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 17, 2004
After the U.S. Labor Department announced that 625,000 jobs had been created in March and April, the news media, economists and, of course, George W. Bush proclaimed a jobs recovery. Their message was, jobs are on the way back.
Don’t hold your breath. The job rebound is small. It is especially tiny compared to the collapse of the job market over the last four years. In that time, businesses destroyed 2.5 million jobs. They left another 4.6 million new workers entering the labor force without work. Thus, the real ranks of the jobless increased by over 7 million.
This is the longest most severe stretch of job losses since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And it took place during a time when profits skyrocketed. Just since the last expansion ended at the beginning of 2001, corporate profits grew by 57%. Businesses are now raking in close to one trillion dollars in profits a year. One trillion dollars. This is a record.
The rise in profits comes directly out of the workers’ hide. The latest government statistics show just how much has been stolen. Labor’s share of the income from nonfarm business, the broadest measure of what workers gain from the economy, fell from 65% at the end of 2001 to 60% at the end of 2003. This measure of wages and salaries is at its lowest since the government started keeping such records in 1947! This is not the worst of it, since this figure includes not just workers, but managers and all kinds of professionals at bigger companies, whose salaries have been increasing. Subtract the big shots’ increasing salaries, and the fall of the workers’ share of what is produced is much greater.
Corporations are taking a much, much bigger part of the wealth that workers produce. And they are taking it at record levels. They have been allowed to carry on such an assault because the working class, for the most part, has remained quiet for two and a half decades. When the workers don’t fight to improve their share of what’s produced, they can’t even defend what they once had.
Part of the responsibility for this abysmal state of affairs rests with top union leaders, who have been pushing workers to make ever bigger sacrifices for the companies–under the claim this would save jobs. Workers did agree to give up health and pension benefits for themselves and accepted two-tier wage and benefit schemes for newer workers. They didn’t protect jobs. The opposite happened as the bosses pushed through ever greater speed-up and intensity of work–which stole millions of jobs.
The idea that we can defend ourselves by sacrificing for the company is complete garbage.
These companies are raking in a trillion dollars in profits a year. That belongs to the workers.
One trillion is more than enough to let us work much shorter hours–and for much higher wages and benefits. It’s more than enough to guarantee that not one person should be jobless, not one worker forced to work for low wages.
But no one will give this one trillion dollars to the working class. We have to take it back.
May 17, 2004
The "No Child Left Behind Act," which was used by the Hamtramck school board to justify their recent firings, was passed by Congress and signed into law by George W. Bush last year.
If Bush and Congress had wanted to help students achieve a decent education–as they claimed–this law would have given money–and lots of it–to the districts that needed it most: money to hire more teachers and decrease class size; money to buy textbooks that are newer than 20 years old; money to upgrade equipment, and to repair or replace ancient, decrepit school buildings.
Instead, the "No Child Left Behind Act" placed all sorts of requirements on local school districts to demonstrate "improvement"–without giving any money to help them meet those requirements. If they are found to be "failing," they can be shut down or handed over to private business to run for profit.
Needless to say, poor and working class school districts are hit hardest by this act.
With the "No Child Left Behind" act, many workers’ children will be left without schools.
May 17, 2004
All by himself, acting against all the medical and scientific advice of his own department, and against his own final review panel’s 23-4 vote to approve, the acting director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research refused to allow the emergency contraception drug, Plan B, to be sold without a prescription.
His excuse was that young 14-year-old women might not be able to follow the instruction label.
With that lame excuse, he condemned young women to suffer pregnancies that can be nothing but tragedies. What 14 or 15 year old is ready to bear a child and able to support one? The question answers itself.
A safe and effective means is available, right now, to avoid such tragedies–tragedies for the mother and for the child! But for other reasons, one FDA administrator made sure that these tragedies will continue to occur. And that other reason is votes for Bush.
The Bush administration wants the votes of the most extreme religious fundamentalists, a very important part of Bush’s base. They are ready to throw away the lives, the health and welfare of very young women–and the children they will be forced to bear–to pander to the prejudices of that voting bloc.
It reveals just how brutally backward those religious prejudices are, in action.
May 17, 2004
There’s lead in Washington, D.C.‘s drinking water.
During the 2001-02 testing period, about half of 53 houses tested in the District showed lead levels that exceed the federal limit. Since then 5,000 additional homes tested were found to have excessive lead in the tap water.
Lead is an odorless, tasteless, colorless metal–which is also toxic to humans. It disrupts production of hemoglobin–a component of red blood cells that carries oxygen to body tissues–which leads to anemia. It interferes with neuron development and neural function, which can cause cognitive problems. It affects the kidneys, which can lead to high blood pressure and even kidney failure.
The effects of lead are cumulative and the damage caused by lead is permanent. This has been known for 80 years. For the last two years, WASA (the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority) knew it had a problem with lead in the water but did nothing about it.
After the scandal became public, WASA began giving out water filters to some residents. But these filters have not been tested at the high levels found in many homes.
WASA is a public utility whose board members are appointed by the D.C. mayor. The agency claims that the fees charged for water are not high enough to cover the costs of supplying it safely to District residents.
This is an old, old story, the complaints of local authorities, and in the case of Washington D.C., federal authorities, that there is no money for services.
Instead of using city funds for clean water, decent schools, health clinics, streets without holes, officials find ways to divert the money to their buddies–the private contractors and real estate developers, for example.
At this very moment, the mayor of Washington D.C. is proposing that the city pay to build a multi-million dollar baseball stadium and a hotel for the Washington Convention Center.
Of course there’s money to be had.
May 17, 2004
After half a century, the Justice Department just announced it was re-opening the Emmett Till case.
Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago, was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi. He was beaten, shot and dropped into the Tallahatchie River, supposedly because he had whistled at a white woman. An all-white jury acquitted the woman’s husband and brother of committing this crime, though the two later gloated about it and discussed the details with a reporter for a national magazine. The others involved were never charged.
For 49 years, no level of the government–not only the Mississippi state police and court officials, but also the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI–did anything about this case.
Why is the case being re-opened now? The Justice Department says new evidence was turned up–by two documentary filmmakers who interviewed people in Mississippi. One of them reported, "We were able to go to Mississippi and find people in a week or two who had evidence to give."
Two filmmakers can turn up in a week or two what the government couldn’t do in 49 years!
But then the filmmakers wanted to tell the truth about the case.
May 17, 2004
Local governments in the Detroit area, like others around the country, are making deeper cuts in all sorts of services. The city of Detroit is planning layoffs, including 112 workers in the transportation department who clean, fuel and maintain buses. Cities like Warren, Dearborn Heights, and Plymouth will be cutting firefighters and police patrols. Dearborn will be reducing library services, just as Warren already did last year. Royal Oak is planning to lay off 75 workers and increase parking ticket and traffic fines.
The local politicians blame the cuts on the reduced amount of money the state of Michigan is giving them out of its sales tax revenue. In turn, the state claims it has to hold onto the taxes to offset its own "budget crisis." They point the finger at cutbacks in budget grants from the federal government or at economic bad times.
None of the politicians or the media questions the excuses given for these cuts. At the same time that they blame the cuts on the bad economy, they have been bragging that the economy has been improving for the last two years. And it has–for the corporations who are announcing bigger and bigger profits. Yet none of the politicians propose to tax them to pay for the needed services.
On the contrary, the politicians continue to give money away to the big companies. The state of Michigan brags that it has given out tax breaks to business totaling 15 billion dollars in the last ten years. The city of Detroit has money to tear down buildings so that developers can come in or to sell two blocks in the heart of its downtown area to Compuware for $1 apiece so that it can build a new headquarters there.
There is no reason why–in the richest country in the world–we should have to go without essential services like libraries, firefighting, and working buses. Let the bosses’ insatiable appetite for profits be damned!
May 17, 2004
More than 800 middle school students in Hamtramck, Michigan walked out of classes April 29 to protest the firing of their principal and assistant principal.
On April 28, the Hamtramck school board had voted not to renew the contracts of Thomas Trawick and Michael Zygmontowicz of Kosciuszko Middle School.
The next day, about half the school’s 55 teachers called in sick to protest the move. The students took that ball and ran with it, walking out of classes and calling for the school board’s recall.
The school board explained its move saying that the school is "failing" under Bush’s "No Child Left Behind Act," and receives low scores on state tests.
It’s no surprise that Hamtramck schools are doing poorly. Hamtramck, a small city completely surrounded by Detroit, has been stripped of any tax base. Years ago, its largest employer, Chrysler, closed down its plants and offices in the city and moved to the far northern suburbs. Then General Motors built a new plant on the Hamtramck-Detroit border–in exchange for huge tax breaks and free land. A whole neighborhood was torn down to make way for the factory.
The city government itself has been in debt for years. The State of Michigan recently put it into receivership.
The school board knows what the situation is in the schools, and why they are in such trouble. But instead of speaking about this clearly, they looked to make scapegoats out of Trawick and Zygmontowicz.
But the students also know the situation: They know that their schools are in much worse shape than the schools in the wealthy suburbs of Detroit. And they see that it’s because of money, and NOT any individual administrators.
They also know what to do about it: to refuse to go along with the lies that are told.
May 17, 2004
Emory University researchers say they’ve discovered that the brain reacts differently when someone is given money, and when they work to earn it. Supposedly, when someone works for the money they receive, the pleasure centers of the brain are stimulated, and the person is much more satisfied and happy.
The wealthy must be miserable with all that money they didn’t work for–trust funds, stock dividends and inheritance. Take their money away from them–it’s for their own good!
May 17, 2004
The EPA has publicly denounced the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority. But behind closed doors, an EPA official admitted in an e-mail to his colleagues:"EPA must face the fact that WASA’s inadequate outreach has been judged here as complying with agency regulations. How can this be?"
How can this be? Simple. The EPA, like other government agencies supposedly set up to protect the population, is good mainly at two things: issuing statements and protecting corporate profit.
May 17, 2004
Saturday, May 8, about 150 people demonstrated against the war in Southwest Detroit. Organized by Women in Black, a pacifist women’s organization, the demonstration attracted other people, including some from the neighborhood.
The march, a silent one, went up and down Vernor, the main street of this predominately Latino neighborhood. People on the street were taking the leaflets, talking about it amongst themselves, calling up friends (on their cell phones) to talk about it. Most were supportive. Only two men wanted to argue for the war. The family of Artemis Brassfield, a soldier from Flint killed in Iraq, sent a statement against the war that was read. They had planned to be there but Artemis’ grandmother died and the funeral conflicted. The family said they would be at the June protest.
Tyree Guyton, an artist known for his Heidelberg Project installed in the streets of Detroit, gave a moving speech at the end. He denounced the government for killing children over there and waging an economic war here at home.
"It’s time we start bringing our own children home," he said. "Our war is not in Iraq, it’s here, against racism, unemployment and poverty."
It was only a small, very local demonstration. But demonstrations like these are going on around the country, organized by different people–even if the big media pays them little attention. They give expression to what the population thinks about this war.
May 17, 2004
Lane McCotter is the man who organized and directed the reopening of Abu Ghraib last year. He came well "qualified" for the job. When appointed to it, the private prison company where he was a top executive, Management & Training Corp., was then under investigation for brutality by the Justice Department.
McCotter had originally headed up the Utah state prison system until he was forced to resign in 1997, after several scandals broke. A naked prisoner had died when shackled to a chair for 16 hours. And the prison system had hired a psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who wrote prescriptions for drug addicts.
Leaving the Utah state prison, he joined Management & Training Corp., the third largest private prison company in the country operating 13 prisons, which already had a record for brutality. At one of its prisons, in Wichita Falls, Texas, Roderick Johnson, a prisoner, was repeatedly raped by other prisoners, even after he appealed to guards for help, and was allowed by the guards to be treated as a slave, bought and sold by gangs. Judge Wayne Justice of the U.S. District Court wrote of this prison, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions." In 2003, the Justice Department criticized Management & Training’s Santa Fe, New Mexico jail for unsafe conditions and the lack of medical care.
No one can say his record wasn’t known when McCotter was tapped for the job in Iraq. It’s exactly his record that made him well qualified for setting up Iraqi prisons–from the U.S. military’s perspective.
May 17, 2004
A 73-year old Iraqi woman was detained without charges for two months last summer, at Camp Cropper and at Abu Ghraib. According to a member of the British Labor Party who had inquired into this woman’s case, she was hooded and forced to get down on her hands and knees. A U.S. interrogator, calling her a donkey, got on her back and forced her to crawl across the cell.
This case puts the lie to what the U.S. says was going on in these prisons. The abuse was not only in Abu Ghraib. It was not only last October and November. And it was not only against possible combatants.
If a 73 year old woman can be ridden like a donkey, the whole population is being targeted. This is terrorism of the rankest sort.
May 17, 2004
The private prisons run by McCotter’s company, of course, aren’t the only prisons in the U.S. where barbaric practices occur. Today in Pennsylvania, prisoners are routinely stripped in front of other prisoners before being moved. In the Phoenix county jail, men are routinely made to wear women’s pink underwear. At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison prisoners are forced to wear black hoods, made to crawl on their knees, and are beaten and cursed by guards. In fact, over the last 25 years, over 40 state prisons around the country have been put under court orders due to overcrowding, brutality, lack of medical care, and poor food.
What goes on in Abu Ghraib might be worse in degree–but it’s part and parcel of the U.S. system of justice.
In an interview in January 2004 McCotter said that the Abu Ghraib prison he set up for the U.S. government "is the only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison." Precisely.
May 17, 2004
According to the International Red Cross report on the U.S. prison system, U.S. military officers informed them last winter that among the tens of thousands of Iraqis held in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison as well as the 13 other U.S.-run prison camps that the Red Cross inspected, 90% were completely innocent. Obviously, that never stopped the U.S. military from continuing to arrest, detain and torture countless Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of them.
The torture at Abu Ghraib is not some accident, mistake or simply limited to a few people like Donald Rumsfeld and his gang at the Pentagon say, echoed by the U.S. news media and the rest of the politicians. No, it is simply part of the U.S. war and occupation against an entire people who are opposing the attempt of the U.S. to dominate their country.
From the beginning of the war, the U.S. military machine targeted the people of Iraq. In the first weeks of the war, the U.S. aimed bombs, rockets and missiles at Iraqi cities. The U.S. military and the media might have pretended these were surgical strikes that largely spared the Iraqi people. But the reality is that in those first weeks of the war, the U.S. killed 10,000 Iraqis, most of whom were ordinary people, men, women and children. Even the fact that the U.S. government advertised this campaign with the name "Shock and Awe" reveals that their real aim was to terrorize the population.
In the months that followed, as the opposition to the U.S. occupation became an active guerrilla insurgency to push the U.S. out, the U.S. began a series of military offensives. In these offensives, the U.S. military was never fighting a standing army on some battlefield. No, after an insurgent attack, the Iraqi resistance melted away into the population from which it came. So the U.S. began to target the population in the small towns and big cities. The aim, of course, was to break the will of the Iraqi people. In fact, all this did was inflame opposition to the U.S. even more.
The U.S. escalated its war, once again bombing several cities in March and April. In Falluja, one of the centers of Iraqi resistance to the U.S., U.S. bombs, missiles and shells killed several hundred men, women and children. The pictures of stacks of bodies were carried in major newspapers and television channels around the world–but not very often in this country.
The U.S. prison camps filled with ordinary Iraqis, including children and elderly people. The systematic torture, rape and humiliation of so many of them was just a part of the broader U.S. war.
Many of the critics of the war point a finger at the Bush administration, saying that it is responsible for the horrendous atrocities in Iraq. Certainly, the Bush administration does bear a heavy responsibility. But the U.S. atrocities in Iraq are hardly unique.
We should not forget how U.S. bombings and massacres during the Viet Nam war killed over two million Vietnamese. Nor should we forget the My Lai massacre, during which U.S. troops killed 600 women, children and elderly people in just one afternoon, as well as all the other massacres. Nor can we forget how the U.S. kept captured Vietnamese and held them under torturous conditions in what were called tiger cages, or how U.S. troops deliberately pushed Vietnamese out of helicopters, as part of their so-called interrogation?
In Latin and Central America the U.S. has carried out dozens of wars, either with its own so-called "advisers," or with troops trained, armed and paid for by the U.S. The School of the Americas, run by the U.S. military at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, gives regular courses in different forms of torture for military officers from all over Latin America.
No, the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the war in Iraq is just the continuation of a long-term policy toward the rest of the world. The logic of these atrocities can be summed up by U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassman, who told the New York Times in December 2003, "With a heavy dose of fear and violence... I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." It is a familiar refrain from the U.S. military when occupying foreign countries. Who can forget during the Viet Nam war, the U.S. military officer who said that a town had to be destroyed in order to save it.
May 17, 2004
The court martial of Specialist Jeremy Sivits in the Abu Ghraib scandal that is set to start this week will be open with the media invited into the court.
Why is Sivits the first to go on trial? According to news reports, Sivits has cut a deal. He has pleaded guilty, and in exchange for a lighter sentence, Sivits is expected to testify that his superiors did not know what was going on. Only the little guys did something bad; the higher-ups never knew a thing about it. He has even said, "If they saw what was going on, there would be hell to pay."
So, just as quickly as the scandal is breaking, the government is furiously trying to put in place some kind of cover-up.
Did the higher-ups know about the torture? Of course they did–from the very beginning. At the very least, they were told about it by the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), which carried out inspections of the prisons and issued several reports starting more than a year ago, in March of 2003, that documented what amounted to torture in U.S. military prisons in Iraq. Moreover, in January, the president of the ICRC met with Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Department deputy Paul Wolfowitz to insist that the U.S. government do something to stop what amounted to systematic torture in its prisons in Iraq. And–Colin Powell recently told the Baltimore Sun that he fully briefed President Bush about these reports. It is a matter of public record that the U.S. government at its very highest level was made fully aware of the ICRC findings as of January–and nothing was done to put an end to the torture. In other words, it was condoned–which in this situation is the same as saying it was authorized.
These findings were not limited to torture in just one part of one prison, Abu Ghraib, as has been reported. No, the ICRC found the torture to be systemic, throughout the U.S.-run prisons, including at Camp Cropper at Baghdad airport and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq–which were both in operation months before the U.S. even opened Abu Ghraib.
Nonetheless, it is also a matter of public record that the U.S. military did not change its policy. On the contrary, the U.S. military carried out torture openly and brazenly. More than two years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that the U.S. would not adhere to the formal Geneva Conventions that outlawed torture. His justification was that the U.S. was in what he called the war against terror, under which the U.S. regularly includes its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To run Abu Ghraib, which had previously been Saddam Hussein’s most infamous prison, the U.S. military sent in Major General Geoffrey Miller, who previously had been in charge of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of detainees from the Afghan war are still being held under special military rules, without access to lawyers. They have been tortured, as reported by several international organizations. Miller claimed his methods got a high confession rate–even though every military authority says these kinds of confessions are completely worthless, since the person being tortured will say anything in order to get the pain to stop.
Under Miller, the U.S. military decided to use military police–the unit to which the seven soldiers being court-martialed belong–to work closely with military intelligence "to set conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation" of prisoners. As the accused soldiers put it, they were to "soften" up the detainees, make sure they "have a bad night," for example. The worst forms of torture were always a part of U.S. policy.
Neither the ICRC reports, nor the formal complaints from several U.S. soldiers, who refused to participate in torture as they had been instructed, forced the military to even investigate its own policies. Only in March, that is a year after the first instances of torture were documented did the U.S. military take action. That was precipitated because Joseph Darby, an MP in Abu Ghraib, brought a formal complaint and backed it up with a CD and video tapes filled with over a thousand photos documenting murder, rape, systemic beatings and other forms of torture of men, women, children and elderly people at the hands of the U.S. military. The photos began to circulate–being copied and passed amongst a wide range of people, even being sent in e-mails. This meant it was only a matter of time before a scandal would break. So, the U.S. military was left with no other choice, and it opened up several formal investigations.
The most well-known of these was carried out by Major General Antonio Taguba, which was only reported in May, after it had been leaked to reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker. Taguba’s report did document many forms of torture. But it still limited responsibility for this to a supposed breakdown in discipline and poor training of the guards. In other words, Taguba still laid most of the responsibility for the torture on seven privates, corporals and sergeants. The problem with more responsible military officers and government officials was that they were supposedly negligent and incompetent.
But as long as the Taguba report remained secret, the military apparently changed little in the functioning of the prisons. The proof is that the rules that were posted in the prisons that authorized the different forms of torture, including sensory deprivation (including by keeping hoods on people for many days), sleep deprivation, chaining people in uncomfortable "stress" positions for long periods of time, were only taken down in mid-May, that is, only after the scandal had taken on international proportions. In other words, the military waited to a very late date to take down from the prison walls the very rules that proved that torture had been institutionalized.
Today, George Bush may claim that "such practices do not reflect our values." In fact, yes they do reflect George Bush’s values–and those of the whole state apparatus.
The members of the U.S. Congress may act shocked for the cameras, and hold hearings, or even call for the dismissal of Donald Rumsfeld. But the fact that they have not immediately moved to impeach Bush and his entire cabinet proves that they are simply stalling for time until the scandal dies down.
Every level of government and the military, from Sivits to the Pentagon to Bush to the Congress are just trying to cover up the crimes that show the real face of the U.S. war against the Iraqi population.
May 17, 2004
Children’s Protective Services workers rallied on May 5th in Detroit, Michigan to denounce the state’s plans to cut child abuse investigators. If plans are implemented, the workforce in Wayne County would be cut by 10%. Nearly half the 200 person department joined in the protest which also included community activists.
In order to ram the cuts through, the state came up with an absurd caseload formula that does not include pending cases–cases where someone reports there has been abuse or neglect but no one has had time to investigate yet.
Investigators are so overworked in Wayne County they have MORE pending cases than "actual" cases. Because the state wants to cut the budget they are pretending that abused and neglected kids whom the overloaded caseworkers haven’t gotten to yet, don’t exist!
Workers were outraged and worried about kids dying and rightly voiced their concerns with homemade signs and chants at the spirited rally.
The Child Welfare League of America, an advocacy organization, says the optimal caseload for child protective services workers is about 12 cases per worker. In Wayne County, if the very real "pending" cases are counted, workers average 31 cases per worker even before the cuts the state wants!
Recently increased tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy have meant that "general fund" revenue, which pays for human services and the prison system in Michigan, has dropped 20% in the last 5 years. Acting like the situation is unsolvable, the state says this means human services must be cut.
In this case, children’s lives are being put at risk while politicians continue to worship at the altar of tax cuts for corporations.
The budget mess in Michigan is often blamed on the previous Republican Governor, John Engler, who did accelerate corporate tax cuts of previous administrations. However, politicians like current Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm, who do nothing to reverse the situation, have the blood of children on their hands if they cut protective services workers just to allow the practice to continue.
May 17, 2004
Five thousand two hundred workers at the Fiat plant in Melfi, Italy have just ended a three week strike. It was over issues familiar to workers in this country: their wages were lower than at other plants in the same company, and the speed of the assembly line was unbearable.
The strikers forced the company to get rid of its current work shift of 12 nights in a row, gaining two days between shifts. And they brought management to narrow the wage gap. The strikers didn’t get all they wanted. And–as here–they had to face union leaders who tried everything they could to bring the strike to an end. But it was a real victory for the workers.
This was the first strike in this factory, where Fiat had bragged it had a new style of industrial relations ... which just meant worse exploitation.
The workers showed they had a new style too–out on the picket line.
Other groups of Italian workers have entered into struggle recently, including workers of Alitalia, the airline company, and public transit workers who struck in numerous cities last December and January. It shows that anger against the bosses’ and the government’s policies can be contagious–and so can the decision to take militant action.
May 17, 2004
The 50th anniversary this month of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools has been noted in all the news media. As usual, the case—Brown v. Board of Education—is presented as the force that broke down the walls of segregation throughout the nation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Brown v. Board of Education—like a series of lower court rulings–was simply the legal recognition of changes that the mobilization of an angry black population was forcing through.
This movement among the black population had already developed strength by the early 1940s. In 1941, the threat of a March on Washington brought President Roosevelt to create the FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Commission) and issue orders outlawing racial discrimination in war industries. During World War II, resistance to being drafted to fight a "white man’s war"–organized by the Black Muslims–and protests within the military against segregated facilities and racist treatment, led to the U.S. War Department banning segregated recreational and transport facilities for troops in 1944.
After large numbers of black troops returned from the war, anger at their treatment at home welled up in a wide range of places. The Black Muslims, whose growth reflected increased anger in the big cities of the North, began to spread beyond Chicago and Detroit. With protests growing around the country against segregated facilities, the Supreme Court issued the first of many rulings declaring that segregation of tax-funded public facilities was illegal. In 1947 the first Freedom Rides were organized by CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality).
In 1948, a movement of black youths against being drafted into the still-segregated military forces of the U.S., combined with agitation among black troops, brought President Truman to issue an order for the desegregation of all U.S. military forces. In 1949, CORE began sit-ins at public facilities in St. Louis, which continued for four years until city officials conceded. A protest against voting restrictions forced the extension of the right to vote in states that bordered the South.
In 1953, CORE began sit-ins in Baltimore. Within the next year, legal segregation in the schools was ended in both Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The sit-in movement spread to other Northern cities. Dozens of black soldiers refused to sit in the back of a bus in Columbia, South Carolina. A boycott of the bus system in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, began and the UDL (United Defense League) was organized to protect black people from racist violence there. Other self-defense groups sprung up in some Southern cities. By the end of the year, black troops who had served in U.S. combat units in Korea were beginning to return home, taking a bigger role in protests throughout the South.
In May of 1954, the Supreme Court issued Brown v. Board of Education declaring that so-called "separate but equal" schools were unconstitutional.
Only a few of the events leading up to this decision are described here, but they show that this legal decision, like others both before and after it, came as the result of a growing movement among black people against the racism of this society. These court decisions, and laws that followed, were an admission of how much the mobilization of the black population was beginning to shake the repressive state apparatus in the whole country.
These decisions and laws were made by both Democrats and Republicans. The Supreme Court in 1954–with a majority of Democrats–was led by Earl Warren, a conservative Republican from California, who had distinguished himself during World War II by his racist decisions against Japanese Americans.
The federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, had a four to one Republican majority when it was at the center of the storm during the 1950s and ‘60s. It issued most of the important decisions throwing out laws enforcing racial discrimination, which were then upheld on appeal by the Supreme Court.
Just as both Democrats and Republicans can attack the population during periods when there is NO mobilization, they both can be forced to cede to demands in the midst of a popular mobilization.
May 17, 2004
The price of milk has been going up rapidly. It’s been above $3 a gallon in many cities, and is even $4 in some parts of the country.
All kinds of reasons are trotted out by the dairy industry. They say demand is outstripping supply; or, dairy farmers sent too many cattle to be slaughtered; or, there was too much rain that made the feed wet and the cows didn’t eat as much!
It’s this argument that’s all wet! Milk is another commodity produced in the capitalist manner–just like oil. Only 20 companies handle half of all the milk sold in the U.S. One of the biggest, Dean Foods, had profit of 356 million dollars last year.
Even though something like wet feed might affect a few traditional farmers with small herds, today’s modern dairy factories, with 20,000 cows or more, use bulk prepared feed. With all the resources of modern veterinary science, they maintain maximum milk production with the minimum number of cows. Just like oil companies, they can decide to milk more cows–or to milk fewer, in quantities large enough to swing prices.
So yes, the price of milk has soared, but it’s simply another large industry that’s milking us.
May 17, 2004
On Friday, April 30, the Los Angeles Times reported that about 10,000 big-rig drivers stayed away from work at three major California shipping ports. The truckers shut down about 85% of the ports’ traffic. To publicize their problem, some hung signs on their rigs–"The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer"–and used the trucks to slow down freeway traffic near the ports.
These are short-haul truckers, who contract with container shipping companies to take goods in and out of the Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. What the shipping companies pay was barely enough to cover costs–before the jumps in the truckers’ diesel fuel expense. What the truckers pay for diesel has increased by 40% since the first of the year. They are staring bankruptcy in the face.
While the protests were for only one day at Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Port of Oakland truckers also stayed off work the following Monday, causing some worry at manufacturing plants like GM’s, that depend on just-in-time shipments of material.
The truckers showed their ability to organize and to publicize their problem. They have thrown out a warning flag against the big shipping companies that exploit them. It remains to be seen, what they may decide to do next.
One thing is sure: every working person is being hurt by the price hikes on fuel. Everyone has an interest in pushing the prices back down.
May 17, 2004
Gasoline prices have reached more than $2.00 per gallon in many places around the country–with predictions it will go much higher. The oil companies, as usual, blamed OPEC for creating a shortage of crude oil–and so causing prices to rise. In reality, it is not crude oil that is in short supply in this country. The oil industry admits it–and the government’s reserve continues to increase as surplus crude oil accumulates.
What’s in short supply is gasoline. And that shortage is being contrived by the companies that refine oil in this country–dominated by the world’s five biggest oil companies, the "Majors" as they are called. These five–BP/Amoco, Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell and Total–have shut down much of their refinery capacity to drive up the price of gas. Since 1980, the companies have closed half of their refineries in the U.S. and they continue to do so, even while prices shoot further up.
They are not replacing old refineries with new more efficient ones–they have not built a single new one since 1976. They certainly could have done so–given their enormous profits during all that time.
This is not the first time that the big oil companies have created artificial shortages to drive prices up. They did so in 1973, during what was known as the "Arab Oil Embargo." OPEC had threatened to embargo countries that had supported Israel during its Yom Kippur War. In reality, that embargo was always violated.
The oil companies took advantage of OPEC’s threat, however, to drive up their prices. At that time, the big oil companies still directly controlled a big part of the production of crude oil, in addition to refined oil products.
It is usually difficult to prove how big companies create shortages in this manner, but in this case a report came out five years later showing that U.S. officials had encouraged OPEC to increase its prices since early in 1971.
U.S. industry overall stood to gain from these price increases, since it would benefit from increased exports to the OPEC countries and because higher oil prices would hurt competitors in Europe and Japan more than U.S. companies. Europe and Japan were more dependent on oil than the U.S. was.
The big oil companies used part of the enormous super profits they made to pay for exploration of new oil resources in the North Sea, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
The oil companies manufactured a similar shortage in 1979, and blamed it on OPEC once again. They did it again in 2000 and they are doing it today.
So what does the oil industry want this time? The U.S. Senate, using the high gas prices as a justification, has just passed a nine billion dollar tax break going to the oil and natural gas industry. It includes enormous tax refunds for companies that increase oil drilling within the U.S. and for a pipeline to carry natural gas from Alaska.
This same bill has been turned down three times before. Given how enormously profitable the oil industry has been, it was a kind of embarrassment, even for politicians who give the corporations everything they ask for.
But now it’s been passed. Effectively, the gas price explosion has extorted another tax break for the oil industry. The other thing the companies want is the elimination of many environmental and health restrictions that cut slightly into their profits.
The world’s oil is controlled by a handful of companies–who create artificial shortages when it serves them, regardless of the havoc this causes to society. But the oil industry is not unique–it’s only a microcosm of how the whole capitalism economy works.