the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 22, 2006
Handing the bosses a weapon against every worker in this country, the U.S. Senate seems ready to pass a so-called “immigration reform” bill. The Senate bill is supposed to be “better” than the one passed by the House last December, HR 4437–what people call the Sensenbrenner bill.
In fact, the Senate bill is every bit as much an attack, it just does it in a much more sneaky and insidious way.
Immigrants without papers are to be divided into three different groups, with only one of those groups having a “pathway” to citizenship–which they can get 13 years from now if there are no hitches. But hitches there will be. For most of those 13 years, this “favored” group will be in a situation where they are “semi-legal” at best. They will have to pass test after test, pay thousands of dollars in fines and fees, agree to let members of their family be deported if they don’t have the same status and–above all–keep quiet. Their status can be changed, made fully “illegal” at the whim of any petty official, at the behest of any boss.
In other words, immigrant workers are being told don’t oppose your employer, don’t attempt to organize a real union, don’t push to strike for better wages. Don’t rock the boat. There are so many technicalities written into the bill, almost any person can be thrown out.
The Senate and Bush dare pretend they are giving the immigrants a gift. This is no gift. It’s an outright attack. And yet, this is the best the so-called Senate “reform” has to offer. And it applies to only about one-third of the nearly 12 million immigrants without papers.
For another third, they have no possibility whatsoever to gain citizenship and the bill orders them to leave or be deported. The remaining third can remain “legally” in this country for the next three years–but then they too have to leave voluntarily or face deportation.
In other words, the choice in front of two-thirds of the immigrants without papers is either to stay here “illegally” or to leave, some right now, some in three years.
This is no choice! None at all!
Most people will remain here “illegally” just as they have been here up until now, looking over their shoulders every day as they go to work.
The Senate bill is not, as some people say, a step in the right direction. It is not the lesser of the two evils, when compared to Sensenbrenner. There are only two evils.
The Senate bill is nothing but a scam, aimed at convincing the immigrants they are getting a gift, when in reality they are only getting screwed, with one part forced to work for years without any rights, and the majority kept in an illegal status.
This is an attack on the whole working class. When one part of the working class is without rights, every part of the working class is weakened. Immigrant workers without rights, who have to keep a job, any job, in order to stay in the country, are forced to work for much less money. The bosses pit the immigrants against other workers, and pit the immigration police against the immigrants. It’s a perfect way to divide the working class.
The whole working class needs to push for immigrants to be given full legalization–and immediately. They have been working, contributing to the wealth the bosses amass off the workers’ labor, paying taxes, helping make the country run. They are an integral part of the working class.
It’s not the immigrants who are cutting wages today or suppressing good-paying jobs. It’s the bosses. The standard of living of the whole working class is going down because the bosses are stealing still more profit from the labor of every one of us. And they are doing it because workers are not fighting back against them as a single unified class.
Either the working class will stand together in the face of these attacks, or we will be splintered into many parts, without force.
Our unity is what gives us the power to back down the bosses.
May 22, 2006
Massachusetts passed a law requiring everyone to have health insurance. Supporters of the bill present it as health care for all. “This is probably as close as you can get to universal,” said Paul Ginsburg of the Center for Studying Health System Change. “They found a way to get to a major expansion of coverage that people could agree on. For a conservative Republican, this is individual responsibility. For a Democrat, this is government helping those that need help.”
In fact, the bosses’ two parties agreed because the bill is aimed at helping business, under the guise of helping the uninsured. Companies that do not provide health insurance have to pay a fine under the new law–$295 per employee per year. That does not begin to pay the cost of health insurance for an uninsured person. It’s really an incentive for companies to stop providing insurance for their employees.
Individuals, on the other hand, will be fined on their taxes up to half the cost of a health care premium if they can “afford” to pay. That is, they will pay 10 or even 20 times as much as the employer who doesn’t insure them. And the state decides who can afford it!
Who is not paying for health insurance now who can afford it? If people are not paying, there’s a reason–lack of money!
Sure the bosses would prefer not to have a lot of uninsured people. It means they wind up in emergency rooms, which is more expensive than if they saw a regular doctor. Since many of the uninsured are poor–it winds up costing Medicaid. In fact, the federal government demanded that the state of Massachusetts do something about their uninsured or risk losing Medicaid money.
That’s why they passed this bill. While it gives employers a cheap way not to provide health insurance–it makes people who can’t afford it starve themselves of something else to pay for this new state system.
May 22, 2006
Two reporters for ABC News, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, were told by a senior federal law enforcement official that the government is tracking all their phone calls, recording who they have called. Other officials admitted that reporters from ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post are being watched as part of a CIA leak investigation.
The Bush administration pretends its domestic spying programs and the databases of millions of people’s phone records are “innocent” and will only be used against terrorists. No, they’ve already used it against any reporter who questions what the government is doing.
Is a reporter looking into the CIA’s secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Put an NSA spy on him! Is another reporter revealing which government official got what money from which oil company? Check his phone records!
When things like this happen in other countries, they call it a dictatorship! Here, they call it “democracy!”
May 22, 2006
Without any publicity, Congress passed new tax cuts for the rich. A family with a million dollars in income gets back $42,766. A worker’s family with income between $40,000 and $50,000 gets back $47–about enough for a tank of gas. Almost half of all the tax breaks go to the top 1% of taxpayers.
This new law also provides tax breaks for some of the biggest banks. Citicorp, JP Morgan Chase and General Electric, all of which have overseas profits from financial operations, will pay 4.8 billion dollars less in taxes in just two years.
This latest benefit for the wealthy shows what this society is all about: workers produce all the wealth and have to pay taxes on their meager wages, while the rich are allowed to live tax free off the proceeds of the workers’ labor.
May 22, 2006
Why are Americans paying so much more for health care and getting so much less? The dollars don’t go to health care. The dollars go to enrich health care companies’ stockholders and management.
Dr. William McGuire, for example, is CEO of UnitedHealth Group, Inc. UnitedHealth is the second-largest managed-care company. It provides an AARP insurance plan. According to Forbes magazine, McGuire’s total “compensation” for 2005 was 125 million dollars! McGuire has also accumulated 1.6 billion dollars’ worth of stock options.
McGuire and UnitedHealth are under SEC investigation for some questionable bookkeeping. But when a finance professor can tell a reporter, “Here’s a guy who did a great job, and just pushed the envelope a little too far,” that speaks volumes about what all the rest of the companies in the health care field are doing or attempting to do. Their goals are to maximize payoff to investors. To do that, they must try to minimize the actual delivery of health care!
Maximizing profit is the standard operating procedure of every industry. When health care is made into an industry, it can only operate accordingly.
May 22, 2006
Yvette Cade was brutally attacked last fall in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Prince Georges County. Her estranged husband poured gasoline on her, then set her on fire. Cade survived, but she was critically burned over almost two-thirds of her body. She was in the hospital for three months. She has had 19 operations, and her doctors tell her she will need dozens more. Half of one of her ears and a patch of her hair is missing. Her hands are still covered with charred skin.
Cade recently appeared on the Oprah Winfey show where she described her ordeal. She has been able to get national publicity in part because the attack on her was so horrific. But even more importantly, Cade, her family and friends have seen to it that the violence against her has not been buried in some police crime statistics.
Most violence against women goes unreported because it’s so ordinary, and not just in an openly reactionary country like Saudi Arabia, but right here. At least one out of every three women in the U.S. is a victim of domestic violence at some time during her life. The number of reported attacks has been increasing ... up from 6,000 in all of 2004 to 7,500 so far this year in Prince Georges County alone.
Cade’s husband was recently tried and convicted of attempted murder for his attack on her. But most violence against women isn’t prosecuted, because it’s a reflection of a class society that treats marriage as a property relationship, and women as the property.
May 22, 2006
The U.S. Supreme Court voted unanimously in favor of the right of states to give special tax breaks to corporations.
It overturned a lower court’s ruling that Ohio taxpayers could sue the state for more than 280 million dollars in tax breaks it gave to DaimlerChrysler on its new Jeep plant in Toledo. The lower court, the Sixth District Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, had also ruled that the tax breaks were unconstitutional because they interfere with interstate commerce.
The Supreme Court ignored the constitutional question and simply said that the taxpayers “had no standing” to sue because they could not show that they were directly harmed.
In other words–state residents may have their taxes increased while corporations’ taxes are lowered, but the court says that state residents aren’t harmed.
Their children’s schools may have less money, but the court says they aren’t harmed. Their garbage will not be picked up as often, and their street lights will be repaired less often, while the corporations’ profits will increase. But no harm there, either.
The Court said it as clearly as could be: the population has “no standing” when it comes to what the corporations want.
And every justice on the court voted–9-0, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat–against the citizens of Ohio and in favor of the big corporations.
May 22, 2006
On Sunday, April 30, rallies were organized in Washington, D.C. and several other U.S. cities, calling attention to the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan in eastern Africa.
“Let’s tell President Bush he needs to do more.... His heart is in the right place, but he is not doing enough,” said David Rubenstein, coordinator of the “Save Darfur Coalition,” the main organizer of the Washington rally. Other speakers, including actor George Clooney, Olympic gold medalist speedskater Joey Cheek, Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel and Democratic Senator Barak Obama, repeated the same message for George Bush.
There is no doubt that the consequences of the ongoing war in Darfur have been terrible for the civilian population. But the kind words of rally organizers about Bush’s heart hide the gross responsibility of the U.S. in this situation.
The media has presented this African conflict as an “ethnic” one, pitting an “Arab” militia force known as the “janjaweed” against “African” farmers in Darfur, suggesting long-standing animosities. In reality, such conflict between Arabs and Africans is not a historical conflict. It is a spill-over of the civil war in Sudan–a war over the control of the country’s resources, including oil, between the central government in Khartoum and rebel armies led by southern Sudanese elite. A power-sharing deal was negotiated by the warring parties in 2003, but it left out the Darfur region, the poorest part of the country located in the west. Hence rebel armies in Darfur started their own campaign against government forces in 2003.
In this war, the Khartoum regime has instigated the atrocities by the janjaweed militia as a way to undermine support for the rebel armies–by arming and using the janjaweed to terrorize the population. It is estimated that at least 180,000 people have died as a result, and more than two million have been displaced and turned into refugees.
As for the U.S., it has never been a passive spectator during the decades of bloodshed in Sudan. And its role has been a self-serving and hypocritical one, characterized by several twists and turns.
In the 1980s, the U.S. had good relations with Sudan, because it saw the Islamic regime in Khartoum as a regional ally in the Cold War rivalry against the Soviet Union. This also gave U.S. oil companies the chance to explore reserves in Sudan–it was Chevron that first discovered oil in Sudan in the 1970s.
By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Chevron had sold its prospecting rights to other companies. The U.S. declared the Khartoum regime “terrorist” and threw its support behind the southern rebels–to whom the U.S. had already provided some help in the 1980s. The Clinton administration even bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998 for supposedly producing weapons for terrorists.
Another turn in U.S. policy came in 2001, when the Bush administration took a more conciliatory stance toward the Khartoum regime. While the “terrorist” label remained, economic sanctions against Sudan were partially lifted–as demanded by U.S. oil companies that planned to return to Sudan.
Then the U.S. stance toward Sudan took yet another turn. In the summer of 2004, then Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Darfur and accused the Khartoum regime of genocide–probably as a way to divert public opinion from the Iraq war. In any event, the atrocities in Darfur had been going on for more than a year by then, supposedly unnoticed by those great champions of the oppressed, Bush and Powell!
The U.S. officials’ lack of sincerity needs no other proof than the huge gap between their proclamations to “save Darfur” and what they have done against the people of that area. Recently, the head of the United Nations humanitarian operations, Jan Egeland, complained that only 21% of the 1.7 billion dollars of aid promised to Darfur by the “international community” had arrived there. That’s about a total of 360 million dollars of aid sent to Darfur, not just by the U.S. but by all countries involved. The U.S. has already spent A THOUSAND times that amount for the invasion and occupation of Iraq!
This is the record of the Bush administration–and the administrations before it–in Sudan. U.S. policy has always been geared toward furthering the interests of U.S. Big Business, especially Big Oil–with no regard whatsoever for the population of Sudan. And it is this same Bush administration that the organizers of the “Save Darfur” rallies ask for help!
But there is more to it. While the speakers at the Washington rally stopped short of calling for direct U.S. military intervention in Sudan (they called for “multinational peacekeepers” instead), that possibility is often raised in Op-Ed pages of U.S. newspapers. The authors of this viewpoint call a military solution “the only way to stop the violence against civilians.”
These hypocrites must hope that people don’t see what’s going on in Iraq! While there are still more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, the civilian toll of a raging civil war has been steadily increasing. The U.S. military has not only done nothing to stop this violence, it has in fact started and fueled it–by using ethnic and religious militias against the population in order to undermine the anti-U.S. insurgency.
If the U.S. ends up sending troops to Sudan, it will not be to help civilians. It will be for similar reasons as to why the U.S. invaded Iraq: to better control the resources of that country and region, especially oil. The result will be an even worse disaster for the population, just as it has been in Iraq.
May 22, 2006
“Thieves,” “vandals,” “These people steal; they’re greedy.” This is what Nigerian government and public health officials had to say about the 200 and some Nigerians who died when a gasoline pipeline exploded, igniting fires that quickly spread across the fuel slick and literally burned to death everyone nearby. The bodies were charred so badly they couldn’t be identified by family members and were buried in a mass grave.
The disaster happened last week in Abuja, a fishing village 30 miles from Lagos, a modern city and Nigeria’s commercial center.
Most Nigerians living in villages and farms are extremely poor. Two-thirds of the Nigerian population live on less than a dollar a day. Life expectancy averages only 47 years. When impoverished villagers saw gasoline leaking from a pipeline that ran through their village, they brought small jerrycans to collect it.
The government says there were vandals who tapped the pipeline to re-sell fuel and make a profit. But the majority were poor villagers, desperate for fuel. Even the small-time vandals who bring tools to crack open the pipeline are poor. The misery the population lives in is what pushes them to take such risks.
Tapping pipelines is a common practice in Nigeria, and tolerated by local police who often take their cut from the practice.
A network of pipelines runs through villages and farms and the lines are hardly covered or buried. Instead they are exposed ... making it hazardous and an accident waiting to happen, as well as easy targets for tapping.
There have been similar accidents in recent years. In 2004 a pipeline explosion near Lagos caused the death of 50 people. The worst was in 1998 in southern Nigeria where between 700 and 1000 people were killed.
Speaking of thieves and stealing, let’s set the record straight. Who are the big-time thieves? The real criminals? Hardly the Nigerian masses. It’s the top Nigerian government officials who get rich from the cut given to them by the foreign oil companies. In 2005, some 450 million dollars was “found” in bank accounts in Switzerland. The former dictator, Sani Abacha, who died in 1998, had stolen it. But the real beneficiaries of this oil wealth are the oil barons from the rich countries who siphon the oil out of Nigeria to be sold on the world market. The largest oil companies are installed in Nigeria, which is the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, to make profits off of Nigeria’s oil.
Oil-rich Nigeria brings enormous wealth to the imperialist and capitalist owners of oil production, while the Nigerian people, with gasoline and oil produced literally in their own backyards and villages, remain severely impoverished.
The profits of the oil companies are made in part with dramas such as the one which just took place. Behind these billions of dollars, there are cadavers found charred to the bone near pipelines, the bodies of poor people who fight to scratch out a little change in order to try to survive.
May 22, 2006
The following article is excerpted and translated from the March 28, 2006 issue of Le Pouvoir aux Travailleurs (Workers Power), an African Trotskyist monthly.
On March 12 in a small village in southeastern Senegal, “circumcisers”–people who carry out the ritual mutilation of women’s genitals–pledged not to do it any more. A humanitarian organization offered to help the circumcisers find another trade, and offered health and education aid to local leaders if they helped stop the brutal practice. With pomp and ceremony, the governor of the region and delegations from the neighboring countries of Djibouti and Mali observed these pledges.
The government newspaper played up the importance of this ceremony. This newspaper claimed that, “an important step has been taken in the fight against circumcision and against young and forced marriages.” The truth of the matter is completely different.
The Senegalese government passed a law many years ago that banned such mutilation. But women’s organizations had to fight against this brutal and reactionary practice before the government pretended to do anything about it. As early as 1997, women’s organizations convinced the circumcisers in one village to publicly stop the practice. Since then, women’s organizations have fanned out all over Senegal and would have done even better if the authorities had not put roadblocks in their path. Inspired by the Senegalese feminists, women from other countries where women are commonly mutilated joined the fight: in Mali, Djibouti, and Burkina Faso.
Since the leaders of the country’s Muslim religious brotherhoods do not denounce the activities of these women’s organizations, the Senegalese government gives them a kind of grudging support and even passed a law condemning the practice. The Senegalese government and many other politicians belong to one of the most important Muslim brotherhoods. This brotherhood does not approve of female circumcision, which is a practice that predates Islam and is not practiced by most Muslims in the world. But the brotherhoods widely practice and support polygamy and the forced marriage of very young women. So the government closes its eyes to these violations of the most basic rights of women. That is why those who want to fight against all the barbaric practices that oppress women cannot count on regime leaders.
May 22, 2006
President Bush and the U.S. Congress are now making a big show about “securing the border” with Mexico. The National Guard, military contractors, high tech monitoring devices, and hundreds of miles of double or triple layered fencing will supposedly stop immigrants from “illegally” coming into the country.
Such proposals are not new. Over the last ten years, under both presidents Clinton and Bush, Congress had already doubled the number of Border Patrol agents along the Mexican border. And they had already carried out militaristic operations like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso and Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego to stop undocumented immigrants from crossing the border.
But these added barriers and obstacles did not even slow the flow of unauthorized border crossings. In fact, most of the undocumented immigrants now in the U.S. made it across after more stringent methods were set up. The only difference is that people were forced to take more risks, to cross in more remote and dangerous areas. Tens of thousands of people lost their lives.
Currently, there are between 11 and 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country, increasing by more than one million per year. More than three-quarters of them are from Mexico and the countries of Central America.
The usual propaganda is that people take these risks to fulfill the “American Dream.” In fact, the opposite is true. They are forced to uproot themselves, leave their families, friends and loved ones, because they feel they have no choice.
In their home countries, there are no jobs, no schools, no future. The history of these countries shows that people have often organized to fight for better conditions. But when they did, they were met by the military and police of these countries, which tried to crush them. Tens of thousands of ordinary people were killed during the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s–at the behest of the U.S. government! Thousands of peasants, workers and unemployed people were cut down by the Mexican government when they simply demanded a decent life.
The U.S. news media speaks of corrupt governments or corrupt business leaders in these countries. True. But they don’t mention that these governments are dominated by the U.S., that the military and police forces are trained and armed by the U.S. Neither do they mention that U.S. corporations dominate these economies, that they own the big plantations, mines and factories. U.S. banks suck wealth out of other countries by imposing big interest payments on top of a huge national debt.
In other words, the growing number of people fleeing these countries for the U.S. are fleeing a nightmare that was created by U.S. imperialism.
Once these undocumented immigrants get to the U.S., they find there is no paradise! On the contrary, the same U.S. capitalist class that has bled their countries dry is ready to take advantage of their desperation. The undocumented immigrants are forced to slave away at dangerous, unhealthy, low-wage jobs for very long hours. They are crowded into tiny apartments, which are often little more than hovels. A big proportion suffer from malnutrition, and when they get sick or injured, they have little or no access to health care. If they dare complain, or stand up for their rights, they can be deported–back to their countries of origin where conditions are even more unliveable.
The politicians pretend to stop the flow of immigrants, making it sound like they are doing working people in this country a favor. The politicians pretend that keeping out impoverished workers from other countries will solve the problems in this country–the lack of jobs and the low wages.
This is nothing but a smokescreen for increasing the police presence and making more repressive laws–which the capitalists and their government can use not just against the immigrants, but against all workers.
What the capitalists and their mouthpieces call the American Dream for immigrants is really an American Nightmare for all workers.
May 22, 2006
The UAW took strike authorization votes at its Delphi plants and announced the vote as more than 95% in favor.
Coincidentally, Delphi’s hearings in bankruptcy court were postponed for at least 12 days, under the pretext that negotiations were once again under way.
Both of these events help to position the top UAW leadership as it faces the union’s constitutional convention this June in Las Vegas.
Not that there is any immediate threat to the leadership’s political machine. But at this convention, primarily because of the Delphi situation, more controversy than usual about the union’s direction is expected.
As well there should be controversy! The top union leadership has for many years proposed that the companies’ interests must come first, and workers can only pick up the crumbs that the companies are willing to leave in their wake. Union membership has fallen dramatically under this policy. Workers have been forced to accept previously unacceptable concessions, such as two-tier wage agreements, unlimited work loads, and reduction of break time, under threats from company and union that their plants would close.
In the past year, workers have been hit with several particularly telling blows that underline the futility of this union policy.
The UAW leadership reneged–and allowed GM and Ford to renege–on past promises of fully paid health-care premiums for retirees.
The leadership signed engine plant agreements with Chrysler, at Dundee and Trenton in Michigan and at Kenosha in Wisconsin, agreements that promise to impose basically non-union conditions on workers, in exchange for the UAW retaining formal recognition–and dues money.
And the leadership is in the process of helping GM impose such conditions on 24,000 Delphi workers, as Delphi proceeds through a sham bankruptcy.
These dramatic plunges toward the bottom are nothing but the logical extension of the “co-operation,” “partnership” policy the union has pursued more and more openly since 1980.
The postponement of the day of the court decision on Delphi–a decision which will certainly side with Delphi–means the issue remains formally undefined until after the convention. The strike vote therefore provides the leadership with a halo of resistance and militancy that it can carry into the convention–without actually producing any results.
There certainly will be no results except further and deeper concessions, so long as the UAW has a national leadership wedded to its policy of corporate “partnership.”
Workers who want more than just the bottom of the barrel will have to find others who feel the same way. They will have to take up a fight against this three-way partnership of government, companies, and union leaders conspiring and co-operating to push them down.
May 22, 2006
GM’s parts arm, Delphi Corp., is in the middle of a sham bankruptcy, using it purely to drive down workers’ wages and benefits.
In bankruptcy court, certain financial information is put on the record. Thus it came to light that Delphi plans to pay 60 million dollars in extra bonuses to managers, on top of 38 million dollars already slated for executive bonuses.
Actions speak louder than words. Delphi says it’s bankrupt but acts like it’s got money to burn. Workers need not be deceived by the words of a high-rolling con artist.
May 22, 2006
A recent study by Michigan State University researchers found that between 1999 and 2001 an average of 869,034 workers were injured or sickened on their jobs each year in the state. This is three times the number reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The researchers cross-checked on-the-job accident and illness figures from five publicly available databases, rather than relying solely on phony figures supplied by the bosses. Their findings indicate that in the country as a whole, about 13.2 million workers were injured or sickened on their jobs in 2003, rather than the 4.4. million the government reported!
The government is certainly doing something about this slaughter–helping the bosses to cover it up!
May 22, 2006
The Death Ship was the first of B. Traven’s novels. B. Traven is best known for his novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made into a famous movie starring Humphrey Bogart.
While Treasure of the Sierra Madre showed how the pursuit of wealth distorts humanity, The Death Ship has as its target the power of the modern state and its endless layers of bureaucracies. “Stronger than God the Almighty,” says Traven of the bureaucracies, “because they could deny the existence of an actual living person,” simply because he had no papers.
The novel’s characters who “have no papers” are sailors stranded in Europe after World War I. Able-bodied seamen, seeking jobs on various ships, are denied and denied again because they have in one way or another lost their passports or seamen’s cards.
The sailors can plead with consulates, they spend nights in jail, they are secretly evicted from countries, they can pay enormous bribes and wait weeks for a promised document that never comes. There’s always a “catch” in the bureaucratic procedure.
The sailors are vital, intelligent, healthy, skilled workers. But the states all refuse to acknowledge their existence. In the end, they have no recourse but to take jobs on death ships–ships that are going to be intentionally sunk at sea for the insurance. The owners will collect the insurance and the witnesses have either gone down with the ship or, if they survive, do not count in court–because they have no papers.
Traven describes the adventures of such sailors, and through their stories, he carries the reader on large voyages, across the length and breadth of history, up and down the always-identical layers of state bureaucracies. Everyone who has been there will relate.
In these times of contrived debate over “illegal” immigrants and “closed” borders, The Death Ship presents the more fundamental questions.
May 22, 2006
The U.S. Senate passed an amendment to its immigration bill that declared English the “national language” of the United States. Already, 24 states have passed similar laws.
The politicians who pass such laws hypocritically claim they are needed “to unite” the country. What lies. English-only type laws play on xenophobia, that is, the fear of people from other countries and cultures. This fear is used to whip up support for depriving immigrants of their basic political, economic and social rights. Just look at how the government used xenophobia after the attacks of 9-11 to whip up support for going after immigrants of Middle Eastern descent, for example. In fact, this country has a long history of the bosses and the government carrying out racist campaigns against so-called “foreigners,” who happened to be Irish, Catholic, German, Jewish, Polish, Chinese, Mexican–even as the bosses and government carried out even more virulent and violent campaigns against black people as a part of a divide-and-conquer strategy which has been used to impose worsening conditions on the entire working population.
Workers–immigrant and native-born–don’t have to be lectured by a bunch of politicians or have a law passed to stress how important it is to speak a common language. In the work place, effective communication is a necessity–and not just for safety reasons. When workers don’t speak a common language, it makes it easier for the bosses to sow divisions and create animosity between them. The lack of a common language makes it more difficult for workers to organize together to fight in their common interests. And that is on top of the need to speak and write the language of a country in order to be more fully integrated and be able to more fully participate in its social, political and cultural life.
But it is the bosses and the government themselves that stand in the way of workers and their families learning the English language quickly and completely. First of all, by making so many immigrant workers put in extremely long hours, the bosses deprive them of the first thing they need to learn a new language: time. On top of that, the politicians have cut funding in education so much that millions and millions of workers have to get on long waiting lists just to have the chance to finally get into a class. As for their children, they are most often relegated to crowded and underfunded schools which don’t have nearly enough teachers, classrooms and text books and where conditions are so harsh in many ways they resemble prisons more than schools.
It’s no mystery what’s needed for people to learn a language quickly and efficiently. All it takes is time and resources. Rich people send their children to schools that teach a language in an intensive manner in small classes, through what they call “immersion” in that language. Various branches of the government, starting with the military, have special schools that do the same thing–and often even quicker. U.S. corporations do the same thing when they send their executives and professionals overseas.
Yes, all workers and their families should speak and write English fluently. That is why all workers should demand that their bosses give them the time off to study and learn it with pay, as well as force the politicians to increase education funding enough so that their children can attend small classes taught by well-qualified teachers so that they too can be “immersed” in the language–just like the children of the wealthy.