Ending The War Against The Climate Movement

Trump hasn’t just made it easier for fossil fuel companies to increase emissions — he has also changed rules to make it harder for climate activists to fight back.


David Sirota
Sep 14






The fires incinerating America’s West Coast are the latest sign that climate change has made landfall in America and is torching its way inward like an occupying army overwhelming battle-weary fortifications. Only, that military metaphor seems a bit off, because if you look carefully, you can see that we are not valiantly losing a battle — our government has made it impossible for us to even fight, and has arguably taken the side of the invasion.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. When Donald Trump became president, the expectation was that he would follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and merely allow emissions, fossil fuel subsidies and oil exports to continue to rise. That kind of run-of-the-mill villainy is so bipartisan and has been so normalized that it’s barely considered news when even Democratic governors publicly lament climate change, while continuing to approve fossil fuel development.

But normal villainy wasn’t enough for Trump. He and the GOP wanted to be supervillains for their fossil fuel industry donors, and so they have not merely enacted policies encouraging more carbon emissions and tacked on fossil fuel subsidies to pandemic response bills. They have also overseen an effort to change the rules of environmental politics and disempower climate activism for the long haul.

In other words: They haven’t just waived the white flag, they have used federal and state governments to undermine the opponents of the climate disaster now lighting the country on fire.

This attitude shift from passive surrender to active complicity is most evident in Trump and the GOP’s behavior the past 6 months. The same president who was quick to send in federal police to crush Portland protests hasn’t lifted a finger to try to help extinguish the wildfires now bearing down on the same city — and that federal inaction happened only months after Trump’s fellow Republicans shut down the Oregon state legislature in order to block climate change legislation.



But that’s hardly a surprise, because Trump long ago made clear that in the with-us-or-against-us climate war, he is against us and has enthusiastically joined the side of the inferno.
“They’re Saying They’re Not Going To Do Anything About It”

A now-forgotten 2018 Washington Post story momentarily spotlighted the tectonic change of attitude.

The newspaper reported that the Trump administration predicted a 7-degree rise in global temperatures under our current policies. Considering the mayhem now unfolding with one degree of warming, that prediction is a death sentence — but this wasn’t a case of Trump merely fessing up to a calamity. Instead, the administration cited that prediction as a fixed eventuality and thus as a rationale to kill fuel-efficiency standards that might help prevent that disastrous outcome.

“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” one scientist told the Post.

That’s an understatement — in truth, Trump and his party have taken proactive steps to prevent anyone else from doing anything about it either.

For example: last year, the White House moved to prevent states like California from strengthening emissions standards.

Regulators at the Trump-led Securities and Exchange Commission have been helping corporations block shareholders from even voting on climate-related corporate resolutions. Rather than cracking down on industry officials who have been caught lying to the public, those same SEC regulators are refusing to use their power to require companies to disclose climate risks to those same shareholders.

Amid the summer fire season, Trump’s Labor Department is helping oil and gas companies make it harder for pension managers, workers and retirees to move their savings out of fossil fuel investments.

In the courts, judges are helping the Trump administration block climate cases before they are even fully litigated, they are helping the fossil fuel industry steamroll pipeline opponents, and they have shut down the case aiming to hold oil companies responsible for misleading the public about the dangers of carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, Republicans in state legislatures have been passing laws criminalizing climate protests. Though Trump promised to let local communities regulate fossil fuel development, his party has been doing the opposite -- GOP lawmakers have pushed preemption laws to try to block cities and towns from restricting that development.
“Expected To Be Small”

Again, these aren’t just efforts to let oil and gas companies increase carbon pollution. These are actions designed to change the basic rules of politics in order to permanently limit the democratic power of any movement that wants to fight climate change. And perhaps most frighteningly of all, you can see that insidious form of climate denial now seeping into the governmental assumptions that determine what is and is not legislatively permissible.

About a year and a half ago, I was perusing a report from the Congressional Budget Office, which arbitrates whether or not legislative proposals adhere to predetermined budget rules and can move forward. Deep inside the report I discovered a passage (which I flagged for reporter Alexander Kaufman) in which those arbiters inadvertently admit they are denying climate science.

In one section, CBO officials declare: “The effects of climate change on the U.S. economy and on the federal budget are expected to be small in the next few decades.”

In another section, they say that “many estimates suggest that the effect of climate change on the nation’s economic output, and hence on federal tax revenues, will probably be small over the next 30 years and larger, but still modest, in the following few decades.” Officials touted the “positive” aspects of climate change including “reductions in deaths from cold weather and improvements in agricultural productivity in certain areas.”

Kaufman’s article showed how these assumptions are at odds with science, but here’s the thing: Those assumptions could have very real-world ramifications because CBO can play a crucial role in what passes — or even gets considered — by Congress.

If, for instance, CBO says that a Green New Deal’s spending to slow and mitigate climate change would eventually generate significant efficiencies and cost savings, that might boost that legislation’s chances. By contrast, if CBO insists that a Green New Deal’s spending will not generate a solid return on investment because the effects of climate change “are expected to be small,” then that could kill the legislation outright.

Now imagine those kinds of climate-denying assumptions being imperceptibly baked into decision-making processes all throughout different levels of governments. In fact, you don’t have to imagine it — there is evidence that is exactly what has been happening.
Reforming The Rules So That Climate Activists Have More Power

None of this is to suggest that resistance is futile or that climate activism is a fool’s errand.

Campaigns against pipeline development have notched victories. The push for fossil fuel divestment has made tremendous progress. Groups like the Sunrise Movement are forcing climate change into the political process and are winning elections. Indeed, as climate scientist Peter Kalmus and fire ecologist Natasha Stavros recently wrote: “The grassroots climate movement has gotten so strong that climate is rapidly becoming the deciding factor in major elections around the world.”

All of those efforts have seen success despite the obstacles thrown up by Trump and Republicans and despite the nonchalance that too many Democratic leaders have exuded throughout this crisis. Those successes offer a glimmer of hope and optimism, even as the wildfires burn.



However, to achieve the kind of energy transformation required to ward off the worst effects of climate change, we need government officials who will not just stand up to Big Oil and advocate for good policy. We need them to also reform the rules of politics to empower the climate movement — or at least level the playing field and make it a fair fight between the movement and its fossil fuel industry adversaries.

There are all sorts of seemingly small tweaks that can start doing that — and the easiest are what’s already on the table.

For example, a new SEC under a new president could finally move forward with requiring more climate risk disclosure from corporations, thereby giving the climate movement more fuel for activism. A new president could rescind the rule making it harder to divest from fossil fuel assets and could halt federal lawsuits against states that seek to strengthen their own emissions rules.

Similarly, instead of preempting local climate initiatives, states could devolve more power to cities and towns to enact their own fossil fuel development restrictions.

At the same time, state legislatures and Congress could replicate Colorado’s recently passed law that allows legislators to request a climate-impact report for proposed bills. That information can let the climate movement and the lawmakers themselves understand the environmental effects of their proposals before they are passed into law. If we’re already evaluating the financial cost of proposed bills, shouldn’t we also be evaluating the environmental cost of those bills, too?

There are countless possibilities like this — and that’s what we must demand from the next administration and all of our state and local leaders.

It is not enough to win the election, appoint a few people who are slightly less bad than Trump’s rogues gallery and then call it a day. It isn’t even enough to just roll back Trump’s worst policies. The underlying rules of the political game must change to give more power to those trying to fix the problem — and less power to industries that are actively, knowingly creating the problem to pad their own bottom line.

That is the only way that we will reorient the government to stop fighting for climate change and instead start defending our country against climate change.

USA: wildfires – catastrophe layered upon catastrophe

David Spenger

14 September 2020



http://www.marxist.com/usa-wildfires-catastrophe-layered-upon-catastrophe.htm

Swathes of the USA have been hit with devastating wildfires: a tragic consequence of climate change and capitalist negligence. With people on the West Coast having already faced COVID-19, multiple disasters are being piled one on top of another.

Amidst the new normal of pandemic and economic collapse, Californians are experiencing another catastrophic consequence of capitalism: wildfire season. The last few years have seen mass devastation across the state, exemplified by the “Camp Fire,” which destroyed the city of Paradise. Many locals lost their homes, while people in San Francisco, Oakland, and other parts of the East Bay had to deal with toxic air quality. This year’s wildfires are also severe, with the LNU complex fire being the second largest in California history.

Consequently, air quality is once again disastrous. Californians were already trapped in their homes due to COVID-19, and now can’t even go on socially distanced walks without inhaling toxic smoke. The contradictions of capitalism manifest themselves in what can only be described as a hellhole: blackouts during a heatwave, poisoned air, the possibility of losing your home, or dying in a fire, all while living in isolation due to the conditions of the COVID-19 crisis.

This year’s fire season has been particularly intense because the seasonal thunderstorms delivered relatively little precipitation. Thanks to climate change, the droughts have continually worsened, radically affecting California’s substrate and providing ideal conditions for fires. In particular, one company has played a pernicious role in this: Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).

For years, PG&E has neglected repairs and needed investment in favor of paying dividends to shareholders. The Camp Fire, by far the worst in California history, was principally caused by PG&E. On June 30, Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature passed California bill SB350 to “address” the situation, allowing the state to intervene if PG&E does not operate within safe parameters. More specifically, it states that if proper protocols are not followed, the governor or an appointee can turn PG&E into a nonprofit public benefit corporation.

Were this to happen, it is essential to note that it would still be a corporation. Workers at nonprofits are still exploited, and ultimately nonprofits still have to make revenue, even if they are legally bound to the abstract idea of “public good.” A glance at the various nonprofits with multi-millionaire CEOs confirms this.

Nonprofit corporations, like their for-profit counterparts, have to operate within capitalism’s boundaries. Merely changing PG&E’s corporate form is not enough. The only way to effectively deal with PG&E is to take it into public ownership, to be operated in the public interest on the basis of democratic workers’ control. This would give California’s working class a real say in how the utility is run.
Cruelty of capitalism

But the cruel absurdity of capitalism’s inability to deal with the problem goes far beyond that. The reason fighting fires has been more difficult this year is due to a lack of prison labor. Hundreds of prisoners have been (rightly) let out of prison early to help stop the spread of COVID-19. However, because the state has depended so heavily on prison labor to fight fires in the past, this has severely weakened containment efforts.

The New York Times recently observed that California simply doesn’t have the funds to support an adequate number of firefighters. Therefore, paying prisoners $1 an hour to fight fires—essentially slavery-level “remuneration”—was the only available option given the budget. But consider this. California has the highest GDP of any US state—over $3 trillion—far more than most world governments. It is also home to 165 billionaires—the highest number in the country.

So the argument that there isn’t enough money to develop an effective strategy to deal with wildfire season doesn’t hold any weight. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos both have land holdings in California, and their personal wealth alone could fully fund firefighting programs. However, the logic of capitalism dictates that these fine gentlemen keep their obscene amounts of wealth while the rest of us burn and choke.

Although Ronald Reagan came from California, the state is tightly controlled by the Democratic Party. These liberal defenders and apologists for capitalism have shown that they are entirely unable to solve any of the real problems faced by California’s working-class majority. The rising homeless population, the unbearable rents, and the annual fear of losing our homes to fire are just some of the ways in which they’ve failed us.

If we want to deal with these and other problems, we need to go beyond just taking over PG&E—we need to bring the state’s top companies under public ownership, starting with the 53 companies based in the state currently on the Fortune 500.

Utilizing these resources, we could launch a massive firefighting program that hires anyone with relevant experience, while quickly training thousands of others to do the same, all while guaranteeing continued employment with union wages and protections once the fires are extinguished. At the same time, we could chart out a science-based plan of action to address California’s environmental problems to contain out-of-control fires as much as possible.

Ultimately, we can’t trust Gavin Newsom, the California Senate, Assembly, or the federal government to solve our problems. Only the power of the workers, organized in a mass socialist party, and forming a workers’ government can lay the foundations for dealing with the catastrophe of capitalism.

The Working Class Is the Vast Majority of Society

BY
HADAS THIER

Class isn’t just about how much money you make, and it’s certainly not about cultural traits or your level of education. Marxists argue that anyone who must sell their ability to work for a wage and can’t produce their life necessities for themselves is part of the working class.



https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/working-class-peoples-guide-capitalism-marxist-economics

The working class — black, white, native-born, and immigrant — across a diverse set of experiences and facing myriad oppressions, collectively make up a class of people who are exploited to create profits for the few. Understanding how class works and on what basis class positions are determined help to reveal the structures of power and exploitation in our society.


A very basic definition of classes as they exist under capitalism begins with this premise: workers have to sell our ability to work, and capitalists buy and command our labor power. You can’t understand either the worker’s or the boss’s class position without understanding that the whole of the system is one in which labor is set to work, in order to produce a profit for someone else.

Class, in other words, is a relationship of exploitation.
Class Isn’t Just About Numbers

This understanding of class as a social relationship is completely absent in mainstream analysis. If class is discussed at all, it is considered in terms of wealth and social stratification.

Income levels, education, lifestyles, and patterns of consumption are used to divide people into a society that is mostly middle class, with some rich and poor people around the fringes. Indeed, in most accounts, the majority of us are middle class, and there is no working class at all.

We are reminded of this fact at least every two to four years in election seasons, when politicians appeal to the “struggling middle class,” a category that apparently includes all “good Americans,” or as former president Bill Clinton said, people who “work hard and play by the rules.” Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns were so notable precisely because he uttered the words “working class.”

An explanation of classes based on levels of wealth also has a more progressive version, as popularized by the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. The slogan “We are the 99 percent” caught on like wildfire as activists identified the top 1 percent of the country’s economic elite, which owns about a third of the nation’s wealth, as culpable for creating the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. While this analysis is a substantial leap forward from that which assumes that we are nearly all middle class, it still assumes that the quantity of wealth is the determinant of class positions.

Class and wealth surely have everything to do with each other, but they are not the same thing. A stable, well-paid job (to the extent that these still exist) such as a train conductor in New York City may pay upward of $70,000 a year, and a small bodega owner in the Bronx may earn much less. But the former is a worker — who does not control her own hours and conditions of work, and the latter is a small business owner, charged with his own exploitation, as well as that of others (even if few in number).

The numbers on someone’s paycheck can’t tell you everything. It can’t tell you, for instance, that a manager at Starbucks, who makes less than a subway conductor, has the power to fire every worker in the store. We can see then that wealth is just one part of the picture, and one that is more symptomatic of class inequality than explanatory of its origin. In fact, power, control over working conditions, and financial decision-making are the bedrocks of exploitation.

Economics professor and author of The Working Class Majority Michael Zweig explained it this way: “By looking only at income or lifestyle, we see the results of class, but not the origins of class. We see how we are different in our possessions, but not how we are related and connected, and made different, in the process of making what we possess.”

The Marxist explanation emphasizes that one’s position in society is not measured quantitatively but is instead determined by a person’s relationship to labor, the fruits of labor, and the means of production. Anyone who holds economic control over the workplaces, has political power, dictates the terms of other’s working conditions, or owns capital that can be invested in production, is part of the capitalist class. And anyone who must sell their ability to work for a wage and has no access to the ability to produce their own life’s necessities for themselves is part of the working class.
Wealth and Poverty Do Not Determine Class

This does not just extend to workers engaged in the production of physical goods. Teachers and nurses must sell their labor in order to provide services, and thus are part of the working class.

As Marx argued: “If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a school-master is a productive worker when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation.”

It is in this sense that Marx and Engels wrote that the “proletarian is without property.” “Proletarians” is another word for workers; and private property does not mean personal belongings, like your TV or laptop, but the means of production — the buildings, machinery, software, equipment, tools, and other materials owned by capitalists.

Marx wasn’t saying that workers literally have nothing, although that is often and increasingly true. He meant that we are without any means to produce and reproduce our livelihoods, and therefore we are at the mercy of capitalist exploitation. A construction company has mechanical shovels, drills, and dozers, which allow them to exploit laborers and turn a profit. I have a shovel, which I can use to grow flowers or tomatoes.

Historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix put it this way:


[Class] is the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure. . . Class is essentially a relationship—just as capital, another of Marx’s basic concepts, is specifically described by him. . . as “a relation,” “a social relation of production,” and so forth. And a class (a particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of control) to the conditions of production (that is to say, to the means and labor of production) and to other classes.

Using this definition, we see that wealth and poverty do not determine class. Rather, they are manifestations of it.

The bosses are thus not defined by the degree of their extravagance. At the same time, society’s poor do not represent an “underclass” who, due to lack of employment or wealth, stand outside of society. Poverty is an integral part of the experience of the working class, and — as has been all too brutally proven by the current crisis — unemployment is just a stone’s throw away for most workers.

Even before the pandemic hit, almost half the US population could not pay their bills if they missed one paycheck, and one in four people reported foregoing health care treatment because they could not afford it. A quarter of the population had jobs that were defined as low-wage. Add to this bleak picture the mountains of student debt carried by tens of millions of people and a rising cost of living, and it is very clear just how intrinsic poverty is to the fabric of American society. Now with thirty million people without a job and forty million potentially facing homelessness in the coming months, the brutally thin line between working and destitution could not be more clear.

Capitalism in fact requires that there be some level of unemployment at all times, or as Marx termed it, a “reserve army of laborers.” The bosses depend on this reserve army of laborers to ensure that there is always someone else willing to take your job, and can thus discipline the paid workforce into acquiescing to the terms set by employers.

High levels of unemployment are a cruel feature of every downturn in the economy, but even when “times are good,” unemployment is still a painful reality for millions. What mainstream economists consider “full employment” is in fact about 5 percent unemployment. The introduction of new machinery, a growing labor force due to demographic or migration changes, regular changes in the structure of the economy (what is and isn’t produced, and where), can all contribute to unemployment during the “best” of times.
The United States Isn’t a Middle-Class Country

This understanding of society yields a much different picture than the popularized version of the United States as a “middle-class country.”

To be sure, there is a middle class. They do not just live in a glossy alternate universe on television screens. The middle class is a layer of society that stands between the working class and the ruling class. It includes small business owners, as well as middle managers, supervisors, and professional occupations that have a fair amount of autonomy within the system (such as doctors and lawyers).

They are often the daily face of exploitation. You see your manager every day at work. He may reward your work with a raise, or reprimand you for being late, but you will rarely encounter the CEO who profits from this arrangement.

Still, this middle class is much smaller than usually assumed, and many of those traditionally deemed “professionals” are being summarily shoved into the working class (or “proletarianizing”), as computer programmers become routine code writers punching timecards, social workers with enormous caseloads spend their days filling out forms, and academic professorial jobs increasingly give way to adjunct positions.

Within many middle-class job classifications as well, the differences between the kind of conditions faced by professors at elite colleges versus those at public universities, or doctors with private practices contrasted to those working in emergency rooms, lead to very different levels of control at the workplace.

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe,” wrote Marx and Engels. “It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Michael Zweig and labor journalist Kim Moody have both estimated that the working class makes up about 63 percent of the US labor force. (By my own accounting of BLS data 63 percent is a quite conservative estimate.) The corporate elite makes up 2 percent, and in between, the middle class makes up 35 percent.

Further, if you include broader society beyond the accounted-for labor force (family members not working, elderly people, people permanently unemployed because of disabilities, etc.), the numbers reflecting the working class would be even higher. As Moody argued: “If working-class people in employment make up just under two-thirds of the workforce, those in the class amount to at least three-quarters of the population — the overwhelming majority. As teachers, nurses, and other professionals are pushed down into the working class, the majority grows even larger.”

This highlights a broader point: classes are fluid and plenty of gray area exists between them. These numbers only offer a general guide to emphasize the broader trend toward increasing polarization.

As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto over 150 years ago (at a time, incidentally, when the working class was a clear minority of the world’s population): “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

Lastly, one belongs to a class regardless of whether one believes in the notion or identifies with the interests of that class. Whether Democrats tell you that you are part of the middle class they are trying to save or Donald Trump promises tax breaks to the “forgotten middle class,” and whether you believe any of them, have little to do with whether you still have to wake up to go to work tomorrow morning, follow someone else’s instructions for what to do, and return home with little more than a meager paycheck and a backache.

Class position is therefore determined by material reality rather than ideology.
Stoking Class Consciousness

At the same time, the structure of the working class does then lend itself to the development of class consciousness. In that sense, we can identify a secondary definition of the working class on the basis of its consciousness and activity.

Along these lines, Marx distinguished between the working class as a “class in itself ”: defined by a common relationship to the means of production; and a “class for itself”: organized in active pursuit of its own interests. As Ste. Croix explained:


The individuals constituting a given class may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class, and they may or may not feel antagonism towards members of other classes as such. Class conflict (class struggle, Klassenkampf) is essentially the fundamental relationship between classes, involving exploitation and resistance to it, but not necessarily either class consciousness or collective activity in common, political or otherwise, although these features are likely to supervene when a class has reached a certain stage of development and become what Marx once (using a Hegelian idiom) called “a class for itself.”

A class for itself is one that must be organized. On the one hand, a shared class position creates objective conditions that connect and bind us together. On the other, divisions within the class, and the ways in which racial, gender, and other oppressions play out among workers, must be confronted if we are to go from objective possibility to subjective advance.

Socialists and other working-class militants can play a critical role in forging the politics of solidarity and helping a class for itself emerge out of a class in itself.

WSWS, latest articles

Dear reader,

Here are the latest articles published today on the World Socialist Web Site.

The California wildfires, climate change and capitalism
The wildfires ripping through California and Oregon have exposed yet again the dangers posed by climate change and the inability of capitalist governments to deal with it.
Read more





Trump, Roger Stone call for violence and repression after Election Day
The US president and his oldest political crony called for a police-military crackdown to back his continued rule.
Read more





University of Michigan graduate students vote to extend strike as opposition erupts at campuses throughout the US
The reopening of campuses is driving an expansion of the coronavirus pandemic, with 19 of the 25 largest outbreaks in communities with colleges that have started in-person learning.
Read more





Autoworkers support University of Michigan strikers
Like the herding of workers into the auto factories, the drive to reopen schools and colleges even as the pandemic continues to rage is entirely driven by profit interests.
Read more




Greece buys billions in French arms amid war tensions with Turkey
The purchase of a squadron of fighter jets and four warships marks a major escalation in the military standoff between Greece, backed by France, and Turkey.
Read more





University of Illinois Hospital nurses strike over staff shortages, unsafe conditions
UIH nurses in Chicago walked out Saturday to demand patient limits and safe work environments.
Read more





University of Illinois at Chicago workers go on strike against low wages and unsafe conditions
Workers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have gone on strike against low wages and unsafe conditions as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads rapidly through college campuses.
Read more





More than 15,000 attend University of Texas football game amidst coronavirus pandemic
A UT Austin spokesperson confirmed that only 1,198 attendees were tested before the game. Out of these, 95 tested positive, or nearly 8 percent.
Read more





Millions in the US choke on hazardous air as West Coast fires continue to rage
With 33 dead and over 4.6 million acres burned, the unprecedented fires in California, Oregon and Washington have quickly spiraled into a catastrophe affecting the lives of millions.
Read more





Wildcat strike over COVID-19 at Lear auto parts plant in Indiana
Lear workers refused to work for several hours Friday night after learning of potential COVID-19 cases in the facility, halting production also at the nearby Ford Chicago Assembly Plant.
Read more




Floods inundate Sudan amid escalating economic crisis
The hardest hit has been the capital Khartoum, where the Blue and White Nile Rivers meet, as the Nile burst its banks, demolishing everything in its way.
Read more





Australian government exploits family funeral to push for end to coronavirus border restrictions
The government aims to shift public opinion against border restrictions, which corporate Australia now wants scrapped.
Read more





Australia: Unions silent as dozens of New South Wales schools are affected by COVID-19
Even teachers over the age of 70, or with serious health conditions, have been forced back to front-line teaching since late May.
Read more




Three postal workers test positive at UK Royal Mail’s Medway Mail Centre
The outbreak at the “state-of-the-art” delivery office demonstrates that workers’ health is being imperilled in an ongoing scramble for profit.
Read more




UK firms announce hundreds of thousands of redundancies
There is a fear among some bourgeois commentators and political representatives that a sudden end to the Jobs Furlough scheme could lead to social upheaval.
Read more





In fascistic Independence Day speech, Brazil’s Bolsonaro condemns “strikes, social disorder”
Bolsonaro’s rant rooted Brazil’s national identity in “fear of god, respect for the family” and the struggle for “liberty” against “communism.”
Read more





Wisconsin Supreme Court blocks mailing out of absentee ballots pending ruling on Green Party ballot access
The Democratic party has led the charge in purging third-party candidates, including the Greens, from the November ballot.
Read more




Tennessee law seeks to criminalize protests on public property
Protests on Tennessee state property could mean up to six years in prison under a new law.
Read more





COVID-19 outbreak at Virginia migrant detention center caused by repression of anti-police brutality protesters
The outbreak at the Farmville detention center demonstrates the capitalist class’s disdain for democratic rights and the lives of the entire population.
Read more




Tens of thousands in southwest Louisiana remain without power two weeks after Hurricane Laura
With Tropical Storm Sally on track to hit Louisiana early this week the social and ecological crisis wrought in the wake of the last major storm is still coming into focus.
Read more



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