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. 1160 — August 29 - September 12, 2022

EDITORIAL
Back to School—In Schools Even Worse than Last Year

Aug 29, 2022

The new school year is underway. But schools in Columbus, Ohio and King County, Washington, a Seattle suburb, did not open as scheduled, because teachers in these two school districts went on strike.

Salaries of public-school teachers in the U.S. have not kept up with the rise in cost of living, not for many years. But both in Columbus and King County, the teachers wanted the public to know that they were not striking just, or even primarily, for better pay. Smaller class size is a key demand in both strikes. Another demand, emphasized especially by Columbus teachers, is that every classroom should have adequate ventilation.

Overcrowded classrooms with no ventilation—in the middle of another Covid upsurge. And when public schools across the country have been dropping practically all precautions against the spread of Covid, including social distancing!

It’s not just teachers who are taking a stand against such egregious neglect by authorities. In Philadelphia schools, bus drivers, mechanics, cleaners, and maintenance workers had to threaten to walk out on the first day of school to bring the school board to the negotiating table. These essential workers, without whom no school could function, are demanding better pay and training.

These shortcomings, too, are widespread in public schools across the country. It’s not a surprise. When the pandemic began two and a half years ago, school boards across the country shuttered the schools and let most of their non-teaching staff go. Then for two and a half years, they did not hire nor train people. And in two and a half years, a lot of workers retired too—without being replaced!

The same is true for teachers. As teachers retired, in higher numbers than usual because of the workload and unreasonable demands of the so-called remote learning, school board officials did nothing to recruit and train new teachers to fill these positions. Now the same officials throw up their hands and say there are not enough new teachers for them to hire.

In fact, not all schools in the U.S. suffer from a shortage of teachers and other workers. There are schools in this country that have a qualified teacher for every subject they offer, in well-maintained buildings that are not overcrowded. These schools have well-equipped, state-of-the-art science labs, auditoriums and sports facilities, and enough trained workers to keep them up.

Yes, this country has excellent schools. And whether public or private, these good schools have one thing in common: they educate the children of the well-to-do.

But for the children of the working class—the vast majority of American children, that is—there is nothing but deteriorating, overcrowded and understaffed schools that cannot even provide their students a safe environment, let alone a real education.

The workings of the capitalist system have caused this, not the Covid pandemic. The pandemic further exposed and amplified the rotten workings of this system, making things go downhill even faster for the working class. Working-class parents have had to live through the pain of watching their children lose two years of their most formative years, hampering their development.

Today, officials of the Los Angeles school district, the second-largest school district in the country, decry the fact that the district has lost at least 50,000 students—nearly one out of ten—in the last two years. Hardly a surprise, considering that before the pandemic, most of LAUSD students did not have reliable access to the internet. But even if they did, how could children expect to learn by looking at a screen?

No, contrary to what district officials claim, it’s not students, or their parents, who are abandoning the schools. It’s the school districts, and behind them the capitalist system, that have abandoned students—not only their education but their well-being too. And this is true for every school district in this country that serves a working-class community.

Pages 2-3

Profit System Caused Chip Shortage

Aug 29, 2022

On August 9, President Biden signed the CHIPS And Science Act, hinting that it would solve the computer chip shortage.

It won’t.

The shortage that’s holding back industries like automobiles and washing machines is a shortage of very old-tech chips of 90 and 45 nanometer, from very old-tech factories, which are about seven generations ago in the chip development world. These are slow, basic, very cheap chips. They are suitable for basic chores like car key fobs, or cheaper consumer electronics like basic laptops and doorbells with video cameras.

The new 280-billion-dollar handouts to the computer chip industry will go for plants making the newest, fastest, most expensive, most profitable, two-nanometer and smaller chips. No company will build a new plant to make very old low-profit chips. The CEO of Intel told a German conference last year: “I’ll make them as many Intel 16 (nanometer) chips as they want.” No shortage of the more up-to-date chips!

This public money will also go for research to be given to chip companies to make their next, even faster, generations of chips. The superfast chips will help out the military, the artificial intelligence industry, and the financial speculators who rely on the fastest circuits available to move their millions of dollars around in split seconds.

But for the consumer waiting for a car or a washing machine, no help at all. The companies simply drafted their politician friends to use the cover of a “chip shortage” to help fund their most advanced projects.

These projects do cost a lot of money. A two-nanometer chip factory runs about 20 billion dollars. The equipment is incredibly complicated and expensive. But the biggest companies have long since accumulated many times that amount in profits … and then given those profits to shareholders.

The ten largest chip makers have given over 160 billion dollars to shareholders in stock buybacks since 2010. One company, Intel, bought back 80 billion in stock buybacks since then.

No, the industry doesn’t need the money. And claiming that the new plants will help consumers today is just smoke and mirrors. But isn’t that what corporate-owned politicians are good for?

Michigan:
$600 per Child to Be Ready for School?!

Aug 29, 2022

The governor of Michigan has come out and said that school supplies should not be taxed, so families with school-age children can save about $54—this is after having to spend an average of $600 per child.

Here is a better solution. With all the taxes we pay, school supplies should not cost families and teachers a single dime. They should be provided, 100%, in all the public school districts.

Wrongly Convicted, Then Ripped Off

Aug 29, 2022

A predatory financial scheme targets some of the most vulnerable people in the country: those who have been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.

More and more people are proven by legal watchdogs like the Innocence Project to have been sentenced based on false evidence or outright lies by police and prosecutors—around 160 each year nationwide.

After much agitation, many exonerated people are due to receive settlement money from the government that falsely imprisoned them. These settlements have totaled over 2.4 billion dollars in recent decades. But after being released, many have to wait months, even years before they get their money. Meanwhile, people face bills, often debts, and the next to impossible challenge of finding a job and paying for housing, transportation, health care—all the expenses of rebuilding a life after prison.

This is where the lawsuit loan or pre-settlement funding industry swoops in, like sharks smelling blood in the water. Banks, hedge funds, and private investors offer to advance people a portion of their settlement money right away, so they can pay bills and have money to live on. But when the settlement is finally paid, they have to repay the advance, plus interest that quickly adds up. Like with payday loans, a high rate of interest is charged every month. People end up having to pay interest on the interest. Add in all the fees: application fee, delivery fee, origination fee, processing fee, review fee, underwriting fee…. Often these schemes cost more than the worst credit cards. Some people have to pay back as much as the entire settlement, or more, even several times more!

The largely unregulated lawsuit-ending industry used to target people expecting personal injury lawsuit settlements. Now they also swindle innocent people who spent years in prison!

Any excuse to steal more from working class people is golden for the capitalist class. It’s past time to throw capitalism to the sharks!

Teacher Shortage Outrage

Aug 29, 2022

A teacher reported how disgusted and humiliated she felt by the actions of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education, in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. Thanks to the shortage of special education teachers in this county for the fall semester, the board paid a contractor, with taxpayer money, to hire special education teachers.

The catch? This experienced teacher in Anne Arundel makes $65,000 per year. The contractor was offering special education teachers $90,000 to come there. And even worse, the contractor was demanding—and getting—$150,000 from the Board of Education for each teacher they supplied!

Every teacher ought to be paid more than $65,000 as they deal with all the problems of trying to help every child get an education. But this Board would rather throw $60,000 extra to the contractor than pay teachers decently themselves.

Third Return to School of the Pandemic

Aug 29, 2022

Students in Chicago returned to public schools last Monday. This is the third “return to school” since the beginning of the pandemic. Yet, students see that many of the problems with the school system remain unsolved.

The biggest problem in the public schools has been staffing shortages. First, due to driver “shortages,” bus services for many students in Chicago have been cut. Some special education students now have commutes to and from school as long as two hours, each way! This is not a new problem, and the district has plenty of money—to pay drivers more, to train drivers—but they don’t do it.

With the difficulties of teaching in the pandemic, many teachers have left. Many who could retire, did, when in previous years they might have stayed on. Others have just quit. 2,300 school workers left last year, almost double the number from before the pandemic. It’s no wonder that there are too few people going to school to get their teaching credentials now, after both parties, Democrats and Republicans, have been attacking teaching and the public schools for years.

Again, this isn’t a question of money—Chicago Public Schools has more than a billion dollars extra for this AND next school year from the federal government. But the district refuses to spend the money to address the obvious problems that students, teachers and administrators face.

The district hired one additional teacher to act as a resource in almost every school building, to remedy the obvious student needs from missing a year and a half of in-person school. One! But in more schools than not, this extra teacher is instead filling in, in a classroom that lacks a teacher.

Even with all this money, Chicago Public Schools still decided to lay off 443 teachers and staff this spring—layoffs that were concentrated in working class neighborhoods like Little Village.

It’s been three years of the pandemic, and we have seen that the ruling class refuses to do right by our students in the public schools. All the more reason for the working class to take matters, including running the schools, into its own hands!

Baltimore:
Robin Hood Upside Down

Aug 29, 2022

Baltimore politicians have given millions in tax breaks since 2013 to developers for building very expensive luxury apartments, according to a recent city report. The “High Performance Market Rate Rental Tax Credit” cuts property taxes to next to nothing for investors spending more than $60,000 per apartment to build deluxe housing. This tax rebate cost the city over 20 million dollars this year alone. Other tax breaks for property developers cut another 42 million dollars from the city budget.

Some of the penthouses and other apartments getting the Market Rate tax break rent for $4,000 or $8,000 a month.

Working class people pay high property tax rates in Baltimore. Wealthy developers get breaks! This is why politicians claim they can’t find money for schools, bridge repairs, or other services we need.

Pages 4-5

College Education Should Be Free!

Aug 29, 2022

President Biden announced that he is fulfilling a campaign promise to help eliminate student debt when he announced detailed plans to cancel up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers earning less than $125,000 a year. And some borrowers, those with the greatest financial need who had Pell Grants in college, could see up to $20,000 in federal student loans forgiven. Biden also extended a pandemic-related pause on student loan collections and interest through the end of the year, since the latest extension was scheduled to end August 31.

More than 43 million people have federal student loan debt in the U.S. On the face of it, for these, $10,000 or $20,000 may be better than nothing. But the average borrower has about $37,000 in public student loans, and this initiative does not cover private loans taken out by people when they were students, often going into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This plan is, in fact, a band-aid on a system that puts tens of millions of people into debt—often for the rest of their working lives and even into their so-called golden years, when they can find their Social Security checks garnisheed for loan payments. It’s a band-aid millions of people who find themselves spending a chunk of their monthly income on student loan debt repayment—often on only the interest on this exorbitant debt. It’s a band-aid for those hundreds of thousands of young, and not so young, who have graduated from college and find themselves forced to live in the room they grew up in or in their parents’ basements, because they can’t afford to pay rent, let alone buy a house, given their student debt load.

Since Biden’s announcement, many people have come forward with their stories about still paying off their student loans after 2 or 3 decades, now with their own children facing the same obstacles to obtaining an education—but worse. Public college tuition and fees have nearly quadrupled in the past 40 years, even after adjusting for inflation. According to BRIDGE, in Michigan, a fifth grade teacher said, "I’m afraid that it’s going to be a one and done, like ‘there, we helped you out, you should be happy, but this is all we’re going to do about it’" instead of fixing the broken system.

Yes, a broken system, for the vast majority of the population, where the right to an education, or to health care, or to housing, or to culture, you name it, is based on a “How much can you afford” model.

The student debt problem will not be eliminated until we get rid of this broken system that can forgive 100% of the billions in PPP loans to big businesses; that can find billions for the war machine and corporate and bank bailouts, while its spokesmen complain and lie that this student debt relief will break the bank.

We need to break the bank. There is plenty of wealth in this society, the wealth the working class produces, so that universities and colleges could be free, all education could be free. It could and should be a human right.

Politicians Bought and Paid for … Richly!

Aug 29, 2022

It’s election season in this so-called democracy. Have you donated to your local politician so that he or she can buy $500 ads in your small local newspaper? How about the thousands of dollars needed to pay for ads every week in large newspapers? Or does the candidate have millions in campaign contributions—coming currently in the multi-millions of dollars to your local Democrats or local Republicans from their national committees—to fund attack ads on television or radio?

This money is what’s required all over the country, especially in state-wide races, but even in some district-wide ones. And thanks to the Supreme Court, it is now legal to spend many millions of dollars on so-called non-profits set up to hide the names of donors making these large political donations.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund has been known to send millions of dollars in support to Democrats, and the Rule of Law Trust sends millions to support Republicans. And because these trust funds are set up legally as non-profits, it really means U.S. tax-payers support all these exemptions to the tax laws—taxes not paid on the income of the rich.

In the 2020 elections, the Democrats funneled more than one and a half BILLION dollars to candidates this way, while the Republicans reported just under a billion dollars spent this way. And that was on ONE election and does not count the millions of dollars in donations that go in the usual way to a finance committee named for a single candidate, all of which is reported to the IRS.

For this election cycle, a new trust, the Marble Freedom Trust, was set up by the former vice president of the Federalist Society, the organization that helped stack all courts, not just the Supreme Court, with conservative judges. This trust received the assets of a company sold by a wealthy computer equipment supplier to an Irish conglomerate. Then somehow, all legally of course, one and a half billion dollars of this company’s money ended up in this new trust to funnel into the campaigns most important to the Republican Party in 2022.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Democratic Party used to talk against all this money going into these legal trusts and winding up supporting Republican candidates—until the Democrats began funneling their billions of dollars to candidates using the same kind of trusts!

All’s fair in love, war, and the American campaign system!

Bus Operators at the Very Front of the COVID Epidemic

Aug 29, 2022

An investigation by the California Department of Public Health found that, when compared to workers in all workplaces in California, bus and rail workers were five times as likely to catch COVID-19 and twice as likely to die from it. This investigation clearly shows public transportation workers are at the very front facing this deadly disease.

This result is not very surprising to the transportation workers who know their demanding work conditions very well. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro) is only one example.

More than 80% of riders of L.A. Metro buses are workers commuting to their workplaces in Los Angeles. Especially during business hours, the buses get very crowded. If the bus operators don’t accept a passenger at a bus stop due to overcrowding, the managers write the workers up. If they stop at all bus stops, passengers fill the buses up to the front, which can quickly spread the COVID virus.

L.A. Metro management could increase the number of buses to decrease overcrowding. But management does nothing to improve the demanding work conditions or pay wages at levels that can attract bus operators in high numbers. With $19.12 an hour in 2022, L.A. Metro bus operators have one of the nation’s lowest entry wages. The new contract approved by the bus operators increased the entry wage to $23.00, which is still quite low. It doesn’t even cover the cost of living in Los Angeles County.

As a result, L.A. Metro is chronically short of bus operators and has been advertising for more than 500 bus operator openings for months. This bus operator shortage was similarly dire before the pandemic started. It got worse during the pandemic because bus operators were getting sick or staying home to avoid COVID.

At the same time, this shortage did not stop L.A. Metro from firing and suspending bus operators for any little thing, thus depleting the ranks of the operators even more. Last December alone, Metro hired 11 bus operators but lost 32. Today, one out of six bus operators is missing.

To compensate for this shortage, L.A. Metro forces overtime on its bus operators to work long hours, up to 13-hour shifts and 6 days a week. Because housing in Los Angeles is so expensive, many bus operators commute one or two hours each way. They get little or no sleep. They are completely exhausted, drained, and spent. Such demanding work conditions and low pay lead these bus operators to quit L.A. Metro and look for jobs that pay higher wages.

L.A. Metro floats in money it has gathered through the Federal COVID and public transportation aids and sales taxes. But these billions of dollars do not reach the bus operators to improve their working conditions or increase their wages. Over the last 10 years, Metro has slashed what it pays in wages and benefits compared to its overall budget by 35%. Thus, Metro has held down wages and benefits even as its budget has doubled in size.

The less money L.A. Metro pays to its bus operators, the more money it can give to banks, financial companies, wealthy real estate developers, engineering companies, and lawyers. That’s how L.A. Metro turns money that was meant for mass transit into profits for the very rich.

It is this profit drive that has led L.A. Metro to neglect the health and safety of its operators and led to the sickness and death of large numbers of bus operators.

California Nuclear Plant Near Earthquake Faults

Aug 29, 2022

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently proposed a bill to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, built within 20 miles of four active earthquake faults, open until 2035. This plant, which provides about 9% of California’s total electrical supply, is located at Avila Beach, a Pacific Ocean shoreline. The plant’s federal certification expires in 2025, and renewal of the certificate requires upgrades to the plant.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which operates the plant, agreed in 2016 to shut it down by 2025, pretending that these upgrades would be too expensive for the company.

To resolve this supposed financial difficulty of a multi-billion-dollar company, Governor Newsom very generously offered a 1.4 billion dollar “forgivable” loan to PG&E to pay for the plant’s maintenance costs and federal licensing. “Forgivable loan” is a creative name for handing over taxpayers’ money for free with no future payback.

As if this free money is not enough, Newsom further sweetened the deal by requiring all California utility customers to pay for the plant’s 460-million-dollar annual operating costs and 300 million in replacement power costs during Diablo Canyon outages. So, we would not only pay for the utilities but also for the operation of this plant. It’s highway robbery!

But there is more. Newsom’s draft bill would also exempt PG&E from the California Environmental Quality Act and several other environmental rules, including the impact of the plant’s enormous ocean water usage on marine life.

In fact, earthquake safety is a serious concern. One of the four earthquake fault lines in question is only 2,000 feet from Diablo Canyon’s two reactors and could cause more ground motion during an earthquake than the reactors were designed to withstand, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Newsom’s bill is mute about earthquake safety. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), responsible for regulating nuclear reactors, has also been mute since this plant went online in 1986. So, if an earthquake causes nuclear leakage, we would probably get a lot of radiation and pick up the cleaning bill too, but PG&E would remain very profitable.

When it comes to safety, PG&E has an atrocious record. This company’s electric power infrastructure ignited many wildfires over several decades in northern California, which burned thousands of acres, destroyed hundreds of structures, and caused dozens of deaths and injuries. In a court case in 2020, PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in the devastating Camp Fire, which was set off by PG&E equipment in November 2018. How could we trust this company to operate a nuclear reactor?

Pages 6-7

Russia-Ukraine:
A War against the Peoples

Aug 29, 2022

This article is translated from the August 2 issue, #2818 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.

Even if the Russian state and the Ukrainian state have found a common interest in the resumption of grain exports to the Black Sea, for the time being in any case, the war continues.

As confirmation of the precariousness of this agreement, just hours after it was signed by representatives of Moscow and Kyiv, the Russian army had fired missiles at the very port of Odessa, where grain ships must be loaded.

For nearly six months now, day after day, military bulletins have followed on the advances of some, the setbacks of others. Press releases and declarations by President Zelensky or the opposing party punctuate the litany of destruction of apartment buildings, schools, accusations of torture, massacres.… As if war could have another face!

The Ukrainian authorities have just calculated at a hundred billion dollars what it would cost to restore the country which the fighting has ravaged in the East and the South, without sparing the Center and the West. The figure, unverifiable, is intended to impress, in any case to remind the Western allies of Kyiv, primarily the United States, that they must continue to finance the regime of Zelensky. It is a question of sending him always more weapons, but also of ensuring his income.

Indeed, international financial organizations are forecasting a 40% drop in Ukraine’s gross domestic product this year, which one of the most prominent financial rating agencies, S&P, translated by declaring that a payment default by the Ukrainian state is “virtually inevitable”.

The Increasingly Insolvent State

Admittedly, it has been regularly announced for more than fifteen years that the Ukrainian state has become insolvent. The loans that organizations such as the IMF have constantly granted to it to avoid its bankruptcy were all conditional on Kyiv turning ever more toward the imperialist West.

It is this line of rupture with Moscow that Zelensky embodies after many other Ukrainian leaders. In times of peace, it made the population pay for it by a policy of forced armament, by the privatization of the land, by attacks on the already low standard of living of the workers. In time of war, it continues this momentum with the reinforced means given to it by martial law.

The powers of the SBU, the secret services, worthy heirs of the KGB in Ukraine as is the FSB in Russia, have been extended to carry out the “repression of internal disorders”. Arrests of people accused of being pro-Russian are on the rise, as are bans on political organizations targeted by this state crime.

As for the world of work, since mid-March, it has undergone the diminishing of the thin protections that remained in the law. Overtime has been made compulsory, wages have been frozen, weekly rest reduced, companies with less than 250 employees have been authorized to impose a different employment contract on everyone, against a backdrop of the suspension of collective agreements. Added to this is the threat that weighs on any man between the ages of 18 and 60 of being sent to the front, especially if he has trouble with the police or his boss. Recently, a video showed how those in power are ruthless with the poor, even the people displaced by the fighting, for it cuts off the gas when they cannot pay.

Parasites of Both Diets

On this ground, Zelensky and his regime present the same openly anti-worker and repressive face as Putin and the Kremlin regime, although they do not miss an opportunity to denounce them. Both oppose each other but are in the direct service of very similar local wealthy people because they come from the same matrix, the Stalinist bureaucracy. The main difference between the two regimes, their bureaucracies, and their oligarchs, is that in Russia the ruling parasites have a relatively strong state to impose themselves, including on the international scene, whereas in Ukraine they find themselves in a situation of increasing dependence vis-à-vis the Western imperialist countries.

So, what is behind the pro-Moscow treason charges that Zelensky leveled this summer against senior Ukrainian military and intelligence officials? Some may be well-founded; after all, the Russian and Ukrainian ruling apparatuses come from the same mold, have a common recent past. It could also be that these accusations are aimed at “explaining” to the population why, despite all its sacrifices, despite the Western armaments constantly arriving in Ukraine, and despite the difficulties in renewing personnel that the Russian army is experiencing, it seems to be progressing anyway.

Another explanation would be that within the Ukrainian state apparatus, even at the highest level, some are beginning to think that ground should be found for negotiation with Moscow before the country is totally ravaged and on its knees. But this is not what Zelensky and his followers want, who have linked their fate, and behind them that of the Ukrainian population, to what American imperialism wills and decides.

For the time being, the representatives of imperialism say it and repeat it: we must expect a war that will last. And it is the Ukrainian and Russian populations who are paying the high price at all levels.

Haiti:
Gangs Conquering Capital

Aug 29, 2022

For decades, the impoverished islands in the Caribbean have acted as “industrial zones” for France and the United States. For 100 years, Haiti has served as a low-paid workshop for U.S. corporations. For more than 200 years, Haitian workers have been the same low-paid labor for French companies.

And in the recent disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and cholera, Haiti and other Caribbean nations have received promises of aid from rich countries that amounted to nothing. Some people have still not been re-employed or re-housed from the devastation of the 2010 earthquake.

The militants of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight) a journal in Guadeloupe and Martinique, wrote in July of these conditions:

For months, the poorest population in Haiti has been terrorized by gangs in the working-class neighborhoods. They have suffered kidnappings, killings, rapes, robberies; and now, these gangs are acting as if they were the power of the state.

A leader of the best-known gang called his gang’s actions the “coup of brilliance” and claimed he was the only one who could lay a wreath on the monument of the “Hero of Independence” at a remembrance ceremony last October. Since June, his gang has occupied the Palace of Justice (similar to the U.S. Department of Justice). Official documents that go to Parliament have been compromised. The gangs have destroyed police stations and claim they make the laws.

Two gangs are fighting for control of the capital, the G9, headed by a former policeman, and the GPep. Their last confrontation in a really poor part of the capital left over 250 dead, injured hundreds and caused hundreds more inhabitants to flee. Power belongs to those who control the most working class neighborhoods and, even more, those who control the industrial zones, from which comes Haiti’s wealth, now in the hands of the gangs.

The gangs have taken control of the ports, so they control all entry and exit of shipping containers. They control the arrival of fuel and other shipments, blocking delivery if they please. So, all transportation of goods is subject to their will. For example, on the main routes, truck drivers, carriers, buses, taxis, even motorcyclists pay them a transit “tax”. In addition, merchants in shops and supermarkets are forced to accept this racketeering if they want to remain open for business.

One gang leader has an “office”, to which people must go for birth certificates or identity cards. In other neighborhoods, gangs deliver makeshift electrical connections, visiting each month to get a payment, like a utility bill, from inhabitants.

In their way of “replacing” the state government, the gangs have rounded up street children, forcing them to be look-outs, intelligence gatherers, and guards for the people who are kidnapped, when they are not forced to be assassins with guns.

The gangs’ control of all roads leads to shortages; goods are blocked from reaching the poor, who are starving. Peasants who can no longer sell their produce go hungry.

However, the gangs are not really operating in the countryside. And in the working-class neighborhoods where the gangs try to operate, they are systematically “unhooked” by the population, which tries to prevent the gangs from establishing a base. Such examples give hope to all because the capital of Haiti has a disgusting history of gangs, whether they were the “macoutes” of President Duvalier’s era, or the army “green olives” gangs, or the “chimeres”, the bandits operating under President Aristide.

Such actions will help the poor to regain their capacity to free themselves from all gangs, and finally from all oppression.

Why Such Violence among Young People?

Aug 29, 2022

This article is translated from the July 30 issue, #1290 of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of comrades in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean.

There were sixteen murders in Martinique and 22 in Guadeloupe since the beginning of this year, almost entirely working class youth. Not a week goes by without one young person killing another. These homicides start from various “settling of accounts”: whether over drugs, theft of scooters, or other causes.

This escalating violence is partly explained by what young working class people are constantly experiencing. Six out of every 10 young people cannot find work. It is also explained by the deterioration of all public services, especially schools. The young get poor training, not leading to a job, facing discrimination in hiring. By chance, when a few do get employed, the work is often badly paid, or not even paid at all. Many young people end up disgusted with work, revolted by the society, rejecting the idea of working for a boss who exploits them. So, most youth are left at the margins of society. The consequence is great despair. A large number have left the West Indies to find work.

Lack of perspective leads to self-destructive behavior. When a young person takes reckless risks on the road or goes so far as to shoot at the police, it means he no longer expects anything from life. The increase in incidents goes hand in hand with the rise in poverty and precarious living. The crazy increase in the price of consumer goods, of fuel, plunges the poorest families into ever greater misery.

We see the social injustice against young people from the working class, but we also live in a society exuding violence from its very pores. The television shows wars, bombings, attacks, appalling massacres everywhere. Video games and movies are often linked also to war and/or killing. This environment, this culture of violence in which our society is bathed, is not likely to cure the evils we see, but rather to make them worse.

Last November and December, it was mostly hopeless and desperate youth who manned the roadblocks to denounce this situation. It was the youth who, for several nights, let their revolt explode until some fired live ammunition at the police. Even if we don’t approve of these acts, we understand how exasperated youth come to do them.

The government’s response to the social crisis has been repression. Hundreds of young people have been arrested, tried, and imprisoned, subjected to judicial and police harassment. The government did not find decently paid jobs, nor try to solve the causes of the social crisis. It just wanted to punish all those who revolted, making the situation even worse.

We live in a capitalist system, in which all that interests the bosses is increasing their profits. And all that interests the government is to serve the bosses. They don’t care that there are thousands of unemployed young people. On the contrary, they use unemployment to put pressure on all workers, to lower wages in order to increase their profits.

The fight of the youth is no different from the fight workers will have to lead: to challenge the capitalist organization of society.

Pages 8-9

Afghanistan:
One Year after Withdrawal, U.S. War on Population Continues

Aug 29, 2022

August 30 marks the one-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, twenty years after the U.S directly invaded the country, and more than forty years after U.S. intervention in it really began.

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in support of an allied government facing an uprising by Islamic fundamentalists known as the mujahideen. The U.S. quickly jumped in to funnel enormous amounts of weapons and training to those fighting the Soviets. After the Soviet Union withdrew, various mujahideen warlords began a civil war for control of the country, eventually won by the Taliban, which itself came out of a layer of students in the religious schools set up by the U.S. to train these fighters.

When asked if he regretted organizing support for these forces in 1998, after the Taliban had taken over most of the country, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski replied: “What is more important to the future of the world? The Taliban, or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims, or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

In fact, the U.S. had no real problem with the Taliban’s fundamentalist government, even as it banned women from going outside the home without a man, forced them to cover themselves from head to foot, and imposed the death penalty for adultery. Until, that is, the U.S. decided to make an example of Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Just one month later, on October 7 of 2001, the U.S. began a massive bombing campaign in Afghanistan in preparation for the U.S. invasion of the country, even though the Taliban was not involved in 9/11.

To eject the Taliban, the U.S. allied with non-Taliban mujahideen warlords, and then set these men up to run the country. Many were just as brutal and misogynist as the Taliban. Abdul Rashid Dostum, for instance, was accused of suffocating hundreds of prisoners of war to death in shipping containers, of raping men, women, and children, of ordering the murder of his wife when she caught him having sex with a child, and even of ordering that his men rape one of his political opponents with an assault rifle. Under the U.S., this man became Vice President.

To reinforce unpopular warlords like Dostum, U.S. forces carried out unending bombings and drone attacks on opponents of the regime, night raids of homes, and torture of suspects—throwing much of the population back into the arms of anyone who claimed to be resisting the U.S. occupiers. Already in 2012, Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president during much of the U.S. occupation, commented that if the U.S. were to withdraw, “everything will collapse. The army is rubbish. The government is a puppet.”

Afghanistan was left in shambles by the 20-year U.S. war and occupation. But even after it finally decided to withdraw—a bi-partisan decision negotiated by Trump and carried out by Biden—the U.S. wasn’t content to turn the shambles it had created over to the Taliban. Instead, the U.S. ensured that the new Taliban government would rule over a completely collapsing economy. The U.S. imposed sanctions and seized nine billion dollars in Afghan government funds, with the Biden administration announcing plans to distribute half of that money to victims of 9/11, even though not one Afghan was involved in the attacks of that day. Worst of all, the U.S. froze Afghanistan completely out of the international banking system, meaning that the country cannot even print money, nor can it conduct international trade.

On top of that, the U.S. cut off foreign aid to the country—which accounted for 75% of Afghanistan’s budget. Government workers of all sorts are not getting paid. There is literally no money for the state hospital; no money for schools; no money for the water and sewer systems.

The result has been mass starvation. According to the U.N., over 90% of Afghans don’t get enough to eat, and about half the population is suffering from acute hunger. About one million children under the age of 5 are suffering from prolonged acute malnutrition, meaning even if they survive, they will face long-term health consequences.

For more than 40 years, the U.S. has inflicted unending misery on the population of Afghanistan. One year after it withdrew its troops, the U.S. war on Afghanistan’s population continues.

Louisiana Woman Exposes Cruelty of Abortion Ban

Aug 29, 2022

A pregnant Louisiana woman named Nancy Davis is working with prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump to let the world know about the gut-wrenching situation women like her are in because of new bans on abortion.

Louisiana has a ban on abortion in place with very few exceptions. Many states have passed similar legislation, collectively called “trigger laws.” These laws were passed by states ahead of time to become legal after the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Nancy Davis was devastated to learn from a 10-week ultrasound that her desired pregnancy was not viable. The fetus has a fatal condition called acrania, which kills babies, sometimes within minutes of birth. Acrania is a condition where the brain lacks a protective skull.

Because acrania was not explicitly listed as a medical condition justifying an exception to the state’s abortion ban, the hospital treating Nancy Davis would not terminate her pregnancy, now in its 13th week. This was because her medical providers feared being prosecuted. Under Louisiana law, medical providers face up to 15 years in prison and loss of their medical licenses for violations of the abortion ban.

"Basically, they said I had to carry my baby to bury my baby," said Davis. Partly to pay for travel expenses and partly because her pre-natal health insurance, Medicaid, does not pay for abortion, she had to set up a GoFundMe campaign to pay for this medically necessary abortion. With the help of 1000 donations, she and her partner will soon travel 900 miles to North Carolina, where abortion is legal until 20 weeks.

Her attorney said in a statement, "By positioning themselves between Miss Davis and her doctors, Louisiana lawmakers inflicted unspeakable pain, emotional damage and physical risk."

Said Nancy Davis, "This is not fair to me, and it should not happen to any other woman…. Being a mother starts when the baby is inside the womb … [because of] the attachment and everything that comes with it. As a mother, as a parent, it’s my obligation to have my children’s best interests at heart."

Nancy Davis’ decision to fight back by publicizing the real-world consequences of post-Roe government interference in women’s reproductive healthcare is important.

The far-right billionaires who fund these laws, the far-right politicians who pass these laws, and the religious forces who promote these laws all wrap themselves in the lie that they are “pro-life.” What is “pro-life” about a woman being forced to risk her own death by carrying a fetus destined only for future pain, suffering and death?

Abortion is a complex and necessary reproductive healthcare procedure. The choice must belong to the woman. She is the one who is most intimately engaged with the life involved: her own and that of the fetus. She is the only one who fully knows the pain that such a decision costs, no matter what the decision may be. The choice must be hers.

Celebrating Our Labor History

Aug 29, 2022

Labor Day was first celebrated on September 5, 1882, a Tuesday, with a parade called by the New York Central Labor Unions.

Peter McGuire, a carpenter and union leader in New York’s Central Labor Union council proposed a holiday for labor, and the council chose September 5, a work day, so that all who attended would have to give up a day’s pay. Some accounts say 10,000 workers attended, some say 30,000, but at any rate, there were cloth cutters, horse-shoers, shoe-makers, cigar-makers, bricklayers, printers, house painters, freight handlers, cabinet makers and so on.

Laboring people had had to fight, to demonstrate, even strike against the U.S. bosses exploiting them. Even before the Civil War, workers tried to fight for a 10-hour work day, since many had to labor 12 or 14 hours a day and a half day more on Saturday. A petition for the eight-hour day had reached the California legislation signed by 11,000 people in 1866.

In New York, labor was strong enough in 1864 to resist the bosses’ attempts at an anti-strike bill. An April 7 rally that spring in New York City brought together iron molders, carpenters, bricklayers, fur workers, clothing workers, some with shouts of "We will send them to hell next election."

In 1894, thanks to actions by working people, Congress agreed to make the first Monday in September a holiday in honor of labor. In Europe, a number of countries celebrated a day for labor on the first of May. But since that day was associated first with pagan rites that the Christian churches opposed, and then with radicals, like the socialists and communists of the mid-19th century, politicians and the more conservative union leaders in the U.S. preferred the September date.

Large Labor Day parades continued in New York up until World War I.

The 1930s saw organizing, especially among unorganized workers across the country. It was these fights, sit-ins, demonstrations and strikes that built the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Workers, drawing millions into unions and winning better wages and benefits for working people for at least a generation.

Labor Day parades, occurring in thousands of U.S. cities on the first Monday of September, captured that spirit of achievement.

Labor Day Then and Now

Aug 29, 2022

More recently, at least through the 1960s, many cities had large Labor Day parades. Detroit, Michigan, heart of the auto industry, following the earlier decades of struggle, saw Labor Day parades of hundreds of thousands of workers, led by local unions.

But with the union movement shrinking over the past 60 years, fewer and fewer places celebrate labor on the first Monday in September. In Detroit, top union leaders called off the Labor Day parade this year.

Whatever their reasons, working people can take advantage of Labor Day to show solidarity, to celebrate what working people have accomplished, and to demand what we need.

A salute to those who remember!

New Abortion Bans

Aug 29, 2022

In Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas, new bans on abortion will take effect. These are almost complete bans, with varying exceptions to prevent physical damage to the mother or her death. The Texas law makes providing an abortion a first-degree felony.

In all, 13 states have passed some form of a trigger law. One in three women in their reproductive years now lives in a state where abortion has been banned or mostly banned.

The fall of Roe has started a chain of legal dominoes falling. Some of the newest laws seek to regulate how much damage can be done to a woman’s body before “the law” will deem an abortion permissible. It is ludicrous!

Women surely pose a threat to the continuation of this unjust system for those currently in power to aim so many restrictive laws at them. That power—the power of women at the heart of the working class—needs to be consciously organized. That day is coming!

Pages 10-11

EDITORIAL
Take Back the Wealth Stolen from Us!

Aug 29, 2022

What follows is the editorial that appeared on the front of all SPARK’s workplace newsletters, during the week of August 22, 2022.

For that one percent, which owns over 90% of all company stock, inflation has fueled a bonanza. Millionaires became billionaires. Billionaires became ... zillionaires.

But for the rest of us, inflation has been a disaster. Our standard of living—that is, what we can buy with our weekly wage—has plummeted.

There’s a clear, simple response to that. Our wages have to go up. Go up now. Go up the full amount to make up for every cent we lost.

There’s wealth enough in this system to pay for it. But it’s been stolen from us. It sits in the investment accounts and offshore accounts of the very wealthy. They sink it into speculative ventures. They throw it into the casinos on Wall Street. They use it to buy up property—and more property. They waste it on giant yachts docked for 11-and-a-half months of the year, so they can take a cruise when they feel like it. They waste it on luxury apartments that sit vacant most of the year.

Money has been accumulating, year after year, in the hands of a very tiny minority of people: the ones who own the big companies and the banks, the capitalist class.

That wealth comes from our labor. Those of us who work for our living produce all the goods and services that everyone in the country consumes. But we don’t enjoy our own labor’s full benefit. An enormous part of the wealth our labor produces goes to enrich a class of super-wealthy parasites.

We’ve got to take this money back, this wealth our labor produced, but which was stolen from us. We can’t trust government to do it for us. In fact, government is part of the problem. Under these two big parties, Democrats and Republicans, government took public money to add to the wealth hoarded by a voracious capitalist class. Trump’s corporate tax cuts, Biden’s infrastructure plan—they were just two different ways to funnel more money into the grasping hands of a greedy class.

So, to come back to the main point: in order to defend ourselves, we have to put our hands on the wealth our labor produces. Regardless of what the problem is—inflation, unemployment, working conditions, the lack of public services, bad schools—the solution is the same. We have to put our hands on the wealth our labor produces, including all the accumulated wealth stolen over the years.

This year, there have been a few attempts by workers to catch up with inflation, to take some of this money back: strikes in some auto parts plants, in food processing plants, in some longshore ports, and mines. Even if it wasn’t possible for any of those strikes to catch up with most of what has been lost, they were important. Part of our class was ready to fight. Without a fight, we win nothing.

It’s true, we can’t win much in a time like this—IF we fight alone, in just one workplace; IF we wait on contracts that expire at different times.

But that’s exactly the point. Nothing says the fight has to stay in just one company. Nothing says fights can be made only when a contract expires.

Union contracts were written years ago to handcuff workers, to make it almost impossible to strike when a strike is needed. Contracts divide the work force, industry by industry, company by company. They ignore the majority of today’s work force that works in companies without a union.

So, ignore those contracts. We need a wider perspective. Think about ourselves as part of a class. Ask ourselves, “How can we bring other parts of our class into this fight—and every fight?”

Our class is a powerful class, key in the economy, able to shut it all down. But how do we get to the point that the whole class fights at the same time, using its power? That is the question. And there are no shortcuts. But when any fight starts, workers in it can try to spread it. Going to other companies in the same industry, but also to other industries, and above all to workers not in a union today, asking others to join—that’s how a fight spreads. A single strike, if it spreads, holds the potential to engage our whole class, our whole powerful class.

Ford Takes Tax Break, Lays off 3,000

Aug 29, 2022

During the week of August 22, Ford Motor laid off 3,000 white-collar workers—2,000 Ford employees and 1,000 contract workers, a “significant” percentage in Michigan. Others are in Canada and India. Ford said their skills were not relevant to the new electric-vehicle world.

Two months before, Ford execs and Michigan’s governor together announced Ford’s 2-billion-dollar investment plans in Michigan. The governor said that as long as Ford created 3,030 new hourly jobs, Ford would get over 100 million dollars in tax credits from the state.

Ford will still claim the tax breaks, even after laying off 3,000 workers, because the deal was for creating hourly jobs—and only salaried workers were laid off! A Ford spokesperson said callously, “So net-net, we’re adding more jobs to Michigan.”

You can bet that all of this was quietly understood by all parties at the time. Back in March, Bloomberg News had reported Ford’s plans to soon lay off up to 8,000 salaried workers.

These are workers with valuable computer skills. But Ford prefers to hire younger workers with more up-to-date training and lower salary demands. The 3,000—and more to come—have to face all the stress, uncertainty, and loss when their job suddenly disappears.

Culture Corner—Belfast & Summer of ’85

Aug 29, 2022

Film: Belfast Directed by Kenneth Branagh, 2021, streaming on HBO and other sites.

This film depicts, through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy, a violent, tumultuous time in Northern Ireland during The Troubles in the summer of 1969. You see a modest, solid working class community where neighbors raised their kids together for decades but which, in this time, is being destroyed by the strife between the Protestants and the Catholics. The film doesn’t analyze the cause; instead, you see the senseless and cruel nature of the violence tearing this neighborhood apart.

This film has strong performances by 9-year-old Jude Hill, and by Catriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan, playing his parents. His grandparents, acted by Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds, have a vibrant touching wisdom and beautiful chemistry.

Book: Summer of ’85. Narrated by Keven Hart, from writer Chris Morrow, 2022, available on Audible.

This Audible Original depicts and juxtaposes two 1985 Philadelphia events: The MOVE house bombing in which 11 people, including 5 children, were killed and 61 homes burned down, and two months later, the huge Live Aid benefit concert in Philadelphia to raise money for the victims of the Ethiopian famine. MOVE members were militants who lived in a communal setting in the city, and who all took the last name of Africa. Their militancy drew the ire of the police, and the callous aerial bombing of their house by the police shook the world. Did the concert two months later seek to hide and cover up those events?

Summer of ’85 is stunningly narrated by Kevin Hart and includes many soundbites from the actual events. The audiobook gives the backstory of each event, examines the motives and consequences, and challenges us to thoroughly know this not-so-distant history that could happen again even today.

Page 12

The CDC’s Apology Won’t Raise the Dead

Aug 29, 2022

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, recently admitted the CDC made “dramatic, pretty public mistakes” in its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Walensky based her remarks on a report she received as a result of an investigation she ordered in April. She apologized for the CDC’s failure to focus on public health needs, slow response to outbreaks of disease, and inability to communicate to the public in ways they could understand and use.

Following Walensky’s confession, other public health commentators have described how in the early months of the pandemic, the CDC bowed to pressure from the Trump administration to play down the disease, but also that the CDC was more directly at fault when it gave out Covid tests that proved to be inaccurate. Some have pointed out that the CDC’s guidance has been confusing, even to public health experts. They say the CDC sometimes took too long to release data for timely decisions to be made, such as information on breakthrough infections among the vaccinated that might have led them to recommend booster shots sooner.

Some have pointed out similar failures in the more recent handling of the monkeypox epidemic. They’ve commented on the CDC’s tendency to dance around the truth out of worry about the public’s reaction to it, like in the initial days of Covid when the CDC discouraged the use of masks, not because masks wouldn’t work but because they worried that if everyone bought masks, they wouldn’t have enough for health care workers. Public health officials at first avoided revealing that monkeypox was mainly infecting homosexual men, to prevent stigmatizing them.

Some public officials point to problems with both the early Covid testing and recent monkeypox testing to suggest the CDC’s testing is too centralized. When the CDC’s first Covid tests failed, the problem was made worse by the Food and Drug Administration’s refusal to allow laboratories to develop their own tests. With monkeypox, the CDC had enough tests in the early weeks of the outbreak but couldn’t get them out to local doctors quickly enough to test their patients.

Yet they also note that reporting on data on testing and cases is too decentralized and fragmented across state and local health departments, hospitals, clinics, and labs with no organization between them. It’s why the public gets more information about new Covid variants and the need for new boosters from other countries like Israel and Britain that have national health care systems!

Yeah, no kidding Sherlock! It’s nice to have the “apology” from the CDC and the information from public officials on all the failings, but what does anyone propose to do about them? Walensky promises to “reorganize” the CDC. That probably wouldn’t hurt, but can they do it? And is that all that’s needed? Not likely.

The timing of Walensky’s “mea culpa” raises the question of whether it’s anything more than simply an election ploy, pointing out the failures during the Trump administration and admitting mistakes and promising to improve now that Biden is in charge.

At the same time Walensky offers her apologies, the CDC continues to issue confusing nonsense on dealing with Covid-19, telling people they don’t have to wear masks or even stay six feet apart! It seems to be yielding to public pressure and acting as if Covid-19 is no longer a pandemic, just something the public has to live with. Yet with over three hundred deaths due to Covid every day, that amounts to approximately four yearly flu epidemics. And it’s the working class that is most affected by the pandemic.

Putting aside such cynicism, the problems with the CDC are only one symptom of the root causes of public health crises in the U.S., though the CDC rightly deserves criticisms for its failures. One look at the CDC’s annual budget shows the lack of attention governments in this country pay to public health. The CDC’s annual budget is 12 billion dollars. The annual budget for U.S. military spending in 2022 is 778 billion dollars. Military spending has increased every year by several times the CDC’s entire budget!

Even just looking at how the public’s health is addressed in this country, spending on medical care has gone up 50% in the last decade, while local health department budgets went down by 24% and the CDC’s budget stayed the same! That’s because the medical system in the U.S. is organized around the goal of profit. Profits for private, for-profit health care systems and the insurance industry. Profits delivered even through the “non-profit” sector to pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, and banks that feed off of health care.

What will reorganizing the CDC do, when so many working class and poor people have no access to a local community health care provider whom they can trust, due to all the cuts made over recent decades. Or when vaccines and tests, when they’re available, are provided through for-profit drug stores, which for many may be far away for those with little access to transportation.

While discussing the failures of the CDC, public health officials conveniently leave out any discussion of the role of conditions imposed on the working class that contribute to the spread of infectious diseases like Covid—by the bosses and their capitalist system. Workers were forced to go to work in crowded and poorly ventilated workplaces, not given proper protective equipment, or allowed take the necessary time off to quarantine, nor to deal with side effects of vaccination. All while being given faint praise for being “essential”.

In the end, it’s not the CDC and not the government that’s to blame for the public health crises in this country and across the world. It’s the wealthy capitalist ruling class and their system that are the root cause, and stopping new pandemics requires a reorganization—not just of the CDC, but of the whole society.

Search This Site