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
Feb 20, 2017
The Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress are signaling their intention to attack health care.
Of course, the Republicans have long said they wanted to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, what they call “Obamacare.” Trump indicated the same intention on the campaign trail, and since taking office.
But they’re running into a problem—people with coverage don’t want to be left without health care! In a recent poll, only 8 percent of Michiganders wanted to repeal the ACA without any replacement. The majority wanted to replace it with something better.
But the Republicans’ plan seems to be to GUT the ACA, not “repeal and replace.” They’re proposing to remove the parts that actually give coverage to low income people, while keeping or shoring up the parts that benefit the insurance industry.
The proposals so far are for changes that can be passed without repealing the ACA itself. Things like: getting rid of federal funding for the Medicaid expansion. This expansion accounts for 60 percent of the people receiving health care under the ACA—12 million of the 20 million people formerly not covered.
For those covered through the ACA Marketplaces, the proposals virtually guarantee that people will eventually drop or lose their coverage, even if their plans still exist. The Republicans propose getting rid of the subsidy for low-income people buying coverage, and replacing it with a tax credit that varies by age. Younger people would receive less of a credit, and older people would receive more—a millionaire would receive the same credit as a poor person.
One proposal is to remove the individual mandate. This sounds nice—it allows the Republicans to say they are for greater choice. Instead, they propose to allow companies to charge much more to people if their coverage lapses at any time. They say that this will encourage people to buy and keep coverage even without the individual mandate—but more likely, it will discourage people from buying coverage that they cannot afford, even when they are sick and desperately need it.
They also say they will keep some kind of “mandatory” coverage for preexisting conditions. BUT they are working on proposals that will allow insurance companies to form “high risk pools” to charge much more to people with those preexisting conditions.
Another proposal concerns the so-called “Cadillac tax” on health coverage through employers. The proposal is to actually lower the threshold for the triggering of the tax on employers, so a much higher percentage of health care plans will be taxed. Employers threaten to gut their employees’ coverage so as not to be taxed. And this proposal includes almost everyone today who has medical care through their employer. Pretty soon, ANY employer-provided coverage will be considered “Cadillac” coverage!
Whatever the Republicans eventually do, it can ONLY mean that coverage for working class and poor people will get worse.
In fact, though, the whole thing is a massive diversion. Republicans have made “Obamacare” the issue, blaming it for the problems people have with coverage and cost. No—the health care system itself is the problem! A health care system built on profit ensures that nothing gets done unless someone is making profit somewhere—and if profit isn’t made, it doesn’t get done. Those who can pay privately can get the best care in the world, while everyone else gets bad care at huge expense—or no care at all. The ACA didn’t change this fundamental fact about the U. S. health care system. It just gave more people access to this broken system, while making sure that insurance companies got paid—and adding to its convoluted confusion.
Republicans talk about getting rid of the ACA. Democrats tell us that the only thing to do is to protect it and keep it where it is. We need to see the reality: both options are not good. The population is being subjected to increasing attacks. Even if your health care is not under attack right now, it will be. An attack on any part of the working class spreads to all parts of the working class eventually.
There is a much better option. We all need, and we ALL deserve, decent medical care—for ALL. At a price our wages can afford!
They want to repeal and replace Obamacare? Replace it with THAT. That is something worth fighting for.
Feb 20, 2017
A pressured sewer main broke last Thursday at Piscataway Treatment Plant in Accokeek, Virginia outside Washington, D.C. So for nearly nine hours, at least 3.3 million gallons of raw sewage flowed into Piscataway Creek. There is no way to contain the sewage in the creek, which is a tributary of the Potomac River.
In other words, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission has not maintained its pipes and has created a hazardous situation for people. And then it increases what it charges us! Where did the money go?
Feb 20, 2017
If working people think they are paying more in taxes and getting less in services, they are right!
Revenue from business taxes has plunged in Michigan over five years’ time between 2011 and 2016.
In 2011 in Michigan, the revenue that came from “principal business taxes” was 2.06 BILLION dollars. In 2016 in Michigan, the revenue from “principal business taxes” was only two per cent of what it had been: 40 million dollars.
Adding insult to injury, in 2016, the state handed out tax refunds to businesses totaling just short of a BILLION dollars—880 million dollars!
These business tax refunds were introduced in Michigan by Republican Governor Engler in 1995 and were then expanded by Democratic Governor Granholm during her eight years in office. The gift to corporations was a bipartisan effort!
In all the different ways that revenue comes in to the state treasury, the working population and retirees are funding Michigan’s budget now.
In 2016, according to the House Fiscal Agency, Net Business Taxes were only 2% of state revenue. The other 98% of state revenue in 2016 came from:
Since 2011, all the different bills passed by the state legislature to cut business taxes were called by one expert, “death by a thousand cuts.”
This led to where Michigan is today—the population pays more and more while “tax refunds” are issued to corporations worth trillions of dollars. No wonder the schools, the roads and cities are starved for money!
Feb 20, 2017
Billionaire Dan Gilbert, founder and co-owner of Quicken Loans, continues his efforts to gobble up land in downtown Detroit. His latest proposal is to take over the land where the failed Wayne County jail construction project sits, so that he can build a new soccer stadium there. In exchange, he would build a jail and courthouse, to replace the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice–but outside of the downtown area.
Gilbert is often portrayed in the media as some kind of savior for the city of Detroit. He already owns nearly a hundred other buildings downtown, and is given credit for “revitalizing” the area.
Gilbert doesn’t do what he does for love of Detroit. He does it to make money–which he has done handsomely. Forbes magazine puts Gilbert’s personal worth at 4.6 billion dollars. He’s already gotten tax breaks on almost all the buildings he owns, most of which he got from the city for as little as $1 a building, plus two parking garages along the way.
Gilbert is pushing the proposal, saying he’ll save the county money by doing the construction for them. Yet his proposal contains a vague clause that would pay him a currently indeterminate “portion” of whatever unclear amount the county would save if someone else finished construction of the old jail project and its operations. In other words, in the long run, Gilbert will profit from this deal also.
What does Gilbert care if his new site makes it much less convenient for family members and friends of jail inmates to visit them? That’s exactly Gilbert’s point–get the poor people out of downtown. They don’t fit with the image he’d like for his downtown Detroit.
Money to build his “Gilbertville” came from the taxes and fees the population pays–and it was stolen from their neighborhoods and schools their children attend.
This is the vicious meaning of Detroit’s shiny new downtown.
Feb 20, 2017
Since the financial crisis of 2008, banks have stepped back from issuing mortgages designed to lure people into a risky contract. That doesn’t mean those mortgages have gone away–“nonbank financial institutions” like Quicken Loans have stepped in.
These nonbanks now dominate the mortgage market. In 2012, banks issued 65 percent of mortgages for newly purchased homes. By 2016, the banks issued only 18 percent of these loans, while nonbanks issued 73 percent. According to one commentator, “the market has moved to the nonbanks because the nonbanks’ appetite for risk is much higher.” This means they’re willing to issue the adjustable rate mortgages that are more likely to end in foreclosure.
Nonbanks are willing to issue these “risky” loans because their mortgages are insured by the government’s Federal Housing Authority. So if someone defaults on a mortgage for whatever reason, the government picks up the tab–though of course, the people who defaulted still get foreclosed on, and still get kicked out of their house.
The biggest nonbank, Quicken Loans, operates like an assembly line. Workers make hundreds of calls a day, hoping to get a customer on the line. If they get someone to agree to take out a mortgage, the call is passed to a licensed mortgage banker, who completes the application, and then passes it to processing. This is how Quicken can launch something like Rocket Mortgage, with its slogan “Push Button. Get Mortgage.” The company admits you have to push multiple buttons, but this is literally an app on your phone that you can use to get a mortgage.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should. Once again, someone is playing huge games with the mortgage market. More than two trillion dollars in mortgages were issued in 2016–not as much as the peak before the last crash, but growing. Someone is laying the groundwork for a new crash.
Feb 20, 2017
Two-year-old Heavenz Luster’s life has been permanently destroyed by lead paint chips and dust in a privately-owned apartment subsidized by the Washington, D.C. housing authority. A few months after moving in, Heavenz stopped sleeping at night, stopped eating, and became violent with her siblings. She has 24 times more lead in her blood than what federal health officials call "a concern," although no amount is considered safe.
The house passed four or more inspections, as city officials let the landlords simply paint over chipping old lead paint. As many as 85 percent of poisonous homes are Okayed for residence because city like federal policy is not to collect dust samples for lab testing.
Lead paint was proven to cause serious, permanent, mental and physical problems more than a century ago. But the U.S. waited 70 years after Europe to outlaw its use and didn’t set up any way to make or help property owners get rid of the old lead paint. D.C. still had more than 300,000 homes with lead paint in 2012.
The “most developed” country in the world is still in many ways the most backward.
Feb 20, 2017
Uber connects passengers wanting a ride with drivers, who pay the company a cut on each fare. France has 15,000 drivers working for Uber, most of whom drive their own cars.
This is presented by the politicians as a miraculous remedy for unemployment. Everyone can become their own boss. But, in fact, drivers must buy and fix their own car, and on top of that pay for their own Social Security and insurance. The company decides on the price of fares and the amount of the cut it takes. If a driver refuses to take a fare, he or she can be “taken off the list of drivers,” i.e. fired, with the click of a mouse by Uber management. If a business trip is cancelled or the weather is bad, the driver isn’t paid.
These supposedly independent Uber drivers are in reality chained to the company. They must work a certain number of hours of taking fares. After Uber’s commission, a driver would have to work 60 hours a week to make $1400 a month. Every year 30 percent of Uber drivers quit, but there is so much unemployment, the company is guaranteed a never-ending flow of new workers.
When Uber raised its own cut from 20 to 25% last December, the drivers organized demonstrations and blocked the road to the airport to demand better payment. They demanded to be legally counted as workers, not contractors, so they have some protection if there are accidents or they miss work due to sickness, plus paid days for vacations and a guaranteed salary.
Drivers like Uber’s, bicycle messengers, home health aides–all these workers, supposedly independent contractors, have simply changed the form of exploitation they work under. In the digital age, the self-employed work for Uber instead of trying to open a lunch cart, but the dilemma is just the same.
Whether people earn wages or work for themselves, in the public or private sector, workers’ power is the only check to the greed of the bosses.
In organizing against the attacks of their boss Uber, the drivers show that the nature of the capitalist economy is exploitation. The only antidote is the collective fight of workers.
Feb 20, 2017
This article is from the February 10th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
Four police officers accused of beating and raping a young man from the Parisian suburbs were suspended from their jobs. Only one was accused of carrying out the rape, with the other three accused of cooperating with this vicious attack.
Several hundred residents of the area where this horrible attack took place demonstrated on February 6. The mothers of the area at the head of the march cried, “Justice for Theo,” the young man of 22 years who was attacked. They expressed their anger: “We are suffocated here; how can our children continue to live with this?” The attack on Theo was particularly barbaric and humiliating. It was an example of the provocative attitudes of the police in neighborhoods of immigrants, which was not at all unusual.
The racism, provocation, stops for papers, humiliations, even violence from the police is a daily occurrence. Of course not all of the police act like vicious louts. But the way the politicians talk stirs up hatred against immigrants, especially against youth from these suburbs, against petty delinquents, permitting the police to feel that anything is allowed.
The police who attacked Theo were from a special unit, a brigade supposed to be a rapid response squad, set up by the Sarkozy government in 2010, especially to intervene in “difficult” neighborhoods. A young person working in the neighborhood said about this special squad: “They are in the area here, especially to act like cowboys in a milieu of Indians.” He continued, “It’s not only the attitude of the police, it’s also the lack of jobs, the lack of justice, showing everyone there is no equality here.”
Theo’s family is demanding justice for the young man, hospitalized after surgery to close the wounds inflicted by these police officers. They can count on support from inhabitants of the nearby area. A new protest is being prepared for February 11 at the Palace of Justice in downtown Paris.
Feb 20, 2017
This article follows from the previous one; it is from an editorial in the February 17th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The attack on young Theo is disgusting. His rape by four officers at a tobacco shop, when they pushed a truncheon into him, was an unbelievable racist assault.
And the injustice goes on: the courts ruled a tear in his anus of four inches was “unintentional.” Young people who threw stones at the police attackers were put in prison while the four officers were let go free. Are they supposed to be innocent? And what is Theo supposed to be accused of? In the eyes of the police, any young man passing them as they leave their homes is presumed guilty of something, they are “bamboulas” [the French equivalent of nigger??], as if that justifies it, according to the police union.
Former Prime Minister Francois Fillon claimed, “The police ... didn’t do anything there.” Really! In acting as torturers against their victim, the police perform their role as defenders of the capitalist social order. Le Pen, leader of the far right party, also defends the police, calling Theo a scumbag.
Theo survived and could testify. But young Adama Traore, dead on July 19 at the hands of the police in Beaumont sur Oise, what of him? The incident in Aulnay is not an isolated case. Each year, youth, and some not so young, are killed following police intervention. And the subsequent investigations never go well for the victims, because some police act as though they are entering enemy territory in these suburbs. That’s what people protested on Saturday at the downtown rally.
Certainly the police are the first line to face the violence of our society which is falling apart. But reinforcing police powers is not going to improve anything....
What’s needed is a fight against inequality and the mass unemployment that is like a gangrene of this society, denying any future prospects to the young in the working class neighborhoods.
Theo, at 22 years of age, was unemployed, whereas Charles Fillon, son of the former prime minister, also 22 years old, is a law student, with a job helping his father when he was a senator, earning almost 5,000 euros a month, for work which left not the slightest trace. Likewise his sister Marie has a job paying 3,800 euros a month. Today Fillon’s son is a business lawyer who earns in a year what Theo will not earn in his whole life.
That’s our society: racism, rejection, repression for all working class young people, with rights and privileges for the son of a senator.
This injustice, with youth like Theo crushed and children of the privileged guaranteed golden lives, is only an example showing that our entire society offers no life or work to some while considering others invaluable. For those with money, what they get in dividends each day is more than a working class family can see in a year, or even in a lifetime. The owner of L’Oreal luxury products gets more than a million euros a week in dividends from one of the largest fortunes in France, and doesn’t even pay taxes on it.
This business with Theo shows this lesson: the rich have all the rights, the poor have none. The police, the justice system, the entire apparatus of the state serves only the rich against the poor. This demonstration, like those last spring against the changes in the work laws, must be continued. The life of the youth in the neighborhoods is another aspect of an unjust social order.
We must be numerous at protests in the days and weeks to come, to express our anger against the bourgeois social order. We must be numerous and we must not accept these inequalities, the exploitation and racism which is a part of this social order. We must grow the numbers of those who take the side of those who no matter their race, religion, color or nationality, fight the domination of the rich in society, fight against all the violence it carries within it.
Feb 20, 2017
After five years of severe drought, a winter of very heavy rains in Northern California began to strain the flood control infrastructure of the state. The focus of this crisis has been at the damaged Oroville Dam in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, as 200,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes for several days, because of the threat of catastrophic flooding.
Oroville Dam is an important part of the massive infrastructure in California that moves water from the Sierra Nevadas down to the extremely profitable industrial farms owned by big corporations and land barons, which use more than 80 per cent of all the water. Oroville Dam is gigantic: high as a major city skyscraper and long as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Its reservoir can hold more than one trillion gallons of water. When the reservoir is full, the amount of water that spills out through the main, concrete spillway is equal to the full flow of the Hudson River, roaring down at 40 miles per hour, sending a plume of mist a thousand feet in the air.
On February 7, after several heavy rains, water that cascaded down the main Oroville Dam spillway tore a gaping hole at the bottom, sending massive amounts of debris into the Feather River and crippling the hydro-electric power station. To reduce the risk of further weakening, operators cut back the flow of water going through the spillway. With water continuing to flow into the reservoir, it filled up completely. Water then began to lap over the top of the emergency spillway, something that had never happened since the dam had opened 50 years ago. The emergency spillway is nothing but a 30-foot high concrete wall that is backed by a dirt hillside. The cascading water began to erode the hillside, threatening to undermine the 30-foot high concrete wall at the top.
As rains subsided, repair crews used heavy equipment round the clock to hurriedly patch both spillways with boulders and concrete slurry, while dam operators gradually let reservoir water flow through the damaged spillways, lowering the reservoir’s water level. A few days after the evacuation, top officials announced that it was safe enough to return home.
But the approach of a new series of heavy rain storms would soon test these measures. If a part of the dam would fail, such as the 30-foot high emergency spillway, it would be a true catastrophe. A wall of water would not only flood homes, towns, highway corridors and power stations, but destroy earthen river levees and other parts of the flood control infrastructure, leading to much worse floods and damage–California’s own version of Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in 2005.
This ongoing disaster could have been prevented. In 2005, three environmental groups and numerous engineers and scientists legally petitioned the federal and state authorities to reinforce the emergency spillway. But officials vetoed the measures, obviously in order to keep the cost of water as low as possible, especially for big agribusinesses.
This is typical of how the massive water infrastructure has been allowed to age without vital repair and maintenance.
And it has turned the massive California system of moving water into a kind of ticking time bomb.
Feb 20, 2017
Chicago Public Schools claims to be facing a massive budget crisis. They’ve cut the budget for every school, imposed four furlough days, cut money for sports buses and for teacher training, and now they’re threatening to cut a week off the school year.
Forest Claypool, the CEO of CPS who has made all these cuts, wants to blame the Republican governor. He came to Lindblom High School to announce he was going to sue the state.
But some of the students at Lindblom saw right through Claypool’s political show. One student shouted at him, “How are we supposed to feel like you’re on our side, when there are all these things you could do, but you’re not pursuing them. Your actions clearly contradict what you’re trying to convey.” As these students pointed out, Chicago is a rich city and money could be raised to fund the schools right here, from the rich people and corporations.
Claypool claimed that his hands are tied, that the political system is set up in a way that he can’t do anything about it. His lackey said that taxing big corporations in Chicago is not as steady of a source of income and would not be reliable. They tried to intimidate the students with corporate jargon.
But these students were not fooled!
Feb 20, 2017
Companies continue to announce new jobs.
Amazon said it would create more than 100,000 new full-time jobs over the next 18 months. IBM said it would add 25,000 jobs over the next four years. Walmart has said it will create 10,000 jobs this year. And so on.
These “new job” announcers carefully omit the fact that many new hires follow new layoffs. For example, Walmart cut 16,000 retail jobs in early 2016, and slashed another 7,000 jobs at its U.S. stores in late summer. In 2016 alone, Walmart fired more than double the number of workers that it pretends to be “adding” in 2017. Amazon’s 100,000 figure looks impressive, but other merchandisers have cut 250,000 jobs since 2012, leaving overall a 150,000 job deficit in merchandising.
What’s being created is more unemployment, not jobs!
Feb 20, 2017
Baltimore’s economy has been growing faster than anywhere else in the state, at more than a 5% rate compared to 2.6% for the rest of the state. Why is this happening in Baltimore? Luxury homes and condos are under construction.
If you can afford a townhouse with a $320,000 mortgage, you can move in, just one block from what was until recently the heart of Baltimore’s drug trade. And you have income above the average for the rest of Baltimore: $33,800 median income for black families and $63,400 median income for white families, none of whom could afford that mortgage. Even more expensive real estate has gone up around the Inner Harbor.
Does all this new real estate translate into more revenues from property taxes for Baltimore? It does not. Property taxes are the largest single revenue source for the city. Yet seven of the ten most recent expensive real estate additions to the Baltimore tax rolls have special tax breaks. That means the money doesn’t get to the city in property taxes collected, sometimes not for 10 or 20 years. So despite more construction, less property tax money is coming in than would be expected. The city has announced a deficit in the budget. And the poorer parts of town are still waiting for the demolition of blocks of boarded up houses.
To add to Baltimore’s deficit, city officials just approved the most expensive tax deal in Baltimore’s history, the new Port Covington expansion. The Port Covington TIF, a special kind of tax break that is paid for by more than 600 million dollars of city bonds, does not return regular property taxes until the bonds bought for the project are paid off–sometime in the next 30 years!
What’s even worse, Baltimore City public schools are funded by a formula based on the value of property. So while the value has been rising, the actual collection of taxes doesn’t show a similar increase. So over the past three years, the city has lost 75 million dollars in funding to the public schools.
That’s thanks to an agreement made by the politicians of both parties in the state legislature, with the Democrats the majority in the Maryland legislature for decades.
The whole tax arrangement is great for luxury property developers. It is anything but great for the children of Baltimore City public schools, who need far more funding than even the rise in property values would allow.
Feb 20, 2017
Regina Elsea was killed last year when the robot she was trying to repair suddenly moved and crushed her. She was working for Ajin USA, a car parts company, earning $8.50 an hour.
Chambers County, where the company was located, offered tax breaks and other financial aid to companies to locate there. Encouraged by such free taxpayer-backed money, car companies, with their high-tech robots and technologies, started to move to the region. People were hired, but most of the wages remained very low. In addition, much of the work was supplied through staffing agencies and was temporary.
Elsea was not an Ajin employee. She was employed through a staffing agency, Alliance Total Solutions. About 250 of the almost 800 workers at the Ajin’s plant were temps.
These companies pushed their inexperienced workers to the end. In her last weeks, Elsea worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, hoping to qualify for a full-time position and an hourly wage of about $12, according to the Financial Times.
This death was preventable. Ajin, like many other companies in the U.S., was cited several times for failure to provide its workers a safe work environment. But nothing was done about it.
Current U.S. government officials, like many before them, promise to bring or create jobs in the U.S. But, this is just the familiar hogwash. What workers find is work with low pay that demands long and hard hours, has no benefits, offers no future. Such work also brings danger, and in the case of Elsea, death.
Feb 20, 2017
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Donald Trump said these openly racist words during his election campaign. And after getting elected, Trump has continued to attack immigrant workers. He has bragged about the raids and deportations carried out by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
Deportation has always been a threat hanging over the heads of the people who live and work in the U.S. without legal papers, whose number today is estimated at about 11 million. But Trump’s open racism against “Mexicans”–his code word for working-class immigrants from South of the border, combined with increased publicity about recent ICE raids and deportations, will no doubt make undocumented workers and their loved ones feel more threatened than usual.
All this, in the end, amounts to a terror campaign run by U.S. immigration authorities–aimed at keeping undocumented workers in fear, rather than keeping them out of the U.S.
How else could it be explained that there are more than 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.? The U.S.-Mexico border is already highly militarized, and the U.S. works closely with the Mexican government to control the flow of immigrants from Central America through Mexico. U.S. authorities could no doubt stop a big part of this flow of immigrants from the South, if that was their goal.
But the authorities don’t want to do that. And that’s because companies in the U.S. have always relied on undocumented workers as a low-wage labor force–precisely because they have no rights and are always threatened by deportation. The routine operations of ICE–the raids, detentions and deportations–serve the purpose of maintaining that pressure on low-wage immigrant workers. And today, with the President of the U.S. openly attacking that section of the working class, this terror regime is probably more effective.
But if native-born workers think that this terror campaign against immigrant workers doesn’t affect them, they are mistaken. Such divisions only weaken the working class. If one section of the working class is forced to accept low wages, it enables companies to impose lower wages on all workers.
This attack on immigrant workers is aimed at the entire working class.
Feb 20, 2017
A right-wing protest against Planned Parenthood in Detroit, Michigan turned into a women’s rights rally for it. The pro-choice rally dwarfed the smaller number of people who had come out to attack it. A spirited and determined group of 300 or more women came out to defend women’s access to medical care, as well as their right to make their own decisions about abortion, birth control and other reproductive issues.
Planned Parenthood provides essential services ranging from HIV prevention, STD testing, cancer screenings and family planning services. And while in Michigan this agency is one of 29 family-planning providers that receive federal funding, Planned Parenthood sees about 65 percent of the state’s poorer patients who qualify for government assistance.
This attack on Planned Parenthood is an attack on women’s right to choose to control their own bodies. It is particularly an attack on working class women, who, for the most part, have no other place to turn to for their health care needs.
It is an outrage in this day and age that right-wing fanatics and religious fundamentalists still try to impose their vicious ideas on the whole population.
Feb 20, 2017
On Thursday, February 16, thousands of immigrants across the country stayed home from work and school and demonstrated in “A Day without Immigrants.”
In Chicago, immigrants organized a demonstration and march of about 1,000 people. Hundreds demonstrated in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston. Detroit had about 150 demonstrators, and even Newark, New Jersey had perhaps 100.
Demonstrations of a few hundred or perhaps a thousand people may not sound like much. But they protested in a climate aimed at terrorizing them.
Trump has promised to deport all eleven million undocumented immigrants, and to build a wall. He bragged about the people he did deport. That immigrants organized and demonstrated against these threats can only be a good thing.
This Day Without Immigrants by itself will not back Trump off or stop the threats against immigrants. But for people who participated, it took courage. It showed that there are people ready to refuse Trump’s obscene fear-mongering. For them and their communities that can be something to build on.