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
Jan 22, 2018
With the paralysis surrounding a government shutdown continuing, the chaos and drama surrounding the Donald Trump presidency continues to intensify.
The government shutdown of non-essential services was the result of unsuccessful negotiations between Democrats and Republicans to simply extend the current budget through February 16. It occurred despite the fact that weeks ago, Trump staged a press event to show that he would sign a bi-partisan bill with no protest.
In an abrupt turn, just days later, he reversed himself. What he had called “A Bill of Love” evaporated and was replaced by a barrage of racial attacks on would-be immigrants that directly denigrated almost a quarter of the world population. With a racist shot heard around the world, he said, “why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”, disparaging the whole continent of Africa plus Haiti and El Salvador. He recommended, instead, increasing immigration from “countries like Norway” where the population is overwhelmingly white.
The president’s behavior provoked rightful protests from around the world. Not at all dissuaded by the outcry, Trump moved from one attack to another, on immigrants, on the poor, on Medicaid, even on Republican senators who were trying to pass the budget bill. The ranking Republican senator said Republicans would move forward on the budget legislation, “as soon as we figure out what he (Trump) wants.”
So, maybe it is not a coincidence that in the last several days, new information about Trump’s inability to govern is circulating. In addition to the already advancing federal investigation of the Trump campaign on suspicion of conspiracy and obstruction of justice, prosecutors announced their intent to pursue interviews with Steve Bannon, Trump’s previous right-hand man, and with the president himself. The third leg of the investigation, which is financial, focuses on possibilities of money laundering by Trump and his cronies.
The higher powers seem to be keeping all of their options open for dealing with Trump. The current paralysis of the government as a result of his chaotic behavior may turn out to be too much even for those who really run things: Wall Street financiers. Trump may be able to deflect blame onto the Democrats to survive one last round. But eventually, even those wealthy bank owners, speculators and bosses who benefit from his tax cuts and deregulation proclamations may worry about the results such instability brings. The shutdown of the government, while always amendable, has its costs and consequences.
And if they can’t get Trump out or don’t choose to, what solution then?
While the Democrats would like us to believe that they are a solution, what are they really offering? Throughout this whole miserable year, the Democrats have waited in the wings, focusing on replacing the Republicans, encouraging voters to wait for 2018 and 2020 elections to vote the Republicans out.
Who has the time to wait for these Democratic millionaires to come forward one more time to explain away why they can’t fix “the mess the Republicans left behind?”
In fact, the situation for the working class drastically worsened throughout the eight years of the Obama administration. The working class has been under attack, losing on every front. Trump, as much of a mess as he makes, will go at some point, leaving a swath of destruction in his wake. But the problems will remain for us.
Maybe the Trump chaos will prove to be too disruptive for the powers that be; maybe they will even remove him, but that won’t take the working class out of the crisis we are in. A real fight to replace this rotten system can take down in its wake the petty tyrants like Trump and the pretenders in the Democratic party, and replace it with government run by and for the working class.
Jan 22, 2018
Yup, Donald Trump, the U.S. president, used that word to describe Haiti and the entire continent of Africa, while praising countries like Norway.
The words are bad enough, but they are symbols of something much worse: the vicious ideas that Trump and others like him try to peddle. Everybody who saw the comment knew immediately the racist message Trump was sending–black immigrants were not wanted, and white ones were.
The countries Trump denigrated are all poor. So let’s talk about why they are poor–the truth which demagogues like Trump trample on.
U.S., Spanish and French capitalists stole the wealth produced by labor in Haiti and Latin America. That’s what impoverishes them.
Let’s talk about the European and American slave traders who stole 20 million human beings and their labor power from Africa. Let’s talk about the colonial system which drained Africa’s mineral wealth to enrich European industry. Let’s talk about U.S., French, Dutch, British and German armies that ransacked large areas of the African continent in order to steal its gold, coltan, platinum, oil, diamonds, uranium, and rare earth metals.
Who are the people who come from what Trump calls “shithole countries”? These people are all the migrants, stolen as the slaves were from Africa, or driven to leave their countries by the poverty that capitalist armies enforced on them. Not only Haitians but, in earlier years, British paupers, the Germans, Irish, Italians, Polish, Jewish–and all the others. Mexicans saw a big part of their country stolen from them, and the people with it.
Your ancestors came here from somewhere else. And most of them came from what were called in their time, “shithole countries.”
Donald Trump–and his race-baiting, racist spewing ilk–would like us to forget our history.
Above all, they want us to forget that if we are becoming more and more impoverished in this country–if THIS country is becoming more and more of a “shithole”–it’s because the capitalist class is stealing an ever bigger share of the wealth our labor produces here.
We, the working people, have the forces needed to stop this impoverishment. We can make the vast fight required to let us impose what we need. But to do that, we need class solidarity, unity of all our forces–which we won’t have if we let vicious demagogues set us at each other’s throats.
Jan 22, 2018
Donald Trump keeps upping the ante in his attacks on immigrants.
Last year, he announced plans to end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a program that allows immigrants brought here as young children to work and go to school legally, if they meet all kinds of conditions. More recently, he’s begun attacking what he calls “chain migration” and the lottery system–in other words, legal immigrants.
“Chain migration” just means that immigrants who become citizens can sponsor their close family members to come to this country. Like everyone else, immigrants need to be with their parents as they age, their children, their spouses! In this country without a social safety net, that’s how people survive. And the lottery is how ordinary people are chosen to be allowed to come here from countries where very few immigrants are allowed in. Applicants are vetted extensively after being chosen, in a process that can take years. But Trump and the Republicans try to make it sound like these are two ways that “the worst of the worst” are “flooding into the country.” It is a way to dehumanize one part of the working class in the eyes of another part.
In the face of these attacks, the Democrats are posing as the friends of immigrants. They say that, under Obama, things were better. What a disgusting lie!
Obama deported more immigrants than any president, ever, 2.5 million people! When he was called on it, Obama said that he was only deporting “criminals,” that is, anyone convicted of a crime, including a DUI. Obama was playing on the same rhetoric as Trump, that “we” need to separate the “good” immigrants from the “bad” immigrants. In doing this, Obama put all immigrants under the gun, threatened with deportation if they got in trouble.
And Obama’s DACA program also set up young people, most of whom have known no other country than the U.S., to be directly under the gun. Not only do they have to give the government every fact about themselves, but they have to renew their status every two years. This uncertainty and regular threat of deportation is a way to keep these 800,000 young people in line.
Behind both parties, the capitalist class is using immigrants doubly. Economically, the companies want immigrants here to work for them. They want these immigrant workers afraid to speak up, afraid to lose their job, afraid to fight back. This lets the companies pay immigrants less and treat them worse, and threaten all other workers with these conditions.
And this same capitalist class uses immigrants politically. They want workers born here to blame immigrants for all the problems that the capitalists themselves have caused. This is Trump’s clear message. Can’t find a job? The immigrants stole it. Too much crime? It’s because of the immigrants. Of course, this is all a lie. The companies took the jobs, through speedup, automation, and outsourcing. And the disappearance of better paying jobs is what leads to crime, when young people have no future.
The working class has a different interest. We are all exploited by the same bosses, wherever we were born. Our strength comes from our numbers, our unity, and our willingness to fight. We have an interest in forcing the bosses to accept that anyone here, anyone they are willing to exploit, has the same rights as everyone else. That’s the only way to stop the bosses from using immigrants against the rest of the working class, economically and politically.
Jan 22, 2018
Worker complaints over immigration-related threats surged last year in California. When the workers raise issues over working conditions or unpaid wages, bosses often threaten to report workers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In one case, reported by the Los Angeles Times, a worker was promised $150 at the end of each day to tile a bathroom and stucco the walls of a home in Arcadia, California. After six days with no pay, the worker finally confronted his boss. Instead of paying the worker’s wages, the boss first called him a “wetback,” and then said: “Not only am I [an ex]-sheriff, my family are all in the police department.... I will handcuff you and take you into custody and wait for ICE to come take you in for felony threats.”
Such threats against and outright wage theft from immigrant workers have been happening for a long time. But, during the last year, emboldened by the Federal government’s daily declarations against immigrant workers and ICE raids of work places, the bosses have increased such threats and theft. Many of them are getting away with it.
Jan 22, 2018
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ordered Jorge Garcia, a landscaper from Lincoln Park, Michigan, to leave the country. Garcia came to the U.S. with his parents almost 30 years ago when he was just ten years old. He was forced to leave his wife, an auto worker who retired from the Ford Rouge plant, and two children behind.
Garcia jumped through all the hoops the government demands in an attempt to stay in this country. He began submitting the necessary legal paperwork 13 years ago and checked in with ICE regularly since then. He had no criminal record and paid taxes all his life, yet despite the fact that he came to the U.S. as a child, the government was able to deport him on a technicality. It seems the politicians who passed DACA somehow neglected to consider those who came here as children 30 years ago!
Garcia’s deportation has rightfully inspired outrage from all quarters, including many workers.
The politicians–from Trump to Obama to Bush–pretending to be looking out for the safety of the population, rationalize their attacks on undocumented immigrants by claiming that they are “only” deporting hardened criminals.
Garcia’s case certainly puts the lie to that notion.
But we can be sure that among the more than 4.5 million who have been deported over the past 17 years under the last three presidents, there were many people who, like Garcia, contributed their labor to make this society run and paid taxes like the rest of us. Including taxes that they’ll never receive the benefits from.
How many workers or our families, coming from the less privileged layers of society as we do, haven’t had some kind of brush with the law? They could just as easily brand many of us as “criminals” as a pretext to attack us as well.
The real criminals are the officials who rip all the millions of Jorge Garcias away from their communities and families–over a piece of paper.
Jan 22, 2018
This article is from the January 5th, 2018 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
On October 31st, 1517, the Catholic priest Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg, a university town on the banks of the River Elbe in Eastern Germany. Luther denounced indulgences, a symbol of the Church’s corruption, which allowed wealthy Christians to buy redemption from their sins by contributing money. The 95 theses, which were soon printed, would spread throughout all of Europe. When Luther received an order from the Pope to recant, he refused and broke with the Church. He was excommunicated in 1521.
This clash is considered to be the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which would go on to tear apart Christianity, the religion that had dominated Europe for a millennium. Luther’s speeches against the corruption of the priests, bishops, and the Pope would find a strong echo among the population, especially in the countryside. But his theses also spread throughout the cities to a mass of artisans and small traders. This newborn petty-bourgeoisie suffocated under the authority of aristocrats and wealthy merchants, and it resented the feudal and Church taxes that it was forced to pay. Two-thirds of German cities in the Holy Roman Empire rallied to the Reformation. Finally, many princes also joined it due to their hostility toward the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who then ruled over these provinces.
The Reformation already existed in embryo in the society of that time. Before 1517, several heretical movements had expressed similar ideas: the Cathars in several regions between the 10th and 14th centuries, the Lollards in England (1381-1417), the Hussites in Bohemia (in today’s Czech Republic) at the beginning of the 15th century. In this period, the political struggles and the material interests of social classes were expressed in religious terms.
The corruption of the Church reflected the greed of the rich families, at the same time that money relations were eroding the foundations of the medieval order. In the countryside, the nobles still reigned. But in the cities of Italy, the Rhine, and Northern Europe, a handicraft industry was developing, capital was becoming concentrated, and trade was progressing and searching for ways to protect itself. The bourgeoisie already played an indispensable role in the economy. The feudal lords themselves had begun a frantic quest for gold, with expeditions to Africa, the Indies, and the Americas, which were discovered in 1492. At the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the great merchant families like the Borgias and the Medicis chose their sons as candidates for Pope in order to accumulate goods and to transmit them to their descendants.
At the same time, conditions were worsening for the poor. The Reformation resonated with all their hopes for change. Many among the poor were conscious of the role that the Catholic Church played in defending the social order. And where the Catholic Church had demanded good works from the rich, the Protestants insisted on the faith of believers and encouraged them to read and understand the Bible for themselves. They rejected the hierarchy of bishops, who were to the Church what the lords were to feudal society.
Luther wanted to reform the Church, but for all that, he did not defend the interests of the poor masses. He represented a young and conquering bourgeoisie, who wished to free themselves from the shackles of feudal society, a bourgeoisie ready to lean on the lower classes of the cities and countryside, but without mixing their interests with its own.
In 1524, a vast peasant revolt began in the German provinces under the leadership of the itinerant priest Thomas Münzer, a preacher of Christian equality on earth and the end of the feudal regime. The princes and Luther himself turned against the insurgent peasants. When they were defeated, Münzer was executed (see the accompanying passage from Engels).
Luther’s ideas spread across all of Europe and became the state religion in Sweden in 1529, and in Denmark in 1536. Under the reign of Henry VIII, England also broke with the Catholic Church at the beginning of the 1530s. A large portion of German-speaking countries rallied to the Reformation, as did Scotland and the Netherlands. The French theologian John Calvin broke with the Church around 1530, and he spent the rest of his life promoting the Protestant Reformation in Geneva and the rest of Europe. His theses met with success in France, which became the scene of the Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598. However, in those places where the Reformed religion became the official religion, it lost its aspects of social confrontation at the same time. When it did so, it was imposed as the ideology and language of the bourgeoisie as it conquered political power.
Jan 22, 2018
This article is from the January 5th, 2018 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
In 1843, Friedrich Engels published a series of articles entitled The Progress of Social Reform on the Continent, of which a selection can be read below, before going on to write The Peasant War in Germany (1850), which drew a parallel with the revolutions of 1848-49 in Europe:
“Soon after Luther had begun to proclaim church reform and to agitate the people against spiritual authority, the peasantry of Southern and Middle Germany rose in a general insurrection against their temporal lords. Luther always stated his object to be to return to original Christianity in doctrine and practice. The peasantry took exactly the same standing, and demanded, therefore, not only the ecclesiastical, but also the social practice of primitive Christianity. They conceived a state of villainy and servitude, such as they lived under, to be inconsistent with the doctrines of the Bible. They were oppressed by a set of haughty barons and earls, robbed and treated like their cattle every day. They had no law to protect them, and if they had, they found nobody to enforce it. … Therefore, they arose and began a war against their lords, which could only be a war of extermination. Thomas Münzer, a preacher, whom they placed at their head, issued a proclamation, full, of course, of the religious and superstitious nonsense of the age, but containing also among others, principles like these: That according to the Bible, no Christian is entitled to hold any property whatever exclusively for himself; that community of property is the only proper state for a society of Christians; that it is not allowed to any good Christian to have any authority or command over other Christians, nor to hold any office of government or hereditary power, but on the contrary, that, as all men are equal before God, so they ought to be on earth also. These doctrines were nothing but conclusions drawn from the Bible and from Luther’s own writings. But the Reformer … believed as firmly in the right divine of princes and landlords to trample upon the people, as he did in the Bible. Besides this, he wanted the protection of the aristocracy and the Protestant princes, and thus he wrote a tract against the rioters disclaiming not only every connection with them, but also exhorting the aristocracy to put them down with the utmost severity, as rebels against the laws of God. ‘Kill them like dogs!’ he exclaimed.
… If he began his career as a man of the people, [Luther] was now entirely in the service of their oppressors. The insurrection, after a most bloody civil war, was suppressed, and the peasants reduced to their former servitude.”
Jan 22, 2018
The following article is translated from the December 29 issue of Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper of the French revolutionary workers group of that name.
The revelations about sexual violence against women since the Weinstein affair have encouraged high school students (in France) to denounce sexual harassment and abuse in schools.
On December 21, 300 girls and boys blocked the entrance to the high school Pissaro de Pontoise, to protest sexual violence.
So much the better if teenagers react collectively against the rule of silence imposed by shame, by the feeling of powerlessness, and by the pressure of the aggressor boys.
But the fight against sexist violence in schools is also the responsibility of the National Education Ministry and depends on the means it allocates.
Of course, schools cannot totally eliminate the prejudice and sexism that impregnate our society. But schools can and must provide an education that fights against stereotypes and violent behaviors against girls.
This was the goal of “ABCD of Equality,” an experimental curriculum for the schools that the Ministry of Education renounced under the pressure of the extreme right and the religious.
In their schools, children can’t count on freely discussing relations between men and women with their teachers, since these are directed to only present sexuality from the angle of physiology or to explain how to guard against sexually transmitted diseases.
The current minister of education is not about to put the problem of equality between men and women back at the center—because the government is much more sensitive to the religious than it is to these demonstrations and others like them.
Jan 22, 2018
The following article is translated from Combat Ouvrier, the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in the French Caribbean.
In October, actresses denounced a big Hollywood producer. Within a few weeks, their example gave confidence to thousands of other women who also denounced the sexual harassment they had experienced.
Mid-November, in Guadeloupe, the high school student newspaper Rebel! publicly denounced the protection given to a high school teacher who sexually harassed students for more than ten years without any reaction from the local education office. That makes seven years that Rebel! has protested against the attitude of the academic authorities, who protect the “educator” harassers, when they don’t take part themselves. At the Agricultural High School of Convenance, this helped lead to the conviction of a teacher who is no longer allowed to work with minors.
Harassing men can be found at many other places than just schools. At work, many women are confronted with sexual harassment, from derogatory remarks and humiliations to the most brutal aggressions.
In the Caribbean, sexism is aggravated by poverty. Working class and unemployed women must confront all the difficulties of life and also deal with this sexist discrimination. This situation has given birth to the idea of the “femme potomitan” (the common image of the woman as the center of life in the French Caribbean), who is a model of force and courage. It is a positive image of women, heritage of the fight for existence of all those who have had to deal with this since the era of slavery, and who continue to deal with it.
But this “femme potomitan” is also portrayed in a somewhat condescending manner. She is always confined to family life, always devoted to children, and occupied with daily survival. It is a false image. Because when ordinary people revolted, women were at the head! In Martinique as in Guadeloupe, all the big movements had their heroines, like Lumina Sophie or the mixed-race woman Solitude. And with them there were thousands of anonymous women whose names have been forgotten by history.
In this moment, women have good reason to denounce the “pigs” who harass them. These denunciations are precious, because they permit women to make shame switch sides. But in the future, when the workers again take the path of collective struggle, we can bet that women will again be at the head. This will be their best revenge against the little men who today permit harassment!
Jan 22, 2018
Headlines are one thing, but real numbers in the real world are another.
Trump tweeted, “More great news as a result of historical Tax Cuts and Reform: Fiat Chrysler announces plan to invest more than 1 BILLION dollars in Michigan plant, relocating their heavy-truck production from Mexico to Michigan, adding 2,500 new jobs and paying $2,000 bonus to U.S. employees!”
First, the math does not add up on the job creation claims. In 2017, roughly 5,700 automotive manufacturing jobs were cut, according to the Center for Automotive Research. Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) may be adding 2,500 jobs–three years from now! How does that make up for the 5,700 lost? This is a slimy bait and switch!
The lie gets worse the further back you go. In the past 10 years, from December of 2007 until December of 2017, the U.S. lost 1.2 million manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The auto industry’s share was roughly 84,000 jobs lost in 10 years. This 2,500 jobs created number is pathetic!
Second, FCA will likely rake in a billion dollars or two in tax breaks year after year. This 2,000-dollar one-time bonus is a slap in the face!
At Chrysler, most workers are paid some form of 2nd Tier wage, which is roughly half of what 1st Tier workers make. In 2017, Chrysler workers got roughly half as much of a profit-sharing bonus as workers at Ford and GM got. This 2,000-dollar bonus will NOT catch Chrysler workers up with where Ford and GM workers were at—last year!
It makes sense for workers to be clear eyed about the many false claims of bosses and politicians. Forget the crumbs! Workers produce the wealth. It is right that ALL new tax break money go to workers and ALL 1.2 million jobs lost be re-created!
Jan 22, 2018
On a cold Tuesday early in December, 60 students at Hirsch High School walked out. They carried signs reading “Give us our programs back” and “No charter school,” while they chanted “Save our schools!” Hirsch is a neighborhood high school in Chatham on the city’s South Side, serving an overwhelmingly black, working class student body.
The students were protesting the Board of Education’s plan to place a charter school inside the building–what the Board calls “co-location.” They know that the placement of a charter program within their building would be a death sentence for their current school. Two of the high schools in nearby Englewood, TEAM Englewood and John Hope Academy, had charter schools “co-located” in the building–they are now among the five schools the Board proposes to close next year.
The student population at Hirsch has dwindled: from 937 in 2007, to 390 in 2012, down to 137 today. The Board drove this process, speeding it along the last four years by tying school budgets directly to enrollment. With conditions at high-poverty neighborhood schools degrading, CPS held out charter schools to parents as the answer–at least for those students able to navigate the application process. But then many of the students who enrolled in the charters find themselves pushed back out–back into the starving neighborhood schools they left.
In 2010, the school won the city’s football championship. It no longer fields a team. Band and pre-law programs, the journalism program, the radio/TV studio, and the librarian have also gotten the ax.
This is the education that the city of Chicago offers to more and more working class students. And when the school does close, the city will be offering many students no education at all.
Jan 22, 2018
A sixth-grade teacher was arrested at a school board meeting of the Vermillion Parish school district in Southern Louisiana on January 8. Her crime? To speak out publicly against a big pay raise the board gave the district’s superintendent!
An online video from the meeting shows the teacher, Deyshia Hargrave, calling the raise for the superintendent “a slap in the face to the teachers, cafeteria workers and support staff in the district, who work very hard with very little.” (A school board member later confirmed that district teachers had not gotten a raise in 10 years.) Hargrave also points to growing class sizes at her school, and others in the audience are seen supporting Hargrave’s comments vocally.
After the board’s approval of the superintendent’s contract–which, a district employee told The Huffington Post, included a 38,000-dollar raise and a car–Hargrave spoke again, asking the superintendent, “How are you taking that raise, ... when we have class sizes that are that big?”
That’s when a cop walked toward Hargrave and told her to leave the room–which she did, while she and other audience members protested. The video then shows the cop handcuffing Hargrave in the hallway.
In two days, by January 10, the video was viewed online more than 1.7 million times, causing an outcry in the whole country. On January 11, hundreds of people showed up for a rally in Abbeville, Louisiana (population 12,000) on a rainy afternoon, to show support for Hargrave.
In fact, such protests at school board meetings have been happening for years across the country in working-class districts, in the face of layoffs and pay cuts for teachers and other school workers, increasing class sizes, cancellation of entire programs and services, and even closure of schools. And officials have always tried to silence and stifle the protests. Perhaps the only difference this time was that this incident was captured on video and seen online by hundreds of thousands of people.
A teacher, who retired from the Vermillion Parish school district last year, said that most teachers have been afraid to publicly speak out, but that a teacher strike may now be on the horizon. There is no reason why these fights couldn’t expand and broaden, when working class people across the country are experiencing the same thing.
Jan 22, 2018
The mayor of Baltimore just announced that part of the Gilmor Homes will be torn down. About 120 families in these public housing units are supposedly to be housed somewhere “better,” according to the mayor. Local community leaders have asked where these residents will be able to go–in a city with an enormous waiting list for subsidized housing. No answer has been given.
This area, West Baltimore, suffers from high poverty, with a median income of $28,841, and high unemployment, especially among black men. It’s the area where a black man’s death at the hands of the police set off riots two years ago.
Gilmor, like other public housing units, probably should have been replaced long ago. Two years ago, residents at Gilmor were waiting for the city to make more than 500 repairs. The city paid a settlement when women at Gilmor Homes sued some of the maintenance workers, who had demanded sex for repairs.
The state of public housing is a sign of a society that cannot or will not provide decent, affordable housing for everyone. And it’s not the only thing this society cannot provide: like decent jobs, and a good education for its children. Baltimore City is like the poor stepchild ignored by its family, or in this case the state of Maryland, which has one of the highest average incomes in the country.
We live in a society that tolerates every form of inequity and injustice–with leaders proposing more of the same.
Jan 22, 2018
Larry Nassar, a Michigan State University (MSU) Sports Medicine doctor, worked for decades with young female athletes, including USA Olympic gymnasts. He just pled guilty to seven counts of criminal sexual conduct against children.
The sentencing phase of his trial in Lansing, Michigan is being live-streamed. It has left viewers stunned. More than 100 women have signed up to give “victim impact statements.” Women have testified, one after the other, that this man is a monster, not a doctor.
One victim testified that her sexual abuse began at age 6, in the basement of Nassar’s home. Her parents were upstairs, because they were friends of Nassar. Years later, her father, wracked with guilt, committed suicide.
She said to the court, “I’m here ... to tell everyone. Little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow into strong women who return to destroy your world.”
The details of Nassar’s abuse of young girls was staggering. One mother testified about the sexual assault of her daughter by Nassar at age 12, stating “It all started with him.” Her daughter took her own life in 2009, at age 23.
Nassar’s serial sexual abuse went on for decades. Most victims were child athletes, seeking help for sports injuries. Nassar claimed what he was doing to little girls, without written, informed consent, without gloves for infection control, and without a parent PLUS a medical observer present–was a “medical procedure.” Bullshit!
But at MSU, where as many as 14 university employees received reports of problems with Nassar over the years, officials believed him.
Why did this happen? Because the reputation of the university was treated as the top priority. If young women’s safety had been the top priority, this man would have been investigated sooner. In this society, sexual abuse is explained away and normalized. Disgusting!
Giving the appearance of being tone deaf, the majority of the Board of Trustees just gave the President of MSU a vote of confidence!
Women, in their testimony, are calling for the resignation of MSU President Lou Anna Simon. She received a report on the abuse in 2014 and responded that the report never named the doctor.
Olympic Gold Medal Winner, Aly Raisman, said that she and the other women who were abused “are now a force.”
“Come hell or high water,” said Amy Labadie, a former gymnast and MSU team manager, “we will find a way to take down every last one of you that could have stopped this monster.”
Jan 22, 2018
I, Tonya may seem to be dredging up the bizarre 1994 attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, a tawdry subject worthy only for tabloids. In fact, it raises many issues about the role of social class in sports.
Tonya Harding is from a hardscrabble, working class family. Her mother married four times—her fourth husband was Tonya’s father. Tonya’s father took her hunting and fishing. He taught her how to fix cars. He ends up leaving the family—he leaves Tonya. This leaves Tonya alone with her abusive mother, who views Tonya as a cash cow and a way out. When she saw Tonya skate, she saw dollar signs. “Maybe she can make it big in the Ice Capades,” announces her mother.
Tonya’s mother abuses Tonya in the hopes of making her a better skater. This is not tough love. It is more like torture. At one point she goes so far as to throw a kitchen knife into Tonya’s arm. In another she bribes a spectator at one of Tonya’s competitions to heckle the young athlete, believing that her daughter will skate better if she is under pressure. In an extreme example of this torture, a very young Tonya is forced to urinate on the ice after her mother won’t let her take a bathroom break. “Skate wet,” her mother tells her, coldly.
Tonya, herself, views her skating as an escape from her working class life. This is no different than basketball or football with working class men. Ironically, Tonya marries Jeff Gillooly to escape her mother. But Gillooly is just as, if not more, controlling and abusive. He also sees Tonya as a way out, with commercials and sponsors. She does all the work, and he does nothing, except plan to take out Harding’s competition.
Another related aspect of the film is women’s figure skating itself and the American Figure Skating Association. Before Harding turned it into pop culture, figure skating was a genteel sport. And an expensive one. The lessons, practice time on the ice, the coach, the costumes, costume designer, choreographer—all cost big money. Tonya did not wear designer costumes—she couldn’t afford them. She sewed her own when she was old enough, and before that her mother sewed them.
Figure skating was not just a sport, it was propaganda. The skating association was promoting an image. Harding didn’t fit that image, and she did not even try to fit the image they were promoting. She was a rebellious and powerful skater—the first American woman to perform a triple axel in competition.
Nancy Kerrigan, on the other hand, came across as a beautiful, pristine, ice princess, exactly the image being promoted. Kerrigan was from a working class background as well, but her family was stable, with a stable income. Her father and mother were together; her father was a welder, and her mother a homemaker. Nancy didn’t go hunting and fishing and chop firewood and fix the car. Kerrigan was happy to fit into the mold. But Tonya did out-skate Nancy technically in 1991.
The film shows the judges scoring Tonya low precisely because she was not polished. At one point Tonya yells, “This is rigged.” And she was right.
In the end, it was the media that made money off of Tonya.
This is an interesting and engaging movie, that shows the role social class played in the making of Tonya Harding.