The Spark

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

Issue no. 829 — September 8 - 22, 2008

EDITORIAL
No Jobs Available—What a Disgrace!

Sep 8, 2008

One out of every ten workers either can’t find a job at all or is working only part-time or on call because no full time, permanent jobs are available.

That’s criminal!

And the proposals John McCain and Barack Obama made when the latest jobs reports came out were pitiful. Rushing to comment, they criticized each other, but nonetheless proposed remedies that were remarkably similar.

In the short term, they both would provide another “stimulus” package like the one Bush pushed through. That didn’t work so well!

In the long run, they would give more tax breaks and subsidies to the big corporations, pretending that corporations will use the money to create jobs. And that’s been done many times before–the money was given, but the jobs weren’t created.

Why shouldn’t government take that same money, but use it to create jobs directly?

There certainly are plenty of things that need to be done. If every rotting bridge were to be repaired or replaced, if every broken-up road made driveable again, millions of people could be put to work, just making those repairs. And that’s only the beginning of work that needs to be done–work that would launch many millions of jobs.

Dams need to be repaired. Five% of all dams in the country are so unsafe they could collapse without further warning–according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And this doesn’t take into account the levees all up and down the Mississippi River system.

There are almost 50 million students in public schools–and most of them study in schools that are substandard, crowded or even unsafe. And with the number of pupils increasing by over a third of a million every year, tens of thousands new schools are needed, just to catch up.

Playgrounds, parks and rec centers need to be cleaned up, expanded, opened up, added to.

Tens of thousands of clinics and people to staff them are needed–just to take care of all those people without medical coverage today.

High speed rail trains with far-flung networks are needed–so we wouldn’t have to waste all our time getting to work.

With all those things that need to be built or established or run or repaired, there is no reason for any person to be without work. If government–which today uses the money it takes from us to increase corporate profits–if government were to put that money to work creatively, there would be no shortage of jobs. There would be a shortage of labor.

Vast public works programs have been carried out before–during periods when the working class mobilized to fight so that its interests were addressed.

The working people of this country already know what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed, what’s about to fall down, what’s missing, what should be added. It doesn’t take a ten year study to figure it out.

All it requires is the will to start working on it. What’s required is a government that puts the interests of the population before the interests of the wealthy who have lived off government handouts for years.

But that’s exactly what neither party has done, and what neither Obama nor McCain is proposing to do today.

We won’t get the jobs we need by waiting for one of them to get elected. But if we start putting our demands forward now, whoever gets elected can be forced to answer.

Pages 2-3

Expensive School Supplies

Sep 8, 2008

School supply lists for parents are getting longer and more expensive. Students in elementary school in Baltimore average $36.91 per child. In middle school the cost per child is about $52.93. The cost for high school students is much higher because they use electronic equipment.

Free public education isn’t really free.

Hard Times, California

Sep 8, 2008

The news media and U.S. officials sometimes try to make it seem that high unemployment is concentrated in the industrial heartland, which they belittle as the old rust belt, states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Yet California–with by far the biggest population and biggest and most diverse economy in the country–also has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the country–tying it with Illinois.

In July 2008, the latest figures released, California’s unemployment rate hit 7.3%–its highest level in 12 years. Other figures also confirm the worsening job market. The number of long-term unemployed, whose unemployment benefits have run out, has also jumped. And the number of workers who are forced to try to survive as their hours have been cut from full-time to part-time has increased by more than 800,000, or by one-third, in just one year.

Just as ominously, the proportion of the population in the labor force is also much lower–as many workers seeking work have simply given up.

In fact, the California labor market never really recovered from the 2001 recession. It took four years after the 2001 recession for the number of jobs to simply catch up to the level in 2000, before the recession. And during those years, more than 60% of the new jobs were in housing-related industries, including real estate, finance and residential construction–that is, they were a product of the real estate bubble, which was especially huge in much of California.

While the job growth during the bubble years helped offset the drop in jobs in other sectors during that time period, those sectors tied to real estate have now led to a new sharp drop in the number of jobs.

As the job market grows ever worse, more working people are having no choice but to look to government programs to keep their heads above water. By late 2007, the number of families seeking cash assistance through the CalWORKS Program (the latest downsized version of the old welfare program) rose for the first time in several years, despite harsher requirements meant to make it more difficult for families to get aid.

In addition, close to 100,000 more California households received food stamps in May 2008 than did one year earlier, an 11% increase. The number of children in the state’s “Healthy Families” program, which provides them some form of health coverage, also increased by 58,000 or 7.1% in one year.

Of course, even as masses of people flood into these programs, Republican and Democratic officials are busy finding ways to cut the benefits, that is, when they are not making it more and more difficult to get them in the first place–under the guise of what they call a state “budget crisis”–thus, spreading hardship and misery in the biggest, richest and supposedly most modern of all economies.

Chicago:
School Boycott for Equal Funding

Sep 8, 2008

On the first two days of school, thousands of Chicago students boycotted class and many of them traveled to a high school in a wealthy suburb to dramatize their demand for equality of school funding. The boycott was led by Rev. James Meeks, the pastor of the very large Salem Baptist church located in a black neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side.

Students went to visit the high school serving the very wealthy suburb of Winnetka. This suburb, where some of the richest capitalists live, spends $7,000 more per student than does the city of Chicago. Not surprisingly, the high school the kids visited is beautiful, with the best science labs, art centers, and sports equipment, along with well prepared and paid teachers–in short, the way all schools should be!

Compare this to Chicago, where lack of funds means overcrowded class rooms, crumbling facilities, shortages of textbooks and equipment, and a lack of counselors, social workers and school nurses. There often isn’t physical education, art or music. Not surprisingly, only 55% of Chicago students graduate from high school. Many of those who do graduate are not equipped to get jobs.

The school boycott was tied to a legal suit by the Chicago Urban League against the state of Illinois, demanding drastic changes in the way the state funds education, which depends primarily on local property taxes.

The system of local school boards financed basically from local property taxes goes back over a hundred and fifty years, when the country was made up mostly of small farmers with less variation–in the North–in income. But in our society today, with giant corporations owned by a handful of billionaires, and tens of millions of workers and the poor, the inequality in society and the resulting inequality in the schools is extreme. The average family income in Winnetka is $229,582, four times as high as in Chicago. Today, the richest school district in the state has 1.8 million dollars of assessed property for each student in its schools, while the poorest district has only $7,000.

We can’t even talk about real public school education until society spends the same amount on every pupil, as much in inner cities and rural counties as in wealthy suburbs like Winnetka–with extra spending to make up for impoverished backgrounds.

Candidates:
By Their VP’s You Will Know Them

Sep 8, 2008

Barack Obama has consistently campaigned promising to bring “change and hope and a fresh direction in Washington.” So who did he pick for his running mate? Just one of the “good ole boys” of Washington, Joe Biden–a senator for 35 years, whose very political career flies in the face of change and hope and a fresh direction. Biden supported the Iraq war from the beginning.

But John McCain was not to be outdone. McCain campaigned as a “maverick,” presenting himself as someone independent of the Republican Party and the Christian fundamentalist voting base they pander to. So who did he pick for his V.P.? Sarah Palin, a Christian fundamentalist, who stands solidly on all the reactionary positions to which the Republic Party has pandered.

The more the Democrats and Republicans speak of “change,” the more they act the same.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:
Bailing out Private Capital

Sep 8, 2008

The U.S. government is taking over the mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is potentially the biggest bailout of private capital in U.S. history.

Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee more than five TRILLION dollars in mortgages, nearly half the U.S. total. The U.S. government is now responsible for all of that. And you know what that means: all of us will be the ones to pay for any mortgages in default.

Fannie Mae was set up by the U.S. government in the Great Depression, to buy mortgages from banks. It was touted as a way to allow ordinary people to afford a home loan; but it mainly allowed the banks to lend without risk.

Fannie Mae was partially privatized in 1968, when it was making lots of money. Now that private ownership has run it into the ground, the government is taking it back again.

Back at the beginning of the mortgage crisis, one of the things the government did was to relax restrictions on Fannie and Freddie so they could buy up mortgage packages from financial companies in trouble, bailing them out. Now Fannie and Freddie are in trouble. Of course they are! The debt was bad to begin with!

The U.S. keeps trying to reassure the financial companies that everything is okay. “Don’t worry,” it said, “we’ve got it covered.” It infused over 160 billion dollars into the system last year; the market barely noticed. It bailed out big financial firms including Bear Stearns; the market paused a bit, but then continued its downward spiral.

Five weeks ago, Congress passed a law giving the government the ability to pump money into Fannie and Freddie. But investors sat on the sidelines, waiting for the government to actually start pumping money into those companies before they invested–so Fannie and Freddie’s problems got worse as their stocks continued to drop.

So now the government has taken the big plunge–taking responsibility to repay the whole five trillion owed to big investors.

Meanwhile, people are losing their homes because mortgage companies ran a scam for more profits. People are losing their jobs because companies lay them off due to machinations in the financial system–and then they lose their homes because they can’t pay.

People’s lives are being destroyed–because of the chaos of this capitalist system. This government, whose role is to defend and prop up big capital, barely noticed.

Maryland Wealth:
Where Does It Come From?

Sep 8, 2008

Residents of the state of Maryland once again are ranked the richest in the United States and overall income went up. The area around Washington D.C. boasts six of the ten wealthiest counties in the entire U.S., with three in the suburbs of Maryland and three in the suburbs of Virginia.

Yet poverty was also UP. It went from 7.8% in the state as a whole to 8.3%. And in Baltimore City, where poverty was already 19%, it went up to 20%. More than 250,000 people in Maryland had no health insurance.

This apparent confusion reflects how much money a few people make off the impoverishment of the rest of the population.

The greater Washington and Baltimore areas are home to dozens of wealthy executives, the top 100 of whose salaries averaged more than six million dollars apiece in 2007.

The chief executive and the president of Marriott Hotels, located in Maryland, together got 12 million dollars. Yet hotel workers make $12 to $14 an hour. The five top officers of Constellation Energy gained 54 million dollars last year. The rest of the people in Maryland helped pay for those salaries with a 75% increase in the price of gas and electricity. The chiefs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who got 14 million and 12 million, made it while presiding over the foreclosures of thousands of home mortgages.

These wealthy people took their money out of everyone else’s pockets.

Pages 4-5

South Africa:
Apartheid Lives

Sep 8, 2008

If you thought apartheid ended in South Africa 18 years ago, think again.

In 2005, a white South African construction boss was sentenced to life for ordering a black worker beaten and then thrown to lions. Only some bones were left of the worker.

Last month, this monster of a boss was released from prison, “on parole,” after serving only three years!

How could something like this, thought possible only in the darkest days of apartheid, happen today?

It’s because the end of apartheid in 1990 left the old power structure in South Africa in place. It’s true that a few black people were able to become bosses and politicians, but the same white wealthy class, which installed apartheid and benefitted from it for 42 years, remained in charge.

Today, black and white politicians share responsibility for keeping in place the capitalist system that gave birth to apartheid.

Legal apartheid may have been done away with. But social apartheid–with the black population in its vast majority confined to the poorer layers of the laboring population–remains.

7000 Pawns on a Murderous Chess Board

Sep 8, 2008

The Bush administration let it be known that 7000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the beginning of next year.

Even if it’s true, these 7000 are only a small part of the approximately 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq who are supported by at least 80,000 more CIA agents, private security personnel and other U.S. contractors. All those who remain will continue to impose martial law on a population that has been violently uprooted from their homes, and virtually imprisoned in ethnic and religious enclaves.

Meanwhile, as 7000 troops leave Iraq, 7000 others are being added to U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The U.S. war in the Middle East is not winding down–it is extending and widening into a regional war encompassing Afghanistan and probably Pakistan.

Afghanistan:
“Blunders” Every Day of the War

Sep 8, 2008

On August 22, coalition troops under U.S. command carried out murderous bombing in the Shindand district in Afghanistan. A Pentagon spokesman declared after its investigation, “We did not kill up to 90 civilians as has been alleged.”

A U.N. inquiry, however, “found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men. 15 other villagers were wounded or otherwise injured.... Local residents were able to confirm the number of casualties, including names, age and gender of the victims.”

In July, two bombings in the east of the country caused 64 civilian victims, of whom 47 were going to a wedding, including 39 women and children.

The government of Hamid Karzai announced that it wished “to renegotiate the terms of the international presence in Afghanistan.” This is a way of distancing himself from these “blunders” that set the population not only against the foreign armies but also against the Afghan government.

After the August 22 bombing, the inhabitants of the region threw rocks at the Afghan soldiers who came to aid them, saying, “The Afghan army is our enemy. We don’t want anything from our enemies.”

But “blunders” are inseparable from the operations of occupation troops. For them, as in all “pacification” operations, every inhabitant is a potential enemy, every village is a refuge for terrorists. And the longer the occupation lasts, the more this will become true–and the more tragic it becomes for the Afghan population.

Hanford Nuclear Reservation:
A History of Horror

Sep 8, 2008

The government has designated the B Reactor at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State as a National Historic Landmark. Senator Patty Murray, D-Wash, said, “This is a great step toward preserving the B Reactor and an important chapter of our nation’s history.”

And what a chapter, since Hanford was involved in the second biggest act of mass murder in the history of the world.

The B Reactor produced the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. By 1968, when it was permanently shut down, it had produced the radioactive material used in the majority of U.S. nuclear weapons.

Those who would preserve its history today–not as a mark of shame, but in patriotic fervor–are trying to prepare us morally for much worse wars tomorrow.

Afghanistan:
Talk versus Reality

Sep 8, 2008

Today the Bush administration pretends that U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to defend the democratic regime of Hamid Karzai and to protect the position of women against a return of the Taliban to power.

For years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, the U.S. had a much different stance toward the Taliban.

When Soviet forces retreated from the country in 1988-89, the Taliban progressively extended their hold over the south of the country, pushing aside the old tribal landlords. They finally took the capital, Kabul, in September 1996. The U.S. and its allies stood to the side, giving their OK. In the years before, they had greatly aided all the Islamist forces who had fought the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

But following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, Bush needed to make a show of force for U.S. public opinion. In the days that followed, the U.S. and its ally Britain began military preparations against Afghanistan, which was presented as the sanctuary of Al Qaeda, under the pretext of seizing Bin Laden. On October 7, U.S. jets began to bomb the country. Bin Laden may have been there, but seven years later, he’s still not caught. And the U.S. is still bombing civilians.

The Karzai regime is far from the glowing image that the imperialist politicians want to attribute to it. A report issued in November 2007 by the U.N., which was the official sponsor of the war in Afghanistan, admitted as much. With respect to the creation of the Afghan police: “Corruption and clientelism seems to affect the police in a particularly grave manner.” The judiciary system suffers from “institutionalized corruption.” And “Journalists risk imprisonment if they criticize the application of Islamic law.”

As for the condition of women, which is so often invoked to justify the coalition’s military intervention, “The U.N. estimates that at the beginning of 2007, thirty% of arrested women weren’t detained for penal reasons, but rather essentially for violations of moral order, and that another 30% were detained for adultery.” The condition of women in the territory controlled by the Karzai government is horribly oppressive.

The U.N. report concludes: “The aspiration for a durable peace ... begins to resemble an ideal whose realization seems more and more precarious.”

Ideal? The U.S. intervention, just like those that came before, have made the lives of the Afghan people intolerable.

Legalizing the “Illegal” Spying

Sep 8, 2008

The Bush Administration released new rules to legalize and broaden the spying government has always done “illegally.” The rules, in a “public comment” phase since July 31, are expected to take effect before the election.

So far, neither candidate has said a word about this reversion back to the police-state habits of the McCarthy period.

At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, public outcry against government spying led to restrictions on the kind of information the police “red squads” could keep on citizens, and what they could do with that information. The new rules effectually gut those restrictions.

Of course, the government started ignoring the restrictions almost as soon as they were passed. And since 9/11, it has used “homeland security” as a pretext to junk all the restrictions in fact, if not legally. Pacifists were reported as “terrorist threats.” Tourists taking pictures of famous landmarks–especially dark-skinned tourists!–were arrested for “suspected terrorist activities.” Denver police “infiltrated” meetings of Amnesty International; California agents spied on environmental activists. Maryland state police were recently discovered spying on opponents of the death penalty and of the Iraq war. South Carolina accused striking longshoremen of “terrorism,” and the head of Homeland Security called in leaders of the West Coast longshore union when they proposed a strike.

A Bush advisor said, “This is a continuum that started back on 9/11 ... to focus on the terrorism threat.” No! This was to focus from the start on intimidating those who wanted to be active against the Iraq war and oppose government and corporate policies.

These new rules, and the many like them already quietly implemented, are aimed at giving legal justification for muzzling an entire population. A population which in large majority hates the Iraq war, fears the growing economic crisis, and sooner or later may call the government to account for these problems.

Carrying out war after war and save-the-rich economic policies, the government seeks to spy on, harass and intimidate those who would raise a voice of protest.

An awakening population can dump those plans.

Pages 6-7

Another Law That Doesn’t Protect Us

Sep 8, 2008

Federal law supposedly protects workers who report their employer for illegal dealings. It’s the so-called “whistleblower” part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

But anyone who ever thought they could use the law has gotten a rude awakening.

Since 2002, there have been 1,273 “whistleblowers” who filed federal complaints about being penalized by their bosses after reporting shady dealings. The government has ruled in favor of exactly 17!

The corporations can sleep well. Their government is on the job!

A Window into the Crooks’ World

Sep 8, 2008

The inside workings of those secretive “private equity” firms were pulled out into the open in two recent lawsuits.

Creditors of bankrupt Powermate Corp. sued its private-equity owners, Sun Capital and York Street. The suit accuses Sun and York Street of deliberately bankrupting Powermate by paying themselves large dividends while loading the company with impossible levels of debt.

Also, the bankrupt store chain, Mervyn’s, sued its former private-equity owners, Sun Capital and Cerberus Capital. The lawsuit describes how Sun and Cerberus took on massive debt to buy Mervyn’s from Target, then stripped off valuable real estate, paid themselves special dividends, took everything they could get–forcing the company to fold.

In their world this is what’s called “unlocking value.”

Call it by its right name: robbery.

Page 8

Inglewood, CA:
Cops’ Killing Spree

Sep 8, 2008

Seven Inglewood, California cops, firing over 40 bullets, gunned down an unarmed homeless man, Eddie Felix Franco, 56. The cops also killed Franco’s dog, wounded a passing motorist and endangered countless others, having opened fire on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend at a busy downtown intersection next to a barbecue restaurant filled with patrons.

Needless to say, no one believed the cops’ desperate excuse for this carnage–that they felt threatened because Franco had what turned out to be a toy gun. Especially not–since Franco was the fifth person Inglewood cops murdered in just over a year!

The cops’ Inglewood killing spree began on May 7, 2007, when they gunned down 20-year-old Richard Tyson for the simple act of getting off his bicycle and running away from them when they wanted to talk to him about a traffic infraction. The cops later claimed that Tyson, who was unarmed, turned and charged toward them and–fearing for their life–they shot him four times–in the back!

One year later, Inglewood police fired three shots into the torso of 19-year-old Michael Byoune as he was riding with two friends to a fast-food restaurant. Byoune was dead at the scene. The driver of the car, his friend, 19-year-old Larry White, was wounded and survived. A third passenger sitting in the back seat was not hit. The cops later claimed that they were “investigating” a report of gunfire in the neighborhood and felt “threatened” by the three unarmed black men in the car.

During the July 4th weekend, Inglewood police shot and killed 23-year-old Ruben Walton Ortega in an alley as he ran away from them when they sought to question him about a loitering complaint. They later admitted that he was unarmed, but they claimed he was a reputed gang member.

Three weeks later, answering a domestic complaint in the dead of the night, Inglewood cops shot and killed Kevin Wicks, a black postal worker with close to 20 years seniority, at his own apartment door–claiming that Wicks, who lived in a high-crime neighborhood, had a gun. It turned out that the cops had the wrong apartment. But the white cop who did the killing, Brian Ragan, was already under investigation for killing Michael Byoune two months before!

That makes five killings by the Inglewood Police currently “under investigation”: Richard Tyson, May 7, 2007; Michael Byoune, May 11, 2008; Ruben Ortega, July 1; Kevin Wicks, July 21 and now Eddie Felix Franco, August 31. Considering that Inglewood has a population of only slightly more than 100,000, that is something of a brutal record–even for that violent gang, the Inglewood police.

Up until now, the authorities–local, state and federal–have only this to say about it: they are looking into it.

In other words, they are covering up the murder spree.

Detroit Mayor Resigns after Powerful Friends Desert Him

Sep 8, 2008

After months of denying any wrongdoing, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick finally copped a plea. He agreed to resign, spend four months in jail and five years on probation and pay one million dollars back to the city. This was the conclusion of a long and tortured series of events going back to a reputed 2002 party in the mayor’s mansion and the subsequent murder of a young woman who had danced at the party and then been attacked.

If Kilpatrick was able to hold on to office this long, it was only because, until recently, he had the full support of other powerful political forces. Michigan’s Attorney General Mike Cox, a Republican, ordered the State Police to call off their investigation into the party and the murder. Famously, Cox declared the party, which thousands of people in Detroit knew about, just “an urban legend.”

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm took a hands off approach, ignoring the obvious corruption in political circles. Prominent ministers like Horace Sheffield the 3rd expressed support for the mayor. Corporate executives of companies like DTE Energy, General Motors and PVS Chemicals threw their support and fundraising behind him before his re-election in 2006.

Long before his personal scandal broke, Kilpatrick had demonstrated who he served and who he dissed. He gave away the Zoo and the Art Institute, and handed over parks and recreation centers to churches. He tried to sell off Detroit’s half of the Windsor tunnel. Saying the city had no money to maintain parks, recreation centers, streets, lighting or garbage pickup, he cut all those back severely. Public works departments were slashed to the bone. One thousand fewer cops were on the street. Wages of city workers were cut. And work was farmed out to contractors who made big profits while paying barely over the minimum wage. And all of this so corporations could rob the city blind. He gave away huge tax breaks to developers and companies on every pretext.

But as evidence mounted against Kilpatrick, and a state representative called for reopening the investigation into the young woman’s murder, Republican Attorney General Cox, deeply implicated in the coverup, threatened Kilpatrick with jail time for supposedly assaulting a police officer.

With the Democrats worried whether they could carry Michigan for Obama, the scandal surrounding their most prominent mayor was too much of a liability. Democratic Governor Granholm called a hearing designed to oust him from office. And Kilpatrick’s corporate friends told him he had to go.

With no more wiggle room left, Kilpatrick accepted the best deal he could get.

If corporate bosses, politicians and the media protected Kilpatrick for as long as they did, it’s because they were protecting their own interests. When they finally called for Kilpatrick to step down, it was only because the growing scandal threatened to bring down too many others.

In their calculations, the life of a young woman, cut off too soon, counted as nothing.

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