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
Sep 5, 2016
“Labor Day”—it’s an official holiday, given to workers by the federal government 122 years ago. So they say—those people who are always saying things.
In fact, Labor Day was at its very beginning imposed by anonymous groups of workers who put down their tools on September 5 of 1882, the first Monday in that September. Leaving work, they marched from City Hall to Union Square, taking for themselves a “workingmen’s holiday.”
This action didn’t come out of the blue. It was NOT the work of politicians. It was a reflection of the agitation then growing for a shorter work week—within and outside union ranks. With work hours commonly standing at 12 a day, often for seven days a week, and with high levels of unemployment, the obvious answer was to cut hours of work. Shorter hours for those with a job could mean more hours of work for those without—but only if wages were raised for everyone at the same time.
This was the situation in which those anonymous New York City workers imposed shorter hours, even if only for one day. Their one-day protest spread, with “workingmen’s holidays” popping up on the first Monday in subsequent Septembers, sometimes at the instigation of unions, sometimes as near spontaneous actions.
In May of 1894, nearly twelve years after the original “workingmen’s holiday,” workers faced federal troops in Chicago during a bitter railway strike. “Rioting, insurrection”—those were the words the politicians used then against the workers.
Having ordered troops to Chicago, having given them license to “shoot to kill,” Democratic President Grover Cleveland took time out to sign a proclamation issued by Congress declaring the first Monday in September an official holiday, “Labor’s Day.” And then he turned right back around and pushed for state authorities to imprison Eugene Debs and other leaders of the railway strike on “criminal syndicalism” charges.
A lot may have changed since 1882, but no matter how much, certain things remain the same. The politicians can’t be trusted. Their declarations of friendship are only declarations—behind which lurk vicious actions.
There are still too many of us working for too many hours while others of us aren’t working at all. And with so many people on the street without a job, wages for everyone still suffer.
The answers that working people would give, if they were mobilized to impose their own answers, are still the same: spread out the hours of work, so that everyone who wants to work has a job, and push wages high enough so that is possible.
Of course, we are working for fewer hours than in 1882—but not a lot fewer! Our wages are higher, but not so much higher that most of us can live comfortably.
But one fact remains absolutely the same: whatever improvements working people got, whatever we will ever get, come only as the result of our own struggles.
Sep 5, 2016
The following article was translated from the August 26, 2016 issue of Lutte Ouvière, journal of the revolutionary workers organization of the same name in France.
Ethiopian athlete Feyisa Lilesa won a silver medal in the marathon on the last day of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. He also crossed the finish line with his arms raised and crossed and his fists clenched. These were signs of support for victims of repression in Ethiopia.
His gesture has the merit of drawing attention to the political situation in Ethiopia, which has more than 90 million inhabitants and is one of the most populated countries in Africa.
At the end of 2015, the Ethiopian authorities had to face the discontent of the people of Oromia, near the capital city Addis Ababa. The government’s new Master Plan project to enlarge the city sparked the anger. This was because the plan gave the government the opportunity to take over farmland and then to sell or lease it to wealthy individuals or international financiers.
From 2008 to 2011, Ethiopia leased at least 8.9 million acres of land. In Gambella, in the west of the country, 42% of the arable land was made available and marketed for lease to investors. Other regions are equally affected.
Farmers who did not want to be dislodged from their land started protests and were joined by people from surrounding towns. The authorities sent the police and the army to suppress them, leaving at least 70 dead. This led students in Addis Ababa to support the movement, as well as a part of the Ethiopian youth. The young people have seen cities expand and be embellished with modern boutiques filled with merchandise they can’t afford, since most of them are unemployed.
There have been hundreds killed and tens of thousands arrested, plus disappearances and many cases of torture since 2015, according to NGOs. Amnesty International reported nearly 100 dead and hundreds wounded on August 6 and 7 when the police shot at protesters in several provincial cities. This repression is in addition to the absence of the freedom of expression and the freedom of association. Only well-muzzled newspapers and parties and unions that don’t contest for power are allowed.
Dictatorship, farmers expelled from their land, and youth in revolt: all the ingredients are combined for a social explosion.
Sep 5, 2016
At least seven people were killed, and more than 40 injured, in a natural gas explosion at the Flower Branch rental apartments in Silver Spring, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. The explosion was so powerful that some of the human remains might not ever be identified. It happened around midnight on Aug. 12th.
More than 100 people survived but were left homeless, losing everything. Twenty-eight apartment units were destroyed.
Investigators determined that the explosion was caused by a gas leak in the basement utility room, where the gas meters were located.
In these apartments, Washington Gas was responsible for maintaining the gas pipes that ran from the outside, up to the basement gas meters. The apartment owner, Kay Communities, was responsible for maintaining the pipes that ran from the gas meters into the individual apartment units.
Kay Communities is a major landlord in the region, the owner of more than thirty large apartment complexes. They have the means to maintain a safe property. Period. There were several reports of the smell of natural gas in the apartments in the weeks before the explosion. And on at least one occasion, a resident called the fire department to report it. The NTSB is “investigating” the phone call, and the fire department’s visit. They say it might take an entire year to complete their investigation.
But since when are tenants—or even the fire department—supposed to act as maintenance look-outs for the whole building? It’s exactly why we pay our rent. It’s exactly what gas meter alarms are for—if they had bothered to buy them. It’s exactly what maintenance workers are for. Could they not find maintenance workers to hire out of this complex made up entirely of workers and their children?
No, this company did nothing but pocket the rent, and rack up more than 1,600 housing code violations in the past six years. Everything from mold to bedbugs to non-working smoke detectors. And that’s not even counting the violations at their other properties.
As for Washington Gas, they are a billion-dollar public company, with earnings of 166 million in 2013. Their top executives take home hundreds of millions in salary. Of course, the gigantic bloat at the top comes with a price: skeleton repair crews running from one emergency to the next. In 2014, private researchers found 6,000 natural gas leaks, just within D.C. city limits! Twelve of those were found to be potentially explosive. In other words, Washington Gas doesn’t even hire enough people to detect the problems, much less fix them.
Our crumbling infrastructure? No, not at all. These are their pipes, their gas lines, which they own—and they profit from. And which they make conscious decisions to let degrade.
A week into the investigation, federal authorities announced that there was “no criminal activity” involved.
Just business as usual in their sick system, all of it perfectly legal. What could be more criminal than that?
Sep 5, 2016
Fighting raged for weeks around Aleppo, in Syria. The troops of Bashar al-Assad, supported by Russian planes, face the rebels, Islamist or “moderate,” in a fight for power, a battle for the second city of the country, which is already almost completely destroyed. Other troops, backed by the U.S., engaged in similar battles throughout the country.
Five years after the start of the war, there are still deadly battles, bombing, a situation of siege that aggravates the poverty of the population, and skyrocketing prices of necessities, all of which makes the conditions worse for the very survival of the population.
Since 2011, according to the least pessimistic estimates, the war has cost 290,000 deaths, more than 1% of the population. More than half the inhabitants have fled their home if not the country. The infrastructure and the economy have been devastated. Eighty-three per cent of the electric system doesn’t work any more, and many hospitals and schools have been destroyed or cannot be used.
What are the stakes in this civil war? Part of the population revolted in 2011, under the banner of the “Arab Spring,” to try and impose their democratic rights against the ferocious Assad regime. This turned into a war between regional powers, each supporting its own local bands, each more or less supported by the great powers.
In the rebel camp, the most radical Islamist militias promise to impose the dictatorship of Sharia law on the population. The most likely outcome, and that which the imperialist powers behind the United States seem to be orienting towards, is that Assad will continue to reign over a country that’s been turned into a field of ruins.
A country destroyed, an immensely suffering population–these are the consequences of these years of war during which the different imperialist powers pretended to intervene to help the Syrian people, but have instead only added to their suffering. And when the wars are done, the big new objective to fight over: how to divide up the market for reconstruction.
Sep 5, 2016
In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, 10,000 Indian migrant workers are threatened with starvation after being laid off. They are in more danger because they haven’t been paid for the last months they worked.
This mainly affects workers on big construction sites. The drop in oil prices has led to a drop in income from oil sales in these countries, and an economic crisis that has led them to shut down some construction sites. For several months, the construction companies stopped paying their workers and only gave them food. Some of the workers were even housed in camps. At the end of July, the bosses decided to stop giving the workers food and officially laid them off.
After months without being paid, these workers no longer have money for airfare home. On top of that, in order to leave, they need their boss’s approval, which they often don’t get. And frequently, the bosses hold their passport and refuse to give it back. The situation has gotten so bad that the Indian government has felt itself obliged to send food packages.
The businesses are often the biggest local companies or are owned by Lebanese bosses. But they are contractors for some of the biggest construction companies in the world.
And they are defended by U.S. military hardware used by the repressive regimes in both countries.
Sep 5, 2016
Eighty years ago, on September 10, 1936, the American Federation of Labor, the AFL, a skilled trades organization, suspended ten unions that had been working inside the AFL to establish unions for industrial workers without specific trades.
The suspension marked a very open split inside the union bureaucracy. The bureaucrats who sat at the top of the AFL were content with the small numbers already inside the unions for workers who belonged to one or another of the skilled trades. And they were militantly ready to keep what they called “the rabble,” that is, the large mass of the working class, outside the doors of their unions.
The Committee on Industrial Organization, which was what those ten unions called themselves, had been formed in November 1935, based on the initiative taken by John L. Lewis, president of the mineworkers union. They proposed to organize all the workers in a particular industry, company or even particular plant, in a single union.
Going beyond the narrow focus on particular trades, which marked the AFL, the CIO was an enormous step forward for the American working class. Nonetheless, the CIO fell far short of the possibilities that the struggles of American workers opened up in the 1930s.
The Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929 ushered in a brutal decline in workers’ living standards. Unemployment jumped up, then stayed high. Workers “lucky” enough to keep a job suffered wage cuts and exhausting speed-up. A million and a half homeless people wandered the country, sleeping where they could.
In the early 1930s, workers carried out isolated and desperate fights for survival, often led by communists, socialists and other radicals. Unemployed Leagues sprang up in many states, mobilizing the unemployed to demand relief. Many times they massed, trying to prevent evictions of people who could no longer pay the rent. Some raided food and fuel from warehouses and businesses to keep starvation at bay.
Those who mobilized had to face the organized terror of the capitalist state–for example, in 1932, Dearborn police and Henry Ford’s private army greeted 4,000 unemployed marchers with machine gun fire, killing five and wounding more than two dozen more.
In 1933, strikes sharply increased, jumping up to 1,695 from the 841 recorded in 1932. More dramatically, the number of strikers almost quadrupled, from 324,000 to 1,168,000. “The country is full of spontaneous strikes. Wherever one goes, one sees picket lines,” wrote Benjamin Stolbert, a labor journalist and historian, in December 1933.
The capitalist class responded, with all the forces of the state apparatus at its command, violently attacking the growing working class movement. At least 15 strikers were killed, 200 injured and thousands arrested in the last six months of 1933. Criminal syndicalist charges were brought against active strike leaders, threatening them with long prison terms, while right-wing gangs kidnapped or tried to lynch some strike leaders.
The working class responded in 1934 with more widespread strikes, including four strikes that shut down whole cities or even regions of the country.
Longshoremen in San Francisco began a 78-day strike for union recognition that eventually spread to other workers on the Frisco waterfront, including seamen and warehousemen, and then to other ports along the West Coast. When cops killed two strikers, strike organizers responded with a call for a general strike of all San Francisco workers. Involving more than 150,000 workers, the general strike continued for four days.
The longshoremen didn’t immediately gain their union, but the forces of the working class were not broken, and workers began to impose their demands through immediate actions.
In Toledo, Ohio, strikers at Auto-Lite, an auto parts company, were joined by unemployed workers to shut down much of the city. They fought pitched battles against the cops and National Guard for eight days. The guard may have been armed with tanks, artillery and Gatling machine guns. But the Auto-Lite strikers pulled to their side most of the working class of Toledo, and the existing unions called for a general strike of all the working population. The government stepped back, the National Guard left town, and the company ceded to workers’ demands, including recognition of their union.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a strike by coal haulers spread to truck drivers and warehouse workers throughout the city. Over a period of seven months, truck drivers carried out four strikes, growing in size, organization and militancy. Two strikers were murdered, leading to a massive funeral demonstration in protest. The governor declared martial law and brought in the National Guard. The strikes spread, engaging wider parts of Minnesota’s working class, and enlisting the aid of farmers who brought in food for the strike kitchen. The strikes effectively shut down all business in Minneapolis.
What gave the strikes in Minneapolis their staying power and real strength was the strike committee that workers had elected and continually reinforced to direct their movement, along with the general meetings of all the workers, which decided on actions and demands. They organized defense guards that drove off the police and the bosses’ goons.
When the employers ceded to the strike’s demands, this opened up much wider organizing efforts all through the upper Midwest and northern Plains states.
The biggest strike in 1934 was textile, which started as a local strike, but spread eventually to more than 400,000 workers in 20 states from New England to the southern Piedmont. The workers confronted cops and tens of thousands of National Guardsmen and company thugs who, together, murdered 13 strikers and carried out mass arrests of picketers. The strikers who were almost all white, having worked for companies that didn’t hire black workers, now faced companies who moved to hire black workers in an attempt to break the strike. The inability of the white workers and the organizers of the strike to confront the divisions that Jim Crow had sown in the ranks of the working class helped contribute to the collapse of the strike.
Whether workers won their demands or were pushed back, the working class was organizing itself, learning to use its own forces–including by resisting assaults by police, the army and the bosses’ thugs. These were only battles in a larger war. And by fighting to organize by industry, they were breaking down the traditional divisions that had long existed in the organized working class. Sometimes they created democratically elected and militant leaderships for their struggles.
The movement of 1934 was potentially revolutionary. The victory of the Russian working class had taken place less than two decades before. And inside the American working class there were revolutionary militants from the pre-World War I generation–unionists, syndicalists, or revolutionary socialists who helped give a political expression and a direction to these struggles.
In their struggles, when workers were organizing without dividing up by skill or occupation, implicitly, they were viewing themselves as part of the same class.
John L. Lewis, and other leaders who stood with him, were every bit as much bureaucrats as any of the others. But they understood that if they did not go with the workers, they would be bypassed, and so for a period, they rested on the workers’ mobilization. This is what gave the new CIO its force and dynamism. In a few short years, struggles of the working class forced one company after another, one industry after another to accept what the American capitalist class had long said it would never accept, that is, industry-wide unions of the unskilled workers.
The old-line AFL bureaucrats, ready to stick their heads in the sand, ignored what the workers were doing. Lewis and the others were suspended, then expelled, forcing them finally to transform the Committee on Industrial Organization to a new union federation, the Congress on Industrial Organization in 1938.
The CIO from the beginning was established by part of the old union bureaucracy as an organizational structure aimed at containing the working class. By imposing these new unions on the bosses, millions of workers were expressing their will to fundamentally change their lives. But the leadership of the CIO maneuvered to prevent this mobilization from going all the way up to the end of the possibilities the workers had opened up for themselves.
The officials who headed the CIO were as hostile as the AFL to the communists and socialists who had led most of the struggles of the 1930s. But the CIO leaders understood that the workers would push them aside if they did not join the workers’ mobilization.
CIO leaders like Lewis sought to bring in those who had led the mobilization, and that meant at least some of those communist, socialist and other radical militants. To be more precise, the CIO leaders worked with them, up to the point they could expel them from the very unions built by the radicals’ leadership and determination. That point arrived in less than a decade; in many cases, much sooner.
Why weren’t the communists and other militants who had so often led the fights that built the unions able to lead fights that could stop the union bureaucrats from consolidating their control over the CIO?
One important reason is that the Communist Party–by far the biggest of those parties, with by far the most militants, and having led most of the hardest struggles–this party believed it needed an alliance with Lewis and the other CIO leaders. Thus the CP turned its back on the workers’ ability to run their own organizations themselves.
Conscious of the destructiveness of capitalism, millions of workers had aspired, however haltingly, to have their own political representatives and to put an end to the failing system in which they were caught. The situation called for the formation of a mass workers’ party, which did not exist in the United States. Such a party would have allowed the workers to have their own voice and their own leadership. It could have provided a consistent policy for those millions of workers in struggle.
The widespread desire for such a party was so strong that Lewis and others were forced to play with the idea of a “labor party” for a whole period during this time, but only to later divert the political aspirations of the working class back behind Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The CP went along, calling for support of Roosevelt’s candidacy.
By the beginning of World War II, the CIO contained six million members. This new federation reflected the mobilizations that the American workers had just lived through. But it also reflected the fact that the union bureaucracy had been able to prevent this mobilization from taking a revolutionary road. And with the push of American imperialism to enter World War II, the CIO actively disciplined the working class.
The American working class had shown its capacity to fight, and to carry out impressive, vast struggles. But in the absence of a revolutionary political leadership for these fights, they remained imprisoned within a union framework, allowing American capitalism to avoid facing what might have become a powerful workers revolution, one that could have changed the whole history of the world.
That revolution is still on the agenda–as are new organizations of the working class.
Sep 5, 2016
Aetna recently said that due to persistent financial losses on Obamacare plans, it will sell individual insurance on the government-run online marketplaces in only four states next year, down from the current 15 states, according to NBC News. This reduction in coverage is nothing but a blatant threat.
Aetna’s real reason to throw this threat is that the government challenged its deal to buy rival Humana Inc., which is another huge health insurance company. If this merger goes through, only three big insurers would remain–Aetna, Anthem and United Health. And the healthcare costs for us would rise and Aetna’s profit would further skyrocket.
These companies are already very hugely profitable by dominating Medicare and Medicaid. They collect most of their revenues directly from the government, or in other words, from our taxes.
And the Affordable Care Act has made them even more profitable. Between March 2009, and February of 2016, Humana’s share price went up an incredible 1010 percent. Aetna was up 628 percent. These mind boggling share price increases show how beneficial the Affordable Care Act has been–for them!
Hey, this is how capitalism works. It doesn’t work.
Sep 5, 2016
EpiPen made the recent news when its manufacturer Mylan increased its price to more than $600 for two injectors, enraging the patients who need this drug to deal with life-threatening allergic reactions. This rage is very justifiable considering that the same EpiPen dose is sold by a company in France, for about $85 a pair. Another French company ALK-Abello, which specializes in allergy therapies, sells the Jext pen for $34 to $67 throughout Europe.
This rage is also highly justifiable since people can die very rapidly due to a severe allergic reaction called anaphylaxis if the drug, epinephrine, is not injected right away by using the EpiPen injectors. Anaphylaxis can occur within seconds or minutes of exposure to an allergen, something like a peanut or the venom from a bee sting, according to the Mayo Clinic. If anaphylaxis isn’t treated right away, it can cause shock, with blood pressure dropping suddenly and a person’s normal breathing blocked. This medical condition can lead to unconsciousness or even death.
Such allergic reactions send more than 200,000 people to the emergency room every year, causing between 63 and 99 deaths yearly. A doctor can inject epinephrine without needing a special injector. The EpiPen, containing this drug, is easy to use: no need for any training, instructions are clear. The patient or any person nearby basically can jam the device’s needle into the patient’s thigh and inject the drug.
Because of the risk of death in cases of anaphylaxis, doctors wrote 3.6 million prescriptions for EpiPens last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The drug epinephrine is a human hormone, first isolated by Japanese scientists in 1901. The auto-injector used by EpiPen was developed in the 1970s by a NASA engineer. It was designed for the rapid self-injection of antidotes to chemical warfare agents used in battle. In 1987 it was approved by the FDA for use with epinephrine.
So, Mylan, the company that manufactures the EpiPen, neither invented the drug nor the injector. These have been available to the public for many years. Mylan does not manufacture epinephrine. Mylan doesn’t even manufacture the injector. Pfizer manufactures the injectors based on the NASA engineer’s original design.
What Mylan did was simple: it cornered the market. EpiPen is the only epinephrine injector approved by the FDA. Mylan first acquired U.S. marketing rights from Merck in 2007, when the auto-injectors cost around $100 a pair. Now Mylan is charging about $600. This is a 500 percent increase in nine years.
In addition, Mylan lobbied the federal government to increase sales of the EpiPen. In 2013, Congress passed the School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act, which, in essence, forced every school to have epinephrine available.
Mylan used every opportunity to its advantage. Mylan was based in suburban Pittsburgh. Last year, Mylan relocated the company on paper to the Netherlands to evade U.S. taxes, thanks to the treaty negotiated by the U.S. government with the Netherlands.
By monopolizing the market, pumping up the EpiPen price, using every legal and tax loophole, Mylan has made more than one billion dollars a year from the EpiPens.
When these schemes were mentioned to Mylan’s CEO Heather Bresch, daughter of a U.S. Senator, she explained, with a straight face, on Aug. 25: “It was never intended that a consumer, that the patients, would be paying list price, never. The system wasn’t built for that.” So, Mylan is asking the taxpayers to pick up the bill. But, the taxpayers and the patients are the same people. They are the workers who make every product, including Mylan’s EpiPen, who suffer from various diseases and pay taxes.
But, Mylan is not the only company that profits at the expense of workers. Prices of generic or brand name drugs–manufactured by giant pharmaceutical companies, like J&J, Merck, Pfizer, Teva and Bayer–skyrocketed in the last 10 years. These companies corner the market using one scheme or another to rob us all, even sometimes shortening our lives.
This is how capitalism organizes medicine.
Sep 5, 2016
A new study shows that the number of flu cases drops a lot in cities that pass laws mandating a paid sick leave. In other words, where companies don’t have to offer paid sick leave, more workers feel forced to go to work sick and spread the disease to their co-workers and customers.
Of course, no worker needed a survey to know that you should stay home and rest when you are sick. Bosses know that too. That’s why they give themselves and their managers paid sick days.
Sep 5, 2016
Over the last three decades, state and local spending on prisons and jails increased more than three times faster than spending on public schools. This is the same period when the jobs for working class children that might provide a decent life have increasingly dried up. And that is no accident.
The capitalists who run this society are only willing to educate people to the extent that they can exploit them–that is, to the extent that they need educated workers. But since the 1970s, the capitalists have done everything they could to increase profits by reducing the number of workers they need: speeding people up, laying them off, forcing people to work overtime, putting in new technology.
The result? A huge portion of the population, disproportionately but not only black people, are left with few job prospects. And the capitalists increasingly find a thousand and one ways to steal the money that should go to educate that same layer of the population.
Because society is set up to serve the capitalists’ pursuit of profit, instead of providing an education that leads to a job, this society offers a future of prison to millions of its young people.
Sep 5, 2016
August 22 marked the 20th anniversary of welfare reform, the so-called “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” which Bill Clinton signed, proclaiming it would be a help for poor people.
Prior to August 22, 1996, families with little or no cash income were entitled by law to a check from the government, thanks to Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This provided a cash floor that somewhat eased the hardships of those at the end of their ropes.
In place of AFDC, the government created a much smaller program of temporary cash assistance, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) that quickly reduced the welfare rolls. In later years, most states simply barred the doors to anyone seeking cash assistance–even in the midst of the recessions of 2001-2 and 2008-9, when unemployment skyrocketed.
Today, TANF barely exists. There are only about 850,000 adults still receiving welfare benefits with their 2.5 million children–a whopping decline of 75 percent from 1996.
Bill Clinton justified these brutal cuts with claims that by “ending welfare as we know it,” poor people on welfare would be forced to get a job and therefore become self-sufficient. Of course, if that were true, the worst poverty would have disappeared. But the opposite happened: extreme poverty increased. As of 2012, according to the most reliable government data available, roughly three million American children spend at least three months in a calendar year living on virtually no money.
So, even if families get food stamps or housing subsidies, they still don’t have money to pay for utilities, clothes, school supplies, transportation–that is, no money to provide anything approaching a stable family life.
The fact that in 2014 blood “donations” hit an all-time high at 32.5 million, triple the rate recorded a decade prior, is one indication of how much dire poverty is spreading, and to what lengths people facing truly desperate times must go to get their hands on even a few dollars.
This impoverishment is used by employers against the rest of the working class, by providing a reservoir of extremely desperate workers, forced to take the lowest paying jobs with the worst working conditions–thus, pushing down the wages of everyone else.
As for the money that used to go to provide cash assistance to families on welfare, most of it is now being swallowed up by the capitalist class in the form of tax breaks and subsidies.
Sep 5, 2016
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recently reported on its web-site that the U.S. Army “did not adequately support 2.8 trillion dollars in third quarter journal voucher adjustments and 6.5 trillion dollars in year end JV adjustments made to Army General Fund data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation.” Put in plain English, this means that 6.5 trillion dollars have disappeared from the army’s accounting system, and there is no paper trail to explain what happened.
The DoD report also asks why the Army’s accountants “... removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter of 2015.” So, the Army not only does not have a paper trail to explain the loss of this mind-boggling amount of tax payers’ money, but it also removed the paper trail that might have explained it. It sounds suspicious, to say the least!
Before workers get their pay check, the federal and state governments, and the companies take their cut. Our taxes, pension and health care payments are taken out of our pay before we even have a glimpse of our pay check. When we submit our tax forms each year, the IRS scrutinizes every minute detail of our returns. The IRS forces us to keep the paper trail that supports these tax forms for years. If workers miss a beat, the IRS makes us feel the heat by threatening us with fraud. This very diligent work by the government is done to ensure that workers pay to the fullest extent. Because workers’ income is the main source for the federal government’s budget.
But, after the federal government takes its cut from the workers, it channels this money to the companies through the government contracts. And the U.S. military is one huge honey pot. So it’s no wonder that the people responsible for keeping the honey pot may prefer to avoid keeping a proper paper trail.