Trump and Musk need to get useful jobs, so they will learn how to do meaningful work

Sketch by Kathe Kollwitz

 

By Steve Halpern

Recently Elon Musk sent letters to employees of the federal government. Musk, who heads the miss-named Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), asked those employees to report on what they accomplished in the past week. Musk, threatened workers with termination if they failed to reply to his note.    

Many liberal commentators have argued that this action, as well as many actions of the Administration of President Donald Trump are unprecedented. While we haven't seen Presidential Administrations enact many of Trump's initiatives, the political course of Trump's politics goes back to the government that took power after the so-called American Revolution. 

The United States has its own peculiar history of the capitalist system. Capitalism is different from the feudal system where royal families ruled. With capitalism manufacturing enterprises work with banks and merchant capitalists, who all work with the government. 

Banks only invest money when they feel they can gouge out profits on those investments. This means continual capitalist growth is necessary. However, since capitalists rarely, if ever, actually produce wealth, all wealth must come from the working class. 

So, because there is a continual need for economic growth, capitalists routinely coerce workers to produce more while wages stagnate or deteriorate. This explains why about 70% of the world's population lives on $10 per day or less. This explains why wages have stagnated for workers in this country over the past fifty years. Yet the billionaires of the world have seen their fortunes increase dramatically. So, while politicians promise to make America great again, tens of millions of people in this country do not have enough food to eat.

I used to work in the automotive parts industry. In those days, we were working as fast as we could to meet production goals. Then a corporate officer came to the plant and demanded that we increase the production speed.

I raised my hand and said that one worker had nervous breakdowns and another needed to go home because his blood pressure was 165. However, we did increase the production speed. After about two years, the plant closed and about 2,500 workers saw jobs we worked eliminated. In all, tens of millions of manufacturing jobs were eliminated due to automation or outsourcing. Recently, when I've asked young people if they know anyone who works in a factory, the answer is usually, no.

In his book Half Has Never Been Told—Slavery and the making of American capitalism, Edward E. Baptist documented how slave owners coerced slaves to continually increase the amount of cotton they collected every day. The punishment for failing to meet production quotas consisted of various means of physical torture. Yet, while the slave owners did no work, they argued that the slaves, who did everything, were "lazy and shiftless." 

This profound contradiction was one of the reasons for the Civil War. In all, about 600,000 soldiers died in that war. Then the United States government adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. These Amendments abolished slavery, established "equal protection under the law," as well as the right to vote for all men in this country. Women didn't get the right to vote until 1920.

However, up until the 1960s, all branches of the U.S. government routinely violated these three Amendments. This meant that it took the civil rights movement of the 1960s to get the government to give Black people the same rights they were supposed to be granted by the Constitution.

Today, the Trump Administration is attempting to reverse many of the gains of the civil rights movement. Trump wants to deny students the right to learn the history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. 

However, the history of this country has been a continuous struggle to advance the interests of the working class. We saw this in the labor, civil rights, women's, anti-war, and immigrant rights movements.

Clearly Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both indifferent to this history. They believe that they have a right to spend their lives living off of the labor of the working class, while they do no productive work. 

Then, they have the audacity to claim that they know something about what it means to be efficient. One way to advance efficiency would be to confiscate the wealth of billionaires and use that money to do away with poverty.

Several years ago I wrote a poem titled The President needs to get a real job and learn what it means to earn a living. This poem was about President Clinton, but could also apply to every President in the history of this country. 

As I've argued in this blog, the government in this country has always been about serving the interests of the most affluent. This capitalist class lives of of the labor of working people all over the world. Mass movements and even wars for liberation have been the means for advancing the interests of the working class. In my opinion, these are the lessons working people can learn from to deal with the uncertain and insidious reality we face today. 

Hamas, Israel, George Washington, October 7, and Sullivan's Campaign

By Steve Halpern

During the course of my 72 years of living in the world, the so-called news media in this country has been consistent. They've worked diligently in tailoring their coverage to support wars made possible by the United States government. 

In the year I was born, the media argued that young people needed to go across the Pacific Ocean and go to war against Korea. In my teenage years, the media argued that young people needed to go across the Pacific Ocean again in a war against the people of Vietnam. Then, they made up more stories arguing that we needed to go around the world in wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Closer to home, they supported the wars against Panama and the tiny island of Grenada.

Nowhere in all these stories do we find even one editorial that makes the following argument. If the United States government used a tiny fraction of the human and material resources to give genuine assistance to the nations it went to war with, this would be a profoundly better world. 

Since October 7, 2023 the U.S. news media has come up with a new story. For the past 76 years, the nation of Israel has forced Palestinians out of their homeland, murdered thousands, and denied Palestinians living the the occupied territories equal rights. Palestinians worked diligently demanding that the state of Israel grant them basic human rights in their homeland. The Israeli government responded to those appeals with indifference and bloodshed.

Faced with this reality, the Israeli government used a carrot and a stick to deal with the Palestinian organization Hamas. On the one hand, they gave support to Hamas since its founding in 1987, and allowed a billion dollars in aid to the group coming from Qatar. However, Israel also regulated everything and everyone going in and out of the Gaza Strip. This meant that Palestinians living in Gaza would be trapped in what many have called an "open air prison."

The contradiction for Hamas is that on the one hand it is the repressive police force in Gaza, while arguing that it is in the leadership of the Palestinian liberation movement. We might consider that the African National Congress of South Africa never worked as a police force before they took power. This contradiction prompted Hamas to organize the October 7 raid that has had unimaginably horrendous consequences. 

The news media, as well as the governments of the United States and Israel labelled the October 7 raid as a "pogrom" and the worst anti-Semitic act since the Nazi organized Holocaust. Following this flawed logic, the U.S. government increased its aid to Israel from $3.8 billion per year, to $18 billion. Without that aid, the Israeli organized genocide against Palestinians would not have been possible.

We might consider that the word pogrom came from the racist raids against Jews organized by the Russian terrorist organization the Black Hundreds. Those raids were similar to the raids on the Black community in this country organized by the Ku Klux Klan. However, all those murderous raids took place in the context of a systematic discrimination against Jews and Black people. 

Palestinians have not been the perpetrators of discrimination. They have been the clear victims of systematic discrimination in the nation of Israel for 76 years. Therefore, just as with other arguments the news media disseminates, the argument that Hamas carried out a pogrom on October 7 has no merit.   

I identify as a member of the working class of the world. In my opinion, an injury to any worker in the world is an injury to me. It is from that perspective that I look at the vicious mythology that the mainstream news media routinely disseminates.

George Washington and the revolution of the thirteen colonies 

I begin my critique of the mainstream news in an unlikely place. This is with the revolution of the thirteen colonies that the United States memorializes on the national holiday of July 4. This commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

For me, the Declaration of Independence gives us a glimmer into the thinking of the leaders of the revolution in the thirteen colonies. This document contains a list of grievances the colonists had against the British. 

In one section, the DOI labelled Native Americans with the racist term "savages" which means less than human. The DOI criticized the British for limiting the aid given to the colonists in their genocidal war against the indigenous people of this part of the world.

Understanding this sentiment, most Native American nations supported the British who they viewed as a lesser evil colonist. Given this relationship of forces, George Washington, gave the following order to General John Sullivan.

"The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians (Iroquois—Haudenosaunee) with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."

Sullivan's forces destroyed about 41 Iroquois villages, murdered about 200 people, and destroyed their means to live. The estimate is that about 1,000 Iroquois would eventually die resulting from famine and exposure to an extremely cold winter. 

So, this number is almost exactly the same as the number of people murdered in the October 7 Hamas organized raid. Many of those who lost their lives in that raid might have been killed by Israeli air strikes that incinerated its victims. However, the so-called media analysis of these two events couldn't be more divergent. 

The capital of the United States is named for George Washington, as well as an entire state. His portrait is on the one dollar bill in your wallet. However, the so-called news media has consistently argued that the genocide against Palestinians was necessary because Israel needed to defend itself. The only problem some media outlets had with the Israeli organized genocide was that it might have been too excessive.       

So, how do we compare General George Washington's orders for Sullivan's Campaign to the Hamas organized raid on Israel? Washington was clear in that he wanted "total destruction and devastation of their settlements and capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible." The Hamas organized raid ultimately cost the lives of a similar number of people as the Sullivan Campaign. In my opinion, both these raids were wrong in that they both targeted civilians. The question remains: Why is the life of George Washington celebrated, while the organization Hamas is demonized?

One reason for this has to do with the fact that the thirteen colonies won the Revolution. However, one of the reasons for the victory of the Revolution had to do with the aid it received from France. France was one of the most powerful nations in the world at that time. 

As far as I know, no nation in the world has given armed support to Palestinian liberation. The consequence of the Hamas raid was an unimaginable repression.

Clearly Sullivan's raid took place in the context of the revolution of the thirteen colonies. However, this raid wasn't aimed at the British, but was a continuation of the war to rob Native Americans of their homeland. The Declaration of Independence outlined the reasons for that revolution. There is no question that Palestinians have legitimate grievances that have simmered for over 100 years. 

We can also say that the United States government has been highly repressive since its founding. I'm talking about over 100 years of genocidal war against Native Americans. Then there were the decades of the unimaginable horrors of chattel slavery. After the revolution, there were the Shays and and Whisky rebellions that protested the insidious policies of the new government. 

However, the news media, the educational system, as well as the government argue that the United States is the greatest democracy the world has ever known. We were all asked to pledge allegiance to the flag they argued represents "liberty and justice for all."

In school, our teachers to view history with the view of formal logic. Either events had positive or negative results. 

I view history from the perspective of dialectical materialism. In other words, history unfolds as a result of contending forces. The results of this conflict can have positive and negative results. However, the clash between these contending forces continues and this explains why our environment is constantly changing. 

Saying all of that, there were legitimate reasons why masses of people rose up in revolution to expel forces loyal to Britain from this part of the world. Caroline Elkins wrote extensively about the history of the British Empire in her book Legacy of Violence. Without the revolution of the thirteen colonies, we can speculate that the interests of this country would have continued to be subordinate to the British royal family.

Another outgrowth of the revolution and the Civil War was the emergence of the capitalist system. On the one hand, from its infancy, capitalism has been an extremely repressive system. On the other hand, the only reason why capitalists and bankers make investments is because they feel that the system will grow continually.

Thinking about that, the colonists living in the thirteen colonies could not have imagined the world we are living in today. Back in the 1700s, most people lived on farms where they needed to provide for many of their necessities. Today, most people in the United States have direct access to electricity, running water, education, health care, and cell phones. In my opinion, most people prefer to have these goods and services rather than living without them. 

Another outgrowth of the revolution of the thirteen colonies and the Civil War was the creation of the working class. The feudal system was ruled by royal families. In capitalism, there is the idea that people can elect their representatives in government. Clearly, capitalist governments routinely represent the interests of the most affluent.

However, in the course of the history of this country many social movements erupted. These included movements of labor, civil rights, women's rights, support for immigrants, LBGT, and against wars. Currently, there is a mass movement demanding a ceasefire in the Middle East. These movements might have been impossible or much more difficult to organize in the feudal epoch. 

There is another clear analogy to the Sullivan Campaign. Rashid Khalidi is probably the most highly respected historian of the Palestinian experience. He argues that if people are critical of the October 7 raid, the Israeli organized genocide that took place over the past year was much more devastating.

In fact, just as in the Sullivan Campaign, the miss-named Israeli Defense Force murdered at least 47,000 Palestinians, destroyed their homes, schools, and hospitals, and denied about 2.3 million Palestinians the necessary food to sustain their lives. These genocidal policies could not have been made possible without massive aid from the United States government. 

There is another clear difference between Sullivan's Campaign and the Israeli organized genocide. The United States government has been extremely repressive since it's founding. We can say the same about the nation of Israel. However, as I've said there were several progressive reforms since the founding of the United States. The nation of Israel began with a highly developed economy that was made possible by Palestinians. So, there were no real progressive reforms that came about because of the 76 year Israeli history. 

When we compare the reality of the Sullivan Campaign to the Israeli organized genocide, there are real parallels. In both these events, the motivating force for Washington and Netanyahu were to remove the indigenous people from their ancestral homeland. The Zionists have been clear about their goals for over 100 years. They want an exclusively Jewish homeland where Palestinians have lived for centuries. The goal of Hamas was to free Palestinians who live in Israeli jails. 

Abraham Lincoln and the 38 nooses

Many historians have labelled President Abraham Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator." There is some truth in that statement. When Lincoln became President, chattel slavery was the law of the land. 

Upon his election, the slave states seceded from the union and attacked the United States at Fort Sumpter. Their goal was to take control of the United States government and make it completely subservient to the interests of slave owners. 

Many in the U.S. government at that time favored a negotiated peace with the slave owners. Although Lincoln wasn't an advocate of abolition of slavery, he mobilized the Union Army in an unimaginably arduous campaign to destroy the interests of slavery in this country. 

This is why many have called Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator." However, just as with the revolution of the thirteen colonies, positive and negative things happened during the same years. 

Scott W. Berg wrote his book titled, "38 Nooses—Lincoln, Little Crow, and the beginning of the frontier's end." There is a problem with Berg's usage of the word "frontier" in his otherwise important book.

This is my dictionary definition of the word frontier. "The extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness, especially referring to the western U.S. before Pacific settlement." So we see that even this definition has problems.

Native Americans have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years. So, there may have been a frontier and a wilderness here thousands of years ago. However, when the Europeans came here there might have been upwards of 100 million people living in what is now the Americas. So much for the ideas that settlers in this country ever lived in on a frontier or in a wilderness.

The Zionist movement made a similar claim. They argued that Palestine was, "a land without a people for a people without a land." The early Jewish settlers who came from Europe would have liked to imagine that the millions of Palestinians who lived in their homeland for thousands of years, simply were not there. Like the early settlers in this country, since the Jewish settlers believed Palestine was a barren landscape, they felt they were justified in forcing the original inhabitants from their homeland.  

Aside from that limitation, Berg reported on the environment where the Dakota lived in what is now the state of Minnesota (Minnesota is a Native American name). As with about 400 Native American nations, the United States government violated its treaty with the Dakota. 

The Dakota were a self-sufficient people who hunted, fished, and farmed to provide for themselves. When settlers arrived in Minnesota, they took much of that land, making it impossible for the Dakota to continue being self-sufficient. So, the U.S. government agreed to provide the Dakota with all the food they needed. However, during the Civil War, this wasn't happening. 

Little Crow (Taoyateduta) was the leader of the Dakota at that time. This is what he said to the Indian agent, Andrew Myrick, who represented the United States government.

“We have no food, but here are these stores filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving.”

Myrick responded to these rational words saying that Little Crow and the Dakota could, "eat grass." That statement violated the treaty between the U.S. government and the Dakota. Violating a treaty isn't like breaking a law where a judgement is made in a civil court. Violating a treaty is an act of war.

So, the Dakota people had a decision to make. They could either starve to death, or they could take the food they needed by force. They fully understood that if the Dakota people took what they needed by force, the response by the U.S. government would be relentless.  

In all, the Dakota murdered about 94 soldiers and between 400 and 600 civilians. The military eventually apprehended the Dakota. The government put the captured Dakota on trials that lasted a mere ten minutes. Those trials were not translated into the Dakota language so many of the accused had no idea of what was going on. In fact, since the U.S. government caused the uprising of the Dakota by violating an agreement. Those who had been accused of murder were actually political prisoners. 

President Abraham Lincoln signed the order to execute 38 of the captured Dakota by hanging. This was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. One of the reasons for this order had to do with Lincoln's desire to win the electoral votes in Minnesota in an upcoming election.

Conclusion

In this blog, I attempted to show some of the parallels between the genocidal policies of the United States and Israel with respect to Native Americans and Palestinians. The mainstream press in this country denies that genocide ever took place in either this country or Israel. In my opinion, the facts tell another story.

The United States government brutalized Native American children in special schools, so the children would be coerced to forget their history. Over the course of more than 76 years Zionists had the goal of removing Palestinians from their homeland in order to make Israel an exclusively Jewish nation.

Today, the capitalist system in the world appears to be falling apart. Hundreds of millions of people in the world do not have enough food to eat. As a result about 30,000 children die every day.

Because of the gross inequality in the world, most workers in this country haven't experienced that level of exploitation. However, today tens of millions of people in the United States don't have enough food to eat. Yet, prices are skyrocketing and wages have remained essentially flat for the past 50 years.

These conditions have led millions to doubt if future generations will ever experience economic security. So, thinking about this reality, in my opinion there is only one way for the working class of the world to escape this crisis.

This is to organize and put in place a workers government that makes fundamental changes.  Those changes can be summarized in the slogan human needs before profits.

The facts are that the resources have been available for a long time to eliminate poverty in the world. The reason why this hasn't happened is because the capitalist system routinely organizes to enrich billionaires at the expense of the working class of the world.

I say all of this to say that no working class movement can be successful without taking an international approach to politics. Another requirement for the working class is to support the unconditional liberation of all oppressed nationalities and this includes Black people, women, LBGT, and immigrants. Today many workers from around the world are discovering the centrality of the demand Palestine Lives. 

  

 

  

       

Not a Nation of Immigrants—Settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the history of erasure and exclusion

 

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

There have been many books that attempted to demystify the history we were taught in school. One was James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. Then there was Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. Recently Jon Jeter wrote his Class War in America. 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz continued this tradition with her book Not a Nation of Immigrants. I also read her book An Indigenous People's History of the United States.

In her new book Ortiz destroys one myth we were raised with. This is the idea that the United States is a nation of immigrants. That argument has obvious problems because Native Americans have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years. Few people would argue that the millions of Native Americans came here as immigrants.

However this argument has several other problems. First, slave traders forced African Americans to come here from Africa under unimaginably horrendous conditions. Many Europeans came here as indentured servants or slaves. Of the first settlers to what became the United States, they weren't immigrants, but settlers. 

Dunbar-Ortiz demystified much of this with her analysis of the lives we know as Christopher Columbus and Alexander Hamilton. It may come as s surprise to most people, but during his life, the person we have called Christopher Columbus, never used that name. The Spanish called him Cristóbal Colón. We don't know what his Italian name was.

Colón—Columbus

Why did people feel the need to anglicize his name? Colón (Columbus) never set foot in what is now considered the United States. However, the educational system teaches us that Columbus "discovered America." This argument ignores the fact that hundreds of Native American nations lived in North and South America for thousands of years.

The argument of the so-called "discovery" of America by Columbus has other problems. This was not just a discovery by Europeans, but the beginning of a genocidal war against Native Americans that lasted hundreds of years. From the beginning, this war was about extracting vast amounts of wealth from the land and labor of people who lived here.

People who lived here felt uncomfortable using the name Colón for someone they argued "discovered America." The United States was an English speaking country. The Knights of Columbus popularized his name. At that time, the United States was a largely Protestant country. Since most members of the Knights of Columbus were Irish, their promotion of the name Columbus legitimized the Catholic religion. 

Another reason for promoting the myth of Colón (Columbus) was that he was white. By arguing that "Columbus discovered America" we ignore the African and Native American populations and influences to this country. The hot war against Native Americans that lasted for over 100 years in the United States isn't something most people think about. 

We are aware of aspects of the long history of slavery and discrimination against African Americans. However, the educational system portrays this history as separated from our present reality. According to this portrayal, there is no need to correct the crimes committed against Black people throughout the history of this country. 

The falsification of the life of Alexander Hamilton

Dunbar-Ortiz also destroys the myth of Alexander Hamilton portrayed in a recent play by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda says that he identified with Hamilton, arguing that they were both immigrants. The problem with this argument is that Miranda's father was born in Puerto Rico which is a colony of the United States. 

Hamilton was born on the British controlled island of Nevis. So, when Hamilton arrived in New York City he was a British subject, like all residents of NYC at that time. While the play Hamilton portrays his life as someone who supported abolition of slavery, Dunbar-Ortiz gives the evidence that Hamilton was a supporter and profiteer of slavery. 

The goals of those who promote the myths of both Hamilton and Colón (Columbus) were about the simplistic idea that the United States has a rich, glorious, and Eurocentric history. This mythology ignores the African, Native American, and working class history of this country. 

James Baldwin and the Price of the Ticket

Dunbar-Ortiz quoted James Baldwin who wrote about the so-called "immigrant" experience. Baldwin argued that there was a "price of the ticket" for the Europeans who came to the United States. He continued arguing that "White people are not white; part of the price of the ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are." By identifying that people of European descent were "white" they debased Black people and Native Americans. 

In turn, Baldwin argued that white people "debased and defamed themselves." "No one was white before he/she came to America." Dunbar-Ortiz elaborated that "European immigrants were Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, English, French, Swiss, Norwegian" etc.

This idea of identifying as "white" had real consequences for all working people throughout the history of this country. While I believe that Dunbar-Ortiz' book is well worth reading, there is one limitation. There is no doubt that the United States has a persistent racist history. However, this country is also divided into the capitalist and working classes. Those classes have antagonistic interests. 

In this country, people who have power have consistently worked to exacerbate the divisions between white, Black, and Native American workers. They also promote the devision between men and women. Today, the new Presidential Administration of Donald Trump is working to exacerbate the divisions between workers born in this country and those who were born elsewhere. Trump continues the policies of Democratic and Republican Party Presidents who have consistently deported millions of immigrants.

In the past, the government adopted the Fugitive Slave Act that required all state governments to apprehend escaped slaves. When the Union Army defeated the slave owners in the Civil War, the government effectively abolished that law. However, with the defeat of radical reconstruction the federal government, in effect, gave political power to the Ku Klux Klan, and Black people effectively lost all citizenship rights. Today the Trump Administration claims it will escalate the racist policies aimed at denying immigrants many of the same rights Black people had been denied during the Jim Crow era. 

The history of Chinese immigration

Before the construction of the transcontinental railroad, it took two to three months to travel from New York to California. At that time the easiest way to make that journey was by ship going around the entire continent of South America. After the construction of this railroad it took six days to make this same journey. This tremendous advance in transportation allowed for the beginning of the massive development of California and the West Coast.

Thousands of Chinese workers participated in the construction of this rail line. In order for that to happen, these workers needed to routinely work in seemingly impossible conditions. One of the most challenging obstacles was to blast through about a dozen granite mountains to make way for tunnels.

Chinese laborers invented the method used to accomplish this task. They wove large baskets capable of carrying the weight of two workers. Chinese workers lowered these baskets to the level of the tunnels. Then the workers in those baskets used a sledge hammer and a steel pipe to bore a hole into the granite. They placed dynamite in those holes and then frantically worked to escape the effects of the blast. This was how the transcontinental railroad became a reality.

Ghosts of Gold Mountain by Gordon H. Chang

While Chinese workers did essential work in building the railroad, Chinese people also indirectly financed this rail-line. During the 1800s one of the most lucrative ways to make money in the United States was in the Chinese opium trade. The Chinese government made this trade illegal. However, the British organized the Opium Wars to force opium on the Chinese people. 

Many of the Chinese who came here, left China to escape the horror of the Taiping Rebellion that was sparked by the opium wars. Some of the financing of the transcontinental railroad came from the profits U.S. capitalists took from the opium trade in China.

After the completion of this rail line, there were racist pogroms against the Chinese community. The U.S. government then adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that prohibited Chinese workers from entering the United States. So, when we look at the idea of the United States being a "nation of immigrants," we can make another argument. This is how there is a long history of the United States government's long and tenacious war against both immigrants, as well as the indigenous people of this part of the world.     

So, Dunbar-Ortiz effectively destroyed the myth that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The first European residents of this part of the world engaged in genocidal wars to remove the native people from their homeland. The wealth of this country also came from the enslavement and systematic discrimination of Black people. Today, workers born in other countries create huge amounts of wealth, while the government is obsessed with throwing them out of the country, or stripping them of any rights they might have. 

I believe this history gives us a clear path to work for a profoundly better future world. We need to break through all the barriers that splintered the working class in the past. Ultimately the overwhelming majority of humanity is a part of the international working class. When we begin to understand this, we can begin to unleash a force that the capitalists of the world will be powerless to restrain.       

Class War in America—How Elites Divide the Nation by Asking: Are You A Worker or Are You White?

By Jon Jeter

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

Most people in this country have become disenchanted with what we call the mainstream news media. My coworkers have expressed one consistent complaint concerning the various sources of news we are exposed to. This has to do with the everyday issues that workers experience on a regular basis. While we see and read stories about issues around the world, rarely do we see a story about what workers need to go through just to make a living.

Jon Jeter is a journalist who worked for the Washington Post and was nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes. The contents of his book Class War in America give us an idea of what real journalism can be when we look at the world objectively. 

In the book 1619 edited by Nikole Hannah Jones, she gave the following summary. “The effort of Black Americans to seek freedom through resistance and rebellion against violations of their rights have always been one of this nation’s defining traditions.”

Jon Jeter's book is a history of this country that focuses on successful and unsuccessful attempts to break through the racial barriers that divided movements for social change. He summarizes this history with the question, "Are you a worker, or are you white?" I agree with Jeter's argument that the labor movement will need to break through those divisions if the working class will ever be liberated. 

Karl Marx, in essence, asked the British working class Jeter's question during the Civil War in this country. The industrialization of the world started with the connection of the enslaved workers that produced cotton, to the British textile mills. So, the British mill owners had a real stake in supporting the interests of the slave owners. 

Jeter quoted Marx when spoke to a meeting of 3,000 British trade unionists where he argued that,

"The English working class has won immortal historical honor for itself by thwarting the repeated attempts of the ruling classes to intervene on the behalf of the slaveholders."     

Jeter started his book by reporting on a Civil War battle historians routinely ignore. This was the Battle of Crater. The Union forces dug an underground trench and mined it with explosives. When those bombs exploded, they created a massive crater. This surprised the confederate forces and there was the potential of an easy victory. 

However, due to horrible military decisions the almost certain victory turned into an all-out defeat. There were deaths of 1,500 confederate forces and 4,000 union fatalities. 

The confederate commanders had a routine policy of murdering all captured soldiers who were Black. Fearing death, many of the white union soldiers chose to commit treason and murder the Black soldiers rather than risking death at the hands of the confederates. The estimate is that about 200 Black soldiers were murdered by their former union comrades. 

So, here we see a profound contradiction in the history of the United States. On the one hand, the Civil War would, for the most part, end the institution of chattel slavery in this country. While this was happening, racist attitudes continued to be prevalent among the soldiers who risked their lives to bring an end to slavery.

Jon Jeter then went on to outline the history of this country from the viewpoint of this fundamental contradiction. The reconstruction governments established after the Civil War brought about real progressive change for white and Black workers and farmers. Yet racist mobs organized by the Ku Klux Klan worked to overthrow those governments by force. 

The federal government merely acquiesced to the terrorism of the KKK. They did this by flagrantly violating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and supported Jim Crow segregation.  

Jeter gave inspiring examples of how white and Black workers joined to support each other in struggles of class solidarity. This happened in the longshore strike in the 1930s, the strike against RJ Reynolds, the cigarette manufacturer, and in defense of the framed up Scottsboro Boys. 

Then after the Second World War, employers were flush with the record profits they gouged out during the war. There was another strike wave where entire industries were shut down. The following passage reflects the mood of the workers at that time.

"Everyone was having a good time...it was a holiday mood, it was a feeling of comradeship, it was the feeling that, well, we're all together in this thing, you know and it was a good, warm, healthy feeling, it was more like this country should be." 

During these same years the government worked diligently to frame up Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of treason. Jeter gave a compelling biography of Ethel Rosenberg where he introduced readers to the inspiring life she lived. 

Jeter went on to write about the financial meltdown of the New York City government in the 1970s. Bankers headed by Felix Rohatyn were determined not to lose any money they invested on municipal bonds. 

Victor Gotbaum was the President of District Council 37 municipal workers union. Rohatyn had a series of discussions with Gotbaum where there was agreement to impose massive cutbacks in social services used by working people. Largely because of this relationship, those cutbacks were instituted with little opposition. After those cutbacks went into effect, the federal government came up with the money to cover the city's massive debts.

Jeter contrasted the politics of the former Mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, to the politics of Kamala Harris. A coalition of forces united to elect Washington and oust the former political machine headed by Mayor Richard Daley. Even in his first day in office, Washington brought about several progressive reforms making it clear that a new kind of mayor was in office. 

On the other hand, when Kamala Harris was the Attorney General of California, she allowed the One West bank, headed by Steven Mnuchin, to illegally evict thousands of residents from their homes. Mnuchin would become Treasury Secretary.

Thinking about this contrast, we might consider the politics of Malcolm X. Malcolm argued that Black people needed to have their own organization that would be dedicated to the needs of the Black community. 

A different conclusion to this history  

Jon Jeter clearly gave a unique and needed history of the United States. A question I have is what conclusions can we draw from this history?

Donald Trump has just been elected President of the United States. Over the past year, the United States government allowed the Israeli Defense Force to commit an unimaginable genocide against the Palestinian people. 

Thinking about that, we might ask another question. Has there been any progress in the history of this country? Looking at the reality of who Trump is, and the reality of the Israeli organized genocide, we might answer that question in the negative. I have a different opinion.

Even with all of its many and vicious limitations, my opinion is that this country is a better place to live because the system of chattel slavery was, for the most part, abolished. For all its limitations, my opinion is that the end of Jim Crow segregation was another advance. 

For all its limitations, the fact that unions organized and went on numerous strikes in this country also advanced the standard of living here. We might consider that before those strikes, most workers had difficulty in finding enough food to eat. With all its limitations, the fact that most workers have access to some form of education and health care are also advances.

Women made real advances where today they work at many jobs they were kept out of in the past. Even the right for women to wear pants was a gain made through struggle.

So, the struggle to liberate humanity today can build on all those advances. As usual, capitalists will work to reverse all those gains. 

While Donald Trump with return to the White House, massive numbers of people have been demonstrating to end murders by police, for women's rights, and in solidarity with Palestinians. We might also consider that the revolutionaries of the past faced significantly more difficult conditions than we face today. Frederick Douglas was born into slavery. Ida Wells spent her life protesting the legalized murders known as lynchings. Malcolm X lived most of his entire life when Jim Crow segregation was the law. 

Yet Douglas, Wells, and Malcolm found ways to persevere and overcome the horrendous environments they lived in. The young and young thinking people who are marching on demonstrations today remind us of the revolutionary heritage of this country. 

Clearly we have immense challenges. However, history has given us a legacy that we can draw on. Jon Jeter's book gives us a glimmer of that history and confronts us with many of the obstacles we will need to overcome. If humanity will be liberated from a system where the drive for profits are a priority over human life, I believe that the working class has the potential to overcome those obstacles. 

The health care system and the war against the working class

 

By Steve Halpern

The other day I had a doctor's appointment. This was at the recently constructed Honickman Center of Jefferson University Hospital located at 1101 Chestnut Street in downtown Philadelphia. The parking lot was under the 19 story Honickman building. 

The elevator in the parking lot brought me to the first floor of the building. There, I was met with a security guard and a metal detector. The security guard told me to register at one of a line of screens that took my information. Then, I was transported to the eleventh floor on what appeared to be a state of the art elevator. 

In the room where the doctor examined me, there was a widescreen television with my name welcoming me to the to the facility. This screen enabled me to choose music and art while I waited to see the doctor. 

After my examination, I spoke to someone who scheduled me for my next appointment. This was via the widescreen television. The person who scheduled me for the appointment was at her home in New Jersey. I needed to wait an extra month before she could find a time when the doctor would be available. Other than the delay in scheduling for my appointment, I found the doctor to be helpful and competent in treating my condition.   

The construction cost of the Honickman Center exceeded one billion dollars. From what I could see, there are few, if any hospital beds in this building. I also did not see offices for primary care, mental health, maternity, or pediatric care. These specializations might be among the least profitable.    

On the other side of the Schuykill River in West Philadelphia, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania erected their Pavilion building. The construction cost of this medical facility was about $1.7 billion. The Pavilion is only one of several relatively new buildings constructed for the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. 

Hospital Closures  

A few years ago, I attended a demonstration protesting the closure of Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia. A few years before that I attended another demonstration protesting the closure of Women's Hospital of Philadelphia. At that demonstration, the President of the Hospital Workers Union 1199, Henry Nicholas, reported that this was one of about 700 hospital closures throughout the country.

Before Women's Hospital closed, the owner, Tenet Healthcare, effectively forced the nurses to go on strike. The strike lasted about one month. A day after the strike was settled Tenet announced the closing of the hospital. During the monthlong strike, Tenet recruited scab nurses from across the country and bussed them to the hospital every day. This was the thank-you that Tenet gave to their employees.

We might also ask a question: If so much money is being spent on health care, why was there an acute shortage of hospital beds and face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic? 

What is going on?

So, these facts beg another basic question. Why are hospitals investing astronomical amounts of money in health care, while at the same time they are closing hundreds of hospitals? 

Dan Cooney was a friend of mine who passed away a few years ago. He was a nurse in the mental health department at Jefferson University Hospital. Jefferson eliminated this department and laid off Dan to make way for a more lucrative orthopedic practice. 

Dan and others spoke to me about how he managed to talk patients through the reasons for their drug addiction and saved their lives. The Center for Disease Control estimated that there were 107,543 overdose deaths in the United States in 2023.

Saying all of that, we need to understand the economics of hospitals. There are many corporations that profit from hospitals. There are the hospital equipment manufacturers. There are the drug companies. Banks receive interest on loans from all those corporations. Insurance companies profit from minimizing payments for health care. Yet the people who work for banks and insurance companies never actually treat patients.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto in 1848. In that document they argued that the capitalist system has a disease that was never experienced before in human history. This is the disease of overproduction.

In other words, banks need to continually find investments where they can grow the assets they have. However, since banks never actually produce useful commodities there is only one way they can get the capital needed to grow their assets. This is to be obsessed with cutting costs. 

We saw how this system blew up in 2008. Banks floated all kinds of real estate loans, but large numbers of borrowers weren't able to pay back their loans. As a result, the investment companies of Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns closed. The news media is determined to never report on the real causes for this banking collapse. When the economy continually grows, while there is an obsession to cut costs, a financial collapse is inevitable.

The effects of capitalist economic growth

Today, about six percent of the population has medical debt of about $220 billion. Student loan debt is about $1.7 trillion.

All the astronomically expensive medical facilities I mentioned in this blog are located in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is also the home of the Comcast Towers that had construction costs of $2.6 billion. So, with all these expensive buildings in the city, we might think that the public educational system would be adequately funded. 

Today per student funding for education in Philadelphia is about $10,000. When we walk across the street on City Line Avenue, we enter the Lower Merion School District. There per student funding is about $26,000. Lower Merion is a suburban community and lacks the billion dollar buildings housed in Philadelphia. 

If you think this disparity in funding for education isn't fair, you aren't alone. Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer wrote a 780 page decision arguing that the gross disparity in funding for education in Pennsylvania is illegal. However, since the Pennsylvania state government says that this decision is non-binding, it hasn't been enforced.

However, in New Jersey the courts of that state ruled in their Abbott v. Burke decision that the inequality in educational funding in the state was also illegal. However, that decision was binding.

Instead of taking the money from the most affluent New Jersey residents to correct this problem, the state had other ideas. They increased property taxes making New Jersey the state with some of the highest property taxes in the nation.

Conclusion  

In order to put all this information in perspective, I believe we need to look at the nation of Cuba. Today Cuba is having a difficult time largely because of the economic embargo enforced by the United States government.

However, Cuban citizens have no debts for education or health care. In fact, both education and health care are lifetime rights to citizens on the island. In fact, Cuba has twice the number of doctors as the United States per capita. Cuba has trained doctors from around the world free of charge. Cuban doctors have also gone all over the world to treat patients in need.

All of this is possible when there is a government that makes human needs the priority over profits. As the capitalist system continues to demand that workers give up more and more just to sustain ourselves, we need to understand that there is another way.    

   

We have always lived under a ruthless dictatorship

Art by Kathe Kollwitz

By Steve Halpern

Donald Trump will be the President of the United States again. Trump says he wants to deport 12 million immigrants who live in this country. He says that they are "illegal." 

These are the words of a convicted felon. We might also consider that President Joe Biden didn't hesitate to flagrantly violate the law when he gave Israel arms to murder civilians. In order to put our current reality in perspective, I believe we need to look at the founding of the nation known as the United States of America.

The revolution of the thirteen colonies

The Declaration of Independence consists of a list of grievances the settlers of the thirteen colonies had against the British royal government. They argued that the British instituted a "long train of abuses" that resulted in "despotism." They felt they had a "right and a duty" to throw off that power and establish new "guards for their security."

Unlike the democrats and republicans today, these colonists opposed the British measures aimed at limiting immigration. They also used the racist word "savages" to describe the first nations who lived on this land for thousands of years.

So, the Declaration of Independence begins to give us an outline of the contradictory character of the government that was established in this country. On the one hand, people began to have rights of free speech, separation of church and state, as well as some voting rights.

There was another aspect to the revolution of the thirteen colonies that few people talk about. In the late 1700s most people were farmers who usually worked outdoors. They could not have imagined the world we are living in today with cars, cell phones, educational and health care systems, as well as refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, and dryers. These monumental changes happened because the revolution began to unleash the productive forces of capitalism. One of the laws of capitalism is that the economy needs to continuously grow.

However, we can also say that from the beginning the United States government has been a ruthless, diabolical, and tenacious dictatorship. After the revolution, veterans were starving and they engaged in an armed uprising led by Daniel Shays. The new revolutionary government dealt with the starving veterans by repressing them with armed force. The government also continued the genocidal wars against Native Americans. 

The new revolutionary government supported the unimaginable horrors of chattel slavery. Then capitalists, workers, and farmers formed a coalition to destroy chattel slavery in the Civil War. 

The government continued the war against the working class

After a brief period of reconstruction, the government used its dictatorial powers to violate the Constitution and strip African Americans of their rights with the Jim Crow laws. Today there is a memorial museum in Montgomery, Alabama of over 4,000 human beings who were illegally lynched. The government adamantly refused to prosecute the murderers.

The revolution of the thirteen colonies as well as the Civil War did expand the rights of people living in this country. However, those rights were extremely limited and needed to be defended through struggle.

Workers were brutalized and murdered when they went on strike. Civil rights activists were also brutalized and murdered in the struggle to give Black people the rights they were supposed to have in the Constitution.

The government arrested Alice Paul and the suffragettes for demanding that women have the right to vote. In prison the suffragettes went on a hunger strike protesting their incarceration. Prison guards then inserted a tube into the throat of Alice Paul to force-feed her.

The genocidal wars against Native Americans lasted for over a century. These wars spanned over the entire area of this country. Why was the government so tenacious in their attempt to steal Native American land and strip them of their culture?

Clearly Native Americans had many problems before their contact with Europeans. The First Nations needed to migrate to find the means to live. At times they came into conflict with other native nations. However, they lived in an environment where everyone worked together to share what they had. During these years Native Americans made outstanding advances with respect to the sciences of agronomy, medicine, and astronomy. 

The United States government advanced their hundred years genocidal war to strip Native Americans of their homeland. They also replaced the Native American communal environment with the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism always requires a gross inequality between the super rich and those who can barely afford to live

However, Presidents place their hands on the bible and take an oath to defend the Constitution. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution says that everyone is supposed to have "equal protection under the law." 

President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt didn't hesitate to violate his oath of office when he ordered 125,000 Japanese to be placed in concentration camps. For decades Presidents didn't hesitate to violate their oath of office when they allowed states to strip African Americans of their rights with the Jim Crow laws. 

President Joe Biden didn't hesitate to violate his oath of office when he gave massive amounts of arms to Israel. They used those arms to murder thousands of civilians. Members of Biden's Administration have resigned because of the President's support of genocide. President Elect Donald Trump promises to continue to violate his oath of office by supplying arms to Israel that will be used to murder babies.

The politics of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are essentially the same   

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had basically the same message in their Presidential campaigns. Trump says he wants to make America great again. Harris said she wants to strengthen the middle class. What are they talking about? 

About 80 million people died in World Wars One and Two. After those international slaughters the United States became the world’s superpower. Then the U.S. economy dominated the world until the 1970s. 

During those years the economy in this country grew by leaps and bounds. The labor, civil rights, and women’s movements also erupted. For all those reasons the standard of living improved for most workers and corporations grew astronomically. 

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris imagine that their policies can bring us back to the time when the U.S. economy dominated the world. Because of the reality of capitalism, this is a truly impossible dream. Since the dreams of Trump and Harris are impossible, I believe it is worth thinking about what is possible.

The so-called news media will not report these facts

First, there are about eight things we need and want. These include food, clothing, a place to live, transportation, communication, health care, education, and exposure to cultural activities that include music, art, dancing, theater, film etc. 

When we purchase any of these commodities we are, in effect, required to contribute to enterprises that add little or no value. These include, profits for manufacture, transport, and sales. Then there is interest to banks, insurance, advertising, corporate law, landlords, and let's not forget maintenance for thousands of atomic bombs.

When we look at all those expensive skyscrapers in the cities, most are office buildings. Few of the enterprises housed in those skyscrapers add value to the commodities we need and want.

So, when we look at this reality, we see how much of the work done in the capitalist world is not necessary to provide for the things we need. This means that if we had a different political economic system, there would be a lot less work to do in order to provide for the things we need and want.

Understanding these possibilities, we might ask a few questions. Why are there about 44 million people in this country who do not have adequate access to food? This, while the shelves of supermarkets are overflowing. Why are there huge numbers of empty office buildings, while hundreds of thousands of people are homeless? 

The answers to these questions are clear. Under the capitalist system the top priority is the drive to maximize profits. This explains why corporations gave over two billion dollars to the Presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

However, the problem is much deeper than the inequities of campaign financing. All the mainstream news outlets routinely give next to no coverage of third party candidates. The educational system routinely ignores the Marxist analysis of politics, economics, and history.

Then we can think about what happens when we go to work every day. Employers control the work environment. When we leave work corporations control the prices we pay. Then they advertise how wonderful overpriced commodities are. So, someone please explain to me how this is a democracy. 

Now I have another question. How can this system ever change?

First, we can say that the economy of the United States has been deteriorating for the past fifty years. There are economic downturns every four to seven years. There were downturns in the years 2000, 2008, and 2020. in each of these downturns the government literally gave away huge amounts of money to prevent an all out depression. The Chinese economy experienced huge growth and this also kept international capitalism relatively stable.

However, it is extremely likely that during the next four years, there will be another economic downturn. We don't know how deep this will be. One possibility is that banks will close and the cash machines we use to get money won't be working. If this happens, we can rest assured that working people from around the world will demand fundamental change. This would be in spite of the fact that Donald Trump just won the Presidential so-called election. 

A new vision for the future

There is no law in this country that makes it illegal to imagine a world where human needs and not profits are the fundamental priority. I believe that most people would like it if everyone in the world had the means to live. Yet, very few people talk about how it is possible to achieve these goals. 

We have all been raised to think that politics is about the elections and who holds positions of power in the government. The reality that I pointed to in this blog is how working people won the rights we have because of sustained struggle and not because of elections.

I believe that as the economy continues to fall apart rank and file working people will be open for arguments calling for fundamental change. Many of these people voted for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. What would that change look like?

We might look at the numbers of people in the working class in the world. We might also look at the amount of work that is, in effect, wasted in enterprises that add no value to the goods and services we all want and need. 

Thinking about all of that, if the government and the economy made human needs and not profits the priority, there would be a fundamental change. Workers would only need to work for a few years before retiring. We would all have lifetime rights to all the things we need and many of the things we want. There could be more teachers so class sizes would never exceed ten students to one teacher. The number of doctors could grow astronomically. This would mean that we could all actually talk to a doctor when we need to. There could be an efficient mass transit system that would take us to anywhere we want to go in the world.

While capitalist stability is becoming an impossible dream. a socialist future world is indeed possible. I encourage everyone to take part in the national demonstration on January 20 to coincide with the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

The Governments of the United States and Israel have a history of kidnapping children

 

By Steven Halpern

Recently, President Joe Biden issued a formal apology to Native Americans for what he called "a sin on our soul." What is the "sin" Biden was talking about?

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found that "at least 18,000 Native American children—some as young as 4—were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to dispossess tribal nations of their land." These kidnappings ultimately caused the deaths of 973 Native American children. (Philadelphia Inquirer 10-25-2024)

In his apology to Native Americans, President Biden said that the removal of Native American children from their community to boarding schools "will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history. For too long this all happened with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books, not taught in our schools."

A protester at Biden's apology ceremony asked the question: "How can you apologize for a genocide while committing a genocide in Palestine?"  

Thinking about President Biden's words of apology to Native Americans, we might consider an October 9, 2024 opinion piece in the New York Times by Feroze Sidhwa titled, "65 Doctors, Nurses, and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza?"

In this column Sidhwa quoted from 44 medical professionals who testified to treating pre-teen Palestinian children for bullet wounds in the head or chest. The 65 also testified to treating children who were starving due to the Israeli government policy of denying Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip access to food and clean water.

So, while President Biden apologizes to Native Americans for what he calls a "mark of shame," his Administration has been making the mass murder of Palestinians by the Israeli government possible with about $18 billion worth of so-called "aid." We can also speculate that of the tens of thousands of Palestinians murdered by the IDF, half of that number were children

There is another question that I believe needs to be asked. Were these isolated events, or is there a history of kidnapping of children by both the United States and Israeli governments?

Operation Peter (Pedro) Pan

After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the Catholic Welfare Bureau collaborated with representatives of the United States government to kidnap about 14,000 Cuban children. They were transported unaccompanied to be raised in the United States in what became known as Operation Peter (Pedro) Pan. Under the direction of Father Bryan O. Walsh, Cuban parents were indoctrinated with the absurd idea that their parental rights would be terminated by the Cuban revolutionary government headed by Fidel Castro. 

As in the case of the kidnapping of Native American children, these Cuban children were separated from their parents. However, in the case of most of these Cuban children, they would never see their parents again. 

Operation Babylift

In the year 1975 the United States government was coming to grips with the fact that their armed forces had been decisively defeated by the Vietnamese people. However, the U.S. government ordered the military to murder over one million people in the course of that undeclared war. 

In the last year of the war, President Richard Nixon ordered bombing raids of Vietnam in what he called Linebacker One and Linebacker Two. These came after the bombing raids ordered by President Lyndon Johnson named Rolling Thunder.

Apparently this mass destruction wasn't enough for Washington. So, President Gerald Ford initiated Operation Babylift. This was an effort to transport about 2,500 Vietnamese children, many of whom were orphans, to the United States. One of the planes used to transport these children crashed. As a result, 78 of the children died.

Yemenite Children Affair

In the year 1994 Rabbi Uzi Meshulam led a group of his followers to barricade themselves in a compound in the Israeli town of Yehud for 45 days. The Israeli police murdered one of his followers. Meshulam and several of the protesters served time in prison. What was this all about?

According to a Feb 20, 2019 New York Times article by Malin Fezahai, between 1,000 and 4,500 Mizrahi Jewish children were abducted in the 1950s. Mizrahi Jews left Arabic speaking nations where their families lived for many years before the establishment of Israel in 1948. 

These Jews came from a different culture than the Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to Palestine-Israel from Europe. There has been a persistent policy of discrimination against Mizrahi Jews since the establishment of the state of Israel. According to Israeli investigations, the Yemeni children were given to affluent childless Ashkenazi families.

Yet according to the Israeli Constitution, amended in 2018, the nation of Israel is supposed to be a homeland for Jewish people. A basic flaw in this constitution is that about half of the people living in Israel and the occupied territories are Palestinians who do not have equal rights.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the following statement about the abducted Jewish children. Most of their families came to Israel from Yemen. Netanyahu issued this statement after the Israeli government made several investigations as to what happened to these kidnapped Jewish children. 

"The issue of the Yemenite children is an open wound that continues to bleed in many families who do not know what happened to the babies, to children that disappeared, and they are looking for the truth." (Ofer Aderet, Haaretz July 31, 2016)

Thinking about this statement by Netanyahu, we might consider the article by Feroze Sidhwa titled "65 Doctors, Nurses, and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza?" The excuse Netanyahu used for organizing the genocide against Palestinians was about his response to the October 7 raid organized by Hamas. Netanyahu consistently argued that his goal in the genocide is the release of Israeli hostages. The facts are that Netanyahu acknowledged that there are over 1,000 Jewish children who were abducted by Israeli authorities in the 1950s. To this day the fate of many of those children is unknown. 

Conclusion

So, President Biden says that the kidnapping of Native American children was "a mark of shame, a blot on American history." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the kidnapping of Jewish Yemenite children for him "is an open wound." Yet both Biden and Netanyahu have carried out a genocidal campaign to murder tens of thousands of Palestinian children.

This leaves working people living in the world only one option. This is to join with all those who are marching in the streets and demand Ceasefire Now!!!