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
Nov 21, 2005
Reacting to calls to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, George W. Bush said: “An immediate withdrawal of our troops from Iraq will only strengthen the terrorists’ hand in Iraq and the broader war on terror.”
As if terrorism had not been rising steadily since the U.S. invasion of Iraq two and a half years ago!
Not a single day goes by in Iraq without terrorist bombings killing civilians. And not just there. Look at the recent suicide attacks on three hotels in Amman, Jordan, which killed more than 50 people. Or the train and bus bombings in London and Madrid, Spain. The U.S. itself is certainly not immune from such attacks.
This rise in terrorism is a direct result of the wars the U.S. has been carrying out in Afghanistan and Iraq–with massive, indiscriminate bombing of cities, random arrests, torture in military prisons. Just recently, military brass admitted to using white phosphorus, a weapon which burns to the bone anybody within 500 feet!
These dirty wars turn more and more people against the U.S. And some people resort to terrorism themselves, attacking what they see as “American” targets: U.S. troops, American establishments, and Iraqis, both civilian and in uniform, who work for the U.S. or its ally, the Iraqi government.
More and more people in the U.S. oppose this war. Responding to this growing mood, some Democratic politicians have spoken for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq–like Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, who jumped on the bandwagon last week.
But these Democrats don’t mean what they say. All it took to pull off these liars’ masks was for Bush to call their bluff. Congressional Republicans introduced a vote in the House last Friday on the question of immediate withdrawal. The vote was 403 to 3, AGAINST! And Murtha was NOT one of the three Democrats who voted to bring U.S. troops out of Iraq.
No, Democratic politicians will not vote to end the war in Iraq. With this last vote, as well as every vote cast since 2003, the Democrats stood solidly behind Bush. Every time Bush asked for it, they gave him their support and the money he requested to conduct this bloody war.
But there IS a vote for withdrawal, from where it really counts. On the very day of the House vote, the New York Times reported that the military was unable to fully staff 41% of its specialty units this year. Combat specialties especially suffered a shortage of enlistments. The Army, National Guard and Marines have signed up only one third of the Special Forces troops, intelligence specialists and translators they were looking for.
Soldiers who have seen the reality of these dirty wars are not waiting for politicians. They are voting for immediate withdrawal, by refusing to re-enlist!
It’s not the first time this has happened. Soldiers of previous generations stood up against the military and politicians who wanted to continue wars–by refusing to be sent from Europe to China after World War II, for example, or in Viet Nam later. And soldiers were joined by their relatives, friends and others back home who opposed these wars. Mass movements, not politicians, brought those wars to an end.
That’s what will end this war too.
Nov 21, 2005
Medicare Part D, the new drug insurance program for retirees, starts in January. About 40 million people on Medicare are eligible to sign up. But when enrollment started on November 15, many retirees were confused and frustrated. They found that instead of a plan with standard coverage, premiums and co-pays, they had to choose from among dozens of different plans offered by different companies covering different sets of drugs with different premiums, deductibles and co-pays. In most states, at least 30 or 40 different plans are being offered; in some states far more. In Michigan, 78 different plans are being offered by 18 companies.
The problem is that rather than creating a fund out of which all retirees’ drug bills will be paid by the government, the program will subsidize individual drug insurance policies that retirees can buy from private insurance companies, all looking to make a profit on their different policies. Also, no pharmacy participates in all the plans. So if a retiree wants to use a particular pharmacy, they also need to know which plans their pharmacy participates in.
Not only does this profusion of plans make it difficult for retirees to know which plan is the best for them, it also wastes billions of dollars. Each company will spend millions of dollars on advertising and each will make millions more on setting up and running a system to process just its own claims. The program will work like other private health insurance programs in which administrative expenses are four times more than what they are for Medicare Parts A and B.
Bush and other politicians have called the new drug insurance program for retirees the greatest improvement in Medicare since it was first started. In reality, it will be a bigger fraud than what Enron perpetrated, providing expensive, incomplete and confusing coverage to tens of millions of people. But for the private insurance companies, it will be a golden dream come true.
Nov 21, 2005
George Bush just called the new Medicare drug plan, “The greatest advance in health care for seniors and Americans with disabilities since the creation of Medicare 40 years ago.”
What a joke! The plan, called Medicare Part D, is a real attack on senior citizens and the disabled, including, especially, the poorest among them. The plan has high monthly premiums, a high deductible and astronomical co-pays.
The average premium people will pay under the plan is $32 per month and the deductible is $250. In other words, people will pay out $634 before they ever see one penny.
Then as their drug bills increase, they will pay a 25% co-pay for a period and 100% for a period after that. Compare that to the $5 or $10 co-pays active workers pay for prescriptions and you get an idea of how little this plan looks like any “normal” insurance plan.
After people have paid their premiums and the deductible, they will pay 25% of the costs until they reach $2,250 in drug charges. People paying average premiums must have drug bills of $1,518 before they even get back the same amount they’ve paid in.
In other words, anyone currently paying less than $1,500 for drug coverage might as well stay out of this plan. And this amount will go up every year as co-pays and deductibles increase.
Above this level, they will finally begin to get back more than they’ve paid in. At $2,250 in bills, the average person will get $549 more than they’ve paid. But then there’s a big gap in coverage between $2,250 and $5,100, where the plan pays nothing. So even if people apply that $549 to their drug bills, a person with average premiums will wind up footing the entire bill for anything between $2,799 and $5,100.
Even those with more than $5,100 in bills, considered the “catastrophic level,” will still have to pay 5% of the rest. The average person will have paid $3,984 out-of-pocket before reaching this level. The bottom of the “catastrophic” level will also go up every year with inflation.
Low-income people with drug coverage under Medicaid, who are eligible for Medicare, will automatically be switched to the new plan. Many of these people currently pay nothing for prescriptions under Medicaid. Under the new plan, low-income seniors will pay between $1 and $5 for every prescription they fill, depending on their income and what drugs they need.
The plan is designed to push people to enroll. Seniors have until May 15 to do so. Those who don’t will be penalized an additional one% on their premiums for every month they delay. They will then pay the higher premiums forever.
Medicare Part D may be a big “advance” for Bush’s friends in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, but for seniors and the disabled it’s a huge step backwards.
Nov 21, 2005
GM complained loudly about its rising retiree health care costs in order to convince its workers to accept health care concessions.
What neither GM, nor any of the “analysts,” ever mentioned was that GM and every other company that provides retiree drug coverage is about to get a big subsidy from the new Medicare drug plan. Corporations will get a subsidy of 28% of what they claim they pay each year. Based on their current claims–as though we should believe them–the average subsidy will be about $670 for each worker covered by company plans. And it’s tax free!
The bosses are experts at selectively presenting figures when it comes to crying broke. Remember this, when the next corporation comes complaining about its “out of control” health care costs.
Nov 21, 2005
On November 14, the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, reported that the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, had ignored its own independent advisory committee and its staff–in order to block young women’s access to a pill preventing pregnancy.
At issue, was how top officials of the FDA handled the application by Barr Laboratories, maker of the contraceptive pill called Plan B, to sell this drug over the counter, rather than by prescription.
Barr had followed the FDA’s rules, providing evidence of the clinical safety and effectiveness of the drug. The scientific panel advising the FDA approved Barr’s request by a vote of 23 to 4. The professional staff of the FDA, many of them scientists, agreed. But the political hacks appointed by Bush to run the FDA turned down the application.
When the GAO looked further, it found that out of 67 drugs approved for a change from prescription to over-the-counter in the last 10 years, only Plan B was not approved.
The acting deputy commissioner and the director of CDER, the drug research center, told four staff members that Barr’s application would not be approved before they even looked at the evidence. When the GAO tried to investigate what the FDA commissioner had said about Plan B, they were told that all his correspondence had disappeared or been thrown out.
The current commissioner is indefinitely postponing Barr’s application, acting against the agency’s own regulations–all to make it more difficult for teenage women to prevent pregnancy.
In protest, the FDA’s Assistant Commissioner for Women’s Health, Susan Wood, resigned on August 31. Dr. Wood said, “I can no longer serve ... when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by professional staff here, has been overruled.”
A majority of Americans, in every poll taken, believe a woman should be the one in control of her own body and the contraceptive methods that allow her to avoid pregnancy. So these political hacks had to come up with excuses and delays, ignoring their own rules, their own staff, and scientific evidence to support views of their minority supporters, the religious right.
These religious attitudes go back three hundred years to the days of the Salem witch trials, when women were supposed to be silent and pregnant, under complete control by their husbands. Christianity had a long history of torturing to death those who disputed its views and its control. The religious right here in the U.S. today sounds just like the Jewish rabbis in Jerusalem or the Catholic pope in Rome or the Islamic mullahs in Tehran.
This arrogant minority pretends to speak for us, to shut us up, to prevent us from making our own decisions. We can’t let them.
Nov 21, 2005
Utilities across the country have announced that in the next month, they will be doubling their natural gas prices, already at an all-time high.
The utilities blame it on the producers. And the producers blame it on short supply.
The companies claim that the rise in price reflects the increase in demand, coupled with a decline in production.
How convenient–since they’re the ones who decide how much to produce!
It’s not because they CAN’T produce any more than they do. It’s because they choose not to.
They’re trying to ride the back of the high price of crude oil to push through this outrageous increase. But natural gas is not refined from crude oil. They’re two different commodities. And the price of one should not impact the price of the other.
But natural gas does share one thing with oil: both are controlled by a few huge companies that believe they can charge whatever prices they want to set.
And just as the big oil companies keep a tight control on the supply of oil, by restricting the number of refineries in operation, the natural gas producers keep a cap on the supply of gas–to justify the prices they want to set. And sometimes they’re the same companies.
We saw them run this very same scam at the time when Enron was ripping off California in its energy crisis five years ago. But just as gas prices were set to rise through the roof in 2001, Enron collapsed. As the scandal spread, the utilities and gas producers backed off their price hikes.
But in the last couple years, they’ve been bringing this scam back–shooting gas prices higher and higher, and saying they have no other choice.
We don’t have that short a memory! If they can’t provide the services we need at a decent price, take away their facilities from them. Heat is too necessary to be left in the hands of profit-making vultures.
Nov 21, 2005
So now we’re supposed to be thrilled because gasoline prices are back down around $2.00 per gallon after climbing to a high of $3.50 or more?
Just a couple years ago, it was down around $1.25.
That’s a price the oil companies could aim for!
Nov 21, 2005
Big Oil just reported their profits for the three months of July, August and September. Exxon-Mobil made 9.9 million dollars in profits over three months. Royal Dutch Shell made nine billion; BP made 6.5 billion dollars.
The numbers are so huge they are hard to understand. So what does 9.9 billion dollars mean if it is NOT the profits of one single corporation for three months? It would allow almost 800,000 additional teachers to be put to work.
These corporations claim they are not gouging us; they claim they are simply charging what the law of “supply and demand” dictates.
We have not yet found the way to push back against these rip-off artists with their hands in our pockets. But we don’t have to fall for their lies.
Nov 21, 2005
On November 13, U.S. troops raided a prison in Baghdad run by the Iraqi government, supposedly to look for an Iraqi teenager whose parents had contacted a U.S. congressman. Instead, the troops found 173 prisoners who had been starved and tortured.
U.S. officials pretended to be shocked! They immediately denounced their allies, the Iraqi government, for the ill treatment of these prisoners. A U.S. general told reporters this incident proved that the U.S. did not play favorites in Iraq.
What shameless lies!
How could U.S. officials not know–when tens of thousands of Iraqis demonstrated to protest relatives being arrested by the Iraqi police and disappearing? How could they not have known when numerous news reports exposed the discovery of mass graves with bodies bearing signs of torture and execution?
The prison raided by the U.S. was run by the militia of a Shiite organization, which also controls the Interior Ministry in the U.S.-sponsored government, and almost all the prisoners were Sunnis. But is this a surprise? The U.S. has been relying on Kurdish warlords, Shiite mullahs and Sunni members of Saddam Hussein’s old state apparatus to run occupied Iraq. The U.S. has been using Shiite and Kurdish troops to raid cities and towns whose population is overwhelmingly Sunni. And the U.S. has set up Iraq’s new political structure on the basis of these ethnic and religious divisions.
This prison raid was nothing but a show intended for the U.S. audience. The U.S. has not only been playing favorites in Iraq; it has effectively been provoking and deepening the ethnic and religious divisions there. In fact, the U.S. has been setting Iraq up for civil war–a civil war that gets more brutal and violent by the day, under the watch of the U.S. occupation forces.
Nov 21, 2005
A documentary, aired by the Italian state television, RAI, on November 8, showed that the U.S. military used white phosphorus in its attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. White phosphorus burns very violently in air. It was used by the U.S. in World War II and in Viet Nam along with napalm, another highly flammable chemical.
After this information hit the airwaves and printing presses in Europe, U.S. officials admitted that they had been using white phosphorus as a weapon in Iraq–something they had expressly denied before. “It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants,” a U.S. military spokesman told the British media, “not as a chemical weapon against civilians.” Compare these words with those of a U.S. marine who was interviewed by Italian TV at his home in Colorado: “I saw the burnt bodies of women and children. When white phosphorus explodes, those within 500 feet can’t escape the cloud it forms. It burns the body to the bone.”
Right now, U.S. troops are engaged in “Operation Steel Curtain,” an offensive on several Iraqi towns along the Syrian border, which the U.S. military claims harbor insurgents. Iraqi Red Crescent officials, quoted in the Washington Post, reported 29 civilian deaths. CNN showed the ruins of a house where neighbors said 19 people had been killed in an airstrike. How many more dozens, or even hundreds, of civilians are being killed? How many of them are being burned with white phosphorus and napalm? How many thousands of civilians are being left homeless, as the 300,000 residents of Fallujah were last year?
We don’t know. But one thing is certain: every day under U.S. occupation brings more death, destruction and suffering to Iraqi people. And thus, every day under U.S. occupation turns more Iraqi people against U.S. troops, who pay the price of the murderous decisions made by their top commanders.
Nov 21, 2005
The following is an editorial from the November 7 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), published by the revolutionary workers group of that name in France, about the explosion of anger by young people in that country, especially in immigrant working class neighborhoods.
After Paris, the flames of violence hit workers’ neighborhoods in other cities. Cynical comments by Chirac about "equality of opportunity" certainly didn’t stop the revolt of young people! And each time Sarkozy (the Minister of the Interior) opened his mouth, he propelled new contingents of youth into the streets, even the very youngest.
Yes, this wave of violence is sterile. When youth burn their parents’ or neighbors’ cars, burn buses which serve workers’ neighborhoods and wreck nursery schools, they demonstrate a lack of social awareness and solidarity. Making life still more unlivable for themselves, copying what others did, isn’t the only way for them to express their anger and certainly not the best way.
But how could political leaders–those who are in power as well as those who dream of returning to power–convince these youth that, despite their present life, there is hope for the future?
The poverty that transforms these neighborhoods into ghettoes, the unemployment and complete lack of infrastructure may not explain the way the youth revolt, but it is the soil in which this revolt took root. How dare politicians pretend they are doing something for workers’ neighborhoods! The youth who live there every day see that nothing changes, when it doesn’t get worse. The police crack the heads of youth whose looks they don’t like. The government is made up of officials scornful of everyone who is poor.
The right wing majority and the socialist opposition together make an appeal to "the republican ideal"–backed up by police clubs. So how could the youth of these neighborhoods take this republic as ideal, when it is made for the rich and powerful? How could they believe it is possible to pull themselves up by working when those who seek jobs can’t find any?
How can the youth in workers’ neighborhoods be pulled away from the influence of the little parasites who engage in trafficking of all sorts, when life smiles only on the big parasites who dominate society? How can youth be convinced that it is stupid to burn schools in the workers’ neighborhoods when there are how many other schools which haven’t been built because those who govern us won’t spend the money to do it? While billions are spent in favor of the rich, the schools in workers’ neighborhoods are overcrowded, with too few teachers and not enough resources. The schools don’t have the material conditions that would allow teachers to transmit a minimum of education to everyone, even just how to read, write and speak correctly. The years spent in school lead to nothing, not even a job!
Workers may not rejoice about the form that this explosion has taken, and not only because they are the first to suffer from it. Youth is the future. But what future can youth who are tossed aside create?
Those who govern us can’t give hope to the youth of the poor neighborhoods. The sole perspective which they offer is at best individual success for a few and resignation for everyone else.
So that the poor youth not be reduced to choosing between resignation to exploitation or sterile violence, the workers movement must find its capacity to struggle and especially its political will to fight for the transformation of the whole society.
What’s happening in the poor neighborhoods doesn’t mean only the bankruptcy of a government. It means still more the bankruptcy of the capitalist organization of society–rotten with inequalities and injustice–which can only lead society into decay.
Nov 21, 2005
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, recently ordered that victims of Hurricane Katrina had to get out of the hotels and motels all over the country where the agency has been housing them. Most of these evacuees–about 150,000–are poor. A survey in Houston shows that about two-thirds had no bank accounts, credit cards or insurance. Most had family incomes before the hurricane of less than $20,000, and few have jobs today.
These people certainly won’t be able to return to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area. In New Orleans itself, thousands of people who managed to stay are being forced out of their homes, too. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, recently allowed her order blocking evictions to expire. Thousands of people had to get out of their homes. Landlords in New Orleans quickly filed for nearly 700 eviction notices to force out those who didn’t leave on their own. Judges didn’t really care why people hadn’t paid their rent. They simply referred them to shelters as they ordered them out, usually within 48 hours.
Big contracting companies and their subsidiaries have been making it impossible for unemployed workers from the area to get jobs so they could pay their rent or rebuild their houses. Rather than hiring people from the area, they are using temporary workers brought in from other areas of the U.S. and from other countries to clean and rebuild. These workers are getting low wages to do hard, dirty, dangerous jobs. Many are living in crowded, unsanitary tents or shipping containers in camps patrolled by company “guards.”
Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate in Louisiana shot up to 11.5% in September from 5.8% in August. The business manager of Construction and General Laborers’ Local Union 689 in New Orleans said he had at least 2,000 people willing to take clean-up jobs.
FEMA also recently declared 60,000 houses in the region to be damaged beyond repair. But homeowners will be able to collect a maximum grant of only $26,200, minus any federal assistance they have already received. Those with insurance may not get anything.
This guarantees that many working class homeowners who fled the area will not be able to return. Thousands of others who managed to stay will now have to follow those who left.
Local officials have joined those on the federal and state levels in attacking hurricane victims. In his first town hall meeting with city residents since Katrina, New Orleans Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin recently told them the city will use its power to withhold permits to make it nearly impossible for homeowners to rebuild in low-lying areas. Again, tens of thousands of working class homeowners will never be able to rebuild.
Government officials are using the re-building process to get rid of those with lower incomes, turning over the land they lived on to developers, oil companies, shipping and gambling interests. In other words, its business as usual, but on an even grander scale than before.
By pushing the poor people far away from their homes, officials must believe they won’t face any reaction. They could be wrong.
Nov 21, 2005
Under the pretext of aiding the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross is well on its way to collect two billion dollars.
This generosity doesn’t mean that the money will go toward helping the huge numbers of people who have lost their homes and jobs. In the first days after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit, the Red Cross didn’t even provide most of the victims with shelter, food, water or medical care. From New Orleans to Mississippi and Alabama, the Red Cross was nowhere to be found.
“The Red Cross has been my biggest disappointment,” said Tim Kellar, the administrator of Hancock County, Mississippi. “I held it in such high esteem until we were in the time of need. It was nonexistent.” Some volunteers quit in disgust.
In the weeks that followed, much of what the Red Cross did proved completely inadequate. There were long lines at assistance centers. Debit cards for emergency cash didn’t work. Then in mid-October, the Red Cross was forced to admit it had wildly overestimated how many people it was helping. It billed the government 11 million dollars a day for putting up 600,000 people in 200,000 motel and hotel rooms. In reality, it was providing shelter for only 200,000 people in 71,000 rooms.
The Red Cross argues it was overwhelmed by this disaster of record proportions. But the Red Cross has operated the same way during other disasters as well, leaving scandal and anger in its wake. On the one hand, it systematically uses disasters to collect huge amounts of money–but then keeps much of it, what salesmen call a bait-and-switch tactic.
After 9/11 in New York City, the Red Cross collected one billion dollars under the guise that the money would go to help the victims. When the Red Cross tried to keep half of it, the uproar was so big that the president of the Red Cross was forced to resign. Eventually, the Red Cross had to pay out much of that money. But it funneled much of it to aid businesses and the wealthy, for example, by paying utility bills for upscale residents of Manhattan.
After the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, the Red Cross raised 55 million dollars, but spent only 12 million on disaster relief. After the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, it spent only about a quarter of the money raised.
The Red Cross can’t even use the excuse that it needs the extra money for future disasters, since it is reimbursed by the Department of Homeland Security for most of the money it spends on shelters, food and other aid. Even the blood that it collects–it sells. Neither can it claim it needs a lot of money for administration, since much of the work–certainly the best work–is done by three million volunteers.
In fact, the Red Cross is just a huge cash machine. It pours much of the money that it collects into fund raising or high salaries for its top officials, big amounts on bloated administration, or big charity events for the wealthy. The organization is now connected to the Department of Homeland Security. This semi-official status means it is harder to investigate and control.
In fact, the Red Cross is managed as a political payoff to the party in power and to the biggest corporations. Eight of the people on the Board of Governors are appointed directly by the president. Thus, the chair of the board is Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, the CEO and owner of Pace Communications, which has donated more than $130,000 to the Republican Party since 2000. Pace is the largest private custom publishing company in the U.S. The president and CEO of the Red Cross is Marsha J. Evans. She is a former rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and a director of Lehman Brothers, the investment firm.
When we donate to the Red Cross, we think we are helping those in need. Instead we are helping to throw parties for the wealthy and the greedy.
Nov 21, 2005
The UAW GM Department announced that 61% of General Motors workers voted for the new concession contract. Even if we believe this figure, this means that almost 40% of the workers voted “No.” It shows that a lot of GM workers were opposed to these concessions.
And the GM retirees, who had the most to lose, were not allowed to vote at all.
But workers have some reason to be suspicious of the count. There were no “challengers” to observe the vote or the count–in contrast to what happens in regular union elections. And very few locals even announced their own vote totals, where workers could more easily know whether the figures accorded with what they knew.
So we have to trust the same union officials who wanted to see this contract passed to make an accurate count!
It’s a warning to workers at Ford and Chrysler, where the bosses have already said they want the same concessions.
Workers at Ford and Chrysler can organize right now to monitor their vote. Even more important, they can begin to organize meetings, demonstrations and other ways to make their opinion clearly known.
No one should ever depend on a piece of paper, or a vote on that piece of paper, to protect them.
Nov 21, 2005
Every time a company lays off workers or demands concessions, someone blames it on jobs being lost to other countries.
That’s one of the biggest falsehoods around. The Department of Labor just published a very revealing study in the August issue of Monthly Labor Review. Of the big layoffs in 2004, only 2.5% of the jobs were lost because of the movement of work to other countries!
That leaves 97.5% of jobs lost to account for. And behind most of them was the fact that the same output, or even more, was produced by a smaller number of workers.
There is a reason we hear so much about lost jobs going to Mexico, China and other countries. It hides who is responsible for layoffs–companies right here at home, in fact, within easy reach of us. And it diverts us from fighting against something we can stop, that is, speed-up.
Don’t let them trick us!
Nov 21, 2005
In early November, the small town of Dover, Pennsylvania voted out eight of their nine school board members. These eight had been responsible for pushing the religious theory of “intelligent design” into biology classes.
This fight in Dover is mirrored in school board actions in other states as well. Pretending to oversee the education of children, religious fanatics, with an anti-science point of view, are trying to push their backward views on all the students.
This time in Dover, a majority of parents decided they didn’t agree. They wanted their children to have scientific education in science class.
Nov 21, 2005
The level of scientific understanding in the country is not the only area to show the failure of the education system. Standardized tests in English and math show equally dismal results.
In two of the highest income counties in Maryland–Howard and Montgomery–more than four of every five students passed. In Baltimore City and other poor districts, only one in three passed.
This enormous gap comes as no surprise. Like children in big cities everywhere, Baltimore students face less funding per child; less experienced teachers; larger class sizes; not enough books, computers or other materials; more children needing special education; and older buildings in worse shape.
The Republican governor claimed the state could not afford a court-ordered initiative to improve special education throughout Maryland. Such funding is most needed in Baltimore, with one in five students needing “special” education.
What did the Democratic mayor do to help with the problem? He and the city council just passed a three hundred million-dollar plan to pay for a new hotel downtown.
Parents won’t get better education for their children unless they force the politicians of both parties to answer their demands instead of handing out money like candy to big business.
Nov 21, 2005
Delphi, Visteon and other large auto parts makers claim to be either broke or close to it. But Wall Street doesn’t seem to notice. In early October, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ford had received 65 offers to buy the 17 plants with 17,000 employees that it had taken back from Visteon earlier in the year. Packs of capitalist sharks are literally circling the 500-billion-dollar international auto parts industry, looking to see what they can snap up.
One of the biggest of these sharks is multi-billionaire Wilbur Ross. In October, Ross teamed up with Lear Corporation, one of the largest auto parts makers, to form a joint venture with the aim of buying up many other auto parts makers. They bought up Collins & Aikman, a maker of auto interiors that also claims to be bankrupt. They went on to make overtures to both Ford and Delphi to take some or all of their supposedly “troubled” parts factories off their hands. The fact that Lear has close ties to Ford Motors could even suggest that Ford, or some of its executives, are among those looking to buy up the very factories that their companies had only recently spun off. And what goes for Ford most definitely goes for the other two of the Big Three.
Of course, driving this new sudden interest in auto parts are the enormous concessions that Delphi is trying to impose on its workforce–the demands for 66% cuts in pay along with big cuts in benefits. These concessions are like blood in the water to sharks.
Ross demonstrated how much wealth can be generated from “restructuring” that other “rust belt” industry–steel. Claiming that they were bankrupt, the big steel companies cut a large number of jobs–and dumped the workers’ pension plans. After that, Ross moved in. In 2002 he bought up five steel companies, including such former giants as Bethlehem, LTV and Weirton. Three years later he then resold them for a profit that was ten times what he originally paid for these companies.
In steel, the workers’ huge sacrifices brought enormous profits, a windfall which was immediately pocketed by speculators like Ross. This then encouraged Ross and others to move in on the workers in auto parts.
It is just one big operation aimed at pushing the whole working class into abject poverty for the benefit of a few capitalist sharks.
Nov 21, 2005
Delphi, GM, and other auto companies justify cutting workers’ wages and benefits, saying they can no longer afford the astronomical costs of health care. They claim they pay $26 an hour for workers’ health care.
If companies paid for health care at the rate of $26 an hour, they would be paying $1040 for a 40-hour week, $4160 for a 4-week month, and $54,080 for a 52-week year–per worker! Not to mention all the extra on overtime.
No health insurer charges individuals even remotely this much, no matter how “gold-plated” the benefits! Find a health insurer that charges $54,080 per person per year in premiums–and you’ll find an insurer whose customers have gone elsewhere!
Today, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan advertises the following rates for individuals who convert from employer plan coverage to individual coverage: for their very best, most expensive plan: $293.94 per month per individual; $587.88 for two people; $617.27 per family.
Taking the most expensive figure, it comes out to only $7407.24 a year–$46,673 LESS than what GM claims!
In fact, big companies pay less than what individuals pay for insurance, because they pay group rates to insurance companies to administer their plans. AND they “self-insure”–which lowers their cost still more.
But let’s not quibble. And let’s even double what GM has to pay to account for dental insurance, etc. And suppose they paid for a family plan for EVERY worker–that would cost them only $14,800 per year, per worker.
Delphi and GM and the rest could still put each and every worker under one of these individually purchased, top notch plans–and SAVE more than $39,000 per worker per year for complete coverage!
In reality, no detailed comparison can be made until workers make a thoroughgoing inspection of the companies’ books and all their business practices. But anyone can get some idea of the scale of their deception by checking examples like this one, or by comparing with someone they know who buys their own medical insurance.
Our example works out to a health-care cost for a family of $7.12 per hour. If companies keep on insisting that their costs are $26 per hour, then workers have the right to insist on at least $18.88 an hour in change–in their paychecks!
Workers might also pause to consider why the leaders of their own unions don’t challenge the companies’ unbelievable figures. Is this the partnership in action?