robbed public funds for the schools.
And so, yes, it’s only logical that many families have opted out for so-called “schools of choice,” or charter schools, because parents are doing their darndest to try to find some semblance of an education for their children and grandchildren—somewhere. In the words of one grandparent: “They call them schools of choice, but they don’t give parents a choice.”
Feb 17, 2025
Chicago teachers have been working without a contact for over seven months, and negotiations drag on.
They want well-deserved pay increases and important changes for students and staff to upgrade the quality of education. But Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has stiffened its opposition to these demands, claiming the funds aren’t there, and a showdown may be brewing.
This is only the latest of an ongoing series of attacks on public education in Chicago that has played out over many years—attacks administered by successive Democratic Party mayoral administrations.
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) leadership said that with the current mayor, Brandon Johnson, things would be different—that Johnson, a former CTU member, would fulfill his campaign promise to support teachers and students and “transform education” in Chicago.
But since 2018, when Johnson decided to pursue his fortunes as a Democratic Party politician, he has been answering to a handful of multi-billionaires that control city government.
The schools budget is woefully inadequate and includes over 200 million dollars in staffing and services cutbacks. The CPS CEO is determined to address major school budget shortfalls which make school closures likely. Currently under consideration are closures of seven Acero charter schools, which would send 2,000 mostly Latino students home and leave 270 teachers on the street.
In fact, the decades-long decline in schools is part of the general attack the capitalist class has been waging against the working class.
The CTU leadership hopes this mayor will somehow find the money to fix the schools and in a generous gesture give it to them. But getting the money would mean going up against the capitalist class that has taken it. And no mayor has the power to do that, even if he wanted to.
But the working class does have that power. Workers could start to mobilize over the schools. After all, workers are all affected by the education their children get, and the problems facing teachers are similar to the problems facing other workers.
A fight for better schools could open up a broader fight, against not only whoever currently sits in the mayor’s office, but against the capitalist class that really calls the shots. Such a fight might be harder to imagine than helping to get one or another capitalist politician elected—but it’s the only way workers, including teachers, will ever be able to stand up against the attacks.
Feb 17, 2025
This article is translated from the February 14 issue, #2950 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Trump has reiterated his delusional plan—declaring that he wants to deport the Palestinians to build “the Riviera of the Middle East” on the ruins of Gaza—despite the strong reactions he’s provoked, including within the U.S. administration.
On the future of the Palestinians as on the sovereignty of Greenland or that of the Panama Canal, Trump expresses his desires without cloaking them under so-called “international law,” like other more hypocritical imperialist leaders. With the economic, technical and military power of the United States, with his Israeli ally, a government determined to drive the Palestinians from their land and an army that has proven its ability to intervene against all its neighbors, Trump would like to settle the old Palestinian question by getting rid of the Palestinians.
On February 10, to remove the ambiguity of his first announcement, he stated on Fox News that the Palestinians evacuated from Gaza to rebuild the bombed enclave would never be able to return there. On the same day, he threatened Jordan and Egypt, the two countries to which he plans to deport most Gazans, with cutting off U.S. financial and military aid if their leaders continue to reject his plan.
Allies of the United States and dependent on its aid, King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian leader Al-Sissi have no desire to welcome nearly two million deported Palestinians onto their territory. They are well aware that these “wretched of the earth” would stir up revolt among the poor classes and become a source of instability in their countries, already suffering from the economic crisis and social inequalities. Seeking to loosen the vise, Al-Sissi repeats “that the reconstruction of Gaza must begin without displacing the Palestinians and preserving their right to live on their land.”
Saudi Arabia, another ally of the United States, had undertaken to normalize its relations with Israel before October 7, 2023. If it agreed to support the Trump plan and participated, with Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, in the financing of this “Middle Eastern Riviera,” it would appear to all Arab peoples as an accomplice to this “Nakba” of the 21st century, a new “catastrophe” reproducing that of 1948.
After all, with all due respect to Trump, who wants to reshape the Middle East as he sees fit, to the leaders of secondary powers who act horrified at his words but have never hesitated to massacre peoples, to Israeli leaders who steal Palestinian land, to the leaders of Arab countries, the main obstacle remains the peoples of the region, starting with the Palestinians, determined not to let themselves be deported or exterminated.
Feb 17, 2025
This article is translated from the February 14 issue, #2950 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
When Israeli hostages were released on February 8, their families were shocked at their obvious poor health. It’s understandable after 15 months of captivity in the impossible living conditions in Gaza under constant bombardment. But the media made no attempt to be fair.
A deafening silence continues to reign among media commentators. They hardly mention the human, food, and health catastrophe that Gazans who survived the bombing have experienced and continue to experience. Hunger, deprivation of water and medicine, and lack of hygiene and sleep were the everyday life for 15 months for the two million Palestinians of Gaza.
Many of the Palestinian prisoners Israel released in exchange were also prematurely aged, weakened, or sick, depending on how long they were detained in Israel’s jails. Of the 183 released on February 8—some requiring stretchers—18 were serving life sentences and 54 were serving long-term sentences. Seven had to be hospitalized immediately due to the mistreatment they suffered in prison. In addition, seven other prisoners with life sentences were deported to Egypt.
Al Jazeera denounced the critical condition of many of the released prisoners, due to “starvation and dehydration as well as deliberate medical neglect which continued throughout their years of imprisonment. Their suffering was not limited to these measures. They also suffered physical and psychological torture. Several released prisoners reported being subjected to severe beatings until the last moments before their release, and being deprived of the most basic necessities of human dignity.”
The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society denounced the Israeli army’s searches and attacks committed the night before the release against families waiting for the detainees in Bethlehem, Hebron and Kobar in the West Bank.
Their release does not end the harassment to which these Palestinians are subjected. Many say they have received threats from Israeli intelligence services and summons for interrogation. The Zionist state only gives them supervised, conditional, and probably short-lived freedom.
Netanyahu’s government held more than 10,000 Palestinians before the ceasefire and prisoner releases. More than 3,300 were in administrative detention, without having been charged with anything or put on trial. One such prisoner was Dr. Hossam Abou Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza. He was arrested after Israeli armed forces destroyed the building where he still provided care. He is still detained. His relatives have no news of him.
Feb 17, 2025
This article is translated from the February 14 issue, #2950 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
By announcing he is for deporting Palestinians from Gaza, Trump adopted the program of the far right in Israel. This encourages them to continue the colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territories.
American soldiers won’t need to carry out Trump’s plan, Netanyahu said on February 9: Israel “will do the job.”
By massacring more than 48,000 Palestinians, according to the latest report, and completely devastating the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has shown clearly how it intends to “do the job.” More than half a million people who fled northern Gaza by foot have returned home. Most have no more belongings left than what they can carry. The majority found only rubble where their homes once stood.
Israeli authorities continue to prevent the passage of convoys which could help homeless Palestinians. This violates the humanitarian section of the ceasefire agreement. In retaliation, Hamas threatened on February 10 to stop releasing hostages. In response, Trump threatened “all hell” in Gaza if the hostages are not released. With a green light from Trump, the Israeli government could decide to start bombing again at any time.
And even during this truce, the Israeli army is still making victims. Three Palestinians were shot dead for having “come too close” to Israeli positions, according to the Gaza Civil Defense.
Two days after agreeing to the ceasefire in Gaza, the Israeli government launched raids in the northern West Bank, which is home to nearly half a million Palestinians. The Israeli military used aircraft, tanks and infantry, and targeted Jenin and Tulkarem in particular. These cities have refugee camps. On February 6, Nour Shams, with its refugee camp, was targeted. At least three Palestinians were killed. More than half of the 13,000 residents were forced to flee. Bulldozers destroyed homes.
The Israeli army is waging a real war in the West Bank and probably intends to prepare to annex more Palestinian territories, with the full support of the new U.S. administration. Trump’s cynical policy falls in line with everything the imperialist powers have always done to establish their domination in the Middle East. They drew borders according to their own interests. They supported dictatorial regimes. And they intervened militarily, full of contempt for whatever the peoples of the region desired.
Feb 17, 2025
This article is translated from the February 14, issue #2950 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
At the end of World War I, French author Anatole France wrote: “You think you are dying for your country. You die for the industrialists.” Ukrainians have just had their own brutal confirmation of it.
On February 10, Trump declared on Fox News that he is making continued American aid to Ukraine conditional on Ukraine giving him 500 billion dollars worth of rare earth minerals.
The minerals in question are 17 metals essential to industrial sectors that represent a significant part of the world economy, namely mobile phones, digital screens, electric cars, offshore wind turbines, medical robots and devices, and weapons. Despite being called rare, these elements are found in abundance on land and undersea. But only a handful of countries mine these strategic metals, such as China with 60% of the market, because extracting and especially processing them takes an enormous investment.
Though the U.S. occupies second place in this field, it is far behind China. In October, U.S. leaders saw a godsend for their mineral-hungry industries in the announcement of an appetizing “peace plan” concocted by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He proposed to his “partners” in the war with Russia a “special agreement” providing for “joint exploitation of strategic resources” including uranium, titanium, lithium, graphite “and other high-value resources.”
This proposal attracts his American “partner” so much that the U.S. demands that American interests get exclusive rights to exploit these resources. Too bad for the European “partners” which will only get the dregs American corporations don’t want!
In the event that Zelensky failed to understand that he doesn’t have much choice in the matter, Trump dotted the i’s for him. In his interview with Fox News, he said that Ukrainians “may be Russian some day, or they may not be Russian some day.” In short, their future will depend only on Washington’s goodwill.
Trump added that some of these mineral resources are in the zone occupied by the Russian army. This was yet another way of pressuring his Ukrainian “ally.” Given the constant advance of Russian troops, Kyiv may soon have few rare earth minerals left to trade. In that scenario, the White House could negotiate the future exploitation of these strategic metals with the Kremlin instead. Trump also mentioned that he had recently spoken with Putin and that they had already spoken before.
Feb 17, 2025
The perfect storm of especially hot, dry weather and exceptionally strong winds that burned huge portions of the Los Angeles area also caused deadly damage in Baja California, the part of Mexico directly south of California.
On December 10, westward Santa Ana winds hit 46 miles per hour in Tijuana, killing two 15-year-olds trapped in their burning home. Then starting January 22, winds exceeded 50 miles per hour, and hundreds of wildfires burned 42 square miles near the cities of Mexicali, Tijuana, Ensenada, San Quentín, and Tecate. Thousands of people there live on hillsides as squatters without public services, while fire departments lack staff.
The problems of climate change and cuts to public workforces are international and respect no borders.
Feb 17, 2025
Donald Trump loudly announced plans to send 30,000 migrants to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba. So far, the administration has sent about three dozen people, calling them “dangerous criminals,” “the worst of the worst,” and claiming they’re part of a gang based in Venezuela.
But the administration gave no evidence. One of these migrants entered the U.S. on January 19 of this year, surrendering to border patrol agents and applying for asylum. Officials said they suspected him of gang ties simply because he had tattoos, and the administration spokesperson admitted, “He may very well be a member of this vicious gang. He may not be,” before claiming new evidence indicated he was a gang member—evidence she did not share.
Guantánamo is very convenient for Trump exactly because the government can hold people there without providing any evidence. Trump has repeatedly talked up “migrant crime.” But if there was a real migrant crime wave, they wouldn’t need Guantánamo or any other immigrant detention center—anyone convicted of a crime can be held in a regular jail, and the U.S. has plenty of those! The whole point of Guantánamo is to make it seem like the administration is getting tough on this crime wave that they invented, while ignoring the real cause of street crime—this capitalist system that inflicts poverty and hopelessness on so many of its youth.
Using Guantánamo to brutalize people away from U.S. legal protections is nothing new. From 1991 to 1994—under both Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton—the U.S. held thousands of Haitians there who were fleeing a coup in their country. Conditions were atrocious: they were served food that had maggots in it, had to sleep on the ground with rats, and were denied sufficient drinking water.
Then, after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush sent more detainees to the base, where the government tortured them, holding them incommunicado, trying to deny them any legal recourse. Many were discovered to have had no connection to the attacks or any terrorist group at all. Three of the first people held there were British tourists who had traveled to Afghanistan right before the U.S. invaded—they were only released after two years of torture. This didn’t end when Bush left office: despite his promises to close Guantánamo, Obama never did.
Biden himself also kept it open as a detention center for migrants, where a small number were already kept with limited communications with the outside world before Trump took office. In August 2024, the Biden administration even granted a private prison company a 163.4-million-dollar contract to run the facility.
So Trump’s brutality and use of Guantánamo is nothing new for the U.S. state apparatus.
What’s new is how much Trump talks about it and insists that he’s sending people there to protect those born here. He wants to convince working-class people that our real enemies are these migrants, instead of the rich class of thieves that Trump himself represents. But in fact, the brutality the U.S. has carried out on Guantánamo has never protected workers here—just the opposite.
Feb 17, 2025
American Indian activist Leonard Peltier is to be released on February 18, after spending 50 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He will remain under house arrest.
Peltier was an activist fighting for Native American rights. He became a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In 1973, AIM occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota for 71 days to protest the failure by the U.S. government to honor treaties made with Native Americans and to protest corruption among official tribal leaders. Federal agents fired on protesters, killing two and wounding and arresting others, before negotiating with the protesters to end the occupation, promising to investigate the concerns raised by AIM.
In June 1975, two FBI agents in unmarked cars followed a pickup truck onto a nearby ranch where AIM members had set up camp. A shootout took place and two FBI agents and one Native American were killed. Though 40 Native Americans and over 150 FBI agents and cops took part in the gunfight, only three AIM members were charged, including Leonard Peltier.
Only Peltier was convicted of murder of the two agents based on testimony of “eyewitnesses” who later recanted their stories and an FBI agent who changed his story. Prosecutors claimed a bullet casing found near the agents’ bodies matched Peltier’s gun. Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two life terms in prison.
Later it came out that prosecutors withheld results of a ballistics test from Peltier’s lawyers showing that the casing did not come from Peltier’s gun; they also withheld 140,000 pages of documents. U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, who led the government’s fight against Peltier’s appeal, later admitted that Peltier’s conviction should have been overturned. Yet SIX presidents before Biden could have pardoned Peltier or commuted his sentence, including three Democrats, and none did.
Though the U.S. courts and law enforcement authorities did nothing about the violence committed against Native Americans leading up to the FBI agents’ shootings, Peltier spent 50 years in prison, experiencing beatings and long periods of solitary confinement. All because the politicians were unwilling to stand up to criticism from law enforcement to overturn a miscarriage of justice. Biden held out to the very end before granting Peltier some limited freedom, despite the fact that Peltier has diabetes and suffered a stroke that left him blind in one eye.
Through all this Peltier maintained his innocence and remains a symbol of the fight of Native Americans for some semblance of justice for the wrongs committed by this society against them.
Feb 17, 2025
U.S. foreign aid programs were suspended by Donald Trump. He withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO), and he abruptly closed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on February 1.
Politicians make a big deal about this agency, which actually has a small budget. USAID has gotten between 0.7% and 1.4% of total federal spending in recent decades, or between 20 billion and 77 billion dollars per year out of a budget of trillions. The agency employed around 4,675 people, about as many as only one big hospital or factory, to manage a range of programs in 177 countries.
The U.S. spends more in total dollars on foreign aid than other countries do. But it spends much less as a percent of the whole economy, the gross domestic product. U.S. foreign aid represents 0.24% of the economy, about the same percent spent by Spain or the Czech Republic.
Politicians say this aid is altruistic. But most of it is spent funding foreign militaries like Ukraine, Israel, and Egypt. And often the aid comes with the requirement that the money is spent buying goods and services from U.S. corporations. So this aid is a way to influence other countries’ governments and to reshape their economies. International aid has been used this way since it was started during the Cold War. But some of this aid money does help relieve the conditions of people. Cutting this would be a catastrophe for them.
Presenting this aid as a donation to make sure that poor counties become rich is a lie and a scam. But the U.S. uses this myth, not only to control people in other countries, but also to divert the discontent of some voters here against others, and to try to force public servants to obey.
Feb 17, 2025
In a press conference two weeks ago, the Los Angeles United Firefighters publicized that firefighters are forced to work lots of unpaid overtime. In fact, the firefighters’ suit about forced unpaid overtime goes back many years.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, forcing lengthy hours of overtime on firefighters without pay is perfectly legal.
Even when there are no fires, the firefighters are forced to work overtime with no pay because of a lack of staff. A firefighter-paramedic, Daniel Gonzalez, who has served 21 years with the Los Angeles Fire Department, said: “In the mornings if we don’t have enough staffing to fill every position in the fire department because a fire engine can’t operate without four people on it, we have to have constant staffing. It’s the same thing with the paramedic ambulance; we have to have two paramedics on there. So if we don’t have enough people on duty that day, they hold us over until our shift technically ends at 8:00 to make sure that they can place us.”
Why is there a lack of firefighters?
Because the City of Los Angeles has continuously cut the fire department’s budget for decades. In a recent example, a leaked memo revealed that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass demanded an extra budget cut of $49 million. And she demanded this cut just one week before devastating Los Angeles wildfires broke out. In the same memo, she also wrote, “The only way to provide a cost savings would be to close as many as 16 fire stations (not resources, fire stations); this equates to at least one fire station per City Council District.”
Why would the City of Los Angeles officials want to cut the firefighters’ budget? Because these officials feed their business buddies through tax cuts and grossly inflated projects. These officials find the money for this looting, the firefighters get the boot.
During the big L.A. wildfires, politicians, rich people, and the news media couldn’t stop praising firefighters for their bravery and heroism. But, as the old saying goes, money talks … and bullshit walks.
Feb 17, 2025
Trump says he wants to go back to “the time when America was great,” the time when William McKinley was president. So what was it like then, when McKinley was president?
Fortunes were being amassed by the “robber barons” who owned the railroads, the mines and the steel mills. Financial speculators were gobbling up the land. Government finances were used to prop up a failing capitalist system.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk would have felt themselves right at home.
For almost everyone else it was a time of severe deprivation and impoverishment. Almost one out of every five infants died before their first birthday. One out of every hundred women died in childbirth. Few men made it to their 40th birthday—they were condemned to 12 or 14 hours a day in the factories and mines. Less than 7% of children finished high school. Before their tenth birthday, they, too, were working in factories and in mines, where the work deformed their growing skeletons.
In the countryside, work went from sunup to sundown, day after day. Everyone worked, from the youngest to the oldest. Even so, farmers were losing their land to big money speculators.
This was the life of laboring people at the time when McKinley was president, the time that Trump calls “great.”
It was against the law for workers who went out on strike for better wages. They were arrested for trying to organize a union to defend themselves.
In the countryside, when farmers tried to organize to prevent the seizure of their lands, some of them found their barns burnt down to the ground by roving bands of thugs.
For black farmers it was even worse. Night-riders reappeared, taking on the name of the Ku Klux Klan. They would soon spread across the country, from South to North, bringing with them lynch mobs and mobs intent on rape. This new Klan would go on to target not only black people, but also Catholics, Jews, and southern and eastern European immigrants. In the 1890s, the KKK went after farmers who attempted to bring black and white farmers together in one organization. In a few decades, they would go after union organizers.
This is the “great America” that Trump would have us return to. It was an America built on extreme exploitation of laboring people, and on severe repression. And it was built on the rapacious warmongering of a capitalist class that wanted to take as theirs not only what was on this continent, but what was in the world.
The time of McKinley was especially vicious because many workers fell into the trap laid for them, blaming other working people for the problems capitalism dumped on all of them.
This is the situation Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk want to take us back to. See what they are already doing. Musk threatens to take the jobs of millions of government workers, destroying departments that provide some resources or protections to the population: education, labor standards, health and human services, environment, medical research. Trump wants to “own” Gaza, expelling the Palestinians, threatening to use the U.S. military if the Palestinians won’t leave.
Of course, Trump is not the only president who ever took us backwards. Since the economic crisis began in 1970, every president has been trying to dismantle protections that working people through their organizing had forced government to recognize. Every president prepared for more wars.
To the extent that workers in this country put the time of McKinley behind them, they did it with their own struggles, their own mass mobilizations, especially in the 1930s and 1960s, reinforced by the struggles of the black population in those same periods, and by farm-labor organizations.
Working people have the capacity to defend ourselves, to improve everyone’s situation when we organize. Our position at the very center of the economy not only can let us dump the capitalists and their political henchmen. It gives us the means to build a collective society serving everyone.
Working people can embody the future. Why would any of us ever want to go backwards?
Feb 17, 2025
Film: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, director Johan Grimonprez, 2024. Free on Kanopy, available for $4.99 on Amazon and Apple+
Belgian film-maker Johan Grimonprez’s Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat weaves together American jazz and the geopolitical machinations of the CIA and the military in the 1950s and 60s. Dozens of African nations threw off the yoke of colonial rule in this time period. The film reflects these events while focusing on the fight for national independence of the Congo, represented by Patrice Lumumba, and his subsequent assassination in 1961.
The film shows the excitement and hope in Africa, reflected in the Black and Asian population around the world. There are numerous film clips of Malcolm X and others, and footage of civil rights fights in the U.S. overlaid with the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and others.
Feb 17, 2025
The Uline office supply company has been bringing dozens of workers by shuttle from Mexico to work in its warehouses in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Uline pays them about $38 per day plus a weekly bonus and food allowance. It’s a “third world” wage. Basically, the company pays them per day what it pays U.S. workers per hour.
Uline instructs the workers to lie and say they are visiting the U.S. on tourist visas or B1 visas, which are for short-term professional training. But then they work up to six months in warehouses, often with freezing temperatures, while managers forbid gloves and thicker coats and hats!
At the same time the owners of Uline, Dick and Liz Uihlein, are major donors to right-wing, anti-immigrant politicians. They donated even more last year than Elon Musk, including giving $130 million to Donald Trump’s campaign. Their political action committee funded a campaign ad screaming about an immigrant “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexican border.
What these bosses want, like other bosses, is to oppress immigrant workers, as part of their exploitation of the entire working class. They drum up panic about “immigrant invasions” to keep their own immigrant workers in fear.
Feb 17, 2025
With his typical grandstanding, Trump announced across-the-board 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, claiming that these tariffs will resurrect rusting factories and provide millions of jobs in the U.S.
There is nothing new about all this big tariff talk. Back in 2018, Trump also issued big tariffs, accompanied by the same promises. But the real winners were the steel and aluminum producers in the U.S. They made huge profit windfalls by simply raising their prices to match the higher prices of imported steel and aluminum. As for all the new jobs that Trump promised … they never materialized.
On the contrary, the tariffs cost jobs. Higher prices for basic materials hit the U.S. auto industry and other metal-using industries hard. Trump’s tariffs also prompted retaliation from other countries. Canada, for example, imposed tariffs on 12.8 billion dollars in U.S. products, including 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum. Harley-Davidson shifted some production to Thailand to avoid Europe’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. motorbikes.
Estimates are that by mid-2019, steel and aluminum tariffs had resulted in at least 75,000 job losses in metal-using industries, and a net loss of 175,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs.
The biggest U.S. companies protected their profits by getting the Trump administration to grant them special exemptions from any tariffs. These exemptions gave those favored companies a big advantage over other competitors that didn’t get the exemptions. Of course, to get these exemptions, big companies hired extremely expensive lobbyists and lawyers, who were usually former Trump administration officials. So, while Mr. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, his tariffs and trade rules did the exact opposite.
In 2020, so much pressure from U.S. and other companies had built up on the Trump administration, it negotiated exemptions to entire countries, including Canada and Mexico. A year later, Biden extended those exemptions to the E.U. and Japan.
Thus, Trump’s 2018 steel and aluminum tariffs were nothing but a scam. And his new tariffs promise to be no different.
But behind all the tariff babble, a deeper, darker scam is being played out. Its aim is to convince American workers that the problems in our lives can be overcome if trade is stopped from coming into the country.
Like all scams, it depends on dazzling people with what appear to be “facts,” so they stop looking at what their own lives tell them to be true.
Here’s what is true: the capitalist class is getting ever richer by robbing the working class of everything possible. The capitalists have robbed us of the steady jobs that part of the working class used to have and no longer exist. They robbed us of wages and pensions. And every basic industry has seen a near collapse in the number working.
Increased trade didn’t do that. The bosses’ incessant drive for profit did. Those industries where jobs are disappearing are making larger profits than ever before—by driving some people to work faster, using machines and computers to eliminate other people’s jobs.
Sitting back quietly, praying for tariffs to bring back jobs, won’t get us anywhere. On the contrary, these lies are used to try to tie the workers to their own bosses and politicians, who are really the workers’ worst enemies. The interests of workers in the U.S. lie with the workers in other countries, who are facing the very same bosses and the very same attacks.
Our fight is their fight.
Feb 17, 2025
The Hispanic community in Chicago and many other states in the country with big immigrant populations are living in fear.
At first, Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar,” said that they would arrest only “criminals.” But president Trump said the majority of immigrants ARE criminals. They look for the criminals but they also arrest anybody they find without legal status. For Tom Homan, these are “collaterals.” With this situation, anyone who looks Hispanic can be detained and questioned, whatever the status of their papers.
For this reason, the Hispanic communities in many states have tried to organize, to protest in different ways, with rallies and boycotts of some big super-stores like Walmart, Target, and Sam’s Club, to name a few.
On Monday, February 3rd there was a call in the social media, Facebook and YouTube, to have a “Day Without Immigrants.” That was supposed to mean no shopping and no work for the Hispanic community.
The result was hardly noticed by the same Hispanic people. In Chicago, there were only a few small businesses in Little Village where people did not work. And some Southwest Side schools like Curie High School had around 50% student attendance that day. But companies with large numbers of Hispanic workers, like Fellowes, WeatherTech and Packtiv Corp, were not affected by the call for workers to stay home.
There is a big immigrant community, largely Mexican, in Chicago. But to organize through social media like YouTube or Facebook is not very convincing for many workers. To reach out to the working class, to organize—that requires a different kind of planning. And there needs to be a call for workers in general, for both immigrants and non-immigrants. We are all under many of the same pressures, and we work for the same bosses, who all want to take advantage of our situation.