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
Jul 21, 2014
The Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip along with the downing of a Malaysian Airline jet over eastern Ukraine on the same day highlights the arc of war that stretches for thousands of miles from the Mediterranean Sea through the Middle East into Central Asia. These wars include not just Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the Ukrainian civil war. There are also wars in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, plus those throughout Africa.
Needless to say, U.S. government officials condemn all these wars. From Obama to Biden on down, they sanctimoniously pose as the supposed “peacemakers.”
Peacemakers????
No, they are the war mongers! The U.S. government bought and paid for the bombs, rockets and shells that the Israeli military is using against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
U.S. rulers and commentators shed crocodile tears for the 300 people killed on the Malaysian jet. All they want is “peace,” they say, as they beat the war drum louder. Obama and the U.S. media blame Russian-backed forces for bringing down the jet. They claim that the war in Ukraine was made in Russia. But whatever role Putin has played, the U.S. super power has been fueling that war. To the U.S., Ukraine is merely a pawn to be used against its big rival, Russia.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: they were created directly by the U.S. invasions and occupations. Those wars spread to Pakistan and Syria. U.S. troops, Special Forces, CIA agents and mercenaries are still in all those countries. U.S. drones, jets and bombers, continue to kill and destroy.
All these wars are “Made in the USA.” The U.S. government and military are the biggest arms dealers. The armies and police of the dictators in charge of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are also “Made in the USA.” Their torturers were trained by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA. And many of the religious fundamentalists and fanatics who are running wild in those countries are getting backing either from the U.S., or from the closest U.S. allies in the region, starting with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Remember, it was the U.S. intelligence services that originally recruited and armed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
The people of these countries are paying an astounding price for imperialism’s wars. Two million people in Gaza are trapped on a tiny strip of land, sitting ducks, while the Israeli military shoots at them and rains bombs and shells on their heads. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whom the U.S. military supposedly liberated, have suffered millions of casualties. Millions more were forced to flee as refugees. Their countries and vital infrastructures have been destroyed. Decades of hard work were turned into smoking rubble and ash. Shock and Awe, they called it. Religious fanatics or extreme-right wing and fascist militias rule the roost, with women being pushed into abject enslavement.
All so the U.S. super power can impose its power, and big U.S. oil companies, banks, military contractors, construction and engineering companies can tighten their grip over what the workers produce, further enriching the capitalist class.
U.S. working people have also paid a steep price for these wars and military adventures, in lives, destroyed bodies and minds, as well as through big cuts in social spending, education and health care. And the U.S. government uses these wars as an excuse to militarize American society, with more heavily armed police, more spying on the population, etc. The wars are like a poison seeping through the entire society.
In order to increase the domination of its own capitalist class, the U.S. government, representing the richest, most powerful country in the world, along with the governments of the other wealthy countries, is turning more and more of the world into a war zone, engulfing more of humanity in truly barbaric conditions. The only way out of this catastrophe is for the working class to end the capitalists’ death grip over society.
Jul 21, 2014
Baltimore announced it made 20 million dollars from its tax sale in May. The city says this sinister auction helps it collect unpaid taxes, but more than anything it serves exploitative real estate investors.
The city says at least 10% of Baltimore homeowners fall behind each year on their property tax, water bills, and other city fees. (What the city doesn’t admit is that inflated fees and unreasonable taxes are the real problem.) Then the city charges the homeowners interest, and some fall further behind.
To collect the full balances, the city announces an auction of “certificates” for many of the properties, especially homes considered valuable. Investors put in bids for these certificates. Investors who win bids then pay the overdue taxes. In exchange, the city lets the investors demand full repayment plus a scandalous 18% interest from the homeowners. Within six months, the homeowners have to come up with far more than what they already could not afford. If homeowners do not pay, the investors get court orders to seize the homes. The sharks evict the residents and then rent out the homes, sell them at full price, or all too often leave them vacant.
For unpaid tax as low as $250 or a water bill as low as $350, a homeowner can lose a house–and a rich creep can get it.
Thousands of residents go through great hardship and a handful of leeches make usurious profits, with the city government and courts ramming the nasty scam through.
A handful of speculators dominate each year’s tax sale. This year, four investors won bids on more than half of the 700 homes up for auction.
The same bloodsuckers often operate in other cities, too, as Baltimore is only one of thousands of local governments holding similar tax sales.
This is legalized theft, pure and simple.
Jul 21, 2014
A 10-year-old boy with severe disabilities was killed by neglect in an Anne Arundel County group home. The home halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. is run by LifeLine, a private company.
This child and others with similar disabilities were sent to LifeLine because the State of Maryland no longer provides services for the severely handicapped.
LifeLine was paid $11,000 per child per month by the State of Maryland. Although it sounds like a lot of money, it isn’t. Caregivers must be paid round-the-clock. If every penny of the $11,000 were spent on their salaries, the caregivers would not even make $12 per hour. But every penny was not paid. LifeLine ran the home to make money for itself.
What the $11,000 did NOT buy was quality care. A nurse working at the facility said the care plan called for one-on-one service but she and others often each had three severely handicapped children to look after. The youngster who died had a tube in his throat that had to be cleaned regularly. The news reported that he died when the tube was not cleaned quickly enough.
But it is not only the company that is to blame. LifeLine was investigated by state regulators in 2012 and forbidden from gaining contracts to care for disabled adults. Yet Maryland officials allowed the company to care for disabled children!
Now that the tragedy occurred, two state senators want to investigate. Where were these senators and the rest of the Maryland politicians when the state of Maryland stopped handling the cases of disabled adults and children and closed state facilities? Where was the outcry about lower standards of care over the past 20 years? Who bothered to notice all the other Maryland people in need of state care, like the homeless, many of whom came from the closing of state facilities? Where was outcry over poverty level wages for the caregivers?
There are many people with bloody hands in the case of this child’s death.
Jul 21, 2014
“Victory. Landmark wage increase.” This is how SEIU Local 99 announced the ratification of the contract for 33,000 cafeteria workers, custodians, special education aides and other service workers in L.A. schools. Local 99 leaders proclaimed that this contract would “lift … 20,000 LAUSD workers and their families out of poverty.”
That sure sounds good, but it is simply NOT TRUE.
These 20,000 workers today make a sub-poverty wage of $8 to $9 an hour. Moving them to $15 an hour over three years will still leave them in poverty.
Even today, it would be a poverty wage. According to the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, the “Fair Market Rent” for a two-bedroom apartment is $1,398 in L.A. County. At $15 per hour, that’s more than two weeks’ income before taxes–IF a worker works 40 hours a week. And SEIU officials themselves said that more than 90 per cent of Local 99 members work less than eight hours a day!
SEIU is running this same fight for a poverty contract all over the country. In Baltimore the lowest paid workers at Johns Hopkins Hospital were handed a similar contract. SEIU says it is not what they asked for, but it’s a beginning. A beginning to what, the same downward spiral?
Poverty wages for tens of thousands of workers who make the schools and hospitals run. This is the record run up by SEIU’s latest “campaign.”
Jul 21, 2014
Some 340,000 Chicagoans are exposed to dangerous diesel exhaust because they live near “intermodal” terminals, where containers are moved between rail cars and trucks.
This exhaust creates soot that gets into lungs and causes asthma, heart, and brain damage. It takes years off many people’s lives.
Of course, the terminals are in working class and poor neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago and in the near suburbs, where 80% of the people are black or Latino. The wealthy have always lived far away from the pollution their companies cause.
New locomotives are required to use technology that greatly reduces diesel pollution–but thousands of old locomotives remain on the rails. The railroads could be forced to replace their old locomotives as quickly as possible. But instead, the Democrats who run Illinois have given these rail giants $110 million out of fuel taxes to clean things up. Why should workers’ taxes pay to help giant, multi-billion dollar companies? They are the ones poisoning us!
And the companies say this isn’t enough to replace all the old locomotives. So they’ll keep putting out their poison, with the politicians’ help.
By putting the corporations’ profits before local residents’ health, the Democrats make it clear: They serve businesses like the railroads, not the working class and poor people of Chicago.
Jul 21, 2014
More than a thousand people marched from Cobo Hall to Hart Plaza in Detroit against the city water department’s campaign to shut off water to homeowners who cannot pay their water bills. Others carried out a second demonstration and blocked the driveway of a contractor to prevent trucks going out to carry out more shutoffs. Detroit police responded by arresting nine of the protesters.
The Cobo Hall demonstration was largely organized by “liberal” Democratic Party politicians, who happen to be holding a convention there. For them–many of whom are responsible for cutbacks in funds to cities–the water shutoffs are simply a handy elections issue. For the people of Detroit and many of the demonstrators, it’s a real public health problem.
The water department has shut off water to 42,000 customers in the last year, and 15,000 in just the last three months. This in a city where 40 per cent of the population lives below the poverty level.
The biggest “deadbeats,” as officials refer to customers delinquent on their water bills, are big companies like Chrysler, but they are not the ones being targeted. Instead the city is going after poor people who cannot pay.
The city didn’t make repairs or bill customers correctly for years. Now people are being hit with huge bills they cannot pay and the city is using it as a pretext to deny people access to a basic necessity of life.
It’s taking the city back a couple of centuries. Shutting off access to clean water can create enormous epidemics.
Not so long ago, the New York Times was running horrible pictures of Detroit’s ruins. But suddenly, its Sunday magazine is carrying an article about all the wonderful things being done to “bring the city back.” They want investors to see it’s the next great place to invest.
The city, under the dictates of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, appointed by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, has made the decision to drive poor people out. Water shutoffs are just part of the campaign.
We’re not the people the politicians and wealthy investors want to remain in the city. But guess what! It’s not their city–those wealthy investors and their political flunkies. That’s what many of the demonstrators were saying. And that fact needs to be drummed into the heads of all those who seek to profit off our distress.
Jul 21, 2014
The oil of Iraq has been split in two parts, one officially controlled by the central government of Nuri al-Maliki, the other controlled by a Kurdish council in the north of Iraq. This division, which resulted from the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq, has allowed the big oil companies, led by Exxon, to jump in to gobble up Iraq’s oil.
In 2011, Exxon signed a contract with the central government to pump oil from fields in the south. A few months later, Exxon signed a much more profitable deal with the Kurdish government in the north to drill for oil there. The Iraqi central government soon fell in line, rewarding Exxon and other oil companies with similar, much more favorable terms for the oil companies than they got from Kurdistan. Exxon also signed contracts with the Kurdish government to develop oil fields around Kirkuk, even though the Kurdish government only shared control over those fields with the central Iraqi government.
But oil production in Kurdistan was still held back because the only pipeline to transport the oil from Kurdistan was controlled by the Iraqi central government, which had cut off the Kurdish government from using it. This meant that the only way to get the oil out of Kurdistan was by slow and costly tanker truck.
So, Kurdistan, with the help of Exxon, built its own pipeline to neighboring Turkey, which was promised a very profitable share both in the pipeline company and the oil flowing from Kurdistan–even though for decades, the Turkish government had vehemently opposed the Kurds in Iraq, even invading Kurdistan and massacring them on many occasions.
Even as civil war envelopes Iraq, even as the country threatens to break apart, oil deals are being made, and oil production continues to boom throughout the country, reaching 3.6 million barrels of crude per day on average. This amount is 50% higher than four years ago, and higher than at any time in the last three decades. Iraq is now the second largest oil exporter in OPEC, behind only Saudi Arabia. It has the greatest potential to grow, given Iraq’s vast oil reserves, much of which has not been explored, because of the decades of wars and crippling trade embargoes.
The big international oil companies, including Exxon, BP, Shell and Chevron, stand to gain the highest profits from all this. They could care less about the wars and chaos that they have instigated, provoked and played on.
That’s just their way of doing business.
Jul 21, 2014
The U.S. deported the first batch of immigrant children back to Honduras. And the U.S. is increasing military “aid” to make sure they don’t leave again.
The U.S. has pushed Honduras to dispatch elite military units to its northern border, like the Honduran Special Tactical Operations Group. This unit was trained and funded by the U.S. military to shoot down people to keep them from leaving Honduras.
That’s the U.S. solution to immigration: turn Central America into a giant prison camp, guarded by murderers.
Jul 21, 2014
In South Sudan, the clans of the president Salva Kiir and former vice president Riek Machar have been fighting a bloody civil war for the past five months. On April 15 and 16, several hundred people died when Riek Machar’s militias entered the town of Bentiu. A few days later, Salva Kiir’s forces assaulted the United Nations base.
It’s a situation leading to genocide and it is the culmination of the policy that the United States has carried out.
South Sudan was created in July 2011 after a long armed fight against the Sudanese central government led by the SPLA. The U.S. government lent military support to the SPLA, with its intelligence services providing training in the U.S. for the movement’s main leader, John Garang, a former colonel in the Sudanese Army. Uganda, a regional ally of the U.S., furnished the SPLA with a safe haven to use in transporting weapons. The SPLA’s attacks on the population were just as bloody as those of the Sudanese Army troops they were fighting. In reality, all of them were little more than a coalition of warlords, recruiting their own armies on a regional basis.
From the beginning they fought among themselves. Riek Machar fought against John Garang and Salva Kiir and even rejoined the Sudanese regime at one point. In order to fight against his former allies, he mobilized the Nuer population, from which he originated, against the Dinkas. The ethnic rivalries that these warlords have cultivated follow along the lines stirred up by the former British colonizers; they continue the same murderous path today.
The U.S. leaders knowingly brought these men to power, hoping to weaken the Sudanese regime that had been hostile to their interests. And they expected a greater access to Sudan’s oil, most of which is located in the South.
Thus the U.S. backed the partition of Sudan, both in the United Nations debates and on the ground. The warlords’ armed gangs merged into the army, which at that point was “national” in name only. The population no longer had access to roads, hospitals, or doctors, but its new leaders could lay claim to a large share of the profits stemming from oil drilling and from grabbing humanitarian aid coming into the country. This same jackpot is what the leaders are fighting each other for today, pitting the different populations against one another and plunging them into a living hell. One third of the population is living off humanitarian aid, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, and many survive only in precarious UN refugee camps.
U.S. policy over the past several decades has played a major role in bringing the situation to this point.
Jul 21, 2014
Israeli troops have once again invaded the Gaza Strip, after weeks when Israeli planes rained bombs down on Gaza.
People are packed more densely into this small territory than almost anywhere else on earth. The Israeli claim of “targeted bombing” is a hypocritical lie. Most of the hundreds of victims who were either killed or severely wounded were civilians. Children’s bloody bodies were pulled from their ruined homes.
The murder of three young Israelis in the West Bank followed by the revenge killing of a young Palestinian were the sparks that ignited the Israeli-Palestinian powder keg. But this is only the latest episode in the war that the State of Israel has waged for decades against the Palestinian people, supported by all the big powers. The Palestinians are cut in two in the West Bank and Gaza, and are cut off economically and surrounded by walls and barbed wire. They are a people deprived of all rights, who are forced to submit to constant humiliations.
For decades now, two people have coexisted in a small territory, some 200 miles long and 50 miles wide. The Palestinian people are locked in an open-sky prison in their own country, while the other people, the Israelis, have become prison guards.
The State of Israel, with the most modern and efficient army, with planes, helicopters and drones, hasn’t been able to prevent the Palestinians from revolting against this oppression. It has only succeeded in provoking organizations among the Palestinians that use on a small scale the same methods Israel uses on a big scale.
The extent of the Israeli repression led the leaders of the imperialist powers to issue statements dripping with hypocrisy. But hypocrisy barely tells the story of the Western leaders’ imperialist policy–a deadly and conscious one carried out over a long time.
The heads of state of the U.S., France and Great Britain–the Democratic Party taking over from the Republican, the Left after the Right in France, the Conservatives after Labor in Britain–all consistently carry out the same deadly policy. In such a strategic place as the Middle East, overflowing with oil, the policy of the big imperialist powers has always been divide and rule, cutting up the population, turning states against one another, all to protect the hold of big corporations over the region’s resources.
Their policy has always been to leave a part of the enormous accumulated wealth to the local potentates, selling them arms to wage war against one another, and above all against their own peoples, who die from poverty.
In this game of divide and rule, the State of Israel has always played a special role. It is imperialism’s most reliable ally and its strong arm against the neighboring Arab peoples. Further, Israel allows the most reactionary Arab regimes to hide their policies behind denunciations of Israel. This is the reality of the imperialist relations that underlay the fratricidal confrontations between two intermixed peoples, whose overwhelming majority would have every interest in fraternally getting along.
Look at the pictures shown on TV, the haggard eyes of children, women and men who flee the bombing.
The source of the tension isn’t the specifics of some incident, but its permanence. From Iraq to Africa, passing through Syria, how many other war zones have risen up, where people or fractions of the population are pitted against one another in the name of nationalism, their ethnic group or religion? When imperialism poses as a peacemaker, as the U.S. does in the Middle East, it is only as a fire-setting fireman.
Capitalism isn’t only exploitation, oppression and the increase in inequality. It is also imperialism. The wars it gives rise to threaten all of humanity.
Jul 21, 2014
John Burge is infamous in Chicago for running a police unit that tortured people into confessing to crimes they often didn’t commit. In 2010, he was convicted of lying about it and sent to jail for four and a half years. The Illinois Supreme Court just voted he can keep his pension anyway.
Most workers have no pension, the state is constantly trying to cut pensions for state workers and teachers, but this torturer cop gets to keep his. That’s justice in Illinois.
Jul 21, 2014
Vaccination prices have soared from a few dollars to sometimes more than $100 in the last two decades. In 1986, the average cost for someone with insurance to fully vaccinate a child to the age of 18 was $100. Today, it costs more than $2,000, according to a Federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Because of such unthinkable prices, some doctors have stopped offering immunizations, explaining that vaccines are unaffordable and insurance companies often reimburse vaccine expenses poorly or even refuse to reimburse.
Childhood immunizations are vital to public health. Vaccines prevent childhood diseases and prepare young people for a healthy future. Vaccination of children also prevents diseases like flu from spreading in schools first and jumping to the elderly later.
The elderly need vaccines to extend their life span. For example, CDC recommends adults age 60 and older get the shingles vaccine to protect their body from reactivation of the chickenpox virus, which most people are exposed to during childhood.
Before, vaccines like the one for polio were developed not by companies, but through funding by the Federal government and government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Today, public universities carry out most of the basic research and development of vaccines. That is, we still pay for the development of vaccines by our taxes.
In the past, because of low retail prices, the drug industry did not consider vaccines as a golden cash cow to extract lucrative profits. But after the health agencies started to advise the schools to require children to be vaccinated, the drug industry realized that they could reap huge profits out of vaccine manufacturing by inflating the prices.
For example, insurance companies pay doctors a median price of $145 a dose for Pfizer’s very popular vaccine Prevnar, according to Athena Health. Pfizer sells Prevnar at $3.30 per dose for use outside of the U.S. But even at $3.30, “I do not think pharmaceutical manufacturers are losing money,” says Dr. Hinman, a former CDC official.
Our vital need is turned into a profit machine in the hands of the drug industry. Vaccines are now so expensive that either doctors are not providing vaccinations or working class people are not able to afford them. Such crucial products for the working majority cannot be left to the whims of a few rich scheming people.
Jul 21, 2014
On July 17, Eric Garner, a black Staten Island resident, was murdered by five white NYC cops on the street in broad daylight. The whole incident was recorded on video. It started when two cops accused him of selling cigarettes! “Every time you see me, you want to mess with me,” Garner told the cops. “I’m tired of it. It stops today.”
That note of defiance was enough to set the cops on their murderous path. Two of them tackled Garner and were immediately joined by three others. One of them wearing shorts and a shirt with “99" on the back applied the choke hold that killed Garner–while the others held him on the ground, one pressing down on his neck and head. He could be heard saying, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!”
And then he stopped breathing.
Ramsey Ora, who had recorded the entire incident, turned it over to the New York Daily News. And that’s the way this murder by the cops came to light, instead of being hidden away, as usual.
Garner’s wife told reporters, “When I kissed my husband this morning, I never thought it would be for the last time.... They’re covering their asses.... They harassed and harassed my husband until they killed him.”
As the video makes clear, Eric Garner, a father of six children, was killed simply because he wouldn’t let himself be intimidated by a murdering band of thugs in blue.
Jul 21, 2014
President Obama called the influx of immigrant children an “actual humanitarian crisis on the border.”
He’s right. More than 50,000 children are being housed in atrocious conditions, in jam-packed holding cells, without access to sanitary facilities. They are fleeing some of the most violent countries in the world, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. These are countries that have been destroyed by more than a century of U.S. domination, where the population is preyed upon by brutal militaries linked to the U.S. and by drug gangs–which are often linked to the same militaries.
So how does Obama propose to deal with this humanitarian crisis? Does he propose to help these children?
No–just the opposite. Obama’s first reaction was to propose a change to the law that would make it easier to deport these children. Right now, the law says that they must be turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services, to provide them safe housing and legal counsel. But Obama wants to be able to deport them immediately.
Obama asked for 3.7 billion dollars to fund what his officials call an “aggressive” approach to the border crisis.
On July 14, the U.S. deported the first group of Honduran children, between the ages of 18 months and 15 years, along with women who had accompanied some of them. They were sent to San Pedro Sula–the city with the highest murder rate in the world–but many were relieved after their treatment by the U.S. Dalia, one of the mothers, explained that U.S. officials treated them like “animals.”
Obama’s policies encourage the rabid right-wing groups who have marched to oppose housing any of these children in their towns, sometimes with real threats of violence.
In Vassar, Michigan, some of the people who protested a shelter for these children marched with rifles and handguns. In Murrieta, California, protestors blocked buses carrying immigrant children to a shelter. In Westminster, Maryland, someone spray painted anti-immigrant graffiti on a closed Army Reserve base.
In the end, armed thugs blocking immigrants from coming into their towns are no different from Obama using armed Homeland Security agents to arrest, detain, and deport the same children.
Both Republicans and Democrats use the insanity of nationalism to try and convince workers here that somehow these children are a threat to “American” jobs.
But the reality is that these children are victims of the same big businesses who have destroyed the standard of living for workers here, looted the coffers of government at all levels, and created the conditions for more and more crime in this country, as well as in Central America. The only “foreigners” are these bosses. They’re the one who create the poverty and violence that drive immigration.
Jul 21, 2014
In just one weekend, June 28 and 29, 5,500 illegal immigrants surfaced off the coast of Sicily. More than 40 of these migrants died of asphyxiation in the depths of one of the makeshift boats they used to try and cross the Mediterranean.
Around 600 refugees were crammed into an old fishing boat that was far too small. Forty-five of them were trapped in a storage hold where they died, probably from breathing the fumes coming from motors.
This was just one of the tragedies that occur almost daily in this portion of the Mediterranean closest to the African coasts. Increasing numbers of people have fled these coasts to escape the wars that ravage their home countries, or to escape from desperate poverty. At least 400 migrants have died in the first half of this year, which is certainly a low estimate since it doesn’t include those who have disappeared and are therefore difficult to count.
In 2013, according to the United Nations, 51 million refugees in the world–of whom half were children–fled from armed conflicts or other crisis situations that created famine and poverty. This is the highest number since the end of World War II.
Since the beginning of 2014, the number of migrants landing in southern Italy has grown. About 60,000 people, most from sub-Saharan Africa, are stranded in overcrowded and often dilapidated detention centers, after an incredibly dangerous journey. The local governments are supposed to take responsibility for the migrants but lack the funding to do so, resulting in the deplorable conditions at the detention centers.
After 400 migrants died off the coast of Lampedusa last October, Italy started patrols near the Libyan coast to intercept boats of illegal immigrants. But this can’t halt the growing numbers of refugees and it doesn’t solve the inadequate way they are received in Italy.
Last May, the new Prime Minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi, declared “Europe has abandoned us. It is just not possible to save governments and banks but to leave mothers and their children to die.” As if the national government that he leads hasn’t done just that!
This faked moral indignation can’t hide the responsibility that the Italian government shares with all of the European governments in the series of tragedies taking place in the Mediterranean. Their policies of restricting legal immigration encourage the unscrupulous organizers of these perilous crossings. And the European Union, just like the different national governments, never has any problem finding the money to repress immigration and surround Europe with new barriers that it hopes will be more insurmountable.
The number of drowning deaths in the Mediterranean is part of the grim ledger of suffering created by this capitalist society, in which Europe is but an island of relative well-being. Its leaders are trying to keep it blocked off to the massive numbers of poor people that their system has created.