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 2, 2020
Evidence is mounting that the coronavirus is spreading in several communities in the United States. Scientists say they had found that the virus had already been spreading for six weeks in Washington state and they estimated that up to 1,500 people may have already been infected. How contagious or deadly will the epidemic be in this country? How long will it last? No one can say, because it is caused by a new coronavirus.
But it’s an epidemic of some sort. And the U.S. healthcare system is completely unprepared to deal with it. Top U.S. officials say it openly: “We’re amazingly unprepared,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness tothe New York Times on March 1.
This is not because of a lack of money. The U.S. pours more than four trillion dollars, or almost 20% of the entire economy, into health care spending every year. And the U.S. certainly has top notch doctors and scientists, modern hospitals and a sprawling health infrastructure. Some of the best in the world.
But almost all of this is set up for the benefit of the capitalist class, so that the capitalist class can make huge profits out of health care, that is, out of peoples’ illnesses and conditions. The capitalists do that through their gigantic insurance companies, hospital conglomerates and multi-national pharmaceutical corporations.
Any extra costs that get in the way of the capitalists making an immediate profit don’t get funded. That’s why this gigantic, extremely costly healthcare infrastructure is so woefully unprepared for the epidemic. It costs money to stock extra equipment in the event of an epidemic. For example, according to government estimates made in 2005, a severe influenza pandemic would require mechanical ventilators for 740,000 critically ill people. As of today, there are only 62,000 ventilators in hospitals across the country—that is, less than 10% of what they said they would need.
Over the years, various government agencies have cut public health spending to the bone. Today, there are 50,000 fewer people working in public health than there were 20 years ago. Public health serves as the front line of any major health care emergency for the community. But it has been slashed repeatedly in order to free up more money for the government to hand over to the capitalist class through tax breaks and subsidies.
And when people get sick, they may very well have no place to go. Inside big cities as well as big stretches of rural and semi-rural areas there are no more public hospitals, and few, if any, clinics. These areas are called “healthcare deserts,” because there are not enough people with coverage to pay the bills. At the same time, hospitals are already stretched to the limit, often run without enough staff to care for patients and maintain the hospitals. Emergency departments are regularly jammed with surges of patients, who have to wait for hours or days for treatment, often for life threatening conditions or diseases.
Moreover, there has been little or no planning or preparation on how to limit the spread of the epidemic. Every company should have an epidemic plan in place in order for workers not to infect others. Schools and universities should do the same thing.
If the epidemic becomes widespread, big parts of the population should be quarantined, either by keeping them home or in big centers for weeks at a time. This would mean essential services such as the systems of water, sewage, electricity, garbage, would have to be intact and in good working order.
Where have preparations been made in this country for public workers to continue on the job and be protected? Where will we get the supply chains, with enormous convoys of food and medicine, just in case they are necessary?
In this country, nothing has been set up to even do what was accomplished in China, which not only slowed the spread of the virus, but saved countless thousands of lives.
The fact that this health care system and the entire society is operated for profit puts us all in tremendous danger if a severe epidemic does break out in this country.
Mar 2, 2020
PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric), the largest utility company in California, went into bankruptcy in January 2019, so that it would not have to pay for deadly wildfires that PG&E equipment caused. So this bankruptcy is worth millions of dollars for the big shareholders of PG&E—but not only for them.
Fees for lawyers and consultants hired as part of the “restructuring” process of this huge company have already amounted to more than $200 million ... and counting. To pay for such “reconstruction costs,” PG&E took out loans. They have paid $114 million in interest to big Wall Street banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs in 2019 alone. Some analysts estimate that, by the end of this restructuring, these banks may wind up pocketing more than a billion dollars!
And then there are certain hedge funds that stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars off PG&E. These vultures have all their bases covered: they own PG&E stock, while they are also betting on PG&E being found liable for the loss of homes—and lives—in the wildfires. They have bought up wildfire insurance claims at a discount and are speculating to secure a windfall when PG&E pays off at a higher rate.
The California state government has already allowed PG&E to raise rates to pay for expenses arising from the company’s liability in the fires. So, in the end, it’s ratepayers that will foot the bill for the billions of dollars that are going to various Wall Street profiteers.
Mar 2, 2020
On February 27 former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh was sentenced to three years in federal prison for a fraud scheme involving a series of children’s books she authored. Between 2010 and 2018 Pugh used her position on the governing board of the 13-hospital University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) to get the board to approve repeated no-bid purchases of her books totaling $500,000. Other organizations also bought her books, which sometimes were never delivered.
The news media gave top billing to Pugh’s sentencing. The judge said, “This was not a tiny mistake, lapse in judgement. This became a very large fraud.”
But all the hullabaloo about Pugh going to jail is obscuring the corruption of other, much richer, former members of the UMMS board. Investigators have found that at least nine of the UMMS board members who served with Pugh also had business with the hospital network. Many used their board positions to get high-profit no-bid contracts for their companies, or for companies owned by friends or family:
—At least 30 million dollars went to a large health insurance company owned by the family of a board member who was a former state senator.
—More than 7 million went for services from M&T Bank, one of whose executives served on the board.
—For six or seven years, another board member was paid $13,000 every month for work that was hard to define.
—And the list goes on....
Pugh has been sentenced, but none of these other schemers has yet to be charged with any crimes. Perhaps this is because, in fact, this kind of situation is not so unusual at all, but rather the normal way that business is conducted in this corrupt, profit-driven economy.
Mar 2, 2020
Katherine Johnson died on February 24th of this year. Made famous by the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, she accomplished much during 101 years.
Johnson worked for NASA, a predominantly white and male institution. When she arrived at NASA in 1953, signs still designated certain bathrooms as being for “colored” people. Women, white and black, worked as human computers, doing calculations now done by computers. But the women computers were segregated.
Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918, in West Virginia. Her mother was a school teacher and her father was a farmer who became a bellman.
Johnson earned a B.S. degree in French and math by the age of 18.
In the early 1950s, she heard that mathematicians were needed at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which later became NASA. She was hired in 1953 as a computer. At that time, computers were understood to mean a human who performed calculations.
She fought for and won a spot in previously all-male meetings that allowed her to play a larger role.
In 1960, she was the co-author of a NASA report, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position.” It was one of more than two dozen research papers she wrote or helped to write.
She calculated the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard’s first space flight, in 1959. She verified the mathematics behind John Glenn’s orbit around earth in 1962 and calculated the flight trajectory for Apollo 11’s flight to the moon.
Johnson retired from NASA in 1986. She is survived by two of her three daughters, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
If not for the recent film, no one would know of Katherine Johnson’s work and how she and other women made many things possible, including going to the moon and back.
Katherine Johnson never entertained the lie that women can’t do math. She didn’t let racism or sexism stop her.
Mar 2, 2020
People are afraid of the new coronavirus. We don’t have very much information about it and haven’t previously encountered it. This has led to panicked gobbling up of face masks in some places and to the blaming of Chinese people in other places like the Ukraine.
Coronavirus or COVID-19 was unknown before the recent outbreak in Wuhan, China in December 2019. It is a new emergent disease. It has now spread to 51 countries in three months. There are more than 86,000 known cases and around 3,000 people have died.
COVID-19 is first of all a virus. Viruses are bits of genetic material that can infect a living host by introducing its own genetic material into the host cells. Once there, the virus takes over the cell’s internal machinery, turning it into a factory to produce more of the virus. Lots more and at high speeds.
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses which may cause illness in animals and humans. Several coronaviruses are known to cause respiratory infections ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The most recently discovered coronavirus causes what is now being called COVID-19.
COVID-19 is closely related to SARS genetically, but they are different. SARS is more deadly but much less infectious than COVID-19. There have been no outbreaks of SARS since 2003.
Over history, humans have experienced new, emergent diseases and epidemics. They often originate in other animals and jump to humans. During the Middle Ages, the plague created much panic and insanity. We now know that fleas transmit the plague bacteria to humans.
Coronaviruses, like the plague, are zoonotic, meaning we get the infection from animals. SARS was associated with civet cats and MERS was associated with dromedary camels. The animal source for COVID-19 is not yet known, but bats are a likely suspect because of the genetic analysis of the virus. An animal source started this process but now the virus is spreading human to human.
Mar 2, 2020
The majority of the 88 part-time teachers at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh voted in 2012 to join the Steelworkers Union. Part-timers called adjuncts, who teach nearly half the university’s classes, have low pay and benefits and unpredictable schedules, and that’s why many voted for the union.
But Duquesne wouldn’t recognize their union and laid off many of the organizers. Duquesne said since it is a religious employer, federal labor relations law doesn’t apply to it because that would violate its freedom of religion.
No matter that most of the part-timers teach secular classes like English, math, or science. In January 2020 a federal appeals court ruled against the part-timers. So freedom of religion means workers don’t have the freedom to unionize!
Thousands of workers are exploited at religious hospitals, day cares, stores, and cemeteries, as well as schools and universities. When some of these workers fight to improve their conditions, they might be next to face judges who use the pretext of freedom of religion to side with the bosses.
To win, workers will need to rely on making a fight in the workplaces and streets, beyond the courtroom.
Mar 2, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
On February 9 in Mexico, Ingrid, a 25-year-old woman, was found murdered and eviscerated by her companion, a 46-year-old engineer. This savage crime provoked a massive reaction by women across the country, who demonstrated on the streets of Mexico on February 14.
“Not One More!” the protesters shouted. Some wore purple scarves for feminism or green scarves for abortion rights. Many hid their faces behind hoods or makeup, fearing retaliation. There were meetings and demonstrations in homage to this young woman in seven different Mexican states.
The photos of Ingrid’s body and details from the confession of her murderer that were published in the tabloids also fueled women’s anger against both the revolting crime and the venality of the newspapers. Demonstrators expressed this anger against the paper La Prensa, by sacking and burning a number of its delivery trucks. This was in response to the refusal of the newspaper’s manager to even apologize for the way the paper had exploited this woman’s murder, prioritizing its sales over basic human dignity.
Mexico is one of the countries on the American continent where life is treated the most cheaply. Infected by diverse mafias linked to parts of the government, with drug gangs possessing the means to corrupt or eliminate anyone who gets in their way, murders are extremely common.
Women working in factories near the U.S. border have long been frequent victims of murder. But since 2015, in this macho society, the murders of women killed by their husbands or boyfriends has exploded. In 2019, 1,006 women were murdered, an increase of 145% since 2015.
Six in ten Mexican women under the age of 15 are victims of physical and sexual assault. But most don’t file a complaint. The police don’t follow up. Officials repeat the stupid clichés heard everywhere about going out alone or wearing a short skirt.
Protesters gathered in front of the palace of President Andrès Manuel Lopez Obrador to demand that he do something to stop the killings of women. He promised not to hide his head in the sand, but so far he has been more effective at stopping Central American migrants trying to reach the U.S. than in protecting women. His Minister of the Interior and the Mexico City council promised that the women’s demands were a priority and announced that an investigation had been opened into the release of the photographs of Ingrid. The Mexico City council has proposed a law punishing the release of these types of images with heavy prison sentences. But the issue of murders of women has been on the table for years, and officials have done nothing while the murders have multiplied.
“My friends protect me, you cops don’t,” women chanted during the protests. They know they can’t depend on a government rotten with corruption. Recent mobilizations of women in other Latin American countries like Chile, Argentina and El Salvador show none of this is limited to Mexico.
Mar 2, 2020
With great fanfare, on February 29, the U.S. announced a new peace deal for Afghanistan. Except that it’s not really a peace deal at all. The U.S. has promised to withdraw if a long series of conditions are met—in 14 months.
The first U.S. condition for this deal was that the Taliban oversee a “reduction” in violence for seven days. In the face of the violence and destruction created by 20 years of the so-called U.S. “war on terror,” this “condition” is a cynical hoax.
In 2019, the U.S. dropped 7,423 bombs and missiles on the country, the most since the Air Force began keeping track in 2006. In response, the Taliban—or organizations the U.S. calls the Taliban—carried out more than 8,000 attacks. So by any measure of violence on the ground, there is no end in sight. In fact, the violence has accelerated.
Even before the current war began, for more than forty years, the U.S. wreaked chaos on this country, supporting one violent, fundamentalist group of warlords after another, for its own imperialist interests.
The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, in a spectacular show of power against one of the poorest countries on earth. U.S. leaders called this retaliation against those who attacked the Twin Towers and Pentagon, even though not one Afghan was among the 9/11 terrorists and the Taliban were not implicated in the attacks. In fact, the U.S. needed a way to flex its muscles and prove that it would not tolerate an attack on its financial and military centers, and that it was still the world’s superpower.
The U.S. then flooded huge sums into Afghanistan—in some years, the U.S. budget for the Afghan war was 60 billion dollars, while the entire GDP of the country was just 12 billion! This money served to fund corruption and reinforce “allied” warlords, who smuggled drugs, plundered, and raped.
The Taliban—or at least, groups calling themselves the Taliban—made a comeback by feeding off the anger of the population at the brutality of these U.S.-backed warlords. So U.S. troops set about trying to root out the Taliban “insurgency,” bombing Taliban-friendly villages, carrying out night raids and torture, and by doubling down on military support for the “friendly” warlords.
The U.S. has carried out variations on this war policy under three presidents, for nearly 20 years now, without bringing the country any closer to being “stabilized.”
The U.S. population has paid a steep price: 2,400 U.S. troops killed; thousands more wounded, including with severe PTSD and the accompanying increase in veteran suicides. Two trillion dollars of our tax money have been used to destroy this already impoverished country—so far.
For the Afghan population, U.S. intervention in their country has been a disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, with many more wounded. At least seven million have been driven from their homes, out of a total Afghan population of 30 million.
In this context, the current “peace” deal is nothing but a cynical ploy, aimed at helping Trump’s chances of re-election by allowing him to brag that he is finally getting the U.S. out of its longest war. If the U.S. eventually withdraws from Afghanistan, it will be well after the 2020 elections—the real point of Trump’s “peace” announcement.
Whatever the outcome of the Trump administration’s show of making a deal to eventually withdraw, the Afghanistan war is a symbol of what U.S. imperialism means for the people of the world.
Mar 2, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
European airplane manufacturer Airbus will pay nearly four billion dollars in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, and France’s financial prosecutor. All this to avoid prosecution and investigations of corruption.
Airbus used fraud again and again over the years to sell planes everywhere. The French prosecutor is reviewing the company’s sales campaigns from 2004 to 2016 in China, South Korea, Russia, Colombia, Nepal, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates. And the list is far from complete. Airbus paid off middlemen, airline executives, and government officials to choose their planes.
Some corrupt handouts were cited, like high dollar amounts sloshed into tax havens, luxurious gifts, leisure vacations with all expenses paid, and fake employment contracts. Nothing too original, although not all the details were revealed.
Airbus is not the only company in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, which have the habit of accusing big European companies. Before Airbus, companies like Société Générale, Technip and Alstom had to pay hundreds of millions to be left alone. U.S. authorities want to have control over all commercial transactions—and not for moral reasons. U.S. prosecutors claim jurisdiction over any transaction in dollars, the sale of even one American part, or the establishment of a legal subsidiary based in the U.S. That’s enough to impose fines or block contracts in the U.S. This so-called law of the fittest is used to stop competition with U.S. companies.
But both corruption and the fight against it are all fair in the war of big business competition, which is only impartial in official speeches. A company like Airbus obviously knows this as well as any other trickster would, so it assesses the costs and benefits. This recent fee doesn’t hit Airbus too hard. Some have called it “not so bad a deal.” Airbus was prepared and had set aside the exact amount. The company publicly tied many managers to corrupt deeds and then replaced them, and now promises to behave better.
With the Boeing scandal taking the stage and Airbus avoiding being dragged into court, Airbus shareholders can rest easy. The four billion dollars will simply be accounted for under profits and losses. It will make back the money by ratcheting up exploitation in its factories, at the expense of the workers. Airbus managers began this by announcing 2,300 job cuts, including 630 in Spain and 400 in France.
Mar 2, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
Giant British bank HSBC announced plans to lay off 35,000 of its 235,000 workers and close a third of its 224 branches over the next several years. HSBC already cut 50,000 workers worldwide in 2015. This biggest investment bank in Europe intends to become even more profitable at the expense of its workers.
The bank justifies the cuts by saying its profits fell from 14.5 billion dollars the year before last to 13 billion dollars last year. This was not enough for big shareholders who told journalists they wanted 21 billion dollars.
Bank officials’ other justifications range from the effects of Brexit to the Coronavirus, trade tensions between China and the U.S., and the protests in Hong Kong. HSBC was founded in Hong Kong in 1865.
As with all capitalist enterprises, profit is the bottom line. HSBC might sell its French subsidiary with 8,000 workers because “its retail banking business is small and its profits limited,” according to one advisor.
Tens of thousands of jobs cut so that shareholders get more dividends: HSBC is the spitting image of this rotten capitalist system.
Mar 2, 2020
Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.
A British court began a hearing on February 24 to decide about sending Julian Assange to the U.S. This government intends to prosecute him for espionage, which carries a sentence of 175 years in prison.
The U.S. government never forgave Assange for publishing several hundred thousand classified military documents on his website Wikileaks in 2010. The leak exposed abuses by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Leading newspapers in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere also reported on the abuses. People around the world learned about military reports of torture, kidnappings, and other war crimes against civilians. Imperialist American policies were exposed to daylight.
Since then, the U.S. has thrown every possible punishment at those who helped expose its lies and misdeeds. The documents were given to Wikileaks by 25-year-old soldier Bradley Manning, who wanted to report crimes he saw as an army computer expert in Iraq. The military held him in solitary detention for almost three years. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Finally, a public campaign got Obama to commute his sentence, and he was released.
Assange had to take refuge inside Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012. Swedish courts charged him with sexual assault, charges he denied and which were finally dropped. Ecuador ended up handing him to British police last April. Assange was held in solitary detention for months in the huge Belmarsh prison, often called England’s Guantanamo. His health deteriorated but he was not moved to a medical wing until 60 doctors published a letter in protest.
In their relentless pursuit of Wikileaks’ founder, U.S. leaders count on the complicity of British and other Western authorities. None of them want the ugly truth about their dirty military adventures exposed.
Mar 2, 2020
Detroit residents, angered by reports the City and Wayne County overtaxed homeowners for years due to overassessments on property taxes, are speaking out. Their fight, with the help of community activists, has finally gotten the attention of the local news media, politicians, and legal experts.
The fight gained momentum after the Detroit News pegged the cost to homeowners of the city’s “mistake” at $600 million. The paper also found that at least 96,000 homeowners were overtaxed, of whom 63,000 still have delinquent debt.
Since the report, 500 residents attended a meeting by the activist group Call ‘Em Out to voice their opinions about the rip-off. More than 150 attended a second event held by an anti-poverty think-tank, the PuLSE Institute.
Their fight drew the attention of other activists, including liberal politicians who filed a class-action lawsuit against Detroit, Wayne County and state officials for preventing property owners from appealing their inflated assessments.
In 2017 the State of Michigan ordered the city to conduct a reappraisal of every city property. But the city was allegedly late sending out notices to people of their right to appeal their assessments. Many residents still remain unaware of that right.
Poor residents also have the right to a property tax exemption. Most, again, are unaware of this right. Only about 7600 homeowners got the exemption last year, out of 39,000 who would qualify. This in a city with a 40% poverty rate!
Homeowners and activists are completely right to speak out and fight in every possible way against this incredible injustice. They have rightfully proposed the property tax exemption be applied retroactively. Their outspoken opposition has led Mayor Duggan to at least ask the state legislature to approve a program for partial tax debt relief.
Who should pay for reimbursing those victimized, including those who lost their homes? Certainly not Detroit residents. The banks, corporations and developers who’ve gotten rich by stealing trillions from the city owe that bill. But it will take a continued and much wider fight to make that happen.
Mar 2, 2020
Donald Trump said he looked forward to an economic crash: “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy.”
Sure enough, the just-released book Homewreckers by Aaron Glantz details the story of how millions of people lost their homes to the banks following the crash of 2008, and how the banks profited from their misfortune.
Seniors, single moms, working class families, all lost their family homes. Many of these homes had been in families for decades, and were workers’ only hope of building wealth and security.
The story is now well-known: the banks pushed cheap and easy debt to families, causing a huge bubble of debt, which of course exploded, devastating cities and communities. Banks were collapsing, and the Bush and Obama administrations bailed them out, to the tune of trillions.
The bankers were supposed to encourage refinancing and restructurings of the harmful loans with the money. Instead they kept the money, paid themselves bonuses and helped only a small fraction of homeowners, snatching thousands and thousands of homes through foreclosure and auctions. They got paid again by the government for any “losses” they incurred. Profits were in the trillions.
But as the book shows, this is only the beginning of the nightmare. Banks and the federal government wound up owning millions of empty or foreclosed homes. These banks, like IndyMac, were going down or were weighed down with unprofitable mortgages. Vultures were circling. One “titan of private equity,” the hedge fund manager J. Christopher Flowers, called himself “a low-life grave dancer,” and announced that the crisis of 2008 was “the Super Bowl of investment, no time to be sitting in the bleachers.” These vulture capitalists wanted the bank assets and foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar.
There were regulations to stop this robbery, but the moving avalanche of billions of dollars controlled by these titans always finds a way. There was a law which said no hedge fund could buy more than 25% of the bank assets without being subject to oversight. But, “no problem” for these vulture capitalists: Flowers, Steve Mnuchin, John Paulson, Thomas Barrack, Steve Schwartzman of Blackstone, Soros, and others all banded together and no one bought more than 24.795% of IndyMac.
Others, like Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, financed and benefitted from this disaster capitalism, while simultaneously decreasing investment in individual homeowners. Wilbur Ross and Sean Hannity also bought in.
What next? These vultures hid behind legal LLCs and became landlords. They discovered it was more profitable to rent the homes. They used the profits to buy up foreclosed homes as cheaply as possible, by the hundreds, in high-demand communities like Phoenix, Atlanta and elsewhere. They charge higher than average rent, and raise the rent every year, and they make renters sign a 20-page lease which says the renter must make and pay for most household repairs. Call your landlord? Impossible.
Just two years of rent paid off a house bought at an auction. Why put the house up for sale when prices and values eventually rose? Just raise the rent! Billions were rolling into their pockets. One of the biggest group of thieves, the hedge fund Blackstone, is this country’s biggest landlord, with more than 80,000 rentals!
But the book shows how even this was not enough. They now bundle the homes and rental contracts into groups of around 3,000 homes and sell the bundles for hundreds of millions each, over and over again. Who owns the homes now? No one knows. And they use those profits to buy more homes, or retail operations, or nursing homes or grocery chains. Anything to plunder and strip.
The author of this book has high hopes that new laws can be passed which would stop this plunder. However, every year this moving tide of money has only adapted and accelerated, wiping out any obstacle. Some say businessmen like Trump or Bloomberg make good leaders because they know how to run a successful business. Wrong. This book shows that what is good for them is NOT good for us!
Mar 2, 2020
In January, LAPD announced that 20 officers of the “elite” Metro Division were pulled off the street because they were found to have falsely labeled people as “gang members” or “associates” and had entered their names into CalGang, California’s gang database.
The LAPD brass themselves should be questioned as to why it took them so long to “look into” the process of how individuals’ names are entered into the CalGang database. Not only had people targeted by cops been complaining to LAPD for years, but a state audit in 2016 had found that CalGang obviously had a lot of names in it that did not belong there, including 42 people who had been added to the list when they were less than one year old. CalGang currently has nearly 90,000 names in it.
The list is not even public; only certain cops have access to it—and police brass keep secret any information about the cops who make entries.
And a big majority of the people entered into CalGang don’t even know their names are there. As few as two “criteria” are enough to get you entered into CalGang. They include, for example, “being dressed like a gang member” and “being identified by a reliable source,” such as another cop!
Being in CalGang is also an almost sure way to be railroaded to prison. Police target names in the database for raids and arrests, and then use the person’s being in the database as an incriminating factor when charges are brought against the person!
This is the Los Angeles version of what has been going on in U.S. cities for decades, under such names as “broken windows policing” or “stop and frisk.” Former LAPD Deputy Chief Dennis Kato explained that people ended up on CalGang because: “We look for black men between the ages of 18 and 24 who look like gang members.”
It’s a way to railroad young black and Latino men into prison—a racist “solution” the authorities use to justify locking up young working-class men, for whom this capitalist society holds out neither jobs, nor hope.
Mar 2, 2020
Donald Trump went on a spree, issuing pardons and commutations to a long list of white-collar criminals and corrupt officials. He pardoned Michael Milken, convicted of insider trading after making fortunes on junk bonds whose schemes led to the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry. He also commuted the sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who sold Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat after Obama became president.
And that’s only the beginning. He pardoned or commuted the sentences of corporate thieves and hackers, bribers, Medicare fraudsters, and tax evaders connected to his political friends. It’s a laundry list of white collar crime committed by wealthy friends.
Trump is certainly not the first president to hand out a pardon to wealthy political friends. In the waning moments of his presidency Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, convicted of tax evasion, who gave one million dollars to the Democratic Party, $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate Campaign, and $450,000 to the Clinton Library. Trump, though, puts the others to shame in his flagrant willingness to help out rich, powerful crooks.
Trump makes it plain: American justice is about who you know and how much money you have!
Mar 2, 2020
Early in January, the first apartment building to house homeless and low-income people in Los Angeles was finally opened—three years after Proposition HHH, which is providing a $1.2 billion bond to fund 112 such housing projects, was approved by L.A. voters.
This first 62-unit project cost $34 million, making the construction cost of each apartment unit nearly $550,000. According to HomeGuide.com, the average construction cost of a home on the West Coast is around $260,000. And a home in South Los Angeles, where the housing project is located, sells at around $520,000 on average, according to Zillow.com. That is, the construction cost of an apartment unit for a homeless family is more than twice as expensive as that of a home, and even more expensive than the sales price of a home in the same neighborhood!
No, these housing projects are not built to provide housing to people who immediately need it. This is another way for city politicians to funnel money to developers, banks and construction companies and their already rich owners.
Mar 2, 2020
If you haven’t gotten a letter from the former Mayor Mike Bloomberg in your mailbox, you have seen his many, many commercials, or his full-page advertisements in the newspaper. Everywhere you turn, there is some type of marketing campaign geared toward one group or another: Blacks, Latinos, women, farmers, you name it.
Most recently, after years of praising the “stop-and-frisk” methods that were used while he was mayor, Bloomberg is apologizing. This is only after a 2015 video surfaced where the former mayor stated: “95% of your murders and murder victims fit an M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25.... The way you get guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them” (according to the Washington Post).
Bloomberg was mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013 and stop-and-frisk increased from 97,296 documented cases in 2002 to 685,724 in 2011 under his watch. Even after federal judges deemed the practice a violation of the Constitution, Bloomberg allowed the practice to continue for the remainder of his tenure.
So while workers are focused on trying to get Trump out of office, it’s a mistake to put one more wealthy, self-serving racist, disguised with good slogans, in office.