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 4, 2011
Obama finally addressed the nation about the U.S. war on Libya, reassuring us that NATO is now “in the lead,” and there will be “no U.S. boots on the ground.”
Hypocrisy dripped off his every word.
NATO may be “in the lead,” but a U.S. admiral, James Stavridis, is calling NATO’s tune. The U.S. military is supplying most of the armaments, and the U.S. is footing most of the bill.
No boots on the ground? More than a month before the war started, Obama had signed an order deploying CIA agents, boots and all, right onto Libya’s ground.
Obama said that the U.S. invaded only to “prevent a slaughter”–at the very moment that the U.S. was carrying out wholesale slaughter in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sending drones that wipe out whole villages.
This latest “no-fly zone” is not some peaceful campaign. It destroys and kills. A village doctor in Libya described how U.S. strikes killed seven civilians and wounded 25 others in his one small village. Among the dead were children as young as 12. A top Catholic official in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, said that his city alone had lost 40 civilians to U.S. bombs.
A half century ago in Viet Nam, a U.S. army officer told a reporter that the U.S. had to destroy a Vietnamese village “in order to save it.” That is how the U.S. military is “saving” civilians in Libya today–just as it destroyed a million people in Iraq in order to “save” them.
The only thing the U.S. war on Libya is saving is profit for the big oil companies, the banks and the weapons producers.
Yes, Qaddafi is a monster. But he was their monster. For more than 40 years, the iron heel of the Qaddafi regime assured order in Libya for the U.S. and the other major imperialisms–France, Britain and, to some extent, Italy.
Did Qaddafi and others around him enrich themselves from Libya’s wealth? Yes, but they were small-time thieves by comparison to the big imperialist interests that stole Libya’s vast oil wealth.
Throughout the region, dictators like Qaddafi hold the population of their own countries in check, driving the workers and peasants into abject impoverishment.
But now, like so many other dictatorships, the Qaddafi regime is threatened by revolt and civil war.
The U.S. missiles and bombs are meant to reinstall a dictatorial regime in Libya against the Libyan people. The result may be someone out of Qaddafi’s regime, someone who poses as an opposition, or even Qaddafi himself. But whoever it is, the population will pay the price–unless the laboring population rises up to defend its own interests.
For almost a decade, the U.S. working class has been paying, morally and materially, for the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, the U.S. ruling class has added one more war to that list, another terrible war for which we will pay, until we force its end.
U.S. out of Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq immediately!
Apr 4, 2011
The 228 workers, members of the United Steelworkers, locked out at Honeywell’s Metropolis, Illinois plant are suffering from cancer at a high rate as a result of handling uranium. Twenty-seven workers have a cancer diagnosis, and about 42 have died of various cancers over the past 20 years. Workers expect the job to take 10 years off their lives. The union has estimated that 128,000 residents within a 25-mile radius would be “catastrophically impacted” if as little as one-sixth of the plant’s dangerous hydrofluoric acid gas were released.
Apr 4, 2011
No one, least of all the U.S. military, should be surprised that more than one in five young war veterans was unemployed last year. After all, many of these young men joined the military because they couldn’t find civilian work at home. Today, many employers won’t hire them over concerns they may suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Yes, this is what happens in war. Young men come home wounded mentally, emotionally and physically.
The government uses up a generation of men in their wars and then just throws them away.
Apr 4, 2011
The wave of protests sweeping through Arab countries is now hitting Syria. Since March 18th, demonstrators have demanded the freeing of thousands of political prisoners, the lifting of the state of emergency, freedom of expression and assembly and an end to the repression carried out by the all-powerful state security forces. Demonstrations occurred in several Syrian cities, including the port of Latakia and Daraa, a city in the south, where the forces of repression killed at least a hundred demonstrators.
Like the other regimes facing demonstrations, the Bashar al-Assad regime used both violent repression and actions that pretend to offer “change.” Since March 24th, the regime promised to create a commission to look into lifting the state of emergency in effect since 1963. It may consider legislation on freedom of the press and political parties. It also promised to raise the pay of public employees.
Finally, on March 29th, the prime minister and his entire cabinet resigned, with the incoming administration supposedly promising liberalization. At the same time, the Assad regime orchestrated counter-demonstrations in its own support. Students and bank employees got a day off, and other workers were paid to take part in the demonstrations.
For 50 years, the Syrian population has known nothing but the Baath Party dictatorship. When the al-Assad family took power in 1970, it ended the instability the country had known since its independence at the end of World War II. In 2000, when Bashar succeeded his father Hafez, who died after 30 years in power, Syrians spoke of a “Damascus spring.” An opposition party appeared, demanding the end of the dictatorship. But very quickly, the new president took charge.
The leaders of the Arab world, and also the imperialist leaders, are visibly worried about what will happen in Syria. Even if they have at one time or another castigated the regime, even portraying it as an enemy to be brought down, they were well aware that in its way it was valuable to them.
Syria has long been a home of Arab nationalism, and the dictatorship of the Assads was an expression of that nationalism. But it was a dictatorship quite adept at compromising with the imperialist leaders. For years it collaborated to maintain an equilibrium in Lebanon after the outbreak of civil war there in 1975, and it controlled the Palestinian movement in Lebanon. Syria still demands the return of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel. But it also knows how to observe the status quo with its neighbor.
The Assads knew how to make use of the Communist Party, by integrating it into a “progressive national front,” gaining the party’s support for the regime. Fractions of the Communist Party opposed to this collaboration were sent to prison. Finally, Assad’s regime repressed the Islamist opposition, especially by bombing the city of Hama in 1982, killing thousands after an uprising there led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The end of the Assad dictatorship could mean the return of the Syrian working masses to the political scene, and in particular of a working class which has traditions of struggle and political consciousness. That’s what worries the leaders of the imperialist world and the regional powers.
Indeed, if the Syrian dictatorship vacillates, it would call into question a fragile internal equilibrium, and also the fragile equilibrium of the Middle East. The Assad regime up to now has maintained a sort of balance between Israel, Iran, Lebanon and the other Arab countries and the imperialist powers.
All these powers question who could replace Assad, and what political forces could emerge among the demonstrators who today are challenging him. But their grounds for unrest could be grounds for hope for all those in the Arab world who aspire to put an end to a situation of misery and oppression.
Apr 4, 2011
It’s now estimated that more than 21,000 people died or are missing due to the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. More than 500,000 people who survived still find themselves in a precarious condition that is worsening every day in certain remote zones.
Some villages had to wait six days to see help arrive. The survivors could count only on themselves, sharing their provisions, trying to resist the cold, despite the shortage of fuel and even shelter. Two weeks after the tsunami, tens of thousands of survivors still couldn’t get hot meals or necessary medicine.
In some areas, there were cases of diarrhea, stress and exhaustion. The survivors had only the clothes they wore when the catastrophe hit. It was impossible to bathe.
People living in the area around the damaged nuclear power facility at Fukushima had to find their own way out of the area threatened with radioactive fall-out. Nothing was organized to evacuate them. There wasn’t even gasoline. A helpless family couldn’t flee the stricken zone unless it called on friends in Tokyo to come pick them up.
Even in Tokyo, people could count only on the solidarity of their fellow citizens and on charitable organizations to provide a little food and comfort. Crammed into gyms, sleeping on mats, they don’t know what’s going to happen. They have lost everything, their homes, their jobs, their income. Some are enrolling in a lottery for 600 vacant houses, but there are thousands more refugees. It may have started as a “natural” disaster, but it’s becoming a “social” disaster, which always hits the poorest people hardest.
Hundreds marched in Tokyo to protest against the slow response of the government to look after the survivors still awaiting aid in the stricken zone in northeastern Japan. The weather conditions, the rain, ice, snow and destruction of roads and bridges hindered transport of food and materials. But that doesn’t explain what happened. In Iwate, one of the northern prefectures, where 46,000 people were still in shelters on March 21st, there was no gasoline to transport necessities.
It is possible for the government of a country as developed as Japan to requisition the gasoline and transportation needed to aid the stricken population.
Only three days after the catastrophe, the Japanese government injected 475 billion dollars into the financial circuits to “reassure” the markets and “prevent the deterioration of the business climate.” So it is clearly a question of political choices whether to see that those who survived a natural catastrophe don’t pay with their lives or their health due to social disorganization.
Clearly, the fate of the survivors isn’t the priority in a society more worried about the interests of the bankers than those of the population.
Apr 4, 2011
Private First Class Bradley Manning, age 24, was arrested in Kuwait in May 2010 and sent back to the U.S. last July. Since then, he has been imprisoned on the marine base in Quantico, Virginia.
Bradley Manning is supposed to have sent to the Internet site WikiLeaks a video of an army helicopter attack in which eleven Iraqi civilians were killed in cold blood. He is accused of transmitting thousands of reports on Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, reports about battles describing the killing of civilians, about how the army hides it, about collusion with the Afghan war lords, the corruption of local functionaries and the continuation of the U.S. and NATO’s dirty war there.
Manning enlisted in 2007, looking for a stable job. Since he had good computer skills, the army used him as an intelligence analyst. In this way he knew of many atrocities committed by the U.S. in Iraq.
Today he faces a possible life sentence for “divulging military secrets” and “aiding the enemy.” And the military stated that such charges could bring a death sentence.
Amnesty International and others have denounced his current harsh conditions of imprisonment. He’s locked up 23 hours a day in a tiny cell. He is allowed only one hour a day to walk and one hour of television per day. He’s not allowed to work and his hands and feet are handcuffed when he is allowed visitors. He has been stripped naked to go to sleep and during inspection. This situation is all the more revolting as the U.S. Attorney General recently admitted there is no proof that Manning had contact with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Meanwhile, Manning rots in prison.
This maneuver will surprise only those who never heard about the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the execution of Communists Ethel and Julian Rosenberg, and the 30-year imprisonment of former black militant Mumia Abu-Jamal for a crime he didn’t commit.
The U.S. treats those it considers its enemies exactly as do the dictatorships to whom the U.S. pretends to give lessons in democracy.
Apr 4, 2011
Union officials for 14,000 L.A. city workers agreed to three year contracts that will cut current workers’ pay, as well as health care benefits for retirees. The union leaders had the gall to say that “collective bargaining does work.”
And these attacks are just for starters. No doubt buried in the agreement are even more ugly takeaways and concessions for city workers that they aren’t talking about.
Sure, city officials promise that this agreement averts lay offs. But that is just another big fat lie. There is no guaranteed protection against future lay offs or job cuts of all kinds.
City officials say they will try to use this agreement as a new pattern to force other unions to accept similar cuts and concessions.
Union leaders may go along with this. But city workers don’t have to. All they have to do is: Just Say No!
Apr 4, 2011
More than 7,000 students in the Miami, Florida-Dade County Public Schools are enrolled in classes online–computers but no teachers–only a computer technician in the classroom.
What this really means is no education for these children. All children need a human being with the knowledge and skill to give them individual attention when they need it. That’s what teaching is. And a computer is no substitute for a teacher.
But Florida is using these e-classes, even placing some middle school students in them, because education officials claim the state lacks funding for sufficient teachers.
Florida, and every other state in the U.S., already has a horrendous education problem. In Florida, students leave high school so unprepared that only 50% of those entering college will actually complete a degree in six years. Only half!
School officials claim they don’t have enough money. Yes, they have money–which they spend on their own nice fat salaries and benefits, and on over-inflated contracts–for computers, text books, maintenance, building additions, etc.–given to their friends.
This future is no future for our children.
Apr 4, 2011
State legislatures are voting to remove teacher tenure in a number of different states across the country.
Teacher tenure is always painted as an iron-clad way for teachers to keep their jobs, no matter how bad they may be–a “job for life,” no matter what.
This is a complete lie. “Tenure” for K-12 public school teachers is really nothing more than a right to due process in discipline and firing, a way to make sure that if teachers are fired, they have the right to a meeting where the administration has to show the reason they were fired. It does NOT keep bad teachers in guaranteed jobs. If a teacher truly is bad, they can lose their jobs–through due process that requires administrators to demonstrate it.
Removing teacher tenure removes that basic protection. It opens up teachers to arbitrary firings with no justification: If a teacher clashes with an administrator for whatever reason, they could be fired. If a science teacher insists on teaching the real science of evolution or plate tectonics, a right-wing school board would remove them. Teachers could be fired for racist reasons or sexist reasons; women who refuse sexual harassment from their administrators could be fired. And finally, older, higher-seniority, higher-paid teachers could be removed–just because they ARE higher-paid.
And THIS is the REAL reason for the removal of teacher tenure: Legislatures and administrators want the ability to clear out the higher-paid, experienced teachers and replace them with low-paid, young teachers who would be easily controlled because they would constantly fear for their jobs.
This is not a bid to get rid of bad teachers. If bad teachers are kept on the job today, it is not because teacher tenure holds them there. It’s because the budgets are too low to provide good conditions where teachers can teach well. More often than not, teachers simply become overwhelmed by these bad conditions after years of trying to compensate for them by putting in long hours and putting out their own money to try to make their classrooms liveable. The conditions they face burn teachers out.
Don’t blame the teachers who have been burnt out. Blame the conditions and low funding of the schools that destroys the schools–and the teachers and the students with them.
Removing teacher tenure rights will make sure that students are taught by young, inexperienced teachers who are afraid to sneeze without their administrators’ approval; teachers who will drive themselves into the ground and be replaced every few years, disrupting all continuity in the schools. It can only mean a worse education for the students.
Apr 4, 2011
Charter schools in general and KIPP schools in particular are held up as the educational model by both the Bush and Obama administrations, since students at KIPP schools supposedly do better. A new study looks at the 99 KIPP schools enrolling 27,000 students in 20 states–and shows why they do better!
The study found that not as many KIPP students are low income as in comparable public schools in similar districts. It found that KIPP took in half the number of disabled children as similar public schools must serve. KIPP serves far fewer students for whom English is a second language than in comparable public schools. And the study found that fully 40% of African American male students leave KIPP during the 7th and 8th grades–much more than from the public schools.
Dealing with many fewer students needing remedial help certainly helps KIPP schools produce good education outcomes, such as the figure that 85% of KIPP alumni go on to college.
But another reason for KIPP success is money. At every level, KIPP has more money–$1,779 per pupil from federal education funding, more than any other group, and a lot of private funding. KIPP’s schools had a total on average of $18,491 per pupil from all sources, compared to a national average of $11,937 per pupil.
In other words, KIPP demonstrates that to have better results, more money needs to be spent–more money that lets classes be smaller, teachers have more help, and allows schools to buy more books, supplies and equipment.
So what do all the local and national political hypocrites propose? Less money for public schools.
Apr 4, 2011
State education budgets are being cut all across the country. That means districts are preparing to lay off teachers all over the country next year. And that means larger class sizes.
Already, California, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Utah and Wisconsin have passed laws raising the allowable class sizes in their kindergarten through 12th grade classes. Class sizes in Charlotte, N.C. have gone from 25 to 31 students. In Los Angeles, the average size of ninth-grade English and math classes has gone from 20 to 34. Eleventh and twelfth grade classes have reached an average of 43 students–and sometimes much larger.
Arne Duncan, Obama’s Education Secretary, is fine with that. Duncan pretends that class size doesn’t matter. Last month he said he’d rather have his kids in a class of 28 students taught by a “fantastic” teacher than one of 23 students taught by a “mediocre” teacher.
He’s lying. We’re talking 35, 43 and 50 students, not 28! Not to mention the fact that large class sizes make sure that the education students will receive will be mediocre at best, no matter how good the teacher is. By trying to blame everything on the teacher, Duncan is hiding the fact that conditions in the classroom have an overwhelming impact on the quality of the teacher and on the quality of education students receive.
Duncan is ignoring decades of studies that show that class size DOES matter–that students in smaller classes perform much better than students in larger ones.
But smaller class sizes cost more money. And the Obama administration is cutting those very education budgets that can make so much difference to that quality of education. In all the propaganda he and Duncan are pumping out, Obama is justifying the attack on the national level while other politicians–Democrats AND Republicans–are carrying it out at the state and local levels.
We have no interest in accepting their garbage and their lies. The attack on teachers is an attack on students–and an attack on the whole working class.
Apr 4, 2011
Last month, the board of L.A.’s Housing Authority fired its chief executive, Rudolf Montiel. Montiel had asked board members to return part of the $150,000 these thieves spent on themselves for travel and food over the last two years. But, Montiel himself was not aiming to be thrifty to protect the agency’s budget. His yearly compensation package was worth nearly $450,000, including 10 weeks of vacation and a housing allowance.
These people of affluent income and high spending managed a Housing Authority responsible for providing shelter to about 60,000 of Los Angeles’ poorest families.
Last year, the Housing Authority came up with a plan to privatize the city’s public housing stock. Tenants of these housing projects protested the plan since it would increase the rent, making their housing not affordable. Montiel retaliated by trying to evict tenants who dared to protest his and his agency’s schemes.
These events reveal who Montiel, the board members and their friends are: people who get lavish lifestyles paid for by the government under the guise of helping the poor.
Apr 4, 2011
The UAW Vice President for Ford said he thinks job security is likely to be a priority in the UAW contract talks this year.
Well, look how well that has worked. Ever since “Job Security” has supposedly been a priority in contract talks as far back as 1980, the UAW has lost more than one million members.
When you see what Ford workers did, voting NO in 2009, and some of the other fights, including the demonstrations in Wisconsin or Michigan, maybe this year we can turn the tide of what has been a one-sided war up until now.
If today, the old “Job Security” slogan is being dusted off, it’s a way to get off the real issues–getting back all of our money, break time, holidays, retiree health, restoring all jobs to full pay.
Jobs are not secure if they are low pay with fewer or no benefits.
Apr 4, 2011
Recently ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has been picking up those arrested and held at Cook County jail. Those brought to the jail haven’t been convicted of a crime. Many come in for very minor offenses, like something hanging in the car affecting the driver’s view or a missing license plate. Nonetheless, they are getting deported.
Despite the claim that ICE is concentrating on dangerous criminals, most of those deported had no criminal conviction.
People have rightly focused anger on the attacks on immigrants by a Republican governor in Arizona. But similar if not worse attacks are being carried out by the Chicago Democrats and the Obama administration.
Apr 4, 2011
Once again, the Supreme Court has shown itself ready to condemn an innocent man to death–this time Troy Davis.
In 1991, Davis was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of Mark MacPhail, an off-duty Savannah, Georgia police officer working as a security guard. Police charged Davis with the murder, despite no gun or any other physical evidence linking him to the crime.
Almost all the witnesses who testified against him in the original trial have since recanted their testimony, accusing the cops of coercing them to lie. Other witnesses were found who testified that someone else had confessed to committing the murder.
In 2009, the Supreme Court put Davis’s execution on hold. But instead of giving him a new trial, it ordered a U.S. District Court to let Davis present evidence of his “innocence.”
That was a way to calm down the widespread international outrage over this case, but it gave Davis no means to defend himself. The District Court soon ruled that he hadn’t proved his innocence, only cast “reasonable doubt” on his guilt.
It is almost always impossible for someone to “prove innocence.” It’s why the standard for conviction has long been that the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty.
By refusing to hear his case again, the Supreme Court turned its back on this standard, reverting to the one used by those ministers three centuries ago who burned women at the stake who couldn’t “prove” they weren’t witches!
Defend Troy Davis! Defend democratic rights!
Apr 4, 2011
The British Trade Union Congress (TUC) organized a national demonstration in London against the government’s austerity attacks on Saturday, March 26th.
Between 250,000 and 400,000 people participated, an amount not seen in a union demonstration since 1985. People came from all over the country, in more than 600 buses, dozens of special trains and countless cars. Seen in the demonstration were numerous young people, as well as young workers and the unemployed, college students and groups of high school students. Many demonstrators carried their own signs, against the bankers and unemployment, against cuts in public services and social protections, and some signs protested the war in Libya.
The demonstration was more marked by the participants’ satisfaction, seeing how many were there, rather than real anger. But there was also an overwhelming sentiment that the government attacks had gone too far and it was time to go against those who caused the crisis.
Some union leaders speak of new actions, even “coordinated strikes,” but without any details. They speak of an “alternative,” without spelling out this means the Labor Party. That means the initiative for the necessary working class counter offense won’t come from them.
Nevertheless, the British workers have made their voices heard, said what they had to say and showed their forces. The day these demonstrators spent in the better off neighborhoods of London forced the journalists to change how they write their stories. Since the defeat of the miners in the 1980s, the working class has been pushed to the forgotten pages of history, in the name of a coming “society without classes,” by the journalists who serve the interests of the ruling class.
Let’s hope the success of this mobilization gives the workers confidence in their capacity to face collectively the attacks of the bourgeoisie, and to go beyond the political calculations of the union leaders.
Apr 4, 2011
The AFL-CIO called for a Day of Action to oppose the attacks on collective bargaining rights for public workers on April 4, the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
Pushed by an ever more angry black population, King had come to the point of taking a clear public stand against the war in Vietnam. He proposed a Poor People’s Campaign including a march on Washington to occupy the nation’s capital. And he went to Memphis in support of the strike by municipal sanitation workers.
The sanitation workers had gone on strike after two of their co-workers were killed when the compactor on a truck, which was known to be defective, started up with them inside.
Memphis sanitation, water, and sewer workers responded to the deaths in anger, refusing to go back to work without union recognition and having their demands met. They took up the slogan, “I Am a Man” and insisted they would live in dignity. Through their strike, they won their union, despite opposition from the Democrats who ran Memphis, the Republicans who outright opposed the Black Movement and the capitalists, who did not want to see unions extended in the South.
The real tribute that could be made to that fight by Memphis public workers would be a renewal today of the struggle they carried out–through demonstrations, strikes, and a new occupation of Washington, D.C. and state capitols.