the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 22, 2008
In a matter of days, once mighty financial companies toppled like dominoes. Lehman Brothers, the giant investment bank, and AIG, the biggest private insurer in the world, went broke. Other giants, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia Bank, teetered on the edge.
So, once again, the federal government rushed to the rescue with obscene amounts of taxpayer money. It pumped 85 billion dollars into AIG to keep it on life support and on the very next day injected a fresh 300 billion dollars into financial markets.
But stocks still plunged. So federal officials came up with a proposal for the godfather of all bailouts. They want to use taxpayer money to buy up the securities based on mortgages of foreclosed homes that U.S. financial institutions concocted. The price tag for all this is supposed to come to 700 billion dollars, according to Treasury Secretary Paulson. Others put the cost at a trillion dollars... or more. And that’s on top of the other enormous bailouts over the past year, including for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The leaders of both parties got behind the proposal right away. President Bush said, “Given the precarious state of today’s financial markets... government intervention is not only warranted, it is essential.” Top congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, concurred. At a news conference with Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke, the proposal’s architects, Senator Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, explained why. The new bailout is necessary, said Dodd, because “we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”
All those politicians and officials pretend that an enormous bailout will clean up the financial mess, save the economy from disaster and save people’s jobs, homes, savings, 401(k)’s, pensions.
No it won’t.
Giving these companies even more trillions of dollars is like handing gasoline and matches to an arsonist. Those financial institutions will greedily snap up the money in an incredible feeding frenzy in order to enrich themselves even more, through speculation and every scheme imaginable. The financial mess will get bigger, laying the basis for even worse crises in the future.
This bailout will not stop the housing crisis from getting worse. It will not stop millions more ordinary people from losing their homes... and their life savings. Nor will it stop the recession from getting much worse, with its increasing unemployment and cuts in pay and benefits. As for inflation, the cost of the bailout will make it much worse, an invisible tax that slices ordinary peoples’ standard of living every day. And at exactly the moment when working people need more social programs and other forms of government aid to fall back on, the politicians will try to cut them, in order to force the mass of working people to pay the full cost of the bailout.
No, this bailout is a disaster. It is a rip-off of monumental proportions. The thieves and con artists at the top of the financial establishment shouldn’t get one cent. They should be thrown in prison.
Working people can have only one response: we have to be protected from the crisis that the capitalists created. The trillions that are going to bail out the capitalists and their profits should be used to create jobs that pay decent wages, improve education, health care and retirement, as well as build what our society so sorely lacks–schools, hospitals, roads, mass transit, flood control systems, parks and on and on.
The Democrats and Republicans will say there is no money for this. We can’t afford it. No, there is plenty of money. And it should go to us and not the filthy rich.
Sep 22, 2008
In Haiti, the number of victims from Hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike continues to mount. Official sources state that over 600 people have died and over one million have faced some type of property damage.
Haiti is located in a region particularly subject to hurricanes and tropical storms. But why do these same climactic phenomena cause 50 or a 100 times more damage and victims in Haiti than they cause in the neighboring countries, such as Florida in the U.S. or in Cuba?
The government of Haiti is incapable of alerting the population when danger is anticipated. There’s no plan in place to allow Haitians to take refuge in areas outside of the danger. Afterwards, the poor people pile on top of each other in whatever makeshift housing they can find, more often than not in areas subject to flooding. In this underdeveloped country, there are almost no sewers or evacuation systems. The very few that exist are not maintained.
Today, the U.N. has sounded the alarm, citing a disastrous situation with great difficulties in implementing a rescue mission. But for years the U.N. military forced stayed in Haiti supposedly to stabilize it. Couldn’t it have constructed an infrastructure and put in place the equipment lacking today? Didn’t they have the means to react as soon as the first hurricane was announced? The U.S. government finally promised to send in a few helicopters to help. The same enormous dollar amounts and technological marvels the U.S. now uses to kill in Iraq or Afghanistan cannot be found to save lives in Haiti.
It is not inevitable storms that kill in Haiti. The population is victimized much more by underdevelopment than by climatic conditions.
Who is responsible? Both U.S. imperialism and French imperialism. From the time of colonialism and slavery to that of the corporate trusts today, the great powers of the world continue to drain the resources out of Haiti, leaving behind a country in extreme misery.
Sep 22, 2008
Cuba was struck by the hurricanes that recently swept through the Carribean, especially Gustav. Hurricane Gustav was the most violent hurricane in the past 50 years.
As in past hurricanes, the alarm system put in place by the Cuban state limited the number of victims. However, tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, as was much of the island’s infrastructure.
The Cuban government asked the U.S. government to lift the embargo it had imposed on Cuba for more than 40 years, in order to facilitate rescue efforts, bring in emergency food and import reconstruction materials. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave the cynical response of the Bush administration. She said that Cuba’s request was out of the question since Cuba has not yet engaged in an “irreversible process of democratic change.”
No one can deny the authoritarian nature of the Cuban regime. But such a concern is not what motivates the representatives of U.S. imperialism. Imperialism supports many dictatorial and corrupt regimes, from Latin America to Asia to Africa, responsible for numerous crimes against humanity. The real reason that the U.S. government denied Cuba’s request is that it still cannot tolerate Fidel Castro’s defiance. Ever since the overthrow of the dictator Batista by Castro 50 years ago, Cuba has refused to bow down to the demands of the U.S. government.
Condoleezza Rice is there to remind everyone of Washington’s tenacity, even when it means that thousands of Cubans must pay the consequences.
Sep 22, 2008
More than a week after Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, Texas, much of the city was still without electricity, gas, water, and sewers.
For the estimated 20,000 residents who stayed through the storm it was a public health disaster. There was little to eat as food spoiled in refrigerators, with no electricity in the Texas summer heat. With no running water, people could not flush toilets or wash their hands. Sewage systems backed up, creating foul-smelling air and a growing mosquito problem. Most had no clean water to drink. There were practically no working ambulances to respond to emergencies. Communication was difficult as systems went down. Elderly people ran low on medicines. Those who got through to 911 complaining of seizures, chest pains, or dehydration found no help. Galveston Island’s main hospital refused to accept any but the most dire emergencies.
The situation is likely to get worse. Officials told residents who evacuated before the storm not to return, other than a few who were temporarily allowed to “look and leave” to assess the damage to their homes. Officials say it could take weeks to fully restore electricity. When running water is eventually restored, there will be contamination from sewage and chemicals which flooded homes and debris.
Three years after Hurricane Katrina, Galveston looked like a giant New Orleans Superdome all over again, just more spread out. In the time since Katrina, government officials have done little.
Areas like Galveston are prone to hurricanes. Officials knew something like this was coming and did nothing to prepare for a powerful storm, except to tell people to get out! People were left to their own devices as to how to evacuate. When asked why they stayed, people said, “We had nowhere to go!”
Houston, which was spared the brunt of the storm, suffered less damage, yet is still not fully up and running. The fact that the fourth largest city in the country could be completely shut down is testimony to a system that does nothing to prepare for such emergencies.
Preparation would mean, among other things, constructing electrical lines and towers to withstand high winds, building water and sewage systems with enough capacity to handle storm drainage, and having enough people on staff to handle repairs. After Hurricane Ike, the utility companies had to borrow repair crews from 31 different states to restore power even at the slow rate they’ve managed thus far.
What happened to Galveston, like what happened to New Orleans, is a product of a system that puts profits over the well-being of the population. More than time for that system to go!
Sep 22, 2008
On Friday afternoon, September 12, 25 people were killed and 135 injured when a Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight train collided head-on near Los Angeles.
The Metrolink bosses hurried to report that the engineer had run a red light. But then they had to backtrack–only their office computers showed that! Then they said he’d been text messaging. Backtrack again–the texts could have been from any time during the day.
The bosses quickly used whatever flimsy fact they had at hand to blame the engineer, so they could duck their own responsibilities!
Railroads across the country, including the Metrolink and the Union Pacific systems, have refused since 1976 to install national “positive train control” systems which use GPS satellite tracking to automatically stop trains that run red signals. Instead, they make the lives of hundreds of passengers per train depend only on the alertness and health of one engineer. Then, they create work schedules for those engineers which guarantee continual fatigue!
The dead engineer, Robert Sanchez, worked “split shift.” He started work before 6 in the morning, had a few hours break between trains, and then worked until 9 at night. The Friday afternoon crash was his fifth day on that schedule, which he worked week after week.
After a similar Metrolink accident in 2005 that killed 3 and injured 260, the conductor said “everyone knows you don’t get much sleep” working for a railroad.
After the 2005 crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended–not for the first time!–that positive train control be installed. The railroads said it was too expensive–as they have said after every fatal crash since 1976!–and that was the end of that.
A retired senior director of the NTSB said, “I’m not surprised that once again there has been a terrible, preventable train collision. It’s extremely frustrating. They know what to do to solve these things.”
Yes, the bosses know what to do, all right–pocket all the money they can, while they blame all the accidents on the workers whom they push beyond their limits!
Sep 22, 2008
Since 1990, fatigue contributed to 10 airline accidents and 260 deaths, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
Tired pilots have been involved in hundreds more close calls. In April 2007, a Pinnacle jet ran off a runway, at the end of a 14-hour duty for the pilot. In February this year, both pilots of a Go! jet fell asleep for 18 minutes, missed their Hawaii landing and headed out to sea. The pilots had been on duty almost continuously for three days.
In April this year, a safety board member told Congress, “Little or no action has been taken.” A veteran pilot said his schedule was often “take a shower, brush your teeth, pretend you slept.”
Rules requiring pilot rest have not been updated since the 1960’s, despite many studies proving those rules are blatantly dangerous. But airlines say they are obeying the law, and besides, hiring more pilots would be too expensive.
In other words, the airlines guarantee that the next fatal accident is already in their plans.
Sep 22, 2008
The following article is translated from the September 19th issue of Lutte Ouvrière [Workers Struggle], the newspaper of the revolutionary Trotskyist group of the same name, active in France. It was written before the announcement of the monster bail-out centering on U.S. mortgage-securities.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers bank, one of the pillars of Wall Street, and the rescue of the AIG insurance company from its death throes, show that the crisis of the capitalist economy, which began with the subprime mortgage crisis and grew into a financial crisis, has entered a serious phase.
Because of its financial system, the entire capitalist economy is failing. Capitalism’s economic experts have stepped up their international meetings. Clearly they have no control over events. Their economy, whose control they monopolize and from which they are the only ones to profit, is completely escaping them. They indulge in assuring everyone that everything is under control. Or they speak like Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, who said that the current situation is a "once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type event," the worst in his career. The stock market crash of 1929, the beginning of the longest economic depression the capitalist system has known so far, casts its shadow over even those responsible for the situation.
The nervous twitches of the U.S. government reflect the panic and hesitations of the leaders of the capitalist world. Last March, the Federal Reserve provided 29 billion dollars to aid Bear Stearns, one of the leading U.S. investment banks, pushed to bankruptcy by the crisis.
A little over two weeks ago, the U.S. government announced it was nationalizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two giants specializing in real estate loans. The take-over meant that the U.S. government put up the colossal sum of two hundred billion dollars.
But then, with a 180-degree turn, it refused to come to the aid of Lehman Brothers. The next day there was a new turn, when once again it opened its treasury vaults to save AIG, one the largest insurance companies in the world, which teetered on the edge of an abyss.
With deregulation, insurance companies, like any businesses with money on hand, became completely free to devote themselves to financial operations. All of them have speculated in the infamous securitized subprime mortgages, which for several years brought in a big return before they collapsed last summer. All the banks have these rotten securities on their books, which today are worth no more than the paper they"re printed on. As a result, the balance sheet of bank after bank has plunged into the red.
This terrified all those involved in this business. Money fled. The mistrust of the banks toward one another dried up the circulation of money. Panic pushed the holders of stock in affected banks or businesses to get rid of these shares as quickly as possible. Stock prices fell. Lehman Brothers’ shares went from $60 a year ago to 20! And the stock prices of the two remaining big investment banks tumbled.
For several months since the beginning of the banks’ crisis of confidence, the heads of the central banks and economic ministers put out soothing declarations, while pouring tens of billions of Euros and U.S. dollars into saving the stakes of the speculators, refilling the money circuits among the big banks. But they didn’t succeed in reestablishing confidence.
The Fed seemed to hesitate, zigzagging day-by-day between two strategies, one as risky as the other and completely contradictory.
To let a bank like Lehman Brothers collapse means that the failed bank won’t be able to pay back debts it owes to other banks. In turn, that could risk pushing those other banks toward bankruptcy.
But when the Fed or the Treasury gives many billions of dollars to save one bank, aren’t they encouraging all the speculators, including the wildest? Why not speculate? In this giant casino game, when you win, you get the money, but when you lose, it’s the state that pays off your debts!
There is another reason which restrains the Fed from its urge to run to the aid of any threatened bank. However powerful the financial means of the Federal Reserve are, they have limits. Just the two hundred billion dollars spent to nationalize Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, that is, to compensate the speculators, represents a quarter of the Fed’s reserves.
When it costs several tens of billions of dollars just to save one bank, if the Fed used its reserves to help out all the banks lacking cash, it would quickly use up all these reserves.
The U.S. state certainly could print money or create money in the modern, computerized fashion. But this would demonstrate to everyone, both the big banks of the world and the nation-states, that the dollar is no longer worth anything, that the U.S. treasury bonds they are holding in their reserves are only pieces of paper. By trying to restore the confidence of the U.S. banks toward one another, the U.S. government may only create distrust of the dollar itself and of the entire U.S. economy.
The states of the big imperialist powers turn out to be completely incapable of restoring confidence among the big banks, even when they pour billions of dollars into the economy, that is, by making the entire population pay to save the skin of the financiers.
And what would happen if this panic extends into the entire bourgeoisie, small and big? What if all those who have money deposited in banks panicked and sought to get back their deposits? The most optimistic of the economic and political leaders of the capitalist world, while evoking the comparison with 1929, add that the financial world today has an experience and instruments to curb the crisis. For the moment, the only incontestable fact is that they haven’t prevented the crisis from breaking out!
In the nearly 80 years since the crash of 1929, crises keep reappearing, despite all those who pretend that capitalism has changed.
But it hasn’t changed. In any case, not in its fundamentals. The motor of this economy still remains the rivalry to realize the maximum private profit in a blind market. Capitalism’s fundamentals haven’t changed since Karl Marx analyzed its mechanisms and denounced not only the injustices of this economic system and the inequalities that it constantly expands, but also its irrationality and its anarchic character.
For over 30 years, the capitalist system seems to have found the remedy for what is ironically called a "crisis of overproduction." It’s an ironic expression, because the problem isn’t that we produce too much, but that purchasing power doesn’t develop at the same rhythm of growth as the capacity for production.
Capitalism’s remedy was to turn to the financial sector, which appeared more profitable than production. But all profits, including those in finance, come from production. The elevated profits of the last ten or fifteen years came in reality from an ever growing exploitation of the working class. The share of labor’s income from production decreased while capital’s share grew wildly.
Reducing the purchasing power of the working class by unemployment and by stagnation or lowering of wages, the capitalist class certainly assured itself of several years of higher profits, but it did this by weighing on consumption, that is, on the market.
The development of finance masked this reality and pushed back the due date of this crisis. But the current financial crisis has only boomeranged back into a crisis of the whole capitalist economy.
Starting as a consequence of the whole economic crisis, the financial crisis becomes in turn a cause of a widening crisis. Over the past year, by aggravating speculation, accentuating its erratic character, this financial crisis has led to completely erratic movements in the prices of raw materials, especially oil. It caused exchange rates between currencies to jump up and down, causing disruptions in international trade. It has led to credit becoming expensive and to worsening conditions for obtaining it. All of this weighs on the productive economy. Not only are banks, insurance and real estate companies going bankrupt or threatening to do so, but so are construction companies and airlines. And there is a real threat for certain auto companies–including the biggest, General Motors–and in the chemical industry.
It’s not one bank or one insurance company going bankrupt. It’s not even the financial system alone. It’s the entire capitalist economy.
For many years the capitalist class has intensified its permanent war against the working class, in order to save itself from the crisis of its economy. It made worse the conditions of life for the laboring classes. The expansion of the crisis will inevitably lead to an intensification of this war against working people. It will inevitably result in still more layoffs, lower wages, growing poverty even in the rich countries and famine in the poor countries.
The only real question for the working class doesn’t revolve around calculations about the consequences of the aggravation of the current crisis.
The immediate question for the working class and more generally for the laboring classes is how to defend themselves against "the two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices," to use Trotsky’s expression.
But, beyond that, the question of the future is posed. In the face of growing crisis, we already hear some opinion makers take on not capitalism and its functioning, but "neo-liberalism," "deregulation" and "globalization," proposing to return to more state ownership, accompanied by more protectionism. But state intervention, which at this moment the very conservative Bush government is engaged in, turns out to be only another way to make the burden of saving capitalism fall on the workers. All the reformist, social democratic and anti-globalization currents can be heard in this chorus of supposed solutions. All these people are involved in theorizing and putting forth as an alternate program what in fact Bush is already practicing: offering a state crutch to save failing private capitalism.
The workers have no other worthwhile program when faced with the crisis of the capitalist economy than a policy aimed at destroying this economic system, that is, to accomplish the social revolution. Is this utopian? Certainly not as much as believing, while remaining in the framework of capitalism, that it’s possible to avoid catastrophe!
Sep 22, 2008
Constellation Energy Group (CEG), owner of Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (BGE), recently announced it was being bought for about five billion dollars by MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a company with operations in ten states and three other countries. There could be other bids. But whatever bid is finally accepted, the deal is expected to be closed within nine months.
MidAmerican is proposing to buy CEG for less than half of what all its stock was worth just a week earlier on the New York stock exchange! Its stock took a nose dive when the credit crunch made it impossible for CEG to borrow the money it needed to pay off its speculative bets in the energy markets. Speculation combined with the credit crunch brought on its undoing just as it did at AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
CEG became the largest energy trading outfit in the U.S. by using the flow of money from customers at its BGE subsidiary to finance its speculation on the energy markets. This flow increased dramatically during the last two years when BGE imposed a 75% rate hike in electricity on its residential customers.
It’s obvious that none of these rate hikes produced more efficient power generation and distribution. Higher rates just went into the speculation that has now brought down all of Wall Street.
Sep 22, 2008
The Pentagon announced last week that they are postponing the competition between Boeing and Northrop Grumman for the next Air Force tanker, leaving it to the new administration and Congress to decide next year.
In a nutshell, this is what the next election is about: all those fat contracts and guaranteed profits that are at stake. This is the real competition between the Republican and Democratic Parties.
Sep 22, 2008
After months of a worsening economic crisis, John McCain and Barack Obama have finally taken notice.
John McCain has suddenly morphed from a staunch defender of deregulation into a populist, going from “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” to loudly denouncing the “greed” and “corruption” of Wall Street–while going along with all plans to hand billions of dollars to those same greedy, corrupt speculators.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, has seen fit to lecture us like a schoolteacher on the crisis, regulations and bailouts–without saying anything of substance. He talks about the “failed philosophy” of Bush and McCain, while doing nothing to fundamentally challenge that “philosophy.”
And, of course, both Obama and McCain blame the other guy–and the other guy’s party–for the mess the economy is now in. McCain even blames his own party!
The candidates’ tones and rhetoric might be different–but the proposals they make are much the same.
Both McCain and Obama now talk about regulation–more or “better” regulation of the financial industry. This is kind of like going to a den of thieves and asking one thief to “regulate” the rest of them.
McCain and Obama support the recent slew of government bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, and they both support an even bigger bailout of the banks that hold worthless mortgage paper. They both say that such bailouts are “necessary” to keep the entire system from collapsing.
Not true–it’s not necessary. First, the money they’re pouring in WON’T keep the system from collapsing. At best, it only encourages more speculation, leading to an even bigger collapse. And second, there are other ways to use that money that would address the real economic problems.
By their own lowball estimates, the government has already committed one trillion dollars to the bailouts; most experts put that amount at two trillion dollars or more–and much more might be on the way. Effectively, the government plans to reach in and pull ten thousand dollars from the pocket of every adult in the country, and hand the money over to the failing banks and insurance companies. That’s just for starters.
Why not give that same trillion dollars to create jobs, to rescue homeowners caught up in this fraudulent mortgage squeeze?
If either McCain or Obama had the interests of ordinary working people in mind at all, they would be proposing such a thing. And they would propose that such a bailout of ordinary people be paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. But they don’t–neither one of them. Instead, both support handing over several hundred billion more dollars to the banks and Wall Street traders–the very criminals who made the mess.
And then they dare to ask us for our vote!
Sep 22, 2008
This is the year the Democrats should not only walk into the White House, but gain an enormous majority in Congress.
The Bush administration has presided over one disaster after another, starting with the bloody quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan and now even Pakistan. The economy is bad, starting with huge job cuts. Prices on necessities are skyrocketing. The housing crisis continues to get worse, with two million foreclosures predicted for 2008.
To top it off, the Wall Street meltdown is threatening working people’s savings and threatening to morph into a major depression. Meanwhile, all Bush does is push stupendously costly bailouts–paid for by taxpayers.
The polls show the population is very angry and blames the Republican for this incredible mess. So why don’t those same polls show the Democrats benefitting from this anger?
Of course, polls are only polls, and elections can produce much different results, above all with the current volatile situation in the country.
Nonetheless, today, the Republican McCain and the Democrat Obama are nearly tied in the overall popular opinion.
Do these polls show an unwillingness of whites to vote for a black candidate?
It’s obvious the country is racist, and that this will have an impact on the election. But that doesn’t nearly begin to explain the situation–first of all because many white working class voters, tinged with racism, were ready in the past to give their votes to black candidates who spoke to their problems and their concerns. For example, when Jesse Jackson used a populist language in addressing them, he gained a lot of white votes, especially from the white working class.
The fact is that Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, has systematically avoided touching the real problems facing the working class. Today McCain is using a more populist language and presents himself as the more radical candidate–and that’s absurd. He’s neither radical, nor a populist.
Obama spent weeks not talking about the problems of the economy, not talking about jobs, not talking about price increases, not talking about medical care, etc. At least not talking in a fashion that lets people recognize their problems in what he says.
Even some astute Democratic politicians recognize the problem. Willie Brown, for example, a former Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly, and then mayor of San Francisco, wrote after the Republican convention, “The Democrats are in trouble.... Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don’t want to be seen as defending the status quo.” In describing Palin’s speech to the Republican convention, Brown said, “She didn’t have to prove she was ‘of the people.’ She really is the people.”
It should be obvious that Sarah Palin stands for some of the most reactionary ideas in the world, but the response of many liberals to her candidacy helps to obscure that. Instead of criticizing her for her politics, they criticize her for her “style,” for buying “do-dads at WalMart” as Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times; some criticize her for running for office while raising children, etc. Those personal attacks only drive more working class women to identify with her.
But the Democrats can’t criticize her for her politics: the Democrats just put in a plank, for the first time, advising women not to have abortions–as though women make such decisions in a light-minded way. The Democrats have also gone out of their way to court reactionary religious groups.
Since winning the primaries in June, Obama has gone out of his way to advocate positions that are openly reactionary, for example, supporting the extension of spying on the population; he has shifted from emphasizing his supposed opposition to the war in Iraq, to calling for an extension of Middle Eastern wars. He went so far as to denigrate black men in a speech on Father’s Day, accusing them of irresponsibility in raising their children, while ignoring how social and economic attacks impact the black family. Thus, Obama’s speech did nothing but reinforce racist attitudes existing in the white population.
Nonetheless, there is vast support in the black population for his candidacy, which will translate into a high vote for him. Of course. His election, like his candidacy, stands as a symbol of barriers falling for the black population.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t distrust among black workers toward him, just as there is among white workers.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the polls is the high level of distrust shown toward both candidates, McCain and Obama. With good reason. Neither candidate offers an answer to the disastrous situation confronting the population, and many workers know that.