With capitalism in deep trouble around the globe the bosses are responding with more vicious attacks on the working class. President Donald Trump’s One Big Billionaire’s Bill is an openly racist blueprint to scapegoat immigrant workers and force workers to pay for the rulers’ crisis. The bill moves the U.S. closer to full-blown fascism and an inevitable world war with its imperialist rivals. To balance tax cuts for the filthy rich, it will steal healthcare and food from tens of millions of workers and children. And it calls for billions of dollars for building a federal police force to discipline and intimidate the entire working class.
The bill sharpens the fight between the domestically focused Small Fascists fronted by Trump and the Big Fascist finance capital wing that controls the Democrats. Both of these bitterly clashing factions need fascism to try to prop up their failing system. Both are cynically targeting immigrant workers to sow fear and division within our class—and to deflect the anger of U.S.-born workers away from the bosses and their brutal profit system. The two wings’ differences are rooted in where they make their money and in their strategies for war. Trump’s lavish tax cuts for fossil fuels and his spending on military hardware align with the Small Fascists’ plan to build a more isolated Fortress America. The Small Fascist wing wants to protect their interests with long-range missiles and bombers and a bigger navy, but without the even higher costs of massive overseas ground forces. The Big Fascists need a larger military with more soldiers on the ground to defend their global imperialist interests against a rising China (breakingdefense.com, 7/3).
But neither Trump nor the Big Fascists can solve the contradictions of capitalism or halt the decline of U.S. imperialism. Neither side will meet workers’ basic needs or safeguard our children’s future. The choice for our class is clear: to drift along with the tide of war and fascism, or to fight for the liberation of our class with communist revolution.
Bosses turning ICE into national terror force
The bill Trump rammed through Congress allocates $170 billion for anti-immigration state terror over the next three and a half years and triples the outlay for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enough to hire 10,000 more masked gestapo goons. ICE now stands to receive more money than the rest of the federal policing, surveillance, and prison agencies combined (politifact.com, 7/8)—and more than the annual military budgets of Italy, Israel, or Brazil (newsweek.com, 7/2). According to Kristi Noem, Trump’s sadistic “homeland security” chief, the plan is to expand on the cages built by Obama and Biden and double the number of immigrant detention beds. The bosses’ latest concentration camp, a disease-ridden state facility stuck in the remote Florida Everglades, is officially named Alligator Alcatraz (miamiherald.com, 7/3).
Under pressure from Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top nazis, to meet a deportation goal of one million people per year, ICE has expanded its raids to courthouses and train stations, to orchards and carwashes and Home Depot parking lots. To sow maximum fear, they’re seizing documented and undocumented workers alike. Not even native-born U.S workers are safe (AILA, 1/29). The ICE invasions of Los Angeles and more than a dozen other cities, backed by local kkkops and at times the National Guard, have turned civilian policing into a military operation, complete with armored vehicles and flashbang grenades. As anti-immigrant terror is normalized, the liberal bosses will use it for their own purposes as soon as they get the chance. As a former “border management” director under Biden observed, the new level of funding for immigration enforcement “likely changes it forever even if Democrats come into power” (New York Times, 7/12).
Regardless of the uniform they wear, more cops have never made us safer. There’s a long history of working-class resistance to the oppression of workers who’ve been brutalized by slavery, marked by yellow stars, forced to carry passbooks, or penned into camps or reservations or Bantustans. These fights have steeled us and prepared us for bigger battles. The courageous fightback against ICE is a glimpse of the power of antiracist, multiracial, working-class unity. The more we stand together, the stronger our class becomes. We rally around no politicians, no bosses, no flags but the red flag of communism!
Imperialists clash over energy
The OBBB consolidates U.S. investment in fossil fuels over solar and wind. Not only does the bill enrich Trump’s billionaire backers in the coal and domestic oil industry with a $65 billion tax break, it decimates tax incentives for solar, wind and electric vehicles—and exposes the fragility of reforms like Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (msn.com, 7/10). Perhaps most important, it advances a strategy to eliminate U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources while leveraging other countries’ dependence on fossil fuels for geopolitical advantage. In short, it aims to prepare the U.S. for war.
Since World War II, the U.S. has dominated the globe by controlling the flow of oil and gas. In recent years, however, China has made huge strides in harnessing solar and wind power and creating batteries that can recharge an electric car in five minutes. As the price of renewables keeps dropping, the balance of power is shifting. Today, China exports about the same value in clean energy technology as the U.S. exports in fossil fuels (NYT, 6/30).
Though the anti-Trump finance capitalists need to protect their multinational oil companies and keep other countries dependent on them, they also want to compete in clean energy and block China from total domination of production, markets, and supply chains. Trump’s bill cedes “the future of wind, solar, hydrogen and battery investment to China. . . . a stunning acquiescence” (Atlantic Council, 7/3). The stage is set for an open confrontation between the two superpowers. As China restricts the exports of critical rare earth metals and expands clean technology exports to Pakistan, South Africa, and Brazil, the U.S. has countered with steep tariffs and trade restrictions to force its allies to purchase U.S. oil and gas. Something’s got to give.
Workers foot the bill for fascism and war
As the fossil fuel bosses get huge handouts to poison and cook the atmosphere, over 10 million workers—many of them white rural workers who voted for Trump—will lose their Medicaid healthcare (NYT, 7/3). Millions more will lose the food stamps they need to feed their families. The callous strategy is to kick people off the rolls with mounds of paperwork and rigid new work requirements. As U.S. Senator Joni Ernst told her worried constituents, “We all are going to die” anyway. If that sounds inhuman, remember the sign that Hitler’s bureaucrats posted above the entrance to Auschwitz: “Work sets you free.”
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party politicians and their ruling class masters have attacked the bill’s cuts to social services while shamelessly delighting in the prospect that the misery to be heaped upon workers will help the Democrats beat MAGA in the next elections (NYT, 7/3).
Every day we see more clearly the disaster that is capitalism. To build a police state and serve their endless drive for profit, the bosses condemn workers and our children to sickness and starvation. As we organize to smash fascism, we must recognize that only communism–a system run by and for the world’s working class–can protect us from detention, deportation, death and despair. Join Progressive Labor Party! Join the fight for communism!