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
Feb 1, 2010
"Jobs must be our number one focus in 2012," declared President Obama in his State of the Union address on January 27.
Yes, what’s needed is jobs. The recession has destroyed over nine million jobs in 26 months. And that’s not counting the 125,000 jobs that should have been created every month just to keep up with the growth of the workforce. Obama may try to sugar coat the situation, claiming, "the worst of the storm has passed." But last month the government reported that–once again–589,000 fewer people had jobs, proving the job crisis is getting worse, not better.
"I am calling for a new jobs bill tonight," promised Obama.
No, he’s not.
The most immediate and effective jobs bill would be for the government to give a large and permanent boost to programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security retirement benefits, welfare, food stamps. That would put more money into peoples’ hands, which would boost consumer spending, leading to more hiring immediately.
He’s not calling for that.
In the long term, the most efficient government jobs program would be to hire workers directly, putting them to work repairing and rebuilding the vital, but aging and decrepit infrastructure, the roads, water and sewage systems, parks, schools, hospitals. This in turn creates many more jobs that produce machinery, equipment and materials.
But Obama is proposing to do the exact opposite, since he’s proposing a three year spending freeze on programs like infrastructure, and aid to the cities and states. A spending freeze is a budget cut, given inflation and the growth of the population.
Instead, Obama’s new jobs bill has no jobs in it. It’s just more corporate tax breaks.
Obama claims these tax breaks are an "incentive" for companies to hire more workers. That’s not true either. Every study done by the Federal Reserve and Congress’s research arm, the Congressional Budget Office, shows the opposite: tax giveaways to business don’t create jobs.
It is a corporate bailout disguised as a jobs bill. That’s all.
We"ve seen this before. Bush, Obama and Bernanke played the same kind of game with the bank bailout. They promised that the bank bailout would save the economy, create jobs, boost lending and stop the foreclosures, keeping people in their homes.
But it did none of that. Instead, it rewarded the very bankers who caused the financial crisis. The bankers took the tax money and paid themselves great big bonuses. To make more money, they took the rest of the government money, turning it into rampant speculation, creating more financial bubbles that could burst at any time.
"We all hated the bank bailout," Obama now says. "I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as root canal."
And yet they did it.
Just like they are doing it today: giving billions to the very companies and corporate executives who caused the jobs crisis.
We are not going to have the jobs we need until we fight for them. First of all, no more job cuts or layoffs. To provide the millions of missing jobs, apportion the available work out to everyone who wants it with no loss in pay for anyone.
The working class produces all the wealth, and makes the society run. Put our needs first, and let corporate profits be damned!
Feb 1, 2010
The Supreme Court voted to throw out limits on campaign spending by corporations and unions.
To equate the amount corporations have to spend to the amount unions can spend is ridiculous. Who has the money? This was simply a decision to give the corporations free rein to influence the outcome of elections.
Of course, it’s not as though current campaign finance laws actually prevented corporations from intervening in elections. Corporations just had to be a little careful about using certain phrases like “vote for” or “vote against” in political ads.
The latest ruling just allows the corporations to be more blatant about spending money to buy political influence.
The Supreme Court just made the meaning of capitalist democracy a little clearer.
Feb 1, 2010
Here’s what President Obama said in his first State of the Union speech:
“To close the credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly and to give our people the government they deserve. That’s what I came to Washington to do.... And that’s why we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.
Here’s the reality:
Top officials in the Obama administration previously held executive positions at IBM, Raytheon, Chevron, Citigroup, Hartford Financial, Lehman Brothers, Alcoa, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, Prudential Financial. And those positions don’t include the revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
These execs don’t worry about losing their Washington jobs–they have permanent jobs paying millions waiting for them back on Wall Street or in corporate headquarters.
Feb 1, 2010
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, in an interview with Fast Forward magazine, said about the 266 teachers fired last October: "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had sex with children...”
She made it sound like many or most of the teachers deserved to get fired. In a later interview, she mentioned nine incidents–not 266!
Michelle Rhee is in charge of making sure D.C. children are educated. So far, the only result we see is Rhee blatantly lying in order to justify firing 266 experienced classroom teachers.
Feb 1, 2010
The U.S. Senate, in a 70-30 vote, endorsed Ben Bernanke for a second term as head of the Federal Reserve. The yes votes came from 48 Democrats and 22 Republicans–truly bipartisan support.
During debate beforehand, senators pointed out that Bernanke’s actions had helped inflate the housing and credit bubbles, then helped bail out the banks when the bubbles burst. All true. But then many of those who said it, turned around and voted for him anyway!
Some senators who voted for him said his experience was important. Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, said, “I had to think about it, but I voted for him. Continuity... may be good.”
Continuity? With a disaster?! Why would that be good?!!
Of course, it wasn’t a disaster for the bankers. And what they want, they get. On that, Republicans and Democrats agree.
Feb 1, 2010
Dr. George Tiller’s killer, Scott Roeder, was found guilty of first-degree murder when his jury trial concluded this past week in Kansas. The jury also convicted Roeder of aggravated assault for threatening two witnesses at Tiller’s church moments before Roeder shot the doctor.
Although Roeder wanted to use anti-abortion arguments to change the charge from first-degree murder to manslaughter, the jury didn’t buy it. It took only 37 minutes to make its decisions.
But Roeder and others like him in the so-called “pro-life” movement had nonetheless closed one of the few abortion clinics still functioning in that area. In fact, thanks to the vicious attacks of the pro-lifers on doctors and clinics, with some 6,000 incidents of violence reported, women in much of the country lack access to abortion–unless they are wealthy.
“Pro-life”? No, call these scum what they are: terrorists who kill, maim and harass to impose their reactionary fundamentalist views on the women of this country.
Government hasn’t used its police powers to prevent the violence of these home-grown terrorists–and usually it did nothing to those who carried it out unless, like Roeder, they went out of their way to admit what they had done. Government did nothing to protect women’s access to needed medical care; it has failed to protect doctors and other medical personnel. And many politicians who fill government seats pander to the reactionary views of these home-grown terrorists. They are all complicit in carrying out and encouraging terrorism against women.
Feb 1, 2010
In Haiti, geologists, engineers and other specialists had long sounded the alarm. To give just a few of the more recent examples, in September of 2008, after a few smaller shocks, a geology professor wrote: “In 1751 and 1771, this city was completely destroyed by an earthquake, and I will bet all I have that this will be reproduced.”
The director of the Bureau of the Mines confirmed this warning: “These minor shocks are worrisome. They generally announce much more intense quakes to follow.”
In March of 2009, a Haitian geologist stated: “We can expect a quake to come at any time.... We must, consequently, think of the impact of such a menace on the population, on the infrastructure, on roads, water and electrical systems, and propose the actions necessary to at least diminish our vulnerability and to limit the devastation.”
One hundred years ago, Wegener explained the shifting of continents. Since then, geologists have understood that continental plates are in motion, and that these shifts lead to fractures, to faults between plates in contact with one another. We know this causes the majority of earthquakes. The outlines of this knowledge is well-known, the faults have been mapped, including the one under the city of Port-au-Prince. We know perfectly well how to construct buildings using anti-quake standards so that buildings do not collapse in quakes. And this is done today in Japan and in California, but not in Haiti.
Perhaps the date of the earthquake–January 12–could not have been predicted. But the earthquake and its tragic consequences were totally predictable.
Feb 1, 2010
Royal Caribbean International, the second largest cruise ship line in the world, continues to use Haiti as one of its port stops. The line regularly stops there carrying hundreds, or even thousands, of tourists on their dream trip to the private beaches of Labadie, about 90 miles from Port-au-Prince. This company location, rented from the Haitian government since 1985, is enclosed in a barbed-wire fence ten feet tall, patrolled by armed guards.
Royal Caribbean declared it was not simply motivated by profits, but equally concerned for the Haitian people. It promised to give a million dollars in aid–the equivalent of profits gained in Haiti. It said it would bring some supplies to aid the survival efforts on each voyage. The company president dared to argue that ending the cruises would mean abandoning Haiti because Royal Caribbean provides a few jobs for Haitians.
The four cruise ships that make trips to Labadie can carry 5000 people or more, with enough supplies to last a week. These ships carry water that could be used for drinking, but instead goes into swimming pools. They produce enough electricity to light up an entire town. Royal Caribbean, using the boats with which it ferries tourists ashore, could have helped evacuate thousands of wounded Haitians.
But instead of requisitioning this fleet of ships, the big powers that claim to be doing all they can, don’t demand the boats be used to aid the Haitian people during this disaster.
This is what they have done in times of war, using passenger liners to transport troops. But no matter what Obama and other politicians say, no one is declaring war against misery in Haiti.
Feb 1, 2010
Two hundred thousand dead, or perhaps double that number? No one knows the number of victims from the earthquake in Haiti. The bodies are not all removed from the ruins. The television cameras show teams carrying a few survivors from the rubble, but they have not ventured into the poor neighborhoods. And how many more victims will there be from epidemics, or from thirst or hunger?
The earthquake is an act of nature, but the number of victims is caused by class society. It comes from the poverty of this country and of the majority of its inhabitants. When the TV media say earthquake standards were not respected, it’s a euphemism for neglect.
The fact that the capital of Port-au-Prince is located on a fault line and thus susceptible to earthquakes was well-known. Scientists often drew attention to the risks. But the Haitian government could scarcely worry about such a risk when it barely worried about the deaths of all its poor people from hunger, from poverty, from treatable illnesses easy to cure. Even in normal times, the hospitals lacked doctors, nurses, supplies and medicines.
The television is filled with images of people saved by the rescue teams from the wealthy countries. But the majority were actually saved by Haitians, showing even in such a disaster an extraordinary degree of solidarity. How many people were pulled from the ruins by those using their bare hands, long before the arrival of forces coming with modern equipment?
But who could trust these imperialist countries? When the United States took control of the airport, it was in order to bring in more soldiers. What the wealthy governments want is to prevent social explosions in Haiti, not to mention the flight of massive numbers of Haitians toward the shores of the U.S. France made a lot of noise about its rescue teams, but the impact is minimal.
The food rations that have been delivered can certainly ease the situation. But if these efforts touch part of the population, they do not reach the poor neighborhoods. Even today, two weeks after the earthquake, the poor population can only really count on the solidarity coming from its own ranks.
As for reconstruction, what will the big powers do other than hold conferences? They will help rebuild the presidential palace and government ministries. They will assure the infrastructure necessary for the industrial zone to once again engage in production with its workers paid about two dollars a day.
What is urgent, besides basic necessities and medicines, is the rapid construction of inexpensive housing using anti-quake standards. But that is not what the rich countries will do.
Nor will they aid workers and peasants in the countryside to have the means to live decently from their labor. To do that would not cost more than what is spent to carry out the war in Iraq and Afghanistan every month. It would cost just a tiny fraction of what was given to the bankers in the United States, France and elsewhere.
The present and the future of Haiti are much less the result of a natural catastrophe than they are the image of a despicable organization of society at the level of the world.
Feb 1, 2010
These wealthy countries that pretend to be rescuing Haiti are just returning to Haiti a fraction of what they have stolen.
Haiti is today the poorest country of the Americas, the result of two centuries of pillage. First by France, sending Africans transformed into slaves there, whose forced labor made Haiti the most important producer of sugar in the world at that time.
It was the revolt of these slaves that put an end to both the colonial domination of France and to slavery. But France still did not end its pillage. It imposed the payment of huge sums of money for the property taken by the slaves, so much money that it took over half a century to pay off the debt.
Then the United States transformed Haiti into its own backyard.
In November of 1914, the Haitian president tried to use his own government’s money which was in Haiti’s own national bank. A U.S. military intervention stopped him. Haiti’s money–$500,000 in gold–was confiscated. Seven months later, U.S. marines landed in Port-au-Prince under the pretext of “reestablishing order.” The chief of the U.S. troops put a compliant Haitian politician in office. A U.S. tax collector was put in charge of customs. A U.S. administrator took control of Haitian finances. The Haitian army was dissolved and replaced by a national guard recruited and commanded by the U.S. army.
The U.S. intervention ran smack into the poor peasants’ resistance. The U.S.’s scornful attitude and brutality during this occupation outraged the Haitians. The U.S. decision to disarm the population and reestablish the corvée–a requirement that the peasants work for free to maintain the roads–touched off the powder keg. At the end of 1918 an insurrection broke out that put the U.S. armed forces in check. The United States was able to assassinate the head of this insurrection, but it took U.S. forces ten months afterwards to bring the revolt under control. 13,000 died in the repression carried out by U.S. forces.
In 1918, a new constitution abolished Haiti’s prohibition on land ownership by foreigners. U.S. companies drove hundreds of peasants off their land and into poverty and emigration. In 1922, the Haitian National Bank was transferred to National City Bank of New York. The U.S. forced Haiti to take out a 40-million-dollar loan from U.S. banks to pay off its debts to France. But this only changed Haiti’s creditor.
The U.S. occupation lasted until 1934. In 1935, the Haitian government bought back the national bank, though half the members of its board of directors were still from the U.S. The financial department remained under U.S. control until the 1922 loan was paid off–that is, until 1947. A 1935 trade agreement gave the United States privileged status.
The United States thus maintained control over the country’s affairs. Their agent during the post-war years was the Haitian army, whom they had recruited and whose officers they had trained. This army would have a big influence on the life of the country–except during the long, bloody and ruinous Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986). To neutralize the army, the Duvaliers built their own militia, the ferocious “Tontons Macoutes,” who were trained by the French!
After the younger Duvalier fell in 1986, the population was caught in the rivalry between the military and mostly corrupt politicians, all in the shadow of a U.S. power which in 1994 once again landed troops. Ten years later, the country became a U.N. protectorate, under the control of U.S. marines and a few French soldiers.
So even before the earthquake, Haiti was a country drained for centuries by imperialist pillage, ruled by the military, and controlled by U.S. marines.
Feb 1, 2010
More U.S. households than ever are being disconnected from the utility grids, despite winter weather.
California, the largest state in the U.S., reported more than 91,000 households lost utility service. Those figures came from the summer, before winter weather caused increased heating bills. In Ohio, hard hit by job losses, one in ten households was reported as experiencing a gas or electricity disconnection last year. The figures are expected to be worse this year.
Southern California Edison admits that it has disconnected customers owing as little as $30, thanks–supposedly–to their new computerized meters. But who programmed the computers–if not the utility company.
Utility shutoffs threaten death during high summer heat and low winter temperatures. Yet no state forces their utilities to keep customers on the grid.
Gas and electricity are basic necessities. They shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies that measure every action according to how it affects their profits.
Feb 1, 2010
In 2007, more than one out of four workers seeking unemployment benefits were blocked from getting those benefits by their employer. The employer falsely claimed that it had fired laid off workers for such things as fraud or stealing company property. Or else the employer claimed laid off workers had voluntarily resigned.
There is a great financial incentive for a company to file such claims. If it is successful, its unemployment insurance payments decrease. So companies have been doing this more and more over the last 25 years.
And since laid off workers are already having troubles in making ends meet, the companies calculate that many cannot afford to fight back against false misconduct claims.
Don’t tell us there is a social safety net in this country–the bosses tear it up faster than we can use it.
Feb 1, 2010
Now that GM, Chrysler, and Ford have closed over 1000 dealerships, sold off brands, wiped out parts and assembly plants, and pushed a vicious speed-up that eliminated most of the 800,000 auto-related jobs lost in the last ten years, the UAW is dramatically protesting–Toyota!
In January, the UAW brought members from their California GM/Toyota plant to the Detroit auto show. They protested Toyota’s plan to close their plant, a joint venture with GM known as NUMMI.
The UAW avoided mentioning that GM had already doomed the plant. GM used its taxpayer-funded bankruptcy as an excuse to bail out of the plant.
But the UAW decided to condemn ... only Toyota. After the auto show, top UAW leaders protested at the Japanese embassy, and released press statements calling Toyota “a danger to America” and “betraying U.S. auto workers.” The statements claimed that the 4,700 jobs from the California plant would be lost to Japan.
In fact, most of the plant’s work will be shifted to Mississippi, Texas and Canada–to non-union plants. Plants the UAW has failed to organize in part because its “nationalist” stance has always been felt as an attack by the workers at the transplants.
In 2009, GM, Chrysler, and the government colluded in corporate “bankruptcies” that imposed on workers shorter break times, wage freezes, fewer benefits, impossible attendance rules, precarious retirements–and a no-strike clause! Not only did the UAW leadership not fight then. It smoothed the way for these atrocities, just as it did for others in 2003, 2005 and 2007.
Today, that same leadership tries to divert workers with “Japanese-bashing.”
If anyone has “betrayed U.S. auto workers,” it is the UAW leadership working in an unholy alliance with the auto companies, their banks and the government.
In November, Ford workers said “Enough of this!” and voted overwhelmingly to reject the last package of concessions the UAW leadership had tried to cram down their throats.
The fight is not overseas, but right here at home against ALL the corporations–GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, etc.–that relentlessly squeeze more and more profit from an ever-shrinking work force.
Feb 1, 2010
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, died Wednesday, January 27. He was 87 years old.
At the time of its publication in 1980, A People’s History was unique in the collection of American history books. Most history books have narrowly focused on the people at the top, the wealthy industrialists and bankers, and the politicians and generals who served them, while ignoring the exploitation and oppression they carried out.
Zinn presented a totally different history: he focused on ordinary people who didn’t like how things were organized and worked to change them. He shed a light on the struggles of workers and farmers for better living and working conditions, of women and of black people for freedom, of abolitionists against slavery, and of many different people against many different wars.
It’s not surprising that A People’s History is the biggest selling history book in the U.S. Laboring people and those who fight to impose democratic rights recognize themselves and their struggles in his book.
But it is not only his book that is unusual; Zinn himself was an unusual academic. As a seventeen year old in the Great Depression, he learned lessons about the state when he was beaten over the head by cops in a workers’ demonstration. As a bombardier in World War II, he witnessed the slaughter of a group of German soldiers and other horrors, and drew the lesson of what war means in this society. After the war, he sealed his medals in an envelope and wrote on it, “Never Again.”
And from his beginning as an academic, he put his talents in the service of ordinary people. In his first teaching job at Spellman College, a college for black women, he took part in civil rights demonstrations in the early 60s and encouraged his students to do so. He lost his job. As he stated later, “I was fired for insubordination. Which happened to be true.”
His problems with employers followed him to his next job at Boston University, where he continued to speak out and demonstrate for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He was engaged in a constant battle with the administration there, which penalized him financially and in other ways for his views, but it did not slow him down.
Up to the day of his death, he was active. Though he retired from Boston University in 1988, he never retired from what he saw as his true profession: participating with, and giving voice to, the struggles of ordinary working people for a better life and against a slew of injustices and indignities–or, as Zinn himself called them, “the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.”
Feb 1, 2010
The Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling concerning Mumia Abu-Jamal. Refusing to grant Mumia a new trial, the lower court had nonetheless called for a new jury trial just to decide his sentence.
This new Supreme Court ruling tossed that out, requiring the lower court, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, to itself decide whether to impose the death penalty.
In reversing the lower court’s ruling, the Supreme Court referred to a decision it handed down a week earlier, reinstating the death penalty on a neo-Nazi in Ohio, Frank Spisak, who bragged in court about murdering three black men.
To compare Abu-Jamal, a journalist and black activist who was completely framed up by the state, to a neo-Nazi who carried out a racist murder spree and then bragged about it, is an outrageous travesty!
This is the second time in less than a year the Supreme Court has ruled against Abu-Jamal. Last April, it denied his request for a new trial in light of a litany of evidence proving his innocence.
Some organizations have now called on Barack Obama to intervene to stop the execution.
This is the same Barack Obama who appeared during his election campaign on the radio program of right-wing talk show host Michael Smerconish, a man well known for his campaign to have Mumia put to death. Telling Smerconish he did not know the details of the case, Obama did say, “In my mind, if somebody killed a police officer, they deserve the death penalty, uh, or life in prison. And that’s my view. And that’s part of the reason why I received the endorsement of the National Association of Police Officers.”
Waiting on people like this is to condemn Mumia to death. For the courts or presidents to intervene against this attempt by the government to silence Mumia Abu-Jamal, they will have to feel the hot breath of an angry population down their necks.
Mumia can’t wait! Push to free him now.