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
Oct 22, 2007
More than two million homes will be foreclosed in 2007, with even more expected next year. It is the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression.
Home prices have become so high and mortgage payments so outrageously expensive, people could work 24 hours every day, seven days a week and still not make their mortgage payments.
More people are being forced from their homes than were forced out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. But this time, nature has nothing to do with it. Every bit of the housing crisis was caused by the actions of mortgage companies, banks, savings and loans, real estate companies and construction companies. Their actions created the housing bubble that is now bursting.
Big financial companies funded the construction of new housing tracts which were sold at outrageously high prices. Speculators profited by buying and selling homes and apartments over and over again, raising the prices each time. As housing prices skyrocketed upward, Wall Street and the banks turned around and made even more money by selling these mortgages to investors.
So what is the U.S. government doing in the face of this disaster for ordinary people? It’s like what happened after Katrina, when government aid helped bail out the tourist hotels and casinos in New Orleans, the owners of luxury homes along the Gulf Coast and all the politically-connected companies and contractors.
In the same way, when the mortgage crisis threatened to engulf the biggest banks, the Federal Reserve Bank stepped in. It flooded the financial markets with tens of billions of dollars in cheap loans. The big commercial banks lend that money out at high interest rates and collect large profits.
This cheap money did not come from thin air, but directly from the U.S. Treasury. In other words, the taxpayers and the workers are paying for this bail-out.
That’s only the beginning. Just last week, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was working with the biggest commercial banks, Citigroup, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase, to set up a special fund that would allow them to dump some of their bad debts.
The government is bailing out and rewarding the very companies and wealthy individuals who created the housing crisis in the first place and made countless billions of dollars in the process.
If their bubble is collapsing, let them be the ones who pay the price. If some multi-billionaires and speculators lose their fortunes in the process–so be it.
What would it take to keep people from losing their homes? What would it take to create affordable housing for everyone who needs it?
It would take a big fight, a broad mobilization of the population to fight for decent housing, and everything else we need–such as a decent job, health care, education. The only rights working people have are those that they are ready to fight to take and defend.
Oct 22, 2007
Two men and a child died in a fiery crash involving 30 big trucks in the area north of Los Angeles on the night of October 13. A part of the blazing Interstate 5 was shut down indefinitely, as authorities sought the cause of the crash. It has crippled part of the main north-south highway along the west coast of the United States, running from Mexico to Canada.
Truckers interviewed by reporters say there is no other route for them to take. One trucker said, “It’s the only interstate that connects Northern and Southern California. If any part of it shuts down, there’s just no good way around it. There are secondary routes, but they’re not made to handle heavier loads.”
Truck drivers said the tunnel was dark and had an enormous curve that created a blind spot. As one put it, “You don’t see what’s ahead until you get in the tunnel.... It’s like you’re going blind. The tunnel is so dark–you only have a second to react.” Some years ago, the speed limit in the tunnel was raised to 55 miles per hour from 45, but conditions in the tunnel were not improved. Like many other parts of the infrastructure, the road system has not been modernized for the traffic it carries.
The trucks are not the only ones at risk on today’s highways. I-5 carries 225,000 vehicles per day, according to authorities.
Driving is like playing Russian roulette, risking our lives daily, in a system where a bridge can collapse or trucks pile up in a dangerous tunnel. Enormous sums are handed out to companies building these roads–with little to show for it.
Road contracts are only another government pocket for business to pick, not a way to build a safe and quick method to get people and freight from one place to another.
Oct 22, 2007
The following article is translated from the September 17, 2007 issue of Le Pouvoir aux Travailleurs (Workers’ Power), published by the International Communist African Workers’ Union active in Ivory Coast.
The cost of living has become so high that there isn’t one worker’s family that can say it can cope with it. Family income is no longer enough to obtain the basic necessities. During the last vacation time, everyone in most workers’ families had to pitch in, more than in past years. Boys old enough to shine shoes try to get work in public places to bring in some change for the family. Those who can hold a machete are sent to the countryside or the family’s village to do agricultural labor, that is, the few who find the means to get there. The girls are transformed into traders, selling small objects or food beside their mothers to earn a little bit of extra money. Despite everyone pitching in, misery continues everywhere. Just like every year, when it’s time to return to school, there’s a new puzzle to solve: how to make the wages stretch to satisfy the vital needs of the family.
It is not that the country lacks wealth. The riches are visible. But the division of those riches is unequally made. Someone would have to be blind not to see the opulence in which a minority of individuals live while the majority rots in misery!
Today, the cost of living has become so high that even doctors employed by the government go on strike, followed to a lesser extent by nurses. The employees of Sodeci (the water supply company) have given strike notice. So if all those who aren’t the poorest have reached this point, it’s because the situation of workers has become intolerable.
And it isn’t only workers who are affected. Thousands of people don’t have a wage income. But thanks to their efforts, to the little services that the adults and teenagers render, the daily existence of an entire layer of well-off people and less well off is made easier in most neighborhoods. Without the daily support of all these ordinary people who work in the underground economy for a pittance, life would be paralyzed rapidly in every neighborhood. This is a form of exploitation which doesn’t involve a wage but which exists on a wide scale in Ivory Coast today.
So the anger is great and it isn’t limited only to those who have the “good fortune” to have an official wage. It is urgent that government officials take measures against the current explosion in prices. These prices fall the heaviest on those who make society run.
Oct 22, 2007
Eighty-two billionaires could not make it into the latest Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest people in the U.S. This year, a billion dollars was not enough to get you on the list.
In 1982, the richest guy in the U.S., Daniel Ludwig, had 2 billion dollars. That wouldn’t even put him halfway up the list today.
Since 2002, the combined worth of the wealthiest 400 has jumped from 860 billion dollars to over 1.5 trillion. That’s an increase of 79% in five years.
There’s plenty of money around. It’s just going into fewer and fewer hands.
Oct 22, 2007
Maryland’s Governor O’Malley is claiming that his proposed tax changes will reduce taxes working people pay. But his figures don’t include the proposed increase in cigarette and gasoline taxes or motor vehicle registration fees.
If these taxes are included, many working people will end up paying a lot MORE taxes, not less.
Oct 22, 2007
In Chicago, the mayor is proposing to raise the property tax by 15%, raise the water and sewer fee by $45 a year, add $2.50 a month to phone bills, 10¢ for a bottle of water and 8¢ for a six pack of beer. At the same time, the head of the county is proposing 2% more in the sales tax, raising the total area rate to 11%–the highest in the country–and adding 6¢ more to a gallon of gas.
The same thing is happening around the country. The National League of Cities, in a report issued October 18, said that 45% of all cities have increased user fees and 29% have increased property taxes, with more increases planned for next year. In Michigan, the state increased the income tax by 11.5% and extended the 6% sales tax to more services. In Baltimore, water fees are going up again and are now double what they were five years ago, while the state is raising the sales tax by another% and adding a tax on services. In Los Angeles, skyrocketing housing prices have driven up property taxes, while workers’ income hasn’t gone up at all.
These new taxes the politicians are pushing through–sales tax and property taxes, along with user fees–fall heaviest on poor and working class families.
The politicians say they need more money and not enough taxes are coming in. That’s true. And public officials make sure of that. They exempt more and more businesses from property taxes. In Chicago, the city takes a whopping 400 million dollars collected in property taxes and turns it over to various businesses, including some of the biggest and richest banks in the world. And they set the evaluation on many of the richest downtown buildings way lower than it should be, losing 18 million dollars a year from just the Sears Tower in this way. In Detroit, selected areas of the city are called Renaissance Zones where developers don’t have to pay taxes and the businesses located there are exempt from taxes for 13 years.
Having given all this tax money away, government officials are now trying to take more from us. In other words–once again they’re trying to rob us so they will have more to give to big business and the wealthy.
Oct 22, 2007
The U.S. government announced that payments to Social Security recipients and most federal retirees will increase only 2.3% in January, the smallest cost-of-living adjustment since 2003. This will increase the average retirement benefit by $24 to $1,079.
This ludicrously small increase is based on the rise in the government’s consumer price index, that is, the official measure of inflation. Of course, in the real world, this kind of increase doesn’t begin to compensate for how much prices are really rising for everything from medical care, housing, electricity, transportation, food, and education. For example, the average retail price of a gallon of milk has never been higher–$3.80 per gallon–up 51 cents since February. And in Georgia its price approaches $5 a gallon.
By deliberately underestimating the inflation rate, the government saves a lot of money. It pays out less in cost-of-living adjustments to the 31 million Social Security retirees, the 11 million people who receive disability or other supplemental income from the Social Security Administration and the 4 million federal government and military retirees. This frees up still more money for government officials to funnel to the big corporations in the form of subsidies and tax breaks.
Besides that, both corporations and government agencies also use official lies about the supposedly lower inflation rate as an excuse to pay lower wages, thus allowing the real inflation rate to silently and relentlessly eat away at ordinary peoples’ real living standards.
As the old saying goes: “inflation is the cruelest tax.” And the government has imposed it on those least able to pay–people living on Social Security.
Oct 22, 2007
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed a 17-year-old high school student in suburban Washington, D.C. recently. It’s a sign that such infections have become a major health problem across the country.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this particular staph infection, known as MRSA, has caused more than 94,000 serious infections and almost 19,000 deaths each year since 2005. That’s almost twice as many deaths as were caused by the AIDS virus in the U.S. It’s more common than well-known infections like strep, flesh-eating bacteria, meningitis and bacterial pneumonia combined.
MRSA can pass from person to person through simple contact, and it can enter the body through open cuts and broken skin. Turning those cuts into huge open sores, it can spread through the body, shutting down major organs.
MRSA may be resistant to antibiotics, but it is very vulnerable to simple public health measures–that is, the systematic use of soap and water.
This bacteria was first found in populations most despised by this system, in areas gutted by budget cuts and worsening conditions: inner-city hospitals and prisons. Cut-backs in janitorial staff meant fewer surfaces got cleaned adequately. Work piled up on staff meant fewer washed their hands adequately. The push to cut workers in such facilities allowed this new strain to take root and to fester.
Today, the same thing is happening in nursing homes, day care centers and schools across the country–where janitorial staff have been cut back and rented out. Sanitary conditions have grown far worse. Areas where bacteria can run rampant–bathrooms, showers, locker rooms and gyms–invite an epidemic if they aren’t cleaned regularly.
In this wealthy capitalist society, with its 21st century medicine, we’re being killed by bacteria spread by poor sanitary conditions like those of the 18th century.
Oct 22, 2007
Over the past 35 years the wealth in this country has been redistributed so much in favor of the capitalist class that this infinitely tiny, excessively wealthy minority now holds as big a share of the country’s wealth as it did in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. And the working class has, in relationship to that capitalist class, as small a share of the wealth its labor produces as it did in the 1930s.
Facing a working class that kept some level of organization, these modern capitalists took 35 years to do what their predecessors accomplished in six years during the Great Depression. But they did it. They did it gradually, and they are not done.
Today, the so-called Big 3 auto companies are trying to go after one of the most organized sections of the working class, the auto workers. Up until now, auto workers have been nickled and dimed to death with one concession here, another there. But until now, the companies have hesitated, afraid to make an all-out frontal assault.
With the 2007 contracts, this has changed. The auto companies have declared their readiness to take on the auto workers once and for all, demanding that workers give back every important protection they had won for themselves in fights over the years. Protections for themselves, for those workers still to be hired and for those already retired.
No one is spared. The auto companies want to unload retiree health care benefits into a VEBA fund, which the auto companies are pretending to finance by stuffing a lot of worthless paper in it, in the form of promissory notes, stocks and bonds. Cerberus is even putting stock into the VEBA fund, even though it is impossible to put a value on that stock, since Cerberus is not a publicly traded company with shares bought and sold on the stock market. Wall Street financial companies have been literally salivating over the prospect of earning big fees and commissions running the VEBA funds. The only fly in their ointment is that they aren’t sure there is enough real money in the VEBA funds to make it worth their while–that is how much worthless paper these funds are stuffed with.
For active and future workers, there is a permanent system of two-tier wages and benefits, with wages of new workers cut–as GM just bragged to Wall Street–down to one third of what the auto companies had been paying. Of course, this new two-tier wage structure is an attack on the current workers too, since it makes it impossible for workers with higher seniority to ever get off the line and onto somewhat easier jobs, that is, unless they are ready to take a pay cut of 50%, and work jobs that will carry no guaranteed pensions, and minimal health care benefits. And those are just the bigger, most well-known parts of the attack. Buried in the contract language are a whole host of other takeaways.
It is an attack on everyone at once, the workers, their parents and their kids, a truly massive attack with truly far-reaching consequences for all workers throughout the economy.
It would be the end of solidarity in the auto plants. As one worker said, who posted his views on the Soldiers of Solidarity website, “If we don’t vote to protect the wages of new hires now, why would they vote to protect us in the future?”
And it would also be the beginning of a new, much more rapid downward spiral for everyone else. If the capitalists can pull auto workers wages down, they will quickly move to bring down everyone else even more.
This kind of sweeping attack shows how arrogant the Big 3 auto companies have become.
In return, auto workers showed what they thought of this–first with their NO votes at GM, which were much greater than in any other contract ratification, and now at Chrysler where the NO vote has been so strong and overwhelming, the UAW International was reportedly considering suspending the vote and going on to Ford.
We will see whether this NO vote is some kind of turning point for the workers, whether the arrogance of the bosses finally provokes the workers to enter onto a new road of struggle in order to repulse the bosses’ concession drive.
But one thing is sure: The bosses are coming for the workers. With the housing crisis, the big financial companies are literally taking the homes from millions of people. In the plants and workplaces the bosses are trying to turn the clock back a century, by imposing 50% wage cuts along with tearing up all their promises and guarantees to retirees.
Whether the bosses get away with this depends on whether enough workers have decided to say NO. And say it again. And again. To mobilize. To begin to use their forces to defend their own interests.
Oct 22, 2007
After workers voted to ratify the GM contract, JP Morgan analyst Himanshu Patel upped his estimate on GM’s annual savings–upped by 1 billion dollars a year! Now he says the workers’ sacrifices will enrich GM by five billion dollars annually!
GM boasted that the money taken from workers will go to other GM pet projects–like expanding its overseas business!
Before the contract came out, GM bluffed and threatened the workers that work would move overseas if they didn’t give huge concessions. So what happened? Workers gave the concessions and GM immediately announced it would take the money and run overseas.
“The risk associated with spending one billion dollars in the United States compared with spending one billion abroad is very different,” said analyst Rebecca Lindland. “So much uncertainty goes into a global emerging market, you never can be too careful.”
Except, if you are GM, spending workers’ money you just stole from them, why not?
Oct 22, 2007
We reprint here part of an article from SPARK newspaper, Issue No. 218, October 11, 1982:
"For the first time since the big strikes after World War II, a majority of autoworkers in one company have voted down a proposed contract. Chrysler workers voted NO in the face of everything the UAW leadership and Chrysler could pull out of their bags of tricks. The workers were told all sorts of lies: that the contract wasn’t a concession; that this was the best contract they could get; that Chrysler can’t afford any more; that the contract is only for a year ... the lies and tricks went on and on."
Twenty-five years later–and it’s still the same old song and dance.
In October 1982, as we wrote at the time, "The Chrysler workers refused to fall for these tricks...."
Oct 22, 2007
Wealthy residents of the City of Detroit are regularly getting “hardship” breaks on their property taxes.
A small city panel called the “Hardship Committee” has the power to decide which residents will be awarded these tax breaks. Though the program is supposed to benefit people whose income is below the poverty level, and with less than $5,000 in assets, the Committee regularly awards tax breaks to people making far more than that: people with homes worth over half a million dollars, who drive several luxury cars, and own boats.
In fact, the wealthiest areas of the city get the biggest number of “hardship” tax breaks. The areas with the greatest number of poor people get virtually no hardship tax breaks.
The “Hardship Committee” is made up of nine people, each appointed by one city council member. The only requirement is that they live in the city of Detroit; even so, several have big suburban homes with one in the city–for appearances, perhaps? One committee member, Roslyn Trotter, voted to award a $6,000 tax break to the wife of her lawyer–who represented her when she was charged with fraud. Another, the Rev. Loyce Lester, became infamous for spewing vile insults in Detroit school board meetings at parents trying to protect their kids. He claimed to hold an MBA from the University of Detroit and a doctorate of divinity from the University of Chicago. Both were found to be false.
These are the people whom the city council appointed to the “hardship” panel–a panel that keeps no records and makes no investigations; a panel that meets in private.
A panel that makes sure that the wealthy get the tax breaks meant for the indigent... and the indigent get nothing.
Oct 22, 2007
The Detroit Public School system has been in the process of being dismantled over the last number of years–all with the help of the district’s School Board.
Among those opposing these policies are two Detroit teachers, Heather Miller and Steve Conn; and Marie Thornton, a School Board member with a base in the Detroit community.
Today all three of these people face bogus charges brought by a hostile School Board president, some Board members and some of their supporters.
Marie Thornton has recently been brought up on assault charges, accused of shoving a guy at a school board meeting in September. Never mind the fact that for months she had been constantly insulted and threatened so much by this same man, a kind of hatchet man for the School Board president, that she had to take out a personal protection order against him.
Interestingly enough, this same man, Loyce Lester, is himself involved in a tax scandal. According to the Detroit News, he has falsified documents, pretending to have a degree from a school he never attended.
The two teachers were placed on administrative leave last June 25th, charged with endangering students by encouraging them to participate in a May 1st march and rally to protest school closings. If these teachers were so dangerous, why were they allowed to teach their students for another seven weeks of the school year before being charged!
No, if anyone poses a danger to students, it is the very officials of the School Board who have left students in decrepit buildings, and forced students to face yet more crowded conditions by closing still more schools.
It is the very officials who have looked at school monies as if it’s in their own wallets, doling out outrageous contracts to their friends, or overpaying for buildings, while closing schools and literally giving the buildings away to charter schools and other groups.
The School Board president and his cronies should be brought up on charges!
Oct 22, 2007
On October 17, the National Assembly of Turkey authorized military intervention in Iraq against the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK, who have military bases inside Iraq.
It was a formality. For a long time, Turkish generals have attacked the Kurds of northern Iraq, sometimes bombing what they say are PKK bases, and sometimes carrying out ground attacks across the border. The generals pressured the Turkish government for months to ratify this policy.
Ever since the first Gulf War, the Kurdish region in Iraq has enjoyed a kind of autonomy. The situation is more stable there than in the rest of Iraq. Turkish capitalists even profit there, selling and building in this Kurdish region. But the heads of the Turkish army view this Kurdish autonomy in Iraq as a risk, setting an example for the Kurds in Turkey. Despite a few legal changes, the Turkish state continues to deny Turkish Kurds the right even to speak Kurdish or to have a press in their own language.
Of course, it would be simpler for the Turkish government to recognize the democratic rights which the Kurds of Turkey are demanding. But the government is incapable of carrying out such a policy, because Turkish society denies a great number of these same rights to the Turks themselves.
Turkey has for a long time had its eye on the oil riches of Kirkuk and Mosul in this region. At the same time, the big Turkish capitalists who wish to join the European Union want to carry out profitable business in northern Iraq, the Middle East and central Asia, without the burden of a costly military intervention. So they prefer to leave that to the U.S., for example.
As for the U.S., military leaders say they oppose a Turkish invasion into Northern Iraq. But they may lack the means to prevent it.
So perhaps a new front will be opened in Iraq by the intervention of the Turkish army. The chaos which the U.S. intervention has brought about in Iraq could be extended a little more, involving its neighbors.
Oct 22, 2007
On October 9, armed guards working for Blackwater murdered two women in broad daylight in Baghdad. This crime is just the latest in a long series. After the killing of 17 passers-by in an earlier incident, a Congressional committee listed “168 crimes and serious infractions” committed by Blackwater employees in Iraq.
Blackwater is only one of dozens of private armies that operate in Iraq, hired by individuals, corporations and, above all, the U.S. State and Defense Departments. According to various estimates, there are between 10,000 and 50,000 armed mercenaries in that country (in addition to the 169,000 regular soldiers), who answer to no authority, and to no court.
These “dogs of war” have been in Iraq since the beginning of the war and have been involved in murder and torture without ever worrying about consequences. Certainly, they have never faced any charges from the U.S. military.
This policy of sub-contracting has existed for a long time, but the practice grew rapidly with the arrival of Bush in office and with the invasion of Iraq. Not only are mercenary soldiers serving in Iraq, so are 150,000 others who perform logistics and maintenance for the army. Contracting out allows the American government to reduce the number of U.S. soldiers (thus reducing the number of official American deaths), and it serves as a way to give large contracts to the companies owned by friends. The mercenary companies are often affiliated companies of large conglomerates directly linked to the Bush family and to Vice-President Cheney.
Blackwater alone has received some 750 million dollars for its actions in Iraq since 2003. Despite the current scandal provoked by the murder of Iraqi civilians, it has just signed a new contract with the American army for another 92 million dollars. It is headed by the son of an ultra-wealthy, ultra-conservative Michigan family, which has thrown lots of money at organizations opposing abortion, civil rights, public schools, etc.
On October 15, Bush’s government implied that Blackwater will leave Iraq within the next six months–in other words, the time needed for these killers to be integrated into other private armies operating in the country.
What the mercenaries do in Iraq is what all the colonial armies did, and what today the American army itself does in the same area and against the same innocent civilians. The only difference is that in the army, ordinary soldiers at times have some scruples, and can even oppose the dirty work their commanders want them to carry out. Mercenaries are hired just because they are ready to do such a job.
Oct 22, 2007
President Bush makes a big deal any time he meets with family members of nearly 4300 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. His aides, of course, try to pretend the families support him and ordinarily they don’t get a chance to say publicly what happened.
But one of those relatives, Elaine Johnson of Orangeburg, South Carolina, told a reporter that when she met Bush, she repeatedly pressed him for a rationale for the war. He actually dared say to her, “Miss Johnson, you sound a little hostile.”
“Of course, I feel hostile,” she replied. “My only son was killed and I can’t get an answer.”