the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 21, 2001
Over the last year, the big energy companies have created what they call an energy shortage, which everyone knows is a complete fraud. They have used this artificial crisis which they contrived as an excuse to boost the prices of gasoline, heating oil, electricity and natural gas to ever more outrageous heights, for their own stupendous profits at our expense.
But this has been only the beginning. Under the guise of solving the "energy crisis" President Bush now brings forward with much fanfare his "national energy policy." But what Bush calls an energy policy is nothing but a naked attempt to use the government to further benefit the energy companies at the expense of the population.
First, the Bush administration proposes that the government drop many of the environmental regulations that protect us from the worst pollution from oil refineries, pipelines and power plants. If these proposals go through, more dangerous chemicals will be spewed into the air, water and ground, threatening the health and safety of much of the population. This increase of pollution will also accelerate the destruction of the ozone layer that protects life from harmful radiation from the sun and the build-up of hothouse gases that are producing global warming. That is, Bush is proposing to allow the big companies to further degrade and devastate precisely those conditions which allow for human life on the planet.
Second, the Bush administration proposes to turn over even more government subsidies and tax breaks to the energy companies. They are proposing to give tax breaks for utility company mergers, to limit the ability of people to sue utility companies in case of a nuclear accident and to grant tax credits, which are subsidies, for any investment and new production.
The same Bush administration that decries "Big Government" whenever ordinary people demand taxpayer money for the most basic social programs, like schools and health care, is more than willing to turn over hundreds of billions of tax dollars to big corporations to boost their profits.
Third, the Bush administration proposes to turn over more government owned resources to the energy companies for exploitation, practically free of charge. More government land will be opened up to drilling for oil, mining for minerals, etc. It also proposes to open up Yucca Mountain in Nevada for the dumping of radioactive waste, despite the fierce opposition of almost the entire population of the region.
The final insult is that Bush would have us continue to pay these outrageously high prices for the foreseeable future, sticking more money into the pockets of these companies.
Bush would have us believe that his proposals would be only a temporary inconvenience. But the Bush family’s many residences and vacation homes are not going to be subjected to these "temporary inconveniences." They are not located anywhere near the oil refineries, power plants, nuclear waste dumps that he wants to "liberate" from environmental regulations. His teenage twin daughters will not have to go to college near, or work in areas where they will be harmed by this pollution. Nor will those of the energy executives’ families. No, the brunt of the sacrifices will be borne by the working class through destroyed health and shortened lives.
Bush may play the game of the amiable, good-for-nothing rogue and fool. But there is nothing funny or friendly about these proposals. They are a true attack. They represent the unbridled drive by the capitalist class for ever more profits at the expense of the population.
If allowed to continue, these attacks can only grow worse, raining down ruin and destruction on working people, the environment and the planet.
May 21, 2001
The Internal Revenue Service has revealed for the first time the tax payments of the 400 richest families. These 400 families, on average, had 110 million dollars in income in 1998. That’s right. 110 million in one year. They paid 22% of their income in taxes in 1998, down from 29.4% in 1993. Their much lower taxes came from the deal cut by Clinton and the Republicans in 1993 to lower the tax paid on capital gains, that is the profits made from selling stock and real estate.
These multi-millionaires–and billionaires–pay a lower portion of their income to the U.S. government than do many workers. First of all, there are all the loopholes built into the tax laws which serve wealthy people. But equally important is that fact that workers pay a 7.65% Social Security tax on their whole income–while the wealthy pay it on only a very tiny part, the first $80,400 of any salary they get.
Now the two parties are again cutting another tax deal. While publicly fussing and feuding about a few details of the new tax cut, they are working out behind the scenes another way to lower taxes on the wealthy.
And all the while, they are pretending they want to cut our taxes–just like in 1993.
May 21, 2001
The Oscar of the Year award goes to those energy companies which produced, directed and starred in the Scam of the Year: "The Energy Crisis."
They managed to create the illusion that there were shortages of electricity in California, shortages of heating oil and natural gas along the East Coast and shortages of gasoline at the pump in the country as a whole.
When power blackouts rolled around the state of California last March, the news media around the country repeated the utilities’ claims that there had been too much demand for electricity and not enough supply of it.
In fact, there had been no significant increase in demand, that is use of electricity. The utilities and the power generating companies simply restricted the supply of power. The small number of producers of electricity who effectively monopolize the market decided to shut down too many plants for "routine maintenance." In fact, they shut down so many plants, all at the same time, that one third of their total production capacity was taken off line during those blackout days in March.
Bad planning? Coincidence? Not hardly. Simply a scheme to raise rates. Credit Suisse First Boston Corporation commented at the time that the blackouts were "intended to soften up the Legislature and the voters to the need for a rate increase." Credit Suisse, by the way, was the Wall Street firm which wrote the recent utility bailout bill for the California legislature, which raised consumer rates and handed over 15 to 20 billion dollars to the utilities.
Not to be outdone by the producers of electrical energy, the marketers of natural gas used their control over the pipelines to reduce the supply of that resource. Predictably, their rates went skyrocketing up also. At one point, the price of natural gas piped into California was selling for 10 times as much as what it cost at the wellhead.
Of course, the real experts at this scam, the companies which have been carrying it on year after year, are the oil companies. They blame OPEC, they blame pollution requirements, they blame refinery capacity. If they could, they would blame your grandmother. And they, too, decided to shut down what the Wall Street Journal called "an unusually high amount of refinery capacity for routine maintenance."
And the result of this "routine maintenance" shutdown was low capacity and–what else?–higher prices.
May 21, 2001
On April 25 the Senate Banking Committee voted 19 to 1 to recommend repeal of what remains of the PUHCA (Public Utility Holding Company Act) of 1935. Congress already in 1978 and 1992 repealed important parts of the PUHCA. The 1992 measure, especially, opened the door to the deregulation fiasco now unfolding.
The PUHCA was adopted in 1935, in the middle of the "Great" Depression as a response to the disastrous situation privately owned public utilities had created. The holding companies which Congress regulated produced no electricity themselves. They simply owned publicly regulated electric utility companies (or other holding companies that owned utility companies), as well as unregulated coal companies, financial services companies, construction companies, and so on. They used their control of companies in various phases of the electric power generation process and their hidden concentration of control over many utility companies around the country to escape all public regulation.
The ownership of all these holding companies, subsidiary companies, affiliated companies and interlocking companies was so complicated, it was impossible to know what was going on. The result was, the utilities themselves, whose rates supposedly were regulated, in fact could charge whatever they thought they could get away with.
What was worse, was that these holding company "pyramids"–as they were called–allowed a very tiny number of capitalists to control the electric power industry in the whole country.
During the 1930s, it was estimated that 16 holding companies controlled 85% of all the electric generating capacity of the country. And these 16 companies were in some cases owned by the same person or group of people who conspired with each other. J.P. Morgan alone, one of the leading financial manipulators of that time, is estimated to have directly or indirectly controlled over 50% of all generating capacity.
After the stock market crash, most holding companies which had been built up on speculation went belly up. Not only did hundreds of thousands of small stockholders in these holding companies lose their money, but electricity was cut off to whole cities, whole areas of the country. In many rural areas, electric service had never been established to begin with because it had never been profitable enough for the barons of the power industry to bother with it.
It was to prevent the recurrence of such financial speculation in public utilities that Congress passed the PUHCA in 1935. A number of regulations set limits on how much a single holding company could own and where it could own it.
But to restore electric service required many cities to build their own system and the federal government to extend electricity to rural areas. Private capital wouldn’t do it. Its goal was the production of profits, not of electricity.
Today Congress stands on the verge of repealing what’s left of this law, even as the new barons of the energy industries are gearing up to concentrate ownership and control of gas and electric utility companies, pipeline and electric power transmission companies in their hands–only this time on a much grander scale than anything that happened in the earlier part of the 20th century.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), in 1992, the ten largest investorowned utilities owned 36% of all generating capacity in the country. By the end of 2000, according to DoE estimates, the top ten owned 51% of all such capacity. John Bryson, current CEO of Edison International, the holding company which owns Southern California Edison, recently predicted that there will be only 10 energy conglomerates left worldwide in ten years. The current disaster in California gives a hint of what that will mean for the prices we will pay for electrical power, with decreasing access to it. These 10 monopolies will roll up enormous profits.
The federal and state deregulation laws of this last quarter of a century, bending to capital’s voracious appetite for profit, are now turning the clock backwards and doing it under the banner of what the U.S. Department of Energy recently called "a new school of thought."
May 21, 2001
The profit figures are out for 2000. Many companies showed what Business Week called "the end of a decade of economic exuberance." In other words, not every corporation continued to make profits up the wazoo. But some did: oil, gas and energy companies did very well indeed.
The top 10 oil companies had after-tax profits of 56.6 billion dollars, which exactly doubled their profits for 1999, which had already set a record. In the first three months of 2001, these ten companies had even higher profits than last year’s record: 16.8 billion dollars for just three months.
Talking about shortages, these companies pushed up prices–sometimes by hundreds and even thousands of%s on everything from heating oil, gasoline and natural gas sold not only to consumers but to the electric utility industry. The largest energy corporations controlling electricity in California saw their after-tax profits soar 54% in 2000 to 7.8 billion dollars.
Shortages? Clearly there’s no shortage of profit to be made in this country from delivering the oil, gas, coal and electricity we all cannot live without.
May 21, 2001
On May 17 a Florida jury found Nathaniel Brazill guilty of second-degree murder in the killing of his teacher, Barry Grunow. Brazill was 13 years old at the time he shot and killed Grunow at his school.
Brazill awaits sentencing on June 26. This 14-year old could face 25 years to life in prison.
What kind of society is this that treats a 13 or 14-year old as if he were an adult, not a child? Can he think like an adult? Can he make the decisions we expect from adults?
There is not a parent, teacher or doctor in the world who would agree that a 13-year old is an adult. Even when our children irritate us, we don’t put them out on the street at age 13 to look after themselves. The law recognizes this reality–it says parents MUST look after children until they are 16 or 18, depending on the state and the activity.
The reason civilized countries don’t treat children as if they were short adults is that neither their emotional, mental nor physical development is finished at age 13.
Nowhere are young people allowed to make serious decisions: about where they live, what their schooling is, how they will be raised. The law prevents young people from voting or driving a car or drinking alcohol or renting an apartment until they are older, usually 18 years at least. This is socieity’s recognition that children don’t have the capacity to reason like adults nor to understand the consequences of their actions.
Yet when we are faced with a child who has committed a terrible act, this society asks us to give up on him–throwing him into its hideous injustice system.
This society proposes to lock up children like Nathaniel Brazill and throw away the key. All the little Brazills it has created will learn to be real criminals in prison or die victims.
Nathaniel Brazill is as much a victim as Barry Grunow.
May 21, 2001
Electricity shortages? Outrageous rate increases? Blackouts leaving you in the dark?
As we’ve all heard by now–this is your fate if you live in California.
But, suprisingly, not everyone in California suffered this fate. There have been no blackouts for people living in Los Angeles or Sacramento, for example. None in most of the other California cities served by publicly-owned utilities.
Nor has everyone served by pubicly-owned utilities suffered a stupendous rate increase. Rates in Los Angeles, for example, which already were lower than those charged by the two big privately-owned utilities, didn’t go up. Nor did rates in Sacramento and other municipal electricity systems.
What’s the difference? Quite simply: The publicly-owned utilities were set up to provide electrical service. The privately-owned ones were set up to provide a profit.
Of course, publicly-owned utilities function inside a system for making profit. And they are trapped by that also. They have to buy their supplies from profit-making corporations. They depend on natural gas for producing some of their electricity. And when their contracts with the suppliers of natural gas run out, they may be held up too.
Nonetheless, Californians served by Los Angeles or one of the other publicly-owned utilities have so far not suffered what other Californians have suffered.
Strangely enough no one bothers to raise why the profit-making utilities have made such a mess of the situation, while the publicly-owned ones have escaped the mess. Could it be that profit is the problem? Maybe that’s why the politicians, from Bush on down, don’t ask. Their job is to defend the right of big corporations to make super-profits at our expense.
May 21, 2001
In what the media call the "most high-profile" case in decades, the FBI "blundered"–so said Louis Freeh. And he ought to know, he’s the head of the FBI. The case he was talking about, of course, was that of Timothy McVeigh. The "blunder" was the FBI’s forgetfulness in "misplacing" evidence.
Accept, for the sake of argument, that the blunder in the McVeigh case was an "innocent" one–just an oversight.
There are many other cases where the "blunders" are not so innocent, and where the defendents, much less well-known than McVeigh, get swallowed up by the justice system.
Ironically, one of these more "ordinary" blunders just came to light in Oklahoma City itself.
A man who had been convicted of rape in Oklahoma City 15 years ago was just released from prison, after his lawyers managed to prove he had been framed up by police for the crime.
The chemist for the Oklahoma City police testified at his original trial that body and scalp hairs as well as semen samples proved he was the rapist. This was the main evidence against the man, since the rape victim had not identified him at the time of the crime.
The defense never got a chance to have this "evidence" independently examined. The police and prosecution "neglected" to turn the evidence over to the defense–until the trial was over.
For the next 15 years, the man’s family attempted to have the evidence examined, only to be turned down by the prosecutor, the courts and the FBI. Only this year, finally, as the result of a new law, his attorneys were allowed to have the evidence examined by an independent laboratory. It found that nothing linked the man to the crime. Only then did the FBI confirmed the new findings.
This was not the only "blunder" made by this police chemist. Over the years, other scientists working in her field criticized her for drawing conclusions which the evidence didn’t support. Nonetheless, the Oklahoma City prosecutor’s office not only continued to use her, it repeatedly gave her awards because she was such a good witness for the prosecution.
In other words, she manufactured evidence so well.
Among the people convicted based essentially ONLY on her testimony were 23 people sentenced to death, 11 of whom have already been executed.
It comes as no surprise that police manufacture evidence, that prosecutors subborn perjury–and that afterwards they do all they can to prevent the truth from being discovered, even when an innocent person is put to death.
This is simply the law which ordinary people confront–in all its "majesty."
May 21, 2001
The heads of a number of African states recently held a conference with high-level representatives of the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity to discuss the current state of health in Africa. The least that can be said is the situation is catastrophic.
According to the latest reports from the United Nations, 25.3 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa carry the AIDS virus. This represents 70% of the known cases in the world. In some countries, like Botswana, more than two-thirds of the adult population is infected with this sickness. In the year 2000 alone, 2.4 million Africans died from diseases linked to AIDS and 2.2 million others died for the same reason the year before. According to a study by the United Nations, an AIDS epidemic such as this can cut 25 years off the average life expectancy in the most affected countries.
AIDS, however, is not the only sickness ravaging the African continent. In 1999, there were two million newly reported cases of tuberculosis; two thirds of the victims were also carriers of the AIDS virus.
Africa also remains the principal victim of malaria, with 300 million people in the Sub-Saharan part of the country suffering its effects. The situation is the worst for the poorest parts of the population and for infants.
The leaders of these countries, who have often been more interested to use state funds to fill their bank accounts than to improve the living conditions of the population, undoubtedly have a part of the responsibility for the worsening state of health. But what can be said about the powerful countries of the world, like the US, Britain and France; or about the western pharmaceutical trusts? These world-leading governments stand by and watch as this disaster takes place. The pharmaceutical companies pay attention and develop products for the small minority of Africans wealthy enough to afford to pay the high prices of their medicine. But these companies ignore the plight of the majority who are poor, and off whom little profit can be made. Ignore, that is, when they weren’t asking the courts to prevent governments from going ahead on their own to produce medicines at a much cheaper cost.
May 21, 2001
FBI and other government agencies have done a lot worse than just "forgetting" some documents. Different levels of police and courts have long been ready to persecute, assassinate, imprison and execute militants from the working class and oppressed layers of the population who dared challenge and organize against the social order the government defends. Ironically, this government has always claimed that it doesn’t charge or prosecute people for "political crimes." Maybe not–it simply cloaks political repression by framing up militants of the working class or social movements on supposed "criminal" charges.
The numbers so persecuted run up into the thousands of people, ever since the period running from the "Haymarket" affair in May 1886.
Thousands of workers in Chicago went on strike for the eight hour day. After an agent provocateur threw a bomb at some police at a rally for the strikers in Haymarket Square, the Chicago police arrested eight of the strike leaders, even though seven of the eight were not even present at the rally. After a campaign of hysteria directed at the strikers, four of the strike leaders were convicted and hanged, while the others were imprisoned. In 1893, John Peter Altgeld, the governor of Illinois, released the three remaining prisoners, admitting that the trial had been a sham.
In 1912, a revolutionary union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), led a strike by 40,000 textile workers, mainly women and children, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. After a cop shot and killed a striker, Anna Lopizzo, the police framed up two IWW leaders, Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovanitti, for the murder. Nonetheless, the workers won the strike. During the trial of Ettor and Giovanitti, the workers protested the trial by going on strike again. This mobilization was a key reason why Ettor and Giovanitti were found not guilty.
Over the next few years, several more members of the IWW were framed up. In 1914, Joe Hill, a union leader and author of many famous IWW songs, was framed up in Salt Lake City for the murders of a grocer and his son. No witnesses could identify him as being anywhere near the store during the robbery. Yet, he was executed on November 9, 1915.
In 1916, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings were imprisoned, falsely accused of throwing a bomb at a pro-World War I parade in San Francisco. Mooney was on a roof of a building a mile away during the explosion. There was no physical evidence against him and Billings. The main witness who testified against them was an unemployed worker, who had been coached by Martin Swanson, an anti-labor private detective employed by Pacific Gas and Electric to keep out unions. Mooney and Billings were found guilty and held in prison until 1939.
In 1917, with the entry of the U.S. into World War I, the U.S. government directed waves of repression against the IWW, the Socialist Party and other organizations that opposed the war. After the war ended, the U.S. working class carried out one of its largest strike waves ever. At the same time, the communist and radical movements in this country, encouraged by the Russian Revolution of 1917, had begun to grow. The U.S. government’s answer to this was the Red Scare of 1919 to 1920 engineered by Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer. and his young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover. Thousands more militants were framed-up, deported and persecuted. In 1920, Nicolo Sacco and Bartlolmeo Vanzetti, were arrested in Boston, Massachusetts, accused of crimes they didn’t commit: the robbery and murder of a shoe factory owner and his guard. Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists, had been active in campaigns against the murder of a printer, Andrea Salsedo, who was thrown from an upper floor window to his death while in police custody, as well as the deportation of Roberto Elia, a radical who had been tortured by agents of the U.S. Justice Department. At the trial nine witnesses testified that Sacco was in another city when the crime was committed. And six more people swore on the stand that Vanzetti was selling fish in another city at the time of the murders. Nonetheless, they were found guilty. Said Judge Thayer, "This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions." Despite worldwide protests, they were executed in 1927. Only 60 years later did the state of Massachusetts finally exonerate Sacco and Vanzetti for the crimes.
In the following years, efforts by workers to organize unions in mass production industries were met by government frame-ups and vigilante violence. On April 1, 1929, 20,000 textile workers struck the largest textile mill in the country, Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina under the leadership of militants of the Communist Party. The governor of the state declared the strike to be a "a form of revolution" and sent in several units of the national guard to crush it. Picketing and parading were barred. Within two weeks of the strike, masked vigilantes sacked the union headquarters. On June 7, several drunken police officers shot each other, while trying to invade the Communist Party headquarters. The local police chief was killed, and three policemen and one striker were shot. Fifteen strikers were arrested for conspiracy leading to murder, but the case ended in a mistrial. After the verdicts, a reign of terror and mob violence convulsed Gastonia for several days. This was the prelude to new police arrests for the same police murders. Seven strikers were convicted in a second trial and they were sentenced from five to 20 years.
With the 1930s, a mass workers movement marked by factory occupations in some of the largest mass production industries swept much of the country. The movement continued after World War II, with the largest strike wave in this country’s history. With the rise of the Cold War, the U.S. government set about breaking the movement and purging the big unions of communists and socialists in a new red scare that became known as the McCarthy Period. The most important trial that came out of this period was the 1950 prosecution of two members of the Communist Party, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of stealing atomic secrets–despite the fact that the theoretical basis behind the bomb was common knowledge among physicists. The government’s case rested on the testimony of David Greenglass and Harry Gold. Greenglass was already in prison, and after the trial had his sentence cut in half. Gold, who was the only one who actually tied the Rosenbergs to any supposed espionage, had been prepared for testimony by 400 hours of interviews with the FBI, and at another trial admitted to being an inveterate liar. The main evidence was a piece of paper with a sketch on it which purported to be a sketch of the atomic bomb–a sketch which reputable physicists said, even at the time, was useless. Nonetheless, the Rosenbergs were found guilty. At the sentencing Judge Irving Kaufman, who it was later revealed held meetings with the FBI during the trial, not only blamed the Rosenbergs for allowing the Soviet Union to develop the atomic bomb, but also for causing "Communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 Americans and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason." The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death and executed in 1953.
In the 1950s and 60s, the black movement swept the country. One aspect of that movement was that a section of the prison population was radicalized. It was in that atmosphere that George Jackson, who had been in prison since age 15, began to read voraciously. Wrote Jackson, "I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me." His eloquent letters discussing the need for a social revolution were published in a book called Soledad Brother and became an international bestseller. In August 1970, Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, took up a gun, entered a courtroom and took a judge captive in an attempt to free his brother. They both were killed in a hail of bullets by policemen. George Jackson wrote that he knew that the authorities would not let him live much longer. There had already been many black men before him murdered in prison. One year later, he was shot in the back by prison guards, who later claimed–in the fashion of all racists–that while searching Jackson they discovered a gun hidden in ... his Afro hair-style. The autopsy proved that the government’s claims of what happened were false.
Since the 1970s, social movements have subsided. But even during smaller movements, the police still use frame-ups to intimidate those who remain active. One such frame-up was engineered by the authorities against a militant of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Mark Curtis. In 1988, immigrant workers who worked in the meat packing plants in Des Moines, Iowa were holding meetings to organize against the deportation of 17 workers at Swift Company. Curtis, who worked at the meat packing plant, was active in that campaign. On March 4, Curtis was arrested on charges of rape. When Curtis asked to see a lawyer, one of the cops said, "You’re one of those Mexican-lovers, aren’t you. Just like you love the coloreds." When Curtis refused to respond to those "questions," the cops beat him, using a nightstick to break his cheekbone and cut his face. Curtis was convicted of a rape he didn’t commit, and wound up serving eight years in prison.
Such notable political prisoners as Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Jamil Abdulla Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) remain in prison to this day. Jamal faces the death penalty. Peltier, an activist with the American Indian Movement is serving a life sentence. Brown faces a trial in which he could receive the death penalty.
Officials may claim that there are no political trials in this country. The record shows that there are.
May 21, 2001
Some 4,400 nursing home care workers went on strike the beginning of May against 39 nursing homes in Connecticut. They are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199. The strikers took care of 5,000 ill and elderly nursing home residents.
The governor of the state, John C. Rowland, has gone all out spending state money to break the strike. He is paying for vans to transport scabs hired by Colorado-based U.S. Nursing Corp., who came from Florida, South Carolina and Alabama to Connecticut. The state is paying them $1,960 a week for 12-hour shifts for seven days. The strikers were receiving $500 to $600 for a 40 hour week.
Without the governor’s strike breaking the patients would be transferred to hospitals and other nursing homes. Instead the state’s money is used to hire the strike breakers in an attempt to break the strike.
May 21, 2001
The Pentagon has come up with another supposedly non-lethal "humane" weapon–to use on civilians who protest. Called a "pain beam," it delivers microwave energy in a beam that quickly heats up the surface of the victim’s skin. Within seconds the person feels intense, burning pain.
Next thing you know, they’ll be sticking people they don’t like in microwave ovens.
May 21, 2001
Five South Carolina longshoremen are facing felony conspiracy and rioting charges punishable with up to five years in prison, in a case initiated by South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon. Two Charleston Locals of the International Longshoremen’s Association and 29 members are also being sued for 1.5 million dollars in financial damage by Winyah Stevedoring Inc. for losses caused by picketing.
The criminal charges and the suit refer to the clash between the longshoremen and the police on January 20, 2000. One hundred fifty longshoremen went out to picket a ship owned by the Danish company Nordana, which said it would no longer be unloaded by union longshoremen, and instead brought in the non-union Winyah Stevedoring Inc. from Georgetown, SC. The union members were confronted by 600 cops dressed in riot gear with dogs, horses, armored vehicles, boats, and helicopters. The cops confronted the pickets, a longshore clerk had his head busted open, and one of the cops clubbed union president Kenneth Riley over the head.
Nonetheless, today it is the strikers who are facing criminal and civil penalties. Longshore locals on all coasts have been rallying in defense of the South Carolina longshoremen, demanding the criminal charges and the suit be dropped. The AFL-CIO is supporting the campaign, as are longshore unions around the world, which have called for strikes to close down ports the day the trial opens.
Contributions to the workers’ defense can be sent to:
Dockworkers Defense Fund
910 Morrison Drive
Charleston, SC 29403
May 21, 2001
The mayor and city council in Washington have officially ended the 200-year history of D.C. General Hospital. In May they phased out its in-patient services, sending layoff notices to 1500 employees and turning its remaining clinics over to the private Greater Southeast Community Hospital.
Last year, the city council voted D.C. General 45 million dollars, and then had to come up with 75 million dollars more dollars to pay for its services.
Health care in this country has been turned into a "business" which is supposed to make a profit. The number of public hospitals has dropped by 50% in the last 20 years, from 1778 hospitals to 1197.
For D.C. Mayor Williams and others like him, a city is comparable to a business. It has to provide services but it is not supposed to lose money. But for years D.C. General has bled money. This hospital began as an alms house for the poor and it ended as the emergency room of last resort, where no one has to be turned away. And Washington is like every other big city: thousands lack health insurance. Some 65,000 to 75,000 people in Washington have no health insurance, not even Medicaid, which is supposed to cover poor people’s health care needs.
Washington D.C. is a particularly poor city because its main "business" is federal government, from which it collects no taxes. The city’s population has among the worst health in the country–in part, the consequence of poverty which breeds malnutrition, disease and alcohol and drug use. But it is also a consequence of the lack of decent medical facilities
The closing of D.C. General, as bad as it might have been, simply condemns more people to an early death without medical care.
May 21, 2001
On May 12, the city of Toledo, Ohio dedicated a new memorial designed to commemorate the strike at the Toledo Auto-Lite company in 1934.
The memorial itself refers to this strike as "one of the three most important strikes in American history." Not only was it a victory during a very difficult period for all U.S. workers, it was a victory that paved the way for the subsequent building of the United Auto Workers and the CIO, in which the UAW played a key role. The largest single delegation at the founding convention of the auto workers union in 1935 were Auto-Lite workers.
The strike had among its leaders a number of revolutionaries who worked with the American Workers Party of A. J. Muste. The memorial just built does not mention Muste, nor any of the revolutionary militants like Art Preis, Ted Selander and Art Pollack, without whose leadership the strike would have gone down to defeat, like so many others of that time. Nor does the UAW itself want to remember not only these but the many other revolutionary militants whose battles brought it into existence.
Art Preis covered the labor movement in articles for "The Militant," the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party. He used many of these articles as the basis for a book he published in 1964 on the real history of the CIO: Labor’s Giant Step–Twenty Years of the CIO.
(This book is available from Pathfinder bookstores, sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party in many cities, or from Pathfinder Publishers, 167 Charles St. New York, NY 10014.)
The following selection on the Toledo Auto-Lite strike is taken from this book.
"The wave of strikes following the enactment of NRA in June 1933 was ending in a series of defeats. Where the union leaders themselves did not rush the workers back on the job without gains -not even union recognition–the strikes were smashed by court injunctions and armed violence. Behind the legal restraining orders and the shotguns, rifles and machine guns of police, deputies and National Guardsmen, the scabs and strikebreakers were being herded into struck plants almost at will....
"One out of every three persons in Toledo was thrown on relief, standing in lines for food handouts at a central commissary. In 1933, the Unemployed League, led by followers of A. J. Muste, head of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (later the American Workers Party), had organized militant mass actions of the unemployed and won cash relief. The League made it a policy to call for unity of the unemployed and employed workers; it mobilized the unemployed not to scab, but to aid all strikes.
"On February 23, 1934, the Toledo Auto Lite workers, newly organized in AFL Federal Local 18384, went on strike. This was quickly ended by the AFL leaders with a truce agreement for negotiations through the Regional Labor Board of the National Labor Board, which had been set up under the NRA.
"Refusing to be stalled further by the labor board or to submit to the special Auto Labor Board..., the AutoLite workers went on the picket lines again on April 13.
"The company followed the usual first gambit in such a contest. It went to a friendly judge and got him to issue an injunction limiting picketing. The strike had begun to die on its feet when a committee of Auto Lite workers came to the Unemployed League and asked for aid....
"The Lucas County Unemployed League, also enjoined, refused however to let the fight go in that way. Two of its officers, Ted Selander and Sam Pollock, and several auto local members wrote Judge R. R. Stuart, advising him that they would violate the injunction by encouraging mass picketing. They went out and did so. They were arrested, tried and released - the court warning them to picket no more. They answered by going directly from court, with all the strikers and unemployed league members who had been present, to the picket line. Through the mass trials, Selander and Pollock got a message as to the nature of the capitalist courts. The picket line grew.
"By May 23, there were more than 10,000 on the picket lines. County deputies with tear gas guns were lined up on the plant roof. A strike picket, Miss Alma Hahn, had been struck on the head by a bolt hurled from a plant window and had been taken to the hospital. By the time 100 more cops arrived, the workers were tremendously incensed. Police began roughing up individual pickets pulled from the line....
"The police charged and swung their clubs trying to clear a path for the scabs. The workers held their ground and fought back. Choked by the tear gas fired from inside the plant, it was the police who finally gave up the battle. Then the thousands of pickets laid siege to the plant, determined to maintain their picket line. The workers improvised giant slingshots from inner tubes. They hurled whole bricks through the plant windows. The plant soon was without lights. The scabs cowered in the dark. The frightened deputies set up machine guns inside every entranceway. It was not until the arrival of 900 National Guardsmen, 15 hours later, that the scabs were finally released, looking a sorry sight, as the press reported it.
"Then followed one of the most amazing battles in U. S. labor history.... With their bare fists and rocks, the workers fought a sixday pitched battle with the National Guard. They fought from rooftops, from behind billboards and came through alleys to flank the guardsmen. `The men in the mob shouted vile epithets at the troopers,‘ complained the Associated Press, and the women jeered them with suggestions that they `go home to mama and their paper dolls.‘
"But the strikers and their thousands of sympathizers did more than shame the young National Guardsmen. They educated them and tried to win them over. Speakers stood on boxes in front of the troops and explained what the strike was about and the role the troops were playing as strikebreakers. World War I veterans put on their medals and spoke to the boys in uniform like Dutch uncles. The women explained what the strike meant to their families. The press reported that some of the guardsmen just quit and went home. Others voiced sympathy with the workers. (A year later, when Toledo unionists went to Defiance, Ohio, to aid the Pressed Steel Company strike, they found that eight% of the strikers had been National Guardsmen serving in uniform in the AutoLite strike. That was where they learned the lesson of unionism.)
"On May 24, the guardsmen fired pointblank into the Auto Lite strikers’ ranks, killing two and wounding 25. But 6,000 workers returned at dusk to renew the battle. In the dark, they closed in on groups of guardsmen in the sixblock martial law zone. The fury of the onslaught twice drove the troops back into the plant. At one stage, a group of troops threw their last tear gas and vomit gas bombs, then quickly picked up rocks to hurl at the strikers; the strikers recovered the last gas bombs thrown before they exploded, flinging them back at the troops.
"On Friday, May 31, the troops were speedily ordered withdrawn from the strike area when the company agreed to keep the plant closed. This had not been the usual oneway battle with the workers getting shot down and unable to defend themselves. Scores of guardsmen had been sent to the hospitals. They had become demoralized. By June 1, 98 out of 99 AFL local unions had voted for a general strike.
"A monster rally on the evening of June 1 mobilized some 40,000 workers in the Lucas County Courthouse Square. There, however, the AFL leaders, frightened by this tremendous popular uprising, were silent about the general strike and instead assured the workers that Roosevelt would aid them.
"By June 4, with the whole community seething with anger, the company capitulated and signed a sixmonth contract, including a 5% wage increase with a 5% minimum above the auto industry code, naming Local 18384 as the exclusive bargaining agent in the struck plants.
"The path was opened for organization of the entire automobile industry. With the Auto Lite victory under their belts, the Toledo autoworkers were to organize 19 plants before the year was out and, before another 12 months, were to lead the first successful strike in a GM plant, the real beginning of the conquest of General Motors."