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
Feb 13, 2006
Today, the Democrats, as well as more and more Republicans, blame Bush for his deeply unpopular policies: the bloody war in Iraq, the disastrous government response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, government wiretaps and outrageous energy prices. Bush deserves every bit of the blame. But so do those same Democratic and Republican politicians, who gave Bush the votes he needed.
The Democrats may throw up their arms pretending they can’t stop Bush because they are a minority in Congress. But in Bush’s first term, when they were a majority in the Senate, they didn’t stop him either. Besides, a minority party can always block programs–as Republicans did during Clinton’s first term when the Democrats had a majority in the Congress. But the Democrats didn’t, not once. They just posed as an opposition. Besides, many times the Democrats voted with Bush–as they continue to do today on the war or the U.S. Patriot Act or extending corporate tax breaks.
Even now, while many Republicans and the Democratic Party strongly criticize the Bush administration, they continue to pass Bush’s agenda. The day after Bush’s State of the Union speech in early February, Congress passed 40 billion dollars in new cuts to social programs. The young have been hit hard. Congress severely reduced Medicaid benefits to 28 million children. The elderly are not spared either. Congress made it harder for retirees to get any help when they are forced into long-term medical care. Working people who are completely disabled now face delays up to a year to get Social Security (SSI). Big cuts in funding for student loans and grants make it more difficult and expensive for people from working class backgrounds to go to college. And Congress pushed millions of the so-called “working poor” from programs that supplement their wages. These cuts add to the growing reservoir of outright misery that stalks the big cities and countryside.
Such cuts are nothing new. They started almost three decades ago, when Congress reduced unemployment coverage from 65 to 39 weeks. The Democratic Party controlled Congress and Democrat Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Since then, no matter which party was in power, the big social programs have been cut over and over again.
Look at what both parties did to nursing home care for working people over the years. Two decades ago, Medicare and Medicaid provided enough coverage when someone from the working class was forced into a nursing home for many months. Today, nursing home care often eats up all savings and spells destitution for the whole family.
What used to be called a “safety net” for people most in need has been smashed to smithereens. And the entitlement programs–which used to give somewhat adequate protection to working people when they retired or were hit by layoffs, accidents or illness–have been shredded.
Both parties are henchmen of the bourgeoisie in its attacks against the working class.
Waiting on the promises of either of these parties to defend us is like waiting for a bus that never comes. It’s through our own struggles that we will throw these attacks back–strikes in the workplace, demonstrations in the streets and all the other means of organizing that working people have when they decide to act.
Feb 13, 2006
Last year, all of us taken together spent more than we made. The economists call that a “negative savings rate.” It was the first time since the depths of the Great Depression in 1933 that we spent more than we earned.
In fact, it’s worse than what it sounds–because that total includes all the wealthy people. If you ignore them, the rest of us dipped even further into our savings or into credit.
If economists really looked at what people earned, with an average between $25,000 and $35,000 a year, they would have no trouble understanding what happened. Look at the price of housing, gas, electricity and home heating oil. Look at the price for a new car–and look at prices at the grocery store.
Only somebody making a million dollars a year could wonder why the work force has no money for savings!
Feb 13, 2006
After Ford Motor Co. said it would close a Wixom, Michigan assembly plant, the county’s executive officer said the property was a “hot property” and new businesses would compete to buy it.
So why did the Michigan Senate vote to give, in advance, a 15-year, 100% tax break to whichever company eventually buys it?
Are they so addicted to passing out corporate tax breaks like candy that they couldn’t stop themselves?
Feb 13, 2006
Downtown Detroit was sparkling for the Super Bowl. Streets and freeways were immaculately clean and free of potholes. Brand new office buildings and posh night spots dotted the landscape. It wasn’t only the media and celebrities from out of town who talked about how great the city looked. People from Detroit and its suburbs did.
People who attended the Motown Winter Blast leading up to the game had a good time. There was good food, music and many things to do, including lots of activities for the kids. The folks who live in and around the city were really struck by the sense that this is what it could be to have a lively, active downtown that’s kept clean and in shape.
The rotten thing is that this is only done when some few people figure they’ll be able to make a tidy profit off of an event like the Super Bowl. Most of the time, the city is starved of money, and the people within it must deal with a crumbling infrastructure.
Boarded up, abandoned buildings fester, like the old Motown building, which was demolished only two weeks before the big game, after standing empty for more than two decades.
The one glaring problem people faced in attending the Winter Blast was the hours-long wait to take shuttles back to off-site parking lots. No wonder there were long waits–in less busy times you can hardly get a bus in the city! Over the years the whole region has let mass transit die a slow death.
The city and state have let public services go to pot, while diverting billions of dollars to big corporations. The city, in fact, recently announced it will no longer pick up bulk trash for its residents. People are supposed to rent a truck to take large items to a city dumping station.
Corporate interests have extorted millions of dollars from the city and state governments for their projects. Compuware got land and a 70-million dollar tax break to relocate downtown. GM unloaded its old headquarters to the state of Michigan when it moved downtown to the Renaissance Center. Altogether the city has spent several hundreds of millions of dollars to help with the construction of the two stadiums and other “redevelopment” projects.
On Super Bowl week, we saw a glimpse of how things could be. The rest of the time we are hit in the face with the realization that it will be that way only if we are organizing the society for our own benefit.
Feb 13, 2006
Rosa Parks is remembered as the person whose refusal to move sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. But countless dozens of other black people just as courageously stood up to the same indignities before her. One of them was Thomas Edward Brooks, who lost his life for doing so.
Brooks, a uniformed soldier in the United States Army, boarded a Montgomery bus through the front door in August of 1950. Black passengers had been forced to board through the rear door.
Brooks refused to exit the bus and re-enter through the rear door, including after a police officer entered the bus and ordered him to. When the officer clubbed him over the head and started dragging him to the door, Brooks tore himself free and ran off the bus. The officer shot him in the back, killing him.
At the time, the authorities justified the killing as self-defense and then swept it under the rug. But you can bet that the black population of Montgomery was very much aware of this event and many more like it. It’s what pushed the population to engage itself so fully in the bus boycott. When Parks refused to move from her seat, it wasn’t the first time a black person was arrested, if not beaten, or killed. But the black population of Montgomery had decided that they were going to put an end to it.
The history books ignore Brooks and people like him, while stressing the actions of a few heroic individuals like Rosa Parks–as if there’s a big gap between these heroes and the mass of common folk. But Parks herself always insisted that there were many, many heroes in Montgomery and throughout the South, who refused to submit to this terror. It was only through their combined action and determination that the terror was overthrown.
Feb 13, 2006
The Medicare drug prescription plan went into effect this January, pushed by the government as the solution to the lack of prescription coverage for older people. According to a government spokesperson at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, “Our analysis shows there have not been any significant price increases at all and pretty big savings.”
Consumers Union, a non-profit organization, put the lie to that claim. In a sampling it did in New York, Florida, Illinois, Texas and California, Consumers Union found that prices jumped an average of 5% in just the program’s first month.
As one part of the survey, Consumers Union checked on the price of five drugs commonly bought by seniors. In 38 medical plans in one state, New York, prices increased by $155.80 a year. This was the increase, not the total price of the drugs.
Apparently the government spokesman lives somewhere the rest of the U.S. population does not, a place where drug prices did not rise after January 1–maybe Canada!
Feb 13, 2006
The woman who shot and killed seven people, including six employees at a postal distribution facility in Goleta, California before killing herself, was in dire need of help. But she didn’t get that help–not from her employer, the U.S. Postal Service, nor anywhere else in this society.
Jennifer Sanmarco clearly had a history of severe mental illness. In the early 2000s, she had grown increasingly confrontational and paranoid toward her co-workers, and she was seen talking to herself incoherently on numerous occasions. She was once removed from the facility by sheriff’s deputies and held in a mental health facility for 72 hours before being released. In 2003, she was put on medical leave for psychiatric reasons.
Instead of getting her treatment, the Post Office simply let her go, and let her disappear. She moved from California to a small New Mexico town, where residents saw her behavior become increasingly bizarre. She made plans to start a newsletter called “The Racist Press.” It’s unclear what this meant to her: the two issues that she published were filled with as many incoherent ramblings as her speech apparently was.
In any case, would anyone be surprised if someone in Sanmarco’s mental condition absorbed racist views, one of the most disgusting and most widespread pathologies in our society?
Once she left the Post Office, Sanmarco lost the structure to her life that a job imposes. Not only that, but she lost her access to any regular medical treatment, including mental health treatment. This is what it means in a society where medical treatment is tied to a person’s job: just when a person may need it the most, they lose it completely.
And, thanks to the dismantling of the institutional mental health care system in the 1980s, Sanmarco had nowhere to go, and no options for treatment.
Sanmarco was undoubtedly mentally ill and deteriorating for years. It’s absolutely criminal that she didn’t get the help she needed. This country’s disgustingly inadequate health care structure has eight more deaths on its hands.
Feb 13, 2006
The following editorial appeared in the February 3, 2006 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the paper of the French revolutionary group of that name. While this is about the situation of steel workers in France, we could have written the same about this country. And we did add a paragraph about the U.S. steel industry.
Steel workers have every reason to be worried about the plans of Mittal Steel, the biggest steel company in the world, to buy up Arcelor, the second biggest.
Steel workers and their families remember all those other mergers and buyouts. Under the pretext of "modernizing" to meet international competition, steel companies closed mills, engineering mass layoffs, which ruined entire regions. Between 1970 and 1990, the right-wing and then the left-wing parties, when in power, spent 18 billion dollars to subsidize the steel industry. That meant 18 billion less for hospitals, retirement homes and national education. Steel company stockholders pocketed all that money while getting rid of three fourths of the industry’s workers.
The company Usinor emerged from these transactions, at the cost of tens of thousands of lost jobs and billions spent. Usinor in turn merged with a Luxembourg company and then a Spanish corporation to produce Arcelor.
Arcelor just bought up a Canadian steel company. But just as the shark was swallowing a big fish, it was threatened in turn by a still bigger shark! Mittal Steel offered 22 billion dollars to buy Arcelor. If this merger goes through, it will do nothing to increase the capacity to produce iron and steel. Mittal is simply purchasing a company that already exists, with all its factories, raw materials and workers. And, in fact, this kind of merger always leads to plant closings and job losses.
The same thing went on in the United States. New York investment banker Wilbur Ross bought up LTV Steel and then Acme Metals. Next he bought Bethlehem Steel, formerly the second biggest steel company in the country, and finally Weirton Steel. The workers of these companies suffered mass layoffs, pay cuts, big reductions in pensions and the end of retiree health insurance. Then Ross turned and sold all these steel operations to Mittal Steel for a 300 million-dollar personal gain for himself.
What’s happening in the steel industry illustrates what is happening in the entire world economy. The large corporations have gigantic sums of money thanks to their higher profits. But they have so little confidence in their own economy that they refuse to invest in more production, which would result in new factories and additional jobs.
Instead, they drive their own workforce to produce more, then use their increased profits to buy each other up. This allows big stockholders to get fantastically wealthy. The boss of Mittal Steel has become the third richest man in the world. His personal fortune exceeds the combined annual production of two African countries like Senegal and Mali. For his daughter’s wedding, he rented the palace of Versailles and two other sumptuous French palaces for the small sum of 60 million dollars!
We don’t know if this new "merger-acquisition," as the bosses put it, will succeed. While waiting, the stock price of Arcelor rose by 28% in one day, increasing the fortunes of its main stockholders by 28%.
But this is what we do see: Big companies with giant profits lower wages and worsen working conditions. They lay off and reduce the number of workers, producing more with fewer workers. They impose flexibility and replace secure employment with temporary and insecure jobs. The French government’s new law allowing bosses to get rid of young workers whenever they want is only the latest of the many services the government has rendered the big bosses, and the latest infamy toward working people.
This is how their economy and society function. Millions of workers are condemned to use themselves up at work if they have a job or to die in poverty if they don’t. All this so the big corporations can play a giant "Monopoly" game. But their Monopoly is played on the backs of workers and the results of this game are catastrophic for the entire society.
Feb 13, 2006
Fifty thousand Italians demonstrated this January for abortion rights. They marched in both Milan and Rome, the two main cities of the country. Abortion has been legal in Italy since 1978, but with several restrictions: the abortion can take place only in the first three months of pregnancy or if there is danger to the mother’s life or if there is a risk of birth defects in the fetus.
The Milan demonstration was organized by a group of union militants and feminists calling themselves “Let’s Emerge from Silence.” Some of the marchers held signs denouncing the interference of the Catholic Church. The church weighs heavily on many aspects of Italian politics. Yet two thirds of Italians polled, Catholic or otherwise, support the right of women to have an abortion.
Last summer, the Catholic hierarchy managed to stop the overturning of a law which prevents the use of the latest scientific methods to aid in fertility problems. Catholic priests, like many other religious leaders, tell their followers that an egg from a woman’s ovary is equal to a human being in law. And in November, the Catholic church began campaigning against the sale of the abortion pill mifepristone, known as RU 486.
The Catholic church also hopes to influence the Italian elections this spring. The prime minister promised, if re-elected, to put “pro-life activists” in every state-funded abortion clinic to “counsel” women. In other words, these male politicians and priests want to make it so difficult to obtain the abortion pill and so unpleasant at abortion clinics that women will be scared off from getting a legal abortion.
In other words, in Italy the Catholic church plays the same role it, along with Protestant fundamentalists, plays in this country. In fact, the Christian right in the U.S., supported by the current administration and many politicians, makes abortion more difficult to obtain here than in Catholic Italy. Since 1993 eight abortion providers in the U.S. have been murdered.
A leader of the Christian right in this country told his followers, as reported in a daily newspaper, that he wanted “a wave of hatred to wash over” his followers, encouraging them to attack abortion clinics. More than 4200 violent attacks on such clinics have been reported to police. And such attitudes have helped to close abortion clinics and scare off doctors. As of 2000, seven out of every eight counties throughout the rural parts of the U.S. had NO medical facilities where women could get an abortion.
Feminists and other defenders of the right of women to control their own bodies have started to oppose such attacks in Italy. People who would impose their reactionary views on all women need to be opposed everywhere. In this country, first of all.
Feb 13, 2006
The following article was translated from the February 10 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), journal of the French Trotskyist group of the same name.
Early on the morning of February 3rd, an Egyptian ferry, Al-Salam Boccaccio, sank in the Red Sea, causing the deaths of more than 1,000 passengers and crew. Three days later, angry relatives of the dead attacked the company’s office.
The survivors emphasized that a fire had raged for hours before the ship sank. They also pointed to the absence of enough lifeboats, which the spokesman for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak admitted. The Egyptian press pointed out that ferries going back and forth across the Red Sea are often unsafe, because they are too old, badly maintained, badly equipped, sometimes overloaded. Their crews are often poorly trained. Many of the ships had sailed for years in the rich countries before starting a second life under much worse conditions. Take, for example, this sinking Egyptian ship. It was built in 1970 near Naples for the Italian company Tirrenia.
After sailing the ship for 28 years between the port of Rome and Sardinia, its Italian owners sold it to an Egyptian company. Two decks were added to the ferry, increasing its height by 21 feet. By raising the ship’s center of gravity, the change made the ship more unstable. The ship’s former Italian captain explained, "When you add height to a ship, there are great risks of pitching. The stabilizers were very effective, but they have to be steered carefully. When the sea is agitated, they act in an opposite direction and have a destabilizing effect." Ignoring the risks, the Italian company Tirrenia and the Italian ship registration society authorized this Egyptian ferry to sail.
Of course, ships also sink in rich countries. The Herald of Free Enterprise capsized out of the Belgian port of Zeebrugge in 1987. Seven years later, tragedy struck off the coast of Finland, where 852 people died in the sinking of the ferry Estonia.
But ships frequently sink in poor countries. The shipping paper Lloyd’s List explained, "Al-Salam was a ship in the autumn of its life, one that age and its ability to comply with post-Estonia criteria such as the Stockholm Rules drove out of European waters to its final trading route."
This is how business operates: a European shipowner sells a derelict ship to a shipowner in a poor country. Whether they ship oil, chemical products or passengers–the blind race for profit cause these disasters. Most of the time, those responsible are based in a small number of rich countries, but their ravages extend to the entire world.
Feb 13, 2006
During the first week of February, angry protests against the publication of a cartoon in a Danish newspaper showing the Muslim prophet Muhammad with a bomb shook more than a dozen countries with Muslim populations in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Protesters marched to, and in some places, such as Syria, Lebanon and Iran, stormed and torched embassies of Denmark and other European countries.
These protests did not begin as spontaneous outbursts against a cartoon in a Danish newspaper. The Middle Eastern countries where the biggest demonstrations took place are harsh dictatorships, which almost always brutally repress demonstrations and protests. But reports showed the police and military acting in a friendly fashion and even helping the demonstrators out.
In fact, the government and religious institutions that are tied to them were behind the protests. With rising anger inside these countries, the governments resorted to a “religious” dispute against a far-off foe that did not at all challenge their authority.
In other words, the demonstrations started as carefully calculated political moves by the leaders of very repressive and corrupt regimes, which in many cases such as Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan and Egypt, have close ties to the U.S., as well as Great Britain and the other big European governments and their corporations. Of course, these leaders did nothing different than politicians around the world, starting with Bush and every other politician in the U.S., who also try to cloak their own disgusting rule under the garb of “religious” piety, and use religion to divert people’s anger away from their rule.
Given the horrible social conditions in these countries, the depth of anger and rage in the population, these demonstrations themselves took on an explosive character that went well beyond what the authorities had planned for. This included the demonstrations in the more prosperous European countries, starting in Denmark, where immigrants from the Middle East face high rates of unemployment and discrimination. “The cartoons were a fuse that lit a bigger fire,” said Rami Khoouri, the editor of an English language newspaper in Lebanon to the New York Times.
Not surprisingly, the demonstrations in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan went the furthest. They turned into huge and violent demonstrations against the U.S.-led occupation of their country. Demonstrators attacked a U.S. military base and set fire to four fuel tankers. Three days of protests in the capital, Kabul, and southern Afghanistan left eleven people dead and dozens more wounded, all of them shot by U.S. and Afghan soldiers firing into the crowds.
But so long as the poor and oppressed fight under the banner of religion, they are tied to the very leaders and institutions that uphold their oppression and exploitation.
Feb 13, 2006
The auto industry has begun 2006 by intensifying its assault on the workers. With all the calculated ruthlessness of a military campaign, the wealthy interests are coordinating their attacks, attempting to “unlock” for themselves the “value” that workers hold in jobs, wages, pensions, and health care.
Ford Motor Company announced its plan, deceptively named the “Way Forward,” by declaring that it would close 14 plants and cut 30,000 workers jobs by 2012. William Clay Ford Jr. did not seem the least embarrassed to be laying out this plan at the same moment Ford Motor registered two billion dollars’ profit for 2005, with cash reserves of 37 billion.
General Motors was more careful to arrange its books to show a “loss” of 8.6 billion dollars for 2005. GM then went into “crisis mode,” installing on its board Kirk Kerkorian’s partner Jerome York, and declaring measures such as a cut in its annual dividend from $2 to $1, reduction of salaries of board members and some executives, and (more to the point) freezing salaried workers’ pensions, and cutting back their health-care coverage.
GM’s motivation for these public-relations maneuvers was not lost on folks like the business reporters for such media as the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the New York Times. They said quite clearly that GM’s actions were calculated to give it more credibility when it demands greater concessions from members of the United Auto Workers, now, and in the 2007 contract negotiations.
The president of the UAW, Ron Gettelfinger, hastened to say that his membership had given up quite enough and he intended to give no more. While that was the right thing to say, Gettelfinger has a history of saying one thing–and doing the opposite. Earlier, he had said that the union would not reopen the contract to give concessions on health care; then he re-opened the contract, without workers’ consent, and gave concessions. In the 2003 negotiations, Gettelfinger said there would be “no cost shifting” on workers’ healthcare; in the final contract, there was quite a lot of cost shifting. Today, Gettelfinger may say the workers have given up quite enough, but at the same time, the UAW is negotiating concessions it expects the Delphi workers to accept.
What “end game” do the billionaires have in mind, those who are pulling the strings? The short answer is, “As much as they can get.” Of course they are careful to reveal only what they want revealed.
What if the UAW did hire the investment banking firm of Lazard to “examine” the books of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, to back up the companies’ pretense of financial trouble? How can workers believe the word of an investment bank? A bank that stands to profit not at all if it should take the workers’ side–but stands to make a good deal of profit on the bosses’ side!
Workers aren’t fooled by that. Jerome York himself said that GM’s CEO, Rick Wagoner, has done a marvelous job “warehousing cash.” In the same speech (to an Automotive News conference in Detroit) York outlined the steps GM needed to take, to appear to be in crisis, so that the workers would more easily accept concessions.
Today the auto honchos are concentrating their fire against the workers at GM’s Delphi plants. A strange “bankruptcy”–“well planned, well structured and well financed,” according to CEO Steve Miller–in which only the workers are supposed to accept significant losses. Miller has had lots of experience in orchestrating this sort of “bankruptcy,” originally at Chrysler, then at Federal-Mogul, then at Bethlehem Steel, and on the board of “bankrupt” United Airlines.
But workers at Delphi have created problems for Mr. Miller. Many have become vocal and active in organizing resistance. Delphi is very much a test case. How much can the bosses steal for their profits? How much can the workers preserve of their livelihoods? The outcome will shape the future course of this war that the auto bosses, and the financiers behind them, have organized against the entire workforce.
It’s for that reason that the entire working class has an interest to support the Delphi workers’ struggle. One of the best ways to do this is to let it be known, in every workplace, that if the bosses are thinking about bringing demands for concessions–those demands will be dead on arrival.
Feb 13, 2006
At a time when 19 coal miners have died from disasters caused by unsafe conditions, we can see what truly matters to the federal government.
When 13 Alabama miners were killed in 2001, the government fined the mine operator only $435,000–and a judge knocked that down to only $3,000!
On the other hand, when Pittston miners went on strike in 1989, their union, the UMWA, was fined more than 64 MILLION dollars.
Federal law limits fines for mining health and safety violations to $60,000 for each violation, with many fines being much lower than that. In contrast, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can levy fines of more than one million dollars for a single violation.
The government charged more–$550,000–for Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” than it did when 13 miners died!
Feb 13, 2006
In December, results of national testing showed the majority of school aged children fail to read at grade level. The tests were mandated by the federal government’s “No Child Left Behind” Act.
Education will flourish only when government makes it a real priority, reflected in how well it is funded. But “No Child Left Behind” doesn’t provide the funds needed. In fact, the tests are used to cut off funds from schools that desperately need more.
Education is what paves the future in any society. Real education encompasses not only reading, writing and arithmetic, but sufficient resources to learn to reason starting from an early age. If a society refuses to educate children when they are very young and most open to learning, then it fails in its commitment to future generations. The whole society suffers because a large part of its members lack education, lack an ability to make use of ever-expanding knowledge, lack a method to make an adult contribution to society.
What this country has instead is two kinds of education: one for the wealthy and a vastly inferior one for the poor and working class.
Maryland’s test scores illustrate the problem perfectly: state test scores say that three of every five tenth graders can pass the statewide test of English. But in Montgomery and Howard counties, two of the wealthiest in the state, four out of five children passed. In Baltimore City, with one of the lowest average incomes in the state, only one tenth grader in three passed the test. As can be shown on every test, the students from wealthy families did better on average than those from poorer families.
Of course, it makes perfect sense since children in wealthier areas have a greater access to educational resources from the start. Their parents are usually more educated and able to help them learn even before their children enter school. Their homes are more likely to have books and computers. Their parents can afford many more experiences for their children than can poorer families. And the schools they go to have more resources.
The schools themselves are supported everywhere by property taxes. Even when poorer areas tax themselves at a higher rate–which they usually do–they get less money for their schools. Montgomery County alone collects more property taxes than the next two wealthiest counties in the state, and more than five times what is collected in Baltimore City. The local, state and federal governments do little to make funds available to overcome the differences in education funding.
Baltimore City’s classes are larger than in wealthier parts of Maryland; the city has fewer teachers with the credentials found among teachers in the suburbs. In Baltimore City, one in four young people drop out of high school without completing, compared to wealthier suburbs where most children go on to college.
The story in Baltimore and in Maryland is the story of education across the U.S. Schools are based on class and they reinforce the class divisions in society.
Feb 13, 2006
After Hurricane Katrina, two million people were left homeless. They were made refugees in their own country. No one can forget the spectacle of how completely the government failed to act. How government at all levels failed those thousands and thousands of people trapped by floodwaters.
What has been the refugees’ fate in the months since Katrina? Did the government come to its senses–or rather, change its spots? No.
The refugees’ homes are being seized, condemned, put on the block for real estate speculators. If the speculators don’t want the properties, they sit in rubble.
No jobs are provided, not even jobs clearing rubble and rebuilding the refugees’ own communities. The jobs are contracted out to political cronies like Halliburton, with no requirement that the people flooded out should be the first put back to work.
The government–after long delays–simply warehoused refugees for the months since Katrina. This may have ensured a period of guaranteed profits to hotels and motels. But it provided no means for people to rebuild normal lives. And now FEMA is cutting off payments to hotels. The refugees from Katrina are now being made refugees from FEMA!
Meanwhile the trailer homes that were at first promised are not being set up. For example, at the airport at Hope, Arkansas, 10,770 house trailers are stockpiled, bought and paid for–but not being shipped to where they are needed. Sitting idle, while those who were promised trailers are being evicted and made homeless elsewhere. The most requests for temporary trailer homes have come from the New Orleans area. What area has the fewest FEMA trailers set up? New Orleans.
The government has been criminally negligent toward the hurricane’s victims. And not only during and after the hurricane! Not only because of Bush, Cheney, and “Brownie!” but because of deliberate policies for years before the hurricane. Administration after administration was fully informed that New Orleans’ levees were capable of holding only a Category Three hurricane. Administration after administration–federal, state, and local–took the money needed to upgrade the levees and floodwalls, and put it to “other priorities.” Other priorities that did not involve protecting the working-class areas of New Orleans! Other priorities that did not involve planning and preparing for the inevitable disaster that would wipe out hospital services, flood nursing homes, and require the rapid evacuation of half a million residents.
If an individual person allows a dangerous condition to exist on their property–for instance, leaving a swimming pool unfenced so that children can wander in–that person is criminally liable. They can be made to pay damages in court for injuries or death that may result.
In exactly that way, the government deliberately neglected New Orleans’ own dangerous condition. In exactly that way, the government owes the hurricane victims full damages. Full housing, full employment, full rights of return to their homes, full rebuilding of their communities. Full and complete compensation for problems that government was responsible for–and deliberately decided not to fix.
If any one of us were so negligent, the government would have us in court in a minute. Guilty. Pay up.