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
Jun 1, 2020
“The system is broken”—the words of a young black man in Minneapolis watching flames destroy a police precinct demonstrators had torched.
Broken? Yes, it is! What else could you say about a system whose police for nine minutes casually knelt on a black man’s neck, watching until he stopped breathing—and then, just as casually, reported the man had died from a “medical incident”? If it hadn’t been for a bystander’s video, it would have been just one more lying police report, filed away in a dusty drawer.
George Floyd paid the price for this broken system with his life. He is not the first black person to pay that price in Minneapolis-St. Paul, only the most recent. Coming not so long before him, there was Thurman Blevins, and before him, Philando Castile and Jamar Clark.
And Minneapolis is not the only city to have a murder-by-cop exposed by video, a murder that otherwise would have been buried with the victim’s corpse. That’s why we know the names of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Brandon Webber, Antonio Smith, and Darrius Stewart in Memphis and Eric Garner in Staten Island, among so many others. It’s why we know the name of Ahmaud Arbery from Glynn County, Georgia, who was murdered by a former investigator for the sheriff’s department and local prosecutor.
No, it’s not just one barbaric beating, and not just one city. It’s the system, and it’s broken.
Born in slavery, this capitalist system, based on the exploitation of labor, is still marked by its beginnings. Almost from the moment the chains of slavery were torn apart in 1863, the once-enslaved black population was condemned to occupy the bottom ranks of “free labor”: driven onto chain gangs and prison labor working in Southern fields; pushed into sharecropping; later funneled into the reserve army of the unemployed by Northern capital.
In general, black labor still occupies that place, absorbing the worst unemployment in periods of crisis, temporarily filling the open slots in the ever shorter periods of expansion. This role for the black population was a creation of a capitalist system still carrying the marks of its birth in slavery. It’s what leads today to the greater rates of poverty among black people; it underlays the worse medical care and the worse school systems, worse levels of imprisonment.
This oppression explains the violence that systematically has been visited on the black population by those in authority. Officially sanctioned violence is what capitalism has used to keep the oppressed from revolting—all of the oppressed, black and white.
Yes, there are many white people, poor white people, killed by cop. White workers are also exploited. But white workers—including all the immigrant groups, one after the other, who have been funneled into the working class over time—have been given the petty privilege of their skin color, which means not quite so low a wage, slightly less poverty, slightly better access to education and medical care, etc. But slightly better doesn’t mean good. White workers may share their skin color with the capitalist class that sits on top of this society, but they do not share the wealth.
Every part of the working class has reason to revolt against this capitalist system that produces great wealth for those on top, creating growing poverty among those who do the work society needs. Today, this system is exposing us to untold thousands of deaths linked directly to the way it handled the virus. It is pulling us down the rabbit hole of its own economy in collapse. And it requires violence to maintain itself.
Now what? A somewhat older black woman in Minneapolis, looking at the burnt out police precinct, said this: “It’s like layer and layer and layer of gunpowder building over a long time and when you become an adult, it’s this stick of dynamite.”
This past week, in Minneapolis, the dynamite began to explode. And, as has happened so often before, young black people were leading the way.
There will be explosions. But beyond the explosions—if this time they are to produce the change the population needs—there needs to be a clear goal for the struggle. We must fight to get rid of the system that is broken, this capitalist system, which has created the oppression, exploitation and violence weighing more heavily on the black population, but still weighing on the whole working class. There need to be people standing for this goal among the oppressed who want to fight back.
Jun 1, 2020
So Trump decided to cancel the annual White House updated midyear economic forecast, a standard forecast done for decades by all Presidents and why?
Not too hard to figure out—it looks bad! And what time is it? Election time.
With over 41 million Americans having filed for unemployment benefits, he figures “Why repeat bad news?”
Trump repeatedly says that the economy will get better in the 3rd and 4th quarters of this year, and that 2021 “will be one of the best years we’ve ever had.”
But don’t try to take that to the bank. After all, the novel coronavirus didn’t disappear like a miracle, either.
Jun 1, 2020
A white cop from Ypsilanti Township, Michigan was caught on video beating a black woman, Sha’Teina Grady El. While the beating was taking place, two other cops tased and restrained her husband, Dan, to prevent him from stopping the beating.
The three cops claim they were there to investigate a shooting at the home next door to the Grady Els. As they arrive, the woman is standing in front of the neighbors’ fence and her husband is videotaping the cops. One of the cops grabs her husband, and another pushes her away. He can be seen picking her up and carrying her back into the video scene and punches her in the side. He then lifts his fist as high as possible and smashes it down into her head three times, at which point she attempts to slap him away.
The mainstream media have cropped most versions of the video posted on the internet to exclude the start of the incident. But there is no way Sha’Teina Grady El could have been biting the cop as he was lifting her entire body, throwing her against the fence and punching her in the side. It’s easy to see the cop is a large man with a boxer’s strength, and she’s a much smaller woman.
The local county Sheriff’s office claims the cop’s body camera audio shows him saying she is biting him.
They point out Sha’Teina Grady El, who is a nationalist militant, had two other incidents of resisting police. After her release from jail in Washtenaw county, police from Taylor, Michigan arrested her on an outstanding warrant, and she was taken to the Wayne County jail in Detroit.
Sha’Teina Grady El was beaten so badly, her face was bleeding. This is clearly a case of racist police brutality. These white cops, in a disproportionately black township, couldn’t accept that someone dare videotape them.
The Grady Els are Moorish nationalists who actively oppose the U.S. legal system. Given the history of racism, including police brutality which has recently been on full display, it’s certainly not hard to understand why they would do so.
The video rightfully prompted large protests in Washtenaw County including at the Sheriff’s office.
Jun 1, 2020
Hundreds of independent corporate groups that produce oil and gas through fracking are expected to go bankrupt over the next year.
This is not simply because of the recent collapse in the energy market due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these companies had already been losing money for a long time. What kept them going, despite heavy losses, was an endless supply of cheap capital supplied by Wall Street.
Big financial companies created hundreds of billions of dollars in debt for these energy companies, thereby enriching oil company executives, not to speak of Wall Street financial companies.
These companies had “sub-primed” the production of American energy. The booming economies from North Dakota to West Texas and New Mexico from greatly increased oil and gas production thanks to fracking was created out of a great big financial bubble.
Over the years, as it became increasingly clear that it was only a matter of time before this bubble would burst, many sources of funding for this industry began to pull back. But the fracking companies stayed in business and even continued to expand because one big source of funding didn’t dry up: pension fund money.
With employers in both the public and private sectors all over the world cutting back on how much they fund workers’ retirement pensions, all pension funds worldwide have been desperate for higher rates of return in order to shore up their promises to retirees. So, they have increasingly resorted to hiring the same financial sharks and snakes, who created the oil and gas fracking bubble, to manage the workers’ money. The pension funds pay these financial “managers” a lot of money—a two percent annual fee—on all the funds under their management, no matter whether they make money or not.
With COVID-19, the money spigot to finance fracking companies has been turned off, and the entire industry bubble is bursting.
Nobody knows how much pension fund money has been sunk into this bursting bubble, money that has been drawn from the U.S. and all over the world.
But what is clear is that now that this bubble is bursting, millions of workers in the oil and gas industries are losing their jobs. Towns that boomed because of the increased oil and gas production are now turning into ghost towns. And pension funds are about to take a big hit, further endangering workers’ retirement pensions.
As for the fracking company executives and Wall Street financiers who have made a fortune—they won’t be the ones who have to pick up the pieces.
Jun 1, 2020
When rioting took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota over the murder of George Floyd, Trump jumped out on Twitter to quote an old, racist police chief from Miami from 1967 who had threatened, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Then Twitter tagged Trump’s tweet and deleted it, saying that it promoted violence.
So who is the thug, now? No doubt, when his handlers couldn’t control him, big capitalist conservatives had to remind him that shooting may start a riot, but often doesn’t end it.
Anyway, he had to roll his comments back and gave the lame explanation that he was just concerned about somebody getting hurt during looting and shooting (haha) and blah, blah, blah.
The only shooting he was doing as usual, was shooting off his mouth!
Jun 1, 2020
Over the past month, the number of workers infected with COVID-19 in three of the biggest meat processors in the U.S.—Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods and JBS—has jumped from 3,000 to 17,000, according to the Washington Post. COVID-19-inflicted deaths of the workers surged from 17 to at least 66. This drastic infection rate increase happened after the U.S. government allowed reopening of more than half of the 30 meat processing plants that were shuttered because of the coronavirus.
After bringing these workers back to work, these companies claimed that they had taken extra steps to protect the workers by providing tests, masks, other protective equipment, and putting in partitions separating the workers, etc. But in reality, these are not nearly enough. The companies continue to maximize the line speeds. In one plant, the workers are forced to slaughter and process more than 30,000 pigs in a day. So, workers are crammed virtually shoulder-to-shoulder to tend production lines. Jobs like “gut snatchers” require people to work right next to each other, slicing open pigs and pulling out entrails.
Very short break time, totaling 60 minutes on every 11-hour shift, force the workers to eat together in crowded cafeterias and walk the same narrow hallways, making social distancing practically impossible. Some workers wear diapers on the line to avoid having to leave for a bathroom break.
The meat and poultry industry in the country is dominated by a few meat processing companies, including JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill Meat Solutions, and National Beef Packing. These very large companies process meat through a few very large plants. Roughly 40 of the largest plants supply about 90% of the pork, and a little more than 50 plants provide 98% of the beef in the US.
Much of the workforce is made up of immigrant workers, that is, the most vulnerable parts of the workforce. Many are refugees from all the continents of the world. They have few legal rights. And many live in fear that if they lose their job, they can be deported, or they could be separated from their families.
Over a century ago, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, described such horrible conditions in the meat packing plants that it caused a scandal. In the essentials, conditions haven’t changed. Profit is still the king of this jungle, produced by a workforce in a state of semi-slavery.
Jun 1, 2020
From the spring of 1918 through the spring of 1919 an influenza epidemic spread all over the world, bringing about the death of at least 50 million, perhaps 100 million. Combined with World War I, it revealed the barbarism to which capitalism had descended. But it also shines a light on the current situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic in a world still dominated by this barbaric social system.
World War I was a struggle among the main industrial powers to re-divide the world. It was the most terrible, bloody conflict known up until that time. Overturning many aspects of human life for a whole historic period, it laid bare the abject, criminal nature of the capitalist social order, and it provoked a powerful revolutionary wave that shook the world for several years, including first of all in Russia itself, devastated by the war.
The war was accompanied by the most destructive epidemic humanity had ever faced. Its frightening cost in human life, perhaps four times as great as that of the war, resulted in great measure from the way the capitalist economy itself was organized, from the imperialist looting of the world, and from the policy of the different states, serving the interests of their own capitalist class.
Wherever the virus that caused the flu originated, it is certain that the war considerably accelerated the flu’s spread into a pandemic, enormously increasing its devastation.
The first known appearance of this influenza came at the gigantic American army boot camp at Fort Riley, Kansas, in March 1918. As the troops who were infected moved, the flu moved with them, jumping to East Coast ports where the American “expeditionary” force for the “European war” was being staged.
By the end of May, half of all American troops had been infected. But American authorities denied there was an epidemic. The Secretary of Defense testified at the end of June that the troops had “never exhibited any signs of illness whatsoever.” The Wilson Administration had already confronted popular opposition when they announced their intention in 1917 to register men for the draft. To admit the existence of the flu in 1918 might have jeopardized U.S. plans to intervene in this war between the big imperialist powers for supremacy.
U.S. troops arrived in Brest, France, in June 1918, bringing with them the first wave of the flu that was to touch the European continent.
There are conflicting theories about where and how the virus itself originated. But wherever it was, the movement of troops, going into combat and returning from the front, is what spread the epidemic beyond the U.S. and Europe and into the African continent, into the Pacific, into Asia, and even into the Arctic, then finally back to the U.S.
Up until the armistice of 1918, military censorship prevented populations in all the contending powers from being warned about any illness, much less about an epidemic. And yet, by the autumn of 1918, half a million soldiers—French, British and American—had been taken out of combat by the flu. The flu spread across the trenches into the camps of Germany and its allies.
Having remained neutral in the conflict, Spain was the only power to admit the wide existence of the epidemic in the spring and summer of 1918. That’s why the flu was at first called, the “Spanish flu,” a name that has stuck ever since, even though it is completely wrong.
To hide the reality of the spreading epidemic, the political leaders of the combatant powers violated every rule of hygiene known at the time. Schools, bars, restaurants, dance halls were left open—except when there were no longer enough people to run them. The “essential” enterprises providing material for the war were run by ever increasing numbers of sick workers, requisitioned by force to work.
People too sick to work in France were put on trains and sent to other parts of the country, thus spreading the virus more widely. The military bases, the military hospitals, the train stations, the factories, even the whorehouses set up by the armies for their troops, were the centers around which the epidemic clustered. Already in the Middle Ages, humanity knew it was necessary to isolate sick people. But isolating sick people would have required the various powers to admit that their troops were sick, and to devote some of the resources they had sequestered for the war to combat the flu. That, none of them were ready to do.
In other words, the needs of their war prevented the imperialist powers from employing any widespread measures that might have helped contain the spread of the flu. This was especially true in the autumn of 1918 when the war was drawing to its close, even as working people throughout the world were looking toward revolutionary Russia. The troops on both sides were fed up with the war.
The end of the war in November 1918 came at the end of the second wave of the epidemic. The celebrations that were organized to greet the announcement of the armistice were major sources for the rebounding of infection. The “victors”—Britain, France and the U.S.—would let nothing deprive them of their “victory” parades. There must be speeches and victory celebrations, flags unfurled, patriotism run amok.
In the U.S., the rapid spread of the flu among the civilian population, the so-called third wave, began with these patriotic, flag-waving extravaganzas, when tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands massed close together on city streets to greet the returning troops.
There had already been so-called “victory bond” parades in a number of American cities in September, which turned those cities into incubation spots for the virus. Philadelphia, with the biggest parade, was particularly hard hit. By contrast, cities like San Francisco and New York, which had already shut down schools and begun to prevent most public gatherings, as well as require the wearing of masks, were significantly more protected.
The situation of health in the countries at war, as well as in their colonies, had worsened considerably since the beginning of the war. On the one hand, the immense majority of nurses, doctors, pharmacists and surgeons had been sent into the battle zones. Hospitals had little medicine, not enough beds, and few means of disinfection. The sanitary situation in European cities was atrocious.
During these same war years, the civilian population had undergone a rapid fall in the standard of living. Workers in the factories were being driven harder and harder to get out more production for the war. In many areas of Europe where war raged, food was scarce. All of this meant that people were dying from other diseases, not only the flu itself.
The blockade imposed on Germany and Austria-Hungary by the U.S., Britain and France led to famine in the very center of Europe.
The U.S. was not as severely touched as those countries where people were living right in the midst of the war. But even here, poverty played its role in the extension of the flu. Working people crowded together in big-city housing were two or three times as likely as those in the wealthy areas to die of the flu.
The quacks who were selling snake oil profited greatly. And so did the major companies rapidly imposing their control over the marketing of medicines. Bayer turned itself into a giant company through its monopoly of the market for aspirin.
The pillage of raw materials and the severe exploitation of labor in the countries submitted to domination by the big imperialist powers rendered the consequences of the flu even more terrible for the peoples living there. The epidemic, which arrived through the ports, revealed the near absence of any medical personnel in these countries. There were hardly any hospitals. This was one of the consequences of the underdevelopment to which the domination of imperialism had plunged two-thirds of humanity.
Africa, under the colonial yoke, was forced to provide half a million men as cannon fodder for the European war and as hands to work in Europe’s factories. Africa suffered a rate of death from influenza at least twice as high as that of any European country. In Southern Rhodesia, under British domination, the rate of death was 9% for Europeans living in the country; 25% for Africans living in the “reserves,” and 92% among the African miners.
In the Philippines, under U.S. domination, U.S. troops who were infected were offloaded, disregarding the consequences for the population, without providing any medical supplies for them or the Philippine population.
India was the hardest hit of all the colonies, suffering at least 18 million deaths. The port of Bombay was first touched by the flu starting on the 29th of May 1919, when Indian troops, infected while serving in the British army, disembarked. Within two weeks, the city was devastated by the epidemic.
The colonial power refused to impose any quarantine on Indian ports, given the importance of Indian industry, particularly textiles, for the British economy. The colonial power paid no attention to sanitary conditions in the big cities, to which it had forced millions of peasants to move. Whatever doctors and nurses had existed before the war had been eaten up by the needs of the British war machine. India was left to battle the epidemic without any medical system.
Finally, it was the population itself that organized against the epidemic, pulled forward by militants who had begun to organize for independence. It was during this period that the Indian independence movement gained credit and extension.
Certainly, the limits of scientific knowledge in 1918 played a big role in the rate of mortality during the 1918–19 influenza. The viral origin of the flu was not yet known. And there was no vaccine that might have offered protection from it.
But capitalism owns a crushing responsibility for the extension and deadly balance sheet of the epidemic. The imperatives of the imperialist war for the profit of big capital catastrophically drove down the standard of living and destroyed the health of populations in the countries at war. People driven into the cities were lodged under totally unsanitary conditions. No country had a policy devoted to hygiene and public health. Workers in the colonized countries were kept in an appalling material and cultural oppression.
What happened in 1918–19 should have condemned bourgeois society, bringing it to its end. It was saved by the treason of the principle leaders of the Social Democracy in 1914, which left the workers in most countries without perspectives and without leadership, both of which had existed in Russia when the proletariat overthrew the domination of the bourgeoisie there in 1917.
There is no comparison between the situation in 1918–19 and the scientific knowledge that exists today. And the material means to confront the COVID-19 epidemic are immeasurably greater than humanity had in 1918. And yet, today, there is also chaos. The number of deaths, given what could be done, is unthinkable. Today, the virus is wedded with an economic collapse, one which the virus may have provoked, but whose roots lie deep in the capitalist system itself. To get rid of the rottenness of this worn-out system means it has to be overthrown. This still remains the only viable perspective for humanity.
As the revolutionary Friedrich Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring in 1878: “Both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions.”
Jun 1, 2020
The following article was the editorial in SPARK workplace newsletters of May 25.
We are trapped by an epidemic, for which there is no cure and no preventative medicine, and we are trapped by an economy collapsing upon itself. This, we are told, will be our “new normal” for some indefinite time to come.
On the scale of the world, 330,000 people are reported to have died from COVID-19. This country, which leads the world in reported deaths, will hit 100,000 by the end of this month.
In the eight weeks since the U.S. economy began to collapse, 42 million people have filed claims for some kind of unemployment benefits.
Neither of these crises is natural, neither would be “normal” in a society organized around the needs of the population. And yet, here we are, with our “new normal.”
The virus may be a newly discovered one, its details unknown before to medical science. But medical science already had predicted the appearance of such a virus, and warned of its possible evolution. Why was it “normal” for the political authorities and medical system not to prepare for it? Isn’t it obvious? To prepare would have eaten into the steady accumulation of profit for a capitalist class bent on recovering the profit it had lost in the financial crisis of 2008—09. Money from public health, like all public services, went straight into the capitalist purse.
When the virus appeared, public health authorities had no supplies, no organization, no preparation to meet it. The only answer the capitalist system had for a rapidly spreading virus was to shut down the economy.
Today, it has no answer to this economic collapse other than to send people back to work under conditions that guarantee new upsurges of COVID-19 in areas around the country.
In Missouri, a woman working in a newly opened beauty salon went to work for eight days, while suffering symptoms, but awaiting her turn to be tested and get results. She exposed 91 people, 84 clients and 7 co-workers. “Irresponsible,” said Missouri’s governor. Maybe, but what does it make him? He ordered the state to cut unemployment benefits for anyone who didn’t go back to work. He presides over a system of public health that still doesn’t have rapid testing for people who feel sick. He, himself, went out in public not wearing a mask, proudly calling attention to that fact.
Of course, it’s only one anecdote. But it’s indicative of the situation under which people are being sent back to work.
Calling people back to work won’t overcome the collapse, not when people are still getting sick. But, more to the point, it won’t overcome a collapse that had been prepared for by an economic system which steadily accumulates wealth in the hands of the biggest capitalists, driving down living standards of almost everyone else.
Out of work for two months, a significant number of people didn’t pay rent or fell behind on their mortgage notes or car notes. They couldn’t. The final blow was being out of work. But the real cause was the fact people’s income doesn’t keep up with basic costs like housing or cars.
Out of work for two months, one in four women reported they were short of food for their children every week. If that’s so, it’s because children had already been going hungry.
This is not normal, but it will go on being “the new normal” in capitalist society until the working class takes the future into its own hands.
The problem is not the capacity of the working class to stop this disaster. Based on its key spot in production, the working class can hold power—and use it to upend the capitalist class and its society.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like it today. But that’s a question of consciousness, of what the working class understands about its own capacities.
That depends on the small number of people today who understand this reality. Will they find the way to convey as widely as possible what is essential, which is that the working class needs to take power and use it? Will they create a nucleus that enables workers’ struggles to take the path of revolution? Are they committed enough to the basic essential interests of their class to do it?
Jun 1, 2020
According to their Teamsters local, at least 36 workers at a UPS facility in Tucson, Arizona tested positive for the virus and three of them are in intensive care. The company’s main concern was that the outbreak was delaying deliveries, so they brought in workers from out of state, exposing them to the virus as well. According to the union, both UPS and the Arizona Department of Public Health “refused to disclose the extent of the outbreak.”
That’s because both UPS and the government put profits first. It’s obvious: workers can rely only on ourselves and each other to protect our health and safety.
Jun 1, 2020
When governors started what they called “reopening” the state economies, certain sections of the population acted like the pandemic was over.
Of course, it is obvious that the capitalists have forced the economy to begin to open for a reason—their profits. But the working class, as badly as it needs money to survive, has to recognize that you have to be alive to work at all.
The mask issue, with some refusing to wear it, shows how individualistic people have been encouraged to be. “It is all about me” behavior. True, wearing a mask doesn’t protect you as much as it protects others BUT, of course, if others wear it, it protects you. A first responder said, “If you think you are tired of wearing a mask, try wearing a ventilator.”
Workers produce together all of the goods necessary for life. Try producing your own water supply, gas and electric, food...It is a myth that as individuals, we can just go it alone.
The problem with the virus is that while you may be tired of it, it is not tired of you. Ignoring our responsibilities to other people can only make it harder and more difficult to address.
Jun 1, 2020
A lack of access to quality medical care is a big reason black Chicagoans have been dying of COVID-19 at six times the rate of white Chicagoans. Many of the hospitals that served them were already in deep financial crisis before COVID-19. Four struggling South Side hospitals had announced a plan in January to try to survive: they requested state funding to merge and establish an integrated health system, replacing their outdated facilities and setting up community health centers.
Given all the lip-service the Democratic Party politicians who run Illinois have been giving to improving health care for under-served populations in this crisis, this project would seem like a no-brainer. But the state legislature didn’t even discuss it.
As a result, instead of the planned improvements, the heads of these hospitals said the lack of state funding “will force hospital closures, cause further service cuts and push access to care even further out of reach for the families we serve.”
There is money for hospitals in the bailout bills passed by the U.S. Congress, but it’s being gobbled up by already rich hospitals. Twenty of the richest hospital chains in the country got 5 billion dollars, even though they are sitting on 100 billion dollars in cash reserves.
In health care as in everything else, the deliberate choices of politicians in both parties reinforce this system that makes the rich get richer, and leaves the most vulnerable to die.
Jun 1, 2020
In late April, Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California announced that it was imposing a 20-percent pay cut on its employees for 10 weeks. Stanford said it was because the number of surgeries and ER visits had gone down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the hospital was making less money.
What Stanford did not say, however, is that it is also receiving $102 million in federal bailout money—more than any other hospital in California, and more than twice the amount the hospital is cutting from its workers’ pay—even though the hospital’s parent organization, Stanford University, has $708 million in cash reserves, and sits on an endowment worth about $28 billion.
To Stanford, like other big health care companies, health care is just a way to make as much profit as possible. And to that end, Stanford is trying to use the COVID-19 crisis to squeeze even more out of its work force.
Jun 1, 2020
After torrential rain, a series of dam failures caused flash floods in a three-county area near the city of Midland, 140 miles northwest of Detroit. In this flood’s path were largely working class and poor communities. In a tribute to the power of working-class know-how, over 11,000 people evacuated on short notice, with no loss of life.
At least one nursing home and one retirement community had to be evacuated in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic!
As far back as 2004, it was found that the largest of the 3 failed dams, Edenville, would not have adequate spillway capacity to handle a major flood. Federal and state government reports were filed year after year—some warning of disaster—but nothing was done.
Flooding caused more than a half a billion dollars of damage to residents, many of whom were under-insured or not insured for flood damage.
The small, largely poor town of Sanford, Michigan was wiped off the map by this flood. Compare that to the two wealthy multi-millionaire cousins, Lee Mueller and Michel d’Avenas, who owned Edenville Dam, the largest and the first to fail. They were able to avoid paying the IRS $600,000 in taxes by purchasing 4 small-town hydroelectric dams 14 years ago.
These owners, and all previous owners, disobeyed federal government orders to increase and repair spillways to prevent floods. These guys were the third owners that had been told to fix the spillway by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and did nothing!
There are 2600 dams in Michigan and about 75% are privately owned. When these dams were first built, their hydropower generated big profits. Now, they are over 50 years old and need repair.
The nearby city of 40,000 that flooded, Midland, is near one of the U.S.’s largest toxic waste clean up sites. Many fear that Midland County’s 500-year flood may have destroyed past attempts to remove toxic dioxins from a superfund site there.
Midland is home to the corporate headquarters of Dow Chemical, a subsidiary of parent company Dow, Inc. Dow Chemical reported over 43 billion dollars in revenue in 2019.
According to one researcher, the national price tag to address all major dam problems across the U.S. is about $70 billion. This one corporate subsidiary, Dow Chemical of Midland, Michigan, reported more than 70 billion in revenue in 2 years. Certainly the money to repair infrastructure exists.
Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, vowed to pursue “every potential legal recourse” against whoever was responsible for the failures. Is she ready to indict the whole system?
The words of one local observer describe the situation well: “I want to point out how weak and spineless the federal and state government’s reaction and directive to all this has been so far...Thousands of people have lost EVERYTHING... [the owners] should be prosecuted—Now!”
Jun 1, 2020
Since the pandemic began, the Trump administration has shipped hundreds of children and teenagers into some of the most dangerous places in the world, often without notifying their parents. These migrants have been sent to Central America and Mexico without being allowed to apply for asylum, or talk to a social worker or anyone else who might represent their interests.
The Trump administration pretends that this is a move to protect the country in the midst of the pandemic. That is an obvious lie, since the disease is much more widespread in the U.S. than in any of the countries these children are coming from. In reality, Trump is brutalizing these children to prove he is tough on immigration—as if ten-year-old children are really the reason there aren’t enough jobs for people in this country!
Many of these children have disappeared, with relatives unable to find them. Many are likely to be killed, or raped, or kidnapped and forced into gangs.
In any reasonable society, someone who purposely put children in this kind of harm’s way would be arrested and jailed for a long time. But in this sick society, the child-abuser-in-chief is called “president.”