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
Oct 22, 2001
After two weeks of pounding Afghanistan with bombs, of spraying the country with artillery and heavy machine gun fire, the U.S. declared that it had gained mastery of the skies over Afghanistan. Of course, the main problem for the U.S. government was never the skies, but the people on the ground.
By bombing one of the poorest countries in the world, by destroying what little was left in that country after it had already been put through almost a quarter century of war, the U.S. has turned a vast region against it.
The terrorist attacks in this country on September 11 were a crime. They took the lives of thousands of people. But the destruction and slaughter now being carried out by the U.S. government in Afghanistan is equally a crime–and one of untold greater proportions.
No fancy words or slogans can hide this shameful fact.
Hundreds of millions of people all over the world know it. Just as they know that what the U.S. is doing today in Afghanistan is no different than what the U.S. has done for decades in many other countries.
Unfortunately, in this country, this shameful reality is all too often ignored by most people, since the news media and government officials propagate an unending stream of half truths and outright lies.
The U.S. rulers have used the military to bomb and destroy other poor countries before: Kosovo, Iraq, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. They fueled destructive wars in other countries throughout the Middle East. They overthrew governments that they deemed not suitable, in Iran, Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala. The desperate and poor have paid each time.
Now the U.S. rulers are doing it again. And the consequences of this new war are rippling through the Middle East and Central Asia, fueling conflict and unrest.
In the Israeli-occupied territories, the Israeli government fires U.S.-supplied weapons at a poor and desperate Palestinian population that is up in arms. This conflict is now quickly developing from an intifada, or Palestinian uprising, to an out and out war.
In Pakistan, demonstrations and unrest in the street challenge that military dictatorship’s support of the U.S. war in neighboring Afghanistan.
All over a vast expanse of the globe, from Egypt to Indonesia and the Philippines, dictatorial regimes that the U.S. depends on and props up obediently make pronouncements in support of the U.S. war against terrorism. But facing the enraged masses of people in their own countries, even they are forced to dance around the question of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.
Only the British government says that it fully supports the war. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. For centuries, the British rulers have carried out similar kinds of wars all over the world for the benefit of their big corporations.
The U.S. rulers have reached the point that they are in a trap of their own making. On the one hand, they feel that they must respond to an attack that for once took place on their own soil. On the other hand, everything they do just makes the situation worse, raises more anger, more people who see no other choice but to fight them to the death.
Of course, if this were just a problem for the U.S. rulers, that would be just too bad. But the population in this country pays the price. Young men are sent off to fight in a foreign land. Many won’t come back. Many more who do return won’t be the same, having been partially destroyed, physically and mentally. And, to the extent that we support those wars, the whole population earns the hatred of hundreds of millions of people.
This is not the only road open to us. We can earn the respect of millions of people in the world by opposing our own government, its wars, and the terrorism it uses against innocent civilians around the world.
Bush and all the rest of them want us to think we have no choice but to support them–no matter what horrible things they do.
It’s not true.
Oct 22, 2001
These days, everyone has heard of Cipro. It’s one of the drugs used to combat the effects of anthrax. Given the scare about anthrax, we would assume that the Bush Administration would already have put aside a stock of the drug.
Not the case. That’s because Bayer, the company which holds the patent on Cipro, is haggling about the price. The Bush advisers have already offered to buy stocks from Bayer for 155 million dollars, which figures out to $400 a patient. In India, where a generic version of the drug is sold, its cost is $20 a patient–and the generic companies still roll up a big profit.
But, of course, the Bush administration wouldn’t infringe on a patent–that is, a pharmaceutical company’s right to make enormous profits. It seems that for the rulers of this country the war on terrorism is one thing; profit is another.
Oct 22, 2001
In a small Montana mining town, 200 people have died from asbestosis, contracted from working at the nearby vermiculite mine owned since 1963 by W.R. Grace & Co. The mine was closed in 1990 when claims began to appear for asbestos injuries. Vermiculite produces fibers that lodge in the membranes of the lungs slowly strangling people to death.
Libby, Montana has the distinction of the worst asbestosis death rate in the country, more than FORTY times the national average. In addition to the 200 people who have already died there, Libby currently has 680 active asbestos cases, meaning more than one in every 10 people in this small town are finding it harder and harder to breathe. At least another 984 people in Libby have asbestos-related scars in their lungs, and could develop asbestosis.
Not only is the area immediately surrounding the old vermiculite plant a source of asbestos contamination. The town has a high school, a middle school and an elementary school whose fields have shown asbestos-contaminated soil. The clean-up did not even begin until this summer. The high school had vermiculite on the sports fields and harmful concentrations under the bleachers and concessions stands and on football and track equipment. The elementary school had to be closed. A skating rink on the school property had dangerous levels of vermiculite tailings, because vermiculite was used throughout the town of Libby as road fill and in gardening. About six miles of a road going past the closed mine has to be resurfaced to contain the asbestos on its surface and shoulders.
More than 30 years ago, health studies demonstrated the link between asbestos-contaminated vermiculite and terminal lung cancers. W.R. Grace and other big manufacturers of asbestos, like the criminals they are, kept it quiet. Instead, Grace produced a report in the late 1970s that pretended that vermiculite products were not dangerous to human health.
In the 1980s, as asbestos cases grew into the thousands, an effort grew to make the EPA ban its use. Even when the regulations on asbestos were finally established, the big corporations like W.R. Grace used legal maneuvers for years to stop the ban from being implemented.
Finally, after years of avoiding the ban, W.R. Grace has now filed for bankruptcy protection, giving as its reason the thousands of asbestos suits pending against the corporation. This corporation claims it has only 2.6 billion dollars left, after years as one of the most successful companies in the United States. If the company has few assets left now, it’s because it put its assets into subsidiaries in order to have nothing left to pay the claims.
One sick ex-miner put it succinctly: "I really feel that W.R. Grace, some of their CEOs, should be tried for murder, because murder is what they committed in this town."
Oct 22, 2001
It is not at all clear who is responsible for the mailing of anthrax to the offices of a few different government officials, as well as several large news media organizations. It could, of course, be people associated with the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks, but it could as well be a “home grown” terrorist like a Timothy McVeigh, or even some completely crazy individual, like the Unibomber. But one thing this anthrax crisis has clearly revealed is how completely inadequate the health care system is to protect people from the disease.
When the news first broke about anthrax, many people sought to be tested, or to have packages that they feared could contain anthrax spores tested. But it didn’t take long before public health systems across the country were almost completely overwhelmed. They did not have the means to test many of the people who wanted to be tested, nor could they test many of the suspicious materials that people sent their labs. Dr. Norman Crouch, who heads the public health department lab in Minnesota, said that his lab received 600 requests to test suspicious materials and “...obviously, we can’t test them all.” This failure could have been a real catastrophe if the medical emergency had been more widespread.
Politicians pretend that the main problem is that the U.S. is not ready to fight bio-terrorism. But, in fact, as health officials show, the ability to fight the outbreak of anthrax or any other disease from a bio-terrorist attack, is identical to the ability to fight the outbreak of a disease that occurs naturally. The first line of defense in discovering and tracking these diseases is the public health system. The problem is, the public health system has been systematically dismantled, cut back and starved of funds.
The public health system is extremely restricted in being able to test for diseases. Public health authorities do not have the resources needed, that is enough trained staff, as well as sophisticated equipment to rapidly diagnose not just anthrax, but many other diseases, including smallpox, tularaemia or Ebola. When epidemics break out, the public health system has little ability to track it until it’s developed widely. Few public health departments, for example, even have modern computers for monitoring disease trends and outbreaks.
Moreover, if some kind of epidemic does break out, the public health system usually has few means to treat it. After all, there are few if any public hospitals left in this country, not just in the smaller cities, but even the biggest ones as well. Just last year, for example, Washington D.C., that is, the nation’s capital, closed its last remaining public hospital, called D.C. General. And Washington is not alone. Some big cities, like Detroit, haven’t had even one public hospital for over a decade.
No one else can do what a public health service does, that is, coordinate on a wide level all of the different measures to deal with the outbreaks of disease on a local, regional and national level. Certainly, the private health companies, hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, are not suited to carry this out. After all, they are driven by profit. They are out to constantly reduce their “costs” by restricting their care to those who are paying customers, that is, those who can afford to pay. They have never been geared to health emergencies on a large scale.
On the contrary, their policies have led in the opposite direction. Since emergency rooms are considered to be unprofitable, private hospitals have closed many of the emergency rooms all over the country. They have also closed even more intensive care units (ICU’s), which means that often people who leave emergency rooms are left stacked up in the hospital corridors. And because stocking medicine for emergencies means tying up their precious capital in inventory, many hospitals have adopted “just in time” policies for vital drugs.
The only medical system whose goal is to fight against public emergencies is public health. But since private health care has always viewed public health as competition, they have pushed to have public health care cut back and dismantled. The U.S. health care system is, by far, the most expensive health care system in the world, with health care spending averaging up to $3,400 per person. But less than one% of that spending goes toward public health, that is, toward some kind of collective protection against medical emergencies.
“I think it is difficult for me to exaggerate the deficiencies of our present public health capabilities,” said Dr. Donald Henderson, a former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. The Bush Administration wants to tell us it is preparing for the eventuality of something like anthrax–that’s a lie. If they were they would right now be pouring money into the public health system. Instead they propose to give more money to the privately run medical industrial complex, one of the largest and most profitable industries in the country.
Oct 22, 2001
At the end of August, a Philadelphia court reporter, Terri Maurer-Carter, filed a sworn affidavit that during the trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal she heard Judge Albert Sabo make statements indicating he intended to railroad him. Jamal is the former Black Panther who has been in prison facing the death penalty since 1982, for a crime he didn’t commit: the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. Maurer-Carter described what happened in the following way: “I went through the anteroom on my way to that courtroom where Judge Sabo and another person were engaged in conversation. Judge Sabo was discussing the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. During the course of that conversation, I heard Judge Sabo say, ‘Yeah, and I’m going to help them fry the n––-.’ There were three people present when Judge Sabo made that remark, including myself.”
During Mumia’s trial, Judge Sabo suppressed evidence which showed that Mumia had not fired at Faulkner and he prevented Mumia from defending himself. Even under the pressure of the campaign in defense of Mumia in this country and abroad, Judge Sabo has remained in charge of the matter at the local level and has blocked Mumia’s defense, despite the new evidence brought to light that another man has confessed to killing the police officer.
Federal Court Judge William Yohn has ruled up to now that he does not believe a Federal court has the responsibility to assess the question of the innocence of a prisoner appealing from a state court, but will consider only whether Mumia’s rights under the U.S. constitution were violated. The disgusting racist statement made by Judge Sabo that Maurer-Carter has sworn she heard raises yet again that Mumia didn’t receive equal justice under the law. Once again, it shows that there will be no justice unless there is enough of an outcry to force the issue.
Oct 22, 2001
The U.S. military makes a big display of its yellow packages of air-dropped food for Afghans.
The food isn’t the point. The display is.
Six million Afghan people are estimated at risk for hunger for this winter. At only one meal a day, in only one week, these people would need 42 million meals. The total number of meals dropped by the air force, up to October 21, was 1.2 million. A very small drop in a very large bucket. Especially considering that some packets land in minefields, some in mountain wilderness, and some are left uneaten or are burned because the people fear poison.
Compare this with one truck convoy. Just one aid convoy of 60 trucks can bring in enough wheat for three million meals.
With the U.S. bombings, however, the truck convoys have been held up; the warehouses in Kabul have been hit. Drivers of convoys don’t dare to get caught in or near Kabul while the U.S. is bombing.
Thus, the bombing has already reduced the insufficient aid that was before going into Afghanistan, making it more meager still.
If the U.S. wanted to aid the provision of food to starving people in Afghanistan, it would never have bombed.
If the U.S. prefers to drop a few flashy yellow packets in the midst of the bombing, it is because the primary target the food is aimed at is not hungry people. It’s us.
They think we can’t see through their charade.
Oct 22, 2001
The U.S. government says it wants to crack down on terrorists by freezing their bank accounts. Bills to reform the banking laws have been introduced in the House and the Senate.
But the banking industry is lobbying heavily against increased accountability about its largest customers. The super-rich want to hide their funds for many reasons: to keep away the tax man, to launder illegal funds, to keep suspicious transfers from any scrutiny.
So the politicians are caught in a trap: any law making the transfer of funds visible could endanger their good friends, that is, those who profit at the expense of everyone else.
Oct 22, 2001
The U.S. war against Afghanistan has raised the question of a new government in that country assuming the fall of the Taliban government. The options presented by the U.S. and its allies, however, don’t look very uplifting: a 86-year old former king known for his corruption and the "Northern Alliance," a coalition of armies busy killing each other before the Taliban ousted them from Kabul, the capital, in 1996.
Until September 11, the U.S., along with its close allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, supported the Taliban. The Northern Alliance, on the other hand, controlled about 10% of the country and were reported to be supplied weapons and money by Russia and Iran and by opium production. Now that the U.S. has declared war on the Taliban, it started to actively support the Northern Alliance as a possible future government in Afghanistan.
But the past record of the Northern Alliance is no better than that of the Taliban–a long history of brutality and bloodshed. Many of the people who make up the Northern Alliance were former "mujahideen" who fought against Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989. Once the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the different warlords leading the mujahideen began fighting each other.
During this period there were nine different attempts to make a coalition government from among the warring factions. There are several ethnic groups living in Afghanistan, practicing different forms of Islam, including the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazaras and the Pashtuns. The Taliban has much of its support from the majority group, the Pashtuns.
From 1992 to 1996, when these warlords fought over Kabul, about 50,000 people died in that city alone. It was common practice for the troops of these warlords to plunder, kidnap and rape civilians. These thugs also carried out what’s known as "ethnic cleansing," that is, they attacked civilians belonging to other ethnic groups. This terror turned almost three million Afghans into refugees.
At the moment, the strongest leaders not in the Taliban are the Tajik leader Rabbani and the younger brother of Massoud, another Tajik leader just assassinated in September, an Uzbek leader Dostum and an Hazara leader Khalil. Some have even changed sides a few times, like Dostum, who helped the Taliban conquer central Afghanistan
Like the Taliban, the warlords who make up the alliance all represent themselves as religious fundamentalists. During an interview before his assassination, Commander Massoud told reporters that his wife wore the head-to-toe veil, the burqa. That’s not surprising, considering that in the Panshir region under Masood’s rule all women were forced to wear the burqa.
Lacking any other options, the U.S. government is proposing to install these same criminals back in Kabul. But even if the Northern Alliance doesn’t come to power, it’s obvious what’s in store for the people of Afghanistan when the U.S. bombing is finally over: more war, more plunder and rape, more ethnic cleansing, more oppression of women.
In short, more terror against the population.
Oct 22, 2001
Within days of the September 11 attacks, Bush began to talk about the fate of women in Afghanistan, making a big show of indignation.
It’s true that the situation of women in Afghanistan is horrible. Their condition has long been shown by the images of bodies completely covered in a kind of shroud out of which they could only see through a wire net. Girls cannot be educated, women cannot work and they are not even allowed to be treated in a hospital. They are shut up in their homes, not allowed to go out without being accompanied by a man. They can be killed for even the hint of acting “incorrectly” toward any man not their husband or their father.
But none of this began on September 11. This scandalous oppression of women, which was carried out by other fundamentalists even before the Taliban existed, did not disgust the American leaders when it was a question of using the Taliban to reinforce the U.S. position in this area of the world–an oil-rich area that U.S. corporations have long coveted.
In fact, the U.S. government provided millions of dollars worth of arms to the Islamic guerillas, including the Taliban. And not a word was said then about the disgusting condition of women in Afghanistan.
The condition of women in this area of the world is, has been and will continue to be horrible until all the reactionary regimes which today oppress them are overthrown by real mass movements of the poor and laboring population, including obviously, of the women.
But to free themselves from these regimes, the population will have to take on the big imperialisms–including the U.S.–which support these regimes.
Anyone who wants to see the condition of women improve in this part of the world also wants to see these popular movements develop–just as it’s true that anyone who wants to see the condition of women improve also wants to see a movement in this country to get rid of governments which pass anti-women legislation and carry out policies against women.
Bush may make a point of bragging about policies harmful to women–but these policies existed long before he came to office.
Oct 22, 2001
The Wall Street brokers and politicians, who want to frighten us about the impending collapse of Social Security, say that when all the baby boomers retire, they will use up the available Social Security funds. If that were true, think what would happen if retirement funds were invested in the stock market and the time came for the baby boomers to retire? They’d be selling off stock to live on, because you can’t buy food with a stock certificate. Imagine the collapse of the stock market then, as worried investors sold off their stock in big amounts hoping to avoid it dropping further?
Trusting stock brokers with our future is like trusting an astrologer on whether it’s safe to go to work today.
Oct 22, 2001
On October 15, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the nation’s third largest, announced it was filing for bankruptcy protection. Bethlehem says the problem is that it lost almost a billion and a half dollars in the first nine months of 2001.
The company’s first demand was concessions from its active work force, which is down to 13,000 today. Bethlehem’s new executive plans to ask for concessions from active workers and for more health care reductions from retirees receiving pensions.
The first place the bosses come is always to the workers. Retirees were supposed to be guaranteed their pensions and benefits, but Bethlehem and other steel corporations, like LTV and Republic which also used this bankruptcy game this year, came after the workers, demanding reductions.
In 1997 the Bethlehem steelworkers at the Sparrows Point plant outside Baltimore agreed to the loss of 900 jobs as a concession to save the plant from closing–or at least that is what the bosses threatened. To show they were serious, they pointed to Bethlehem’s giant facility in Bethlehem Pennsylvania which it had closed in 1995.
The workers at Sparrows Point gave the concessions. And what did Bethlehem management do with the money they gained? They went out and bought and sold other companies and invested 300 million dollars in upgrading a Sparrows Point facility. In 1998 they bought up Lukens Inc. and in 1999 they could afford to start new ventures with both Columbus Coatings and with BethNova Tube.
So, despite bad years, despite competition, despite whatever else the company claimed, they bought and sold steel operations. They had enough money to pay back their loans with interest, to pay dividends to their shareholders, to pay their corporate execs big salaries.
Bethlehem has now hired a specialist, R.S. Miller, to “turn the company around.” Miller got his start in the 1980s turning around Chrysler–by demanding concessions. His first proposals at Bethlehem are like some of those he made at Chrysler; shift out jobs to lower paid contractors and change work rules, i.e. speed-up.
What Bethlehem–like all the big corporations–is trying to do is make workers pay for ever larger profits. Effectively, they want to take us back before the time when workers organized in their own defense.
Previous generations of steelworkers found the way to protect themselves–stopping wage cuts, improving their wages and benefits, putting an end to horrible working conditions and favoritism and discrimination. This generation should do no less.
Oct 22, 2001
On October 2, a federal jury found former Teamsters Union President Ron Carey not guilty on all charges that he had lied to a grand jury. This came out of a federal government investigation into illegal fund-raising in the 1996 Teamsters elections. In the end, the government had only one witness who claimed to have any knowledge that Carey approved of illegal fund-raising–a witness already convicted of other charges and clearly hoping for a reduction in his sentence. The jury didn’t believe him.
Innocent until proven guilty–remember? If this were really a democratic country, Carey never would have been removed from office until AFTER having had his day in court and being found guilty. Instead, even before any charges were filed against him, he was removed from office–an office to which he had been elected by Teamster members.
Carey was removed not because of what he had done in an election he clearly won. He was removed because he had just led a nationwide strike of UPS workers that gained the attention and support of millions of working people all over the country. The strike gained this support for several reasons: First, the UPS strikers demanded that part-time workers be given full-time jobs–a concern for many workers all over the country. Second, the UPS strikers, by holding rallies and talking to other workers, put their strike in front of the whole working class. And third, the strikers forced UPS–which had insisted it wouldn’t give them what they wanted–to give in.
When the UPS bosses granted several of the strikers’ demands, the UPS workers returned to their jobs in triumph. This successful strike stood as an example to other workers–who had hesitated to make fights in recent years.
Significantly, Carey was not faced with any action for his 1996 election until eight months later, but only four days after the strike was successfully concluded.
The fact that Carey could now be acquitted–despite all the money and time put into convicting him–shows what a frameup this case was. And it shows what this case was all about. Carey’s real crime in the eyes of bosses all over this country was that he stood at the head of the UPS strike in contrast to most union leaders today who wouldn’t think of associating themselves with a strike.
By succeeding in such swift, harsh and undemocratic action against him, the government made Carey into an example of what could happen to any other union official who might entertain the idea of leading such a strike: they would face immediate retaliation.
The government’s swift success in removing Carey from office also quickly reversed the small change in the political climate in the country that had been brought about by the success of the UPS strike.
Now Carey is finally freed from the charges. He should have been. But this does not undo the damage done to him, to the UPS workers, the Teamsters and the working class. That damage will not be undone until workers–those at UPS or elsewhere–make a bigger fight, including being ready to protect those who are willing to lead their struggles.
Oct 22, 2001
On October 15, over 800 workers at three General Dynamics Land Systems plants in Lima, Ohio; Sterling Heights, Michigan; and Eynon, Pennsylvania went on strike. One of the issues apparently is the health care benefits for retired workers. These benefits had been given up as a concession to the company years ago when the bosses claimed it was in bad financial shape. They promised to return the concessions when the company’s situation improved.
The company’s profits did improve drastically. Just to make the point very clear, General Dynamics announced two days after the strike began that its sales went up half a billion dollars compared to the same quarter last year, while profits went up to 230 million dollars for the quarter, compared to 204 million last year. General Dynamics’ Chairman stated, “This was another very good quarter. We had revenue growth of 21%... Earnings were matched by strong cash flow from operations. We won significant new work in all of our business groups, completed two important acquisitions, and pushed (the order) backlog to a record high of 30 billion dollars–an increase of 6 billion dollars in the (last) quarter.”
Nevertheless, General Dynamics continued to refuse to return the retirees health care.
Al Logie, a mechanic at the Sterling Heights plant, said there was only one vote against striking in Local 12. “They should have thought about that when they gave our benefits away,” he said. Another worker said, “There’s no health care for retirees after they retire. We try to buy health care, but when you get to be 50 or 60 years old, no one wants to sell you health insurance... The contract ran out, we had to go.”
As soon as the strike began, the patriotic cries started: “This is no time for a strike.” Just as with the Minnesota state workers, the bosses’ apologists rushed to make use of September 11 to try to convince the workers not to defend themselves.
It’s the most disgusting hypocrisy to see a military contractor like General Dynamics use this argument against its own workers, pretending to care about the victims of September 11, in the very same month that they boast about how much profit they are making off of all the wars the U.S. is carrying out.
If any sacrifices are to be made, it’s up to the big corporations to make them, not the workers. It’s a good time to strike.
Oct 22, 2001
Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke star in the film, Training Day, which is currently on its first run in movie theatres. The film is a quite realistic portrayal of the lives of two Los Angeles cops involved in the “war on drugs.” Hawke plays rookie cop Jake Hoyt, recently chosen to join a special unit under the command of Alonzo Harris, played by Washington.
Harris has the job of schooling Hoyt in the ways of the street. He is a street-hardened taskmaster, fond of lecturing Hoyt about how on the streets you’re either a wolf or a sheep, and he tells Hoyt, “You have to get a little dirt on you if you want to get anything done.” As it turns out Harris has plenty of dirt on him. Not only does he shake down drug users and small-time dealers to force them to inform on their suppliers, he also fakes search warrants to get into dealers’ homes to steal money from them.
As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Harris–and the rest of the police department–are in fact “wolves,” knee-deep in what has become a lucrative and violent business, involved with the bigger players in the drug trade.
It is clear in the film that Harris’s superiors know what he’s doing and look the other way. When Hoyt raises objections to what Harris asks him to do, Harris assures him that his bosses know about it and will protect him. Harris also reminds Hoyt of the cops “code of silence” in case Hoyt has any intentions of going against him. As he tells Hoyt, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.”
It is interesting that the film is shot in Los Angeles, a city which just recently experienced a scandal involving the elite anti-gang CRASH unit, in which the cops were shown to have acted as the biggest gang in L.A. The cops were shown to have been involved in drugs, prostitution, frame-ups and murders. In the real-life scandal, just as in the movie, the higher-ups and training officers were responsible for recruiting younger cops and showing them the dirty tricks of police involvement with the drug trade.
The movie has the requisite Hollywood happy ending, but before then it provides a realistic glimpse of police involvement in the drug trade.
Oct 22, 2001
On October 16 a letter written by James Goodwin, the head of United Airlines, to United employees was leaked to the press. It said, “today, we are literally hemorrhaging money. Clearly this bleeding has to be stopped–and soon–or United will perish sometime next year.”
For a company hemorrhaging money, United has been acting very strangely. From1996 through 2000 United reaped 3.2 billion dollars in profits after taxes and all sorts of other charges, many of them simply bookkeeping entries to hold down taxes. Just last year it paid 44% of its profits out in dividends to its stockholders, instead of using the money to buy more equipment or to have cash on hand in case of an emergency. Even so, United had almost a billion dollars cash on hand on June 30.
United had enough money that it tried to buy US Airways for 4.3 billion dollars and to take over 7.3 billion dollars in debt that US Air owed its banks and bondholders. The merger didn’t go through, but not because United couldn’t come up with the money. The government ruled the merger would limit competition. The same company that had plenty of money for this purchase, now cries poor.
United is simply using the tragedy of September 11 to demand sacrifices form its work force. It laid off 20% of its workers–more than the% of the flights it cancelled. Before September 11 United was insisting in contract negotiations that it would not return the concessions United mechanics and baggage handlers gave up in 1994. After September 11, it was doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is that United now has a bigger club to use against the workers–patriotism. The bosses say, “You must sacrifice for the good of the country.”
No. The workers’ concern should be to strengthen their situation, to prevent these rapacious corporations from running roughshod over everyone.