The Spark

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

Issue no. 1127 — April 12 - 26, 2021

EDITORIAL
Amazon Claims Victory after Stacking the Deck

Apr 12, 2021

After the vote to unionize almost 6,000 Amazon employees at a Bessemer, Alabama warehouse went down to defeat, the company boasted that the vote represented a free choice by its employees against the union.

What a lie! There was no free choice!

Back in the fall, over 3,000 Amazon workers in Bessemer had signed union cards. That was the workers’ choice.

But in this country, it is not enough for workers to say they want a union if the company opposes it. Instead, to get union recognition, the government steps in and imposes a drawn-out process that includes an election. This gives the company plenty of time to roll out a big anti-union campaign.

That’s exactly what Amazon did. Before the union election, it forced all employees to attend anti-union meetings. Supervisors harangued individual workers. Many of the original 3,000 workers who signed union cards were forced out or fired. The company hung anti-union fliers everywhere, including in bathroom stalls. It used social media to spread fake news. The company even got the U.S. Post Office to put a mail box on company property to intimidate and spy on workers when they cast their vote.

A lot of politicians, including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio, said they supported the Amazon workers. But those were just words. The law serves the company, not the workers.

It’s been used against workers who wanted a union over and over again, including at Walmart, Nissan and Volkswagen.

After this latest defeat, top union officials say they want the law changed, so it favors the workers more and the company less.

Don’t believe it. Looking to the politicians, Congress and the government never got workers anything.

Everything workers have ever gotten, they have had to fight for and win. That includes unions.

Unions are workers’ organizations. Workers build unions during periods of struggle and social movements. During the 1880s, workers built unions in carrying out the great strikes for the 8-hour day. In the 1930s, workers built unions in order to carry out sit-down strikes and general strikes.

Workers didn’t need the permission of the company or the government. The workers built the unions themselves.

But once workers stopped fighting, the companies and the government moved to take back what they had given up, including by destroying the unions. For decades they have decimated the standard of living of big parts of the working class.

The conditions and pay at Amazon are a testament to that destruction. Amazon is the second largest employer in the country, with a million employees. The company’s stock, valued at close to two trillion dollars, is worth more money than the economies of most countries. Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the country.

This empire is built on the backs of a poorly paid, super-exploited workforce that is driven so hard, under conditions that are so brutal, most don’t last more than a year. But for every worker who leaves Amazon, there are a hundred outside the door ready to take their place, because the mass of workers in this country with no steady income has increased so tremendously.

That’s not due to a bad boss or company, but the workings of the entire capitalist system. The more companies squeeze the working class, the richer the capitalists get.

It is a permanent class war.

To end the attacks, to end this class war, the working class, which produces all the wealth and makes everything run, will have to make a revolution and take the power away from the capitalist class. Society will be reorganized so that it is run in the interests of everyone. And the working class will finally be able to enjoy the fruits of its labor.

Pages 2-3

Derek Chauvin Trial:
A Different Kind of Show

Apr 12, 2021

The trial of Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is ongoing. While the outcome of the trial is not yet known, some of the testimony from witnesses in the trial has been remarkably different from what normally happens when a cop is brought to trial. A number of high-ranking police officials, from Minneapolis and other cities, have testified against Chauvin. They all basically testified that Chauvin was responsible for killing George Floyd.

Normally, on those rare occasions when a cop is charged for killing someone, police officials and other authorities do all they can to make sure the cop gets away with it.

It appears that possibly, in this case, the authorities want to see Chauvin convicted. And if that is true, it is only because they are afraid that if Chauvin gets off, there could be more massive protests in the streets, like those that happened after George Floyd was murdered.

Tens of millions of people in this country and around the world saw the video of Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for over 9 minutes. They didn’t need to hear any testimony to know that Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Millions of people came into the streets, day after day, protesting police brutality and racism.

But even if Chauvin is convicted, it does not change the fact that, in this society, the police are given the right to kill people, especially black people and other minorities. It happens day after day after day, with little consequences for the cops.

The federal government does not even keep statistics on how many people are killed by the police. Local police departments are not even required to report murders by cops.

Recently the Washington Post newspaper used news and media accounts from across the country to compile their own statistics. The Post study, which likely missed some killings, showed that about 1,000 people are shot and killed every year by the cops. Most of those killed are young men. Black men are killed at a rate 3 times higher than white men. Hispanic men are killed at a rate 2 times higher than white men.

The Washington Post study showed that of 6,163 people killed by cops over a 6-year period, 2,572 of the victims did not even have a gun, or even allegedly have a gun on them.

And what consequences did the cops face? The Washington Post study showed that when cops have killed people, 99% of the time they do not face any charges for murder or manslaughter. And 99.5% of the time, they are not convicted.

The legal system in this country is set up to give the police a license to kill. One of the police witnesses in the Chauvin trial said that killings by the police are “awful but lawful”. In 1989, a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court basically gave police all but full immunity from being charged after murdering people.

They get that legal right because those that run this capitalist system use the police forces to maintain their control over the population. Many times in the past, the police have been used to attack striking workers and to break picket lines. The police use their right to kill people in order to terrorize and intimidate the population.

Those millions of people who protested the murder of George Floyd made a powerful statement against police brutality and against racism. It may even lead to Chauvin being convicted.

But even after all the protests, the killings by cops have continued, like the recent murder by police of a 13-year-old child in Chicago.

To stop police brutality and murders by cops, it will take a fight to get rid of the capitalist system that uses police to maintain and defend exploitation.

Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Is a Corporate Boondoggle

Apr 12, 2021

This country’s capitalist class has let critical infrastructure go to seed for decades. Drivers in Michigan see it in front of them every day—watch out for those potholes! AAA says the potholes we don’t avoid cost drivers 3 billion dollars in damage to their cars every year.

Then there was that downtown bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis that collapsed in 2007, or the massive dam in California that required hundreds of thousands to evacuate.

The city of Flint still doesn’t have clean water, half a decade on. Chicago’s transit system has 13 billion dollars worth of “deferred maintenance,” according to its chief.

The American Society of Civil Engineers says that the country must spend at least 2.59 trillion dollars to shore up infrastructure over the next decade. Biden just announced a 2.3 trillion dollar spending plan, supposedly to take on the problem. But only 1.3 trillion is slated to go toward infrastructure, meaning this bill at most covers half of what’s necessary—assuming it passes, and goes where it’s supposed to. And where will that money go, really?

Half a trillion is set aside for “Training and Research and Development.” What does this mean? The federal government proposes to spend billions to train workers in advanced manufacturing techniques, an expense the companies would otherwise have to spend themselves. And it proposes to spend 140 billion dollars to develop technologies—that it will hand over to those same manufacturers to profit from, just as it did with the coronavirus vaccines for the pharmaceutical companies. Billions of whatever does get passed will go straight to padding the bottom line of all kinds of contracting firms with connections to state, county and city politicians.

In Chicago, work on the Jane Byrne interchange, also known as the “Circle,” began in 2013 with a budget of $535 million dollars, to be finished in the summer of 2018. Projected costs have risen to $713 million, with the finish line pushed back to 2022—for now. Big area construction firms, like Walsh, get the biggest take.

This latest infrastructure bill does nothing to truly address the nation’s infrastructure. In reality, it’s just another corporate bailout bill.

Chicago Police Kill 13-Year-Old

Apr 12, 2021

At 2:38 in the morning of March 29, Chicago police shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

Instead of immediately publicizing the details of the shooting—as they do in every killing when a cop isn’t involved—the police issued a statement saying simply that “foot pursuit … resulted in a confrontation,” and an officer “fired his weapon, striking the offender in the chest,” and tweeted a photo of a gun they say they recovered at the scene.

They reduced this child to the single word, “offender.” It took reporters digging through an autopsy ledger to discover Adam Toledo’s age.

It then took two days for the cops to notify Toledo’s mother, even though she had given police a photo when she reported him missing a few days earlier. They claimed they could not identify him because he didn’t have ID—of course not, he was only 13!

When the news finally broke, the cops had the nerve to say that they could not release the body cam video of the shooting—because the person they had killed was under-age! Despite growing pressure to release it, they still hadn’t done so as of this writing.

A local alderman, George Cardenas, tried to shift the blame, asking: “How is it possible that this 13-year-old is in an alley at 2:30 in the morning?” Despite the fact that Toledo’s mother has been in the news, demanding justice for her son, Cardenas said: “This young man had nobody.”

Mayor Lightfoot said we shouldn’t blame Toledo’s mother, but focused on the gangs: “An adult put a gun in a child’s hand.... Gangs are preying on our most vulnerable.... And when the wolves dare try take one of ours, we must hit them hard with the staff of a community united against the evils that threaten our youth.”

Adam Toledo wasn’t killed by a gang. The “wolves” that took his life were cops. And in response, Lightfoot’s answer amounts to a call for more police violence.

Maryland Car Exhaust Testing:
Hot Air

Apr 12, 2021

Maryland officials propose to ease up on the vehicle emissions inspection program, letting buyers of new cars wait six years instead of three before having their exhaust tested.

Most drivers have to take their car or truck in every two years and wait on endless lines to have the emissions tested, and pay a fee. The program’s supposed aim is to reduce toxic smoke and gases that dangerously trap warm moisture in the atmosphere. But this program has put the responsibility for lessening pollution onto individual commuters.

As for the auto manufacturers, their new cars and trucks just had to meet very moderate federal emissions limits until 2010, and after that, the slightly less moderate limits effective in California. Heavier vehicles like trucks are allowed to pollute even more than cars.

Many new vehicles do pollute less, but they are so expensive that two out of three drivers in Maryland can’t afford to buy one. And what is the result? Air pollution is still high enough to ruin the climate.

Pages 4-5

U.S. Tap Water Contains Toxic Contaminants

Apr 12, 2021

Every corner of the U.S. has alarming levels of arsenic, lead, and fluorinated “forever” chemicals in their drinking water, as found after the investigation carried out by Consumer Reports and the Guardian. In this investigation, the drinking water quality from 120 sites in 36 states and Washington, D.C. was tested. This research very clearly indicated that the toxic contamination of our drinking water is not limited only to Flint, Michigan. Every corner of the U.S. is contaminated.

This widespread contamination of our drinking water is a result of industrial pollution, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate treatment at water plants.

Arsenic gets into drinking water through natural deposits or industrial or agricultural pollution. Lead contamination happens through leaching of this metal from corroding water lines and home plumbing fixtures. Companies use fluorinated chemicals to make stain-resistant fabrics and carpets, water-repellent clothing, nonstick cookware, and hundreds of other common products. These compounds can seep into water from factories, landfills, and other sources. And they can stay in the water forever since they don’t easily break down in the environment.

The researchers found these chemicals to be extremely dangerous to human health in every household. Both lead and arsenic, which are very toxic chemicals, are linked to brain damage in children that causes learning delays, to cancer, and to other health problems, even at very low levels. Scientists have found a “probable link” between exposure to fluorinated chemicals and many health problems, including high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension, testicular and kidney cancers, and again, brain damage leading to learning delays in children.

That is, our health is getting jeopardized in many ways, small or large, slow or fast—but day by day through the presence of these and many other toxic chemicals in our drinking water. The infrastructure is deteriorating because the money required for repairs or new construction is instead handed over to companies through tax breaks or many other schemes that put profit over human life.

Emergent Vaccine:
Corporations First, Health Last

Apr 12, 2021

Emergent, a manufacturer of vaccines, must destroy 15 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine. It mixed up the ingredients from an Astra-Zeneca vaccine with one from Johnson & Johnson. Now Johnson & Johnson is taking over Emergent’s Baltimore, Maryland manufacturing site.

It is not the first time Emergent has been in trouble over quality control. A review of Emergent last year noted quality control problems, problems the company was given 163 million dollars from the federal government to fix. The company has had other citations for contamination and mold.

Why is one pharmaceutical manufacturer important? Because neither the United States nor the rest of the world has enough manufacturers of vaccines to produce what the world’s population needs. It was also true of the flu pandemic of 2009 and Zika and Ebola. The world’s businesses do not particularly want to make vaccines, because the profit on them is less than profits made on many other medications, from which pharmaceutical companies make not only millions of dollars, but billions.

Emergent’s years of profits came from another vaccine, one for anthrax. But anthrax has not harmed anyone since the 2001 attack in the U.S. that killed five people. That hasn’t stopped Emergent from reaping millions off of government contracts to make the vaccine: for the past 20 years, Emergent made its money by manufacturing anthrax vaccine for the U.S. Defense Department and for the Strategic National Stockpile. The U.S. didn’t have up-to-date or sufficient personal protective equipment to help stop the spread of Covid-19, but they sure helped Emergent execs and stockholders.

Recently, the CEO of Emergent had a conference call with investors, referring to the billion and a half dollars Emergent has received for coronavirus vaccine work. He described 2020 as “wildly successful.”

In profits, yes. In saving human lives—absolutely not.

Los Angeles:
Another Hospital Closure—During a Pandemic!

Apr 12, 2021

On March 31, corporate hospital chain Alecto closed down Olympia Medical Center, a 204-bed hospital that had served overwhelmingly working-class and poor patients in Los Angeles since 1947.

The announcement of the closure came on New Year’s Eve—at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in L.A., that is—and drew outrage and protests from the community. Never mind that the communities these hospital chains short-change are also communities where there is a dire need for hospitals. And it is also these working-class and rural communities where the pandemic has spread—and killed people—at a much higher rate than in wealthier communities. Olympia had 25,000 ER visits in 2019 alone.

Alecto received $27.5 million in COVID stimulus money and advanced Medicare payments for Olympia in 2020 and, obviously, has maneuvered to take the money and run.

UCLA Health, which bought the property that Olympia is on from Alecto for an undisclosed price, said it also had no plans to keep the hospital open. So no new or continued jobs for the 451 former workers already laid off.

In fact, Alecto’s own history shows that this company is not interested in providing health care. It is nothing but a private equity shark, posing as a “health care company.” Like it did with Olympia, Alecto buys up hospitals that are available (because they are not “profitable enough” to hospital chains), drains their resources with budget cuts and/or sells their assets in exchange for cash, and then closes them down. Within the last two years, Alecto closed three other hospitals besides Olympia—one in Ohio and two in West Virginia.

That’s how health care companies operate, one expert said. “Nobody can tell them [hospital owners] they have to stay open, in the same way that nobody can tell a restaurant downtown when it closes that it has to stay open.”

As if getting treatment for illness—including life-threatening illness—can be compared to the choice of having chicken or sausages for dinner! That is capitalism to its rotten core.

Amazon’s Pee and Poop Problem

Apr 12, 2021

Amazon finally admitted that the biggest company in the world has a pee and poop problem. “We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed,” Amazon wrote last week.

This follows one Amazon manager’s email to others about this rather very frequent problem last May: “This evening, an associate discovered human feces in an Amazon bag that was returned to station by a driver. This is the 3rd occasion in the last 2 months when bags have been returned to station with poop inside. We understand that DA’s [driver associates] may have emergencies while on-road, and especially during Covid, DAs have struggled to find bathrooms while delivering,” Amazon email reads.

But then, Amazon doubled down on this naturally occurring “nuisance.” Amazon, trying to defend itself, said urinating in bottles was an industry-wide problem and shared links to news articles about drivers for other delivery companies who have had to do so, as reported by the Guardian.

In other words: if other companies have the same practice of forcing their workers to the extreme such that they have to pee in bottles to avoid getting fired, what is wrong for Amazon following the same “industry practice?”

Then the sh.. got deeper, with an Amazon spokesperson saying: “Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it. We don’t yet know how, but will look for solutions.” But for now, the proposed solution is as follows: “Regardless, [driver associates] cannot, MUST NOT, return bags to station with poop inside.”

Either way, this is a company that is full of “it!”

The Dam Truth

Apr 12, 2021

Repair of aging U.S. dams got barely a mention in Biden’s new infrastructure proposal. “It’s one of those ticking time bombs that can really devastate a community,” said a Michigan woman forced to flee her home almost a year ago when 2 dams collapsed in mid-Michigan.

Torrential rainfall of 150-year proportions in May of 2020 led to 2 privately owned dams failing. The city of Midland was under up to 9 feet of water. State and federal emergencies were declared in 5 counties: Midland, Gladwin, Iosco, Saginaw and Arenac. People’s lives were destroyed. Flood damage remains a year later.

Ordinary people often don’t know when they live near an aging dam. In the U.S., there are 90,000 dams in 50 states. The “design life” of a dam is usually 50 years and over half of U.S. dams are over 50 years old!

Also, over half of U.S. dams are privately owned just like the 2 dams that failed in Michigan! Bought as a tax shelter by a wealthy family, necessary repairs were never made. Owners wanted taxpayers to foot the bill!

A recent report with recommendations that came out in March about the mid-Michigan floods was deliberately “toned down” to make it less scary.

In fact, since 2016, at least 5 studies have looked at dam safety in Michigan. Funded by both Republican and Democratic administrations, all concluded there is a festering problem with dams in Michigan that needs action. Both parties have been unable to deliver what their own studies say is needed. Why?

Society cannot keep people safe and maintain dams properly when the job description of the government under capitalism is to prioritize profit first. If we leave profit in charge of deciding what does and does not happen in this society, disaster prevention will not happen. Private property looks out for the best interest of private property and not of humanity, period.

Not Keeping Track of Prison Vaccines

Apr 12, 2021

The number of Michigan Prison and State Hospital employees who received the COVID vaccine on-the-job is surprisingly low. But these numbers only reflect records on who got the vaccine on-the-job, and not figures for those who may have gotten the vaccine on their own, outside of work.

So no one knows the actual numbers of how many workers in Michigan State Hospitals and State prisons have been vaccinated. Just one more example of how the fight against COVID has been completely disorganized.

Pages 6-7

The Extreme Right—Violent Gangs, Deranged Ideology

Apr 12, 2021

By early April, Federal prosecutors had charged 405 of the rioters who invaded the Capitol building with crimes. Most were charged with simple misdemeanors and freed on bail or even on their own recognizance.

Yes, some very small number face more serious charges and might even be sentenced to long stretches in federal prison if they are convicted—and even that isn’t certain. But most of them, when they come up in front of the judge, will be given a small fine, if that, and perhaps face a lecture from the judge.

What is all this but political theater—an attempt by federal police and military agencies to cover their asses after the embarrassment of being caught out January 6.

For people targeted or threatened by the extreme right organizations that led the charge into the Capitol, it would be a deadly mistake to put their hopes in this same state apparatus that had no answer on January 6.

Blind Spot?

Testifying to Congress, officials from federal police agencies and the military granted they might have made some mistakes on January 6. Some even acknowledged that they had a “blind spot” when it came to recognizing the danger posed by extreme-right groupings.

Blind spot? No, the feds simply closed their eyes. Those groups had already written a violent history.

Last year, “Patriot Prayer,” a white supremacist Christian group from Washington state, joined by “Proud Boys” from California and Colorado, and armed militias from out-state Oregon, invaded Portland every weekend for months. They set themselves up as adjuncts of the police, facing off against anti-racist protestors who had been demonstrating in Portland after the murder of George Floyd. Sometimes in truck caravans, sometimes marching in squads, the white supremacists carried weapons, flaunting them to intimidate anyone whose path they crossed. Their violent behavior continued for months, but apparently no one in authority noticed.

Really?

Again last year, so-called “militias” from different Midwestern states invaded Kenosha, Wisconsin after Black Lives Matter protests had broken out to denounce the police shooting of another unarmed black man. Jacob Blake was shot in the back, while his kids were in the car. Of course, people protested.

The militias came decked out with weapons, announcing their intention to “reinforce” the police—who welcomed them. A young Illinois man, a self-declared white supremacist who aspired to join the police, joined the crowd in Wisconsin, bringing from home his handy AR-15. He shot three people, killing two—yet his lawyer dared to claim self defense! What did he come armed for, if not to shoot someone?

Over the past ten years or so, there have been hundreds of people killed by violent extreme-right individuals like this. A self-declared white supremacist shot up a black church. A self-declared Nazi bombed a Jewish synagogue; another anti-Semite, another synagogue. A white man, declaring that the white race is in danger of being “replaced,” firebombed a black church. A religious fundamentalist assassinated medical personnel working in women’s health clinics. A man, who declared his hatred for women, shot up a women’s yoga retreat. A man, who declared his aim was to drive all Mexican people back to Mexico, shot up a Walmart filled with Mexican-American shoppers. Nativists, who proclaimed themselves “patriots,” set up large animal traps to disable human beings crossing the border from Mexico. A man who spouted “Incel” nonsense killed several women who spurned his advances. Several whites killed a black man they knew by dragging him for more than a mile, chained to the back of their car.

And a young religious fundamentalist just demonstrated that the U.S. is still producing such individuals. Seeking to put “sexual temptation” behind him, he killed eight people with a gun he had just purchased, six of them Asian women working at massage facilities.

Just a Few “Deranged Individuals”?

Each time, we heard the same refrain: the violent act was just the work of “one individual,” a “deranged” individual. Such individuals are certainly “deranged”—deranged by racist and/or Christian nationalist and/or misogynist and/or nativist views openly spouted by segments of American society.

Their monstrous work cannot be explained away as “just the work of an individual.” All of them imbibed some or even all of the ideology propagated by the extreme right. Their violence was the practical consequence of ideas floating in this still dispersed, loosely organized, but nonetheless organized, extreme right.

After their murderous rampages, financial support and lawyers flooded in for many of these assassins. Within a few weeks of the killing in Kenosha, nearly two million dollars had been raised to defend the killer, much of it coming in large donations. In other words, not only do a “few individual” marginalized white supremacists exist, ready to kill in the service of their cause. Those “few individuals” are supported by people with lots of money, people ensconced in the top levels of capitalist society.

The criminal justice system dares to pretend that it has only now discovered that the extreme right exists, and that it is filled with dangerous people. Really? Please!

If officials at the Justice Department didn’t know what was going on in their own backyard, they could have contacted the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League, two long-established organizations that have been documenting in painstaking detail the violence perpetrated by right-wing extremists for decades. The Anti-Defamation League has been around doing this work since 1913. The Southern Poverty Law Center was established in 1971 to expose similar violence and pursue the legal defense of civil rights activists attacked by right-wing extremists.

Information on this violent extreme right has been available for years. If the state apparatus—its police, military and prosecution agencies—overlooked it, this was more than just a “blind spot.” It was a conscious choice to give the violent extreme right a pass.

Military Boots on the Civilian Ground—and “Optics”

Federal police and military authorities also claimed they didn’t prepare for right-wing violence on January 6 because they were worried about the “optics”—of how it would look to have police and National Guard forces near a political demonstration. They didn’t want to put “boots on the ground” in ways that might inhibit “freedom of speech” or the “right to assemble.” So they claimed—afterwards!

These same agencies weren’t so concerned by “optics” when they sent military forces into cities around the country during protests that spread after the killing of George Floyd. In Washington, D.C., itself, there were National Guards in the District, and active troops stationed outside. Army helicopters flew overhead, buzzing Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Those agencies weren’t worried then about what it looked like; weren’t worried then about interfering with “freedom of speech” for demonstrators who protested another killing of another black man by police.

“Optics”? When has the state apparatus ever worried about what it looked like when cops or National Guard troops were sent against workers attempting to exercise their “right to assemble” in picket lines? Almost every important groundbreaking strike in this country was met by National Guard troops (and before the Guard, state militias). The threat of sending the Guard, even active duty troops, was used repeatedly against coal miners in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. The Guard moved the mail in the big 1970s postal workers strike; they’ve been sent to deliver freight during teamsters’ strikes, and unload ships when dockworkers were on strike. In 1980, air traffic controllers trained by the military were sent to break the PATCO strike. We can’t even begin to count the number of strikers who ended up in the hospital—or the morgue—beaten down by troops of some stripe or another. If the Guard hasn’t been thrown into action against strikes much lately, it’s only because there have been few combative strikes.

The State (the Government) Is Not Neutral

The state apparatus has always been a defender of the basic class interests of the wealthy class that rules over society: at the beginning, the Southern slave-owning class and the Northern merchants who based their first wealth on the slave trade; today the capitalist class. The state apparatus has never been neutral in the struggles that go on between the laboring population and the ruling class. A key weapon this state apparatus maintains in reserve is the possibility to use “extra-legal” forces to impose capitalist control in the event the state apparatus is stretched too thin.

Today, many extreme-right organizations put themselves forward, contending to be a force adjunct to the police, sometimes by serving as bodyguards to the extreme-right politicians who call for more action against the left; sometimes serving as an additional force in the street in the event of demonstrations; sometimes providing “guard” services to public buildings and/or shops.

The police often made it clear they value this support. In Portland and other places, when extreme-right hoodlums attacked Black Lives Matter demonstrators, the police arrested, not the hoodlums who attacked, but their victims who tried to defend themselves.

There certainly have been organized extreme-right or openly fascist groups that functioned in other countries as extra-legal “hit squads” to eliminate trade union organizers and socialist militants.

Don’t we know that this same role was played by the KKK through much of its history: acting as an extra-legal force used to keep the black population as a whole subjugated; to kill those who tried to organize; to impose acceptance of poverty on white sharecroppers who for a period had recognized their commonality with black sharecroppers. Union organizers in the North were attacked and sometimes killed by home-grown groupings similar to the Klan; sometimes by organized crime gangs directly hired by big industrialists; sometimes by gangs organized by the VFW.

Under the blows of this economic crisis that will not go away, as the desperation of the population reaches intolerable levels, as struggles break out, who will play the role of a modern KKK, a modern extra-legal gang? Maybe it will be the misogynist, ultra-nationalist Proud Boys or the militaristic Oathkeepers or other militias drawn from former military and police. The KKK itself may be reinvigorated. Maybe the Patriot Churches or some other White Christian Nationalist organization will step forward. Maybe it will be some other one we haven’t heard of, or maybe some amalgam of all of them.

We aren’t there yet. This multitude of groups that have made their appearance are not able today to play the role once played by the KKK in the American South. But they could become that, and much sooner than we think. These groups, many of which look like “deranged” offshoots of QAnon, all with their own self-appointed leaders today, can become a cohesive movement tomorrow.

The biggest danger from that standpoint is that they might attract parts of the laboring population, which allow themselves to be set against each other—for the great benefit of the capitalist class that steals value through the exploitation of labor, the same capitalist class that weighs on all the levels of modern society.

Such groups already attract layers of the middle class—first of all, shop keepers, owners of restaurants, beauty salons, barbershops, farmers losing their land—those social layers have been loudest today in protesting against the shutdowns imposed to control the virus. The extreme right has also attracted former soldiers thrown back in civilian society without any possibilities. But it has also attracted some workers, mostly white, but also Latino and even a small number of black workers.

It’s a mistake to believe that the state will defend working people from the violence of this extreme right. What happened both before, during and after January 6 demonstrates this.

In fact, the real defense against the dangers posed by this extreme right can come only through the organized activity of the working class to defend its own class interests. In the face of the economic crisis that is decimating large parts of American society, the working class, when it begins to fight, can pull with it some of those people who today see no prospect.

It’s important to recognize that the issue won’t be resolved simply because workers take up a struggle for their own immediate interests again. That struggle will have to be taken to its conclusion, to the overthrow of the capitalist class that exploits us all. That capitalist class, so long as it’s left to continue, will fight to the bitter end to preserve its privileged position.

It has to be replaced by the working class which can organize itself to run society for the benefit of all.

Pages 8-9

Afghanistan:
Withdrawal or Not, U.S. Interests Remain the Same

Apr 12, 2021

President Joe Biden has said that removing troops by the deadline of May 1 will be “tough.”

The deadline, set by the Trump administration in February 2020, is fast approaching, with no moves being made for the withdrawal of troops.

Meantime, talks are supposedly taking place in Istanbul between the U.S., the Taliban, and the Afghanistan government, to work out a power-sharing agreement leading up to a more permanent government.

Some have pointed out that the “Taliban” isn’t even the same Taliban—it’s a collection of local warlords and their militias, not one cohesive organization. So who is negotiating, and for what?

Officials and analysts warn that if the U.S. leaves “too quickly,” chaos could descend on Afghanistan.

Chaos? Really? U.S. involvement has brought nothing BUT chaos!

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been dragging on for nearly 20 years. During that time, the entire country has seen continued fighting. The U.S. was able to throw the Taliban out of power relatively easily, but defeating them has proven much more difficult. The government the U.S. set up is a paper doll, ready to blow away as soon as the U.S. stops propping it up; it can barely control the capital city of Kabul, let alone the whole country!

And, in fact, U.S. meddling in Afghanistan started long before it invaded at the end of 2001. Starting in 1979, it armed and funded various right-wing militias (the mujahedeen) for years, fighting against the Soviet-backed government and then the Soviet army—dragging the USSR into its own Vietnam-like quagmire in the country. Those same U.S.-backed militias later formed the Taliban—the repressive fundamentalist group that the U.S. later went to war against.

For over 40 years, Afghanistan has known nothing but war and repression. The very fabric of civil society, the state and its infrastructure, has been torn apart. And the U.S. has been right there in the middle of it.

U.S. policy has remained the same toward Afghanistan, through administration after administration. Bush started the latest war, but Obama kept it going through eight more years. Trump talked about withdrawing, but the U.S. was still there when his term ended. And now, Biden makes it clear that the U.S. will keep its hand in under his watch.

Officially, 2,500 U.S. troops remain in the country today, though the number of private military contractors—mercenaries—is surely much larger. And they are likely to remain, no matter whether the official troops are removed or not.

One way or another, the U.S. wants to retain control in the country and influence in the region. Everything it has done, it has done for its own economic and political interests. Not the “fight against terrorism,” not to free the population. It will continue to serve those interests, no matter the consequences to the populations, either in Afghanistan or in the United States.

If it’s debating whether to pull troops out, or how, or what kind of presence to keep, that’s all tactics. For the millions of people in Afghanistan who have had to live through years of destruction and death created by the U.S., it won’t make a damn bit of difference.

Why Microchips Are in Short Supply

Apr 12, 2021

Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.

A new shortage hit the world economy, after shortages of facemasks, test kits, and vaccines: a shortage of microchips. The automobile industry uses more and more of these high-tech electronic components, and the shortage is most evident among auto companies.

Automakers have shut down assembly lines in the U.S. and in Europe. Renault shut down its plants in Sandouville and Flins in France for two days.

When France’s government declared the first lockdown last March, automakers suspended their orders with suppliers like Valeo, Faurecia and Bosch, which in turn canceled their orders with semiconductor producers. Computer chips are designed more and more into the components of modern cars, such as braking systems, airbags, and fuel systems. So later, when the automobile factories revved up production again, the equipment suppliers—who had gambled that their inventories on hand would be enough for them—found themselves short and had to restart production on a rush basis.

But the microchip industry is extremely concentrated. The race to make ever smaller and more powerful chips means that today, companies have to be able to make and sell hundreds of thousands of chips to be profitable. The world leaders in electronics—mainly American and Japanese companies—have offloaded production onto a handful of trusted subcontractors in order to focus on chip design, which is much more profitable. At this time, the world’s production of microchips is done by a few giant companies mostly located in Taiwan and South Korea.

The biggest manufacturer is Taiwan’s TSMC, which makes microchips for Apple phones and computers and 70% of microchips in automobiles. So the production bottleneck is not new.

The bottleneck is the result of industrial and commercial choices made by the big electronics cartels. But it worsened this year with the high demand for computers because of the rise of working from home and the arrival of 5G phones. So orders are exploding and factories are running at full capacity. Deliveries are made after long delays, because it takes months to set up a production line adapted to a specific electronic product. Chips in Apple phones have nothing to do with chips in an automobile engine.

Auto production delays are somewhat exaggerated, but are also used by the manufacturers to pressure European and American governments to force the government of Taiwan and semiconductor producers there to produce automobile-related orders ahead of other orders. Meanwhile, world electronics leaders want to take advantage of the crisis to get billions of dollars of additional public subsidies, often in the name of “national economic independence.”

In the U.S., giants Intel, AMD and Qualcomm—which design and sometimes produce microchips for many different computer manufacturers—wrote to President Biden asking for substantial funding and subsidies. The economic war is going well! And billions are sure to rain down on these manufacturers. But nothing says they will use this money to build new microchip production lines. Production is very expensive. It is only profitable if production quantities are very high.

Monopolization in this sector does not just happen by itself. Last month, when the microchip shortage was already glaringly evident, U.S. producer Intel announced it would outsource the production of its microchips ... to Taiwan’s TSMC.

The organization of production itself is bizarre and creates the shortages. All the same, industrial giants all around the world are making money.

Myanmar:
The Complicity of Total

Apr 12, 2021

Translated from Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active in France.

Since the February 1 military coup in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and the bloody crackdown that followed, French gas corporation Total has kept silent, like many other firms. Total has operated a natural gas field there for 30 years. Finally, during a forum on April 3, CEO Patrick Pouyanné explained why Total will not divest from Myanmar.

Total has been a major contributor to the country’s government for three decades. Its gas subsidiary—registered in tax haven Bermuda—won Myanmar’s official award last August for biggest foreign business taxpayer for fiscal year 2019—2020.

The CEO began by asserting that Total has paid no taxes or duties to the military junta since the coup. But this goes without saying because, quite simply, the banking system is no longer functioning, particularly due to a strike affecting the banks. But as for the future, he also said, “Not paying taxes is a crime in Myanmar.... It would put those in charge at our branch at risk of arrest and prison.” So it’s more ethical for a capitalist to finance an army which has already assassinated 560 protesters and imprisoned thousands of opponents!

His second argument: “How could we stop production when our gas supplies electricity to a large population in Rangoon, and stopping it would add to the daily hardship of its inhabitants?” It takes the cynicism of Total executives to hide the fact that much of the gas does not benefit the local population at all, like much of the country’s vast natural resources. The gas is mostly exported. As for electricity, less than half the population has access to it. Fewer than two in five homes are connected to the national grid. Many residents use solar power kits to charge their cell phones. Electricity prices have skyrocketed in recent years.

His final argument: “Last but not least, even if we decided to halt production to protest against the situation in Burma, we could put our contractors in a drastic situation: that of forced labor.”

In terms of forced labor, Total knows what it is talking about. In 1992, Total signed a contract to exploit gas deposits in Yadana with the Myanmar State Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), a commercial business associated with the army. The regime had just massacred 3,000 pro-democracy demonstrators in 1988 and still refused to recognize its defeat in the 1990 elections.

With the signing of such contracts, the living conditions of local populations, mostly small farmers and fishermen who lived in the gas pipeline region, were disrupted. Many villages were displaced. The entire area was militarized to guarantee Total’s operations.

According to a 2005 report by the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH), “during the construction of the pipeline in 1995—1996 … the use of forced labor was particularly prevalent, as the military used thousands of civilians, including children, the elderly and the infirm, to perform forced labor for the benefit of the pipeline, including the construction of service roads and helipads, military camps.... Village heads were called on to send forced laborers on a rotational basis.” In its defense, Total indicated that “when cases of forced labor were brought to its attention, [Total] helped the victims or their families by donations in money or in kind and [made] sure the money reached them.” With the same hypocrisy, the CEO is now proposing “to pay non-profit associations working for human rights in Burma the equivalent of the taxes that we would actually have to pay to the Burmese government.”

Total and all the big capitalist firms which exploit the natural resources and the workers of Myanmar are not only complicit in the dictatorship. They have been its main beneficiaries for decades.

Pages 10-11

EDITORIAL
People Didn’t Cause the Spread of Covid

Apr 12, 2021

The following is the editorial from SPARK’s workplace newsletters, for the week of April 5, 2021.

Easter weekend was the busiest travel day of the year. More people on the roads. More people in parks, more people in hotels, many more people in airports and on planes. It was a kind of “jailbreak” by fed-up people. Many people ignored the warnings that Covid is spreading.

Did some people do foolish things over this weekend? Undoubtedly. But the basic problem does not stem from the population.

The CDC, itself, had announced that it is OK for people who had been fully vaccinated to travel, to take planes and other public forms of transportation, so long as they maintained behavior to mitigate the spread: wear masks in public; avoid crowds; respect social distancing around others.

People who traveled by air could not respect these proscriptions because the airlines made it impossible. Delta sold so many tickets that it had more people traveling than it had planes for them. People on 100 cancelled flights discovered they were being stuffed into other flights, so crowded that “social distancing” could not be respected.

Delta did not have enough pilots or flight attendants to get all the flights it had scheduled off the ground. It was short of ground crew, short of maintenance, short of people running the gates. Delta excused itself by saying its work force had been reduced by Covid infection. Well, yes, of course, there’s an epidemic. But Delta was doing what every company always does, regardless: it contrived to squeeze more profit out of not enough facilities, more profit out of too few workers.

Other airlines did similar things. The government’s own TSA did it on an even bigger scale. People waited a long time in line to go through a security gate too packed for anyone even to pretend they were respecting a 6-foot distance in every direction from all other people around them.

Since the beginning of this epidemic, those who own the responsibility for the spread of this virulent virus have tried to palm off responsibility for stopping it onto the population.

Certainly, some people are foolish about not wearing masks. And yes, the virus can be deadly, no matter how some politicians pretend otherwise to get attention.

But why, in this wealthy country, has a virus been able to spread? Why was so much unknown about it? THESE are the questions to ask.

Governments, as far back as the Reagan administration, regularly cut funding for public health, the organization that knows how to block a spread of a new infectious disease. Public money, which long ago should have gone to research into the whole family of corona viruses, went instead to increase the wealth of a few hundred billionaires.

Why weren’t hospitals able to service the population when the virus hit? In the midst of the economic crisis, they have increasingly been organized to channel a stream of profit into private hands. As a result, they were short of staff and of space to attend to people whose ailment did not produce extravagant amounts of profit.

The population paid the price—in deaths, which day after day continued to mount, and in illnesses, from which many still are not recovered.

We also paid the price of being subjected to an inhumane lock down—the reactionary way this system found to deal with a spreading virus. Many of us lost jobs. Many more have been impoverished. We could not care for many elders. Our children weren’t being educated. We were even told not to shake hands, don’t mention hugging each other.

This capitalist system, by its essential mechanisms that push profit at the expense of every human consideration, turned the biological problem of a new virus into a social catastrophe. Its political hacks in both parties, who stand always ready to serve the class that sits at the very top of this economic system, worked to excuse it, to shift the blame for what happened onto the population.

The conclusion should be obvious: this capitalist system is what’s to blame for the catastrophe. Its basic mechanisms will cause others. If we are to have decent lives, capitalism will have to be ripped up, root and branch, and replaced.

Massive Unemployment—With Minimum Unemployment Workers

Apr 12, 2021

More than a year into the pandemic and subsequent massive unemployment, the Michigan department that handles problems associated with unemployment claims and payouts is still understaffed and difficult to reach.

Want to make a phone appointment? Keep hitting refresh because all appointments for the next week are booked.

How about their online chat support? Sorry, all employees are busy helping other people.

Call their help number? All employees are helping other people and you can’t even wait on hold.

No doubt, workers at all the various unemployment offices throughout the state want to help people solve their claims and get the money they so desperately need. But these workers are extremely swamped with overwork—staffing is still kept to a minimum.

It just shows that in a capitalist system, it doesn’t matter if there is work to be done. Jobs that help people and don’t make anyone rich will always be staffed as little as possible!

Page 12

L.A. Riot Police Clear Homeless Encampment

Apr 12, 2021

On March 24, LAPD sent in dozens of riot police to kick out the remaining residents of a homeless encampment in Echo Park near Downtown L.A. The encampment had been there, in a public park, for nearly a year, growing to nearly 200 tents at its height.

In the following days, as cops dispersed protests with brute force (180 arrests were reported in one night alone, as well as severe injuries to protesters and journalists), the city fenced off the park to keep homeless people out; and so now the park is not open to the public either.

Homelessness has exploded in Los Angeles in recent years. By the last official count, from last summer, there were more than 41,000 homeless people in the City of L.A. and more than 66,000 in L.A. County, which are likely to be undercounts. Echo Park was one of many homeless encampments in L.A., where tents of homeless people are found practically everywhere; in parks, under freeway overpasses, along the L.A. River, or simply on city sidewalks. Despite promises of city and county politicians—and ballot measures passed by voters, allocating money to provide housing for the homeless—the number of tents has only been growing.

Before the violent police raid on Echo Park, some of the homeless people living there had already been relocated by the city under a state program called “Project Roomkey.” A few dozen people were placed in hotel rooms, empty due to the COVID pandemic. But this is, at best, a very limited, short-lived answer to homelessness.

In short, city and county officials don’t have any solution to offer to this huge humanitarian crisis. It’s because they will not even go near the root causes of homelessness: housing costs in and around L.A. are astronomical, and there is a severe lack of jobs that pay enough for working-class families to be able to pay the rent and buy necessities also.

Politicians and officials who run the city and county governments will not go near these social causes of homelessness because behind both—high rents and low wages—is the very driving force of the capitalist economy: the profits of the capitalist class, which these politicians and officials serve.

This crisis of homelessness exposes the fundamentally inhumane nature of capitalist society—a society that forces tens of thousands of people to live in tents on the streets of a city, next door to fabulous wealth.

Georgia Politicians Attempt Voter Suppression

Apr 12, 2021

After Donald Trump’s narrow defeat in the November election and the election of two Democrats to the U.S. Senate, Georgia’s Republican-led legislature and Republican Governor Brian Kemp passed a massive 98-page bill aimed at suppressing the right to vote.

The bill’s provisions are clearly designed to make it more difficult for black, poor and working class people to vote. The bill especially aims at making it more difficult to vote by absentee ballot.

It’s not hard to understand why the Republicans are so intent on carrying out this attack. In November, 1.3 million Georgians, or 26%, voted by absentee ballot. Of those, almost 2/3 voted for Biden to only 1/3 for Trump.

The new law includes stricter ID requirements for obtaining absentee ballots, and requires they be submitted at least 11 days before an election. It prohibits election officials from mailing out unsolicited absentee ballot applications. It reduces the number of drop boxes available—especially in urban areas with higher black and working class populations, and no longer allows drop boxes to be available 24-hours. The bill specifies the number of drop boxes allowed based on population, so in Fulton County where Atlanta is located, the number will drop from 38 in 2020 to only eight in the future. Drop boxes will now have to be located inside government buildings or early-voting sites, so they can only be accessed during business hours, making them more difficult to get to for people who work.

The bill also makes it harder to vote on election day. It makes it more difficult for voting sites to extend hours if problems arise, which happens often. It makes it a misdemeanor to provide food or water to voters waiting in line and bans mobile voting centers.

Georgia is not alone in its efforts aimed at voter suppression. There are currently at least 253 voter suppression bills being considered in 43 states.

U.S. elections have never, in fact, been democratic. Even with the most widely available voting rights, these elections would not be truly democratic because who it is that can be voted for is strictly limited to the selection of a few candidates by electoral rules that prevent the population from choosing candidates representing interests apart from those of the wealthy upper class.

Nevertheless, the current discriminatory voter suppression drive in Georgia and elsewhere is, in fact, an attack, on the black population and the entire working class.

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