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
Mar 18, 2002
Marking the six-month anniversary of September 11, Bush declared that the U.S. is winning the “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan and that it is preparing to step up this war to other countries: among them, the Philippines, Yemen, Georgia (formerly part of the Soviet Union) and, implicitly, Iraq.
Whatever is happening in Afghanistan–and it’s certainly not the crushing victory that Bush has been proclaiming ever since December 11–it is not essentially a war against “terrorists.”
It is first of all a U.S. bombing war on the people of Afghanistan. Bush, himself, in describing the recent battle in the Shah-i-Kot Mountains, announced that hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists had been killed. In fact, only three bodies have been found from that battle although hundreds were killed in that campaign–in the “mistaken” bombing of two villages, which completely wiped them out.
What’s going on in Afghanistan is also fighting between different warlords based on different ethnic groups–fighting which holds the promise of another bloodbath like that in the former Yugoslavia when it broke apart. Those warlords are today’s “good guys,” according to the current U.S. script–just as Osama bin Laden was himself once one of the “good guys” of U.S. foreign policy. And they are just as bloody and disgusting as Osama bin Laden ever was.
This U.S. war against the people of Afghanistan may wipe out a few al Qaeda. It may even interfere with its network. But this war is hardly protecting the U.S. from further terrorist attacks. Just the opposite.
In countries throughout Asia, the Middle East and Africa, people watch with horror and disgust at what the U.S., with all its military might, is doing to the impoverished and already desperate people of Afghanistan. Out of these enormous populations can spring the next group of terrorists. If there has been a sudden growth of terrorists in the Philippines and Indonesia–as Bush says there is–this is in great measure a response to the picture Bush has painted of this country. Bush’s U.S. is the bully of the world.
For years, Israel, with enormous U.S. support, has counted on being able to use its military might against the Palestinians to dominate the area of the Middle East. Its leaders have tried to convince the Israeli people that they can be safe doing this. The current situation proves how much of a lie that is. The military actions and repression carried on by the Israeli army simply created the preconditions for the current bloody situation.
On the scale of the world, the U.S. plays the same role that Israel plays in the Middle East. Of course, the magnitude of the problem is different. The U.S. has more protection provided by the oceans. It is larger, with more military force. But it also creates a reserve of terrorists around the whole world, not just in one tiny population.
In the long run, there can be no permanent protection afforded to a people who agree to repress another people. And that is what the U.S. population is doing today–repressing another people, even if not very
many people are happy about this war.
During the war in Viet Nam, the people of the U.S. won respect from around the world, precisely because a significant part of the population did stand up to their own war-mongering government. And they did, by their actions, make it impossible for that government to carry out the much wider war it wanted to carry out. That opposition to the war extended to many of the troops, even under military discipline.
Today, the U.S. population has lost whatever credit that earlier generation won. It’s time to earn it back.
Mar 18, 2002
On March 9, high winds blew a scaffold off the Hancock building. It broke up and fell 500 feet to the ground with the force of a freight car, killing three women in their cars below.
The scaffold was owned by Beeche, which leased it to AMS Architectural Technologies. AMS was in the middle of an 18-month project to clean and caulk the building.
These companies have both been responsible for deaths on other scaffolding projects. A worker for AMS fell to his death while working on a high rise in Los Angeles. The company was fined only $905. A Beeche Systems scaffold on the San Francisco Bay Bridge buckled in the middle, killing a worker two months ago. The company has been cited for 33 OSHA safety violations since 1989. They were fined a total of only $10,000 for all these violations, including the deaths.
City of Chicago regulations prohibit the use of scaffolds when winds are over 35 miles per hour, and state, “all scaffolds ... shall be so constructed as to insure the safety of persons working on, passing under or passing by.” After the accident, Mayor Daley said, “It isn’t the city’s problem, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to keep tabs on people. This is the responsibility of the company.”
But what use then is the city ordinance if city inspectors don’t enforce it?
The small fines the companies received for other scaffold deaths shows that the system treats the death of people due to company negligence as a trifle. For the mayor of Chicago, as his comment demonstrates, the lives of these people are not even worth a trifle.
Mar 18, 2002
Kmart chief executive Charles Conaway announced on March 8 that 22,000 employees would lose their jobs, as Kmart reorganized under bankruptcy protection. Kmart will close 284 stores across the country. The next day, the Kmart board of directors announced that Conaway would also lose his job.
But Mr. Conaway’s golden handshake as he leaves is worth 9.5 million dollars. As for the other 21,999 employees? They get nothing.
Capitalism at work!
Mar 18, 2002
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the death of a Fulton County, Georgia Sheriff’s Deputy Ricky Kinchen in a March 2001 shoot-out. The sentence will be appealed.
From the beginning, Al-Amin has stated he did not do the shooting. But from the beginning, he has been prevented from publicly presenting his case by a gag order. This did not prevent the prosecution from broadcasting information insisting he was guilty.
In the same way, Al-Amin was forbidden to state that he believed he is the victim of a government conspiracy against him which has continued over the past 30 years.
Al-Amin was certainly the target of repeated government harassment since his days as a militant of the black movement in the 1960s. The FBI, for example, has 40,000 documents in a dossier they keep on him, but they had never been able to convict him of any charges based on this dossier. In two decades, he has been repeatedly picked up by various law enforcement officials on bogus charges and served time on several of them. He was not the only civil rights and anti-Viet Nam war activist to be prosecuted by various state and federal agencies.
In fact, there was an FBI program to "get" militants of that period, a program called COINTEL-PRO. Thanks to COINTEL-PRO, a number of those active in the South about Jim Crow issues and those active in Northern cities protesting conditions for black people were killed; others remain in prison to this day.
In this current trial, witnesses agreed with the deputy’s own original testimony that the shooter was a different build from Al-Amin. The deputy also described his eye color and hair color as radically different from that of Al-Amin. Witnesses saw someone running away who appeared to be wounded–and the deputy said he had shot this man in the gut. But when Al-Amin was arrested four days later, he had no wound. This deputy’s own testimony should have cleared Al-Amin. Instead, fingering Al-Amin from a photo given to him, the deputy contradicted his own description of the incident.
The prosecution made much of the fact that Al-Amin left Fulton County and went to a small town in Alabama, where he was arrested. Why did he go if he was innocent? Al-Amin had plenty of reason to fear what could happen–30 years of persecution had proved it.
At the trial, there was testimony from police officers of White Hall, Alabama, the small town where 100 officers of the FBI and various law enforcement agencies converged to arrest Al-Amin. Three residents of White Hall said they saw agents firing at Al-Amin but Al-Amin did not fire at anyone. Two Alabama deputy sheriffs there testified that an FBI agent assaulted Al-Amin while he was lying handcuffed on the ground. The FBI agent kicked Al-Amin in the head, according to witnesses. All the FBI agents, of course, denied it until confronted by the statements of the deputies. This is the same FBI crew which said it found the guns used in the shootings.
The FBI agents said the guns were found in a woods in Alabama in the same general area where Al-Amin was arrested. Yet the guns were not found on Al-Amin. And not one of these sophisticated police agencies bothered to test Al-Amin’s hands to see if he had fired the guns. What’s more telling–the guns were not even tested for fingerprints to see if Al-Amin had actually picked them up.
This government case–full of holes as it is–was able to convince a jury because the judge systematically muzzled the defense lawyers as they tried to bring in evidence to support their case.
Al-Amin now joins a long list of those who have militantly opposed the government’s point of view and paid the price for it. A number of them have died at the hands of government agents.
H. Rap Brown, as Al-Amin was called before his conversion to Islam, was a SNCC activist who urged people to defend themselves when under attack.
In the racist town of Cambridge Maryland in 1967, a town in which the Ku Klux Klan was part and parcel of the city police and government, Brown bravely said to people, "This town is ready to explode ... if you don’t have guns, don’t be here ... you have to be prepared to die." Brown was not one of the numerous black leaders who would later tell people to go home and let them handle the problems. He was active in the fight for civil rights, for the right to vote, against drugs in the black community.
Brown also opposed the war in Viet Nam. His famous statement, “No Vietnamese ever called me ‘nigger’,” was picked up by thousands of young black men of the time.
The dead end of “Black Power” may have led Brown to convert to Islam–which itself offers no prospect to the problems of this racist and class society. But this did not prevent the state from using the link between Islam and September 11 to help inflame public opinion and the jury pool. The judge certainly would not allow the trial to be postponed sufficiently to avoid this.
In any case, what we really see here is that the government finally “got” one more person from its COINTEL-PRO hit list.
Mar 18, 2002
On March 5, President Bush announced that he was putting tariffs on imported steel products: 30% on some products and 15% on others. These tariffs are to last three years. They will affect mainly the steel makers of Europe, Japan, South Korea and Brazil, while Mexico, Canada and some poorer countries are exempt.
Bush undoubtedly had political reasons for his actions. He’s looking to the 2002 Congressional elections with Republicans in trouble. The states of West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where many steel workers live, were close in the past election.
But Bush also was serving the interests of the steel barons. These tariffs on steel imports will let U.S. steel companies raise their own prices perhaps as much as 10%. And this will improve the profits of the steel companies. Like many other Rust Belt industries, the profit rate of steel companies in recent years has not been as high as it has been for companies like Enron, which produced nothing but only bought and sold. Nor has the rate of profit in steel kept up with the amounts to be made in financial speculation.
The steel companies blame their lack of profits on the imports of steel. However, this argument rings hollow. After all, imported steel was 31.5% of the U.S. supply in 1998 and steel company profits were the highest in many years. Today steel imports are 20.1% of supply, and profits are down. The reason for the drop in steel sales and lower profits is not imports, but the recession, the typical regular downturn of a capitalist economy. But the steel companies are using this downturn to argue that they are in terrible shape.
It’s not a surprise that Bush spouts the companies’ line. Nor, unfortunately, is it a surprise to hear union leaders do the same thing. Right before Bush’s action on February 28 United Steel Workers leaders called on USW members to rally in Washington to demand that President Bush put 40% tariffs on imported steel. USW rallies were also held in steel centers such as East Chicago and Gary, Indiana and Baltimore, Maryland, with slogans like, “Fight to Save the American Steel Industry.”
For decades, the Steelworkers Union lobbied together with the steel companies against imports. By 1999, the number of production workers in steel had fallen to one third of what it had been in 1969. At the same time the amount of steel produced went up slightly. What caused these lost jobs? Imports? Maybe a few. But most were lost to the tremendous increase in productivity. From 1973 to 1994 the companies took profits they made by reducing the wage bill and put them into basic oxygen furnaces and continuous casters, closed mold yards, some primary rolling mills and many open hearth furnaces. Most importantly, they greatly intensified the work that each steel worker does in an hour. Productivity rose by 3.8% a year. Today a steel worker produces three times what he produced in 1969. This rise in productivity could have been used to lower the hours that steel workers labored in one of the most difficult industries to work in. But instead all the gain went to the stockholders, while the companies drastically cut the jobs of steel workers.
The increase in the profits of the steel companies that may come from the increased tariffs on imported steel will not go toward saving jobs. But the diversion which union leaders have made around this issue will once more be used to prevent workers from making the only fight which could save jobs–that is, to take the benefit of increased productivity to lessen the hours that each worker puts in. This would mean that many more steel workers could be employed. Why shouldn’t the workers receive the fruits of all they produced over the decades, which could go to better their lives?
That means treating the steel barons as the enemies of the workers, instead of their allies who are supposed to have common interests with the workers.
Mar 18, 2002
American Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman is part of a media campaign touting the opening of schools in the “New Afghanistan.” She expresses her hope that children will be able to learn democracy in the newly-reopened schools.
Well, some children might, the ones who are not so poor they cannot go to school. But some Afghan children, especially in the small rural villages, come from families so poor they have been forced to find a new method to get food: they sell some of their children. After 25 years of war, and a drought which currently means no crops, no water and no seed, some fathers have been forced to make this hideous choice by their family’s destitution.
Feldman doesn’t mention this reality in the “New Afghanistan,” supposed to be newly liberated by the American bombing which began last October and is still going on. Did she get her propaganda ideas from the same PR firm that scripted the lies about the babies in Kuwait?
Mar 18, 2002
The following article was translated from an article in the February 22nd issue of Lutte Ouvriere (Workers Struggle) in France.
Last October 24, the employees of the McDonald’s at Strasbourg-St. Denis in Paris began a strike for the return of five of their comrades who had been fired. McDonald’s pretended the five had stolen money from their cash drawers. The real reason was that these five had called for a strike in solidarity with a union activist who had been threatened with firing for demanding an election for shop stewards and trying to present himself as a candidate in these elections. At the end of nearly four months of struggle, the employees finally obtained their basic demand.
On February 2, at a demonstration of support, the strikers at McDonald’s were able to see how much sympathy their movement had won. About a thousand people demonstrated on a nearby boulevard. Several dozen young workers from the fast food industry led the demonstration with a banner, “Against layoffs and against the anti-union repression at McDonald’s and elsewhere.”
During nearly four months of conflict, the strikers displayed great determination. There was never any question of stopping their movement before all five of the fired workers got back their jobs. Three of the five were finally given their jobs back by different government offices regulating labor. But the two others remained out on the street.
Finally, after several meetings between the strikers’ representatives and the boss at McDonald’s, the other two got their jobs back, maintaining their seniority and their pay as assistant managers. However, these latter two have not been allowed to return to the cash drawers nor are they able to hold the keys to the restaurant.
The agreement made at the end of the conflict gave the strikers wages equal to 45% of what they had lost while on strike. In addition, they are supposed to get full wages while the restaurant is being restored–which is soon to start.
On the 15th of February, at a general assembly of strikers, the agreement was submitted to a vote and was signed by that evening. The tenacity of the strikers had paid off.
One striker during the general assembly insisted that their common struggle had allowed the workers of McDonald’s to reinforce their solidarity, and this will be indispensable when they go back to work and have to come up against the boss each day.
Mar 18, 2002
The following article was translated from Le Pouvoir aux Travailleurs (Power to the Workers) put out by comrades of UATCI, Union Africaine des Travailleurs Communistes Internationalistes (African Union of Internationalist Communist Workers).
A Nigerian woman, Safiya Husaini, was buried up to her neck and then stoned to death. Her crime: giving birth to a child out of wedlock. This was decreed by the Islamic court of Sokoto, one of 11 Islamic states in northern Nigeria (out of the 36 states of the country). Another woman, Hafsatu Abubakar, was prosecuted for “fornication” because she had sexual relations outside of marriage.
As in Afghanistan, where the majority of women are still enclosed in burkas, it’s the women who are the principal victims of the dictatorship of Muslim fundamentalists.
But it isn’t only religious fanaticism which proliferates in Nigeria. There’s also ethnic fanaticism. Over the past few years, thousands of people have died in clashes between ethnic groups. During December and January, according to the press, a hundred people killed each other in the course of conflicts between the Lokus, Udeges and Agutus. In this case it was for the control of fishing resources in a lake situated in the center of the country. At the beginning of February in Lagos, a violent fight between Yorubas and Haussas left several dead. A simple neighborhood dispute, which before could have been settled amicably, was transformed into an inter-ethnic blood bath.
The current escalation of ethnic violence flows from the explosion of inequalities and the brutal impoverishment of the planet. Nigeria, which is the sixth largest oil producer in the world, has suffered under a severe drop in oil revenues as a result of the world economic crisis and the rapacity of the oil companies. The great majority of Nigeria’s 120 million inhabitants don’t benefit from this oil income. Only a small minority of local privileged people linked to business and to the heads of the state apparatus have benefitted from some of the financial fallout. It’s the same for the upper military ranks who have enriched themselves thanks to corruption and to misappropriations of state funds.
Parallel to this type of behavior in the upper levels of the state apparatus, there was an increase in every type of organized violence and hostage-taking. Assassinations and racketeering are carried out by organized gangs who fear no one. In addition, inequalities worsen between the oil provinces in the south and the north, which is literally abandoned and as a result has become an easy prey for Muslim fundamentalists, who benefit from financial support from the leaders of Saudi Arabia.
Nigeria, this giant of Africa, is sick today. The evils that it suffers from flow from poverty. The giant oil companies keep the largest part of the oil wealth for their big stockholders to the detriment of payments made to the Nigerian state.
But after all is said and done, it’s the whole of this system which is sick and which is leading this giant country into catastrophe–if the workers don’t extend their hands to each other independently of what ethnic group or religion they belong to.
Mar 18, 2002
“Strike the Palestinians as hard as possible. That’s what they need: blows. It’s necessary that they understand that they’re conquered.” This is the way that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon summed up his strategy March 5, several days after setting off a chain of violence which left many dozens of people dead, this time on the Israeli side as well as on the Palestinian side.
Sharon talks like all those who advocate colonial wars, like the soldiers who think that the only end to a conflict is to make the people that they oppress “understand” that rebellion is hopeless. And like them, Sharon has learned nothing from history. A year and a half after the beginning of the second Intifada, after the provocative visit of Sharon in September 2000 to the esplanade of the Mosque of Jerusalem, events have once again shown that this policy of force leads to a bloody impasse.
The heads of the Israeli army pretended they struck a great blow by invading Palestinian camps in Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank with tanks. These military expeditions were supposed to show the “terrorists” who aimed at Israel that Israel could strike them wherever it wanted. What it really did was destroy miserable hovels.
In any case, these military operations don’t dissuade anyone. How could they? The situation continues to bring forth from among the Palestinian people hundreds and even thousands of people ready to be martyrs–to die by the bomb that they carry, provided that they can cause deaths and sow panic in the camp of the adversary.
Since the beginning of March there have been continual suicide attacks, and also the attack by an isolated sharpshooter against an army control post, which killed ten solders and Israeli settlers. The suicide attacks are horrible for the Israeli people, who are attacked at random, and also for their authors, who sacrifice themselves. But the Israeli responses aren’t less horrible. Israeli authorities think they can strike terror into a people by the intensity of the means used. They, too, attack civilians randomly–innocent men, women and children are their victims.
It seems, if we can believe the press, that Sharon’s credibility is disintegrating among the Israeli population. One year after taking office, he has shown that his policy leads to an impasse and that he doesn’t bring more security to the Israelis, all of whom today fear that they might fall victim to an attack in the street at any moment.
For years Sharon has cultivated his unyielding image. Taking the initiative to create Israeli settlements in Gaza; unleashing the war in Lebanon of 1982, which he forced his own government to accept as an accomplished fact; protecting the Lebanese militias who massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps; denouncing the Oslo accords as inadmissible concessions to the Palestinians–Sharon presented himself during all this time as the strong man, the one man who wouldn’t hesitate to use any means to put down the Palestinians.
Today Sharon is in power, U.S. leaders back him up, the army has a free hand to carry out its operations in the occupied territories ... but the action of his government instead looks more like someone throwing a tantrum. Sharon only has one important asset: the absence of an alternative on the side of the Labor Party leaders. Their policy allowed him to take power; they now participate in his government and in fact don’t propose another policy than that of Sharon, which is itself only the continuation in a more determined fashion of what the Labor Party carried out before.
Thus, it’s unfortunately the case that Sharon is likely to be challenged from the right. There are Israeli extreme-right groups who preach pure and simple annexation of the territories and expulsion of all Arabs, an “ethnic purification” on the scale of Palestine; they reproach Sharon for refusing to carry this out.
These partisans of outrage forget one thing: if Sharon hasn’t done it, it’s not because this long time partisan of a “greater Israel” has scruples, but because he doesn’t have the political means to do it. Despite everything, despite even the rightward trend of Israeli society during recent years, there are demonstrations of opposition, including in the Israeli army. A great part of the population continues to think that one day or another it will be necessary to get along with their neighbors, and they aren’t ready to envisage a total and prolonged war, which the pursuit of such a policy would lead to.
Before leading that war, before being able to lead a radical policy of expelling the Palestinians, Israeli leaders would have to indoctrinate the Israeli population, to silence all opposition, to install a real fascism against the Israelis themselves, to make the population accept this and, finally, to accept the consequences that such a choice would create in western public opinion, whose pressure still counts for a lot in Israel.
Sharon, despite his boasting, doesn’t have the means to do this, nor does the Israeli extreme right. But they could have the means to do so tomorrow and this is a real danger. The Israeli population isn’t threatened only by the Palestinian suicide attacks. In the long run, it’s threatened still more by the policy of its leaders and that of its army.
It’s urgent and indispensable that opposition grow in the Israeli population to this dirty war, that Israelis find a way toward the Palestinian population, and that before it’s too late, they stop this spiral, which is as dangerous and as murderous for the Israelis as it is for the Palestinians.
Mar 18, 2002
On March 12, U.S. troops finally occupied the valley of Shah-i-Kot, eleven days after the start of the largest ground battle in the Afghan war. The U.S. had dropped more than 2,500 bombs and completely leveled–by accident!–the villages of Sirkankel and Marzak. This battle, of course, puts the lie to Bush’s declaration of victory in early December.
This battle was fought under close military censorship. The Pentagon has long explained that one of the reasons for its defeat in Viet Nam was all the TV coverage showing burnt down villages and the horror of war, which turned the American public against the war.
The Pentagon says it also decided it would no longer give body counts. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “I don’t do body counts. This country tried that in Vietnam and it didn’t work.” During that war, the Pentagon vastly inflated body counts, adding up to more people than there were in the country, and still the U.S. lost the war.
Despite what Rumsfeld said, various U.S. commanders are giving body counts. Reporters on different days heard that 100, 500, 200, 800, or 300 Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers were killed. “These numbers are extremely fuzzy” a so-called “senior” military officer told the New York Times. When reporters finally got to tour the valley, they found only three bodies, less than the eight Americans and three Afghan allied soldiers who died in the fighting. (Where were the others? One Pentagon official declared that other al Qaeda might have buried them!)
In fact, what seems obvious is that U.S. troops were drawn into a trap, from which the al Qaeda (or whatever these forces were) were able then to melt away into the countryside. As General Abdul Wahab Joyenda, who commanded Afghan forces allied to the U.S., said, “There are always ways to escape. It is a mountainous place, full of snow. You can’t seal everywhere.”
A couple of the U.S. soldiers did manage to speak to reporters before the brass shut them up. They described the battle, where they were shocked to come under attack and to see they were outnumbered. The troops understood the battle in a different way from the generals, which isn’t a surprise. The same thing happened in Viet Nam, where many of the troops realized that they were invaders and that the people of the country certainly didn’t want them there.
U.S. troops can hardly expect a different welcome in Afghanistan when U.S. planes wipe out whole villages.
Mar 18, 2002
States, one after the other, are saying that they don’t have enough money to cover their share of CHIP, Medicaid and other social programs. California, for example, won’t extend CHIP to uninsured parents. Utah not only froze enrollment in CHIP, it also eliminated most dental coverage, imposed monthly premiums and increased co-payments for drugs, lab tests, X-rays and hospital stays. Montana also froze enrollment, Oklahoma and New Mexico are moving towards dropping children from the program, and Rhode Island imposed monthly premiums.
CHIP covers children whose families make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but can’t afford private health insurance. The federal government pays for up to 85% of the costs, the states the rest. By last year, 4.6 million children were enrolled in CHIP.
The politicians started CHIP and expanded Medicaid in the 1990s, as a way to justify cutting back on welfare. They said they wouldn’t allow people who go to work but get a low income to suffer a loss of the medical care welfare had provided.
Now, however, the politicians are going back on their promises. They say that these cuts are necessary because times are hard, that there’s no money, etc. They say they have to cut Medicaid and similar programs because these programs amount to a big part of the state budgets.
But that’s only because these social programs are used as a way to relieve the corporations from paying for health insurance for their workers, and to make taxpayers, that is, the working class itself, foot the bill instead. It’s all part of how corporations increased their profits year after year throughout the 1990s–with the help of the same politicians who cry poverty today.
Moreover, there are much bigger parts of state budgets that could be cut today–all those subsidies to the corporations.
Denying health insurance to children, that is, human beings in their formative years, means that millions of people will be prone to diseases throughout their entire lives. It’s a sick society that sacrifices the health of future generations for the sake of protecting the profits of a few.
Mar 18, 2002
On March 2, a man who had done nothing was shot by a trigger-happy FBI agent in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.
The FBI had been searching for a 32-year-old who had robbed a bank branch two weeks earlier. Supposedly, the agents had received a tip the bank robber would be driving a “red sedan” and–if you believe them–wearing a white hat. The FBI spotted 20-year-old Charles Schultz wearing a white hat and getting into a red Pontiac driven by his 16-year-old girlfriend, Krissy Harkum. Four FBI agents in an unmarked car pulled the Pontiac over. They surrounded the Pontiac, all four carrying M-4 assault rifles. The couple was ordered to get out. When Schultz reached for his seatbelt to comply, an agent shot him in the face, shattering his cheek and jaw, causing major damage to his face.
The FBI admits that Shultz had nothing to do with the crime. It was simply a “coincidence,” a case of “mistaken identity,” a “horrible accident.”
No–this is simply the result of a conscious FBI policy, which the FBI admits. Their agents are trained to–in the words of the FBI manual–use “deadly force.” That is, “shoot first, ask later.”
For a week and a half, Schultz was in serious but stable condition at Maryland’s Shock Trauma unit. Though the bullet remains lodged in his face, he has now been released from the hospital. He is waiting for the series of operations necessary for reconstruction surgery. The couple is worried about coming up with the money because Schultz was recently laid off from his job with a medical company and is without health insurance.
While his girlfriend was not wounded, her family said that she continues to be traumatized. Both families of the young couple expressed shock, as are other people, over the FBI’s use of brutal violence in the shooting of an innocent man.
The FBI has now apologized–although they continue to insist that Krissy Harkum was wrong about what happened. She said they gave no help to Schultz when he was lying on the ground wounded and did not call an ambulance for almost a half hour.
FBI officials also say they are “investigating” the matter–that is, delaying it long enough to sweep it under the rug.
And that’s what will happen unless there is sufficient reaction from people in the area.
Mar 18, 2002
In 1929, the financial bubble of the “roaring ’20s” burst. The stock market crashed. Companies and even banks went bankrupt. Factories closed. Millions of workers across the country lost jobs, homes, their life’s savings.
There was no unemployment insurance, no public assistance, no social security in 1929. Those without jobs survived only by their wits–or they starved.
In many cities, socialist and communist militants formed Unemployed Councils which attempted to organize the unemployed to demand food and other aid.
In Detroit, by March of 1932, 225,000 were unemployed. Over one-third of those were laid off from the Ford Motor Company. Detroit’s Unemployed Council organized a march on Ford’s River Rouge manufacturing complex, to demand that the unemployed be given their jobs back.
This march of about 4,000 workers went peacefully until the Ford marchers crossed from Detroit into Dearborn–when police tear-gassed them, the fire departments hosed them with blasts of icy water, and Ford’s private police force, the “service men,” opened fire on the crowd, with Dearborn police following suit. Four of the organizers, in the front, were killed instantly. One wounded worker died weeks later. About 60 others were wounded–shot in the back as they fled.
The Unemployed Council held a massive public funeral march for the four murdered. A massive crowd, tens of thousands strong, took over the broad main street. Detroit police decided it was better to disappear. For several miles, through the downtown area, stopping all traffic and all business, the crowd escorted the victims to their graves. Nothing like this had ever been seen in Detroit.
The Ford Hunger March of 1932 may have marked a set-back to the workers’ movement–for a brief period–as did a number of other strikes during 1932 and 1933. But these first actions gave heart to the workers and unemployed who were ready to fight. By 1934, workers had begun to win a few very important strikes which then gave a huge impulse to the workers’ movement and finally to the “sit-downs” of 1936-37–that is, to the workers’ take-overs of their factories.
Out of these struggles were born the fighting unions of the 1930s. The movement forced the giant corporations and their government to accept the workers’ unions. They were forced to install the “social safety net” of social security, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, and public welfare.
The power and audacity of this movement rested on the leadership and inspiration of political militants, of socialists and communists.
Today, 70 years after the Hunger March, some union officials and some politicians celebrate its anniversary and try to borrow its credit for themselves. But had it been left up to bureaucrats and politicians like those today, no Unemployed Councils would have existed. No leadership would have been available to workers ready to wage a relentless battle against capital and its defenders.
The next upsurge of the workers’ movement will need to find its leadership from the same sources as did that of the 1930s.
Mar 18, 2002
Last month, California Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, announced that he was cutting funding for education by 843 million dollars. Much-needed school maintenance and renovation projects will be abandoned, classes will be cancelled, nursing and counseling positions will be eliminated, class sizes will increase further. Needless to say, schools in working-class districts will be hit hardest.
Of course, Davis and the rest of the politicians and state officials say that they have no choice, that these cuts are due to a 12.5 billion dollar deficit for the state. They go on to blame this deficit on the recession, the impact on the economy of September 11, etc.
What a story! You would think that the state was about to run out of money, and the politicians were busy cutting spending across the board.
Of course, none of this is true. On the contrary, tucked into the California state budget are billions of extra dollars in spending on electricity, money that is going directly into the profits and bank accounts of the big power companies, electric utilities and power brokers.
That’s right. The very same companies–with Enron leading the pack–that engineered the big supposed “power crisis” last year are now being rewarded for their fake crisis with taxpayers’ dollars. Last spring, in the middle of the state’s supposed “energy crisis,” Governor Davis secretly signed long-term contracts with the electricity companies. These contracts meant that the state is now paying 88 dollars per megawatt-hour, or three times more on average than the current rate. Not only that, but the state is also buying more electricity than it can use and paying companies whether they provide power or not.
These contracts are not just for a few months. No, many of them extend for 20 years or more!
What a scam!
No, Davis and the rest of the politicians are not cutting public education, as well as other social services for the working class, because the state government is running out of money. No, they are cutting education because they have other priorities. Their priorities are first and always to boost the profits of the big capitalists.
Mar 18, 2002
The Washington D.C. Metro is changing the signs, maps and pylons systemwide. They’ll now read, “Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.”
Was anyone confused as to what airport is sitting across the Potomac from the nation’s capital? No! But someone in Congress thought it would be a good idea–a good idea, which will cost in excess of $400,000. The District has no better way to spend $400,000?
The irony here is that the new signs will probably confuse lots of people who today call the airport “National.”
Mar 18, 2002
On March 9, leaders of AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) signed off on the governor’s third contract proposal for Maryland state workers. Like the previous two, this one would also give up pay raises and health benefits that state workers now have. Unions affiliated with the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) had already agreed to proposal number two.
Governor Parris Glendening spoke of a budget crunch to justify demands for these sacrifices. Nevertheless, his administration has continued and even expanded its subsidies to businesses. What the governor really means is that he will continue to sacrifice the interests of working people to serve the interests of the rich.
This isn’t the first time the Maryland state administration has delayed state workers’ raises. Over the past few years, across-the-board pay raises have been delayed repeatedly. Having gotten away with that, Glendening must have decided he could now also delay seniority-based raises called “steps.”
While they call it a “delay,” in reality it’s a cut in pay. Workers never get the money for the time it’s “delayed.”
The Glendening administration was playing a game with these three contract proposals–much like a shell game where a pea is quickly shifted back and forth under three shells. Now you see it, now you don’t: Shift things around often enough and the governor expects to hook a sucker.
The unions are doing the dirty work for the governor–pretending that because one proposal appears to take less away from the workers than the others that it is less bad than the other two. And AFSCME is warning the workers that the state legislature might not agree to proposal number three, implying that the workers better take one of the governor’s proposals before it’s too late.
What nonsense! This is a Democratic governor with a Democratic state legislature. But the unions pretend that the governor can’t control the legislature. This is nothing but the old hard-cop-soft-cop routine!
In effect, the unions are running interference for the governor.
Workers certainly can see through these games. At the very least, they don’t have to give their stamp of approval to sacrifices being foisted on them.