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
Sep 26, 2005
Could it happen in Los Angeles or Chicago or Washington, D.C. or New York? What about St. Louis or Cleveland or Pittsburgh? Could a Katrina-style catastrophe happen elsewhere in the country?
You bet! Because the same preconditions that turned a million people from Louisiana and Mississippi into refugees exist throughout the country.
We may not all be threatened by hurricanes. But we are all put at risk by official decisions not to keep the country’s infrastructure in good repair. The country’s roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, water systems, sewer systems, ports, public transport, medical systems have all been left to rot–every bit as much as were Louisiana’s levees. All it would take is a fairly sizeable natural or man-made disaster to create as big a catastrophe as Katrina–or bigger.
California has been expecting the big earthquake for years now. St. Louis could be flooded every bit as badly as New Orleans if just one important dam or set of locks on the Mississippi gave way. There are factories handling highly toxic materials without sufficient safeguards, nuclear power plants that have already teetered close to meltdown.
But it’s not these "once-in-a-100-year" disasters that really pose the biggest threat. If Katrina’s levees and the infrastructure around the river and the port had been kept up, Katrina would not have buried New Orleans in water. What puts all of us truly at risk is the terrible degrading of this nation’s infrastructure–both physical and social.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, it would take 1.6 trillion dollars over the next five years just to keep things from getting worse. But only 900 billion dollars is now allotted, not enough to prevent this infrastructure from degenerating further, much less to improve the situation. Government at every level has abdicated all responsibility for ensuring the safety of the population.
We don’t have to wait for the big catastrophe to pay a big price. According to highway studies, about 13,000 people die every year in auto accidents caused by inadequate maintenance of highways and roads. Almost every city would be as log-jammed as Houston in an attempt to evacuate, many would be worse. Over one-third of major urban roads are so congested under ordinary circumstances that 60 billion or so dollars is wasted in extra fuel costs every year.
More than 3500 dams are considered so unsafe they could collapse with little notice–in the past two years, 29 dams did give way. The government is spending less than 10% of what needs to be spent to keep drinking water in public systems sanitary, causing the deaths of unknown numbers of infants, the elderly and other people in weakened conditions. Sewer lines break all the time, dumping 850 billion gallons of raw, untreated sewage into rivers, streams and lakes. There are 350,000 chemically contaminated sites that need to be cleaned up–meanwhile, tens of millions of people living nearby have their health compromised.
It’s not a lack of money that has created this disastrous situation we live in. The U.S. gross domestic product adds up to 12.4 trillion dollars this year. The federal government spends about 2.5 trillion dollars, with state and local governments themselves spending 1.3 trillion more.
There’s money in this country. As Bush frequently likes to remind us, it’s the richest country in the world.
But its riches aren’t being spent on the population. Bush, in the tax cuts enacted in just four short years managed to hand over 1.1 trillion dollars to the wealthiest one-fifth of the population–nearly enough to cover the nation’s repair bill. And Bush was just continuing what presidents before him, Democrat and Republican, started.
Money that should have gone to New Orleans’ levees, to the nation’s highways and public transport, to our water and sewage systems has gone, instead, to the wealthy.
Bush, this hypocrite, says Katrina gave a wake-up call. Yes, it did–and the warning says that we are all potential victims if we don’t begin to insist that our needs be met. We have the forces and the potential power to do that. Don’t let Bush or other apologists for the wealthy tell us any different.
Sep 26, 2005
"The people we’re talking about are not refugees," said George Bush, referring to the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. "They are Americans and they need the help and love and compassion of our fellow citizens."But actions speak louder than words. What kind of help does FEMA, the federal disaster aid agency, propose for hurricane victims? To set up huge, crowded trailer parks!
This obviously sounds like refugee camps. And residents of such "trailer ghettos" set up after last year’s Hurricane Charley in Florida can tell a thing or two on that subject.
"It’s hell," said one resident of "FEMA City," as she took her 5-year-old son for a walk in a scorching morning sun. This trailer camp, which was set up for about 1,500 residents of Punta Gorda, Florida who were made homeless by Charley, has no trees or shrubs and only two playgrounds for hundreds of children.
The situation will only be worse for the refugees of this year’s hurricanes, for two reasons. There are many more of them (Katrina alone displaced more than one million people), so their trailer ghettos will be much bigger. FEMA City, for example, has about 500 trailers, but officials are talking about towns of 25,000 or more trailers along the Gulf coast. Secondly, most of this year’s refugees will have very little, if any, income because jobs have disappeared along with homes.
By contrast, most of the people living in FEMA City work. But their low-paying jobs don’t allow them to move out. After Charley destroyed practically all of the low-rent and public housing in Punta Gorda, landlords used the scarcity of affordable housing as an opportunity to jack up the rents. Apartments that were renting for $600 before the hurricane are now going for as much as $1,500. And in place of the affordable housing units that were destroyed, developers were encouraged to build expensive houses and luxury hotels–and given tax breaks to do so!
FEMA plans to buy up to 300,000 trailers. Of course they can provide housing for the refugees for the moment–and be very useful. IF they were used to bring the refugees back to where they came from, letting them work to rebuild the towns and cities destroyed by the hurricanes. Why not hire the refugees at decent wages and allow them to rebuild new decent and affordable housing for themselves, along with their cities?
"Love and compassion" for the victims of Katrina and Rita? Bush has none! All Bush has to offer them is to be herded into overcrowded ghettos of poverty, permanently uprooted, without the prospect of a job. That is, to be refugees in their own country.
Bush’s warm emotions are reserved for other people: his rapacious corporate buddies–the Halliburtons, the Bechtels, the developers of luxury hotels, casinos and mansions.
Back at FEMA City, Florida, residents are required to vacate the trailers by Feb. 13 according to federal regulations. "We’ve got old people, we’ve got a lot of new babies. Where are they supposed to go?" said one teenage resident. "Personally, I think there will be riots here if they try to evict people."Yes, anger can explode into riots and it should. But the refugees linked to these hurricanes–whether Charley or Katrina–can also organize themselves into a powerful social and political force, forcing the government to give them the opportunity to rebuild their lives.
Sep 26, 2005
At least 24 sick, elderly patients from a nursing home in a Houston suburb were killed trying to flee Hurricane Rita. The Houston Chronicle reported that one of the wheels on their bus had a blowout. Then the wheel caught fire, which apparently set off explosions from oxygen tanks that some passengers needed to breathe. Horrified onlookers and the bus driver were not able to get most of the patients off the burning bus alive.
The bus, carrying 38 frail passengers and six staff from a nursing home in a Houston suburb, had been trapped 16 hours in the miles-long backup of cars trying to reach Dallas from Houston.
And what led to the 50 to 100 mile backup seen on television by the entire country? An evacuation plan that was a disaster. Texas officials apparently learned nothing from the New Orleans disaster.
Like New Orleans, the plans for evacuation rested essentially on individual cars. This, in a city where one in every 12 people was reported to have no access to a vehicle.
The mayor of Houston talked of mandatory evacuations on Wednesday, but then he asked businesses to voluntarily let non-essential employees leave–but not until Thursday.
So Thursday presented a monumental traffic backup in the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country. Officials didn’t anticipate it. They could not even decide how many lanes of the freeway should be outbound or if some lanes should be left open for emergency vehicles. And finally when it became completely log jammed, they ordered people NOT to leave or go back.
The only thing that saved the people of Houston and Galveston was that Hurricane Rita turned away from their area.
Reporters found after the bus tragedy that the company operating it, Global Limo, had its operating license suspended in May for safety violations!
Why were patients with oxygen tanks being transported by such a company? Because the state eased safety rules for vehicles to be used in the evacuation. So some nursing homes ended up with buses with worn tires. Reporters also mentioned seeing many other people on old buses without air conditioning in 90-degree heat. As a result 24 people died. The media reported that when people without a car tried to call government offices for help, no one answered. When nursing home operators tried to get the bus companies they thought would transport their residents, the buses had gone somewhere else. The governor said FEMA had ambulances, while FEMA officials said they knew of no ambulances.
Gas stations ran out of gas, banks closed. But even with money and gasoline, the line of cars could not go anywhere.
Houston and New Orleans both showed that there is no disaster planning in this country. The United States does not begin to use its available resources to help its own population. Chaos and death are what we get in a society where, we are told, "the market" will take care of everything.
Sep 26, 2005
Over 60 billion dollars has already been slated for "rebuilding" New Orleans and the Gulf coast area devastated by Hurricane Katrina. And there is talk that the total cost will reach well over 200 billion dollars.
FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers have already awarded big money contracts to corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, the Shaw Group and Fluor for the "rebuilding" of Louisiana and Mississippi.
These are no-bid contracts, handed out to those corporations. They’re also "cost-plus" and "infinite delivery-infinite quantity" contracts. Put into plain English, it means the corporations can write their own tickets–saying they needed to spend any amount they want, and they’re guaranteed to be paid for that amount, PLUS a guaranteed profit margin on top of that.
We can see what has happened when these same companies were given the same kinds of contracts in Iraq. Halliburton has already been paid more than nine billion dollars on those contracts. An audit shows Halliburton was paid for over one billion dollars in "questioned" costs, and 422 million dollars in "unsupported" costs. Meanwhile, everything they were supposed to "rebuild" is still a giant disaster.
Nothing’s been done to yank Halliburton’s Iraq contracts or make them pay this money back. Instead, they’re being rewarded with even more contracts–this time here in the U.S.
Very little of that money will be seen by the people who need it most.
There IS a crying need for money to be spent in the region, and right now. There are hundreds of thousands–close to a million people–left without homes, livelihood and the bare means of survival. Communities in the area that have taken in refugees created by the disaster–all the larger cities as well as smaller towns–have had their budgets completely drained by the money that they’ve already spent tending to the needs of people forced to flee New Orleans and other coast areas. The strain has all but wiped out local budgets for schools, city services, and fire departments–in other words, local emergency response–all up and down the region. This sets the stage for even more disasters, on large and small scales.
These communities have been crying out for some of that money from FEMA and other agencies, to repay at least some of what they have spent. But so far, they haven’t gotten one single cent.
This isn’t incompetence. This IS government policy: to use this horrible human catastrophe as an excuse to hand over billions of dollars to their buddies, while leaving the real needs of millions of people unmet.
Bush has said, "We will do whatever it takes" in the Gulf. What he really means is, "We will do whatever it takes to give as much money to my friends as I possibly can!"
Sep 26, 2005
Airline workers who went to New Orleans to aid in the evacuation saw family members being split up and put on separate planes, with no lists being kept of where they were sent. With organization like this, or the lack thereof, it’s no wonder announcers on CBS radio are asking if anyone has seen a missing child!
For all Bush and his clan speak of "family values," this shows just how much respect they have for families in the real world!
Sep 26, 2005
Several million people evacuating coastal Texas ahead of Hurricane Rita were trapped for days on the freeways around Houston.
But a few were able to fly out–if they had the money for an airplane ticket.
Any government, concerned with saving as many lives as it could, would have commandeered the planes and opened them up to evacuees with special needs: the elderly, or those too sick to stand a long bus trip.
Instead, this government left the planes in private hands. And those private corporations did what they do best: they jumped at the chance to gouge desperate people for as much cash as they could get.
Prices for flights out of Houston skyrocketed–doubling and tripling in price and even more. Tickets that would have cost $228 a few weeks before were now going for anywhere from $516–to $1,937 for a Continental flight to Washington, D.C.!
This story was the same as in New Orleans: those with the means got out. Those without were trapped.
And a few corporations made lots of money.
Sep 26, 2005
It wasn’t widely publicized in this country. But in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan whipped Cuba with 160 m.p.h. winds, the Cuban government evacuated nearly two million people and there wasn’t a single death or serious injury!
Cuba is a poor country compared to the U.S., the richest country in the world, and made much poorer by U.S. government policies. Yet the Cuban government could plan in advance and carry out an evacuation without it becoming a disaster.
It shows that a government can make the population’s safety and security a priority. Why doesn’t this one do it?
Sep 26, 2005
The Bush administration has its constitution. After months of negotiations and several fruitless attempts, the draft Iraqi constitution was finally presented to the Iraqi national assembly on September 17. This time, the occupation authorities didn’t take any chances: there was no vote or even debate in the assembly!
What does the White House care if behind this "democratic" travesty, Iraq each day sinks a little more into a blood bath. Or that the week before the final constitution was turned over to the national assembly there were terrorist attacks that killed more than 350 Iraqis, half of them on September 14 alone, when 14 attacks in Baghdad killed 167 and wounded 570! There is the same silence on the endless war, like the attack on the city of Tal Afar, on the Syrian border, first by heavy bombs and then by 5,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. Or when the British army in Basra smashed open the prison of the Iraqi government it is supposedly there assisting, to rescue two British soldiers who had been undercover dressed as Iraqis. The Iraqi government defended the police in arresting the British soldiers, and criticized the British rescue. They might as well have spoken to the wind.
According to U.S. propaganda, the main reason the situation in Iraq is deteriorating is the presence of al-Qaeda. Others say the reason is a religious conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. But these convenient explanations hide the real responsibility for the mess in Iraq.
The U.S. and British invasion caused the Saddam Hussein regime to collapse, leaving a gaping vacuum in the state which is being filled by many rival reactionary factions fighting for power. The arrogance of the occupiers, the miserable conditions of existence that they imposed on the population and their attempts to support themselves on a Shiite majority against a Sunni minority–all this stirred up divisions between communities, while doing the recruitment work for factions who don’t shrink from demagogy.
Today, besides the occupation troops, the reality of power on the ground is exercised by the armed militias of these factions, each striving to increase its influence at the expense of its rivals.
Besides competing for power, these factions have their own ambitions. The two Kurdish nationalist parties, for 15 years now solidly installed in power under the protection of imperialism, primarily want to preserve the status quo, provided that they exercise a monopoly over the Kirkuk oil fields–which is contested by the other factions.
The Shiite factions are divided. Some of them, like that of Prime Minister al-Jaafari, aim at an Iraqi federation, with a vast southern region under Shiite control centered around the Basra oil fields, which would be a counter-weight to the Kurdish area. Others, like the faction of the religious leader Moktada al-Sadr, following the example of the Sunni factions, are opposed to any form of federalism and advocate a centralized power, in the name of Iraqi nationalism.
What all of these factions have in common, whether or not they take part in the democratic travesty orchestrated by Washington, is the willingness to use their arms not only against their rivals in the struggle for power, but also if necessary to impose themselves by terror on the population. For example, the fact that some of them justify their terrorist attacks against Iraqi construction workers by the fact that they "collaborate" with the occupier, changes nothing of the disgusting character of such actions.
These are all the ingredients for a civil war, which is not a new development but dates back to the first months following the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime. Now, in the two and a half years of the occupation, not only hasn’t imperialism defused this powder keg, it has stoked it. For several months there has been an increase in brutal terrorist attacks affecting practically every part of the Iraqi population. There is every reason to fear that Bush’s "democratic" travesty will only hide the transformation from a latent civil war into an open one, in which the population finds itself caught in the trap between the bombs of the imperialist armies and those of different local militias fighting for power.
Sep 26, 2005
A rally and march called by several anti-war organizations drew at least 100,000 people to Washington D.C. on Saturday, Sept. 24. The organizers said that the crowd exceeded 200,000. Even the D.C. police chief agreed that the march probably exceeded the organizers’ original goal of 100,000.
Whichever figure, this was the largest demonstration against the Iraq war since it began in March 2003.
The crowd that gathered in Washington was diverse. Activists were joined by people of all ages and occupations, as well as relatives of troops stationed in Iraq and some soldiers in uniform. Many protesters said that this was the first time they were participating in a demonstration like this.
The rising number of U.S. deaths was a prominent concern expressed by protesters. A woman from New Hampshire brought a 700-yard banner–a long rope carried by 80 people, holding the pictures of 1,900 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Many protesters questioned the priorities of the government. "Make Levees Not War," proclaimed one T-shirt; signs demanded, "Healthcare Not Warfare." Some protesters carried a 25-foot-tall effigy of Bush, sporting a military flight suit and a growing Pinocchio nose.
A second rally with more than 10,000 people took place in Los Angeles, and other smaller ones in other cities. In San Diego, which has a large naval base, 2,000 protesters showed up for a rally called by "Veterans for Peace." Two signs there read, "War Is Terrorism With a Bigger Budget," and "Bush is a Category 5 Disaster."These rallies were able to gather large crowds despite the Bush administration’s open efforts to intimidate would-be protesters. Two days before, Bush had said: "Some Americans want us to withdraw our troops so that we can escape the violence. I recognize their good intentions, but they are wrong. ... Withdrawing our troops would make the world more dangerous and America less safe." The administration’s efforts to encourage counter-demonstrations in support of the war also failed, as no more than 200 showed up to oppose the anti-war rally.
Ironically, the significance of these protests was perhaps best summarized by one of the organizers of the pro-war rally, who said that it was not protests that stopped the Viet Nam war but the fact that they "demoralized" the troops.
Demoralized? No, to the contrary, large anti-war protests during the Viet Nam war encouraged soldiers to do what they wanted to do anyway: refuse to "sacrifice" their lives–or, for that matter, limbs–for a war they didn’t see the point of.
That was also the sentiment expressed by Army Sgt. Frank Cookinham: "I’ve never done this before, but here I am, in uniform, figuring this is the only way I can shove it to Bush," said the veteran who just returned from a second tour in Iraq, "This war makes no sense."
Sep 26, 2005
The Palestinian population, humiliated and mistreated for thirty-eight years, let their joy burst out after the last settlers and the Israeli armed forces evacuated the Gaza strip. Now the Palestinians have to take over a heavily devastated territory. When the settlers and the army left, they destroyed almost everything: houses, facilities and plantations.
Everything except twenty synagogues constructed in the settlements, which were emptied but deliberately left in place by the Sharon government. Just a year before, this same government said it was proposing to demolish the synagogues during the evacuation.
This was a provocation on Sharon’s part, for it was clear that the Palestinians were going to take on the only symbols that remained after the Israeli occupation, even if they were religious places. Those Israeli politicians who defended leaving the synagogues in good condition hoped "the entire world would discover the infamy" of the Palestinians.
The Israeli government said it adhered to the principle of the "preservation of holy places." This principle seems to run only one way. At the time of the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948, numerous mosques were destroyed by the Israeli army, which chased the biggest part of the Palestinian population away while conquering the land. This episode is recalled in the Israeli daily paper Haaretz (The Land), in a chronicle on the "war of holy places." "Of around 140 village mosques abandoned as a consequence of the 1948 war, a hundred were entirely demolished. The 40 that remained were in an advanced state of abandon and degradation or were utilized by Jewish inhabitants for usages for which they weren’t intended.... A big mosque in the midst of a moshav (a cooperative farm town) in the mountains of Judea served as a warehouse and garage for farm equipment.... When the inhabitants of a western Galilee moshav wanted to ‘expand,‘ they attacked the remains of the village mosque in the middle of the night with a bulldozer and entirely demolished it."That is to say, those who take on synagogues are just following this lead, with one difference: in 1948, the destruction of mosques was a decision carried out by the Israeli state.
Daily life in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated zones in the world, remains marked by poverty, unemployment and the situation of semi-apartheid that successive Israeli administrations have maintained since 1967. Ariel Sharon may have freed himself from the "burden" that Gaza represented for the army and the country’s finances, but his policy consists in consolidating the settlements on the West Bank and isolating Palestinian zones behind high walls, including East Jerusalem. This is far from the free and sovereign Palestinian state the population aspires to, and which the government of Sharon continues doing everything to prevent.
Sep 26, 2005
On Sunday, September 18, elections were held in Afghanistan to choose representatives to the national parliament and to provincial councils. No one knows the results of these elections, as the counting of the ballots is going to take more than a month, but they have nonetheless been presented as a victory for democracy. Kofi Annan, the general secretary of the United Nations, stated that these elections demonstrate "the clear determination of the Afghan people to pursue a peaceful and democratic development of their nation." And George Bush spoke of a "success," of an "important step in the development of Afghanistan into a democratic state governed by the rule of law."Looking at the circumstances under which these elections took place, one can only say that the representatives of the western powers have a strange conception of democracy.
To begin with, these elections took place under strict surveillance: thousands of men from security forces (both Afghan and foreign) were mobilized because of the fear that the voting stations would be attacked by the Taliban, who called for a boycott. Under these conditions, the "observers" claimed it was likely that 50% of the population voted.
Nor apparently did they bother to look very closely at the past of the 2800 candidates who ran in these legislative elections. Among them were former members of the Taliban, with pasts as little dictators and torturers; accompanied by a number of war lords who saw the elections as a way to legitimize in the eyes of the western rulers the power they exercise over the population they control through terror and assassinations. Even if 32 candidates were eventually excluded from the voting lists because of their "links with armed groups," many others remained. And during the last six months of the election campaigning, more than a thousand people, including seven candidates, were assassinated.
We were also told of "democratic advances" because some women voted in Afghanistan. There was even a quota of 25% of the seats assigned exclusively to women candidates. But the so-called defenders of democracy were not shocked by the fact that women had to be fully covered in head-to-toe robes and veils in order to vote, nor that they could not vote inside the regular polling stations mosques–where "purity" would be compromised if the skin on a woman’s hand might show when they dropped their ballots in the voting box. Thus, women were required to vote outside in the weather. At the same time, a young female television announcer was assassinated because she dared to show her uncovered face before the television camera!
But above all else, this parody called an election took place in a country at war, where the government of President Karzai survives only because of the force imposed by U.S. and other Western troops. Just what kind of democracy is possible inside a country under the armed occupation of the Western powers?
Sep 26, 2005
On Labor Day weekend, on the Southwest side of Chicago, there was a block party, which is quite common in the city. It’s a chance for people to socialize, for neighbors to get to know each other better and they often discuss the problems they face every day. The main problem in this neighborhood is gang activity.
The party went on, and about 11:30 p.m. a car sped into the street which was still full of people, including children. This car almost hit a kid. Since the street was still closed at the other end, the driver decided to go onto the sidewalk. One of the people at the party threw something at the car. He, like all of us, was very upset at what we were witnessing.
Three gang bangers came into the block to support the driver. We started to tell them that they shouldn’t drive like that with so many people in the street. Then one of the gang bangers said, "So what if we do? Do you have a problem?" Then about 20 friends visiting one person surrounded the gang bangers and confronted them. The gang bangers waved over other of their gang friends from the end of the street to get help. Because we were so many, only a few teenagers came to help them. They were defiant and threatening people, but our large group escorted them down to the end of the street. They got into their cars and sped away.
Once they left, a big debate began in the street whether we were right to confront them. Some people, including some of those who had surrounded the gang bangers, said it was a mistake, we couldn’t win, we were acting stupid, we had kids and were endangering them. Others defended what we did, saying we were right to stand up for ourselves. If we didn’t confront the problem, we’d live for the rest of our lives with it.
Sep 26, 2005
On Monday, September 12, more than two million Los Angeles residents were left without electricity for more than an hour. Traffic jammed so badly, intersections were totally blocked, elevators stopped, people were stuck in garages and on top floors of high-rises without air conditioning. How many people’s lives were endangered because their medical equipment failed? How many died? We’ll never know.
DWP (Department of Water and Power) officials not only tried to play down the outage, they also tried to blame it on one "careless" worker who had snipped the wrong bundle of wires at a small power station. Then, to prevent the power failure from spreading to networks well beyond L.A. and to avoid extensive equipment damage, the DWP said, it had to cut off power to large parts of the city. Three days later, the DWP admitted that the worker who cut the wires had been given a faulty work order.
Whoever was at fault, errors like this may obviously happen once in a while. The real question is: how is it that one minor glitch can lead to the failure of the whole power network serving one of the country’s most populated areas, and possibly beyond? Why were there no safeguards in place?
It’s because L.A.‘s power network, like the rest of its infrastructure, suffers the same problem as the infrastructure in the rest of the country. That is, L.A. is still using a system that was set up decades ago, when the population was much smaller. So the network is run at its limit, making it vulnerable to such large blackouts if one part of it fails.
Improvements on the L.A. grid, urged by engineers and DWP officials, have routinely been put off for being "too expensive." Never mind that the same politicians who say that there is no money for the maintenance of the infrastructure or public services always find lots of money to hand out to companies in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, contracts or "consulting" fees!
We literally can’t live without electricity. Blackouts, even if for a short time, disrupt lives and can cause deaths. Power networks are too important to be left in the hands of capitalists whose only concern is the bottom line of their books, or politicians whose only concern is to funnel tax dollars to corporations.
Sep 26, 2005
On Saturday, September 17, a Metra commuter train in Chicago derailed. Two people were killed and 80 people were injured, 17 of them seriously. The train, which had been switched over to a side track because of maintenance on the regular track, was going 69 mph at the time of the accident, when it should have been going 10 mph when it came up to a new switching intersection.
Metra, the public agency that runs the trains, immediately issued statements that everything in the system seemed to be running correctly. And it made a point to announce it had given the engineer a drug test. Metra also said that its equipment had been tested just before the accident. In other words, Metra was indicting the train crew before any investigation was done.
The engineer’s union representative, who was present at the National Transportation Safety Board hearing, told the press that the engineer had seen seven green lights in a row telling him to go forward at 70 mph immediately before the accident. The Board threw him off the investigation, saying he was prohibited from making public statements, although Metra management had already made damaging statements. Why couldn’t the engineer’s side be told? Apparently, it had a lot of validity, otherwise they wouldn’t be so worried.
With good reason. An identical accident occurred at the exact same spot in 2003, under the same conditions–high speed, with the train crew saying they weren’t warned to brake it down, which resulted in 45 people injured. Any cop will say, a coincidence is a red flag–that someone is guilty. In this case, the finger points at Metra, which has made no change in the system since the first accident.
Of course human error causes accidents, since we all make mistakes. That’s why there should be back-up safety controls. Such controls exist for this situation, called positive train control that can brake a train if it doesn’t slow down before reaching low speed tracks. Mark Rosenker, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, admitted, "positive train control would prevent that type of accident."
Metra says it’s too expensive. It’s possible it doesn’t have the money since Metra gets all the money for its track and equipment from the U.S. government, which has been consistently under funding transportation and other parts of the infrastructure for decades now in order to give more money to the wealthy.
Like the inadequate levees in New Orleans, the absence of proper controls on the Chicago commuter rail lines led to the needless loss of lives.
Sep 26, 2005
Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) warned customers to expect their costs to go up 25 to 33% this winter in Maryland, blaming the effects on Hurricane Katrina. Washington Gas also warned customers in the D.C. area to expect increases during the winter heating season. And home heating oil companies already told customers in Washington D.C. to expect their bill to rise more than 50% this winter.
The energy giants–whether for electricity, heating oil, gasoline or natural gas–were looking for an excuse to raise their prices as quickly as possible. And they found it in Katrina–which supposedly took a quarter of U.S. refinery capacities out of production. Then Hurricane Rita was supposedly going to affect another quarter of all refinery capacity. If it were true–instead of simply being a scare tactic–then how were these energy companies suddenly able to make sure that gasoline was available when the Bush administration began to worry about public outrage–before they started to push it up again?
But even if they had a temporary shortage–so what? The oil and natural gas companies are well aware that hurricanes happen every year in the Gulf of Mexico. That means, companies should have ample reserves in production capacity and inventory to ensure there aren’t shortages during these regular weather problems.
And in fact, there WERE large reserves of crude oil. At the end of July, crude oil stocks in the United States were at their highest levels since 1999. The U.S. is awash in crude oil and so is the rest of the world.
BUT, say the oil companies, there is a shortage of refining capacity. If that is so, it’s a contrived shortage. An internal memo written in 1996 by a Texaco executive bluntly stated, "the most critical problem facing the refining industry ... is the surplus of refining capacity, and the surplus gasoline capacity." Note it said surplus, not shortage. The memo concluded: "Significant events need to occur to assist in reducing supplies and/or increasing demand for gasoline."In fact, it’s obvious, the energy companies are using these hurricanes as a "significant event"–an excuse to allow the companies to charge higher prices and make greater profits.
Sep 26, 2005
According to a report in the Detroit News, since 2002 the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) legal aid program has handled nearly 10,000 cases of UAW members going bankrupt. The lawyers estimate that members’ bankruptcies are increasing about 10% annually.
The leading causes of bankruptcy for workers are often catastrophic medical bills, and divorce. But the News report focused on a different problem: less overtime available for workers who had come to depend on it. The report states that the typical auto worker in Michigan has lost five hours of overtime per week since 1997, an average loss of $10,000 per year.
Companies these days are constantly eliminating jobs, thousands of jobs. At the same time, production of vehicles and parts has not slumped, it has expanded, as the market for vehicles has stayed at record levels since 2001.
More production with fewer workers–why hasn’t this meant more overtime, not less? Because of a never-reported fact of life in workplaces today: speed-up. Intense speed-up. One worker today is doing the work that two, or more likely three, did yesterday. The boss can get more production done in fewer hours. Less overtime is required. Workers’ incomes drop, even while they are producing more product per hour than ever.
The first organizers of the UAW used to say, "It was the speed-up that organized Flint." More pay in the envelope was less important to the autoworkers of the 1930s than relief from the inhuman speed of the line. The first job actions by workers after their successful sit-down strikes were to work on a set number of jobs per hour–and then stop working until the hour was up. They forced the companies to slow the line speeds to a more human pace.
As the workers’ fighting reflexes gradually deteriorated, the companies very gradually speeded them up. A notable turning point came in the l980s when the UAW began accepting concessions in a big way–chief among them, big concessions on the pace of work. The speed-up ceased to be gradual.
Today, the fact of speed-up may be showing up in a few statistics about loss of overtime income. But behind the statistics is the harsh reality of how far backward the working class has allowed itself to be pushed–and especially that section of the working class which once set a far different pace, not only for itself, but a standard of improvement for the working class across the country.
On every level, workers have been forced back nearly to those inhuman speeds and conditions of pre-union days. And so, the working class has returned to the same choice that faced their great- grandparents: organize and fight for your life–or let yourself be worked to death.
Sep 26, 2005
While Northwest Airlines just declared bankruptcy and is demanding huge concessions and job cuts from its workers, its top officials have made out quite nicely.
Al Checchi and Gary Wilson, together with a group of investors, carried out a leveraged buyout of Northwest in 1989. With a mere 40 million-dollar investment, the pair used assets of the company they intended to buy to borrow more money to purchase the company for 3.65 BILLION dollars.
In 1994, to pay back part of their loans, they took their company "public," that is they sold Northwest stock. Of course, Checchi and Wilson took their share right off the top. They each made an estimated 150 million dollars from the initial public offering of Northwest stock.
That was only the beginning. Year after year, Northwest paid its top five executives big bucks. Since 2002, the airline gave its top five executives more than 32 million dollars, 15 million of it the year before it declared bankruptcy! And that doesn’t even include other benefits like lifetime health care benefits or a million dollars a year pension for CEO Doug Steenland.
Since January, Checchi and Wilson have each sold about 80% of stock options they owned. Checchi made 26.4 million dollars on the sales and Wilson made 19.5 million dollars. After dumping most of their stock–they declared bankruptcy.
If Northwest is anywhere near death, it’s only because these vultures have feasted on it for so long.