the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jul 16, 2001
It’s time for a vacation.
We certainly need it. No matter what job we have or where we work, it’s time to replenish ourselves. And what nicer way but to do it by getting away from work, resting our bodies and clearing our minds!
Unfortunately, we often run into problems. The week we want has already been taken by someone else, and the company doesn’t hire enough vacation replacements to let us take our vacation when we want. Or we’re all given the same week when the plant or office shuts down but it doesn’t fit the time our spouses get.
Don’t even think about trying to arrange a family vacation with the kids once they start working a summer job. And forget about having enough time so we can really see a little bit of the world.
And then there’s the problem that everyone knows only too well: too much work left around the house to get away. Vacation time is when we catch up on all the things we didn’t have the time to do when working.
The fact is, we don’t have enough time for ourselves.
Why not? Every single one of us should have a full month of vacation in the summer. And work time should be organized so we could all take it off in either July or August if we wanted.
Utopia? No, not at all. Other countries–not nearly as wealthy as this one–already schedule vacations like this. In almost every country of Europe, as well as in Japan, workers have more time off than we do. So why not here?
There is no material reason for this. Labor productivity is higher here. But the fact is, we take a smaller share of what we produce. Not only do we have less time for ourselves, our standard of living is actually lower than what workers in a number of other countries enjoy. This may be the wealthiest country in the world, but a much larger part of the wealth that workers produce by their labor is taken here by the capitalist class.
In countries where workers have more time than we have, they usually gained it through struggles of the whole working class. They gained it because they put their own needs first.
The right to a real vacation, in countries where every worker has this right, was a social conquest won by the whole working class for everyone. It doesn’t depend on who your boss is or how long you worked for that particular boss. If you have worked during the year, you are entitled.
If there is enough wealth in other countries for workers to enjoy a real vacation and more time for themselves during the year, there’s certainly enough here for us to have the same thing. But, as with so many other things, the question is whether we put our needs first. The bosses certainly don’t do it for us.
We are the ones whose work builds this country. Our muscle and brain power make it run. Let us take the time to enjoy what we have built.
Jul 16, 2001
With great fanfare, President Bush announced a prescription drug plan for the more than 13 million seniors who have no prescription drug coverage.
There are a few catches, however. The new card will cost seniors $25 to enroll. No pharmacy or drug manufacturer is required to give a discount. Nor is there any proposal to prevent the pharmacy chains and drug manufacturers from raising their prices before they give you a discount. Finally, the whole system runs through Medicare, the agency whose forms already are so incomprehensible they make you sick.
This discount card–is it a method to assist seniors with their prescription drug costs?–of just an attempt to boost Bush’s standing in the polls?
Jul 16, 2001
On July 5 the Bush Administration announced a new policy which would allow states to define a fetus as an "unborn person."
According to Bush, this will allow more pregnant women to get prenatal health care and care during delivery. In most states, pregnant women qualify for publicly paid care so long as their family income is less than two times the poverty level.
But this restriction, plus others the states have set up, still leave millions of women without access to medical care when they are pregnant.
Obviously, if Bush’s purpose had been to fill this gap, it would have been simple to do so: just extend prenatal medical care to all women without medical insurance.
Instead of that, we are being presented with one more bureacuratic nightmare which gobbles up a great deal of money in adminstrative overhead, while making it so complicated that the people who need help can’t get it.
Just in case you are wondering if Bush dreamed up this complicated approach because he’s not firing on all cylinders, consider this: while Bush talks about extending medical care, he is not asking for more money to fund the program.
Bush may not be playing with a full deck, but he’s also playing to a reactionary right wing which wants to see the government chip away at the rights that women won for themselves–and first of all, the right to decide whether or not they want an abortion.
The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade said, "The unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense."
Under the pretext of extending medical care–without of course providing any funds to do it–Bush is doing nothing but trying to encourage a further attack on Roe v. Wade.
Bush, like all the other reactionary politicians, is ready to condemn a woman to having children she doesn’t want and often can’t support. In the name of defending fetal life, they condemn children to an existence in which not even their most basic needs can be met! This is not respect for human life. It’s playing politics with human life for the personal gain of politicians.
Jul 16, 2001
At the end of June, over a thousand workers at seven electric generating plants went on strike against Midwest Generation in Illinois.
Midwest Generation sells the power it produces to Commonwealth Edison of Illinois. In fact, the seven plants involved in this strike were owned by Commonwealth Edison until a year and a half ago. In December 1999, as part of the deregulation of the electric utility industry in Illinois, Commonwealth Edison sold a total of 12 plants, including these seven, to Midwest Generation. But it then immediately signed a contract with Midwest Generation to buy back 80% of all the power produced by its former plants when they are running at full capacity.
Does this sound complicated? It’s only the beginning of complications. Midwest Generation is a new company, only recently set up as a subsidiary of Edison International. And Edison International is the holding company which owns Southern California Edison–that’s right, the same Southern California Edison which has been claiming that it is so broke it can’t even buy the electricity to provide power for the half of the state it serves. The state of California is buying electricity and handing it over to Edison to resell to consumers.
Let’s recall that, under deregulation, Southern California Edison itself sold off most of its power generating plants in California–only to then go into the marketplace to buy up electric power from the same companies to which it had sold its own plants. Many of these companies are in turn subsidiaries of other utilities who had sold off their power producing plants in other states
El Paso Natural Gas, for example, a Texas company, bought 225 power producing plants from Southern California Edison.
This is what the politicians call “introducing competition” into the public utility industries. When writing “deregulation” into the law, they promised that “competition” and the “marketplace” would lead to lower prices for consumers and more efficiencies.
But–as California has amply demonstrated–exactly the opposite is happening. Prices are skyrocketing. Of course! First of all, new layers of companies have been put into the system–and each one expects to make a big profit. Second, this system is becoming so complicated that no regulatory agency can keep track of all the ties between companies–even if it wanted to do it.
The real competition going on between the different companies is to see which one can gobble up the most plants in other states and which one can make the most profits in this whole mad race. So called competition is simply leading where it always does under capitalism–to greater monopolization and higher prices.
Now the people of Illinois, just like those in a number of other states, are about to be put through the same wringer as Californians were last year. The main difference between California and the rest of the states is that California deregulated its electric utility industry first–it got a jump on the rest of us.
What this strike demonstrates is that electric deregulation is also providing the companies with a great big mallet with which to hammer down wages, benefits and working conditions of its workforce.
When Midwest Generation bought up Commonwealth Edison’s plants, it also assumed the last contract that the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) had signed with Commonwealth Edison.
But on March 31 of this year, that contract expired and Midwest Generation made it clear that everything is up for grabs–and it intends to grab back a lot of what the workers had. When the union simply proposed to extend all the provisions of the current contract along with the current work practices and discipline policy, the company refused even to discuss the union proposal. A company executive recently commented, “The union has failed to recognize that it no longer works in a utility environment, but in a competitive environment.”
This is just talk–and of no importance whatsoever unless the workers fall for it. Not only are these big electric power conglomerates NOT in a poor position–they are making more money than every before. Southern California Edison was able to show that it was losing money only because it transferred all the parts of the company that were making big profits over to other companies set up by its parent company. This is nothing but a sleight-of-hand con game–just like three-card monte, only a little more complicated.
The problem is that union officials seem to have fallen for it. William Starr, the president and business manager of IBEW Local 15, commented at the end of June, “We understand, given the fact that Midwest Generation is part of a financially troubled California power corporation, that there are concerns about Midwest Generation’s ability to operate and maintain its Illinois operations. However, during the course of our negotiations, Midwest Generation representatives informed Local 15 that there was nothing in the union’s proposal that would hurt the company’s revenues or profitability in today’s competitive marketplace.”
If the workers start thinking that way–putting the needs of the bosses first–there’s no place to go but down. There is no reason that workers can’t insist that their needs be met–just as consumers have every right to expect that they can continue to get electric power at reasonable prices. And if these companies aren’t able to give decent wages, benefits and working conditions while providing cheap electric power to consumers, then take their power producing plants and their electric power lines away from them.
Jul 16, 2001
A discussion is going on inside the Administration: should President Bush ban the use of federal grants for stem cell research? This, of course, would severely limit any such investigation since the government pays for a very high proportion of new medical research.
This relatively new line of medical research involves the use of living cells extracted from human embryos that can be used to create new tissue to repair malfunctioning body organs. The embryos that the stem cells are extracted from generally come from fertility clinics, frequently in frozen form. According to many doctors and health care officials, stem cell research holds great promise in developing treatments and cures for Alzheimer’s disease, juvenile diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and a number of other disorders.
Could this research realize the promise it seems to hold? Of course, no one can be sure. It’s why medical science needs to investigate.
But one thing is sure: it will provide nothing at all if religious obscurantism has its way.
Should we handcuff science–the means through which humanity has rapidly advanced its knowledge of the world in which we live and of ourselves during the last four centuries?
“By all means,” answer the religious fanatics who would take us back to a Middle Ages rife with superstition.
And Bush–if he were diagnosed with cancer–would he like to be treated with “eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog”?
Or would he go to the most advanced practitioner of medical science?
Can there be any doubt?
Jul 16, 2001
(The following article is translated from an article appearing in the July 6, 2001 issue of Lutte Ouvriere, the newspaper put out by comrades in France.)
.... Two demonstrators, one of whom was a teen-ager, were killed when the Argentine armed forces tried to break up a barricade that workers had built on a road in Salta. This province in the northwest of the country had already seen a number of confrontations in recent years.
The degradation of the conditions of existence
To break up the workers’ roadblocks, the “radical” government of De la Rua sent in 400 police, pretending to "protect the population." The workers who blocked the road had hoped to win a modest demand–that is, an increase in their wages from $1.60 to $2.50 per hour. The authorities claimed that it was not the police who shot but some "snipers." The picketing workers who barricaded the road had no doubt that the "snipers" who shot the two came from the state police.
These confrontations, which have become more and more routine, are provoked by the decline in living conditions. The Argentine population finds it more and more difficult to survive. And there is nothing good in the recent government proclamations. They are only now recognizing that Argentina has been hit by recession. The sale of automobiles has fallen 55%, textiles have fallen 20% in the course of the last year.
An engineered depression
In 1991, Domingo Cavallo, President de la Rua’s Minister of the Economy, established a plan which tied the Argentine peso directly to the U.S. dollar. This convertability plan was supposed to be able to bring about monetary stability. In any case, it certainly did bring about austerity measures, frenzied privatizations and budget cuts, which fell heavily on the population.
But this did not create an economic recovery, because the Argentine economy is part of the world. Starting in 1999, Argentina suffered blows coming from the crash of the Brazilian currency, which was itself a consequence of the financial crash from 1997 which ravaged southeast Asia and parts of Latin America.
Cavallo decided on a mini-devaluation. Each dollar gained from export got an 8% bonus, while a levy was put on imports, making them more expensive. While this was not at all likely to stop the fall of the peso, it did lead directly to an increase in the cost of living for the laboring classes.
The population isn’t over its troubles. The rulers have mortgaged the future to obtain ready cash today. They already have to pay increased interest on the debt they owe to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), representing 23% of the Argentine state budget today, compared to “only” 10% in l997.
In 3 years, they might have to pay 15% interest, instead of the 7% they are currently paying on the government bonds they issue. That is double! Not only has it become a matter of urgency to pay the debt to the IMF, but the government evidently doesn’t have the political will to oppose itself to international finance. Completely the contrary.
Toward a new devaluation?
The threat of a new devaluation–no matter how tiny–is not ruled out. The recent injection of 40 billion dollars in the financial circuits has not stopped speculation on the peso. Cavallo navigates, to conserve the confidence of investors who doubt that the Argentine state will be able to meet the various debt payments. Too sudden a withdrawal of capital from Argentina would doubtless lead to a new crash touching neighboring countries, Brazil among others ....
Unemployment is already officially 17%, which means in reality it is well above 30%; at least 20% of the population are relegated to temporary and part-time jobs. But if the Argentine economy is shaken by a recession which today threatens the world economy, the essential weight of the sacrifices falls on the shoulders of the poor population. Over the past 20 years, that is since the end of the dictatorship, the disproportion between poor and rich has steadily grown. Today, the richest 10% earns 26 times more than the poorest, compared to “only” 12 times as much, 20 years ago.
When it goes so very well for the rich, then it goes proportionally that much worse for the poor classes, who must struggle to survive, sometimes without any salary or with a salary or pension which is late, without even a decent living place. The shanty towns multiply in the province of Buenos Aires, while in the heart of the capital homeless camps appear–under the highways, in the most deprived neighborhoods.
This is what drives unemployed or underpaid workers, forced to live hand to mouth, to revolt. When they barricade the roads to make their anger heard, this government, which can’t stand up to the representatives of imperialist finance, meets them with violence and sometimes–machine guns.
Jul 16, 2001
(The following article is translated from an article appearing in the June 1, 2001 issue of Lutte Ouvriere, the newspaper put out by comrades in France.)
In Argentina, in the capital of Buenos Aires and the main parts of the provinces, the unemployed have set up picket squads, blockading the main roads and the railroads, demanding unemployment compensation and the creation of jobs.
About 4,000 “piqueteros” have camped out in a suburb of the capital called La Matanza, cutting off the railway and national road 3 for several weeks. This is an important road which goes 3000 kilometers from Buenos Aires to the end of Tierra del Fuego. La Matanza is primarily an industrial city, completely devastated by the economic crisis and the layoffs.
These picket squads are not the only sign of the workers’ discontent. There have been numerous marches and demonstrations in the square by the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. One day it was the children from a distant village in the Andes Mountains on the Bolivian border, demanding work for their parents and schools for the children. Another day it was a march for bread and work; another time the beekeepers protested against restrictions which prevent them from exporting their honey to the United States.
Argentina has been in a full economic recession for several years. Factories have closed one after the other.... A large part of the working class finds itself in economic misery.... The level of unemployment is officially 15%. Out of a little more than 30 million people, 7 million live in conditions of extreme poverty. Salaries are very low and even those who work are not sure of being paid.
For example, the workers in the Air Argentina company, which has belonged to Spain for the past 10 years and which is supposed to be on the verge of bankruptcy, didn’t receive their salaries for the month of April.
Hit by the crisis and the misery, workers and those laid off demonstrate and insist on their right to a decent life. If these Argentine workers who are angry and already revolting find an organization capable of defending their interests to the end, this can allow them to reverse the relationship of forces in favor of the workers.
Jul 16, 2001
Encouraged by the White House, a number of U.S. politicians denounced the awarding of the 2008 Olympic Games to China. China, they said, has a bad human rights record. They pointed in particular to China’s frequent resort to the death penalty.
According to the best figures available, China executed about 1,500 people in the year 2000. In other words, China, with its population around 1.26 billion people, was killing people at a rate of one for every 840,000 people. That same year, the state of Texas under Bush executed 40 people. Texas, with its population of a little more than 20 million, managed to beat China, killing one person for every 500,000 people.
In other words, Texas, this supposed citadel of morality and goodness, was more blood-thirsty than China.
Maybe this is why Bush suddenly discouraged the protest. One of his advisers must have run the figures for him.
Jul 16, 2001
On July 12, government bulldozers and riot police with rifles tore down over 1,000 shacks of squatters illegally occupying land in South Africa. Dozens of angry squatters sang "The ANC is killing us," saying the government failed to deliver on their promises of land and housing.
Two weeks before, the squatters had occupied the vacant land near the Johannesburg Airport, which is owned by the government and a private farmer.
The government’s land minister, Thoko Didiza, attacked the land occupation, "It is bound to have investors hesitating to move in." The government’s actions were praised by businessmen and white farmers for upholding the law and reassuring foreign investors. In other words, the ANC government has fully accepted the logic of the market, which means pleasing foreign investors and the rich white capitalists and landlords in South Africa–to the detriment of the poor black population which propelled the ANC into office.
The old apartheid government repeatedly evicted poor black people from land they squatted on and demolished their shacks. Now, the ANC, which came to power opposing apartheid, carries out many of apartheid’s same policies toward these same people.
Today, many of South Africa’s government officials may be black, and there are increasing numbers of black managers and rich people. Ten or twenty thousand black middle class people have been able to move into the formerly all-white suburbs, solving their own housing problem. But there are three million poor black people in South Africa still in need of housing. The thousand families evicted by the government are now added to the homeless.
The traditions of struggle of the South African workers and poor people have not died out, as this land occupation and recent strikes have shown. It will be actions like these and the reliance of the poor and the workers on their own power, and not on the government, that will offer the only possibility of solving the basic needs of the mass of the population.
Jul 16, 2001
On July 3, Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia, was arraigned at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for “crimes against humanity” that he is accused of committing during the war in Kosovo in 1999.
This was hailed as a victory for the U.S. government, which had openly threatened and bribed the Serbian government to force it to agree to extradite Milosevic to the The Hague. Back on April 1, immediately after the Serbian government arrested Milosevic, the U.S. government released 50 million dollars in “aid” for the Serbian government. Then during the week leading up to Milosevic’s extradition, Secretary of State Colin Powell twice warned the Serbian prime minister that unless Serbia immediately delivered Milosevic to The Hague, the U.S. would block Serbian government efforts to raise over one billion dollars at an international conference in Brussels.
Despite the fact that Serbian President Kostunica repeatedly denounced the international tribunal and asserted that Milosevic should only be tried for embezzling government funds instead of “crimes against humanity,” he ended up giving in to the U.S.
Of course, the Serb leaders tried to use all these maneuvers with the U.S. to reinforce their very fragile hold over a Serb population. On the one hand, by refusing to give up Milosevic except at knife-point, the Serbian leaders tried to show that they were not just patsies for the U.S. government. On the other hand, by allowing Milosevic to be tried for war crimes, they were trying to put all the blame for the suffering of the Serbian people on Milosevic’s shoulders.
In no way are the U.S. leaders acting against Milosevic out of any sense of “justice.” For years, the U.S. government had treated Milosevic as the strongman of the Balkans. Sometimes, U.S. leaders even reinforced Milosevic’s position, as when President Clinton called Milosevic “the guarantor of peace” during the Dayton Peace Accords when the different powers divided up Bosnia following the Bosnian war six years ago. Only in the course of the war that followed in Kosovo did the U.S. leaders turn on Milosevic. Only then did they decide to go to war against Serbia in order to impose their absolute control over the Balkans. With Milosevic’s arrest, the U.S. government sent a message not just to the other Serb leaders, who are politically no different than Milosevic, but to all the other leaders of the region, that the U.S. was still the boss.
But it was the Serbian population that paid the price for the war, the embargo and the catastrophic collapse of the economy. In no way is this policy aimed at improving the conditions that the laboring masses of the region have to live under, nor to relieve the vast divisions and hatreds that these policies have opened up.
Jul 16, 2001
The Baltimore City Council announced that its new budget came up 20 million dollars short. Its solution to its budget deficit was to pass a higher income tax for Baltimore City residents and to cut 140 city workers’ jobs.
In the months leading up to the budget announcement, politicians had threatened that they might have to cut trash collections, they might have to close 20 rec centers, they would be shutting five library branches, etc.
But the city council didn’t carry out these threats–so far–because by threatening, it got what it wanted: higher taxes and fewer city jobs. It was a con game, that’s all, trying to play us for chumps, making us think those were the only choices.
No! There were other ways to make up the deficit. The council could have chosen to give back their own pay raises or the raises which put the mayor and five deputy mayors at salaries over $100,000 apiece.
Even though 20 million dollars sounds like a lot of money, it is only a crumb in their 1.66 billion dollar budget, a little over one%. And there are plenty of slices of cake, not just crumbs, for their pals who are rich and politically-connected. For example, the city with a deficit signed a 99-year lease with one of the biggest developers in town, Cordish Company and arranged a million dollar loan for the Sylvan Learning Corporation. Since the NFL Ravens team began playing five years ago in Baltimore, the city has accepted $1a year (yes, a dollar per year) for the lease of a training facility.
For the big redevelopment project on the west side, the city has paid businesses compensation to move them out of the way. Taxpayers paid over $130,000 to one businessman who didn’t want to move part of his inventory up the block to a different store he owned. Another business owner got more than $500,000 for inventory he didn’t sell, although he could have moved the unsold goods to another store he owned two blocks away.
As for the job layoffs, the city just approved the first privatization contract for the jobs of the workers it is laying off from the Bureau of General Services–janitors, guards, landscapers, etc. Instead of city jobs paying $10 to $12 per hour with benefits, the job rate will be $8.20 per hour with no benefits–except to the Abacus Corporation, which won the contract and will make big profits off it.
They shouldn’t think they fooled us. We aren’t chumps.
Jul 16, 2001
A Detroit cop has now been charged with felonious assault in a beating which happened two and a half weeks earlier.
Willie Hamilton, a patron in the Motor City Casino in downtown Detroit, had been escorted outside by two security guards because he had fallen asleep at 4 a.m. at one of the casino’s gaming tables.
Neither the guards nor any other casino official called for the cops. Nonetheless, Donahue and his partner, both of whom are white, accosted Hamilton, who is black, when they saw him on the street across from the casino.
It would have been another brutal beating like so many others–except for the fact that it was caught on video cameras.
According to Wayne County Prosecutor Michael Duggan, the video tape shows Donahue grabbing Hamilton, throwing him up against the wall, beating him in the stomach with his flashlight, and finally rubbing pepper spray directly into Hamilton’s eyes when the man was down on the ground. The video shows that Hamilton never fought back or even “resisted” during any of this attack which lasted more than a minute.
Prosecutor Duggan proclaimed, “I want there to be no mistake how seriously we take these matters.”
Oh, yes, we can certainly see with what seriousness Detroit authorities consider such cases!
In the first place, neither cops nor prosecutor did anything at all about this vicious beating when it happened. It wasn’t until after a reporter broke the story two weeks later, that the authorities even decided to put Donahue off the force temporarily, much less charge him.
When Donahue finally was brought into court, he came trailing a bit of a record. He still is facing charges for an incident that happened two years ago when he pepper-sprayed and pushed a man who wouldn’t move his car fast enough. The department had ruled that he “improperly” assaulted a civilian in 1999. And the city had paid out almost $30,000 in 1994 to settle a claim which resulted from an earlier attack he made on another citizen.
Nonetheless, Donahue remained on the streets. What’s a little “improper” assault when it’s committed by a cop?
Things still haven’t changed.
When Donahue was arraigned in this latest attack, he was immediately released on $100 bond! You have to pay more to get out of jail on old traffic tickets.
The authorities never took Donahue seriously. If they had, he never would have been left out on the streets after the first incident.
No, what Detroit and Wayne County authorities took seriously was the publicity which began to swell up after his story finally came to light.
What counts now is what people do keeping track of this case–not what the prosecutor does.
Jul 16, 2001
Since 1996, a growing number of landlords who receive federal subsidies to house very poor people–mainly the elderly, disabled and single parents with annual incomes of less than $9000–have been allowed to pull out of these programs in order to take advantage of quickly rising market rents. Thousands of the very poor have already lost apartments and been forced into much worse living situations. Over the next five years, these numbers are expected to skyrocket, as federal subsidies for 1.3 million units that house 2.5 million people are set to expire.
Most of these subsidies come out of HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development) which was formed in the mid-1960s, when the major urban uprisings that came out of the black movement shook the entire country. This vast social movement wrenched a series of reforms from the ruling class and the government. Among them were programs to provide more affordable housing for the poor, which HUD administered.
But as the movement receded, HUD money was used increasingly to subsidize the profits of big landlords and construction companies. By the late 1970s and early 80s, recessions had battered the housing market in many parts of the country. Under the guise of funding a housing program for poor people, HUD stepped in with large subsidies to the biggest realtors and construction companies. Then, HUD paid the landlord to fill the buildings by subsidizing the rents of lowincome tenants. Tenants paid 30% of their monthly income to rent, and the government covered the rest, therefore awarding relatively high rents to the landlords.
Certainly, this program helped the poor tenants who were able to get in, although usually less than half of those eligible ever benefitted from this program. But even more importantly, it guaranteed the landlords a big profit at a time when their markets were depressed.
Today, however, a lot has changed. Much of the housing stock for the very poor has deteriorated and disappeared, and the government has torn down the few public housing projects that still exist. As a result, vacancy rates are approaching historic lows in many parts of the country, providing bigger possibilities for landlords to jack up the rent. So, having made big money from the HUD subsidies, many landlords now are looking for even bigger profits by throwing the poorest tenants onto the streets.
In Los Angeles and Orange Counties in Southern California, for example, the vacancy rate has shrunk to less than three%, and rents have been increasing at double digit rates. Since only one lowincome unit exists for every four households that need one, landlords have found that they can greatly increase their profits by dropping their tenants with rent subsidies. Often by renting to new tenants they have been able to instantly double their rents. Since 1996, one out of every seven tenants in subsidized apartments in Southern California has been pushed out. Within the next five years, a much larger number will be put on the streets.
Thus, the government housing programs that were supposed to help the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the population are being cut back at precisely the time that they are most needed–once again to the great profit of the landlords.
Jul 16, 2001
In June, one of Baltimore’s largest landlords finally signed a consent decree with the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE). Stanley Rochkind agreed to take care of dangerous levels of lead paint in at least 480 of his 700 apartments over the next two years, while paying a fine of $90,000. Although, if he completes the work in the required time, the court will allow him to get half the money back!
The current settlement shows how slow the city was to go after landlords. After all, the law under which he was fined has been in effect since 1994, and ignored since then. And even now, Rochkind is required to repair only two-thirds of the apartments he owns.
The problem has been well documented for over 50 years. In fact, a Baltimore pediatrician was a leading researcher on the effects of lead paint poisoning on children. He founded a division of Hopkins Hospital which still runs a lead clinic. Dr. Julian Chisolm took samples from the children living in the slums near his hospital. He wrote “The Exposure of Children to Lead” in the early 1950s, explaining that the toxin found in lead paint was in the children at levels six times higher than levels found in industrial workers handling lead. He showed how dangerous the metal was in damaging a child’s brain. He designed a chemical treatment to strip the paint from children’s bodies.
Lead in paint (or gasoline) is so dangerous that it was banned nationwide in 1977 after a long campaign. Lead found in paint chips in older houses is often eaten by young children. The substance is so toxic that children have died from eating lead paint. Even a small amount of it can lead to brain damage. The brain damage can mean permanent developmental problems, including learning disorders, violent behaviors, and even mental retardation.
The problem is particularly severe wherever houses are older and the population is poorer. In Baltimore, estimates are that one third of black children suffer from lead paint poisoning, and, of these, a quarter of the problems are severe.
For decades, politicians have known of the problem and ignored it, allowing landlords large and small to stall, and then letting them off with a slap on the wrist when they are finally brought into court. The permanent damage done to thousands of children in Baltimore and in every other city lies on the doorstep of every politician who ignored what medical science long ago proved.
Jul 16, 2001
A new study of Nissan Motors car loans shows that black customers consistently were charged more than white customers.
The study compared buyers when they had the same income; yet black customers were still charged more in the states studied. When their credit ratings were exactly the same, black buyers were again charged more than white buyers. In Maryland and Wisconsin, for example, black buyers paid an average of $800 more than white buyers. In some states, black buyers were charged three and four times what white buyers were charged.
The study gave an example of two women from Louisiana who each bought the same model in the same year. Each woman had the same credit rating, the top one. But the white woman, who borrowed $15,093 over five years, paid $277.73 per month. The black woman, who borrowed less, $14,787 over five years, paid $309.94 per month. The difference meant that the black buyer paid $1932.60 more than the white buyer over five years. Racism, pure and simple.
A spokesperson for Nissan was quick to defend the company: “NMAC has never tolerated unfair treatment of any of its customers, let alone racial discrimination.” And that’s what all the car companies say–they would never discriminate.
If anyone thinks the problem is a foreign corporation, they can think again. In addition to the Nissan lawsuit, there are class action lawsuits by black consumers against the financial subsidiaries of General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Toyota.
So it’s not a question of one car corporation or one dealership or one state. It is a systematic problem. The racism of this society shows up even in the most mundane everyday transactions over and over again.
Jul 16, 2001
FM Global, the primary insurer for the Rouge Steel part of the Ford Rouge automobile complex in Dearborn, Michigan, recently made its final payment settling claims resulting from the February 1999 explosion at the Rouge powerhouse. Rouge Industries has now collected over 343 million dollars in insurance claims. In addition, Dearborn Industrial Generation, the joint venture of Ford Motor Company, Rouge Steel and Detroit Edison, asked for and received a 12-year, 50% reduction of its real estate and personal property taxes to help finance the new power plant. Of course, they had already been working on that plant before the old one blew up.
The company’s insurance also paid 30 million dollars to the families of the six workers who were killed and the dozens who were seriously injured.
So what did Ford Motor Company pay from all this money it collected for this disaster? Just a 1.5 million dollar fine to MIOSH (Michigan Occupational Safety and Health) plus another 5.5 million dollars to improve health and safety throughout the plant–only 7 million dollars total!
The "accident" which was no accident killed or maimed dozens of workers. On the other side of the ledger, it netted Rouge Steel, and Ford which stands behind it, hundreds of millions of dollars in return.
Hardly an encouragement to pay more attention to safety!