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
May 9, 2016
On the Wednesday after the Indiana primary, President Barack Obama was in Flint, Michigan. In his short visit there, he asked for a glass of filtered Flint water and proceeded to drink it while delivering a threefold message. First he said, “I’ve got your back” and secondly, he encouraged residents to drink filtered tap water in order to get water containing a new treatment circulating throughout the Flint water system. Finally, he inferred that Flint children are all right, and that no permanent damage was done. He even suggested that perhaps he had eaten a lead chip or two as a child and, obviously, he turned out all right; even grew up to be President....
Riding in a limo with Governor Snyder, Obama repeated promises to get money for Flint to begin the process of fixing the water system. And in the meantime, he says, what Snyder wants to say, “go ahead and drink the water.”
In fact, he did what Republican Snyder could not do; he intervened to persuade the population to move on, and finally, to accept their situation.
This is the horrible fact of the matter: in a situation where the drive for profit resulted in deaths and permanent damage to residents of Flint and their children, the governments, federal and state, have nothing to propose but more of the same. And while Democratic and Republican parties held primaries and announced “historic” results for candidates on Wednesday, neither party has anything to propose to address the life and death problems faced by the U.S. working class. Only words.
No doubt, this is one reason for the troubling support of a section of the working class for Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican candidate for president. Flying in the face of top level Republicans and Democrats, the Republican Party voters, no doubt mostly white and mostly male, knocked down traditional conservative Republican Party men like Bush, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich to give the nomination to an outsider, a wild card, a totally untested and untried candidate who joined the party four short years ago.
Why would voters do that? Yes, Trump plays to all of the nationalist, racist, sexist crap that has plagued the working class for centuries. Yes, he directs workers’ anger against other workers who are just like them; he plays on the prejudices and anger of workers in order to convince us that he has something different to offer.
But most importantly, he plays the card that the Democrats and many union leaders played before him: he promises jobs for everyone. He points workers away from blaming their bosses who eliminate jobs and into the dead end of blaming immigrants and trade laws.
Perhaps in the coming months, we will see a quieter, “more presidential” Trump; a Trump who looks to pull the Republican Party around him. Or we may see a Trump who engages in a dogfight with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and/or Bernie Sanders, both of whom mostly support the status quo or talk about social fixes that they have no way to enforce on the U.S. bosses.
In any case, we can anticipate six more months of this political circus followed by four more years of deteriorating conditions. Worsening jobs, schools, roads, bridges, infrastructure, all broken after years of theft by these same politicians on behalf of the Wall Street bosses. War, unending war that is devastating entire regions of the world and further damaging any hopes for a peaceful, prosperous life for working people.
Why are we wasting precious time watching the acts of political players who are from and for the upper class–pretenders who have done nothing but diminish our abilities to lead a decent life?
Workers have nothing in common with these bourgeois parties: the working class needs its own party to lead in organizing a real fight for jobs, for clean water, for healthcare for all. After all, the U.S. bosses are pulling the strings behind this puppet cast, both Democratic and Republican–bosses who have no intention of giving workers a dime without a fight.
May 9, 2016
The Trump International Hotel and Tower looms over the Chicago River, with giant letters spelling out the name of the tycoon. You would think Trump would pay tons of property taxes for this massive building, the second tallest in the city. But Alderman Edward Burke’s law firm has helped Trump “save” 11.7 million dollars in property taxes over the last seven years–money stolen from the services and schools for the population.
Ed Burke is one of the most powerful leaders of the Chicago Democratic Party machine. He replaced his father as alderman in 1969–and he’s still there. He chooses who the Cook County Democratic Party will nominate to be judges, and he funnels campaign cash to Democrats across the state.
He also runs a law firm that helps corporations avoid property taxes. And over the years, his law firm has pulled out every trick in the book to reduce Donald Trump’s taxes.
Republicans like Trump and Democrats like Burke work together to steal money from the schools and services people in Chicago need, all so rich investors like Trump can have even more private jets and gold-plated bathroom fixtures.
May 9, 2016
Politicians always tell us jobs are being shipped overseas. But chicken processing company Allen Harim Foods plans to increase its profits by cutting jobs and speeding up work right here in the U.S.A. This competitor of Perdue plans to close its chicken processing factory in the town of Cordova on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, which was the largest private employer in rural Talbot County.
The company said it will move the equipment and transfer the 600,000 chickens processed every week at the Cordova plant to another plant one hour away in Harbeson, Delaware. But after cutting the 300 jobs at Cordova, the company will at most add 250 jobs at Harbeson. The company’s sales are growing, yet it had already cut more than 100 jobs since 2011.
Processing the same number of chickens but with fewer workers–the poultry industry’s recipe for profit, with a side order of job loss.
May 9, 2016
More than 100 Baltimore high school students walked out of class on Friday, April 15 and rallied outside the school system headquarters to protest the start of PARCC testing. PARCC stands for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers testing. This testing takes two and a half weeks, during which there will be no teaching or learning. Just testing.
PARCC is big business for the company that provides the test. Baltimore’s program is part of the State of Maryland’s 65 million dollar, four-year contract with Pearson Education. Pearson reported more than 660 million dollars in profit last year.
The students are right to protest!
May 9, 2016
Chicago Public Schools wants to contract out the management of engineers to a private contractor, SodexhoMagic. This is one more way to hand more money to the capitalists at students’ and workers’ expense. The company plans to profit from “savings,” which will come from laying off engineers, and which will endanger students.
Currently, the school board employs 520 engineers to maintain the boilers and heating systems at more than 600 schools. Most work at one building, but some have to shuttle between multiple schools. This already causes problems. There have been three carbon monoxide leaks at CPS schools. The worst, at Prussing Elementary, saw 80 students sent to the hospital. Prussing’s engineer works at two schools–he was not in the building the day of the leak. Contracting out will make incidents like this more likely, as more engineers have to shuttle between schools.
The school board says this move will save money. But the engineers’ union points out that the numbers of the supposed “savings” don’t add up. And when they handed school cleaning over to SodexhoMagic and Aramark, they didn’t save money, and the schools got filthier. William Iacullo, president of the engineers’ union, pointed this out: “CPS lost money when they outsourced janitors.... Our schools have never been dirtier. Our teachers and parents have had to bring their own cleaning supplies and clean the buildings themselves.... Now you want to privatize 500 engineers?”
So why did they privatize janitors, and why do they want to privatize engineers? Of course, so company investors can get rich!
It’s of a piece along with other Board schemes–handing nursing over to a contractor, giving charter school operators as many as thirteen more schools. The Board is looking for any way it can to hand money over to their friends–at the expense of students’ education and safety.
May 9, 2016
The book Evicted by Matthew Desmond is a powerful indictment of the American system of housing for profit.
As incomes for ordinary people have stayed flat or gone down, rents have gone way up. Today, most poor families spend more than half of their incomes on rent, and many spend more than 70 percent.
This means families are forced to choose between rent and food. They are constantly falling behind, and getting evicted, often over and over again. One woman Desmond follows is a single mother, who is left with $20 a month to support her two kids after paying the rent.
Out of 105,000 renter households in Milwaukee, landlords evict 16,000 people each year. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Landlords force people out without “evicting” them—sometimes by simply taking off their front door.
And landlords make out like bandits off this system. Rents in Milwaukee’s poor neighborhoods are only a little bit lower than in its wealthy neighborhoods, even though people have MUCH less money. This is because only landlords in poor neighborhoods will take in renters who have an eviction on their record, or who can’t prove they have a high income, or who have bad credit. So they can charge what they want!
When renters fall behind, landlords hold the threat of eviction over their tenants’ heads, and refuse to do even basic maintenance. One of the families Desmond follows lives for months without working plumbing. A trailer park owner “gives away” trailer titles to new tenants, but still charges very high rent for the lots where they are parked. This legal dodge allows him to avoid paying for trailer maintenance.
Desmond shows how the whole legal system is set up against renters. Eviction court almost never goes the renter’s way. The Sheriff’s Office then sends deputies to kick evicted people out.
In another case, a woman called the cops on a man beating up her neighbor. The cops charge the landlord a fine for having been called to the house, and the landlord evicted her tenant for having tried to help a neighbor. She winds up on the streets, trying to survive as a prostitute.
This book is set in Milwaukee, but it could be anywhere. It shows that housing run for profit is a disaster for the population. It’s like everything else in this rotten capitalist society—a few shameless investors make fortunes off the suffering of the poorest people.
May 9, 2016
Over the last 16 years, the Chicago Housing Authority demolished massive high rises like the Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green, and Stateway Gardens. Instead of operating its own buildings, the CHA now gives 44,000 people vouchers to help pay the rent in private buildings. The Chicago Housing Authority calls this part of its “Plan for Transformation.”
Something has been transformed–but it’s not the living conditions for the tenants. Yes, conditions in the old high rises were terrible. But so are conditions in the private housing market. Four of ten voucher tenants live in buildings that have had code violations over the last five years, including apartments with no heat, rodents, and structural problems. The vast majority still live in poor, high crime neighborhoods where jobs and supermarkets are scarce.
What has been transformed is the amount of profit made off the CHA. One man, who admits “I’ve been called a slumlord,” brings in $364,150 a month from CHA voucher-holders. Another company, Pangea–whose investors include Illinois governor Bruce Rauner–collects more than a million dollars a month.
CHA used to be the biggest slumlord in Chicago. Now it’s contracted out that privilege, all to the profit of wealthy landlords.
May 9, 2016
Homelessness in Los Angeles County has doubled since 2009, the official end of the “Great Recession,” according to the most recent homeless count.
No surprise there. The economists who announced the recovery six years ago have told us that this is another “jobless recovery”. And whatever jobs are there, they pay less. On top of that, house prices have skyrocketed in the Los Angeles area; and so have rents. So thousands of people who lost their homes to foreclosures have NOT recovered. A significant part of the nearly 47,000 homeless people counted in L.A. County are people who have jobs and live in their car or RV–if they still have one.
But there IS a recovery. The profits of big companies have increased, big time. And that’s the only measure used by the economists and public officials who speak for the capitalist class.
Yes, there IS enormous wealth in this society, and the labor of the working class has created it. The working class will recover that wealth and use it for its needs, only when it finds a way to organize as a class and fight back.
May 9, 2016
... from a talk given at a Spark public meeting in Baltimore, MD on March 19, 2016.
Today I want to raise how the people of Baltimore are harmed by the falling apart of all kinds of infrastructure. I want to bring up lead paint poisoning; the still damaged water and sewage system; and the crumbling of city roads, bridges, and tunnels.
Yet the resources exist, there is enough wealth in Baltimore to begin to resolve some of these problems, although these issues are not what current political leaders are addressing in this campaign season.
At a recent meeting the Baltimore City health commissioner, Dr. Leana Wen, said some 50,000 young children remain at risk of lead paint poisoning. When very young children eat lead paint chips, they are at risk of damage to their growth and development, especially of their brains and nervous systems. This damage from lead poisoning can never be undone.
The health commissioner said Baltimore City has very few inspectors to check up on the problem and in fact, checking only gets done AFTER someone suspects a child has been poisoned—which is way too late. She said Baltimore City lacked the money to have enough inspectors. Not only is there an apparent lack of funds for inspections, the whole system has broken down in these cases. No one is checking up that repairs are done. Yet, lead paint was banned from use in homes built after 1978. And you cannot buy or sell a home in Baltimore today without a privately paid inspector stating there is no lead paint that hasn’t been treated or removed.
The problem of lead causing dangerous illness is not new. Lead has been known to be deadly to humans for centuries. In the 1800s in England, porcelain dishes were widely sold. Even at that time, factory inspectors could see a high rate of death for workers who painted the dishes with lead paint. But even so, the paint industry pushed lead paint into the 20th century. (And, we would later see the same thing with the auto industry. Both insisted for many decades that lead added to gasoline or paint was NOT a health hazard when they knew it was.)
Although the number of cases of lead poisoning began to fall after the 1980s, the problem remains. Hundreds of young children in Maryland are still diagnosed with lead paint poisoning each year, 129 in Baltimore last year.
Baltimore City banned the use of lead paint in 1950, that is, 28 years before the federal government outlawed it. But in older homes, that lead paint remained and poisoned thousands of young children, especially in poorer homes or apartments that had flaking paint chips.
The state of Maryland also passed laws requiring landlords to remove lead-based paint that is peeling or flaking. But the law is largely self-enforced; no one is going to check that landlords are actually having their properties inspected or doing the removal work needed. In fact, state auditors themselves have criticized the Maryland Department of the Environment for not keeping its rental lists up to date. But the fine for not registering is $90, so thousands of landlords don’t bother to register. And the Maryland Department of the Environment only has 12 inspectors to check up on 400,000 rental units all across the state.
The city, and the state, both need a program—the same program, with the same information so cases don’t “slip through the cracks” while the city and state officials blame each other. What’s needed is a program that hires and trains inspectors and takes those landlords who are renting for profit to court over lead paint violations.
The water system and sewage system in Baltimore remain a mess—even now 13 years after the city of Baltimore signed a consent decree. Sewage had been going into the Baltimore water system and pipes were aging and breaking (more than 1,000 breaks per year).
When sewage contaminates the water people use for drinking, cooking or bathing, their lives are actually cut short. It was clear centuries ago that human populations grew and lived longer when the water they used was kept from coming into contact with sewage.
Because sewage in water is a real health danger, Baltimore City, and many other jurisdictions, were forced to agree to fix the problems, an agreement made with the federal government—called a consent decree.
This is from the April 2002 agreement, “Baltimore has agreed to undertake a comprehensive, system-wide program that will bring the city into long-term compliance with the Clean Water Act. This will end the years of chronic discharges of millions of gallons of raw sewage into city streets and local waterways, including the Patapsco River and other tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay.
Baltimore has agreed to complete the construction work associated with increasing the capacity of its collection system and eliminating physical overflow structures by June 2007 and complete an extensive sewer upgrade by 2016. Complete implementation of this system-wide program will cost approximately $940 million over the 14-year life of the agreement.…”
To repair all those pipes and the water system would have required the city to put 70 million dollars into the project each year. What did city officials do? The city’s budgets and web sites are not easy to use, they are not transparent. No one can say where all the money goes. But one thing is obvious: the system is not repaired!
Raw sewage CONTINUES to go into the waterways around Baltimore. In a recent heavy rain storm, twelve million gallons were deliberately released into the Jones Falls, which runs through the city. Thousands more gallons of contaminated water continue to reach the inner harbor every year. The streams and Fallsway drain into the waters leading to the Chesapeake Bay, in a way that puts everyone at risk for bacteria and other serious contaminants.
Despite that agreement, Baltimore is not even halfway through the process of fixing all the pipes. And what we know is that over that same time period our water bills have more than doubled.
The one thing the city got around to doing last year was sending notices to thousands of people about their water bills being late. People faced not only water shut-offs but possible loss of their homes, due to unpaid water bills. Meanwhile, millions of bills remained unpaid from businesses. The highest one, never collected, was seven million dollars from Bethlehem Steel, which closed and later was taken over as RG Steel. Still those water bills are not paid.
Whether you drive or take the bus, you already know how much road work desperately needs doing in Baltimore City. People who want and need to work could be hired and trained to fix roads. In a 2011 report, the American Society of Civil Engineers surveyed infrastructure all over the country. They said Maryland’s infrastructure and Baltimore’s water system were mediocre at best.
Or take the railroad tunnels under the city—some more than 100 years old, belonging to the Chessie rail system.
When 26th Street collapsed over the railroad tunnel two years ago, there was fortunately no injury to human beings. But city officials had ignored the residents of 26th Street. Residents had complained that the street surface showed serious problems. Could there be other places like 26th Street?
Now Chessie officials want the city to allow the railroad to dig a deeper, larger tunnel that would let more trains per hour go faster. But the proposals would disrupt many neighborhoods, even throwing some people and businesses out of their buildings.
But you ask where is the money? And there IS money. You cannot travel around the city and not see new condos, new townhouses, new apartments, new structures—and that is before they start putting up the buildings at Harbor Point or at Port Covington.
Yet Baltimore has less than a quarter of the assessable property on which taxes are collected, compared to a wealthy county like Montgomery. Baltimore has far less property assessed for taxes and the tax rate on property is twice as high in Baltimore City as it is anywhere else in the state of Maryland.
There is new building in Baltimore. But while the new property appears to be adding wealth to the city, it is NOT adding TAXES to the city budget. How can that be?
For 15 years Baltimore has been giving tax deals to those who want to put up new property or rehabilitate property—at least in some areas. Some of the special deals are called TIFs, which stands for tax increment financing and others are called PILOTS, or payments in lieu of taxes. In either case, these deals mean that for 10 years, sometimes longer, the new properties don’t pay the regular property tax rates. Under most of these tax breaks, 80% of the property taxes are forgiven for five years, then the amount gradually decreases so that the property owners then begin to pay more taxes, although not the full amount for 10 years.
Yes, anyone can try to read up on TIFs and PILOTs. But when the city council did a study on them five years ago, since the city council has to approve them, one recommendation was for more transparency. You see, when you look at the information provided, you just scratch your head. Tax money is what goes to the Baltimore Development Corporation, and then it makes the deals behind closed doors.
City officials claim TIFs and PILOTs benefit the city treasury. But if that were true, they would show what money was coming in, they would even brag about it.
What TIFs and PILOTs show is a form of blackmail. Corporate heads and their development arms and real estate interests and their financial backers can and do demand that the city give them deals—or else they claim they will go elsewhere. Indeed, every city and state is pitted against every other city and state to give special deals.
I would remind Baltimore residents that Camden Yards and Ravens stadiums were not built by the owners of those teams. You don’t hear city officials bragging about how wealthy all those ticket sales are making the city. The information can hardly ever be found.
And last year city taxes went to pay part of a 300-million-dollar deal for the Hilton hotel downtown (Hilton is the largest hotel chain in the world). Clearly that deal did not benefit the city.
Now we have Kevin Plank’s development project demanding half a billion or so from the city of Baltimore and another half million from the state of Maryland to get their Port Covington project going.
Baltimore is a city claiming that it doesn’t have money to eradicate lead paint in housing, that it cannot rehabilitate or pull down thousands of vacant homes, where the infrastructure needs millions of dollars of work—and I haven’t even mentioned the failing school system.
There are simple answers: People want to work and work needs to be done. There are plenty of people looking for work. The unemployment rate in Baltimore is twice as high as in the rest of Maryland. One in three young black men are unemployed, and so are at least one in every ten young white men unemployed.
To get money for the many services we need, we will have to fight to get that money. We will need the officials of the city to pay attention to the needs of residents, so that TIFs or PILOTs or other special funds are used for the needs of the population—not given to the politically connected millionaires and billionaires like Plank or Biscotti (owner of the NFL Ravens).
We need to help organize a fight for what it would take to improve the situation of Baltimore’s working people and poor people.
May 9, 2016
In January of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent a letter to the town of Hoosick, New York recommending it not use well water for drinking or cooking, using bottled water instead. The EPA had found a chemical, PFOA, in the town’s wells at levels dangerous to human health. In March, environmental officials in Vermont, New Hampshire and New York initiated statewide searches for areas contaminated with PFOA. It is turning out that water in much of the U.S. may widely be contaminated with this toxic chemical.
PFOA is a chemical that was used in manufacturing Teflon products like Teflon pans, Gore-Tex boots, computer cables, bearings and seals, and implantable medical devices. Scientific studies indicate that there is a link between PFOA exposure and a variety of illnesses, including high cholesterol, kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, inflammatory bowel disease, as well as dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women.
3M has been the main manufacturer of this chemical and it was a supplier to DuPont since 1951.
After DuPont started to mass manufacture Teflon, people working for or living around Teflon manufacturing plants started to experience health problems. Workers came home with fever, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. In the plants, they called this sickness “Teflon flu.” Farmers who had farms next to DuPont Teflon plants observed that their cows were dying left and right.
Documents acquired through lawsuits showed that 3M and DuPont had been conducting secret medical studies on PFOA for more than four decades. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that there were high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of the workers at its Washington Works. After 3M found that ingestion of this chemical caused birth defects in rats, DuPont tested the children of pregnant workers in their Teflon division and found in two out of seven births, the babies had eye defects.
Thus, both 3M and DuPont have known for decades that this chemical was exceedingly harmful to human health, but these companies did not stop manufacturing and using PFOA. They would lose too much if they stopped. DuPont alone, through its Teflon products, made more than one billion dollars in annual profits every year.
But, for DuPont, the risk of losing in law suits and getting fined was very low. After the EPA found that DuPont concealed its knowledge of PFOA’s toxicity and contamination of the environment, DuPont paid a fine of only 16.5 million dollars in 2005–less than 2 percent of its profits for Teflon.
There currently are around 3,500 lawsuits against DuPont related to the PFOA contamination of water. But the law suits also don’t stick to DuPont. In the courts, DuPont has dragged its feet for years, waiting for the people harmed by its poisons to die.
All these fines and law suit costs must have been calculated as a cost of doing “business” and incorporated into the price of DuPont’s Teflon products. Nothing sticks to these companies.
As long as profit is the king and capitalism rules this world, we are going to bleed the poisons of these companies.
May 9, 2016
Healthier eating leads to better health–that is widely known. Half the U.S. adult population has chronic health problems tied to bad diets–and that is widely known. The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2015-2020 version, was supposedly just issued to address these problems.
The new report does not deal with the reality faced by large parts of the U.S. population, who live in “food deserts.” These are parts of any city with convenience stores and fast foods but lacking the big grocery chains that allow people more choices. Even at the big grocery stores, foods full of sugar, salt and saturated fat often cost less than the healthier foods. Stores offer large size packages of cookies or ten hot dogs for a dollar, cheaper than fresh fruit or fresh vegetables or fresh fish.
And what is advertised widely? Not “Eat More Carrots!” The familiar ads are Pepsi and Coke, Mickey D’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then there’s Mars and Nestle, makers of candy, and Tyson’s, Cargill or Perdue, for meat and poultry.
The committee making up the dietary guidelines, from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, apparently didn’t want to offend the big corporations that make their fortunes off our food choices.
May 9, 2016
Ever wonder why it’s so difficult to figure out and file your taxes? One reason is because online tax preparation companies lobby Congress to NOT simplify the process. Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, spent 13 million dollars between 2011 and 2014 doing just that!
May 9, 2016
As Michigan legislators continued to debate how little they could conceivably give to pay off some of the debt they had run up for the Detroit schools, Steven Rhodes, the latest emergency manager, declared that without the money teachers would not be paid for the last months they worked.
Teachers answered by staying away from school for two days–sick and tired of the disastrous situation created by state government raids on school funds.
Suddenly the money appeared–at least enough to pay them what they are owed. In any case, that was the deal cut. Even while legislators denounced the teachers for being “selfish” and “egotistical,” they came up with the money.
Selfish, egotistical–is this what legislators call it when someone works and expects to be paid?
The latest emergency manager said that while he could “understand the frustration and anger that our teachers feel,” he called the teachers’ actions “counterproductive, detrimental to everyone’s efforts working to help the district.”
“Counterproductive?” Actually, it seems like what the teachers did, staying off work, was very productive. The state managed to come up with the money to pay the teachers just as soon as the teachers stayed home.
Of course, no teacher, being put through this wringer would be so foolish as to believe that things are now settled. They know full well that the state has no intention to provide a decent education for Detroit’s children–and that means, no intention to give the teachers what they need in order to be able to teach and to have a decent life for themselves.
May 9, 2016
Michigan’s legislators have pushed through a bill that even further attacks the Detroit School district and its teachers.
The bill would split the district in two, creating an “old” district saddled with the remaining debt–debt created by the state–and a “new” district charged with teaching students. That district would receive only 35 million dollars in start-up money, instead of the 200 million previously proposed.
All teachers would need to reapply for jobs at the “new” district–a clear way to get rid of all teachers who have been fighting against the state-appointed emergency manager. Once there, teacher and administrator pay would be based on “performance” instead of seniority–again, a way to control teachers and keep them in line. And, harsh sanctions would be imposed on the district and everyone in it if an “illegal strike” takes place.
This is clearly an attempt to punish teachers–and parents, and everyone else who has been fighting against the state control of the district that has been destroying it for more than eight years!
And it would completely destroy the district, wiping out the last remnants of any public education in the city of Detroit.
The teacher’s union has denounced the passage of the bill. But legalities and legislation are stacked against the working class and its children. The only thing that will stop the attack will be a continuing fight–and that fight needs to spread, to shut down not only the schools but the entire city.
And beyond, because working class cities everywhere are experiencing the same attacks.
May 9, 2016
Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, wants to give 715 million dollars of state money to help reduce the Detroit school system debt. The Michigan Senate has signed on, but the state House wants to give only 500 million. They have been debating these figures and this issue for over a year.
It’s nothing but a vile soap opera–put on by the thieves in Lansing to divert attention from what they have done to Detroit schools and Detroit children.
When the state first took over Detroit schools in 1999, the system was running an annual surplus. The number of students was growing. And test scores for Detroit students were in the middle of the state’s results.
None of that was outstanding, none was even adequate. Detroit children deserved better–they deserved as good an education as the children in wealthy suburbs were getting.
But the system was not a complete, total wreck–not like the human disaster the state has created in the years since 1999, when it first took over the schools.
Today, the system runs a deficit every year. The total debt stands at 3.5 billion dollars. There are only half as many schools as there were 17 years ago–and only half as many students. The students have been driven out of the system by the closing of neighborhood schools, the destruction of education in the schools that were left, as teachers were given a heavier load, bigger class sizes every year–making it impossible to give children the attention they each need. So, yes, student results began to sink–and they rest at the bottom in the whole state today. Schools had no money for books and supplies–nor for keeping the schools clean and repaired.
This is the result of the state takeover. This is the result of “emergency managers” appointed to run the district over the last 13 years–and a state appointed “reform” board for five years before that. Together, they have practically dismantled the Detroit school system.
It was not an accident, not the result of incompetent politicians and emergency managers–incompetent though they may be. It was the result of conscious choices made by the political class running this state, as well as the country. They chose, consciously, to put their hands on that great big pot of money dedicated to providing an education to children. They put their hands on it–in order to give it along with tax breaks, subsidies and other gifts to some of the biggest corporations and banks in the country.
This political class–and the capitalists they serve–have decided they can’t afford any more to educate most of the children of working people. They may be starting with Detroit and other districts like Detroit, but they are coming after the money put aside to educate every child.
And they will keep coming so long as their profit-making system is left in place.