Who is Tom Homan and why is his arrival in Minnesota important? This enemy of the people started as a cop before joining Border Patrol in 1984. In 1988, he joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). By 2013, Homan had been appointed to serve as the head of Enforcement and Removal of what had by then become ICE by the “Deporter In Chief,” President Obama.

Compared to Bovino, who has spent his prior career in border cities acting with jack-booted impunity, Homan is much more polished. Bovino paraded around California as a Border Patrol sector chief, posing with long guns on horseback. He directed a short snuff film for Border Patrol called “The Gotaway” where a fictional migrant sneaks across the border and stabs the first person he sees. In a more recent Bovino production, Darth Vader is depicted as a Border Patrol agent. “We don’t want our border patrol agents quiet,” he said in an October interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We want them engaged in the fight. So I asked several times, ‘Well, how about, you know, I go up north?’”

Bovino’s settler-cowboy style caught Kristi Noem’s eye when he instructed his agents to mask up and carry out three days of raids on farms and Home Depot parking lots in 2024. Last spring, Bovino outlined a plan to take his strategy — using Border Patrol to engage in an “urban immigration crackdown” (in the words of the Wall Street Journal) — across the entire country with him at the vanguard of the reactionary spear. “A city-hopping campaign, an interior-operations campaign,” he told the WSJ. “Let’s take it everywhere in the United States.”

Bovino is the cocksure Erwin Rommel – or Andrew Jackson – of the Washington immigration strategy.³ Tom Homan isn’t like that. Homan knows how to talk to the press. He’s spent a good part of his career in press conferences or in front of cameras. If Bovino is Rommel, Tom Homan is the unassuming Heinrich Himmler – or the unassuming slaver Martin van Buren.

During his time in the Obama administration, Homan repeatedly proposed an idea that even the Deporter In Chief, a man who gleefully authorized hundreds of remote killings of civilians and even some American citizens, thought was inhuman. This idea was the horrific scheme he calls “Family Separation.” Homan’s policy was eventually put into place by the first Trump administration after he pushed again and again to get Washington to adopt it. The policy, pitched by the gray-faced police functionary as a punitive, zero-tolerance plan to “deter” undocumented immigrants, required DHS agents to forcibly separate parents from their children when being taken into custody. Using the machinery put in place by Obama, federal agents tore thousands of children and infants from their parents and guardians. These children were held in overcrowded “border control centers,” and many spent up to three weeks with minimal food, no clean clothing or bathing facilities, and no adult care.

This is the Tom Homan being rotated into Minneapolis. Washington is replacing a murderous cowboy with an equally cruel and far more efficient administrator. Since arriving in Minnesota, Homan has promised that DHS is “working on a draw down plan.” However, he has been clear: The draw down depends on local authorities submitting to DHS requirements and supporting ICE raids.

“We’re not surrendering our mission at all,” said Homan. “We’re just doing it smarter.”

Homan is the “good cop” to Bovino’s “bad cop.” He is the slick technocrat to Bovino’s cowboy. The administration wants you to forget Minneapolis, but to remember that it will deploy Bovino as a swagger-stick whenever the going gets tough. This bait and switch has been used by the “law” in this country since it was founded in the 19th century. This time, we aren’t falling for it.

Tom Homan is an enemy of the people, the architect of misery. Unlike Bovino, Homan reminded the press that “I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines. You haven’t seen me.” Homan is not a mediation of the Washington policy. Instead, Washington wants to go back to normal: cruel and inhuman mistreatment of working class people under a protective media blackout. Tom Homan doesn’t signify reform, and his unctuous presence does not mean Minnesota is any safer from the DHS army occupying the state. Replacing Bovino with Homan is the swapping out of one colonial administrator who was doing too much damage to the colonial infrastructure – the settlers themselves, the Euro-Amerikans – with another, who promises a “quieter” kind of monstrousness.

Resistance must continue, and Homan must be seen for the monster that he is.

1. We often refer to the right of the American political spectrum as the “right-fascists,” as compared with the Democrats, or the “left-fascists” here at the Clarion. ︎
2. The Clarion presently defines labor aristocrats according to a global average price of labor power; those workers who receive higher than the global average within the imperial center are considered labor aristocrats. It is debatable as to whether Alex Pretti was a labor aristocrat or petty bourgeois, as he was a VA nurse. For the purposes of this analysis, the distinction is not important. ︎
3. One of the Nazi regime’s most capable generals, often disgustingly praised by US historians. ︎

Traditionally, a good place to start would be to examine the candidate’s platform and consider its merits, point by point. The Harris campaign, unfortunately, does not appear to have a platform, at least not one posted to the public, and so we will have to rely mostly upon an analysis of her record as a politician, instead.

Political operatives of the Republican and Democratic parties have written much about Harris’ six-year stint as California’s Attorney General, and her own campaign frequently refers to that period when trying to build the case of her competence for office. Harris herself isn’t shy about discussing her work as California’s top cop, but her characterization of her work during that period the years before, when she worked as the head prosecutor in San Francisco, shifts with the political winds. One year, she describes herself as a progressive and a reformer who bravely took on the worst excesses of the Californian carceral state. When it suits her, however, the story changes, and we find instead that she had always been a hard nosed cop who worked tirelessly to protect California’s pristine suburbs. It is therefore difficult to get the measure of her without investigating this record directly.

Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General from 2011 until her election to the United States Senate in 2017, and before that was the head prosecutor for San Francisco from 2004 until 2011. Her record during these years reflects the “tough-on-crime” era of the 1990’s and 2000’s — a period which might, arguably, be said to have opened with Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill, now famous as the racist “superpredators” legislation which saw incarceration rates across the country soar to barbaric new heights. This was a time which, like today, saw Republican and Democratic politicians, from the Clintons to the Presidents Bush, in open competition to determine who could be the toughest on crime, lay down the longest and most draconian sentences for the most minimal offenses, and take the most racist political positions. During Kamala Harris’ tenure as the top prosecutor in California, Black people were incarcerated at a rate 9.5 times higher than their white counterparts. They were far less likely to have positive outcomes at parole hearings, and far more likely to be subject to police violence.

Then, as today, California state law mandated that prisoners do labor for the state and for private companies who contract with the state for that purpose. Refusing to work can result in write-ups, housing changes, stripping of the inmate’s rights to phone access, visitation, and ordering food or supplies. It can also affect parole considerations.   

Involuntary servitude (the term ‘slavery’ apparently having been too on the nose) is legal in California under Article I Section 6 of the state constitution, and under the 13^th Amendment to the federal one. It has been so since 1865, when the 13^th Amendment was written to provide a direct means to reinstate the slave relation that the Civil War had recently abolished. It served the triple purposes of producing a fungible, renewable, and cheap source of labor for the country’s growing economy, codifying a legal avenue for the appropriation of what meager properties Black people were then permitted to own, as well as to shore up a white supremacist hierarchy that had been teetering on the verge of collapse.

Under Attorney General Harris’ oversight, tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Californians were shuttled into the carceral system and subject to this “involuntary servitude.” Inmates were paid on average between 8 cents and 32 cents per hour, or between 12 dollars and 56 dollars per month, for their work for the state and the private corporations who contract with it. The jobs they were assigned then as now are menial, physically demanding, and often extremely dangerous. Prisoners are regularly deployed as firefighters during California’s increasingly severe wildfire season, cannon fodder in the capitalist state’s halfhearted fight against climate change.

Not only did Harris fail even to pay lip service to abolishing this abominable practice, she actively defended it from those who worked to curtail its worst excesses. She fought bitterly against a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons, filing obstructionist, frivolous motions to delay or derail the order entirely, and flirted with the idea of denying that the Supreme Court even had the authority to order such a thing.

That the Supreme Court, dominated by Republicans in 2011 (and hardly a bastion of progressive or liberatory thought at any time), even ordered such a thing is telling. In the majority opinion written by conservative Justice Kennedy, it was observed that Californian prisons were over 200 percent capacity, that they saw inmate deaths due to inadequate medical facilities and staff on a weekly basis, and that they had an inmate suicide rate nearly 80% higher than the national average for prison populations. Kennedy wrote that “…in one prison, up to 50 sick inmates may be held together in a 12-by-20-foot cage for up to five hours awaiting treatment… A prisoner with severe abdominal pain died after a 5-week delay in referral to a specialist; a prisoner with ‘constant and extreme’ chest pain died after an 8-hour delay in evaluation by a doctor; and a prisoner died of testicular cancer after a ‘failure of MDs to work up for cancer in a young man with 17 months of testicular pain.’”

Harris’ office acted with such intransigence in defying the order that the Court considered finding the State of California in contempt. Observers noted that her behavior may have fallen afoul of Californian legal and ethical standards against filing motions “for an improper purpose, such as to harass or cause unnecessary delay’” The State Government was eventually defeated and forced to reduce the prison population, but not before her office argued in court that extending the proposed inmate release programs “…to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought”.

Simply put, the State and its Attorney General were reluctant to release any of their cheap, disposable “involuntary servants.” The regime of slavery was simply too profitable to allow it to be undermined without a fight. It is worth noting that the institution of involuntary servitude persists in California to this day. When, in 2024, she stands on stage and portrays herself as a “tough on crime top cop”, this is the record that she is looking back upon so fondly.

Shifting the focus away from Harris’ violent, racist record inside the United States, we now examine her record and position on the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Kamala Harris has sat now for three years as the second-in-command to President Biden, during which time the administration has dispatched at least 25 billion dollars to Israel in military aid, and recently authorized at least 20 billion more. Israel has long been, since its inception in 1948, the primary recipient of U.S. military aid, but the pace of this aid has accelerated dramatically in the wake of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. Between October of 2023 and May of 2024 alone, aid to Israel totaled 12.5 billion dollars, though this data is provisional, and the actual amount is almost certainly higher. This tranche of aid accounts for about half of the total amount sent over the course of Biden’s presidency.

As evidence of Israeli atrocities mounted, as the world watched the undeniable ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip in real time via live-stream and reacted with indignation and rage at the inhumanity of it, Harris never broke with her President or changed course.

Rhetorically, Harris has tried to play both sides. She’s commented more than once on the need for a ceasefire. When mounting pressure from student protests across the U.S. threatened to destabilize the country and, horror of horrors, her own political prospects, Harris paid lip service to the notion of establishing a ceasefire, or, more often and more tellingly, a “pause” in the Israeli extermination campaign.

Liberals and optimists alike might have been tempted to find some small shred of hope at that, and perhaps by Israel’s apparent willingness to discuss the possibility, but those fantasies were blown away when, on July 31, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas and the negotiator on their behalf, in his private room in Tehran.

Harris was now caught in a difficult position. Her halfhearted calls for a ceasefire suddenly seemed less convincing when her side had just murdered the very man that ceasefire negotiations might be made with, and therefore foreclosed on the possibility of any negotiations in the most spectacular possible way. Indeed, her refusal to denounce Israel in the aftermath of Haniyeh’s assassination, or for that matter the assassination of senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr the day before, reveals the naked cynicism of her words.

She has hardly had a sharp word for Israel since. Not since the clearly terroristic assassination of its negotiating partner, not since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and members of his government on war crime charges, not since the release of reports estimating that over 186,000 Palestinians, fully 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, have been shot, starved, beaten, and bombed to death. She didn’t even have anything to say on July 29 when, in a fit of sociopathic rage, mobs of Israeli fascists stormed a prison facility to release a soldier who was being held there on charges of brutally gang raping a Palestinian prisoner.

Since then, the most notable thing the Harris campaign has had to say on the matter of the ongoing genocide is that she is categorically opposed to an arms embargo on Israel. Publicly, she shouted down a group of pro-Palestine protesters at one of her rallies in Michigan on August 7, admonishing them for mentioning the genocide of the Palestinians and telling them that “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” before security ejected them from the event.

Kamala Harris is guilty of lying about many things, but when she says that her support for the genocidal Zionist project will never waver, she does appear to be speaking the truth. This steadfast and unbreakable support for the blood soaked colonialists occupying Palestine is hardly unique among American politicians, and a particularly generous (or naive) reader might be tempted to point this out. But then, vocal and energetic opposition to racial genocide has rarely been common among politicians who are actively engaged in it. One wonders who among the active politicians in 1940’s Germany might have represented the “lesser of two evils.”

Harris has walked in lockstep with Joe Biden and the right wing of the Democratic party every step of the way. She issued vocal support for Biden when he crushed the nascent rail workers strike in 2022. She’s been actively heading up the administration’s approach to immigration along the U.S. southern border, where ever more draconian tactics dominate. Deportations are on track to be higher under Biden’s administration than they ever were under Trump and, having apparently forgotten that she once pretended to have a problem with “children in cages,” Harris now weaponizes this brutal and racist record to outflank her Republican opponent on the right.

Recently, the Vice President was subject to a substantial amount of pressure from the U.S. working class over her choice of running mate. For a time, there was every indication that Josh Shapiro was her favored candidate, being as how he is the governor of Pennsylvania, a critically important swing state. Shapiro hit immediate opposition from the left, who cried out that he is a fanatical zionist who volunteered for and served six months in the Israeli occupation military earlier in life, and who penned racist tirades against the “battle-minded” and “belligerent” Arab people.

This didn’t seem to change Harris’s calculus on the issue though, and for weeks it seemed she would name him as her running mate at any moment. Shortly before a decision had to be made, however, a story broke about how in 2022, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office concluded that Ellen Greenberg, a victim who had been found in 2011 dead with 20 stab wounds on her body, had died by “suicide” rather than been murdered by her fiancé. Shapiro later had to refer the case to a different office after it became public that he had connections to Greenberg’s fiancé’s family, and thus had a conflict of interest.

This, apparently, was too much for the Harris campaign, and shortly thereafter they announced that Tim Walz would be her running mate instead. Walz cuts a public persona as an affable, easy-going, white suburban dad. He is the sitting governor of Minnesota, a position that he’s held since 2019. While he hasn’t, as far as this author is aware, covered up any murder cases for family friends, he isn’t free of the zionist charge that marred Shapiro either. On August 6 of this year, Yinam Cohen, a Consul General of Israel to the U.S., publicly thanked Walz for “deepening the Israel-Minnesota partnership” and “…for standing with Israel during our darkest hour.” The Twitter post was accompanied by a photo of the two, shaking hands in front of the United States and Israeli occupation flags.

Tim Walz is likely more recognizable, though, as the governor who called in the U.S. National Guard without hesitation to put down the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 and to occupy the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding areas. Thousands of National Guardsmen stormed the streets and fired indiscriminately into protesters and uninvolved onlookers alike. They demonstrated spectacular brutality, beating and arresting hundreds and abandoning even the pretense of acting within legal or proportional bounds.

A recently viral audio recording of then-President Trump from that period is enlightening. In it, Trump recounts how he had been in regular contact with Walz during the protests, how he’d asked the Governor to send in the National Guard, and how deeply impressed he’d been with the way that Walz had handled the events. He said that Walz is an “excellent guy” and that “what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately.” He goes on to explain that Walz is on the phone and, addressing the Governor, says “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Odd Trumpian language notwithstanding, it is very clear that in that acute moment of crisis for American capitalism and class society, Donald Trump and Tim Walz are much more similar than they are different. At that juncture, when the structure of capital itself was at risk — when the colonial capitalist state’s inherent antagonism towards the working and racialized masses was exposed — the party lines disappeared and Walz, and the rest of the Democrats, joined hand in hand with Trump to put down the threat from below. The Harris-Walz campaign intentionally shared that audio clip to make a hypocrite of Trump on the campaign trail, but all it does is show the complete moral bankruptcy of both campaigns, both parties.

Harris claims to be a progressive, but she has the record of a brutal reactionary. She pretends that her campaign is about smashing glass ceilings and empowering women and people of color, but she has made a career of oppressing women and Black people, and is directly involved in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. She begs the workers to believe her when she says that she is the sane alternative to another four years of a fascist Donald Trump, but then she positions to the right of his campaign and criticizes him for being weak.

Like a chameleon who never really got the hang of its trade, Harris shifts her colors but never very convincingly, and hopes her audience has forgotten how she appeared a moment before. Unfortunately for her and her ilk, the working class and the oppressed of the world aren’t that gullible.

Heavy equipment giant Caterpillar Inc. settled its most recent racial discrimination case this May after a federal investigation found systematic refusal to hire at least 60 qualified Black job seekers at the Decatur, Illinois plant between 2018 and 2020. The corporation, which holds $481 million in U.S. government contracts, agreed to pay $800,000 in back wages to the affected workers. 

The company’s history is littered with a pattern of systematic inhumanity. In a 2015, workers from the Aurora, Illinois facility sued the company over anti-Black harassment and discrimination, including white workers making racist “jokes” that referenced lynchings and Planet of the Apes, management punishing Black employees for mistakes made by other workers, and standard working equipment (desks, phones, and computers) denied to the only Black new employee of the quality inspection office. Black workers had brought their complaints to the company, which simply ignored them or targeted them further with retaliation.

A decade earlier, in 2003, two cases were brought to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over racial and sexual harassment at Joliet and Aurora facilities. Racist aggression specifically included white workers and supervisors whistling at Black workers, as one would whistle at a dog. The company refused to take action when made aware of this behavior. When it came to the “constant” sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, Caterpillar not only refused to discipline the aggressors but retaliated by firing women who exposed hostilities.

Two years later, Caterpillar was sued again, this time for their participation in a particularly heinous act of racism, namely, the 2003 murder of Rachel Corrie and several Palestinians during the ethnic cleansing of Rafah. The murderers were “israeli” colonizers, the murder weapon Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer — gifted by the U.S. government to its attack dogs in the Levant. 

This was only one act of imperial violence using the tools built by this billion dollar company. A 2020 report published by Shoal Collective documented proven use of CAT equipment by the zionist occupation during the previous year, including, but not limited to: all 61 invasions of the Gaza strip, 41 demolitions of Palestinian homes, 3 demolitions of water systems, ecocide of at least 3,000 native trees, construction of 8 occupation roadblocks, and at least 2 instances in which the colonial regime destroyed the entire village of Al-Araqib. By February, 2020, the occupation had completely razed the Bedouin village of Al-Araqib a total of 173 times, genocidal destruction no doubt made possible only with the possession of CAT’s 65 ton beast. This is all, of course, only a limited snapshot of the corporation’s complicity in over 75 years of ongoing imperialist genocide.

But the U.S. Empire’s zionist hellspawn is only the inheritor of this cruel tool. The armored ‘dozer first saw use on the other side of the Asian continent, operated by the U.S. troops themselves to destroy Vietnam’s forests and facilitate the infamously bloody invasion. Like today, the military and its corporate contractors weren’t the least bit phased by mass condemnation of their brutality; brutality, life, and dignity, in the logic of capital, do not warrant a second of consideration in the race towards profit. 

Whether it’s destruction of life and land abroad or degradation and abuse of workers at home, Caterpillar’s corporate ethic is a mirror of imperialism. Not satisfied with squeezing the sweat and coin of the people within the U.S., CAT, like other cogs in the monopoly system, hungrily digs its claws into the throats of our kin around the world. That is to say, the mistreatment and vile destruction wrought by one corporation is not an anomaly, it’s the rule. It’s only with clear eyed recognition of our shared enemy that the working and oppressed masses can uproot these poisonous weeds.

In 2013, Barnett was demoted and removed from his management position for writing an email that documented quality control issues with the 787. He was suggested that he “shouldn’t put problems in writing.” In 2017 he filed an FAA whistleblower complaint against Boeing with OSHA. That same year, he retired from Boeing, after his doctor said that job-related stress would be responsible for a heart attack unless he quit.

In 2021, after a four-year investigation, OSHA found in favor of Boeing and closed Barnett’s complaint. He immediately appealed the decision, claiming the firm had “undermined his career because he had raised safety concerns at the Charleston plant.” Barnett was a featured interviewee on the 2022 Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.

On March 9, 2024, Barnett was in Charleston as part of a week-long series of depositions for his suit. He had another deposition scheduled that day, but he didn’t respond to calls from his lawyers on the 9th. He was discovered in his truck, in the parking lot of the hotel where he had been staying, with a pistol in his hand. He had been shot in the head.

Official reports from the police all claim that Barnett killed himself in the middle of his suit. His lawyers, friends, and family disagree.

On January 5 of this year, at 5:07 p.m., Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 took off from Portland, Oregon on its way to Ontario, California. At 16,000 feet, an emergency exit door blew off the side of the plane. Flight 1282 was a Boeing 737 Max 9, and within days the FAA ordered all Boeing 737 Max 9s to be grounded for checks. Boeing admitted that all the Max 9s may have “loose hardware” — meaning improperly fastened bolts that could lead to just such an explosive decompression.

Sam Salehpour, who worked for Boeing for 10 years, came forward in 2019 after sending his concerns to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and said publicly that Boeing’s new Dreamliner 787 could “break apart” due to its safety flaws. He also sent his allegations to the FAA, telling them that changes in the construction process had introduced shortcuts that caused parts of the fuselage, the plane’s body, to be improperly fastened together. Salehpour was transferred to work on the 777, and he said he found safety problems with that plane too.

“This is a culture,” said Debra Katz, Salehpour’s lawyer, “that prioritizes the production of planes and pushes them off the line even when there are serious concerns about the structural integrity of those planes and their production process.”

The corporation’s public response to all this was to fire the executive in charge of the 737 Max program. It was only when Boeing’s major buyers — Southwest, United, Alaska, and American — demanded to meet the board without the presence of the CEO that the CEO, Dave Calhoun, was quickly fired by the board.

In the past three years, Boeing has been the subject of an unprecedented 32 whistleblower claims. Of these, 13 were related to aviation safety. Fifteen were related to workplace safety, two were filed as claims of fraud, and one was filed concerning the handling of toxic chemicals.

If you guessed the root cause behind all of these problems, the driving force that has spurred Boeing to make these disastrous changes was the profit incentive, you guessed correctly. The COVID pandemic saw Boeing deep in the red for several years, and even as it began to recover, its margin of profit is in the toilet. Even today, the stock price (which helps us track how bourgeois economists value the company) of the Boeing Corporation is half of what it was in 2019. But the trends run even longer — and we can see the precipitous rise in Boeing’s stock prices starting in 2016, after the illegal, dangerous, and poor manufacturing techniques took hold and began paying off.

Of course, this isn’t all. Boeing is not only the enemy of the people here at home, where they steal, lie, cheat, and sell planes that fall apart in the air — they are the enemy of the world proletariat, as they sell their ramshackle planes to the U.S. empire, where they are used to defend global capital. They also produce a $5 billion missile defense system and other tools of empire.

   No American corporation would be complete without its direct connection to U.S. imperialism abroad. In 2023 alone, the Boeing Corporation received $2.35 billion in contracts from the Department of Defense (DoD) to produce planes for the U.S. war machine. In 2021, Boeing was awarded a $23 billion DoD contract. Despite the whistleblowers, the government continues to award these enormous contracts. Will Boeing cheat the DoD and the imperialist armed forces of important parts and safety checks to pad their accounts? If they do, we must be ready to take advantage of it.

Danielle Smith is also an enemy of the people. As a serving Canadian politician, this status is almost automatic — she shares the gamut of genocidal opinions without which one is politically ostracized and removed from power. For instance, Smith believes that Israel should exist and has a right to defend itself, that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7th constituted a “terrible terrorist attack,” etc. What are the full historic depths of her depravity and crimes against the working classes, which are only increasing as she seeks to dismantle Alberta’s social security, healthcare system, and pensions?

Smith lived in subsidized housing growing up. She attributes her interest in politics to her father scolding her about the evils of Communism and the U.S.S.R in the eighth grade after a teacher presented them in a glowing light. One is forced to wonder what her father knows about Communismbeyond the usual misconceptions and propaganda. Indeed, that Smith ever had a teacher in McCarthyite Alberta during the height of the Cold War who portrayed Communism in a remotely positive light beggars belief.

Concerned about “Marxist indoctrination” happening in Alberta’s schools (don’t laugh), Smith’s father scared her back into politically acceptable anti-Communism. He taught her about the non-communist politicians of whom it’s considered appropriate to think highly, such as Ronald Reagan. Smith would become a libertarian who admired all the standard ghouls such as fellow social security recipient Ayn Rand and the queen of the ghouls herself, Margaret Thatcher. While she was in university, Smith was a favored student of disgusting reprobate and conservative thought leader Tom Flanagan. Flanagan is notorious for his affirmative comments about child pornography, his anti-Indigenous political positions and racism, and for once advocating for the assassination of Julian Assange. 

Today, Smith’s politics are a crude synthesis of Thatcherism and the ideas of what’s called the “Calgary School” in order to lend gravitas to its specific blend of Austrian economics and Straussianism; in other words, to validate it as a legitimate political and economic philosophy when it’s actually nonsense. Unfortunately, an elaboration of the many and varied deficiencies in this “school” would be beyond the scope of this article.

Even with no knowledge of Marx or the philosophy underpinning Smith’s actions, the span of her career illustrates the amorality and harm of neoliberalism and conservatism. What she lacks in original ideas, Smith makes up for in a mindless goferism for recapitulating conservative talking points. Even the fact that her own party thinks little of her individuality or autonomy does not discourage her from implementing their platform and pushing it further right. When the party was in danger of losing seats in the most recent Alberta election, they reminded voters that it’s the party’s principles that are important, and the party that makes decisions, not foot-in-her-mouth Danielle Smith. Still, neither the lack of propriety nor knowledge have dissuaded Smith. She’s often spilling out the shit that right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute fill her with — and spew she does. 

As a “Private Property Rights Advocate” in the nineties, she argued that private property rights trump all other rights, so protections for endangered species should be removed. Naturally, she’s vitriolically anti-Indigenous.

After a brief stint on the Calgary Board of Education, on which she operated as a poison pill against progressive interests, she became a journalist. She didn’t have any journalistic credentials, but was hired as a scab during the 1999-2000 Calgary Herald strike, proving that she has the most important journalistic qualification of all — the sycophantic zeal to regurgitate whatever garbage the Fraser Institute or tobacco lobby put on her plate. Her peers at the Herald didn’t call her “Trash Can Dani” for nothing. At the behest of both the Fraser Institute and the tobacco lobby, Smith famously lauded the “special health benefits” of smoking cigarettes — specifically that “smoking half a pack per day reduces the traditional risks of disease by 75% or more.” She also wrote an article entitled “Natives ultimate losers as reserves become ghettoes” in which she repeated Tom Flanagan’s perverse argument that increased constitutional protections and sovereignty for Indigenous nations encourage segregation and apartheid.

We must make abundantly clear what a bastardization and insidious framing of the issue this perspective is. Flanagan has written several historically revisionist texts which are meant to reframe and justify colonialism as beneficial to the colonized. He would have us believe that the problems which beset Indigenous reserves — from crumbling or non-existent infrastructure to the general poverty and social ills —  are all due to Indigenous mismanagement. For him, it’s the Indigenous unwillingness to peacefully integrate into the “superior, European-modeled society” that is the cause of their troubles — not the underlying issues of colonial trauma and apartheid. Of course, which society imposed the reserve system on the other conveniently slips his mind. This is so he can say any increased sovereignty for reserves, or any token acts of reparation by the Canadian state towards its Indigenous people are actually harmful because they incentivize Indigenous peoples to remain in their own inferior civilizations. Smith espoused this opinion as a journalist about the Nisga’a Treaty of 2000, and the same attitude has pervaded her political stances towards Indigenous nations since. For Flanagan, and, by extension, Smith, any money or support rendered by the Canadian state to Indigenous nations is self-defeating; he believes that corrupt Indigenous leadership will squander whatever is given so that they always have the pretense to ask for more.

In her career as a journalist, Smith enthusiastically propagated this nonsense — it’s a very comforting narrative to a certain strata of settlers who would eventually form her political base.

Flanagan also wrote a dubious biography about Louis Riel, which frames Riel as a millenarian in order to delegitimize Metis land claims. This is eerily similar to the zionist obfuscation that the Palestinian struggle is purely religious and existential, not rooted in the ownership and occupation of land. 

Flanagan and his mouthpiece Smith falsely equate the integration of Indigenous Nations into the Canadian state with the desegregation of the United States and the end of South African apartheid. This is a prevarication. An actual end to Canadian apartheid demands the dissolution of the legal fiction that is the Canadian state and the complete reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty by Indigenous nations.

Eventually, Smith turned her latent fascism into gold and became a politician. In this way, she made the leap from speaking and writing toxic waste to dumping it on millions of Albertans. Informed by her faulty understanding of sovereignty (thanks to having read and repeated Flanagan for so many years), her government passed the Alberta Sovereignty Within a United Canada Act in December 2022. Though it masquerades as protection for Albertan interests against interference from the federal government, the only interests it truly defends are those of the same corporations and conservative political insiders we’ve been describing. The act was criticized by Indigenous leaders on the grounds that it could supersede their tribal rights. Smith even had the gall to compare the quibbles between Alberta and the federal government as comparable to the struggle between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. Of course, she apologized for this.  

 The controversies and gaffes of her political career are well-documented and too numerous to get into, and are identical to those of any other fascist politician such as Ron DeSantis, whom she admires. She shares his COVID denialism, has compared vaccinated Canadians to supporters of Hitler, and called unvaccinated people “the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed.” Again she issued some lackadaisical apology, but the statement’s function as a dogwhistle had done its work. Ultimately, Smith’s apologies always take this insincere form — she says something that appeals to her base and is incendiary to everyone else, then hastily apologizes. But by the time Smith apologizes, whatever she said has already achieved its purpose, and the apology is comparatively meaningless.

If there’s one way Smith is unlike many similar figures, it’s her “live and let live” attitude about 2SLGBTQIA+ people and communities. But even this is not commendable. Although she is not vocally anti-2SLGBTQIA+ or “anti-woke” in the way many of her supporters wish she was, her desire to “depoliticize the issue” is functionally the same as theirs. By giving equal validity to oppressors and the oppressed, she is siding with the oppressor.

But this all pales compared to Smith’s latest neoliberal machinations, though we should stress one final time that these ideas do not belong to her, per se — she is merely the current, spineless functionary who must enact them. Smith wants Alberta to leave the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) in order to create an Alberta Pension Plan; she wants to dismantle the Alberta Health Service and cannibalize it into four new bureaucratic entities. Even Margaret Thatcher regarded the National Health Service as sacrosanct — if by “sacrosanct” we mean, “a line that even the bourgeoisie hesitate to cross, lest the masses come for their heads.” Though the details of what these nascent policies would entail are murky, history shows that their enactment can only have disastrous effects for the working class. Similar reforms, like those enacted by Thatcher and Pinochet in the eighties, only ever benefited corporations and the government officials who implemented them. They had deleterious impacts upon the social security of the working classes, and their effects remain apparent today.

Both AHS and the CPP leave much to be desired — they are meant to only benefit people as inexpensively and minimally as possible. But that even these programs risk vivisection by Danielle Smith and her handlers should still raise anyone’s alarm. For these policies, her anti-Indigenous attitudes, and for being the pliable tool of humanity’s most reprehensible elements, Danielle Smith is an enemy of the people.  

Biden was born on November 20, 1942, in Scranton Pennsylvania. Biden’s father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., was an executive at the Sheene Armor Company, owned by his uncle Bill Sheene, Sr. The family purportedly went through a period of hardship; young Biden himself went to college (and did poorly) at the University of Delaware. He then went to law school, where he plagiarized a paper for one of his courses from the Fordham Law Review.

He worked very briefly as a public defender, then opened a law firm and began a small property-management business for landlords. In 1969, Biden ran as a Democrat for the New Castle County Council, and served on the council from 1970 to 1972. He entered the all-empire public stage in 1972 when he ran for the U.S. Senate.

It was in his 1973-2009 career as a U.S. Senator that his most vile qualities were encouraged, enlarged, and exaggerated — likely by constant exposure to the odious class politics of the U.S. political system. He wheeled and dealed with the lobbyists and developed the same cronyist habits that most lawyers and politicians eventually exhibit. In 1981 he became the ranking minority Democratic member of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and, by 1984, he took the lead as a “tough on crime” legislator.

During his time in the Judiciary Committee, he joined segregationist senators to help lock up Black Americans. “The truth is,” Biden said in 1993, “every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” He was close friends with many segregationists: Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi, whose foul, racist policies once led to him being accused of “Hitlerism” on the Senate floor, helped place Biden on that committee. He partnered with legendary hatemonger Strom Thurmond to author many crime bills.

In 1977, with Eastland’s support, he pushed for mandatory minimum sentence laws. In 1989, he criticized George Bush, Sr., complaining that he wasn’t doing enough to put “violent thugs” in prison. In 1993, he warned of “predators on our streets.” In a 1994 Senate speech, he said: “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Biden opposed the busing program in Wilmington, a plan intended to even out the racist segregation of schooling. “The real problem with busing is you take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school, and you’re going to fill them with hatred,” he said in 1975.

He was responsible for the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which established mandatory minimum drug sentences, and the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created a disparity of one hundred times the penalty for possession of crack cocaine over powder cocaine. When working for Clinton’s disastrous and vile 1994 crime bill, Biden rhetorically asked the Senate “What do you need?” He answered himself: “The first thing we need is more cops…. The second thing we need is more prisons.”

During his time as president he has ruthlessly worked to suppress unions and prevent or end numerous strikes, all the while crowning himself the most union-friendly president since FDR.

But over the last few weeks, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., secured himself as one of the most bloodstained presidents of this bloodstained oligarchic republic in its history: he has given his explicit approval for the zionist state to exterminate, relocate, and ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population of Palestine.

Forget his time as a struggling lawyer; for 52 years, Biden has lived in the lap of luxury, first as a U.S. Senator, then as the Vice President, and now as the President of the U.S. Empire. This U.S. aristocrat has spent his entire political career as a vocal zionist. Now, on the eve of the zionist ground invasion of Gaza, after weeks of brutal bombing campaigns designed to terrorize, kill, and exterminate the Palestinian population in the strip, he has doubled down on his commitment to the zionist state.

On October 27, 2023, after zionist bombings of hospitals, during the intensification of the air campaign against Palestine, the White House said that it will not “draw red lines” for Israel. The Biden State Department instructed its representatives not to speak about popularly-demanded ceasefires or de-escalation. His government has been shipping weapons into the zionist state, and Biden himself has been on a tour of the legislature to argue for more appropriations for the zionist war machine. His support of genocide is so blatant, it prompted a senior member of the State Department to resign. “I cannot work,” wrote Josh Paul, “in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.”

Although in the past few days, Biden has made some mealy-mouthed asides about “protecting civilians,” as the zionist state annihilates Palestine, in the first hours of the brutal air assaults, he pledged public “unconditional” support.

Godfather of mass imprisonment, gleeful participant in wiping out Palestinian lives. The message is clear: Joseph Biden is not merely an enemy of the American people — he is a genocidaire.

The bankruptcy of the supposed representatives of the U.S. Empire is on full display. Biden, at the head of a lockstep contingent of almost the entire Democratic caucus, have been baying for blood. They applaud the salivating “Bibi” Netanyahu as he calls for extermination on zionist television. They upbraid the handful of politicians who dare to challenge them. They support the silencing of pro-Palestinian and antizionist voices. This country is exploding in protest. The world is exploding in protest. Biden, one hand gripping the wheel with white knuckles, continues to drive the U.S. into deep, criminal complicity with the worst and most genocidal acts of the world’s most heinous regime — because he is, at heart, himself a killer. Joseph Biden is a blood-soaked enemy of the people.

On Monday, May 14, 2023, San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins, who has a history of dropping charges against police, announced that she was declining to prosecute the Walgreens rent-a-cop Michael Anthony for the April 27 murder of Banko Brown. The security video has been made widely available on social media, and one thing is clear: this was an execution. Anthony lunged at Banko, then let him go; when Banko turned to leave, Anthony shot him. The rent-a-cop would later say that Banko was threatening to stab him, but, of course, there was no knife, and we have only his self-interested word for that.

The DA’s report alleges that Banko had “collect[ed] items” and then “move[d] to exit the store without having paid for any items.” From the brief clip that has been circulating on social media, it’s clear that when Banko tried to leave the Walgreens, he was confronted by mall cop Michael Anthony. Although Anthony wept when he was told he’d killed Banko, he later said what he meant: “I did what I had to do.” He told the police “I feel like I wasn’t, you know, wrong.”

Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony is employed by private security corporation Kingdom Group Protective Services. His title is “robbery suppression officer.” Walgreens has a contract with Kingdom whereby the pharmacy employs these “robbery suppression officers.” Kingdom requires them to buy and maintain their own firearms. Although almost all loss prevention staff are instructed not to get into physical altercations with people they suspect are shoplifting this is purely out of the corporate interest to avoid lawsuits — because Kingdom is a private contracting group and Walgreens is unlikely to be held responsible for their “hands-on policy.” Armed and unaccountable, rent-a-cops like Michael Anthony are the front line of defense… for what?

For corporate property.

Let us be even more precise: this front line of defense is maintained not by watching, recording, reporting, but by unleashing these rabid mercenary dogs to go on the offensive, to proactively murder people they suspect of shoplifting.

We have no evidence, other than the word of the top cop, DA Brooke Jenkins (and the killer Anthony himself), that Banko was trying to steal anything. Legally, thefts of the kind that Anthony claims was occurring are low-level misdemeanors. Under California law, petty theft is the theft of anything under $950. The maximum penalty for this kind of petty theft is a six month prison term. Loss prevention officers and mall cop types love to physically block, tackle, or grab people who are committing what would otherwise be a petty theft or a minor larceny. The reason for this is simple: robbery, that is theft from a person or using force, is a felony. In California the difference between walking out of Walgreens with under $950 worth of merchandise and of tugging a plastic bag containing $1 in snacks away from a “robbery suppression officer” is the difference of a jail sentence of six months, and one of nine years.

But here’s the thing: even under the law of capitalism, what Anthony did was murder.

We know that property owners will kill to make sure their ownership isn’t contested, and that’s not just in the claim-jumper frontier murders of bygone ages. Every winter, unhoused people are swept out of abandoned buildings to freeze to death on the street so the owners of those buildings can maintain their title. White homeowners in particular have established a recent trend of murdering strangers for driving up their driveways, knocking on their doors, etc. Property is sacrosanct, and Americans have been primed to defend theirs with violence.

Still, it is a long established practice that loss prevention is not supposed to be involved in the actual physical apprehension of people they think are taking property. Of the $48.9 billion in shrinkage reported in 2016, for example, less than 1 percent of that was accounted for by “external theft.” Loss Prevention Media, an online trade magazine, said this, in 2018: “[T]his is a staggering statistic. Even when a substantial margin of error is factored in, this data does not support the philosophy of any loss prevention program that spends the bulk of their time and capital investing in the apprehension of shoplifters.” The California State Senate passed Bill 553 this summer, which bans retail staff from physically stopping suspected thieves.

Under U.S. law, using deadly force against someone to stop them from stealing is murder. It’s not manslaughter, it’s not justified homicide. It’s murder.

So why isn’t Anthony being charged with murder?

Despite the fact that the laws, as they are on the books, forbid the execution of suspected thieves — despite the fact that the only justifiable homicides are those in which the imminent use of deadly force is reasonably feared by the person who did the killing — despite the fact that using escalating force is not justifiable (if you make a fist I can’t shoot you in self defense) — despite all of this, suspected thieves or people who are later said to be suspected thieves almost never receive the protection of the law. The law was written by capitalists and their petty-bourgeois lawyer cronies. When they want to change it, when they need it to do something other than what it says it must do, they can.

There’s this thing, you see, called prosecutorial discretion. That means prosecutors get to choose which cases to bring and which cases to drop. There’s no way to hold them accountable for this.

That’s why Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco DA, moved to dismiss the murder case against Officer Kenneth Cha for the brutal slaying of unarmed Sean Moore as soon as she took office. That’s why she won’t prosecute Anthony. What did she say when she made this choice? “The people of San Francisco elected me to restore accountability and enhance public safety… As prosecutors, we have a sacred duty to try cases in good faith, to not abuse our power and ensure that the cases we bring forward are fair in order to maintain trust in the criminal justice system.”

What Jenkins meant was that she was going to quash investigations into the police. In her twisted parlance, “accountability” meant the end of accountability. She essentially accused her predecessor, not the police of being “unaccountable” for trying to prosecute them. Not even the most straight-forward language is safe around the lackeys of capitalists — they will piss on your head and tell you it’s raining.

Samuel Sinyangwe, an anti-police violence activist, said that “murder is now fully decriminalized for police in the city of San Francisco.”

Just like the murder of Banko, the murder of Sean Moore was captured on video. In Sean’s 2017 case, there was no crime whatsoever. He was at home, on his front steps, unarmed. A noise complaint had been made and Kenneth Cha had been dispatched to investigate. Moore was having a mental health crisis when the police arrived and, from the safety of his home, he told them to leave. They forced him outside, pepper sprayed him, and beat him with a baton. In his thrashing, he punched an officer and kicked Cha.

Cha shot him. Those wounds killed him in prison.

Jenkins presides over a city with one of the worst records in California for disparate use of force on Black people, who are 6.5 times more likely to be killed than white people by San Francisco officers. This, despite the fact that there are 10 times as many white people in San Francisco as Black people.

Jenkins, who has helped the police and the monied interests of the Golden City to contort the law in new and obscene shapes to help justify their violence, is an enemy of the people she claims to serve.

They’re out to save themselves.

Each one of these so-called environmentalists is either a bare-faced liar — someone with a vested interest in destroying the planet — or a monster willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity for their own, post-cataclysm comfort. Climate change — more properly, the ecocide, the knowing murder, of the planet — is something that is already affecting both capitalist bosses and us workers alike, but, critically, not to anywhere near the same degree. Every drought-triggered crop failure causes agricultural capitalists to miss out on their profits, but meanwhile, thousands of workers are laid off or starve. In fact, most capitalists clearly plan to use their stolen and hoarded wealth to protect them from the worst side-effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe. They’re hiring up guards, building fortified strongholds, and preparing for the worst.

From the outset, we need to be clear: even if it were true that the five listed billionaires above were actively trying to save the planet, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. They’d be outvoted and outmaneuvered by the other capitalists, the ones who aren’t trying to save the planet and who are willing to make money off of climate-destroying industries. Then, once these “saviors” were outmaneuvered in the marketplace by their more ruthless capitalist cousins, they would be relegated to political unimportance by the power of superior money. The fact is that it’s cheaper and more profitable to destroy the environment. As long as we live in a capitalist economy, this is going to remain true. So long as it’s true, it necessarily follows that those capitalists willing to destroy the economy for an advantage will out-compete and out-perform those who aren’t. And hey, we live in a bourgeois republic, where money is power. These ruthless capitalists will simply buy more politicians and legislation than any would-be climate heroes.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s not even true that Buffet, Bezos, and company are trying to save the planet. What they’re doing is paying a lot of lip service to the idea of environmentalism, and then just going about their business. Just like giving to a charity (that they conveniently own, which furthers their political ends, reduces their taxes, and gets cushy contracts for their corporations), climate activism among the ruling class is nothing more than a dodge, a con, a public relations stunt.

What have these men done to earn this reputation?

In 2012, Buffett argued that “what’s bad for the environment is also bad for the bottom line” in what was essentially a fluff piece put out by one of his corporations. “Taking shortcuts is not the pathway to achieving sustainable competitive advantage,” he warned. In 2022 Forbes glowingly wrote that Buffett’s holding and investment company,  Berkshire Hathaway, “escaped ‘The Coal Trap.’” Berkshire Hathaway energy features a large page on their website devoted to the advancement of “Cleaner Energy” and company jargon cheerily mentions PacifiCorp, the Berkshire Hathaway power company in the Pacific Northwest, and its investments in such glitzy-sounding nonsense as “noncarbon generation,” “modernized transmission,” and the Berkshire Hathaway wind and solar plant. But PacifiCorp not only operates over eleven coal power plants; it also operates captive coal mines. On June 12 of this year, a Multnomah County jury returned a verdict against PacifiCorp finding them liable for more than $70 million in fines for its negligent and reckless management of its power lines that caused one of the biggest and most devastating fires in the history of Oregon, the 2020 Labor Day Fires. Buffett’s words to the public are one thing, and his words to his shareholders are quite another. He has called climate catastrophe an overall benefit to his insurance companies. His real view is the view he shares with the rest of his class: that, overall, climate catastrophe won’t be that bad, that they’ll find ways to make money from the chaos.

So much for Buffett. What about Bezos? The bald gnome responsible for piloting Amazon to the heights of the U.S. market founded the Bezos Earth Fund, investing $1 billion to help “transform food systems to feed a growing population,” after all. In 2021, Bezos pledged $2 billion to help protect the environment. At the same time, the Amazon corporation’s carbon footprint grew by 19%. The $10 billion total investment over all his contributions amounts to little more than 17% of his hoarded fortunes. Not only that, but grants from his foundations come with strings attached; do what Mr. Bezos says, print what Mr. Bezos agrees to, or this sudden flood of funding will dry up. This is one of the shady ways billionaire “philanthropy” works.

Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in the world, owner of brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Fendi, also masquerades as one of these saviors of Earth and humanity, despite the fact that his companies consistently exploit slave labor. But this contradiction — between the supposed philanthropic environmentalist and the slave magnate — is more apparent than real. There’s no real contradiction between capitalist environmentalism and slavery, even if it seems out of place that a so-called philanthropist would rely on exploitation to fuel his supposed generosity. Slave labor is the modus vivendi of the “green” capitalist movement. For those capitalists who buy into their own bullshit a little more than Bezos and Buffett do, their “green” capitalism is actually a kind of fascist vision of the future. They harken back to the Nazi Reichsminister for Agriculture, R. Walter Darré, the man who coined the phrase “blood and soil,” and who envisioned the future of the earth as a kind of vast eco-preserve administered by “racially pure” hierarchs with a mystic connection to the land — after eliminating all “undesirables,” of course. These green fascists have a long heritage; they’ve inherited the self-satisfied attitude of great feudal lords who kept “pristine” forestland for the sole purpose of hunting. For men like Arnault, the environment is important because it exists to serve them. It exists, not for itself, for its own beauty, but rather to be a parkland where they can unwind. That is the future the far-right green capitalists foresee: a parkland earth, a nature preserve, kept empty of other people, for their own pleasure, whose upkeep falls on the slaves they intend to work out of existence. So it is wrong to call all these capitalists little Hitlers — some of them are little Goerrings and little Darrés instead.

Musk, heir to a Zambian emerald mine and a white South African fortune, also falls into the category of a little Darré-like fascist. This technologically-incompetent Tony Stark prances around with his proclamations of “saving the human race,” but what he really means is that he plans to colonize the Red Planet using glorified indentured labor. He has already revealed plans for laborers to take out loans to pay him for the pleasure of moving to Mars, with the principal to be paid back through work. Never mind the fact that his transportation company, SpaceX, so far can’t get its rockets to function, unless their intended function is egregious pollution in the form of concrete dust, which his rockets habitually create. When Musk talks about environmentalism, he’s talking about a red blood and soil — with a Martian aristocracy living off of indentured colonial labor.

As for Bill Gates, he’s publicly copped to his impact on the environment. “It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high,” he tells us. But don’t worry, he’s “buying offsets through a company that removes carbon dioxide from the air and a nonprofit that installs clean energy upgrades in affordable housing units in Chicago.” So he’s pouring money into startups, which is being suctioned off into the pockets of small scale tech capitalists. Gates has always been loud on climate change — loud in the media, loud in personal conversations, loud everywhere but where it counts: with his investments. In 2011, even as he was publicly declaring his dedication to green solutions, Gates invested in NEOS GeoSolutions, a firm that helps gas and oil companies decide where to drill. In 2020, the Gates Foundation Trust owned 17 million shares — some $1.54 billion worth — of Canadian National Railway Company, which transports oil from Canada’s tar sands.

What else does he spend his time saying about the environment? Oh, only that “[d]ivestment… has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions.” Gates has bought his way into the environmentalist media space so he can champion goofy tech solutions that put money in the pockets of greedy angel investors (like him) and fight real climate change solutions — like divestment from fossil fuels or the implementation of the only real long-term answer: the complete and radical alteration of the economy such to remove the profit motive entirely from production.

So long as the economy remains the private preserve of wealthy individuals, and so long as production is designed not to satisfy the needs of individuals and populations but rather to make certain men (and, occasionally, women) obscenely wealthy; so long as the driving force behind all our industries remains the production of profit rather than the fulfillment of needs; so long as we are forced to deal with the anarchic, disorganized, and individualistic whims of the market to determine what is made and what is wasted, the environment can never be truly safe. So long as Capital remains in control of the economic decision-making, there are only two roads down which we can travel: the utter depletion of the planet and environment’s life-sustaining capacity, or the institution of the parkland fascism that certain sects of the wealthy plan in the gilded rooms of their mansions and yachts. These men are not, by any stretch of the imagination, climate heroes. They are champions of nothing but their own vanity and greed. Capitalism, which has given them such wealth, has also mutilated them. They are incapable of seeing the world as anything other than a subject, something to manipulate and control. The only world they’re out to save is their world, the world that exists for their pleasure, the world that is an extension of themselves. The rest of us? Well, to them, we’re just fuel for the fire.

Sam Walton, of Walmart fame, was a U.S. army intelligence officer. In 1945, he took a $20,000 gift from his father and $5,000 of his own army intelligence pay, equivalent to roughly $500,000 in 2023, and bought himself a franchise store. In the 1960s Walton took the millions he was making as a franchisee and opened his first Walmart. He made it a point to open his large retail centers in small towns, not major cities. His strategy relied on an “economy of scale” — using his access to a massive distribution network, Walton’s early small-town Walmarts outcompeted locally owned businesses, financially ruined local small retailers, and conquered local retail monopolies. 

During the 1950’s and 60’s, a process known as “white flight” began: the white labor aristocrats (highly paid skilled workers) and  professionals “fled” apartments in the cities for homeownership in the suburbs. Overt racist discrimination and subtler “redlining” tactics, which are still employed today, maintained these suburban communities as white-only, and sometimes as white- and Asian-only, enclaves —  “safe” from “urban” problems. Walton found in these settler enclaves new local markets ripe for expansion, and so Walmart grew with them. Soon, Walmart became the flagship retailer of white suburbia.

Jim Walton, Sam’s third child, was born in 1948. Since his childhood, his job has been assured: manage one of daddy Walton’s enormous, city-devouring corporations. His first position was in Walmart’s real estate division (what exactly his job was there, sources do not say), and later he transferred to Walton Enterprises, where daddy made him president. He was only there for a few months before he moved into the lucrative world of banking as the president, and later the CEO, of the Walton family’s megabank, Arvest. From September 2005 to 2016, he served on the Walmart board of directors. He also owned the newspaper firm Community Publishers, Inc. until its sale to another giant capitalist firm, Berkshire Hathaway (owned by another famous enemy of the people, Warren Buffet). Continuing this “family tradition” of nepotism, Jim’s son Steuart currently sits on the Walmart board of directors. The net worth of this archetypical heir of American nepotism is reported to be $66 billion USD — equivalent to the entire gross domestic product of Costa Rica. Taken together, the Walton family (Jim and his siblings, and their heirs) are the wealthiest family in the world.

What about Walton’s politics? It should come as no surprise that Jim is a donor to the far-right reactionary arm of the Republican Party: the fascists-with-teeth who have, of late, vied with the “moderate” fascist old-guard for power. While Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon helped install president Trump with his donations and then went on to serve as a Trump regime advisor, Jim Walton was financing the GOP and its candidates to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars —  $20,000 to the Republican Party of California in 2020 alone, $142,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and $33,600 to various individual Republican candidates.

The Walton family is powerful enough to create their own political enclaves throughout the country. For instance, Jim and his siblings have captured the politics in Colorado: tens of millions of Walton dollars poured into government agencies, schools, sports teams, media companies, and nonprofits over the course of 2022. We cannot measure the true impact of Jim and the Walton siblings in Colorado or anywhere in U.S. imperial politics because most of their donations are non-disclosable, but the Waltons’ various investments in Colorado surely total billions of dollars.

And what has this feckless capitalist to show for his labors? What critical services does Arvest banking group, for example, provide? “For six banks, overdraft revenues accounted for more than half their net income,” a Brookings Institute study showed in 2022, remarking that Arvest was merely a “check casher[] with a charter.” In fact, Arvest makes 62% of its income simply by charging poor working class people overdraft fees! This is typical capitalist predation on the working class. Those who rely on Jim’s vulture-bank Arvest to deposit their paychecks are those least able to afford the overdraft fees that plague them. Although all banks rely, to some extent, on this disgusting trick of “forgiving” fees for wealthy clients and ruthlessly prosecuting the poorest depositors, Arvest is especially depraved for deriving their primary source of income by driving working class people deeper into debt, slamming them with fees they can’t afford, and then selling that debt to collectors who will hound and harass working families for years.

But let’s not beat around the bush: what about the behemoth in the room? What about Walmart? It’s the largest private-sector employer in the United States. The average hourly worker in a Walmart store is reported in the news as having made $14.76 an hour in 2020 — roughly $25,000 for a full-time employee. That’s twice the 2020 federal poverty rate. Not bad, eh? Except that’s nothing more than a line from a corporate press release, and it’s the one that all the capitalist papers run with. We know that’s not true — Walmart cashiers kicking back on a cushy salary? Bullshit! We aren’t so simple as to be duped by an accounting trick. Because what’s the truth?

In fact, a 2022 working paper from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth indicates that the real average wage is actually $11/hour. Most of Walmart’s employees are replaced each year. Using data Walmart turned over in court cases, we can see the average annual turnover: 69%. In some stores, the yearly turnover of employees is higher than 90%. The core of the business model developed by Sam Walton and carried out by his heir Jim is strict emphasis on payroll control.  The elder Walton designed store payroll expenses off a fixed dollar-number based on achieving that week’s sales plan. As ales rise above plan, the payroll expense budget remains fixed. Most companies allow their managers to increase their expenses when and if sales rise; not the Waltons. In fact, those court documents show that the average ‘tenured’ full-time hourly Walmart employee earned $16,882 in 2022 dollars, just barely above the federal poverty level.

Walmart’s hourly workers are almost never employed full-time. This is a common tactic used by the CEOs and enemies of the people, from men like Howard Schultz on down to line workers like your local barista. Taking care to make sure that employees never work 40 hours a week means they’ll never be eligible for federally-mandated health insurance and other perks that labor organizing “won” for the workers over the past century, while simultaneously tearing down attempts at those workers unionizing in the first place. What are the average yearly earnings for part-time Walmart workers? According to the study, a pitiful $7,877, far below $13,500 federal poverty line — in fact, almost half.

Jim Walton, CEO, longtime Walton family member and servant of the patriarch, is as responsible for these policies as anyone in the organization. Most Walmart workers have to rely, thanks to Jim, on government-funded Medicaid, food stamps, and poverty-reduction programs. He demands that the state use your tax dollars to cover his egregious theft. Walmart has been viciously anti-labor since its foundation, ensuring that organization of unions never happens in its stores.

You don’t have to rely on the numbers. You can hear it from the living, bleeding workers themselves:

“I skip a lot of breaks. They don’t tell you to skip them. They’ll give you so much to do that there’s no way you can take a break…. They make you feel guilty for taking breaks, i.e., ‘Why didn’t the work get done? I was on break.’” (Human Rights Watch interview with Jared West, July 17, 2005).

“What happens at Wal-Mart is that at the end of the shift before you leave the department, you have to ask your supervisor to check the department. You think your department is okay and clock out. They tell you to clock out after your shift. You wait ‘till the department manager says okay, but if he says you didn’t do certain things, you have to fix things before you leave. So, you do work off the clock. This happened every night…. That’s how they get [the] extra ten, twenty, thirty minutes every day. That adds up.” (Human Rights Watch interview with Diana Griego, 2005).

“There’s been times when I haven’t got lunch. They wouldn’t send anyone to give me coverage so I could take my lunch. It’s happened several times — over ten times…” (Human Rights Watch interview with Pat Quinn, 2005).

“I had fifty to fifty-one days when I worked without a lunch break.” (Norine Sorenson, 2005).

“You’d be given something to do that was impossible to finish on time. A lot of people would clock out and then finish.”(Liz Boyd, a department manager, 2005).

A former department manager told Human Rights Watch that managers would “take thirty minutes off my sheet [even] when I hadn’t taken lunch.”

Carol Anderson said “As customer service managers, we were instructed to ask cashiers to… skip breaks because there were not enough cashiers to keep lines down…. Higher managers would suggest having associates skip breaks…”

The Waltons were not content with merely stealing from their workers like all capitalists do. Walmart is at the bottom of the retail wage scale. Nor is Jim Walton happy to merely bleed his employees of an hour here or two hours there. No, he set up Arvest bank to steal overage fees from the very people he employs. He pays a king’s ransom every year to elect “business-friendly” ghouls to state and federal government. Jim Walton lurks in the shadows, watching his workers everywhere they go, and whenever he can he pounces and drains them of a little more of their lives. When they finally get used up, too angry to work, or just burned out, they’re fired.

This is where the Walton money comes from. Jim, like all his siblings, and like his father before him, is steeped in blood and cloaked in the stolen hours of his 2.1 million Walmart retail associates. If he steals just half an hour from each of his workers each day on top of the normal capitalist exploitation, he is taking one million, fifty thousand hours. That is 114 years stolen every day. Lives that will never be returned. Hours that he cannot even enjoy. All used to increase his power and deepen the exploitation he commands.

Jim Walton, like all the Waltons, is an enemy of the people.