The modern executive branch of the US government is designed to work in the general interests, not only of the entire class of US capitalists, but also for the general welfare of the US economy and, as a result, manages the interests of the entire petty bourgeois and labor-aristocratic classes. But what does this mean? There are three classes that directly benefit from the US empire’s stability and economic success: 1) the big imperialist bourgeoisie, the finance capitalists invested in US firms like Bill Gates, the Kochs, etc.; 2) the petty bourgeoisie, those who own their own capital but also have to work; and 3) the labor aristocrats, roughly defined here as those proletarians who receive more than the global average pay for their labor-time.² It is the political expectation that the executive branch will look out for the interests of these three classes. Affordable college and healthcare and access to purchasing land (usually in the form of housing) is part of that understanding. Most division between the Republicans and the Democrats actually comes down to which section of these classes to favor the most.

The Fed has generally played a neutral role in these feuds, leaning toward the Democratic camp of stability to benefit the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats. The reserve system regulates the country’s money supply, which has a direct impact on the velocity of exchange (how quickly money or credit changes hands; in other words, how many transactions occur in any given time), on the total price of all commodities produced in the US market, and on the total number of those commodities produced. These figures are interdependent and related to one another on a push-pull basis, and they trend toward an equilibrium. That equilibrium can be expressed through the following equation:

(p * q) / v = m

Where p = the price of all commodities produced in the economic unit (the US market), q = the total number of commodities in that unit, v = the velocity of money, and m = the total money supply.³ Changes in any of these variables will cause subsequent changes in the others as they move toward the above equilibrium.

Inflation is reflected in the variable (p). For instance, all things remaining equal, if (m), the money supply, increases, either (p) or (q) must increase, or (v) must decrease. The regulation of this process is central to the purpose of the reserve system to prevent, on the one hand, runaway hyperinflation, and on the other, the velocity of money trending toward zero, either of which would cause a catastrophic collapse in the US economy, freezing transactions and halting production. For more details on the role of the Fed, see “The Inevitable Capitalist Crisis Looms” in the Red Clarion.

The thing now under dispute is the Fed’s overnight bank funding rate,⁴ the rate of interest which other banks must pay to one another or to the Fed if their own money supply is below the reserve amount required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for large broker-dealers to ensure the bank can cover its loans at the end of any given day. This rate determines the interest rate for all lending in the US economy. All other lending rates are set somewhere higher than this Federal rate. The lower the lending rates, the more speculative investments will become as money can be loaned with less risk to the lender and thus the borrower. The reason this number is the source of conflict among the ruling class is because it embodies a contradiction in the interests of the major classes invested in the performance of the US economy.

For the big bourgeoisie, it is objectively better for their capacity to invest and make profits if the interest rates are zero. Although the Fed had historically always maintained some interest rate, in the wake of the 2008 crash the Fed set the interest rates to 0%. The US economy had been on this “life support” rate from 2008 until the 2020 economic crisis triggered by COVID-19. An interest rate of zero, however, will not remove excess money from the economy. At the beginning of 2020, the money supply was at 4,000 thousand billion USD. Today, the money supply is at 19,000 billion USD, reflecting a nearly five-fold increase.⁵ It also tends to make banks more unstable (as they will lend far more than they can safely cover), and increase the velocity of money by encouraging increased lending and investment. As a consequence, either the total number of commodities in US markets must fall (and why would they? There has been no change in production) or the price of commodities must rise. This rise is inflation.

The rise in the price of articles of consumption – consumer commodities – has a negligible effect on the big bourgeoisie. They can afford any increase, however large, because personal consumption is a marginal amount of their overall money. Even the rise in the price of means of production – raw materials, machines, factories, land, etc. – would lag significantly behind the gains made as a result of zero-percent lending at the federal level. Indeed, even if the banks should fail and the economy collapse, history has proven that the big bourgeoisie are shielded from the worst effects of that crash and would be able to buy up the resources of those smaller bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that are driven into bankruptcy, default, or foreclosure for pennies on the dollar, further concentrating their stranglehold on the country’s economic resources.

Conversely, the labor aristocrats cannot weather such a storm and consumer inflation, particularly of necessary staples like food and healthcare. It can drive labor aristocrats into the ranks of the working proletariat and cost them their comfortable class-basis – their homes, their long-term investments, etc. It is in their interests to keep interest rates high, reduce or slow the rate of inflation, and ensure that the banks remain stable.

The petty bourgeoisie, possessing economic relations that are both bourgeois and proletarian, tend to be more like the labor aristocracy when it comes to this question than the big bourgeoisie. Inflation in the costs of the means of production will inevitably drive a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie out of their class and down into the proletariat as the continued running of their businesses becomes financially untenable. The upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie – those able to draw on reserves of credit or who are becoming regionally powerful and are on the cusp of entering the lower ranks of the big bourgeoisie – tend to prefer the lowering of the interest rates so they can attempt to grow their money-capital and progress out of their class and enter the big bourgeoisie.

What, then, does this grand jury indictment mean? The Fed has consistently kept the interest rates higher than they had been since 2008 for the past several years. President Trump, acting as the hammer of the big bourgeoisie, has made repeated demands that the Fed lower those interest rates.

On Sunday, January 11, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, released a video statement in which he said that the subpoenas are an attempt to force him to capitulate to the White House’s political demands. That, in essence, Trump will force him out unless he does not agree to lower the federal interest rate. This matters for three reasons. First, it is an unprecedented breaking of ranks and airing of internal political differences between the Fed and the White House. Second, it suggests a continued feud within the ruling class over how to distribute the spoils of empire. Third, if the Fed does lower the interest rate and if, as a result, inflation explodes more than it already has done, this will result in the proletarianization of large numbers of labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie, the closure of many routes available to students and young people intent on entering those classes, and an overall increase in the size of the revolutionary mass base.

For us, the first issue means we have an opportunity to expose the machinery of the state and how it functions. We must also be aware of the concurrent risk here; the left-liberals, the Democrats mostly, will use the extraordinary nature of this rupture to bang their anti-Trump drum and try to recuperate their ramshackle coalition. This risk is real and requires our active intervention to minimize the number of petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats who are ideologically drawn back into their orbit.

As to the second reason, we must be extremely wary of declaring that the imperialist bargain between the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the working class is breaking down.⁶ However, we do have the benefit of the bourgeoisie’s own mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to help understand their perspective. Although both sources have been moderate in their reporting of the Powell investigation, both have taken soft pro-Powell and anti-Trump stances.⁷ We can also look to the stock market, which has registered constrained disapproval as investments were moved from stocks into gold.⁸

If there is a fracture between elements of the big bourgeoisie, that group supporting Trump’s nationalist position (as opposed to the old neoliberal internationalism of capital) is growing and the neoliberal position is dwindling.⁹

Therefore, we must begin to prepare for our third conclusion. Trump has rarely allowed himself to be stymied by decorum or procedural niceties. He now holds the US Supreme Court by a wide margin should any of his actions be enjoined by a federal judge. We should first prepare immediate agitation, not demanding that Trump step back and allow Powell to continue as chair, but exposing the manner in which the Federal Reserve serves to stabilize an inherently unjust and exploitative world order. We must do our utmost to ensure the masses correctly understand that any complaints from the Democrats about Trump’s behavior aren’t on their “behalf,” but rather are intended to secure the supply of anesthesia with which they have been dulling the class struggle for a century; that the Democrats are attempting to lull US workers and petty bourgeoisie back to sleep so the empire can continue to burn, loot, and rape the world in their name.

In the intermediate term, we should prepare for a potential economic crash that may result in the unleashing of the contradictions contained by the Fed and its policies since 2020: a collapse in the real estate market and a subsequent depression triggered by numerous bank failures.

Careful attention must be paid in the coming weeks to the way in which this mini-crisis is handled by the state and by the political actors. We must continue to weigh evidence of one kind or another, and determine where the chips will fall so we can formulate a concrete plan of action. As of today, it seems that Trump is routing the supporters of neoliberal stabilization and preparing to enter a new phase of class warfare. This aligns with the White House strategy on increasing friction with ICE and the kidnapping of President Maduro: a global assault on behalf of the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie to repudiate the imperialist power-sharing that had been achieved during the last century.¹⁰ Washington has exploded the “rules-based order” it went through pains to establish over the last hundred years by acting unilaterally, in defiance of international law, and stating the geopolitical-economic interests which it is pursuing, rather than hiding its maneuvers behind high rhetoric of “democracy.”

1. The US central banking system. 
   ︎
2. Here we are using the term labor aristocracy, as elsewhere in pieces published by Clarion staff, to mean anyone who is paid more for each hour of labor than the global average. For more, see Lauesen, Torkil. Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025). ︎
3. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Chapter 3. This is consonant with Adam Smith’s understanding of the velocity of money.
   ︎
4. Also called the “Federal Funds Rate.”
   ︎
5. The M1 money supply over ten years, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL.
   ︎
6. See, for instance, H.W. Edwards’ groundbreaking work Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. ︎
7. The Economist, which represents British capital, has much more firmly presented an anti-Trump position on Powell as well as on the ICE killing of Renee Good. The re-emergence of national (as opposed to international) capitalist planning in the US empire has rattled many cages in Europe. See, for instance: Financial Times, “Justice department’s probe into Jay Powell galvanizes Fed leaders to repel Donald Trump’s attacks,” Jan 12; Wall Street Journal’s, “The Fed Fights Back,” Jan. 13.
   ︎
8. On the following Monday, the day after Powell’s video, trading was muted and the DOW opened down 500 points. The transfer of money out of the stock market and into commodities represents a fear that the value of the stock market may fall.
   ︎
9. Hatred of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory power has been poured into the Libertarian movement and thus embodies a certain kind of right-liberal settlerism. This has been the preserve of an alliance of right-leaning big capitalists and upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie since at least the early 2000s. It seems this logic is now winning over more and more of the big capitalists themselves.
   ︎
10. The neo-liberal position on immigration has always been the Democratic party line: “We need immigrants to do the jobs no one wants to do, that are too difficult, grueling, intense, or low-paying for real Americans!” The ICE sweeps represent a new ideology that flatly denies this rather grotesque logic and embodies instead the naked nationalist nativism in Washington.
    ︎

There are several diseases currently spreading unregulated throughout the world, many of which are centralized in the so-called United States. The U.S. government, corporations, and much of the population has decided that unmitigated and uncontrolled transmission of deadly disease is now the norm. 

These diseases include SARS-CoV-2, Influenza A, H5N1 Bird flu, Measles, Tuberculosis and Norovirus. This article will mostly focus on the mitigation of the spread of these five diseases and to combat specific misinformation that is clouding current understanding of the risks of these diseases on the individual and the community. 

These five diseases are exceptional in their current level of spread, lethality or resurgence. We will go through several sections discussing vocabulary, the diseases themselves, best practices of prevention, control of symptoms, and post-illness care.

Vocabulary and Concepts

• Epidemic: uncontrolled spread of a disease in a given area that causes exceptional threat to human life and society
• Pandemic: epidemics of worldwide reach
• Multidemic: colloquial slang for multiple pandemics occurring at the same time.  
• Pathogen: any organism or agent that can infect a living being and cause disease
• Virus: a kind of pathogen that hijacks the DNA of the cells of hosts and uses them to reproduce copies of itself, which then go on to infect other cells. Viruses are not technically living. Some viruses can be treated by antiviral medications, although not all. 
• Bacteria: single-cellular life forms, some of which are infectious and cause bacterial infections. These infections are treatable with antibiotics that target different kinds of bacteria and kill them outright. 

Spread

Airborne 

• COVID, Flu A, H5N1, and Measles are airborne viruses that are aerosolized through breathing. This means that they are made into microscopic particles that remain in still air. In indoor rooms without ventilation, they can stay in the air from 2-8 hours. Imagine someone smoking and the odor remaining in the air, and lasts for some time after smoking. Infectious particles can stay in the air for hours after being breathed out. 

Bodily fluids 

• Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection of the lungs that spreads through coughing up mucus, blood or saliva. It is not able to hang in the air like the above viruses, but does remain on surfaces, and anything that your bodily fluids get onto after coughing.  
• Norovirus is transmitted through stool, after bowel movements. It can transfer onto hands, which can then spread by touching surfaces, items or people. Touching a contaminated surface with your hands, and then touching your mouth transmits the disease to you. 

Surfaces

• Flu A, H5N1, Measles, norovirus and Tuberculosis are spread through surfaces, touch, skin, and eating after others. 

Contagiousness

• Flu A, H5N1, COVID, and measles are contagious several days before symptoms show up. 
• COVID is asymptomatic (does not show any symptoms) in up to 40% of all cases, and it is spread during this time. 
• Measles is spread through air and is extremely contagious for unvaccinated or immunocompromised individuals, which may be more people than currently known due to the continuing COVID Pandemic. 

Diagnosis and Seeking Treatment

If you believe you are sick with any of these conditions, seek medical attention at a clinic. COVID, Flu and Norovirus can be diagnosed with a lab test. 

Prevention

Spread of all of the above pathogens can be reduced through one of several means. 

Masking

• Effective against all airborne pathogens. 
• Wearing masks can reduce the amount of pathogens that are breathed out if one is sick, and breathed in if you are in contact with contaminated air. 
• Masks should fit tightly, around the nose and cheekbones, under the chin, and not have any gaps on the side. 
• Once in place, masks should not be removed because this will expose you to contaminated air. Avoid touching your mask (and face in general) to prevent infection through the eyes or mouth. 
•  The most easily accessible are surgical masks but these are by far not the most effective. 
• Properly fitted respirators are far and away the most effective masks. Respirators are ionically charged, meaning they have an effect similar to static, that traps and removes particulates from the air before you breathe it in.
• Properly fitted respirators should have two straps that go around the back of the head, fitting above and below the ears. They should have a good seal around the edges of the mask and your skin that air does not pass through. Depending on the size of your face you may need smaller or larger masks. 
• The most effective masks are N100 or P100 respirators, which block about 99.97% of all microscopic particulates. These can be purchased at hardware stores such as Home Depot or Lowe’s, online at distributors sites, such as 3M or other industrial supply companies. 
• Many people are likely familiar with N95, KN95 or equivalent respirators. Of these, the statistically best respirators are the “duck-bill” respirators. They work best for folks with rounder faces, flatter nose bridges. Other popular choices include 3M Aura respirators or the rounder 3M respirators, and others. Respirator masks with ear loops, such as KN95 masks and KF94 masks, are not as effective because the ear loops do not provide an adequate seal around the mask, and air leaks through. 
• Do not remove masks in bathrooms, when eating, or when in rooms with closed doors, as this will expose you to infection. 

Hand-washing

• Hand washing should be done frequently, before and after eating, after peeing or pooping. 
• Wash your hands in the following manner:
  • Rinse them with hot water for 20 seconds, and spread to your whole hand and wrist. 
  • Use soap and thoroughly scrub your whole hand, palm and back, between all fingers, and under fingernails, for 20 seconds. 
  • Rinse them with hot water for 20 seconds, being sure to wash all the soap off. 
  • Dry with a disposable towel thoroughly until dry. Dispose of the towel.
• Norovirus is not killed or removed from the hands by alcohol hand sanitizer, only soap and water. 

Air Filters

•  Homemade air filters can be constructed from a box fan, duct tape, and four air filters. These can filter out pathogens (and allergens like dust, pollen and pet hair/dander) from the air. 
• You can also purchase HEPA-rated air filters from hardware stores or distributors online. 

Vaccination

• Vaccines are available for Influenza A, Measles, Tuberculosis (unless in the US) and COVID-19. 
• The flu vaccine is generally not taken enough to give herd immunity (needing around 95% vaccination rate), but is effective in significantly reducing infection rate. 
• The COVID 19 vaccine is an MRNA vaccine that is generally safe. It reduces (but does not stop!) risk of spread, and severity of the acute phase of illness. 

Nasal Sprays 

• Airborne viruses are able to be reduced in risk of infection with daily use of  several nasal sprays, including diluted Povidone Iodine (can be diluted from iodine solution), Iota-Carrageenan spray (Betadine Cold defense or other generic sprays), or HOCl (short shelf life of 2 weeks, can be made at home). 

Food Prep

• H5N1 can pass to mammals (humans included) through undercooked poultry and mammal meat, and through unpasteurized milk. Do not drink unpasteurized milk or meat that is not cooked to at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit or 74 degrees Celsius. 

Treatment 

Antiviral therapies 

• COVID patients can be treated with Paxlovid, which is a course of 3 pills twice a day for five days. 
• Paxlovid is a very safe medication. It must be started within 5 days of onset of symptoms, and is indicated for mild to moderate symptoms to prevent worsening disease. 
• There is no reason to not start it for most patients, unless you have kidney or liver damage. 
• It is currently being price gouged, and price can be up to $1700, but insurance covers it for around $25, and there are federal programs in place to apply for reduced cost. 
• Influenza can be treated with Tamiflu, a five day antiviral, or Xofluza, a single dose anti-viral. 
• There are no antivirals for H5N1, Measles, or Norovirus. 

Antibacterial therapies

• Tuberculosis is treated with either an injection or oral form of Penicillin antibiotics. Contact medical providers for instructions on seeking treatment. 

Measles

• Measles causes a fine rash and is contagious for about 4 days before the rash appears. The rash is red, splotchy, and appears across the face, body and limbs. 
• Contact a physician immediately if you are concerned that you have measles or if you were exposed, and follow instructions. 

General Treatment for Viral Illness

• Rest, rest, rest. 
• Fever is often treated with Tylenol/Acetaminophen, or Advil/Motrin/Ibuprofen. Follow instructions on packaging and advice of medical providers. 
• Drink lots of fluids (especially if you have diarrhea), especially broths, or electrolyte drinks (Pedialyte or store brand. Avoid gatorade/powerade, as these are mostly sugar). 
• Cough medicine, either started by doctors or over-the-counter medications as instructed. 

The Diseases

SARS-CoV-2  / COVID-19 / COVID

This virus was discovered in late 2019, sourced to a meat market in Wuhan, China, where it spread rapidly across the world. It is a disease that affects and can damage every system in the body, including the neurological system (brain, spine and nerves), the cardiovascular system (the heart and blood vessels), pulmonary system (lungs), gastrointestinal and digestive system, skin and hair, and every organ. 

Risks of COVID are as follows:

Especially concerning, COVID damages the immune system in the same manner that HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) does. It may cause anyone infected to lose their body’s natural ability to fight off all other diseases. 

COVID damages the brain, causing brain fog, memory issues, can cause neuron cells in the brain to fuse into clumps, can damage other sensory nerves throughout the body causing neuralgia (a burning-type nerve pain), loss of smell and taste. Since the start of the continuing COVID pandemic, dementia rates have drastically increased, and are occurring in younger and younger populations, including young adults. 

COVID damages the heart and blood vessels, and causes blood to clot much more often. Strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, have all increased in all age groups and significantly younger since the start of the COVID pandemic. It can also damage the kidneys due to the blood vessel damage it does. 

COVID makes developing cancers significantly more likely,  with all age populations experiencing increased risk of developing cancers such as colon cancer. 

Mortality from all causes has increased in all age groups and populations since the onset of the COVID pandemic, with the number of car accidents increasing, heart attacks and strokes becoming much more frequent. 18-34 year olds are dying twice as much as compared to before the COVID pandemic. 

COVID is deadly, resulting in deaths in 1-2% of all cases. Only about a third of the hospitals reporting deaths from COVID, averaging 1000 deaths a week, but multiplied out to all the hospitals not reporting, it may be killing several thousand people. 

Despite rumors to the contrary, there is no evidence that the source of COVID-19 was from labs of various world governments, nor is this functionally possible with the current level of genome editing technology. 

Influenza

Influenza is a collective name for many related viruses. Influenza A and B are labels given to the most likely strains of influenza to become extremely contagious, and spread during the year. These likely candidates are then taken, and vaccines are made to prevent them by triggering the body’s immune response. 

Flu kills tens of thousands of people each year, and since the start of the COVID pandemic, has killed more and more people every year. 

H5N1 and other avian flus are related to most other common flu strains, but tend to be much more severe, and dangerous to the human body, with much higher likelihood of death (up to 50% of all humans infected with H5N1 die without treatment, and 20% of people die even when aggressively treated). H5N1 is spreading entirely unchecked and uncontrolled in wild, domestic, and agricultural birds, among agricultural mammals like cows and pigs, with many and growing instances of human infection.

All flus damage the lungs and can cause pneumonia (fluid filling the lungs, also risking a secondary bacterial infection). 

Measles

Measles is an extremely infectious, dangerous virus. This is normally vaccinated against in infancy, but efforts by anti-vaccination interests have significantly reduced vaccination rates, either delaying vaccination or not vaccinating outright. Some places in the US are below vaccination required for herd immunity, meaning there are enough unvaccinated people to allow spread. 

Measles can damage the body’s immune system, and wipe out your immunity to diseases you have been vaccinated for previously. 

Measles can permanently damage the brain from inflammation, and the lungs through inflammation and pneumonia. 

Tuberculosis / TB

Tuberculosis was eradicated in the US until very recently. There are vaccines available for this bacteria outside of the US, but it has not occurred enough to warrant vaccine use in the US. It is treatable with Penicillin antibiotic, but until it is treated and resolved is highly infectious and contagious, spreading through droplets of mucus, blood or saliva. 

Norovirus

Norovirus is a virus that causes diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration in individuals. It is highly contagious and particles can remain suspended in bathrooms for several hours. Ventilation is key, and washing hands and wearing high quality respirators is imperative. Dehydration is a major threat of the illness and is the primary danger especially to the elderly, infants, and children. Norovirus sticks to surfaces extremely well, and cannot be neutralized with hand sanitizer alone. Avoid going to eat at restaurants. 

Well, not over over… they just aren’t going to be helping the workers of Connecticut deal with it anymore. That’s on us now!

Yesterday, Lamont announced that the services and programs put into place to support the residents of Connecticut during the state of emergency are being canceled as of May 11, 2023. 

He makes it very clear that this does not mean that the danger has passed, “I continue to urge Connecticut residents to take actions to protect themselves from the spread of COVID-19 and all respiratory viruses – stay home when you’re sick, get vaccinated and boosted to limit your risk of contracting viruses, and listen to the advice of medical experts on ways to stay healthy.”

Hey, Ned? How are working people expected to “stay home when sick” when they can barely afford to put food on the table as it is? Especially when emergency SNAP benefits are being canceled along with every other program! We have no sick leave, no medical coverage, and no way to provide for ourselves when we get infected. We are being set up for economic disaster for the sin of protecting our fellow workers.

Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani adds, “Residents still should get vaccinated, get the updated vaccine, use at-home tests, stay home when they’re sick, and based on your own medical conditions, consider wearing a high-quality mask when respiratory viruses are circulating at high levels in their community.”

Unfortunately, in addition to eliminating the emergency food relief, the state is also transitioning all vaccination, testing and therapeutics to the broken for-profit insurance system. Even the most “up-to-date” vaccines are obsolete, and much less effective against the viral strains currently circulating; if more effective updates ever get released, how will we afford them? The available tests are expensive, and fail to detect new variants with increasing frequency; what worker can afford to take them over and over as a precautionary measure?

Also, if you are amongst the nearly ONE MILLION Connecticut residents covered by Medicaid, you will need to pay extra close attention to your insurance because continuous enrollment is being canceled as well. 

KFF, an independent health policy research organization, has outlined the devastating effects that the abandonment of the continuous enrollment program could have. Especially vulnerable are “…immigrants and people with limited English proficiency (LEP), and people with disabilities.” 

This entire process of rolling back programs and services highlights a few important facts:

1. The government is run by and for the wealthy capitalist class.
2. They do not care about the working class, especially the most vulnerable and least empowered sections of the working class.
3. Any reforms that the government is forced to put in place to respond to the inevitable crises caused by capitalism can and will be taken away as soon as these monsters have the slightest excuse.

The ultra-wealthy elite that run this country did not face this pandemic the way that the working public was forced to. They have always been able to protect themselves, with round-the-clock testing, the ability to stay home whenever they wish, unmitigated access to effective treatments, and comprehensive protection measures at their events. While workers continued to put their lives on the line, the corporate vampires that run this country funneled more profit than ever into their greedy maws, all on the backs of a working class who is still struggling to survive.

Today, as Lamont rips away the meager concessions that were put in place for workers’ safety in the face of a continuing global pandemic, we are reminded who we can rely on: each other. The ruling class is not going to protect us. It is up to us to come together to protect each other from the deadly virus that still rages around us. It is up to us to come together to protect ourselves from the tyranny of these capitalist exploiters. It is up to us to come together to create a world where people come before profits. 

The Connecticut regulatory agency, Public Utilities Regulation Authority (PURA), ordered a moratorium on stopping gas, electric, and water services to residential customers for non-payment on March 12, 2020. Connecticut is the last state with an energy payment moratorium. Now, energy companies Eversource and Avangrid are asking PURA to end the shutoff moratorium and permit them to turn off power to over 20,000 residents of Connecticut in the middle of August, following a record-breaking heat wave and before the onset of what is predicted to be an exceptionally cold winter.

More than 20,000 of the poorest families in Connecticut are now threatened with shutoffs that could last until November 1st when this year’s Winter Moratorium goes into effect. The Winter Moratorium may restore service for those families come November, but it requires residential customers of power and heat to know and apply to prevent utility shutoff during Connecticut’s coldest months. This would leave houses without heating during the Connecticut winter which can be killingly cold. Worse, if PURA lifts the shutoff moratorium, families that are already struggling to make ends meet will see their refrigerators turned off and food they can’t afford to replace will rot and life saving medicines such as insulin to expire. If another heat wave arrives before November, these families will be trapped in overheating homes. With functioning air conditioning, Connecticut averages one heat-related indoor death a year.

Eversource and Avangrid claim $171 million dollars in bills overdue by more than sixty days. Many of these residents will never be able to pay off the back bills, which can amount to over $2,000. “When people who have a $1,500 back bill think their service is going to be shut off, and they call the company and someone says, ‘If you pay $200 a month, we won’t shut you off,’ – in my experience, they’re gonna say, ‘Sure, I’ll pay the $200.’ They’re so relieved they won’t have their service shut off, but the reality is, they can’t afford it,” said Bonnie Roswig, an attorney at the Children’s Center for Advocacy, which provides legal services for low-income residents. That’s the goal. Energy prices are at all-time highs thanks to the imperialist war between US proxy Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Euro-American sanctions have interrupted the global oil and gas supply, which is highly reliant on imports from Russia, to try to bring the Russian state back into the orbit of Europe and NATO. To date, the sanctions have only managed to increase the causes of inflation and to increase energy costs. While Avangrid and Eversource are reaping untold profits from this imperialist war, they have the audacity to stand before the Connecticut regulators and beg poverty so they can squeeze another few million dollars from the most impoverished people in Connecticut.

What can you do?

If you’re in Connecticut, you need to talk to other residents. Keep an eye on the developing news. If PURA agrees to resume power shutoffs, you need to be prepared to help. Households with no power will need more food assistance—and food pantries around the state are already at a historically depleted level. You should talk to other radicals in your community and prepare for the crisis that appears to be developing.

PURA is a regulatory agency, which means it’s less susceptible to class power—that is, to marches and demonstrations—then, for example, elected officials like mayors, city councilors, and the state legislature. That doesn’t mean PURA will ignore pressure from the mobilized working classes. Marches are not likely to affect PURA, but pickets around their offices at 10 Franklin Square in New Britain won’t go unnoticed. Plan your actions now and exert pressure before PURA makes the decision to reinstate power shutoffs.

Only together, as the mobilized and active elements of the working classes, can we stop the monopolists at Avangrid and Eversource, who already prey on the poorest among us, from further exploiting the working people of Connecticut. Stand fast, and stand together, against the big bosses and their political agents!