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
Jun 2, 2008
Big price increases are spreading beyond the enormous jumps in energy and food prices. Since the beginning of the year, steel prices jumped by 40 to 50%. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, just announced another 20% increase. And Dow Chemical announced that it is sharply increasing prices on everything from plastics to commodity chemicals.
These lying thieves say their costs are rising, they have no choice but to raise prices.
Get out the violins!
Yes, they have a choice, and they made it. They have taken the axe to their workforce year after year. Worker productivity in steel has increased by more than eight times in two decades. That means a worker today produces on average eight times more than just 20 years ago! And that’s not all. The steel titans slashed wages and benefits. They also dumped their pension promises to all the retirees in outright raids of the pension funds.
The steel industry has been running 10% profit margins–profit margins so high, they are practically unheard of in a capital-intensive industry. The steel companies are rolling in so much money, ArcelorMittal bought up 35 smaller steel companies in just the last year!
The steel industry is not the exception. Dow Chemical made 3 billion dollars in profits–after taxes. And they funneled almost all those profits right back to their stockholders through massive stock buybacks.
Oh yes, sometimes these companies do have cost increases. But for every one dollar extra that they have to pay out, they pass along a two-dollar price increase to us. And every big company and every big industry in the country does the same thing. They all boost their profits by gouging us, first as workers, and then as consumers.
The banks, financial and construction companies have destroyed housing–and set off a foreclosure crisis of historic proportions. The oil companies have made gas so expensive, workers can’t afford to drive their cars. The insurance and health care industry have put ordinary medical care out of the reach of most workers.
So today we find ourselves mired in a crisis, an economic emergency. Just in the last year, prices on what we are paying for have gone up by at least 25%, if not more. Every worker would have to have an immediate wage increase of 25% just to catch up.
If there were a political party that tried to address workers interests, it would propose a law mandating an immediate 25% wage increase paid by all bosses. It would forbid further cost cutting at workers’ expense.
Does anyone believe that the likes of a McCain, Obama or Clinton are about to propose anything like this? No–and everyone knows it.
Don’t look to the elections to get us out of this crisis. Waiting until November is a trap.
We need a raise–a great big one right now. We need jobs. In workplaces, in schools, in the streets, workers have to think about coming together to demand it.
No matter which candidate wins in November, masses of angry workers in the streets can force them to give us much more than anyone could imagine.
Jun 2, 2008
Worried about rising prices at the grocery store? Profits are up among food producers and speculators–which is not a coincidence.
Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) announced in April that its profits had gone up 42%. The part of ADM that trades in grains had seen income rise seven times. There’s a very good reason: in 2006, a ton of wheat was sold on the world’s exchanges for $375. Now it is selling at more than $900 per ton. Maize (corn) went from about $250 to $560 per ton. Rice prices went from $320 a year ago to $1150 per ton today.
And, of course, it is not just ADM that makes out like a bandit. Profits at agri-businesses Cargill, John Deere, Monsanto and Mosaic were up even more than at ADM.
So is there a shortage of food? Not in the least. A headline in a Business Week story explains it all: “High food prices prompted producers to hoard, limiting supply.” The capitalist bandits don’t hold anyone up with a gun: they just hoard what they buy, waiting to extort higher prices still while people starve to death.
Jun 2, 2008
A 307-billion dollar farm bill passed in Congress last month, with a huge margin of both Democrats and Republicans voting for it.
One important part of the farm bill is continued subsidies to the big corporate farms. Subsidies were increased for wheat and soybeans, and several new crops were added to the list.
Does Congress know that food prices have never been higher? That net farm income for agribusiness is up over 50%, while working people pay more and more for basic necessities?
Of course they do.
Jun 2, 2008
Something to think about as you pay more than $4 per gallon for gas:
–Since the summer of 2001, the five largest oil companies in the U.S.–ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, BP and Shell–raked in 586 billion dollars.
–Since January 2007, ExxonMobil has spent 40 billion buying back stock while spending only 4.3 billion on U.S. capital investment and exploration.
The oil companies aren’t even looking for more oil. They just claim there is an oil shortage and jack up the price. Then they recycle their profits to their stockholders, the capitalist class itself.
Fill ‘er up.
Jun 2, 2008
In Michigan, the City of Hamtramck and Wayne County finally started construction of a housing development, as part of a settlement with former residents who sued the city forty years ago. Many of those residents are now dead.
In the mid-sixties, Hamtramck officials forced out residents from three areas of the city, all three of which were predominantly black, refusing to maintain streets and sewers and later shutting off water to the homes. City officials even pushed the Michigan state highway department to change its planned route for the Chrysler Freeway, when the highway department said that the plans wouldn’t require tearing down any homes. The city also harassed residents who stayed, regularly overcharging them for water and property taxes.
As a result of the settlement, pushed-out residents and their children or grandchildren could receive up to $30,000 toward the purchase of one of the homes under construction–which average $140,000 in price. Others are receiving subsidized rent on rental homes in the area.
It’s not much. As the saying goes, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” But the settlement itself at least recognizes the reality of what many black people have long said: “Urban renewal is black removal.”
What happened in Hamtramck has happened in many cities. Besides the underlying racism that is obvious in the Hamtramck case, “urban removal” is also carried out to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the working population, including in cities like Detroit, headed by a black mayor.
Cities across the country have been swept by “gentrification”–a fancy name for handing over large chunks of inner city land to the wealthy.
Jun 2, 2008
For the second time in three months, a crane at a construction site in New York City collapsed and fell into a nearby building, killing workers. This time, on Friday, May 30, the top arm of a crane in Manhattan snapped off and plummeted to the ground, killing two workers, including the crane operator.
They were the fourteenth and fifteenth high-rise construction deaths this year.
The city swung into its usual “action,” bringing in inspectors who announced that a bad weld had broken.
A crane topples on top of a building–and they want us to believe it all depended on just one weld? Either the whole city of New York is ready to come tumbling down–or it’s another case of government BS.
The city had posted inspectors on every crane site ever since the earlier collapse of a crane on March 15–a policy that lasted only two months, until it ended a couple days before this collapse. Clearly these inspections were worthless, if they could allow for this ticking time-bomb to continue.
As for OSHA, it was nowhere to be found in this whole affair–which should come as no surprise.
Since the OSHA Act was passed 38 years ago, roughly 341,000 workers have been killed on the job. But only 68 criminal cases have ever been prosecuted, handing down only 42 months of jail time–total, for everyone involved. Not only is OSHA a toothless, clawless watchdog, it doesn’t have any eyes, ears or nose for workplace dangers.
No one was charged for the deaths of seven workers in the March 15 crane collapse–by any agency or government.
The OSHA Act was passed at a time when a number of workers across the country were fighting about safety issues–even stopping work, many times, until a problem was addressed. In fact, OSHA was a way for the government to discourage workers from taking their own safety into their own hands.
We can see how far government “protection” can get us: nowhere, if we’re not fighting for ourselves.
Jun 2, 2008
The sub-prime mortgage crisis has led to many people losing their homes. As if that weren’t bad enough, a two-year study proves minorities were deliberately steered into the worst mortgages by brokers and lenders, even when their credit qualified them for better loans.
The investigation, from February 2004 through June of 2006, showed across-the-board discrimination against black and Hispanic applicants by mortgage brokers in the cities studied: Baltimore, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Atlanta.
White, black and Hispanic individuals and couples were sent to the same mortgage companies to request mortgage loans. For purposes of the study, the black and Hispanic applicants had better income averages and better employment profiles than the white applicants in the study.
What were the results? Obvious, overt discrimination.
Ninety% of white applicants were offered fixed rate mortgages, but only 56% of minority applicants were. Fixed rate mortgages work out to less money spent each month and over the life of a mortgage.
Black and Hispanic applicants were never told about better mortgage deals, although 7% of the white shoppers were.
The mortgage lenders even spent more time on average with white applicants than with black or Hispanic applicants.
This study, funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was carried out BEFORE the sub-prime mortgage crisis broke. Now that foreclosures on those sub-prime loans are going through the roof, what conclusions does HUD draw from its study? What remedies is it proposing?
Jun 2, 2008
On June 1, as hurricane season begins in 2008, thousands of victims of the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita still lack housing.
What has FEMA done in the three years since those disastrous hurricanes? It studied the issue of prefabricated housing. It let people stay in FEMA trailers laced with formaldehyde. And now it is closing all trailer parks.
The only thing that neither FEMA nor any other part of the government did was to organize a response to the lack of affordable housing in the Gulf area including especially New Orleans. But of course they didn’t. Rather, government officials took advantage of the hurricanes to drive the poor out, so the wealthy could gobble up prime coastal real estate.
Jun 2, 2008
Did you ever wonder why the auto bosses don’t push Congress to rein in oil prices since they are obviously affecting their sales?
Because the auto bosses are part of the problem. Owners of industry are the very people who are taking the profits made in their factories and production and throwing them into the speculation on Wall Street–driving up the price of oil, for example, or housing before that.
There’s more than one way for a capitalist to skin a cat.
Jun 2, 2008
Seventy-five years ago, Franklin Roosevelt, the newly elected Democratic president, was putting the finishing touches on a package of economic reforms. Between March 1933, when he took office, and June, he pushed 15 measures through Congress.
In the land that champions free enterprise, the New Deal marked the intervention of the nation-state into the affairs of the bourgeoisie. Some businesses and political reactionaries viewed this state intervention as interference in free enterprise. They considered the New Deal “socialist,” due to the social nature of some laws put into effect to re-start the economy. In fact, the laws Roosevelt got Congress to pass were simply an attempt to patch up a capitalist system threatened with collapse, and to prevent a social explosion by allowing a few rights to unions and a little aid to the poorest. The constraints imposed on the capitalists aimed at protecting their interests.
By 1933, the crisis affected all sectors of the economy. More than 5,000 banks had closed since the crash of 1929, leading to numerous closings of businesses starved for money. Industrial production had fallen 50%, putting 15 million workers out of work, between 25% and 33% of the working population. There was no unemployment compensation at that time. Those who still worked suffered big wage cuts. Poverty generalized throughout the working class. Workers who could no longer pay their rent were evicted. Vast shanty towns appeared, called Hoovervilles after former President Herbert Hoover. For many people, soup kitchens were the only source of food. Countless farmers were kicked off their land; sharecroppers and farm workers had no work. There were plenty of goods for sale and food available to be bought, but there were few buyers.
The situation was explosive. Workers and small farmers were being reduced to misery. Spontaneous riots broke out everywhere in the country. Despite brutal repression, the revolts threatened to spread.
In this situation, Roosevelt was able to convince the capitalists that it was necessary to accept some restrictions–if they didn’t want to lose everything. On the one hand, the system needed to be regulated if the economy was to be relaunched; on the other hand, social aid needed to be extended to avoid social revolts by the working population.
Roosevelt’s first measure, taken the day after he took office, was the emergency decree to close all banks and prohibit gold transactions for a week, in order to stabilize the banking system. On March 9th the Emergency Banking Act authorized banks with good financial health to reopen. The law allowed shaky banks to obtain credit from the Federal Reserve Bank, one of its first bail-outs. In this case, the ferocious defenders of “free enterprise” had no problem with the state intervening in the economy–if it was in favor of big business.
The Economy Bill, introduced on March 20th, cut wages of federal employees by 15% and reduced veterans’ pensions. Roosevelt’s excuse was the need to reduce government expenses.
With respect to industry and agriculture, Roosevelt began a policy to limit production, thus reducing inventories, allowing prices to rise, letting the capitalists make profits once more.
Even while part of the population was starving and without money, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, passed on May 12, aimed at pushing up farm prices. Landowners were encouraged to reduce the acres under cultivation and to kill off part of their livestock. The government paid the landowners compensation, so they lost nothing. Essentially this compensation went to benefit the biggest farms. Farm workers and share-croppers, thrown out to starve, were the first victims of this reduction in cultivated acres, as were small farmers who could barely survive on their meager production.
The same policy was followed for industry. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the key law of the early New Deal, was aimed at relaunching production by limiting the savage competition among the capitalists. The act provided for manufacturing companies to agree to fix production quotas, price and wage minimums, and to lower the hours of work in order to create jobs. The agreements were negotiated between employers, unions and government.
The more reactionary manufacturers immediately cried that this was socialism, first, because the state had intervened in their affairs and, second, because workers gained a few rights to join unions. This “statism,” however, was very limited, and didn’t go beyond encouraging the bosses to act. There was no enforcement in the NIRA to ensure that employers respected the law. Moreover, the organism set up to administer the NIRA was controlled by businessmen! Most of the wage minimums fixed by the industrial sectors were lower than what was already paid. And the famous clause 7A, which authorized workers to participate in collective bargaining with their employers and to belong to the union of their choice, did so only if the state authorized their particular union.
To fight unemployment, Roosevelt began a program of large public works, similar to what the Italian and German fascist regimes were doing. The projects included the repair or construction of schools, museums or public buildings. The most important program was the development of the Tennessee River Valley, under the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Created with federal credits in May of 1933, the TVA began building a public network of dams and hydroelectric power plants in order to contain flooding of the river and to furnish cheap electricity to businesses and inhabitants of the area. These big public works, however, didn’t put an end to unemployment. At most, they employed four million workers, who got wages lower than those paid by businesses. The lower wages were established so that public works would not compete with private business.
Many of these first laws were thrown out by the courts, still adhering to the wishes of the most reactionary part of the bourgeoisie.
It was not until after the big strike wave of 1934 pushed the bourgeoisie to the wall that many of these early social laws were re-instituted.
The year 1934 saw three nearly generalized local strikes set off by longshoremen on the California coast, truck drivers in Minneapolis, and auto workers in Ohio, as well as the national textile strike which spread from the South into 16 states. In 1935, the Social Security Act was passed, a law that initiated unemployment compensation. But Social Security was financed by deductions from wage earners. And even these minimum coverages did not apply to domestic workers and farm workers, occupations in which the black population was concentrated. Just as they were excluded when the minimum wage laws and farm subsidies were set in place. Roosevelt did not want to annoy the reactionary South, which traditionally voted Democratic.
The measures put in place by Roosevelt were not socialist in the least, despite what his critics said. These measures were an expedient accepted temporarily by the U.S. bourgeoisie to get out of the crisis, without having to face widespread revolt.
But the New Deal did not respond to the needs of the working class. The great strike movement of 1936-37 was testimony to this–it was also the proof of the force of the U.S. working class and its capacity to propose its own solutions to the crisis.
As for the economy–the New Deal measures did not relaunch it. In fact, the economy by the end of the 1930s was falling back again into the morass. American capitalism did not get out of its crisis until it engaged itself–and all of society with it–in the butchery of World War II.
Jun 2, 2008
In several South African townships–the former black ghettos from the time of apartheid–there have been waves of violence since May 12, mainly against immigrants from neighboring Zimbabwe. Dozens of people have been killed or wounded. More than ten thousand people have fled Johannesburg townships and poor neighborhoods to take refuge in public buildings, police stations, churches and the streets.
Misery weighs heavily on this country of 50 million: 43% of the population lives below the poverty level, the unemployment rate is 40%, and two-thirds of those under age 35 are jobless. The collapse of the workers’ standard of living and the catastrophic increase in food prices this year has made things worse. Unfortunately the poor population has directed its anger against “foreigners” and in particular the three million Zimbabweans who fled to South Africa. Their country is suffering a severe crisis, with inflation making the currency worthless and unemployment at 80%.
Zimbabweans are accused of causing crime, taking scarce housing, overcrowding the schools and medical clinics, and, above all, “stealing jobs,” as they try to survive doing casual labor. The Zimbabweans aren’t the only victims of this wave of blind anger. In Alexandria township, where the racial violence began, the Shangaan and Venda ethnic minorities, originally from the northern part of South Africa, have also been driven from their homes.
A further cause of these inter-ethnic clashes is the legacy of the apartheid regime. In the past, the white minority in power used the Zulu as allies, turning them against other ethnic groups. The end of apartheid didn’t put an end to these clashes. Since the elections of 1994, establishing a new “multiracial” government, those in power never stopped playing on ethnic differences in an attempt to divert mounting discontent. They went so far as to establish zones surrounded by barbed wire on the northern border to prevent Zimbabwean migrants from escaping into South Africa.
The anger of the South African population is being diverted against those as poor as they are. Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, the buildings that house insurance, banks and U.S. and Australian corporations display enormous wealth. This financial wealth comes from the profits of South Africa’s mines, with their 250,000 miners. These luxury buildings, sitting directly opposite the miserable shanty towns, symbolize the real enemy of all the poor in South Africa, wherever they come from.
Jun 2, 2008
Marina Silva, Brazilian Minister of Ecology in Lula da Silva’s government, has just resigned the post she has held for five years. No one in the country had to wonder why she decided to quit a government that hasn’t cared about protecting nature for years. Rather, they were only astonished by the reasons she gave for remaining as long as she did.
Marina Silva, who was born on an Amazon rubber plantation, was a comrade of the ecology and union militant Chico Mendes, who was assassinated 20 years ago by henchmen in the pay of the landlords. She belongs to that current of the Brazilian left which defends the idea that Lula and his government balance between the interests of the population and those of the rich. Like others, she believed she could work within the government to push it to adopt good policies. It took her five years to figure out that Lula didn’t defend nature any more than he defended the workers’ interests.
Since he came to power, Lula, a former union leader, has turned his back on the ideals proclaimed by the left and by his party, the Workers Party. Ecology was no exception. Particularly in Brazil, this cause is closely linked to the struggle of small farmers against the big landlords and agribusiness.
Under Lula, agrarian reform has stagnated even more than it did under his right-wing predecessor. A few peasants have been given land. Budgets to help equip them have shriveled and what has been allocated has barely been spent. The big landlords, who rapidly understood that Lula’s government was on their side, redoubled their violence. Never have there been so many expulsions of peasants from the land and so many assassinations of militants in the Brazilian countryside. The assassinations have gone unpunished, even when they involve foreigners, like U.S. missionary Dorothy Stang, shot in February 2005.
This total reliance on exports by Lula’s government meant unhesitating support for industrial agriculture, in particular large-scale cattle raising and soy growing, the two sectors where Brazil is the world’s leading exporter. The consequence has accelerated the destruction of the Amazon forest. Gigantic farms were carved out of the forest by illegal burning and bulldozing. This burning is responsible for most of Brazil’s carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. Brazil is the fourth largest emitter of such pollution in the world.
The authorization of genetically modified crops is only one aspect of this policy that favors agribusiness. Another aspect is the eviction and extermination of Indian tribes, who occupy vast coveted reserves.
Bio-fuel speculation is another area in which the government favors big landlords. Lula has gone so far as to call the big planters of sugar cane “heroes.” These big planters defended slavery and the slave trade right up to the end of the 19th century. Today they remain the most reactionary sector of the Brazilian bourgeoisie.
When Marina Silva resigned, Lula commented that “environmental policy won’t change.” In other words, he told the big landlords and agribusiness capitalists they have nothing to worry about.
Jun 2, 2008
In a recent speech, President George W. Bush compared the critics of his war strategy in the Middle East to those who sought to “appease” Adolf Hitler before World War Two.
Of course, Bush’s own grandfather, Prescott Sheldon Bush, helped bankroll Hitler’s war machine, and served on the board of directors of several of the biggest German war contractors. Prescott Bush then turned around and made even more money off the war effort in Britain and this country. In other words, the Bush family made a fortune by arming both sides of the war. The only loyalty that the capitalists have is to themselves and their own profits.
No “appeasement” for them–the more wars they make, the more money they make.
Jun 2, 2008
After 12 weeks on strike, UAW (United Auto Workers) members at five American Axle plants in Michigan and New York voted to accept the company’s final offer and return to work. Not because they wanted to! But they saw no way out of the bind they’d been put in.
This was the third longest strike in UAW history, but one of the few to suffer such a dramatic defeat. Within a few dollars, the company got what it had demanded from the beginning.
New wage classifications cut unskilled workers’ pay as much as $10 per hour, skilled workers by $6. When benefit cuts are counted in, and the new still lower tier taken into account, the company’s wage bill was cut almost in half. “Pension, wages, healthcare, you name it. They took everything our fathers fought for.”
Gone are longstanding shop rules; and brought in was a total ban on any strikes.
After 12 weeks of determined picketing, workers felt, as one said, “It’s a rotten contract, but probably the best we could get in the situation.”
But it was not the best that the strikers could get–it was merely the best that the top union officials would get! And there is no doubt this is their contract. From the beginning, they pronounced themselves ready to agree to terms nearly identical to the final surrender.
Nonetheless, for nearly 12 weeks, workers held out. Most felt, as one striker said: “If we took the cuts they are asking for, I’d eventually be in this position financially anyways. So we might as well stay out. At least this way I have hope."
They picketed in large numbers, from February’s snows through April’s rains.
Local activists and elected leaders called for a rally outside the company’s annual shareholder meeting.
Many workers–strikers or from other plants–brought out others to picket the shareholders’ meeting. They organized worker shareholders to attend the meeting and point out the hypocrisy of a ten-million-dollar executive getting a 9% raise, then demanding that workers take a 50% wage cut.
They made use of the daily newspapers’ “comments” sections to try to state their case to a wider audience. The workers showed all along that they had the determination to win their strike.
The problem was they found no way to get outside the box the union’s policy put them in. Certainly the union tops did everything they could to keep control of the strike, including cutting off information on the negotiations and letting management lies remain unchallenged.
Strike pay was not increased, even though the UAW strike fund has nearly a billion dollars, and even though workers got up a petition for doubled pay to let them hold out longer.
But the real problem is not that some union leaders pushed company proposals on the workers–although certainly those leaders put up obstacles.
The problem is for workers to build up their own apparatus, for workers who don’t go along with union policy to propose another one.
The real fighting resources are within the membership ranks, their determination, their creativity, their ability to “go to war” for their own interests.
Strikes need to expand beyond the normal bounds. When have workers made breakthroughs within those bounds? The UAW and the other CIO unions erupted on the scene in the later years of the Great Depression just because they went outside normal bounds.
In the 1950s and 60s, the civil rights movement developed in the same way.
These two great movements became so many sparks in the wider political life of the whole population. Everyone being shortchanged by the system began to put forward their own demands. In the last analysis it was this widespread threat of generalized revolt that forced the owners of capital to yield.
In the coming months, we can be sure that more companies will make more outrageous demands. Workers who want to refuse will have to take control of their own actions as soon as possible. Choose their own strike leadership. Decide when and how they strike and what other forms of struggle to use. Decide how to bring other workers into the fight, how to reach out toward the widest possible layers of all those workers who have something to gain by fighting. Tie up business. Shake up the status quo. Ignore those who tell us that we have to live by the bosses’ rules.
The American Axle strikers didn’t have the perspective to go in this direction. But others facing battles soon to come may build on the foundations this strike laid.
This strike had wide support from other workers, even when the Axle workers didn’t approach other workers. It’s an important sign that workers could have the forces they need to win.
Jun 2, 2008
It is nice to have a holiday. Even better a paid holiday. Here are two ideas for other holidays:
Iraq War Over holiday.
No more U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags holiday.
Jun 2, 2008
A lot of noise has been made about a senator’s proposal to change the G.I. Bill so that veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will receive full payment for college educations once they return. Veterans are for this, and the Pentagon is against it. Democrats are for it, saying it’s long overdue; Republicans are against it, saying some vets should get more than this, some less.
Lost in all this hullabaloo is the fact that both parties voted for another 165 billion dollars to keep those wars going.
Keep your eyes on the check book–not on the election hullabaloo!
Jun 2, 2008
Scott McClellan, who used to be Bush’s press secretary, has now issued a memoir claiming to expose some of the dirty dealings that went on in the Bush administration. In his book, What Happened, McClellan also criticized the U.S. news media for working hand in glove with the Bush administration to promote the U.S. war against Iraq.
A few high profile television broadcasters agreed and even went so far as to blame their corporate bosses for pressuring them to repeat the Bush administration line. Speaking on the “Early Show,” Katie Couric, the anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” complained that pressure came from “the corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of it [the Iraq War].” Jessica Yellin, a reporter at MSNBC who now reports for CNN, also spoke about the “enormous pressure from corporate executives” to justify the U.S. attack on Iraq.
Of course, these are not exactly new revelations. From the beginning, a big section of the U.S. population saw through all the lies used to justify going to war. Long before the war started, millions of Americans all over the country went into the streets to demonstrate their opposition to the war, even while the news media spread lie after lie.
More than five years later, the war is more unpopular than ever. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. A whole part of the U.S. generation that went to war has been maimed in one way or another. But people like McClellan think they can rescue their own scabby reputations by blaming it all on Bush–and make some money doing it! No! There’s more than enough blame to go around.
Bush, McClellan, and the news media all deserve to be hung from a yard-arm!
Jun 2, 2008
In Waterloo, Iowa 270 immigrants without legal papers, most from Guatemala, were sentenced to five months in prison for working at the Agriprocessors Inc. meat packing plant in nearby Postville. Judge Mark Bennett told them, “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families. Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”
Were laws violated? Yes–a lot of them. And the worst violations were committed by the company and the government itself. Agriprocessors has been regularly cited for “serious health violations,” including the improper storage and use of hazardous chemicals, the improper labeling of emergency exits, alarms that couldn’t be heard by everyone, and improper programs for handling blood-borne pathogens. But it barely got a slap on the wrist, just over $1,000 per infraction. When the May 12 raid occurred, it was violating child labor laws with children younger than 16 working in this dangerous plant, and overtime hour laws.
Criminal? You bet, but the government demonstrated it had no intention of imposing respect for worker safety laws. No–the government rushed to prosecute the victims, the immigrants forced to work under such horrendous conditions, in what could only be called a kangaroo court.
A total of 270 immigrants were run through shotgun trials and sentencing in only four days time. The “courtrooms” were the National Cattle Congress grounds, mobile trailers and a dance hall. The Agriprocessors workers were denied the right to see immigration lawyers, and the time to understand what they were being charged with. They were threatened with a mandatory two years in prison unless they pled guilty immediately and accepted five months in prison and signed away their right to go to immigration court. The workers entered with their hands and feet shackled in groups of ten, reinforcing the intimidation. They entered their guilty pleas together and immediately were moved en masse to another courtroom for sentencing, then to five months in prison.
Respect for the law? These criminals who run the government have none.
Jun 2, 2008
On May 19, Philadelphia’s mayor and police commissioner announced they were taking quick and decisive action against the 18 Philadelphia cops and one mass transit security officer involved in brutally beating three black men.
It was hardly “quick.” It didn’t come until two weeks after the attack. And it came only AFTER FOX News repeatedly aired video footage taken from one of its helicopters showing the 18 cops kicking, stomping and beating the men. Nor was their response “decisive.” Only four of the 18 were fired and another four given minor discipline. None face criminal charges.
The police commissioner did claim that the entire 6,700 person police force will also be re-trained in the use of force.
But what good will re-training do? After all, the incident happened when “trainees” were being taken out and shown what it is that “Philadelphia’s Finest” do on the streets–brutalize people who are poor.
If brutal cops are to be re-trained that will come only at the hands of the population.