the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 4, 2006
Today wages and salaries count for only 45% of all the wealth produced in this country. Since the government started recording such information in 1947, wages and salaries have never counted for such a small share. In 1970, wages and salaries made up 54% of all the wealth produced.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that profits are higher than at any time in nearly 50 years. UBS, a Wall Street investment bank, described the economy as going through a “golden era of profitability.”
For the wealthy it may be a golden age–but for the rest of us, it might as well be made out of tin.
And yet every one of these companies pretend that they are doing badly, that without sacrifices from us, they won’t survive.
What? How is that possible? Every company pretends to be doing badly–yet overall profits are higher than they’ve been for decades! Someone’s telling some monster lies here!
The problem is not a lack of money in the hands of these companies–the problem is their outright greed, their unwillingness to give up even a penny when they’re not forced to do it.
In the more than three decades since 1974, the number of strikes in this country has gone down, down and down again. The number of major strikes in 1974 was 424. Compare that to the number last year–22. Almost twenty times as many strikes three decades ago.
That’s why we are getting a smaller share of the wealth we produce. We haven’t fought to take it for ourselves.
In the three decades since 1974, the amount of goods and services we produce has almost tripled. But the standard of living that one person’s wages will buy has barely budged. If our families have improved their situation somewhat, it’s mainly because more members of the family are working.
We won’t share in this “golden era” until we start taking some of the gold for ourselves.
Who better deserves it? We produce it. We make things run. Our brains figure out how to make the society run; our brawn keeps it running. The only thing we need is the audacity to keep for ourselves the wealth that our labor produces.
Sep 4, 2006
A U.S. District judge in Detroit found massive voter fraud in the collection of signatures for a Michigan ballot initiative...but ruled that it would stay on the November ballot anyway.
The reason? It wasn’t the right kind of fraud.
Judge Arthur Tarnow found that organizers of the so-called “Michigan Civil Rights Initiative” (the name itself is a fraud) had engaged in “systematic voter fraud by telling voters that they were signing a petition supporting affirmative action,” even though it really attacks affirmative action in Michigan.
So they got it on the ballot by lying to people.
But, because they lied to black and white people equally, the judge ruled that they didn’t violate the Voting Rights Act–so it stays on the ballot.
Apparently, there’s no law against election fraud! Not when it’s a racist ballot initiative, anyway...
Democracy???
Sep 4, 2006
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, 40,000 people–including workers, firefighters, EMS workers, and cops–massed at Ground Zero. Now well over 12,000 of them are extremely sick and disabled, with more falling ill every year.
They were in the prime of their life. But today many of them are so disabled, they can hardly get out of bed. They suffer from scarred lungs, severe headaches, shortness of breath, chronic bronchitis, acid reflux. Some have already died.
There is not a day that President Bush doesn’t invoke 9/11 at least once. He regularly salutes those who rushed to the scene to search for survivors, excavated the site and carted away the debris.
But in all the five years since 9/11, government policy has never wavered: all those who rushed to the scene and pitched in have been stonewalled when it comes to their health and safety.
Within the first hours after the twin towers came crashing down, Christine Todd Whitman, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), assured the first workers to get there that the air was safe. This was the exact opposite of what she had been told by her own department experts.
Thus, the government deliberately put recovery workers in harm’s way and defenseless, without special protective gear and breathing devices. “We didn’t want to scare people,” Whitman later said.
The impact was immediate and devastating. In the first 24 hours after the attacks, 240 firefighters and EMS workers sought treatment, half for dire respiratory symptoms. Three were hospitalized, and two went into acute respiratory arrest. Within 48 hours, more than 9,000 firefighters–90% of the New York Fire Department’s earliest responders–suffered acute respiratory symptoms.
In the weeks and months that followed, the hospitals continued to fill up with those who had been working at the site.
Yet, the government did not issue warnings or health and safety guidelines to people continuing to work at the site.
In fact, President Bush issued an executive order that gave Whitman the power to bury embarrassing documents by classifying them as “secret.”
In the period that followed, scientists and doctors did 27 studies, detailing how the toxic cloud that erupted after the collapse of the WTC ate at the lungs of the workers, a disaster in the making. A 2004 report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives said it was “the largest acute environmental disaster that ever has befallen New York City.” The studies showed how the air had become laden with highly alkaline concrete dust, glass fibers and particles of lead, chlorine, antimony, aluminum, titanium, magnesium, iron, zinc and calcium. Flaming fuel and plastics released carcinogens including dioxins, polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls and polychlorinated furans.
But the government refused to carry out a comprehensive public health care campaign. On the contrary, government officials ordered the New York State Health Department to abandon a program designed to monitor the health of 9,800 state and National Guard personnel, and the New York City Health Department has yet to issue treatment guidelines for physicians.
Rising numbers of ailing workers, who could no longer work, took early retirement. When others were forced to go on disability, the government tried to block them from receiving benefits.
“Eventually, I got three-quarters disability, but the city had played these little technicalities. The lawyer for the city said that because the department hadn’t filed a form, there was no proof that the accident I was claiming for had actually occurred. The judge had to instruct the lawyer for the city that it can be taken for a given that 9/11 had happened,” William Gleeson, age 45, told the Daily News.
The public outcry and outrage in New York has been so great that the politicians are now being forced to assure the families of workers, who may very well die from their ailments in the coming years or even months. New York Governor George Pataki, a Republican, and U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, have introduced legislation to provide “line of duty” benefits, which means that if someone gets sick and dies, the survivors will get 100% of his or her final pay. Of course, the legislation has a catch. A very big one: the survivors will be compensated only “...if it can be conclusively proved” that their deaths were caused by working at Ground Zero. In other words, the government gives itself more “technicalities” to deny benefits to the survivors.
Heroes–just like other workers–are used up and discarded every day by this capitalist society.
Sep 4, 2006
Responsibility for the recent crash of a commuter jet, killing 49 of the 50 people aboard, falls directly on the government. Comair Flight 5191 crashed about a half-mile from the end of a short runway in Lexington Kentucky. The crew apparently thought they were on another runway, twice as long.
The crash could have been avoided if ground control had warned the crew they were using the wrong runway. But at the time of the crash, in violation of FAA rules, there was only one air traffic controller on duty at the airport. He cleared Flight 5191 for takeoff from the longer runway and then quickly turned away to perform other duties.
Because of a shortage of controllers at the airport, this controller had been given an exhausting work schedule. He worked 6:30 am to 2:30 pm on Saturday, returned at 11:30 pm Saturday, and had been working another 6½ hours when the crash occurred at about 6:00 am Sunday.
The FAA is responsible for these deadly conditions. It has failed to hire enough controllers all over the country. There are 1,081 fewer controllers now than there were three years ago, even though the number of flights has increased significantly. This short-staffing will likely increase, since about 2,400 controllers are eligible to retire now. About 8,000 more become eligible to retire over the next 10 years, and the FAA is making few moves to replace them.
Instead of hiring and training more controllers to end the deadly consequences of short-staffing, on September 3–just a week after the Kentucky crash–the FAA announced it would impose new work rules. Sick leave will no longer be granted if a controller simply needs more rest, so tired controllers will have to work no matter how fatigued. And during their shifts, controllers will no longer be entitled to a break every two hours, and more frequently when performing particularly stressful assignments.
All of this reflects budget decisions made by Congress and the president, taking money away from public services, giving it to the wealthy.
If we lived in a society where government officials took responsibility for their actions, they would be charged with murder, 49 counts of it. Instead, the FAA today is laying the ground work for more fatal crashes.
Sep 4, 2006
An on-board warning system already in use on some planes might have prevented the recent crash of Flight 5191 in Lexington, Kentucky. The system lets flight crews know which runway a plane has entered and how many feet of runway remain as the plane prepares to take off.
The device would be particularly useful for smaller planes, because they frequently operate out of airports with no air traffic controller on duty.
But the FAA doesn’t require airlines to install it!
Evidently the FAA prefers to let the airlines keep the $18,000 per unit, and let passengers and crew take their chances.
Sep 4, 2006
Marking the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush revisited New Orleans. Standing once again as a tourist in front of St. Louis Cathedral, Bush declared,“It may be hard for those who have endured the last year to really have that sense of change, but for a fellow who was here and now a year later comes back, things are changing.”
Bush is right: Things are changing–in ways that definitely benefit the wealthy at the expense of workers and the poor. The areas where most of the rebuilding has occurred are those of the wealthy and the businesses of the French Quarter. These are also the mostly white areas. These areas may have suffered less damage, since they were located on higher ground and were more protected. But they are also the areas where the most services have been restored.
Overall, less than half the population has returned to the New Orleans area. It’s even fewer people in areas like the Lower Ninth Ward where only 13% of the homes and business have been reconnected to electricity. And in small towns along the Mississippi, less than 5% of the homes are being rebuilt.
Most ordinary people cannot return because there is no place for them to live–even today. It took FEMA months to bring in trailers, but most of them aren’t in New Orleans. Thousands of them are still standing empty in Hope, Arkansas, hundreds of miles away!
For people to return to the poorer areas of the city, they must have a place to stay, located near or on their property, until they can rebuild. They must have services. They must have public transportation, schools and hospitals. The politicians have provided almost none of these necessities.
The majority of public transportation routes are not working. Only 17% of the city’s buses are in operation.
Only 50 out of 128 public schools have reopened. The federal government recently allocated 24 million dollars for schools–but only for charter schools.
The city’s public hospitals, which the poor and uninsured always depended on for health care, have not reopened.
The lack of housing and services shows that the politicians are determined to block the return of tens of thousands of poor, mostly black, working people to the city. FEMA officials cynically lied during those 5 days a year ago while they left thousands of poor people stranded in the Super Dome and Convention Center. Likewise, politicians like President Bush and Mayor Nagin have been shedding crocodile tears ever since.
But while they cynically shed these tears for the television cameras, what they have actually done is throw tens of thousands of people to the wind, hoping they will disappear–either dead or alive–but in any case, never to return to live in New Orleans again.
Sep 4, 2006
Boeing’s new one billion dollar contract from Homeland Security is a magnet for “fraud, mismanagement and abuse”–according to a congressional study.
The first contract Boeing got in 2002 was worth more than half a billion dollars. On that one, Boeing outsourced the work and revised the contract 54 times. The majority of the machines Boeing installed to screen luggage in airports through the U.S. don’t work. It could cost five billion more to replace these machines.
Boeing was not the only company mentioned by the congressional study. Thirty-two other contracts with Homeland Security, worth 34 billion dollars, were “plagued by waste, abuse or mismanagement.”
In other words, lots of corporations are ripping off the taxpayer ... under the guise of “national security.”
Sep 4, 2006
On August 10, British officials announced that they had uncovered a massive terrorist plot. Police raided the homes of 25 British citizens and arrested them as “would-be terrorists.” Supposedly, these “suspects” had been planning to blow up as many as 10 airplanes in the air between Britain and the U.S. with liquid gel explosives.
In both countries, government officials declared high security alerts, saying that terrorist attacks were still imminent. In the U.S. all liquids, gels and pastes were banned from carry-on bags, while in Britain carry-on baggage was banned altogether. Airports, especially in Britain, sank into chaos as 2,380 flights from London were cancelled and tens of thousands of passengers were stranded. In the following two weeks, several transatlantic flights were diverted because passengers who looked Middle-Eastern supposedly “behaved suspiciously”–by “looking at their watches frequently,” for example.
Government officials in both countries seemed to be competing as to who would make the scariest pronouncement. The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, said the terrorist plot was “getting really quite close to the execution stage.” London deputy police chief Paul Stephenson said the terrorists’ goal was “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” British Home Secretary John Reid called the attacks “highly likely,” with loss of life on an “unprecedented scale.”
As it turned out, the only thing that was on an unprecedented scale was the blatant lies of these charlatans. None of the “suspects” had either bought or reserved a flight to the U.S.–or, for that matter, anywhere else. At least two of them didn’t even have passports. One official even said that some of the would-be bombers had not been recruited and “radicalized” yet!
The famous liquid gel bombs didn’t exist, either. The police said that, during the raids, they had found “the necessary components” to make a liquid explosive known as HTMD–those components being hydrogen peroxide, a sports drink and an MP3 player or cell phone. The police could just as easily have found these items in Tony Blair’s house if they had searched it! And some of this so-called “bomb-making equipment” was supposedly found five days after the arrests in a suitcase buried in the woods! Not to mention that the authorities still have to explain how these “suspects,” who had no skilled chemistry background, could have carried out the very precise and measured actions required to make a highly explosive bomb from these individual items–in the bathroom of an airplane during a flight! British and U.S. authorities seem to be reading from a comic book!
But all this nonsense didn’t prevent the British government from charging eight of the “suspects” with “conspiracy to commit murder and preparing for acts of terrorism.” Three others were charged with “failing to disclose information” about those eight. And one 17-year-old man was charged ... NOT with being part of the same plot, but with “possessing articles that could be used” in some other terrorist act, which apparently hasn’t even been planned yet. And the authorities have the audacity to say that it may take three years to bring these cases to court! In other words–after all the publicity dies away and the elections are over.
This ridiculous farce has nothing to do with terrorism and public safety, and everything to do with the falling poll ratings of Tony Blair and George Bush. There is a “plot” all right–not by some British Muslims with fantastic liquid gel bombs, but by the British and U.S. governments and their accomplice, the corporate mass media, to divert public opinion from the real problems working people face on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sep 4, 2006
Amnesty International has accused Israel of “war crimes” in Lebanon because the Israeli army deliberately attacked civilians during its invasion. Even today, after the battles have stopped, the war is creating more victims among the population.
Israel used fragmentation bombs on at least 170 villages and sites in southern Lebanon during the 34 days of its offensive.
This type of bomb breaks up above its target, setting free dozens of mini-bombs which rain down, covering more than 250 square yards. But many of these mini-bombs don’t explode immediately. Like anti-personnel mines, they lie there waiting to kill or maim civilians later on.
In one week’s time, four teams from a British humanitarian organization found and neutralized a thousand such bombs inside Lebanon. Given the small size of the country and the area where the bombing was concentrated in the south of Lebanon, entire villages have been thus “contaminated.”
Since the cease fire, 14 more people have been killed and 51 others wounded by fragmentation bomb explosions. These are in addition to continuing explosions of tens of thousands of mines left by Israel in 2000, when it withdrew from southern Lebanon.
The Geneva convention prohibits the use of land mines against civilians. This didn’t stop Israel in Lebanon, no more than it stopped imperialist armies from using them in recent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, causing the death of thousands of civilians. Nor did it stop the U.S. from supplying Israel with these bombs. The U.S. government has even admitted it knew they would be used in civilian areas.
There is no war that spares civilians, but this war has been particularly atrocious in that regard.
Sep 4, 2006
The U.S. government just created a special CIA department to concentrate exclusively on Venezuela and Cuba, two countries whose governments the U.S. would like to overthrow.
The reasons for focusing on Cuba are clear: Castro’s current health and his age raise the problem of his succession, and Bush hopes to take advantage of it to put an end to a regime the American government has long tried to isolate.
With Venezuela, things are more complicated. The U.S. continues to buy a great deal of oil from Venezuela, and commercial relations between the two countries continue as before. But with Venezuela having large oil resources at a time when the price of oil has reached new heights, President Hugo Chavez has more leverage and more ways to avoid pressure from the United States. And this sets a very poor example for the rest of Latin America, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned!
Bush denounces Venezuela and Cuba for their lack of what he calls “democracy.” But the creation of a special CIA force aiming at these two countries shows that “democracy” is not what the U.S. has in mind.
Since the end of the World War II, the CIA has organized a number of military coups that overthrew regimes–most of which were duly elected. The support given to Pinochet to eliminate Allende in Chile is just one of the better known examples of this policy. During the same epoch, the CIA actively collaborated with a number of dictatorial regimes, such as those in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as they murdered tens of thousands of their own citizens. And it invaded some countries to overthrow elected regimes–as it did in the Dominican Republic in 1965.
It’s no surprise that neither Venezuela nor Cuba takes the CIA’s new interest in their country as a friendly gesture.
Sep 4, 2006
Ever since Fidel Castro was hospitalized for a serious operation, the U.S. press has carried a torrent of commentaries by people hoping that the “communist dictatorship” would soon be ended.
All those people who denounce the Cuban dictatorship ignore the fact that Castro and his forces came to power through a popular uprising that overthrew the disastrous dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
For a half century, Cuba had been the private hunting grounds of U.S. imperialism. Cuba had more U.S. investments than any other country in Latin America except one. Batista protected all these U.S. investments, skimming wealth off the top for himself. Batista pillaged the state treasury and enriched himself, especially through gambling and prostitution, which flourished in Havana. It was commonly said that the Cuban capital was the U.S.’s biggest brothel. The Mafia found a warm welcome there. All this wealth was based on the profound misery of the poor population in the cities and the countryside.
Organizations began to rise up against Batista’s regime, which was increasingly hated, even by a part of the middle classes. Some of these organizations, including Castro’s own, chose the route of guerilla struggle against Batista, who fled at the end of 1958, stealing away with hundreds of millions of dollars in plunder. The way was left free for Castro’s troops, who seized power in the first days of 1959.
At first, Castro didn’t want to break with the U.S. On the contrary, the new Cuban regime sought economic agreements with all countries that wished it well. But the U.S. refused to recognize Fidel Castro’s regime. When he established an agrarian reform which wasn’t at all revolutionary–basing it on the 1940 constitution drawn up by Batista himself–there was an outcry by all the Cuban reactionaries and from the U.S. But Castro didn’t give in to the U.S., even when it imposed an embargo on Cuba, that is, a prohibition on all U.S. sales to the island. This embargo, with different modifications, has lasted more than forty years.
In order to avoid economic strangulation, Castro turned to the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries, which gave Cuba economic and financial support and enabled it to hold out. The misery which the Cuban people suffer from today isn’t basically due to the Castro regime, but comes from the embargo imposed by imperialism and from the underdevelopment of the island, which was there before Castro took power. With the disappearance of the USSR in the 1990s, and the end of the economic agreements Cuba had with it, the situation got worse.
It’s true that the Cuban government is a dictatorship. Opponents are silenced, including by being thrown into prison. We denounce this. But the word dictatorship can cover different realities. Even the U.S. media has been forced to acknowledge that the new regime promoted literacy and a system of free health care found nowhere else in the region on the South American continent–not to say in the U.S. itself!
On Haiti, the other big Caribbean island, misery and violence against the poor are frightful. Even today, most of the medical care existing in Haitian villages is delivered by Cuban doctors. Because of this, the Castro regime gets its political support from the poor population of Cuba and elsewhere.
In fact, it isn’t the Cuban dictatorship which bothers imperialism and the commentators who serve it. The imperialist governments, in particular in the U.S., have directly or indirectly supported and established many other dictatorships in Latin America and throughout the world. They reproach Castro for defying them for more than 40 years, and for proving that this regime offers the population a more dignified life, even if it isn’t easy.
The Castro regime has nothing in common with communism. Castro didn’t discover himself to be a “communist” until after he came to power and the connection with the Soviet Union was imposed by circumstances. But, faced with the attacks of imperialism and the lying campaigns of the media, we show solidarity with those who try to escape the hold of the great imperialist powers.
Sep 4, 2006
At the end of August, the UAW leadership called Ford local presidents and shop committee chairs to a Detroit meeting about Ford’s so-called financial problems. After the meeting, local leaders aimed communications at their memberships, repeating Ford’s lies about needing more concessions from its workers.
The bulletin from Ford Local 600 leaders sets the example of complete surrender to the Ford point of view. Repeating Ford’s arguments without question, it declares the local’s readiness to give up whatever Ford might demand. Pretending that workers at Rouge are in a competition with other Ford workers, they tear up the union’s very reason to exist. Workers unionize in order to stop companies from pitting them against each other, not to help the companies do this.
For workers to accept Ford’s “competitive” baloney means accepting a race to the bottom–a race to the harshest conditions and lowest pay that Ford and the other bosses can devise.
Companies are more “competitive,” that is, more profitable for their owners, when they exploit workers harder.
Since Chrysler declared its so-called “bankruptcy” in 1980, all the companies have cried “competitive” without let-up. Workers have paid a bigger and bigger “competitive” price every day in a faster and faster pace of work, fewer and fewer jobs, fewer and fewer rights. The new concessions at Ford show there is no bottom limit.
Company lies don’t stop being lies just because union officials repeat them.
UAW officials repeated the lie that Toyota has no retirees and therefore no pension costs. No! Ford and Toyota pension costs should be the same. Companies are supposed to pay into pension funds while workers are working, in order to be able to pay out benefits when workers retire. The big U.S. companies either have vast pension surpluses that are hidden by fancy bookkeeping–or else they have stolen the workers’ retirement money outright and used it elsewhere!
The union leaders claim that healthcare expenses for the U.S. auto companies makes them “uncompetitive” with Toyota. If the companies wanted to be “competitive,” they could long ago have used their power to get national health care passed and remove the problem completely. If they did not, it was the choice of their stockholders–who are also big holders of insurance and medical and drug company stocks. It was their choice to try to tie workers to one company for life instead of allowing workers the freedom to change jobs without worrying about losing health-care benefits.
Workers made none of those decisions–but now the workers’ leaders are telling them they must pay with concessions for the fallout from the bosses’ choices.
In fact, the Local 600 leaders have a long history of telling workers they must give up concessions to save jobs–only to have workers lose those jobs because of the concessions.
Beginning in the early 1980s, workers in the steel division took the first of the concessions. Thousands of jobs were cut and huge work rule concessions continue to this day.
The “Save the Mustang” campaign in 1992 contained more work rule concessions to “save jobs.” Those concessions made jobs disappear and work get harder. The “Rouge Viability Agreement” in 1997 gave yet more concessions. Again, jobs disappeared and work got harder. Now another “site-wide competitive structure” is in the works–if the officials are allowed to do it. And again jobs will disappear, and again work will get harder.
Isn’t this history plain enough by now? “Competitiveness” and concessions don’t save jobs! It’s a lie, a damnable lie.
The workers’ only real chance is to fight back against Ford’s plans, and against all those who support Ford’s plans.
Sep 4, 2006
Northwest Airlines laid off some 60 workers and on the way out the door gave them some free advice: start dumpster-diving for food and get used to wearing used clothes!
This was no joke–101 similarly insulting “tips” were in the employees’ lay-off “assistance” packets.
Workers could just see their poor bosses dumpster-diving for caviar and using hand-me-down tuxedos and limos!
But Tip # 53 said it all. “Bicycle to work.” Where? To what job? You just laid us off!
Sep 4, 2006
This year, 66 U.S. senators voted for a constitutional amendment that would ban “flag burning.” The proposed amendment fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass.
It never fails–all year round, these politicians lie, cheat and steal. But when they come up for election, they suddenly huff and puff and wrap themselves in the American flag. Patriots one and all!
Sep 4, 2006
Over 6,000 members of the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) voted Sunday, August 27, to strike rather than accept a concession contract offer from the school board.
The contract offer contained 88 million dollars in cuts, including 5.5% wage cuts, and cuts in medical benefits. The school board says it is 105 million dollars in debt.
The teachers point out that they just accepted 64 million dollars in cuts last year when the school board first said it was in dire straits; but then the board gave raises to administrators with that money. Teachers demand a 5% raise, with no cuts in medical benefits.
Many other issues are on teachers’ minds, all having to do with the quality of education that can be provided in their classrooms. And these issues all boil down to the fact that much more money needs to be put into the schools.
Superintendent William F. Coleman and the school board president, Jimmy Womack, say there is no money. But that’s a load of bull. Administrators in the district continue to pull down six-figure salaries, and the district continues to pay contractors big money for their services.
Not only that, but money from the state could be there–even though the politicians claim it isn’t. The state promised, when it shifted school funding from local property taxes to statewide taxes, that they would provide the same funding and more; this promise disappeared in a puff of smoke. Before that, the state promised that the lottery would provide extra funding to help the schools. But the politicians simply diverted other money away from the schools, into the pockets of corporations.
Today the state continues a pattern of give-backs and tax cuts to the wealthy, while cutting funds to the schools. It just did away with its last remaining business tax, the “single business tax.” Governor Jennifer Granholm makes one announcement after another about tax breaks to major corporations. All this is money that COULD be used to save school districts like Detroit–but instead goes to line the pockets of the very rich.
Yes, there’s money! The hogs at the top are stuffed full of it. And the teachers in Detroit are doing the one thing that can get that money where it belongs. They’re fighting, and striking, together.
Thousands of teachers have been picketing since Monday, August 28, the day they were scheduled to return to work. Students are scheduled to return on Tuesday, September 5.
Up until now, the school board has been stonewalling in the negotiations. The board went to court expecting to get a judge’s injunction against the strike. The judge, however, perhaps mindful of needing workers’ votes in the next election, refused to grant the injunction and instead ordered the two parties to meet and negotiate.
An important moment in the strike will come on the day after Labor Day, when children are to report for the first day of classes. The judge may grant the board’s request for a hearing and injunction–or she may continue to demand negotiations.
But no matter what, the deciding factor will be the determination of the teachers, not to give in, judge or no judge, law or no law. The teachers have the power to pluck from the lawbooks the state’s law that is supposed to restrain them, and dump it in the dumpster where it belongs.
In fact, if teachers would show this sort of determination, in this working-class city that suffers acutely from years of attacks on education and jobs and incomes, they would have every reason to expect the working class’s widespread support and encouragement. Moreover, in the teachers’ determination, the working class itself could find an example they could pick up and spread.
Certainly it is past time for all workers to call the bosses and their state to account.
Sep 4, 2006
A Michigan law makes it illegal for any public employees to strike. This includes teachers and state office workers.
The ban on striking is bad enough. But the punishment for it is just ridiculous.
Any public employees’ union that calls a strike can be fined $5,000 for every day the strike lasts. But not only that–every individual striker can be fined a day’s pay for every day he or she is on strike.
So not only would striking workers get no pay while they are striking; they would also get no pay while they’re working, for the same number of days they were on strike!
This law would have public employees work for free.
Wasn’t slavery abolished long ago?
Sep 4, 2006
On August 15, Elvira Arellano took refuge, along with her 7-year-old son Saul, in the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago. Arellano is one of the 11 million immigrants in this country without legal papers. Like most others, she worked for companies that took advantage of her legal status to pay her less money and give her few benefits. Like most others in this situation, she paid income taxes and Social Security, with no hope of getting anything back.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that she worked as a cleaner at O’Hare airport, she would likely have escaped notice. But in the aftermath of 9/11, the government, pretending it was doing something, rounded up people without papers at many airports. She was one of them.
Since that time, her situation has been unsure, with the threat of what might happen to her son hanging over her head. Her son, who was born in this country, is a citizen. She is not. Fearing that she might be removed–with her son forced to move with her to a country he doesn’t know, or to be separated from her when she was expelled–immigrant rights activists finally moved her into the church, which offered her sanctuary.
Some people are trying to turn Arellano into a symbol. But the issue is not symbolic. It’s real, and it involves 11 million people, forced to work under difficult conditions, in fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of course, it’s outrageous that the government would even think of deporting her. But she’s only one person. And what’s completely outrageous is that the government is preparing to deport most of those 11 million immigrants under a bill currently pending in the U.S. Senate–deport or put them into a semi-legal situation much like indentured servants in this country’s early history.
Every one of those 11 million deserves to have legal papers–and immediately. If bosses can bring them here to work, then this government should be forced to give them legal papers.
The only defense for someone like Arellano is a defense of all the immigrants in her situation. And the only way for the whole working class to defend itself against the drive to lower everyone’s wages is to fight against the illegal status given to this large part of the working class.