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Workers’ Voice newspaper: March-April edition
The U.S.-Israel war on Iran is a major escalation in the Middle East that has dangerous implications for working people everywhere. The brutality of the imperialist assault internationally is paired with the attack on civil liberties by the Trump regime inside the U.S. This includes the continued operations of ICE and Border Patrol, the threats to the 2026 mid-term elections, environmental rollbacks that deeply impact the Black community, and unchecked police brutality.
Our editorial in this issue warns us: “There is a great danger of underestimating the determination of the U.S. corporate elite to drive through this effort. We cannot rely on court rulings or upcoming elections to save us. We must organize now, not only for mass demonstrations and community networks against ICE violence, but to find our way to building a new working-class party through which we can organize our political defense on every plane and on every day.”
In this issue we also have articles on the Epstein files and the ruling class, the San Francisco teachers’ strike, and a review of the new album by U2.
The March–April 2026 edition of our newspaper is available in print and online as a pdf. Read the latest issue of our newspaper today with a free pdf download! As always, we appreciate any donations to help with the cost of printing.
Click on the image to read the paper or message us to get a hard copy:
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April 9 webinar: ‘Wars on the People’ — Repression and resistance at home and abroad
The UNITED LEFT PLATFORM, an alliance of revolutionary socialist organizations, invites you to an April 9 webinar with an activist panel on confronting and anti-immigrant terror and attacks on democratic rights at home, and U.S. imperial crimes around the world.
This roundtable discussion will represent some of the important experiences of the rising movements resisting the domestic and global rampages of U.S. imperialism under the Trump administration, with perspectives on how these struggles can become powerful, unified, and politically independent. From beating back ICE terror in Minneapolis to opposing the U.S.-Israeli wars on Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon, and the U.S. threats to Cuba and Latin America, we see the critical necessity of bringing the struggles together for the common purpose of collective liberation.
The speakers will discuss how the concrete experiences of May Day organizing can connect domestic resistance to MAGA authoritarianism to opposition to U.S. wars and imperialism as a whole. The panelists will give brief initial responses to focused strategic questions, followed by open discussion. JOIN US!
Thursday, April 9, 8 p.m. Eastern; 5 p.m. Pacific
SPEAKERS:
• Kip Hedges – school bus driver and longtime union activist in Minneapolis
• Avery Wear – Tempest, San Diego Socialists, LSAN
• Omid Rezaian – IMHO
• Dan Piper – Workers’ Voice, CT Civil Liberties Coalition
• Meg C – Speak Out Socialists
• Ashley Smith – VT Tempest Collective
CHAIR: Blanca Missé, Workers’ Voice
REGISTRATION INFORMATION:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R702vOe8QluM7Mha7LVF5g
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MAGA prepares a darker patriarchal order
By CHRISTINE MARIE
As the Trump administration unrolls a new imperialist war, working women must be prepared to fight a brutal gendered assault in the offing. In military actions like the war on Iran, the government daily burns up millions of dollars in fuel and destroyed weaponry, and moves quickly to get rid of non-military costs deemed expendable. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill set the pattern. Even before Washington had launched the war on Iran, the government had budgeted $1 trillion for war, while simultaneously cutting $1 trillion from funds previously won by working people for health, education, and housing support.
Now, with the cost of the Iran war approaching $1 billion a day, the MAGA forces are preparing to offload the costs of any social welfare benefits still intact onto the backs of individual working-class households.
How do the right-wing capitalist think tanks advise the government to do this? A deeply reactionary Jan. 8, 2026, Heritage Foundation report, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” lays it out in painful detail. This policy document, a pendant to Project 2025, suggests that, for the MAGA crowd, the recent restriction of access to abortion and the bans on gender-affirming care for the trans community are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their patriarchal goals.
“Saving the Family” argues that the Second Wave of women’s liberation and the 1964 War on Poverty were the beginning of the destruction of America. The women’s liberation movement, by legitimizing the desire of women to go to college and develop skills for the kind of employment that would give them financial independence from the family, is here deemed a monstrous perversion. Because of that movement, they argue, women were less likely to get married early, and more likely to delay childbearing. The struggle for basic support for poor women, the authors claim, with obvious racist bias, was equally destructive, leading to families without fathers and dire social decay.
The solution, “Saving the Family” argues, is the restoration of a society anchored by a nuclear family, composed of one cis-gender man and one cis-gender woman. This patriarchal unit must function as a patriotic core of society, training wives and children to respect authority, imbuing a work ethic that will reduce the need for government social support, and producing warriors. To “save” this “family,” the report proposes “Manhattan Project” scale social engineering that includes cutting almost all supports going to unmarried women, eliminating student loans for college, providing cash stipends to women who bear children while in their 20s, delegitimizing “unmarried coupling” and no-fault divorce, and getting rid of surrogacy and gay marriage.
“Saving the Family” signals the opening of the most massive assault on the rights of women and the LGBTQI community since the Nazi era. Working women and their allies must be ready to create a fightback anchored by mass demonstrations in the streets, concerted labor action at points of production where it really hurts the bosses, and a decision to stay independent of the electoral machinations of the big business parties.
(Photo) Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
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Remembering Country Joe: A musician who sang for peace and justice
Joseph “Country Joe“ McDonald, a key figure of the psychedelic music scene in San Francisco and the 1960s counterculture, died of complications from Parkinson’s on March 7, 2026.
From the start to the end, Country Joe was a man of the left. He was born on Jan. 1, 1942, the son of two active members of the Communist Party USA, who named him in honor of Joseph Stalin. He grew up in Los Angeles in the post-war years and was exposed both to various progressive causes as well as the pervasive repression of the left during the McCarthy period. His father was brought before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and lost his job for his support of communist policies in the 1950s. His parents played a big role in his political development from childhood, but also left him alienated from his peers as a child due to the social stigma of these beliefs during the repressive McCarthyist Era.
Immediately after graduating high school, Joe enlisted in the Navy and served as an air traffic controller in Japan during the early 1960s. Upon his honorable discharge and return to the U.S., he got involved in the lively music and political scenes in California at that time. He published a small magazine as a student at Los Angeles State College called Et Tu, where his political beliefs quickly expressed themselves. He published the lyrics to one of his early compositions, “Epitaph for Three,” which memorialized three civil rights activists who were murdered in Mississippi during 1964.
McDonald then moved to Berkeley, Calif., where he got involved with the burgeoning folk music scene and intervened in numerous causes including civil rights, justice for migrant farmworkers, the free speech movement, and opposing the embargo against Cuba. McDonald formed another magazine there called Rag Baby, which combined political issues with music. The politics, magazines, and music were a joint endeavor for McDonald. He performed alongside other musicians at a variety of local protests and rallies, promoted the magazine and self-produced music at these rallies, and wrote songs that connected with the attitudes of the protesters.
Country Joe & the Fish
His most important musical endeavor came together in 1965 when he formed the band “Country Joe and the Fish.” The name for the band came from an obscure allusion to a quote by Mao Zedong that a revolutionary is a “fish who swims among the sea of the people.” Country Joe and the Fish, like so many other artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, made the transition from traditional folk music to electrified psychedelic rock music, and the band became one of the lynchpins of that scene, which shaped rock music across the world. The rise of both the counterculture and the New Left created a receptive audience for the new band.
CJ and the Fish made their greatest wave when they put out their track “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag.” This song presented an absolutely scathing critique of the Vietnam War, paired with a psychedelic reinterpretation of a ragtime theme. The instrumental has an upbeat and nostalgic feel combined with abrasive distorted electric guitar that undermines its sentimental and patriotic tone—very similarly to Jimi Hendrix’s reinterpretation of the Star Spangled Banner.
The instrumental detournement matches perfectly with the lyrical content of the song, which presents itself as a military recruiting pitch but is really a dark satire of the brutality of imperialist war. But unlike so many of the other Vietnam antiwar anthems, it is not a mellow call to give peace a chance. It moves beyond liberal pacifism to offer a biting critique of how working-class lives are destroyed for the sake of profit and political power for the capitalist class. The song exposes how militarism, anti-communism, imperialism, and capitalism are interconnected.
While the track didn’t top the charts, it became one of the most popular songs among anti Vietnam war activists. Beyond politicized circles, the legacy of the song has endured thanks to Joe’s acoustic performance of the piece at the singularly famous Woodstock Festival of 1969.
Both in CJ and the Fish and in his solo career in the following decades, Country Joe wrote and performed songs that critiqued systems of oppression from the left and sought to connect with the mass movements of his time.
The counterculture and the left
The 1960s counterculture is popularly remembered as a time of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” A minority—but a significant minority—of youth in the United States were searching for a different way of living, thinking, and doing that rejected the reactionary social and political mores that were common during the previous decade.
The consensus for this generation was progressive, though the counterculture, despite its affinity with leftist politics, sometimes found friction with it. Much of the organized left (often rightly) saw these youth subcultures such as the “hippies” as utopian, escapist, and eminently middle-class in outlook. A segment of the counterculture certainly focused on free living, fantastical spirituality, and hedonism while neglecting a confrontation with the stark political realities of the time.
But the counterculture had many faces, and Country Joe represented one of its most socially aware. McDonald and his band were paragons of the anti-establishment ethos of the counterculture, and their psychedelic music is one of its purest reflections. Yet, instead of escaping into pure fantasy, they used the counterculture as a conduit for radical politics. The 1960s were a time of both profound social changes and deep radicalization across the world. Country Joe was one of those figures best able to bring together these distinct, but intertwined, processes.
From the start to the end of his life, Country Joe was a fighter for equality and justice for all. He saw himself as “moral support” for good causes. Far beyond the upheavals of the 1960s, McDonald continued to use his music to support progressive causes. He continued to participate in antiwar, environmental, and other progressive movements into the 21st century.
The best way we can memorialize Country Joe is to continue his work and the work of so many others like him. Both as organizers and as artists, we need to swim like fish among the people, engage and confront the realities of our time, and develop the fight for a better world. These are solemn tasks, but as Country Joe showed us, they can be fun too.
Photo: Country Joe sings at the Woodstock festival in 1969. (Michael Fredericks / The Image Works)
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Trump’s environmental rollbacks hurt the Black community
By BRIAN CRAWFORD
Upon returning to power, Donald Trump wasted no time in resuming his environmental destruction. With a stroke of his felt-tip pen, Trump revoked Executive Order 12898, the “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations.
”As a result, no longer will the federal government address racial discrimination in environmental policy considerations.”
The Environmental Protection Agency closed the Office of Environmental Justice, as if to add another exclamation point to the administration’s racist polices. It allows corporations to continue to pollute in the Black community unchallenged. Even with significant evidence, Black communities rarely have received anything approximating justice, whether Trump was in the White House or not.
As was the case in his first term, Trump eliminated or weakened nearly a hundred environmental regulations, according to the Sierra Club. One of the more significant was the “endangerment finding” that provided the legal basis for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions are the cause of the warming of the planet.
Regarding the “endangerment finding,” Samantha Gross and Ryan Beane write in a commentary for the Brookings institute: “They want to remove it root and branch in a way that will make it more difficult for future administrations to reverse.” The president and his administration argue that regulations hinder growth and place undue burdens on business.
EPA’s “endangerment finding” has its origins in the Supreme Court’s 2006-2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA. The agency argued that the Clean Air Act did not mandate it to enforce regulations to address climate change, and that causal links between global heating and greenhouse gases had not been established. The agency lost that argument; the court affirmed that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, qualify as air pollutants.
Two years later, the EPA accepted the scientific belief that greenhouse gases were health hazards and contributing to the climate crisis. In January 2026, however, the EPA reversed that finding, removing the legal basis for regulating emissions from vehicles. Previously, in 2012, the majority of the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. EPA that the agency does not have the authority under the Clean Air Act to broadly limit greenhouse gas emissions in a way that would change the country’s power system.
The EPA “has a deplorable record of responding to discrimination complaints” (Equal Justice Initiative: “Environmental Injustice in the Black Belt”). In 2018, it dismissed a complaint against Alabama’s Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) for failure to address the effect of toxic and radioactive materials on poor Black communities. When the ADEM rescinded its civil rights policy, this became the basis for the EPA to dismiss the complaint. ADEM’s abolition of its policy raises the question: what environment is it managing? The same could be asked of EPA.
The city of Uniontown, Ala., (predominantly Black) has multiple environmental hazards that include coal ash containing arsenic and radioactive material, and numerous sources of water contamination. That should be more than enough evidence to pursue the case.
Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” which encompasses the region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is so named for its high rates of cancer. In 2023, Jeff Landry who served as Attorney General (now governor of Louisiana) sued to stop EPA from investigating environmental racism. The agency dropped the case. Governor Landry is a key ally of the state’s oil and gas industry.
St John the Baptist Parish exemplifies the racial history of the U.S. “As the regional economy has shifted from chains and plantation slavery to smokestacks and petrochemical plants,” the descendants of the former slaves who founded the cities bear the brunt (capitalbnews.org, “The Court Ruling that Guaranteed a Future of Environmental Racism”). In August 2024 a Trump-appointed federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana ruled that the Department of Justice could not enforce the disparate impact requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The courts as an avenue to fight against environmental discrimination is becoming a much narrower street.
These communities must fight to survive. Scientific research established links between climate change and hazards to human health, as well as a correlation between the geographical proximity of predominantly Black communities near polluting industries and high rates of disease.
Exposure to particulate matter (PM2.5) is a significant contributor to a wide range of illnesses. PM2.5 are tiny particles, often emitted from oil and gasoline emissions, that enter the body through the respiratory system and into the bloodstream. Black communities are disproportionately affected by this exposure and are more likely to die than other racial and ethnic groups, according to a study conducted by Stanford Medicine. Proximity to polluting industries was the primary contributing factor to higher rates of disease. African Americans have historically been trapped in location populated by refineries, and other industrial polluters.
African American communities “suffer more from storms and flood events, extreme heat, infectious disease and disruptions to labor markets, all of which are occurring more frequently because of climate change” (clasp.org, “The Trump Administration, Earth Day and Environmental Racism”).
This is not a result of the neglect of one agency or even the malevolence of the government. It follows the logic of capitalist production. From primitive accumulation of capital, which snatched resources from native populations (and continues today), dispossession and displacement, forced labor, and the creations of ghettos and reservations all are features of capitalism. Affected communities are condemned to a slow death. They personify what is to come as the crisis becomes more acute. Trump is just the front man for this band of destroyers. He represents a system that extols the virtues of “creative destruction.” This is destruction for the sake of economic growth.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” wrote Edward Abby. To save the patient, radical medicine is necessary. Defeating environmental racism is a victory for the entire working class. We must demand an end to the system that like a metastatic cell dooms us and the planet.
(Top photo) Julie Dermansky. (Below) James Jordan.
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Epstein and the unity of the ruling class
By COCO SMYTH
Since the Miami Herald’s expose, “Perversion of Justice,” brought knowledge of the Epstein conspiracy to the mainstream in November 2018, we have entered a period in which elements of the most lurid conspiracy theories are revealed to be realities. Jeffrey Epstein, once referred to glowingly as a mysterious “New York financier,” was revealed to be the organizer of a massive pedophilia and sex trafficking operation servicing many of the most powerful figures of international capitalism—from politicians to CEOs and intellectuals.
Though the ruling class has tried to kill and bury the Epstein case through all possible means, its reverberations keep pulling it back up to the surface in all its grotesqueness. The shocking details of the case would have attracted mass interest in themselves, but the depth of the affair and the way in which it implicates and exposes the ruling class have ensured that it won’t leave public consciousness.
The Epstein case has incited a protracted crisis of legitimacy in which the facade of bourgeois society has slipped and revealed the true nature of the system to millions. It has exposed the linkages of capitalists across the world despite supposedly irreconcilable national and political divides. It has revealed that the ruling class stands above the law, and the principles of bourgeois law and order are nothing but a weapon against working and oppressed people and a shield for the political and economic elites. It has shown that the capitalists are willing not only to commit heinous crimes, but have the power and the will to cover them up.
The decadence and depravity of the ruling circles confirm the patriarchal and oppressive core of contemporary capitalist life. For the socialist movement, it is vital we both connect with the mass disillusionment incited by the waves of revelations, offer a framework for parsing their real significance and implications, and organize the outrage into effective resistance.
The state of the coverup
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump promised the speedy release of the Epstein files to throw a bone to his base and indict his Democratic opponents as participants and supporters of Epstein’s pedophilic sex trafficking ring. The Epstein case had already become a core element of the worldview of large swathes of Trump’s committed base, confirming to them how essential Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of the “deep state” really was.
During Trump’s first term, the popular QAnon conspiracy theory used the Epstein case as the rational kernel of a larger worldview that the world is presided over by a shadowy (Jewish) pedophile cabal, and Trump was on a secret mission to purge the government and society of these evildoers. The unhinged reactionary fantasy of QAnon only brought a minority of the Republican into active participation, yet many of its tenets seeped into the broader zeitgeist among the Trumpian base. Consequently, the deepening of the Epstein crisis and Trump’s undeniable connection to it have been one of the few things that have made Trump’s seemingly unassailable loyalty from his base waver.
Given this contradiction, the administration has fumbled incompetently for over a year trying every quick fix imaginable and failing to stop the legitimacy crisis. The start of Trump’s second term was accompanied by bold declarations by officials like Pam Bondi that all would soon be revealed. Mysteriously, they publicly walked back everything and claimed there was no Epstein list or files to disclose. Shortly thereafter, there was a big press event celebrating the disclosure of the files, when in reality documents that had already been released were just rereleased with more redactions than they had the first time.
Pressure mounted after this failed stunt and ultimately precipitated The Epstein Files Transparency Act. Signed on Nov. 19, 2025, the Act has put the Trump administration in a bind. Trump hoped for a party-line split to stymy the Act’s passage, but a large percentage of Republican representatives turned in favor of the Act. This brought the Act to Trump’s desk to be approved or rejected. If Trump allowed full disclosure, then the depth of his and many other ruling-class peoples’ associations with Epstein would be revealed to the world. If he didn’t disclose, then it would confirm to millions that he has something to hide and is covering for a pedophilic sex trafficking ring. Trump felt forced to sign, but hasn’t followed the letter of the law.
The government’s process of disclosure of the Epstein files has been just as incompetent and bungled as all the other phases of the crisis. Eventually, the administration finally released 3 million documents on Dec. 19, 2025, seemingly finally complying with the Disclosure Act. However, it was clear upon examination that there were excessive redactions, suggesting political reasons for the suppressed information. Even more galling, some survivors’ names were not redacted, opening them up to targeting and harassment. Furthermore, the 3 million documents released were not the full “Epstein files” demanded by the Transparency Act.
The administration had violated the Transparency Act, though there were no formal mechanisms to discipline or punish them. However, pressure continued to mount until the government was forced to release another 3 million documents in the next month.
The bitter struggle by the government to avoid disclosing the Epstein files has tarnished the reputation of the administration both nationally and internationally. It has even led Trump’s notoriously fanatical base to question why the man and the party who had demagogued about the case for so long suddenly had such cold feet.
The most obvious reason for the Trump regime’s vacillations is how implicated Trump is himself with Epstein. In the currently available documents, Trump’s name appears more than 38,000 times. There are many publicly available photos with the two together. Beyond that, it is very clear that Trump and Epstein were close associates, even friends. But there are even deeper considerations here than just for Trump to save his own hide..
What was Epstein’s operation?
Conspiracism has long been a major sideshow in the politics of the United States. For the most part, the conspiracy theories that animate the body politic tell us more about the segments of society that believe in them than reality—like the moon landing, the JFK assassination, or communist infiltration of American institutions. But sometimes the rumblings that the wider society dismisses as overactive imagination are just the early signs of a coming earthquake.
During the 1960s and ’70s, leftist organizers were confident that their organizations were being systematically undermined. This notion appeared as a farce to mainstream America, but the disclosure of COINTELPRO made it clear the problem was even greater than most activists had suspected. The disclosure of MKUltra, the CIA’s mind-control program, made many of the wackier conspiracy theories appear tame by comparison.
Today, with Epstein, a hundred conspiracy theories have bloomed. The three questions these theories tend to revolve around are: what was Epstein’s operation, what were his aims, and who did he serve?
On the first question, despite obfuscation by the U.S. government, it is clear that Jeffrey Epstein was the head of a large-scale sex trafficking ring servicing the ruling class. During the first Trump administration, the government estimated there were 100 victims of Epstein’s rings. After the investigation was expanded during the Biden presidency, that number was expanded to over 1000. Yet, both administrations have carefully avoided identifying whom the trafficking ring was for besides Epstein. The current government has repeatedly contended that Epstein created the sex trafficking ring solely to service himself, a notion that’s patently absurd given the scale of the operation and the clear links many elites have had with that side of his activities.
Beyond that, it is clear from the files that Epstein also had his hands in financial speculation and offered advice on these questions to the elites. This aspect has come to a head in England, where the former prince, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and Labour Party politician Peter Mandelson have been charged for exposing state secrets in financial discussion with Epstein. The exact nature of these activities and why Epstein was considered an expert on these questions by the capitalists remain unclear. No prominent politicians or capitalists have yet faced charges anywhere in the world for their participation in sex crimes in relation to Epstein.
This brings us to the question of Epstein’s aims in engaging in large-scale sex trafficking. The most popular theory is that Epstein was the head of a blackmailing operation that gathered compromising information on many of the most powerful actors in contemporary capitalism. Other explanations include that he was just an amoral libertine and hedonist or that he was providing a service in demand in ruling circles for the money; however, neither of these latter two speculations seem to fit the facts as we know them.
Finally, and most contentiously, there has been wide debate about whom Epstein served. Given how large his trafficking ring was and the many indicators that it was also the basis of a blackmail operation, many have wondered if Epstein was in the service of one government or another. For the most part, the U.S. government has avoided addressing this question, though recently they’ve been pushing the narrative that he was a Russian asset, a notion little evidenced by the available files or the network he cultivated. In popular consciousness, the most common assumptions are that he served the CIA or Mossad. This is a factual question and can only be confirmed by full disclosure of relevant information related to Epstein. Though this is a question of interest, it’s not particularly salient for either our understanding or practical response to the Epstein Affair.
Epstein and the unity of the ruling class
There are many important aspects of the Epstein Affair. To really understand its full implications, though, we have to understand cliques like Epstein’s in the context of international capitalism. It would be easy to fall into the conspiracist logic that the whole ruling class is a pedophile cabal operating behind the scenes of the formal structures of “democratic” capitalism on the basis of the Epstein case. In the opposite direction we can easily downplay just how much cliques like Epstein’s say about the capitalist class and its real mode of operation.
The way we square this circle is by examining the peculiar unity of the ruling class under international capitalism. The capitalists themselves like to make us believe that the ruling class is permanently factionalized along many different lines in the same ways they want the working class majority to be. They promote antagonisms around nationality, political party, race, gender, and economic interest. By maintaining the illusion of irreconcilable differences between different sectors of the ruling class, they dissolve the recognition among the masses that there is any ruling class at all. In this narrative, there are no common ruling-class interests and therefore practice; there is instead sectional differences and antagonism. These differences skew across class lines—a worker and a capitalist can both vote Democrat or identify America’s interest as their own interest.
The apparent sharpness of these intra-ruling class antagonisms leads to head-scratching and cognitive dissonance for those looking at the Epstein Affair. In reality, international capitalism is comprised of a “band of warring brothers,” as Marx described it. On the other hand, there are real conflicts between the ruling class. Capitalists are in competition over profit and seek to use the state for their own personal and sectional interests. This can be a struggle for existence for capitalists—if they lose out to other capitalists, they could lose their positions as capitalists themselves.
But the structural level of capitalism cuts against these antagonisms. The capitalist state brings together all the competing capitalists into an organization that mediates their internal squabbles and provides them the ability to unite to oppress the working masses. Without this unity, they could not organize society under their collective control and society would either be dominated by constant strife or transformed through a revolution bringing the masses to power.
But there are a thousand other smaller ways that the ruling class achieves its unity. Beyond the immediate and obvious reasons for the ruling class to participate in Epstein’s crimes, the whole affair is an exercise in building the unity the ruling class requires.
Epstein and Maxwell were experts at bringing together capitalists, politicians, and intellectuals and strengthening their bonds. The sex trafficking was not just a quirk. By participating in despicable acts together with impunity and simultaneously creating the potential to compromise themselves as individuals, these ruling-class elements are bound together. We see this same phenomenon on a smaller scale with the ubiquity of hazing in college fraternities or rituals in secret societies and elite organizations. Common participation and knowledge of each other’s crimes gives them a deep investment in each other despite their differences. We can see the evidence of this in how Trump has talked softly about another close Epstein associate, Bill Clinton, during the latest flare up of the Epstein crisis despite his previously apparently implacable struggle against the Clintons on the political terrain.
The maturing of the crisis has revealed the solidarity between the whole ruling class, which in normal times is obscured by the daily conflict over everyday political issues. Whether the Epstein crisis will pass by with little effect or end in real accountability will depend on whether the working class can exploit the current fractures the ruling class is working to smooth over.
Socialism against the Epstein class
The whole course of the Epstein saga has been a dark example of world capitalism at work. Impunity, exploitation, sexual coercion, and coverups are daily realities of life within class society. That there are Epsteins, Maxwells, and their elite clients is sadly nothing new. What is new is the knowledge of the real workings of the ruling class and the mass outrage of millions across the world. For socialists, it is our duty to connect with this righteous anger and channel it towards the struggle for justice.
Our immediate demands are for full transparency and for justice for the multitude of survivors of Epstein’s crimes. It is thanks to the advocacy of these survivors at great risk to themselves that Epstein’s apparatus and the ruling class’s support for it have been revealed in all their brutality. All the capitalists and politicians who sexually abused women and girls must face the legal consequences that the bourgeois justice system promises but rarely delivers on. Getting justice will depend on continued exposure of the already publicly known crimes and pressuring the system to reveal all the information they have hidden to protect the ruling class.
The method to secure justice is through organized struggle. It is clear that public knowledge of the crimes and mass outrage are insufficient to win justice. We are seeing movement in this direction, particularly in Ohio, where Les Wexner, one of Epstein’s primary backers resides. Concerted organization has begun to put the heat on Wexner. Local leftist organizations and students have called rallies demanding justice and the removal of Wexner’s name from the many buildings that are adorned with it. Most notably, the Ohio Nurses Association and the AFL-CIO called a rally outside Wexner Medical Center to expose Wexner. Bringing unions into the movement and organizing workers and the community to strengthen the calls for justice will be essential to get trials or any other measures implemented.
Beyond the immediate demands of the moment, the Epstein Affair calls on us to wage a systematic struggle against world capitalism as a whole. The patriarchy and impunity of the ruling class are endemic features of capitalism and can only be mitigated as long as capitalism itself hasn’t been eliminated. The complicity and coverups of Epstein’s ring extends through all wings of bourgeois politics from the right to the left—from the Republican Party, through the Democratic Party, to the UK Labour Party. We need an independent and radical working-class party, which is committed to exposing every crime perpetrated by the ruling class and which seeks to encourage mass struggle by the working class to wrest power from our oppressors and exploiters.
Today, the unbridled decadence of the ruling class is recognized by the masses. We must turn this knowledge into action to win justice for the survivors and achieve a world where a Jeffrey Epstein is an impossibility. That world is socialism.
(Photo) Trump and Epstein. (Netflix)
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Freedom for Leqaa Kordia: The Palestinian activist Trump has held for a year
Persecuted for protesting the genocide in Gaza, an immigrant worker nears one year in an ICE detention center. The case exposes the criminalization of Palestinian resistance in the United States.
By MAURICE M.
On March 13, Palestinian immigrant worker Leqaa Kordia, 33, a U.S. resident, will mark exactly one year since her detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and given a political prison sentence disguised as an immigration status case. She remains incarcerated in a detention center in Texas.
Leqaa is originally from East Jerusalem and worked as a waitress in Paterson, N.J. She supported her family while fighting to regularize her immigration situation.
Leqaa’s crime, in the government’s eyes, was participating in a peaceful protest near Columbia University in April 2024 against the genocide committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip. She was arrested at the time, but the charges were soon dropped. She was arrested again in March 2025, after going to a DHS office to deal with her paperwork.
Many of Leqaa’s family members were killed in the Israeli offensive—which receives military, diplomatic, and political funding from the U.S. government. Her story exposes one of the cruelest faces of the current Trump regime: the domestic persecution of those who dare to denounce the barbarities that American imperialism sponsors in the Middle East. Arresting activists who fight for Palestinian liberation is the expression, within U.S. borders, of the imperialist policy to subordinate Gaza as a colony—first through fire, then through the silence imposed on those who protest and those who resist.
In February of this year, Leqaa suffered a seizure, fainted, and hit her head. She spent three days hospitalized—shackled to the bed, unable to speak with her family. ICE hid her whereabouts from her family and legal defense. “They refused even to remove the chains when I went to the bathroom or took a shower,” she told The Guardian, in an article published on Feb. 13. “I felt like an animal,” she said in testimony broadcast by Democracy Now! on Feb. 16.
Leqaa remains behind bars. Even after an immigration judge authorized her release on a $20,000 bond—an amount her family was ready and willing to pay—ICE appealed the same day and kept her imprisoned. The official justification points to her having sent money to relatives in Gaza. In the distorted logic of the Department of Homeland Security, this would make her a “Hamas supporter.” The accusation was dismissed by the judge on the case, Tara Naselow-Nahas. In her decision, the magistrate stated there is no evidence in the record that Leqaa supports Hamas or is a member of a terrorist organization, concluding that the court cannot consider sending money to a relative in Palestine as constituting support for terrorism.
Trump wants to silence activists in the country
The persecution of Leqaa is not an isolated case. Trump uses the immigration system to criminalize international solidarity with Palestine and also to instill fear among U.S. working people, who can feel intimidated when seeing activists from various movements being harassed or arrested.
The Trump administration has turned ICE into a political repression arm. Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rasha Alawieh, Rümeysa Öztürk, Sarah Shaw—dozens of pro-Palestine activists, many of them students and immigrant workers—have already been detained, threatened with deportation, or expelled from the country. Many others now live in hiding, afraid of being next.
The Trump regime is the political expression of U.S. capital in crisis, facing inter-imperialist competition with China. To try to discipline the working class internally, the government needs to increase the degree of repression. ICE is its military and political tool of coercion, used to sow fear and criminalize any dissenting voice.
Unify the struggle for democratic freedoms
The campaign to free Leqaa has gained prominence, especially because we know she is not alone; other activists for the Palestinian cause are currently being persecuted. But Leqaa’s release will not come from appeals to the government’s goodwill, or any disposition from bourgeois judges, or from the tepid opposition of “liberals” who choose to remain silent before Trump’s repressive escalation. It will come from the independent mobilization of the masses.
Working people have already signaled the path in the Minneapolis struggles, when they took to the streets and confronted the state apparatus that murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Strikes, occupations, marches—these are the methods that build collective resistance capable of halting the brutal repression underway. Every day, new cases emerge: Palestinians, Latin Americans, students, Black workers—all turned into targets for expressing opinions that displease the man in the White House.
The Trump regime wants to make an example of every dissident. It wants to demoralize them, isolate them, break them physically—to implant fear in a population that is beginning to awaken and oppose his policy of war against the country’s oppressed. Freeing them, therefore, is more than an act of individual justice; it is a key step in the political struggle against the authoritarianism growing in this country.
Leqaa Kordia must be freed—and with her, all political prisoners of this government. Not one step back in solidarity with the Palestinian people! No retreat before the ongoing barbarism! Workers’ Voice unconditionally supports the liberation of Leqaa Kordia and all those politically persecuted by the Trump regime.
Photo: Hamzah Abushaban
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“Board of Peace”: A mockery in the face of genocide against Palestine
By M.A. AL-GHARIB
Over four months into the (in reality, non-existent) “ceasefire” in Gaza, Israel continues its genocidal campaign to drive all Palestinians out of the strip. In spite of the near-disappearance of Palestine from daily news in the West—supplanted in the headlines by the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and Lebanon—the Israeli murder machine continues to kill Palestinians. The Israeli invasion forces have slaughtered at least 586 Gazans since the beginning of the “ceasefire” last October; this is in addition to the (official number of) 72,000 dead since Oct. 7, 2023. As the Palestinian lawyer and human rights campaigner Diana Buttu points out, these figures are in reality a huge underestimate.
Israeli forces are also destroying Palestinian schools, homes, and buildings, along with confining Palestinians into shrinking areas inside the “yellow line” that Israel has implemented to cut into the pre-Oct. 7 Gaza boundary. Gazans also continue to experience a severe humanitarian crisis due to the Israeli blockade. With over 81 percent of buildings bombed and no clear plans for reconstruction, Gazans still live in tents and spend their days digging through rubble to find the dead.
Buttu also adds that over 9300 Palestinians are currently imprisoned in the West Bank, including 350 children, and 3300 held without charges. More than 1000 of these are hostages from Gaza, detained under harsh conditions, including 80 medical professionals. Exact numbers, however, are hard to come by as Israel withholds them.
“Board of Peace”
It is in this context that Trump and a handful of US clients inaugurated the “Board of Peace.” Those who agreed to join are exclusively either leaders of authoritarian states or right-wing politicians. Traditional U.S. allies, such as Western European nations, have thus far refused invitations. As Mouin Rabbani acidly put it, this mockery is presented in grand language but with no concrete details. For example, despite their public displays of sycophancy, none of Trump’s allies actually intend to send troops or financial support to Gaza. The BOP is nothing more than a “big shiny object” to celebrate Trump.
Politically, the BOP’s aims are twofold. First, the broader aim is for the Board challenge and ideally replace the United Nations and, in turn, create an instrument for Trump and his family to accumulate wealth and consolidate power beyond his presidency. Second, it is to shift attention on Gaza away from the reality of a political struggle for national self-determination to one framed as a “humanitarian crisis” solvable by aid and reeducation. In other words, this means erasing the settler colonial and genocidal reality.
The Board represents the “second phase” of the Trump Initiative for Gaza, following a “first phase” marked, as mentioned, by ongoing genocide, no ceasefire, worsening humanitarian crisis, a continued Israeli military presence in Gaza, and an accelerated West Bank colonization.
Erasure of Palestinians
No mention was made at the inauguration of any of these realities. To add insult to injury, the U.S., one of two main perpetrators of the genocide, invited Israel, the other perpetrator, as a founding member. At the same time, the Board has no Palestinian members. Instead, the Trump administration has established formal a two-way “communication” with the Palestinian Authority—a body lacking legitimacy and widely loathed by the Palestinian people.
What was conspicuously missing were any of the main Palestinian demands: Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank, respect for international resolutions on Palestine, and any mention of Palestinian rights to self-determination. Nothing about the Board limits Israel’s ability to resume mass violence at any time. The whole steaming mess is, indeed, worse than nothing. It is a clear example of Trump-MAGA’s larger project, to replace established international law with a “might makes right” paradigm.
Potemkin peace plan, bleak future for Palestinians
The Board envisions Gaza’s governance to be managed by the “National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG),” which is led by the so-called Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (CoGAT/BoP). This body is in reality under Israeli control, with, at most, limited Palestinian representation and no actual Palestinian power. The NCAG is under strict orders to avoid blaming Israel for ceasefire violations. It is part of the broader US – Israeli agenda to prevent any political or organizational revival in Gaza.
It also helps secure the ground for Kushner’s “master plan,” a redesigned Gaza with a coastal tourist strip and inland housing and industrial zones. Even this is probably fantastical. As discussed in a recent interview with Jewish Currents, former Clinton and Obama Middle East policy expert Robert Malley predicted that, under the Board’s vision, a normal life in Gaza would only be possible well into the 22nd century.
“Greater Israel” and “Western Civilization”
Days before this article went to the editorial team, the United States and Israel viciously attacked Iran in a bombing campaign all over the Middle Eastern country. Along with the depraved slaughter of young girls, teachers, and staff at a school—an unspeakable act of barbarity—the U.S.-Israeli campaign has killed the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, along with a number of leading government and military officials.
Barely more than a week after the inauguration ceremony of the Board of Peace, the attack on Iran exposed the truth behind all the words of praise for Trump. Like the Gaza genocide, the kidnapping of Maduro, and the escalating strangulation of Cuba, the bombing of Iran shows the true logic of the emerging “new Western century” about which Rubio—to a standing ovation—lectured the European leaders at last month’s Munich Security Conference.
Around the same time, Mike Huckabee, the leading U.S. diplomat in Israel, reiterated to the far-right influencer Tucker Carlson the U.S. view that Israel has a “Biblical right” to all the land between the Nile and Euphrates Rivers—“Greater Israel.” “Let that sink in,” writes the political scientist and Middle East specialist Trita Parsi. “Huckabee wants Israel to annex parts of Egypt, Turkey, Saudi, and Iraq, as well as all of Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.”
Gaza was the first act. We are now firmly in the middle of the play: “The new Western Century” is one in which nuclear-armed Western powers no longer make any pretense to legality of the previous imperialist “rules-based order.” The U.S. and Israel, the world’s leading far-right powers, are not the only ones to blame. All of the major Western powers—from the UK to Germany to France and Italy, and a good number of non-Western ones too, principally Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries—are complicit. Now, all working-class and oppressed peoples of the world—our planet’s vast majority—are on notice: You either submit to the U.S. and Israel, or you will be annihilated.
The blood-soaked death machine of U.S. imperialism is more open than ever in showing us the future it has in store for all of us—workers, the young, oppressed communities, and anyone who rejects fascism and slavery. It is past time to unite as broad a mass movement a possible to fight and resist this future.
Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP
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International Women’s Day statement of the IWL-FI – March 8, 2026
For an internationalist, class-conscious, anticapitalist March 8 and solidarity among peoples
By WOMEN’S SECRETARIAT of the INTERNATIONAL WORKERS LEAGUE – FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
This March 8th—International Working Women’s Day—we raise our voices as part of the global working class against the imperialist capitalist system that is responsible for producing exploitation and oppression on a global scale.
Capitalism is not just a regime of exploitation of the workforce. It sustains itself by fomenting sexism and all forms of oppression to divide our class, intensify super-exploitation, and preserve the privileges of a parasitic minority. The oppression of women is not an archaic remnant or a moral deviation: it is part of the very functioning of the system.
Job insecurity, double shifts, unemployment, low wages, and informality are the result of the system’s architecture. Austerity measures, relocations, company closures, and layoffs due to economic crisis and the incorporation of new technologies into production affect us disproportionately because we are a precarious and disposable workforce.
The increase in femicides, domestic violence, harassment at work, the commodification of bodies, and widespread impunity shows that, in the logic of profit, the lives of working women are worth less than market stability. We are overburdened with tasks of social reproduction when states cut rights and services such as health and education, where the workforce is predominantly female; we are overexploited in the workplace; we are abused in our homes and neighborhoods; and when we respond, we face an institutional apparatus that protects the powerful.
Along with this, capitalism also means the destruction of nature. Women suffer especially from the environmental catastrophe that is deepening in step with the capitalist crisis, despite the promises of governments all over the world to address it. We are the first to suffer from disease, unemployment, and social violence that intensifies with environmental collapse, and that is why we are also at the forefront of resistance against environmental destruction.
The crisis of the world order and imperialist rearmament
The global capitalist crisis and crisis of the world order, which is concentrated in the dispute between the United States as the hegemonic imperialist power and China as an emerging imperialist power, is also expressed in an unprecedented drive for rearmament and an arms race by all the imperialist powers.
This already constitutes a threat to the peoples of the world by itself, but the increase in military spending is also being carried out by dismantling already meager public services, which are fundamental for the working class as a whole, but whose destruction has a special impact on us women.
The far right and the imperialist offensive
This scenario is aggravated by the advance of the far right throughout the world, an expression of a reactionary surge in the face of capitalist crisis. Openly authoritarian governments attack the basic democratic rights of women and all oppressed people. In the United States, the Trump administration epitomizes this offensive: it combines misogyny, racism, and xenophobia with attacks on labor rights; it attacks abortion rights and the self-determination of transgender people; and it makes immigrants a permanent target of persecution and political blackmail.
The escalation against Venezuela, Iran, and the so-called “peace” plan for Palestine reveal the real content of this policy: to reinforce imperialist domination, deny the self-determination of peoples, and deepen wars, blockades, and occupations, as in Gaza and the Donbas (Ukraine), which are transformed into concentration camps, brutally targeting the working class, especially women and children.
Mass deportations, militarization, and the closure of borders and detention centers, both in the United States and in Europe, reveal a capitalism that openly resorts to state violence to discipline entire peoples and expand exploitation.The class-collaborationist governments and their false alternatives
But the far right is not advancing alone. Bourgeois governments that present themselves as “progressive” or “democratic” are not a strategic alternative. They administer the same social order, preserve private ownership of the major means of production, guarantee payments to bankers, and maintain agreements with or between imperialist powers. They implement fiscal adjustments, cut social policies, and make public services precarious while talking about equality.
For working women, this means fewer daycare centers, fewer protections against violence, greater domestic overload, and more economic dependence. These governments celebrate symbolic dates while keeping intact the structures that produce femicide, hunger, and unemployment. When the political crisis deepens, their priority is to contain popular mobilization and preserve the stability of the regime. Class collaboration does not defeat the far right, but rather paves the way for its strengthening.
Power, trafficking, and impunity: from sexual exploitation to elite networks
Nor can we ignore the direct role of elites in the global sex exploitation industry. The scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein exposed to the world a network connecting tycoons, politicians, and high-ranking imperialist representatives in schemes of trafficking and abuse of girls and women. This was not an isolated case, but the visible tip of a mechanism rooted in the structure of capitalist power.
International trafficking of women and children, forced prostitution, and private circuits of sexual exploitation move billions and operate under the protection of states and institutions. The impunity surrounding these cases reflects a judicial system that protects those at the top and selectively punishes those at the bottom. For working-class and poor women—especially migrants, Black women, and young women in precarious situations—this structure means constant vulnerability, economic coercion, and ongoing violence. Capital turns our bodies into commodities, either as cheap labor or as direct objects of profit in the industry of violence.
Against the illusions of bourgeois feminism and feminist separatism
Faced with this reality, proposals proliferate that promise emancipation without breaking with the system. Institutional feminist currents and corporate inclusion policies attempt to reduce inequality to a question of representation. They advocate for more women in government and on corporate boards, but do not question the class character of these structures. They celebrate the individual advancement of a few while the majority continues to be subjected to super-exploitation.
Other currents shift the focus of the struggle to an abstract opposition between men and women, deepening the fragmentation of the working class and obscuring the antagonism between exploiters and exploited. We do not deny the need for the autonomous organization of working women to confront sexism within and outside our own ranks. On the contrary, it is essential. But it must be anchored in class independence and a socialist perspective, not in adaptation to the regime or in replacing the struggle against capital with fragmented disputes based on personal identity.
Women’s liberation will not come from integration into this system or from the humanization of its institutions. It will come from destroying the material bases of oppression: private ownership of the major means of production, the bourgeois state, and imperialist domination.
Class independence and socialist revolution
We reaffirm: there is no progressive solution that maintains this system of functioning. The emancipation of working women will be the work of the independent mobilization of the working class, the building of its own organizations, and the conscious struggle for a revolutionary transformation of society.
We call on women workers, peasants, migrants, racialized women, precarious youth, and unemployed women to strengthen their unions, movements, and revolutionary parties; to demand that the struggle against sexism be organically linked to the general struggle against capital; to confront both the far right and the governments that administer the same policies with different rhetoric.
We defend a program that attacks the material bases of oppression: we want jobs with rights and decent wages; reduction of the workday without reduction in wages; socialization of domestic work through quality public services; effective combating of violence against women with resources under social control; unrestricted right to legal and safe abortion; full rights for migrants and LGBTQI+ people; breaking with imperialism and the payment of debts that bleed the people dry.
No conquest will be stable as long as economic and political power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. We link every immediate demand to the strategic perspective of overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society based on the democratic planning of the economy under the control of the working class.
This March 8, we reaffirm its internationalist character, and that is why we send our class solidarity to all women who are fighting. To the Ukrainian women workers who are fighting Putin’s invasion not just on the front lines and in the rearguard, but are also fighting the sexism and anti-worker measures of their government. To the Palestinian women in their heroic resistance against Zionist genocide and Trump’s false peace plan. To the Iranian women who are confronting the oppressive regime of the ayatollahs and imperialist military attacks. To the women workers in Cuba and Venezuela who repudiate the blackmail, threats, and intervention of the United States while remaining on the front lines in defense of democratic rights and dignified living conditions for their people.
If oppression is global, our resistance must be too. From factories to schools, from the ghettos and favelas to the countryside, we raise the same banner: class independence, solidarity among peoples, and socialist revolution.
We don’t want to merely survive in this system. We want to defeat it.
Long live March 8!
Long live internationalism!
Long live the struggle of working women!
Down with capitalism and imperialism!
For socialism and liberation!
First published here in Spanish by the IWL-FI
Photo: March 8 during the 1917 Russian Revolution.
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Trump threatens to disrupt congressional elections
By JOHN LESLIE
Many activists and observers have predicted that Trump will attempt to subvert the 2026 midterm elections in order to thwart the Democrats’ election chances. The Washington Post has reported that people around Trump “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” While the China claim is not credible, Trump could use this as the basis for what would essentially be a self-coup, allowing him to deepen his authoritarian turn.
Since retaking the White House, Trump has launched military attacks on Iran and Venezuela, commenced an assault on civil liberties, undermined due process, attacked union rights, sought to dismantle the “administrative state. Trump’s anti-immigrant onslaught includes the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an unaccountable national political police with a budget larger than some countries’ militaries.
Working-class people are still suffering from high consumer prices and an uncertain jobs market. While the stock market is doing well, we are experiencing what some economists are calling a “jobless boom.” Meanwhile, Trump has been battered by controversy and scandal. He has faced questions about his role in the Epstein sex trafficking scandal and his popularity ratings have hit rock bottom.
Trump: “I’ll get impeached!”
The Democratic Party has tried to make excuses for its weak response to Trump’s reactionary offensive by declaring that a victory in the midterm elections of 2026 will be essential to its efforts to stop Trump. Speaking to a House Republican Retreat in January, Trump said, “You (have) got to win the midterms because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”
In this context, Trump has doubled down on his posturing regarding election integrity and has repeated false claims of electoral fraud while presenting little actual evidence of illegal voting.
The Justice Department has demanded the voter rolls of almost every state. According to the Brennan Center, “At least 47 states and Washington, DC, have received requests for their complete voter registration lists. Most states have provided a publicly available version (which does not include Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers) or have not provided the voter registration lists at all. The DOJ has sued Washington, DC, and 24 states for refusing to provide their statewide voter registration lists with driver’s license and Social Security numbers … cases in California, Michigan, and Oregon have been dismissed.”
Despite claims by Trump and his minions, voter fraud in the U.S. is very rare. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Heritage Foundation says that, based on 30 years of data, across which 32 elections were held, only 39 cases of voter fraud were identified out of over 100 million ballots cast in those elections.
Rhetoric from Trump and his supporters has increased the fear that he may try to steal the midterm elections or use force to intimidate voters. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon suggested the use of ICE agents to “surround” polling places on election day and on Feb. 18, Trump suggested sending National Guard troops to Atlanta, saying, “We could take care of Atlanta so fast.” Guard troops remain in DC, Memphis, and New Orleans—all cities with significant Black populations.
Further, Trump has called on the GOP to take over or “nationalize” elections in 15 states. Some have raised the alarm that voting machines could be seized in November—just as Trump’s spy chief, Tulsi Gabbard, did in Puerto Rico in February. Trump told The New York Times in January that he regrets not seizing the machines in swing states in 2020.
The SAVE Act
The so-called SAVE Act is another step towards the disenfranchisement of eligible voters through stricter voter ID requirements, restrictions on voter registration drives, the possible reduction of early voting days, restrictions on mail-in voting, and the purge of voter rolls will impact constituencies most likely to vote for Democrats; Black voters and women. Since passage of the SAVE Act has stalled, Trump has tried to get the same results by executive order.
Some Democrats in the House voted for the SAVE Act. The ineffectiveness of the Democrats as an opposition has been demonstrated repeatedly. Since Trump’s return, the Democrats track record has been one of acquiescence coupled with oppositional rhetoric. For example, the Democrats have criticized ICE enforcement as heavy-handed and violent but have refused to vote to disband ICE.
Why defend the elections against the right?
All the rights working people have in terms of union rights, free speech and assembly are under attack. This is a bipartisan effort that began under Biden, but has deeper roots in the so-called War on Terror (WoT). The WoT meant the growth and consolidation of the national security state. This includes the formation and expansion of ICE as a national political police force. The Democrats helped build ICE and will now only commit to “reforming” it. But body cameras and badges will not address the fundamental institutional problem.
As socialists, we have no illusions about bourgeois elections. We understand that elections do not fundamentally change anything. No reforms won through elections are permanent as long as capitalist parties control the political system. We also understand that the two major parties, which are both capitalist political institutions, can never serve the interests of the oppressed and exploited. We disagree with the notion that socialists can capture or realign the Democratic Party. By assimilating themselves into the Democratic Party, radicals must necessarily adapt to that party.
Yet elections are a basic democratic right, which needs to be protected. Working-class and oppressed peoples need our own political party—a party that leads the struggle every day of the year in workplaces, in the street, and in elections.
Elections alone will not stop Trump from instituting his reactionary program or from trying to steal the election. The struggle ahead will require working-class methods—strikes, boycotts, factory or workplace occupations and, importantly, united-front mass actions built by the unions and other popular organizations.
There has been resistance in the streets to Trump’s repression and anti-immigrant crackdown, first in Los Angeles, DC, and Chicago, and then in Minneapolis. We can learn from these protests—and take even further steps. Building a broad popular movement against Trump and authoritarianism requires that we build a movement on a democratic foundation with popular assemblies in workplaces and neighborhoods. Ultimately, we need a broad-based congress of labor and its allies among the oppressed to mobilize working people nationwide.
Photo: Patrick Semanski
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Feds and local police, one and the same
By ERWIN FREED
Three thousand federal agents tasked with terrorizing Minneapolis are said to be on the path towards withdrawal. Meanwhile, Wired and other outlets report that ICE is purchasing new or expanding bureaucratic office spaces and their network of concentration camps “at breakneck speeds.” The spectacle of the Fed’s occupation of Minneapolis obscures immigration enforcement operations all over the country, and also clarifies basic questions for working class and oppressed communities to understand our terrain of struggle. In particular, the actions of police and the Democratic Party from top to bottom are exposing who exactly these organizations work for.
Kieran Frazier Knutson, president of CWA 7250 in Minneapolis put it clearly in a Facebook post: “[T]he mayor, the governor, and other officials—described ICE as “an occupation” who they said should ‘get the fuck out,’ but actually began working with ICE in an ‘unprecedented level of cooperation’ including specifically protecting ICE agents and the Whipple Federal Building from the resistance.
“I saw with my own eyes MPD and Hennepin County Sheriffs protect ICE’s flank while ICE fired hundreds of rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades at the resistance in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Alex Pretti. The MPD and Sheriffs Dept. later opened a corridor (using mace, tear gas, and “non-lethal” ammo, themselves) for the ICE killers to escape.”
These instances of collaboration between Democratic Party officials and local and state police, and the Feds are no accident. The Democratic Party is completely integrated with the ruling class’s repressive apparatus. Local police are, in reality, the big capitalists’ strongest and most active foot soldiers. The vast majority of the 1300+ annual reported police murders are not committed by the Feds.
Intelligence fusion and an infinity of cops
The modern police apparatus in the United States is based on the principles of intelligence fusion and intelligence-led policing. These are fancy ways of saying that all of the various police agencies are in communication and organization with each other using methods of mass surveillance, informant networks, and community engagement to enforce capitalist social order. The ways that this communication and organization is organized are concrete and easy to identify, but largely undiscussed by politicians and the mainstream press. They are also more expansive than the police, or even the state, including in their networks large corporations’ and other private surveillance as well as executives and other elites.
Basic means of “intelligence fusion” include policing task forces and fusion centers. Federal task forces include the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), the DEA/DHS’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, various ATF programs, the U.S. Marshal’s Fugitive Task Forces, and many other similar bodies. To give an example of the scope of federal task forces, there are over 200 JTTFs alone, with field offices around the country. Fusion centers are very similar to task forces, but in theory are supposed to coordinate between them as well as organize information sharing and operational coordination between the local and federal police and the “intelligence community.” The “intelligence community” is a nice way of saying the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and other spy agencies carrying out the dirty deeds of U.S. imperialism.
The way that both fusion centers and federal task forces are structured is that they have participating officers from federal and local police departments as well as working agreements for data and information sharing. Any information received by a task force can be assumed to be available to not only the entire policing system, but also the military. Many task forces and fusion centers include National Guard and NORTHCOM operatives in their ranks.
The general relationship between local and federal police is not new. One example is what could be considered the first “biometric database.” That was organized by the National Bureau of Criminal Identification (NBCI), a private agency initiated by the National Police Chiefs Union (now known as the International Association of Chiefs of Police) in 1896. The NBCI compiled a broad range photographs of criminal suspects, including fingerprints. When the Bureau of Investigations (precursor to the FBI) was formed in 1907, the NBCI and its records were folded up into the new agency. Thus, it was not the actions of the federal government but rather the collective action of local police chiefs that created the bureaucratic home for mass surveillance by the federal government.
Today, private organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, police foundations, and business interest groups work with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to structure and set policy around mass surveillance and policing strategy. There is nothing particularly exceptional about any of this, and the fact that there are particular organizations which propose policy and strategy should not be taken to mean that they are somehow separate from the capitalist state. They are simply the groups assigned by the ruling class to organize repression and surveillance on behalf of the whole ruling class.
These high-tech surveillance networks take the form of public-private partnerships between big businesses, community organizations, local police, and the federal agencies. The most high-profile case is that of Flock Automated License Plate Readers, which are utilized not only by local and state police agencies but also “private” organizations like HOAs. All of the private ALPRs, as well as video and other electronic surveillance, usually are linked to local and federal police programs that join together huge amounts of data.
The Atlanta Police Foundation’s Operation Shield, for example, is a “network of more than 20,000 public and private sector cameras, [which] monitors Atlanta’s neighborhoods, business centers, major public spaces, and thoroughfares. The cameras are integrated into [Atlanta Police Department]’s Video Surveillance Center which provides real-time monitoring and dispatching of police to trouble spots. Some 80% of the cost is borne by the private sector.” Similar programs, often under the name Connect [City], are run all over the country.
Crisis management and bourgeois law and order
Fusion centers and federal task forces have been developed over long periods of time and include in their genesis the experiences of Indigenous genocide, anti-Black terror gangs, organized violent strike breaking, and colonial occupation. They are based on a longstanding strategy that has come to be known in bourgeois circles as “counter-insurgency.” The basic idea is to identify, isolate, and “neutralize” potential social movement leaders that can organize working and oppressed people.
As CIA director Allen Dulles stated in a 1955 speech at a meeting of the International Association of Police Chiefs in Philadelphia, in the view of the CIA, law enforcement “must generally be the first line of defense … to ferret out agents of subversion… and maintain domestic peace … without … calling on military forces to deal with open revolt.” He would go on to say that “When I need help … [domestically] I turn to the [FBI], and on the local scene to many of you for help and assistance.”
Expanding police powers always is fundamentally aimed at attacking the organization of Black and other oppressed and working people. Often this is justified through capitalist moral panics around “crime” and/or “terrorism.” FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces were initiated in part due to the failure of J. Edgar Hoover to catch the Weather Underground and the growing desire by the U.S. ruling class to amplify surveillance and “counter-intelligence” activities in Muslim communities. They were also part of a larger project to create conditions of “Total Information Awareness” on behalf of the secret police. The ruling class was planning out how to subvert the nominal restrictions placed on domestic spy agencies after the COINTELPRO, Watergate, and MKULTRA scandals while also utilizing new computer technologies to crack down on Black and migrant communities as well as anti-imperialist activists.
Fusion centers have a many-years long development. The first official fusion center is the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC). Established by CIA operatives under the cover of the newly-formed DEA, EPIC created a vast, computerized database for law enforcement agencies all over the country. Justified under the guise of the “war on drugs,” EPIC was also explicitly and consciously a tool for border enforcement. In actual fact, EPIC was the importation of a “counter-insurgency” model and techniques developed through centuries of colonial wars and occupations and formalized must fully by the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. That also included technologies tested for the first time in Vietnam, like an integrated radar-sensor-aerial border surveillance program known as IGLOO WHITE.
Notably, a major organizer of both the Phoenix Program and the Office of Public Safety police training program was the CIA officer Robert “Blowtorch” Komer. Komer was in charge of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), which was basically an assassination squad said to have killed at least 20,000 Vietnamese, while also organizing police chiefs from the United States to train police around the world in the methods of brutality refined in stateside Black and working class communities.
What is more substantial than any particular technologies was the construction of a nationwide policing system, first in an ad-hoc way through Joint Terrorism and other task forces like HIDTAs and then systematically with the formation of DHS. The Sept. 11 attacks were used to justify reconstructing the whole federal police system to be that modeled off of national occupations. The most direct model for this was, again, the Phoenix Program, but the Phoenix Program itself was developed out of a series of conversations organized by the Rand Corporation in 1962 that brought together British, French, Australian, U.S., and other officers with direct experience of colonial occupations and “counter-insurgency,” particularly in Malaysia and Algeria.
The basic structure of that model is to have a geographic hierarchy of intelligence sharing, starting from the local and moving up to the national, each with their own CIA or similar overseer. In the U.S., this looks like real-time crime centers and/or municipal fusion centers (district/local) and DHS-backed fusion centers (state/province) all combined in various networks, particularly DHS’s Intelligence and Analysis division.
These police entities have the official purpose of fighting crime and terrorism, but in actual fact almost exclusively surveil oppressed communities and political activists while creating fake propaganda whipping up moral panics that go to all of the police departments in a particular state. One example of the latter was a May 2024 bulletin sent by the Connecticut Intelligence Center that claimed May 14, the day before Nakba Day, was being promoted by “social media accounts” as a connected anti-Israel “Burning Day.” This was completely fabricated but served to give a plausible reason why local police should be on alert about potential “domestic violent extremists” on Nakba Day.
Confidential informants
Each individual agency presumably has its own “Human Intelligence” programs, which is a fancy way of saying confidential informants. The FBI has over 15,000 official confidential informants, with the expectation that for every “on the books” paid informant, there are two or three times that many “off the books.” ICE also has its own informants, despite having basically no oversight mechanisms or coherent policy for maintaining them according to a Congressional audit.
Local police have their own undercover and informant operations, although there is surely overlap between agencies. These are both the “heart” of modern policing and the most obviously corrupt part. There is no investigations without informants and undercover operatives, and informant and undercover investigations necessarily mean police participating in criminal activity. In New Brunswick, Mass., for example, a major Boston Globe investigation (“Spotlight: Snitch City”) showed that former police chief Paul Oliveira not only made his career through cultivating relationships with drug dealers, but also that the FBI helped cover it up.
Informants may be used to “gather intelligence.” However, they are also used to harass and entrap people of color and activists. The work of informants goes a long way to creating the myth of “terrorist threats,” in the name of “stopping terrorism.” A 2012 report by Project Salam estimates that at least 93% of “terrorism” cases are completely made up and many of those are “the FBI foiling its own entrapment plots, often after having targeted mentally ill defendants.” Many of the so-called “terrorism” stings are due to the extreme penetration of FBI and local police’s “counter-terrorism” units informant networks in Muslim and Black communities. The Muslim Justice League found through a grassroots survey that one out of ten Muslims in Boston either had or knew someone from the community who had the FBI knock their door.
The entire system of policing in the United States is set-up to create and sustain large informant networks. That is, for example, why the vast majority of “convictions” at all levels, in some places virtually 100%, are due to plea deals. The point is to make people so uncomfortable and uncertain that they will take a plea and potentially become an informer, even if they are innocent.
Coercing people into becoming informants was on open display in Minneapolis, where U.S. citizens detained without charges reported being taken into interrogation rooms and given the option to work for ICE in exchange for protection. This must be seen as broadly in line with policing practices everywhere. That includes in Minneapolis, where County and State Police ran a bizarre program during the Occupy movement, when they gave activists drugs, reportedly mostly marijuana, in a warehouse by the airport and attempted to turn them into informers.
Putting the pieces together, mobilize against the nationwide police apparatus!
The United States is a country whose history includes ongoing anti-Indigenous ethnic cleansing, growing border authoritarianism, and the largest prison population in the world. Many of the worst atrocities of the last 100 years were carried out by U.S. forces or armed groups trained and directed by them. The U.S. police are often on the frontlines of these atrocities.
“Reforms” to the policing system often are not only ineffective, but actually tend to increase police power. Automated License Plate Readers and bodycams are both examples of this phenomenon. Similarly, attempts to paper over the many mechanisms of local and federal police cooperation without addressing the basic facts of the U.S. police apparatus tend to build illusions in the local police, who are no ally of working and oppressed peoples.
Instead of following the path laid out by capitalist politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties, who support the cops every step of the way, the millions in the streets struggling against ICE and FBI terror need to recognize what the migrant community has always said “La policia, la migra, la misma porquería!” (“the police, the immigration enforcement, the same bullshit”).
That means responding politically to every act of police violence and every attempt to frame-up our community members and siblings in struggle. Building a movement capable of defeating the MAGA agenda and the domestic terrorism carried out by federal police entails being clear-eyed about the inseparability between all the violent arms of the capitalist state.
Photo: The Columbus Dispatch
