Explosion in billionaires’ riches over the past ten years

New York Times, 3/2– …analysis shows the stunning velocity at which the fortunes of the 1 percent have increased across the country since President [Donald] Trump first took office in 2017. The richest Americans saw their net worth soar 120 percent between 2017 and 2025, a colossal leap from the 45 percent growth they had seen over the previous nine years. The number of U.S. billionaires jumped…to more than 900 people…The legislation, which slashed personal income taxes and doubled the estate tax exemption…Overall, the top 1 percent now control $55.8 trillion in assets — more than the G.D.P. of the United States and China combined.

China spends for war as destruction spreads across the world

Reuters, 3/5– China will boost defence spending by 7% in 2026, it said on Thursday, the lowest rate in five years but still outpacing wider economic growth targets and the rest of Asia at a time of growing regional tension, including over Taiwan…China’s ⁠share of Asia’s total military expenditure grew to almost 44% in 2025, up from an average of 37% between 2010 and 2020, it added…China gives no breakdown of defence spending, though its budget of 1.91 trillion yuan ($277 billion) is just about a quarter of a $1-trillion defence bill U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law in December.

Israel and U.S. bosses fight for regional control

Al Jazeera, 3/9–...the February 2026 assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei…are increasingly viewed by military analysts not as the long arm of the Mossad, but as the result of a massive and pervasive United States technological umbrella as well as profound internal decay within Tehran’s security apparatus…The strike that killed Khamenei and Iran’s top military brass was essentially a joint US-Israeli mission. Experts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) note the mission relied heavily on a target bank and real-time electronic surveillance provided by the CIA. The technical footprint is undeniably from the confines of Langley, the Virginia, US home of the CIA, and its global web. 

As usual, police in U.K. protect, defend, and fight for racists on march through Bristol

BristolLive, 3/7–At one point police officers managed to create a 50-yard buffer zone as around 40 of the ‘Bristol Patriots’ as they continued their slow march around to Cabot Circus…As Bristol Patriots headed back towards the Cenotaph, counter-protesters can be heard shouting “Bristol is anti-fascists”...Scenes of violence erupted in the city as the police battled to hold back hundreds of counter protesters and allow the march to pass into Haymarket. There were chaotic scenes near Primark as police are pushing and shoving counter protesters out of the way.

Are tired U.S. sailors sabotaging toilets?

MarineInsight, 2/25–The US Navy’s largest and most expensive aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, is facing persistent sewage system failures…the carrier recorded 205 toilet breakdowns in just four days…The clogs are mainly caused by calcium build-up in the pipes and by improper items like t-shirts and mop heads being flushed… sailors have reportedly described unsanitary conditions and growing fatigue as the extended deployment continues…The prolonged deployment has meant missing major life events…In April–May 2025, the USS Harry S. Truman lost several fighter jets during operations against Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. Subsequent investigations linked the losses to operational strain and crew fatigue.

Mine collapse kills hundreds in D.R. Congo as U.S. bosses negotiate control of minerals

BBC, 3/3– More than 200 people, including 70 children, have been killed after a landslide caused a collapse in a mining area in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the government says.The landslide struck Rubaya, the country’s biggest source of coltan - an ore vital in the electronics industry - in the rebel-controlled east on Tuesday following heavy rains…The Rubaya mining site was recently added to a shortlist of assets that is being offered to the US by the Congolese government under a minerals cooperation framework…A similar collapse at the site in late January following heavy rainfall killed more than 200 people.

The most recent bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel is another link in a long chain of imperialist violence and a brutal reality: competing capitalist powers fighting for dominance over land, resources, trade routes, and profits.

It is no surprise that Trump and his warhawks chose to bomb Iran. The Democrats' silence on this attack shows their greenlighting of it. Despite his talk of being the “Peace President,” Trump and co are at the helm of expanding military actions with no end in sight: Venezuela, Ukraine, Greenland, Canada, Cuba etc. Everywhere we look the world’s ruling classes are sharpening their knives to defend markets, oil fields, shipping lanes, and geopolitical advantage.

Imperialism is not an accident. It is a natural outgrowth of capitalism itself. As capitalism’s crisis continues to worsen, sanctions, proxy wars, regime change operations, and direct military strikes are what the bosses turn to.

The bombing of Iran must be understood in this global context: as a warning sign of escalating rivalry between the U.S. and China, Iran’s ally. This may spiral into a regional war — and beyond that, toward a catastrophic world conflict.

Who Pays the Price?

Workers in Iran, Israel, the United States, China, and across the globe will be told to wave flags and defend “national interests.” They will be conscripted, displaced, bombed, and impoverished. They will be turned into cannon fodder while corporate executives and political elites calculate profits and power from a safe distance.

The same system that closes hospitals, underfunds schools, and drives up the cost of living suddenly finds limitless money for missiles and military bases. The same politicians who preach austerity at home demand unity behind war abroad. Racism and nationalism are used to divide working people and convince them that their enemy is a worker in another country — rather than the ruling class that exploits them all.

The Only Solution is a Communist Revolution!

The path forward lies not in choosing one capitalist camp over another, but in building international solidarity against a system that breeds war. Only a mass international movement will crush the racist and sexist profit system that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, and replace it with a system run by workers, who will harness the enormous potential of all and distribute the fruits of their labor according to need.

PLP has been at the forefront of the communist movement for over 50 years, immersing ourselves in militant working-class struggles in the schools, universities, hospitals, factories, military and churches! We advocate that only a mass international movement of millions fighting directly for communist economic relations will destroy capitalism, its racist artificial borders and its endless imperialist wars! Fight back against these bombings! Fight for communism! Join PLP today!

Capitalism is built upon selfishness, inequality, and exploitation. Under the dictatorship of the bosses, workers are treated as objects to be used up and thrown away–with impunity. For years, the parasite Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faced no consequences for his ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Though he was belatedly stripped of his royal titles, he faced no criminal charges for his role in driving Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s victim and bravest accuser, to suicide. Finally, on February 19, four months after Giuffre’s posthumous memoir told how Mountbatten-Windsor repeatedly raped her when she was 17, he was arrested and briefly detained–not for the sexual abuse of children, but on suspicion of sharing state secrets that Epstein might cash in on. 

The Epstein files expose the stark reality of a system where violence against the vulnerable is the norm, where the legal system is a travesty and the courts and cops exist to serve the rulers and crush the working class. Epstein didn’t operate outside the bounds of capitalist society. He was a monstrous product of the profit system, rewarded by it, and for many years protected by it–until he became too dangerous to even bigger fish in the rotten and degraded ruling class.

We now know that hundreds of filthy rich and powerful individuals–people who actually run things for the bosses–cultivated Epstein for access to money, influence, children, or all three. They stood by him and partied with him for decades after victims began reporting his abuse. They looked past the damning events of 2008, when investigators found that Epstein had raped and abused dozens of girls as young as 14 and he went to jail for 13 months–the ultimate sweetheart plea deal, complete with a work-release program (Forbes, 9/19/25). Many of these ruling-class pillars flew on the Epstein’s private jet, infamously dubbed the "Lolita Express," or wangled invitations to his Florida mansion or his New Mexico ranch or his private nightmare island. They were Republicans and Democrats, husbands and grandfathers, politicians and academics and philanthropists–a toxic stew of capitalist power and privilege. The enormous roster of Epstein pals includes Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, one-time Harvard president Larry Summers, ex-Labour peer Peter Mandelson, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, former prime ministers of Israel and Norway, Emirati billionaire Ahmed bin Sulayem, arch-Zionist attorney Alan Dershowitz, Bob Kerry, Steve Bannon, Noam Chomsky, and Woody Allen. Predator-in-Chief Donald Trump, a serial abuser in his own right, flew on Epstein's plane at least seven times and rated thousands of mentions in the documents, though we can’t know what’s been redacted or omitted. 

And while there’s been a tiny handful of arrests and some forced resignations and lost endorsement deals, not one of these animals has faced real justice. While the bosses may throw a few more of their gang under the bus to keep their broader cover-up intact, they’ll never stop sexist violence against women and children–it’s an organic part of their system. Sexism can be smashed only by overthrowing capitalism with communist revolution. We need a society led by and for the working class, where Virginia Giuffre would have been valued and protected.

Capitalist justice system protects its own

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who ignored Epstein’s crimes as Florida’s attorney general, is now running the same play in Washington: burying evidence, shielding favored names, harassing lawmakers doing any oversight, and turning her back on survivors in open congressional testimony (NPR, 2/12). As Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, the bosses’ state apparatus is a machine for protecting capital and suppressing the working class. The Epstein cover-up isn’t a failure of capitalist democracy. It’s proof that the system is working as it was designed.

The racist character of capitalist injustice could not be clearer. The same court system that let Epstein off easy keeps filling prisons with Black and Brown workers who can't make bail or afford a real defense. The same state that shielded Epstein’s billionaire network is rounding up tens of thousands of migrant workers and throwing them into toxic concentration camps. Meanwhile, Trump, a felon convicted on 34 counts, walks free while his ICE and Border Patrol gestapo commit mayhem and murder. Capitalist society is run not by the laws on the books, but by the brute force of those who hold state power. 

Trafficking of women and minors: business as usual

In the United States, a country created by genocide and slavery, racist and sexist terror is foundational. Indigenous women were captured and forced to become wives, while Black people were bought and sold on auction blocks. The reproduction of the slave labor force required the rape of enslaved women and the violent discipline of their bodies. Slavery didn’t disappear after the Civil War. It evolved into new atrocities: mass incarceration and human trafficking. While only a small fraction of traffickers are prosecuted, it’s estimated that tens of thousands of women and children in the U.S.--and possibly hundreds of thousands–are forced into sexual slavery each year (deliverfund.org). 

Like the capitalist system that spawned it, it’s a global abomination. In 2023, more than 27 million people were trafficked worldwide for either forced labor or coerced or underage sex (dhs.gov). Today, mass sexual violence devastates women in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are not isolated crises. They reflect a system that renders certain lives disposable and treats their suffering as collateral to the interests of those in power.

The files on Epstein's transnational trafficking revealed the abuse of as many as 1,200 women and girls, some as young as eleven. He targeted those failed most miserably by capitalism: runaways, girls in foster care, survivors of domestic violence. He cast his net in impoverished communities in the U.S., South America, and the former Soviet republics. When survivors resisted or attempted escape, they were threatened, isolated, and stripped of identification and financial security. 

Capitalism requires unemployment to discipline labor, racism to divide workers, and sexism to legitimize unpaid and underpaid work. As Engels observed in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, prostitution recruits disproportionately from those with the least property. 

Generating billions in profits, it represents the commodification of the working class in its purest and most disgusting form. 

Only communism brings justice

Workers cannot look to the bosses’ legal system or mad-dog cops for protection. What makes us safe, time and again, is working-class solidarity. 

We’re protected when neighbors organize to defend their communities, when workers resist ICE raids in Minneapolis, when Epstein survivors risk everything to speak publicly, when women in Sudan form grassroots committees against mass sexual violence in wartime. These examples demonstrate a material truth: Working-class people defend one another when the system will not.

For real justice, we’ll need to abolish money and profit, the roots of inequality. Without the profit motive, sexual trafficking would have little purpose. Without sexist inequality, sexual coercion and gendered violence would be collectively confronted and, over time, eliminated. Under communism, people would be kept safe by their shared commitment to an egalitarian world.

In the early Soviet Union, the communists aimed to address prostitution through social welfare and rehabilitation, one of the first state-level attempts to treat sexual exploitation as a capitalist social problem rather than a private moral failing. In China, one year after their communist revolution, the 1950 Marriage Law banned forced marriage and concubinage. The new socialist government moved aggressively against trafficking and other feudal practices. These efforts were uneven, but they pointed in the right direction–to the communist world we’re fighting for today.  Join Progressive Labor Party to help make that future a reality.

The Pakistani ruling class has intensified its offensive against the working class under the familiar slogan of “economic reform.” The renewed push to privatize Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), electricity distribution companies, railways, energy assets, steel, ports, hospitals, schools, and public land is not about efficiency or national development. It is a direct attack on the working class. It is a deliberate transfer of wealth created by workers into the hands of capitalists. 

In recent months, workers across Pakistan have repeatedly resisted these attacks through strikes, protests, and collective struggle. PIA workers have mobilized against repeated privatization attempts, recognizing that selloffs mean layoffs, wage cuts, and intensified exploitation. Spontaneous resistance alone is not enough. The ruling class is organized politically and economically to defend its power. Workers must also organize politically. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has consistently emphasized that only revolutionary organizations, under the red flag of PLP, rooted in the working class can defeat capitalism.

PLP is actively working to foster unity among workers across different trade unions, professional organizations, peasants, and students. We emphasize that privatization is not reform—it is class war. The state, acting in the interests of capitalist bosses, is dismantling public institutions built through decades of workers’ labor and sacrifice. What generations of workers collectively created is now being handed over to capitalists for profit. This is theft carried out under legal cover. 

PLP is exposing the truth to the working class that Pakistan International Airlines was not built by investors. It was built by pilots, engineers, technicians, ground staff, and millions of workers whose labor funded and sustained it. Its planes, routes, infrastructure, and expertise are the accumulated products of social labor. Yet today, the ruling class claims that this collectively created wealth must be sold off to capitalist buyers.

Workers are fighting back!

Electricity workers have organized nationwide strikes against the privatization of distribution companies, understanding that privatization will destroy job security and raise costs for millions. Pakistan Steel Mills workers have waged determined struggles against closures and layoffs imposed to prepare privatization. Railway workers have resisted outsourcing and restructuring designed to benefit private capital. Healthcare and education workers have protested privatization and commercialization that deny access to the working class.

As PLP stresses in strikes and political work, workers cannot rely on the capitalist state to protect their interests. Workers must rely on their own strength and organization. Appeals to patriotism, or to parliament or reform cannot stop privatization. Only class struggle for a communist world can. Capitalists do not buy public institutions to serve society. They buy them to extract profit. This inevitably leads to layoffs, wage cuts, speed-ups, and profiteering. It leads to union repression and increased insecurity. It leads to higher prices and reduced access for workers and the poor.

This is not mismanagement — it is the normal functioning of capitalism.

Bosses “solve” self-inflicted problem

The bosses justify privatization by pointing to losses, inefficiency, and debt. But these conditions were not created by workers. They were created by the ruling class itself. For decades, political elites and bureaucrats looted public institutions. They imposed corrupt management, burdened institutions with debt, sabotaged operations, and diverted resources. After deliberately weakening these institutions, they now declare them “failures” and demand privatization.

We can see this clearly in the destruction of Pakistan Steel Mills, which threw thousands of workers into unemployment. Pakistan Railways has been weakened while profitable routes are opened to private operators. Electricity distribution companies are being prepared for privatization through layoffs, tax increases, and to get workers from private contractors. Public hospitals and schools are being commercialized, turning basic human rights into commodities. This proves that privatization is not a response to failure — it is the completion of the looting process.

Much more struggle is needed 

Economic struggles must be linked to political struggle. Workers must build unity, class consciousness, and an organization capable of confronting the capitalist system itself. Without a revolutionary organization, resistance can be defeated, diverted, or absorbed. With revolutionary organization, workers can transform class struggle into class power.

The future belongs to the working class. The international communist revolution under the red banners of PLP requires our sharp class struggle against every injustice produced by capitalist bosses. Long live international communist revolution. Long live PLP.