Crossfire

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What we're reading

• One of the most powerful images in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party depicts capitalism’s inevitable demise: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.” In the Manifesto, these gravediggers are the proletariat, the class of workers compelled to sell their labor power to survive. Protean Magazine

• Fortunately, some unions and workers’ centers have been busy mobilizing a robust defense, through direct action, political action, and negotiating protections into union contracts. Many of these efforts started long before Trump was elected. Labor Notes

• Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier finally returns home. In the last moments of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted his two consecutive life sentences to home confinement. Many in Indian Country see this executive clemency as a significant victory in a decades-long campaign for his release. However, clemency is not the same as a pardon or exoneration, nor does it reclaim the five decades of life taken from elder Peltier or the time lost with his family. Red Scare

• In 1999, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then an environmental lawyer, was named by Time magazine as a “hero of the planet” for his pioneering work to clean up America’s waterways. On February 14 of this year, his second day as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he ended HHS funding for climate change and health programs at the National Institutes of Health, a move that will likely terminate this work. Mother Jones