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 16, 2011
One after another, financial authorities in the different states have embarrassed their governors by announcing they were taking in more money than expected. In Michigan, officials said that the state would take in 700 million dollars more for the year. In California, state authorities announced an “unexpected surge” of 2.5 billion dollars in taxes for just the first months of the year. In Massachusetts, officials announced that in April the government had taken in close to 600 million dollars than expected in one month. And Kansas announced that it had collected 3% more in taxes in April than expected.
For the last few years, state governors–Republican and Democrat–had used dire talk about budget deficits as a great big club to attack the population. They swung the deficit club to cut every social program in sight. They swung the deficit club to attack their own workforce, imposing layoffs, furloughs, pay and benefit cuts. They slashed aid to local agencies and city governments that provided vital services and programs, starting with education and health care, leading to more job cuts.
The budget scam was this: they had no choice, the deficit made them do it. They said it was a structural deficit. They said that state government had to learn to live within their means.
All the while, these politicians were handing all the money they had stolen, through the cuts and layoffs, and turning it over to big business and the wealthy. The politicians cut business taxes–over and over again. They privatized entire departments, granting rich contracts to their wealthy friends: janitorial, administration, IT. They turned public schools into charter schools, run by corporations, with big profits coming from money paid by the government, while dumping teachers and staff and forcing the new hires to work much more for much less pay. And they provided rich subsidies of all sorts.
It was a regular budget deficit gravy train. And the politicians have been riding it for all that it is worth. Apparently, they had gotten away with these scams for so long, they were caught off-guard when their financial departments actually let a little light on the real budget.
But the governors didn’t miss a beat.
California’s Jerry Brown, a Democrat, said that he will continue to push for the extension of expiring tax increases–in sales, income and vehicle taxes, that is, taxes on working people. He then announced that he would close 70 state parks immediately.
And Michigan’s Rick Snyder, a Republican, had his budget director announce that he would go ahead with severe cuts that are planned for education, Community Health, social services and “other areas of the budget,” while pushing through the elimination of the Michigan Business Tax, said to be worth 1.8 billion dollars per year.
These liars! We have no reason to accept a single cut. No reason to give up a single concession.
There is money for education, public services, and social programs. The wealthy have stolen it! Take it back from them!
May 16, 2011
One reason why prices all over the world on such basic necessities as gasoline and food have skyrocketed has been Wall Street greed.
For more than a decade, Wall Street companies, led by Goldman Sachs, have set up big investment funds that have bet on the prices of raw materials from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy and wheat.
Of course, speculation in these markets is nothing new. For more than a century, for example, farmers in this country sold their crops to speculators before the harvest. These “future” contracts were a way that the farmer hedged against lean times, not to speak of pay their production costs. As for the speculators, they made their money by buying low and selling somewhat higher. But with the rise of these investment funds, Wall Street companies and speculators, who have nothing to do with actual production or distribution, set up a scam that has done nothing but push prices up, higher and higher still.
When the global financial crisis hit in late 2007, speculators, fearing the financial meltdown, began to pour their money into what they considered safe places to park their cash: starting with basic commodities–including food and fuel. There was a 50-fold increase in dollars in these Wall Street investment funds. So, while real estate and stock prices plunged, food prices skyrocketed, creating new bubbles. The price of hard red spring wheat more than quadrupled on commodity markets. And from 2005 to 2008, the worldwide price of food rose 80%–and has kept rising.
As the money flowed, the bankers put together sparkling new investment products, spearheaded by oil and gas products, as well as various grains, to attract more money. Speculators, who used to account for one-fifth of the traders in the market for grains, now outnumber the real producers and distributors by a four-to-one margin.
Investment bankers engineered an artificial upward pull on the price of grains and other products. As prices rose, more speculative money was pulled in, which pushed prices still higher. And this created a shock to the global food production and delivery system.
Wall Street companies, bankers and traders made huge profits from these speculative bubbles, devouring everyone and everything. Smaller farmers gained nothing from the sharp rise in food prices. Whatever increase they got was erased by bigger increases in their cost of production, such as energy, fertilizer, pesticides–not to speak of their financing costs.
As for the working class and poor, the rise in food and fuel costs comes on the heels of the jobs crisis, the housing crisis and all the rest. In the U.S., some of the worst hunger has increased by 39% over the last three years–according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, about 17% of the U.S. population is classified as “food insecure,” which means that at times during the year, they don’t have enough to eat.
But for the roughly two billion people across the world who spend more than 50% of their income on food, the effects have been staggering: 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world’s “food insecure” to a peak of one billion–a number never seen before.
And yet, none of this crisis is due to an actual lack of food. On the contrary, food production has increased faster than population growth. No, it is because the capitalists squeeze the world markets of the most vital necessities simply for their own profit.
May 16, 2011
Ford’s nearly 2.6 billion dollar record first quarter profit was the highest since 1998. They made profits in all regions of the world and in all of their business units. Their North American pre-tax operating profit jumped 49% this quarter compared to a year ago.
These profits came from our labor and from the labor of workers around the world. This only makes us remember how much we have all lost and how much we all have in common.
When Alan Mulally’s windfall compensation for 2010 was announced, UAW President Bob King said: “Alan Mulally is a great CEO but I don’t think any human being in the world deserves that much money.” (Detroit News, April 14th).
Well, this “great CEO” cut jobs, closed plants, took our pay, gutted retiree health care so they have to pay more out of pocket, and wants to condemn our children and grandchildren to second class citizens with a lower standard of living.
So, other than that, yeah, he’s a great guy–and a thief, to boot!
May 16, 2011
For big developers, new schools are a chance to make big bucks.
Take the brand new Central Region High School No. 13 that is being completed in Glassell Park. In 2004, after the Los Angeles Unified School District chose the site for a new school, a big developer and major contributor to Villaraigosa’s first mayoral campaign swooped in and bought the property for 32 million dollars. He then sold it right back to the school district for 50 million dollars.
An instant profit taken from the schools, students and teachers.
May 16, 2011
Rahm Emanuel recently named Jean-Claude Brizard as the next CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. He formerly headed Rochester, New York’s school system, where he did exactly what Rahm wants him to do here: attack teachers, close schools, hand public schools over to private charter operators.
We know what to expect from him: he’ll continue the campaign to dismantle public education, unless Chicago’s students, parents, and teachers force him and Emanuel to step back.
May 16, 2011
The Washington, D.C. School District notified around 660 teachers and other school employees that their jobs will be eliminated next month because of “budget cuts and enrollment shifts.” Included in the 660 is the entire staff of Johnson Middle School.
These employees are not guaranteed to get hired in a new position. Principals can hire newly recruited teachers instead–meaning less experienced and lower paid.
In schools, just like hospitals, airports, or any other workplace–experience counts a lot. Acting chancellor Kaya Henderson is carrying out Michelle Rhee’s same policy: attacking the very children who are most in need of experienced teachers, local schools, and small class sizes.
May 16, 2011
Baltimore City’s school chief just pushed 330 experienced teachers out of the school system, with an early retirement package. Now he proposes up to 500 more layoffs, including classroom aides, accountants and office staff.
The money saved will not go to help improve the education of Baltimore school children. On the contrary, fewer experienced teachers and less help for the entire school system–whether professional or janitorial–simply makes an already bad situation worse.
The money supposedly saved on education will go to line the pockets of the rich, whether contractors who provide computer systems that don’t work, or right-wing destroyers of public education who start private schools–or the wealthiest people in the state who have their hands in the state’s treasury.
May 16, 2011
Michigan governor Rick Snyder claims that his 1.7-billion-dollar tax cut for businesses will create jobs.
A reporter asked him how many–and he wouldn’t answer.
With good reason. Study after study has shown the same thing: tax cuts don’t create jobs. In the short run and the long run, a researcher said, “the results are likely to be very disappointing.” His studies show that after a 10% business tax cut, employment rises only 2%–after 20 years!
But then, creating jobs was never the point–increasing profits for big business was!
May 16, 2011
This past January, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the merger of media conglomerates Comcast and NBC-Universal. FCC commissioner Meredith Baker pushed for approval, and said it “took too long.”
On April 18, commissioner Baker said she would resign and become Senior Vice President at–where else?–NBC-Universal!
Baker is a scandal, true. But the bigger scandal is that Baker’s move is so typical. Of legislators who have left office, more than a third have gone directly into lobbying. And we need only recall the revolving door between Goldman Sachs and positions at the U.S. Treasury.
Government is a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business, and those who act accordingly feather their nests in spectacular fashion.
May 16, 2011
The U.S. invasion of Iraq has turned the clock back several decades for the poor majority of the population. Every indicator which reflects social deprivation in any society–life expectancy, death rate at birth, death rates from common diseases, illiteracy rate, average calorie intake, joblessness, etc.–is now far worse than it was before the U.S. invasion.
U.N. officials admit that there are more than 1.5 million “internally displaced people” in the country–i.e., internal refugees forced out of their homes by the civil war or the threats of the militias. Many of these internal refugees have nowhere to go and flock to illegal squatter camps in the main towns. The number of urban squatters is increasing, reaching half-a-million in late 2009, according to the U.N.’s figures–which are generally considered a vast underestimate–with more than half that number in the capital.
More than eleven million (almost 60%) of today’s 19 million urban dwellers live in slums, compared to around 20% before the invasion–at a time when living conditions were already considerably worsened by the Western blockade of Iraq.
The Iraqi government’s own statisticians acknowledge the terrible rise of poverty. Their figures show that 23% of the population lives on less than $65 per month and 5% on less than $34 per month. Yet, the food rations, which have been the only means of survival for the poorest ever since the pre-invasion blockade, have been reduced several times by al-Maliki’s caretaker government.
Power shortages have been an old problem in Iraq, ever since the U.S.-British carpet-bombing of the country preceding the invasion put most power stations out of service and destroyed a large part of the power transmission network.
For years, a large section of the Iraqi population has had to make do with no electricity at all. Those who could afford it bought fuel-powered generators, which were often shared between several households.
After eight years of this process, whole urban areas–the poorest–are still getting no electricity at all, while the other areas get only a three or four hours’ supply each day, on a largely random basis. Only highly militarized areas, such as Baghdad’s so-called “Green Zone” get a reliable 24-hour supply. The Green Zone is where most foreign and government facilities are located, along with the residences of the richest.
This is the human balance sheet of the U.S. war on Iraq.
May 16, 2011
Under its Western-backed regime, Afghanistan has become the poorest country in Southern Asia and one of the world’s ten poorest countries, depending on the measures used. Conditions have become even worse than they were in 2004, when, despite the destruction caused by the blind bombing of the invasion and the two previous decades of war, the country was still in 6th position on the U.N. poverty scorecard. Overall, according to U.N. agencies, 20 million of the country’s 26 million inhabitants live under the internationally recognized poverty line. And such figures do not take into account the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who still live in refugee camps in Pakistan and in Iran.
Countless factories have been closed down for lack of parts, lack of energy or due to attacks from resistance groups, not to mention those which have been destroyed by coalition bombing or missiles as a result of “faulty intelligence.” The jobless count reaches as much as 80% in some of the country’s urban areas.
Even in the most urbanized parts of the country, electricity is seldom available for more than a few hours a day, when it is available at all. In Kabul, the majority of the four million inhabitants, most of who flocked to the capital in order to escape from the rural combat areas, live in squalid conditions, without drinking water or functioning sewage systems. Buildings destroyed by the Western bombing stand in the middle of makeshift squats and shanties. Only the rich Western-controlled central area enjoys the trappings of modern amenities. But these are out of bounds for ordinary Afghans.
The situation of women is especially dire. With the exception of a small minority among the better-off layers, little has changed in the condition of women under this regime which, according to U.S. and British leaders, was meant to free Afghan women once and for all from the feudal yoke of Islamic fundamentalism. Against the backdrop of worsening material conditions, this also means worsening physical conditions for women: after Sierra Leone, Afghanistan has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world.
Meanwhile the heroin capitalists are ostentatiously showing off their increasing wealth in places like Herat, for instance, a northwestern provincial capital and a traditional smuggling conduit to neighboring Iran. There, in the middle of the vast amounts of rubble left over from three decades of war, among the derelict mud compounds where the majority of the population lives, extravagantly luxurious houses occupied by heroin capitalists have sprung out of the ground, surrounded by lush gardens, which seem out of place in such arid surroundings.
One of the most obvious results of the U.S. war on Afghanistan has been to make heroin production the mainstay of Afghanistan’s economy, accounting for more than 50% of its GDP. What a record for U.S. imperialism to be proud of!
May 16, 2011
There were demonstrations of joy in Washington after Obama announced the execution of bin Laden.
Bin Laden was scum and there is no reason to shed tears over his death. Certainly the attacks of 2001 were obscene. Even if the World Trade Center might seem to be a symbol of American imperialism, the nearly three thousand people who died in this attack had nothing to do with imperialist policy.
But there is no reason to rejoice when you look at this whole history.
Bin Laden was spawned by American imperialism itself. And the details of his life show that. He was a son of a rich bourgeois family with connections to Saudi royalty. He began his terrorist activity, paid by the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services, and directed by them. At that point, during the 1980s, Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviet army. To counter the influence of the USSR, the U.S. went all out to support and to arm fundamentalist guerrillas. The U.S. used Al Qaeda against the Soviet Union and the Afghan government it supported–just like it later used the Taliban to reimpose order on Afghanistan.
The imperialist powers are used to this kind of game, even when the Soviet Union is not on the scene. Their domination of the world raises so much indignation, anger and hatred that all their armies together are not sufficient to contain the explosions that result. They supplement their own violence with local reactionary forces they manipulate, and they set one people against another. The looting of the planet by a few dozen large capitalist corporations is perpetuated at this high human cost.
But sometimes watchdogs become rabid and bite their own masters. That’s what happened to the state of Israel, which had once manipulated Hamas to reduce the influence of Arafat. That’s what happened to the United States with bin Laden. After creating a perfect killing machine, the U.S. ruling class had to watch it operate with terrible efficiency in the heart of U.S. power.
The leaders of the imperialist world may rejoice and loudly announce that one terrorist is dead. But terrorism is not dead, because imperialism is creating new people so angry that they bring terrorism to life over and over again.
Pakistan may be an ally of the United States, but bin Laden hid in a villa near Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, not in some caves in the mountains. He could get away with it for so long because he benefitted from Pakistani accomplices, starting with the Pakistan secret services as well as in the population.
Bin Laden was certainly scum, who had the same contempt for humanity that the leaders of the imperialist world show every day when their bombs fall indiscriminately on the population in poor countries. Looking for men desperate enough to blow themselves up, bin Laden found his candidates in the huge pool of physical and moral misery produced by the domination by imperialism over the poor Muslim countries.
Despite their euphoria, the political leaders of imperialism fear a wave of attacks in vengeance. While bin Laden is hated, and rightfully so, by the U.S. population, in other parts of the world even his worst actions are seen as acts of vengeance against the Western powers that have plundered, exploited and humiliated so many millions.
Those poor masses who felt their own humiliation vindicated by the acts and speeches of this rich, reactionary son of a bourgeois family are wrong, of course. Those who practice indiscriminate terrorism in the name of reactionary ideas can only bring forth fiercely oppressive regimes weighing on the exploited. For the poor, a supreme avenger exists no more than does a supreme savior.
The emancipation of the workers from the shackles of a society where money, exploitation and imperialism reign will be the work of the workers themselves. That is as true for the disinherited masses in the poor countries as it is for the exploited in the heart of imperialism.
May 16, 2011
In Cairo, Egypt on the night of May 8th, Muslims and Christian Copts once again clashed in the working class neighborhood of Imbaba. There were at least 12 deaths and 260 wounded in the violence that followed the burning of two Christian churches in the area.
Unfortunately, violent anti-Copt attacks aren’t new. On New Years Eve, in another poor neighborhood of Cairo, with a majority of Copts, six Copts were killed. Several dozen more were wounded by an attack carried out by hoodlums and Salafists, Muslim fundamentalists. In April, in a poor area in Qena, in the south of Egypt, demonstrators came together to protest the nomination of a new governor, a Copt, who was accused of collaborating with the state’s security services.
Witnesses have reported that the rabble rousers appear to belong to the Salafist movement or to be elements of the underworld, although no one is quite sure how to sort out the two. Mubarak’s clique and the secret services that depended on him used similar provocations. They made the Copt minority scapegoats, used to explain away the profound misery of Cairo’s poor and the poor in other cities as well.
Three months after the departure of Mubarak, the social situation remains tense, with people still waiting for real change.
Gasoline prices have shot up. Food has increased at least 20%, weighing heavily on the poorer parts of the population. The official inflation rate in April was more than 12% a year. Strike movements continue, for example, in the Mefco furniture factory in Helwan, in the Jawhara ceramic factory in Sadat City, and at the Abu Simbel airport, showing that workers continue to demand wage increases.
In these conditions, the inter-religious confrontations could furnish a very convenient diversion for discontent. It’s likely that elements of the police, the army and the secret services are using such incidents to fan the flames. In Imbaba, the police were very careful NOT to intervene to prevent confrontations.
These tensions show that the new power, or certain of its elements, don’t hesitate to use the same dirty methods as Mubarak did.
May 16, 2011
The U.S., resting on warlords just as vicious as bin Laden, went to war in Afghanistan in 2001. It used the pretext of bin Laden to take over another country of the Middle East. Several hundred thousand Afghan people have died, most of them civilian.
Then, the U.S. went to war in Iraq in 2003. Pretending to look for weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. went to war against Iraq to carry out a long-held goal of U.S. foreign policy: to establish its own control in the middle of the oil-rich Middle East. This war plus U.S. bombing has claimed nearly a million lives, mostly civilian.
Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the U.S., the world’s strongest power, with the most terrible weapons, has used its might against civilian populations. What is this, if not terrorism of the worst kind?
And the terrorism the U.S. visits on people in other countries blows back against us–against U.S. troops ground up in these filthy wars, against American workers suffering in an economy starved for the money pumped into war.
May 16, 2011
May 4 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides. The rides began with 13 brave young college students who had planned to ride at the front of Greyhound buses in order to break down the segregation experienced by all black people in the Deep South. They were expected to ride at the back of the bus.
Stanley Nelson, a documentary filmmaker, created this homage to the hundreds of Freedom Riders by interviewing every one of them still living who would talk to him. He also took film footage from the era and made the decision not to editorialize during the documentary. So he allows a politician justifying the Kennedy administration’s handling of the crisis to speak his piece. He gives time to former Alabama Governor John Patterson, a Southern politician who called the civil rights activists “fools,” when he didn’t call them worse.
The intent of the Freedom Riders was to reach New Orleans in 10 days for the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, passed in May of 1954. Activists not only challenged the racism of segregated education, they were attempting to challenge segregated transportation. As James Farmer, a leader of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) put it for the filmmaker, “We were merely doing what the Supreme Court said we had a right to do.... We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law.... We were prepared for the possibility of death.”
After six days on the Greyhound, the riders were confronted by an angry mob of white men. They surrounded the bus, preventing the riders from getting off in Anniston, Alabama and firebombed the bus. After some riders ended up in a local hospital, they were rescued in the middle of the night by the Reverend Fred Shuttleworth and other local black activists.
Kennedy had won office with the support of Southern Democrats who had no intention of respecting basic civil rights of the black population. Kennedy didn’t want to send in federal troops, but he had a problem. He waited, hoping the riders would stop.
But the firebombing and threats didn’t stop everyone. Diane Nash, who helped organize the next round of riders on interstate buses, said her fellow students at Fisk University argued the issue in several meetings, and then some decided to continue. Nash explained, “If the Freedom Riders had been stopped as a result of violence, I strongly felt that the future of the movement was going to be cut short. The impression would have been whenever a movement starts, all [you have to do] is attack it with massive violence and blacks will stop.”
Two interstate buses left from Nashville, Tennessee on May 17 with those Fisk University students willing to risk arrest and worse to arrive in Birmingham, Alabama. The infamous sheriff with the vicious dogs, “Bull” Connor, had his police meet the bus riders, and take them from the bus station to the countryside on the border of Alabama and Tennessee, dumping them in the middle of the night. On May 20, a bus arriving at the station in Montgomery, Alabama was met by a mob that grabbed the riders and beat them up.
The rides continued on into Mississippi. The riders were met by the police at the Jackson bus station. The police passed them through the terminal–directly into a paddy wagon. Governor Ross Barnett sent them to the dreaded Parchman, Mississippi state prison.
But the next group of Freedom Riders boarded interstate buses, knowing they would be arrested in Mississippi and sent to Parchman. Four hundred people ended up spending time that summer in the prison camp there.
After five months of angry confrontations, the federal government was finally forced to begin at least the appearance of enforcing the interstate transportation laws in the South. De facto, the Freedom Riders had already enforced those laws.
One thing filmmaker Nelson does not cover is the context of the freedom rides. The choice to do the rides and the choice of activists to participate did not fall from the sky. In the South, battling against enormous prejudice and violence, many activists had been working long years to organize for real civil rights in education, in voting, in transportation, in everyday life. They were the ones who prepared the Freedom Riders and organized the Rides.
Nonetheless this film is well worth seeing. It will be shown on American Experience, part of public television, starting May 16.
May 16, 2011
GM says they will soon “create or retain” 4000 jobs. We are supposed to be impressed.
If GM “retains” 3999 jobs and creates only one, they have not exactly lied, but they have made a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
Where are these 4000 jobs? Spread in tiny numbers all over the map. Sixty in Flint; 50 in Saginaw; 18 in Bay City; 25 in Warren; 110 in Arlington; 80 in Spring Hill. Plus one possible, maybe, new shift building electric Volts in Hamtramck, MI.
That’s the kind of “job creation” we are supposed to be pleased with?
In only the last five years, GM has eliminated at least 40,000 jobs.
In 2009, they were given a government bailout that they put directly into profits and executive pay–and let the jobs stay gone. Now they want to restore only one out of ten jobs–and we are supposed to rejoice?
Yes, it’s very possible they will “retain” 4000 jobs–except not with the same workers in those jobs. GM wants high seniority workers gone, their decent wages and benefits eliminated. GM is putting on the pressure to force them out. In their places, GM wants to hire new two-tier workers at less than half the cost. Imagine the boost to GM’s profit margins!
No, this is no time to rejoice. The time to rejoice will come when workers refuse to be played like this.
May 16, 2011
State politicians all across the country claim that the system that administers unemployment benefits is supposedly broke. Officials in Michigan say that the reserve fund for unemployment benefits is more than four billion dollars in debt to the federal government. The other 50 states owe tens of billions of dollars more, with California topping the list, carrying 10.5 billion dollars in debt.
What the politicians don’t say is that over the last years, they repeatedly slashed the taxes that businesses pay into the unemployment system. Instead of companies paying into the trust fund and building up its reserves during the good times, they continued to draw the reserves down. It got so bad, over the past three decades, three national commissions and several federal audits issued warnings to the states that their systems were close to going broke.
For business, this constituted a huge savings. A 2001 study for the National Employment Law Project (NELP) found that tax cuts and reduced tax rates took more than 47 billion dollars out of unemployment insurance funds between 1994 and 2000.
This continued in the following years. From 2000 to the end of 2007, years with relatively low unemployment, when reserves should have been built up, the unemployment reserves in all 50 states fell from 54 billion dollars down to 38 billion dollars. This meant that even before unemployment really skyrocketed when the recession hit, business had already drained what had been left in the reserves for the unemployed.
Once the recession hit, businesses continued to seek reductions in what they had to pay, and lawmakers in such states as Michigan, Texas, South Dakota, Hawaii and Oregon complied with further reductions in the taxes businesses are supposed to pay to cover the unemployment they create.
For more than 30 years, big businesses have been cheating the unemployment reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars.
In other words, the funds aren’t broke–business stole the reserves. Make the thieves pay!
May 16, 2011
The tornados of April 27 hit Alabama especially hard, killing 350 people and destroying 10,000 buildings. This was one of the worst natural disasters since Katrina in 2005, and like that catastrophe, the poorest people were the most affected.
Certainly, tornados are climate events that weather forecasters can’t predict, even in the short term. At most they can say what areas are at risk, where tornados have hit before, and predict that this spring there will likely be many tornados. In fact, they were able to give some warning to some areas in Alabama, but could not predict the path of the tornados.
There is only one way to be protected from tornados: build underground shelters or underground basements that will protect people when the building collapses. In Pratt City, a black neighborhood of Birmingham, a tornado devastated the area in 1988. Since the residents were poor, they were never able to build shelters that could protect them in future disasters. The state of Alabama did nothing to aid them. Most of the people there have homes made of wood, and the roofs were swept away like straw in the wind, leaving survivors in rubble with no shelter! Other parts of the state suffered in a similar way.
Some residents said with resignation, “Mobile homes attract tornados.” It could even be said that poverty attracts tornados. A meteorologist showed that 44% of those who died in tornados in 2008 lived in mobile homes, and that this figure could rise to 50% today!
It is one of the aspects of this economic system, which forces residents of the richest country on earth to live in mobile homes, at the risk of natural disasters. Will the U.S. government offer the survivors new mobile homes, like all those that still exist six years after Katrina?
May 16, 2011
Last year’s BP oil spill released more than five million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Part of this oil was skimmed by ships, burnt or evaporated to the air and dispersed into and naturally degraded in the ocean.
But the remaining oil, which is estimated to be somewhere between one and four million barrels, is still out there, according to a Federal government report.
Scientists expect that this unaccounted oil sunk to the sea floor as it did in previous oil spills and remains hidden in the shoreline and marshlands of Louisiana. If it is not removed, this oil will stay there for decades, continuing to kill natural resources in the Gulf of Mexico and to damage lives that depend on them.
Nice that the government finally issued a “report.” But action would be better–specifically, require BP to clean up every last bit of its oil.
May 16, 2011
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been deliberately flooding big areas along the Mississippi River. To reduce the risk of flooding in Cairo, Illinois, the Army blew up a levee releasing water that inundated hundreds of square miles of farm land and destroyed about 100 homes in Missouri. Then the Army opened the floodgates of the Bonnet Carre Spillway 33 miles upriver from New Orleans. Now they are proposing to open more and more of the 125 gates of the huge Morganza Spillway more than a hundred miles above New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
An estimated 3,000 more square miles of land in Cajun country could be flooded by water from the Morganza Spillway with 2,500 people directly in the water’s path and 25,000 more subject to some level of flooding. Thousands of those fleeing Cajun country will find nothing at all to live in when they return. And hundreds of millions of dollars of their crops and more than 10,000 of their homes, barns, shops and stores are being destroyed.
Politicians claim the only choice for the Corps is to flood these vast, mostly rural areas in order to lower the level of the Mississippi by a few feet to reduce the risk of even more disastrous flooding in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and other heavily populated urban areas.
In fact, if levees had been properly maintained and improved over the years, and development had been discouraged on some parts of the river’s flood plain, there would be much less damage from this flood.
But the idea that top politicians and officials care about saving the population in urban areas is ridiculous. Look at what happened during Hurricane Katrina! The reason the Army Corps is flooding other areas to lower the Mississippi near Baton Rouge and New Orleans is to maintain shipping operations and save the pipelines, tanks and refineries of the oil and chemical companies located in the area. The investments and profits of these big corporations are being protected.
Damn their profits! Save workers’ homes and jobs! Save farmers’ houses, barns, crops and lands! Save the shops, stores and other property of small business people!