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
May 4, 2020
By last week, 30 million people had signed up for unemployment benefits. Another ten million couldn’t get through to state unemployment websites or offices. Ten, perhaps 20 million more aren’t even eligible for the “expanded” benefits.
Add it up: 50 to 60 million people suddenly found themselves without a job. That’s as bad as it got after four years of the 1930s “Great Depression.” But this collapse hit us in six weeks, not four years’ time.
Yes, the crisis was caused, in the first place, by the emergence of a newly discovered coronavirus that first appeared in China. But that virus was turned into a murderous pandemic by government inaction, worldwide, and above all in this country.
This is the beginning of May, four months after the Trump administration was warned by U.S. intelligence that the world could be overtaken by a pandemic, that this virus could infect millions here, causing untold death and economic collapse.
The Trump administration had time to organize the material needed to prevent this from happening. It had time to pump money and resources into the public health system. It didn’t do it. It’s still not doing it. Why not? Because Trump is a self-serving idiot? Maybe he is, but behind Trump is the whole federal state apparatus, which did nothing. Were they all blind, self-serving idiots? No. The government didn’t do it, quite simply, because the health and well-being of the population isn’t its priority.
It’s a disaster. And responsibility for it lies not only with the federal government. Over the last decades, the states stripped their public health departments to the bones. They turned public hospitals over to private, profit-making companies. They cut people off Medicaid—some even bragged about it. The states also cut back staffing in the unemployment offices. They reduced unemployment benefits. They toughened requirements for assistance.
In a society that regularly faces crises, stripping public health, medical services and social services seems illogical. But it obeys the logic of the capitalist system, which is to defend profit at the expense of everything else. Government did what it did, carefully and systematically, in order to devote money, then more money, then still more money to a capitalist class whose own economy was foundering.
Working people paid the price for it. We paid the price long before this crisis erupted. We continue to pay the price with an epidemic out of control, and we pay the price with an economy out of control.
Today, the biggest capitalists want to send people back to work—at the expense of the population—and the states rush to serve them. Some do it brutally like Georgia and Florida; some do it “gently” like California and Michigan, but they all do it.
Pushing people to go back to work without adequate protection from a contagious and deadly virus will certainly increase the number of people who will die. But it won’t make the economy healthy. The virus may have been what laid the economy low, but the capitalist economy was already sick, distorted by the chase after profit, everything else be damned.
The virus doesn’t cause hospitals to lay off today, while people are dying of many causes. Protecting the “bottom line” is what did it. States and cities are cutting people, right in the middle of a crisis when their services are desperately needed. Big corporations are shifting money from production to speculation—in order to keep up profits. That’s why there are layoffs.
We can’t look to the capitalists nor their government to protect us—not from the virus, not from the unemployment.
This crisis has shown us that the only people who have an interest in protecting us are ... us.
We are the ones who know what happens in the workplaces. We are the ones who could work out how to protect our health and safety there. Working as we do to make the economy run, we are the ones who can figure out the answers to unemployment. It’s not rocket science—it just requires that the interests of working people be put first. And we are the only ones who will do that.
The coronavirus/unemployment crisis we face has already shown us we can’t depend on the economic and political systems that spawned them. But there’s a more profound conclusion we have to draw. We have to recognize that in order to defend ourselves, we will have to tear up these systems, throw them out, take up the challenge of creating our own system.
May 4, 2020
The Republicans and Democrats in Congress claim that the big spending bills that they have passed over the last two months are aimed at rescuing the economy and saving jobs in the midst of a pandemic and economic shutdown.
Don’t believe it.
The politicians made a big deal about their new 660 billion dollar Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which they advertised as a way to rescue small businesses and protect the jobs of their employees. Of course, Congress turned the program over to the big banks to run. This allowed the banks to grab tens of billions in fees and commissions, while they doled out much of the federal tax money to their richest customers, including huge restaurant groups, hotels managed by large chains, pharmaceutical companies, rich private universities and professional sports teams.
Almost no small businesses saw any of that money, nor were any jobs saved.
The politicians advertised how they prohibited rich people from receiving the $1,200 stimulus checks. Of course, what they didn’t advertise was that Congress also passed over 200 billion dollars in new tax breaks for the richest individuals and largest corporations. Just one of these tax breaks is worth on average about two million dollars to each of the very wealthiest families in 2020, according to Congress’s Joint Tax Committee.
So, no stimulus checks for Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and about 40,000 of the wealthiest families this year. But they WILL each get millions more in tax breaks!
And, as financial markets spun into a free fall in late February and early March, Congress also appropriated $454 billion aimed at Wall Street. This money is supposed to absorb possible losses by the U.S. Federal Reserve, which will provide trillions of dollars to buy up debt of all kinds, by businesses, as well as municipalities. In other words, the politicians are funding a record high bailout of corporate speculators and banks.
News of this bailout did stop the collapse of the financial markets, and even ignited new fits of speculation, big increases in the stock and other debt markets.
But none of this rescued the economy, which has plunged into the worst recession in almost a century. Nor did it stop the collapse of the job market, in which tens of millions of people have lost their jobs in a matter of weeks.
On the contrary, the politicians are making the working population shoulder the capitalists’ gigantic losses, while the capitalists grow ever richer.
May 4, 2020
Los Angeles’s garment industry got busy when the City of Los Angeles announced in late March that it was launching a program to produce five million much-needed masks for essential workers.
The problem is, many of the essential workers who make these masks have to work under unsafe conditions themselves—and for poverty wages—as they did before the coronavirus pandemic.
Workers continue to work in small, crowded sweatshops without windows, where the doors are kept shut. Safety gear is usually minimal: bosses may provide masks, but often not much else—not even hand sanitizer, for example. And pay is often still per piece and very low. Some garment workers’ hourly wages remain as low as about half the legal minimum wage, which is $13.50 in L.A.
Being undocumented, many of the garment workers are afraid to report these safety and pay violations.
These workers, whether they have papers or not, do work that is literally saving lives. But the capitalist society we live under just tries to exploit them beyond any limit, so that their bosses, and above all big-name corporations many sweatshops work for, can increase their profit beyond any limit.
May 4, 2020
Amidst pandemic, economic collapse and vast unemployment, the rich are getting richer.
Jeff Bezos, who heads Amazon, just gained 24 billion dollars and is now worth 139 billion. His competitors, Alice, Jim and Rob Walton, the world’s richest family, who own WalMart, have seen their combined fortunes hit 170 billion dollars. And Elon Musk, the celebrity billionaire who is CEO of Tesla, has added 10 billion dollars to his stash since the world plunged into crisis.
Wild swings in the stock market have led to wild speculation. Randall Weisenburger, a board member of Carnival Cruise Lines, bought 10 million dollars of his own company stock, just before maneuvers in the market caused it to jump 60%! Big banks like UBS are seeking ultra-wealthy clients, to loan them massive amounts of money for placing bets in what they call a “cheap market.”
Of course, there have also been some big losers, like speculators in the oil and gas industries, who have been hammered by the collapse in oil prices. But not to worry—they’re first in line for a bailout from the U.S. government and Federal Reserve.
There may be a crisis that has already thrown nearly 40 million people out of work. But for the capitalist class, crisis can be an even bigger chance to make money. This is how their system works. It’s a really rotten system.
May 4, 2020
Lots of jokes, and good ones at that, have followed Trump’s suggestions about injecting bleach and ultraviolet rays.
But really, there is not a damn thing funny about the total lack of responsibility being shown by the ruling class.
Why haven’t they told somebody to “get the hook” and drag him off the stage?
He is still there because the people that put him there think he is useful. And we’re not talking about the working poor, or the right-wing workers and middle class, not about the 30-some percent of those being tricked by him.
If he is still there, it’s because his bull, his misinformation, his right-wing divisive tactics, are helpful to the ruling class; helpful to keep people confused and upset and focused on wrong solutions like waiting for an election.
And getting more working people to understand that workers will have to GET UP and reject this circus, is what it will take for us to change this society.
May 4, 2020
In a completely NOT normal situation, we are being asked to pretend that things will gradually go back to normal. They say that “soon” the economy will be back on its feet and that workers will go back to production and paychecks will flow with normal days, normal holidays.
But in back of this narrative flows another one. Scientists are talking about continuous “waves” of infection, or surges, for the next TWO YEARS, depending on what impact social distancing may have.
Two years of social distancing for some, back to work for others. Going in and out of the workplaces, getting sick and carrying the pandemic back into the neighborhoods and households.
Two years of no hugging, no family gatherings, no physical contact, hide your face with a mask, so no smiles! No frowns!
This is not normalization. This is a deliberate abandonment of responsibility by those that pretend to “lead” the society.
May 4, 2020
When the government finally got around to admitting that there was an epidemic, all they could propose to the population for protection was to wash your hands a lot, for 20 seconds and sing happy birthday. Then, after the virus had been allowed to invade all sectors of the society (go viral) they admitted that masks were probably a good thing, but only masks you make yourself.
So they created a “war effort” kind of game: have everybody make their own mask so that PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) would be available to front line health care workers.
What a joke! First of all, no matter how handy you are, you can’t beat modern science for remedies like masks. High tech materials, high tech construction: people pay real money for high tech everything and the industry brags on it.
But for a pandemic? A red kerchief? A tee shirt? Who would wear homemade shoes if you could wear Nike Air Jordans?
A real mask affords real protection in combination with other safeguards, not only for others but for the mask wearer himself or herself. Otherwise, why would medical workers wear them?
The fact is that we have NO real protection, and the blame for it lies with those who own and run this profit system; the banks, Wall Street, auto bosses, all of them. The bosses never intended to protect the population, only to pacify it. They never did protect front line workers; not only doctors, nurses and health care workers are getting sick and dying. Store workers, meat cutters, bus drivers, transport workers, the list goes on and on.
They could have spent some of the billions they got off of Trump’s billionaire bailout, taken a few millions out of the bank accounts of the wealthiest one percent, gotten money from any damn where, if they had wanted to protect the population.
But they didn’t and don’t intend to. Don’t care, not a priority, not good for the monthly bottom line.
What are we doing letting fakes and frauds and billionaires and their clowns, (not just Trump) run this society, anyway?
May 4, 2020
This article is a translation of a major article appearing in Lutte-Ouvrière, the newspaper of the French revolutionary communist organization (Trotskyist). We reprint it because it speaks clearly to the situation that revolutionaries in this country and around the world confront in the midst of the coronavirus crisis/economic collapse.
The quarantine forces those who stand on revolutionary communist ideas to find ways to go on propagating their ideas and carrying out their activity, adapting their methods to the circumstances.
These circumstances came about due to the rapid spread of a previously unknown virus, but in a situation marked by the severe shortage of basic protective gear like hand sanitizer and masks. There are also shortages in the hospitals, from ventilators to basic anesthetics like curare, and even shortages of disposable gowns for healthcare workers. The entire hospital system found itself unprepared to deal with an unknown pandemic, after years of being weakened by deliberate policies imposed for the bourgeoisie by its political servants in successive governments. They pushed to cut costs, forced hospitals to bend to finance, and kept eliminating beds and personnel. All of this pushed hospital and nursing home workers to fight back for months.
It seems clear that the so-called coronavirus crisis will drag on, with the end of the quarantine pushed back, spread out, and fragmented. Macron recently set May 11 as the date for beginning the process of ending the quarantine. Whatever happens, the fact he announced it shows his goal is to clear a path for starting up the big workplaces, something which the representatives of the big bosses are loudly demanding. Even the government’s evocation of children’s needs to justify a partial reopening of the schools is poor cover for its real concern, which is “liberating” parents from having to care for their children so they can go let themselves be exploited.
The pandemic will pivot into the economic crisis, which has already begun. This crisis certainly existed well before the coronavirus appeared! But the coronavirus crisis is the factor that has unleashed its brutal worsening.
What will happen in the coming weeks and perhaps months depends both on the evolution of the pandemic, which scientists are for the moment having trouble grasping, and on the government’s reaction to it.
Trying to obey the wishes of the big bosses, while trying to appease public opinion, the government has tied itself in knots pursuing a schizophrenic policy.
The desire of the big bosses and the big shareholders was recently expressed by Roux de Bézieux, president of the major employers’ federation: the profit machine must be restarted as fast as possible. Many companies have been carrying out production, including of useless or even harmful goods, in spite of the quarantine. But the ones that temporarily closed clearly want to put their workers back to work. The French auto company PSA symbolizes the general desire. The big U.S. auto corporations push in the same direction. Coronavirus or not, competition and the laws of the market continue. For capitalism’s biggest predators, this period and its uncertainties offer many opportunities. It would be naive to think they wouldn’t take advantage of the situation to make their workers pay for the crisis. If there has been one constant in the history of capitalism since it imposed itself as the dominant mode of production, it is this: the push to make the workers pay.
The pressure of public opinion takes shape in a contradictory manner. It is expressed through a relaxation of quarantine measures, but also by the reaction of scientific milieus. The government is torn between the pressure of the bosses and that of the scientists, who disapprove of its half-measures, of its hesitations, and above all of its inability to provide healthcare workers with the equipment they need.
This is the context in which the political activities of Lutte Ouvrière take place today. We should not let our own specific activity, based on the class struggle and revolutionary communism, fade into the background, neglecting it, even forgetting it. Taking part in volunteer work and community associations is commendable, and we have a great deal of respect for those who do it. But volunteering in soup kitchens and housing rights organizations is not fighting for the construction of a revolutionary communist party. Fortunately, thousands of people are led to devote their time and energy to selfless social activity.
The coronavirus crisis has shed a light in this field also. Within the world of labor there have been treasures of initiative, imagination, and desire to work for the collective good. These are buried treasures, initiatives which are suffocated and frustrated by the bourgeoisie and its state, by its social structure which is hierarchical from top to bottom. The leadership of society is monopolized by the social class whose interests are directly opposed to collective interests. It infuses all of society with an individualism and a dog-eat-dog mindset which corrupt social life. The particularity of revolutions is that they liberate the creativity of the exploited. Our convictions as revolutionaries are largely founded on this. This creativity can show itself spontaneously, bringing forth militancy, not only in revolutions, but in other circumstances also. But outside of revolutionary periods, there are infinitely fewer women and men who continue to raise the banner of social emancipation and to advance its cause.
It is important that we continue our own fight, finding the means to do it, adapted to the constraints of quarantine. There is a vast field for initiatives, using the multiple possibilities of modern instruments of communication. Nonetheless, this is basically not a technical question. With more or less difficulty depending on the period and the relations of force between classes, the revolutionary workers’ movement has always found the way to put forth its ideas—because, in the final analysis, they express the class interests of the exploited majority.
Continuing to do so in this situation is all the more important because, faced with the government’s negligence, many more workers than usual are asking questions and looking for answers. It is important that they hear another voice besides that of the bourgeois press or state media, important that they hear what we have to say, which is that responsibility for the crisis lies not only with government that mismanaged the situation; the responsibility lies with the whole social organization based on private property in the means of production, on the pursuit of profit, and on exploitation.
The pandemic and the government’s imposition of quarantine to respond to it—in a context of shortage due to the capitalist functioning of the economy—may be the factor that unleashed the crisis, and yet it also conceals it. Coronavirus will serve as did the famous Black Thursday stock market crash of October 24, 1929. Already parts of the business press point out that what is taking place before our eyes is already worse than what happened in 1929. But they can’t explain profoundly the basic fundamental cause of the crisis.
In the United States, the unemployment level rose by ten million people in the first two weeks! This brutality is unprecedented, even in 1929. Economists are saying that in about 15 days, the unemployment index will have shot up from a little less than 4% of the active population to around 10%. Unemployment statistics all over the world are generally understated, particularly in the United States. Even so, the catastrophic trend which these figures highlight is significant.
We remark in passing that the crisis, which is bringing about the collapse of some capitalist companies, reinforces others. We already have a glimpse of this, watching huge companies like Amazon and Netflix profit from the crisis. On the other hand, the collapse of companies in the tourism and air transport sector, and even to a certain extent the auto industry (particularly the subcontractors), will upset the balance of forces between the great predators of imperialist capitalism. The only thing certain is that the more powerful are infinitely more likely to swallow up the less powerful than the other way around.
In periods of crisis, the capitalist mode of production resolves the problems that result from the anarchic pursuit of profit. After all the pain and suffering, an equilibrium is reestablished between the productive capacities of the economy and its solvent demand. In crises, the capitalist economy sheds its dying branches in order to concentrate big capital into fewer and fewer hands.
What will be the political consequences of this collapse? The only thing we can say is that they will be considerable, but also that they are unpredictable. Already, under the pretext of the fight against the coronavirus, borders have been closed, and the myth of the European Union is dissolving amidst the clash of “national egoisms”—that is to say, the disparate interests of its states. Again, under this pretext of the fight against coronavirus, there is a general evolution toward authoritarianism in political regimes. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, just gave himself the ability to rule by decree for an indefinite period of time. Central European countries like Hungary have had only a slight impact on the evolution of the capitalist world, but they have often pointed the direction toward which the rest of it was moving.
The political and human elements for an evolution toward authoritarianism can rest on the rise of the most backwards ideas, which we see today, in the name of religion or otherwise.
Parallel to this, however, the specter of the class struggle reappears. The social democratic reformist intelligentsia has discovered that the working class exists. This “discovery” generally serves all sorts of reformists as the justification for digging up all the old social democratic rubbish, while offering to serve the bourgeoisie.
It is impossible to foresee which political forces the bourgeoisie will use when reactions of discontent—which are scattered for the moment—take the form of social movements, that is to say, intensification of the class struggle. Will the first class to swing into action be the working class, or will it be some category of the petty bourgeoisie whose despair is mounting over the strangling of its livelihood? We can hear workers express discontent or anger here and there, but what seems to prevail so far is worry about the future and being fed up with the quarantine. This has reached the point that some volunteer to return to work, when the constraints of inactivity weigh more heavily than the fear of being infected.
What will be the attitude of the big bourgeoisie? Will it choose the reformist and state-based “carrot” or the “stick” of an authoritarian regime? Will it choose to lull the oppressed classes with promises or will it try to crush them? It will probably decide to do both, all at once or one after the other.
The experiences of the past can help us to make a reasoning, but not at all to predict. The national governments of Europe are negotiating plans to restart the economy. They don’t need to consult each other about their generally shared desire to shower the bosses with billions, neither about who will pay for it. It will fall on the exploited classes. But this, which is the common approach of all the governments, will not regulate the power struggle between the different states—as can be seen by today’s discord in the so-called European Union.
Opening wide the state treasury for the big bosses will obviously not be enough. States will resort to nationalizations. This “demand” for state planning—so prized by reformists—has been a weapon for all the bourgeoisies, who knew how to use it during wars. In certain periods, the laws of the market and of competition are not enough to defend the general interests of the national bourgeoisie, and they may even hurt it. Even the United States, the country with the most free-market capitalism, is picking up certain state-run social measures, at least for now.
In France, there is an older tradition in this regard. The government has already taken measures which it calls social (payment by the state to keep people employed, putting off the retirement reform). These measures can’t make up for the consequences of the healthcare crisis for workers, but they are costly for the state. The bourgeoisie currently seems to have decided to accept these measures and finance them by monetary creation, in other words by fabricating fake money on a large scale. But if the discontent of the petty bourgeoisie transforms into anger and provides the bourgeoisie with the means, it may well decide on more violent methods.
It is pointless to play a guessing game. Those who identify with the ideas of revolutionary communism must be capable of confronting intensification of the class struggle. They must keep their political compass, which comes from more than two centuries of the revolutionary workers’ movement. They must do so without impatience, without ultra-leftism, and without mistaking their desires for reality. No one knows when our class will launch itself into struggle, and no one has the power to provoke revolutionary upsurges. But this is what we have to prepare for.
We must be capable of resisting adversity, in the event that the bourgeoisie chooses increased authoritarianism or violence, if the situation provides the bourgeoisie with the means and social forces to impose them. Still more important: if the working class starts to move, the revolutionary communist current must be capable of defending its program and convincing the working masses, in order that they might have the means to take their fight to its conclusion, including overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie and expropriating it.
The bankrupt privileged class embodies humanity’s past, not its future.
May 4, 2020
This is the editorial that appeared in SPARK workplace newsletters, for the week of April 27.
As the politicians debate how to “restart” the economy, this is the choice we are being given: risk our lives by going back into work or risk our lives by sitting imprisoned at home knowing our jobs can disappear—if we even had a job.
This is the only kind of choice capitalism has ever given us: a choice between two clear evils. It’s no choice at all.
People are right to be worried about what will happen when we go back to work—we can see what has happened to workers in the so-called “essential” industries. At one point almost half the cops in the city of Detroit were quarantined because the virus had spread so widely through the force. And not just the cops themselves, but their families, too. A five-year old girl—whose father is a Detroit firefighter and whose mother is a Detroit cop—contracted the virus and died. Five years old.
Those “essential workers” were put to work with little thought for their lives. Not just firefighters and cops, but nurses, doctors, grocery store workers, warehouse workers, truckers, factory workers producing parts for transportation, transit workers. The number of “essential workers” who died—and of their family members who died—shows us what can happen when more of us return.
Now, one by one, as different workplaces start up, more of us will be guinea pigs. Human guinea pigs, letting those who run the society test to discover how many more will die.
But people are also right to be worried about what will happen if the shutdown continues. Already 22.6 million people have put in an unemployment claim, coming on top of the 7.1 million who were already unemployed. Even using those figures, which ignore many without a job, we face a rate of unemployment as high as it was in the worst point of the Great Depression.
Yes, stimulus bills supposedly promised benefits to “tide us over.” But up until now only about half those eligible for the $1200 payment have received it. Hardly anyone has received the full unemployment benefit. And hundreds of thousands of people, haven’t yet been able to file.
But even if all of us had got all that money, it’s only temporary. In the best of circumstances, it provides barely enough to pay for housing and groceries and immediate needs. What’s most important, it doesn’t deal with the essential problem: that is, a society that does not produce the goods and services needed by the population—a society without jobs—cannot long survive.
So we have no good choice: take the risk with our lives, or take the risk with our livelihood.
In fact, there can be another choice, but capitalism doesn’t give it. The capitalist drive for profit is what made society totally unprepared for the emergence of a newly discovered virus. Medical science knows how to confront newly emergent viruses. But money is needed for research, just like money is required to prepare equipment which could prevent disease from becoming epidemic. But money is exactly what was not given to meet these human needs. It went, instead, to more profit.
When we go back to work, it will be to jobs where our safety has never been a concern. How many people die from industrial “accidents” caused by the rush to wring more profit out of production? How many people die young from heart attacks as the intensity of work is increased? This happens every day, with or without a virus. Under capitalism, there is death.
Life, of course, means there will be death. But, under capitalism, unnecessary death is the necessary companion of the drive for profit.
The capitalist control of the economy is what needs to be shut down. This choice, a humane one, lies within the grasp of working people to make. Because of our position in production, working people have power. We could get rid of the capitalist control over the economy and begin to organize a society putting the needs of people first, including the need to be safe at work and secure in our livelihood.
May 4, 2020
For Michigan’s Unemployment Agency workers, working from home has meant the stress of the office is now—in their homes!
State employees are under tremendous pressure that many have never faced before. And the Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) has been hell-bent on trying to grind too much work out of too few workers.
Especially at a time like this, the unemployed in the community should be able to call the agency and talk to someone who can help. But simple customer service is impossible with too few workers.
The department has roughly one-third fewer employees in 2020 than during the 2008 economic collapse, when the number of claims was lower! That does not stop managers—living in some fantasy world—from setting quotas and threatening employees. The State of Michigan must hire more workers now!
Covid-19 is not the reason that the Unemployment Agency is understaffed. Political choices have been made for decades—by both political parties—to shred the social safety net. The wealthiest HAVE a social safety net, and the working class does not.
When it comes to what the working class needs to be able to live, this society, based on greed, is not able to deliver. A whole new system, run by workers, is necessary. One day an overhaul and a movement of the workers will take place!
May 4, 2020
A group of homeless people, including families with children, took over 16 vacant homes in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The houses they occupied are part of a much larger number owned by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), a publicly funded state agency. Many have been sitting vacant for years, if not decades.
Martha Escudero moved into one of the houses with her two young daughters, together with another mother of three children, and Benito Flores, a 64-year-old who had been living in his van.
Escudero, who had been living on couches with friends and family members for the last 18 months, said, “We all work and get paid, but what they call ‘affordable housing’ is not affordable for working people.”
Flores, who works as a welder, said, “Rents go up and wages don’t.” He also pointed out that Caltrans bought these houses with taxpayers’ money, adding, “These houses should belong to us; we worked for them.”
May 4, 2020
Hundreds of thousands of people in the Chicago area have lost their jobs and cannot pay their rent or mortgage.
In response, the governor of Illinois put a temporary ban on evictions. Chicago’s mayor asked landlords to “give tenants some grace” and set up a Chicago Housing Solidarity Pledge in an attempt to get landlords and mortgage lenders to avoid touching off a wave of evictions and foreclosures. But the pledge just promises that two or three months missed rent or mortgage payments will be spread out and added to normal monthly payments—which will still be impossible for many to pay.
Despite the eviction ban and the “pledge,” unemployed tenants are already reporting that landlords are refusing to renew leases. Are they being stopped from doing so? No. After all, it was only a voluntary “pledge” to begin with!
Even during a pandemic, whatever politicians say, this system is set up to make sure that the owners get their money.
May 4, 2020
Children’s National Hospital, one of the Washington, D.C. area’s largest employers and the largest provider of pediatric care in the city, asked its 6,000 workers to take a week off by mid June. Management told workers to go without pay for their week off or use paid leave. Administrators claim workers must sacrifice now to prepare the hospital’s finances for the next round of the virus.
Children’s stands to save no more than 10 million dollars if workers comply. But why should they? The hospital normally pays its top two dozen bosses a combined total of 40 million dollars. Cut THEIR pay. Let the bosses see what it means to “help sustain financial operations!”
The same day, the hospital’s infectious disease division chief told reporters the hospital is seeing more children with coronavirus, with and without other health problems—many of whom need critical care in the intensive care unit. Experts in children’s injuries expect a “huge spike” in injuries while schools are closed.
Care for children won’t benefit from workers being forced to take vacations. This policy only benefits the money grubbers who control health care.
May 4, 2020
Saint Anthony’s Hospital on Chicago’s West Side has so many Covid-19 patients that it has had to set up ventilators outside of its ICU. Saint Anthony’s, on Chicago’s West Side, serves a working class and poor population. Many people who live there are essential workers, continuously putting themselves at risk for low wages.
But as a “safety net” hospital, it comes under all the pressures of our capitalist society. For example, the hospital had to rely on an outside lab to take care of its tests—which means waiting on results. Wealthy Chicago hospitals like Rush had the money to set up their own testing facilities.
St. Anthony’s saw thirteen of its ICU nurses take higher wages to leave for the new field hospital in McCormick Center. So now St. Anthony’s sits on the front-line with a depleted nursing staff.
This is a crazy way to function—hospital services need to be organized at the level of the city at a minimum. But this society organizes everything to make profit—healthcare resources follow the money, to the detriment of the working class.
May 4, 2020
Ten thousand deaths from Coronavirus have come in nursing homes—one fifth of all deaths in this country. The Wall Street Journal, which provided this report, says it is a gross undercount, since there is no real public accounting of what happened in the nursing homes. There is only one thing sure: there is a horrifying human waste.
Yes, part of the reason is that so many people in nursing homes are already fragile; many come in with serious illnesses. They are vulnerable.
That’s all the more reason there should be extra care and extra sanitary precautions in nursing homes. Plain human respect requires it. All the more so, because these are our elders, the people whose lives laid down the base on which all the rest of us exist today.
There should be trained staff in nursing homes, enough staff so they have the time to obey rules that could prevent the spread of infection—whether Coronavirus or the flu or just the “simple cold.” Staff in the nursing homes should have full access to protective equipment, preventing them from getting sick and from spreading disease from one patient to another.
But this is exactly what didn’t exist in so-called normal times in a very large number of nursing homes. So when Coronavirus hit, of course, it swept through them.
This disaster waiting to happen reflects what has happened to the nursing home “industry”: thousands of nursing homes have been gobbled up by private equity companies. Those financial wolves did to nursing homes what they did to retail outfits like Sears or J.C.Penney. They drained them of every bit of profit they could squeeze out. Every bit of protective equipment they didn’t buy, every nursing position they didn’t fill, every humanly fulfilling activity they suppressed meant more money in their pocket.
But the product in nursing homes is not washing machines or towels and clothes—it’s human beings, human beings whom private equity wolves considered disposable.
Private equity is just the latest variant of capitalist investment. But capitalism has always pushed to make more profit at the expense of people. And every level of government has been complicit with this functioning, including today in the nursing homes. Even now, as Coronavirus spreads through nursing homes, states are rushing to pass regulations providing the nursing home “industry” with immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. The same immunity deal was included in the federal “small business” loan program.
This is where American capitalism is taking us, back to a time when people whose working years had been used up were considered encumbrances on the economy, trash to be thrown out.
May 4, 2020
While the COVID-19 pandemic in Michigan first hit hardest in the three counties surrounding Detroit, it is now spreading to other parts of the state, according to the Metro Times, a Detroit weekly paper. In late April, 81% of coronavirus cases were in the tri-county metro Detroit area. By May 1, that was down to 71%.
Some of the largest increases were in rural counties like Iosco and Ionia, which saw their numbers triple in 10 days. However, counties that include fairly large cities, like Kent County surrounding Grand Rapids, are also seeing more rapid increases.
Protesters have recently demonstrated in Lansing against the strictness of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19.
While these demonstrations have clearly been motivated, at least in part, by wealthy donors and far-right organizations, they certainly touch on real struggles being faced by many people in the state due to the economic crisis touched off by the pandemic. Many of the protesters are small business owners facing difficult economic circumstances, despite what help has been made available to some from the federal government. Others spoke out about not being able to get through the state’s unemployment benefit system to receive benefits.
Some protesters have made the argument that with no cases existing in their areas, the stay-at-home order should be relaxed. The choices, however, are not that simple. The numbers showing the increasing spread of the pandemic demonstrate that county boundaries don’t protect against the spread of a highly contagious, highly deadly virus.
In other words, there are only two bad choices: Shutting everything down to slow the spread of the virus or opening them up to slow the capitalist economic disaster.
May 4, 2020
At a plant producing fabric for car seats in Juarez, a city just south of the U.S/Mexico border, many workers began showing COVID-19 symptoms in mid-March. But the plant’s owner, Michigan-based Lear Corporation, did not close the plant until April 1—after it had become obvious that the plant was the center of a coronavirus outbreak. Thirteen workers of the plant are known to have died.
Despite shut-down orders by the Mexican government for non-essential manufacturers, many U.S.-owned factories along the border have continued production. These factories, known as maquiladoras, are very profitable for their owners. Under the pretext that they produce goods for export only, maquiladoras are exempt from most taxes and tariffs. On top of that, the companies keep the wages very low, and subject their workers to sweatshop conditions.
At some plants, workers have been walking out, protesting the lack of safety against the coronavirus. At one plant in Baja California, owned by Georgia-based Cooper Lighting, management’s answer was to put chains on the doors to prevent the 800 workers from leaving the plant!
History books tell us about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, where 146 workers were killed because factory owners had locked the exits. That was more than a century ago, but under capitalism, bosses will behave like bosses.