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
Nov 24, 2025
When Trump hosted Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, he rolled out the red carpet and gave him an opulent royal reception. Trump, the wannabe king, showed the prince his new gold-plated bathroom and his plans for a Billionaire Ballroom at the White House. After Trump flaunted his extravagances, the next order of business was to cut business deals between the Saudi ruler and the Trump family.
This is not the first time a U.S. president or politician has taken advantage of his position to enrich himself and his family. But Trump has taken this kind of corruption to a whole new level, flaunting it, not even bothering to hide it. On almost every foreign trip, Trump has one of his family members along to cut a business deal. Trump just pardoned a crypto billionaire guilty of money laundering, a billionaire crook who “just happened” to have a big investment in the Trump-backed crypto venture. The pardons and deals go on and on.
Using his power as head of the world’s strongest military and economic state, Trump is blatantly enriching the Trump business empire. Meanwhile, an ever-increasing proportion of the population is struggling to pay their bills and survive from day to day.
U.S. corporations are cutting jobs in the pursuit of more profits. Verizon laying off 13,000 people is only the latest. Wages keep falling farther behind prices. Housing costs and electric bills are going through the roof. Repossessions and credit card debt are at all-time highs. The ridiculously high cost of health care is skyrocketing, whether through the so-called Affordable Care Act, Medicare or any other health insurance. Drug overdoses and suicides are climbing.
The capitalist system itself is impoverishing the working class. While Trump is flaunting his wealth, the capitalist system he is part of is driving the working class into poverty and early death.
Capitalism has always been a system where capitalists profit by exploiting the labor of the working class. Workers produce all the wealth of society but get paid only a small portion of what they produce. Most of the money ends up in the pockets of the capitalist class, a tiny, less than one percent of the population. Today, with their system in a long-running economic crisis, the capitalist class and its political servants are more brutal and savage than ever, driving down the standard of living of the working class even further, transferring wealth from the laboring class to the millionaires and billionaires at record-breaking levels.
Trump is a corrupt politician, but the real problem is a whole capitalist system that is corrupt. Trump is simply the public face of U.S. capitalism, for now. If the working class begins to rise up against the attacks it is enduring, the capitalist class may push Trump aside and bring in other politicians, from either party. But getting rid of one corrupt politician would not change the functioning of a corrupt system.
The working class is quiet today. Workers have done little striking or fighting in response to the daily attacks that are driving down our standard of living, shortening our lives, and where each new generation is already living worse off than previous generations. History has seen the working class rise up and fight against its exploitation over and over again. History may not repeat itself exactly in the same way. But the conditions are already here to produce a new explosion by the working class. When it happens, it is key that the struggle be carried all the way to the end, leaving no remnants of the capitalist system of exploitation in place.
Nov 24, 2025
While workers pinch pennies, demand for luxury travel is hitting record highs, and high-end hotel companies are expanding. “Thank God for luxury and ultra-luxury,” a travel company executive told the Wall Street Journal. “They want the villa. They want the yacht.”
These rich people actually live on the same planet as us. And they get their high incomes from our hard work and low pay.
Nov 24, 2025
Even before the current attacks, most government aid programs kept track of people’s income, including SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid, and housing assistance such as Section 8. Your income has to stay low to get benefits.
Work 15 extra overtime hours in a month? You get one bigger check, then lose your SNAP.
Get a seasonal job for the holidays to pay a few bills or save up for a car? Your rent could go up for the whole year, or you can lose your housing or health care altogether.
And of course, every time you lose benefits and try to get them back, you have to jump through all the hoops and wait for understaffed government agencies to put you back on—if they’re not shut down that month!
Workers make all the food, houses, and healthcare but don’t control them. If we did control them, we would make sure everyone had food, a home, and the care they need!
Nov 24, 2025
The average passenger car on the road is up to 14.5 years old. The average light truck is 11.9 years old.
People keep old vehicles longer because prices are so high, no one can afford a new one. Even used cars are too expensive, with an average price over $31,000 for a 3-year-old car.
But with older vehicles, pricey repairs rack up!
Nov 24, 2025
More and more families in the U.S. have been falling behind on their utility bills. Six million households, or nearly one in twenty, have been sent to collections, and another eight million households are close to it, according to the Century Foundation.
The average past-due balance in the three-month period of April-June 2025 was $789, or more than three months’ combined gas and electricity cost for U.S. households. Compared with the same three-month period last year, the past-due amount has increased about 10%.
That increase more or less mirrors the steep increase in gas and electricity prices. Utility companies have jacked up rates by 12% between April–June 2024 and April–June 2025. Being so expensive, utility bills rank among the top monthly expenses for U.S. families, approaching rent or home mortgage payments and auto loan payments. It will get worse as winter approaches. Experts estimate that average heating costs will rise to as much as $1,000 this season.
Utilities are supposedly regulated, but state regulatory agencies allow practically every rate increase the companies request. In 2024, the operating revenues of investor-owned electric companies in the U.S. rose to more than 403 billion dollars, for a profit of nearly 55 billion dollars.
Like other necessities such as housing, food and transportation, gas and electricity are used to rob the working population to feed the sky-high profits of the capitalist class.
Nov 24, 2025
When a U.S. House committee released 20,000 emails of convicted sex offender and human trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, one of the most prominent names that popped up was that of Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.
It turns out that Epstein and Summers regularly communicated in hundreds of messages between 2013 and 2019. Those emails revealed just how much Summers and Epstein, the convicted sex offender, had in common. After the emails were published, a contrite Summers was forced to resign from all of his important positions in academia and business.
None of this was a surprise. The kinds of bigoted statements Summers wrote in private to Epstein, he occasionally let slip out in public. In 1991, as chief economist of the World Bank, for example, Summers circulated a memo advocating shipping toxic waste produced in the richer countries to Africa. “I’ve always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted,” wrote Summers. He claimed that it wouldn’t be a problem, since people die younger in Africa, anyway!
This might have sounded shocking. But it was little more than a justification for what the big capitalists in the imperialist countries were doing anyway. It certainly was not a problem for President Bill Clinton, who soon afterwards appointed Summers to his economic team, where Summers eventually became Secretary of the Treasury.
During his tenure, Summers was praised by the capitalists for pushing through bailouts of the U.S. banks during the financial meltdowns in Mexico and East Asia, bailouts that were paid for by the working class and poor through harsh austerity programs.
His role in those bailouts helped Summers land the job of president of Harvard University, another plum job, in the year 2000. In 2005, while occupying that position, Summers defended the fact that there were many fewer women holding important positions in the sciences, by claiming that women have less “innate” ability than men. An outcry this caused forced Summers to resign. But he remained at Harvard, holding one of the most prestigious faculty positions at the most prestigious university in the country.
In reality, Summers was just giving the usual justification for the rampant discrimination against women in academia and business.
Certainly, Barack Obama didn’t let any of that stop him from tapping Summers to head his economic team in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008 and deep economic recession. Once again, Summers was called upon to help push through the massive taxpayer-funded bailout of the banks, insurance companies and auto companies, while millions of workers lost their jobs and millions of homeowners their homes.
After leaving the Obama administration, Summers continued to gain great stature and wealth by loyally serving the rich and powerful. He was connected to some of the richest companies in finance and business, which rewarded him with compensation packages worth tens of millions of dollars.
And, as a regular paid commentator for The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post and Bloomberg News, Summers was always ready to call for more sacrifices from the working class. Thus, over the last few years, Summers advocated mass layoffs of millions of workers, supposedly to fight inflation.
In fact, Summers’ contemptuous attitude toward workers and women and his racist innuendos are simply the important everyday tools that the capitalists use to divide the working class and poor.
No wonder that Summers found in the sex trafficker Epstein a kindred degenerate, laughing at the same lewd jokes, confiding in each other over the latest gossip. In reality, it was just like Donald Trump was besties with Epstein in his own degradation of women and all of humanity.
Nov 24, 2025
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D.C., has an exhibit of 40 long-forgotten Dutch and Flemish women artists from the 1600s. The exhibit titled “Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750,” is a collection of paintings, lace, prints, paper cuttings, embroidery, and sculpture.
During this period, colonial exploitation and the international slave trade enriched Europe’s upper and middle classes, fueling the demand for art and other luxuries.
Some of the artists were professional portraitists, even while raising large families. Some did illustrations documenting the natural world, which was important in the pre-camera time period. Wealthier women had more time and opportunities to create art. But also, women who were born into families who specialized in certain kinds of art, like printmaking, took up the family trade.
Poor and working-class girls and women toiled making some of the most expensive lace of the day. They worked in large institutions like orphanages and prisons.
While these women’s skills were clearly respected during their lifetimes by people who could afford to buy their work, most of them were later written out of history for hundreds of years. Sometimes their works were falsely attributed to men. Maybe that is why this period is associated only with men like Rembrandt and Vermeer.
This exhibit gives a sense of the rise of capitalism and an appreciation of these great women artists.
The museum is open during the shutdown and is free on the first Sunday of each month. The exhibit runs through January 11, 2026.
Nov 24, 2025
Following instructions from Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) added a sentence to its website. It said, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” That contradicts what the website had said for many years up until now.
Kennedy often plays to people who push anti-scientific and anti-vaccine agendas. But moves like these can leave parents confused about what to do. Childhood vaccination rates have declined in many states in the country. A vaccination rate of at least 95% is considered necessary to achieve herd immunity against an infectious disease. Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) vaccination rates in Idaho, Alaska, Wisconsin and Minnesota currently range from 78.5% to 86.5%.
We see a huge increase in measles cases in the U.S. this year with over 1,750 reported. Ninety-two percent have been in unvaccinated people. There have been 211 people hospitalized in the U.S. with measles and three people have died from the disease. There were 762 cases confirmed as part of an earlier outbreak which spread from Texas to several neighboring states. Now there is a new outbreak occurring in Arizona and counties in Utah near their common border which has produced over 200 cases of measles thus far.
The measles vaccine is highly effective. Cases of measles dropped by 97% in the year after the vaccine was introduced. Measles is an airborne disease that spreads easily from person to person, so the drop could not be attributed to better sanitation, as might have been the case with some other diseases.
When pushed, RFK, Jr. calls for people to get the MMR vaccine, but calls it a “personal choice.” Unfortunately, with a highly infectious disease like measles, one person’s personal choice can endanger many others.
The debate over a possible link between vaccines and autism can be traced back to a faked-up study conducted in Britain by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, which claimed that eight of 12 children studied lost acquired skills, including speech, after receiving the MMR vaccine. The medical journal The Lancet, which published the study, later retracted it, saying Wakefield’s study was funded by parents involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and that Wakefield acted unethically.
The supposed link between vaccines and autism spread widely despite many research studies showing no such link. According to the Los Angeles County health department, “Over 40 high-quality studies involving 5.6 million children have found no link between routine childhood vaccine and autism. This conclusion is supported by leading health authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the California Department of Public Health, the World Health Organization, and leading research institutions.”
While there are certainly limits to the public health system under capitalism, they are not helped when someone like RFK, Jr. decides he knows better than some of the best minds in the current scientific community and pushes anti-scientific theories.
Nov 24, 2025
The following is taken from a speech at a public meeting in Detroit, on November 16.
Since September 15, 2025, there have been over 80 people murdered in waters near Venezuela and Colombia, in over 20 separate attacks by the U.S. military, that we are aware of. The Trump administration is saying that all the boats they blew up were a part of a Venezuelan gang, smuggling drugs into the United States; and this gang is supposed to be under the control of the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro. On social media, Trump described the occupants of the boats as “narcoterrorists” who were “at sea in international waters transporting illegals narcotics, heading to the United States.” He has stated that the boats are carrying enough drugs to kill tens of thousands of Americans, but strangely enough, never mentions what type of drugs they are. Also, there has been no published proof to these allegations and there is no reason to believe what they are reporting.
Why would people have doubts? Well, let’s start with information provided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department and the Congressional Research Service who state that Venezuela has no role at all in the smuggling or production of fentanyl. Most of the production happens in Mexico with chemicals from Asia and China. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, there are three countries in South America that produce most of the world’s cocaine supply, and Venezuela is not one of them. They also state that much of that cocaine supply travels through the Pacific and not the Caribbean. Data also shows that if boats were to leave Venezuela with drugs, these drugs in most cases do not end up in the U.S., they end in Africa and Mexico. They stop at other islands, go to Mexico or Central America, not U.S. shores. Clearly, there is no reason to believe what they are telling us.
If anyone were to look at the size of the boats they incinerated, they would have been loaded down with people, with very little room for drugs. But we will never know because their lives, along with any evidence or lack thereof, were destroyed in the blink of an eye.
Then let’s ask ourselves, why does the U.S. government need so much military might gathered in the Caribbean to track some alleged drug boats? The U.S. has ordered eight warships, a nuclear-powered submarine, a mobile lander to transport troops to shore, and 2200 marines sitting on standby to go ashore. Some of the ships carry helicopters; some have cruise missiles. All of these vessels need personnel, which total about 4500 sailors in all. If this weren’t enough, there are 10 F-35 Stealth fighters based in Puerto Rico to reinforce the battle group. News outlets are reporting at least 10,000 troops on land and sea are being used in the Caribbean. Clearly, there is something more behind it, making it hard to believe all of this is needed for a few small boats.
Then there is the allegation that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is the leader of the gang running these boats. The gang that the Trump administration alleges is running these boats has been associated with human trafficking, not drug trafficking. So, if those boats were being run by this particular gang, then those boats were probably carrying people, not drugs. But we will never know, since everything has been obliterated.
So, with no proof of their allegation about Maduro, Trump and his administration still find it necessary to slap a 50 million dollar bounty on Maduro’s head? A bounty that is being paid using taxpayer money. We are spending billions maintaining the enormous military presence in the Caribbean, and now we have to pay for a 50 million dollar bounty? I’m sorry, wasn’t our government just shut down over health care funding?
The Trump administration recently gave secret authorization for the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela. This allows the CIA to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela and all kinds of operations in the Caribbean. Even going so far as to being able to conduct covert action against Mr. Maduro or his administration, either unilaterally or in conjunction with the local military. After this announcement, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who was heading the military operations in Caribbean, resigned. He had already brought up his concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats. The former American ambassador to Venezuela from 2018 to 2023 also expressed concern about the military might being used to take out small trafficking boats when he said it is like “using a blowtorch to cook an egg.” Clearly, there is no reason for us to believe what they are telling us.
So really, why is the Trump administration so focused on taking Maduro out of office with such unrelenting brutality? The quick answer is that Maduro is not playing ball with the plans of the U.S. corporations and capitalists. The U.S. government is working as their bully guards to make it easy to get the Venezuelan oil.
Really, this has been the same answer going back to 1910 when Royal Dutch Shell, a British-Dutch owned company, first started developing oil in Venezuela. The U.S. government has been working on behalf of the U.S. banks, corporations and their capitalist friends for a very long time. But as recently as 2019, they laid it out again, just in case there was any doubt. John Bolton, Trump’s national “security” advisor at the time, made the claim that the Venezuelan people would be better off if the U.S. oil companies were the ones calling the shots in THEIR country. He promised, “If we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela, it would be good for the people of Venezuela.” They want the oil. They have been going after the oil for over 100 years.
With such a rich natural resource under their feet, you would think that money was flowing and the Venezuelan people would not have a care in the world. Quite the opposite. Since the first discovery of oil in Venezuela, the country was run by a series of military dictators who served as puppets for the U.S. government, who in turn were working on behalf of the oil barons and the banks. Conditions for the working-class people of Venezuela just got worse as the years went on. The people had no voice since all political parties were banned.
The military dictatorships that plagued Venezuela have been fueled by the U.S. government and their imperialist partners and continued to tear down the population for decades to come. Just imagine, between 2013 and 2019, approximately eight million people fled Venezuela, many to the United States.
These attacks are what continue today. As of this past Friday, President Trump continues to make aggressive threats to Venezuela, saying, “I sort of made up my mind.… I can’t tell you what it is, but we made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from pouring in.” If by “progress” he means killing people, then this would be a correct statement. And even though they claim they are making “progress”, they are still adding more military forces to the area. America’s largest aircraft carrier, the Ford, was moved from its position in the Mediterranean and is about to take up a position within striking distance of the country. This will increase the military personal from 10,000 to 15,000 sitting in the Caribbean. They have even given these military maneuverings a name, “Operation Southern Spear.”
Trump and his administration are still saying this is all about drugs, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. In a recent interview on Air Force One, he told the reporter, “If they stop sending drug boats, there won’t be any problems.” Still not providing any proof that the boats that were attacked were drug boats, or what drugs they are stopping. The U.S. threats are only causing more confusion and speculation by the American people and the U.S. allies as to the real reason why the U.S. is in Venezuela. Some of our allies have even said they are no longer sharing information with the U.S. as they fear it will help the U.S. attack more boats.
No one is really sure what will come from all of this U.S. aggression, but right now it just seems to be pushing us closer and closer to war. President Maduro has placed his military on high alert, and their guns are cocked. Trump’s former advisor on Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, in a panel discussion last week said, “Either Trump is going to win or Maduro is going to win.” Once again giving us reason not to believe any of the explanations from Trump and his fellow goons.
What the U.S. government is doing in Venezuela is not about drugs. It is not about humanitarian concerns. It is about oil and it is about money. History has shown that the U.S. government, the U.S. banks and corporation alongside with their imperialist allies are only interested in making money off the backs of the Venezuelan people. These military maneuvers and killings should be considered criminal. Actions like this will not stop until the working class unites, across borders, to fight the capitalist domination that has no concern about our lives and our future. All the more reason to fight for the development of OUR party, the Working Class Party.
Nov 24, 2025
This article is translated from the November 14 issue, #2989 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Editor’s Note: As of this publication date, the Trump administration is pushing Ukraine to accept what he calls a 28-point plan to end the war with Russia. It is not clear whether this plan would lead to a ceasefire, or if it would fall apart and be quickly forgotten. What is clear, however, is that Trump’s plan has nothing to do with peace. Instead, it is an ultimatum to Ukraine to end the war on U.S. terms. Demonstrating what was obvious—that the Ukraine war was the U.S.’s war from the beginning.
A major corruption case in Ukraine hit the headlines. According to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), it involved the activities of a “high-level criminal organization” in the immediate circle of President Volodymyr Zelensky. The criminals extorted money from the energy production sector. Remember Zelensky made his name as an anti-corruption candidate.
This scandal couldn’t have come at a worse time for the government. With Russian bombings systematically targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, every year on the eve of winter its major cities lack electricity and heat.
NABU investigated the case for 15 months and conducted 70 raids on the homes of prominent figures and the headquarters of corrupt institutions involved in the money laundering network. Among those investigated were four ministers, including the minister of Justice and former minister of Energy, Herman Halushchenko; state-owned company Energoatom, whose contractors were systematically required to pay 10 to 15% bribes; Timur Mindich, a businessman very close to Zelensky; and Mindich’s two deputies in charge of his financial operations, both legal and illegal.
NABU and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) warned the trio before the sting. They were able to flee abroad a few hours before the raids. Minditch is not just anyone. He is a very close collaborator and associate of Zelensky. Co-owner of their film production company Kvartal 95, he experienced a meteoric rise in the business world after Zelensky’s election to the presidency in 2019. He used his influence in the government to expand his activities, particularly in the energy, media, and especially defense sectors. He secretly controlled Fire Point, the company which became Ukraine’s leading supplier of drones.
Last summer, NABU indicted former deputy prime minister and Zelensky family friend Oleksiy Chernyshov for abusing his power and accepting bribes. NABU also raided the Berlin home of Zelensky’s former economic advisor. Zelensky rammed through a law placing NABU and SAP under the direct authority of the prosecutor general, who is appointed by him. Ukraine’s legislature, the Verkhovna Rada, voted unanimously for the law, which Zelensky signed that very night. Legislators had every interest in curbing these dangerously independent bodies, even though these inspectors had never shown any zeal in fighting corruption before.
But the cover-up did not go as planned. Some students and urban lower-middle-class people—until then, pillars of the regime—took to the streets to voice their outrage at a law which so shamelessly aimed at ensuring impunity for traffickers and corrupt officials at the top.
Zelensky was threatened with a serious political crisis and the loss of further support. More and more Ukrainians expressed their weariness with the endless war. At the same time, he was also threatened with the withdrawal of some of his Western European backers’ aid given his overly open tolerance of corruption. He was forced to back down. He compelled reluctant lawmakers to restore NABU and SAP’s independence.
This didn’t solve much. Investigations can’t eradicate a problem that predates Zelensky’s election. This kind of widespread corruption is not even unique to Ukraine. This mode of operation by ruling “elites” and by the entire state apparatus in most of the states that emerged from the dissolution of the USSR is reminiscent of the way in which the bureaucracies of Stalin and later Brezhnev thrived by leeching off the Soviet economy.
NABU and SAP couldn’t change this situation, even if they wanted to. At most, some politicians can take advantage of the scandalous situation and power struggles to exert pressure on Zelensky, or to prepare for a post-Zelensky era in the framework of an eventual ceasefire. Western European leaders repeat that Ukraine must fight corruption to join the European Union.
Legislator Oleksi Hontcharenko commented, “Everyone knows how much it costs to get off the bus” [i.e., where men rounded up in the street are herded to be sent to military assembly center CTR.] He added, “It ranges from $1,000 to $8,000. Once inside CTR, it’s $8,000 to $15,000 to be released.” In other words, everyone knows how much it costs to bribe recruiting sergeants.
Getting a medical exemption from military service costs at least $20,000. Legal leave to move to another country and avoid risking life in combat costs even more. These figures are beyond the reach of most salaried workers. But they are tiny compared to the colossal fortunes amassed by men in the upper echelons of the Ukrainian government. Military contracts are the jackpot. These same men increase penalties for men who refuse conscription. They debate in the legislature over ordering up women to replace soldiers killed in action. All this in the name of “defending the homeland,” of course—at the expense of ordinary people. Meanwhile these corrupt politicians and insatiable oligarchs stay far behind the lines, or even abroad.
Ukrainian leaders and oligarchs chorus, “Defend us from the Russians.” The population may well ask, “Who will defend us from these pests?”
Nov 24, 2025
This article is translated from the November 21 issue, #2990 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
Deadly violence perpetrated by far-right settlers and the Israeli army in the occupied West Bank has intensified since October. Settlers, often supported by the army, carried out at least 264 attacks during October alone. This level is unprecedented, according to a U.N. agency.
The figures speak for themselves. Since October 7, 2023, 1,006 Palestinians and 43 Israelis have been killed in the territory, both active-duty and civilians. Settler attacks rose after some heads of state hypocritically acknowledged the fact of the Palestinian problem and after the U.N. vote on Trump’s peace plan. Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinian teenagers in the southern West Bank between November 13 and 17. On the 14th, far-right settlers set fire to a mosque in Deir Istiya, in Salfit township. The army killed a 19 year old near Nablus during a raid. Settlers attacked villagers near Ramallah on the 15th. Four villagers were still missing as of November 19. On the 16th, two villages were stormed northeast of Ramallah, and dozens of Palestinians were arrested near East Jerusalem.
Somewhat out of the ordinary, on November 17, Israeli authorities evacuated a settler outpost near Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem. They used bulldozers to clear the site. They said the land was reserved for official construction. What they meant was, a new settlement. This decision seems to have emboldened far-right militants in the West Bank, who intensified their relentless harassment and attacks on Palestinian villagers.
Commandos destroying homes and crops. Deadly attacks on olive grove workers. Destruction of and denial of access to harvests. These are all aimed at depriving residents of resources. This is the daily reality that army-backed settlers inflict on more than three million Palestinians living in the West Bank. Whether they occupy outposts or officially legal settlements, including in East Jerusalem, more than 700,000 settlers now feel backed by the settlement policy pursued by all Israeli governments since 1967, both left-wing and right-wing.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently distanced himself somewhat from the most violent and extremist settler groups. But most likely this is because an election is coming, and he is also responding to opposition protests. Yet since the end of October, the settlers haven’t forgotten that the Israeli legislature voted to consider two bills aimed at extending Israeli sovereignty into the occupied West Bank.
But even as settlements keep encroaching relentlessly in the West Bank, making the existence of a contiguous territory for Palestinians increasingly impossible, Palestinians persist in demanding recognition of their rights. This is the only way forward for these two peoples who coexist between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Nov 24, 2025
Israeli seven-year army veteran and trauma therapy social worker Tully Flint spoke at a protest in Haifa on October 25. He represented two organizations of soldiers against military duty in Gaza. Flint had been dismissed from the reserves in December 2024 for refusing to deploy to Gaza and for signing a letter calling on others to refuse.
Flint addressed the crowd, “As soldiers, it was our duty to refuse a clearly illegal order. Now, as citizens, we must refuse to remain silent in the face of clearly illegal actions and laws.”
Why don’t we hear about protests like this in the media or on our feeds?
Nov 24, 2025
What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of November 16, 2025.
Democrats won the two big governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey. The Democratic governor of California won a big referendum vote, by almost a 2-to-1 margin. Democrats, attaching a “socialist” to their name, won mayors’ races in New York City and Seattle. And Democrats won down-ballot positions in small cities and towns.
CNN was ecstatic. FOX News tried to explain it away.
But it wasn’t a surprise. When people get fed up with the party in power, some of them vote for the other party, some sit out the next election. The same dance has been going on for a lot of years—since 1860, to be exact, 165 years.
For all those 165 years, the same two parties have taken turns running the government. A few Democrats have called themselves “socialists,” some Republicans said they belonged to the “Tea Party.” But the same two parties that dominated in 1860 still dominate today.
The two parties alternated to craft laws that serve the interest of the ruling capitalist class, whoever made it up—merchant-traders, slave-owners, industrialists and/or their bankers.
Democracy, it wasn’t—no matter how many times we voted.
During all the wars carried out by this country, the population has never once decided whether or not to go to war. Yes, we’ve voted, but ordinary people didn’t decide on a policy for war. Some of our class died in the wars, but we were not the ones who decided that millions of people should die, and whole towns and cities laid waste.
Governments ran up big deficits to throw money at the capitalist class. Ordinary people paid the taxes, yes, voted, yes, but we weren’t the ones who decided to give our tax money away.
Big corporations, in the pursuit of more profit, made decisions that created severe unemployment, recessions, and depressions. Workers ground out the production society needed, but we never decided how the economy should run.
Yes, we could vote out the party in power—only to get back the other one, its spitting image.
Democracy? That’s a fancy word for a dictatorship presided over by the two parties and owned by the capitalist class.
The only time we ever had any say in these matters is when we voted with our feet, when we organized strikes, pushing them to extend from one city to the next, one state to the next; when we organized protests; when we took over the streets.
Republicans just pushed through Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which cut taxes so disproportionately that 10% of the population got 80% of the benefits. When that happened, were you at the table that decided what was in it?
The Democrats pushed through laws under Obama, then Biden, that gave a little bit of medical coverage to the poorest workers while improving profits of the insurance industry a lot. And when that happened, were you at the table?
To believe that an election gives us a seat at the decision-makers’ table is a pipe dream. To believe that someone else will do it for us, is to be deluded by smoke and mirrors.
We fought for the vote, only to discover that the system is still monopolized by two parties that represent the ruling class. And we aren’t part of that class.
The working class will sit at the table when it creates a different kind of system, one in which working people will make the decisions, choose their own representatives based on their workplaces and neighborhoods. Such a system will not be set up by the ballot box. It can come out of the working people’s own struggles.
Even now today, working people can head in this direction—IF we break free of the illusion that voting for one of these two parties will solve our problems. It won’t.
We can do that by building our own organizations. Why not start with a party, to make the voice of our class be heard.
Nov 24, 2025
An unidentified investor just paid the highest price ever to buy a work of modern art, forking over 236 million dollars at a Sotheby’s auction for a World War I era portrait by the painter Gustav Klimt. The prior owner was an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune. A painting by Frida Kahlo sold for almost 55 million dollars, the highest ever paid for a work by a woman or Latin American artist.
Rich bosses tell workers they have no money for our wages and benefits. But they have money for what they want: speculative investments.
Nov 24, 2025
The National Transportation Safety Board reported in November its investigation of the March 2024 collision of the containership Dali with Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which killed six workers doing road repair on the bridge.
The board reported that quick action by the ship’s crew and others prevented more lives from being lost. But the collision and the deaths were PREVENTABLE. They only happened because governments and businesses chose to put fast dollars over safety.
The state transportation authority police had exchanged cell phone numbers with the road crew but did not call them with the emergency warning. The state had built the bridge in the 1970s without the massive concrete barriers called dolphins, which could have prevented the collapse. For 50 years, with freight companies using increasingly larger ships, the state chose not to add them. The tug boats which took the ship from its dock were not used to take it past the bridge.
As for the ship, the preventative maintenance technology of infrared thermal imaging could have detected the one loose wire out of thousands which caused the Dali to lose power and steering, but that was not used. To cut corners, the Dali and at least one other ship in the owner’s fleet inject diesel fuel into power generators using a pump designed only for flushing out the fuel instead. Dangerously, the pump has no backup and cannot automatically be restarted when it shuts off. This use does not meet classification requirements.
The blame game goes on in court, and people wait for a new bridge. No one should have died! But they did. These kinds of cost-saving practices are sure to continue in ports and ships around the world.
Nov 24, 2025
Car repossessions have reached a record high in 2025. By October, 2.2 million vehicles had been repossessed in the U.S., surpassing the previous all-time high, last year’s 1.7 million. By the end of 2025, repossessions are expected to reach 3 million.
It’s no mystery why. Prices of cars, both new and used, have skyrocketed, and so have interest rates on car loans. Maintenance costs and insurance premiums have also soared.
Defaults on car loan payments and repossessions are highest among so-called subprime borrowers—one in fifteen subprime auto loans were at least two months past due in August. Subprime is a code word for low-income. So, in other words, working-class families are falling behind on payments, and losing their cars, at an alarming rate.
No surprise there either. With the cost of housing, food and utilities through the roof, working-class families are left with the bitter choice of what necessity to pay for last—meaning, often, not to pay at all. And for millions of workers across the U.S., losing a car means not being able to go to work, because public transit is very inadequate, sometimes even non-existent, in many parts of the country.
To working-class families, a repossession means sliding down deeper into poverty. But the capitalist class has increased its profits and wealth enormously by jacking up the prices of cars, loans and insurance.
It’s just how capitalism works: a few people amass tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars, while millions of working families fall into deeper misery. There is no way to “fix” the capitalist system. It needs to be discarded and replaced with a system that puts human need above profit.
Nov 24, 2025
The Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna River in Maryland, upstream from the Chesapeake Bay, has trapped sediment in its reservoir for nearly a century. Phosphorus and nitrogen spill past the dam and fuel toxic algal blooms in the Bay.
In early October the dam’s owner, Constellation Energy Corp., made a deal with Maryland officials and environmental groups for a new license for the dam. Constellation promised to pay 340 million dollars over 50 years for environmental work. This comes out to less than seven million dollars a year, a fraction of the dam’s electrical power generation sales. Almost all the money pledged will go for projects having nothing to do with the sediment problem, like freshwater mussel restoration, trash removal, and fish and eel passage improvements.
As for the urgent need to dredge the sediment in the reservoir, less than 19 million dollars is promised, and that will only pay for “additional studies.”
In other words, this “historic agreement” avoids the main threat to the Bay.