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
Mar 6, 2017
More jobs, better pay, less crime, rebuilding cities, rebuilding infrastructure, better schools, better health care, less terrorism, more peace and more prosperity–those were only some of the promises that President Trump made in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on February 28.
But look at what he wants to spend money on!
First, Trump says he wants “the largest increase in national defense spending in American history.” That spells more wars and terrorism. But it also means much greater profits for the big U.S. banks, oil companies and manufacturers. A bigger, more powerful U.S. military imposes the U.S. capitalist class’s rule over working people and the poor all over the world, while U.S. companies steal valuable resources. More military spending also brings richer and fatter government contracts for countless U.S. companies.
Second, Trump says he wants to cut taxes for American companies. “It will be a big, big cut,” boasted Trump. In fact, there are many different tax cuts on their way. Certainly, there will be a big cut in the corporate tax rate. There will also be a massive tax cut on the two trillion dollars in U.S. corporate profits stashed abroad when those companies bring that money back to the U.S. One company, Apple, has 250 billion dollars in cash sitting abroad, which is more than the entire economy of small countries like New Zealand, Viet Nam or Ecuador.
U.S. companies always complain about high taxes, which Trump echoes. But, in reality, their share of the federal tax burden has been slashed by more than two-thirds since the 1950s. Many big companies, like GM, GE and Boeing, consistently don’t pay any federal taxes–and even get tax rebates. Tax time is when the U.S. government pays them! Of course, the capitalist class is never satisfied. It always wants more–which Trump’s “big, big tax cut” will deliver.
Finally, throughout Trump’s speech were slightly disguised government giveaways to various other corporate sectors. Trump’s big crackdown on immigrant workers means big profits for private prison companies and their suppliers. Trump’s brand of education reform, what he calls school choice, means tens of billions in taxpayer dollars for private, for-profit schools, testing companies and suppliers. (See the article in this issue on “school choice” in Michigan, which serves as a model for the entire country.) The fact that Trump had a meeting with the heads of the big health insurance companies a day before his speech signals that no matter what health care legislation passes, their profits will be protected. And finally, all his talk about infrastructure spending really amounts to not just more fat government contracts to U.S. engineering and construction companies, but more giveaways of government-owned infrastructure to private companies for their profit.
No wonder the U.S. stock market leapt by more than 300 points the day after Trump’s speech! No wonder the U.S. stock market is higher than ever!
Trump “forgot” to mention that the entire cost of all these giveaways will fall on the working class. Trump expects workers to sacrifice with our lives and tax money for his wars and military build-ups. He expects workers to pay for all those corporate tax cuts and government giveaways through ever more cuts in vital government services and programs for working people, including more cuts to so-called entitlements, that is, Social Security pensions, as well as government-provided health care through Medicare for the elderly, and Medicaid for the working poor.
Trump’s big slogan “America First” is nothing more than another scam, a way of dividing working people against each other. Our enemies are not working people in other countries. Nor are they immigrants coming to this county in order to escape U.S. wars or economic hardship. No, we all face the same capitalists.
Mar 6, 2017
Last month’s heavy damage to the main concrete spillway at the massive Oroville Dam in Northern California was “an accident waiting to happen from Day One,” said Don Colson, a retired engineer, who worked on the design of the dam in the 1960s. It caused the emergency evacuation of 200,000 residents.
As Colson pointed out to the Los Angeles Times, the original design of the spillway was flawed; it was not built to withstand the force of massive amounts of roiling water traveling at more than 50 miles per hour that can chew through concrete and even steel. Nor was the spillway properly maintained or repaired; even the soil and rocks that support the heavy structure were eroded and damaged by the roots of trees and by water running downhill outside the spillway.
This failure of Oroville’s main spillway was compounded when the emergency spillway also crumbled when it was put to use. The emergency spillway had never been repaired and reinforced, despite the warnings of engineers and scientists 12 years before.
These structural failures within the Oroville Dam are no surprise. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has classified 14,000 dams in this country as “high hazard potential.” These include the biggest, most spectacular dams. The spillways at Hoover Dam have been used twice, and both times they sustained heavy damage, similar to what happened at Oroville. Glen Canyon Dam, also on the Colorado River, sustained massive damage in 1983, when its underground spillways were put in use.
The entire infrastructure of dams and levees is supposed to provide safety and security. Instead, because the government has been constantly shifting funding away from infrastructure funding in order to funnel money to the capitalist class through tax breaks and subsidies, the dams and levees are crumbling, making future floods and catastrophes inevitable.
Mar 6, 2017
It was a nightmare for Stephanie Scott. On the evening of February 17, the street under her SUV collapsed, and the car tipped over and fell 20 feet into a giant sinkhole. The 48-year-old woman managed to open the door and climb on top of the overturned car. But she was still 10 feet below street level and unable to get out of the hole.
Scott said she thought she was going to die; and it wasn’t necessarily an exaggeration. Shortly after she was rescued by firefighters, another car, a minivan that had stopped on the edge of the sinkhole, fell onto Scott’s car, as more of the road caved in.
City officials called the sinkhole in the Studio City area of Los Angeles “an accident,” and blamed it on a “combination of” heavy rain and sewer failure.
City engineers were more precise, though. They said the top of the concrete sewer pipe, which is 89 years old, had eroded away, as aging concrete tends to do. So the soil and asphalt above the pipe collapsed.
Two days later, as crews were working on repairing the sewer, city engineer Gary Lee Moore was still worried. “The last thing we want is to have that area collapse,” he said, “and then sewage ... could then back up and come out on the street”–which would pose a genuine health hazard for thousands of residents.
No, the collapse of this sewer pipe was no accident. City officials are only trying to cover the fact that they have been neglecting the maintenance of L.A.’s aging infrastructure–making it more and more prone to failure, and turning it into a ticking time bomb threatening the whole population.
Mar 6, 2017
After more than two years of “investigation,” federal authorities say there is no reason to file charges against LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District). The iPad scandal case dates back to June of 2013, when the L.A. school board approved a 1.3-billion-dollar contract for Apple to provide 650,000 iPads to the school district.
It turns out that tens of thousands of iPads distributed to schools could not even be used. Pearson, the giant publishing company that had partnered with Apple for the contract, had not even bothered to provide the software it was paid handsomely for.
Then it came to light that there had not even been a proper bidding process before giving the huge contract to Apple and Pearson; and that the companies were overcharging the district.
The publicity around the scandal not only brought school officials down; two months later, in December 2014, the FBI demonstratively raided the school district headquarters and confiscated 20 boxes of documents. To date, however, no charges have been filed.
If they are acting as if this whole iPad fiasco was just business as usual ... well, it is. Under this capitalist system, big companies see public treasuries just as a cookie jar they can dip their greedy hands into. And government officials, at every level, are at their service, keeping the lid of the jar wide open for them.
Mar 6, 2017
For three days in the beginning of March, Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park, Michigan residents were exposed to possible health hazards when a purported equipment malfunction at a main water treatment plant caused water pressure to drop to levels that could allow bacterial contamination. In spite of all the glowing descriptions of Detroit as a “reborn city,” descriptions that attracted wealthy investors and residents alike to downtown and midtown areas of the city, on those days Detroit was not a great place to live.
Notification of a potentially dangerous situation was handled in a haphazard way. Public alerts did not happen until well into the second day of the situation. People were instructed to boil all water to be ingested, but tens of thousands got the message after they had ingested it. Instead of widespread immediate notification like what happens in an “Amber Alert” or a Tornado Warning, news and information trickled out very slowly.
WHERE the boil-water area was and WHAT people needed to do took far too long to be communicated.
In this “information age” it IS possible to send a text saying, do NOT use the water at Henry Ford Hospital, and the Detroit Medical Center, in the New Center Area, in the Wayne State Area, in the Downtown/Riverfront area. There were 29 schools in the boil-water area and on the first day, teachers knew nothing about it!
Whether it was the Great Lakes Water Authority or whether it was city or state or county officials who dropped the ball, the lack of information was inexcusable. There is no “world class city” without clean water, and no fancy PR campaign can excuse the failure to notify the population of a health risk.
Mar 6, 2017
The incompetence displayed by the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) in dealing with the recent Boil Water Advisory comes as no surprise to those who know the GLWA’s history. The GLWA took control of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) as part of the bankruptcy agreement imposed on the city of Detroit in 2014 by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, and his hand-picked city emergency manager, Kevyn Orr.
The deal put together to bring about the takeover allows the GLWA to cut the DWSD’s workforce from 1400 to 500, and since the takeover has indeed already laid off 41 percent of the workforce. Those laid off include many with decades of experience and a great deal of knowledge of the city’s water system.
The layoffs did not occur without a militant fight by water department workers to save their jobs. In 2014, the DWSD threatened to subcontract out 80% of workers’ jobs. In response, a portion of the workforce in AFSCME Local 207, led by its late militant President, John Riehl, carried out a 5-day strike to fight the layoffs. Despite the workers being forced backed to work following the firing of 36 workers, workers temporarily prevented job cuts and the fired workers were all reinstated.
Since the takeover, however, workers were laid off and forced to re-apply for their jobs. Though many were brought back, most were forced to accept the re-classification of their jobs. Many then lost seniority protections after the slashing of jobs began.
The “malfunction” that resulted in the Boil Water Advisory is a harbinger of things to come due to the takeover of the DWSD. Besides the layoffs, the GLWA has forced the DWSD to reduce its budget, which will result in the closing of water treatment plants and fewer repairs to prevent flooding from water main breaks.
Mar 6, 2017
On February 23, 1917 (March 8 according to the Western calendar), the revolution that would shake the world for decades began in Petrograd, once again called Saint Petersburg, the capital of Czarist Russia. While the heads of the European powers led their people to kill each other in the trenches of World War I for three years, the working class of Petrograd, after five days of strikes and street fighting, overthrew Czar Nicholas II and the regime of the czars that had ruled for centuries.
“The 23rd of February was International Women’s Day. The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organization called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organization, and a most militant one—the Vyborg borough-committee, all workers—was opposing strikes.”.
But, on February 23, “the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metal workers with an appeal for support. With reluctance...the Bolsheviks agreed to this, and they were followed by the workers—Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike, one must call everyone into the streets and take the lead.”
That day there were 90,000 strikers, demonstrations, meetings in the working class neighborhoods. “A mass of women, not all of them workers, flocked to the municipal duma (the city council) demanding bread. It was like demanding milk from a he-goat,” writes Trotsky.
The next day, “the workers come to the factories in the morning; instead of going to work, they hold meetings; then begin processions toward the center of the city. New districts and new groups of the population are drawn into the movement. The slogan “Bread!” is crowded out or obscured by louder slogans: “Down with the autocracy!” “Down with the war!” The workers’ anger at the war and its privations added to their desire to clear away the hated Czarist regime.
“On the 25th, the strike spread wider. According to the government’s figures, 240,000 workers participated that day. The most backward layers are following up the vanguard. Already a good number of small establishments are on strike. The street-cars are at a standstill. Business concerns are closed. Attempts are made to organize street meetings; a series of armed encounters with the police occurs....”
“The mounted police open fire. A speaker falls wounded. Shots from the crowd kill a police inspector, wound the chief of police and several other policemen. Bottles, firecrackers and hand grenades are thrown at the gendarmes. The war has taught this art....”
“During this whole day, the crowds move from neighborhood to neighborhood, violently chased by the police, contained and forced back by the cavalry and certain detachments of infantry....
The crowd has a ferocious hatred of the police.... It is different with the soldiers. When soldiers are outside of the barracks, on sentry duty or patrol, or marching in formation, male and female workers gather and exchange friendly words with the troops. It is a new stage due to the development of the strike and the contact between workers and the army.
The war had changed the perspective of the soldiers. Under their uniforms, peasants merged with the working class. They were politicized and shared the same hatred of the war and of their officers. Even the troops specialized in repression, like the Cossacks, “had enough and wanted to go home,” writes Trotsky.
Little by little throughout the city, contact between the soldiers and the workers multiplied. “Thus in the streets and squares, by the bridges, at the barrack-gates, is waged a ceaseless struggle—now dramatic, now unnoticeable—but always a desperate struggle, for the heart of the soldier.... a great role is played by women workers in the relation between workers and soldiers. They go up to the lines of soldiers more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: ‘Put down your bayonets—join us!’ The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd.... the revolution makes another forward step.”
Trotsky further recounts how the Bolshevik Kayurov addressed the Cossacks: “‘Brothers—Cossacks, help the workers in a struggle for their peaceable demands; you see how the Pharaohs (the mounted police) treat us, hungry workers. Help us!’....” The Cossacks glanced at each other in some special way,’ Kayurov continues, “and we were hardly out of the way before they rushed into the fight.’ And a few minutes later, near the station gate, the crowd were tossing a Cossack in their arms who before their eyes had slaughtered a police inspector with his saber.”
The morning of February 27, “the workers streamed again to the factories, and in open meetings resolved to continue the struggle.... To continue the struggle today would mean to summon an armed insurrection.” In reality, wrote Trotsky, their task “was nine-tenths behind. The revolutionary pressure of the workers on the barracks fell in with the existing revolutionary movement of the soldiers.” One after the other, the regiments of the Petrograd garrison went over to the side of the revolution, and each mutinous regiment tried to convince others to assure itself that no retreat was any longer possible.
“During the 27th of February the crowd liberated without bloodshed from the many jails of the capital, all political prisoners.” By the evening of the 27th, the capital was in the hands of the insurgents. Within a few days, Moscow and the provincial cities fell and the Czar abdicated.
“The insurrection triumphed. But to whom did it hand over the power snatched from the monarchy?” asks Trotsky.
Once the fall of the czar became inevitable, some deputies in the Duma (the national assembly conceded by the Czar after the 1905 revolution) began to form a provisional government. But the real power was elsewhere. On the evening of February 27, at the initiative of the leaders of the socialist parties and the unions, 250 delegates from the factories and the insurgent regiments of the army gathered for the first meeting of the Soviet (Council in Russian).
“The experience of the Soviets of 1905 was chiseled into the consciousness of the workers. At every lift of the movement, even in war time, the idea of soviets was almost automatically reborn,” writes Trotsky. “From the moment of its formation, the Soviet, in the person of its Executive Committee, begins to function as a sovereign....In order to remove financial resources from the hands of the officials of the old power, the Soviet decides to occupy the State Bank, the Treasury, the Mint, and the Printing Offices with a revolutionary guard. The tasks and functions of the Soviet grow unceasingly under pressure from the masses.... The workers, the soldiers, and soon also the peasants, will from now on turn only to the Soviet. In their eyes, the Soviet becomes the focus of all hopes and all authority, an incarnation of the revolution itself.”
In these days of February, the determination of the working class had overthrown the Czar. Yet this was just the first stage of the Russian Revolution.
Mar 6, 2017
Between February 23 and February 27, 1917 (March 8 and March 12 according to our calendar), the determination of the working class of Petrograd mobilized in the streets forced the czar to abdicate. The workers recognized only one power: that of the soviet, the assembly of representatives of the masses in struggle. The paradox is that this soviet, in the first few days of the February revolution, handed power to a provisional government that represented no one but the bourgeoisie. Trotsky writes about this paradox in his History of the Russian Revolution.
The first session of the Executive Committee of the Soviet met on February 27. “Delegates from the mutinied regiments made speeches of greeting at this meeting. Among their number were completely grey soldiers, shell-shocked as it were by the insurrection, and still hardly in control of their tongues. But they were just the ones who found the words which no orator could find. That was one of the most moving scenes of the revolution, now first feeling its power, feeling the unnumbered masses it has aroused, the colossal tasks, the pride in success, the joyful failing of the heart at the thought of the morrow which is to be still more beautiful than today....
“However, even in those very first days of victory, when the new power of the revolution was forming itself with fabulous speed and unconquerable strength, those socialists who stood at the head of the Soviet were already looking around with alarm to see if they could find a real ‘boss.’ They took it for granted that power ought to pass over to the bourgeoisie....The workers, the soldiers, and soon also the peasants, will from now on turn only to the Soviet. In their eyes, the Soviet becomes the focus of all hopes and all authority, an incarnation of the revolution itself.
“That the power was from the very first moment in the hands of the Soviet–upon that question the Duma members less than anybody else could cherish any illusion.” According to the testimony of one deputy, “the Soviet seized all the Post and Telegraph offices, the wireless, all the Petrograd railroad stations, all the printing establishments, so that without its permission it was impossible to send a telegram, to leave Petrograd, or to print an appeal.”
“How did it happen that in such a situation the liberals turned out to be in power?” asks Trotsky. It happened because the socialists who found themselves at the head of the Soviet estimated that “‘the power destined to replace czarism must be only a bourgeois power....’ On the evening of March 1, representatives of the Executive Committee appeared at a meeting of the Duma Committee, in order to discuss the conditions upon which the soviets would support the new government. The program of the democrats flatly ignored the question of war, republic, land, eight-hour day, and confined itself to one single demand: to give the left parties freedom of agitation. An example of disinterestedness for all peoples and all ages! Socialists, having all the power in their hands, and upon whom alone it depended whether freedom of agitation should be given to others or not, hand over the power to their ‘class enemy’ upon the condition that the latter should promise them...freedom of agitation!”
“In giving their confidence to the socialists the workers and soldiers found themselves, quite unexpectedly, expropriated politically. They were bewildered, alarmed, but did not immediately find a way out....The proletariat and the peasantry voted for the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries not as compromisers, but as opponents of the czar, the capitalists, and the landowners. But in voting for them they created a partition-wall between themselves and their own aims.”
The Russian Revolution of 1917 in the SPARK Paper
In the coming issues of the SPARK paper, we will continue to publish articles about the events that shook Russia and the world 100 years ago. We will rely on testimonies and writings from the revolutionaries of that period.
Mar 6, 2017
District health officials botched Zika testing for more than 400 Washington, D.C. residents last year, including 300 pregnant women. At least 9 of the 300 pregnant women were incorrectly told they did not have the virus when in fact they were infected. Zika virus can have potentially devastating consequences for pregnant women. The mistakes have prompted retesting for the Zika virus of all the specimens by the CDC.
The mistake was caught when Anthony Tran, the new head of the lab, discovered that Zika markers weren’t being found in any specimens. Even the control test which should have tested positive for Zika, tested negative.
The D.C. public health lab, like most labs around the country, is very busy. In addition to testing food and substances for the government, they test water pollution in the Potomac and help identify strains of the flu virus that should be included in next year’s vaccines. Add to that the Zika crisis which strained an already overloaded lab.
In the year before it confronted Zika, the public health lab was shedding its most experienced staff, including the loss of its virology director. In March 2016, three of the lab’s six quality assurance jobs were vacant. One lab worker acknowledged that preparing for Zika in the early months of last year with a thin staff was “a mad scramble.”
Cutbacks have crippled the lab, forcing it to limp along with too few workers, inexperienced workers to boot. And who pays for the mistakes caused by the cutbacks? Pregnant women, and babies born with microcephaly and other major defects. This is what it means when the health of the population is not the top priority.
Mar 6, 2017
Life expectancy will continue to climb substantially for residents of most industrialized nations. Not so in the United States, according to a scientific study published by the Lancet, a leading medical journal.
South Korean women will be expected to live to an average of 90 years old by 2030, when human beings would break the 90-year barrier for the first time. The reason is that “South Korea has a remarkable investment in early childhood nutrition, and has been taking advantage of medical advances and technology across its population and has some of the world’s lowest obesity and hypertension rates.”
In December 2016, the U.S. government reported that the U.S. life expectancy had declined in 2015 for the first time since 1993, in agreement with the scientific study.
The main reasons for the decline in the U.S. is that this country has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates as well as the highest obesity rates (a marker for bad nutrition). The U.S. is the only one without universal health insurance coverage and has the “largest share of unmet health-care needs due to financial costs,” the researchers wrote. In the U.S., people have bad nutrition and health education at the beginning of their lives, and later, during their adult lives, get diagnosed too little and too late due to lack of universal medical care.
The U.S. has superb medical technology and treatment quality according to these researchers. However, not all have access to this superb treatment. “If you have good insurance and you live on the East Coast and the West Coast, you probably get the best health care in the world,” concluded the scientists.
That is, if you are rich you can get good health care and live long, while working class life expectancy is lowered by the vast inequities of the U.S. health care system.
Mar 6, 2017
Protests erupted in Anaheim, a city 50 miles south of Los Angeles, after a video appeared on the internet showing an off-duty Los Angeles police officer dragging a 13-year-old boy, who demanded the man release him. The off-duty cop had initiated the fight after he accused some teenagers of walking across his lawn. When some of the boy’s friends tried to free him from the man’s clutches, the man pulled a pistol from his belt and fired it. The shot prompted many of the teenagers to flee.
In a statement after the shooting, Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait appeared to condemn the actions of the off-duty cop. “Like many, I am deeply disturbed and frankly angered by what it shows,” said Tait. “The video shows an adult wrestling with a 13-year-old kid and ultimately firing a gun... It should never have happened.”
Yet, the police did not arrest the off-duty cop. But they did arrest the 13-year-old boy and another teenager. And when 300 demonstrators took to the streets to protest police brutality, the police arrested 24 protesters.
Because in this society, the government and police always defend the right of police to fire their guns at anyone they want... including teenagers for walking across a cop’s lawn.
Mar 6, 2017
During the run-up to the February, 2015 election, the Chicago city council and Mayor Rahm Emanuel passed a law to raise the minimum wage to $13 an hour. Emanuel said this was a way to lift working families out of poverty.
That was a big fat lie.
First, the $13 doesn’t go into effect until 2019. The current minimum wage is just $10.50. And even $13 isn’t enough to live decently in Chicago with its high cost of living: the Living Wage Calculator developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that a single adult working full time in Cook County with one child would need $24.91 an hour.
Then these increases don’t apply to everyone. The city said the raise would help 270,000 workers in Chicago. But more than 20,000 workers are “exempt” from the raise because of all kinds of exceptions written into the law. This includes young workers under 18, student workers, disabled workers, new hires in their first 90 days on the job, and people in transition programs for the homeless or those who just got out of prison. It even included the city’s own crossing guards!
And the city doesn’t even enforce the raise for workers who are supposed to get it. In order to complain about a boss who doesn’t pay the new minimum wage, workers have to fill out a form and sign it–and that form will then be shared with their employer! As of December, 2016, the city had gotten 454 complaints about bosses not paying the higher minimum wage. The city had only investigated 112 of them, and had recovered a total of just $82,000 for 51 workers. And the city had imposed exactly zero dollars in fines on bosses that broke the law.
No surprise: Election-year promises from the Democratic Party politicians who run cities like Chicago will never help workers get decent wages. That will require that workers mobilize their own forces.
Mar 6, 2017
If anyone wants to know what the Trump administration has planned for the country’s school systems, they only have to take a look at what has been done in Michigan over the past twenty years.
Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and her millionaire buddies, pushed through the most permissive charter school set-up in the country, allowing just about anyone to set up a charter, with virtually no regulation or oversight. Michigan has among the highest number of charter schools in the country; and eighty percent of Michigan’s charters are run by for-profit companies! That means a billion dollars of public school money going to for-profit charters every single year.
Second, Michigan set up a “School Reform Office,” which requires public schools–not charters–to meet an arbitrary test of “success,” or risk closure by the state.
Earlier this year, the School Reform Office announced a list of 38 schools that could face closing because of “poor performance.” All of these schools are in poor and working class districts. Twenty-four of them are in the city of Detroit, and have been controlled by state-appointed managers for years! If these schools close, the entire eastern half of Detroit will be without any public high school.
What we have seen in Michigan–and especially in Detroit, in Pontiac, in Highland Park, Benton Harbor, Muskegon Heights, Saginaw and other mostly majority-black, working class districts–has been a systematic dismantling of the public school system and a replacement by a for-profit system.
Performance has not gotten better–in fact, it has gotten worse or at best has stayed the same. But Betsy DeVos’ friends have sucked billions from the school systems into their own private accounts.
This is the reality behind what Trump offers to the rest of the country’s schools as “choice.”
This was, in fact, happening before Trump. Both George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” were attacks on working-class public schools and established charters across the country. And it is not a new thing for the capitalist class to want to make money off of public schools. As early as 1997 a Wall Street banker said public schools “are ripe for takeover by private management companies.” Adding, “Wall Street is interested in any big-spending industry.”
With every successful attack, the ruling class has been emboldened to take more. Now it looks like they’re eyeing public school systems across the country.
Mar 6, 2017
Two men, originally from India, were shot at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kansas. Srinivas Kuchibhotla was killed while Alok Madasani was wounded, along with 24-year-old Ian Grillot who tried to intervene. They were shot by a white, ex-Navy man, Adam Purinton.
The two men were hanging out, drinking whiskey when Purinton began harassing them. “What visa are you here on? Are you legal? Get out of my country.” After other patrons complained, Purinton was thrown out, only to return later and start shooting.
Purinton later told an Applebee’s bartender 70 miles away that “he shot and killed two Iranian people in Olathe.” So he apparently thought the two were Iranian.
President Trump just got through making a speech about “violent” immigrants, reinforcing his call for building a wall along the southern border, and banning people from seven countries from entering the U.S.; a list that includes Iranians. So while White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, rejected any link between President Trump’s policy agenda and the shooting, there clearly is a link.
Trump talks about the violence between native-born and immigrants. And there is violence. What he doesn’t say is that immigrants are most often the victims of that violence and not the reverse.
Mar 6, 2017
On March 1, six Baltimore City police detectives and their supervisor were arrested and indicted on federal racketeering charges including stopping people on the street who had not committed crimes, shaking them down (basically robbing them) of thousands of dollars, intimidating witnesses, filing false court paperwork and making fraudulent overtime claims... things that city residents in poor areas have been complaining about for years.
These charges grew out of a DEA investigation of drug dealing in Baltimore that led to one of the cops. The cops were all members of a special unit tasked with... getting illegal guns off the streets.
Federal prosecutors have dropped five cases that were based on the testimony of one or more of these officers. The Baltimore City State’s Attorney said the state has dropped four cases, and will have to drop more.
Were these cops even worse than other bad cops? Is that why they have been indicted while other bad cops have not?
According to the Baltimore Sun, over $500,000 has been paid to settle lawsuits filed against these officers for use of excessive force and other infractions.
These seven cops were paid almost $400,000 for overtime claims in just the last year alone, much of which is now known to be fraudulent. This overtime money almost doubled their earnings. But for sure they are not the only Baltimore City cops making fraudulent overtime claims.
These cops were just extremely brazen and brash about their crimes... more than most other cops who do some of the same things. That is probably why they have been arrested and charged, while other cops have not been.