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
Jan 18, 2010
With double-talk spouting out of every mouth, government officials declared the job situation “stabilized”–since the official rate of unemployment didn’t go up in December! They even dared to say it with a straight face–despite the net loss of jobs suffered by the “job market,” once again.
What produced this statistical miracle? Government statisticians ignored an additional 661,000 people who didn’t look for jobs last month–didn’t look because there are infinitesimally few jobs to be found. Even officially, there are six applicants for every job opening. More unemployed people got tired and didn’t look for work last month, and so they weren’t considered unemployed.
With such sleights of hand, the government can disappear anything it wants, and often does–the unemployed, the big gifts it continues to rain on Wall Street, or the wars it carries out in multiple countries around the globe.
Employment stabilizing? Bull feathers!
In the two years and one month since the recession officially started, employers have cut eight million jobs–NET. And that’s only half the story. To keep up with the increase in the size of the work force, they should have created five million MORE jobs. In other words–just to get back to where we were in December 2007, which was hardly a good year, employers today would have to create 13 million jobs MORE than they cut.
The Federal Reserve acknowledged this reality when it recently admitted that the job market won’t improve anytime soon. The Fed forgot to explain why, however, even though this bank in the service of the bosses knows full well what is going on.
Whether production increases or not, the job situation will not improve so long as the bosses are able to push to put out more production with fewer workers. In the third quarter of 2009, the speed-up was so intense that the rate of productivity increased an astounding 8.1%!
The bosses are using the crisis they themselves created, using the threat of unemployment to make everyone else work harder, longer, and for less money–that is, to reorganize work for their own benefit.
In 2005, even before the recession started, more than one quarter of the work force were already “irregularly scheduled” workers, either temporary, part-time, on-call or so-called “independent contractors.” Business Week, the bosses’ magazine, says this is the wave of our future, calling them “disposable workers.” The bosses want, says Business Week, “just-in-time labor forces that can be turned on and off like a spigot.”
Not since the early 1930s have the bosses been so ferocious in trying to reorganize work. Just as then, the bosses are today using a severe crisis to carry out what they had been trying to do all along: take a bigger share of the wealth the workers’ labor produces, increasing the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else.
By the mid-1930s, the bosses were discovering how quickly such calculations could backfire. With workers taking over factories, with the unemployed clogging up the streets, with neighbors refusing to let their friends be tossed out of their homes, all hell began to break loose–and continued for the next few years.
Well that’s what we need today, a lot of hell breaking loose. It’s the only thing finally that threw the bosses backwards in earlier periods. It’s still the only language they understand.
Jan 18, 2010
The market for junk bonds–bonds issued by already very indebted companies–is soaring once again. Ford Motor Credit, up to its ears in debt, issued 4.6 billion dollars in such bonds in 2009, for example. Clear Channel Outdoor, another highly leveraged company, issued 2.5 billion dollars worth of bonds that, because they are risky, pay much higher rates of interest.
In 2008, in the midst of the financial meltdown, there were almost no such bonds issued. But in the last few months, businesses with dubious financial health are once again borrowing from banks seeking very profitable places to put their money... very profitable because they are so risky.
Companies that borrow heavily to finance their activities pay a stiff price–which they take out of the hide of their workers, laying off some workers, intensifying the exploitation of those who remain.
The fact that the market for junk is booming again tells us all we need to know about this so-called “economic revival.”
It’s not just some bonds that are “junk”–the word describes the entire capitalist system today.
Jan 18, 2010
New York police smashed in the door to the apartment of Juanita Young in November, after refusing to identify themselves. It was the fourth time in 2009 the cops attacked Young or her family, after falsely arresting her three other times in previous years.
Young, legally blind, became active in protesting police brutality after one of her sons, Malcolm Ferguson, was killed by police in 2000. He had been active in protesting the killing of Amadou Diallo who was shot 41 times by the NYPD in February of 1999.
Plain and simple: New York cops have been terrorizing Young for daring to speak out against their brutality. In 2003, they evicted her illegally and charged her with trespassing in her own home. When they arrested her, one of the cops said to her, “No rallies for you today.”
Each time Young was arrested, the charges were either dropped or she was acquitted. In their most recent attack, the cops used the pretext that Young’s younger son Buddy fit the description of a robbery suspect, only then to charge him later with marijuana possession.
Young, who is black, recently said, “Not only have my rights been violated in the most blatant ways, but I feel physically and psychologically terrorized. I fear for my safety, my very life, and the lives of my children and grandchildren.” Nonetheless, she has stood up courageously in the face of this police terror campaign.
Stop police terror against Juanita Young and her family!
Jan 18, 2010
The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal in November to review Kevin Cooper’s case has cleared the way for Cooper’s execution, as soon as a federal judge approves lethal injection as a “humane” way of killing people.
If that happens, California will execute an innocent man. That’s the publicly stated opinion of 11 federal judges, a prison warden and five of the twelve jurors who originally found Cooper guilty of four 1983 murders.
There is overwhelming evidence that the police and prosecution knew who the real murderers were and framed Cooper instead.
That hired hitmen committed the murders was evident from the testimony of Anthony Diaz, a former sheriff’s deputy, and of Diana Roper, the ex-girlfriend of one of the apparent killers. And there was physical evidence showing this–but it simply disappeared!
There was even a direct witness testimony that cleared Cooper. The sole survivor of the carnage, then eight-year-old Josh Ryen, told two deputies that he had seen three white men in his family’s home during the attack, and that Cooper, who is black, “was not the guy who did it.”
While suppressing testimonies in favor of Cooper, cops planted false evidence against him. A button, supposedly found near the murder site and used as evidence by the prosecution, was from a green prison jacket, not the brown version Cooper was wearing. A bloody shoe print and a hatchet were also clearly planted after the fact.
An appeals court judge dissented from the last review upholding Cooper’s conviction in a 101-page statement. He concluded that deputies “manipulated and planted evidence in order to convict Cooper,” and “discounted, disregarded, and discarded evidence pointing to other killers.”
It’s the deputies and prosecutors who framed an innocent man who ought to be in prison. Instead, this system of “justice” is ready to kill an innocent man.
Jan 18, 2010
State governments all over the country are competing for “Race to the Top” money from the Department of Education.
But this promise of federal money is just a shell game. Only 4.3 billion dollars are available for all 50 states to compete for, and federal officials themselves have said that only a few states will get funding.
Even if a state gets the money, it’s still a drop in the bucket. For example, if California won something, it would be at best a few hundred million dollars–that is, maybe 2 or 3% of the 17 billion dollars that the state has already cut from schools in the last two years alone. And Governor Schwarzenegger has already proposed more cuts in this year’s budget!
Obama’s vague promise of a one-time, small funding from the federal government is nothing but bait. And state politicians are using it as an excuse to launch another attack on public education.
Jan 18, 2010
Early this month, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm rushed to sign a set of laws attacking public schools.
The new legislation will, among other things:
These measures, passed quietly by the state legislature just before Christmas, are an attack on the working conditions and the wages of teachers across the state, especially those in poorer school districts where students struggle. Not only will this drive down teacher pay, it will lower the quality of education for students in those districts.
The governor and legislature say these measures are necessary because the Obama administration demands it in order for states to get a piece of the 4.3 billion dollars in "Race to the Top" money the administration is dangling over their heads. And it’s all true! They are holding the children’s education money hostage, to push through an attack on teachers.
To get that money, the districts and their teachers’ unions have to sign off on the state’s plan. Wealthy districts, which aren’t in such desperate shape, have been able to say "no thank you;" poorer districts have been forced to sign the plan.
So far, most teachers’ unions in the state have refused to bend to this blackmail.
Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel once said, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." And that’s exactly what the Obama administration and the state government are doing: taking advantage of the crisis to force teachers into accepting cuts they could not have pushed through before.
Jan 18, 2010
On January 1, parking meters in the neighborhoods went up from $1 to $1.25 an hour and in the outer area of downtown from $2 to $2.50 an hour. The parking meter rates had already doubled earlier in 2009.
When Morgan Stanley, the giant investment bank and other investors paid the city of Chicago 1.15 billion dollars to privatize the meters, they got a 75-year lease. But Mayor Daley has used up almost all the money in just two years.
So the money is gone–but these wealthy investors will be making money off these meters for 73 years to come!
Jan 18, 2010
On the night of December 26, U.S. forces in Afghanistan massacred 10 civilians, including 8 school-aged children, during a night-time raid in a small, remote village in Kunar Province, bordering on Pakistan.
U.S. and NATO officials tried to cover up the massacre with one lie after another. First, they denied having any information about military operations, even though western officials conceded that U.S. special forces had been operating in Kunar. A day later, the U.S. changed its story, claiming that those Afghans killed were insurgents.
However, even the Karzai government, that is, the U.S.’s own puppet government, was forced to condemn the U.S. massacre of civilians. “They gathered eight school students from two compounds and put them in one room and shot them with small arms,” said one Afghan investigator. According to the London Times, it was either U.S. Special Forces or private mercenaries working for the U.S. government who dragged the children from their beds, handcuffed them and executed them.
In response to news of the massacre, thousands of students and teachers in many cities, and throughout Kunar, took to the streets in protest. They blocked the main roads and burned American flags. In Kabul, protesters held up banners showing photographs of dead children alongside placards demanding “Foreign troops leave Afghanistan” and “Stop killing us”. Hekmatullah, a young protester, said: “We’re sick of Americans bombing us.” Samiullah Miakhel, an older man said: “The Americans are just all the time killing civilians.”
Even while the protests were taking place, a NATO drone fired a missile into a village in Helmand Province located in the south of the country, killing nine civilians, including children, leaving many more wounded. A spokesman for the local government said that people had been gathering to discuss water distribution when the air strike took place. “All of a sudden the area was bombed, eight people were killed on the spot, another died later,” one resident said. In fact, U.S. forces have often targeted large gatherings of people, especially weddings and funerals.
The massacres of civilians are becoming more frequent. Even U.N. statistics, which greatly undercount the real death toll, show a big increase in civilian deaths in the first 10 months of 2009. More than 1,050 people under the age of 18 were killed last year, according to an Afghan human rights organization.
This bloodshed promises to get worse, as the U.S. military sends tens of thousands more troops and mercenaries in the big “surge” that Obama announced in his December 1 speech at West Point.
No, the U.S. is not sending in these troops to “protect” the Afghanistan population, as Obama had the nerve to say in his speech. They’re hoping to drown the population’s resistance in oceans of blood.
U.S. troops out of Afghanistan!
Jan 18, 2010
Last week, India said that it intends to purchase 10 C-17s. The Indian army is also planning to purchase Chinook and Apache helicopters and P-8I planes from Boeing. The Indian army is becoming a good customer of Boeing.
At the same time, the U.S. is heavily arming Pakistan. Considering the longstanding hostilities between India and Pakistan, selling arms to these countries might not be a good idea.
But, hey, Boeing’s sole goal is to increase its profits, not reduce conflicts and bring peace.
Jan 18, 2010
A federal judge dismissed charges against five Blackwater Security workers, accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians. On September 16, 2007, these mercenaries, whose job was to protect a U.S. convoy, shot into a crowd in Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding at least 20 others.
Blackwater, now called Xe, is the largest private military company operating alongside the U.S. army in the Middle East. Supposedly, its operations are limited to protecting people and goods, and its agents are only allowed to carry out defensive operations. In reality, the Blackwater mercenaries act like any other occupation army, with the usual amount of “errors.” But, unlike official military forces, they have far more immunity under which to operate. They are immune from prosecution by the Iraqi justice system. They don’t have to answer for their actions before a military tribunal. So it was always going to be difficult to prosecute these mercenaries; they were let off the hook by the U.S. justice system, and the company paid a little compensation money to the Iraqi families of the dead.
From its origins, in 1997, Blackwater got very profitable U.S. army contracts to specialize in training troops. Its missions, as well as its profits, expanded with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Besides the September 2007 killings, Blackwater guards were supposedly involved in arms trafficking and various assassinations. So much so, that the Iraqi government demanded this private army be pulled back. By the end of 2009, Blackwater had only two contracts, one of which is for the protection of diplomats in southern Iraq.
By using its subsidiary companies, Blackwater got more contracts for its services in Afghanistan. Its agents there have also been accused of killing civilians.
The U.S. government continues to sub-contract its murderous wars, as a way to hide the true extent of the wars. And companies like Blackwater reap huge profits in this bloody business.
Jan 18, 2010
The U.S. government is approving 100 million dollars to aid Haiti.
Surely there will have to be more to follow. The lives of a third of Haiti’s 9 million people are immediately at stake. How much of that 100 million dollars will actually get to the people?
Thirty-three dollars in aid per person won’t do. Plus, it’s a very tiny amount, when compared to the 136 BILLION dollars that Congress recently approved to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But then, Haiti is not in a region where the world’s major gas and oil powers are competing.
Jan 18, 2010
Officials put the death toll from the earthquake in Haiti on January 12 at anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 people. No one will ever know for sure how many were killed, trapped under poorly constructed houses and workplaces that pancaked upon themselves. The impact of the earthquake was made worse because it was centered near Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s largest city. Haiti’s Red Cross now estimates three million people are injured or homeless.
Yes, it was a powerful earthquake, with a number of aftershocks. But the impact is made far worse by the extreme poverty of the country.
Ever since Haiti’s birth, in the world’s first successful slave revolt in 1804, first France and then the U.S. have been sucking the wealth out of Haiti. Then the U.S. occupied the country from 1915 until 1934, and has been propping up corrupt dictatorships there ever since. Those dictatorships have allowed U.S. corporations to make huge profits from the labor of poor Haitians.
As a result, 70% of the population lives on less than two dollars per day. Government services are so nonexistent that more than 10,000 “non-governmental organizations”–charities–were operating in Haiti before the earthquake.
Buildings in Haiti reflect this poverty. They are often shabbily constructed and not engineered to withstand earthquakes.
Scientists who study earthquakes report that in poor countries, the damage from earthquakes is typically 100 times higher than in rich countries–because construction does not use advances in engineering dating all the way back to the 1950s. Compare the devastation in Haiti with what happened in San Francisco in 1989. That earthquake was the exact same magnitude of the Haiti earthquake: 7.0. But in San Francisco, only sixty-three people were killed–many thousand times fewer than are estimated to have died in Haiti.
Today the media focuses on how Haiti is presently being flooded with supplies and relief workers, but that the country’s collapsed infrastructure is making it difficult to get the aid to people.
But roads, access to electricity, clean water and other services in Haiti, were abysmal even before the earthquake hit. There weren’t enough doctors, hospitals, hospital supplies, backhoes to dig out victims, to begin with. And today, neither the airport, the port, nor the roads that exist are usable. All of this is why survivors of the initial quake now die from the lack of access to basics like food, drinkable water and medical care.
And yet the media are shamelessly outraged by the rising anger of the population and the “risk of looting!” The colonial and imperialist looting of Haiti for centuries, however, is never even mentioned.
The immense majority of Haitians, whose life expectancy is 20 years less than in richer countries like the U.S., live a daily catastrophe whose name is “capitalism.” This is what is turning this latest natural disaster into a social catastrophe of massive proportions.
* * * *
Those of us active with the Spark have friends in Haiti who have stood on the side of the poor and working class for many years. The earthquake certainly makes their work more difficult, yet all the more crucial. Our concern and our hopes are with them.
Jan 18, 2010
At the beginning of winter, Detroit Edison (DTE) informed its customers they will be eligible for a $25 credit–IF they suffer a power outage of more than 16 hours under “normal conditions.” Or if they have an outage of more than five days, in the event of a storm. Or if they have eight “sustained” outages in a year’s time.
A person could freeze to death in less than five days. Are our relatives supposed to find consolation in the $25 credit DTE will give them for our lives?!
Jan 18, 2010
On January 5, two elderly workers and a friend were killed when their Detroit home caught on fire. The workers, brothers, were disabled and could not escape.
The house had no heat except for small electric space heaters. Even those had to run on bootleg electricity. The electric company, DTE, had turned off the power earlier in 2009. In December, when the homeowners tried to get power restored, DTE said they had to come up with $181 first. They could not.
For the lack of those dollars, three people were sentenced to die in January’s cold.
The gas and electric companies brag about their no-shut-off policies in the winter months. But these people were shut off. The gas and electric companies knew all about it. And they produced the past-due bills to justify it.
But accounting for human beings needing help? Assuring that no one has to burn to death or freeze, in winter? Not the companies’ affair! No profit in that!
Jan 18, 2010
The EPA has looked the other way while about 50 million people in the U.S. have been drinking tap water that violated the “Safe Drinking Water Act,” according to an analysis of drinking water violations since 2004 in the nation’s largest water systems.
This same EPA has allowed 316 chemical pollutants in tap water. Arsenic, chromium and uranium are among the cancer-causing substances contaminating numerous water systems above the limits considered safe.
The current administrator of the EPA blames the previous administrator. And the next one will blame her! There’s one thing the EPA is good at: passing the buck!
Jan 18, 2010
A six-year saga of investigation for corruption has ended with the conviction of the mayor of Baltimore, Sheila Dixon, on a single charge of taking a few hundred dollars worth of gift cards. The cards, which she solicited from friends, were supposedly for the needy. She was convicted of using them for herself.
At sentencing in early January, Dixon agreed to resign–receiving probation before judgment. Her plea bargain included community service, restitution of money–and keeping her city pension of $83,000 per year!
But if there is really a crime going on, it’s not about gifts for the mayor. It’s about political favors for big developers. The investigations revealed that the mayor had accepted expensive gifts and then not reported them from a developer, Ronald Lipscomb. Lipscomb’s company had ties to many other companies, including one of Baltimore’s biggest developers, John Paterakis.
These people feed off public funds by getting multi-million dollar contracts and tax breaks. Baltimore’s budget, for example, just gave a 34 million dollar tax break to two inner harbor buildings renovated by Paterakis.
Dixon’s case provided a small window into the world where business and politics meet.
Jan 18, 2010
On Christmas Day over the skies of Detroit, a young Nigerian man attempted to kill himself in order to blow up an airplane, along with all its passengers and crew. When pulled off the plane, he claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda.
Individual terrorism is a horrifying act, engaged in by desperate people, often aimed against civilians. Organizations that engage people in such self-destructive acts, targeting civilians as a way to get back at governments, are despicable.
But despicable as they are, the terrorists are gaining adherents today. And they are gaining them precisely because the U.S., with its vast arsenal, has engaged itself in terrorist actions against whole populations.
It’s been eight years and three months that the U.S. has been in Afghanistan. Almost seven years in Iraq. Those wars were mirrored in “secret” U.S. wars in Pakistan and Yemen, which have now become open wars. And all during these wars, the level of terrorism around the world went up.
Of course, terrorism didn’t start with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The attacks of 9-11 showed that. In fact, the reservoir of terrorists who were behind 9-11 came from clandestine forces the CIA helped establish in the 1980s. Used originally against the Soviet Union, these brutal forces then bit the U.S. hand that had fed them, turning their CIA money and covert military training against U.S. civilians.
Instead of stopping the activity that had created these terrorists, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, overthrowing its government and attacking a civilian population who had nothing to do with the attack of 9-11.
Then the U.S. invaded Iraq, pretending that al-Qaeda had forces there–an outright lie. More than a million people are dead in Iraq as the result of this U.S. war–most of them civilians.
What is this, except state terrorism, carried out by the most powerful nation on the planet against defenseless people?
When unmanned drones hit villages in Pakistan, killing women and school children, al-Qaeda gains recruits. When Blackwater’s private army shoots up a busy cross-roads in Iraq, killing dozens of people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, more people are convinced to sacrifice themselves in terrorist acts. When Special Forces raid a village in Yemen, pulling out all the young men, trashing the village, al-Qaeda gains support. When U.S. money and troops go to prop up a corrupt Afghan government, when the U.S. uses brutal Afghan warlords to impose order, it funnels more desperate people into the terrorist reservoirs.
The U.S. military is in the Middle East and nearby Asia today in order to maintain the hold of U.S. corporations over the region’s oil and its oil pipelines. The so-called war on terrorism is simply a pretext. These are imperialist wars.
These imperialist wars have let loose a conflagration on the world–including the terrorism they have inspired.
To end the ravaging of the world by terrorism requires the ending of imperialist wars that terrorize civilian populations.
Jan 18, 2010
Why does medical insurance cost so much more in this country, while providing so much less coverage than state-run systems in other countries?
Of course, profit and CEO salaries take a sizeable chunk of money right off the top.
But the much bigger drain on the U.S. medical system is administrative cost–the complicated result of an industry where companies compete with each other to make profit.
Today, there are 13,000 different private insurance companies in the country–almost twice as many as the number of hospitals!
Each of these insurance companies has its own billing system; its own system for checking patient eligibility and verifying a doctor’s claims; its own system for paying doctors; its own sales and advertising departments to attract clients. Duplication on top of duplication! This army of private insurers gobbles up nearly 12% in administrative costs.
Outrageous when compared to Canada, where administration of the single government-run insurance system absorbs just over one% of insurance costs.
Hospitals have their own administrative costs; so do doctors’ offices, laboratories, temp agencies for nurses, etc. When all these administrative costs–insurance, doctors, hospitals, etc.–are added together, they come to about 31% of the insurance premiums.
That’s outright waste–a vast amount of money that could be used to provide medical care to every single person in this country, better medical care than we have now.
But the so-called reform coming out of the U.S. Congress does nothing to control this waste–it just opens the public purse to the same privately owned companies that created this bloated system.