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
Sep 29, 2025
The second Trump administration has been eight months of chaos. Eight months of “shock and awe.” Eight months of threats. Every day it is something new. Some of it Trump uses to distract the population. But Trump’s attacks on the population are very real.
Trump sends masked ICE agents to round up and deport immigrants, most of whom are ordinary people who work hard for low wages. Trump went after federal government workers, firing many of them and tearing up the union contracts for those who are left.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” was nothing but taking from working people in order to further enrich the wealthy. Medicaid and food stamps are being cut, healthcare premiums will soon rise drastically, social services and education programs are being eliminated so that billionaires can get a bigger tax cut and military contractors can make more money. Trump eliminates regulations on pollution, climate change and worker safety, cutting any regulation that stands in the way of corporations increasing their profits.
For working people, life is becoming more dangerous and more unhealthy. And more expensive. Trump got elected by promising to lower food prices. He promised that his tariffs would increase jobs. But instead, tariffs are just increasing inflation. Trump’s promises of lower prices have been tossed aside and been replaced by all of his distractions.
To try and silence any opposition to what he is doing, Trump uses threats and intimidation and violent language. He threatens TV stations, newspapers, universities, talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, and even the panel of women on “The View.”
Trump threatens other politicians and people in the government establishment, people like former FBI Director James Comey, because they didn’t always do his bidding. Trump fired people who had been assigned to investigate his corruption. Trump is using the power of the federal government to exact retribution and revenge on all his perceived enemies.
Trump is acting like a dictator. Certainly, with his giant ego, Trump is a wannabe dictator. But Trump could not be doing what he is doing unless the capitalist class that he works for was not in agreement on his moves toward a more repressive regime. The capitalists so far have put up with Trump’s sometimes unhinged behavior because Trump is doing everything he can to squeeze the working class in order to increase profits of the wealthy class and to prepare the military for war.
So who is going to stand up to Trump? The Democrats? The Democrats may be yelling and screaming right now, but what are they really doing to change things? The Democrats have had plenty of chances to run the government and what have they done for working people?
The courts? The Supreme Court already has given Trump immunity for anything he does and it has been striking down legal challenges to Trump’s policies, even as Trump violates the Constitution and established law. So no, Trump won’t be stopped by the Democrats or the courts.
But the working class can stop Trump. When it is organized and ready to fight, the working class can be a powerful force to change society. Working people make up the big, big majority of the population. Look around you. Workers are together by the thousands in the factories, in the offices, in the fields, on the job sites, on the roads, railroads and airports. Workers are millions in the society. Workers make the economy run. Workers are the economy. That is power when it is used.
Most workers don’t see the power today, they don’t see it because we haven’t used that power in a real way, not for a long time. The politicians who serve the capitalists, who are aware of our power, try to distract workers with other things, like Trump is doing now. And they do everything they can to keep the working class divided, pitting workers against each other, trying to get us to blame each other.
But many times in the past, the working class has found the way to overcome any divisions. The working class has found the way to build up its own organizations and make a fight, pushing aside any politicians or union leaders who would stand in our way.
When the working class is ready to fight, a fight can come on fast and spread like a tidal wave. The working class can make a fight that can push aside a wannabe dictator, it can even get rid of this whole profit-over-life system that Trump represents.
Sep 29, 2025
In early September, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced changes in the rules for women seeking asylum in the U.S. from rape, and other such threats. Bondi argues that such persecution is NOT what Congress had in mind when it passed certain asylum regulations. Maybe not, since Congress is primarily males who have not shown themselves sympathetic to changing laws to help women (or men) abused in the U.S.
In the U.S. an estimated three women are killed by their domestic partners every single day.
If this is any indication of what female asylum seekers are facing, they deserve asylum, unquestioned.
Sep 29, 2025
Some public elementary schools in Baltimore County, Maryland have not taught science in recent years, the schools chief told the board of education in late September. The state has no mandatory minimum of science instruction minutes, and some county schools have been reduced to skeleton crews. That’s why fewer than a quarter of county fifth graders pass the state’s fifth grade science test.
Science is part of the education all young people need—especially young workers.
Sep 29, 2025
An ICE officer assaulted a woman after her husband’s hearing at New York City’s immigration court. Seeing her husband taken away by other ICE officers, the woman became distraught. She pleaded to an officer, who tried to shrug her off, saying “adios” several times. He proceeded to shove her into a wall outside the courtroom, before pushing her to the floor. The whole shocking scene was caught on camera by reporters and bystanders.
In the face of this ugly footage, the Department of Homeland Security announced that, “The officer’s conduct in this video is unacceptable … this officer is being relieved of current duties as we conduct a full investigation.”
Of course, this behavior is by no means unique. With ICE systematically detaining people at immigration court hearings—inside the courthouses—situations like this have become routine. It’s just in this case, a viral video lifted the veil on the campaign of brutality against immigrants.
Sep 29, 2025
Sales of Hamburger Helper shot up 14.5% so far this year. It’s no surprise to anyone who’s tried to buy a good cut of beef recently, and found they could only afford ground beef, if that!
Sep 29, 2025
Charlie Kirk has been presented as something of a conservative star “out of the grass roots”—a kind of “self-made young man.” A posting published in Forbes shows the reverse. Kirk has been sponsored by a section of the ruling class since the beginning.
Kirk founded Turning Point USA, his political organization for spreading right-wing, Christian nationalist ideas, in 2012. He attended the Republican National Convention that year, and impressed Foster Friess, a fund manager and conservative politician, who gave him $10,000. That’s how Kirk got his start.
Since then, Turning Point has raised close to half a billion dollars. It raised 80 million dollars just in 2023. Much of it comes from multi-million-dollar donations from billionaires, as well as big contributions from donor funds, which allow the wealthy donors to hide their identities.
Turning Point’s funders include a founder of Home Depot, Jimmy John Liautaud; the founder of a sandwich restaurant; the founder of Waste Management; the Chair of Univision; an ex-chair of Marvel; and Richard Uihlein. Some may remember Uihlein as the billionaire Wisconsin packaging capitalist (Uline) who funded Darren Bailey’s failed far-right, Trump-aligned campaign for Illinois governor in 2022.
Why so much money? What do these wealthy people get for their money?
Turning Point offers ideas directed largely at young white men, who may be frustrated with this society. It consciously directs that anger against black people, against women, against LGBT and trans people, against immigrants. This is nothing new of course—these kinds of reactionary politics go back centuries in this country.
Turning Point’s “point” is to turn anger in this society against different sections of the population—especially the working population. And to direct that anger away from the capitalist class, whose exploitation has driven society into the dead-end that we all face.
Sep 29, 2025
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” saw a huge viewership boost for its post-suspension return. All of Trump’s attempts to force Disney to shut down the show, just because it made fun of Trump, only aroused more interest in the show and provided it a much wider audience.
In fact, it was widespread anger over the cancelling of the show that most likely forced Disney to bring it back in the first place. After Disney caved to Trump and imposed the “indefinite suspension” of Kimmel’s show, consumers began a boycott of Disney services, products, cruises and vacations as a protest.
But Kimmel’s return with a larger audience is only a small setback for Trump, who has plenty of allies and supporters among the corporate elite who own the biggest media and entertainment companies. Two large media conglomerates, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, continue to back Trump and kept Kimmel off the air in dozens of cities for additional days.
Trump also has an important ally in multibillionaire David Ellison, who just bought up Paramount and CBS. Ellison is already taking extraordinary steps to please the Trump administration by appointing Trump’s people to key positions in the news division and cancelling another late-night comedian Trump doesn’t like, Stephen Colbert.
Ellison has been very busy lately, buying up major media companies like so much candy. He is soon slated to gain a major stake in TikTok in a deal being put together by the Trump administration with the Chinese government. And according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, he is in the process of trying to buy up Warner Brothers-Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO and many more channels.
Ellison can well afford to throw a lot of money into these ventures. His father, Larry Ellison, is sitting on a fortune valued at 400 billion dollars, making him one of the richest people in the world.
If all these deals go through, Ellison will have assembled an extraordinarily large and wide group of holdings in a very short period of time. According to The New York Times on September 18, these include “a material stake in a powerful social media platform, an iconic Hollywood movie studio and one of the largest content streaming services, as well as two of the country’s largest news organizations.”
In other words, Ellison will have an extraordinary amount of power over what people in the U.S. and all over the world see and hear, simply based on how much wealth he possesses.
Right now, says The New York Times, “Given Ellison’s friendship with, and affinity for, Donald Trump, an increasingly emboldened president could be getting an extraordinarily powerful media ally.” But obviously this alliance between two capitalist snakes is only based on how much they can use and benefit from each other.
As nice as the return of Jimmy Kimmel’s show is, no one should have any illusion that the First Amendment means that there is a protection of freedom of the press for ordinary people. Not in this society, run for the profit of the capitalist class.
“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake ‘public opinion’ for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.” Those words were written more than a century ago by the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin.
And they still hold true today.
Sep 29, 2025
Since early June, the U.S. government has pushed immigrant workers across Los Angeles into a terrible choice: “Go to work and risk being kidnapped by ICE, or stay home and fall further behind on the rent,” as a tenant rights organization observed. These included documented and undocumented, as well as citizen and non-citizen, mostly low-income workers.
Now, because they are losing their already meager incomes, these workers, imprisoned or not, are facing utility shutoffs, landlord harassment, eviction notices, and homelessness. One third of the immigrant workers owe more than one month’s rent to their landlord, placing them at risk of immediate eviction. One in eight immigrant workers said that their landlord threatened to report them to ICE.
In Los Angeles County, the rents are unaffordable. For example, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is approximately $3,400, while the average monthly income for undocumented households is around $3,900. The vast majority, more than three-quarters, of the low-income undocumented workers annually earn less than $25,000.
For this reason, not surprisingly, a 2024 investigation by the University of Southern California (USC) found that a staggering majority of undocumented households, about 70%, are considered to be financially burdened by rents. As such, immigrant workers were already struggling to pay these high rents before the ICE raids started.
After the ICE raids, 95% of undocumented immigrant workers were experiencing a rent burden as of early August. As a result, most immigrant workers had to return to work because of their fear of eviction.
One worker, Leslie Quechol, told a reporter from a local public radio station that her cousin was one of dozens arrested in an ICE raid on Ambiance Apparel, a company in downtown Los Angeles’ Fashion District. Her cousin is “the head of his household.” After being detained, he “left three kids and his wife” behind in their home. “Their conditions inside there were awful.”
Even immigrant workers who have not been detained, or those who have documents, are also losing their income as entire workplaces shut down to avoid being targeted in future government sweeps. Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, a Los Angeles shopping district known for its predominantly Latino community, is now unusually quiet. The usual rush of shoppers looking for fresh fruit, clothing, or home goods has mainly disappeared.
Los Angeles is now facing a working class disaster that can result in mass evictions and homelessness.
The workforce that faces this immediate danger consists mainly of low-income workers performing menial labor at construction sites, restaurants, farm fields, car washes, gardens, daycare or nursing centers, or as street vendors.
ICE, which the U.S. government is building into a much bigger paramilitary force, is currently used against this low-income workforce. But in the future, it will be used against the whole workforce, whether documented or not. The fight of this immigrant workforce against such oppression is also our fight.
Sep 29, 2025
Glenn Medical Center, the only hospital in Glenn County, California, is planning to close its emergency department by the end of September, and close the entire hospital by October 21.
The company that owns the hospital, American Advanced Management, says the hospital will no longer be “profitable enough,” because the federal government is reducing reimbursements to Glenn for Medicare and Medicaid.
Federal officials, on their part, say they are cutting down the payments for the hospital because there is another hospital in the area which the county’s Medicare and Medicaid patients can go to. Never mind that the 30,000 residents of Glenn County will now have to travel at least 40 minutes to reach an emergency room—which of course can be a matter of life and death in critical cases.
At least nine rural hospitals in California have closed in the last 20 years, and many others have cut essential services such as birth care and cancer treatment. The reason hospital owners give is always the same: with an impoverished population in rural areas, the hospitals are not “profitable enough.”
In capitalist society, profit trumps human life. Low-income, working-class people are the first to pay the price.
Sep 29, 2025
This article is translated from the September 26, issue #2982 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
French President Emmanuel Macron officially recognized the Palestinian state in a speech at the United Nations on September 22. It was a symbolic gesture because Macron knows he has no influence over the policies of American or Israeli leaders, who oppose it. And he knows that his speech won’t stay the executioner’s hand.
Macron’s gesture provoked anger from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hostility from France’s right wing and far right wing. At the same time it was supported by many people revolted by Israel’s murderous annexation policy.
But this recognition is as late as it is hypocritical. It took at least 65,000 Gazans killed and 163,000 wounded—a genocide—and a famine for Macron to change his tune! He recognized a Palestinian state when Gaza is nothing but a field of ruins, and Netanyahu is preparing the total annexation of the West Bank.
Macron doesn’t care about the fate of Palestinians. By re-orienting his policy back to France’s so-called “Arab policy,” Macron is thinking about strengthening France’s alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates—and the benefits French capitalists could reap in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East. He is thinking of French military-industrial giant Dassault and freight shipping corporation CMA CGM. He acts every bit the cynical leader of an imperialist power that is reckoning its revenue. He’s like previous French leaders who divided this strategic region floating on oil with the British, and set entire peoples against their neighbors.
Even when he claims to act out of solidarity, Macron dictates his terms. His price for recognizing Palestine? The Palestinian Authority—which administrates the West Bank—must commit to disarming Hamas and excluding Hamas from any future government. In other words, Macron is ready to recognize Palestine, but first, the Palestinian leadership has to upload its resumé and follow orders!
The only role the leaders of imperialism are willing to leave for the leaders of a hypothetical Palestinian state is to be guards in an open-air prison.
The Palestinian Authority was established during the Oslo Accords in 1993 to stem the uprising of Palestinian youth (“intifada” in Arabic) and played this role. This embryonic state apparatus was responsible for administrating territories separated from each other by checkpoints and border walls, subject always to Israeli military authority, and entirely dependent on international aid. Powerless, corrupt, and tasked with maintaining an unjust order, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority were set up to discredit themselves. Their discredit allowed Hamas to seize power in Gaza.
For 15 years, Hamas also controlled its share of the Palestinian population, forcing Gazans to accept every kind of deprivation. Hamas strengthened its military apparatus and hunted down and executed its opponents. Financed by funds from Qatar, with Israel’s consent, Hamas participated in preserving the imperialist order in its own way. By launching the attack of October 7, 2023, Hamas sought to brutally disrupt the normalization agreements between Israel and the Arab states. Hamas never troubled itself with the foreseeable consequences this attack would have for the people of Gaza.
For almost two years now, Israel has been waging a war of extermination against Palestinians, as demanded by the far right-wing parties which are in Netanyahu’s administration. No wonder many people wave Palestinian flags in solidarity with Palestinians and in protest of imperialist barbarism.
But, politically, the strictly nationalist perspective the Palestinian flag symbolizes is a dead end. The goal of a Palestinian national state—even an economically dependent rump state—suits the leaders of Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which leads the West Bank. They only challenge the imperialist order as much as to carve out a place for themselves and prosper by exploiting workers there, which they already do. This perspective offers the Palestinian masses only poverty and unemployment.
The only true emancipation for Palestinians—and for all the oppressed people of the earth and exploited workers like us—will come by overthrowing the imperialist order and its foundation, capitalism.
This perspective envisions a revolutionary wave of Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian peoples converging to reject the policies of their respective leaders. Then everyone could see there is room for the two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, to live together in an egalitarian and democratic manner.
Sep 29, 2025
This article is translated from the September 26, issue #2982 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded when French President Emmanuel Macron and other Western leaders theatrically recognized the Palestinian state. He accused them of giving “a huge reward to terrorism.” He added, “It will not happen. A Palestinian state will not be established west of the Jordan River.”
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir immediately called for the immediate annexation of the West Bank. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich agreed: “The only response to this anti-Israeli move is the annexation of the Jewish people’s homeland in Judea and Samaria [the biblical name that settlers/colonialists use for the West Bank] and the definitive abandonment of the absurd idea of a Palestinian state.”
These speeches are nothing new from representatives of the extreme right who run the Israeli government. These themes have been repeated nonstop, along with the pretext of “eradicating Hamas,” the official justification for the incessant bombings and massacres committed in Gaza for nearly two years. After the brief ceasefire this past January, the intensification of military operations and settlement-building in the West Bank was one of the war aims stated by Israel’s general staff. Netanyahu’s decision in March to break the ceasefire led to redoubled calls for the establishment of new settlements. Meanwhile, the Israeli army increasingly covered up atrocities and attacks by settlers against Palestinian villagers who were driven from their lands and were defending themselves at the cost of their lives.
The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967. It is home to approximately 3.2 million Palestinians, and now includes half a million Jewish Israelis living in more than 130 settlements recognized and encouraged by successive Israeli governments. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 did lead to the establishment of a Palestinian Authority, which was supposed to govern the affairs of the people of the West Bank and Gaza. But Israel’s political leaders have done everything possible to strip it of any real power.
Will Israel finally annex the West Bank and Gaza? If it has not done so yet, it is because there is an obstacle. In a unified Israeli state the Arab population would be as numerous as the Jewish population. Palestinians would hold sway—unless a system of apartheid is officially established.
Israel’s far right is tempted instead to find a “final solution” to the problem posed by the Palestinians: to exterminate or at least expel them. But the fact is that for nearly 80 years, Palestinians have stubbornly refused to disappear. All of Netanyahu’s pomp is powerless.
Sep 29, 2025
This article is translated from the September 16, issue #1355 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.
Haitian gang coalition leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérisier claimed in late August to have liberated the neighborhoods occupied for over a year by gangs. He invited the population to return to their homes.
After a year spent in tent camps, schoolyards, shacks, and makeshift shelters, the displaced longed to see the homes they had been forced to flee. For a few days, the so-called liberated neighborhoods bustled with residents searching for some sign of their former homes. They searched in vain. They found devastated neighborhoods, fields of ruins in a war zone. Houses were gutted, mostly burned, their walls ripped open, the tin roofs gone.
Streets are littered with wrecked cars, piles of garbage, rubble, and barricades erected by gangs. The streets are as devastated as bombing sites.
Gangs have retreated to other neighborhoods where they have solid bases. Various gang leaders meet to negotiate in the palace of one of their leaders. They show themselves off and celebrate in a sumptuous swimming pool. In a town near the capital, one of these criminals filmed himself in a room stuffed with cash. The gangs have not stopped their attacks. Kidnapping and racketeering continue. They charge tolls on the roads.
Although the gangs have withdrawn with their weapons from the so-called “liberated” neighborhoods, they have not been defeated. They can choose to come back whenever they want. Attempts to repatriate people at the beginning of the year failed when gangs attacked and claimed new victims.
In the neighborhoods gangs have razed and emptied of residents, the gangsters are more exposed, more visible. The returning population will serve as a screen against possible police attack. The gangs have never given the population anything free.
The residents cannot trust the fine words of the gangsters, who have already deceived and massacred them. Nor can they count on the intervention forces announced by the government. Only revolts by the masses can force back the murderers by imposing defeats on them, by taking back what they have stolen. Struggles by the exploited masses must aim to shift the balance of power.
Sep 29, 2025
This article is translated from the September 26, issue #2982 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
At the Paris Summit a decade ago, 200 countries solemnly promised with great fanfare to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than during the pre-industrial era.
They committed to reducing the production of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and gas. But now production levels are twice as high as what they promised!
The Stockholm Environment Institute and the Institute for Sustainable Development published their annual report on September 22. The report shows production forecasts for 2030 by the main fossil fuel-producing countries. They are 120% higher than the level compatible with warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius. The forecasts are 77% higher than the level for warming of two degrees. And the gap keeps increasing.
Brazil will soon host the next climate summit, to be called COP30. Brazil reflects this general headlong rush. Brazil’s oil production is expected to shoot up by 50% by 2030 compared to 2023. Its gas production will shoot up by 110%.
The report explains there is a “disconnect” between countries’ climate claims and commitments to achieve carbon neutrality, and their real-world plans for fossil fuel production.
What’s more, non-profit Reclaim Finance recently published a study showing that the world’s largest banks lent fossil fuel projects twice as much as they lent so-called “energy transition” projects.
The capitalists’ overriding objective is profit. They never wonder whether a planet hotter than the tipping point will still allow for profit.
Sep 29, 2025
The following is an excerpt from a presentation given in Chicago.
As capitalist society decays, we see things moving backwards. Any rights that women have today have been won through fights. But as the fights have receded, gains that were previously won are being taken away. Nothing won is guaranteed within this capitalist society which relies on exploitation, and takes advantage of every vulnerability.
We see this with the attacks on abortion rights. Roe v. Wade, the ruling that made abortion a constitutional right, was decided in 1973 as a response to fights made by the population. But as quickly as it was won, the Hyde Amendment added in 1976 didn’t allow Medicaid to pay for abortions. This means that poor women lost their access to abortion only within a few years of the original decision.
It’s also worth pointing out that this amendment has to be renewed with each budget vote, meaning that both parties have continued to pass it. Now with the recent Dobbs decision in 2022 repealing Roe v. Wade, some states are banning abortion altogether.
The Right has also grown as workers’ situation has degraded. There are few jobs available for working class men that could allow them to provide for a family. Social services and schools have been cut again and again, forcing women to pick up the slack, imposing more child and elder care on us. Men and women workers have to take on more hours of work to make ends meet.
We’re all under a lot of stress just to survive—which can set people against each other, even within families. And without anyone offering a working class perspective in a big enough way, right-wing forces have been able to take advantage.
Misogynistic ideas have gained more popularity as our current economic crisis deepens. In addition to their racism and nationalism, right-wing groups tap into the real frustration that many men feel today of not being able to play the role of the provider, which is still promoted as what men need to do. The internet certainly reflects that, where the “incel” movement took shape. Short for “involuntary celibacy,” men within this movement blame women for not wanting to sleep with them and justify rape as a legitimate reaction.
The “incels” may be some of the most extreme, but many right-wing “influencers” blame women for the problems facing men, and right-wing capitalists finance a lot of media put in front of people offering them sexist, reactionary “solutions.” Self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who himself was charged with rape and human trafficking, has said that women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. This got him banned from Twitter. But he was soon reinstated after Elon Musk bought the platform, now called X, where Tate has over 10 million followers. And he’s certainly not the only such figure.
The Right’s attacks on feminists also serve to defend the capitalist order as it is. They defend the interests of capitalism by reinforcing gender roles and keeping women down. These divisions help the bosses because they can take advantage of the subordinate role of women in the workplace and in the home. And all this right-wing crap encourages men and women workers to blame each other even more, fight each other, and ignore the capitalist class which is really causing our problems.
Sep 29, 2025
The stock market continues to hit one record high after another. It’s gone up 50% in the last two years, increasing under both Biden and Trump. That means stocks valued at a million dollars two years ago are now worth half a million dollars more.
Consumer spending also keeps going up, especially for luxury goods. People with investments to draw from have been spending more every year, as their wealth keeps increasing. For them, the economy has been doing great!
Not so much for the rest of us. All of the growth in consumer spending is driven by the richest 10%. The poorest 80% of people—meaning, the whole working class—aren’t buying more this year than they did last year, even though we are supposedly in an economic boom.
This trend of rich people having more to spend while ordinary people have less has been going on for decades, under both parties. Today, the richest 10% of people in this country account for about half of all consumer spending, compared to about a third 30 years ago.
Sep 29, 2025
On September 16, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem came to the Chicago suburb of Elgin for the biggest spectacle of “Operation Midway Blitz.” Agents blocked off streets with military vehicles, sent in low-flying helicopters and dropped smoke bombs before breaking down the door of a suburban house at 5:30 a.m. and grabbing the six people living there. Noem bragged that the raid had taken “violent offenders off the streets with arrests for assault, DUI and felony stalking.”
In fact, one of those paraded in handcuffs for Noem’s cameras was a U.S. citizen, and the others were low wage workers sharing the rent on a house.
This raid was par for the course for the entirety of this highly-publicized assault on immigrants in the Chicago area, which is supposedly targeting “the worst of the worst.”
They’ve set up traffic stops in immigrant suburbs—during one of which they killed a cook, Silverio Villegas González, and then lied about it. They claimed he had severely injured and dragged an agent with his car, but bodycam video later showed the agent standing with a scratch on his leg, saying the injury was “no big deal.” ICE claimed Villegas González had a record of “reckless driving”—which amounted to one speeding ticket in the last 15 years!
Of the 550 “criminals” Homeland Security says have been taken into custody in all these raids, the Chicago Sun Times could identify only one who was convicted of murder—and he had already spent decades in jail. About half—with their names released on a list next to their supposed crimes—did not appear on any court records the newspaper’s reporters could find.
Sep 29, 2025
Maryland households will have their electric bills lowered by a total of between $30 and $70 over the next year because of a rebate legislated earlier this year. Top elected officials declared the program “a lifeline to those with the tightest budgets.”
The real lifeline is to the power companies. To make up for the lower bills, the state will pay 200 million dollars straight to the electric companies like Pepco and BGE. Meanwhile last year the state approved rate increases which will raise electric bills by a total of 180 million dollars a year for the next four years. Goodbye rebate!
In the last decade and a half, the state has let Pepco more than double what it charges to deliver electricity.
BGE raised its rate steeply, too. Some household bills hit $1,000 or more per month last winter. Customers are falling behind on their payments. Overdue balances of BGE customers nearly doubled in the last year. But BGE’s parent company Exelon made two and a half billion dollars in profits.
No lifeline. Just more lies to cover up high rates and high profits, most painful for “those with the tightest budgets.”
Sep 29, 2025
This Sundance Festival award-winning documentary was filmed initially when filmmakers arrived at an Alabama prison to film a revival meeting. Off camera, inmates tell of the horrific conditions in the prison. Over six years, inmates secretly film the abuses, and even the details of a murder, with contraband cell phones, and they get the details to the filmmakers. The result is a powerful indictment of brutality, corruption, cover-up and a system in collapse.
This book examines the development of human culture from 3000 B.C. to the present. The author describes the rise and fall of cultures all over the world from a class point of view. He focuses on not just the role of the heralded and famous rich, but also the role of each of the classes, including the workers, employed and unemployed, and the peasants. He also examines how societal organization either encourages or alternately stifles technological development, and how that determines the health of a society.
Obviously this is a lot to put in one book, and he includes references for further reading. He makes incredible sense of the many cultural and religious twists and turns that human culture has made for itself. The promise of a better future is clear.
Sep 29, 2025
Assata Olugbala Shakur died on September 25 at 78 years old. As a young woman she became deeply involved in the civil rights and black power rebellion. She was raised in New York and North Carolina, “exposed to the degrading, dehumanizing side of segregation,” she later wrote. Conversations with African students helped awaken her to the history of colonization and slavery and the need to organize a struggle for freedom. After moving to Oakland, California and back, she led the Black Panther Party chapter in Harlem, and then joined an offshoot, the Black Liberation Army. In 1971 she stopped using the given name JoAnne Byron Chesimard, and renamed herself a combination of Arabic and Yoruba names.
Assata Shakur’s activity was always repressed by the government. She was indicted 10 times by federal and state authorities. All but one of those cases led to dismissal, acquittal, or a hung jury. In May 1973 she and two other activists were pulled over by New Jersey state troopers for having a broken taillight. The troopers fired. Shakur and a companion were shot and wounded. One state trooper was killed, and another was wounded. Prosecutors charged her with first-degree murder. They had no evidence. But an all-white jury found her guilty. She was sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years. She was the first woman to be named on the FBI’s “most wanted terrorists” list. Friends helped her escape from the penitentiary and eventually to Cuba, where she lived in exile for more than 40 years, until her death.
She declared in 1973, “I have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied. I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces…”
Some people know her as rapper Tupac Shakur’s godmother and step-aunt. She told the story of her life and struggle in her autobiography and other writings.
Sep 29, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of September 21, 2025.
Bowing to demands made by the Trump administration, Disney indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel. The popular late-night host may be the target, but his suspension shows that anyone can lose their job. And that is exactly the point.
What was the terrible thing that Kimmel said? He dared to accuse Trump of cynically using the assassination of Charlie Kirk to justify new attacks on Trump’s critics.
Well, isn’t that exactly what Trump is doing? Within hours of the murder, Trump’s department heads rushed to attack anyone who had said anything against Kirk, or anyone who was on what Trump called his “enemies list.”
A teacher made a comment in a private chat room—only to discover he was fired. Hundreds of workers were axed or disciplined—by airlines, restaurants, schools, universities, law firms; by an NFL football team and a print shop, even by the Secret Service and army regiments.
Newspapers were threatened with lawsuits; TV networks, with loss of licenses; universities and school systems, with loss of funds. Small shopkeepers were threatened by thugs who demanded they put up posters praising Kirk.
Vice-President JD Vance called on his supporters to report people they heard saying anything negative about Kirk. Extreme-right activists trolled through social media to find comments, and identify the people who made them. One of those trolls bragged to the Wall Street Journal that she had reported 471 people to their employers in just two days’ time.
In reality, many people had negative things to say about Kirk, since he had tried to cement white-supremacist ideas on parts of the working class. He denigrated women’s capacities and denied their right to make their own decisions. This self- proclaimed advocate of “Christianity” and “family values” said that the death of a few children is the price we have to pay to protect the Second Amendment and the “right to bear arms.”
So, we face a campaign of repression, and not just about Kirk. From the beginning, it was also about Trump, targeting those who criticized him. But it’s not just Trump acting like the gold-plated autocrat he always aspired to be.
This is Trump being a two-bit figurehead for some of the wealthiest people in the country. They want more tax cuts like the trillion-dollar cut that Trump just gifted them. They want more tariffs that favor their businesses. They want the U.S. military sent to defend their profits overseas. And they want the working class kept in check so they can squeeze everything they can get out of its labor.
Trump may have expected everyone to jump when he launched his latter-day witch hunt. Some people wouldn’t jump. Good!
But, repression won’t be stopped only by people who resist as individuals, no matter how courageous they are. Repression will be stopped by force. And it’s the working class that can have the necessary force—when it organizes itself.
Today, the working class doesn’t seem prepared to take that step. In many cases, it is divided –and people like Trump and Kirk have been working to drive wedges into the working class, splitting it to pieces that fight over crumbs.
But the working class has overcome its divisions before. Sometimes its most desperate, driven-down parts found the way to start the fight that pulled the rest of the class behind them.
We don’t seem to be there, you say? Maybe not. But we could be there. The working class can rush onto the scene ready to fight, faster than anyone realizes. It can build its own organizations from the ground up, sweeping away anything that would handcuff it, whether Turning Point USA or the unions as they are today. In any case, we have no other choice. Either the working class will organize itself or barbarians like Trump will impose repression, economic catastrophe and war.
Sep 29, 2025
As of the middle of September, due to a delayed state budget in Michigan, Michigan school districts had no idea how they were to pay for anything, since schools started on August 25.
One concern was how districts were to cover the cost of their school meals program that has provided breakfast and lunch for all of the state’s 1.4 million public school children. So districts had to decide whether or not to cancel their meals program, or make other cuts in order to cover these costs.
And if school officials and teachers’ unions thought that a Michigan budget resolution would provide solutions, they were sorely mistaken. On September 25, the governor and the Republican Michigan House speaker and the Senate Majority leader, a Democrat, announced they had reached a deal to avoid a government shutdown and pass a budget before the new fiscal year begins October 1. But little information was provided about the compromise budget agreement, including any details about the K-12 school aid budget.
EXCEPT—what does seem to be in the compromise agreement is to move about 750 million dollars in gas sales taxes from the School Aid Fund to fund road projects. And at the same time, various school and teacher union officials have received zero details about how blowing a hole in the School Aid fund will be filled!
Yes, the “Damn Roads,” as the Governor of Michigan has talked about for years, have to be fixed. But taking it from the schools is just plain crazy! It’s a classic Robbing Peter to Pay Paul measure.
The school budget doesn’t have to be robbed from, to pay the roads budget. Budgets don’t have to be “fixed,” as if there isn’t enough money. With all the money ordinary people pay in taxes, the money is there.
And if the politicians stop subsidizing corporations and real estate developers, there would be plenty of money to pay for the schools, and the roads and everything else ordinary people need.
No more “free lunches” for the billionaires!
Sep 29, 2025
The Canadian United Postal Workers, 55,000 strong, went on strike across the country on September 25. They reacted immediately when the government announced plans for Canada Post to massively reduce service, cut jobs, and create hardships for millions of Canadians.
Canada’s many rural villages, its elderly, its infirm, its population without internet, as well as the workers’ own jobs, all depend on the success of the organized workers’ fight.
A unit of Teamster Local 705 in Chicago has been on strike at Mauser Packaging for 2 months. The 140 workers do the dirty, dangerous job of cleaning industrial chemicals and residue out of used 55-gallon steel drums so that the drums can be re-used.
Workers were in negotiations for a new contract when they discovered management spying on union discussions. The Local promptly struck. Now they have escalated their demands to include guarantees that Mauser will not allow warrantless ICE raids, since the Latino workers reasonably fear they may be targeted.
Teamsters Local 705 has several units in the Chicago area, including a very large UPS facility….
Sep 29, 2025
Trump, Kennedy and Dr. Oz held a press conference to announce that his top health officials would be carrying out a campaign to “confront the crisis of autism.”
It was an obvious attempt to give Kennedy positive press when he is being roundly attacked as a quack, which he is. But Trump got a little frisky and took things beyond what even Kennedy and Dr. Oz had anticipated.
Trump proposed that autism in children was caused by women taking Tylenol during pregnancy. Tylenol, also known by its generic name as acetaminophen, is a drug recommended to pregnant women by doctors to alleviate pain and treat fever. Fever during pregnancy can be a cause of birth defects in the developing embryo.
Science does not show that acetaminophen (Tylenol) causes autism. Studies fail to show the drug causes autism as opposed to simply being correlated with it. Correlation does not necessarily prove causation.
In fact, one very large study published just last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association involving almost 2.5 million children in Sweden found no increased risk in children whose mothers took acetaminophen during pregnancy, compared with their own siblings who weren’t exposed to the drug in the womb.
Current science is making clear that autism is not simply one disorder; it’s a whole spectrum of conditions. It has been linked to more than 100 different genes involved in embryonic brain development and is now more often identified as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). At least in part, the reason for the increase in the frequency of children being diagnosed with autism is that in the early 2000s the American Academy of Pediatrics started recommending to pediatricians that they do autism screening in children between one and two years of age.
Trump told pregnant women to “Fight like hell not to take it,” and several times in his speech said they should take it if they just can’t “tough it out.” What an idiot! You can be sure that he’s never had a baby and wouldn’t know what to do when the labor pains struck him!