the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 28, 2010
By the end of June, Congress had still not passed a bill to fund the emergency extended unemployment benefits. Already, one month had passed since funding had run out for this program–and the benefits for close to 1.5 million workers had already been cut. One and a half million families were threatened with utter destitution, little or no money for food, shelter, clothing.
The Democrats and Republicans have let vital funding for emergency unemployment benefits run out four times in just the last six months.
Ever since unemployment hit record levels, the Democrats and Republicans have been playing political games with the funding for extended benefits. Each time the funding has come up for renewal, the politicians from both parties have maneuvered for their own political advantage, blaming the other party for not coming up with the money. And when they finally coughed up the money, it was only for a few more months–at most.
This benefit program is supposed to kick in during an emergency, when unemployment levels remain high for a long time, and millions of workers are running out of the usual unemployment insurance coverage, along with its extensions. Therefore, those workers have no other means of support.
Funding for this kind of program should be permanently available, to be used in cases of economic emergencies.
If the Republicans truly represented those ruined by the crisis, as they say, if the Democrats represented ordinary working people, as they say, they would have supported permanent funding during times of economic emergency.
Of course, the Democrats and Republicans have done nothing of the kind.
Instead, they have resorted to the usual political rhetoric of blaming the cost of the emergency benefits for the unemployed for driving up the federal budget deficit. The Republicans have argued the funding is too costly, all together. The Democrats counter by proposing to cut unemployment benefits by $25 per week.
Both parties are literally snatching the food from the mouths of hungry children.
And for what? By cutting aid to the unemployed, as well as every other safety net and social program, the politicians are merely making more money available for the banks and big business. The Democrats and Republicans have already fattened corporate profits and wealth by providing huge tax breaks, obscene subsidies and fat contracts–thus already widening the budget deficit before the crisis broke out. With the crisis, the government accelerated this aid at warp speed: literally trillions of taxpayer dollars are being shoveled over to the very banks, companies and speculators whose mad drive for profits triggered the crisis in the first place.
It’s the money given to the capitalists that has made the budget deficit balloon.
The toll from the record level of unemployment can’t just be measured in dollars and cents. It is a stupendous waste in every way possible: human, social, economic. It condemns working people to both idleness and abject misery, literally wasting away. All of this is a product of a society run solely for the profits of big business and the wealthy.
Everyone should have a decent job. And if big business and the state officials don’t provide this basic minimum, the very least Congress should do is make sure that people continue to have an income, until they find a job. Clearly, the capitalists and their government no longer even pretend to do that.
They sit astride an increasingly corrupt and destructive system.
Jun 28, 2010
On June 25, Congress agreed on a bank reform bill to send to the President. The bill was supposed to be a hard-hitting reform to stop the big banks’ ability to wheel and deal us into another crash of the economy.
So what happened the very same day that Congress agreed? Investors bid up bank stocks by three%! That was Wall Street’s verdict!
How could it be otherwise, when the banks own the Congress? The bank and hedge-fund lobbyists spun the bill into nothing but a gift for themselves. Derivatives trading, which brought us the collapse and scandals of the biggest of the big, like Goldman and AIG, remains in place in the same banks. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t drive all the derivative business out of New York,” said a New York congressman.
A banking analyst summed it up: “The banks will have numerous methods of getting around the ... bill to maintain their earnings growth. But the things they do will increase the cost of banking to everybody in this country.”
And as far as preventing the next collapse? The chairman of the very committee that wrote the bill said he wouldn’t know “until we face the next economic crisis.”
In other words, they all know that a new crisis is coming. And they are helping the banks to make as much money as possible before then, by helping them reach even more deeply into our pockets.
Jun 28, 2010
The Chicago Board of Education just gave Ron Huberman, head of schools, authorization to layoff 2,700 teachers and allow 35 children in a classroom. Today the average is 28, already too high.
Which teacher can follow closely the problems and the progress of 35 students in one classroom? No one.
These layoffs will mean even less education for public school students in Chicago. And they will hit the poorest students, who need individual attention from their teachers, the hardest. Already 43% of Chicago high school students do not graduate. How many more will drop out after these cuts?
Huberman says these cuts are meant to plug a “427 million dollar deficit.” But Chicago is a rich city. Out of the property tax levied for the schools, 247 million dollars a year goes to Mayor Daley’s TIF funds, which he gives away to business. And the Board of Education spends tens of millions of dollars on consultants–the exact amount carefully hidden from public view.
Who makes these decisions? Are they people with years of teaching or studying education? Nope! Mayor Daley appointed the seven members of the Board, which includes two lawyers from some of the biggest corporate law firms in the country, two bankers and a mutual fund operator, a business consultant and one doctor. Not one ordinary parent or teacher. Not one educator.
The teachers, fed up with their current union leadership, just overwhelmingly voted in new officers, who had organized the fight against school closings and charter schools. They called for a protest at the end of May that turned out more than 4,000 people.
More and more protests by parents, students, and teachers have been taking place in front of schools, at neighborhood meetings by the Board, and downtown at City Hall and at the Board. They’re right to raise their voices. Workers’ children deserve a decent education–something these lawyers and businessmen know nothing about.
Jun 28, 2010
The City of Detroit announced at the end of June that it is laying off 33 Emergency Medical Services workers.
When asked how the city could respond to emergencies with 33 fewer workers, James Mack Jr., executive fire commissioner for Detroit, told a local radio station, “We ... have contracts with private ambulance companies to fill in during times when we don’t have units available. And, that happens. I can’t tell you that it doesn’t happen now.”
This latest layoff is nothing more than a further privatization of Detroit’s EMS system, a gift to private companies. The meaning is very clear: Private companies will drain more money from the city treasury, and Detroiters will get worse emergency medical services.
And more people will die.
Jun 28, 2010
Austin Beutner, the new interim general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), says he wants to sell off some of the DWP’s most valuable assets, including its downtown headquarters, natural gas reserves in Wyoming, and an electric power plant.
Beutner claims the DWP is running out of money. Funny thing–this is the same excuse the DWP used for raising utility rates back in April. Only later did an audit by the city controller report that the DWP is sitting on a big surplus and shouldn’t have raised its rates. Never mind–the city council, which had approved the rate hike, let it stand, anyway.
In fact, the DWP, the largest publicly-owned utility in the U.S., is an enormous cash cow. The city politicians regularly dip into its surplus to pay for their pet projects–such as providing huge tax breaks to developers and speculators.
If the DWP does go through with the fire sale of its assets, it certainly won’t save the public any money. But it will hand over valuable property to private interests for their own profit–while the public pays more for worse service.
Jun 28, 2010
The federal Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program is anything but “rapid” and certainly hasn’t prevented homelessness.
Eight months ago 38,000 people applied for aid in Detroit. Even then, the program was a joke–since it promised aid to only 3,400 families. In fact, it’s given aid to only 330.
Delphia Simmons, program director at the Coalition on Temporary Shelters said, “When they were at Cobo, they were facing eviction. By the time we got to them, they had been evicted.”
City officials blame the “delay” on having to carefully “vet” the applicants to comply with federal rules.
The federal government never “vetted” the banks it doled out trillions of dollars of bailout money to! The city never “vetted” the people responsible for handing fire and police pension funds over to the cronies of a corrupt mayor.
To government officials used to treating public money as their own cash cow, it may be just a “delay.” To the unemployed and now homeless, this “delay” meant disaster.
Jun 28, 2010
Besides heading the Los Angeles DWP, Austin Beutner is L.A.’s official “jobs czar.” When Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa appointed him “First Deputy Mayor” last January, Beutner said his goal was to create jobs.
His credentials? According to Beutner’s resume, he advised the Russian government on its “privatization strategies” in the 1990s. He then co-founded Evercore, a bank that advertises itself as providing “advisory services” to other companies on buying and selling other companies, and on “other strategic corporate transactions”–including GM’s bankruptcy, for example.
In other words, the L.A. “jobs czar” specializes in turning full-time better-paying jobs into lousy, temporary low-paying jobs for the profit of a few wealthy speculators and high rollers.
Jun 28, 2010
On June 21, Amtrak management ordered its crew to lock up a thousand commuters in a MARC train heading from Washington to Baltimore after the train broke down. Temperatures inside the cars soon soared to more than 100 degrees. There was no drinking water available and toilets were soon overflowing.
Passengers removed train windows to get air and made 911 calls on their cell phones to summon paramedics. An hour later, some passengers climbed out windows or broke through doors–to discover they were only 200 yards from a Metro station!
The state pays Amtrak 40 million dollars a year–for what?
Apparently, engine maintenance was not included in the deal!
Jun 28, 2010
President Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal for his remarks about the Obama administration in a Rolling Stone article. But Obama’s problem is not McChrystal’s remarks. It’s the war itself.
Military officials always resent civilians, and they always talk about their civilian leadership the way McChrystal did. The fact is, if they were in control of the war, McChrystal’s remarks would not be a problem, even made so publicly.
But U.S. imperialism does not control the war, even though we keep hearing otherwise. The month of June was the bloodiest month so far with 85 coalition deaths, more than any previous month. Last year had by far the highest casualties of any year, and 2010 is already on pace to surpass it. Even though the U.S. has stepped up the war, it controls less of Afghanistan, not more.
Imperialism has been trying for decades to impose its will on a region it has not been able to control. And now, after nine years of steadily worsening war, with more and more civilian deaths, the U.S. tries to pretend it’s playing nice and reaching out to the population. But the population is not buying it, not rolling over like they want it to. So the war continues, and gets more bloody.
So now, the criminals are all blaming each other for their failure–from Obama and McChrystal, all the way down the chain of command of civilian officials AND military officers.
They’re like rats jumping a sinking ship. But it’s the Afghan population that is drowning, for U.S. imperialism’s crimes.
Jun 28, 2010
A 14-year-old youth was shot in the head, killed by the U.S. border police at Juarez. Witnesses said he was part of a group of youths trying to cross over the Rio Grande River on the border between Mexico and Texas.
The U.S. State Department said it regretted the incident and was suspending the guard who fired the shots. But it wasn’t a “blunder,” it was a result of a hardening U.S. policy on immigration, especially immigration from Mexico. This policy started under Bush and has continued under Obama.
In the same week, three people, one of whom had lived in the U.S. more than 40 years, were murdered by border police. For several months now, the U.S. border police have been on a veritable manhunt, pretending they are protecting the entire border from illegal immigration.
On April 23, the state of Arizona adopted a new law that not only authorizes but actually encourages police to arrest people on a suspicion that their papers are not in order. This law, specifically aimed against Mexicans, is denounced by them and many others as racial profiling.
In Phoenix, Arizona and elsewhere, there have been demonstrations against this law. Plenty of people remember that Obama promised he would reform immigration law when he was running for president.
Whatever platitudes Obama may say about democracy and immigration, his administration has announced 400,000 deportations of foreigners each year. Even Bush didn’t deport that many!
Jun 28, 2010
British Petroleum (BP) and the Obama administration agreed on a twenty billion dollar compensation fund to help those who have lost their livelihoods along the Gulf Coast, thanks to the BP spill.
Does 20 billion dollars sound like a lot of money? Not when you take account of the damages. Several million people have been directly or indirectly hit by this catastrophe. That comes to less than $10,000 a person spread out over four years’ time–if all the 20 billion went to BP’s victims.
No, it’s not generous of BP. It’s just a face-saving gesture for a corporation that made profits of 14 billion dollars in 2009 and 26 billion in 2008 when oil prices peaked.
Jun 28, 2010
The following article comes from the Workers’ Fight newspaper of June 14, 2010 put out by the revolutionary workers’ group of that name in Britain.
Everybody–poor or not-so-poor–loves soccer! On the other hand, the three-mile exclusion zone around all soccer stadiums and the “clearances” of small traders from their traditional spots outside railway, bus and tax stations, deprived thousands of their livelihoods, at the very time when they might have been able to get a welcome boost!
Anyway, the bright colors and happy sounds cannot conceal the poverty and deprivation behind it all: on one side an estimated six billion dollar cost for the World Cup “circus,” and on the other side, a population where almost one half lives below the poverty line. A third of South Africans have no electricity and a sixth of them have no clean running water!
The six brand new state-of-the-art stadiums are fantastic. But the money spent on Cape Town’s stadium would have paid for 9,000 school libraries in a country where one in seven can’t read or write. Why did the city of Durban need bungee jumping and a sightseeing train built into the top tier of its stadium? And who can afford the new underground railway from Johannesburg to the airport, costing $15 one way?
South Africa’s “economic miracle” was always a jobless growth. And that’s what will be left over when the soccer is finished: more joblessness. The unofficial figure is more than 40%, without counting those whose jobs end on July 11. The poor majority will still have a fight on their hands, not just for jobs, but for the basic necessities of life.
But one thing’s for sure: they certainly have the energy for it!
Jun 28, 2010
Just how “British” is BP? The initials stand for British Petroleum, and the company is 41% British-owned. But it is made up of several U.S. companies and is 40% U.S. owned! In the last ten years, BP merged with Amoco and Atlantic Richfield oil companies. In 1978, BP had already merged with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Ohio.
This British-American company trying to polish its image promised to provide 20 billion dollars to compensate the oil spill’s victims.
But these billions are just a drop in BP’s barrels of oil. This company is so large that its sales are measured in the HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of dollars every year.
In Louisiana, and spreading toward Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, the damage from the oil spill is ruining coast lines, beaches, flora, animals, fish and the livelihoods of millions of people.
There’s no doubt that BP will recover very well. It controls more than 40% of U.S. oil reserves from the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.
And no one at any level of government is proposing to take its ill-gained wealth from BP permanently.
Jun 28, 2010
A St. Louis company, Talx, owned by Equifax, makes millions every year by helping companies block, delay, and evade workers’ unemployment claims.
Talx sells its services to firms like Home Depot, AT&T, McDonald’s, Cargill, Tyson, Wal-Mart and the U.S. Postal Service. Talx brags that it can save employers money by contesting claims.
Talx tactics are familiar to anyone who has ever tried to get a medical insurance company to pay a claim. They delay, don’t answer phones, file false affidavits, tie workers up in long appeals processes, and even allege that applicants have died!
Talx claims to handle 30% of U.S. companies’ unemployment cases. Where there’s profit to be made, there’s always another slimy capitalist ready to cash in.
Jun 28, 2010
The following article was translated from the June 25 issue of Lutte Ouvrière [Workers Struggle], journal of the revolutionary workers organization of that name active in France.
Fiat workers just voted, 36% “no,” with less than 60% “yes” among those eligible to vote. That’s the result of a referendum held among the 5,000 Fiat workers of the Pomigliano factory near Naples, Italy.
The proposed new agreement was pushed through by extortion, pure and simple. After Serge Marchionne, Fiat chief, announced the closing of the Fiat factory in Sicily, he said he would maintain production in the factory in Naples, after a long layoff there, only if workers accepted certain draconian measures.
The first point of the new contract is that the factory will run 24 hours a day, six days a week, with an alternating rotation of 18 shifts, with one day off shifting a day every week. Maintenance of the plant will be done also with rotating shifts, but on a seven-day-a-week basis. To avoid any down time in production, the 30 minutes of lunch time will be placed at the end of each shift, the other breaks will be reduced and overtime hours will be mandatory up to 80 hours a year, without any need for union approval when this overtime is scheduled. In the case of any production downtime, it is to be made up over the following six months through work during the scheduled break times or on days off.
Above all, Fiat wants something like a no-strike clause in the contract.
Fiat’s plan was supported by all the political forces of the country as well as by the union federations. Even the CGIL (General Confederation of Italy), the main Italian union, gave its support when its secretary, Eifani, announced his support, after a few minor modifications.
Fortunately, the metal workers section of this union federation spoke out against the proposed contract, declaring the June 22 referendum illegal and the results marred by a lot of cheating. A small independent union, the Slai-Cobas, took the same position. They were denounced by a government official as the people “obsessed with looking for conflict,” and by the head of the bosses’ confederation as the people who “seek to protect workers who abuse absence and sickness policies.” News commentators called workers of Pomigliano “lazy” and drug traffickers.
For Marchionne, the time when workers could strike against the bosses is finished. He wants complete freedom to impose his wishes on the workers.
But the bosses like Marchionne haven’t won yet, as the referendum in Pomigliano showed. And as workers in a Fiat plant in Turin showed. There, the workers got 80% to carry out a work stoppage in protest of this proposed agreement. Clearly workers see this new agreement is aimed also at them.
Marchionne thinks workers defending themselves is an anachronism. He’s wrong: It is the only possible future for workers.
Jun 28, 2010
After the success of the Honda strike in May, when 1850 workers at a factory in Canton won a $40 increase on their base wages, strikes spread to other parts of China. Chinese workers at Hyundai factories near Beijing, the capital, also won an increase after striking.
On June 11, other Honda workers struck, as did 1500 workers subcontracted to make locks and keys for Honda. These workers increased their monthly salary from 1700 yuan to 2040 yuan (a 20% raise) and won the right to organize their own union.
Workers at another subcontractor of Honda, Foshan Fengfu, also went on strike for a salary increase.
And 2,000 workers in an industrial zone near Shanghai went on strike at a Taiwan-owned factory making valves. It lasted five days, and workers demanded a salary increase from their bosses. The police attacked strikers, leaving 50 wounded. Also in early June, workers in central China at a subcontractor to Adidas went on strike, showing enormous anger at the death of a striker.
We cannot know from a distance if the strikers are deepening their strikes, as well as extending them. But it’s clear the Chinese workers have been paying for 20 years for the so-called Chinese “economic miracle,” and paying also for the enormous profits of the Western multinational corporations that subcontract their “cheap” labor.
A non-profit group, China Labor Watch, has denounced such practices as making workers sleep in dormitories infested with insects; not allowing them days off; working 11 hours a day six days a week; working overtime without any additional pay, all for a salary of $75 to $100 per month. And these are workers making items for Disney, Mattel, Warner Brothers, grocer Carrefour, as well as auto and electronic groups like Taiwan’s Hon Hai that employs 800,000 Chinese workers, making products for iPhone, Apple, Nokia, Sony, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
The reasons to revolt are many: These workers were forced to leave the countryside, living far from their families.
But as a recent study underlined, these migrant workers are less inclined than the older generation to accept the long hours and bad living conditions.
In any case, we hope that this fight will deepen, and that the hundreds of millions of Chinese workers will make the central government step back, along with the local bosses and the multinationals that stand behind them.
Jun 28, 2010
For only the third time in more than 60 years, there was a challenge at a UAW convention to the president-designee selected by the so-called “administration caucus.” Gary Walkowicz, a bargaining committeeman from Ford and a leader of the workers who rejected the last concessions at Ford, was nominated for president of the whole union at its convention in Detroit.
Walkowicz was nominated by some Ford delegates who themselves had played a role in organizing the big 70% NO-vote. And his candidacy was supported by Jerry Tucker, who 18 years ago was the last person to challenge for the office of president against the “administration caucus.”
It was obvious, given the monolithic hold over the union by this apparatus, that Walkowicz couldn’t get many votes at the convention. And he got only 74 to 2115 for Bob King.
But his nomination was significant. A leader of the fight to refuse concessions ran against one of those union officials who had pushed the policy of concessions.
Without Walkowicz’s candidacy, the 35th UAW Convention would have gone down as just one more “carefully scripted” convention, from which the workers’ concerns were completely excluded. As it was, those who tried to raise issues were forced to run through hoops just to be heard.
Dozens of resolutions came in from locals attempting to deal with the crisis facing the union and its members. They were buried long before the convention opened. There was no discussion of issues like two-tier wages that destroy union solidarity; nothing about the broken promises to retirees; nothing about the way top officers are elected and contracts ratified, both bypassing the membership; nothing about the fact that the International had imposed concessions on locals despite opposition from local committees.
Instead, the convention was filled with speeches by politicians and other union leaders ignoring the real problem facing the working class. Then, there were all the balloons and hoopla for the official candidates–and parties.
“You wouldn’t know this was a union in crisis,” said one local president to the Oakland Press.
UAW contracts once set a steadily improving pattern for other workers, as workers fought to get a bigger share of the wealth their labor produced. For the last three decades, however, the pattern set by UAW concession contracts has been a disaster. With the UAW leadership working to push through one concession after another, auto wages lost ground, benefits were destroyed, working conditions toughened.
Pushing concessions, union officials claimed it would save jobs. That claim was a big, fat lie. The biggest concession of all was the loss of good-paying jobs–and along with it, a steep drop in union membership. Three quarters of the jobs at the Detroit Three companies were lost. Some were lost to speed-up. Many more jobs went to low-wage subcontractors, most of them right in this country. Today, many subcontractors run production in former GM, Ford or Chrysler buildings. Others have space right inside GM, Ford or Chrysler’s current plants.
The concessions in auto set the pattern not just for the non-union auto companies like Toyota and Honda to cut their wages. But they also were the justification used by other industries to gut their wages and benefits–producing a roaring flood of profits. Even today, in the midst of a deep recession, companies make astounding profits, passing on much of them to the banks with which they are linked.
Walkowicz’s candidacy was a statement that workers are fed up–no matter how many union officials turn a deaf ear to what the ranks are saying.
Gregg Shotwell, known for the role he played in fighting the concessions drive at Delphi told Automotive News: “Gary’s audience won’t be the hundreds of UAW delegates in an air-conditioned Cobo Center. It will be the more than 100,000 active hourly workers on Detroit 3 factory floors. He’s really out to build resistance to further concessions during next year’s master contract negotiations.”
We can hope so. There needs to be a fight to take back what these greedy corporations and the banks that stand behind them have stolen from our labor.
One person alone can’t change all this–even if he was brave enough to tell the truth in a convention from which the workers’ opinions were excluded.
But his candidacy was a reflection of those hundreds of thousands of workers who are fed up. And when those workers begin to move, mass their forces, they will have the means to stop this race to the bottom, and to toss aside union leaders who took the companies’ side against them.