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
Jan 24, 2005
During inauguration week, Bush spoke once again about fulfilling the mandate "the people" had given him.
This idea has been drummed into our heads, ever since November 2. Bush was supposed to have won a crushing mandate, and now he’s going to use it to implement his program.
Not so fast!
Bush didn’t win a crushing mandate. He won by fewer votes than did any other winning candidate since 1940, with four exceptions. As for the electoral college vote: only two times since 1878 did an elected president come into office with a smaller margin of victory–and one of those two times was Bush’s margin last time. It was hardly an overwhelming victory.
Nor do the policies that Bush is pushing represent the ideas of the majority of the population. Just the opposite.
On the domestic level, Bush’s main issue is Social Security. He wants to divert our retirement money into "private investment accounts" handled by Wall Street, while severely cutting Social Security benefits. Less than 30% of the population agrees with Bush on this proposal.
As for the war in Iraq, only 25% have confidence in what Bush says about it. Less than 40% of the population today says the war has been worth the loss in life.
Then there are those issues that Bush has pushed in order to rally a solid electorate–trying to appeal to their prejudices in order to make them forget their own real interests.
On the question of abortion, which Bush lets it be known he thinks should be illegal–only 30% of the population agrees with him.
On the question of a legal relationship between homosexual people: 27% of the population is ready to accept marriage between two lesbian women or two gay men. Another 35% think that homosexuals should be able to establish a "civil union," which would give them the same legal rights as marriage. Only 38% agree with Bush that no such relationship should be recognized.
In other words, while Bush pretends to speak for all the "people," in reality he has only been pandering to the reactionary prejudices held by a minority of the population.
And Bush can get away with it because Kerry campaigned on these issues like a pale imitation of Bush–with a few minor attempts to appear not so bad as Bush. He gave working people no real reason to vote for him, and the majority of working people didn’t even bother to vote.
So now what? Bush will continue to say the people gave him their mandate. And the Democrats will pretend there’s nothing they can do about it.
One thing is true–there is nothing the Democrats will do. But there’s a great deal that working people can do.
The first thing is to recognize that we can’t put our trust in any of these liars. We have to begin looking to ourselves. We are the ones who can protect Social Security–putting up a big solid wall the politicians will be afraid to tackle. We are the ones who can demand this war be brought to an end, sparing the loss of another Iraqi life, another American life. We are the ones who can make sure there is acceptance for all people’s views and lives.
Working people, in fact, are the big majority of the population. When we organize to fight for our own interests, when we don’t let ourselves get sidetracked by reactionary demagogues like Bush or false friends like Kerry, we can do a lot in a short period of time to change our situation.
Jan 24, 2005
Bush said the words "freedom" or "free" 27 times in his 20-minute inaugural speech.
He did not mention Iraq or Afghanistan. Not even once.
This time, not even a compulsive liar like Bush could bring himself to claim any relationship whatsoever between "freedom" and those two bombed, tortured, occupied, oppressed nations.
Jan 24, 2005
Armstrong Williams, a conservative newspaper columnist and TV commentator, was paid $240,000 by the Bush Administration to talk up Bush’s "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) education policy.
It’s now become a scandal, since the news media are supposed to be "neutral" and "impartial."
The real scandal in this whole affair is the NCLB program itself.
"No Child Left Behind" is a shell game, pure and simple. It forces public schools to meet a whole list of unreasonable criteria–or they lose federal money.
On the other hand, NCLB allows for charter schools to be set up to compete with public schools for students. The charter schools can get federal money–and they don’t have to be tested to meet the same rigorous criteria. Even though study after study has shown that most charter schools perform WORSE than the public schools they draw from.
"No Child Left Behind" is nothing but a way to shift money from public schools to private, charter schools–leaving children behind across the country.
This scandal continues–and very few of the news media bring it up at all, whether or not they were paid by the Bush administration.
It seems like there are a lot of ways other than money for an administration to buy off reporters.
Jan 24, 2005
Kenneth Burnley, the Detroit Public Schools CEO, has announced that the district will need to cut 340 million dollars from its budget in the next few years–and close 110 of its 255 school buildings. He says the schools are in a "crisis."
Some of the ideas actively being promoted to "fix" the "crisis" include turning the whole district into a charter school district, or breaking it up into a number of smaller districts–and turning those separate pieces into charter school districts.
In both cases, the public schools will be turned over to private interests to run on their own behalf–whether for profit or religious aims.
In 1999, talking about a "crisis" in the Detroit Public School system, then-governor John Engler and then-mayor Dennis Archer agreed to remove the old School Board and jointly appoint another one.
The CEO hired by the new board said the district was bloated with unnecessary costs. Talking about streamlining the schools’ operation, they cut schools, cut teachers, cut staff, and cut funding for school needs.
At the same time, the state opened the door to charter schools and "schools of choice," forcing public school districts to spend time and money competing with each other for students.
Five years later, the situation in the Detroit schools is much worse. The cuts in the schools, combined with all the propaganda touting charter schools, only served to provoke a mass exodus of students from the district, taking millions of tax dollars with it, making the budget situation worse than it had ever been.
Student enrollment in the district is down from 200,000 in 1999, to 140,000 today. Burnley is now projecting it will drop to 100,000 by 2008.
If enrollment drops like that, it’s only because the board continues to slash away at the schools, even while handing over still more money to charter schools.
Five years ago, the talk of a crisis in the Detroit Public Schools was aimed at justifying the beginnings of privatization. Everything that has been done since only deepened that crisis.
Today, with the situation many times worse, the final shoe is being dropped: to "save" the system, officials say, they will have to dismantle it completely.
What’s being put on the table is the wholesale privatization of the Detroit Public Schools.
This is nothing less than a declaration of war on the children of Detroit.
Jan 24, 2005
Managers at Social Security have been given "how to" memos, proposing they push the lie that Social Security faces immediate and dire financial problems. This action plan calls on managers to raise the idea that Social Security is going broke in staff meetings and to spread the word at farmer’s markets and shopping centers.
Spear-heading this campaign at the Social Security Administration (SSA) is Andrew Biggs. A former employee of the Cato Institute, a reactionary "think tank," Biggs has long advocated turning Social Security into private accounts despite all evidence that this would reduce total payout to retirees.
After Social Security workers and their unions began to publicize what was going on, a White House official claimed on "Meet the Press" that no Social Security employees would be asked to promote President Bush’s plan to create private investment accounts.
That this is a lie is obvious to anyone calling the Social Security 800 number. Callers on hold hear messages like: "Did you know that the 76-million strong baby boom generation will begin to retire in about ten years? When that happens, changes will need to be made to Social Security–changes to make sure there’s enough money to continue paying full benefits. And most experts agree, the sooner those changes are made, the less they are going to cost."
Is this George Bush’s propaganda? Certainly. But this particular message was created and used during the Clinton administration!
There is more. A document mailed this year to active workers spends half the first page talking about the coming Social Security "crisis." Go to Social Security’s website and financial problems are described as "very large and serious," and the shortfall "massive and growing."
A union representative and Social Security employee summed it up well: "These tactics exploit the public’s trust in SSA, to convince the public that such reform must be necessary if SSA tells them it is."
And it’s all nothing but a crock of lies, aimed at convincing us to let politicians hand Social Security over to Wall Street.
Jan 24, 2005
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to end pensions for California state employees, starting with those hired after July 1, 2007.
The "Terminator" says pensions are "out of control," and costing the state too much. He blames retirees for causing the $8 billion deficit in his budget.
Oh, really? Never mind that some of the biggest, most profitable corporations in California don’t even pay taxes! Never mind that the top one% of income earners in California are getting $12 billion in federal tax cuts this year!
No–Arnold wants to cut the pensions of retirees who will have given their whole working lives to the state–and replace them with 401(k) plans!
No thanks! We have been around long enough to know what that means–instead of gambling our retirement away on the stock market, we might as well go to Vegas and play blackjack!
Arnold might as well be honest and tell us straight: "You better die young because I’ll take away what you deserve after working all your life."
There is only one answer to this: This ain’t a Hollywood movie, Big Guy, and you won’t get it your way this time!
Jan 24, 2005
To carry out its sweeping attack on Social Security, the Bush administration may have a Republican controlled Congress to work with. But it still cannot get this so-called "reform" passed without the support of at least some Democrats in Congress. If there are Senators who block together, they can prevent a vote on any measure they consider critical unless 60 Senators vote to override them. And the Republicans have only 55 seats. The Democrats could literally kill any attack on Social Security by not letting it come to a vote–if they wanted.
Will the Democrats do that? Don’t bet on it. The Democrats are playing their usual game. On the one hand, some Democrats are playing to working people by denouncing Bush’s plan for Social Security. On the other hand, other Democrats have quietly made it clear that they are "willing to work with Bush." One of the Democrats’ main leaders, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Gore’s running mate in 2000, has already announced that he is leading the negotiations with Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine to reach "a consensus" on "reform." Joining Lieberman are other prominent Democratic senators, including Evan Bayh of Indiana and Thomas R. Carper of Delaware.
This sounds awfully similar to the tricks pulled by the Democrats all through Bush’s first term. Then, too, the Democrats had the votes to stop Bush’s entire program, but consistently provided enough votes to guarantee Bush and the Republicans the margin of victory–after denouncing them! Despite all their bluster, the Democrats helped Bush to impose his entire program. And this includes in the first two years of Bush’s term, when the Democrats had a majority in the Senate.
There is no reason to believe that on the question of Social Security, which is an attack of historic proportions, the Democrats will act any differently. For many years, plenty of Democrats have called for precisely these same kinds of attacks, thus helping to lay the groundwork for Bush’s present proposal. When he was in power, Clinton himself tried to follow up on his enormous, historic 1996 attack on welfare, ending welfare as an entitlement, by beginning the push to also end Social Security as an entitlement. Even though Clinton didn’t finish the job, he kept up the drum beat for future attacks on Social Security. And in 1999, he named a commission headed by several prominent Democratic senators–including Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, John B. Breaux of Louisiana and Charles Robb of Virginia–that proposed to privatize Social Security. This commission was supported by the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who headed a similar commission for Bush two years later.
Working people have no reason to expect the Democrats will stop Bush this time either. That doesn’t mean that Social Security "reform" can’t be stopped. But working people cannot count on any politicians to do it.
If the attack on Social Security is to be stopped, it will have to be thrown back in the same way Social Security was established–by a mobilization of the working people of this country that forced the capitalist class and their politicians to accede to something they didn’t want to give up.
Jan 24, 2005
The Indonesian military has told foreign aid workers that if they want to travel outside the two main cities in the Aceh province to help tsunami victims, they must get a special permit and be escorted by the military. Indonesian officials say this is necessary for the aid workers’ own safety, because they could be attacked or kidnapped by rebels.
Nobody believes this. So far, no incident involving rebels and aid workers has been reported from Aceh, where about 40 food trucks have been traveling every day. And everybody knows why the Indonesian military wants to keep the area off limits and increase its presence there: for the past 30 years, the Indonesian military has been fighting a civil war against the separatist Free Aceh Movement, known as GAM.
In fact, Aceh was already sealed off before the December 26 tsunami. In May 2003, the Indonesian army invaded Aceh with 40,000 troops. Human rights organizations have reported severe abuse of civilians at the hands of the military. The military targets the population as a way to attack the GAM.
The Indonesian military has a long history of repression, at times extremely brutal. It is estimated that the military killed more than one million people in the 1960s, when the government went after the workers’ unions and separatist organizations under the pretext of "fighting communism." In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor, a former Portuguese colony that had become independent. Over 200,000 people, or one-third of the population there, were killed during two decades of Indonesian occupation.
The whole time, the United States armed and trained the Indonesian military. In 1992 the U.S. said it would stop military aid to Indonesia after the news media widely publicized the army’s killing of protesters in East Timor. But that certainly didn’t mean a loosening of the ties between the two governments. Using September 11th as a pretext, the U.S. announced that it would start to train Indonesian officers again, in the name of the "war on terror." And now, after the tsunami, the U.S. said it has relaxed some of the restrictions on the sale of military equipment to Indonesia–in the name of helping the aid effort. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who visited Indonesia a few days after the military announced the restrictions on travel in Aceh, suggested that Congress should further ease the restrictions on U.S. training and arms sales to Indonesia.
In other words, as the Indonesian government is trying to use the tsunami aid as an excuse to increase its presence, and repression, in Aceh’s countryside, the U.S. is also trying to use the tsunami as a pretext to help the Indonesian military carry out that repression.
For the 400,000 Aceh residents who have been uprooted by the tsunami, the aid effort amounts to just a drop in the bucket. But, above and beyond the tsunami, the population of Aceh is faced with another, permanent disaster: poverty, imposed on the population by the brutal Indonesian ruling class, with the help of its big brother, U.S. imperialism.
Jan 24, 2005
More than 40 governments have promised nearly four billion dollars in aid to tsunami victims. But now that the television cameras are gone from the Jakarta donors’ conference, the scummy details about these deceitful "pledges" are coming out.
Half of the four billion dollars in aid pledged is not aid at all, but interest free loans. In other words, the countries that get the money are expected to pay it back. This means that poor people who live in these countries, where millions of survivors of the tsunami have absolutely nothing, will be squeezed to pay the money back.
Hundreds of millions of dollars of pledged money turns out to have been money already scheduled to be spent in the area. The Asian Development Bank, which distributes money from various countries, pledged 675 million dollars to rebuild roads, trains and other projects in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. But 175 million dollars of this is "reprogrammed" money. In other words, it is not new money at all, but takes money away from previously pledged projects in the devastated countries.
Nonetheless, Jan Egeland, the United Nation’s emergency relief coordinator, blathered away, "We are recording now pledges between three billion and four billion dollars, which again shows that it is indeed the world coming together in a manner we’ve never, ever seen before."
No, we’ve seen it before. Exactly a year before to the day of the tsunami, an earthquake devastated the Iranian city of Bam, leaving 32,000 dead and 18,000 wounded. One billion dollars in aid was promised, but only 17 million dollars has arrived, less than two% of what was promised.
Even the head of the U.N. Kofi Annan admits that these pledges will not be kept: "I will not be surprised if we do not get all the money. This is the history we live with."
This "history we live with" has a name. It’s called capitalism, where even natural disasters are turned to the advantage of the big imperialist powers.
Jan 24, 2005
At the end of December, some 50,000 workers took part in a demonstration in Dongguan, a blue-collar city near Canton in southern China. This protest was a response to police violence, which had killed several protesters. The police seemed especially to target migrant workers. The greater Canton area contains Special Export Zones, where electronics, toys and other goods are made for export. Many of the workers are migrants who come there from the impoverished countryside; some in the area were forced out of their homes by the giant dam projects.
It’s only the latest in a series of major protests in China. In November, 100,000 farmers in Sichuan province seized government offices in Hanyuan County, stopping work on a dam that was going to flood their lands. The government brought out 10,000 paramilitary troops against the farmers.
In October, in Wanzhou on the Yangtze River, thousands of angry protesters surrounded police cars, tipping over a police van and burning it. Over thirty thousand people stopped traffic in the streets downtown. Protesters took concrete slabs from a construction site and hurled them at the police; others entered police headquarters, took computers and office furniture outside, running off with some and burning the rest in a giant bonfire. The incident was provoked by a dispute in which a porter carrying bags got mud on a wealthy woman’s pants. Her husband seized the porter’s pole and beat him. The husband also bragged that he was a public official and could have the porter killed. Witnesses to the beating spread the news by cell phone, quickly surrounding the wealthy couple.
Police statistics say there were almost 60,000 protests in China in 2003, eight times the number a decade earlier. The protests include disputes against land seizures, misspent government money, forced migration, discrimination against ethnic minorities, unpaid wages or pensions, and killings by the police.
All these outbursts of anger are adding to industrial unrest, especially in the Canton region. There was a strike in October at Computime, a factory in Shenzhen. Three thousand workers blocked the main boulevard of the city; they gained a 170% wage increase. The company was fined about a quarter of a million dollars for paying below the minimum wage and using forced overtime.
Workers can barely survive on a minimum wage varying from 352 to 684 yuan, or about $42 to $82 per month. Some companies in the Special Export Zones impose 10 or 12 hour work days, six or even seven days a week. During the strike at Computime a worker told the South China Morning Post, "Our base wage is only 230 yuan a month or $28. We need to work 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Compensation for overtime is only two yuan an hour or 24¢. We can’t survive with this wage."
In December, 12,000 workers struck another factory in Shenzhen, Uniden. The wages for a month, working 11-hour days, are $58, according to an article in The New York Times.
These examples give a sharper view of the reality of what has been called the "Chinese miracle."
Jan 24, 2005
In 1996, Hurricane Mitch struck the Central American country of Honduras, the century’s worst natural disaster in the Western Hemisphere. For five days it rained torrents, producing landslides that swept entire villages off hills. There were 9,000 people killed and nine billion dollars of property damage.
Six months later, a number of the richest countries met at a donors’ conference in Stockholm. They pledged nine billion dollars for long term programs to develop the area, with the U.S. pledging 900 million dollars. Nine countries deferred debt payment.
Most of the money never arrived. The United States Congress set a two-year limit on reconstruction. When the time ran out and government money was shut off, many of the private organizations stopped their assistance too, leaving the projects unfinished. Nor did debt relief mean that interest payments on the debt stopped. The people of Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, had to come up with 219 million dollars to the banks last year alone.
Three years after the disaster, 20,000 people remained homeless, living in temporary shelter. They decided to do something about it. In 2002, 200 people from the area of Amarateca, where many refugees were settled, went into the capital of Honduras and stormed a church. They told the priest that no one could leave until they got permanent housing. Relief agencies finished the construction of buildings in their area, but left out the electricity, water and sanitation.
A year later the residents took action again: they blocked the major northbound highway demanding basic services. Today half the homes are still not properly wired with electricity, the water pump for the area is broken, there is a clinic without a doctor and a community meeting hall, to which no one in the community has a key.
The failure of reconstruction is clear. And so is the reason for this failure: The priority of capital is to extract economic surplus from the poor countries. Despite plenty of TV coverage at the recent donors’ conference, there is no reason to believe that the tsunami victims will fare any better than did those of Hurricane Mitch.
Jan 24, 2005
On January 9, Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority. Both Israel and the U.S. hailed his election, saying that the late Yasser Arafat had been the obstacle to peace, but now that a "moderate" was elected, peace became a possibility. Bush quickly invited Abbas to the White House, and Israel spoke of opening the door for him.
But just a week after Abbas’ election, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon grabbed the first possible pretext to send the Israeli army into Palestinian cities and refugee camps, giving them free reign to shoot "at will."
Sharon retreated a bit when Abbas ordered the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, part of the Fatah movement which he heads, to integrate its forces into the Palestinian police and then said he would send Palestinian policemen into the northern Gaza Strip to protect Israel.
In fact, Sharon didn’t listen to Abbas’ promises, but to the U.S., which wants to continue with the pretense that it was Arafat, and Arafat alone, who stood in the way of resolving the conflict in Israel-Palestine.
That’s as much of a lie as is Sharon’s pretense that he is for peace.
The disastrous situation in the area has been caused by the policies of the Israeli government pushing more Israeli settlements into Palestinian territory. And there are courageous people in Israel who point this out.
The Israeli peace group Gush Shalom (Peace Block) says in one of its press releases that the settlers continue to establish themselves in the Gaza Strip despite Sharon’s and the Israeli government’s decision that they will have to leave this year. Further, it says, "In the West Bank the occupation is intensified. Merciless military road blocks continue to prevent any possibility of a normal life. The photo showing a Palestinian violinist forced to play for soldiers at a road block evoked terrible memories for numerous Israelis. [This was done by Nazis against Jews in the death camps.] The construction of the wall of separation continues, with some route changes to conform to the decision of the Israeli court, but totally ignoring the decision of the International Court. The settlers root up Palestinian olive trees to build new housing. The number of settlers increases throughout the West Bank and the road network reserved for Jews continues to be built. More and more illegal outposts continue to be built under the protection of the Israeli army and with the tacit aid of various government ministers. Enormous sums are invested in these projects, while in Israel pensions are cut and the sick wait in the aisles in the hospitals."
This exactly describes the reality. Under such conditions, the responsibility of which falls on Israel, there is not going to be a movement toward peace unless Israel recognizes the national rights of the Palestinian population. And both populations will continue to pay the terrible human price they have paid for years.
In a recent speech, Sharon promised Israelis better times ahead, greater security, peace of mind, economic growth and social progress. Israelis won’t obtain any of these goals so long as the Palestinians don’t obtain what they have fought for over the decades.
Jan 24, 2005
Tom Coleman was an undercover cop in Tulia, Texas in l998. He arrested 46 adults, 39 of them black, on falsified charges of drug dealing. That was 13% of Tulia’s adult black population! On his word alone, with no supporting evidence, all-white Texas juries convicted 38. Twenty-two of those were sentenced to jail–their sentences totaling 750 years–and the rest sentenced to probation.
It took three years of work by organized families and friends of the victims before the media and finally the Texas courts looked into the case. It was so clearly a travesty that the Texas governor eventually issued a pardon for those convicted–after those in jail had served three and a half years.
Despite his 46 false arrests, 38 false imprisonments, and countless violations of civil rights, ex-officer Tom Coleman was charged only with one count of perjury–and that in an unrelated case! On January 18, he was sentenced to what? A fine of $7500 and ten years probation!
Why such a small sentence for such an atrocious crime? The Texas authorities say it’s because the statute of limitations on perjury runs out in Texas after two years.
Maybe–but those are not the only things he could have been charged with. In fact, the sentencing of Coleman is just another in a long history of Texas-style justice.
The man from Texas sitting today in the White House bellows long and loud about freedom and liberty. But it doesn’t apply in his old home state–as the Tulia travesty more than proves.
Jan 24, 2005
UAW members at Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler (DCX) learned from the newspapers the amounts of their so-called profit-sharing. For their work in 2004, GM workers will get a bonus of $195 each, Ford workers $600 each, and Chrysler workers somewhat above $1,000 each.
Since these are before-tax figures, workers’ take-home will be much less. As one Ford worker told a reporter, "It’s better than nothing. At least I can take my family out for dinner and a movie."
Yes, a worker’s bonus for a whole year’s hard, speeded-up labor isn’t much more than a nice family dinner and movie. The companies claim that workers should be thrilled with this bonus, since it is a few dollars more than last year’s meager payouts.
Workers are also supposed to recall the lean year of 2001 when the industry paid no profit-sharing at all. If workers are so bold as to mention the year 1999, when GM paid $1775, Ford paid $8000, and DCX $8100, all the corporate voices chorus, "Those days are gone."
But then why aren’t those days gone for the shareholders? The idle few who do no work at all, but who own huge blocks of stock, 200,000 shares, 500,000 shares, and more, receive their same steady payouts year in and year out.
General Motors’ stockholders rake in two bucks a share, every single year. The holder of 100,000 shares in 2001 got $200,000, even when workers got nothing. In 2002, 2003, 2004, whether GM workers got $940, $170, or $195, that stockholder got his $200,000.
The same general pattern holds at DCX and Ford, with a few cents’ variation. For 2003, while U.S. DCX workers received not a cent in profit-sharing, a holder of 100,000 shares of DCX received $189,000–$1.89 per share. A little more than a family dinner and movie!
Unless, of course, the leisurely cruise to the Mediterranean is included.
Jan 24, 2005
On January 7th, a railroad crash in South Carolina left nine people dead and sent dozens to the hospital after chlorine fumes leaked from a tank car in the train. More than five thousand people in the surrounding area had to be evacuated from homes, businesses and schools.
It’s not the first train crash involving chlorine. Last summer, another ruptured tank car carrying chlorine killed three people in a Texas train crash.
Chlorine is a deadly chemical used to treat water–made more dangerous by the way it is transported. Half of all railroad tank cars in use today were built before 1989 when new regulations required reinforced steel. Some 30,000 tankers have not been rebuilt. And no government agency or locality forces the chemical corporations and the transportation companies that own these tank cars to spend the money to bring them up to safety standards.
But the regulations themselves are no protection against accidents. This new leak of chlorine came from a tank car built in 1993, after the new regulations were put into effect.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating this accident, is trying to shift the focus of responsibility–saying it wants to question a rail worker about a switch left open. This action might have allowed the train carrying chlorine to crash into a stationary train on a siding, according to newspaper accounts.
Maybe so. But everyone ignores the real question that should be put to the railroads themselves–why have they cut staffing to the bone, which can only lead to "accidents?" Like hospitals and schools, railroads provide a service in carrying freight all over the country. But they are run as an industry for profit. And management always tries to increase profits by making fewer employees do more work.
Shoddy equipment, deadly substances and exhausted workers make more deadly accidents inevitable.
Jan 24, 2005
On Friday, January 21, UAW leaders organized a demonstration at Ford World Headquarters, near Detroit, protesting the company plans to build a new mid-size Lincoln in Hermosillo, Mexico rather than at an assembly plant in Wixom, Michigan. About 600 union officials and workers were there. At present, Wixom’s future is uncertain, since the luxury Lincoln models built there are slated to be built in Ford’s Atlanta plant next year.
Certainly there should be a demonstration when workers are threatened with losing their jobs–one which leads to a fight.
Workers throughout Ford Motor Company have lost jobs steadily over the years–not primarily because car production has shifted to Mexico or any other Ford plant, for that matter. The company has pushed to increase worker productivity for years, and the UAW International has accepted this push, even going so far as to inscribe cuts to the work force in the contract, which calls for only one worker to be hired to replace every two or three who retire or quit. This push for productivity–that is, speed-up–has meant a loss of 900,000 UAW jobs. In 1979, the UAW had 1.5 million members. It’s down to about 600,000 members today.
So yes, a fight needs to be made!
There was no fight in 2002 when Ford stopped production of the Lincoln Continental at Wixom, cut one of the plant’s two shifts, and transferred 900 workers to other plants, including to the Dearborn Truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
If this demonstration leads to a real fight, good. But Wixom workers better watch out. We’ve seen it before that Ford promised to keep a plant open–only if workers accepted more concessions and more speed-up. And the UAW International pushed for it, calling it a victory.
Nothing short of Ford workers using their power to stop production will force Ford’s hand. That would be a serious fight to propose.
Jan 24, 2005
On January 9, Andres Raya, a 19-year-old Marine recently returned from Iraq was killed in a shootout with police in Ceres, California. He had gunned down two cops, killing one, before being shot by the police.
The Ceres police quickly tried to paint him as a gang member high on cocaine at the time of the incident–neither of which turned out to be true.
Raya had been on a weekend leave from Camp Pendleton near San Diego. Raya’s family says he snapped because of what he had gone through in Iraq. People in the neighborhood attempted several times to set up a shrine to him in the alley where he was shot and spoke out against the police at a public meeting held in a nearby school.
Of course, no one can say for sure what relation exists between service in a war and subsequent actions of one person.
But one thing is certain. There already are serious problems faced by soldiers returning from Iraq. An Army study of veterans of combat in Iraq found that one in six reported symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. That figure is apt to grow as time goes on, since it takes many months, even years for these symptoms to gain full force. Among Vietnam vets, the rate finally turned out to be one in three.
Doctors are already seeing the effects and worry about how they will care for all the returning soldiers needing psychiatric care. Officials at six out of seven Veterans Affairs hospitals said in a survey that they "may not be able to meet" the demand for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In response to a New York Times article on the problem, Dr. William Peterson, the chief of Mental Health Services at an Army health clinic in Germany wrote, "I have only one quibble with your fine article: as an Army psychiatrist working daily with recently returned soldiers from Iraq, I assure you that the flood is not ‘in the offing,‘ as your headline says; the flood is here."
That there would be this kind of psychological toll is obvious. U.S. soldiers are today engaged in a war of occupation directed against the population of Iraq. In such a situation, you are an enemy to every man, woman, and child who may act against you.
War-mongers pass around these bumper stickers telling us to put them on our cars to support the troops. Yes, we should support the troops–but the only way to do it is to demand they be brought home immediately.
Jan 24, 2005
On January 30, Iraqi voters are supposed to elect a Transitional National Assembly of 275 members, which will then have nine months to draft a constitution. The constitution is to be voted on in a referendum October 2005, and a new assembly election set up for December 2005. In addition, voters in the three Kurdish provinces will elect an Iraqi Kurdistan National Assembly of 105 members. Voters in each of the country’s 18 provinces will elect governing councils. All these elections are organized according to a list system. Each voter votes for one list in each election and each list will be allocated a number of seats proportional to its votes.
At least 75 lists have been registered. The main lists are the "Iraqi United Alliance," bringing together the two main Shia parties; the small party of ex-U.S. favorite Ahmed Chalabi, dominated by Sunnis with a few individual Shiites, Kurds and Turcomans; the "National Front," which is formed by Prime Minister Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord with various satellite groups; and an association of two Kurdish parties, the KDP and PUK. The Iraqi Communist Party has formed a "People’s Union" list, which includes candidates from all minorities, on a program advocating, among other things, the separation of state and religion.
There are many questions that this election leaves unresolved. First, there is the question of the Sunni parties who, with public support from the Sunni Council of Clerics, have called for the election to be postponed until some order returns to the Sunni Triangle. Faced with U.S. refusal, they seem to have decided to boycott the election. What will they do next?
Also, what will the Shia fundamentalist movement of Moqtada al-Sadr do? Al-Sadr has made no secret of his intention to turn his militia into a political movement at some point. And he is definitely working to build support for it with a certain amount of success. His supporters are organizing a national protest against power cuts, with a demonstration in Baghdad, while his militiamen are hunting down black-marketeers and organizing the distribution of petrol and kerosene in Sadr City, the capital’s Shia slum. But when and how he will decide to move remains an open question.
Whatever happens, this election can only be a parody of a democratic election. It’s clear it will be rife with fraud. And the only observers sent by the Ottawa conference to monitor the vote will be "observing" from the safety of Jordan, for security reasons.
But the main reason it will be a farce is the situation in which it is taking place.
On one side, there is the state terrorism of U.S. and British imperialism, with their arsenals of bombs and tanks, their 170,000 heavily armed soldiers, and their determination to reduce Iraq to a vassal state, under a pliable regime.
The U.S. approaches this election with the blood of Fallujah dripping from its hands. How many civilians died in the U.S. attack? The only estimate of civilian casualties available was given by the Red Crescent on the basis of incomplete reports it had from the town’s hospitals–6,000 dead! But no one will ever know the real casualty figure. The only certainty is that this was a bloodbath that will long be remembered and not just in Fallujah.
On the other side, there is the terrorism of armed reactionary groups born out of the western invasion of Iraq, who consider the Iraqi population as disposable cannon-fodder, as they search for ways to establish their own dictatorship in Iraq–or in fiefdoms carved out of Iraq.
What sort of "democratic election" can there be? The real issue is not what voters put in the ballot box, but what they find outside when they leave the polling station–assuming they do vote. And what they find is a bloody war, which claims dozens of lives every day and can claim theirs at any moment.
Whatever happens in this election, the likelihood is that it is only the preparation for a still wider civil war. With the election virtually boycotted in the Sunni areas, the Transitional Assembly will have "legitimacy" at best only in the Shia and Kurdish regions–and not even really there. What the U.S. and Britain have already done in Iraq, setting the different religious and ethnic groups against each other, threatens to erect a wall of blood between them.
Even if there would be a credible turnout in this election, which seems somewhat unlikely, the powder keg created by the invasion of Iraq will not be any more stable. If anything, the threat of an implosion is increasing. And the only methods that imperialism knows how to use facing this threat are the ones it has already demonstrated in the Fallujah massacres. The only prospects imperialism has to offer the Iraqi people are more bloodbaths–not democracy, freedom and liberty as Bush proclaims.