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
Apr 28, 2025
Donald Trump reached the mark of his first 100 days at the end of April, and he and news outlets have trumpeted the occasion.
Trump himself ordered up a rally in Macomb County, Michigan to celebrate all of his “accomplishments.” Others felt nothing but disgust about his actions in his first days in office for his second term.
In fact, Trump’s poll ratings have dropped quite quickly for a president newly in office.
A Fox News poll (a source seemingly in Trump’s pocket) shows that his approval rating is below 50% on almost every subject: His numbers on foreign policy (-14), the economy (-18), tariffs (-25) and inflation (-26) are all worse than his overall approval rating. Only his numbers on border security (+15) are positive.
No wonder Trump has doubled down on all his attacks on immigrants. And since Trump’s only good polling numbers are on the border, he’s leaning in to the idea that so-called “foreigners” are taking American workers’ jobs, and that he is the one to protect those jobs by keeping those people out of the country.
What a crock of bull!
EVERYTHING that Trump has done in those first 100 days has been an attack on working people. The attack on immigrants is purely a distraction, and one more attack on the working class.
Trump and Elon Musk’s “DOGE” have gutted departments that provide essential services to working people. They have attacked jobs. Federal workers have been fired; and even if some have been brought back, the chaos has disrupted the entire process of getting help to people who need it.
Even when they have not outright stopped those services, those departments have put service delivery into slow motion. People trying to enroll in Social Security or Medicare may have to wait extra months or years to receive their benefits. Trump’s administration is counting on long delays from short-staffing to block people from money and benefits that are owed to them. Funding for services for children in low income working families is diminishing or disappearing.
Meanwhile, working people are anxiously watching their 401(k) accounts diminish because of Trump’s chaos on the international economic front. Most workers were forced into a 401(k) retirement fund based on the stock market years ago. As in the 2008 financial crisis, they are seeing those funds disappear before their eyes, all over again.
In addition, prices on groceries and housing costs are continuing to climb, while Trump, who said he’d stop that “on Day One,” has done nothing to halt the process. In fact, everything he’s done has ensured that prices will rise.
The attack on working people is not just in this country. All of Trump’s cuts to international spending are hitting aid spending that might have helped working people in other countries. This attack on the international working class ramps up division between workers of this country and workers of other countries, and prepares U.S. workers to be cannon fodder in current and future wars. Workers of the world are just attempting to live and feed their families.
Billionaires around the world benefit as wages are driven down for workers all around the world. Workers are being forced into competition for jobs, for money, for food … and all are being told by their politicians to blame workers in other countries for the desperate situation they find themselves in.
So, Trump has doubled down on attacks on immigrants from other countries, and on other countries’ exports to this country. He—and the ruling class behind him—want to get us to look to other workers, our natural allies, and blame them for the conditions that our own bosses are forcing on us.
We can take heart in the fact that many people are angered by the brutality they see coming out of Washington, D.C., supposedly in our name. We can start to fight back against the attacks against us. We can start to build what we truly need, a working class party, to help us defend our own interests.
There’s only one way forward: To look to our allies, the full working class here AND abroad, to fight against the enemy that we all share—our employers, the government officials who serve them, and the billionaires who control both.
Apr 28, 2025
The Los Angeles City Council is getting ready to impose enormous increases for trash collection starting January 1, 2026. For single-family homes, trash collection fees would increase from $36 to $56 per month. Those who reside in apartment buildings would get an increase from $24 to $56—that is a much, much steeper increase.
And that’s just the beginning. Under this plan, trash fees will increase every year over the next five years.
As usual, city officials claim that these fee increases will help fill a one-billion-dollar gap in its current budget. But in reality, these fees are the most regressive imaginable, with every household paying the same set monthly trash collection fee, whether rich or poor. Someone in a multi-million-dollar mansion will pay the same fee as someone in a run-down, one-bedroom apartment in the middle of the worst slum!
With the mayor and city council also planning on laying off thousands of city workers, this clearly shows that the working class of Los Angeles is expected to pay for the budget deficit. The majority of the L.A. City Council may call themselves “progressive” Democrats, but their policies are aimed at protecting the capitalist class from the coming budget crisis.
Apr 28, 2025
About 80 million people in the United States depend on Medicaid for their health insurance. This is about 25% of the entire country!
The Medicaid cutbacks that are being talked about in Washington are a big risk to those who receive Medicaid.
Apr 28, 2025
Almost half of all births of babies in this country are paid for by Medicaid. NEWBORN BABIES is where these Bozos want to cut!
Apr 28, 2025
The strike of Kaiser Permanente mental health workers in Southern California has entered its seventh month, making it the longest mental health strike in U.S. history. The strikers are demanding cost-of-living wage adjustments, a pension plan and, above all, better staffing to provide timely appointments for patients and to ease the stress on workers.
Kaiser calls itself a non-profit company, to avoid taxes. But it acts every bit as ruthlessly as the big, for-profit health care companies it competes with. Kaiser short-staffs departments, limits wages and benefits, and increases premiums to amass profits—and uses those profits to play the financial markets, and to buy up other companies.
In 2024, Kaiser bought two big health care companies and reported nearly 13 billion dollars of profit—three times the profit it made in 2023. So, Kaiser could certainly meet the demands of its mental health workers also. But it is obvious that Kaiser is determined to break this strike and send a message to all of its workers: “If you stand up to Kaiser, Kaiser will crush you.”
Today, the U.S. working class is facing a deep, widespread mental health crisis, bred by exhaustion, poverty and despair. Instead of helping ease the crisis, Kaiser Permanente, this health care giant, is actually worsening it—not only by denying care to patients, but also by pushing its own workers into work overload, and more stress.
Apr 28, 2025
On April 17, United Healthcare’s stock price dropped by a whopping 22% in one day, and it has continued to sink ever since.
United Healthcare is the largest health insurance company in the country, and it is the ninth largest company in the entire world, based on sales revenue. So, when United Healthcare’s stock dropped, it was like a minor earthquake in the corporate world.
The stock dropped despite the fact that the company had just announced record profits of over 9.1 billion dollars for the first three months of the year. But the company’s sin—its cardinal sin—was to announce that it didn’t expect to make quite so much money for the rest of the year. In response, Wall Street speculators rushed to dump the stock because their bets are based on what they think will happen in the future.
The company’s main reason for the expected drop in profits was that many of those enrolled in the company’s Medicare Advantage plans had used more health care than the executives had expected. Only in a world in which health care is just another way to make a profit for the rich would this be considered a bad thing!
Undoubtedly, to satisfy its wealthy stockholders, the company will make it even more difficult for people enrolled in its Medicare Advantage plans to get the care they need. And corporate executives will also descend on Congress to get even bigger overpayments and subsidies from the federal government than they already get.
For United Healthcare, the government is really the goose that keeps on laying the golden egg. The company made a huge bet on Medicare Advantage several years ago—and also on Medicaid—and it has seen big increases in payments from the government ever since.
These payments are so huge, more than three-quarters of all the money that United Healthcare takes in comes from Medicare Advantage and Medicaid, even though the company is also a major provider for big business insurance plans and for Obamacare.
This shows that United Healthcare’s main goal is not to deliver and organize healthcare, but the opposite. It’s simply out to funnel tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money into the bank accounts of the capitalist class through increased dividends and other gimmicks, while locking out tens of millions of the elderly and poor from the vital healthcare that they so desperately need, thus costing the health and lives of the tens of millions of people whom it pretends to serve. And—the company is punished mercilessly by Wall Street speculators at the slightest hint of a slowdown in that flow of corporate profits.
Apr 28, 2025
Ten years ago 25-year-old Freddie Gray died in the hospital in Baltimore, a week after sustaining fatal neck and spinal cord injuries from being driven roughly while handcuffed in a city police van. Six cops involved had arrested him for running from them early on a Sunday morning. They claimed he had an illegal switchblade.
On the Monday of his funeral, city schools were released early while the subway and buses were closed. Youth rioting against the police broke out in West Baltimore. The rebellion spread and continued during the week, until city prosecutor Marilyn Mosby charged the murderous cops.
Ten years later, after endless revelations about police corruption, politicians are quick to say there has been progress for young people in the city and state. But, in fact, over 43% of young people aged 16–24 in Maryland are not in the workforce—not even in those few part-time, low paid, bad-benefits jobs that exist. They are not in the dilapidated and understaffed schools, either. In Baltimore over 48% of students are chronically absent from school. More than two in three students in Maryland cannot read proficiently.
Many young people have nowhere to go but the streets, where trouble is waiting. Homicides and non-fatal shootings of Maryland youth are rising. Over 12,000 juveniles are charged with crimes each year. Almost 5,000 teenagers were booked in adult jails since 2018, where they spend up to 23 hours a day in isolation, without schooling. More than 3,500 have sued state agencies because they were sexually abused in juvenile detention facilities.
This society offers nothing to poor and working class youth. No jobs, no future. The authorities’ solution is to throw young people in jail or in the cemetery. Ten years after Freddie Gray’s murder, rebellion against capitalism is even more urgently needed.
Apr 28, 2025
On Friday, April 24th, FBI agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, accusing her of impeding the arrest of an immigrant.
The week before, an ICE team arrived at Judge Dugan’s courtroom, seeking to pick up a defendant for deportation. Judge Dugan told members of the ICE team to speak to the head judge of the courthouse. She then allowed the defendant and his lawyer to leave her courtroom using a side door. The defendant got out of the courthouse, but was immediately caught by the ICE team.
This administration has been making a big show of deporting immigrants. Hundreds of Venezuelans were sent to a prison in El Salvador, then paraded before cameras. Many of those deported have no criminal record. They were denied any semblance of due process. They were not allowed to challenge the government’s claims before being shipped out of the country.
Several judges have contested the Trump administration’s actions in court. So far, Trump’s officials have made a show of not complying with their orders.
Now the administration is making a show of attacking a judge, whom they paint as defending an immigrant. High officials in the Justice Department gave out instructions to look for cases where local officials are getting in the way of deportations.
The Trump administration is raising the stakes by arresting and prosecuting a judge. It signals their commitment to attacking the immigrant population. This is meant to intimidate that part of the working class.
Trump’s policy is also aimed at native-born Americans. He stokes the idea that, by attacking immigrants, he will make the economy “better,” as if immigrants—instead of the capitalist class—are the source of our economic problems. All these deportations haven’t brought down the price of eggs….
The administration also seeks to test how far they can expand the “imperial presidency.” It is one more step in an authoritarian direction.
Apr 28, 2025
The American Lung Association released its annual State of the Air report, which found that 156 million Americans, or 45%, lived in areas it gave failing grades for air quality. That includes measures for ozone pollution (smog), long-term and short-term spikes in particulate matter (soot). The number means 25 million more people are breathing bad air than last year, by the ALA’s measures, a 19% increase.
The report found about 43 million Americans lived in counties that failed on all three air pollution measures. These counties include the metropolitan areas of Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles and a number of others in California, just to name a few. Not surprisingly, it found black and Hispanic people to be twice as likely to live in such areas as white people. This is also likely to be the case for the working class, which the report did not measure.
Ozone and particulate matter pollution lead to many types of health problems in the population, including asthma, chronic bronchitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer and premature death.
The report blamed the worsening air quality on the increasing number of wildfires producing soot, and climate change contributing to the increase in ozone pollution or smog. When air becomes warmer at higher altitudes, it increases the chances that the chemical reactions needed to produce ozone will take place.
Cuts to the Environment Protection Agency and reductions of Clean Air regulations being carried out by President Trump only stand to lead to even poorer air quality measures. The harmful climate change that leads to wildfires, and the emission of chemicals into the air that lead to ozone pollution, are products of the lack of controls preventing environmental contamination that has gone on for many decades. Neither Trump nor the more mainstream politicians of the Republican and Democratic parties who serve the corporations and the wealthy are about to do what’s necessary to really protect the environment and people’s health.
To accomplish that requires getting rid of the system that puts profits before anything else, the system of capitalism.
Apr 28, 2025
The current tariff fight that Trump is carrying out isn’t just Trump. Tariffs have been going up all over the world at the fastest pace since the Great Depression. When Biden was president, he kept all of Trump’s tariffs from Trump’s first term in office, then added on to them. As for the left-wing Democrats, like Bernie Sanders, they have always blamed NAFTA for the loss of manufacturing jobs. Today, the Democrats’ only criticism of Trump is the chaotic nature of how Trump has been doing it, claiming that the tariffs should be more targeted.
According to the politicians and the big news media, tariffs are being imposed in order to address a dramatic loss of manufacturing in this country, what they often call deindustrialization. To illustrate this decline, they compare the percentage of manufacturing jobs to the rest of the work force, and look at how this has changed over time.
In fact, this is really misleading. They don’t show that the number of jobs is declining, which is what this argument seems to say. It doesn’t show that industrial production is declining in this country—which is what most people today believe. But that is not at all true.
By the end of World War II, production was really booming. Then, it increased pretty constantly, with temporary drops during periods of recession. That happened all the way up to 2008, during the Great Recession, when there was a substantial drop. After that, there was something of a recovery. There was another big drop in 2020 during the Covid shutdown, and then a recovery to about the same level, if not a little more. There has been little meaningful growth in industrial production since 2008—which is a sign of a worsening economic crisis, more than anything else.
Actual industrial production is ten times higher today than at the end of World War II. See the chart below. And it is twice as high as it was in 1980. During this whole period, we were being told that production was in a steep decline, that the U.S. was swamped by imports, that we don’t make anything anymore in this country, that everything is made in Japan, or China or Mexico—BUT actual industrial production continued to go up.
We are not trying to paint a pretty picture here. We are not trying to say that things are really great when things are awful. Things are awful. There has been a tremendous amount of deindustrialization. Entire regions have been gutted. But the real reason for this has to do with the chaotic nature of how capitalism operates.
The biggest elimination of steel jobs is due to the change in technology. Old integrated steel mills have been replaced by mini-mills that operate with electric arc furnaces. In the process, steel mills close in one part of the country and open in another and nine-tenths of the steelworker jobs are eliminated.
There is very little underground coal mining. Instead, giant machines take off the tops of mountains and other giant machines scoop out giant amounts of coal in open pits, thereby destroying most coal mining jobs.
The Detroit 3 auto companies gave up their monopoly control over the U.S. car market in order to concentrate on only the production of the most profitable segments of the car market. So, auto manufacturers owned by Asian and European companies produce cars today—but in different regions of the country. At the same time, auto companies contracted out much of the work that they used to do in-house to other companies, with the contractors often operating in the very same plant as the company workers, for much lower wages and benefits. And, at the same time, the work is being done not just in one country, but it is being done all over the world, with a worldwide division of labor. So, the companies are constantly shifting the work and the workforce, in the process destroying millions and millions of jobs.
We can go on and on…. Older industries die out, or move out of the country. But they are replaced by other industries. There might be less light manufacture, such as garment, but there is more high-tech manufacture, more airplanes, military goods, MRI machines, more manufacture of machines that make machines. Etc.
There is one constant in all this chaos: the growth of productivity. There is more work being done—but with fewer and fewer workers. Since 1945, worker productivity increased by between four and five times. Put another way, a worker today produces what five workers used to produce in 1945.
But the workers didn’t benefit from these productivity gains.
Sure, there was an increase in living standards after World War II, as the employers tried to buy labor peace, confronted by a working class that still had a tradition of striking, along with a gigantic movement of the black population, that is, the most oppressed sections of the working class. But that increase was temporary. And it coincided with a brief period after World War II when the economy was still expanding to make up for all the war’s destruction. But all those gains went out the window after the economic crisis hit in the early 1970s.
The capitalists have used the workers’ productivity gains against the workers, imposing greater unemployment, more long-term joblessness and worse working conditions. The lives of millions of workers were ground up, destroyed, leading to worsening desperation and despair, worsening social ills and falling life expectancy.
This is not unique to the U.S. The same process is taking place all over the world—and yes, even in China, which has become celebrated as such an industrial and export powerhouse. An article in the New York Times on April 17 about the plight of workers in China says, “For China’s workers, financial security is further out of reach than ever.” As a result, increasing parts of the Chinese workforce have had to depend on a gig economy in order to survive, including delivery and ride share drivers. According to the Times, there were already 200 million people in the Chinese gig economy in 2020, and their number has been skyrocketing ever since.
Whether workers live in a country that has more exports or has more imports, their lives and living standards are still being ground up by the capitalist class. There is nothing normal about this in human terms. But it is the normal way the capitalist system functions.
Here is how Marx described what happens to workers during this constant churn of the workforce in the 1860s:
“The laborers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch…. Even should they find employment, what a poor look-out is theirs! Crippled as they are by division of labor, these poor devils are worth so little outside their old trade, that they cannot find admission into any industries, except a few of inferior kind, that are over-supplied with underpaid workmen. Further, every branch of industry attracts each year a new stream of men, who furnish a contingent from which to fill up vacancies, and to draw a supply for expansion. So soon as machinery sets free a part of the workmen employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men are also diverted into new channels of employment, and become absorbed in other branches; meanwhile the original victims, during the period of transition, for the most part starve and perish.”
Those lines could have been written to describe what’s happening to workers today. There is no let-up in the class war that the capitalist class wages on the working class. But the big difference is that when Marx was writing, the development of capitalism was increasing productive forces and thus laying the material foundations of a communist society, despite the barbaric way it was being done. What is happening today is much worse, because it is happening under a capitalist system that long ago stopped playing its positive role and is instead descending into barbarism.
Today, the government and the news media falsely claim that the loss of jobs, especially manufacturing jobs, is due to other countries lying and cheating. That is how they justify their big tariff increases and trade war. They want workers to ignore the class war and instead support their trade war. They want to convince the population that it is in the population’s interests to not only support that war, but to sacrifice for it, accept higher prices, more unemployment, still lower living standards.
And in the future, the capitalists expect the workers to give their lives in another shooting war. In other words, they want the workers to sacrifice in the interests of their own slave drivers and executioners. It’s what all the propaganda from the news media, the politicians, the economic experts, as well as the trade union apparatuses, is all about. If workers accept this, they will go down to destruction tied to their own capitalist class.
The world becomes a smaller and smaller place. There is too much productive capacity, too much money chasing too few productive investments. The clash between capitalist groups becomes more threatening and violent.
The rush to war is not exactly the same as it was for either World War I and World War II. Those wars were fought between imperialist powers to settle which power would be top dog. The U.S. was already the biggest and most powerful. But it was only beginning to impose its domination over the other imperialist powers. By the end of World War II, that process had been completed. U.S. imperialism had emerged as the predominant and unquestioned imperial superpower.
For a whole period, this domination kept the ongoing conflicts and competition between the different imperial powers from breaking out into the open, although often that competition played out in proxy wars fought in the poorer, underdeveloped countries. This period has been hailed by liberal apologists as a period of so-called peace, even though there was no peace, not ever.
The worsening of these conflicts, many of which are unending forever wars, such as the wars in the Middle East, the growing numbers of casualties and refugees fleeing those wars, are all signs of the breakdown and rot of this imperialist order.
Now, spurred by the worsening trade war, the conflict between the U.S. and different imperialist powers, along with Russia and China, are coming out into the open, and preparations for war are accelerating once again, both here and abroad.
We do not know in advance what this war will look like, how the sides will line up, or how quickly and to what extent the war will develop. But we do know that the potential for destruction and death is many times greater than anything we have seen before. The rapid advance of science and technology in the hands of the capitalist class increasingly yields only much more horrible engines of death and destruction.
On November 1, 1914, at the beginning of the first imperialist war, Lenin wrote: “Imperialism has placed the fate of European culture at stake. After this war, if a series of successful revolutions do not occur, more wars will follow. The fairy tale of a ‘war to end all wars’ is a hollow and pernicious fairy tale…”
In 1940, Trotsky wrote: “Workers, call this prediction to mind! The present war, the second imperialist war is not an accident; it does not result from the will of this or that dictator…. It derived its origin inexorably from the contradictions of international capitalist interests. Contrary to the official fables designed to drug the people, the chief cause of war as of all other social evils—unemployment, the high cost of living, fascism, colonial oppression—is the private ownership of the means of production together with the bourgeois state which rests on this foundation.”
But Trotsky also saw the way out of this disaster: “With the present level of technology and skill of the workers, it is quite possible to create adequate conditions for the material and spiritual development of all mankind. It would be necessary only to organize the economic life within each country and over our entire planet correctly, scientifically, and rationally, according to a general plan…. State power and domination of the economy can be torn from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class.”
That perspective is even more valuable today, when capitalism condemns most of humanity to a barbaric existence.
Apr 28, 2025
This article is translated from the April 12 issue #1348 of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean.
Dominican Republic president Luis Abinader announced in early April a set of 15 restrictions aimed at strengthening control over immigrants from Haiti, which lies directly to the east on the shared Caribbean island of Hispaniola.
Haitian immigrants are a significant part of the informal workforce in the Dominican Republic, especially in construction, agriculture, and domestic service. Racial discrimination against Haitians serves capitalists as a political tool to maintain the brutal exploitation and super-exploitation of this big part of the working class. They work the toughest jobs for the lowest wages and live in the most dilapidated housing.
Among the most demeaning of Abinader’s new rules is the requirement for public hospitals to request identification papers from patients to document their legal status in the country. Abinader claims this law will “guarantee that public services are reserved primarily for citizens and residents with legal status.”
Even with valid papers, Haitians do not dare leave their homes. Riding a bus or a taxi means risking being rounded up, imprisoned, raped, killed, or deported across the border without their few belongings. Abinader had already launched an earlier campaign of mass expulsions of Haitians. In January, the Dominican Directorate General of Migration announced the creation of an immigrant detention center. An estimated 15,000 Haitians were expelled from the Dominican Republic in the first two weeks of this year alone.
Abinader’s speeches and actions stoke the fire of violence of far-right groups targeting Haitians. One of these groups, Old Dominican Order, organized a recent demonstration. Draped in black and waving Dominican flags, they chanted slogans like, “Out with foreigners! The Dominican Republic belongs to Dominicans!” and “No Haitians on Dominican land!” Tensions escalated when the demonstrators deviated from their authorized route, entered predominantly Haitian neighborhoods, and attacked Haitian homes.
As for native Dominican workers, their own exploitation is based on this division between poor Dominicans and poor Haitians. At the root of racism and oppression is the capitalist system. Proletarians, regardless of their skin color—Black, mixed-race, or white—share a vested interest in putting an end to this bankrupt economic and social system.
Apr 28, 2025
This article is translated from the April 18 issue #2959 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Israeli army faces a rising number of refusals by reservists to report to duty, as well as a series of protests by groups of soldiers and veterans.
After completing their mandatory military tour of duty, Israelis remain in the military reserves until they turn 40. They can be called up at any time. After the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, reservists who were not called up volunteered. As many as 300,000 reservists reported for duty. But since then, the rate of reservists reporting for service has steadily fallen. The army claims the rate is between 75 and 85%, but journalists estimate it lower, at only 60 to 70%.
Recruitment campaigns are carried out on WhatsApp groups. Finance and defense ministers announced a fund of around 800 million dollars (three billion Israeli shekels) to offer “benefits” to reservists, such as an additional tax break and an online credit account based on how long they served.
But these weren’t enough to convince all reservists to leave their families and jobs behind and go to war. Most troops who do not report for duty simply and quietly just don’t show up. But recently a coordinated movement developed. For example, 1,000 pilots and aviators mostly on reserve but some on active duty signed a letter accusing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of endangering the lives of the remaining hostages held by Hamas. They denounced Netanyahu’s relentlessness, attributing it to his “political and personal interests.”
Continuing the war lets him stay in office as head of state even though he is named in several corruption cases. But the letter doesn’t directly oppose the war or the legitimacy of the Israeli army itself. Everyone who signed the letter was discharged from the military. But then a group of 150 former naval officers also signed, followed on April 14 by more than 1,500 armored corps reservists and veterans openly demanding a unilateral ceasefire and the return of the hostages through diplomatic channels.
These protesters are not as clear as the activists who refuse to serve and who also directly denounce the overall oppression of Palestinians. Those refuseniks, as they are called, are subject to prosecution and prison time. In March, 18-year-old activist Ella Keidar from the Tel Aviv Communist Youth was sentenced to 30 days in prison for refusing to do her military service. “We will not participate in the genocide in Gaza or the oppression of the Palestinian people,” she declared at a rally organized in her support. Conscientious objector 18-year-old Itamar Greenberg denounced “a system of violence, domination, and oppression” and got 197 days in detention.
A group supporting the refuseniks, Enough is Enough (Yesh Gvul in Hebrew), says the current refusal movement is the largest since Israel went to war in Lebanon in 1982. Although the troops denouncing Israel’s colonial policies against the Palestinians remain a small minority, their outspokenness shows that war fatigue affects more and more troops. These troops see the dead end this endless war represents, not only for the Palestinian victims of bombing, but also for the Israeli people.
Apr 28, 2025
This article is translated from the April 25 issue #2960 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Israeli army on April 20 announced the results of its internal investigation of the deaths of 15 Palestinian medics. Unsurprisingly, the army denied having deliberately assassinated some of them. Instead the army acknowledged an “error” and claimed an officer would be suspended.
But everything clearly indicates this was a deliberate execution. The Palestinian rescue workers were killed while riding their ambulances on March 23 near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The ambulances were obviously identifiable, as proven by a video recovered from the cell phone of one of the victims. This contradicts an initial Israeli account. And the rescue workers’ bodies were found several days after the shooting. They were buried in the sand in what the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) described as a “mass grave.”
This episode, like many before, serves to illustrate the reality of the massacre that the Israeli army has been cynically carrying out for 18 months in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 50,000 Gazans. After the ceasefire ended on March 18, Israel increased its bombings. Day and night the army targets the few homes that have not yet been destroyed, as well as refugee camps, schools hosting refugees, and so on.
Israeli authorities have begun establishing “buffer zones” along the Gaza border, expelling the residents. An estimated 250,000 Palestinians have been forced to evacuate Rafah and its surrounding areas since the resumption of the war. The army spokesperson announced on April 21 that a buffer zone three miles deep in southern Gaza would be emptied of all its inhabitants, from the Egyptian border to the outskirts of Khan Younis and including Rafah.
Israel has blocked humanitarian aid from entering Gaza since March 2. Famine is worsening. Humanitarian aid is “threatened with total collapse,” according to a joint statement from twelve NGOs. Despite this atrocious situation, the Israeli government just got support from the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee. “We call upon Hamas to sign an agreement so that humanitarian aid can flow into Gaza to the people who desperately need it,” he mouthed.
With U.S. support, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is showing his determination to continue the war now more than ever “until Hamas is destroyed.” Some Israelis accuse him of sacrificing the hostages: 58 are still being held in Gaza by Hamas, 35 of whom are believed to have died. Netanyahu desperately needs the support of the far right for him to stay in office. His government partner and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich even announces, “The return of the hostages is not the most important objective,” and repeats his call for the total re-occupation of Gaza.
Faced with this clique of jingoists of war and colonization, thousands of Israelis continue to make their voices heard by demonstrating every Saturday. Military reservists now publicly declare their refusal to continue a war with no end in sight. Some also denounce the massacre of innocent Palestinians. This is where hope lies. It will not be possible to end the current impasse without challenging the policies that led to it. After all, Netanyahu simply continues and magnifies the policies pursued by his forerunners who have led Israel since 1948, based on the total denial of Palestinian rights and their nonstop oppression.
Apr 28, 2025
Today, the president of the UAW is supporting Trump’s tariffs on the auto industry. By doing so, he and other union leaders are, in fact, telling workers here that workers in other countries—whether it’s Mexico or Canada—are taking American workers’ jobs.
This is not a new set of ideas intended to direct U.S. workers against workers in other countries. It’s not new that workers here are being distracted away from the reality that it’s their own capitalist bosses here that are responsible for an economy in crisis.
Today, it’s Mexican and Canadian workers that are presented as competitors for jobs. During the recession of the late 1970s into the 1980s, the target was Japanese workers. Workers were told that the import of vehicles manufactured in Japan was the cause of plant closings, mass layoffs, and wage and benefit cuts. Workers were told, point blank, that they were losing their jobs because of Japanese workers.
The media, the politicians, the companies, and the leaders of the UAW repeated these lies. Well-known Democratic Party politicians, from John Dingell to Carl Levin, joined in this Japan-bashing—Dingell blaming “little yellow men” for the automobile industry’s problems; Levin saying, “We are being shot at and shot up, by the Japanese,” even referring to them as “Japs.” (See the documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin, streaming on PBS YouTube.)
But it just wasn’t words. Some union officials even went so far as to organize workers to smash Japanese cars with sledgehammers at media events. The UAW distributed racist bumper stickers.
And so the stage was set, the groundwork laid, for what happened to Vincent Chin. And it was two men; one a Chrysler plant supervisor, and his stepson, a laid off UAW Chrysler worker, who acted on those lies.
Nearly 43 years ago, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American young man at his bachelor party with friends at a bar in Highland Park, a city within Detroit, Michigan, was first verbally attacked by these two men. Thinking he was Japanese, they yelled, “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work.” The altercation spread to a nearby McDonald’s, where the two men repeatedly beat Chin with a baseball bat. Chin died four days later.
And for this lynching, the two men were fined $3,000, put on probation for three years, and did no jail time.
Who killed Vincent Chin? Yes, it was two men that held him down and wielded the baseball bat. But the unions, the media, the companies, and the government, including the courts, which all promoted the Japan-bashing, were just as guilty then, and are so today.
Apr 28, 2025
The best-selling non-fiction book provides incredible detail of one of the oldest, pervasive and most persistent diseases. The story is mesmerizing: the author provides numerous narratives of how this disease is intertwined with our story over our entire history, in aspects of our lives which you would never guess. There were times in our history, he writes, when almost everyone had tuberculosis, though for well-nourished people in a healthy environment, the disease lay mercifully dormant. It was not until relatively recently that the disease was understood to be infectious and finally curable with antibiotics. He presents how the ubiquitous disease influenced style, fashion, romance, the arts, and even statehood for New Mexico.
But once the cause and the cure were found in the 1940s, the disease was NOT eradicated, even though the possibility was there. In poor areas of the world, it persists, virulent as ever. The current federal policy cutting off access to available antibiotics in underdeveloped and poor areas of the world is making TB even more of a global threat. TB requires a long regime of antibiotics, which if interrupted, causes the disease to become drug-resistant. The author lays out these facts and shows how this threatens all of us, and leaves the solution to us.
Apr 28, 2025
Congress forced Washington, D.C. to budget for next year only what it spent last year. Mayor Bowser says this means 410 million dollars in spending cuts. No new hires or promotions, no pay raises, no bonuses, no overtime—well, except maybe for cops—and possible temporary closures of rec centers and libraries.
At the same time Bowser proposes to spend 850 million dollars to help the Washington Commanders develop a new football stadium at the RFK stadium site.
Politicians from both parties together cooked up this scheme. They will cut the budget on our backs while the billionaires get fat on what’s left.
Apr 28, 2025
The Trump administration said it is pushing to end the war in Ukraine. It put forward a so-called peace plan that would recognize Russian control over the areas its army has won in the war, as well as agreeing to Russian sovereignty over Crimea.
It is not clear yet whether Trump’s proposal will actually lead to the end of the war, or even to a real ceasefire. Ukrainian president Zelensky has been pushing back against the U.S. proposal, saying that it is too favorable to Russia.
As part of his “peace” plan, Trump also demanded that Ukraine turn over much of its mineral wealth to U.S. corporations, and he is proposing to take over operation of Ukraine’s biggest nuclear power plant. Trump is trying to cut a deal with Putin to share, between U.S. capitalists and Russian oligarchs, Ukraine’s rich agricultural land, its mines and its many industries.
Trump arrogantly told Zelensky when he came to the White House that Ukraine “doesn’t have a lot of cards to play” in deciding what happens. Meaning that, behind the scenes, the U.S. government has been the dominant decision maker in this war, and that it plans to continue to be.
U.S. policies led to this war between Russia and Ukraine. U.S. money and weapons have dictated how the war plays out. For several decades the U.S. government, with its NATO allies, put a military noose around Russia, stationing troops, warplanes and missiles right up to the Russian border. The U.S. threw promises at the former Soviet states and brought them into the camp of NATO and the European Union and away from Russia. It was these actions and threats from the U.S. and NATO that provoked Putin to order Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration paid U.S. military contractors to provide much of the weaponry for Ukraine. The U.S. government dictated which weapons, how many and where they were used. U.S. generals coordinated war planning for Ukraine. U.S. spy satellites and the CIA provided military intelligence. It was a U.S. war against Russia in all but name. The Biden administration kept this war going in order to weaken Russia as a competitor among the world’s major powers.
Now the Trump administration seems to be going in a different direction. But with the same goal: to strengthen U.S. imperialism in its competition with the rest of the world.
The war in Ukraine has brought about carnage, death and destruction for millions of people in Ukraine, and in Russia. Hundreds of thousands have died, Ukrainian and Russian. They are the victims of the war.
For Biden and Trump, who both represent the interests of U.S. imperialism, the Ukrainian and Russian peoples are just pawns to be used to protect the profits of U.S. capitalists.
Apr 28, 2025
Starting in the midst of the pandemic, in March of 2020, and for the past five years, the federal government paused repayment requirements on federal student loan debt.
Forty-three million people, that is, 20% of all American adults, with undergraduate degrees, hold 1.6 TRILLION dollars in federal student loan debt. The pause in repayments is now over, according to the Secretary of the Department of Education, Linda McMahon.
And so, as of May 5th, no fewer than five million borrowers who had missed payments for 270 days, as well as four million more borrowers who are in so-called “late stage delinquency”—in imminent danger of defaulting—are threatened with federal debt collection. In plain terms, that means up to nine million student loan borrowers could face having their paychecks garnished. Or they could have their tax refunds, or pensions or Social Security benefits tapped for loan repayments.
The Education Department said it was resuming collections to protect taxpayers from shouldering the cost of federal student loans. McMahon said, “American taxpayers will no longer be forced to serve as collateral for irresponsible student loan practices.”
Irresponsible practices?! How about the irresponsible practice of the high cost of education in the U.S. that makes it almost impossible for working class and some middle class young people to go to college in the first place, without going into debt. The average outstanding student loan debt per person is nearly $39,000. And obviously many have higher debt.
How about the irresponsible practice of taxpayers being forced to serve as collateral for the huge tax breaks to billionaires and the 850 billion dollar military budget—which surpasses the budgets of all the other federal agencies combined?!