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
Aug 4, 2025
Trump sent his Mideast envoy and the U.S. ambassador on a public relations trip, supposedly to see what the rest of the world was already looking at in horror—men, women and especially children are starving to death in Gaza. There are Palestinian children in Gaza today who look like they had been in a Nazi concentration camp.
The Gaza Health Ministry said that over a hundred people have already died of starvation, with many more on the brink of dying. Doctors in Gaza say that hundreds more people have died from other causes that were exacerbated by malnutrition—people who could have lived if they had gotten enough food.
Medical experts say of the children in Gaza who do survive, many of them will be permanently deformed, physically and mentally, by the lack of food at this young age.
The starvation in Gaza is not due to some crop failure or a natural catastrophe where food is not available. Food is available. This starvation is being deliberately and consciously produced by the Zionist regime in Israel. Thousands of truckloads of food have been kept out of Gaza by the Israeli regime. This mass starvation in Gaza is part of the war the Netanyahu regime has been waging against the Palestinian people.
In October of 2023, Hamas organized a terrorist attack into Israel, killing over a thousand people. In response, the Israeli military invaded Gaza and began a war. They claimed the war was against Hamas, but most of their weapons and bombs have been directed against civilians in Gaza.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 60,000 people are known to have been killed, the majority of them women and children. Many thousands more are believed to be buried under the rubble of Gaza, where Israel has destroyed over 70% of the buildings, including the hospitals and schools.
During the occupation of Gaza, the Israeli military has controlled the borders, deciding when and if to let food in. The United Nations and other relief agencies have been providing some food; at best it was barely adequate to keep people alive. But in March, the Israeli regime stopped all food deliveries into Gaza, despite warnings that it would lead to mass famine.
In May, a handful of food distribution areas were opened, controlled by the Israeli military and U.S. contractors. Most of the two million Palestinians in Gaza have to walk miles to get to the food. They have to decide whether to risk starving to death, or risk being shot down by Israeli soldiers, because at the food distribution sites, over one thousand people have been killed by Israeli troops firing into the crowds. It is a continuation of the genocide of the Palestinians committed by the Israeli regime.
But it is not only the Israeli regime that is responsible for this mass murder and genocide. Standing firmly with and behind the Israeli regime is the U.S. government, just as it has for decades.
U.S. imperialism uses Israel as its cop in the Middle East. The U.S. government, under both parties, has armed Israel to the teeth. With U.S. money and U.S. weapons, Israel has the strongest military in the Middle East, in order to protect the interests and profits of U.S. oil companies and U.S. banks against the peoples of the Middle East. Today, that U.S. money and those U.S. weapons are being used to kill and starve the Palestinians.
Trump didn’t have to send people to Gaza to know what is happening in Gaza. It was his policy to support Israel as it stopped all food coming into Gaza. Just like it was Biden’s policy to support Israel as it dropped bombs on Gaza hospitals. Just as it has been the same policy of U.S. imperialism for decades, under both Republicans and Democrats, to support Israel’s wars in the Middle East.
The interests of the Israeli regime and the U.S. government don’t always exactly align. But they are both responsible for today’s slaughter and starvation in Gaza. They both have blood on their hands.
Aug 4, 2025
A British doctor who volunteered to work at a hospital in Gaza described the shock of seeing a skeletal infant who looked only days old but was actually seven months: “The expression ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do it justice. I saw the severity of malnutrition that I would not have thought possible in a civilized world. This is man-made starvation being used as a weapon of war.”
Aug 4, 2025
Amazon SAID in April they wouldn’t raise prices. But they DID raise prices, by around 5%, on 1200 items or around one third of what they sell! Target and Walmart also raised prices.
Jeff Bezos and his billionaire bros must want to buy bigger yachts. We need a real raise!
Aug 4, 2025
Many people depend on credit cards to get them through the month. But, to add insult to injury, at times when you are forced to use a credit card, a surcharge is added onto your bill, on top of the finance charge. That surcharge can be three percent or more.
In other words, you are already going into debt, and are being penalized for not being able to pay with cash.
Despite what the business news and politicians maintain, the economy, especially for the working class, is NOT in good shape!
Aug 4, 2025
Parents are often told they must give their kids a healthy diet by giving them fruits and vegetables. But that is easier said than done—especially in this time period, where ONE apple can cost three dollars. And if you have two or three kids, that’s nine dollars for one apple each.
Everything is high—and when you have kids and/or grandkids to feed, multiply that by the number of kids you have.
Aug 4, 2025
Many office workers are now working from home. There are certainly advantages, but it is not without its issues either.
Workers have to make sure they have a fast enough internet connection. Then electric bills include peak hours surcharges and we are paying higher rates all over the country—so be prepared to pay more unless you want to sweat away while working.
If the power goes out, you’re on your own as well to find a new place to work or call in or use your limited PTO—if you get any.
Pros and cons of work from home, but in a society where workers are in control, people would be able to work how they needed to—and given the necessary tools!
Aug 4, 2025
For months now, agents carrying out deportation arrests have gone around masked, wearing vests that just say “Police.” They’ve refused to show IDs, or to provide warrants.
Those they’ve arrested have often disappeared into a network of immigration prisons, moved from one state to another, and been denied access to lawyers.
The Trump administration justifies all this by claiming they are going after migrant criminals. Or, when it’s obvious those they’re arresting aren’t criminals, that they’re going after undocumented immigrants. Or, when they’ve arrested people who have green cards or other legal status, that they are at least going after immigrants with limited rights.
But recently released video footage from an arrest on May 2 shows once again that citizens are not safe from these tactics. Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio is an 18-year-old high school senior from Florida. He was riding in a work van with his mom and two undocumented companions when they were pulled over and he started filming.
His video shows Border Patrol agents opening the door and grabbing one of the men inside before putting him in a chokehold. Agents can be heard shooting another man with a stun gun. Even though Laynez-Ambrosio repeatedly told the agents “I was born and raised right here,” he was told, “You’ve got no rights here,” pushed to the ground, threatened with a stun gun, and held for six hours. While in detention, officers threatened him with charges if he didn’t delete the footage, and he was eventually charged with “obstruction without violence,” even though the video shows him cooperating with agents’ orders.
In fact, the Trump administration has not deported as many people per day as were deported under Obama. But the bragging about brutality, hiding of faces, denial of “due process,” are not about deporting undocumented immigrants—these are tactics meant to intimidate. And as the case of Laynez-Ambrosio and others show, this intimidation is aimed not only at immigrants, but at people who are in the company of immigrants, or who might “look like” immigrants—and ultimately, at everyone else.
However many people they actually deport, getting us used to seeing masked “police” with no name tags and no warrants grab people off the street is a preparation for even more brutality.
Aug 4, 2025
After the Labor Department announced the number of jobs added to the economy in July, the president fired the official who made the announcement. Dr. Erika McEntarfer had worked in economic statistics for decades and was appointed to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) by a Senate confirmation including “yes” votes by Vance and Rubio in 2024.
The BLS also annoyed the president because they lowered the figures given for how many new jobs were created in May and June by 258,000. The president proclaimed the figures to be fake but Wall Street dropped 500 points from the stock market. Apparently, investors also disagreed with the president on how fake the figures are or were.
It’s easy to be reading such news on your app or in your newspaper over your morning coffee—oops, make that your half a cup of coffee since prices for coffee are rising. Alas, the president just put a big tariff on Brazilian coffee beans, the country which supplies the largest amount of coffee to the U.S. market.
Was Brazil picking on the U.S.? Was Brazil running a trade surplus that hurt the U.S. economy and jobs? Nope. However, no coffee beans can be grown in the continental U.S., so no jobs in that area. In fact, the U.S. runs more than a seven-billion-dollar trade SURPLUS with Brazil.
Some lies work better than others.
Aug 4, 2025
At age 16, Virginia Guiffre was working a summer job at Mar-a-Lago where her father was a maintenance man. Virginia explained in a BBC interview how convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell first chatted with her at Mar-a-Lago as she was reading a book on massage therapy. Ghislaine offered her a better paid job and training with another employer, Jeffrey Epstein.
Virginia took the job and ended up as one of Jeffrey Epstein’s young sex trafficking victims. After 5 years of being “passed around like a piece of fruit” to billionaire men, Virginia escaped. She married, moved to Australia, and raised a family.
Virginia only spoke out as a survivor when her third child, a daughter, was born. Virginia decided to fight like hell to tell the truth about international child sex trafficking by and for billionaires.
Tragically, Virginia died by suicide in April 2025. Her family has carried on her fight. They insist their sister wanted all of her own court records made public. She was proud of her work to bring this sex trafficking ring down. The family has been on the news demanding no pardon of anyone convicted and that all the Epstein files be made public.
The family has a dream that a collective voice of outrage will become so powerful that the full documents are released. Were that to happen, as impossible as it might seem today, the names of all the politicians, the royals, the CEOs, the billionaires, would represent just the tip of the iceberg.
The names coming to light would begin to expose the hypocrisy and depravity that is right now being protected. And that which is protected is condoned. Because in the top circles of capitalist society, it IS acceptable, it IS “normal” to treat women and children—and workers—as property to be used, abused, and thrown away. Yet what must truly be thrown away is capitalist society itself!
Aug 4, 2025
Only hours after the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its monthly jobs report, President Trump fired the head of the agency, Erika McEntarfer. Trump said she was trying to make him look bad.
The job numbers did look bad. In the whole country, the report said, only 73,000 non-farming jobs were created in July when, each month, about ten times as many people enter the U.S. workforce. But even more damaging to Trump’s claims of “the economy doing great” was the BLS’s revision of its May and June figures. The real number of jobs created during those two months, the agency said, was actually 33,000, instead of the originally reported 291,000—an 89% drop, that is!
The jobs numbers are revised every month because the BLS announces them on the first Friday of each month—too soon, really, to come up with precise numbers. So, the monthly jobs figure is an estimate—usually an estimate higher than the actual number, since the BLS also is inclined to make things look rosier than they are.
Look at the “official” unemployment figure, for example, which the BLS also announces. This figure leaves out millions of people—like the people who are not actively seeking work because they have given up; or the people who work part-time but want a full-time job and can’t find it; or the people who can’t work because they have to take care of children or elderly relatives, or because they are in prison.… It’s a long list—and the BLS simply doesn’t count them.
But workers know what the job situation in the real world is, anyway. The fact that jobs are hard to come by; that jobs that are available don’t pay enough to cover the cost of living; and that millions of people work two, sometimes even three jobs just to pay for rent and necessities.
So, as the crisis deepens for the working class, Trump wants federal officials to paint even rosier pictures—tell even bigger lies, that is. But it’s not just him. Trump may be more crass than other elected officials. But in the end all these politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, do the same thing: they lie to the working class on behalf of the big capitalists they represent.
Aug 4, 2025
On July 22, a woman drowned her 14-month old child in Lake Michigan, before trying to kill herself.
Police had been regularly called to this woman’s home for months because she was obviously going through a mental health crisis. They issued an order of protection barring her from seeing the child’s father or grandparents. Finally, she became homeless.
A judge ordered her jailed while waiting trial, saying: “The behavior kept escalating despite that order of protection.” Of course it did! It was obvious to everyone involved that she and her son needed help. But she didn’t get help. Instead, she was left to continue to spiral until she killed her son.
At least three people in the Chicago area suffering mental health crises have killed family members since May. Every time, the response is the same: charge them with crimes and lock them up.
This disintegrating capitalist society destroys the mental health of increasing numbers of people. Instead of help, when people crack, they are sent to jail.
Aug 4, 2025
To anyone who has been paying attention to the death, starvation, and displacement of the Palestinians in Gaza, it might seem surprising that politicians around the world are just now beginning to speak out against the conditions there. One reason they’ve ignored it until now is because the big corporations and banks around the world, many of them here in the United States, profit from the murderous policies Israel is carrying out there.
Some of them were listed in a report from Francesca Albanese, a special reporter for the United Nations. Among them, U.S. military contractor Lockheed Martin has a deal worth 3 billion dollars to produce 25 F-35 fighter jets for Israel, on top of the 50 it has already sold them. IBM provides training and equipment the Israeli state uses for the collection of biometric data on Palestinians. Hewlett-Packard supplies technology for Israel’s military, prison system and police.
Microsoft provides specially designed computer systems for the Israeli military, and Google and Amazon have a deal worth 1.2 billion to provide it with technological infrastructure. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is helping Israel to develop military drones. Palantir, headquartered in Denver, has a deal to provide AI platforms to assist the Israeli military in choosing targets in Gaza that don’t involve human oversight.
Albanese mentions Caterpillar, Volvo, and Hyundai as providing heavy machinery to destroy homes, mosques and infrastructure in the Palestinian territories. Banks like BNP Paribas and Barclays have provided Israel with financial backing to make its treasury bonds attractive to investors. And big energy companies like BP and Chevron are reaping profits off the use of pipelines passing through the waters off of the Gaza shore.
Trump’s call for turning an ethnically cleansed Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” earlier this year didn’t come out of nowhere. The Tony Blair Institute, connected with the former British Prime Minister, and the Boston Consulting Group worked together with Israeli businessmen on a plan to develop Gaza into a major trading hub. The plan would be complete with man-made offshore islands, a deep water port and “special economic zones” to allow foreign companies to avoid paying taxes.
The suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza was not the result of politicians in Israel and its imperialist allies in the U.S. and Britain losing their moral compass. Rather, their moral compass points directly to the profits of the wealthy ruling class that they serve.
Aug 4, 2025
This article is translated from the August 1 issue #2974 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Protests against the genocide in Gaza are spreading within Israel itself. With more than 60,000 Gazans killed and nearly 146,000 wounded after 21 months of war, more and more voices are being raised to denounce the murderous policies of the Israeli government and its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Two Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, known by its abbreviation) and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, issued a statement on July 28 denouncing killings by starvation and the systematic destruction of the Palestinian health system.
Criticisms by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert are likely not innocent of political calculation. He was a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party. He now claims Israeli public opinion is overwhelmingly for the immediate and unconditional end to the war if that means the hostages are returned. He adds that he regrets that a significant part of the Israeli government explicitly opposes ending the war although this means more hostages will die.
Former Israeli ambassador to France, Elie Barnavi, had supported the war in response to the Hamas attack on October 7. But in a recent column he wrote, “What is improperly called the Gaza war has long since mutated into a brutal assault against the civilian population, which no longer has any military justification. What remains is the thirst for revenge, the tortuous designs of a desperate prime minister fighting for his political and judicial survival, and the aspiration of his supremacist and messianic allies to empty the territory of its inhabitants and replace them with Jewish settlers. This is what we call ethnic cleansing.”
Israeli government spokespeople respond to these criticisms by daring to assert, “There is no famine caused by Israel in Gaza today.” They accuse Hamas of causing the shortage by seizing humanitarian aid. The testimonies of Israeli soldiers present on the ground, relayed by the New York Times, do not prevent Netanyahu and his loyalists from continuing to lie brazenly. Israeli leaders and spokespeople are used to this. Their job is to defend the indefensible, anyway!
Still, testimonies are multiplying, particularly from soldiers returning from Gaza. They are severely affected by what they saw and the dirty work they were forced to do. Some lose their minds. Some commit suicide. But above all, every week and sometimes more, demonstrators demand the government stop the famine, stop the war, and bring back the remaining hostages. Protestors oppose Netanyahu’s cynicism, as he makes every effort to continue the massacre and shows the utmost contempt for the hostages and their families. As recently as July 24, demonstrators in Tel Aviv saying, “Netanyahu, you’re killing us!” were chased away by police.
Clearly, Netanyahu and his band of far-right ministers want to take advantage of the current situation for as long as possible. They have been able to carry out massacre and destruction with the complicity of all the major powers and with the open support of U.S. President Trump. This backing gives them the opportunity to kill as many Palestinians as possible as well as to advance their agenda, which is to drive Palestinians out and annex all of historic Palestine, which would complete the Zionist project as a colonialist project of the worst kind.
One obstacle remains: the Palestinian people, who after decades of this oppressive regime still resolutely oppose this enterprise of annihilation.
Aug 4, 2025
By the summer of 1945, World War II was all but over. Germany surrendered in May. The U.S. had controlled the seas around Japan since the battle of Leyte Gulf in October of 1944 had all but destroyed the Japanese Navy. The U.S. Navy cut off raw materials and food, essentially ending Japanese war production and starving the population. By December of 1944, the Japanese government had no choice but to ask for negotiations to end the war.
But instead of agreeing to negotiate, the U.S. proceeded to inflict increasing horror on the Japanese population. Starting in March of 1945, it undertook a massive campaign of firebombing, destroying 64 cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians over the course of five months. Then, on August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped its new atomic weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, it dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. It was the first time such weapons had been used anywhere in the world.
Few of the 200,000 or so people killed by the bombs died instantly. One Hiroshima survivor, Keiji Nakazawa, recounted part of the horror in his autobiography:
“The bomb blast pulverized the windowpanes…. People who’d been in rooms with windows straight ahead of them had their fronts covered with glass splinters. The glass splinters had pierced even their eyeballs, so they couldn’t open their eyes.... Countless pieces of glass were embedded in their bodies, so that each time they took a step, the glass splinters jingle-jangled.”
Thousands of others were burned to death, or died of radiation poisoning, or were crushed by falling debris. Hundreds of thousands more were severely injured, or rendered homeless.
Many American military commanders, including the leading U.S. generals MacArthur and Eisenhower, said at various times that they thought dropping the bombs was unnecessary to end World War II. Admiral Nimitz, commander of U.S. Naval forces in the Pacific said clearly: “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” But whatever role these bombs played in ending the war with Japan, their main target was the rest of the world.
In 1945, much of the world was still technically part of the British or French colonial empires, including almost all of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Vietnam, and much of the Caribbean. Other places like China, Iran, and much of Latin America were semi-colonies, technically independent but dominated by the imperialist powers. People in many of these places were already mobilizing against the colonizers, and it was clear that neither Britain nor France had the military strength to retain control over their empires.
U.S. corporations were already drooling at the possibility of taking over control of large areas of the world, and of the money to be made. The war had set up the U.S. to be the predominant economic power with the most extensive and strongest military in the world.
The massive assault on the civilian population of Japan, culminating in the dropping of the two atomic bombs, served as a perfect demonstration of what U.S. imperialism was prepared to do—not only militarily, but humanly.
The only potential rival of the U.S. was the Soviet Union, even though it had lost tens of millions of people in the war and had a huge swath of its territory laid waste by the Nazis. U.S. imperialism had worked with the Stalinist bureaucracy that ran the Soviet Union when it fit U.S. interests, as in defeating Nazi Germany, or keeping a lid on revolutionary movements in Europe after the war. But as warped as it was by that Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union remained a country with an economy that U.S. companies couldn’t so easily profit from, having come out of a workers’ revolution. The atomic bombings also served as a threat aimed at the Soviet Union.
So as much as they were the last acts of World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also the first acts of the new series of wars the U.S. was preparing to fight to dominate the world.
The U.S. has not again used atomic bombs, but they were an accurate warning of the brutality U.S. imperialism’s domination would mean for the world’s people. This brutality has continued, from mass firebombing campaigns in Korea and Vietnam, to the support for murderous dictatorships across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, to the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the current genocidal policies being carried out by Israel, the U.S. surrogate.
Aug 4, 2025
On July 18, President Donald Trump signed into law the GENIUS Act, a major legislative win for Trump, who campaigned on making the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet.” (The acronym for the Genius Act stands for “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoin”.)
Joining Trump and the Republicans, the Democrats provided wide support for the bill. In the Senate, the vote on the GENIUS Act was 68–30, with 18 Democrats joining most Republicans in favor. The House approved it with a 308–122 vote with most Republicans and 102 Democrats, including House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, voting in favor.
And no wonder. It’s a giant gift to some of the biggest companies, financial speculators … not to speak of drug traffickers and other criminals.
This new law claims to provide a regulatory framework to one kind of cryptocurrency, called stablecoins. Stablecoins are supposed to be a safer and less volatile type of cryptocurrency because companies are supposed to hold the equivalent dollars or gold or euros in reserve to back them up. But up until now, there was no real use of stablecoins in the real world, except by criminals, drug traffickers and scammers, in order to transfer money and access the cash without being detected by regulators or the police.
This is now changing. The U.S. government claims that it will regulate stablecoins, that is, make them safer and more mainstream. This will undoubtedly open up the gates for a giant influx of money from big parts of the supposedly “legitimate” economy into stablecoins. Companies like Amazon or Walmart are already talking about adopting stablecoins as a means of payment and transactions. Big banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, are exploring launching their own stablecoins. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon are partnering to launch their own stablecoins as a basis for new kinds of money-market funds. (Who knows how that will work!)
All these big companies claim that the use of stablecoins potentially saves them a lot of money and makes certain kinds of transactions more efficient.
But nobody should take the assurances of financiers or politicians at face value. First of all, it is almost impossible to know if the companies marketing stablecoins are actually holding the equivalent dollars or gold in reserve. Second, once big companies and financial companies start using stablecoins, it will make it a lot easier for them to do the same thing as the criminal networks: to hide money and transfer lots of money secretly.
Many, many economists have warned that all cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins, are little more than a scam that make a few speculators extremely rich. But they also warn that it has all the makings of a great big economic disaster, that no doubt will result in many more crashes, bank runs, debt crises, as well as taxpayer-funded bailouts of the cryptocurrency sector.
The GENIUS act, stablecoins, cryptocurrencies, bitcoins—they are all merely a sign of the times. Many decades ago, the capitalist class curtailed its investments in production or in useful construction. This has left them swimming in money, with no place to put it except for increasingly more risky and speculative ventures, which pay off much more quickly. Everything can be the subject of speculation and gambling: a fashionable company, a biotechnology laboratory, a master painting, real estate, government debt ... or stablecoins.
Thus, the vast wealth produced by the working class around the world that could be used for the betterment of humanity is blown up and wasted on an epic scale, all because it is under the control of a tiny class of billionaires.
Aug 4, 2025
This article is translated from the July 21 issue #1394 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.
Gangs linked to trafficking of drugs and weapons continue to extend beyond Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince. They looted the communities around the capital and then seized communities further away. They also have made Haiti a trafficking hub. Police seized more than a ton of cocaine on July 13 on Tortuga Island, off Haiti’s coast.
The population has fled. More than 27,500 people were displaced in a week because of gang attacks, according to the International Organization for Migration. Some displaced people found refuge with host families. The majority ended up in shelter camps which now hold more than 218,000 people. The western department of Port-au-Prince now has more than 85 such camps where there were none last December. For the first time, the number of camps outside Port-au-Prince exceeds those in the capital.
Adding to these displacements are mass deportations of Haitians, mostly from the neighboring Dominican Republic: more than 108,000 people so far, according to the United Nations.
As for government efforts to fight the gangs, the plan of deploying a police brigade to monitor supposedly protected zones has had few results.
Another police unit uses exploding drones against the gangs. A community near the capital was struck by suicide drone attacks during the weekend of July 13. Police claimed to target gang positions there with three days of salvos. Police did not disclose the number of gang members hit. But the damage to homes and small marketplaces was considerable.
Poor people are the main victims, caught between gang bullets and the sporadic police response. Stopping the criminals is a matter of life or death for the masses. But in the absence of a political organization defending their interests, the masses find themselves alone facing the gangs and their accomplices, such as big businessmen and drug traffickers.
The only alternative lies in a self-directed struggle by poor and working people—in organizing around a workers’ party that could lead a collective armed mobilization to put the gangs out of commission.
Aug 4, 2025
On Thursday, July 31, the “Second City” was, for a few hours, “Number One” in the world. It was a record Chicago could do without, though: with an AQI (Air Quality Index) of 174, Chicago had the worst air pollution in the world, according to the air-technology company IQ Air.
It was because smoke from Canadian wildfires had covered Chicago and a large part of the Midwest. Earlier that day, Minneapolis had ranked third in the world in worst air quality, and Detroit seventh.
The Canadian wildfire smoke spreads far and wide with the winds—as far south as Florida, and eastward to the Atlantic Coast. So, since May, cities in the midwestern and northeastern U.S. have had many days of severe air pollution. On July 15 the AQI reached 170 (Code Red) for Detroit. On July 26, the state of New York warned that the AQI could reach 135 (Code Orange) in the New York City metro area, where more than 20 million people live.
This is a serious health hazard for all of us. Smoke from wildfires contain toxic materials that can cause cancer. It also carries a very fine dust, which no one can escape completely, not even indoors. Depending on how sensitive a person is, this dust can cause respiratory illnesses, heart attacks, strokes, premature births and even neurological damage. So, this kind of pollution causes millions of premature deaths.
What is making wildfires around the globe more frequent and more explosive is that the earth is warming, bringing about changes in the climate. The soil and plants in certain parts of the earth are becoming drier, creating ample fuel for wildfires. Then, a few sparks from a campfire or a power line can start a fast-moving wildfire that quickly becomes uncontrollable.
These changes in the climate are linked to the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) for energy. Scientists have known this for decades, and technology to burn these fuels more efficiently has existed for decades. But big energy and manufacturing companies have never chosen to invest money into that kind of technology, because their priority is to increase their profit.
The dangerous smoke that threatens us year after year is another result of the capitalist economy.
Aug 4, 2025
This article is translated from the July 25 issue, #2973 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
“Our comrade Isaac Szmulewicz, whom we called Charron, also known as André Victor, has passed away at the age of 84. The son of a father deported to Auschwitz and a Jewish family from Poland, Charron began his activism in the precursor to Lutte Ouvrière in the early 1960s. He helped develop it in the provinces, first in Lyon and then in Marseille. Many of us knew him through the Presles fete, which he supervised almost from the beginning. He was a musician in his spare time and had a talent for humor. Ill for several years, he refused to give up. Sensing his end approaching, he left us this farewell: “In my entire life, I have been nothing but a modest activist. I hope to have worked to one day create a revolutionary party. I’m done. Long life and success to the living!” We will not forget you, comrade.”
And everyone from Spark who attended the fete in Presles won’t forget him either.
Aug 4, 2025
A non-profit company, Chrysalis, employs workers who clean the streets of downtown Los Angeles, paying them wages ranging from $17 to $25 per hour. The hourly living wage in Los Angeles County is about $28 for one adult with no children, as calculated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). So, Chrysalis’ pay for these street sweepers is not enough to sustain a decent life in Los Angeles.
Chrysalis is a contractor for the so-called Business Improvement District (BID), financed by the Los Angeles Arts District businesses, one of 40 BIDs operating in the Los Angeles area. BIDs are also non-profit companies, “supplementing” the city services such as public safety, maintenance, street cleaning, marketing, and capital improvements, according to their website. BIDs are funded by the fees paid by property owners and businesses located in their districts, which are tax deductible. This is a scheme that has been set up to benefit only the business owners.
The City of Los Angeles laid off more than half its personnel assigned to street cleaning during the 2008 recession. Those still working usually only clean the districts where wealthy people live.
The City charges the cleaning costs to workers through our taxes, and, unlike businesses, we cannot deduct such expenses to reduce our taxes. So, we also pay for the cleaning of business district streets, while our streets are neglected.
Today, workers with meager wages clean and pick up garbage on the streets of the ultra-modern, rich area so that their businesses look ever attractive to their customers.
Capitalism creates oases serving the rich and a hell for workers.
Aug 4, 2025
This nonfiction book tells the story of Sherman’s 1864 march from Atlanta to Savannah through the heartland of the South. This book tells the story of the march from the freed slaves’ point of view.
As Sherman marched through cotton country, enslaved people did all they could to help. They led the advance bands through the back roads, helped them forage and even led them to hidden storage caches. When the main ranks of the army reached them, they joined the army by the tens of thousands, bringing with them all the wealth they could carry. Everywhere the army went, they were met by cheering crowds who then joined the march.
Even though the army only really welcomed the healthy men, thousands of older men, women and children brought up the rear. Letters that soldiers wrote home show the courage and hope the freed slaves held.
The march did not just destroy and burn the economic wealth of the plantation system in a 60-mile-wide swath, it also caused a much wider social revolution. Slavery was gone, there was freedom to move, to find loved ones, to choose where to live for the first time!
This Scottish documentary by an independent Scottish journalist reveals how billionaires like Trump use politicians and the police to push through their latest get-rich scheme. The film shows the politicians giving Trump permission to tear up protected sea dunes for a golf course. He even got them to force the residents of the neighboring farms, including a woman in her 90s, to be forced off their land.
Trump tried first to buy out the farmers. Then threatened them with public insults and evictions. Next his contractors “accidentally” cut off their water source and their electricity. Journalists were arrested and thrown in jail. But none of this worked, and in fact the community rallied around them, and their plight made international fame.
Around this time Trump ran for president, so he had to back off for “public relations.” But this film clearly shows how the billionaires get the politicians and the police to brutally do their bidding.
A timely film, given how often Trump visits his golf courses in Scotland….
Aug 4, 2025
This summer, Microsoft Corporation laid off some 9,000 workers, following at least 6,000 layoffs in May. More than 15,000 decent-paying jobs are gone, while the corporation showed a first quarter profit of 70 BILLION dollars.
That’s one corporation making almost 6 billion dollars per week in profit. Then this same corporation laid off thousands in the following months.
Follow the money: Layoffs for workers, billions in the pockets of big capitalists.
Aug 4, 2025
A prisoner was killed in western Maryland’s “maximum security” North Branch Correctional Institution on July 18. Last year six people died at the prison, where prisoners also died in 2011 and 2015.
Guards are driven to brutally harass prisoners or set them up to fight to the death. This isn’t rehabilitation, and it isn’t repaying a debt to society. This is effectively capital punishment, which Maryland claimed to end in 2014.
Before then, North Branch was Maryland’s “death row,” where people sentenced to death were held until the state executed them. What has changed?
Aug 4, 2025
It has been in the news recently that a bipartisan bill is moving through Congress to speed up payments to people who were exposed to poisonous chemicals between 1953 and 1987 at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
Over these years, as many as a million people, soldiers and their families as well as workers at the base, bathed in and drank water contaminated with harmful chemicals. These ranged from a dry-cleaning solvent linked to a nearby off-base dry cleaning company; a degreaser, from on-base units using chemicals to clean military equipment; benzene; vinyl chloride, and dozens more contaminants.
It was only years later, in 2014, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded that the contaminated water significantly increased the risk of contracting diseases—including for children born at the base during the contamination years. These serious diseases range from leukemia, bladder, kidney, liver, lung and breast cancers; Parkinson’s; and many more.
The story behind this contamination is long and convoluted.
The buck was passed, more than once, when base commanders and other officials ignored the reports that showed contamination.
In 2022, nearly 60 years after the contamination started, after years of veterans, their families and their supporters fighting for some kind of justice, Congress passed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, which was supposed to provide compensation to everyone who was contaminated. And today’s current bipartisan bill, in fact, is proof that just a small fraction of the plaintiffs in a current lawsuit have received any financial settlements. In one of the recent testimonies before Congress, one Marine said how the water stank and it smelled bad, “but we didn’t question it because we were Marines.”
Poisoned well water at Camp Lejeune is just another part of the story of how the government, how the top brass of the military, treats its rank-and-file soldiers. Add it to the list—whether it’s the “Atomic Vets,” in the 1950s, who were exposed to radiation during nuclear weapon testing in military exercises; soldiers in Vietnam exposed to Agent Orange; or those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, exposed to burn pits.
Today these same officials are beating the drums of war, trying to prepare the laboring population of this country to be ready to go to yet more wars this system carries out. But this is how they really treat their soldiers—all the while hypocritically mouthing the words, “Thank You for Your Service.”
Aug 4, 2025
The Baltimore Orioles and the Toronto Blue Jays played two games the same afternoon on July 29, a double header. Relief pitcher Seranthony Domínguez played both games—the first for Baltimore as an Oriole, and the second for Toronto as a Blue Jay. In between the games, the owners traded him!
He had to walk through a tunnel from the home team dugout to the visiting team dugout, and change uniforms. And somehow find the time to tell his family they are moving from the U.S. to Canada, after moving from Philadelphia to Baltimore last year when he was traded before.
“A really, really smart, intelligent baseball person…. We’re really going to miss him,” the Baltimore manager said. The teams also traded minor league player Juaron Watts-Brown. The exchange was done in a rush to beat the trade deadline of July 31.
This kind of trade has been done by all major league teams, every year, for over a century. It’s treated as perfectly normal. But player’s lives can be upended in a second, without a second thought by executives and owners.
Bosses want workers to be loyal to their “teams.” In the big business world of sports, as in the rest of the business world, bosses have no loyalty to their workers. And as in the rest of the economy, baseball bosses are making more money from workers now than even in recent years.
For example, as the Orioles’ revenue has nearly tripled since 2002 from around 130 million dollars to 366 million dollars last year, profits grew to 99 million dollars. Major League Baseball team owners are also keeping more of the revenue as profit, and paying a smaller share to the athletes: 47% now, down from 63% then, according to the commissioner.
Fans want to watch athletes play baseball, but the business side has us watching team owners play ping-pong with players, while scoring big home runs with profits.