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 20, 2016
The two parties seem to have settled on their presidential candidates. The choice offered to the population is between two candidates both strongly disliked by most of the population. This is what recent polls show. Almost 70% have an “unfavorable” opinion of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton does somewhat “better”–only 55% view her “unfavorably.”
Clinton and Trump may both be truly unlikeable. But the problem does not rest with them. They are simply true representatives of the two major parties. And these two parties both represent a class that is alien to the interests of the majority of the population.
The Republican and Democratic parties both speak for and act for the biggest banks in the country, the biggest industries and the tycoons that run them, the biggest real estate “developers” and speculators, the biggest agribusiness barons. Republicans and Democrats alike both represent the capitalist class, and their wealthy tagalongs. And both the Republicans and Democrats defend the capitalists’ interests at the expense of the rest of us.
The capitalist class has two parties, the working class has none. This is the problem.
Most of us work for our living–or have worked or will work or we take care of the children who will work. But there is no party that is representative of our class. No party even speaks for us in the election. No party offers answers to society’s problems from the viewpoint of our class.
This is not a new problem. The situation may seem worse today because of an economic crisis that has pulled almost all of us down for several decades now. In the midst of economic crisis, the two parties show themselves more openly for what they are: our enemies. But they have always been our enemies.
For almost a century, the working class has had no party of its own. And that will not change just because we wish it.
A serious working class party can be built–but it will come into existence only through the struggles of the working class. Whether the working class mobilizes to address its own immediate problems or to build its own party, it doesn’t matter. What will count is whether the working class mobilizes its own forces to impose its own solutions; whether it fights against the capitalist class; whether it fights to get rid of the weight of the capitalist class over society. And it has to be ready to take that fight up to the end.
Today in Michigan, there are people who agree with these ideas gathering petition signatures to put a working class party on the ballot. Its name: Working Class Party.
It’s obvious–and they say it–that the working class can’t change its situation through elections. But if they succeed in putting a working class party on the ballot, that could help change the situation, at least somewhat.
The state of Michigan makes it quite difficult to get a new party on the ballot, requiring more than 30,000 signatures on petitions. In reality, many more are needed, just to deal with all the bureaucratic tricks and traps.
Some people, of course, sign just for “democratic reasons”–to allow a wider choice of perspectives in the elections. But many of those sign to express what they think, to say they agree that a party based on the working class is needed.
If this effort in Michigan succeeds so that people get a chance to vote for some of Working Class Party candidates, this will give a wider opening to all working people in the state of Michigan. It will let everyone who agrees with the necessity of building a working class party to express it through their vote. And that can be a road-sign planted for the future.
We are not there yet. The petitions have not even been turned in yet. But in this year, when everything on the political scene seems screwy, this effort to put Working Class Party on the ballot is one of the few things that is perfectly reasonable.
Jun 20, 2016
Following the primaries in mid-June, Bernie Sanders met with President Obama. A couple of days later, Sanders announced that he was ending his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders stopped just short of formally endorsing his opponent, Hillary Clinton. But everyone knows what Sanders meant when he said: “The major political task that we face in the next five months is to make certain that Donald Trump is defeated and defeated badly.” Sanders was positioning himself to deliver the support to the Democrats of millions of voters and activists who had voted for him in the primaries.
Sanders had campaigned as an “independent” and “socialist.” This allowed him to appeal to millions of voters and activists who blame both parties, the Democrats and Republicans, for the growing inequality and the destructive quagmires and wars that the U.S. military is involved in throughout the world. But throughout the primaries, Sanders reinforced the illusion that the Democratic Party could be changed, that the wars and growing inequality were just “mistakes” that the Democrats could correct.
Now that he is ending his campaign, Sanders is promising to supposedly push Clinton and the Democratic Party in a “leftward” direction. Sanders even mentioned that he had met with Clinton earlier in the week to begin to bridge their differences.
What differences?
Strip away the rhetoric and Sanders’ own record shows that he is no different than Clinton or the rest of the Democratic Party. As a U.S. Congressman and Senator, Sanders faithfully supported the same agenda as Clinton. He voted to finance the same wars, including against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. He supported the same corporate bailouts and tax cuts to big business, under the guise of “stimulating” the economy. And he voted for Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill in 1994, that boosted the growth of the repressive state apparatus in order to fill the already overcrowded federal and state prison system with millions more, hitting the black workers and poor especially hard.
No, Sanders is just another bourgeois politician, who carried out a populist campaign in order to try to get millions of fed-up voters and activists to support the Democrats one more time, that is, to support the very party that has worked hand in hand with the Republicans to carry out the same policies that attack working people in the interests of the capitalist class.
Jun 20, 2016
The FBI, Obama, and the media say that Omar Mateen, the shooter at the Pulse gay nightclub, did this for ISIS.
No one will ever know what went on in his mind. Only his actions can be known. And the actions of Mateen, who happened to be a guard, were to kill gay people, mostly Latino.
This was a guy who wanted to be a cop, who did everything he could to be cop. He earned a degree in criminal justice, worked as a correctional officer at the Martin Correctional Institution for adult males. Then for nine years, until his death, he worked for G4S Secure Solutions as a contract armed security guard for the company. Mateen was assigned work at various places including a facility for juvenile delinquents, a gated community on a golf course, and a courthouse.
Why gay people? ISIS is not alone in killing gay people. The U.S. has a long and vicious history of violence carried out against gay, lesbian or transgender people.
Thirty-two people were burned to death in June of 1973 when an arsonist turned a gay bar in New Orleans into an inferno. Five people were hurt when a bomb exploded at a lesbian bar in 1997. A gunman opened fire at a gay bar in 2000 after seeing two men hug each other. And of course, the infamous 1969 police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that touched off riots and the modern gay rights movement. No, the shooting at Pulse was not the first such homophobic violence. That violence doesn’t spew up out of nowhere.
That violence is promoted by Christian preachers. Just hours after the massacre in Orlando, a Sacramento Baptist preacher praised and celebrated it exclaiming, “Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today? Um–no–I think that’s great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight.” The preacher’s argument represents the same reasoning behind all the controversy surrounding who can use what bathroom.
This society, through its laws, and supported by fundamentalist religions of all sorts, says homosexuality is a crime and a sin. Mateen’s own father said “God will punish those involved in homosexuality.”
It shouldn’t be a big surprise that someone, who wanted to be a cop, murdered in cold blood 49 mostly gay men. It is not different from all the vitriol and hate espoused by this society against all of its victims and scapegoats.
Jun 20, 2016
The House Oversight Committee released its “reform” proposal for the USPS the other day. It’s not impressive.
The proposal doesn’t seem to do anything about the crippling prepayments the law requires for retirement and health care, which are the only reason for the USPS deficit. And unless the plan proposes to reverse the privatization, remove profit from the expectation in the USPS, fully fund it and treat it as the public good it is, it’s not a reform “that favors working people.”
And we’re not holding our breath.
Jun 20, 2016
Some of Donald Trump’s supporters in Congress seem to be embracing Trump with one arm, while using the other to distance themselves from him after each of Trump’s ethnic or racial slurs makes headlines. For example, Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, said that Trump’s call for a sweeping ban on immigrants if they happen to be Muslim is racist, as he said after Trump insisted that a federal judge ruled against him because he was “Mexican.”
But Trump’s overtly racist statements haven’t been enough for Republican leaders to disqualify him from representing their party in the November election. Ryan still says, for example, that he supports Trump’s candidacy.
And why not? Trump’s remarks are not very different than what Republican politicians spout every day. They just aren’t as open or crass as Trump.
As for the Democrats, who gleefully jump all over Trump’s remarks, they might not resort to the same kind of rhetoric as the Republican politicians. But in the end, the Democrats support similar policies that divide working people against each other.
How many times have we heard Republicans, Democrats, as well as most union officials, blame unemployment on foreign workers, thus stirring up racism and prejudice? It is the capitalists who rob workers of our jobs by driving fewer workers to work longer and harder in order to produce more. Politicians scapegoat workers in China or Mexico as a way of not just diverting workers’ anger away from the capitalist class, but justifying even more job cuts.
The same goes for terrorism. The politicians drum up racism and chauvinism in order to justify wars and the U.S. military build up–when it is precisely these wars that exacerbate the conditions that produce the terrorism. ISIS got its start in prisoner of war camps during the U.S. war in Iraq. Decades earlier, al Qaeda was created by the CIA and Saudi intelligence services during the war in Afghanistan. These are not accidents or mistakes. It is the U.S.’s own military allies, including in Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states and Turkey, which arm and finance “radical Islamic” groups in their own quest for power and influence in that region–with the blessings of U.S. imperialism and its agents.
But the politicians turn around and use the threat of terrorism that was created by their own policies to attack the U.S. population, through more surveillance of the U.S. population, carried out by an increasingly more repressive police apparatus, thus tightening the grip over the U.S. population.
Trump’s brand of bigotry is at home in the Republican Party (and the Democratic Party), because it is a tool that politicians of both parties use in their defense of their capitalist masters–even when some of Trump’s openly racist statements make it harder for them to hypocritically pretend otherwise.
Jun 20, 2016
This was the editorial in the June 17th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France. The French government run by the Socialist Party is trying to pass the El Khomri law which will eliminate a great part of gains won over the decades by workers. There have been large worker demonstrations of protest for months.
The administration, the bosses and the media don’t let up. They have poured out torrents of slander. They carried out crude blackmail over solidarity with victims of the floods. They used the European soccer games being held in Paris to demand the end of strikes. That didn’t prevent the June 14th demonstrations from being a big success. The strike at the French national railroad continued, the garbage collectors held firm and the Air France pilots made good on their strike threat.
The workers are right. Will the administration and the bosses observe a truce in their offense against us? Obviously not. Then why should the workers make one?
They go on about the image of France and the supposed celebration which the European soccer games are supposed to be. It’s a crude trick. One can be a soccer fan and even a flood victim without wanting to see the abolition of the Labor Code!
Do workers’ rights mean nothing? The soccer games will go on for a month, but we’ll have to suffer the effects of this law for years if it’s adopted. Enough of this blackmail, which is always aimed at workers who are silent and submit.
Workers have sacrificed for years. They must let their hours of work be flexible, work still more, knock themselves out, be ever more put upon. All that, for what? So the stock holders and the CEO’s can put more in their pockets.
President Hollande and Prime Minister Valls carry the entire responsibility for what’s happening. They accuse the opponents of the El Khomri law of being extremists, a minority, irresponsible. But who’s the minority in this affair? Who’s persisting in pushing for this bill that’s massively rejected by the population and almost all workers? As for irresponsibility, it consists in making the conditions of workers go years backwards!
The administration intends to clear up the lack of understanding by instructing us. No worker is deceived. If the bosses can, by agreements at the company level, get rid of rights written into national industry contracts, there will be a worsening of working conditions. If they can lay off more easily, there will be more layoffs and more job insecurity.
The elimination of jobs, the backward moves on working conditions and pay are the reality that millions of workers see. From railroad workers to pilots, from Peugeot auto workers to Michelin tire workers, this offensive takes the exact same form: plans for competitiveness, where workers need to work more, with hours that jump around and cuts in compensation, when it isn’t a question of outright pay cuts as at Air France.
We can’t be silent any more, and we must continue to denounce this umpteenth attack of the administration, as we’ve done for three months. The June 14th demonstration was the occasion to show the massive rejection of the El Khomri law. As long as the opposition continues, nothing is settled.
But what’s at stake in this mobilization goes beyond what happens with this bill alone. The opposition means the recovery of a more widespread discontent, a larger anger against the general offensive of the bosses and of retreat across the whole of society. It is shown in the variety of sectors which have thrown themselves into the mobilization: the youth, public and private sector workers, those of big companies and small and middle sized ones.
It shows the wish of a fraction of the workers to reverse the relation of forces with the bosses. It’s still a question of only a minority. But in workplaces across the country, workers organize, stop work, go on strike and demonstrate. We need to continue in this way, it’s the only way which will permit the workers to be respected!
This is more important for the future. For workers aren’t facing the end of the bosses’ attacks. And if they have the habit of resisting, things will go quite differently.
The administration and the bosses bet that the movement is winding down. Some workers have already gone on strike for eight, 10 or 20 days. Many railroad workers and oil refinery workers have already lost a month of wages in strikes.
So yes, it’s a long drawn out struggle. But the working class has the resources, it has forces in reserve. Let’s show the bosses and their political henchmen that we are denouncing their offensive as on the first day. Let’s show them that we are just as angry and that we don’t accept that the bosses get this law!
Jun 20, 2016
Since May 25th, the Iraqi army and various mainly Shiite militias, supported by bombing from the imperialist coalition, have been trying to retake Falluja. This city in the northwest of Iraq has been occupied by Islamic State militias since January 2014.
In this Sunni city, which used to have 300,000 inhabitants, there are now only 50,000 according to Human Rights Watch. Many have attempted to flee at the risk of their lives, to escape the Islamic State militias, but also the intensified bombing. They have to escape shots from the Islamic State and land mines that it placed all around the city, while trying to reach the countryside or to cross the Euphrates river on makeshift boats.
“The people use anything that floats, from a chest of drawers to a plastic container,” said Caroline Gluck, the spokeswoman for the High Commissariat for Refugees for Iraq. In Amriyat al-Falluja, a place some 30 miles to the south of Falluja, displaced people, having fled locations under ISIS control, flow in every day, starving and exhausted, according to the Norwegian Council for Refugees. Those who escaped testify to the tragic situation that the population remaining in Falluja suffers from: famine, total lack of medicine, lack of drinkable water, without speaking of exactions committed by the jihadists who impose their rules that come from the Middle Ages.
But the population, mainly Sunni, equally fears reprisals from the Shiite militia called Population Mobilization Forces, which is supposed to liberate them. Hadi al-Ameri, the commander of the Badr militia, a former minister in the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, announced clearly some months ago his wish to attack the Sunni zone, “until nothing remains.” According to Joe Stork, assistant director of the Middle East and North African division of Human Rights Watch, “Iraqi civilians are trapped between a hammer and anvil, suffering on the one hand attacks from the Islamic State and on the other, abuses committed by pro-governmental militias in the territory they have reconquered.” He had denounced the exactions committed by the Shiite militias in Diyala Province in February 2015.
The chaos in which Iraq as well as the whole of the region is plunged, isn’t a consequence of any geographic curse, nor of pretended ancestral religious conflicts, but the consequence of multiple imperialist interventions in the region. It flows in particular from the war unleashed in 2003 by the U.S. and allied imperialisms against Iraq, and the years of the occupation that followed. It was during this occupation, in 2004, that the U.S. army made a blood bath among the population of Falluja, in order to show what it costs to oppose that army.
Once Saddam Hussein was conquered, the imperialists destroyed the apparatus of the Iraqi state, whose cadres were Sunni, creating a new Iraqi power based on religious adherence, and supported essentially by Shiite militias. In this, they followed the policy that imperialism has always used, dividing in order to rule, supporting themselves on the most reactionary forces. When the U.S. troops left Iraq in December 2011, nothing was restored to normal, very much the contrary. The imperialist leaders had opened a Pandora’s Box, and out flowed the militias of all persuasions, Shiite and Sunni, including those of the Islamic State.
Today Iraq is a country which is imploding under the action of armed bands: Sunni militias of the Islamic State, those mainly Shiite of the Iraqi power put in place by the U.S. authorities, and all others, including those supported and financed by Iran. Even if the Islamic State militias are conquered in Iraq and Syria, that won’t be the end of the suffering of the population. Imperialism has nothing to offer to the working people of Iraq, as elsewhere in the world, but a future of barbarism.
Jun 20, 2016
Microsoft just bought up the internet company LinkedIn for trifling 26 billion dollars in cash, money the company had tucked away. In five years time, Microsoft spent almost 40 billion dollars buying up these types of companies. This increased Microsoft’s control over the industry but it didn’t create one job.
What Microsoft spent would pay the yearly wage of 620,000 factory workers. All the political parrots harp on the necessity for the working class to make still more sacrifices. And why? Only to let billionaires, like Bill Gates, amuse themselves in the casino of the world economy speculating with the tons of money earned off the flesh and sweat of millions of workers.
Jun 20, 2016
On June 16, 1976, thousands of black youth in Soweto demonstrated against a reform of their education system. The white South African government, at the head of the racist apartheid regime, shot at the students who dared defy its policy.
Far from silencing black anger, the repression of Soweto marked the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime, which deprived black people of all rights, penned them up in their own country and delivered them to exploitation by the white bosses.
Apartheid meant that officially the “races” followed a “separate development.” In reality, it was the dictatorship of the white bourgeois minority over the majority of black poor people.
Soweto was a township, that is to say, a satellite city, that didn’t appear on any map, but brought together hundreds of thousands of people. This black city was near Johannesburg, the main economic metropolis of South Africa, where black people didn’t have the right to reside. They worked there but had to leave at the end of the day.
On April 30, 1976, the students of the Orlando West school in Soweto went on strike to demand education equal in quality to that of young whites, and not to be forced to learn Afrikaans, which was only used by their oppressors in South Africa. In the following days, the strike spread to other schools in Soweto. The students formed an Action Committee and organized a demonstration for June 16th, 1976. That day, thousands of youth rallied, surprising the government by their number and their energy. Beyond slogans about education, the youth cried, “power” and the crowd responded, “it’s up to us,” showing a political consciousness which grew against the regime.
When workers came home after their labor in Johannesburg, without knowing what had happened that day, they ran into shots from the police in the streets of Soweto and found themselves straightaway mixed up in an uprising. Twenty-three people died that day, including two whites on whom the crowd took revenge because of the police bullets. The next day, the police combed over Soweto with armored cars, shooting on anything that moved, and the army was held ready at the entrance to the township. The clinics of Soweto were flooded with thousands of wounded.
The name of Soweto was rapidly known in the entire world as a synonym for revolt against injustice. It spread like an oil stain. In the months that followed, 160 townships rose up, including in neighboring Namibia, that was then administered by South Africa.
Administrative imprisonment without time limits multiplied, while the repression continued, killing in total hundreds of people in 1976, including many children.
The agitation in Soweto lasted two years. Since the beginning of apartheid in 1948, the South African state had ceaselessly reinforced prohibitions of all sorts, making life for black people impossible. Now it was forced to retreat. It had to withdraw its law on teaching in Afrikaans. Moreover, all inhabitants of the townships won the right to officially reside there and to buy their own home as property, which had previously been denied them.
In the townships, neighborhood committees arose. Militants, young for the most part, got involved in activity and were politicized. They were influenced by the struggles of black people in the U.S., who had just come to fight for Black Power. Many adopted these ideas mixing nationalism, Third Worldism and non-violence, called Black Consciousness, whose leader Steve Biko would be tortured to death by the police in 1977.
In the course of the 1970s, the working class also went into action. Non-white unions were openly constituted, succeeding in 1983 in grouping together six times more members than four years before. This worker rising forced the government to lessen the repression, and the bosses were constrained to recognize these unions, which could no longer be simply ignored or crushed. Only five companies officially recognized a black union in 1979. Four years later, there were more than 400. Even the powerful bosses of the mines saw themselves forced to negotiate with the national union of African miners.
When it was clear that the government could no longer bring to heel rebellious black people and end the struggle which had lasted for more than a decade, it turned toward the African National Congress (ANC) to negotiate a political transition and to get rid of the system of apartheid without questioning the power of the bourgeoisie. Nelson Mandela, who left prison, was propelled to the presidency of South Africa in 1994.
The ANC in power ended the racist laws. But for the majority of black people, that is to say the working people, it wasn’t the end of social oppression. The ANC permitted only a new black bourgeois layer to join the older white bourgeoisie. The odious regime of apartheid ended, but only a small layer of privileged black people really came to power at the side of the white bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, it was the uprising that began at Soweto and then the growing struggle of the working class, which had the necessary power, that ended official racism in South Africa.
Jun 20, 2016
Brock Allen Turner, the Stanford University swimmer convicted in March of three felony sex abuses, was sentenced to only six weeks in the county jail–not the 14-year maximum nor even the six years the prosecution asked for. His victim told BuzzFeed News she was disappointed with the “gentle” sentence and angry that Turner still denied sexually assaulting her.
“You have been convicted of violating me, intentionally, forcibly, sexually, with malicious intent, and all you can admit to is consuming alcohol,” said the woman in a statement read in court. “Do not talk about the sad way your life was upturned because alcohol made you do bad things. Figure out how to take responsibility for your own conduct.” A lenient sentence would be “a mockery of the seriousness of his assaults, an insult to me and all women. It gives the message that a stranger can be inside you without proper consent and he will receive less than what has been defined as the minimum sentence ... Someone who cannot take full accountability for his actions does not deserve a mitigating sentence.”
In her statement she describes coming to and finding out what happened to her. “I learned that my ass and vagina were completely exposed outside, my breasts had been groped, fingers jabbed inside me along with pine needles and debris, my bare skin and head had been rubbing against the ground behind a dumpster, while an erect freshman was humping my half naked unconscious body. But I don’t remember, so how do I prove I didn’t like it.”
Judge Persky determined that six months in jail was the “best” punishment for Turner, stating that he asked himself, “Is incarceration in prison the right answer for the poisoning of (the woman’s) life?” He also cited Turner’s lack of criminal record as a factor.
Turner’s father sent a letter to the judge pleading for his son. He wrote, “Brock’s life has been deeply altered forever by the events of Jan17th and 18th. He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easy going personality and welcoming smile.... His life will never be the one he dreamed about... That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”
That comment, “20 minutes of action,” brought no condemnation by the judge–and that says everything there is to say about the “privileges” that wealthy college males have been thinking of as theirs–indeed, the right to use women’s bodies as they see fit.
Do Judge Persky and Turner’s father belong to the same country club? It doesn’t matter. They belong to the same class.
Jun 20, 2016
Rev. Edward Pinkney continues to sit in prison, while his appeal is put on hold. In this circumstance, a prisoner ordinarily would be granted bail.
But Rev. Pinkney is not an ordinary prisoner. He has been active in Benton Harbor, Michigan for more than 15 years: involved in protest marches against the racism and violence of the police department; led a successful recall campaign of a city commissioner who was a mouth-piece for Whirlpool; organized against the take-over of Benton Harbor by a state appointed “emergency financial manager.”
Rev. Pinkney has been put through the legal wringer before. In April of 2005, he was tried on charges of election fraud–accused of improperly possessing absentee ballots. His first trial ended with a hung jury. The second trial in 2007 was stacked with only white jurors, even though Benton Harbor is a very large majority black city. The only witnesses were three people charged with a drive-by shooting, whose testimony earned them a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Convicted, he was sentenced to “house arrest,” then re-sentenced to three to 10 years in prison after he criticized the trial judge–a violation of his parole!
Eventually, that prison term was overturned on appeal.
Three years ago, Rev. Pinkney and others turned in enough signatures to force a recall election of the mayor, who had refused to sign a tax the city council had imposed on Whirlpool–a multibillion dollar international corporation which, up until then, paid no income taxes at any level.
Once again, Pinkney was put on trial, again for election fraud. Supposedly he had altered dates after five voters signed the petition. Although those voters testified at trial that they had changed the dates themselves to correct their own mistake, Pinkney was convicted and sentenced this time to two and a half to ten years in prison. The trial involved no evidence, no testimony–only a wild attack by the prosecutor on Pinkney’s involvement in “radical causes.”
As Pinkney said about the trial: “There was not one person from Benton Harbor, not one person from Benton Township on the jury. Anytime a black man is sitting inside that courtroom and the jury is all white, that is a major problem.” It was, in fact, nothing but a case of Northern Jim Crow “justice.”
Currently, 68-year-old Rev. Pinkney sits in Marquette prison, nearly 500 miles to the north of Benton Harbor, cut off from family, other activists in Benton Harbor and the lawyers who are trying to defend him.
Rev. Pinkney issued the following statement: “As a long-time resident of Benton Harbor, I have steadfastly opposed the conduct of Whirlpool and Harbor Shores, Inc., as I watched the loss of jobs, the loss of homes and the loss of dignity for the residents of my city. I am being punished by the racist Berrien County ‘justice’ system and local authorities for opposing Whirlpool’s plan to expand its hostile land takeover, gentrify Benton Harbor and turn the area into a multimillion dollar golf resort and playground for tourists.... For my opposition and outspokenness, I am paying a debt to society which I do not owe, with my life, my family life, and my community.”
People who want to support Rev. Pinkney’s appeal should contact the organization he helped build: BANCO, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor MI 49022.