The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Issue no. 696 — February 3 - 17, 2003

EDITORIAL
Bush Prepares for War on Iraq While Declaring War on Us

Feb 3, 2003

Bush’s second State of the Union speech may have ended with an argument for going to war against Iraq. But it started out with some ringing pronouncements about domestic policy. There was a reason for this order, and all the media repeated what Bush’s advisers had told them: he did not intend to repeat his father’s mistake, going to war against Iraq, while "forgetting" about domestic issues. Junior Bush’s speech was carefully crafted, as a New York Times headline put it, to "cover his domestic flank."

And so we heard Bush pledge that he would work for "an economy that grows fast enough so it can employ every man and woman who seeks a job." He promised "high quality affordable health care for every American." And he talked about "tax relief for everyone who pays income taxes."

The speech that Bush’s advisers wrote for him was long on promises, and replete with a pretty picture of an American filled with opportunity for everyone–but awfully short on details.

No wonder, since this pretty picture was painted to hide some pretty ugly details.

In reality, Bush’s America is an America where the government is even now looking to see how to cut back health care for seniors, and how to cut social programs that give some support to the unemployed. And the budget that Bush submitted to Congress shows this.

It is an America where the wealthy will take an even bigger share of the national wealth because of the tax cuts Bush is proposing. It is an America which encourages corporations to run to the bankruptcy courts to dump their pension plans, and in which Congress requires companies to demand wage concessions from their employees, just as the last Congress did for the airlines. And it is an America where corporations can declare a fictitious loss and get tax credits for laying off workers and closing plants.

Bush’s America is an America built on the backs of working people. And his so-called concern with "domestic issues" is only a concern for getting re-elected.

His speech had two aims–to fool working people while robbing us blind, and to get us to accept the war he right now prepares.

This war against Iraq that Bush wants to drag us into is not our war. If we were to accept it, we would accept all Bush’s terms.

Bush would have us agree to send the sons and daughters of the working class to fight a war against innocent civilians. They will die in this war–or come back in pieces, physically or mentally, just as U.S. soldiers did after Viet Nam or after the Gulf War.

Bush would have us agree to reduce our own living standard still further so war can be carried out to prop up the profits of all those corporations that benefit from raiding the wealth of other countries.

Bush’s State of the Union speech was a speech written to fool us. But working people are not fools. And his "union" is not ours. There is no reason for letting ourselves be suckered by this man, who is an open liar.

Pages 2-3

Factory Explosion in North Carolina

Feb 3, 2003

The day after Bush’s State of the Union address there was an explosion at a West Pharmaceutical Services factory in the small town of Kinston, North Carolina. Almost immediately the TV and radio screamed about a possible terrorist attack. Local officials were quoted as saying that terrorism couldn’t be ruled out.

This explosion was simply another of the regular industrial accidents that take as many a recorded 5,000 lives a year in this country and injure hundreds of thousands more. But it was another pretext for the media to try to convince us we’re surrounded by enemies who are trying to kill us. And they used it.

This explosion seems to have been caused by ignitable rubber dust, a lot of which is made in the production process. Large pieces of sheet metal rose 300 feet in the air and then rained down. Walls collapsed on the 130 workers in the factory and computers flew through the air. Four workers died and 36 were injured, some critically with severe burns.

This factory was inspected last October 15 by the North Carolina Division of Occupational Safety and Health. It found 15 safety violations, of which seven were considered serious, that is, life threatening. And yet this company, which owns 23 other facilities, was fined only $9,075. Nor did the state demand immediate changes to eliminate the dangers. And it certainly didn’t threaten to shut the factory down until the changes were made.

Companies put their workers in unsafe conditions–and then often fire you if you refuse to work in those unsafe conditions. And the state, which doesn’t really enforce safety standards, backs up the company when you’re fired.

This is the terrorism that workers face, and we face it every day.

Medicare:
Under the Guise of Giving Drug Coverage to Seniors, Bush Gives Them the Shaft

Feb 3, 2003

In his State of the Union address Bush spoke about a new government program to add prescription drugs to Medicare. It would cost 400 billion over ten years. The government would make contracts with private insurance companies and any senior wanting the drug coverage would have to join an HMO or PPO set up by these insurance companies.

A few years ago seniors were encouraged to join HMO’s which offered them prescription coverage plus a kind of Medicare supplement plan. But then the HMO’s and PPO’s found they weren’t making enough profit off of them and either severely cut back their benefits or dropped them. People who were dropped had to try to go back to their old plans, which often wouldn’t take them because of their medical condition, leaving them stuck not only without drug coverage, but without any Medicare supplement plan.

Now Bush is proposing a repeat of the same plan, without any improvement of the HMO’s into which seniors would be pushed. The joke–except it’s not funny–is that Bush says he’s proposing a 400 billion dollar increase even while his administration has been whittling away at Medicare spending.

The main thrust of this new spending is not to improve Medicare. It’s to give a massive subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry, which is already the most profitable industry in the country. Many seniors can’t afford drugs because of their high expense. Under Bush’s plan the government would pay part of the cost–not nearly all–for their medicines. The price of drugs wouldn’t come down at all, but sales for the corporations would go up.

No wonder the head of Abbott Laboratories, one of the biggest drug makers, praised Bush’s "prescription drug benefit."

Bush:
State of His Union—Not Ours

Feb 3, 2003

What did Bush actually propose in his "State of the Union" message?

Bush says, "We have a duty to reform domestic programs vital to our country ..." What he means by reform is to cut funding for the states, costing states millions of dollars for education, road construction, medical care and low-income housing, among other things.

Bush says, "We must offer younger workers a chance to invest in retirement accounts that they will control and they will own." In other words, younger workers should exchange a guaranteed pension from Social Security for speculation on Wall Street–all so that Wall Street can put its hands on more money.

Bush says, "Our second goal is high quality, affordable health care for all Americans." What he proposes would give older people drug coverage only if they moved to one of the few HMOs accepting Medicare.

How does Bush propose to "promote energy independence for our country, while dramatically improving the environment"? By giving another billion dollars in subsidies to the auto industry under the pretext of research in hydrogen-powered automobiles–cars which Detroit already had made in proto-type and then put aside after the last billion dollar hand-out was put in their accounts. In every other case, the Bush administration has already shown its willingness to make the air dirtier and reliance on oil greater by easing pollution rules on the energy generation industry and by refusing to insist on better gas mileage. "Energy independence" is another word for giving billions to their buddies running the oil, gas, auto and electricity corporations.

Bush brags, "I propose a 450 million dollar initiative to bring mentors to more than a million disadvantaged junior high students and the children of prisoners." So why did his administration propose to cut back on what the federal government will contribute to school systems which produce so many "disadvantaged" students? Why does he propose policies which lead to higher unemployment and more poverty, exactly the things that lead to crime? Bush’s proposals today will create even more children whose parents are in prison.

In fact, Bush is not "reforming" domestic programs to serve the population, he’s "reforming" them–that is, cutting them–so he has still more money to give to the wealthy. Last year’s tax cuts are estimated to cost more than 600 billion dollars over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The price of Bush’s new tax cuts would be more than a trillion dollars in lost tax revenues. In 2003, the top ten% of taxpayers are due to gain 60% of the tax cuts.

But Bush is proposing to give still more tax cuts to the wealthy. He said, "I ask you to end the unfair double taxation of dividends," and he also proposes to lower the taxes paid by corporations on profits. Who benefits from such proposals? Only the top 10% of the population, which own 90% of the stocks.

But beyond tax reductions, there are all the subsidies Bush is proposing for the corporations. The administration has already given billions in subsidies to the airline industry, which claimed it was hurting after September 11th. The Senate is debating a three-billion-dollar farm disaster aid bill which would provide millions of dollars to large agri-businesses–beyond the subsidies they already receive–even if they were not located in areas of declared disasters, and almost nothing to small family farms which are in desperate shape.

But the biggest gift of all is military spending, at least 364 billion dollars in 2003 and 380 billion dollars in 2004–without counting the extra cost of a war in Iraq. A good part of the defense budget goes to the huge U.S. corporations that make weapons for the military. As with many other government contractors, they are guaranteed profits–and high ones.

Bush tells the nation his government has a "duty to reform domestic programs." What he meant was a duty to the capitalists, which Bush is carrying out very well. His proposals go a long way toward allowing those whose business is making profits to continue making them–at our expense.

The Loss of Space Shuttle Columbia and Its Crew

Feb 3, 2003

On February 1, the space shuttle Columbia, with its crew of seven on board, disintegrated during re-entry, leaving parts strewn over several states.

It was both terribly shocking and yet a reminder of the dangers inherent in space travel as it is today.

A NASA spokesperson reported that the odds of a shuttle breaking up during re-entry are one in 350. If we look at the number of trips carried out by the space shuttles–113–and remember that both Challenger and Columbia ended in disaster, the odds are much worse.

If our odds for commercial air travel were this bad, few people would take a plane.

It’s a tribute to the men and women who have carried out missions on the space shuttle that they did it despite the odds. One former shuttle crew member, interviewed after Columbia disintegrated, explained that for an astronaut "the fear of not getting on the next flight exceeds the fear of flying on it."

The men and women who perished in this disaster, just like the other men and women who have ridden the shuttle before them, are explorers in the best sense of the term. They were ready to rigorously train themselves, to use all their considerable expertise, to devote the central part of their lives in order to expand our knowledge of the earth, the solar system and various parts of the universe. And they did this, knowing the risks they were taking.

In so doing, they helped science push beyond the limits of what was known before about the universe.

None of this is to say that this was the only aim or even the primary aim for which the U.S. government set up NASA.

NASA was built primarily as a vehicle for extending military capabilities. The scientific discoveries and the technical know-how that have come from NASA are in fact mainly a side effect of that main purpose. And many things that NASA might have done–if its purpose had been essentially to expand what we know about the universe–were not done. Many technologies were not developed. Not because they could not have been–but because they did not contribute to the military aim of NASA, at least indirectly.

The crew died flying in a vehicle that was designed primarily to serve U.S. military needs in space, and only secondarily to serve scientific purposes. Whether or not this contributed to the tragedy we have no way of knowing. But it illustrates what was primary for NASA and what was secondary.

One of the seven astronauts on this mission was an Israeli colonel who had made a name in Israel’s various wars against Arab countries. He was part of the mission that took out an Iraqi nuclear reactor before the Gulf War. In other words, one member of the crew was not included because of his scientific expertise, but as a way for the Bush administration to make a political statement. This, too, shows the way that NASA has been distorted.

U.S. capitalism, precisely because of the wealth accumulated in this country, has done some extraordinary things–but always in a distorted way, leaving much promise unfulfilled.

For the full realization of the promise in a program like NASA–stripped of its military purposes–society itself would have to be stripped of capitalism and its drive for profit anywhere and everywhere in the world. It’s this system which requires an ever expanding military and submits projects like NASA to it.

Nonetheless a future society will one day pay tribute to the explorers like those who rode Columbia’s last flight, just like we today pay tribute to Ferdinand Magellan, who died before his mission was completed–a mission which proved that ships could sail around the earth.

Pages 4-5

January 18–19:
Weekend of Protests against War on Iraq

Feb 3, 2003

January 18-19 was a weekend of big protests in a number of countries against the U.S. government’s escalating war against Iraq and its threatened invasion of that country. Thousands marched in Japan, Turkey and Egypt. In Europe there were large demonstrations in France, Belgium, Spain and Britain; others were held in Germany, Italy, Sweden and Russia. Military bases were chosen as the rallying point in several demonstrations.

Demonstrations took place in this country also. At least a hundred thousand people, probably more, young and old, gathered in Washington, D.C. on the Mall and then marched to the Naval Yard, determined to say NO to the Bush administration’s drive for an all-out attack against Iraq. Nearly a hundred thousand more marched in San Francisco, and smaller numbers in other cities.

Among the marchers were a sizable number of first-time protesters as well as many people who had opposed the war in Viet Nam. They spoke of their objection to American soldiers and Iraqi people dying in this war. All around, the protesters could be heard calling Bush "nuts" or "crazy."

It’s a good sign that throughout the U.S. there are a growing number of people ready to add their numbers in protest. But Bush is not "crazy." People who oppose the war need to recognize that. If he is able to get away with talking blatant lies to justify something so dangerous as this, it’s because he represents a ruling class whose interests are served by such wars.

They are the ones who own the media that has been beating the drums of war. They own the oil companies that will get to grab more Middle Eastern oil. They own the factories that pay low wages for labor working in horrible conditions in countries all around the globe.

This war is aimed at imposing and reinforcing the U.S. empire around the world. Workers here are in the belly of the beast. The American working class has the power to stop this war.

Don’t Bet on the U.N.

Feb 3, 2003

In the United States, the French government, along with Germany and other governments, is portrayed as being against U.S. military intervention in Iraq. But why? And where will this opposition lead?

The minor imperialist powers like France and Germany do not want to see Bush launch a war against Iraq because it would translate into a reinforcement of the domination of American corporations in the Middle East, against which the French corporations will not be able to compete.

That’s not the same as saying they will oppose U.S. domination when push comes to shove. The proof is what happened before the U.N. gave Bush Resolution 1441 when he threatened he would go to war whether or not they did. France and Russia had seemed ready to oppose Bush. But their pitiful reversal at the end already showed that the "principles" which they refer to don’t carry much weight.

In any case, Bush has already announced that he will go to war with or without another U.N. resolution, with or without other countries’ support. But that does not mean the U.N. will oppose the U.S. when Bush decides to go to war. Just as before, it will fall in line, despite what its inspectors find, or more exactly, don’t find.

So the question then, is what will the governments which supposedly oppose this war do if Bush decides to go it alone? They will not remain on the side in the name of principle, any more than they did in the Gulf War of 1991. They will send troops, preparing for their corporations to participate in the spoils.

People in this country who oppose this war cannot put their trust in the U.N.

Anthrax Danger:
Here, Not in Iraq

Feb 3, 2003

Bush devoted a lot of time to anthrax in his speech, going on and on about what Saddam Hussein could do with it. It’s certainly true that Saddam Hussein once had anthrax, and Bush should know, since the U.S. sent it to Iraq’s Sera Vaccine Institute in 1980’s, when the U.S. was supporting Iraq against Iran. But in 1996 the U.N. weapons inspectors blew up the Al Hakum factory, the only factory in the country where Iraq prepared anthrax for weapons. No new factory has been built. Any liquid bulk anthrax that might not have been found at the time became useless as a weapon within three years time, at least according to experts in the field.

And yet there is an anthrax threat in this country–it just doesn’t come from Iraq. In October of 2001, anthrax was sent through the mail, killing five people. But that terrorist attack has since been brushed under the table. For obvious reasons. The anthrax that was used then was developed by U.S. biological weapons laboratories which continue right up to this very day to manufacture anthrax as a weapon, using the excuse that it’s necessary in order to develop a vaccine against anthrax.

From time to time the name of Steven Hatfill has come up in connection with this attack. Hatfill worked at Ft. Detrick in Maryland, the government lab that worked on germ warfare and was one of the few scientists to have access to the exact type of anthrax used in the killings in 2001. Whether or not he sent the anthrax letters, his history gives a pretty picture of U.S. weapons research. Before he did research on anthrax, he worked for the U.S. government on the Ebola virus, one of the most deadly known, looking into its possibilities as a weapon. He was chosen for this work because of the "medical research" he had done for the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia, followed by similar "medical research" for the apartheid government of South Africa. He also worked for the Selous Scouts, a white paramilitary unit that fought the new black regime inside Zimbabwe.

We have no way to know whether Hatfill was the anthrax terrorist. But one thing we do know is that a government that employed someone like him for five years must employ any number of people who could be the anthrax terrorist.

In any case, whoever was behind the anthrax attack is still functioning, with some connection to anthrax laboratories here–while George Bush whips up war over Iraq.

When Bush Doesn’t Like What the U.N. Inspectors Say the News Media Ignore the Inspectors

Feb 3, 2003

Ever since September 11, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Pentagon chief Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Powell all have raised the specter of Iraqi nuclear weapons being used to attack people in the United States. In a speech in October, President Bush asserted: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi scientists, a group he calls his ‘nuclear mujahedeen’–his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

And yet according to the report first given to the United Nations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, inspectors concluded, Iraq has no "nuclear mujahedeen" and no nuclear facilities that are being rebuilt. They just don’t exist. As for the famous "high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment," the inspectors found that they are not used for building nuclear weapons but instead for building short-range rockets that are–by the way–legal under the U.N. accords.

Earlier last week, when the Bush administration was informed of the nuclear inspectors’ findings, it was reported to be "furious"–obviously because the inspectors’ report would not conform to the Bush administration’s lies–and Bush’s henchmen openly vowed to the press that the U.S. would pressure the nuclear inspectors to change their findings.

But in the end, the International Atomic Energy Agency did not alter the report. No problem–it was all but ignored by the press, at least in this country. The news media, which is supposedly so free here, relegated it to the back pages, when it was reported at all. The Democrats, the supposed opposition to the Republicans, did not raise any of the issues that were dealt with by the nuclear inspectors.

Once again, Bush was given a free hand to continue lying to justify a war that can only be described as a potential holocaust. If this holocaust is carried out, it is clearly because the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the owners of the news media, agree with this war.

The Only "Smoking Gun" Is the One Bush Is Aiming against Iraq

Feb 3, 2003

Bush, in his State of the Union speech, tried to convey the sense that the inspectors had reported finding a "smoking gun" in Iraq, when they gave their report to the U.N. the day before.

He thundered, "The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons material sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax...,materials sufficient to produce 38,000 liters of botulinum....Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve gas. He has not accounted for these materials, he has given no evidence that he has destroyed them."

In fact, the inspectors had not concluded what Bush tried to imply. They had given a short list of things they had not yet been able to verify regarding some of these materials–and the quantities of each of these things that they talked about, by the way, were less than half of what Bush claimed the next night.

Of course, Bush grossly exaggerates when he is making propaganda, which is every time he speaks "to the nation," but his exaggerations are not the main point. The main point is that he engaged in outright lies claiming or implying things about these chemical weapons that neither the current U.N. inspectors, nor the earlier ones had ever said. In the first place, most of the "missing materials" that Bush referred to are now far past their expiration dates. They degrade over time, and become harmless.

In the U.N. inspectors’ report, there was no "smoking gun"–that is, no proof of all the charges that Bush has made over the last months. And, in fact, many of the charges–such as the supposed ties between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, or the famous aluminum tubes for weaponizing uranium–were shown to be quite simply false, as the U.S.‘s own CIA already said.

This is not to say that the U.N. inspection report did not include some charges against Iraq. But the first thing that should be said about this is that there were actually two reports–and the one that most clearly refuted U.S. claims, the one on nuclear weapons, was not televised on the major networks.

The other part of the report, given by Hans Blix, was the only one that most people saw, if they happened to see it in the middle of the day. This report, after complementing Iraq on the way it had allowed the inspectors to do their work, then included some reproaches of Iraq: the regime had not offered complete total proof that the weapons Bush referred to had all been destroyed. As if a nation which had been submitted to intermittent bombing for over 12 years and a catastrophic blockade for almost that long, could be expected to keep absolute records on every single weapon it had ever had in its possession, even after they were destroyed. Look at the U.S.‘s own Pentagon–year after year, Congressional audits discover that the Pentagon, with all its computerized inventories, has "lost" as much as ten% of all its supplies and weapons. It loses armored vehicles, big modern tanks, even airplanes–without anyone having any idea where they went to. We might add that the anthrax that was used in the terrorist mail attack of October 2001 somehow found its way out of U.S. weapons laboratories, without anyone apparently noticing it was gone. Last year, the Pentagon reported that it had lost dozens of laptop computers with highly secret information on them.

And yet, they pretend that Iraq, in a really desperate situation, will keep track of every single liter of anthrax that it ever produced. No, Blix’s complaint that Iraq had not kept adequate records and that it was not "actively" helping the U.N. inspectors, was nothing more than a way to criticize Iraq, when they had nothing real to criticize it for. And Blix certainly knew full well that Bush would take these criticisms–and turn them into a very different accusation, making most people who heard his speech believe that the inspectors had found proof of such weapons in Iraq.

Blix also reproached Iraq for the fact that the U.N. inspectors sometimes met demonstrations of hostility toward the West by the Iraqi population. Imagine that! You live in a country, which has been bombarded and starved. You have seen your children die because of this. And then you are reproached because you do not greet people who have been involved in these attacks on you with open arms and kisses. This may not have been Blix’s biggest reproach, but the fact that he dare say that shows exactly what the U.N. is doing in Iraq. Under the pretext of remaining "scrupulously neutral," it is providing Bush with just enough implied criticism of Iraq, that Bush can take it and run.

But, as everyone knows, and the U.N. first of all, since Bush already proclaimed this when he addressed the U.N. in October–he does not need proof to go to war.

In other words, the inspections are a sham, whose only purpose might be to kill time, while the U.S. military builds up its forces in the area. Of course, the U.S. could buildup much faster than this, if it wanted to. If Bush has been dragging his feet, it’s almost certainly in order to give the Iraqi generals one last chance either to carry out a coup against Saddam Hussein or to convince him to go into the asylum that Saudi Arabia has offered him–probably with U.S. blessing.

Neither of these things would provide much respite for the Iraqi population–nor would they mean that U.S. troops would not be sent in to Iraq to quell the disorder that might jump off in such a situation.

In any case, no matter what happens, Bush is preparing to carry out a further war on the Iraqi population. If the Iraqi generals get rid of Saddam Hussein in some way, Bush will ally with them–and with all the torturers who made up Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship–against the Iraqi people. Bush has already announced that these torturers can have amnesty for what they did against the Iraqi people, if they only switch sides.

This farce of the inspections is nothing but a way to justify further destruction, in one fashion or another, in Iraq. And why? All so that the U.S., now the only superpower in the world, can demonstrate to the world, that everyone must dance to the U.S.‘s tune. That is, so that U.S. corporations can go where they want around the world, paying as low a wages as possible and draining as much wealth as possible.

Pages 6-7

Baltimore City:
Passing the Blame to the Victim

Feb 3, 2003

Three children, ages 6, 5 and 4, were found alone in a freezing cold house with no electricity during the bitter winter weather last week. Their mother, 22-year-old Tiffany Simmons, was later arrested and charged with child abuse.

Simmons’ lawyer disputes the child abuse charge, pointing out that the mother had left her children with their grandmother while she went out trying to find help for the family. The young woman and her children slept in a bed piled with blankets on each night that the police accused her of leaving the children alone.

Tiffany Simmons was a desperately poor, undereducated young woman, without a job, without an income with which she could pay her heating bills.

Did the police officers arrest her landlord when there was no water running in the pipes? Did the police officers go to the gas and electric company to ask why a house with three young children had its heat and electricity turned off–despite the company’s claims that there is help for all the poor who need it during freezing weather?

No, as usual in a society that produces poverty as a necessary result of enriching a tiny capitalist class, they sought to blame the victim.

Shame on them!

Freezing to Death in a Cold System

Feb 3, 2003

On January 23, a homeless man named Larry Andrews was found frozen to death in an alley in Detroit. Andrews had constructed a makeshift shanty out of cardboard and blankets to protect himself against freezing weather. Detroit was in the middle of a three-week frigid period in which the high temperatures never reached above freezing, and many nights were near zero. The temperature on the day Larry Andrews froze to death never got above 20 degrees.

This was only the latest in a series of deaths from the cold in Detroit and other northern cities. After Andrews’ death, the media reported that homeless shelters and warming centers are filled to overcapacity and have had to turn people away.

It’s an outrage that this society, with all its wealth, can’t even provide a place for homeless people to go so they don’t freeze to death. But warming centers and charity are only bandages on what is an open, gaping wound.

Homelessness is a social problem resulting from the way this society functions. There are estimated to be over 6,000 homeless people in the Detroit area. Certainly, many of the homeless have mental health problems. That, in itself, shouldn’t lead to homelessness. But in Michigan, 10 out of 15 state psychiatric hospitals have been closed during the last decade. Another one, Northville Psychiatric Hospital is slated for closing in July.

Some of the mentally ill thrown out when hospitals closed wound up in prison. The number of new state prison inmates in Michigan reporting past mental health care rose from about 6,200 in 1990 to almost 12,000 in 2002. Many others wind up on the streets, when they can’t really take care of themselves and have no family to provide care. They are simply waiting to be victimized.

But that’s only part of the problem. Over the last thirty years we have seen a lowering of wages for working people at the same time that the cost of living has increased. This can only mean that some people lose their homes and have no money to afford new living arrangements–even while working and even more if someone loses a job. Today we see whole families living on the street, even when someone in the family is still working.

This is the other side of the picture of a country in which great wealth is accumulated in the hands of a few people at the very top.

It’s outrageous to have people living in cardboard shanties in a society of such great wealth! A rationally organized society, if it used this wealth to address social problems, could provide jobs for its people. It could make treatment available for those with mental illness. And it could provide housing to everyone who needs it.

This capitalist society doesn’t do that.

In California, Democrats Lead the Attack on the Workers and Poor

Feb 3, 2003

California Governor Gray Davis’s proposed new budget is nothing but a massive attack against the services and programs that the state’s workers and poor depend on. Public schools, kindergarten through college, are to lose 5.4 billion dollars in funding, which will lead to layoffs, larger class sizes and all kinds of cuts in programs and services. Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for the poor, will lose 3.6 billion dollars, which is expected to push more than 500,000 people out of the program. For those still eligible for Medi-Cal, the state will no longer pay for artificial limbs, dental and eye care, hearing aids, physical therapy, syringes and test strips for diabetics and catheters for heart patients. Davis’s plan will reduce the cash aid from CalWorks, which provides relief to poor children and their families, by six%. Another program on the chopping block is the Supplemental Security Income, which currently helps nearly one million Californians who are aged, blind and disabled. Davis wants to cut their monthly payments by 49 dollars, the maximum amount allowed under federal law.

For state workers, Davis has 1900 job cuts in store–but that’s only the beginning. He said he also wants to renegotiate contracts and threatened additional layoffs if union officials don’t agree to concessions.

On top of all this, Davis is proposing tax increases amounting to 8.3 billion dollars, the burden of which will rest on the shoulders of people with low income. The sales tax is to increase by one cent per dollar; cigarette taxes will go up by $1.10 a pack; and there will be an additional surcharge for in-state telephone calls. Fees for various state services will also go up.

In declaring this all-out war on the workers and poor, Davis said he had no choice because of a record 35 billion dollar budget deficit California will run over the next 18 months. Other politicians and media "experts" jumped on the bandwagon, repeating like an old record: "We have no choice; we all have to sacrifice."

No choice? "All" have to sacrifice? First of all, where did this astronomic gap in the state budget come from? Who is really responsible for this outrageous deficit which is larger than the budget of any state except New York and Illinois?

These same politicians and "experts" blame the deficit mainly on reduced tax revenues, stemming from an economic downturn. The fall of the stock market reduced the taxable income of the wealthy, they say. Even if the wealthy had always paid all their taxes–which certainly isn’t true–that drop in tax revenue, estimated between six and eight billion dollars, doesn’t explain the nose dive of the budget from a 12 billion dollar surplus two years ago to a 35 billion deficit today.

If politicians don’t want to discuss in detail what’s really behind this budget shortfall, it’s for a good reason: they are responsible for it. Throughout the 1990s, states just like big corporations underfunded their pension funds and then covered it up by speculating on the high-riding stock market. In 2000, what was obvious and inevitable finally happened: the stock market started to collapse, leaving them short of cash–not just in California but in almost every state.

And what did these politicians do with the extra billions they didn’t put in state-run funds? Did they expand public services for the population? Did they hand the surplus they were running to the workers and poor–whom they are today trying to force to pay for the deficit?

Of course not. To the contrary: all those billions went, year after year, to the corporations and the wealthiest layers of the population. Some of these handouts are obvious–like the 6 billion dollars that Davis gave to electricity traders last year alone. The state will be paying much more for the long-term contracts that Davis signed during California’s "energy crisis" in 2000, buying electricity from these companies at artificially inflated rates. Other handouts are harder to detect, more or less hidden in the form of subsidies and tax breaks. Corporate taxes in California, for example, have dropped from 10 to 5% in the last two decades. The share of corporate taxes in the state’s total revenue has also been halved in the same time period, from 14% to 7%. And none of these low tax rates and tax breaks is being touched under Davis’s "rescue" plan for the California budget–so much for us "all" sacrificing to "save" California!

When Davis now tells working people that we have to sacrifice, it’s nothing but a continuation of what politicians have been doing all along, in California or elsewhere, whether the economy looked up or down, whether the budget had a surplus or a deficit: let the rich get richer at the expense of the workers and poor. It’s just that the cuts are bigger now.

Behind the smokescreen of the budget deficit, Davis in Sacramento is playing the same game as Bush in Washington, with tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for the workers and poor. With one alleged difference: Davis is a Democrat, and both chambers of the California legislature are controlled by the Democrats!

Michigan:
"Budget Crisis"?
No Just Another Politician’s ‘Trick’ to Fleece Us

Feb 3, 2003

Why is Michigan claiming severe state budget problems? It certainly had money not so long ago when it gave a lot of it away to some of wealthiest corporations in the world. For example, General Motors has received huge tax breaks, such as 107 million dollars for its Flint engine plant, 93 million dollars for the Warren Tech Center, and 169 million dollars for its new Lansing plant. In addition to this, the state took the outdated GM Building off GM’s hands, and gave it tax breaks for its new headquarters in the Renaissance Center. And GM is even now working on a deal to get still more.

Chrysler, meanwhile, just received millions in tax breaks to retool its Warren Truck Plant.

But it’s not just the auto companies that benefitted from Lansing’s deep pockets. In 2001, the drug giant Pfizer received a 25 million dollar state tax break to build a facility near Ann Arbor. In addition, the state agreed to invest one billion dollars over 20 years to fund research that Pfizer will have free access to and can profit from. In addition, the city of Ann Arbor also gave Pfizer 47.7 million dollars in tax breaks.

These are far from the only examples. It seems as if every week there is a new corporation announcing it is receiving tax breaks.

Besides giving tax breaks to wealthy corporations, the state also changed its entire tax system during the 1990s. Michigan cut the Single Business Tax, and changed the way schools were funded by drastically cutting property taxes and shifting a bigger burden on sales taxes–a tax that hits the poorest the hardest. They raised the sales tax from 4% to 6%.

So if there is a budget crisis today, it’s because these billions of dollars were handed out as great big gifts to some of the richest companies in the country. It’s obvious that if there’s now a crisis, these same corporations should be the first to pay.

So what has Michigan’s newly elected governor, Democrat Jennifer Granholm, proposed? She has said not one word about undoing the damage done by her Republican predecessor and forcing the wealthy and big businesses to start paying their fair share or rescinding tax breaks to wealthy corporations. Instead, she now says that the state needs to redefine what Michigan does for its people and some programs and entire departments must go.

Granholm announced she is cutting 127 million from the schools in the middle of the school year. Layoffs of non-union personnel have already started in several schools.

Granholm says don’t be surprised to see higher fees for state parks and services.

And she’s continuing cuts proposed by her predecessor in the social programs that mainly benefit poor and working class families. The state is also cutting money to education and to local revenue sharing programs that cities and townships (especially the poorer ones) rely on to fund many of their city services. Libraries, after-school programs, parks and recreation, fire protection, are all to be cut.

Of course, Michigan is not the only state in this situation. Forty other states are in the midst of what has been call the worst "budget crisis" in 50 years.

They are all there for the same reason. Whether run by Democrats or Republicans, they spent the 1990s stripping the cupboard bare for the sake of the big corporations.

Page 8

Pushing Safety to the Limit—And Beyond

Feb 3, 2003

A US Air commuter plane crashed January 8 in North Carolina killing 21 people. It turns out the plane was overloaded.

United Airlines, US Air and American are all laying off workers who service their big planes and at the same time expanding their "commuter" lines, which use these small planes where the workers get much lower wages and benefits. And they are using these little planes for longer flights.

The response of the Federal Aviation Administration to this crash was to require airlines to weigh all their commuter plane passengers over the next three months.

Why not cut back on the lengths of flights? Longer flights require more fuel, which weighs a lot.

Why not cut back on freight shipments? These, too, add weight.

No–the FAA is only making a pretense of a study. It has no intention of stopping the airlines from increasing their profits by using these small planes on longer flights.

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