CHICAGO — “BP decided to dump its petcoke here, in a working-class neighborhood,” Ilona Gersh, Socialist Workers Party candidate for governor of Illinois, told an April 26 rally here demanding the city government remove mounds of petroleum coke piled up along the Calumet River on the Southeast Side. “Workers and farmers create the wealth of this country and we should be the ones who decide what to do with it. To do that we need to take political power.”

Gersh pointed to mass mobilizations in Ukraine that overthrew the hated government of President Viktor Yanukovych in February as an example of independent working-class political action.

“Today is the 28th anniversary of the nuclear plant explosion at Chernobyl in Ukraine,” Gersh said. “As children began to develop cancer, revolutionary Cuba began bringing children and their families to Cuba for free medical care.” More than 25,000 people, mostly children, have been treated under the program, which continues to this day.