Everywhere we look, the U.S. government and the billionaires they serve are attacking us day after day. They are slashing budgets and cutting our social safety nets, working to replace jobs with AI and robots, cutting regulations to dig for and use more climate-destroying fossil fuels, and laying siege to cities with armed, masked ICE thugs who are terrorizing our streets and threatening all of us, not just those without documentation.
All the while, the price of basic goods — housing, energy, food, healthcare and more — are rising through the roof with no end in sight.
Trump is using tariffs to tax and threaten countries who he deems as competition or potential competition to the U.S. economy, virtually every country in the world. But tariffs hurt regular people’s pockets. Consumers end up paying the cost of the increased tariffs so that businesses can keep their profits. And any strain to companies often leads to increasing unemployment of workers around the world.
So, some may have felt hope when even the far-right Supreme Court struck down most of Trump’s tariffs as unconstitutional. But this is no solution to regular working people’s economic woes. Trump used a legal work-around to reinstate a global 10% tariff on the same day as the Supreme Court decision. Then he raised it to 15% the very next day. Regardless, the billionaires will continue to find ways to make us pay for their profits.
To maintain order abroad and at home, they are funneling money into military actions and into ICE. The U.S. government is building up significant air and naval military presence in the Middle East, threatening Iran with a regime change that is both meant to stabilize the economy in the region for U.S. benefit, and also co-opt and subdue uprisings and dissent with a flex of force.
Meanwhile, Trump initiated his “Board of Peace” (where Trump designated himself as chairman for life), meeting with billionaires and political leaders to discuss their vision for how to bulldoze and “rebuild” Gaza, without even pretending to include Palestinian representation.
Trump and his pals want to control Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba, Palestine, and more to continue manipulating the global economy for their benefit.
In the U.S., ICE and Homeland Security in general are receiving bloated budgets to keep us in check. Although the government is reducing its forces in Minneapolis because of the fightback of people there, ICE has not disappeared and continues to terrorize people across the U.S. And they are staging increases in ICE presence in other cities around the country.
The chaos of the attacks, on top of the already absurd conditions we work and live under, can feel impossible to face. But this is exactly what they want — to overwhelm us with attacks and make us feel hopeless. They are relying on us not responding so that they can keep playing some workers off against others, squeezing more and more out of all of us.
But Minneapolis showed us a glimpse of how we can stop them. People went into the streets to face down ICE; and many did that instead of going to work. That is a step in the right direction.
Through the haze of chaos, fear, and attacks we can see the clear source of our problems. It is not just Trump and his administration; it is the system of capitalism that he defends. Working people can organize, strike, and stop the system in its tracks. That is our superpower. If that seems far-fetched, we can start creating emergency response networks and other organizing in our communities to defend ourselves and our neighbors. That begins with us — maybe just a few individuals at first. But it can snowball, as it did in Minneapolis.
Some people are looking towards the No Kings Day protest on March 28 and May Day on May 1 as opportunities to show that we will not accept what Trump is doing. Often, such nationally organized events point towards voting for the Democratic Party as the solution to Trump’s administration. But ultimately, we can see that neither of the established parties will solve the vast problems that we face. Most Democratic Party politicians go out of their way to say they support capitalism. In fact, both parties support this system that is all about squeezing more profits from us. Strikes and other actions we’re seeing around the country point to the real liberators we can look to – ourselves.
