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
Jun 9, 2025
On the morning of Friday, June 6, ICE conducted several sweeps in the city of Los Angeles. Dozens of agents, heavily armed and driving armored vehicles, descended on a clothing wholesaler and a couple Home Depots downtown, among other places. They rounded up between 20 and 30 workers, mostly of Mexican or South Korean heritage, at Ambiance Apparel.
The raids did not go quietly nor smoothly. Hundreds of protestors, brought out by local immigrant rights groups who had prepared in advance, converged on several locations. ICE brandished rifles, threw flash-bang grenades, and had to clear paths through protestors, who tried to block the vans taking the detainees. Protestors later converged on the courthouse downtown. Over a hundred protestors were arrested that day.
A week earlier in downtown San Diego, 20 masked ICE agents in tactical gear raided a restaurant, arresting 19 workers. Dozens of people in the neighborhood immediately responded, surrounding the officers and their vans. Again, ICE resorted to arrests and flash-bang grenades to extricate themselves from the angry crowd.
People, especially working people, have plenty of reason to be angry. Trump’s talk about so-called “criminal migrants” is total bullshit. These were not rapists or murderers. They are workers, doing a job and making a living—moving clothing, taking day labor jobs, cooking and serving in a restaurant. In short, making things run.
These raids are a form of terrorism—yes, that is the correct word. The raids are meant to intimidate immigrant workers. To silence them, to push them into the shadows—and to make them accept lower wages and worse conditions. Lower wages and worse conditions for some workers—that can only pull down on the wages and conditions for everyone else who works.
Ever since Trump entered politics here, he has leaned into attacking immigrants as a wedge to divide the working class. He seeks to blame immigrants for low wages, for the lack of good jobs—real problems, but problems created by the capitalists, not by any of the workers. Trump may seek to purposely provoke a response in places like L.A. and San Diego, in order to feed into that division.
Having armed agents and armored trucks out on the streets in working-class cities like Los Angeles is a way to condition us to accept more repression. These attacks, carried out now on immigrant workers, will be targeted against others next. Trump and his cronies have plenty more people they’d like to bundle off to camps in their unmarked vans.
But not everyone is terrified—and not everyone accepts the repression. The protests in Southern California show that, first of all. Around the country, some have rallied to support immigrants.
In Massachusetts on Saturday, May 31, ICE arrested Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, a Brazilian high school junior, while on his way to volleyball practice. Hundreds of students at Milford High School walked out the following Monday, in support of their fellow student. Marcelo was released on bond on Thursday, after almost a week in detention. He has spoken out about the bad food, lack of translation, and inhumane conditions there, despite the obvious risks he takes doing so.
Some politicians, mostly Democrats, have stepped into the fray. The president of the California SEIU was arrested in L.A., on Friday. The mayor of L.A. and the entire city council wrote a letter denouncing Trump’s actions. All well and good, for them to show up.
But the Democratic Party has no answer for working people. They do not challenge the functioning of capitalism. The Democrats support this capitalist system, a system that requires the super-exploitation of immigrant workers as part of the exploitation of the whole working class. They give lip-service to a struggle against Trump’s thuggery but will not challenge the capitalists behind him.
On Saturday, Trump and the White House upped the ante, calling out 2,000 National Guard troops to L.A. Trump posted “Great job by the National Guard in Los Angeles”—before they had even arrived on the scene! Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to mobilize active-duty marines. There were additional protests in and around L.A. on Saturday, but smaller than Friday. Trump appears to be making a grandstanding provocation.
The working class is the target of these raids—we have every reason as workers to fight them. Working people, in pushing against these ICE raids, could move toward making a fight against capitalism and the capitalist state. If the working class refuses to be divided by nationality, a fight started by immigrant workers could open the door to a fight by the entire working class. And that could lead to taking on the capitalists, finally prying control over this society out of their grip.
Jun 9, 2025
When Trump and Musk took their power struggle to a public stage and started viciously attacking each other in front of the whole world, it was shocking. When the world’s richest person is feuding with the president of the world’s wealthiest country, people notice.
Were ordinary people seeing themselves in this fight? The opinion poll done by YouGov asked, “If you had to choose, who would you side with more: 1) Donald Trump, 2) Elon Musk, 3) Neither, 4) Not sure.”
Apparently, this bizarre battle brought a moment of unity to part of the U.S. population. The opinion poll winner, by 52%, was: “I side with neither!”
Jun 9, 2025
Many U.S. presidents have used that office to enrich themselves and their families. But Donald J. Trump has taken it to a whole new level.
In less than 5 months, Trump has used the power of the presidency to enable his family to collect 320 million dollars in fees from its new cryptocurrency. The Trump family and its business partners have brokered real estate deals worth billions of dollars.
Trump is opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch (get it?); a club which will charge people a half million dollars to join. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his club in Virginia for 220 investors in his cryptocurrency. The invitees had to pay to a Trump business in order to have a few minutes to whisper in Trump’s ear.
Then, of course, there is the luxury jet that the government of Qatar is giving Trump for his use while he is president. Experts have valued the plane as being worth more than 200 million dollars, which is more than the value of all the foreign gifts given to all previous presidents combined.
Trump has always tried to portray himself as a great businessman, even though he started his real estate career with the benefit of 450 million dollars given to him by his father. And even with advantage of that “startup” money, Trump filed for bankruptcy six times.
But now Trump has found the way to really hit it big. Put the power of the U.S. government behind your business deals.
Jun 9, 2025
When images from a surveillance video suggested that January’s Eaton fire, which killed 18 people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, started at the base of a Southern California Edison (SCE) electric tower, it didn’t come as a surprise. In 2024, SCE equipment had already started 178 wildfires—almost twice as many as in the previous year, and 39% above the company’s five-year average. Also in 2024, the number of Edison workers seriously injured on the job rose to 56% above the average—and five of them died.
In April, Edison International, SCE’s parent company, told California regulators that it was cutting down part of its executives’ bonuses because of the company’s worsening safety record, as required by a state law passed in 2019.
It was just a show. The Los Angeles Times reported that, overall, the bonuses for four of Edison’s top five executives actually rose in 2024. And the only top honcho whose bonus declined, CEO Pedro Pizarro, had hardly anything to complain about either. Pizarro’s cash bonus was “reduced” to 128% of his salary, instead of 135%—so that, his total compensation for the year was “only” 13.8 million dollars!
In fact, that 2019 law is a huge bailout for California’s three big utility companies, whose equipment has sparked so many big, deadly wildfires year after year. The law created a 21-billion-dollar insurance pool to pay for the utilities’ future liabilities because of the wildfires they keep causing—and half of the money is to come from taxpayers!
It’s not the only big gift state politicians have given to Edison and the other utilities. For many years, the state has approved practically every rate hike the utilities have asked for. So today, California households pay about twice as much for electricity as the national average. And SCE, whose rates have increased by about 40% in the last four years, has asked the state to approve another 10% rate increase.
Put another way, SCE wants to increase the monthly electric bills of its customers by 18 dollars on average. If approved, that would mean an extra 270 million dollars in Edison’s coffers each month!
Edison’s cutting back on safety has paid off hugely for the company’s big shareholders and executives. They have already become very, very rich, whether California regulators approve this latest rate hike or not. All at the expense of Edison customers, including the victims of the Eaton fire, many of whom are working-class people who have lost their homes—probably because of Edison’s cutbacks in the first place.
Jun 9, 2025
On May 27, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) sent a letter to federal agencies, recommending that they terminate their existing contracts with Harvard University. Those contracts are estimated to be worth $100 million, so this is a serious attack by the Trump administration on one of the country’s most famous universities.
The GSA letter accuses Harvard of racial discrimination against white people, claiming that Harvard favors black and Latino people in student admissions as well as hiring. But is Trump really the defender of the rights of working-class white people he claims to be? Well, not really. The letter says that Harvard offers a remedial, “middle-school” math course for incoming freshmen, apparently to “prove” that Harvard admits students who don’t deserve to be there. But the real problem is that working-class students of all races are shut out of a good education in this country’s severely underfunded public schools. And the Trump administration is busy cutting public education funding even more.
The letter also accuses Harvard of allowing anti-Semitic protesters to harass and attack Jewish students on its campus. But when Trump issued an executive order calling for “rooting out anti-Semitism on college campuses,” what he specifically demanded was that universities provide extensive information about all students who had protested Israel’s war on Gaza—even though the majority of the protesters had certainly not harassed or attacked Jewish students, and in fact welcomed Jews among them.
What Trump really wanted was for universities to fall in line behind him and his agenda. Most of them complied, but Harvard did not. So, Trump set out to punish Harvard, systematically aiming his blows at the heart of the university’s financing.
In April, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard and also told the IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Then, in May, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revoked Harvard’s certification to enroll foreign students—who make up 27% of the university’s enrollment and pay Harvard hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Then came the GSA letter to federal agencies to cancel Harvard’s contracts.
Trump is making an example of Harvard to send a message to all universities—that the chief must be obeyed. Universities are places where people can learn history, science and other subjects, which could then allow them to develop their own views about the world. But that would go against the Trump administration’s attempts to control education and suppress opposition.
Look, for example, at the Trump administration’s orchestrated effort to restrict information children get in school about this country’s history of slavery. It is part of the same old strategy the bosses have used for centuries: to divide the working class along racial lines.
And that’s what workers have to watch out for from Trump, that billionaire boss in the White House.
Jun 9, 2025
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Bill” has passed the House and gone to the Senate for approval. Trump’s bill will mean big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP).
According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, cutbacks to those health care and food programs will mean the early deaths of tens of thousands more poor and working-class people. But when you are one of the politicians supporting these cuts, who cares about more workers dying?
Iowa senator Joni Ernst certainly doesn’t. When she was confronted at a town hall by someone who said the Medicaid cuts will mean, “People are going to die,” Ernst sarcastically responded, “We are all going to die.” The next day, instead of apologizing, Ernst doubled down and posted more flippant comments about people dying.
Then there was Mehmet Oz, who Trump put in charge of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare. Oz said that people on Medicaid and SNAP “can prove that they matter” by meeting the new work requirements. But Oz has it backwards. Trump and the politicians behind this bill have already proved that people on Medicaid and SNAP don’t matter to them. These politicians know damn well that many people will not be able to qualify under the new rules, because they wrote the bill specifically so that many people would not qualify. They have already calculated in their “Big Beautiful Bill” that they will be cutting over 600 billion dollars out of Medicaid and at least 250 billion dollars out of SNAP. They have already calculated that they will be taking benefits away from as many as 11 million people.
For Ernst and Oz and Trump and the other political servants of the wealthy class, these 11 million working-class people “don’t matter.” What matters to them is that in their “Big Beautiful Bill” they plan to give trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest of the rich. In order to pay for these giveaways to the wealthy, Trump and the other politicians have to take money away from someone else. So, they are planning to take it from the working class, knowing that it means more people will die. They are like vultures preying on dead carcasses, except that vultures don’t kill people in the first place.
Jun 9, 2025
Medicaid originally never had a work requirement. Medicaid was originally created as a health insurance safety net to provide coverage for low-income dying people, disabled people, children, and the folks who had to stop working to care for all of the above.
Medicaid was able to get passed in Congress 60 years ago partly because it helped health insurance corporations to not have to pay for the most expensive coverage for the sickest of the sick. It transferred those costs onto the federal government!
An expansion of Medicaid passed in Congress in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act. Now part of the working class was able to qualify for Medicaid if earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line. This helped employers of low-wage workers by shifting health insurance costs onto the federal government.
The proposed federal budget promises to deliver over half a TRILLION dollars in cuts to Medicaid over 10 years. This dastardly legislation is being sold as a good thing, encouraging “work.”
The hidden truth behind this fiendish legislation is that those who wrote it are counting on people on Medicaid getting bogged down in new red tape they are creating. Few will be able to collect and submit the piles of paperwork to document “work,” “frailty,” or other requirements.
It will be like winning the lottery to be able to complete ALL the paperwork AND submit it AND for short-staffed agencies to process it!
Few will continuously keep coverage. Losing coverage in the middle of chemotherapy for cancer can be deadly.
What society DOES need is work requirements for the billionaires who will get the tax cuts! Eighty hours a month of useful hourly work! Submit paystubs to a computer program with an imaging system that loses half of what is entered. Make billionaires jump through so many hoops they can never meet program requirements and they never get their promised tax cuts!
Budget shortfalls solved!
Jun 9, 2025
The first recorded fights of the American working class were to reduce the hours of work from 14 or even 16 hours of work in a day. In 1791, Philadelphia carpenters struck to set a limit of 10 hours. In 1835, a general strike in Philadelphia demanded 10 hours of work, two hours for meals. The first strikes were smashed or isolated.
As Karl Marx pointed out: “Every independent movement of the American workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in white skin where in the black it is branded.”
It took the Civil War and Reconstruction to initiate the deep-seated movement which led to a general strike for the eight-hour day that began on May 1, 1886. That strike was the height of the movement, the force that pushed forward a real reduction in hours all over the country over the next few decades.
Those struggles were led by working-class militants who understood that capitalism was the problem, and that for workers ever to have time for themselves, they would have to wrench power out of the capitalists’ hands; workers who understood that the struggle could not succeed unless the whole working class was involved.
The struggle for the eight-hour day has never been completed—and will not be so long as capitalism is allowed to rule over the country, determining our very lives.
What follows are excerpts from a presentation in Detroit on June 1. The presentation was followed by a spirited discussion by workers incorporating their own experiences….
Hello everyone. And welcome to the Spark meeting about the eight-hour day. Yes, International Workers Day was May first. So, we are a month late. But in May it was all Musk, all DOGE, all the time, and we had to deal with that. But, never too late, for this question: WHY don’t we ALREADY HAVE the eight-hour work day? Why are we under so much pressure to work longer and longer hours, even while we are creating so much extra wealth and value that we should be able to have an easier life and enjoy it? This makes no sense at all and it has not made sense for a long time now.
These days I hear more and more of the younger workers talk about getting more hours, getting more hours. The pay is so low for most workers, they need to get more hours just to pay basic bills. I saw a story about a driver for Uber Eats, in New York City. He starts work at 8 in the morning and he drives until 11 at night. If he took his daily pay and put it into eight hours it would be $32 an hour. Not much to live on in New York—but he has to drive 15 hours to make it.
For most workers, eight-hour days, 40-hour weeks, are long gone. You got to have a regular job plus at least one side job. They call this the gig economy. Now, I retired in 2002, before gig economy was a thing. But even so, even working that supposedly “good” Chrysler job, I never had an eight-hour day, because to me an eight-hour day was when you could work your eight hours and go home and take care of home. Never had that right. If they called nine hours you had to stay nine. If they called Saturday you had to come in. It stole your life. The life you wanted to have. And all the company had to do was pay a little overtime, for their right to keep you away from your life.
But we could, back then, we could leave at nine hours. Chrysler workers still had that right: only nine hours was mandatory. I don’t recall the year we lost it. I think somewhere in the late 90s. But I recall the way very well. The line was stopped and we were called to a town hall meeting up by the offices, and the UAW vice president in charge of Chrysler was there. He said the union had signed off on 10 hours mandatory to help the company, and that was that. Be glad you got a job. Never mind about your life.
Even today, the UAW won’t do any better. Just two years ago we had a strike where one of the demands was supposed to be work-life balance. They settled that strike with a WORSE work-life balance than we went in with! With more pressure on your attendance, more pressure to work sick, and almost all of the unlimited overtime exemptions still in place.
Working time is the LAST thing a company will give up! They will fight their longest and hardest battles to extend the hours of work, to shorten your break time, to steal more and more of your life and your energy for themselves. Because that is where their profit comes from. They buy your labor power, your ability to work, and you work those hours and create value.
Everything you work on leaves your hands as a more valuable commodity than when it came to you, because you have put in your part of the needed work to create that truck they will sell for $90,000, or to process the data needed to complete a project. But your pay is below the value that you put in! Your work has added more value than you are paid for. There is a surplus of value in your product, and when it’s sold, the boss pockets that surplus and says, “I paid you what you agreed to. Be glad you got a job.” The key is that the longer he can keep you on the job in a day, the more surplus you will produce for him in a day. And the capitalist is a greedy bastard. He’s never got enough.
It was Karl Marx who developed this analysis of how capitalists steal surplus value from workers’ labor. Marx therefore said that the interests of capital in taking more, and the interests of labor in giving up less, these interests are completely and forever opposed to each other. If workers are ever to stop being exploited, we will have to organize well enough to overthrow the capitalist system entirely and take over the running of society ourselves. With the wonders of modern technology under our communal ownership, and with the immense quantity of the world’s capital under our communal control, the way will be wide open to a communist society of free, equal, and highly developed human beings.…
From 1950 to 1970 the U.S. economy expanded … and the American Dream, 40 hours and all, did not seem all that far out of reach for most workers. Only, if you were those suffering in segregation and discrimination, the American Nightmare ran right on. But starting in the early 1970s, the average workweek in the whole U.S. began to get longer. Economic crisis, cycles of recessions and stagnation set in, amidst one wave after another of plant closings and mass layoffs. Employers used the overhanging threat of unemployment to force the remaining workers to work harder—and longer.
By the mid-1990s, production and non-supervisory employees were working the equivalent of more than six extra weeks a year, 250 more hours a year than they did in the early 1970s. Work hours remain at extremely high levels today for most of the workforce, like that Uber driver. Whatever gains workers made in the past, through decades and decades of hard struggle, over and over again, are being wiped out as we watch.
Now we have Sergei Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, telling his AI team that he expects them in the office six days a week, and that 60 hours a week is what he considers the “sweet spot” of productivity! So, they are working with AI that is supposed to do so much work in place of humans, that humans will hardly be needed—but they are being told they have to work 60 hours a week!
Under the capitalist system no gains for workers are ever safe or permanent. Anything and everything that the workers gain is liable to be sacrificed later, on the altar of capitalist profit and enrichment. The first sacrifice demanded is the amount of time we once won for ourselves. Making surplus value for the boss must come first!
But with our enormous increases in productivity of labor, multiplied many, many times by computers and automation just over the last decades, people should be able to work only a few hours a week—completely transforming the nature of work. The burden of long work hours should disappear. All people could lead much richer and fuller lives, with talents developed all around. The only thing in the way is the capitalist system.
The mission and the destiny of the working class is to take away that power and control. We are already at the center of the world economy. We do all the work. We make everything run. We know what it takes. And we also know where the stupid stuff can be eliminated! We can do it better. Much better. But first we have to rip social, political power out of the hands of the capitalist class that has it now. We have to get that big picture in focus. We have to upgrade our sights. We need to prepare our class to fight to extinguish capitalism, worldwide, so it can never come back. And gain control of our own lives. For real.
Jun 9, 2025
On May 1, 1886, a national strike for the eight-hour day engaged 350,000 workers. In Chicago at that time there was a strike going on against McCormick Reaper. On May 4, there was a peaceful support rally in Haymarket Square. Authorities immediately created a police riot. A cop was mysteriously killed in the police charge. Leaders of the union movement in Chicago came under attack. Eight anarchist revolutionaries were convicted of murder—with a specially chosen jury—but the only evidence submitted to the court was that they had organized the rally and issued posters advertising it! They committed no murder. Three death sentences were commuted. One killed himself in jail. Four were hung. In honor of these Haymarket Martyrs the international workers’ holiday of May 1—and still the fight for the eight-hour day—is celebrated worldwide. Only in this country, they changed Labor Day to the END of summer and eliminated the reference to eight hours, or Haymarket, or an international power.
Jun 9, 2025
The first widely organized battle for worker rights was the Chartist movement in England in 1835, 190 years ago. Workers demanded the right to vote, just like property owners could vote. They hoped that if elected to Parliament, they could win relief from the extremely long workdays and starvation conditions. The power and the persistence of the Chartist movement pushed the English Parliament to shorten the working day to 15 hours, and then later to 12, then 10. An Uber Eats driver would be very happy to get back to a 10 hour standard!
Jun 9, 2025
This article is translated from the June 6 issue #2966 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The Israeli army opened fire yet again on June 1 on thousands of Palestinians gathered outside a food aid distribution center in southern Gaza, killing 31 people.
In the course of a week, more than 72 people were killed and hundreds injured in similar circumstances. The director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, condemned the fact that “aid distribution has become a death trap” for the inhabitants of Gaza ever since food aid was withdrawn from the U.N. and the NGOs that had been distributing it.
Israeli authorities alleged that Hamas was diverting international aid for its own benefit. Supported by Washington, Israel turned food distribution over to a new organization founded in Switzerland on May 14, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose governance and funding sources were undisclosed. Food aid now is distributed in locations in southern Gaza guarded by private American security companies Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions, run by a former CIA officer and a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who describes himself as a “degenerate who joined the army to inflict pain on the people who inflicted pain on us,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
“These are not aid distribution centers, they are a kind of military base,” an NGO official said. The conditions of access to these aid centers were defined restrictively. Only one person per household is allowed to enter, provided they are registered, are identifiable by facial recognition, and get a notification by text message. In no way can this system meet the needs of the more than two million Gazans who have been victims of a total blockade since the beginning of March.
As expected, thousands of starving Palestinians clustered at the gates of the GHF centers after crossing Gaza by foot. Chaos erupted. The massacres committed by the Israeli army were predictable and effectively premeditated.
The implementation of this distribution system, and its deadly consequences, won’t relieve the Palestinian population. This is intended to further displace Gaza’s people, following an outright program of ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile fruitless negotiations drag on. The war and the massacre of Palestinians continue—with the open support or the self-serving objections of the major imperialist powers.
Jun 9, 2025
This article is translated from the June 6 issue #2966 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Trump declared on assuming office that the U.S. would withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). The institution plans to cut its staffing costs by a fourth as a result.
WHO’s budget was only six billion dollars, a pittance compared to global health needs, although other agencies also address health issues. But U.S. funding at just over one billion represented around a fifth of WHO’s revenue. This paid for more than a quarter of polio eradication expenses and made significant contributions to health and nutrition services projects and the fight against vaccine-preventable diseases.
People in poor countries will pay dearly for this gesture by the U.S. But they will also pay because all the governments of other rich countries have also increasingly withdrawn funding. According to WHO officials, it is highly unlikely that European countries will try to make up for the loss of America’s contribution.
In fact, the Western countries which hoard a large part of the world’s health resources—especially the gigantic pharmaceutical companies—feel no responsibility for global health beyond a minimal token. Their participation in humanitarian projects has always depended on political calculations, in part to counterbalance the image of neocolonial powers plundering the wealth of poor countries. According to the director of the Geneva-based Institute for Global Health, “Rich countries believe they do not need the WHO.”
After the U.S. leaves, the country contributing the most to WHO funding will be ... China. The Chinese regime also obviously has its own political agenda in seeking to play a global role in health. But it can do so precisely because all the rich countries are washing their hands of the matter.
Jun 9, 2025
This article is excerpted from the May 21 issue, #2964 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
In Birmingham, Great Britain, more than 350 garbage collectors have been on strike since March 11 against a reorganization that would cause nearly 200 of them to lose up to over $10,800 (9,500 euros) in annual pay.
More than two months already: this is a record length for a garbage collectors’ strike in Great Britain. The strikers are facing a Labour-led city council that, on paper, claims to represent the working class. But in reality, it is waging war on its municipal workers—with the support of the Starmer government, which is also Labour. The pretext for the pay cuts is the municipality’s bankruptcy two years ago.
…. In their fight, the garbage collectors have the support of the population, despite the inconvenience caused by the accumulation of garbage in the streets. The residents of Birmingham are well aware that their wages are not astronomical. And they themselves have been suffering for years from drastic cuts in municipal services.
The Unite union is leading the strike, but it is managing it as a separate struggle, without seeking to involve other municipal employees. It has certainly called for support rallies, which have been well attended. But its leaders believe that it is enough to bring the issue into the public arena and then negotiate well, and that this will make the local authorities back down. Clearly, this is not working.
Yet it would be possible to expand the movement. Municipal workers have been under attack for years, well beyond Birmingham. And in the region, many industrial workers, such as those at the Jaguar Land Rover plant in Solihull, would also have reasons to fight for their wages, with the added advantage that they could hit the bosses where it hurts.
The striking garbage collectors, now approaching three months on strike, are not lacking in tenacity. Successfully mobilizing workers around them who, like them, are fed up with austerity and pro-business policies would be a decisive weapon.
Jun 9, 2025
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian immigrant, is charged with carrying out a horrific attack on pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado. Soliman allegedly used a “makeshift flame thrower” and threw a Molotov cocktail into a crowd, injuring 15 people, one critically, and a dog.
The demonstrators were part of an organization called Run For Their Lives, which aims to draw attention to the remaining hostages taken by Hamas during its October 7, 2023, attack. The police say Soliman planned the attack for a year with this specific group in mind. Court documents say Soliman said “he hated this group and needed to stop them from taking over ‘our land,’ which he explained to be Palestine.”
This latest attack comes on the heels of the attack in Washington, D.C. in which two staffers from the Israeli embassy were shot and killed. The shooter in that attack yelled, “Free Palestine!”
The politicians, especially those on the right, and the press were quick to label these attacks antisemitic and pointed to a dramatic increase in antisemitic acts in the U.S. in recent years. Antisemitic acts certainly do appear to be on the rise in the U.S. The American Jewish Committee reported earlier this year that 33% of American Jews said they have been the target of antisemitism at least once in the past year. They added that 56% of American Jews said they changed some behaviors due to fear of antisemitism in the last year, up from 46% in 2023 and 38% in 2022.
This would not be shocking given the long history of antisemitism in this country throughout its history.
In the context of the current killings and massive suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza following the terrorist attack carried out by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, and the violence being carried out by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, it can be hard to sort out what constitutes antisemitism as opposed to what are acts of protest in support of the Palestinians.
In the current context, defenders of the Zionist state in Israel are quick to point to antisemitism, but they say nothing about the state terror being carried out by Israel, both in Gaza and the West Bank, with the complete support of U.S. imperialism. Nor do they discuss the long history of the Palestinian people being driven off their lands, going all the way back to the beginnings of the state of Israel in 1948.
But many more people around the world are outraged at the slaughter in Gaza. Clearly, acts of individual terrorism are not a solution. In both of the recent attacks, the victims were ordinary people with no power to affect the current situation in Israel. This individual terrorism, in addition to the loss of lives, is a mistake because it gives politicians and the corporate media a way to divert the discussion away from that of the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Even acts of individual terrorism against powerful officials would not bring an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people, nor to that of any oppressed nationality. They do nothing to organize the power of the population, and especially that of the working class, the only force capable of transforming society.
Take down imperialism and the system of exploitation which repeatedly invokes war in the interests of domination and profit!
Jun 9, 2025
Trump’s “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL” is ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL HANDOUT to the capitalist class. But it is also ONE BIG TERRIBLE PREPARATION for war.
The big handout in the bill is the 3.8-trillion-dollar tax cut, most of which goes to the wealthiest one percent of the population.
That transfer of wealth to the already very wealthy is to be paid for by cuts that will further impoverish every working class community.
One trillion dollars is being cut from Medicaid and Food Stamps through so-called “administrative” changes. Similar moves for “efficiency” will claw back over 400 billion dollars from Social Security, and several hundred billion more from Medicare.
Trump’s “ONE BIG BILL,” running 1000 pages, is packed with specific cuts that never make the headlines. But they harm someone.
If you buy your own medical insurance in the exchange, your premium will balloon next year.
If you are trying to get technical training at a community college while working, you may lose your Pell Grant and pay more for a loan.
By the way, did you believe Trump’s promise that your Social Security would no longer be taxed? Well, he screwed you. It’s still taxed.
If you live in rural areas where the few hospitals have been kept alive by Medicaid payments, you may see the last one close.
If you’re a woman who depends on clinics like Planned Parenthood for your medical needs—including cancer screening, pap smears and birth control—you may see your clinic close, deprived of the federal money it needs.
If you are an immigrant who works all year long, paying taxes, you’ll discover you can’t claim a tax credit for your children, not even if they are U.S. citizens.
If you file a safety complaint on your job, you will likely retire—or die—before a federal inspector shows up. Inspections are cut.
If your children go to public school, their school will get less money—it’s going into support for private schools.
This is only a sample. There are hundreds more cuts, ripping money out of social programs and public services to satisfy the lust for wealth of the capitalist class.
That’s not the worst of it. The “ONE BIG BILL” adds hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending—over and above the trillion dollars already allocated in the budget resolution passed in April. The big increase is another indication that the capitalist system is pulling us down the road toward war.
By the way, don’t look to the Democrats, hoping that if they come back in 2026, they will wipe this all out. Did you forget that the Senate Democratic leadership gave enough votes to pass the April Budget Resolution? Did you forget that the Democrats, when they controlled government, also increased military spending?
For over a century, this government, regardless of which party was in power, has carried out two main policies, both at the expense of the population. One has been to keep wealth flowing into the hands of the capitalist class. The other is to prepare for the war their system requires.
With all its wealth, this capitalist nation today has no other answer to the problems its own system has created. Capitalism, itself, shows why it needs to be torn up, tossed aside, replaced by a system that puts human needs first.
That system in its time produced an enormous flowering of technology and science, which could be put to use to serve humanity. And capitalism also produced “its own grave diggers,” the working class, the social force that has the potential of sweeping away capitalism.
Jun 9, 2025
Dangerous weather is on the rise again. After ice storms near the Great Lakes in early spring, 724 tornadoes killed at least 35 people across the U.S., and then the extreme Canada wildfires took off. Forecasters predict up to five major hurricanes and an above-average hurricane season this year.
Farmers, truck drivers, ship captains, and many kinds of workers need to know what weather to expect, both short term and long term. But sticking a finger in the air is not enough. Experts have to collect and analyze much information from many sources. The federal employees doing this work are essential. But they are among the federal workers targeted for cuts.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration could lose around one fifth of its staff. These include hundreds of National Weather Service meteorologists, hydrologists, physical scientists, and radar and electronics technicians at 122 local weather service offices around the country, which are supposed to operate 24 hours a day and launch weather balloons twice daily. The service already lost 300 workers since 2010. Cutting back certainly won’t make their predictions any better!
Hundreds of scientists and experts were cut from the National Climate Assessment. The Interior Department’s National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Geological Survey cut staff. NASA is losing nearly a quarter of its science and climate change budget, including one billion dollars for replacing climate monitoring satellites. Even the congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment all-volunteer work done for free by scientists and scholars was halted.
This was not money being thrown in the wind! But while Washington has plenty of money to throw at Wall Street, military contractors, and other big capitalists, working people are left twisting in the wind, or worse.
Jun 9, 2025
The first month of Canada’s wildfire season saw many more fires start and then spread farther than normal. By June 6, 204 fires in eight provinces had burned more than six million acres, almost the area of Massachusetts or Maryland. Two people were killed and 31,000 people were ordered to evacuate.
Like in 2023, the wind didn’t stop at the border. Smoke spread into and across the U.S., causing “unhealthy” air declarations in five states, and going as far south as Florida and then across the Atlantic to Europe, all the way to Russia. This excessive wildfire smoke undoes decades of progress in cleaning the air through lowering pollution from factories, power plants, and automobiles.
Scientists had predicted this. Climate change from global greenhouse gas emissions has made western and central Canada drier and hotter. This caused severe and extreme drought. With less winter snow on the ground, spring sunshine quickly dried plants and soil, creating vast fields of tinder. Excessive dryness also made it easier for sparks from campfires or industrial machinery to start more wildfires.
Wildfire smoke is unhealthy to breathe. It has tiny particles 30 times narrower than human hair, which can cause asthma, bronchitis, heart attacks, strokes, premature births, and even neurological decline. Americans today are exposed to twice as much of this “fine particulate matter” as decades ago. And twice as much U.S. woodland burns by wildfire now as it did 20 years ago.
Jun 9, 2025
Fifty years ago, on June 26, 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were shot near the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Town residents are Native American, members of the Oglala subtribe of Lakota Sioux. A federal court sentenced American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier to two life terms and imprisoned him for nearly half a century. This was punishment for his activism.
The supposed eyewitnesses, and an FBI agent who testified, later took back their stories, and the bullet casing presented as evidence later turned out not to come from his gun. Peltier was released this February at the age of 80 to live out the rest of his sentence in home confinement, at Joe Biden’s request. Violence to Native Americans continues … and began long ago.
When Europeans began colonizing North America in the mid 1500s and early 1600s, they tried to force many of the millions of Native Americans who survived Old World infectious diseases to labor for them. But the Native Americans’ tribal societies were based on egalitarian, collective hunting and gathering and planting. They used land, tools, and necessities in common. Many fought back against the settlers’ drive to own, buy, and sell everything, including human work.
The colonizers and then the U.S. government violently drove Native Americans off their homelands and onto land considered worthless, promising them autonomy. But when lucrative minerals were discovered on those reservations, capitalists and governments demanded mining access. What happened at Pine Ridge is a symbol of what happened across the continent.
The Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires, or “Sioux” as the settlers called them) had long lived on the richly wooded Paha Sapa or Black Hills in what is now South Dakota. The U.S. invaded, but the Sioux defeated General George Custer in battle in 1868 and forced the government to cede the land back to them. Six years later, gold was discovered. The U.S. outgunned the Sioux and forced them onto the Pine Ridge prairie reservation. Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills was carved with presidential faces. The Sioux launched a federal lawsuit in 1922 to regain the land.
During World War II, the military came onto Sioux land yet again, searching for valuable minerals, and found uranium and molybdenum in the Black Hills. The government cut a secret deal with corrupt Oglala president Dick Wilson in 1972 to develop mining there. But in the meantime, militant young Native Americans had built AIM to defend their communal heritage. AIM militants confronted Wilson, his goons, and 2,500 FBI agents. For three years before and after the Wounded Knee shootout, at least 69 AIM members and supporters were killed and 350 wounded by shootings, stabbings, and beatings. To this day the Oglala insist, “The Black Hills are not for sale.”
In fact, more than half of U.S. uranium is on Native American reservations, as is a quarter of low-sulfur coal, a fifth of oil and natural gas, and much copper. On the Navajo reservation in Arizona, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from leased mines between World War II and the mid-1980s, when mining finally stopped there, after hundreds of cancer deaths among thousands of Navajo miners and their families. Just this May, the U.S. Supreme Court authorized the excavation of a two-mile-wide crater for a copper mine in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona, exactly where the San Carlos Apache Tribe holds sacred ceremonies.
AIM militants like Leonard Peltier had no choice but to fight back! But it will take a fight by the whole working class to end this capitalist system which sees land and people as nothing but resources to exploit.