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
Oct 27, 2025
October 18 protests across the country drew as many as 6.5 million people, according to organizers and news outlets. It is hard to know exactly how many people participated, because there were more than 2,500 “No Kings” events.
When the slogan of “No Kings” was put forward, no doubt it rang true for many workers. Democracy? Trump could give a flip. He mocks the very idea and makes it clear that he is not asking anyone, including Congress, for permission to do anything.
His killing spree in the Caribbean Sea is intentional and he says outright that he has no intention of asking Congress for permission to do it. He grabs workers off the street after racial profiling and deports them. He sends the U.S. military into U.S. cities to attack U.S. citizens. Where did that come from? He tears down the East Wing of the White House. Who did he ask? And why isn’t he stopped? Isn’t there a law? And on and on.
In fact, it comes from the very foundations of this so-called democracy we are living in. Trump may be taking it to a new level, but the foundations for what he is doing were laid long ago. Rich people do what they want.
The people have never called the shots! This country has been engaged in dozens of wars, for example—wars that Americans have paid dearly for, in money and lives. Did the population ever vote to go to war?
In fact, the word “democracy” is nowhere in the constitution. The founding fathers, in their bourgeois “wisdom,” made sure that the masses, the plebeians, would never rule. John Jay, the Chief Justice of the first Supreme Court, put it bluntly: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” And when the U.S. Constitution was being written, Jeremy Belknap stated: “Let it stand as a principle that government originates from the people, but let the people be taught that they are not able to govern themselves.”
Citizens are allowed to vote for presidential candidates of parties restricted to those who represent the upper class, the ruling class of this country, capital.
The very process of voting and elections is undemocratic. Whole sections of the population are left out. Look at the fights that had to be made so that women and the black population could vote. Look at the ongoing attacks on voter rights. Millions of immigrants live and work in this country with no rights. The electoral college system, set up to impose inequality, came out of a tradeoff to deny black people the vote or even consider them one full person! It stipulates that representatives of the ruling class make final decisions, not the majority.
And then, how do they protect this so-called democracy? Look at the myth of the separation of powers, three branches, legislative, executive and judicial. This so-called protection against abuse by the executive branch is a joke. Trump didn’t make it so, he has only taken it to a new level. The Supreme Court has never guaranteed the rights of citizens. Ask women if they have ever been free to control their own bodies. Ask why so many black men languish in prison.
Underlying all this talk of a return to freedom and democracy lies the framework of a dictatorship of the owning class, the capitalist class. Equality for all? Bull! The majority of the population has to work, trapped by the rules and regulations set down by an upper class that values only profit. Where is the equality? Where is the protection against abuse? There is none. You may have it better or worse. But no worker has the right to an income nor health nor housing nor food.
The top organizers of the No Kings demonstrations feel that the system, rid of Trump, is adequate. Leaders of the Democratic Party, which puts itself forward to be the ruling party on behalf of the capitalist class, see themselves as the alternative to the Republican administration run by Trump.
But look how we got here. The same broken record of choosing the lesser of two evils has propelled us toward the bottom at an astonishing pace.
With or without Trump, the capitalist economic system is descending into crisis. War, finally, will be the solution held out to the working class as capitalism gobbles up all the profit and goes further into a downward slide.
The workers have no interest in tying themselves to old, false, outworn slogans and “solutions.” The workers need a revolutionary party and a revolutionary fight for real economic and political security that only a new system can bring.
Capitalism belongs in the dustbin of history. The working class can build a new, egalitarian society by taking the productive system that we have built, with its advanced technology and capacity to provide sustenance for the world population, out of the capitalists’ hands and organizing it to produce for the whole population.
Oct 27, 2025
The Q-Collar athletic device was criticized recently by federal scientists. The collar is made of springy metal coated in plastic, and is intended to be worn around an athlete’s neck. Its function theoretically is to put pressure on the jugular vein to restrict the flow of blood from the brain, so as to limit the movement of the brain when the athlete’s head is shaken.
The FDA let manufacturer Q30 sell them starting in 2021. Since then the company has sold tens of thousands of them, at around $200 a device, to athletes from National Football League players down to 13-year-olds. That’s millions of dollars.
There are also a number of problems. The Q-Collar does not prevent concussions. It can give athletes a false sense of security, so they play more riskily. Medical proof that it works is lacking.
But for investors, the word is “play ball.”
Oct 27, 2025
Satellites fall to the earth at an alarming—and increasing—rate. Every day, three or so satellites fall—around 1,200 per year, and rising!
To save fuel, companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink launch many satellites for telecommunications and surveillance only several hundred miles up into the zone called low earth orbit, where the thinning atmosphere is still thick enough to protect them from ultraviolet radiation.
But the air also causes friction which slowly forces the satellites from orbit. They need to fire their booster engines periodically to return to orbit. But the fuel they can carry only lasts around five years. So after five years they start falling.
If they don’t break up or burn up entirely, they might hit someone or something. But the companies don’t address this problem. The world’s governments, which spend a king’s ransom to subsidize the companies, let them get away with this.
The capitalist system needs to be ejected from earth, never to return.
Oct 27, 2025
Southern California Edison is facing hundreds of lawsuits for January’s Eaton fire near Los Angeles, which destroyed 9,400 buildings and killed at least 19 people. Surveillance videos show that the fire started under an Edison power line, and even though the official investigation is not complete, Edison has already been offering settlements to fire victims.
Experts say the cost of insured losses alone in the Eaton fire could reach 23 billion dollars, without taking into account damages to uninsured or underinsured residents, or awards for pain and suffering. But California Democrats, who control the state’s legislature, came to Edison’s rescue. They added an amendment to a bill, SB 254, allowing Edison to increase rates. This amounts to a huge gift worth billions of dollars—to be paid for by Edison customers, including the fire victims.
Another amendment to SB 254 extends California’s 21-billion-dollar wildfire fund, which is paid for by taxpayers and ratepayers. Back in July, California governor Gavin Newsom had already said that he was looking to add 18 billion dollars to the wildfire fund, and Edison had broken the good news to its shareholders: that it expected to be reimbursed by the state for most, if not all, of the costs for the Eaton fire.
All this means that California’s three big private utilities will continue to get bailed out for future fires they cause. Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric are by far the biggest causes of wildfires in the state. These three companies have caused more than 3,600 wildfires since 1992, and their record has been worsening in recent years. And the California politicians have kept bailing out the utilities.
These companies’ equipment keeps starting wildfires because the companies have been cutting back on the maintenance and upgrading of their power lines. This policy of willful, in fact, criminal negligence has translated into billions of dollars of extra profit for these companies’ big shareholders. And California politicians continue to help them to amass this blood money from the loss of tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of lives.
Oct 27, 2025
As a “test run” on Friday, October 17, a day before the 250th birthday celebration for the Corps at Camp Pendleton, in southern California, the U.S. Marines fired 30 live artillery shells carrying explosives over Interstate 5 freeway and train tracks during rush hour without public warning or safety closures. Each shell fired by an M777 howitzer weighed 100 pounds.
Because the Marines finally notified the State of California on Friday evening that they would again fire live artillery shells during the celebration the next day, the freeway was shut down to the public. This time, during the initial firings of five shells, one of them exploded mid-air, raining shrapnel on the ground. One California Highway Patrol (CHP) cruiser was hit shortly after escorting J. D. Vance to the event. More shrapnel fell next to a cop sitting on a motorcycle. After the CHP informed the Marines, they stopped firing the next 55 shells.
Luckily, no one was injured or killed in these firings.
Before the event, the Marines wrote on X that “All training events will occur on approved training ranges and comply with established safety protocols. No public highways or transportation routes will be closed.” The mid-air explosion of one of the shells was certainly in contradiction to this declaration. But this reckless act did not move the White House one iota. Government officials continued to insist that the Pendleton event was safe and that the freeway closure was unnecessary.
The Marines could have easily used other areas of Camp Pendleton that are explicitly designated for live fire, without endangering the public.
This shelling over a live freeway is very possibly a part of Trump’s broader goal. Indeed, Trump has said, during a meeting of top U.S. generals and admirals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, on September 30, that he wants to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military against the “enemy from within.” These declarations of Trump came after he deployed roughly 7,000 National Guard and U.S. troops to Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon. He added, “It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our borders is essential for national security.”
So, the U.S. government certainly planned this dangerous show of force to coincide with “No Kings” protests, which occurred on the same day.
Whether such troops and the city invasions will be used to secure the House for the Republicans during the November elections next year remains to be seen.
But surely the U.S. government is conditioning and coercing the public for larger wars abroad.
Oct 27, 2025
The “No Kings” rally on October 19 in Chicago was massive. There were many tens of thousands of people, a dense crowd stretching two miles.
The protestors seemed much more representative of the city than at the last “No Kings” protest, with more Latinos and Black people, more working-class people.
One thing is clear: many Chicagoans are mad, especially at the Trump administration’s big ICE and Border Patrol operations in the city. Agents have been kidnapping older people who have been here for decades, Uber drivers waiting for passengers, flower and food vendors, workers at construction sites and a flea market, mothers bringing kids to school. They have tossed tear gas, not just at protestors, but at people going to a supermarket and in front of a school, and have threatened people with guns.
Some of the signs at the protest were silly, or focused on Trump alone, but others expressed outrage at these attacks on the population.
Many in the crowd said that it felt good to see all those people standing up, especially for the immigrant workers who are most directly under attack.
The Illinois governor and the Chicago mayor gave speeches criticizing Trump and the administration. Mayor Brandon Johnson even referred to the way enslaved people fought for freedom during the Civil War: “If my ancestors, as slaves, can lead the greatest general strike in the history of this country, taking it to the ultra-rich and big corporations, we can do it too!”
Good idea!
But these Democratic politicians are not about to organize anything like that. Instead, this huge crowd was only given the perspective that they vote for the Democrats when the next election comes along. None of the speakers mentioned that the Democrats have their own history of repression, including large numbers of deportations of working people under Obama and Biden.
Still—the march made clear there are many, many people ready to do something, to take a stand against the brutality being inflicted on working people in this city.
Oct 27, 2025
ICE and Border Patrol agents have continued to run rampant through the streets of Chicago, detaining working people and causing mayhem.
For two days in a row, the Border Patrol invaded Little Village and Cicero, the heart of the Mexican American community in Chicago. Last Wednesday, they detained seven people and caused a car crash in the bargain. Two of those arrested included staffers working for local alderman Mike Rodriguez, who had shown up to observe.
Thursday morning, the Border Patrol convoy showed up at the Discount Mall on the East side of the neighborhood. They had in mind to raid the mall and arrest people indiscriminately—but they hadn’t checked the schedule—the store was closed.
A crowd soon gathered to object to their presence. Agents arrested five people, including a security guard for the mall, and a student from Juarez High School; another Juarez student was brutalized on the spot, but released.
Greg Bovino, Border Patrol commander-at-large, was caught on camera throwing a tear gas canister into the crowd. He is the only federal agent who operates without a facemask—because of his role as the “celebrity face” of the operation.
ICE agents have branched out into more white, middle-class neighborhoods this week—detaining construction workers off a job in Lincoln Square and a comedy club manager in Lakeview and pulling people over at random in Wicker Park to ask about their citizenship.
As in Little Village, ICE raids there have been met with resistance. Six weeks into this raid campaign, many neighborhoods have set up “Rapid Response Networks;” activists have distributed thousands of whistles. They have set up “ICE patrols” for neighborhoods and schools. Parents at some elementary schools have organized “walking buses”—where they walk home together in groups for safety.
Recently, two teachers in Albany Park saw agents trying to detain a man. One filmed while the other loudly alerted neighbors, who gradually came out onto the street. The chased man got away. The neighbors gathered around the agents’ cars, some of them locked arms. The agents threw teargas to break them up, then drove off.
ICE and Border Patrol have continued their campaign of provocation and terrorism toward working people in Chicago. But hundreds of Chicagoans now are working in an organized way, to protect their neighborhoods and schools.
Oct 27, 2025
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2986 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
The right wing once again rules Bolivia, following the second round of the presidential election on October 19. The deciding factor was the first round on August 19, when the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) collapsed after holding power for 20 years. MAS got 55% of the vote in the first round of the 2020 elections. This year the party only got 3.5%.
Two right-wing candidates reached the second round with nearly 80% of the total votes. Tuto Quiroga represented the traditional right: white capitalists, landowners, ranchers, and soybean growers in the Santa Cruz region. They’ve dreamt of getting rid of MAS for 20 years.
The surprise was Rodrigo Paz, mayor of Tarija. He won 55% of the vote in the second round. He presented himself as different. He promoted a vague “capitalism for all.” He managed to overlook the corruption scandals in Tarija he had been involved in. He was careful not to say he would reverse social reforms implemented over these last 20 years.
He was accompanied by former police officer, “Captain” Edmand Lara, who became popular after being fired for denouncing his superiors’ corruption. This success in the first round was even celebrated in a poor town located uphill from La Paz, El Alto, historically a MAS stronghold and the scene of several uprisings in the past.
MAS rose to power with the election of Evo Morales in 2005, following major social struggles. The poverty-crushed population demanded control of resources: free water and a share of revenue from gas and oil exploitation by foreign companies. In 2006, there was a very partial “nationalization” of these resources. But it allowed for a more favorable distribution of profits for Bolivia. This generated enormous revenues for the state for more than 10 years. Morales and his successor, Luis Arce, chose to use these resources to meet basic needs of the population. They installed nearly 30,000 literacy centers across the country and built roads and hospitals. The population benefited from food stamps and fuel subsidies. The standard of living improved. Extreme poverty declined sharply. A minimum old-age pension, financial assistance for children’s schooling, and free healthcare were established.
But these relative improvements depended on natural gas world prices being high. MAS did not want to attack the national bourgeoisie and large landowners. The bosses were also winners, as they benefited from guaranteed prices. However, over the last decade, reserves have been depleting. Production fell from almost 2,100 million cubic feet per day in 2014 to just over 1,300 million in 2023. Dollar reserves couldn’t prop up the system for long. Crisis erupted. Fuel shortages became widespread, slowing the entire economy. Inflation rose from 2% in 2024 to 25% today. Many food products became inaccessible.
All the public benefits of previous years are disappearing. MAS has discredited itself with its attitude. Scandals, trials, open war between Morales and Arce, violent conflicts between different parts of the MAS coalition: coca leaf growers and indigenous people, cooperative miners turned capitalists, and proletarian miners. All this undermined popular support. Morales called for abstention this year. Many more people than usual didn’t vote. This shows that despite everything, he still enjoys significant popular support.
The claws of global capitalism have closed in on Bolivia, on Morales’ attempts at reform, and on the revolt by Bolivia’s people. But this revolt will resurface sooner or later.
Oct 27, 2025
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2986 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Bolivia is without a doubt one of the Latin American countries where the working class and the poor have shown the most combativeness against the state and capitalist powers.
In the 1950s, tin miners organized in combative unions that shook the government—sometimes with dynamite—and ultimately imposed nationalization of mines owned by imperialist corporations, especially American ones. This respite was short-lived because production of tin, the country’s main resource, soon collapsed.
Bolivia experienced a long period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1982 with the blessing of the U.S. government, Latin America’s master. But powerful and radical protest arose in the 2000s, both against the large landowners who own 87% of the land and against the bourgeois layers linked to imperialism.
This protest developed in parallel in the country’s second largest city, Cochabamba, in 2000, and in 2003, in the department of the capital La Paz, which has a population of nearly three million, compared to 12.5 million nationwide. The power and radicalization of the mobilization against American and French corporations, called “the battle for water,” forced them to withdraw from the country. Former peasant leader Evo Morales and his party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), were elected to lead the country on the basis of these mobilizations and this radicalization.
But capitalism and imperialism never stopped exerting their pressure. Bolivia turns out to have a lot of rare earth minerals. Today, mining of them makes major international companies salivate.
Like other countries, Bolivia is subject to the world market and its rules. The point is not to rant about what Morales could have done but didn’t. No one can defeat these forces without revolutionizing the world. The exploited masses of Bolivia must join forces in this fight with those of the rest of the world.
Oct 27, 2025
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2986 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared on October 18 to announce that he will run for re-election. He also prepared to bomb Gaza again.
More than 45 Gazans died the next day under 153 tons of bombs, as Netanyahu cynically claimed. Meanwhile two Israeli soldiers were killed.
Ceasefire along the lines of Trump’s so-called peace plan went into effect on October 10. But it gave displaced Gazans little time to return to the ruins of their homes. Once the surviving hostages were returned to Israel, the thorny issue of returning the remains of the dead hostages became a sword hanging over Palestinian heads. Fifteen bodies were returned to Israeli families by October 21. It is obviously difficult to find bodies and remove them from the ruins that Gaza became under Israeli bombardment and bulldozing. Hamas seems concerned with respecting the terms of the agreement and not providing any further pretext for war to resume.
But the threat of renewed war is a key tactic for Netanyahu’s government. Bombs were dropped on Gaza’s central and southern areas, under the pretext that Hamas troops crossed territorial lines guarded by the Israeli army.
It seems the Trump administration wanted to ensure its plan was implemented by sending heavyweights to monitor Netanyahu. On October 20, Trump’s billionaire son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy and billionaire Steve Witkoff landed on Israeli soil. The following day it was U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s turn to land in Tel Aviv.
“We made a deal with Hamas that they’re going to be very good, they’re going to behave, they’re going to be nice. And if they’re not, we’re going to go and we’re going to eradicate them, if we have to,” Trump blared on October 20. This was his way to assert yet again that nothing may be resolved in the region without the approval of the leading imperialist power.
“Phase Two” of his plan is supposed to mean the demilitarization of Hamas. But clearly some Gazans see Hamas as the only organized force capable of regulating life amidst the ruins, and particularly of confronting gangs armed by Israel which plunder the meager resources reaching the population. Indeed, despite the war the Israeli army waged, Hamas’ forces have not disappeared.
The demilitarization being discussed is obviously one-sided. Who talks about disarming the over-equipped Israeli armed forces, or at least the far-right settlers who attack Palestinian villages in the West Bank daily, supported by police and the army? As recently as October 19, Israeli troops entered the Al-Ain refugee camp west of Nablus. Infantry units preceded by bulldozers conducted an operation in the town of Tubas, arresting people and destroying homes and infrastructure.
Israeli leaders have already shown that, for them, ceasefires are mostly about making their enemies stop fighting, for example in Lebanon. Now they are far along the road of putting this concept into practice after the ceasefire agreed to under Trump’s watch.
Oct 27, 2025
This article is translated from the October 24 issue, #2986 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Testimonies of the 1,968 Palestinian prisoners released under Trump’s plan for Gaza confirm the extent to which deprivation, torture, and humiliation are entrenched in Israeli prisons.
Many Palestinian former detainees keep silent after being released. Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet threatens reprisals if they describe the conditions of their detention. Shin Bet wields total power, including in the West Bank. But all the testimonies are consistent and moreover are corroborated by the released prisoners’ physical condition.
“I was hungry for two years,” one of them explained. “No sugar, no salt. They just gave us enough to keep us alive.” “They gave us two pieces of dry bread. Sometimes a spoonful of yogurt. A spoiled vegetable.” The emaciated prisoners were nearly invisible inside their old clothes. Many lost 80 or 90 pounds.
Beatings in detention happened daily. A doctor from Gaza, arrested in January 2024, recounts: “Torture was our daily bread. We would spend entire days handcuffed, blindfolded, and held in painful positions.” With each transfer between prisons, or even between cells, prisoners were stripped naked for hours and beaten: “Every time we were asked to leave our cells or moved, they beat us with batons. It was our daily ration.”
Over the past two years, 77 prisoners died from torture or lack of food and medical care. Very harsh already, detention conditions deteriorated more when far-right Zionist Itamar Ben Gvir became Minister of Internal Security. He boasts of reducing food portions.
Since 1967, one in three Palestinians has been arrested by Israel during their lifetime. While 1,968 prisoners were released in exchange for the last Israeli hostages held in Gaza, between 8,000 and 10,000 still languish in Israeli prisons. Some were sentenced to life imprisonment or decades in prison for certain actions; some, because they participated in the Intifada of the 2000s. But most were arrested and placed in administrative detention without trial or judgment and for unlimited time.
Israel follows practices inherited from the decades when Britain had a mandate to rule Palestine essentially as a colony. Israel uses administrative detention to destroy Palestinian society and break up families. Of the 250 Palestinians recently released after spending 15 to 25 years in prison, only 88 were allowed to rejoin their families in Gaza. The rest were deported to Egypt and other countries, most likely for life.
Torture, deprivation, dehumanization, and deportation. These are the systematic methods of a colonial state oppressing an entire people. Imperialist leaders are actively complicit. They call anyone anti-Semitic who denounces this dictatorship exercised over the Palestinians.
Oct 27, 2025
Drugs kill tens of thousands of people in the U.S.: 80,000 last year and 110,000 in 2023. But Trump cynically played on this horror to falsely justify ordering U.S. troops to kill civilians on boats in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
U.S. forces murdered 43 people in 10 such attacks between September 2 and October 26, with more murders sure to follow. None of the boats were firing on U.S. forces. They posed no imminent threat to U.S. forces or to people here. The attacks were totally illegal.
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed the dead were “narco-terrorists.” But terrorists have specific ideologies or religious causes. Drug runners simply try to make money—in places where unemployment is high.
One video shows brown packages in one boat in the eastern Pacific before it was attacked. But the U.S. presented no proof of drug running. Family members of murdered fisherman Alejandro Carranza of Colombia and Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo of Trinidad insist their dead had nothing to do with drugs.
Trump lied, “Each boat carried drugs that could have killed 25,000 people.” But this would mean the U.S. attacks saved 250,000 lives. That’s more than three times the number of U.S. drug deaths last year!
Most U.S. drug deaths are caused by fentanyl from Mexico, which is transported by land, not by sea. Very few drugs are carried to the U.S. by boat in the southern Caribbean at all.
But Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth want bombed bodies. Corpses with limbs blown off by bombs have washed ashore in places like Trinidad. These war casualties are neither autopsied, claimed, or repatriated—just left to rot hundreds of miles from home.
These U.S. war crimes won’t save any Americans’ lives. No doubt these killings are intended to accustom people here to U.S. killings south of the border, near places where there is oil or where the U.S. wants additional control. And the U.S. already has 64 bases in 31 countries in this region.
Oct 27, 2025
According to the latest estimates provided by Hamas’s Ministry of Health, Israeli forces have killed over 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded another 170,000. These figures have been found valid by the United Nations and other international entities.
Yet the true death toll is likely considerably higher.
One recent study was carried out under the direction of Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway University of London. He and his team actually conducted a “household” survey among Palestinians in Gaza around the beginning of 2025. They drew a random sample of people, most of whom were living in built-up shelters and tent gatherings, and conducted “door-to-door” interviews with them under extremely difficult conditions.
Despite the vast number of Palestinians who were displaced by the war, Spagat’s team was able in this way to get better estimates of the true death toll than has been possible in conflicts in other parts of the world, where the population is more dispersed.
They estimate the true death toll to be about 35% higher than what Hamas reports. That would make the current total closer to 92,000. Spagat’s team estimated that 56%, or more than 51,000 of the dead, were women, children and the elderly.
It may be hard to ever know the true death toll for sure, given the difficulty of finding all of the dead bodies buried in the rubble of the buildings destroyed by Israel’s bombings. But this research makes it clear it’s even higher than we’ve been led to believe to date.
Oct 27, 2025
Donald Trump has decided the White House needs a “big, beautiful ballroom,” ornate and gilded enough to rival the world’s most luxurious. He’s said he’s worried that the tents set up on the White House lawn look tacky and force his world class guests to walk on wet grass and get their hair wet! So he has gone ahead and torn down the entire East Wing to construct a massive structure that will actually be larger than the main White House itself.
The East Wing was the way into the White House for all of the tourist tours. So apparently Trump is shutting off the popular access to the “people’s house” in favor of an exclusive entrance for the world’s wealthiest and best connected.
So clearly, throwing massive parties for the world’s wealthiest is most important. Talk about the perfect symbol for the priorities of the Trump administration, at the head of the American capitalist government.
He and his wealthy cronies in the tech industry are spending 300 million dollars (they say only private money will pay for this, but who knows what will actually happen down the road … remember Trump’s wall?) to build this ridiculous showroom that only they will ever see.
Meanwhile, the government is shut down and essential services are cut from needy poor and working-class Americans. But they still find the way to gild the White House.
Let them eat cake, indeed!
Oct 27, 2025
In the congressional stalemate that has resulted in no new federal budget, heads have rolled. But they are not the heads of the politicians who sit in the Senate and the House. They are the heads of ordinary people, 1.4 million federal employees who find themselves without a paycheck as of October 24th.
They include an estimated 670,000 federal employees furloughed from agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs. And an estimated 730,000 deemed essential who are continuing to work without pay, who include TSA workers, air traffic controllers, and workers in the Social Security Administration.
Today, many of these workers find themselves lining up for food at food banks that are already stretched, because this economy has forced many workers to compensate for what their pay doesn’t cover—like rising food costs.
And if the shutdown continues through December 1, roughly 4.5 million paychecks will be withheld from federal civilian workers.
This shutdown is impacting regular people, not only federal workers who aren’t getting paid, but also people in the communities that depend on them—the grocery stores, the daycare centers, the gas stations….
And all the while, Republican and Democratic Party politicians play games, blaming each other for the stalemate, and all acting like there isn’t enough money in the federal government to pay for everything and there have to be cuts.
Lies! Take the money from the salaries and perks of Congressmen who continue to serve the interests of weapons systems contractors, the war machine and billionaires.
Take it from the obscene one trillion dollar a year military budget.
Take it from the billions of dollars that are being spent on 70,000 ICE agents let loose to terrorize the population on the streets of major cities.
Oct 27, 2025
It’s that time of year again for the Social Security Administration to announce the amount of the Cost-of-Living Adjustment, or COLA, that Social Security recipients can expect to see next year. After a delay due to the ongoing federal budget shutdown, they managed to announce it will be 2.8%, which for the average recipient will come to about $672 more for the year.
A lot of the news media report that fact by itself. As if those on Social Security should be relieved that the increase might actually keep pace with inflation.
If you look a little deeper, though, you’ll see that the Medicare Trustees expect Medicare Part B premiums to increase by about $258 for next year. That will take a pretty big chunk out of the COLA. Some may not be aware of that increase, as it is taken out of people’s Social Security checks.
And that’s no accident, by the way. This pretty much happens every year, because the cost of Medicare is not included in the Consumer Price Index that they use to determine the amount of COLA for Social Security, even though pretty much everyone on Social Security pays for Medicare.
To a rational person that might seem completely nuts. But in reality, it’s a deliberate way to protect Social Security from inflation in the long run. To make us eat the increase.
Oct 27, 2025
Workers at Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services were told on October 23 that due to the federal government shutdown, there is not “enough funding to fully support November Food Assistance Program (FAP) benefits nationwide.”
Management said federal officials ordered Michigan NOT to pay out Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly Food Stamps, beginning on November 1, 2025. It is the elderly, the disabled and children who are the vast majority of food assistance recipients. Such depravity, to attack society’s most vulnerable!
In Michigan, roughly one and a half million people will NOT see November money load onto their electronic benefits card—a card that provides the food needed to live. Why? Because both political parties are playing “Hunger Games” with people’s lives. The federal government has NOT stopped taking tax money from workers’ checks! So games are clearly being played regarding what is shut down and what is not!
Oct 27, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of October 19, 2025.
U.S. is threatening war against Venezuela. Sure, Trump likes to play “tough guy.” But he’s driving down the same road U.S. imperialism has mapped out for decades.
Today, Trump sends helicopters and drones to blow up fishing boats, then brags about killing their occupants. His secretary of war puts a U.S. naval armada in the Caribbean near Venezuela and sends U.S. planes capable of carrying nuclear weapons into Venezuelan air space. Trump’s attorney general issued an arrest warrant for Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, putting a 50-million-dollar bounty on his head.
Intent on keeping his head, Maduro acceded to most U.S. extortion demands. He agreed to transfer control over Venezuela’s oil and gas fields to U.S. oil corporations. He accepted to sever trade relations with Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, cutting off Venezuela’s last semi-independent leg.
But the U.S. wanted more. It wanted its man (or woman) as Venezuela’s president. Maduro, however, wouldn’t step down.
So, Trump upped the ante. He authorized the CIA to invade Venezuela and assassinate Maduro. Venezuela’s president-in-waiting is Maria Corina Machado, who just won the Nobel “Peace” Prize. That little ornament can’t paper over her long reactionary history in Venezuela. The daughter of one of the richest capitalist families in the region, she has been supported ever since 2002 with funds coming from a George Bush foundation. She was involved in planning for a military coup in 2002 aimed at throwing out Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, who had tried to use part of Venezuela’s nationalized oil wealth to pay for education and health care for the population.
Machado called for the U.S. military to invade Venezuela then, and she’s calling for it now. She supported every economic sanction imposed by the U.S.—sanctions strangling Venezuela’s economy and impoverishing its people. She applauds Trump when he incinerates fishermen and their boats and when he sends Venezuelans to a vicious jail in El Salvador.
She will be the perfect flunky for U.S. imperial interests as Venezuela’s next president.
The U.S. has a long history of organizing coups against regimes in Latin America it could not completely control: Guatemala, 1954; Cuba, 1961 and many subsequent attempts; Brazil, 1964; Dominican Republic, 1965; Chile, 1973; Nicaragua, repeated attempts in the 1980s; Haiti, multiple times throughout the 20th century.
This history does not rest on the evil machinations of any one president, even one as evil as Trump. It was produced by the functioning of imperialism in the world.
There are six or seven major imperialist powers in the world, with the U.S. on the top, and a few more minor ones. All the other countries are, in one way or another, economically subject to these powers. A significant part of their wealth is drained toward the imperial centers.
Their natural resources, like oil, must be traded in the world markets that imperialism controls. Their products produced by human labor must be traded in those same markets. The products and materials they need to buy can be found only in those same markets.
The terribly unequal relations spawned by such a system don’t rest on economic legs alone. They require the threat of force and, behind the threat, actual force. That is why war is an ever-present reality in a world organized by imperialism.
There is no answer to such a system unless the working class organizes itself to get rid of it—unless this perspective, no matter how far off it seems, is advocated inside the working class today.
Oct 27, 2025
Stellantis announced that it would not build its Jeep Compass in Ontario, Canada, and instead would build that vehicle in Belvidere, Illinois. That means that 3,000 auto workers in Canada will now be out of the jobs they were promised.
Meanwhile 3,000 workers in the U.S. may be going back to work after Stellantis had taken away their jobs several years ago. But those jobs may not even materialize because Stellantis has given us no reason to believe any of its promises.
The leaders of the U.S. auto workers union (UAW) have been supporting some of Trump’s tariffs, claiming they will increase auto worker jobs. They celebrated the announcement by Stellantis and called it a “victory”.
But what the hell kind of “victory” is it when the corporate bosses are taking jobs away from other workers? Pitting auto workers in one country against auto workers in another country is a “victory” for the corporate bosses, not for the workers.
The capitalists want workers to fight each other over jobs. That is how you get a race to the bottom, where all workers lose.
Every worker in every country needs a job. The working class has the power to fight their own bosses for jobs. When workers are ready to make a fight, they can put forward their own leaders who know that our power comes from bringing the working class together, not dividing it.
Oct 27, 2025
At the end of September, U.S. auto parts conglomerate First Brands declared bankruptcy. First Brands makes replacement components including filters, brakes and lighting systems for the automotive aftermarket.
The collapse of a medium sized company rocked the world of finance, well beyond the size of the company. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon suggested parallels between bad lending in the private credit market and the bad subprime lending that brought on the 2008 crisis. To quote Dimon: “I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.”
Over the last decade, First Brands, a relatively small company, had gone on a 12-billion-dollar borrowing spree, buying up well-known brands that include Raybestos brake solutions, TRICO wiper blades, FRAM filtration products and AutoLite sparkplugs. Its products fill the shelves of AutoZone, NAPA, O’Reilly, Walmart and Amazon.
At its height, the company had sales of about five billion dollars a year, that is, a fraction of the amount of debt it had taken on. But it was able to attract some of the biggest names in banking to help finance not only its takeovers, but also its day-to-day operations.
First Brands’ borrowing binge was not unusual. It was part of a two-trillion-dollar boom in corporate lending in private credit markets, that is, subprime loans for corporations. These loans come with high interest rates and fees, and therefore are extremely profitable. But they are also very risky and opaque.
The companies making the loans had no idea of the full extent of First Brands’ load of debt … nor did they much care, because they didn’t keep hold of the loans themselves. Instead, they bundled the loans from First Brands with other corporate loans and turned them into new securities, which they called collateralized loan obligations. They then sold these securities to pension funds, endowments and private investors, claiming that these securities were extremely safe and secure, making big profits along the way.
This summer, First Brands’ house of cards, based on debt upon debt, fell apart. Trump’s new tariff policy put a crimp in First Brands’ business, while greatly increasing its expenses. In danger of running out of money, the company tried to get much more financing. But this time, lenders began to ask questions, and the money spigot was turned off. Without more financing, First Brands quickly ran out of cash and collapsed, causing enormous losses from Zurich to Tokyo.
So far, however, this has not led to a bigger financial collapse, as many Wall Street insiders, like Jamie Dimon, feared. But nobody knows when another bankruptcy might lead to a new catastrophe.
All those Wall Street companies, financiers, politicians and regulators, who swore after the financial collapse of 2008 that they had learned their lesson, that they would never do the same thing—they all lied. Their drive for ever more profit and wealth has put in place not only a repeat of the last big financial collapse—but the possibility of something far, far worse.
Oct 27, 2025
This book extolls the feat of Magellan and his fleet of five sailing ships in the early 1500s, circumnavigating the entire earth. Though Magellan died in the Philippines, one of his five ships did succeed in traveling around the globe and back to Spain, finally returning with a cargo load of the highly sought precious Asian spices.
It was an incredibly difficult journey, meticulously planned by Magellan. He knew it would be very difficult, and he therefore drove his crew and the other captains with discipline and iron will, without which it would have failed. But more than anything, this book shows the incredible birth of capitalism from the drive of innumerable people, a bubbling over of the desire to explore and conquer.
This film is a tragic portrayal of the conflict between Susan, an older white woman who lived alone, and her black neighbors, primarily Ajike Owens, known as AJ, and their children. Susan, or as the neighbors called her, “Karen,” would call the police twice a week to complain about the children playing outdoors and the noise they made. The film is put together from the footage from the police’s body cameras. You see the tension rising over the months, and eventually it escalates to the older woman waving a gun at the children. And then the fatal night.
The film shows how nothing in this society addresses or attempts to solve the racism against black people, or the rising mental illness and anger of the increasing number of isolated individuals.
Oct 27, 2025
The Baltimore city jail regularly holds people for hours before releasing them—after a judge has ordered them released.
Each year around 7,000 people in Baltimore Central Booking are presumed innocent and are ordered to be released. But then the jail keeps them in holding cells an average of 14 more hours.
In cases where the prosecutor drops the charges, the jail holds the person for 24 more hours, twice as long as it holds those who post bail. And the jail holds some people much longer: up to five days. A lawsuit over this has dragged on since 2022.
This callous disregard for people’s lives and time can cost people their jobs, their cars, and sometimes their health or their life. The jail reports two violent incidents each day.
The jail is understaffed. But it is also functioning as intended: to oppress ordinary working people.