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
Apr 26, 2010
The Obama administration has been pushing what it calls a big reform of the financial system. The House of Representatives has already passed their version of the bill, and it is now being considered in the Senate. Some Republicans seem ready to sign on.
The politicians promise that “financial reform” will reign in the banks and financial companies that caused the crisis; that it will regulate all the different shady forms of speculation that are so profitable to financial companies; that a consumer protection agency will regulate and oversee mortgages, credit cards and other loans. Finally, the politicians promise that there will be no more government bailouts of banks too big to fail.
In other words, it’s election time. In the midst of a worsening economic crisis, the politicians pretend they are now going to protect ordinary people.
These are the same politicians who have already turned over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the biggest banks and financial companies. They spent more than two trillion dollars in taxpayer money just to buy up these companies’ toxic mortgages and worthless speculative securities.
And their bailout continues. The Fed continues to lend trillions of taxpayer dollars free of charge to these big companies. The companies then lend the money right back to the consumer, or back to the government–at very high rates of interest. Great big profits are guaranteed.
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that this could be the biggest transfer of wealth from savers to the banks in history!
And the politicians don’t blink an eye when bank executives pay themselves huge bonuses and salaries, after they pretended that their banks had paid back some of the money the government gave them through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). These politicians know that the banks used money borrowed from the Fed to pay back the TARP. But the politicians said nothing.
So could anyone really believe these same politicians and government officials are ready to “reform” and “regulate” finance, really crack down?
Crack down on the banks? The Republicans? The Democrats? They gotta be kidding!
The politicians of both parties are linked tightly to the banks. In 2010 Wall Street companies have already given 32 million dollars to political candidates–and that was before the Supreme Court removed the ban on corporate campaign contributions in politics. And don’t forget that when he ran for president in 2008, Barack Obama collected a million dollars from one company, Goldman Sachs.
More than 125 former Congressional aides and lawmakers are now working for financial companies. And at least 70 former members of Congress are lobbying for Wall Street, including former House majority leaders Dick Gephardt, a Democrat, and Dick Armey, a Republican.
At the same time, former bankers and financiers have placed their people at the top levels of the government. Two recent treasury secretaries, Robert Rubin, a Democrat, and Henry Paulson, a Republican, came from Goldman Sachs. And today, Treasury Secretary Geithner’s chief of staff is a former lobbyist from Goldman Sachs.
If either of these two parties really wanted to control the banks, they would first remove all the bankers from their leading posts in the government. And they would start to take the Federal Reserve away from the ownership and control of the banks.
But they don’t. And that says it all: big government is nothing but an extension of big business. It exists in order to assure that big companies continue to make profits in good times and bad, under the Democrats and Republicans.
Apr 26, 2010
The Los Angeles City Council and Department of Water and Power (DWP) have passed a nearly 5% electric rate increase. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the DWP board, appointed by him, had been publicly calling for an even bigger increase. But the politicians on city council left the door open for further rate increases in October.
Why this rate hike–especially when the DWP is running a big surplus, and just gave 73.5 million dollars to the city treasury?
Supposedly to switch to less-polluting technology instead of coal to generate electricity, according to the city politicians and DWP officials. Never mind that no one has bothered to give any details as to how long this project will take, and how much it will cost, and how many companies will make how much profit off of it.
No matter–in the middle of the worst recession in decades, when official unemployment in Los Angeles, as in California overall, stands at more than 12%, city politicians are increasing the burden on working people even more, so that they can hand their greedy friends still more money.
Apr 26, 2010
Once again, the Prince George County, Maryland cops show a section of the population who is boss. After the University of Maryland beat Duke, the cops beat some students and then dared to turn around and say the students had attacked them. No one believes unarmed students attacked cops in riot gear and on horses.
Usually the cops direct the violence and intimidation at black people and working class people. But occasionally, P.G. County cops let loose on other sections of the population–like the mayor of Berwyn Heights and college students most recently.
No surprise in capitalist society, where groups of men are armed and given the power to use force against the population.
Apr 26, 2010
The number of people who will be able to stay in their homes as the result of having their mortgages modified under the government’s latest anti-foreclosure program will certainly be very small. The re-default rate is already soaring on the modified mortgages and they are only a few months old.
However, even though this multi-billion dollar government program will not help very many homeowners, it will clearly help the banks involved. How? By substituting government-insured FHA mortgages for most of the original mortgages issued by the banks.
The result? Far more taxpayer money is likely to be given to the banks than to homeowners. It’s just another bailout for the banks masquerading as a homeowner rescue program.
Apr 26, 2010
Banks, credit card companies and collection agencies are garnishing wages much more frequently. In the Phoenix area, garnishments are up 121% since 2005. In Cleveland, pay seizures increased 30% just between 2008 and 2009.
By federal law, workers who have their wages garnished by credit collectors today can be left with just $217.50 per week. That’s less than what a full-time worker makes on minimum wage and only one half the poverty level for a family of four!
Many of the people garnished ran up their credit cards because their health insurance did not cover a large part of the bill. Or their boss laid them off and state unemployment benefits did not provide enough to live on. Credit cards were their last resort. Then the credit card companies piled on exorbitant interest rates and other fake charges!
And now these credit company vultures, who had a major hand in creating the very economic crisis that pushed many people into debt, cannot wait to feed on their kill.
Apr 26, 2010
The pension funds in the 50 states are short nearly a trillion dollars–needing that much money to meet the pension obligations the states owe their workers and retirees. This is the finding of a recent study by the Pew Center.
Illinois alone had a 54 billion dollar gap in its state pension funds. But Illinois is hardly alone. In the supposedly financially promising years, most states did not fully fund their pensions. New Jersey, for example, hadn’t put a penny into its pension fund in more than 10 years.
Instead, state pension managers rushed to throw state money to hedge funds and other exotic Wall Street inventions. They counted on what these financiers told them were “sure” bets. Such investments would supposedly keep returning enormous amounts of money.
Reality caught up with pension funds in 2008, when CalPERS, the largest pension fund in California, had to admit it had lost millions of dollars on real estate investments.
The Government Accountability Office says that from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008, state and local pension funds lost 900 billion dollars of their value. They lost, not only because they put funds into risky investments, like CalPERS did, but also because of all the money paid in management fees. The ten largest public pension funds paid 17 billion dollars in fees since 2000. And that was only ten large pension funds.
Hedge funds and other financial schemes get their fees whether they make money or lose money. Meanwhile state employees who retire have to worry about state funding cuts as well as these huge Ponzi schemes that drain money from their funds.
Apr 26, 2010
In South Africa a notorious racist, Eugene Terreblanche, the leader of the extreme right pro-apartheid Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), has been killed.
In 2001, Terreblanche was found guilty of murder, having beaten to death a black worker on his farm with an iron bar. He was known as a terrorist bomber and found guilty of assassinations. Nonetheless, he was walking around a free man. This April he was killed at his farm, supposedly by two of his black farm workers after he refused to pay them their wages.
The murder of this despicable individual became more than macabre news because it shone a light on South African racial relations. The terrible tension between black and white broke out in a fight at the court where the two workers accused of his murder were brought on April 6. It was a fight between white supporters of the AWB and blacks carrying an African National Congress (ANC) flag.
Black President Jacob Zuma called for “unity of the country,” a completely hypocritical appeal, given the condition of the immense majority of the black population in the 16 years since apartheid officially ended in 1994.
The promises of Nelson Mandela’s government for agrarian reform weren’t kept. Good farm lands remain essentially the property of a wealthy white minority. This minority has found the ways to continue to rule over the majority of poor black workers. Even as black politicians tear each other apart in unending clan battles, the population suffers the full brunt of the current economic crisis.
World speculation in food staples has led to a 16% increase in food prices in South Africa in just one year. Mining production has gone down by a third, thanks to the crisis, and manufacturing production is down by 20%. More than 750,000 jobs were lost in one year. Monthly wages of 1,000 Rand ($219) are common.
For investors, however, the Johannesburg stock market has gone up by 30% since April 2009. South Africa has been invited to become a member of the G20–which permits President Zuma to parade before the cameras next to Obama and other heads of state.
During apartheid, the ANC camouflaged its policy of defense of bourgeois interests with the words “liberty” and “universal suffrage.” In the end, the struggle of the black working class in the 1970s and 1980s only succeeded in changing the color of the political personnel serving the capitalist exploiters. The bourgeoisie these black politicians serve is still largely white. And for the large majority of blacks, there is nothing but social apartheid.
Apr 26, 2010
In recent weeks, women working in Hassi Messaoud in the south of Algeria once again are victims of violence by gangs of young men. These thugs in masks, equipped with knives or sticks, assaulted women in their homes, stealing their meager belongings and trashing their apartments–as well as brutalizing them and raping them.
The victims of this outburst of violence are single women. In order to feed their families, these women come to Hassi Messaoud seeking work with one of the many foreign companies operating there. They live there, in miserable housing in searing desert heat because it’s their last resort. Wages are higher there. And the high unemployment that hits all Algerians bars them from a decently paid job in the north.
These women are trapped by the Islamist family code adopted in 1984. In Algeria women are legally minors all their lives in matters of marriage, divorce and inheritance. So they have no way to live and support their children when they are abandoned by their husbands.
The thugs who attacked and humiliated the women reproach them for stealing the jobs of men. These unfortunate women receive no help from the authorities. Some who went to complain at a police station were told, “What do you want us to do? Go home to where you came from. Here it’s too dangerous for women like you.” No police helped these women. No police said, “Do you know who these young men are?” The women don’t even know if policemen were among their attackers. The justice system is completely unwilling to investigate and prosecute these men, even if their identities are known.
Nor was the latest attack an isolated incident. An imam in 2001 gave a sermon about punishing the “lost women” of Hassi Messaoud. Several hundred men then attacked women living there. Some victims were stoned, tortured, raped and even buried alive. To this day, no man has been prosecuted for these barbarous acts, nor have any women received reparations. Known attackers live freely in the area.
A book was written in Algeria on the conditions of women. Included was the testimony of two women from Hassi Messaoud about what happened on that night of horror in 2001 and about the lack of justice that followed.
But such attacks don’t happen only in Algeria. Women are victims of rape and brutality in many other places that have no Islamic family codes of law. Look at the U.S. Army–which pretends it is rescuing women from their degradation in Afghanistan. Women soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have been raped by fellow soldiers.
So long as men, encouraged by certain religious and political figures, maintain the attitude that women are inferior, that they should not do the same work as men, be paid the same, have the same rights–such attacks will continue.
In southern Algeria, some reactionary brutes continue to attack women simply because they are women who must work to live. These men must be stopped there–and everywhere!
Apr 26, 2010
In Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, one of the five ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia, the crowd put tulips on the graves of the victims of the demonstrations that just forced President Bakiyev to flee to the south of the country.
Bakiyev served as Prime Minister under former dictator Akayev, the ex-head of the local Soviet republic, who remained in control after the breakup of the USSR. Then, just five years ago, through a coup d’état called “the tulip revolution,” Bakiyev removed Akayev and took power with a coalition of officials from Akayev’s regime.
This coalition made up of rivals soon broke apart, as Bakiyev and his clan monopolized all posts by removing their former allies. In this little mountainous country the size of Nebraska without resources to sell, the best way to get rich is to monopolize power. Of course, the risk is that those kicked out will turn against the one in power.
That’s exactly why Roza Otunbayeva, named interim president after serving in the governments of both Bakiyev and Akayev, denounced her predecessors. It seems they and their relatives grabbed up all the riches, leaving nothing behind for her family.
The western powers found no fault with these dictatorships. First of all, Bakiyev was kind enough to let the U.S. army have an air base to use for their operations in Afghanistan.
As the Bakiyev regime moved further from Moscow than its predecessor, the U.S. and European governments were hardly worried about how the population could survive under such a regime.
But the recent price increases, especially of energy, cut sharply into the already miserable wages–far less than $100 a month for those with a job in Kyrgyzstan.
This ignited the explosion, as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets. A murderous police counterattack killed 80 protesters. Still other protesters seized the presidential palace and other symbols of the hated power. They paid a heavy price to drive out the dictator. Bakiyev’s old allies didn’t risk their lives and die, but they still make up the transitional government, from which the population can expect nothing good.
Kyrgyzstan’s big neighbors, Russia and China, have their own reasons for supporting the eviction of this more or less pro-western dictator, who managed to antagonize most of the country.
On the other hand, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, two more populous ex-Soviet states next door, offered aid to the deposed dictator, closing their borders. The situation of their people certainly isn’t as terrible as it is in Kyrgyzstan, but their leaders have no illusions about what their populations think of them. It’s especially true in Kazakhstan: For several weeks ten thousand workers at the country’s largest industrial complex in the region have held out in their own struggle against those in power, despite repression.
So the leaders of these two neighboring states fear that the Central Asian powder keg–only two steps from Afghanistan and Pakistan–could blow up on them, like what happened to their former colleague Bakiyev.
Apr 26, 2010
Auto workers in the U.S. will recognize their own situation in this report from Britain. It comes from Workers’ Fight, put out by the revolutionary workers group of that name in Britain.
The government’s Business Secretary Peter Mandelson hasn’t said a word about the plight of former Ford workers who were transferred by Ford to its parts factories–spun off as Visteon in 2000. In fact Ford now expects the government to pay these workers’ pensions–many of whom gave it more than 30 years of their labor–via the Pension Protection Fund, having washed its hands of all responsibility!
The British division of Visteon declared bankruptcy almost exactly a year ago, shutting its three remaining plants in Belfast, Basildon and Enfield, precisely, it seems, to get rid of its commitment to the “Ford” final salary pension terms, which had been guaranteed to the workers when they transferred over to Visteon. At the time, workers occupied two of the factories for weeks, but were eventually convinced by Unite union officials to accept a buyout plan–which left the pension question unresolved. And so it remains. Pensioners could lose 10-50% of their due! Yet at the same time Ford is getting government awards and handouts? Says it all about this bosses’ government.
Apr 26, 2010
Rivers, streams and lakes are so polluted we cannot eat fish from them, we cannot drink water from them, and we don’t dare swim in them. Yet the EPA has shelved 1500 major investigations of water pollution over the last four years.
The Clean Water Act may have been passed in 1972, but the promises that were made back then to “sharply reduce direct pollutant discharges into waterways, finance municipal waste water treatment facilities, and manage polluted runoff” still haven’t been realized 38 years later.
Is it just an accident that bills passed supposedly in the interests of the population never have any teeth? Hardly!
Apr 26, 2010
An April report says the state of Maryland is falling behind on enforcing its own water pollution regulations. The Center for Progressive Reform says funding has fallen by 25% since the year 2000, and the number of inspectors has fallen by a similar amount. With 1200 permits apiece to investigate, inspectors cannot possibly get to see most sites.
To make matters worse, the Maryland Department of the Environment pursued only 60% of the cases referred by inspectors.
In other words, even weak laws are not being enforced. Funds have been systematically cut under both a Republican and a Democratic administration.
Apr 26, 2010
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) applied for $700,000 in U.S. stimulus money to enable Archer Daniels Midland to buy a million-dollar engine for a locomotive. The EPA says ADM doesn’t “have the needed capital.”
That’s a lie. ADM had a super-high 15.7% rate of profit on its stockholders’ investment last year. But even if it were true, why should workers’ taxes go to ADM to replace its polluting engine? ADM benefitted from it all these years. Let ADM pay to replace it.
Apr 26, 2010
Did you catch the article in the Detroit News about GM CEO Ed Whitacre walking the shop floor in a GM plant and rubbing elbows with the workers?
Yeah, he’s just a down-to-earth-kind-of-guy–making $9 million!!!
Apr 26, 2010
In Maryland, a “flush” tax was added to all water bills in 2005, with the promise that 66 major water systems would be upgraded. And this tax was on top of more than $400 a year collected for water and sewage from the average household.
Yet, five years later, a water pipe breaks on average once a day in Washington, D.C. and its Maryland suburbs. Baltimore has similar problems–frequent water main breaks.
Now some Maryland politicians, having done nothing with our money all these years, dare to propose still higher water rates in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
A city council member put it well, “Providing inexpensive reliable water is a fundamental obligation of government. If they can’t do that, they need to reform themselves, instead of just charging more.”
Apr 26, 2010
Arizona’s state government passed the ugliest immigration bill in the country on April 23.
The new law would make it a crime for any immigrant to not carry immigration papers on them at all times. It also would extend broad powers to law enforcement to stop anyone “suspected of being illegal” and demand to see those papers, arresting and detaining anyone who doesn’t have papers on them at that moment.
Who else would be “suspected of being illegal” in Arizona, but anyone who looks Mexican? This law is nothing but an open license for the state to harass, arrest, and deport any Mexican-American target.
And it’s not just Arizona, no matter how much officials may want to pretend that. Anti-immigrant incidents have been happening across the country. In Illinois, for example, in a suburb of Chicago with a large immigrant population, police have been knocking on doors–and if anyone opens the door, they arrest everyone in the home who can’t prove they’re in the country legally.
President Obama made a big show of disagreeing with the Arizona law, saying it threatens to “undermine basic notions of fairness.” But Obama’s own administration, through its Immigrations and Customs Enforcement department (ICE), has declared its intention to increase deportations to 400,000 a year. No year has ever seen 400,000 deportations; last year’s deportations reached 387,000, already a record number, including throughout the Bush years. How else could ICE plan to reach these extreme numbers, but by the exact same kinds of tactics just legalized in Arizona?
The U.S., and cities and states across the country, are targeting undocumented immigrants as scapegoats for the high unemployment in the country. They want to convince “legal” workers that “illegal” workers are taking their jobs. As if! It’s the employers, the corporations themselves, who take away jobs, laying off workers sometimes even as they increase production–having fewer workers do more work.
The bosses and the politicians are trying to get workers fighting against workers. And isn’t it convenient for them if they can get us to fall for his age-old trick–keeping us from focusing on the REAL cause of the desperate situation we’re in!
Apr 26, 2010
The following article is from the April 23 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France
Three months after the January 12th earthquake, which left hundreds of thousands of people without homes or shelter, the Haitian government carried out the forced eviction of refugees from the camps the population had set up in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Seven thousand people were evicted by government forces from the city’s stadium. Some ten thousand people had taken refuge within the grounds of Saint Louis of Gonzague high school, a very upper crust establishment in the capital. They have been evicted. A church official dared to approve the evictions, claiming, “It isn’t normal for the emergency to continue after three months!” So much for Christian sharing and morality!
These camps had provided only makeshift shelter, but they let those who have lost everything have easier access to drinking water, toilets, food and medical care than if they were living alone.
In other words, by driving the refugees from the camps, the Haitian government has shown it hasn’t the slightest concern for the living conditions of the population–just as it demonstrated right after the earthquake. And by driving the refugees out of their camps, the Haitian government makes their living conditions even worse.
In addition, the rainy season has arrived in Haiti, posing a serious threat to this weakened population.
International organizations are the willing accomplices of the Haitian government’s plan to drive the homeless from the capital. Distribution of food has stopped or been cut back in certain camps. A spokesman for the World Food Program stated, “It’s part of our strategy. Things are beginning to return to normal in Haiti,” as though thousands of homeless refugees were normal!
Such international personnel show their contempt for the Haitian people. They dare to think that “normal” in Haiti means disgusting living conditions and extreme misery!