the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 12, 2009
The Obama administration says its stimulus plan is working and the economy is recovering. According to Vice President Joe Biden, “we’ve created... we think over a million jobs.”
A million jobs? Even if that were true, the government admits that four-and-a-half million people lost their jobs this year. And that comes on top of the three million people who lost their jobs in 2008.
Moreover, in September, 53,000 government jobs were cut, as well. No, the government isn’t creating jobs, as Biden boasts, it is destroying them.
Sure, the Obama administration provided money for some new construction projects and “green job” programs. But that money went straight to private contractors, middle men, who keep most of it for themselves. Only corporate profits have been stimulated.
The other government bailout programs are even worse.
Obama continued Bush’s program to prop up the banks and big financial companies that triggered the economic crisis with their mad speculative binges. Following in Bush’s footsteps, Obama handed over trillions of government dollars that these companies used to pick up where they left off and rake in even more money through speculation and predatory lending.
The companies that finance housing have already gotten over a trillion dollars in direct aid from both the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve–according to recent Senate testimony by Edward J. DeMarco, the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
The government handed the auto giants, GM and Chrysler, 70 billion dollars in taxpayer money. With its “cash for clunkers” deal, the government allowed the auto companies to clear their inventory without resorting to price cuts.
The government is making sure that other corporate sectors get higher profits as well. The new 634-billion-dollar defense budget has plenty of big fat profits for the defense contractors. The new health care reform working its way through Congress aims at forcing an estimated 30 million more people to buy an expensive insurance policy that will not provide much actual health care–fake insurance–but will foster even higher profits for big business.
No, the Obama administration is stimulating profits, not jobs.
If there is a justification for government, it is to ensure that society meets the needs of the population. And when the capitalists, a tiny minority, create chaos and disaster in their drive for profits, government–if it were true to its mandate–should set it right and call the capitalists to account.
We live in a society in which bridges collapse, dams break, roads crumble, raw sewage flows into our harbors and rivers, school roofs leak, and hospitals are so unsanitary and understaffed they transmit infections that kill nearly 100,000 people a year.
For just a small fraction of the money the government is now handing over to big business, all the unemployed could be put to work producing and building things that are absolutely vital for the well-being of the population and society as a whole.
Instead of doing that, the government handed 750 billion dollars over to the banks, a trillion more to buy up toxic speculative securities, 640 billion dollars to the military and military contractors, countless billions toward construction company profits, and on and on.
Don’t come back telling us, Mister Biden, that you created a million jobs. If you had really done that, you wouldn’t have to keep saying it. People could see it with their own eyes.
Instead, what people do see is that you and your government have taken our tax dollars and given it to big business.
Oct 12, 2009
On September 24th in Chicago, honor student Derrion Albert, 16, was beaten to death by two youths seven blocks from his school. After a cell phone video of the murder was put on the internet, there was an outpouring of sadness and anger. This comes after 400 Chicago students have been shot in the last year, many on their way to or from school.
Mayor Daley and the Chicago Public Schools responded to the outrage in the population by pretending they are going to do something about the violence. They announced they are instituting a program to supposedly protect 10,000 students–students that statistics show have a high risk of being shot.
Obviously this is a token gesture, designed to make it look like the officials are actually doing something. Never mind that of the 410,000 students in the Chicago Public Schools, 85% are growing up in poverty with huge levels of unemployment. Never mind all of the social and economic conditions that cause the demoralization behind the terrible violence.
Also making a public appearance after the murder was none other than Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, and Eric Holder, the Attorney General. Duncan had been in charge of the Chicago Public Schools, and President Obama cited the schools’ supposed success when he appointed Duncan to his cabinet. Under Duncan, the number of charter schools was greatly increased. This funneled money for education to private companies for their own profit. A few elite magnet public schools were built up, while the rest of the public schools remained among the worst in the country.
Of course, none of these officials actually mentioned the need for more money and resources for the schools. Further, there was no talk of providing a massive number of new, decent paying jobs. No, not at all.
Oct 12, 2009
A new report from the California Budget Project shows that 5.3 million Californians had incomes below the federal poverty level in 2008. In 2007, the number was 4.6 million. Over 20% of children in the state are living with families that are below the poverty line.
And politicians say that the economy is improving!
Oct 12, 2009
It turns out that only 39 million dollars–instead of 130 million–is going to California’s community colleges from the stimulus plan.
Either way, it’s not nearly enough. The state has cut 520 million dollars from this year’s funding for the colleges and already cut an additional 320 million dollars from next year’s community college budget.
All this comes at a time when enrollment in the state community colleges has increased to 2.9 million, an all-time high. This is not a surprise, since the state’s four year colleges have announced steep tuition increases, reducing enrollment, and tens of thousands of laid off workers are trying to go back to school. Now these students and workers are facing fewer course offerings and larger class sizes in community colleges–and higher fees as well.
The stimulus bill was presented as a grand rescue plan for workers hit hard by endless layoffs. The media made the pitch, and politicians used the stimulus plan like a fig leaf to cover their own shameful cuts in public services.
As workers in California and other states have found out once again, most of that talk was hot air.
Oct 12, 2009
President Obama said that he, unlike Bush, would keep company lobbyists out of high government positions.
Maybe he thinks the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is a low position?
Obama nominated Anne Ferro to head this trucking-safety agency. For the past six years Anne Ferro has been the president of the Maryland chapter of the American Trucking Association. She pushed the trucking companies’ program of lengthening the hours per day that companies can force drivers to stay on the road.
A dramatic example of driver fatigue was a crash on an Oklahoma turnpike last June. A semi plowed into a line of stopped cars. Ten people were killed. The semi driver, 76-year-old Donald Creed, did not see the cars. He did not brake. He had worked 10 hours straight, delivering groceries in the June Oklahoma heat.
Five months before this, Anne Ferro had written a letter to the Baltimore Sun, defending the Bush Administration’s weakening of driver-fatigue regulations. Now, she is nominated to be in charge of trucking safety regulations!
One more example of how government is there to make sure business gets its way. Safety be damned.
Oct 12, 2009
Around 50,000 people lined up at Cobo Hall to pick up applications for $3,000 in federal stimulus money from the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department. So many people showed up that the double line of people snaked around inside Cobo Hall and then around the block all the way down to the river.
This came one day after 25,000 people had snapped up applications in just three hours at six local neighborhood city halls. After the huge response on the first day, city officials announced they would give out just 5,000 more applications and funneled all the remaining applicants to a single downtown location.
If someone had wanted to produce chaos, they couldn’t have done a better job of organizing it!
They staffed the facilities with volunteers rather than paid professionals. They kept the doors to the hall closed until ten in the morning, despite the fact that people had been lined up outside since midnight on a cold night, with winds of 50 miles an hour.
What was the response of the media to this disastrous situation? To blame the victims! They focused on the few fights that occurred and the scam artists that are always around waiting for a situation like this. The ministers and politicians of both parties showed up all over the local and national television news, bewailing the chaos created by the population.
How dare the scum who created this situation blame the people THEY put in these circumstances at Cobo Hall?
Detroit is a tragedy attacking its people. The official unemployment rate for Detroit is around 29%. In fact, it’s much higher. Easily half the population has practically no income, and the city offers a tiny amount of money, $3,000, just enough for people to get their heads above water for a minute, to just 3,400 people. In other words, the 80,000 people who applied have less than a 1 in 20 chance of actually receiving anything.
This was the final insult in a city that has been ripped to shreds by the banks, real estate developers, insurance companies, and mortgage companies, which have decimated large blocs of formerly working class neighborhoods.
Detroit and its people have been ripped to shreds by the auto industry, which had been moving jobs out of the city, long before the current crisis broke out.
The population has been bled dry by the local politicians. The new mayor, Dave Bing, comes in proposing to help private companies strip the city of everything that was still left over after the previous mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was done. Bing is currently planning to privatize the city’s payroll department and City Airport. What he proposes is exactly the opposite of what is needed under the conditions of this economic crisis. It’s a plan designed to get rid of good paying jobs, by hiring companies that won’t pay as much, and mostly to people who do not live in the city.
The previous mayor, Kilpatrick, closed down the city’s rec centers, sold off city parks, and gave huge tax breaks to the corporations. While he was the House Democratic Leader in the State Legislature, Kilpatrick engineered the takeover of the city schools, along with the Republican Governor John Engler. The state opened the door to private investors and other charlatans, beginning the process of transforming public schools into “charter schools.”
The people who stood outside Cobo Hall on a cold, windy night hoped for some small shot at some economic assistance. If they had rushed into City Hall, taking it over, they would have been more than justified!
Oct 12, 2009
A scandal is brewing in Chicago: apparently aldermen used their influence to get friends and families into the city’s nine selective enrollment schools. Okay, this is disgusting, but it’s not surprising–this is the city Mayor Daley and Rod Blagojevich call home.
The real problem is how few places there are in these schools. Chicago’s top selective enrollment schools are the best in Illinois. And they are free to Chicago residents–but only a very tiny number of residents get in: At two of the schools, fewer than 3% of applicants get in.
What makes these schools so desirable? For one, they have enough teachers for their students. Class sizes at these schools are around 25 to 28 students per class, while at neighborhood high schools 30 or more students are in most classrooms.
Schools like Northside, Jones College Prep, and Lindblom Math and Science Academy have undergone renovations costing tens of millions of dollars in the past decade. Meanwhile, at neighborhood schools like Farragut Career Academy, students have to deal with leaky roofs and atrocious bathroom plumbing.
Teachers at selective enrollment schools get new computers every few years, up-to-date textbooks, and can make as many copies as they need. Teachers at Bowen, a neighborhood high school on the South Side, are limited to 1,000 copies a semester. For a teacher with 135 students, that’s eight copies each–or one page every two weeks.
Lindblom has after school robotics and biotechnology classes for students. At Farragut, the school won’t even pay for the buses to take sports teams to their matches.
With all these advantages, the teachers tend to stay at these schools–and leave the neighborhood schools. So the students learn more, and have a better chance at going to college.
Every school should have what these schools have–all our children deserve a decent education. But that would require diverting money from tax breaks for profit-making corporations into the schools.
Oct 12, 2009
Over the last year, almost 100 banks have gone bankrupt and have been taken over by the FDIC. To finance these takeovers, the FDIC has burned through all 50 billion dollars in its fund, and is now considered to be broke. Yet hundreds more banks are in danger of going bankrupt over the next year.
The FDIC is supposed to assure that the money of depositors is insured and safe. It is supposed to be funded by insurance premiums that the banks themselves pay on those deposits.
But the banks have kept their premiums into the fund at a minimum. In fact, for 10 years, between 1996 to 2006, the banks didn’t pay any premiums into the FDIC at all–even after a 120 billion dollar taxpayer-funded bailout of the savings and loan industry five years earlier.
The money the banks did not put into FDIC premiums went to fatten their own profits.
Now that a new and much bigger crisis has struck, the bankers are once again getting ready to stick taxpayers with the bill for another gargantuan bailout.
Oct 12, 2009
The Nobel Peace Prize was funded by Alfred Nobel from the family fortune made on explosives used in wars. War was not only profitable for the Nobel business; war was also the basis for the prizes given to famous people involved in “peace” after innumerable wars.
In 1906, then-president Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt had made his reputation during the so-called “Spanish-American War” in 1899, when he led troops into Cuba.
The next U.S. president winning a “Nobel for peace” was Woodrow Wilson. He was re-elected in 1916 with his promise to keep the U.S. out of World War I, already wreaking horrendous devastation in Europe. Three months after his inauguration, he led the U.S. into war, expanding it greatly.
In 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (for both the Nixon and Ford administrations) won a Nobel Peace prize, supposedly for negotiating a cease-fire in the U.S.-Viet Nam war. In fact, Kissinger had been one of those behind the hideous policies that helped destroy Viet Nam.
Why don’t they just call it the Nobel War Prize?
Oct 12, 2009
On Friday, October 9, President Obama awakened to the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Later that day, he met with his National Security Council–his war cabinet. The generals and ambassadors discussed the next steps in the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan, including escalating the war with more troops. Two days earlier, they had discussed the ongoing extension of the war into Pakistan. And then, of course, they are also dealing with the ongoing war in Iraq–not to speak of other smaller wars, like in Colombia.
Obama, the peace prize winner, heads a war machine that is perhaps the biggest in history. The U.S. spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. The U.S. has over a thousand military bases spread out over most of the world. Its planes patrol the skies. Its thousands of missiles are aimed at countless cities, often armed with nuclear weapons.
A spokesman for the Nobel Prize committee explained that the prize represents hope for the future.
If Obama, who is running the show, is eligible for the peace prize, who is getting the war prize?
Oct 12, 2009
Two different kinds of leaks regarding Afghanistan have been flowing out of the Obama administration.
On the one hand, a report by General Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, was leaked in which he urged President Obama to increase troop levels by anywhere from 40,000 to 60,000 troops or MORE. In other words, that leak sends out the message that the war is about to get a lot bigger.
On the other hand, other members of the administration have leaked discussions saying, maybe they can work with Iran to control Afghanistan; or, maybe they can work with the Taliban and only focus on going after al-Qaeda. In other words, they send out the message that the war could get a lot smaller.
And in the middle of it, Obama is being cautious about what he says he will do. He said that he will not make his decision until he has “absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.”
Are they confused? Of course.
But it is because the U.S. is caught in a difficult situation. It’s caught in a war it can’t win. It is also a war that is very difficult to get out of–without appearing weak and risking losing some power in the region. This is a tough spot for U.S. imperialism to be in–as they found out to their bitter regret in Vietnam!
The more the U.S. intervenes, the more unstable Afghanistan grows; and now the instability is spreading into Pakistan. The U.S. already discovered when they sent more troops earlier this year that it spread opposition and the situation in the region got MORE explosive.
So, while they work to figure out a way forward for U.S. imperialism, they’re floating two trial balloons to try to prepare us to accept either direction.
Either way, though, the population of Afghanistan is in for an even bigger disaster than the one they’ve faced so far. Whether the U.S. goes in with greater force of arms or hands the country back to the Taliban, the people of Afghanistan are the ones who will continue to pay the biggest price.
Oct 12, 2009
With the U.S. news media focusing increasingly on the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the war in Iraq has practically disappeared from view. But the Iraq war is far from over.
A few U.S. troops are leaving now with tens of thousands scheduled to leave next year. But by even the U.S.’s most optimistic projections, by the end of 2011, 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq. These troops are not supposed to be patrolling or engaging in combat. They are only supposed to be “advisors”–just like what U.S. troops in Viet Nam were called before the U.S. government was ready to admit that U.S. forces were fighting a war.
The U.S. is reducing its forces in a country it has largely destroyed. A big part of the Iraqi population is still dispersed, living as refugees. Most have little or no clean water, nor electricity or functioning sewers.
To keep the population under control, the U.S. has adopted a divide and conquer strategy. It has purposely played upon the tensions between different leaders and different parts of the population that fed into a civil war and ethnic cleansing. This civil war continues and the situation remains explosive.
To impose order, as the U.S. withdraws some of its troops, it has been trying to build up the Iraqi armed forces. It is also continuing to maintain a force of military contract personnel that is almost equal in size to the number of U.S. soldiers in the country. And a larger proportion of the contractors are now performing armed security and combat duties rather than non-combat jobs like constructing buildings, doing laundry or preparing food that they did previously. The U.S. is also converting some of its private military contractors to civilian employees of the U.S. State Department. As such, they are no longer counted as military contractors, even though they are performing the same duties.
So as more and more U.S. combat troops are withdrawn from Iraq, it still maintains a huge armed force that continues killing Iraqis. The only difference is that the people doing the killing are less likely to be U.S. soldiers and more likely to be private U.S. contractors or Iraqi troops armed and trained by the U.S.
Either way, the Iraqi people are still being brutalized and murdered in a bloody war, and it is still the U.S. that is behind much of the violence and killing.
Oct 12, 2009
The following article is translated from the October 9th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group of that name active in France.
After the Pittsburgh summit, the imperialist leaders publicly expressed satisfaction with their handling of the economic crisis. But behind their public facade, they demonstrated real concern. The finance ministers and treasury secretaries of these countries, meeting with the leaders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Istanbul on October 3rd, raised the possibility that the crisis in the financial and banking sectors could spread to a financial crisis inside the governments themselves.
One indication of the problem has been the increasing fluctuations in the exchange rates between the various national currencies. But the officials had no proposals for how to deal with this problem. Government ministers clearly don’t want to interfere with how the big international banks make money.
The banks have been speculating on the different currencies, as well as on differences in interest rates in various countries. They have been buying and selling huge sums of money in one currency and then another. These trades increase or reduce the demand for one currency or another, thus pushing up or down the currencies’ exchange rates. These big increases and decreases in exchange rates are potentially dangerous and destabilizing. And often the big banks are doing it with funds that governments had given them in various bailouts, although the different treasury officials say nothing about this.
The different governments do not have an international agreement to stop this speculation. Each government uses the variations in its currency to support its own capitalists in their competition on the world market. For example, today the dollar is low in relation to the Euro, which makes U.S. exports cheaper on the world market and European exports more expensive. This harms the big French or other European industrial companies. So the French finance minister has been protesting against the drop in the dollar. Obviously, she was not protesting some months ago when the higher rate of the dollar favored the exports of Airbus, Areva and other French products over U.S. exports.
These big fluctuations in currency exchange rates are nothing new. But the means the imperialist governments have used to contain the world economic crisis–by bailing out big financial companies with taxpayer money–could set in motion worse crises in the future, starting with a monetary crisis. The International Monetary Fund, in its report for the conference in Istanbul, warned of the “transfer of private sector risks to the public sector.”
So far the wealthier governments have taken over 3.4 trillion dollars of bad debt held by the banks. The IMF estimates that these governments will spend an additional three trillion to try to buy up the rest of the bad debts, running enormous deficits.
As a result, the people of the entire world pay the cost of these bailouts. But, of course, this is of no concern to the wealthy. The second consequence does concern them. For there is a real possibility that a loss of confidence among the banks, part of the crisis unleashed a year ago, could be reproduced, but this time on a much bigger scale, as a financial crisis of the governments themselves. By monkeying around with the amount of money in circulation, the great imperialist powers risk that their own money could be considered worthless scraps of paper–just like a year ago when all those financial instruments and securities held by the banks and financial companies turned suddenly into “toxic debt” that nobody wanted.
For the moment, the IMF only speaks about the risk of a monetary crisis. But the bankruptcy of a government of a wealthy country is not impossible. It has happened in the past as a result of enormous public deficits. Finally, the entire economic system is so unstable and so absurd that a panic over the credit- worthiness of a government can cause panic in the world’s stock exchanges at any moment.
In no way have the economic policies of the big imperialist governments over the past year reduced the crisis. Instead these policies might have created conditions that could set off a still more catastrophic crisis.
Oct 12, 2009
On October 9, the UAW International was reported to have a deal at the top with Ford Motor Company. They are coming back with the demand that workers agree to more cuts, in the endless round of concessions.
A few days before, a Detroit Free Press business columnist wrote to warn investors of how to spot "red flags’ of fraud. Ford workers may want to bear these signs of fraud in mind:
Workers will recognize these signs from previous frauds they were sold!
The state of Michigan asked the various state worker unions for concessions. The unions’ bargaining committees said: "No!"
The state had wanted to permanently eliminate longevity pay, annual bonuses based on seniority. The state wanted to defer the October 1st raise of 1% until September 2010. The state wanted to freeze step increases for one year. It wanted to initiate a two-tier health insurance plan. (New hires need the same healthcare as everyone else!)
So what will the state come up with next?
Back in 2003, the state asked workers to give up huge concessions. State employees mobilized. Calls were made. Letters were written. Petitions were signed. Over 500 people demonstrated at Cadillac Place. Over 4,000 demonstrated in Lansing from all six unions. After all this, the state backed off their worst demands. There was a no-layoff pledge.
Workers mobilizing in 2003 did more than many realized. We can draw on that experience when the next round of attacks comes.
Politicians still have not resolved the state budget, even though the new fiscal year has started.
There is one easy way to resolve budget problems–quit giving out tax breaks to big, rich corporations. This, by itself, would resolve the state’s budget mess.
Inquiring minds ask: How much campaign money is "donated" to politicians by the very same corporations that get all these tax breaks?
Workers think of "Nightmare on Elm Street" and the slasher "Freddy Krueger" when we look at the horrible budget cuts Lansing plans on making. School children, the poor and public employees are asked to give up. What have the politicians given up? Gee, they never quite get around to slashing themselves, do they?
The social security disability backlog in Michigan is huge because of new applications. Even more applications are expected next year!
Has the state hired more workers to deal with this? No!
Just think of how much federal money could be flowing to Michigan communities if disabled people got their social security money quicker? Spending money to hire more DDS workers would speed up the flow of money to a state in crisis. It’s a no brainer.
The State Police had been paying one dollar a year for rent at their current building. (The building is owned by Michigan State University, and the school is willing to continue this $1 per year relationship.)
But the state, despite the "budget crisis," found the money for a brand new building with a total cost of roughly 71 million dollars.
The state just cut its own cash flow–again–because of new corporate tax breaks. The state just approved 20.6 million dollars over 10 years in tax breaks to Hummer.
Then the state announced two "refundable tax credits’ of over 125 million dollars over a few years to two "renewable energy companies’ at the old Wixom Ford Plant. According to the October 7th Detroit News, "Refundable tax credits provide cash refunds to companies .... Both companies also are eligible for more state tax breaks."
The state keeps saying they are broke, but in our own households, we would not squander money like they do.
Oct 12, 2009
Ever since GM and Chrysler exacted huge concessions from their workforces earlier this year, Ford Motor Co. executives have been chomping at the bit to get the same concessions from Ford workers. But they had a problem–it seemed Ford workers weren’t eager to give in. So the company executives delayed. And now they seem poised to mount the attack.
UAW International leaders have called local union leaders to come to Detroit, saying that Ford is now ready to give something in return for some contract "changes."
B.S. There’s a promise of a bonus–MAYBE, for MAYBE a few workers, at MAYBE a few plants. MAYBE. And then there’s the promise that every plant would have a "product" this year. But Ford workers know well what such "promises’ amounted to in the past: NOTHING.
The real deal is not this fake promise–it’s the concessions being pushed behind them.
The most recent SPARK newsletter that came out at the Ford Rouge Truck plant just before the deal was announced addressed some of the issues behind any concessions. We"re reprinting this newsletter below.
There were no surprises when it came to going to hear VP Joe Hinrich’s speech. We all knew what the point of it was: "Blah, blah, blah, and by the way, we want more concessions from you."
Does the company think they would get a different response if they brought one of their high-rollers in? We have already made it clear we"re saying NO concessions.
What part of "No" don’t they understand?
What did it cost the company, just to stop the line for Hinrich’s talk on Sept. 24th? Well, if you figure 60 trucks per hour at roughly $25,000, that’s 1.5 million dollars of lost production just at our plant alone. And they did this at almost every Ford plant.
If they can afford to stop production for one hour in all the plants, on all the shifts, they can certainly afford to give us back our break time.
Did you count how many times the man used the word, "We" as in "We are in this together."
Well, Joe, if "We" are in this together, WE wouldn’t mind sharing in those millions in salary, bonuses and other perks you enjoy.
Funny they forgot to show those statistics.
Alan Mulally was escorted through the DTP Final on Monday. Let’s see, at his pay rate, he probably made about $6500 for his 30 minutes of shaking hands and smiling for the cameras.
When UAW President Ron Gettelfinger spoke at a Kiwanis Club meeting in Plymouth, he was asked about the discussions the UAW was having with the company on contract modifications. He was quoted in the September 24th Detroit Free Press as saying, "I don’t want Ford to be disadvantaged."
What about Ford workers being disadvantaged?!
Oct 12, 2009
When Michael Moore drives an armored car up to AIG headquarters in his new film–Capitalism: A Love Story–the moment sticks with you. He asks AIG to give back the hundreds of billions of federal bailout money. We laugh, because we know they never will. Besides, all that money wouldn’t fit into that dinky armored truck!
Moore’s film shines light on the last two years of financial meltdown.
He shows economic sharks with no awareness of their ludicrousness.
A damning internal memo from banking giant Citigroup describes how companies take out secret life insurance policies on workers, setting themselves up to profit from working employees to death.
On the other hand, he shows ordinary people who are ground up by events but refuse to suffer in silence. They share their stories.
Moore shows people fighting back. He filmed some of the December 2008 workers’ factory occupation at Republic Windows in Chicago.
He shows neighbors organizing in south Florida to put an evicted family back into their own home.
Moore gives insight into his own political views. He shows footage from his childhood. He says he came to politics wanting to be an “activist priest” like Daniel Berrigan who protested the Viet Nam war.
To him, the problem is not as much capitalism, but simply the losses of the recent decades. He holds up the period after World War II as a kind of golden age for workers, using the example of his father, who worked on the line for GM at Flint. He says that in the 1950s, “A lot of people got rich–and they had to pay a top tax rate of 90%.”
The film illustrates how the policy of “partnership with the corporations” has devastated workers’ standard of living.
Some say Michael Moore doesn’t offer any solutions in the film. He does. Moore recommends: laboring at a worker-owned company, voting for progressive Democrats or waiting on Obama.
But the way workers gained a better standard of living in the past was not by depending either upon politicians or on enlightened corporate schemes. They gained by engaging in wide social struggles. Moore shows footage of the enormous Flint sitdown of 1936, when workers occupied the factories. But workers throughout the Midwest followed after Flint. This wider struggle rocked capitalist society. The capitalists had to improve wages, benefits and conditions. The great flaw of the film is that this wider struggle is not mentioned.
But what the film does do is raise a lot of the problems and issues confronting us all.
Oct 12, 2009
The following leaflet was published by Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two Caribbean islands that are overseas departments of France.
Ghislaine Joachim-Arnaud, the secretary-general of the General Confederation of Labor of Martinique (CGTM) and a leader of Combat Ouvrier, received a summons to appear at a police station on September 16. She was summoned to explain why she should not be prosecuted for calling Martinique’s capitalists “thieving profiteers.”
Really, that was all. So what should we make of this?
In February and March, 2009 a successful general strike protested the high cost of living, demanding a wage increase and a lowering of the price of necessities, such as rent, water and electricity. Many thousands joined the strike–workers, the unemployed, the retired, housewives and youth who responded to these demands. They demonstrated in the streets of Fort de France for 38 days, demanding real price reductions and real wage and pension increases.
The population has endured shameless exploitation by a handful of the rich in Martinique, notably the békés (descendants of former slave owners), who own a large part of the island’s economy.
The February and March demonstrations were an expression of anger against these extremely wealthy men and against the French State. Martiniquans were defending their dignity. They demanded that workers not be used as milk cows, ripped off by a handful of capitalist profiteers of every stripe. These capitalists can increase the price of necessities to an exorbitant level, due to their hold over the economy. They can and do demand exorbitant rents. The result is that these gentlemen, with the complicity of the French state and the politicians, guarantee themselves profit margins that are two or three times higher than those in France.
What words can describe these men? The wave of tens of thousands of people, mostly from poor neighborhoods, who demonstrated and denounced these injustices, chanted: “Martinique is ours, Martinique isn’t theirs, a band of thieving profiteers who we’re going to kick out.”
In this context, our comrade Ghislaine Joachim-Arnaud reflected the sentiment and the discontent of the population in her radio speech. So, in a way, when this colonial form of justice summoned her, they were really summoning the thousands of people who dared speak up, calling these exploiters “thieving profiteers.”
These exploiters who have the government and its justice system at their service are right to fear that one day the angry workers will “put them out of power.” So they want to take revenge against the spokeswoman of the workers, displaying their aggression against all whom they exploit.
When the justice system hears Joachim-Arnaud on September 16th, they will be hearing the thoughts of hundreds of workers, sympathizers, union and political militants of all types, including the collective that ran the general strike. These supporters will show the courts that she didn’t lie. They will continue their chant, “Martinique is ours, Martinique isn’t theirs, a band of thieving profiteers who we’re going to kick out.”
Oct 12, 2009
The following article is translated from the October 9th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France. Guadeloupe and Martinique are islands in the Caribbean, with about 400,000 people each.
In Guadeloupe, the street demonstration of October 3rd, organized by the LKP (Coalition against Profiteering), was a success. Several thousand people, the big majority workers, demonstrated in Pointe-à-Pitre with enthusiasm and determination. In Martinique, several hundred workers demonstrated in the streets of the capitol, Fort-de-France, at the appeal of the February 5th Coalition.
These were protests against the failure of the State to carry out the agreements signed at the end of the general strikes of January and February. They were particularly directed at the problems many workers had getting the State to pay the 100 Euros a month additional wages won at the end of the general strike.
The State was supposed to raise pay for all workers whose wages were less than 1.4 times the minimum wage. But only a minority of those eligible received the increase, mostly due to a complicated six page government form with 130 questions! Further, the State excluded a certain number of workers from the wage increase by including bonuses in their pay level, although it had agreed to use only the base hourly wage.
The recent increase in the price of gasoline of six cents a liter in Guadeloupe and seven cents a liter in Martinique is also a violation of the agreement that ended the general strikes. No price increase was to take place until the method of establishing gas prices was made completely clear. But TOTAL, the giant French oil company, monopolizes the supply of oil to the islands. It easily convinced the new French Overseas Secretary Marie-Luce Penchard to give it the price increases.
And the prices of all other goods continue to go up in the supermarkets, despite the agreements!
In Guadeloupe, the unions announced a strike so that workers knew to come to the demonstration on October 3rd. But the unions made no call for a renewable general strike, nor for raising barricades, contrary to what the media wanted people to believe. The government sent out their forces of law and order in big numbers, beginning at the end of the previous week. On October 5th, armed men took up positions at all strategic points in Guadeloupe. They were the ones who blocked cars, causing bottlenecks and slowdowns.
New protest actions and mobilizations will take place in the two islands in the days to come. In Guadeloupe, the first round of meetings organized by the LKP in the towns brought out hundreds of people each time. There will be more meetings. One is scheduled for October 9th in front of the Mutualité building in Pointe-à-Pitre, with a second meeting scheduled for October 19th in Marie-Galante. They’ll take place to coincide with the visit of the French Overseas Secretary to the West Indies. Mobilization actions are also being called in Martinique.
In addition, the LKP called for more volunteers for the control committees that monitor prices following the October 3rd demonstration. These actions will allow the workers and the leaders of the LKP and the February 5th Coalition to respond in real time to the administration’s deceitful policies.
The French government has raised certain political diversions, including a possible change in the status of the islands, especially in Martinique. The dictatorship of TOTAL, and the rule of the capitalists and the békés (descendants of the slave owners, now the biggest capitalists) are being imposed. But their actions will nourish the combativeness of a good part of the workers and the population.