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
May 2, 2011
First-quarter profits rolled in, to loud hurrahs and overturned champagne bottles: GE, $3.4 billion for the first three months of 2011; Ford, $2.55 billion; Caterpillar $1.23 billion; Apple, $6 billion; Deutsche Bank, $1.4 billion; DuPont, $1.42 billion; PepsiCo, $1.41 billion. Don’t even talk about the oil companies, six of which racked up 38 billion dollars altogether.
“It’s a recovery,” trumpets the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a recovery,” repeat the politicians.
What a recovery! CEO bonuses increase; the stock market is up; speculative “investments” blow up new bubbles.
Almost everything expanded–everything but jobs.
We are mired in what the professional economists call a “jobless recovery.”
Even the official, heavily massaged jobless rate proves it. Nearly 16% of the labor force were either unemployed or underemployed in March: one out of every six people. Officially.
The real situation is more vicious. Intolerably high unemployment has lasted so long, the government no longer counts millions of the unemployed. It’s as though 11.3 million people just “disappeared”–gone, evaporated by the trick of a statistician’s formula.
And the real situation has not begun to “turn a corner”–despite what politicians pretend. Even the government admits that at the current rate of new job creation, it will take until 2019 just to get the economy back to the level of unemployment that existed before this last recession started.
How bizarre and vicious is this world in which capitalism traps working people.
Are there people without a job, people who want to work? Millions of them. And there is work that needs to be done, vast amounts of it.
Potholes eat up your car, bridges tumble on your head, trees fall down and cut off electric service for weeks at a time. Look at the work that could be carried out by the people who have no job today.
Schools in big cities and rural areas are in a disgraceful state, often hiding dangers to the children in an unrepaired stairway or electrical outlet. Fix them. Clean the windows, plant some flowers so the children have a pleasant place to spend their day.
Too many children are crammed into too few classrooms. Build more schools. Too many children depend on too few teachers. Train more teachers, hire more assistants, and put janitors back in the schools so they are clean. Provide each school a nurse, a librarian, a staffed science lab, a music room, an art studio, a well-supplied gym.
Services in cities and towns are deplorable. Resume them–pick up garbage frequently enough to stop the spread of disease; treat alleys for rodents and bugs; clean out the sewers so water doesn’t back up. Re-open libraries and recreation centers.
Repair the dams and levees so people don’t lose their homes and farms to flood waters.
No jobs? No work? What nonsense.
There could be jobs. All it requires is money.
And there is money–in the hands of all these companies and banks today bragging about their profits. There are vast sums in the private holdings of the banks, money they got from the government and stuffed away. Take back those trillions. Put them to use to create jobs, carry out the work that needs to be done.
Would the wealthy yell, scream how unfair? Yes, they would. So what, so do thieves when they’re caught.
The wealthy, rolling in profits from the workers’ labor they stole, are thieves.
Laboring people in cities, small towns and farms created the wealth of this country. They should decide what to do with it.
May 2, 2011
Rahm Emmanuel announced his new school board. And what a bunch! Penny Pritzker, a billionaire owner of the Hyatt hotel chain which is denying its workers a contract, got a seat on the board. Then there’s the head of a bank; a former president of Northwestern University; a publishing executive; and a woman who’s worked as a lawyer for Exelon (owners of ComEd) and Sears. It’s a bunch of people tied to big business–and that’s who the schools will serve!
May 2, 2011
Lately, every trip to the grocery store brings yet another deception. One day it’s that $2 can of tuna, the same price as last week ... or is it? Well golly gee, this week, that $2 can of tuna is 2 ounces less than last week.
The hucksters who run the food corporations have come up with a new gimmick: instead of just raising the price outright, they shrink the food!
May 2, 2011
Public officials and the news media praised former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor Donald Schaefer following his death recently as a “man of the people” and “savior” of the city.
In fact, during his four terms as mayor of Baltimore, from 1971 through 1986, Schaefer started the massive turnover of city land and public funds to developers and other business interests that is still continuing now in Baltimore and other big U.S. cities.
Meanwhile, just a few blocks from new inner harbor restaurants, bars and shopping attractions for tourists; new office space for big corporations and financial institutions; and new luxury apartments and condominiums for the wealthy, there were–and still are–huge poverty-stricken areas.
Schaefer also pushed for the continued construction of highways through the city itself. And as a critical reporter for a small local newspaper noted, by getting one single mile-long stretch of highway built in West Baltimore–not connected to a highway at either end–Schaefer destroyed more houses and small businesses than had burned up everywhere in the city during the Baltimore riot of 1968.
Schaefer sacrificed the interests of Baltimore’s working people on a massive scale in order to produce profits for developers, corporations, banks and wealthy people. This is why politicians, public officials and the news media honor him today.
May 2, 2011
On April 19th, a jury convicted Lee B. Farkas of 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy for pyramiding 2.9 billion dollars of fraudulent mortgages.
A witness recalled Farkas saying, “I could rob a bank with a pencil.”
In his defense, Farkas stated, “It’s very common in our business ... to sell loans that don’t exist. It happens all the time.”
Yes, the frauds happen all the time. It’s only prosecutions and convictions that are rare.
May 2, 2011
On April 21, a house fire killed a four-year-old girl in a poor working-class neighborhood on Detroit’s northeast side.
The nearest fire station, less than a mile away, was “browned out” at the time. Detroit fire stations are starved for funds and city officials “brown out,” that is, temporarily suspend operations, at a certain number of stations each day.
The city rolls its financial dice every day, and this day a four-year-old girl lost the roll of these loaded dice.
May 2, 2011
An unheard-of barrage of more than 200 tornadoes swept through the Southeast U.S. in late April, killing almost 400 people at first count.
A five-mile path through the center of Tuscaloosa, Ala., was devastated. Birmingham was hit, the municipal water system badly damaged. Destruction was widespread in small towns across Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Some completely disappeared off the face of the earth.
The U.S. government has immense resources, which could be used to support the tornadoes’ victims. We saw them deployed like lightning in Iraq and then Afghanistan. Battalions of soldiers and engineers constructed instant bases complete with showers, air conditioning, and full-course meals. The government flew in pallet-loads of hundred-dollar bills, stacks and stacks of them for the new favored elite.
What resources and aid will flow to the tornado victims? Well, it depends.
Do they have any oil?
May 2, 2011
Two foundations have now “partnered” to join the business interests that are experimenting with education-reform gimmicks.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, world’s largest so-called “philanthropy,” is joining the Pearson Foundation to provide experimental courses for the new “common core” curriculum in K-12 schools.
Behind the Gates Foundation is, of course, Microsoft, with its business interests highly focused on selling as much computer software and hardware to schools as possible.
Behind the Pearson Foundation is Pearson Education, with its business interests highly focused on selling schools as many of its textbooks and multimedia courses as possible.
School districts will soon get an “education” in how quickly their money disappears into these corporate jaws.
May 2, 2011
Detroit’s mayor says there is no money so the Public Library must close branches. In the worst-case scenario, the library would close 18 of the 23 current branches. Even in the best case scenario, 12 branches would be closed. Between 135 and 191 library workers would lose their jobs.
In this capitalist society that uses us up there is no room for workers’ kids to have access to schools, libraries and teachers.
That, plain and simple, is the mayor’s message.
May 2, 2011
“Detroit Public Library extravagant redecorating spree”–this was the headline on an article in the Detroit News, complaining that the library had spent $1100 each for 20 comfortable chairs put in a lounge for its patrons, and $500 each for 24 hanging light fixtures over computers.
In other words, patrons of the Detroit library–mostly workers or high school students, the majority black–shouldn’t expect to have even a few modest comforts.
Go peddle that racist and elitist crap somewhere else, Mr. Editor of the Detroit News.
Crap–and a very convenient coincidence, printing this article just when Detroit’s businessman-mayor, Dave Bing, wants to cut the library’s budget to shreds.
May 2, 2011
Public employee pensions are under attack. Since 2008, public workers in approximately 37 states have experienced pension cuts–either through being asked to contribute more of their own money to pensions, or by having benefits lowered.
This year, it’s worse. All 50 states are considering bills to reduce pensions or require workers to pay more.
The politicians say that pensions are too generous. That’s a lie. The fact is, pensions average around $20,000 a year, often less, and state workers in 19 states get no Social Security. Pensions are under attack because the pension funds are underfunded. Politicians in the states stole from these funds, then used the money for other things.
According to a recent study by the Pew Center on the states, states have been “failing to make annual payments for pension systems at the levels recommended by their own actuaries.”
Instead they took the money and gave it to Big Business in lucrative state contracts, tax breaks to corporations and privatization. There has been a huge transfer of wealth from the states to private companies, and much of that money came from workers’ pensions.
Public employees kept up their side of the bargain. They taught the students, they provided public services and maintained public safety. They worked hard. But they are now being told that their benefits should be cut because the politicians stole the money and gave it to business.
Well, take the money back. Repay the pension funds. The money is there. There is no reason a single pension should be cut.
May 2, 2011
City officials just gave a nice gift to Patrick Turner, the millionaire investor involved in a billion-dollar Baltimore development project. He gets another parcel of land worth half a million dollars for–nothing. He pays no property tax on it. In exchange, he plants some trees and bushes, and keeps it up as a park, which will increase the value of his upscale development next door.
And the politicians claim Baltimore is broke. Well, no wonder!
May 2, 2011
Private First Class Brian Manning, a 23-year-old computer expert, has been in prison since July 29th, 2010, accused of having furnished thousands of military documents on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the website, WikiLeaks. One of the documents included a video showing soldiers laughing as they machine-gun civilians. He risks a sentence of 52 years, in effect a life sentence, since he’s accused of being “a traitor to his country.”
The United Nations took up his case. The prison authorities responded by moving him from Virginia to Kansas. They claimed this was an improvement, but the result is that it makes it more difficult for his family and lawyer to visit. His trial isn’t any time soon, so it’s yet another way to break him. This is probably the government’s goal–a government which has a long history of such tactics, as seen with the several-decades-long imprisonment of the former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the Native American leader, Leonard Peltier.
This case has already made waves at the top of the state apparatus, including the resignation of State Department spokesman, Philip Crowley, who said that the treatment inflicted on Manning was “ridiculous, counter-productive and stupid.” But the official position, expressed by President Obama himself, is that Manning’s conditions of detention are “appropriate.”
In fact, nothing justifies Brian Manning being held in prison. What is his crime? He helped expose crimes committed by the U.S. army in the Middle East. By denouncing an unjust war which the great powers lead against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, which profits only the bankers, arms merchants and oil companies, he was doing his duty. A simple human duty.
May 2, 2011
A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided for a second time that Mumia Abu-Jamal deserves a new sentencing trial to determine whether he should receive the death penalty or life imprisonment. The U.S. Supreme Court had asked the Circuit Court to reconsider its earlier decision in response to an appeal by Philadelphia prosecutors.
This is now the third time a court has overturned Mumia’s death sentence, yet the Philadelphia district attorney still intends to drag Mumia through yet another appeal. It has been 10 years since a lower court judge at the district level first overturned Mumia’s death sentence and 28 years that he has been on death row–put there because of his political views just as political activists were railroaded or killed by dictatorships in Egypt, Syria, Libya....
This latest decision does nothing to overturn Mumia’s conviction for the killing of a Philadelphia cop, despite mountains of evidence in his favor. But it does testify to the support Mumia has gathered around the world. He is alive today because of international outrage against the trial and condemnation of an innocent man.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal now!
May 2, 2011
Tunisian authorities created a commission to investigate corruption, and to find and recover goods misappropriated by the ex-dictator Ben Ali and his clan. The total sum is estimated to be between five and ten billion dollars, an amount comparable to the foreign debt of Tunisia. The task won’t be easy, since Ben Ali’s fortune was hidden in numerous accounts, thanks to front names and dummy companies in tax havens like Dubai, Qatar, Lebanon, Malta and the Bahamas.
But Tunisians have gotten a glimpse of the extent of Ben Ali’s riches. TV showed the search carried out in his private residence in a Tunis suburb. The ex-president was the owner, but leased it at a high price to the Tunisian state, which in turn gave it to him free as his official residence. Quite a profit made off of that deal! In this little palace was a pile worthy of Ali Baba’s cave: from jewels, luxury watches, gold pieces, to wads of currencies totaling a value of 37 million dollars.
While this one treasury has been recovered, it will be another matter to identify all his clan’s assets held abroad, with a value one hundred or two hundred times as much.
As for recovering the still more numerous billions extorted from the Tunisian workers by industrial groups and banks of the great powers, in particular French companies, no one has even mentioned that idea. But it was these capitalists who were the sponsors and beneficiaries of the Ben Ali dictatorship for twenty-three years.
May 2, 2011
The following report from Britain appeared in the April 29th issue of Lutte Ouvriére (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers organization of that name active in France.
The marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29th had 1,900 invited guests, 7,000 journalists, 5,000 police, fighter planes and helicopters, with the center of London under surveillance, topped off with an outlandish parade. For two weeks up until the wedding, the media inundated the British population with every detail of this event, which was supposed to “weld the nation together” after the shock of the economic crisis.
But by far the most scandalous aspect of this great nationalist spectacle is certainly its cost, which the government is very careful not to reveal, nor to talk about the profits which businesses will get from it.
In response to the understandable hostility of the working population to this arrogant luxury, April 29th was declared a public holiday. Save that ... the law didn’t impose anything on the bosses—including government contractors, like the giant Kelly Services, which forced its workers to take a day off without pay!
All the public monies that have gone to fund this royal wedding will serve only to make things worse for the population, which has already shouldered the burden of the huge budget deficit caused by bailing out the banks. The working masses have had to pay a very high price for this bailout, costing them hundreds of thousands of jobs. A million households have seen their housing allocation drop sharply. Now, who knows how many hundreds of millions of public dollars have been wasted on this wedding! The night that Kate Middleton spent in a hotel the night before the wedding could have provided seven months of unemployment compensation!
“Weld the nation together”? It’s hard to see how this extravagant parade of wealth could do that. But maybe it will give an additional reason for the laboring classes, who the bourgeoisie wants to make pay for the crisis, to weld their ranks together to make all these parasites give up their gains.
May 2, 2011
WikiLeaks just released new files to several U.S. and foreign papers. These latest ones came from the Guantanamo detention center, the U.S. army base located in Cuba.
The files cover from 2002 when the center opened, up to 2009, and concern 750 of the 779 people detained there, accused of links with al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban.
In the final reckoning, the detention center classed 220 of these detainees in the category of dangerous terrorists, 380 were considered simply to be generally affiliated with the Taliban and 150 were classified as either victims of the settling of scores, arrested on the basis of false information obtained under torture, or simply present at the wrong time in the wrong place ... whom their jailers finally recognized as innocent.
For example, the press cites the case of a poor Afghan farmer who spent two years in Guantanamo because he had the same name as a Taliban warlord. A Sudanese cameraman for al Jazeera was detained for six years for interrogation ... about his training by the TV station and its supposed links with terrorist organizations. An Afghan shepherd, captured near a terrorist act, was recognized as innocent after three years. Missing travel documents, having a calculator, even wearing a certain brand watch, which supposedly was used by al-Qaeda for its attacks–these were all justifications for imprisonment. Only after years of detention and inhuman treatment were some of these detainees freed.
During Obama’s election campaign in 2008 and when taking office in January 2009, he pledged to shut the detention center within a year. At the beginning he even suspended exceptional military tribunals. These promises have been forgotten.
The detention center, which hasn’t received new prisoners since 2007, still functions. 172 people are still detained there, the majority since it opened. The exceptional military tribunals have resumed. Of the 172 detained who remain, 33 are going to be judged for war crimes, a hundred sent back to their country or sent to a third country for detention, and the others will be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial. From Bush to Obama, state barbarism continues.
May 2, 2011
Not everyone loses under the EFM. The mainly wealthy investors that hold municipal bonds are protected. According to a Snyder administration spokesperson: “There is nothing in [Public Act] 4 which would allow an [emergency manager] to void bonds or other municipal securities.” (Lansing State Journal, 4/22)
Of course not. The servants of the wealthy wrote the law!
May 2, 2011
With a few amendments, the Michigan legislature has turned the old “Emergency Financial Manager” (EFM) into a lethal weapon. It allows the governor to decide to underfund cities, counties and school boards, and then declare them “in danger of bankruptcy.” And it lets him then appoint an EFM.
The EFM is given the power to make all decisions concerning a city, county, or schools. He can override or set aside all elected officials, issue edicts just like laws; cancel union contracts; cut wages, benefits, working conditions and jobs; eliminate social programs or public services; sign very profitable contracts.
The EFM is a dictator, charged with imposing the wishes of capital without having to go through any of the cumbersome steps of the legislative process. And the EFM can’t be voted out in the next election.
We’ve already had a taste in Michigan of what that means. The day after the new law went into effect, the Emergency Financial Manager for Benton Harbor, Michigan handed over a public beach to a private developer–something that had been blocked for three years in the City Council. He then handed over the Water Department to another private company to run. And he is merging police and fire, making firefighters try to answer burglary calls, and police try to put out fires.
The Emergency Financial Manager for Detroit schools ordered 45 schools to be transformed into charter schools–giving them only a few weeks to find themselves a charter company to run them–or they would be closed. He made it clear that union contracts would not be respected, salary schedules not respected, seniority not respected. And he sent out layoff notices to every single teacher in the whole Detroit school system. He made it clear that tenure and seniority will not determine which teachers are brought back, and that their wages will be cut.
In the same week, the mayor of Detroit said that if city unions wouldn’t give him the concessions he wanted in wages, health care and pensions, he would ask the governor to appoint an EFM. And the governor let it be known that he would appoint the Detroit mayor himself as the EFM.
Wisconsin Governor Walker, noting what a great idea Michigan’s new governor had, is right now preparing his version of an Emergency Financial Manager. He calls it “financial martial law.”
May 2, 2011
Inside 2,000 Walmart stores there are kiosks from the company Jackson Hewitt, which makes loans against coming tax refunds. Someone might get $1,500 in advance of the tax refund, while paying from $25 to several hundred dollars in fees.
Loan shark interest rates, right at your local Walmart store.
May 2, 2011
Members of four of the unions representing Los Angeles city workers voted against concessions demanded by the city–including a 4% pay cut and the freezing of scheduled pay raises. In response, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa threatened to impose 42 unpaid furlough days on the 6,300 workers, a 16% pay cut.
Los Angeles has already been imposing unpaid furlough days on its workers for the last two years.
Trying to get approval for this latest set of concessions, city officials made promises–guaranteeing workers healthcare coverage after they retire, for example. But many workers were skeptical. Street services worker Dan Mariscal said: “We gave concessions. We were promised the same thing in 2009, when they said we would have shared sacrifice, and they didn’t follow through on what they promised.”
Many workers were also skeptical about the officials’ claim that the city has no money. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants to give prime city land in downtown and large subsidies to one of the wealthiest real estate developers in the world so he can have a new football stadium.
So workers voted No. They need to keep on refusing with the only language the bosses’ understand.
May 2, 2011
During a speech in Queens, New York, William Dudley, the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a former Goldman Sachs partner, was explaining why inflation is–supposedly–low, when the audience reminded him of food and gas prices.
Dudley dismissed the question. “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he said, “you have to look at the prices of all things.”
Stupid answer? Yes, but Dudley did exactly what the government has been doing for decades–ignore the prices of certain necessities in cost-of-living reports–in order to hide inflation and thus lower wages and Social Security pensions tied to COLA adjustments.
Except that, this time, there were real people in the room to challenge such obvious lies. Someone in the audience shot back: “I can’t eat an iPad.”
May 2, 2011
Today energy companies promote natural gas as a clean source of energy. But thanks to their new, profitable technique called “fracking,” it’s anything but clean.
In this new process, more than two million gallons of water, sand and chemicals are pumped through a well under very high pressures to fracture underground rock and release entrapped natural gas. The fracking process may be efficient for them, but it has many damaging effects.
The biggest damage is done by the chemicals used for fracking. These include very harmful chemicals like benzene, a well-known carcinogen, and fluoride, which can cause bone damage.
Thanks to fracking, these chemicals have already ended up in clean water wells and rivers surrounding the drill sites in Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia. And health problems and cancer rates have increased among residents living near these wells.
The water used for fracking leaches naturally occurring contaminants from underground soil, like barium, strontium and radioactive radium, and brings them to the surface. This waste water is highly toxic.
“Clean energy”? Tell that to anyone living near one of the 450,000 active wells that have sprung up over the last ten years.
Fracking: another product of capitalism–poisonous for anyone around. But very profitable for the companies.
May 2, 2011
Gas prices are skyrocketing once again. A gallon of regular has pushed above $4.00 in most places around the country.
Meanwhile, oil company profits took a huge leap last quarter.
Coincidence? Not on your life.
All the major oil companies reported huge profits in the last quarter. ConocoPhillips’ profit jumped up 44%. Chevron’s was up 31%. The profits of the second biggest company, Royal Dutch Shell, rose 30% to 6.3 billion dollars–in one quarter. And Exxon, the biggest oil company in the world, saw its profit leap 69%–to 10.7 billion dollars. In one quarter!!
All the reasons they used to give for why prices have to rise have fallen away like so many dead leaves.
They once pretended that there’s a scarcity–that demand is increasing while production is falling. Scarcity? Saudi Arabia itself says that there is too much oil on the market right now! Too much demand? Hello–there’s a downturn: worldwide demand has gone down, not up!
Their ballooning profits tell the whole story: they’re robbing us, plain and simple.
The oil companies will charge what they think they can get away with. If they think they can get $5.00, they’ll charge $5.00. If they think they can get 6, 7 or 8–the price will climb to 6, 7 or 8 dollars.
That’s the rules of the capitalist game, as played by big oil.
May 2, 2011
On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon-Valdez spilled more than 260,000 barrels of crude oil after it was grounded on a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. This was the worst oil spill in the U.S. history before the 2010 BP destruction of the Gulf of Mexico.
According to a Federal government report in 2010, spilled oil is still in Alaska’s sand and soil. A study carried out in 2003 predicted that it will take up to 30 years for natural resources to recover.
As for the victims of this spill, they were stalled in the court system by Exxon for decades before they got paid. In 1994, a jury ordered Exxon to compensate 38,000 spill victims for damages. But Exxon appealed this decision in one court after the other. In 2008, when Exxon finally agreed to pay, the payment was only 7.5% of the original decision: around $30,000 per victim before the expenses, not enough money to recover their lost income back.
Big oil knows it can damage the environment with impunity and harm people. They bank on acquiescence from the government to pump up their profits.