the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 19, 2008
Bush, pushing the Saudis to announce an increase in their oil production, pretended the additional supply would bring down the price of petroleum, and all its refined products.
The Democrats in Congress, ordering the Bush administration to divert oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve into the ordinary oil supply, made the same claim.
Nothing but propaganda! Not only did increasing the supply of crude oil not bring down its price–the price continued to hurtle upward. Of course. Because the cause of high oil and gasoline prices today is not a lack of crude oil. By every measure, supply is plentiful. Even defenders of the oil industry admit that. A managing director of PFC Energy, a petroleum consulting group, was quoted by the New York Times, saying: “I don’t see many American refineries clamoring for oil right now.” The big U.S. oil companies aren’t clamoring because they have more than enough.
Yet oil prices are running away, squeezing all our pocketbooks. So are prices of fruits and vegetables, many of which come from other countries, and for the same reason: the U.S. financial crisis, caused by the collapse of speculation in housing and mortgages, has pulled down the value of the dollar.
If you travel across the border into Canada you know what this means. Whereas not so long ago, one U.S. dollar got you 1.35 or even 1.50 Canadian dollars in return, today one U.S. dollar gets you less than one Canadian dollar. When the U.S. dollar is worth less, you’ve got to put out more dollars to get the same amount of commodities–oil, for example, or fruits or vegetables, or clothing, etc.
And that’s only the half of it.
The other half is speculation. When housing speculation collapsed, the speculators just diverted their bets from housing and mortgages to more fertile fields.
And guess what they hit on–oil, driving up the price we pay for transportation, electricity, heat and even for food, since petroleum goes into the fertilizers used in commercial farming. And not only oil. Speculative money has been pouring into basic agricultural commodities: wheat, corn, oats, soy, sugar, coffee. So we pay more for bread and cereals, and also for meat, dairy products and eggs, since animals feed off these same grains.
The same sharks whose speculation priced housing out of the market for many workers are now speculating in the basic commodities we need to survive. In some other parts of the world–parts of Africa and Asia especially–speculation in these basic commodities is leading to mass starvation for hundreds of millions of people who could barely afford to buy staples before the speculators moved in.
Some of the biggest Wall Street banks are involved–as are the oil companies, themselves, and major industrial corporations. They buy commodities not in order to use them, but to sell them at a higher price, buy them back, then sell them at a still higher price, driving up prices with each new sale.
If Bush and Congress wanted to do something about the high cost of oil and other commodities, the first thing they would do is round up the speculators. Hang them out to dry. Close down the Wall Street casinos. Take over the big investment banks. Get an exact idea of the wealth belonging to each of them. Put that money to use hiring people without jobs. Put it to use producing the goods and services we need. Repair the cities, build the schools, etc.
A foolish dream? Yes, of course–if we count on either Democrat or Republican to do it. Neither would think of touching the vast sums of money that circulate in the financial world. Nor would they put their hands on all that profit the oil giants have been amassing.
Like all the other problems we face, the answer to skyrocketing prices will have to come from ourselves–from our determination to use our forces to impose the needs of the whole population on the tiny minority that today rips off the whole world.
May 19, 2008
Ninety-six times over the past year, aircraft operated by Continental Airlines arrived in New York from Paris almost out of fuel–this was reported in the Wall Street Journal on April 17.
Continental’s smaller-sized Boeing planes were originally designed for flights within the United States. But for economic reasons–to increase profits–Continental decided to use them for intercontinental flights in the off-season. These planes have a smaller sized fuel tank that holds just 30 minutes more fuel than is required to make the flight across the Atlantic ocean. Thirty minutes is the mandatory minimum airlines are required to carry in case of difficulties that can arise, for example, delays at airports or poor weather conditions that force delays or strong headwinds that gobble up fuel.
Continental pilots were told they could divert to Canada–if they make it there–in order to refuel. But the management of Continental Airlines warned the pilots not to use this procedure. A memo warned that diverting a plane could “reduce profits and consequently the ability to finance retirement plans”! If this isn’t blackmail of the pilots, it sure looks a lot like it.
Until an accident happens, the airline will continue consciously to put the lives of its passengers and crews in danger. The law of profit demands it.
May 19, 2008
Lost your job? In debt up to your ears? Feel like the harder you work the worse it gets?
Welcome to the 21st century United States. It wasn’t some poor guy overseas that took your job. It was your boss. He laid off workers and made those remaining do all the work.
This information is from a new book called The Big Squeeze, by Steven Greenhouse. It reports that since 1979, U.S. workers gained only ONE% in real wages, while bosses grabbed 60% more in productivity from each one left on the job. The book mentions a number of tricks the bosses use to cheat us out of our miserable wages and benefits. And much of the debt we face comes from the loss of benefits, like health care or pensions, that might have helped to offset the cut in wages.
In only a generation of so, 80% of the U.S. population is worse off than before. It’s not a mysterious law of nature, it’s not globalization–it’s the bosses.
May 19, 2008
Last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers made MORE than seven million dollars a WEEK. Three of them actually took in three BILLION dollars–in one year.
Who are these people who made more than the entire gross domestic product of 50 of the world’s smallest countries? They are the ones who make possible the buying and selling of companies in an enormous wave of speculation that is swamping most of the economies of the world.
A bond fund officer said about these huge rewards to hedge fund managers, “It’s not illegal. But it’s ugly.”
He’s got that right!
May 19, 2008
Last month, the government once again made the laughable and ridiculous claim that inflation is “contained” at a supposedly “moderate” 3% annual rate. In the real world, the only way that could be true is if the government did not count the skyrocketing cost of housing, food, health care, transportation and just about everything else.
The government has been cooking its inflation statistics for a long time. Back in the early 1970s, when food and gas prices skyrocketed, President Nixon instructed the head of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, to make inflation look lower than it was. Burns came back with a new concept, what he dubbed “core” inflation. He said that since energy and food costs were more “volatile,” they should not really be part of this new “core” inflation index that government officials and newscasters started talking about. Of course, this was always patently absurd, since everyone consumes food and energy, which are the real “core” of every consumer’s budget. But no matter, Burns’ “core” inflation did not include those things, and that was used to promote the idea that inflation was under control–which it wasn’t.
The proof came just a few years later when the Reagan administration sought to downplay the surging inflation again, this time by hiding big increases in housing costs, pretending they took up a much smaller share of ordinary people’s budgets. And then, in the 1990s, the Clinton administration came up with one of the phoniest arguments ever invented to deny that there was much inflation. Saying that whenever prices rise, people substitute cheaper products for more expensive products, like hamburger for steak, they concluded that prices weren’t rising, but were even going down.
Their falsification of the real level of inflation provided the bosses with an excuse to keep wages low–even as those same bosses raised the prices of what workers consume. Government officials used these debased inflation figures to nearly eliminate cost of living adjustments for government workers and Social Security recipients.
Just like politicians spawned all those lies about “weapons of mass destruction” to launch their dirty wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, so they have spawned all kinds of lies to hide their dirty attacks against the standard of living of working people in this country.
May 19, 2008
A Belgian bank announced a new financial offering, indexed to the price of six agricultural products: cocoa, coffee, sugar, wheat, corn and soy. The bank invited its clients to seize this “opportunity,” produced by the “enormous growth of population, climate change, water scarcity and a lack of farm land,” for an estimated return on investment of 14%.
After this description appeared in the Belgian press, a spokesman for the bank apologized to “those people who were shocked by the slogan.”
But the bank didn’t reproach itself for offering such a deal, saying that its financial offering wouldn’t “cause the price of agricultural products to rise or fall.”
Not alone, no. But prices are being pushed up by the general speculation–which this investment is part of and from which it expects to profit.
In the capitalist system, banks are supposed to take advantage of any little changes in the market, even if it pushes entire populations into famine. Ordinarily, the bankers manage to hide their intentions a little better.
May 19, 2008
Delta and Northwest Airlines announced an agreement to merge.
There is plenty of history of past mergers to see what comes next: layoffs and wage cuts. The steel industry in the U.S. was cannibalized in this way by mergers.
With each merger, companies go into debt to bring it about. The merged companies push workers to work harder while dumping many of them. They use the threat of layoffs to extract concessions from the workers.
There is no rational basis for the airlines to lay people off at this time. There are more flights than ever, they’re fuller than ever, they’re constantly overbooked and there’s no slack between flights for delays or cancellations.
The only problem is the desire of a few wealthy people to accumulate still more money at the expense of those who do the work.
May 19, 2008
The First Lady, Laura Bush, waxed indignant against the Myanmar junta–that it was late to warn about the cyclone and it didn’t help the population to face the terrible consequences.
She practically said it–that the same thing could never happen in the United States. Apparently she has no memory of what happened as Hurricane Katrina approached the area of New Orleans. Nor did the First Lady seem to remember the way the government ignored experts who had warned about the fragility of the levees holding back the Gulf waters.
May 19, 2008
The cyclone which ravaged the south of Myanmar on May 3rd has claimed at least 78,000 lives, with another 56,000 missing victims. The part of Myanmar affected by the passage of the typhoon contains nearly half of the country’s 53 million inhabitants.
The enormous whirlwind spent 12 hours over the Irrawady delta, the deadliest area because the population is very dense there. Hundreds of thousands of fisherman and their families live along its coast lines, in their little dinghies or in bamboo huts built on pilings. Even a little ways inland, the frail huts of poor peasants couldn’t stand up to the winds blowing at more than a hundred miles per hour nor to waves as high as 20 feet. Nor could those on lower lands or by rice paddies survive the rains that fell in such a short period or the inundation of the waves. A tidal wave of 12 feet engulfed many inhabitants. In one village, Bogalay, 95% of the housing was destroyed by the enormous waves.
In the former capital, Rangoon, a city of more than five million, there was damage, especially in the slums. There were reports of military squads in Rangoon pulling broken trees and limbs out of intersections. But it was really the population itself, equipped only with whatever it could find, that cleared the roads, in order to ensure that food and water could be obtained.
The previous September, when there were protesters in the streets against the military regime and low wages, thousands of soldiers were sent to savagely attack the demonstrators, especially the Buddhist monks. So where were all of these thousands of soldiers in the cyclone crisis?
The public authorities gave advice on sanitation on the radio, advice difficult to follow in the chaos touching the whole southwest part of the country. There was nothing to drink except bottled water. How could people in such conditions find fresh fruit, use proper toilets, throw away waste correctly or protect themselves from mosquitos. How were hundreds of thousands of refugees supposed to follow such advice when they were totally deprived, sometimes caught in villages isolated by high water? Even in Ragoon the rubbish was piling up.
While the cost of rice, a staple of the Burmese diet, tripled, the military government was busy organizing a referendum for the weekend following the cyclone. They wanted voters to ratify a constitution that would make the military power legitimate, although it had already been in power for more than 40 years. In fact, it was this referendum that monopolized the news media and journalists even as the cyclone was approaching. The population certainly didn’t get warnings soon enough, even though the weather surveillance center in India had announced the cyclone’s arrival, its likely path and its probably size.
Although it is normal in this area to face destructive cyclones, only city centers and Buddhist temples were built to survive such storms. In this poorer part of Asia, other countries faced something similar: last November’s destructive cyclone in Bangladesh and Indonesia’s tsunami in 2004. The families of fishermen all along these coasts have nothing to help them survive giant waves or possible landslides.
The population may be poor but the country of Myanmar is not. It produces oil, copper, gold, and 13 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually going to the multinationals–and returning at least two billion dollars annually to the military junta. Half the country’s annual revenues go to maintain the military. It’s a regime that welcomes international capital, which supports what this regime does to its population. The riches of the country don’t go to improve the lives of the population, nor to prevent the terrible risks it faces.
May 19, 2008
In April and May of 1963, the black population of Birmingham, Alabama broke the back of Jim Crow segregation in the South. Against fire hoses, police dogs, police clubs and KKK bombs, black Birmingham–including school-age children–joined in a movement that proved itself stronger than the forces of segregation and “law and order.”
For seven years, the Bethel Baptist Church had been a center of civil rights organizing. The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, organized by Bethel’s pastor, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, had over 500 members in Birmingham. In March 1963, Shuttlesworth called on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to join their fight. He thought that Dr. King’s prestige could bring in reluctant local ministers and other leaders.
Birmingham had long been a dangerous place for black people. The KKK had a free hand, so much that the town’s nickname was “Bombingham.” In the past 10 years there had been 40 unsolved dynamite bombings in the black community. Rev. Shuttlesworth’s house had been bombed twice. One bomb blew his bed right out from under him. He said, “We never did find the spring.” Whenever asked why he risked his life again and again, Rev. Shuttlesworth would say, “I wasn’t saved to run.”
In Birmingham, the South’s steel-producing center, the economic weight of the black community was important. With King and the SCLC in town, the Birmingham movement made five demands of the city government:
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Desegregation of downtown department store lunch counters and facilities
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Fair hiring practices in stores and for city jobs
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Dropping all charges against arrested demonstrators
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Reopening of parks and playgrounds under federal desegregation orders
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Set up a biracial commission to prepare desegregation of public schools.
On April 6, l963, the first 45 demonstrators gathered to march to City Hall for a prayer meeting. They were promptly arrested by Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor’s police. Each day for the next 34 days, more demonstrators gathered, were arrested, and went to jail. Rev. Wyatt Walker of SCLC said, “There’s two kinds of people. People who are committed to the movement and people who get committed by the movement.” In Birmingham, more people got committed by the day.
On April 10, a judge sent down an injunction that the demonstrations must cease. Obeying such an order would have killed the movement. Shuttlesworth and other local leaders refused to obey. The number of the jailed rose toward 1,000. Meanwhile the white-owned stores suddenly had almost no customers. “The real power was that 250,000 black citizens were not buying anything but food and medicine.” Some white businessmen began secretly to contact the SCLC.
On May 2, the “Children’s Crusade” began. Hundreds of high school and even grade school students left school, gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church, and marched singing toward City Hall. More than a thousand were arrested that day. “Bull” Connor was running out of places to put people.
On May 3, Connor resorted to brutality. Instead of arresting the children, he let loose the high-pressure water hoses, the police dogs, the police clubs. “They’ve turned fire hoses on those black girls. They’re rolling the little girl there, right there in the middle of the street.” Pictures of the dogs, the beatings, the hoses were national news. The critical moment came the next day when the next thousand young men and women, even grade schoolers, showed up to march again and face the dogs and hoses again. Some taunted the firemen: “Tomorrow we’ll bring soap.”
On this day, the adults–the parents, aunts and uncles–decided it was time to defend their children. Some began throwing rocks and bottles at the cops and “began to organize their guns and knives and bricks.” The “non-violent” leaders talked them down. On May 6, a high-pressure hose slammed Rev. Shuttlesworth into a brick wall, hospitalizing him.
On May 7, with Shuttlesworth hospitalized, city leaders met with the SCLC for official negotiations, and there was no march. But demonstrators by the thousands flooded into downtown, blocked stores, sat in, paralyzed traffic. When the white negotiators broke to go for lunch, they couldn’t get lunch. At this point, they understood that the movement could not be stopped.
But there were more games to be played. The businessmen said they could work something out, but they couldn’t negotiate with the protests going on. President Kennedy had sent a representative who said the same thing. Dr. King and the others were ready to go along. But Rev. Shuttlesworth insisted that without constant pressure, negotiations would go nowhere, just as so many times before.
Shuttlesworth recalled telling King, “That’s what people are saying, you go to a point and then you stop.... You go ahead and call it off, and I know we’ve got around three thousand kids over there in the church. When I see on TV, that you have called it off, I will get up out of this, my sickbed, with what little ounce of strength I have, and lead them back into the street.” The protests did not stop. In less than 24 hours, an agreement was signed with these bankers and businessmen who represented “about 80% of the hiring power of Birmingham.” They met the demands put forward by the movement concerning public accommodations, hiring, and the release of prisoners.
The businessmen may have signed, but “Bull” Connor, Governor George Wallace, and the KKK were not ready to agree. Wallace sent 575 state troopers into Birmingham. The KKK rallied. On the night of May 11, Dr. King’s motel was bombed and his brother’s home was bombed. Neither was killed, but people immediately massed in the streets. Against the state troopers, they threw rocks, bottles, their bodies, fire. Seven stores burned.
President Kennedy mobilized the National Guard, replacing Wallace’s and Connor’s forces, to prevent things from spinning further out of control.
Nonetheless, the black population of Birmingham had won its victory. Meeting fire with fire, they backed off all the forces of segregation. And they let loose a massive wave of protests.
Within ten weeks, 758 demonstrations erupted in 186 cities across the South. At least 14,733 persons were arrested. People had learned that organized collective action could succeed.
Rewriting history, school books give credit to Kennedy for introducing the Civil Rights Act in 1963. But credit for the crumbling of segregation belongs to the black population of Birmingham. Only after Birmingham scared Kennedy did he make his move. And only when the movement kept pushing, scaring Johnson, did he push the bill through and sign it in 1964.
In a way, Birmingham summed up the development of the black movement of the 1960s. Those who counseled patience and negotiations were bypassed as more people were ready to stand up to the established order, including by meeting force with force. In Birmingham, the movement showed that the more people shook that order, the more fruit fell from the tree.
May 19, 2008
A powerful earthquake hit the western Chinese province of Sichuan on May 14. The Chinese government estimates that the final death toll may reach 50,000. Over 160,000 have been injured.
But the destruction in Sichuan was not evenly distributed. In cities like Chengdu, where wealth is centered, shiny new office towers and hotels were still standing the day after the earthquake. But in poorer small cities and rural towns and villages, buildings everywhere were reduced to rubble–even in areas farther from the center of the quake than Chengdu.
Principles for building structures to more strongly withstand earthquakes are well understood at this point, and China applies them; but not equally. Even though the official country-wide building code requires all buildings to be built to withstand an earthquake of this magnitude, the code is enforced very differently in poor areas than in wealthy cities. In the poor areas, cheaply-made concrete and brick mortar turned to dust in the earthquake, and buildings came tumbling down.
Worst hit were schools and health centers in these areas. Throughout Sichuan, at least nine schools and two hospitals collapsed–even when multi-story buildings next to them remained standing. Thousands of school children were trapped and killed beneath the collapsed school buildings.
Almost half of China’s population–over 550 million people–are living in poverty, surviving on less than a dollar a day. Sixty to seventy% of the population still lives in rural areas like Sichuan–and these areas remain the most poor and destitute in the country.
Until the 1980s, China’s economy was centrally organized and controlled by its government. And local expenses were paid centrally.
But the Chinese government has opened its economy more and more to foreign investment, allowing more and more private corporations to set up shop; it also pushed more of the rural population off the land to supply labor for these factories; towns and cities grew rapidly in formerly rural areas–and housing and schools were built rapidly, and cheaply, for them. The workers have been paid very little, and extremely substandard homes, schools and hospitals were built for them. Meanwhile, a very small minority of the Chinese population has grown very rich. In 2000, over 40% of the bank deposits were owned by only five% of the population; and it’s only gotten worse since then.
In addition, tax collection was decentralized twenty years ago, leaving schools and health centers locally financed. Of course, this means that poor areas HAD no money, and schools and hospitals there have been constructed in a shoddy fashion, with poor materials. Making it worse, local government bureaucrats have pocketed much of the collected taxes, leaving little to meet the needs of the local populations.
In this society, natural disasters don’t hit everyone equally. The earthquake may have hit the whole province of Sichuan, but most of those who died were victims not of the quake, but of the disgusting disparity in wealth that allowed only a few to hoard well-made buildings for themselves.
May 19, 2008
The HBO series about Baltimore, Maryland–The Wire–offers five seasons of some of the best that television has to offer. Available now on DVD at public libraries and through video rental, The Wire is gritty, funny and leaves you thinking about it long afterwards.
The lives of ordinary working class and poor residents of Baltimore are illuminated with such honesty that the show could be mistaken for a documentary. It’s set in Baltimore, but it could be taking place in so many U.S. cities. The dysfunction of the schools, the courts, the police department and city services are all exposed.
The series is a fictional drama based on the life experiences of the show’s creators. One had worked as a crime reporter. The other is a Vietnam vet, retired homicide detective and former inner city school teacher.
Because the show is “character driven” it can seem “slow” at the beginning of each of its five seasons. Until you have been introduced to all of that season’s characters, which can take a few episodes, the show doesn’t pick up speed and suspense. Stick with it. You will be rewarded by a show that makes you laugh and makes you think.
Each of the shows seasons has a slightly different focus. Season One is about the “war” on drugs. Season Two focuses on the unions and job losses. Season three is about gangs and corrupt politicians. Season 4 is about children in the underfunded school system. Season 5 is about the news media and the homeless.
The Wire dramatizes the futility of the war on drugs, the underfunding of the schools, the corruption of the cops and politicians. It shows that the power games and politics that go on at work are the same wherever you go, whether your employer is the government, a school system, the waterfront–or a drug lord!
Throughout all five seasons, the path society is on comes across as a vicious circle. Reforms are ineffectual. The thought comes to a viewer’s mind that only a revolutionary solution points a way out.
May 19, 2008
On Friday night, May 16, UAW leaders (United Auto Workers) announced they had cut a tentative deal with American Axle Manufacturing (AAM). If ratified by the 3,600 strikers, the agreement would end the 12-week-old strike. Most of the details were hidden, but the information that did come out made it clear that Axle got almost all of what it asked for. The voting is scheduled for early this week.
The strike was provoked by GM’s desire to continue lowering its labor costs, including in the parts plants it depends on.
When the American Axle-UAW contract ended, management said it needed to cut wages by 50%, pushing them down to $14.50 an hour, or in some cases to $11.50.
GM made it clear it was behind Axle’s decision. It had accumulated a large inventory of unsold cars, letting it ride out a long strike.
On their side, UAW leaders offered to let Axle cut wages down to between $14.65 and $16 an hour.
In other words, the workers were up against not only Axle and GM, but also top union leaders.
Axle workers soon made it clear they were not ready to cave in to such demands.
The company essentially sat it out, hoping to wear the strikers down. As the strike wore on, it became obvious many workers were severely pinched for money. But UAW leaders refused to increase the amount of money going to strike benefits–which they easily could have done.
Nearly two months into the strike, Ron Gettelfinger, UAW president, announced the union was calling a rally for two weeks from then–but offering to cancel it if there was a settlement. Just before the rally, he announced its cancellation, pretending the union and the company were close.
But it was obvious on the line–and undoubtedly obvious to management and top UAW leaders–that workers were not ready to concede, neither to the company’s demands nor to the union’s offer. “We might as well lose this job if it’s going to pay so little.” “Why go back for a wage that won’t let us pay for the house and car we already have?” “Might as well hurt a little now instead of a lot later.” These were the common sentiments on the picket lines.
UAW leaders and Axle management didn’t even bother to bring out an offer. Instead a scare campaign was ramped up.
American Axle advertised for new applicants and set up “training” in schools, hinting that these “trained” workers would be brought in as scabs. Strikers reacted by picketing the schools and making a public scandal.
AAM told the press that it could get all the axles it needed by expanding production in one of its Mexican plants. The press repeated this as fact without questioning whether it was possible for one plant to replace five.
UAW leaders doubtless have precise production figures that would reveal this “Mexico” lie to be the whopper it is. But no information came from Solidarity House to undercut the scare stories in the newspapers.
Then General Motors made a show of restarting two assembly plant shifts, claiming they had “received” some axles–another way to worry the strikers, again reported as if GM management had never told a lie in its life.
Axle talked about closing all its U.S. plants, sending all production overseas–as though it were possible to ship heavy axles back to GM from afar.
Absurd–but never mind, the papers repeated it.
On May 10, Gettelfinger did a radio interview, claiming that AAM had threatened to close a third plant at Cheektowaga, New York with 115 workers. Unless that plant is kept open, said Gettelfinger, there will be no settlement.
Just six days later he announced a deal that kept the Cheektowaga plant open–but forgot to mention that two other plants with a total of 900 workers, would close or be sold.
The night the deal was announced, a rumor was started that if the workers did not accept this deal, AAM would start bringing in replacement workers. At the same time, Solidarity House ordered the picket lines to come down–don’t let workers gather together to talk things over and develop a collective response!
The strength of the strike has been the workers’ strong attitude of resistance in the face of weeks of lost wages and despite the psychological warfare waged against them. And their fight has been reinforced by the support of workers from many other workplaces–GM, Chrysler, Ford, the State of Michigan, Blue Cross in the Detroit area, as well as many workers in the area surrounding the Three Rivers plant in western Michigan. Learning that money donations did not go to the strikers, workers from other places began to bring food and other goods. Other workers marched on the picket lines and came to demonstrations because they understood what was at stake in this strike.
So the question now is what will happen? Whatever workers decide, they will still have to find the way to put up their own leadership, since from beginning to end the top leadership of the UAW has shown it is not on their side.
May 19, 2008
Second-shift workers laid off from Chrysler’s Sterling Heights (Michigan) Assembly Plant got two letters in the mail. One was an offer of work in Belvidere, Illinois. One was an offer of work at Kenosha, Wisconsin. That is, two “offers” were made.
Under new rules set up by the 2007 contract, a worker who declines two offers can be removed from the Jobs Bank and put on a regular layoff with its limited benefits.
In the past, Jobs Bank workers could not be forced to take jobs far from their homes. The new rules mean that at any moment a worker might be required to pull their children from school, put their house up for sale (good luck!), and take their chances in a new far-off plant that might soon lay them off again. And then what?
But to Chrysler, the new rules are nothing but a way to push out seniority workers, making about $30 an hour, to replace them with “two-tier” workers–paid only $14.50 an hour and without any Job Bank claims.
It’s another way the 2007 contract was a gift to the bosses.
May 19, 2008
Kellogg Brown & Root, KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is the largest contractor in Iraq, rolling up at least 16 billion dollars in contracts during this war. Today it has more than 21,000 employees in Iraq.
So KBR must be paying a nice little sum in employment taxes to Social Security and Medicare, right? Wrong! It didn’t pay a cent.
KBR set up two shell companies incorporated in the Caymans, tiny islands in the Caribbean! And the Caymans don’t recognize U.S. tax laws.
Employees of the subsidiary will have no money paid into Social Security, meaning they will get less money when they are old enough to retire. But KBR is pocketing one hundred million dollars a year.
KBR didn’t see why it should pay any U.S. taxes. After all, they have their man Dick Cheney sitting in the vice president’s chair.
May 19, 2008
The new Foster Care Task Force for the State of Michigan will waste $300,000 pretending to come up with solutions to foster care problems.
There are no magic formulas. More foster care workers are needed, and more money is needed for services for the kids themselves.
Current problems stem from years and years of the legislature pushing state workers to do MORE with LESS.
You can only do LESS with LESS.
May 19, 2008
Dangerously high amounts of lead–more than seven times greater than the maximum allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency–were found in the water fountains of a Los Angeles elementary school. Parents made the discovery.
Two years ago, when teachers told students not to drink from the fountains, worried parents began to demand answers. Instead, they got the runaround. Finally, a parent who works for the L.A. Metropolitan Water District tested the water and found the lead.
Caught out, district officials tried to blame school workers, saying that custodians and teachers were told to flush the fountains for 30 seconds every morning to get rid of the lead. In other words, officials knew about this grave hazard to children’s health. They just hid it.
The hazard goes back much longer than two years. In 1993, old water pipes containing high amounts of lead were banned–but the California legislature exempted the existing pipes in schools and other buildings. It’s now 15 years later, pipes haven’t been replaced and dozens of schools in Los Angeles are involved.
If it hadn’t been for the parents deciding they had to take things into their own hands, officials might well have hidden this outrage for another 15 years.
May 19, 2008
Dockworkers at 29 ports on the West Coast carried out a one-day strike on May 1 to protest the war in Iraq. The strike effectively shut down the ports, the biggest in the U.S., handling 40% of goods imported into the U.S. each year.
It was just a one-day strike–in fact, just a one-shift strike–so its economic impact was meager. But the fact that union leaders even wanted to make a statement against the war shows how much anti-war sentiment exists among the workers.
Of course, it’s the family members of workers like those who operate the cranes and drive the trucks at these ports who are being sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This strike many have been limited, but it clearly shows one thing: Workers have the force to bring an end to the war, as well as to stop the attacks being carried out on them. The point is to use it.
May 19, 2008
Five years after George Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, papers have been filled with stories saying the situation in Iraq is improving.
Not true–not for the Iraqi population, not for American soldiers in Iraq and not for soldiers returning to the U.S. and their families.
Nearly 20% of returning veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. Another 20% have possible traumatic brain injuries. That adds up to 600,000 vets with severe disabilities. These figures were reported in a recent study by the Rand Corporation.
The physical and mental trauma of these wars explain why the number of veterans of the two wars committing suicide far exceeds the number dying in combat.
And veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are not the only casualties of these wars either. The rate of suicide among Vietnam vets spiked upwards again as news coverage of the current wars brings back traumatic experiences from their war years.
What has been the military’s response to the growing number of vets under severe stress? A complete and total cover-up!
For example, last year Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA’s Mental Health Division, testified in a Congressional hearing that there had been fewer than 800 suicide attempts in all of 2007, denying there was a suicide epidemic.
But an e-mail Katz himself had sent to a VA colleague gave a different story: “Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” That’s 12,000 suicide attempts in a single year, and that’s only among veterans receiving treatment from the VA–not all those others who never make it to a VA treatment center. This email came to light in a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Veterans Affairs by two veterans groups
The vets also presented an e-mail from a PTSD program coordinator at a Veterans’ Center in Texas to other psychologists, social workers and a psychiatrist that said, “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out.... Consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.... We really don’t have time to do extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”
When they’re not denying the entire scope of the veterans’ mental health problems, the VA simply delays paying the vets disability benefits. During the trial, lawyers for the veterans’ groups showed that in the prior six months almost 1500 vets died waiting for their disability claims to be decided and that veterans who appeal denials of their claims wait nearly four and half years on average to get an answer.
No matter what military recruitment ads and all the politicians pretend, this is the harsh reality: the troops are just so much cannon fodder, to be used up and thrown away.