the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 26, 2003
Deflation–it’s the new buzz word being bandied about to explain the mess the economy is in. When Alan Greenspan, head of the government’s Federal Reserve Banking System, referred to a "possible risk" of deflation, all the economists stepped up to debate the question: will Germany go the way of Japan and fall into a deflationary spiral, and will the United States follow soon afterwards–with greater unemployment and more cutbacks in government services and programs?
If what’s meant by deflation is a decrease in the prices we pay for goods and services, then there’s no deflation. That’s for sure. The government’s own Consumer Price Index demonstrates this–even with the multitude of tricks it uses to understate what’s happening to prices. Prices are still going up, and we continue to feel it in our pocketbooks.
But the question should be raised: why should "deflation" pose any risk to the economy? Deflation–which is nothing but a generalized decrease in the prices of goods and services–would simply mean we could buy more goods and services. In other words, we could be benefitting from the big increases in the productivity of our labor.
Year after year, we have been producing more goods and services in the same amount of time. Our labor has become more productive. Prices should have been going down; the time we have to work should have been reduced–in both cases, with no cut in pay.
If the benefits of increasing productivity were shared out equally, this is what would have happened.
But it’s not. And when government economists begin to speak about "deflation," they’re throwing the word around to hide the reality of today’s economy. Having lived through a vast speculative period–a so-called bubble, when prices on stocks, land, etc. all skyrocketed–the economy has since been stagnating, when it wasn’t declining. The bubble has burst. In a vain attempt to repair that damage, government authorities have been throwing money into the hands of the wealthy in every way they can.
Greenspan has dropped interest rates, month after month. Bush has cut taxes, several times over. None of this created new jobs. Just the opposite. Unemployment has gone up. Greenspan’s interest rate cuts and Bush’s tax cuts haven’t brought about new investment in the production of goods and services. Of course not, the aim of these measures was to insulate the wealthy from the consequences of the economic crisis that their own system produced.
The danger is not "deflation," as such. The danger is the mess which the bosses have made of their own economy. The risk is the still greater mess caused by every measure the government takes to prop up the bosses.
We are living through a period when the attacks are coming at us from every direction. Lost jobs, cuts in wages and benefits. Pensions destroyed in the stock market or the bankruptcy courts. The current attempt to "privatize" Social Security–that is, to turn it over to the same stock market which has eaten up workers’ private pension funds. Medical insurance taken away from us and medical care priced out of our reach. Declining public services and cutbacks in education. When the bosses’ flunkies start talking about "deflation" this is nothing but an announcement that they intend to cut back still further on our standard of living.
Those of us who work for our living have to prepare ourselves to fight against the real danger which exists–the intention of the bosses and their government to keep squeezing every bit of wealth out of our labor that they can. They won’t stop until we are convinced that we have to make a stand to stop them–and then start to do it.
May 26, 2003
Hoping for a little tax relief this year? Then don’t wait on the new tax cuts–there’s not a whole lot in them coming to the vast majority of the population.
President Bush said, "This bill I’m going to sign is good for American workers; it is good for American families; it is good for American investors, and it’s good for American entrepreneurs and small-business owners."
The president is certainly half right: the bill is good for American investors who get reductions in dividend and capital gains taxes. And this bill is good for businesses which will be estimated to get back 60 billion dollars over the next two years by a change in the depreciation rules.
But it’s not good for most American families. Half the tax cut goes to only the top five% of taxpayers. The other 95% of all taxpayers share out the other half of this tax cut, but not very equally.
For those earning up to $20,000 per year, the tax cut will average only $53 this year. However, those who make ten times that amount, $200,000 per year, will get a tax cut averaging more than $2,500, almost 50 times as much. And those who make half a million will get back more than $5,000. In other words, Congress was 100 times more generous to someone making half a million dollars than to someone making $20,000.
What’s worse is that those provisions which favor working people–like the child tax credit–will expire after two years–just after the next election. Those provisions which favor the wealthy either don’t expire at all or go for four years.
The final name on the bill they are now signing should be the "2003 Tax Cut Bill of the Rich, by the Rich, for the Rich."
May 26, 2003
The state budget in California is recording a record deficit, which politicians say is getting bigger every month. Democratic and Republican politicians claim that this is a "full-fledged crisis." To meet it, they are proposing to raise taxes that fall mainly on the working class, such as the sales tax and vehicle licence fees; to take away health care from millions of low-income working parents and their children; to slash education spending, laying off countless thousands of teachers and staff and shoe-horning students into ever more dilapidated and overcrowded schools and classrooms.
Crisis? Then why have the Democrats, the majority party in the state, introduced no fewer than 30 bills that would lower taxes paid by assorted businesses, including pharmaceuticals, NFL franchises, start-up companies, oil and gas companies, etc.–as well as wealthy individuals? The Republicans–not to be outdone by the Democrats–introduced no fewer than 50 bills lowering business taxes?
Of course, not all these bills will make it into law. But the political experts in Sacramento all agree that in any final budget package, there will certainly be a good number of business tax reductions tucked away.
This is why there’s a so-called budget crisis. The politicians are creating it.
Over the past 20 years, business taxes have been cut drastically. Companies are actually paying fewer total dollars in taxes than they did 20 years ago, despite the fact that business profits have officially more than tripled during the same period.
These tax cuts have come in two forms. Politicians pushed down the official tax rate on profits. At the same time, they put through a blizzard of what politicians and businessmen politely call "tax incentives," but which actually are tax loopholes and tax breaks for particular companies or industries.
Companies now get tax breaks for anything and everything. Tax credits for so-called "research and development" reduced corporate state taxes by 500 million dollars. Some of the biggest companies get their own private "manufacturing investment credit," worth 340 million dollars in lower state taxes every year. Oil companies get tax breaks for pumping oil–the state oil depletion allowance is 100 million dollars. Multi-national companies get tax breaks by reporting much of their income outside the U.S. (another 360 million dollars in lost taxes). Businesses that own property are given tax breaks simply for holding onto the property. Big farmers get tax breaks–for not selling their property to developers. What the state calls small companies get tax breaks for being small, tax breaks worth almost two billion dollars. And the state will often cut state taxes to zero for 5 or 10 years to a company for simply opening a new factory or office building, or to a sports team for opening a new stadium.
Of course, this is only a partial list of the kind of tax breaks companies get. The real list goes on and on. And that is not to speak of the billions of dollars in subsidies–through which the state government gives these companies the tax money we’ve paid in.
If there really is a budget crisis, then there’s a simple solution to it: Tax those with the deepest pockets, the biggest and richest companies in the world who took all this money.
May 26, 2003
On May 14 a refrigerator truck was found near Victoria, Texas. Inside were 19 people who died of asphyxiation and heatstroke. A dozen more were hospitalized. More than 100 people had been bunched in the truck with the temperature over 100 degrees inside. These were desperately poor people trying to get into the U.S. without legal papers, from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic.
Behind this tragedy lies a system based on the exploitation of labor with each boss trying to drive down the wages he pays. One of their favorite means is to bring in immigrant workers who have no papers and no legal rights: people who come from a desperately poor situation in their own country; people afraid to complain in this country about the extremely low wages and unsafe conditions they face.
This traffic in immigrant labor is common in the meat-packing industry, agribusiness, construction and garment, among others.
The police arrested four of the people directly involved in the incident, including the drivers of the truck and smugglers they worked with. But not touched were the owners of the various companies where the immigrants were being brought to work.
Of course not. The border patrol that let this truck pass without any inspection, the police, the district attorneys all line up in defense of a system based on the exploitation of labor.
May 26, 2003
Hutzel Hospital and Detroit Receiving Hospital are part of the DMC (Detroit Medical Center) system. These hospitals have long been a health-care safety net for Detroit’s poor and uninsured. But no more.
On May 20, DMC’s director announced that Hutzel and Detroit Receiving will stop accepting all but the most high-risk trauma and childbirth cases. One thousand hospital workers and doctors are to be laid off, and 300 beds closed.
Is this because the health of Detroit residents has suddenly improved dramatically, and there is no further need of these beds and these workers? Hardly! Just as everywhere else, the needs are growing as the economy shrinks. No, the issue is money. DMC says it cannot operate with continuing losses, and federal and state programs do not cover enough of the expense of caring for the poor.
DMC’s decision will force the uninsured to seek help at other hospitals, miles away and already themselves overcrowded and understaffed. The DMC director said, "There are other health care facilities in the region. This is not just the DMC’s responsibility."
Of course it’s true, a lot of other powers and institutions bear responsibility for health care for the population. But all of them are taking the same course as DMC: leave more and more of the uninsured to suffer and die on their own.
The Federal government leads off by underfunding Medicaid and Medicare programs, not covering all who need care, and denying payment for legitimate and necessary treatments. The drug and medical-equipment companies contribute by charging huge markups on their goods. Health insurance companies like HealthSouth and Aetna extort millions upon millions of dollars from those needing coverage–millions that flow into shareholders’ and CEO’s pockets. And hospital corporations, like DMC itself, tailor their policies to only one measure: are we making money?
The costs of health care in this country have little to do with the actual cost of care. We pay far more to support this host of parasites who milk the system at every turn. And increasingly, when the parasites find no more profits to be gained from the impoverished, their message is clear: "If you can’t pay, go away and die. Somewhere else!"
May 26, 2003
A bill now introduced in the Senate would open up loopholes for bosses to avoid paying time-and-a-half for overtime!
Set in fancy language, this outrageous time-warp of a proposal would allow bosses to avoid paying overtime unless workers put in over 80 hours in a two-week period.
Even then, bosses would not cough up overtime pay at the time. They would be allowed to "bank" the time and use it to give workers paid time off when the bosses didn’t need them. Thus the nickname, the "comp time" bill, standing for "compensatory time off."
Bosses’ uses for a bill like this can hardly be exaggerated.
Imagine the press operator who works 50 hours a week, gets paid for 40 hours straight time, and has 15 hours "banked" which he can use toward some time in the future. But that time is up to the boss. And the Senate bill even allows the boss to make the worker wait 13 months to claim the "bank" time. And what if a boss then says, "Not now, maybe later"? The worker has no recourse except to hire a lawyer and sue!
This is just one more step in the worsening of our working conditions–an attempt to get rid of time and a half or double time when you work more than eight hours.
Time and a half itself was a way to let the bosses get away with murder. Towards the end of the 1800’s the workers’ movement began to push for the 40-hour week with no loss of pay from their 60-hour weeks. Their goal was more time to live their lives, as stated in their anthem: "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will."
When the union movement of the l930s arose, the unions adopted the struggle for time-and-a-half as a half-measure, saying that the bosses would hire more workers if they had to pay a premium over 40 hours. Back in the day, it may have had some effect. But soon the bosses had no problem paying this small premium to avoid the expense of hiring more workers, and the issue of "eight hours for what we will" slipped into the background.
If, today, some bosses are so bold as to want to eliminate even time-and-a-half, it’s a measure of how little opposition they feel to any and all of their schemes. The few cents they would save with "comp time" would not look like much in their bank accounts. But "comp time" will push workers back toward the bad old days of the 19th century.
May 26, 2003
On May 12, a few hours before Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Saudi Arabia, a triple explosion took place inside a Western residential compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital. Twenty-four were killed, including seven Americans and one British citizen; many more were wounded as the explosion ripped through the buildings.
The regime in Saudi Arabia has for a long period been one of the main U.S. allies in the region. But its absolute allegiance has been questioned lately by U.S. authorities. Not only did bin Laden come from a rich family in this country, but 15 of the 19 suicide bombers of September 11th were also Saudi. Now, those who carried out the bombing in Riyadh undoubtedly had accomplices from within the Saudi state apparatus, if not protection from a level higher up in the regime. They had a lot of specialized equipment and nine of the bombers were able to penetrate into this supposedly well-guarded compound.
The Bush administration undoubtedly knows that there is increasing hostility to the presence of U.S. troops, which have been stationed on bases in Saudi Arabia since 1991. The U.S. had already planned to transfer them to Qatar. And distrust of the possible evolution of their Saudi ally was probably one of the reasons for the war in Iraq. The U.S. has long wanted a second ally in the region, as rich in oil as the Saudis.
But as can already be seen, there’s a big difference between conquering Iraq, which was relatively easy for the American troops, and installing a regime in the country that will prove to be loyal to the United States. Moreover, this war has already made other Arab regimes in the area less stable, beginning with that of the Saudi royalty. So instead of finding more solid allies, the U.S. government may only have created a situation where all of its allies are less secure and less loyal.
The methods used by the organizers of these attacks are disgusting. But these attacks demonstrate that their organizers are looked on with sympathy from a large part of the public, notably within Saudi Arabia itself, where bin Laden has become a kind of hero because he dared to stand up to the United States. And this approval from a part of the Arab populations signifies, too, that Al Qaeda or other terrorists will likely have no problem in recruiting more candidates for future suicide bombings. For a significant part of the population in the Middle East, the latest bombing in Riyadh seems like revenge for the massive bombings of the Iraqi civilian population.
Bush promised to carry out his "war on terrorism" to the bitter end. This may well be a war without end because the very same policies carried out by American imperialism–together with its aggressiveness, its arrogance and its clear desire to control the riches of the whole Middle East–are exactly what is nourishing terrorism.
May 26, 2003
The following excerpts are translated from an editorial appearing in Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper put out by the French Trotskyist organization of the same name. Adding its voice to the calls of other organizations for the workers to mobilize, LO proclaimed: "Make May 13 a demonstration of force of the world of labor."
This pretended reform is a grave attack against those who are retired, and those who will retire tomorrow.... Workers who are victims of layoffs at an age when they can no longer find work won’t have enough years to receive a full pension.
But this is precisely the goal of the operation! Work more years for a reduced pension. By lowering wages and cutting pensions the big employers and the government decrease the share of the national income going to labor....
In a rational and humane society where the fruits of progress were shared by everyone, increasing productivity would lead to shortening the years of labor. In this society, however, the more that productivity increases due to the intensification of labor and speedup, the less the workers gain from it. The fruits of increasing productivity are exclusively pocketed by the employers, the rich class....
The people who govern us pretend that the class struggle doesn’t exist. But what else can we call what they are doing to the workers? What else can we call their refusal to pay for coverage of many drugs? Of course it is class struggle when the government knows it will prevent hundreds of thousands of workers with the lowest incomes from being properly taken care of.
The reduction in the number of pubic service workers is yet another attack against workers, in two ways. First, because the fewer nurses, the fewer teachers, the fewer transit employees, the fewer letter carriers, the more the quality of public services will go down. But also because reducing the number of public employees aggravates unemployment at the moment when all the bosses are proceeding with mass layoffs.
The state, which refuses to prevent big business from proceeding with these layoffs, should create jobs itself. Instead the state as an employer is cutting jobs.
Every worker is able to see how their situation has gone downhill over the years. There has been a catastrophic decline in certain regions, because the closing of businesses plunges part of the population into poverty.
The attacks are so widespread that everything depends on the overall relation of forces between the bosses and the government on one side and the world of labor on the other. We can’t let our condition continue to degrade. The teachers who refuse to accept it and are making their disagreement known through strikes and demonstrations are right and are showing the way....
May 26, 2003
Kirkuk has recently become the center of ethnic rivalries between, on the one hand, Kurds who were kicked out of the city by the Saddam Hussein regime, in the framework of a policy of "Arabization" which began in the 1980s, and on the other hand, the Arab populations of the city and its surroundings, some of whom were "implanted" by the dictatorship to replace the expelled Kurds.
After the end of the war, thousands of Kurdish families who used to live in Kirkuk left the northern refugee camps where they lived, returning to their city of origin. Were they pushed by nationalist militias, in order to grab control of the city by their presence, or by illusions created by Bush with his promises to the Kurds, or simply by their material situation, which was worsened by the war? Undoubtedly all these factors played a role. Whatever it was, the majority found their old homes occupied by Arab families or even destroyed.
Clashes broke out between Kurds and Arabs. Between May 16 and 18, these clashes took the form of armed combat in several neighborhoods of Kirkuk, which caused five deaths and wounded 40, while neighboring villages inhabited by Arabs were burnt.
The case of Kirkuk–a city in which other minorities also have demands, like the Turkmens–illustrates how the imperialist occupation opens the way for ethnic rivalries, fed by the ambitions of reactionary forces. There is a growing danger that the different ethnic groups will be thrown against each other in bloody and fratricidal struggle, a struggle which could end up even pitting the two principal Kurdish militias against each other. These militias, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (DPK) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), act more like traditional Kurdish clans than nationalist parties.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Iraqi Kurdistan has benefitted from a relative autonomy in relation to Baghdad. The DPK and the PUK cut out zones they each controlled after the first Gulf War. Thanks in part to the Iraqi oil revenues that they received from the U.N. and fees they got for permitting the illegal transit of oil between Iraq and Turkey, the region enjoyed a very relative prosperity.
Paradoxically, the fall of Baghdad ended this. Payments from the U.N. have dried up (as they have for the rest of Iraq), as have illegal oil sales. As a result, the population has mostly found themselves without financial resources or material aid since March. Since the end of the war, this has led, for example, to demonstrations against the non-payment of wages by the DPK in Erbil, the capital of the occupied zone.
Today, the militias of the DPK and PUK encircle Kirkuk, the oil capital of northern Iraq, and undoubtedly push the Kurdish population to move back into the city.
A century ago the interests of the rival great powers tore the Kurds apart and left them in four countries–Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria–where they were reduced to the status of an oppressed minority. Today, their hopes for autonomy are being played on in order to impose order over the region–an order which may very well be brought about through increasing ethnic violence. The U.S. leaders don’t care any more about the condition of the Kurdish people than it did that of the Arabs of Kurdistan. Both peoples risk paying a very high price for this today.
May 26, 2003
The French government is carrying out an attack on the national pension system reminiscent of the one being carried out by the U.S. government on Social Security and Medicare today. Proclaiming a possible future deficit in Social Security, even though there is no deficit now and according to official studies there won’t be a deficit for 20 years, the French government is moving to "reform" the system.
The first aim of this "reform" is to lower what French employers contribute to Social Security. In order to do this, the government has proposed to increase the number of years government workers must have for a full pension to 40 years, bringing them up to the private sector. Following this, it wants to increase the years of work to 42. And it is proposing to reduce pension payments to all workers.
This is not the first time the government has tried such an attack on workers’ pensions. At the end of 1995 the government tried something similar. The result were massive strikes by many public sector workers that lasted for some time and steadily grew in numbers. Workers mobilized around the slogan "All together." They were successful in beating off the attack on their pensions, but now the government is trying the attack once more.
The big union federations called for a one day strike against the government’s plan on May 13. The strikes and demonstrations on that day were a success. There were over a million demonstrators around the country, showing the workers’ anger against the attacks on pensions. Over 100,000 demonstrated in Paris and a similar number in the big city of Marseilles. There were other demonstrations in various sized cities across the country. Public sector workers were particularly important, including teachers, railroad, transit and postal workers. But many workers from the private sector also demonstrated from some of the biggest companies, which was important because it went counter to the government’s attempts to divide the public from the private sector workers. Workers could measure the force that they represented in the country and it encouraged those who want to continue the struggle.
After May 13 some sectors stayed on strike. On May 19 there were more demonstrations, particularly of teachers, but also of many postal workers, Bank of France employees and hospital workers. There were work stoppages in the post office and the phone company and of transit workers in various cities. Another demonstration is called for May 25.
May 26, 2003
Within eight days time, the U.S. reversed every announcement it had made concerning its plans for occupying Iraq. Jay Garner, who had arrived in Iraq only three weeks earlier to head the "reconstruction" of Iraq, was demoted. A new man, Paul Bremer, was rushed to the scene. Plans for an Iraqi Provisional Government were cancelled, and the U.S. and Britain announced that they would run the country, without making any attempt to put what Bush had called "an Iraqi" face on their regime. Four of the top people whom the U.S. had just sent into Iraq to direct different aspects of the "reconstruction" were also replaced–even before they’d found an office to start working out of.
Most telling of all, orders to return to the U.S., which had already been issued for the troops who did the heaviest fighting, were cancelled, just days before they were scheduled to leave. They were being sent back to Baghdad and given orders by the new man to go out into the street to shoot down every looter. And more troops were being ferried in. Even while sailors and airmen arrive in the U.S., more ground troops are going into Iraq.
At the same time–and very much behind the scenes–various U.S. generals who had criticized the plans for this war from the beginning were being moved around or even cashiered out.
In other words, things were not going nearly so well as Donald Rumsfeld, the man who thinks for George W. Bush, was pretending. And in a rather embarrassing twist, not only did media sources reveal that the bang-bang-shoot-em-up rescue of Jessica Lynch had been staged for the cameras (since her captors had deserted the scene a day earlier, U.S. troops had only been shooting blanks!). They also revealed that the supposedly welcoming crowds greeting U.S. soldiers in Baghdad had also been staged–several hundred members of the exile Iraqi National Congress had been flown in for the occasion, to applaud as U.S. soldiers tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein.
As every military expert has said, there was no doubt that the U.S. could win the war–if winning the war meant that the Iraqi army would evaporate. What was questionable was what would happen in the days and weeks and months and years to follow. What the last few weeks have made clear is that staging things for U.S. television won’t play well in an Iraq which has been devastated by war, an Iraq whose basic facilities for water, electricity and medical care are still not functioning even at a minimal stage–where they are functioning at all. This was not inevitable. It’s simply because the battle plans of the U.S. took no account of what would be required to restore the basic services that U.S. bombs destroyed–any more than the "reconstruction" plans take those things into account today. Almost nothing has been done. Nor has there been any significant provision of food or money that the population, cut out of its jobs or its pensions, so desperately needs.
This is why demonstrations have continued to grow in the streets of Baghdad and other cities, demanding the immediate departure of U.S. troops. And it’s why U.S. soldiers on patrol run into more and more incidents with a population that wants to see the U.S. leave.
Bremer, who for years was a spymaster, has been brought in to "restore order." In other words, to reestablish prisons, to bring back Saddam Hussein’s police and torturers, and to carry out door-to-door sweeps of the poor neighborhoods.
This is the real balance sheet of what the U.S. war on Iraq has meant so far–a balance sheet that promises to grow much worse.
May 26, 2003
Rumsfeld has called on the CIA to carry out an investigation of the various U.S. intelligence agencies. He wants to know–he actually said this–whether the U.S. intelligence agencies had "exaggerated" their findings about Iraq’s ties with al-Qaeda and its possession of weapons of mass destruction.
"Exaggerated?" That’s just a politician’s word for "lied." Rumsfeld should know whereof he speaks, since he was the one pushing the biggest of these lies.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that the man who condemned civilians, including children, to death to further imperialist ambitions would stoop to lying. What’s a little lie among murderers?
May 26, 2003
On May 23, the first school district in the state of Oregon shut down its schools, three weeks early, for lack of funds. Eighty-four districts are expected to follow suit, with six more having already cut out days of instruction to save money.
This is one result of the recent 10% cut in state funding for public schools. Other results were teacher pay cuts and elimination of money for after-school programs.
In other states, where legislators also claimed budget deficits leave them no choice, the cuts have come in the form of less instruction, fewer books, more children per classroom, repairs delayed or cancelled, aides fired.
Although the current administration claims, "No Child [will be] Left Behind," the reality is that, even without cuts, most U.S. public schools have been leaving children behind for decades and are leaving them even further behind today.
Every study of education across the globe ranks the U.S., the world’s wealthiest nation, shamefully low. Millions of youngsters leave high school–when they don’t leave before graduation–barely literate, scarcely knowing their own history let alone math formulas and scientific facts that are standards in the curricula of the school systems of other industrialized nations.
The vast majority of children have a useless education, while the tiny group of children whose parents run society gain a very good education at expensive private schools or public schools in the wealthiest suburbs.
This class education may be perfect for the rulers of society, but workers have every reason to insist society must pay collectively for a quality education for all children.
May 26, 2003
On May 16, a New York police raiding party battered down the door of a Harlem apartment, supposedly in search of a dealer’s stash of drugs and guns. In fact, there were no drugs or guns, nor had any drug dealer been there. And the dealer who the police say they were trying to find had been arrested and jailed four days before–living at a different address.
Alberta Spruill, the 57-year-old woman who did live in the apartment, was a 29-year employee of the city’s personnel office.
After breaking down the door, the police threw a stun grenade into the apartment that produced a shocking flash and concussion. Even though Ms. Spruill clearly wasn’t the man being sought, nor was anyone else in the apartment, the police placed her under arrest and handcuffed her to a chair for several minutes. She suffered a heart attack. Before EMS got her to the hospital, she died.
A nearby resident of Harlem was quoted in the press: "When police deal with situations in this community and other communities, it’s not the same. And that’s what makes me angry. You see people on Fifth Avenue, they’re not being dragged out in handcuffs. They’re asked to come out, even if they’re being arrested."
A judge had granted the police a "no-knock" search warrant for this raid based only on the assertion of the police that they had a tip from an informant.
Oh, certainly, New York’s mayor and police commissioner expressed sorrow over Ms. Spruill’s death and said there would be an investigation. They said that the police lieutenant in charge of the raid was suspended and use of stun grenades was put on hold.
For a minute. By the day of Ms. Spruill’s funeral, the suspended lieutenant was back on the job, just in a different area. The ban on the use of stun grenades was already ended. Another unarmed innocent man had been shot to death by a plainclothes cop in the city.
This is the real reality show put on in New York City’s black working class neighborhoods every day.
May 26, 2003
The stockholders’ meeting of Hollinger International on May 22 in the gilded salon of the Metropolitan Club on New York’s Fifth Avenue wasn’t the usual quiet, staged affair. This company owns Chicago’s Sun-Times newspaper, along with The Telegraph of London and The Jerusalem Post. Some minority stockholders made a big fuss that Conrad Black, who dominates the company, along with his top executives, drained off 74 million dollars over the last three years by pocketing so-called "non-compete fees" for papers they sold off. Also, Hollinger paid over 200 million dollars in "management fees" to Black’s privately owned Ravelston Corp. over the last seven years.
But the real scandal isn’t the tens of millions of dollars that Black took from the other stockholders. The real scandal is the daily diet of lies that his papers spew.
Before the war in Iraq, the Chicago Sun-Times was busy drumming up support for the war. Every article was blatant propaganda, repeating such lies as the claim that Saddam Hussein was about to unleash nuclear weapons and his army had all kinds of biological and chemical weapons, even though information was already coming out that none of this was true. Once the war started, there was no mention of the fact that U.S. soldiers or Iraqi civilians were being killed. There were no reports that Iraqis were angry at the U.S. invasion. The paper told readers that the Iraqis were dancing in the streets at "liberation."
As for this country, while Bush was preparing his massive tax cuts for the rich, the Sun-Times had a giant headline claiming that every family would soon be getting a refund. Not true.
On the board of Hollinger sits Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Nixon, who carries on a consulting business for some of the wealthiest oil sheiks in the world, as well as for various U.S. businessmen. There is also Richard Perle, the former chairman of Bush’s Defense Policy Board, who was one of the main promoters of the war in Iraq, and a man quick to make a big buck off his war-mongering.
So it’s no surprise they were ready to award a single Hollinger executive such a large bonus. They subscribe to the belief that "freedom of the press"–(freedom only for those who have over 100 million dollars to buy a daily as big as the Sun-Times )–means their right to lie in defense of capitalism.
May 26, 2003
After dozens of U.S. teenagers ran away from an academy to which they had been sent in Costa Rica, authorities there moved to shut down the school. The school was owned and run by an American company called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (Wwasps).
The owner of Wwasps, Narvin Lichfield, was then arrested by Mexican authorities. He was charged with holding children against their will and physically abusing them.
Child welfare investigators in Costa Rica said the Wwasps academy used beatings, physical restraints, emotional abuse and isolation.
Although Wwasps claims to help troubled teens, the one in Costa Rica turned out to have no classes, no teachers, not even staff who spoke English–despite the fact that the students all came from the U.S. The academy, housed in an old hotel, was so overcrowded that nine girls were living in one small room.
Such private schools are supposed to offer an alternative in education for youth in difficulty. In reality, Lichfield and others running such schools make money off the idea that what children lack in the schools is discipline. The "tuition" is $30,000 a year–whether paid by parents or by a juvenile court which sends children to such places.
This scam is based on the claim that a child’s difficulties can be turned around if the schools act with what is called "tough love." "Tough love" by beating and depriving a child of education? That’s child abuse.
But such attitudes lie behind much of what is called the juvenile justice system. In several states, teen "boot camps" have been set up for young people showing what the courts call "behavior problems" in or outside the school system. Like the Wwasps academies, these boot camps offer no real education. They are simply a form of imprisonment practicing physical, mental and emotional abuse.
Lichfield may have opened schools outside the U.S. thinking that he could get away with more in other countries. The Costa Rican and Mexican authorities investigated and acted, while U.S. authorities in four states where Wwasps academies exist have been unwilling to do so. They don’t wish to interfere with "private enterprise."
American capitalist society is more and more willing to imprison and beat children than to give them an education they won’t want to rebel against. It’s turning the clock back a century or more.
May 26, 2003
While SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), the form of pneumonia that appeared in China, affects several thousand people throughout the world and continues to spread, urgent work carried out by a network of researchers have already borne fruit: within a month, research advanced sufficiently to identify the origin and nature of this new disease.
Scientists emphasized that this doesn’t mean they will soon provide a vaccine, but it’s still a new encouragement for those in the struggle against this epidemic.
The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services announced that the test for the disease would soon be "accessible to scientists and laboratories in the entire world." It’s the least that could be expected. Research carried out in different countries should rapidly be put at the disposal of the world’s population.
Unfortunately, such a step is far from the rule in today’s society. The right to treatment is too often accessible only to those who can pay. And if the spread of SARS hadn’t threatened the industrialized countries, including the richest layers of the population, it’s likely there would have been no rush to look into the problem.
Diseases which cause thousands of deaths each year in the poor countries–like bilharziasis, malaria and sleeping sickness–are often ignored by the pharmaceutical industry. Even when treatments exist, they often aren’t available because of their cost.
For several years an epidemic of meningitis has affected part of Africa, including Burkina Faso. A report at the beginning of April counted 998 deaths (out of 6,234 known cases) since January. This was four times more than the known number of SARS deaths, and these figures are certainly much too low, for they don’t take into account those who had the disease and died before being able to reach a health center.
Vaccines do exist, even for the new strain of meningitis identified last year which has expanded rapidly. But each dose costs $5, twenty times the price of the vaccine adapted only for the old forms of the disease. A spokesman for the World Health Organization, who tried to negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical laboratories, said last September, "It’s simply too expensive for the African countries most affected by meningitis."
So, many people will die this year of an epidemic against which there exists a means of prevention. Not only does the poverty to which capitalist society reduces them make them more susceptible to disease, but vaccination is not available to them.
In the medical domain as in all others, in order to respond to the most urgent needs of the whole of the population, it’s necessary to construct a society where scientific research and production are organized as a function of needs and not of profit. The choices made by capitalist society often mean death.
May 26, 2003
Late on Saturday night, May 24, the infamous London Telegraph published the results of a study by the Medical Research Council denying there was Gulf War syndrome. The study also said there was no link between the illnesses suffered by veterans and the use of depleted uranium shells or nerve agents. A spokesman for British veterans, Charles Plumridge, said, "He who pays the piper calls the tune. It is exactly what we have come to expect from the MoD (Ministry of Defense) and government-funded research. If you look at the record of the MoD over the last few years they have only funded research which comes out in their favor." He added, "They just want to sweep us under the carpet as quickly as possible because they are going to have veterans from Gulf War Two coming along."
May 26, 2003
Auto contracts expire this September 14. The UAW (United Auto Workers) will negotiate with Ford, GM and Chrysler. A recent "leak" about so-called "backroom" talks indicates that the UAW proposes to go along with plant closings by the big manufacturers–IF those manufacturers help the UAW to unionize enough members in the supplier industry to offset the numbers lost by plant closings.
It’s impossible to tell what a "leak" like this is worth. Who has leaked it? For what advantage? Is it something accurate? Or an attempt at some sort of manipulation through the news media?
Were this to be true, however, it would not break with UAW policy. This strategy, of replacing lost membership through unionization of suppliers, has been in place since the last contract–with little to show for it. The UAW leadership accepted further cuts in Ford employment. In exchange, Ford Motor agreed to send letters to its suppliers urging suppliers to take a positive stance toward unionization of their plants. Results have been negligible. DCX (DaimlerChrysler) made a similar commitment regard a Mercedes assembly plant in the South–unorganized to this day.
From the time of Chrysler’s alleged bankruptcy in l981, the UAW has been finding ways to sugar-coat the concessions it has granted to U.S. automakers. Plant-closing "moratoriums," job banks, training centers, programs such as BEL (Base Employment Level)–and many other legal tricks–have disguised the closing of dozens of plants, the elimination and outsourcing of tens of thousands of jobs. A union of 1.5 million workers in l979, the UAW is now reduced to less than 640,000. In the last year alone it has lost 50,000 members.
During this period of plants and jobs disappearing at an alarming rate, the UAW has managed not to have a major strike over the matter. It’s an awesome record of collaboration with the corporations. At each and every contract, the union shouts to its members that it has achieved great victories against plant closings. But after each and every contract, there are fewer and fewer plants! And many of those remaining are no longer named Ford and GM, but Visteon and Delphi–or XYZ.
For the last half year, DCX has already started to close down production at McGraw Glass in Detroit. Despite the contract’s prohibition of plant closings or mass layoffs except due to "volume related" problems, and despite the fact that auto sales are and have been well above average volume, the UAW has not opposed such plant-closing preparations.
When we consider the massive losses, it is clear that less would have been risked–and a great deal more up for gain–had the UAW battled from the beginning against plant closings and concessions.