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
Jul 13, 2020
Loud voices declare, “Children need to be in school so their parents can go back to work.”
A swaggering Trump declares, “CDC rules for reopening the schools are too tough, will cost too much money, rewrite them.”
Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), staunchly declares, “The rules aren’t being rewritten”—but then explains they’re not rules set in stone, only guidelines.
Lost sight of in all this mad cacophony are the needs of the children.
Yes, children need to be back in school, physically back in school. If anyone didn’t understand that before last winter’s experiment with long-distance virtual “learning,” they should now. The shutdown shows the damage inflicted on children when schools are closed. No school system managed to complete the new material slated for this school year. In most big cities, a large part of the children was completely excluded from any instruction. The big Los Angeles Unified School District estimated that one-third of the children couldn’t participate. A number of systems, like the Washington, D.C. or Detroit systems, just gave up and shut down after a few weeks of “virtual learning.”
As bad as most school systems are, they satisfy needs that otherwise aren’t met, and first of all, time away from the family—which is as important for the children as for the parents. Children develop and deepen friendships; they discover the need and possibility to cooperate with a larger number of people than just their family. In discovering they are not the center of the universe, they also discover how to live in society with other people. At the same time, they gain confidence in their own real capacities. For the majority of children in big city schools, school is the place they get dependable meals and basic medical attention. For very many children, school is the only place that gives them access to books or to computers. And this doesn’t even take into account that children encounter subject matter brought to them by people trained in these fields. It doesn’t take into account the possibility for children to discuss with their peers new concepts, methods and ideas.
To the extent that schools fail in one or another of these fields, it’s because the schools today are cheated for money.
Money has been the schools’ overarching, basic issue for years. Money will be the issue if children are to come back to school safely in the midst of an epidemic.
Every school would need to separate the children from each other, maintain distance. In other words, more space will be needed. New structures need to be put up, older shut-down structures modernized and repurposed. Every school would need masks, shields and other equipment so children could be somewhat protected. Every school would need daily medical checks. And all of this means more teachers, and more support from trained medical personnel, so children can get the individual attention they need for learning, but also for being kept safe.
Where is the money to come from? The money schools need is today being pocketed by the big banks. It’s in the hands of big real-estate developers. It’s in the luxuries piled on top of luxuries purchased by that one percent, the people who live by consuming the wealth that other people’s labor produces.
Capitalism has always disproportionately rewarded those who own at the expense of those who work. But during the past fifty years, as the system itself founders, wealth has been hijacked from the basic functioning of society. Schools, among other necessities, have been cannibalized.
This system, such as it has become, will not provide the money needed so children can get the education they need and get it safely. Instead, there is only a steady drumbeat for sending children back to school—without any preparations being made so they can go.
In no way will the children be served.
The real abdication of all responsibility can be seen in politicians, liberal and conservative, who say they will leave the choice up to the parents, whether or not to send their children. What kind of choice is this? To keep their kids home, depriving them of what they need, possibly scarring them for life; or send them into schools that will not provide the needed protections from disease and from the chaos that will ensue when the disease develops and spreads.
We deserve better. With our labor, we have produced the wealth of this country, billions and trillions of dollars of wealth. A system that can’t provide a safe and secure way for our children to be educated should be thrown on the trash heap, like the garbage it is.
Jul 13, 2020
Reporters for the New York Times sought out coronavirus records for all the hospitals in New York City and the surrounding boroughs, comparing them with records of death through the end of June.
They found that where you lived helped determine whether you lived or died when suffering from COVID-19. People in wealthier private hospitals, with good health coverage, often got Remdesivir, which shortened the time of the disease and overall resulted in fewer deaths. People in these hospitals had fewer deaths per number of hospitalized cases, a total of about 6,000 deaths over three months.
In the outer boroughs over 11,500 people died, almost twice as many. These areas with more deaths had an average income of $38,000 a year, compared to an average income in Manhattan of $82,000 a year. So people in areas with lower income were more likely to die from the disease than those with higher income.
Manhattan had twice as many hospital beds for patients, compared to Brooklyn and Bronx hospitals and three times as many beds as in Queens. Emergency room nurses and doctors in those boroughs were sometimes looking after 20 or more coronavirus patients, where in better-off hospitals the case load was 2 to 4 patients.
But this news is not surprising. The statistics in other areas showed that more deaths tended to be in areas where income was lower, where more people had to go out to work, not stay at home, and where it was long known that health care was worse than in wealthier areas.
The pandemic has not changed “health care by zip code” in the U.S.—it has just made it even more deadly than it already was.
Jul 13, 2020
Gilead Sciences, a pharmaceutical company worth $95 billion on the stock market, has decided what price it will charge in the U.S. for Remdesivir. Remdesivir is the drug given to lessen the severity of the COVID-19 disease that has now killed at least 130,000 people in the U.S.
People using health insurance will be charged $3,120 for the treatment of six doses. People using Medicare or Medicaid will be charged “only” $2,340 per course of six doses. In reality, it means all of us will pay in higher premiums for so-called private insurers. And Medicare and Medicaid will “charge” the population by having millions of dollars less to spend in other categories of care.
To pass on ever more profit to its shareholders and investment companies, Gilead will screw the entire world, since it is going to charge the $2,340 in Europe as well.
In a crisis without solution, a private company puts profit before life.
Jul 13, 2020
In July 6, in Los Angeles County, there were 2,903 new COVID-19 cases, the largest number of daily cases ever reported in a U.S. county.
In a dominant majority of these cases, the working class, the poor and the homeless are the people being infected with this disease.
Nursing homes became hotbeds of coronavirus deaths, accounting for almost half of all fatalities. California’s Department of Public Health has listed 399 skilled nursing and assisted-living facilities in Los Angeles County that currently have COVID-19 cases.
This is neither an accident nor unexpected. The hospitals push recovering COVID-19 patients to the nursing homes. And the nursing homes push their residents, who need health care, to the streets to accept the new COVID-19 patients, because these patients bring more money and profit. And the state inspectors who are supposed to check the conditions in the nursing homes look the other way.
In one example, at Hollywood Premier Healthcare in Los Angeles, the inspectors found the facility to be in compliance on March 30, then three days later, it had 68 confirmed cases. The staff reported the lack of protective equipment and materials, and some refused to show up for work. Later that month, the National Guard was deployed to assist the overwhelmed facility.
"These weren’t real inspections; they were more like courtesy call visits. At a time when residents desperately needed the California Department of Public Health to help protect their lives, it tolerated infection control violations that have proven so deadly," said Patricia L. McGinnis, executive director of Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.
Jul 13, 2020
Workplaces have become an epicenter of new COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles. One company, Los Angeles Apparel, has operated its three factories on a 24-hour-7-day-a-week schedule, with multiple shifts, each with more than 100 workers.
Workers reported a lack of social distancing during multiple shifts throughout the pandemic—even as they worked to churn out masks and gloves for the safety of consumers. After 150 workers tested positive for coronavirus, these factories were shut down.
When Los Angeles Apparel tried to reopen its factories in July, COVID-19 infections flared again, resulting in the shutdown of the factories. Los Angeles Apparel’s only concern was making money off of the masks it manufactured to exploit the epidemic for profit purposes.
Warehouses and meat processing plants were also Los Angeles hot spots for new COVID-19 cases. In May, 104 workers out of 500 in a Ralph’s warehouse in Compton got infected by the virus after complaining about shortages of protective gear and material. Also in May, Los Angeles County reported that 153 of the 1,837 workers at the Smithfield-owned Farmer John’s meat processing facility had contracted the coronavirus.
So, one of the richest places in the world and one of the most advanced in technology and medical care, Los Angeles County has become the epicenter of this deadly disease, reporting the highest numbers and deaths in the state.
Jul 13, 2020
The caseload of coronavirus in California has exploded. In the two-week period between June 23 and July 6, close to 100,000 people tested positive for the disease. Hospitalizations increased by 43% in that same two-week period.
California, however, is not yet in the same crisis as other states, such as Arizona and Florida. While the rate at which coronavirus tests are confirming infections in California is 7%, in Arizona it’s 24%, and in Florida it’s 16%. California’s lower rate of infection is due to measures that the state took in the first stages of the epidemic.
California had been one of the first states to get hit by the virus. Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, was a major hot spot, seeded by travelers arriving from China. In response, counties across the Bay Area announced the nation’s first stay-at-home order on March 16. Three days later, Governor Gavin Newsom extended that order statewide.
Early action allowed infection rates to stabilize at levels well below experts’ dire predictions. Military field hospitals and sports arenas and auditoriums that had been mobilized in case of a shortage of hospital beds were unnecessary.
But by early May, despite the warnings of public health officials that an early and wide re-opening would fuel a much bigger outbreak, big hotels, resorts, restaurant chains, and big farm growers, hungry to make a profit, as well as Trump supporters and their allies, who always opposed the shutdown, pushed for an early reopening. Members of the Republican National Committee filed more than a dozen lawsuits challenging the lockdown. So did many churches.
Leading this campaign was Elon Musk, the head of Tesla Motors. Musk railed against his Bay Area car factory shut down and threatened to move the company’s headquarters out of California. He became a high-profile purveyor of misinformation about the virus, regularly promoting false messaging to his more than 34 million Twitter followers, lending his voice to far-right fringe political movements equating public health measures with government oppression, referring to shelter-in-place orders as “fascist” and tweeting messages such as, “FREE AMERICA NOW.”
Local governments, under the direct pressure of big employers and churches, ordered reopenings, in defiance of state rules. Musk defied health officials and opened the Tesla assembly plant. Meanwhile, sheriffs in Riverside and Orange counties announced they wouldn’t enforce social-distancing regulations, showing how little control elected officials had on them.
In response to this ever-widening chaotic and dangerous reopening, Newsom caved. On May 7, he announced a system for counties to reopen one-by-one, ceding control of much of the timing of reopening to local officials, similar to what Trump had done in relation to the states. The result was a disastrous, decentralized, haphazard process that sowed confusion and gave residents a false sense that they were in the clear.
Thus, as predicted by health officials, the virus quietly spread. Within a matter of weeks infection rates creeped upward. Large indoor gatherings triggered multi-generational COVID-19 outbreaks.
So, the effect of many of the sacrifices that people made during the early months to contain the spread of the disease has been lost. And more shutdowns are in the works.
In California, just as in most of the rest of the U.S., the capitalist drive for the profit of a few leads to anarchy and chaos, paving the way for the worsening pandemic.
Jul 13, 2020
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York. We present excerpts here. The systemic oppression Douglass speaks to still exists today; and the next revolution to overthrow it is in our future.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.
With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it.
The timid and the prudent of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it. Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it,) may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor. ...
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?
Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. ...
My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. ...Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered...dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery--the great sin and shame of America!
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty.... To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than ... these United States, at this very hour.
Jul 13, 2020
It has been three weeks since a Sheriff’s deputy shot 18-year-old Andres Guardado in the back, and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department is still trying to block any information about the killing.
Guardado had been working as a security guard at an auto body shop, trying to make some extra money, since both of his parents had lost their jobs in the middle of the pandemic.
There is no video of the shooting. But an independent autopsy paid for by the family and their supporters showed that a deputy shot Guardado five times, all of them in the back. As for the Sheriff’s story that Guardado had a gun, it was so flimsy, the lawyers for the two deputies have already had to try to modify it.
Certainly, details about the shooting wouldn’t have come out, if not for the repeated protests in the community. Finally, the Los Angeles Times was able to reveal the deputies’ names. It turns out that Miguel Vega, the deputy who pumped five bullets into Guardado’s back, had been named in several complaints before, and has an active lawsuit against him over a false arrest.
This is nothing but another case of “shooting first and asking questions later,” backed by all the higher-ups. One more proof that all the protests against police violence should continue and grow.
Jul 13, 2020
Christopher Columbus has become a target of protest in recent weeks. In Baltimore, protesters tore down that city’s Columbus statue and threw the pieces into the harbor. Other cities have taken down their statues before they could be destroyed. Columbus, Ohio, is even reportedly considering changing its name.
As many protestors point out, Columbus brought disaster to the indigenous people who lived in the Americas. Columbus’ voyages also helped to tremendously accelerate the development of capitalism on the scale of the world. From its beginning, this development rested on slavery and the death and displacement of peoples to concentrate wealth in the hands of a capitalist class centered first in Europe.
In 1492 when Columbus set out, the process of capitalist development was in its early stages. The European economy was still overwhelmingly based on agricultural production by peasants, with a ruling class of aristocrats feeding off of them. But especially in northern Italy, the capitalist class was growing, basing itself on trade in silk, cotton cloth, spices, and other commodities that came from Asia. The Spanish monarchy had a big interest in finding ways to get around the Italian control of the trade of these commodities. The funding of Columbus’ voyage was done to find a new route to Asia.
Instead of finding a new route to Asia, Columbus landed in the Bahamas. Columbus would make three more voyages to the Caribbean, establishing the first European colony in the Americas on the island of Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti.
Columbus’ own colony was a disaster for the native people. From day one, Columbus and his fellows sought gold or other riches—that was the point of their voyage. To find these riches, they tortured and enslaved the people they encountered, and killed those who resisted. Within just a few years, most of the Taino people who had lived on Hispaniola were dead.
This was a foretaste of what was to come as the Spanish, English, Portugese, French, and Dutch each carved out their piece of the Americas. These European powers competed to extract the wealth of this “New World” for their own ruling classes. To do so, they destroyed the natives’ means of survival, took their land, and forced this indigenous population into slavery to work on plantations or in mines.
In addition to this brutality, they spread diseases to which the indigenous Americans had no immunity, especially smallpox, but also typhus, yellow fever, and the bubonic plague. Everywhere the Europeans went, they brought death. For instance, Mexico dropped from an estimated population of 22 million indigenous people in 1500 before the Spanish arrived, to about one million by the early 1600s.
As the indigenous population died in huge numbers, the colonial ruling classes sought another source of labor. Their solution was to import enslaved people from Africa as a labor force. Plantations based on the labor of Africans and their descendants expanded throughout the Carribean islands, and they would soon stretch from what is today Maryland all the way south to Brazil. Tens of millions of people were ensnared in a brutal nightmare that lasted for more than 300 years. Other colonies relied on a labor force of indentured servants from Europe—many of whom also died within a few years of their arrival.
The European conquest of the Americas set off by Columbus was not just a disaster for a big part of the human family: it was also central to the development of capitalism. In the centuries to come, huge amounts of wealth would flow from throughout the Americas into the hands of the European capitalist class. This wealth formed a large share of the initial capital that made possible Europe’s economic development, and later the development of the United States with its ruling class imported from Europe.
The conquest of the Americas more than 500 years ago helped lay the basis for today’s concentration of the world’s wealth in the hands of the capitalist class of a few rich countries.
Jul 13, 2020
On March 21, as the coronavirus was spreading like wildfire in the U.S., the Trump administration declared that it would effectively shut the borders to migrants and asylum seekers, because of the “serious danger” of infection coming from abroad.
This was already a baldfaced lie in March, since the outbreak was much worse in the U.S. than it was in any of the Central American countries most migrants were coming from. The declaration was one more excuse Trump used to blame migrants for bringing the disease here.
Reality has been just the opposite of what the administration claimed. After it closed the border, ICE warehoused migrants in crowded jails where social distancing is impossible. It then deported thousands back to Central America, without giving most of them tests. Of course, many of these deportees were infected, spreading the disease to Central America.
The numbers of people with COVID-19 being deported to the Central American country of Guatemala reached such proportions that it put a limit on how many deportees it would accept back from the U.S. From 4,000 people a month, Guatemala is now only accepting 400 a month—meaning thousands of migrants are stuck in ICE jails where the virus is spreading rapidly. One told the Miami Herald: “Me and so many Guatemalans have been ready; we are dying to get deported at this point. If not, we’ll end up dying behind these bars instead.”
Guatemala also began testing deportees when they arrived, refusing to accept people who test positive. One immigration lawyer reported that four people deported to Guatemala the last week of June tested positive, so Guatemala refused them entry. They were then flown back to the U.S., where, instead of treating them, ICE tried to deport them to Guatemala again a few days later!
The U.S. government, led by Trump, is quick to point fingers at others in all situations. But this blaming of migrants for allowing the virus to spread unchecked when they are its worst victims is even more deplorable than usual.
Jul 13, 2020
The following article was the editorial in SPARK workplace newsletters of July 6.
Yes, the Confederate statues should come down, smashed to little bits. They are not just innocent chunks of cement or rock. They symbolize the depraved system whose goal was slavery, the ownership of human beings for commercial purposes.
The statues that young people are tearing down today portray as heroic those violent men who carried out a brutal war to preserve slavery. In the Constitutional Convention establishing the Confederacy, its new vice president, Alexander Stephens, laid out the despicable aim of the Southern rebels: “Our new government is founded upon the great idea that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that Slavery, subordination to the superior, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”
This was the Confederacy, this was what all the generals from Robert E. Lee on down were fighting to impose: to maintain slavery in the South, to push it out into the Western territories and up into Midwestern farming states.
Whatever Lincoln’s slow trajectory, whatever hesitations, he understood that one country could not exist half slave labor, half free labor. It wasn’t a moral choice, it was a practical one, but a practical choice that had moral implications. Lincoln’s quality was to recognize what Northern Generals Grant and Sherman recognized before him, that the North could not win unless it emancipated the slaves. The troops of the Northern armies were the sons of Northern farmers who understood that same truth. The South was defeated when the slaves freed themselves, leaving the plantations, crippling the Southern economy, reinforcing the Northern armies in the push to root out the slave power. The slaves pulled behind them many landless whites who had no stake in the Confederacy’s war. Together they pulled the poor whites who deserted from the Confederate army.
For a while after the war, a real democracy grew up in the South based on the rural poor, the former slaves and the poor whites, both of whom desperately needed land. This was Reconstruction, the brief period after the Civil War when the poor population, working together, set up their own governments, establishing schools for children, medical clinics for a population beset by illness.
The statues that are coming down now did not exist during that period. In fact, they were not erected until almost 40 years after the end of the Civil War. They went up to celebrate the reign of terror that swept through the South, getting rid of Reconstruction, pushing the ex-slaves back into conditions of near slavery.
Former Confederate generals established the Ku Klux Klan, using it as the violent instrument for undoing emancipation. Edmund Pettus, a former Confederate general, led this new KKK. His statue is among those being torn down today.
All of those statues were set up to say to the black population, know your place, stay in it—and to say to the poor white population, consider yourself lucky, even if you are poor, that you aren’t black. Every one of those statues is linked to a bloodbath in the South. Lynching was the fate of black men for how many generations; rape was the fate of black women for how many generations. Poor whites, facing the KKK, turned themselves into craven enforcers of the resurrected old order.
This is the history that people like Trump want to celebrate and preserve: the violent history the KKK imposed on everyone living in the South.
But there is another history, and this is the one we should celebrate. The black population managed not only to survive, but to organize communities, to pass on their history from one generation to another, to pass on the knowledge gained from living communally, depending on each other, drawing strength from each other. There is an enormous moral strength coming out of that experience that comes down to us today.
This history is the one we should celebrate, all of us, black, white, and immigrant.
Jul 13, 2020
Politicians, police officials and the media have been playing up recent increases in violent crimes in cities across the country. They say violent crimes are increasing because of the movement against racism and police brutality, and the changes police have had to make as a result.
For example, New York City has seen 585 shootings this year, a 53% increase compared to last year. New York’s police chief Terence Monahan claims that emboldened criminals think “that the cops can’t do anything anymore, that no one likes the police, that they can get away with things, that it’s safe to carry a gun out on the street.”
Donald Trump has jumped on the trend, buying a $250,000 ad campaign on Facebook and Twitter, saying violent crime has exploded because of the protests, blaming the Democrats for being soft on crime. He is waving the flag that there will be more to come if Biden gets elected. His press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “Law and order are the building blocks of the American Dream, but if anarchy prevails, this dream comes crumbling down.”
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, was a little softer in her approach in addressing the fatal shooting of an 8-year-old girl near the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed by police. Bottoms said, “That’s an important movement that’s happening, but this random, wild, wild West shoot ‘em up because you can has got to stop.” Again, “because you can” implies the current movement caused a decrease in “policing” and the increase in crime.
What nonsense! Violent crime is not new. It is endemic to a society based on racism and class oppression.
The recent protests are not the cause, and more police are not the answer. Thirty years ago in New York there were 2,000 murders a year. Was it a movement against police brutality that caused the murders then?
Certain violent crimes have decreased in recent years, but there are today a host of other problems that were set in motion long before the current movement. First there was the coronavirus pandemic and people being locked down for months on end. That contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Add to that decades of high unemployment (underestimated by government statistics), the destruction of the public schools, mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline, and years of murders by police that have gone unpunished.
Apologists for this racist capitalist society maneuver to divide the working class and to discourage any attempt to change the system. These same people often point to “black-on-black” crime, yet never mention that white-on-white crime is more common.
The whole working class has an interest in uniting against racism and police brutality. The current protest movement could be the beginning of a fight to take down this rotten system and replace it with one that serves the majority’s needs.
Jul 13, 2020
The Supreme Court, on July 8, ruled that employers with religious or “moral” objections can legally limit women’s access to birth control. As many as 126,000 women might now lose contraceptive coverage from their employers.
The court ruled on a case brought by Catholic nuns: the Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania. As one analyst pointed out, “With these religious objector cases, we are witnessing the blurring of women’s constitutional and statutory rights into the background as the interests of everyone else, including their religious bosses, are positioned as singular and urgent.”
The Affordable Care Act mandates that employers must provide coverage for birth control at no out-of-pocket cost. This latest Supreme Court ruling upends what had previously been done to accommodate bosses and their so-called “moral” outrage over having to pay for birth control.
Up until now, religiously affiliated organizations such as universities and hospitals—as well as for-profit companies—have had an “arrangement.” Their health insurer would cover the cost of birth control, so that they did not have to sully their delicate hands paying for women’s reproductive health care.
With this new decision, virtually any employer can seek an exemption based on religious—or so-called moral—objections.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, an estimated 99% of sexually active women in America between the ages of 15 and 44 have used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning at some point. So this ruling has implications for most women.
As one women’s healthcare advocate pointed out, due to COVID-19, the U.S. healthcare system is severely strained. “Now is a time when we should be removing barriers and addressing inequities that stand between people and health care... I’m appalled at these policies.”
A recent study found that only 39% of Black women between the ages of 18 and 44 could afford $10 or less if they needed birth control today. And a 2014 survey conducted by Planned Parenthood reported that 57% of young Latina women struggle with the cost of prescription birth control.
This court ruling shows one more way that a healthcare system, where coverage is tied to the employer, is crazy. The money exists in this society to provide free, quality healthcare—including reproductive healthcare—for all.
This latest attack will hit young women the hardest. The Black Lives Matter Movement has shown the best way to react when you are under attack—pour massively into the streets and make your righteous anger felt!