A leaked draft opinion outlines plans for the Supreme Court majority to strike down the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision that maintained these rights. Here is a link to the draft majority opinion.

Women in Struggle/Mujeres en Lucha and the Socialist Unity Party/Partido de Socialismo Unido assert that it is time to take to the streets and resist the imminent, deeply reactionary Supreme Court decision that paves the way for a surge of attacks by the far right, including the neo-fascist elements responsible for the failed January 6, 2021, coup.

Reversing Roe v. Wade seeks to turn the clock back to the time when women – especially Black, Brown and poor women – were forced to seek back-alley abortions. 

This decision is an attack on the rights of all genders, including transgender people and the LGBTQ2S movement. If affirmed, the arguments the draft opinion is based on would also undermine many other hard-won rights, including same-sex marriage, and be used to further the ongoing assault on trans people.

This attack is also deeply connected to the white supremacist attacks on voting rights for Black and Brown people and the attempts to stop workers from unionizing.

In the final analysis, the crushing of reproductive rights will fall disproportionately on women of color and poor women, as well as trans men, non-binary and gender non-conforming people who also need the right to abortion. It will also impact transgender and LGBTQ2S people by cutting their access to medical care. The very wealthy have always found a way to access abortions and other care. 

Mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians have done almost nothing to stop the right wing in its tracks and to defend women’s rights. The attack has been clearly coming for years – yet the Biden White House, with a Democratic majority in Congress, did nothing to prepare.

In the blink of an eye, Biden and Congress are preparing to turn over another $33 billion dollars to escalate the U.S./NATO proxy war on Russia and Donbass. But they remain powerless to stop the storm threatening millions of women, oppressed-gendered people and the working class in general.

What is needed to stop this storm is a massive mobilization in the streets, independent of the capitalist parties. This mobilization must hurt the real power behind the right-wing threat – the big banks and capitalist bosses.  

We propose building a one-day strike, sick-out, walk-out and sit-down that will be costly for those in power. Our power as workers, as students, as members of the community, can transcend the reactionary Supreme Court and the for-profit, anti-women, anti-trans, anti-people, anti-working-class policies.  

When business as usual stops – they will reverse themselves!

We must defend a woman’s right to choose whether or not she wants to be pregnant. Nor can we forget others who may become pregnant, including trans men, non-binary and gender non-conforming people. That most basic freedom may now be denied, with the U.S. Supreme Court indicating it will overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling upholding a person’s right to control their own body. 

Ruling-class politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties have either pushed this tremendous attack on women, or allowed it to be pushed. They’ve allowed state governments like that in Texas, one of the most racist and reactionary, to continue policies that encourage further reactionary attacks around the country.

Today we the working class face unprecedented, multiple attacks. We have to be aware of those members of our class hit the hardest, like women, who are still paid only 79% on average of what men make. They are being victimized by Texas laws denying their right to an abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. 

Women in Texas face forced pregnancies under penalty of debilitating fines and imprisonment, and their caregivers could face life in prison. This is having a devastating effect on those unable to travel to other states to get the procedure. 

It is Black women who are most severely hit by this form of fascism. Texas has a severe maternal mortality crisis, and Black women are three times more likely than white women to die during pregnancy or as a result of childbirth. And, although abortion is a safe procedure, every week of unnecessary delay increases the risk. 

The goal of these reactionaries has long been to use multiple challenges in states and the complicity of the Supreme Court to abolish Roe v. Wade. The ACLU estimates that this will mean 36 million people across the country forced to carry pregnancies against their will.

As stated in an article in the publication of my party, the Socialist Unity Party’s Struggle-La Lucha, Texas has become ground zero for some of the most reactionary and divisive laws in the United States. The government is also attacking the voting rights of Black people – many of whom died gruesome deaths at the hands of white supremacists fighting for that right. Texas leads in the racist rejection of truth-telling in teaching U.S. history – and now, of persecuting trans children and their families.

The consequences are being felt everywhere. NBC News reported on March 20 that across the U.S., state lawmakers proposed a record 238 bills since the beginning of 2022 that would limit the rights of LGBTQ2S peoples — more than three per day — with about half targeting transgender people specifically.

Isn’t it time that we abolish the appointed-for-life Supreme Court, this most undemocratic institution, and replace it with elected members representing our multinational, multi-gendered, and LGBTQ2S working class?

When artillery hit a busy public space in Donetsk, it brought flashbacks of attacks in Gaza and Syria

If the Donetsk marketplace that was hit by rocket artillery on Thursday had been in a city controlled by Kiev, the names and faces of the five civilians killed would be on all major news sites. But because it was another Ukrainian attack on civilians in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the deaths and 23 additional civilians injured will almost certainly go unreported, as has the been the norm during the regime’s eight years of the Donbass and Western media’s eight years of ignoring the attacks.

According to the DPR’s Healthcare Ministry, “The strike at the Tekstilschik neighbourhood in the Kirovsky district killed four people on the spot. One patient died in an ambulance during the transportation.”

With another journalist, I went in a taxi to the bombed markets. Two of the dead still lay at the site when we arrived, splayed on the ground. The other bodies had already been removed, but traces of their blood remained on the ground, doors nearby were riddled with shrapnel holes and debris from the strike was all around.

Presumably, rescue workers dealt with the injured first and didn’t prioritize retrieving all the dead as further Ukrainian strikes were possible. I saw this during my experience in Gaza, where Israeli’s waited for people to come to the scene of their attack, then bombed again.

According to Gennady Andreevich, a local employee of the district’s safety commission, at 11:40 am Grad missiles struck two different nearby markets: the vegetable and clothing market where the bodies lay, and a household chemicals and building materials market across and down the street. The latter was far more damaged, stalls completely burnt out, but no one was killed there.

Gennady walked with us to the vegetable market, speaking about previous Ukrainian attacks–which have been happening since 2014. More recent shellings hit near a gas station outside the market, at a residential building beyond the market, and in his own market administrative building, killing two colleagues.

He noted that at this time of day the market would have been filled with people, and that Ukraine knows very well what it is firing at.

“They know there is a market here and that from 10am to 1pm there are many people here,” Gennady said as we walked past shops.

This is a completely civilian area, no military installations.

Who else attacks markets and public spaces?

Striking crowded markets and streets at a busy time of the day is something terrorists in Syria did for years, to the silence of Western media. It is something Israel has also done for a long time, hitting residential and public areas of Gaza–one of the most densely inhabited places on earth.

During the 2009 war on Gaza, Israel bombed crowded mosques, hospitals, and buildings housing displaced Palestinians. One of the more notable incidents was when Tel Aviv targeted a UN-run school in Jabaliya sheltering nearly 1,500 people. At least 40 were killed. Another horrific attack on a crowded place was in the Zeitoun district, after Israeli soldiers forced at gunpoint nearly 100 of the extended Samouni family into one home and later bombed it, killing 48 members of the clan.

During the war, I accompanied medics in their ambulances, documenting Israel’s war crimes. A medic (Arafa abd al-Dayem) I had accompanied was killed one day when the Israeli army fired a prohibited flechette (dart) shell directly at him and the ambulance he stood beside. The following day, Israel struck the crowded mourning tents, also with flechettes, killing six and injuring 25 of the relatives and friends who had gathered in one small space to mourn Arafa’s death.

Damascus’ old city is a maze of twisting lanes, overlapping houses, churches, mosques, schools, crowded outdoor eateries, and markets. Terrorist factions occupying eastern Ghouta shelled most frequently when children would be going to or from school, people to markets.

Having spent a lot of time in the East Gate and Thomas Gate areas of the old city, I experienced the shelling and, unfortunately, acquired many accounts of the terrorists shelling crowded places.

Even today, walking around Old Damascus, you’ll find the imprint of mortar blasts. And if you do walk those lanes, you’ll see how crowded they usually are, meaning many people would have been injured and killed per single mortar blast.

In mid April 2014, for example, they hit an elementary school and a kindergarten, killing one child and injuring 65 more, just some of the countless children killed and injured by shelling over the years.

Incidentally, I later wrote about how the BBC were present at the same hospital where I saw these injured children, and were told explicitly that terrorists were mortaring the city every single day. The BBC article that later followed included the line: “the government is also accused of launching them into neighborhoods under its control.”

I also wrote about terrorist bombings of Aleppo, citing one day in November 2016 when I was in the city, which by the end of the day killed 18 and injured more than 200 civilians. These were some of the nearly 11,000 civilians killed in Aleppo alone by terrorist attacks on homes and public places.

I could continue citing such acts of terrorism in Syria, in Palestine, elsewhere, but I’ve made my point: when Ukraine bombs a crowded market, it is an intentional act of terrorism. As is Ukraine’s relentless bombing of homes in the Donbass republics these past eight years.

Western Media won’t report on this; Western politicians won’t condemn this; virtue signalers won’t speak about this. And when you actually go and document it, they will silence you relentlessly.

My initial tweet about the market attack was predictably trolled, with comments claiming the bodies were fakes, the bombing never occurred, “prove it” sort of remarks.

Since my observations and photos, as well as Gennady’s testimony, will still not be proof enough, in my video I also included footage taken by a local who was in the market when it was bombed and filmed the immediate aftermath. Gennady himself showed photos on his phone of firefighters dousing the flames, and scenes of the wounded and dead, clearly surrounded by new bomb debris.

But this is what we’ve come to today: Ukraine, often using weapons acquired from the West, can continue to bomb busy civilian areas of the Donbass republics, killing still more civilians, and not only do the hypocrites of the West so keen to accuse Russia of war crimes (which they can never prove and often contradict themselves over), but media and troll farms work in lockstep to gaslight the public and whitewash Ukraine’s war crimes.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

Statement by John Parker, Socialist Unity Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, at a memorial in Moscow for victims of the 2014 Odessa Massacre on May 2. Parker is on a fact-finding trip to uncover the truth about the U.S./NATO proxy war on Donbass and Russia.

Now more than ever, we must raise the reality of the nature of the Ukrainian government, to alert our class to the danger of U.S.-led NATO expansion, the greatest danger to humanity today.

The massacre at the Odessa House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014, was a war crime by proxy, with Nazi and other fascist gangsters following the script written for them by U.S. imperialism before 2014.

But instead of being tried in the International Criminal Court – because they were doing the bidding of U.S. and European imperialists – they received the de facto immunity for war crimes enjoyed by all U.S. forces committing murder and genocide spread across the globe.

Instead of being tried in Ukraine, the Nazi forces were emboldened by the fact that the evil that was done was rewarded with the jailing of the anti-fascist victims of the terror.

Following President Petrenko before him, President Zelensky not only rewarded the perpetrators by not charging them, he appointed a fascist as governor of Odessa to put salt in the wound.

That refusal to act in the name of justice and that most unjust appointment of a Nazi sealed the historical designation of Zelensky as not only a traitor to the working class but also a traitor to Jewish people around the world.

Is this the person, is this the regime of serial killers, that deserves the sophisticated weapons of mass destruction the U.S. has been sending to Ukraine?

People should not dismiss Zelensky’s suggestion that he should now be allowed to accept nuclear weapons in Ukraine. No one should underestimate U.S. imperialism’s willingness to commit any murder, genocide or war crime. The over 200,000 civilians killed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima by atomic bombs, used even on children, makes that clear.

The best way to honor the martyrs, the anti-fascists and courageous comrades who were willing to risk their lives to defeat the fascists, who risked their lives to protect humanity from that scourge, is to ensure that the fascist movement in Ukraine receive no more weapons, money or political support from the imperialist powers, who hypocritically talk about imaginary war crimes while excusing the elephant in the room with blood on its tusks.

How can we do this? By raising and highlighting the events on May 2, 2014, so every individual in the working class in every imperialist country knows what their governments did in enabling the rise of fascism in Ukraine.

In various U.S. cities, our comrades are holding picket lines and vigils to honor this anniversary.

We must speak louder than the corporate media – we can and we shall. They may have the propaganda apparatus, but we have the people, whose potential, if organized, could easily overwhelm them. 

We have the truth – whose containment is not sustainable – and most important, like our comrades who died knowing they were on the right side of history, we have the moral fiber, integrity and love for humanity that resists fire, resists bullets and keeps coming back until every last vestige of fascism is finally thrown into the dustbin of history.

On April 29, thousands of teachers, students and parents from Schools and Labor Against Privatization (SLAP) rallied at Oscar Grant Plaza next to City Hall in Oakland, California, then marched to the Port of Oakland where they held a picket line that shut the port down.

The innovative joint labor action was an historic day in the campaign led by SLAP, union teachers of the Oakland Education Association (OEA) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, against racist gentrification in Oakland.

Local 10 honored the picket line with a stop-work action in solidarity with the teachers and community to fight the privatization and destruction of the port and Oakland’s public school system engineered by billionaire John Fisher. 

Fisher is an heir to The Gap fortune, a real-estate developer and owner of the Oakland A’s baseball team. He also owns a charter school and acts as a national spokesperson for school privatization under the guise of charter schools. 

One-day strike

Oakland educators called a one-day unfair labor practice strike on April 29 after the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) failed to follow its 2019 agreement with OEA to engage with families when considering closing schools. 

Despite widespread outcry from families, including legal action filed by the ACLU of Northern California on behalf of the Justice for Oakland Students Coalition, 11 schools are scheduled to close by the end of next year – three this year and eight the following year.

OUSD has a history of closing schools in predominantly Black and Brown communities. In the past 15 years, OUSD has closed 16 majority-Black schools, upending communities and pushing more than 18,000 Black students out of the district since 1996.

“Let’s be clear – educators don’t want to strike, but we are because OUSD has forced us to fight to protect the schools our Black and Brown students deserve,” said union President Keith Brown. “Rather than putting their resources towards unilaterally closing schools, OUSD should be acting as a respected governing body of learning and walking the walk to support the future of Oakland’s families.”

Watch a report of the day’s actions by Steve Zeltzer of the LaborVideo Project.

Widespread opposition

Preceding the one-day strike, trade unionists from OEA, ILWU Local 10, Service Employees Local 1021, and Steel Workers Local 5 held a joint press conference next to the Howard Terminal in the Port of Oakland to voice opposition to Fisher’s plan to privatize the terminal and build a new stadium, a sky-box hotel and 3,000 luxury condos. 

Other organizations engaged in building a united labor and community front against privatization in the Bay Area include ILWU Local 6, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21, University Professional & Technical Employees, and the All City Council student union.

Billionaire Fisher’s stadium privatization deal and a giveaway of $850 million in taxpayer money for the project is supported by Mayor Libby Schaaf, the Oakland City Council and the Alameda Labor Council, led by the conservative Alameda Building Trades.

Opposition to Fisher’s gentrification scheme won ground on March 16 when the Seaport Planning Advisory Committee, in a 5-4 vote, recommended that the 55-acre Howard Terminal property be used only for Port of Oakland activities, not as the site of a 35,000-seat ballpark surrounded by a planned village of 3,000 housing units, offices, retail, hotel rooms and parks. 

Angela Davis spoke at this year’s San Francisco May Day rally as an honorary member of ILWU Local 10. Davis denounced Fisher’s stadium gentrification as a project which would destroy the working Port of Oakland and part of the privatization of public areas. She joined the ILWU contingent at the head of the march.  

Zeltzer of the LaborVideo Project reports there were also solidarity greetings from the Japanese railway workers’ union Doro-Chiba, fired leaders of the Mineworkers Union Of Namibia Rössing branch, and Partido Obrera/Workers Party in Argentina.

Thousands participated in a beautiful, multinational May Day commemoration in downtown Los Angeles on May 1. 

Beginning with a rally at the corner of Broadway and Olympic, unionists, immigrant rights fighters, socialists, environmentalists and activists fighting racist police brutality took every lane of one of the busiest thoroughfares on their northbound route to Grand Park. 

The march was initiated by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and numerous L.A. trade unions. The signs and banners, consistent with the tradition of this international holiday, called out the important issues in the global working-class struggle. 

After long decades of suppression, it was a resurgence of the immigrant rights movement that fueled a mega-march on May 1, 2006, and brought May Day to the attention of hundreds of thousands of people once again. Though interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the size and breadth of this year’s march shows that was not an aberration. 

Workers and oppressed people are geared up for a fightback to recoup all that was lost or delayed by the billionaires who have exploited and elongated the deadly pandemic. 

SLL photos: Scott Scheffer

Havana’s Revolution Square looked beautiful this Sunday, as it had not been for three years. With the first morning light, thousands of Havanans, Cubans from all over our geography, and friends from other latitudes paraded as one in front of the giant bust of José Martí. All carried Cuban flags of all sizes, signs that read “Cuba Lives and Works,” “Yes, we can,” or showed images of Fidel, Raúl, and President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

Cuba missed the joy and creativity with which it marks International Workers’ Day. At 6 a.m. local time, the crowd looked like a sea of little heads from the 15th floor of a Havana building near the Plaza.

A huge Cuban flag, another with the face of the Cuban National hero, José Martí, and another with the colors of gay pride, stood out from the heights.

May Day is for Cubans as Fidel Castro described 60 years ago, in honor of the date: “The jubilation and the multitudinous concurrence of the working class today mean the beautiful reality of our island, the fact that Cubans wake jubilant with the first light of the dawn. All the factories begin the commemoration by whistling their sirens, and all the workers mobilize and prepare themselves to make this day more beautiful impactful as years gone by.”

Before the march was done, the photos taken by great Cuban photojournalists, such as Ismael Francisco, Irene Perez, Andy Jorge Blanco, began to circulate on social networks. They managed to immortalize the joy of a little children advancing through the sea of people on their father’s shoulders; the pride of a man carrying a Cuban flag on his chest, the emotion of Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro, who watched the march a few meters from the José Martí monument.

The last time the Plaza de la Revolución was as crowded as today was on May 1, 2019. A few months after, everything changed for Cuba and the world. The 2020’s and 2021’s May Day were mark trough social medias as the COVID-19 desolated cities, emptied squares, and forced doctors to fight to save lives in hospitals and isolation centers.

This Sunday was different thanks to the Cuban scientific community and to our leaders’ efforts. 87.8 percent of the country’s population is immunized against the disease with our own vaccines. Their effectiveness is reflected in the low rates of contagion that the country registers, which made it possible for all of us to go to the Plaza as we do every May Day, even when this time we all wore face masks, something unprecedented.

Once again, the world looked at the parade held in Cuba for the International Workers’ Day in bewilderment that the Cuban people could come out once again in such a huge expression of unity, dispelling the myths that appear daily in the corporate media, especially what we see from the US.
Many Cuban friends and colleagues I spoke with said the march was larger than they expected after the long layoff. And many came out with homemade signs on card board. The main themes of the march were honoring Cuba’s health system, available equally to all, and the development of economic industries of all sizes and products.

Meanwhile, in other countries people took to the streets to express their discontent with the lack of labor laws to protect them from the greed of corporate bosses. But I must say the marches in Cuba seem more like a big party endorsing the plans of the socialist island nation. Over 200 organizations from 60 countries, including the US, participated in Cuba’s May
Day event.

Fidel’s words pronounced 60 years ago are still applicable: “What is happening today serves to define the policy of a country. In many nations workers are oppressed and are victims of the fiercest exploitation, and they cannot even gather on May Day.”

Indeed and during the seven years that our country lived under the Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, back in the 50s, workers were not allowed to go out on the streets on May Day; the working class had to commemorate this event secretly, in private meeting rooms.

Luckily, Cuba’s fortunes changed in 1959. Although we are immersed in a complex economic situation and an unprecedented international disinformation campaign, the island has shown today that it may have a long way to go but that it is willing to keep pushing for a better future, which is only possible by being united.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

May 6 – 8
opening Friday, 5:30 pm
The People’s Forum,
320 W. 37TH St, NYC 10018

RISING TO RETURN:
Mapping strategies to advance Palestinian liberation and return;
Devising tactics to dismantle zionist supremacy and colonization

Join us for a weekend of strategic collaboration for advancing Palestinian liberation and return. The conference will include film screenings, poetry, music, organizers, activists and speakers from Palestine and globally ~ combined in a weekend of intensive workshops geared to craft advanced strategies for advancing the Palestinian liberation movement.

Sneak Preview of Partial Speakers List:
Samia Halaby • Ahlam Muhtaseb • Ubai Aboudi • Said Arikat • Adel Samara • Ramzy Baroud • Seif Dana • Lara Kiswani • Miko Peled • David Sheen

Music, poetry and Dance (partial list)
Freedom Debka • Turath Band: featuring Zafer Tawil, a virtuoso on ‘oud, violin and qanan, and a master of Arab percussion.

Featuring the first live stateside Book Launch of Ramzy Baroud and Ilan Pappe’s latest publication “OUR VISION FOR LIBERATION: Engaged Palestinian Leaders & Intellectuals Speak Out”

REGISTER NOW

On Opening Night, Friday May 6, 5:30 pm
Speakers, activists, organizers and student groups from Palestine and across the US and Palestinian entertainment including Watani Music and Turath Band, film screening of Gazas Angel, 1948: Catastrophe & Creation, and Kufr Qassem, with more surprises in store…

A sneak preview, with more to be announced soon

• Samia Halaby. World Renowned artist, politico, and author,
• Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, Professor of Media Studies and Director of the film “1948: Creation & Catastrophe”
• Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resources and Organizing Center and the 2021 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 Honoree,
• Ayah Ziyadeh: Advocacy Director of American Muslims for Palestine, human rights scholar, activist,
• Said Arikat, Bureau Chief Quds News
• Dr. Seif Dana, Sociology Professor and author,
• Andom Ghebreghiorgis, son of Eritrean immigrants, teacher, ran a progressive campaign for Congress in NY’s 16th District in 2020
• Dr. Adel Samara, Political economist, author, former political prisoner, and editor of Kanan Magazine,
• Miko Peled, Author of books The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine and Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five,
• David Sheen, Journalist who will be sharing explosive investigation of the connections between Zionist terrorist groups in Palestine and their U.S. sponsors.
• Clarence Thomas ILWU Local 10 retired: Labor activist, author of “Mobilizing In Our Own Name”, and key supporter of the Block the Boat Actions in the U.S.

More soon…

Also: Messages from Abdul Bari Atwan, Ilan Pappe, Masoud Hayoun and TBA

And by video:
Lowkey (banned from U.S.) British rapper under attack by Zionists and
Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Father of Palestinian Return, author and historian

REGISTER NOW: tinyurl.com/risingtoreturn

An appeal for help:

Please use the donation button at the bottom to help us cover the costs of this amazing conference.
Please contact us at alawdany@gmail.com if you can donate frequent flyer miles to help get our speakers and some students to NYC.

A few nearby hotels include: Hampton Inn Times Square Central, TRYP New York City Times Square South, Doubletree Times Square South, La Quinta Inn and Suites by Wyndham, Hotel Shocard, The New Yorker Hotel, Pestana CR7 Times Square, and Fairfield Marriott Times Square South.

Hosted by Al-Awda NY

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
DONATE HERE TO SUPPORT AL-AWDA PRRC

Struggle-La Lucha writer John Parker, Socialist Unity Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, is on a fact-finding trip to uncover the truth about the U.S./NATO proxy war on Donbass and Russia. 

Moscow – Today, May 1, on the Day of International Solidarity of Workers, communist and left-wing organizations of the capital held a solemn event.

In this difficult time it is more important than ever to show international solidarity, because no matter what conflicts and wars go on now or in the future, it is worth remembering that there are only two classes, and this is the largest world conflict, which so far does not even think of ending – the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Our modest event was attended by a guest from the United States – John Parker, a public figure and social activist with great experience, coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles, who formerly worked with Angela Davis, was a labor organizer and a former coordinator of the International Action Center. He currently writes for Struggle for Socialism-La Lucha por el Socialismo.

Source: Union of Communist Youth – Moscow City Branch

For a brief period last summer, even as the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the headlines, climate change news burst to the forefront. 

There were wildfires in several western U.S. states, where record-breaking droughts dried up the water system. There were floods in China, Central Europe and India, where 1,300 people died. A Pacific Northwest heat wave took the lives of more than 1,000 people in the normally temperate and humid region. 

Considered the most extreme heat wave in world history, it shocked climatologists and was a basis for the reassessment of climate change timelines.

All of this was happening as President Joe Biden’s proposed “Build Back Better” legislation, which included funds for action on climate change, was being crushed in Congress. The legislation was already not enough – but still too much for the powerful energy industry and giant banks to allow. 

The defeat left the White House without a plan of action to bring to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow last October.

The humiliation and consequent surrender by Biden revealed the weakness of the executive branch of the capitalist U.S. government when it is forced to confront the power of the ruling class, and in particular, giant energy corporations and banks.

Washington prioritizes war

Because of the resources ostensibly at the fingertips of the U.S. empire, capitalist media throughout the world interpret the role of the U.S. as primary in the global effort to fight climate change. This is false hope. The U.S. military is itself the worst single entity that emits CO2 in the world and has evolved into nothing less than a brutal police force for the U.S. energy industry in its efforts to control the world’s oil, natural gas and coal. 

The energy industry is a powerful section of the capitalist class and garners huge and growing investment by the giant banks. Instead of aiding the replacement of fossil fuels with wind and solar, or pushing reforestation on a massive scale, the major oil companies are now investing in ventures that by design can enable their continued drilling and fracking of oil and natural gas.  

They can’t lead this fight. A leopard doesn’t change its spots.

Nonetheless, and understandably, during the leadup to the Glasgow conference, tens of millions of people throughout the world were hoping the White House would take charge and work to alleviate the menacing climate crisis.

Despite the U.S. delegation attending the conference with obvious empty promises instead of a list of actions already funded and soon to be underway, the conference stiffened some of the goals set at previous conferences. All agreed on preventing the global rise in temperature since the industrial revolution from topping 1.5 degrees, reaching “carbon neutrality” by 2050, and mobilizing financing for the global south for mitigation and adaptation.  

Since the conference, the White House’s failed climate proposals are all but forgotten. The media is focused now on the conflict in Ukraine – a crisis created by Washington that threatens the world with nuclear war, as U.S. imperialism maneuvers to increase its domination of oil, gas and energy pathways. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued strident warnings that not enough progress has been made in the five months since COP26 and humanity is not on pace in the fight to save the planet. The funding promised to the global south has not come to pass.

Without the blazing headlines over climate change nagging Biden, the White House has now made a u-turn. To alleviate the consequences of Biden and NATO’s campaign against Russia and Donbass, he greenlit the auction of 1.7 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil giants Exxon, Shell, Chevron and others, in a realization of right-wing Sara Palin’s cry to “drill, baby, drill.”

The people pay the price

But there’s no need to hear from the IPCC, or to do a deep dive through mainstream media, to know that the crisis is ongoing. Hundreds of thousands of people are experiencing the consequences firsthand.

An April 5 Newsweek headline reported, “Texas Flash Flooding Sweeps Cars Away as Roads Turn Into Rivers.”

Firefighters in drought-stricken Flagstaff, Arizona, have finally made headway in battling a 19,000-acre fire that was within miles of the city.

In Durban, South Africa, families are mourning more than 400 victims and cleaning up after devastating floods swept away homes of many of the poorest South Africans.

As if the people of Iraq haven’t endured enough at the hands of U.S. imperialism, after wars and sanctions that killed millions, a report by the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies says that Baghdad could be uninhabitable by 2040. The number of 120-degree days will increase from 14 per year not long ago to 40 per year by then.

Awareness of the impending threat is as old as the problem itself. The pioneer of climate science was a remarkable scientist and women’s rights fighter – Eunice Newton Foote, who studied and wrote about the dangers of greenhouse gasses. Her work had to be introduced to other scientists by a male colleague in 1856. But the science was isolated and largely ignored for nearly a century. 

Now there are hundreds of thousands of expert climatologists throughout the world. Engineers are constantly pushing innovations that should be invested in, developed and employed. All of this science and every resource needs to be freed from the influence of the capitalist class. 

Though every criminal U.S. energy corporation today claims to be “green,” it’s never been more clear that the fight against climate change must be severed from their grasp to turn the situation around. The needed momentum won’t come from any occupant of the White House – Democrat or Republican. The only real power capable of saving our planet is in the independent mobilization of the people.