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 24, 2007
On September 13, Bush gave his supposedly “long-awaited” report on Iraq to the nation, insisting that things in Iraq have improved so much that “our success... now allows us to begin bringing some of our troops home.”
Bring troops home? Don’t tell that lie! At the end of October, 2,200 marines, who are at the end of their tour in Iraq, supposedly won’t be replaced. That’s all. It still leaves 162,000 regular troops in Iraq, 32,000 more than were there when this so-called surge started last February, a surge that was presented as lasting only six months when Bush first announced it. And the number of troops is still supposed to increase to 172,000 later on this year.
In that very same week, Democrats loudly demanded that Bush set a timetable for bringing troops home. That’s another lie that shouldn’t be told. When the Democrats put the timetable up for a vote in the Senate, they couldn’t even get 22 of their own members to support it.
No matter what lies were told to justify going into this war, the lies being told to keep it going are worse. They come at a time when everyone can see the war’s horrible human cost: 660,000 to one million Iraqis dead, more than two million who have been forced to flee their country and another two million who have been driven out of their homes, forced to move to another part of the country by the violence. And that only begins to tell the depth of the catastrophe that the United States, in all its might and glory, has inflicted on the Iraqis.
Compared to that, what can we say about the U.S. troops, those who are part of the war machine?
We can say what many of them would say: they are in Iraq, doing something they never wanted to do. And for each one of them, Iraq has also been a catastrophe. Maybe a few of them joined the army to fulfill a sick, macho fantasy. But there are all the rest–those who joined because there were no jobs, or to get an education, or out of mistaken patriotism after 9-11, only to discover that they had been duped.
Whatever their reasons for going into the army, for most of them it was not to kill civilians, men, women, children, even babies.
They put themselves, unknowingly, in the midst of a disaster, one that can haunt them for the rest of their lives. But they have the possibility to get themselves out of it, and by so doing stop this atrocious organized, high tech murder of other human beings just like themselves.
The U.S. troops carrying out this war, day by day by day, can stop it. Many have already left the army as soon as they could. Many more can do the same–or leave even earlier. They can be the soldiers who want to avoid combat, not those who seek it out. They can continue to express their disgust with this war, as many already have been–but more loudly, more widely. They can show that the generals have troops who aren’t ready to follow.
Just as with Viet Nam, finally it all boils down to the army–will it fight or will it not?
Civilians in this country–friends, family and friends of the soldiers, and not just them but also all those who want an end to the war–can support the desires of the troops not to fight it any longer.
If it depends on the Bush administration and its pet generals to stop the war, then the troops won’t ever all be brought home. The aim of this government is to use Iraq as its main base to control the oil of the whole Middle East.
If it depends on Democrats who verbally oppose this war, but don’t supply the votes needed to stop it–then the troops won’t be brought home. The aim of the Democrats is to use the war as an issue to get elected. Period.
This war will stop when the population of this country–soldiers and civilians–stops it.
Sep 24, 2007
An epidemic of cholera has already infected 7000 people in northern Iraq. It is spreading quickly into neighboring provinces through the unsanitary and decrepit water system, and has already reached Baghdad.
Cholera is not a contagious disease that spreads from one person to another. Rather, people contract cholera by drinking water or eating food contaminated with the bacteria. As a result of the war, almost 3 out of 4 people in Iraq have no drinkable water, and raw sewage runs through whole communities–conditions ripe for cholera to become an epidemic.
People with mild cases who get intensive health care can usually fight off the infection. But this barbaric war, made worse by the surge, has made it difficult, if not impossible, to get such care.
This is not a natural disaster. In the 1980’s, Iraq had a medical system much better than most in the Middle East. But this was before the 1990’s decade of U.S. sanctions and bombing, followed by the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation, all of which has reduced Iraq’s infrastructure and water and health systems to a shambles.
This epidemic is a U.S. government-made disaster.
One more reason the U.S. should get out of Iraq now!
Sep 24, 2007
U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and top Bush administration officials have been talking about a rescue plan for all those people in danger of losing their homes in the next years. One part of their plan is to raise the limits on mortgages guaranteed by “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac.”
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are enormous financial companies, set up by the federal government. Even though both companies are officially considered to be privately owned, they also operate under the government umbrella, that is, with an unofficial guarantee of a taxpayer bail-out if their losses ever get too great. Their stated purpose is to guarantee mortgages. These guarantees are supposed to encourage banks and other financial institutions to offer mortgages to middle and working class people–and supposedly, no one else. There is an upper limit on the size of the mortgages that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could guarantee. Currently, that limit is $417,000.
When Schumer and the Bush administration officials propose to substantially increase the $417,000 limit on the mortgages for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it is not to help the middle and working classes, since few of them are buying houses worth nearly half a million dollars. Instead, it is to bail out the banks and big financial companies which hold billions and tens of billions of dollars in mortgages that are much larger than $417,000 and are in danger of default.
In Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada, where the number of mortgage defaults is the highest, between 21% and 32% of the defaults are on expensive mortgages taken out by speculators, according to a recent survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association.
It was these speculators who helped drive up housing prices, by buying up houses and then “flipping” them, that is, quickly reselling them at a higher price, thus pocketing an instant profit. And the banks and big financial companies that provided the credit for these speculators, at enormous fees of course, profited every bit as much as the speculators.
The proposal to lift the limits on mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will allow the banks and financial companies to unload those much bigger mortgages on those two companies. And then, because both companies are “guaranteed” by the government, when the loans finally default, it will be the taxpayer who will foot the bill.
Under the guise of helping homeowners buy and keep their homes, a taxpayer-funded bailout is being engineered to protect the profits of those who inflated the speculative housing bubble in the first place.
Sep 24, 2007
For months Britain’s finance minister insisted that U.S. financial turmoil would not cross the Atlantic Ocean, that the British economy would be safe from the U.S. mortgage crisis.
In fact, the English real estate speculative bubble was similar to what happened in the U.S.! And the popping of the bubble meant that a similar crisis was unfolding in the English banking system!
No matter how reassuring British officials were, on September 13, thousands of people waited hours in line to withdraw their money from Northern Rock, the eighth biggest bank in Britain. Northern Rock is also the fifth biggest real estate lender in the country. Obviously, the bank’s depositors had little faith in the government reassurances.
Northern Rock was one of the mutual or depositor-owned savings and loans that has for years provided people with money to buy homes. The golden rule was that the total loans they issued couldn’t exceed the money put in by depositors, with administrative costs and profits taken out of interest paid by borrowers. But deregulation changed all the rules, allowing these kinds of savings and loans to convert themselves into banks.
In 1996, Northern Rock transformed itself into a bank listed on the stock market, and it began to engage in new speculative methods. In order to finance its real estate loans, it began to borrow from financial markets. Today this borrowing adds up to 80% of all the mortgages it wrote. The problem is that this borrowing from the financial markets is short term, so the bank has to constantly borrow again to pay off the loans that come due. In other words, it’s a classic pyramid scheme. And a classic panic when it threatens to collapse.
In fact, neither the bank panic at Northern Rock nor the current restriction of bank lending occurred out of the blue. Since the beginning of 2007, despite the colossal profits that the banks made in 2006, all English banks saw the price of their stock drop on the stock exchange. In the case of Northern Rock, its stock price fell by 25%. Beginning in August, bank stock prices dropped even faster. The price of Northern Rock stock declined from $25 a share at the beginning of the year down to $6 a share on September 17.
The government reacted to this incipient bank panic only because there was a risk it would spread throughout the banking system. On September 17, the government promised to guarantee all deposits in Northern Rock. It promised to cut the interest rate for emergency loans from the Bank of England to businesses. In other words, the government, using tax money, is ready to make the population pay for the cost of speculation.
These promises were enough to raise the price of bank stocks on the stock market, but for how long?
The English population, the most indebted in the world, has a total debt of 2.9 trillion dollars or 1.3 times the total annual production of the English economy. What would happen if the mechanism of the financial markets really got jammed up? For the working population, it would mean not only a decline in its standard of living, but also the closing of a great number of businesses, which would have no access to money.
What the sick capitalist system offers the population is the threat of uncontrolled crises.
Sep 24, 2007
An Illinois judge just blocked the opening of a new women’s health clinic in Aurora, a suburb of Chicago. Aurora city officials had refused a permit to open the clinic and Planned Parenthood, the facility operator, asked the judge to force city officials to let them open.
City officials used the fact that Planned Parenthood had contracted for the facility under the name of Gemini Office Development.
Obviously Planned Parenthood had a good reason to do so. From the moment the Chicago Tribune revealed the name of the building’s tenant, protesters have used physical force to try to stop it from opening. And city officials, giving in to pressures from anti-abortion activists, did nothing to stop the violence.
This battle is taking place in the supposedly liberal state of Illinois, with a Democratic governor and legislature. Aurora officials collapsed in the face of threats of violence from anti-abortion foes despite poll after poll after poll which show that the majority of Americans favor the right for a woman to be able to choose abortion.
This cave-in by politicians deprives one of the fastest growing suburbs in the Chicago area of a very much needed women’s health clinic. Planned Parenthood has provided more than 50,000 clients per year such services in 10 different Chicago area clinics. These services, including contraception, pregnancy testing, adoption referrals, sexual disease screening and abortion, are otherwise not available to many women, especially poor and working class women.
The president of Planned Parenthood, Chicago Area, said, “The fact that people are trying desperately to get appointments [at our clinics] even in the midst of this speaks volumes to the need in this community.”
In the more than 30 years since abortion became legal, those opposing a woman’s right to choose have tried many tactics to intimidate women–often bordering on terrorism. They have used physical violence and even murder to close clinics and scare off doctors. The result is that the vast majority of counties across the United States lack even one single medical facility offering abortions.
Anti-abortionists like to claim they are “pro-life.” It’s their biggest lie.
Planned Parenthood and the millions of supporters of abortion rights are the ones trying to protect women’s lives from the good old days–35 years ago when many women died in back-alley abortions, thousands died from too many extra births and too little access to contraception, tens of thousands of children–whose parents couldn’t support them–were condemned to abject poverty.
We are not going back to those days–not if women stand up for their rights, including for access to health clinics wherever they live, from Aurora to Alaska.
Sep 24, 2007
The following is the presentation given at a Spark public meeting in Detroit on September 23, 2007, before the auto contract was settled.
I"m here to talk about the auto contract being negotiated that we aren’t supposed to know anything about.
Negotiations have been going on for six months at least–if not two years. And during this whole time workers have gotten not one solid piece of information. Only carefully managed "leaks’ designed to create high levels of fear in the workforce: fear about possible big job losses if the companies move plants overseas–and fear that one of these companies could go into bankruptcy.
They are trying to scare workers to accept harsh concessions, as GM-friendly analyst Sean McAlinden admitted to Bloomberg News yesterday. Commenting on a so-called "leak" that GM was demanding cuts like $5 an hour and threatening to move plants overseas if they didn’t get health-care concessions, he said this was "exactly what the UAW needed GM to do in order to be able to sell" the health-care cuts to the rank and file. Well, I"m not sold–and neither are many other workers.
We don’t know exactly what package they will finally bring out. But, I"ll tell you this: their past performance shows they are not to be trusted. And I"ll tell you about some red warning flags I will be looking for when they do bring out a tentative contract–any ONE of which should be enough to make us vote NO.
They may come with a new two-tier wage scale. The companies want to hire everyone from here on out at permanently lower pay and benefits. They want me to be installing exhaust hangers for $27 an hour and the worker next to me is supposed to be hanging exhaust pipes at $14 an hour! They are even talking about denying new hires a regular pension. Real solidarity! No, anything like that, send it back! No one works second class!
Besides, once a second class is established, everyone will be pushed down to it quite soon, as they have just done at Delphi. The leaders say they are from "Solidarity" House, but their way of getting a YES vote on the contract is to attack solidarity, dividing us into groups, making make each group think the worst problems will fall on some other group.
Another red warning flag will be attacking us in all the ways that force us to work harder and harder, faster and faster–and with more injuries. Work rule changes so that the companies can try loading even more work on individual workers. More eliminations of classifications. An even worse attendance program. If you are working under one of the current programs you can’t IMAGINE there can be a "worse" one, but it’s coming. They"re talking about a "no fault" system where you only get so many days per year to be absent no matter what the reason, no matter if you have a doctor’s note or not. It’s nothing but a way to fire you as soon as you have health problems. The companies’ way to dump older workers and workers who have family members with serious health care problems.
Outsourcing will be another red warning flag. The companies have long shipped work out, but now they want sub-contractors paying lower wages taking over jobs inside the plant. Many places already have subcontractors doing the janitor and material handling jobs that used to allow higher seniority workers to move off the line. There are a few places like Toledo Jeep where whole departments like paint, and metal shop, and even chassis assembly are run entirely by subcontractors who hire their own workers at cut rates! At Ford’s Rouge truck plant, engine assembly and frame selection and driving trucks between plants are also handled by sub-contractors working inside the plant. It’s another way to try to divide workers into separate interests.
The red warning flag they"ve talked about the most is taking away health care benefits for retirees, which have been guaranteed since 1964. We all were told for 30 years that if we made it to retirement, our benefits were guaranteed for life. Well, I guess "life" just ended. They"re talking about changing the plans, getting out of company-guaranteed benefits, replacing it with a plan which will NOT guarantee benefits–a plan to be operated by the union. It’s called a Defined Contribution VEBA, it’s been tried already at Caterpillar, J.I. Case, and Detroit Diesel and it has FAILED at all three places. But we"re not supposed to worry about that! And now I just read that even active workers might be shifted to this new type of plan! Can you say, "Big Monthly Premiums Deducted From Your Check"?
Attacks like these and others will be justified by saying they keep companies competitive, keep them out of bankruptcy, and ensure job security. Job security! I suppose it’s job security to outsource every job you can? I suppose it’s job security to overload jobs that permanently disable you before you make it to retirement? Job security negotiated in UAW contracts has been a fraud. Every contract since 1982 has promised Job Security! After every contract we have fewer jobs than ever. Just going back to l990, contracts promising Job Security covered 463,000 workers. Today there are only 178,000 left. In other words, "Job Security" has eliminated 285,000 workers, just since 1990–more than 60%! Since 1979 Job Security has eliminated 547,000 workers–half a million. False promises, false.
They claim the companies are nearly bankrupt. Please, let ME be that close to bankruptcy! None of my family would ever have to work again. The companies hide their assets off the books, off shore, or in "conduits’ or "special investment vehicles," like every good businessman. In 2005 when GM was supposedly near death and Kerkorian bought his 10%, Kerkorian’s own man Jerry York made a speech and congratulated Wagoner, GM’s CEO, for having done a great job of "warehousing cash." Or take Ford. (This example I really like.) Ford just made a big deal over "mortgaging the Blue Oval." Oh my god, we"re going to lose the company. Crap. Ford mortgaged itself to–Ford! Ford Motor borrowed some of its borrowed billions from guess what? The Ford Capital Trust #2. Ford borrowed Ford money and then will repay Ford–plus interest. All the while showing the "borrowing" on their books as an "expense!" Isn’t it clever? Ford still has all the money but it can run this game about "bankruptcy" to demand more sacrifices from workers. And who knows how many of these Capital Trust sort of things are out there?
I"ll just mention another way they hide their money. They separate out the money paid for new cars and put that money into special companies: GMAC, Ford Credit, Chrysler Financial. Then these FINANCIAL companies get the actual income from the car payments–leaving the MANUFACTURING company to look like it’s nearly broke. On paper.
How much profit do they make really? We only know what the companies tell us, and, like their man David Cole let slip last May to a Free Press reporter: "In business, lying is something you do all the time."
But even with all these ways of lying and hiding their money, they still admit to some profits. Take the 12-year period of 1994 through 2005. GM, Ford, and Chrysler admitted to profits that altogether came to 133 billion dollars. 133 BILLION. What did they do with it? They moved it off the books into special accounts, bought back their own stock, speculated with buying and selling other companies, gave out extra shareholder dividends and executive bonuses as quick as they could, that’s what.
And haven’t the corporations and their owners made out like bandits! Why do we see these unheard-of CEO bonuses like Mulally’s 39.1 million for his first 4 MONTHS at Ford? Or Chrysler’s Nardelli–his pay is secret now that he’s under Cerberus, but we know Home Depot paid him off 210 million dollars to go quietly. Matter of fact, if workers’ wages had risen at the same rate as CEO pay, today we would be making $200 an hour!
These lying executives have the nerve to pretend that it’s labor costs that are killing the companies. Executives aren’t paid for managing, they"re paid for their acting skills! I asked some friends, what% of a car did they think were labor costs? They guessed 50 and 60%, more than half. Just what you"d think if you believe the company propaganda they call "news." But what is reality? Labor costs all told–wages, benefits, pensions–labor costs are only 8.4% of the average vehicle’s price. That’s a long way from 50%! It means that every hundred dollars a company receives when it sells a vehicle, they put $8.40 toward labor costs and then they have $91.60 for everything else–not only materials but CEO bonuses, payoffs, corruption, mismanagement, profits, country clubs, you name it.
Here’s another fact gleaned from company books: for every hour auto workers put in, we add $206 in value to the cars. And yet they cry because our wage and benefit package might approach $75–even using their own false inflated figures for our wages and benefits. They admit they are ripping us off more than $131 per hour!
This information is based on auto companies’ own figures. The UAW’s staff had them printed as part of a package for the media. IF you went on the UAW website and IF you printed out the package and IF you dug around for a while you too could find those figures. But if you were in the factories? Or in the local union meetings? Never a word! Not a hint!
Why don’t UAW leaders push this information in the locals, in the plants, why don’t they give workers this ammunition? Because if we found out, if we ALL knew these facts, we might vote NO! We might refuse to give any more concessions! We might demand to get back the stuff we"ve already lost! If we had this information, the UAW leaders might be pushed to act on it, by workers who want to draw the line against concessions once and for all.
But no. The policy the top UAW leaders push is "the partnership" to go along and get along with management.
I can’t tell you what is in the leaders’ minds, or what goes on in the back rooms, but to us they say: We are in a partnership with the companies and we have to help them do better before we can do better. Some of you may recall that they said we"d get further with a partnership than with an "adversarial" relationship. Now we see how far.
This "partnership" has been an UNSTATED policy since WWII, but I"m not going there right now, I"m just talking about since they STATED it up front in the early l980s. Partnership. If the companies aren’t satisfied with taking 8 cents per hour from our cost of living payments, then we have to give them 15 cents–in order to stay in the "partnership." If they aren’t satisfied when we have 17 minutes of break time, then we have to cut back to 12 minutes. If they aren’t satisfied when our jobs are overloaded at 110%, then we have to give them 120%. That’s the logic of partnership with the bosses.
It started with the Chrysler bankruptcy in 1980, giving Chrysler special concessions and then NEVER GETTING THEM BACK WHEN CHRYSLER RECOVERED. That was the partnership, giving up eleven paid personal holidays per year, giving up work standards, giving up attendance protections, giving up certain seniority rights and certain classifications–claiming it was only because the company was in trouble. BUT when the rich partner miraculously came back to prosperity, the other partner–us–didn’t get anything back.
The UAW leaders aren’t alone in pushing partnership. It’s the policy of nearly every major union across the board. This generation of leaders are the type who start from the point of view of keeping society as it is, keeping this bosses’ capitalist society in its particular kind of order.
And what has been the result?
The end result of 27 years of an open partnership policy is that the working class is very much poorer while the boss class is very much richer. The wealth of the upper 1/10 of 1% of the population has shot up more than 51% just since 2003. Because the corporations and banks and funds they own increased their profit 72% overall. They took over every single bit of the growth in the economy and then took extra by reducing our living standards! The richest 300,000 individuals in this country have as much income as the poorest 150 million people, that is, the income of half the entire population is matched by just 300,000 at the top. That’s the "better off" that their "partnership" got us!
But even if most of the top union leaders have signed up for the partnership dance and the concessions bandwagon, there still are other leaders especially at local levels who don’t want to go along with it. And there is still US, the workers. It may seem like we have been easy targets, with all that the bosses are getting away with. But in fact we have resisted all along. They have not been able to break us down all at once. Far from it! From 1980 to 2007–27 years–they"ve had to chip away little by little because they could not take us on in a big attack all at once. Our resistance during those years wasn’t very visible. Nor is it very visible yet. It’s basically unorganized foot-dragging. We do as little as we can, and we jam the gears in thousands of small individual uncoordinated ways. But even that much is helpful! Every voice makes a difference too. Every clipping or cartoon posted up at work. Every NO vote in the box. Every defeat of a concession-minded local leader. Every retiree that gets up in a meeting and says, "The heart is still beating!" All these little things taken together have weight, they slow the attacks a little, they make the company and union "partners’ stop and think how far they dare to push.
As the attacks got worse, more workers showed their desire to resist. The Delphi bankruptcy brought out and connected together a large number of Delphi workers who yelled, protested, picketed and worked to rule. The Ford workers’ vote against the 2005 concessions was so big that the union could only claim it passed by 81 votes nationwide–and that’s when workers didn’t supervise much of the voting! As ex-UAW president Fraser said, the Ford vote was "scary"–for the companies and top union leaders, and it kept UAW leaders from agreeing to the same thing with Chrysler. But just as in earlier hard times, the first fights often look like losses, the early ones like the Detroit Newspaper strike here for example. But the first fights prepare the way for the next ones; workers learn solidarity, they learn company tactics, they become the voices of experience within the larger working class.
It’s been done before. The working class has built up its fighting capacity while under attack.
It can be done today. We have learned who are false friends and who are our best leaders. All of this will be done in the days ahead of us. At what cost and through what struggles we can’t say. But in any case, the sooner the better–for our sakes certainly, but most of all so that our children and grandchildren actually inherit a better world.
Sep 24, 2007
The 78,000 teachers and staff who work for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have started the new school year where they left off–concerned that they won’t get paid. For the last seven months, 30,000 of them have gotten paychecks shorted by thousands, and sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars. Many have fallen so far behind on their bills that they had to take out special bank loans.
This debacle was brought to them by the LAUSD, which had hired Deloitte Consulting, a subsidiary of Deloitte Touche, one of the biggest accounting companies in the world, to install a new computerized accounting and payroll system. The system is named Business Tools for Schools, and Deloitte charged the school district 55 million dollars for it. But it didn’t deliver what was promised.
Did the LAUSD top administrators go after Deloitte and force them to pay for their debacle? No, the LAUSD rewarded Deloitte with another contract for 10 million dollars to supposedly fix their own mistakes.
Meanwhile, the LAUSD instructs teachers and staff to patiently wait another several months for payroll “glitches” to be fixed.
Teachers and staff could create a few “glitches” of their own!
Sep 24, 2007
Merrill Lynch’s 11th annual “World Wealth Report” is out! If you are keeping score:
The wealth of the very richest class jumped up again last year. There are now 94,970 super-rich individuals whose assets (not counting their home mansions) exceed 30 million dollars EACH.
These 94,970 people together control 13 trillion dollars. That’s 12 zeroes: $13,000,000,000,000. That’s nearly 9% of the total wealth of the entire world, which is 6.6 billion people strong.
The Wealth Report adds that the class of mere millionaires also enlarged. The world now has 9.5 million of them. Lumped together, they control 37.2 trillion dollars–a full one-quarter of the wealth of the whole world.
Thanks, Merrill Lynch. Now we know who’s holding on to all the wealth our work helped create!
Sep 24, 2007
The politicians from both parties agree that the State of Michigan has a budget crisis. The only thing they have been bickering over is how to pay for it to avoid paying the political price for what they are about to do to solve it.
The Republicans have been pushing for bigger spending cuts, including eliminating medical care for young adults from poor families and deep cuts in public transit for senior citizens. The Democrats propose slightly smaller spending cuts, but they favor a bigger increase in the state income tax, from the current 3.9% to 4.6%. Under the guise of opposing more taxes, the Republicans say they might favor a sales tax or a smaller income tax increase.
Does the State of Michigan have a budget crisis? Yes, but only because the politicians created it by giving money away to big business.
The Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth gave away 8.2 billion dollars, just in 2006, in the form of uncollected taxes on businesses, according to a study by Good Jobs First, a think-tank that follows tax breaks to corporations.
Some of the biggest winners were the auto companies. Ford got grants of at least 143 million for its Auto Alliance plant, its plants in Wayne, and its “former” parts division, Visteon, from 2001 to 2004. General Motors received at least 105 million dollars in grants for three plants in the same period. Parts companies like Covisint, Johnson Controls, and Siemens also got big handouts. Other industries were not left out, either. Dow Chemical, Quicken Loans and Warner Lambert all received big tax breaks as well.
And that was not all. The state gave out millions more to these companies in job training grants and tax breaks to those operating in “Renaissance Zones.” On top of that, in 2006 alone, local governments handed out another 700 million dollars.
Now, in order to pay for hand-outs to business, Democrats and Republicans will take money and services from the working population.
Throw all the thieves out!
Sep 24, 2007
On September 11, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a report on the July 11, 2006 rapid transit derailment and fire in Chicago, which injured 152 people and caused 1,000 passengers to flee for their lives through a smoke-filled tunnel.
The Safety Board found the main cause“was the Chicago Transit Authority’s ineffective management and oversight of its track inspection and maintenance program and its system safety program, which resulted in unsafe track conditions.” The Safety Board found that 80% of the inspection records for the three months before the accident were conveniently missing. They also found that there were false records claiming repairs that had never been made.
For years, workers inspecting the rail tracks knew that their inspections weren’t resulting in repairs. As far back as 1996, inspectors began writing in chalk on the subway walls what serious problems they found to cover themselves when management did nothing.
Now the NTSB report confirmed what workers had long been saying. But issuing reports is one thing; proposing corrective action is another. The NTSB did NOT propose that CTA top management, which was responsible for this accident, should be charged with criminal negligence. It did NOT order the CTA to improve the tracks. It did NOT order the CTA to use its gifts to corporations–like the 58 million dollar subsidy now going to Hilton Hotels for its new building above Union Station–to finance adequate transit maintenance. NO. Instead, it let the CTA institute miles of slow zones on its rail routes, causing long delays for travelers going to and from work and wasting numerous hours of their time every week!
In other words, the NTSB is complicit in the degradation of the rail system.
Sep 24, 2007
Hillary Clinton recently came out with a supposed health care plan. Of course, Clinton’s plan would not actually provide health care for anyone. It would simply give money to companies that already provide health benefits.
Clinton’s plan would also require all U.S. residents who do not now have health insurance and do not qualify for public assistance, to buy a health insurance policy.
Who says they can afford it? Clinton?
Certainly health care is in crisis. The number of people without insurance is increasing by more than 2 million per year, and is now up to 47 million. And there are at least this many more people who are under-insured (their policies don’t cover many essential health services). Co-pays, deductibles and premiums have been going through the roof.
Clinton’s plan does nothing to deal with the problems. She claims people like it this way.
Who has she been talking to? The big drug companies and hospital chains?
Sep 24, 2007
On September 4, 1957, a line of Arkansas National Guardsmen with bayonets drawn prevented one young black woman from entering Central High School in Little Rock, three years after the Supreme Court ruled that “separate” education is “unequal.” Racist mobs threatened the nine brave black teenagers who determinedly went to school day after day. The ugly situation led President Eisenhower to send in troops of the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the law.
These young people kept courageously facing angry racists who threatened to kill them.
Here is one of those teenagers remembering. Said Melba Pattillo Beals, “The first day I was able to enter Central High School, what I felt inside was terrible, wrenching, awful fear. On the car radio I could hear that there was a mob. I knew what a mob meant and I knew that the sounds that came from the crowd were very angry. So we entered the side of the building, very, very fast. Even as we entered there were people running after us, people tripping other people.... I’d only been in the school a couple of hours and by that time it was apparent that the mob was just overrunning the school. Policemen were throwing down their badges and the mob was getting past the wooden sawhorses because the police would no longer fight their own in order to protect us....”
And here is the story of Minniejean Brown, as told by Ernest Green: “For a couple of weeks there had been a number of white kids following us, continuously calling us niggers. “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” one right after the other. Minniejean Brown was in the lunch line with me. I was in front of Minnie and there was this white kid, a fellow who was much shorter than Minnie.... He reminded me of a small dog, yelping at somebody’s leg. Minnie had just picked up her chili out of this line.... And before I could even say, “Minnie why don’t you tell him to shut up,” Minnie had taken this chili, dumped it on this dude’s head. There was just absolute silence in the place. And then the cafeteria help, all black, broke into applause. And the other white kids there didn’t know what to do. I mean it was the first time that anybody, I’m sure, had seen somebody black retaliate in that sense. It was a good feeling to see that happen, to be able to let them know we were capable of taking care of ourselves. With that the school board suspended Minnie....”
If some things have changed since then, there are still violent racists, official and otherwise. And there are still black people determined to stand up for themselves.
Sep 24, 2007
After the events in Jena Louisiana became national news, most newspapers and TV stations jumped immediately from the hanging of nooses from a tree last September to the beating three months later, ignoring everything that happened in between. They helped to fuel the impression–and in many cases even said it–that this was a savage beating carried out by six black supposed thugs, in response to a childhood prank by a few innocent whites. It was anything but.
Let’s review:
After several black students sat beneath a tree designated by white students as “for-whites-only,” three nooses were hung from the tree. The principal of the school originally expelled the three white students who were responsible for this; but the head of the school board reinstated them after a few days, calling it a “harmless prank.” The district attorney did not charge them with anything, saying they had not broken any law.
In other words, in Jena it’s not against the law to threaten to lynch a black person!
The black students understood the threat, though, and so a large number gathered beneath the tree in protest. District Attorney Reed Walters threatened them later, saying, “I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.”
In the months after the protest, there were several attacks by white students against black students. One time, a group of white students attacked and beat 17-year-old Robert Bailey. Of this group, only one was arrested. He was given probation and asked to apologize.
On a later day, a white man drew a gun on Bailey. Bailey and several friends were able to wrestle the gun away from the man and escape. The white man was not charged with anything. No indeed. Instead, Bailey and his friends were arrested and charged with robbery for taking his gun!
Is it any wonder that these black students decided to defend themselves? The law certainly didn’t–it was too busy giving the racists the go-ahead.
When Bailey and some of his friends hit a white student on December 4, all six of them were arrested and charged them with attempted murder–a charge so preposterous that even the district attorney was forced to reduce it to aggravated battery.
The Jena Times called it “one of the most violent attacks in Jena High School history.” Really? That violent? The white student was seen later that same day at a social event at the school!
Most news outlets reported none of this in the days leading up to or following the huge protest in Jena on September 20. The most that was ever said was that “fights were frequent” between white and black students.
This is not just a problem of one small town. It’s a problem of a whole society that treats all this as ORDINARY–the reserving of the best shade tree for white students only; the beatings and harassments by white students against black students that were ignored by the school administration and cops; and the overt threat to KILL that the nooses represented. The racists may pretend that no one was ever lynched with nooses like those, but black people remember. Almost anyone whose family came from the South–and many who lived in the North–know of someone who was lynched. They understand exactly what the message was. That’s why people demonstrated. That’s why six young black men refused to accept violence without responding in kind.
News media that choose not to tell the whole story not only are liars. They are outright supporters of racism.
This is the lesson of the whole story, that the racists want to bury: Facing racist violence, you don’t turn the other cheek!
Sep 24, 2007
Tens of thousands of people, mostly black, traveled to Jena, Louisiana on September 20 to make their protest heard. Many thousands more took to streets in cities and towns around the country. A good many were high school age.
They would not let pass the overt racism of a judicial system ready to convict six young black men for a school yard fight, when it gave a pass to young whites who had been attacking blacks in Jena for months with impunity.
All those who demonstrated were right to do so–just as those young black men were right in standing up for themselves. In this racist and socially unjust society, there can be no justice when you don’t force the authorities and the racists to respect you.