As oligarch fortunes soar: The case for expropriating the billionairesAs the WSWS has explained, the second election of Trump represented “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States.” Trump, himself a billionaire, heads a government of, by and for the financial oligarchy, with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, overseeing measures to slash $1 trillion by firing federal workers and cutting the social benefits provided by the federal government. It would make far more sense, from the standpoint of the working class, to oppose the Trump-Musk cuts with demands to seize the $1 trillion in additional wealth accumulated by just 19 super-billionaires in 2024 alone. More fundamentally, the entire wealth of the capitalist class, the trillions produced by the labor of the working class, should be expropriated to provide the basis for the socialist reorganization of economic life under a workers’ government.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/04/24/mpeq-a24.htmlStellantis’s Tariff Plan: Cut Jobs and Reward ShareholdersThe automaker behind Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep vehicles just announced a $2.26 billion payout to its shareholders — less than two weeks after the company used President Donald Trump’s new auto tariffs to lay off nearly a thousand American workers. On April 4, Stellantis, one of the country’s “Big Three” automakers, announced the temporary layoffs at five US factories and production pauses at facilities in Canada and Mexico. The Dutch conglomerate, which subsumed Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in 2021, told its employees it had “decided to take some immediate actions” in response to Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which included a 25 percent tax on auto imports. “With the current path of painful tariffs and overly rigid regulations, the American and European car industries are being put at risk,” said John Elkann, chairman of Stellantis’s board of directors, at the company’s April 15 general assembly meeting. But that risk wasn’t enough to stop shareholders at the meeting from voting to reward themselves with $2.26 billion in total dividend payments. Shareholders also voted to pause the company’s annual stock buyback program, which involved purchasing $3 billion in Stellantis stock l
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