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 1, 2004
Congress asked Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan for some advice about how to handle the current budget deficits. He responded by proposing to gut Social Security and Medicare. "Adjustments in our commitments" are needed–so said Greenspan.
"Adjustments"? That’s hardly the word for what Greenspan is proposing. He wants to rewrite the cost-of-living formula so it will cover still less of the actual inflation increases, and he wants to introduce another increase in the retirement age.
Government officials have been calling for changes in Social Security for decades now–and Congress has been sliding in some of those changes, pretending to defend Social Security as it did. The current cost-of-living formula–itself a revision of an older one–was written to cheat retirees out of some inflation protection. And the age for retirement, which had long been 65, is right now in the process of going up to 67 years. Before it’s even got there, Greenspan wants to raise it still further.
Greenspan justified his call for still more "adjustments" by predicting that there would be "soaring budget deficits" when "baby boomers" retire.
What cynical toying with the truth!
Social Security for two decades has run an enormous surplus, amounting to a trillion and a half dollars today. If, for a decade, the "baby boom" bubble will draw funds out of this surplus, why should that create a problem? Ever since the early 1980s, Congress has been raising Social Security taxes beyond what was needed to pay out then current benefits, claiming that the additional money would cover the short term deficit when the baby boomers retired.
What happened? Did Congress spend the money on something else?
Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what it did. Congress has been running up deficits in its regular budgets year after year–extending ever bigger tax breaks to the wealthy, funding wars all over the world, subsidizing profits through all sorts of contracts to the corporations. And every single one of those deficits was paid for in part by money that Congress borrowed out of the Social Security surplus, putting in IOU’s as promises to pay in the future.
Well the time is coming for Congress to start paying up its IOU’s. But, it seems, Congress wants to welch on its promises. They sent their boy, Greenspan, in front of the microphones to speak for them.
Outrageous! Don’t they dare try to tell us there is no money for our retirement.
Are they short of money? Then take back those tax breaks from the wealthy. Stop those wars. Put a moratorium on extra profits to the corporations. Those actions would be more than enough not only to pay for the Baby Boomers, but to provide a fully adequate Social Security benefit for everyone, and starting at a much earlier age.
How dare they try to raise the age of retirement! The labor of this society’s workers has long created enough wealth that we could all retire at 55, if not 50. Why not? For years, we contributed our muscles, brains, blood and guts to make this society run. We have the right to retire early enough and with enough money to let us have a productive and fulfilling life after work while we are still young enough to enjoy it.
Mar 1, 2004
Elite Traveler magazine released its 2003 Luxury Spending Survey. What it calls the Elite Affluent have a net worth of 10 million dollars or more. They spent over $5,000 on electronic gadgets for the holidays and over $20,000 a year on clothes. Typically they belong to two or more golf courses and own at least two houses worth over a million dollars each.
Some of the biggest companies don’t even expect their CEO’s to pay for incidentals out of salaries that top 10 million dollars a year. Gillette paid James Kitts $3,240 for parking fees; Oracle paid Lawrence Ellison $8,360 for a personal trainer. And then there was Tyco, which bought Dennis Kozlowski a house in Florida worth 29 million dollars and a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan for 17 million dollars.
This elite of bosses makes enough just in interest and dividends to keep five average working families per year. Maybe we need to take over their big mansions.
Mar 1, 2004
The Bush administration rewrote a Department of Health and Human services report on the state of health care in the United States.
The original study reported that blacks and Hispanics "tend to be in poorer health than other Americans," and that "disparities are pervasive in our health care system."
Among the dozens of examples illustrating this disparity were these three:
Emergency room waiting time for blacks and Hispanics is several times longer than for whites; and they are less likely to get treated at all.
Hispanics are less likely to get good care when hospitalized for heart attacks.
Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to get needed pain medications.
Bush spokespersons said they thought the original report was too negative. They wanted to focus on the "good things" instead.
So they removed all these examples–and many more. And they introduced their rewritten report with pollyanna blathering: "The overall health of Americans has improved dramatically over the last century."
In other words, they eliminated the effects of racism–by ignoring them.
Mar 1, 2004
State governors and legislators, both Republican and Democrat, of at least 13 states, have begun to question their participation in the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act of 2001. For example, the Republican chair of the Virginia Education Committee called the act "unworkable," "utopian nonsense."
The act, with its catchy name, is a Trojan horse, designed to tear apart the public school system and throw the children piecemeal into the arms of private contractors. The act sets impossible standards for yearly improvement in all public schools–all must show year-to-year improvement in all of 37 different measures, including requirements so impossible as to expect 100% of all special-education students to become proficient at reading at grade level, each and every year.
As schools fail to produce these miracles, the NCLB act requires school districts to pay–out of their own funds–either for tutoring services (by private contractors) or vouchers to transfer to other public schools. After 5 years in the "failing" category, a school must be put into "alternative governance," such as converting to private "for-profit" hands.
Although NCLB is a federal law, there are no federal dollars provided to pay for tutors and vouchers. Nor are there any similar draconian educational requirements for the "alternative" private or religious schools which ultimately might receive students from "failing" schools.
This Trojan horse will quite rapidly eat up the public schools’ funds by forcing more and more public schools into the "failing" category, thereby forcing public school systems to fund privately run schools.
If the government truly wanted no child to be left behind, the way to do it is no secret. Legislative archives and university libraries are stacked to the rafters with studies on how to improve education. All conclude the same things: small class size, personal student attention, comfortable and secure surroundings, stimulating educational aids and equipment, and good student nourishment are the keys to helping students learn well.
In other words–more money. Paying more for children’s education makes it possible to provide a better education. Paying less guarantees a worse education. And the NCLB act is all about paying less to the public schools. Students in the less wealthy districts will receive progressively less and less education, because more of the money will go into private hands.
Siphoning funding from public schools toward private "alternatives" is a program that would gladden the heart of any 17th-century baron. The wealthy have always resisted spending state money on education for workers’ children. In fact, we have public schools today only because earlier generations of laboring people fought for them beginning with the workingmen’s parties in more than 60 New England cities as early as l834, coming up through the period of Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War, when the goal of the freed slaves and poor whites was to have a public school system, state-funded, secular, open to every child without exception and where every child’s attendance was mandatory.
Public schools are an acquisition won by laboring people. We need to fight to improve them–and keep them.
Mar 1, 2004
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the full support of most top Democrats, has been campaigning for two propositions on the March 2 ballot that would allow the already heavily indebted state government to borrow 15 billion dollars more–while promising to set spending caps for the future. It’s either that, these politicians say, or face immediate and catastrophic budget cuts.
In fact, that is not a choice. For whether the bond passes or not, the state has already planned to make budget cuts in vital social programs and has set ever more state taxes and fees on ordinary people.
There are other choices–requiring, for example, that the wealthiest one% of the state population, with an annual income of over half a million dollars, simply pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as do working people. This still wouldn’t be fair, of course, but it could eliminate the budget crisis, the deficit, the cuts in social programs and the tax and fee increases–in one blow.
The politicians always claim that the wealthy pay too much in taxes. But the opposite is true. The rate at which the wealthiest one% pay state and local taxes works is actually much lower than anyone else’s, lower than any other tax bracket. Their tax rate is even much lower compared to the working poor. Estimates are that the working poor, those who earn less than $18,000 a year, pay 11.3% of their income in state and local taxes, while the richest one% pay only 7.2% of their income in state and local taxes.
And that is just on the state and local level. This year the federal government is handing the wealthiest Californians a tax cut of 13 billion dollars. That comes to $68,000 in tax cuts per person.
So this opens up more possibilities for a supposedly cash-strapped state. California could close its deficit this year and next by simply taking the tax cut that the federal government is giving the wealthy.
Will this happen? Not unless the working class majority begins to flex its muscles.
Mar 1, 2004
The government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMMS) has proposed to stop paying for certain life saving medicines. These are new drugs that have been approved so far for only one type of disease, which doctors found effective for another. Sixty% of cancer specialists say they use such "off-label treatment." Dr. Sean R. Tunis, chief medical officer at CMMS, is out front about the reason for the proposed change: "That practice wasn’t a problem when drugs cost $100 to $150 per patient, but it’s another thing when they are $3,000 to $4,000 per patient."
The government says prices are out of control? We agree. But why do drugs cost $3,000? It doesn’t cost that much to do the research and then produce the drugs. It’s simply because the government gives the drug companies a patent so they can charge whatever they want for decades.
They tell us that capitalist competition holds down prices. But it obviously doesn’t hold down the price of drugs. The companies need to be forced to lower prices.
The government’s response instead is simply not to pay for the drugs, letting the patients die if they can’t afford them.
In capitalist society, it’s money that gives you the right to live.
Mar 1, 2004
Bush’s propaganda balloon floating over Iraq has suffered another puncture: the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi government has refused to give its official approval to the U.S. military occupation. This doesn’t mean the Iraqi Governing Council, as the current puppet government is called, is demanding that U.S. troops leave. It simply wants a new, "caretaker" government, scheduled to take office by June 30, to take the flack for this obviously unpopular move.
This means that, one after the other, all of the elements of Bush’s "transition plan" for supposedly handing over power to Iraqis on June 30 have fallen by the wayside.
First, the Governing Council has failed to meet Bush’s February 28 deadline for drafting a constitution. Even if it patches up a constitution soon, the second step of the "transition plan," the selection of caucuses which in turn would elect a national assembly, is already out the window. Instead, the "plan" now is to have a "caretaker" government put in place by June 30, selected by who knows what means, to prepare for elections which are to be promised–for 6 months later.
Bush’s Iraqi allies are uneasy about openly appearing as his puppets, and they also have fundamental disagreements amongst themselves.
Shiite leaders from the south basically want Islamic law, the Sharia, to be the law of the country. Shiite cleric Ali al-Sistani’s recent statements in favor of the "transition plan" may indicate that he has reached some kind of agreement on this. But U.S. allies that belong to the other two groups are not necessarily happy with this kind of an arrangement. The leaders of the Sunni faction, that is, Saddam Hussein’s old base, want the elections to be postponed because they are not as organized as the Shiites and Kurds are. The Kurdish leaders from the north want more autonomy and official status for their militias. The Shiite leaders also want to keep their militias intact. All this raises the threat of armed conflicts in the future between these rival groups in Iraq.
Will all this prevent Bush from pretending that he is handing power to Iraqis "as planned" on June 30? Not at all. He will keep his "deadline" of June 30, by hook or crook. And he may even get away with making the war seem to disappear. For the most part, his Democratic rivals have stopped talking about it.
But the fact that the war has already mostly disappeared from the headlines of the mainstream news in the U.S. doesn’t mean that the war in Iraq has gone away or is even waning in any way.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed by the U.S. and the British since the war began, and they continue to die on a daily basis. Aside from the violence of the ongoing war, daily life continues to be unbearable for most Iraqis. With an unemployment rate of at least 70%, most Iraqis are without jobs or any income. Many basic services such as electricity and running water are still not fully restored. Crime is rampant throughout the country, with people being reluctant to leave their homes for fear of being robbed, kidnapped or raped.
The U.S. troops also continue to suffer the consequences of Bush’s war. In January, for example, Iraqi rebels killed 51 coalition troops. That’s the second-highest monthly toll since Bush announced the war over 10 months ago. Of course, this figure doesn’t include the soldiers who are wounded (whose number the U.S. military refuses to announce), nor those who suffer other types of war-related problems, such as mental disorder, after they complete their tour of duty.
In any event, the death figures suggest that the rate of attacks against the occupation is rising sharply, despite the fact that U.S. troops venture out of their bases much less often now than they did a few months ago. In a military bulletin on February 6, the U.S. military acknowledged 73 attacks in one day on coalition targets, including on Iraqi aides. The bulletin said that the insurgents had "become more sophisticated and may be co-ordinating their anti-coalition efforts, posing an even more significant threat."
Despite Bush’s pretensions and lies, the U.S. occupation of Iraq continues to be catastrophic for U.S. troops as well as the Iraqi population.
Mar 1, 2004
The news media show photos or television clips of Haitians trying to open containers of food, with reporters adding derogatory comments about the population. In fact, the people were right to do this. There is no food available, and water and electricity are shut off for most Haitians. With armed gangs raging, roads are blocked, nothing functions, and workplaces have shut down. Yes, hungry people seeing food containers coming into the country want to tear them open.
As fighting continues throughout the country, hospitals are not functioning, medicine is impossible to get, buses do not run, kerosene for lamps is rarely available. And still the gangs terrorize, beat up and burn down the homes of their victims, leaving uncounted dead.
But before this all began, even for those with jobs–and that was a minority of the population–life was very precarious. Little racketeers kept the prices of necessities soaring. Most workers make no more than about 76 gourds a day (currently worth $1.79)–when they have any wages at all–while they must pay 20 gourds for just two tomatoes, three onions or three bananas.
This is life in a poor country under siege.
Mar 1, 2004
Following weeks of fighting in the streets of Haiti’s main cities, with more and more of the country taken over by gangs of rebels, the U.S. and France pressured Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to step down. Aristide was Haiti’s only elected president in 200 years of independence.
Aristide had been put into power in 1991 as the result of a vast mobilization of the population that forced through elections. But he was almost immediately overthrown by a military coup, whose leader General Cedras held onto power for three years. Aristide was restored to the presidency in 1994 when the U.S., having decided that the growing popular mobilization might lead to wider unrest in Haiti, sent in marines to convince Cedras and his cohorts to leave. Having been threatened by the army before, Aristide disbanded it, setting up in place his own militias. But this disbanded army soon was regrouping in the form of localized gangs, including among themselves some of the old Tontons Macoutes from Duvalier’s days. They lived off the population, carrying out a rampage of rape, robbery and extortion.
If the population had given its overwhelming support to Aristide during all these years, placing their hopes in him, their hopes soon were betrayed. Every day the country fell a little further into misery. The wealthy and the big companies stopped paying any taxes. The militias were no defense against the gangs, and, in fact, without the money to pay his militias, Aristide set them loose to pay themselves by also extorting money from the population, terrorizing people in order to get the money. At the same time, the bosses were tightening the screws on their own workers. Aristide’s armed gangs were increasingly used to prevent any kind of dissent, both against his government and against the bosses.
In recent months, as the situation worsened, the popular opposition to Aristide has grown, including among former Aristide supporters. This opposition emboldened many of the gangs developing in the country to build a loose alliance with each other and to move to take over parts of Haiti.
Whatever hopes the population once had in Aristide, the last ten years have shown him and his government to be as corrupt as his predecessors, squirreling away riches or openly flaunting wealth in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. For such reasons, the rebels were sometimes cheered on by crowds.
At the same time, a more "legal" opposition formed around the Group of 184, an organization of the bosses. While they encouraged the rebel gangs to attack Aristide’s followers, they pretended to distance themselves from the gangs, putting themselves forward as the "democratic opposition."
It’s very possible that the U.S. and France will push to establish a "coalition" government built around this Group of 184. If so, this will not stop the exactions which the gangs take from the population, nor will it stop the enormous exploitation carried out in the factories and workshops owned by these very same bosses or foreign, including U.S., interests.
If the U.S. and France are intervening in Haiti today, it’s only to impose order so their big companies can once again drain wealth out of the industrial zones where desperate workers slave away at below subsistence level wages.
The working people of Haiti have nothing to gain in all of this. But they have shown themselves capable of chasing from power those who would enslave them. They have every reason to do it again.
Mar 1, 2004
Haiti was once a rich French colony called Saint-Dominique. During the 1600s and 1700s the French plantation owners brought in black slaves who were forced to turn sugar into profit. Starting in 1791, the slaves of Haiti revolted. They fought the French until 1804, when Haiti became the first black republic in the Western hemisphere.
But the French extracted a price for this bold defeat of their colonial forces. Haiti faced the equivalent of a blockade. With few resources, without materials coming in trade, the country was in no position to develop. The population was driven further into poverty, their only crops were sugar and coffee. The French who remained played an important role in the economy. But for the vast majority of the population, there was nothing but desperation, and the French supported one brutal dictator after another to maintain control.
The U.S. ties go back at least as far as 1915, when the government of Woodrow Wilson sent in U.S. troops to help reinforce dictatorial rule. These troops occupied the country for 20 years. The U.S. has reinforced dictatorships ever since.
Haiti has been forced to pay for 200 years, gaining nothing from the French or the Americans except for the ongoing exploitation of its impoverished work force.
Mar 1, 2004
On February 25, Ron Muller, President of the Viet Nam Veterans of America Foundation, signed an agreement with the Vietnamese government to help in locating unexploded U.S. ordnance in Viet Nam.
Viet Nam is the most heavily bombed country in the world. During the Viet Nam war, U.S. military forces used two to three times the amount of munitions used by all countries all over the planet in World War II. A lot of these munitions malfunctioned and did not go off at the time they were used. As much as 850,000 tons of unexploded ordnance remain scattered across the country along with as many as three million landmines.
As a result, since the end of the war in 1975, over 38,000 Vietnamese have been killed and about 64,000 injured–many of them children–by old bombs, shells, rockets and mines going off–an average of about 10 people killed or wounded every day.
It is now almost 30 years since the end of the war, yet the identification and removal of unexploded ordnance is just getting underway in much of Viet Nam. This deadly delay is mainly due to the impoverishment imposed on the Vietnamese by the destruction caused by that war and by the U.S. government’s refusal to accept any responsibility for what it did to Viet Nam.
Ron Muller, who signed the agreement, was disabled in the war, then came home to oppose it. He is one of the co-founders of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and says that he has devoted his life since returning from Viet Nam to helping the victims of war. The push to work in Viet Nam came from him and other vets like him.
The U.S. government may finally have agreed to pay part of the expense of this survey, but it continues to refuse to admit any responsibility for what happened in Viet Nam–hiding behind the vets who have pushed to go there, just like it once used them to carry out its war there.
Mar 1, 2004
On February 12, Del Martin, 83, and Phyllis Lyon, 79, became the first same-sex couple to be married in San Francisco. The two had been together for 51 years.
What reasonable person would be opposed to these two people, clearly devoted, pledging a personal commitment to each other? What kind of threat could these women possibly pose? What reason could there be to be against this union?
Is it unnatural? Why? Because the Bible says so? What kind of authority is that? If ever there was a book that contradicted itself at every turn, the Bible is it! You can find quotes throughout it to support and oppose just about anything.
Some may say that the example of these two women, a gay couple who have stayed together for 51 years, would be the exception. Perhaps. Just as with heterosexual marriage: where the divorce rate is over 50%, couples who stay devoted to each other for over 50 years is the exception. Would abusive or sick relationships take place? Almost certainly, just as in heterosexual marriages, where spousal abuse, child abuse, or even murder are all too commonplace. Given enough time, gay marriages within this society are bound to reflect the same trends. In fact, though, it may be less, since most abuse in this society involves men attacking women.
Why should anyone want to interfere with what someone else wants to do, when absolutely no one is being harmed?
On the other hand, seeking the approval of a religious institution or the government for a relationship should be unnecessary. What right should these institutions have, when they have carried out so many immoral acts throughout history, to put the stamp of "morality" on some relationships and leave it off of others? Clearly such a stamp of approval is not necessary for two people to love and be devoted to each other. Just look at Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon! Why even bother?
In fact, there are many reasons why some feel they need at least a legal recognition for their commitment to each other; and those reasons all have to do with the legal rights given to married couples. In a society where health care coverage, for example, depends on the job you hold; and when you must be married to someone in order to cover them under your health insurance, there is a strong incentive to declare legally such a personal commitment. When some people are not allowed to do so, it means that they have no means to gain health care coverage.
There are many benefits that depend on marriage status in this society: health coverage; some life insurance coverage; the right to make decisions about a loved one’s health care when they are incapacitated; or funeral arrangements, child custody and property ownership after a loved one’s death. In a rational society, none of this would matter, because EVERYONE would automatically receive coverage and protection just by being here. But in THIS society, what kind of legal status you can get makes a big difference. Families have been torn apart and homes have been lost because relationships weren’t legally sanctioned. This is as true of many relationships between a man and a woman as between two women or two men.
When so many benefits depend on marriage status, it is absolutely criminal to withhold them simply because a relationship does not conform to someone else’s definition of what is acceptable.
Mar 1, 2004
On February 26, the companies and the union involved in the Southern California supermarket strike reached an agreement. The result of the ratification vote was not known at the time this article was written. If the 59,000 strikers vote to end the strike, it will certainly be because of the financial hardship these workers have had to endure, and not because they are happy with the terms of the settlement.
The companies–Kroger, which owns Ralphs; Safeway, which owns Vons; and Albertsons–imposed one of their most important goals, a two-tier wage scale. Newly-hired clerks and cashiers will begin at $8.90 an hour, down from $9.80 in the old contract. Their top pay will also be reduced, from $17.90 to $15.10 an hour. In addition, new hires will have to pay, on average, $450 a year for health insurance and will have a worse pension plan than current workers have.
As for current workers, they will not get a raise for the next three years–only two lump-sum payments instead.
In return for these concessions, the companies agreed to keep the current workers’ health care benefits at the present level for the next two years.
Even this, however, is not the "gain" that the union, UFCW, makes it out to be. While not all the details of the agreement have been revealed yet, it seems that it includes a cap on the companies’ contributions to the health care fund. In other words, the issue of premiums will soon be raised for current workers as well as for new hires.
A picketer summed up the outcome of the strike as: "We get squeezed, the big shots make more money and Wall Street likes it."
The big shame is that this strike actually stood a good chance of succeeding. There was certainly no lack of enthusiasm and dedication on the part of the strikers, at least in the beginning of the strike. And despite its length, the strike enjoyed the support of other workers throughout the area. Only days before the settlement, a Los Angeles Times poll found that, among people who shopped at the three chains before the strike, 60% had never crossed the picket lines. These people certainly were not "intimidated" by picketers, as the companies claimed–they were expressing their support for the strike.
This sentiment of solidarity might have been tapped to strengthen and extend the fight, to carry it out into the streets of Los Angeles, to make the fight a broader fight of all workers whose health care is endangered. But no real attempt was made to organize the strike in such a way that other workers could actively participate in it.
In fact, even the strikers themselves were not really mobilized by the union. Strike activities were limited almost entirely to picketing. Over time, the strikers’ energy and enthusiasm wore down and this reinforced the sense that it was "a David versus Goliath thing," as a striker put it. The same striker added: "It was local workers versus national companies. They could have stayed out all year. We couldn’t."
It didn’t have to be like that. Of course the companies had all the means to outlast the workers in this waiting game. But who said it had to be a waiting game? Who said the fight had to be fought on this basis alone, that is, exactly the way the companies wanted to fight it?
Despite all this, however, the fact that the workers put up a fight, the fact that they took a stand and gained the solidarity and respect of the community, has meant that the companies were not able to impose all of their demands on the workers–at least not fully and immediately.
That’s important in view of future fights, which are certain to come in many sectors of the economy. For the big corporations and Wall Street will not stop pushing for ever more take-aways and cuts in a drive to increase their profits even more. And the workers will have to put up a fight to defend themselves against these attacks.
Mar 1, 2004
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says it hopes to propose a rule this fall requiring airlines to make changes to prevent fuel tank explosions like the one that caused the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, killing 230 people.
The FAA congratulated itself on developing a new technology to prevent these explosions. Marion Blakey, FAA director, said, "Once planes are equipped with inerting technology, we can close the book on fuel tank explosions. It’s a major moment in the safety of aviation." The technology involves taking compressed air from the jet engines and separating out only the nitrogen, which is then pumped into the fuel tanks, lowering the oxygen level from 21% to 12%, so that a spark or flame won’t cause an explosion.
So is the FAA going to require this be put in planes right away? No, the rule will take effect only in 2006, and will be phased in over seven years. Almost a decade will pass before all planes are fit. The FAA itself estimates that a plane will crash due to such explosions every five years, so several hundred more people will likely die.
What is this but legalized murder carried out by the big airline companies, abetted by the government that claims to be insuring safety?
Mar 1, 2004
George Bush came out last week in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages.
All the political commentators agree: they see this an attempt by Bush to "shore up his base" in an election year.
In other words, he’s appealing to the religious conservatives who are his biggest supporters–that 20% of voters that he thinks will support him on this issue no matter what–even IF they lost a son in Iraq; or even IF they lost their job.
But he’s doing more than that. He’s also hoping to broaden that base of support by appealing to more moderate voters–voters who oppose his stance on abortion and sending public school money to religious schools, but, because of the prejudices against homosexuals in this society, might decide to vote for him because they feel uneasy about the idea of "a man kissing a man!"
At the same time, he’s trying to confuse the issues of the mess he’s made in Iraq and the mess the economy is in. The Democrats will never really challenge Bush on Iraq or the economy in any real, substantive way; they, ultimately, have nothing different to propose on those fronts. Bush knows this.
That’s why Bush hopes the solid base of support he has on this one ridiculous issue will be enough to get him back into the White House.
Mar 1, 2004
The Solo Cup has just bought Sweetheart Cup, in a merger typical of the current business climate. Comcast, the cable provider, offered to pay over 50 billion dollars to buy Disney. The week before, Cingular proposed to buy AT&T Wireless for 41 billion dollars. And this year has seen the consolidation of the two most important banks in U.S. history–J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan–in a deal costing 58 billion dollars in stock.
Whether in cash, loans or stock, the bosses are smugly expressing confidence that their economy will continue to serve them. For them, there’s no need to worry about discipline, or cutbacks, or lack of customers.
They need to have the rug pulled out from under their feet.
Mar 1, 2004
Solo Corporation of Chicago recently bought Sweetheart Cup of Maryland. Both are cup and paper product manufacturers. Together the two companies have 34 plants, with 5000 Solo employees and 7,400 Sweetheart employees.
Solo is actually smaller than Sweetheart, but it is able to pay for the merger by getting loans worth more than 650 million dollars. The sale includes a 16 million dollar bonus for the owners of Solo, a privately-held family company.
In fact, this is hardly the first time these companies have been involved in buying, merging and selling. Sweetheart itself is the product of one company emerging out of others, going back to 1983.
Maryland Cup, begun in 1911, was a family-owned manufacturer of all kinds of cups and paper products. In 1983, it was bought by a paper products corporation, Fort Howard. In 1986, Fort Howard bought a competitor, Lily Tulip, another cup manufacturer. Fort Howard sold off its cup businesses to investment giant Morgan Stanley in 1988, in a deal involving 300 million dollars of short term debt. This new company became known as Sweetheart Holdings.
By 1993, a group of bosses known as the American Industrial Partners had bought up the majority of Sweetheart, using 300 million dollars in junk bond debt. In 1998, another company, Fonda, became involved in stock and loan deals to merge with Sweetheart. Fonda itself was the result of the buying up of a number of smaller paper products companies. And now Solo is willing to spend 880 million dollars, almost none of it cash, to buy up Sweetheart Holdings, which had just spent 12 million dollars to buy up another cup company in 2002.
Every one of these loans has to be paid back–and with big interest payments to boot. And the price paid for each new sale is calculated to cover for the cost of earlier debt.
The interest payments alone for Sweetheart Holdings were 37 million dollars last year, more than twice the amount the company formally showed for profits! But that interest is nothing but disguised profit going into someone’s pocket. And it all came out of the wealth the workers produce.
At Sweetheart, for all the millions of dollars produced by making cups all these decades, skilled jobs pay between $30,000 and $40,000 per year, but packers, for example, scarcely make $20,000 per year. What used to be a pension package, at the old Maryland Cup, has become a 401K plan in which workers are forced to gamble on the stock market. Like workers everywhere, Sweetheart workers are paying more for their health insurance and the employee attendance policy has become a way to get rid of employees.
While the basis of any economy is products and services, the wealth created from what workers make and do ends up in the hands of only a tiny minority who have been speculating in various ways, including by buying and selling companies.
Mar 1, 2004
Two white men from an outlying township, one a parks commissioner, drove into the city of Detroit early in the morning of February 23. Defacing the sculpture of a black fist erected in honor of boxer Joe Louis with white paint, they left behind photos of two white Detroit cops recently killed by a black man. On the photos they had scrawled the words, "Courtesy of Fighting Whiteys."
They might as well have burned a cross in the middle of Detroit.
Blaming all the people of the city of Detroit for what one man did, these fools were hardly different than the KKK in the period of Jim Crow, who were ready to lynch dozens of black men for what they accused one man of doing–often falsely. But there’s this difference–the black mobilization of the fifties, sixties, and seventies got rid of legal Jim Crow. In doing so, the black population exposed the cowardice and stupidity of racists hiding their faces at night under bed sheets–or behind a can of white paint.
These fools thought they could come into a predominantly black city, deface a symbol of a black fighter and get away without anyone noticing. They must have thought their white skin would make them impervious to anything.
In this case, these two idiots were prevented from getting away by a taxi driver with a cellphone, who followed them out of the city for many miles until he finally forced the cops to arrest them.
Mar 1, 2004
Thirty-five murders in January in the city of Detroit were followed by the murder of two city police officers on February 16, during a routine traffic stop.
The authorities and media, acting as if they had just noticed the problem, made crisis pronouncements. The police chief extended officers’ shifts from 8 hours to 12 hours. The mayor called for a "spiritual" solution. As if more patrols and more praying were some sort of answer!
The increase in murders in Detroit is only the early sign of what is coming in every large city with hundreds of thousands of youth with no jobs, no education, and no future offered to them except the streets, the prisons, the army–or early graves.
A report last year by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies sampled this increasingly desperate population. Nationally, from 2000 to 2002, the number of young adults, ages 16 - 24, who were both jobless and out of school rose 12% and totaled nearly five and a half million. Most of these unemployed young adults are not included in government statistics. If they were, the unemployment rate would jump up more than 60% above today’s level!
In this time when there are fewer jobs even for working-class youth who have been able to get some higher education, there are virtually no jobs for the rest.
In response to the sudden official concern over the Detroit murder rate, there were some blind enough to dismiss it as simply something that always happens in Detroit. And there were those who were racist enough–ignorant enough–to blame it on the large black population in Detroit.
But it is not a problem of some particular city–except that Detroit, based on the cyclical auto industry for well over 70 years, has always been hit earlier by bad times than other cities. Nor is it a problem of some particular race, except for the fact that in this racist society unemployment has always weighed most heavily on the black population.
This society today increasingly offers to its unemployed youth only violent options–the streets, the army, the jails. It should be no surprise to anyone that as joblessness increases among more and more millions of youth, murders will increase. The violence encountered in every large city today is only the mirror-image reflection of the violence done to those who are denied a part in the normal life of society.
It should come as no surprise in the future, that as long as joblessness is not eliminated, crime and violence will not go away.