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 30, 2011
In a heavily Republican district in New York state, a Democrat won a special election to fill a vacant Congressional seat.
The Republican campaigned by defending a Republican plan to privatize Medicare. The Democrat, Kathy Hochul, campaigned by attacking the Republican plan.
Hochul won, and she won by a very comfortable margin.
The Democrats were ecstatic–they had found their campaign issue for the 2012 election.
It’s certainly true that people are worried about Medicare, as well as Social Security and Medicaid.
They have reason to be. The political establishment has been sharpening the knives, spewing scare talk about budget deficits. A special “deficit commission” was set up to offer recommendations–which included big cuts in Medicare, big cuts in Medicaid, and big cuts in Social Security. The so-called Gang of 6–three Democrats and three Republicans, until one of the Republicans dropped out–have also been working on a plan to “cut the budget deficit.” Isn’t it amazing, they too want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are at risk, and everyone knows it.
It’s understandable someone might want to vote against a person who openly proclaimed his intention to reduce Medicare to shreds.
But what does that get us, if the person put in office turns out to be someone who also will gut Medicare? Hochul may have attacked the Republican. But she didn’t say, “leave Medicare alone, don’t touch its benefits, don’t require bigger co-pays, don’t increase Medicare B and Medicare D premiums.”
No, she was only making election propaganda.
Last month Obama may have rebuked the Republicans–after all, he had to put on a little show. But he, too, then trotted out the budget deficit.
What did he offer up for cuts? What else, but Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which he said account, along with military spending, for two-thirds of government spending. And he wasn’t offering to cut military spending!
No, he spun us another yarn about the budget deficit!
Budget deficit? Social Security didn’t create the budget deficit. Medicare didn’t create it. And don’t even talk about Medicaid, which exists only because the medical system, run for profit, prices care out of the reach of many people.
The politicians created this budget deficit. Democrats and Republicans alike created it, throwing away trillions to the biggest banks in the world, billions to massive insurance companies, billions to the executives and bondholders of the auto companies, billions in tax breaks to oil companies, billions in pharmaceutical research paid by the government, billions in engineering research, billions to big mining companies that strip government land.
The Democrats and Republicans created this deficit by throwing away several trillions in wars aimed at imposing U.S. corporations’ claws on the world’s oil. They created it by giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the world. They created it by letting people worth hundreds of billions, if not a trillion dollars, pass all their ill-gotten gains on to people who did nothing for that money–and pay no taxes, to boot.
Don’t talk to us about budget deficit. Let the ones who created it pay for it.
And get their dirty fingers out of our pockets. Don’t touch our Social Security, don’t touch our Medicare, don’t touch our Medicaid. Those programs were won by our parents, our grandparents and our great grandparents in the vast social mobilizations of the 1930s, 1960s and ’70s. Leave them alone!
May 30, 2011
Republican attacks on union bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states have been all over the news and led to huge protests organized by the unions.
Now another state legislature has passed a bill limiting collective bargaining rights of certain public employees. Yet this time, the unions are strangely silent.
Maybe that’s because this time the bill was passed by their friends in that bastion of Democratic Party “liberalism,” Massachusetts, where the Democrats control both state houses and the governor’s office. The bill allows mayors and other local officials to make changes to public workers’ health care without their approval.
The Republicans have no monopoly when it comes to attacking workers’ bargaining rights and their wages and benefits. On that they’re in a “bi-partisan agreement.”
May 30, 2011
The California Department of Labor estimates that 343,657 people in the state have exhausted all unemployment benefits–and the number continues to grow.
These long-term unemployed are casualties of the war that big business and the wealthy are waging to increase their profits, trying to squeeze ever more work out of fewer workers.
May 30, 2011
Big lay-offs in Maryland are continuing. In May, Solo Cup in Owings Mills announced they will eliminate 101 office jobs, plus 540 manufacturing jobs are likely to end this summer. Northrop Grumman is laying off 70 workers. Superfresh, about to be shut down in the Baltimore area, will lay off 1500 employees, unless new stores step in and hire them.
In recent months, Honeywell, Giant, Pepsi and Aramark have announced layoffs in Maryland.
This is why there is a “jobless recovery”–the bosses, rolling in profit, continue to destroy jobs.
May 30, 2011
Late one day on a credit card bill? It’s going to cost a lot more than that $35 late fee. As of June 25, Bank of America will resume a penalty interest rate of 29.99% on future purchases.
This means you will owe a third more on your purchases. If you owe $4,000 on a credit card with a 15% interest rate and made only the minimum payment each month, it would take you 22 years plus $5,580 in interest to pay off that balance.
At 30%, the Fed says you would never pay it off if you made only the minimum payments!
It seems the new credit card act protects consumers from snakes, spiders, bumblebees–everything but usurious banks!
May 30, 2011
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) just issued assurances that 23 reactors in the U.S. with the same design as those at Fukushima are updated and now safe!
This kind of assurance from nuclear regulators is nothing new. Japanese authorities gave similar assurances before their disaster, and the NRC has a history of looking the other way, despite highly dangerous conditions at nuclear power plants.
For example, the New York Times reported in 2007 that corrosion was thinning pipes at the Byron nuclear plant located 100 miles south of Chicago. Instead of fixing the pipes, Exelon, the plant operator, repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it required for safe operation. Finally, a brush ripped a pipe apart during a routine cleaning, causing water to leak, and the plant to shut down. It was later discovered that the NRC had not inspected the pipes for at least eight years and “did not notice” that Exelon kept lowering the pipe thickness standard.
According to David Lochbaum, who heads the Nuclear Safety Project with the Union of Concerned Scientists, the NRC tends to tolerate violations: “Otherwise, nearly all the U.S. reactors would have to be shut down.”
What makes these nuclear power plants so unsafe is the corporate drive for profit. The federal regulators, who regularly give these power plants their good housekeeping seal of approval, are little more than window dressing.
May 30, 2011
The March tsunami and earthquake in northern Japan knocked out power in the region, threatening people’s lives, due to a lack of heat in the middle of winter.
So why didn’t the Japanese utility company TEPCO take electricity from another region, which was not affected?
Because the two sides of Japan don’t run on the same electric power. In the west of the country is a power system operating at 60 hertz; in the eastern part of Japan, the system runs on 50 hertz. The two power systems are incompatible.
The power problem in Japan is an aspect of the power problem all over the world. In the early days of making electric power, there were many systems, running on many different rates of hertz. London, England, for example, had 10 different power systems in 1918, each running on a different hertz rate. Great Britain did not standardize power systems until after World War II.
The same is true for Japan, which first purchased electric generators from AEG, a German company, in 1895. But when the U.S. occupied Japan at the end of World War II, it pushed the German company aside, and the part destroyed by U.S. bombing got its power equipment from U.S. manufacturers. And that’s why TEPCO still runs on two different, incompatible systems.
People shiver in the cold and dark after disasters because capitalist competition is unplanned chaos.
May 30, 2011
When Metro Transit Police pulled Dwight Harris from his wheelchair and threw him to the ground, cracking his head open, many people gathered. Some approached the police, protesting their actions. One man yelled at the police repeatedly, “What did you do to him!” The police replied “Move on.” A woman exclaimed to the cops: “He’s in a wheelchair! He’s always in a wheelchair. He lives a block away. What is going on here? This is stupid!”
Of course, the police claimed “the patron resisted arrest which resulted in him falling out of his wheelchair.”
BUT some witnesses took pictures and videos with their cellphones and later posted it on YouTube. Clear as day, everyone could see the vicious brutality.
The Metro Transit Police acting like bullies is not unusual. But they got a surprise this time with people openly questioning and defying their brutal, disgusting violence. More power to those who did it!
May 30, 2011
The 2012 fiscal year budget recently approved by the Montgomery County Council in Maryland includes no pay raises for county employees, more furlough days, and significant increases to what county workers pay for their health care and retirement. It also imposed more furlough days.
The furlough days are simply intimidation against county workers to get them to agree to accept the rest of the Council’s attack on their standard of living.
So far, the tactic has not been having the desired effect.
Last month 200 county employees protested outside the county’s executive office. And just last week 50 police officers booed and shouted at the County Council when they approved the budget.
The officers held signs saying, “Pay your taxes,” referring to at least two Council members that owe thousands in unpaid taxes. Nine people dressed as clowns were mimicking the nine members of the County Council.
The Vice President of the Council told the press, “None of them [the police] conducted themselves in the manner that is expected of those charged to protect and promote peace. For them to engage in disturbing the peace was deeply disappointing.”
We bet it was “disappointing” to those clowns and thieves to be called out!
Maybe a little more “disturbing of their peace” is in order!
May 30, 2011
A Michigan Appeals Court just upheld the conviction and sentence of journalist Diane Bukowski, someone who for years has reported on police brutality in Detroit. She was appealing her fine of $4,000 and sentence of probation.
She was originally arrested on Election Day in November 2008 while reporting for the Michigan Citizen.
Just prior to her arrest, she was investigating a crash scene. According to footage Bukowski’s lawyer was able to obtain and introduce at trial, state police cameras show a young man joy riding on his new motorcycle when a state police chase ensues–without sirens. The chase ends tragically with a crash killing the motorcyclist and a pedestrian.
Bukowski was convicted of obstructing police at the scene but footage introduced from a local Fox News crew showed Bukowski complying with all police instructions.
From this system’s standpoint, you are interfering with police by your very presence when you expose police wrongdoing. That’s why Bukowski was put on trial and why the appeals court joins in this legal lynching.
May 30, 2011
School vouchers are back. Ever since the 2010 elections, state legislatures in a number of states have introduced bills that would take money out of public schools to educate students in private and religious schools.
School vouchers are an old idea first pushed in the 1950s, and they have long ago been proven useless for improving education. In all the districts where school vouchers were implemented, like Milwaukee and Cleveland, educational achievement has gone down, not up. So if the idea is being pushed again now, it’s NOT because those pushing it believe it will improve public education.
No–this is part of a coordinated attack by right-wing billionaires on the very existence of public schools. Some want the “free market” to rule the schools; some want government money to pay for religious education. But all of them see it as a waste for public money to be used to provide a free, public education for all children.
One of the biggest players in this group is the DeVos family of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Richard DeVos’ father was a founder of Amway; his wife, Betsy Prince DeVos, is the sister of Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater mercenary contractor. This family made tons of money off of government contracts to carry out atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq and who knows where else–while they denounce government involvement in public education!
The DeVoses have poured money into several organizations they control: “All Children Matter,” “American Federation for Children,” and “Alliance for School Choice.” Together they work with other foundations across the country, funded by other wealthy families–the Koch, Scaife and Walton families–to push for laws allowing public money to pay tuition to private, religious schools.
All these wealthy families dress this up as school choice. But their true purpose is to completely dismantle the public schools altogether. Many have signed a Public Proclamation to Separate School and State, which declares a “commitment to end involvement by local, state, and federal government from education.”
If these right-wing billionaires were to succeed in getting rid of public schools, what would education look like for working-class families? Sure, parents could choose good private schools–if they had $20,000 per student per year to spend. Or, they could send their children to religious schools, to receive an education lacking a systematic scientific understanding of the world. Or, they would be forced to home-school their children–to educate their children themselves. Home-schooling limits children only to what their parents themselves already know–which, even in the best of circumstances, is extremely limited.
Working people fought for free public education long ago, in the hopes that their children could also receive an education. Even with all the problems of public education in a society divided by wealth, it is much better than no education at all.
Now these billionaire slimebags want to take it all away, leaving generations of working children with nothing.
May 30, 2011
Rick Snyder and the Michigan Legislature are proposing to cut school spending by $370 to $470 per pupil. School districts can save $100 per pupil only if they agree to the politicians’ idea of "best practices." The requirements include:
1. Making school employees pay at least 10% of their health care premiums.
2. Working toward consolidating services–in other words, laying off workers.
3. Obtaining competitive bids for non-instructional services–that is, outsource other jobs to low-wage companies.
4. Self-insure their workers’ health care.
“Best practices”? Only for all those corporations who want to put their hands on the schools’ money.
May 30, 2011
School districts all around the Detroit area, not just the Detroit Public Schools, are giving teachers the pink slip. Walled Lake is laying off 242 teachers, which is one quarter of its staff. That’s on top of the 196 they laid off last year. Plymouth-Canton is laying off 269 teachers. And, of course, Detroit sent layoff notices to all 5,466 of its teachers, though it remains to be seen how many will be called back.
Getting rid of experienced teachers is an attack on our kids.
May 30, 2011
What Rick Snyder, the Governor of Michigan calls a “high quality budget” passed the legislature and awaits his signature. “Quality” is a strange word for a budget that increases taxes on retirees and even stoops to eliminating money to families for indigent burials!
Worst of all, this budget hits children and young people the hardest.
It cuts more than one billion dollars from K-12 schools, community colleges and universities. For students in grades K-12, the minimum “foundation allowance” will drop from $7,316 per pupil to $6,846 next year, less than half what is needed.
On top of cuts to education, the state’s neediest children will be robbed of household income. This budget imposes a retroactive limit on welfare to 48 months in a lifetime. According to state estimates, more than 12,600 children will see their families stripped of cash assistance–$492 a month for a family of three–effective October 1, 2011.
This is not going to mean that welfare families will have to start working. As one Michigan Senator recently testified: “Ninety% of families on [welfare] are working, but not earning enough to leave assistance.”
Adding insult to injury, 124,000 of the state’s lowest income children will lose their $80 per year grant to buy school clothes.
Adding it all up–all these various cuts on top of 1.5 billion dollars in new income taxes–it comes to nearly three billion dollars that the population is losing. And why?
To pay for the newly passed 1.7 billion dollars in tax cuts for businesses, an amount that will surely increase over time.
What kind of “quality” is that? It’s piracy–pure and simple.
May 30, 2011
Los Angeles teacher Bennet Kayser has won a seat on the L.A. school board. Commentators called this result unexpected, since Kayser’s opponent, Luis Sanchez, was backed by the electoral machine of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and by big donations from billionaires Eli Broad and Philip Anschutz.
Sanchez’s campaign slogan was “school reform.” These days, that has become a euphemism for cutting the number of teachers and their wages while blaming public schools’ problems on teachers. In his last State of the City address, Villaraigosa called for a “new kind of contract” for teachers.
Teacher Bennett Kayser will now take the seat held by Yolie Flores, who spearheaded the firing of at least half of the teachers at Huntington Park High School as a way to get rid of high paid teachers and reduce the number of teachers, jamming more kids into each classroom. The school board approved the firings unanimously, turning Huntington Park High into a guinea pig for a plan that the board intends to implement at other schools.
The election turned into a referendum for this kind of “school reform” which Flores, the school board and Villaraigosa have been pushing in the name of parents who are “fed up with the failure of public schools.”
Fed up many parents may be. But parents in Flores’s own district sent another message with their votes–that they disagreed with these “reformers.” The voters showed that, in fact, they would fire politicians like Flores and Villaraigosa and keep the teachers.
May 30, 2011
About 300 students from Huntington Park High School walked out of their classes on the morning of May 11. They then marched the seven miles to the L.A. Unified School District headquarters, to protest the school board decision to fire at least half of their teachers.
District officials say that a big overhaul of Huntington Park High is necessary, because the school has poor test results and graduation rates.
In fact, the officials have another agenda. In these times of endless budget cuts, school districts have been trying to save more money by getting rid of higher-paid teachers.
The problem is the higher-paid teachers tend to be the ones who are more experienced–and often the ones who know the needs of their students better, because they have spent more time at their schools.
“We don’t want our teachers fired,” said Jonathan Rojo, one of the students who protested. “The school will be messed up and disorganized.”
This 11th grader knows what he is talking about.
May 30, 2011
The Los Angeles school board has given layoff notices to 85 teacher-librarians–librarians who have a teaching credential in addition to their librarian license.
District officials say they have to make drastic cuts because they have a big budget shortage. That makes these doubly-licensed librarians, with their higher pay, obvious targets.
And what about the libraries? They will either be run by a less-trained, lower-paid library aide, or closed down altogether. And the gutting of school libraries is already underway, since big budget cuts have made it virtually impossible for schools to buy new books.
Educating children without books is like building a car without any kind of framework. Don’t let these slimy officials who run the public school system pretend they are interested in educating the children of workers. They are ready to junk our children with the librarians.
May 30, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron has died at the age of 62. He was a tremendous artist, a politically conscious poet and musician, and a voice of black protest from the movement of the 1960s and ’70s until his death. His often humorous, rhythmic lyrical style, set to rock-influenced jazz was an early influence on the rap and hip-hop of generations to follow.
Scott-Heron is best known for his song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. It was at once a satire of commercial culture and false political leaders and a call to arms for people to get involved in the fight for social change. In Whitey on the Moon, Scott-Heron again used humor to point out the contradiction between the attention given to the moon landings and the cover-up of the tremendous poverty here on Earth. It began with the famous lines, “A rat just bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon, her face and arms began to swell, with Whitey on the Moon....” It ended with the punch line, “I think I’ll send these doctor bills airmail special, ... to Whitey on the Moon.”
Scott-Heron could also be deadly serious, as in songs like Pieces of a Man, the story of a mailman delivering a layoff notice to a worker for whom the letter was the last straw, or Save the Children, a reminder that “Soon it will be their turn to try and save the world.”
Scott-Heron’s political and social commentary covered a wide spectrum. He ridiculed the growing right-wing of Ronald Reagan in songs like B Movie, and Re-Ron and spoke out against police brutality and the infringement of civil liberties in No Knock.
He wrote about the dangers of nuclear power in We Almost Lost Detroit, a song about one of the first nuclear accidents at the Fermi plant in Monroe, Michigan. The song is very apropos in the wake of the recent disaster in Fukushima, Japan.
He also celebrated black culture in songs like Lady Day and John Coltrane.
With the passing of Gil Scott-Heron, the world has lost a treasure who represented the best that American jazz, rock n’ roll and the black movement had to offer.
May 30, 2011
Before 2009, Metro used to have 46 track inspectors working in teams of two, each checking one rail of the track for cracks and defects. But it was dangerous work. Eight workers were killed since 2005.
So what did Metro do to correct the problem? Did it add a third worker to act as a lookout for oncoming trains and other hazards?
No!
Metro doubled their workload by assigning half the track inspectors to act as lookouts instead of as inspectors, making it impossible to fully inspect the tracks.
Metro’s idea of safety: trading one accident for another accident.
May 30, 2011
Caterpillar is waging a campaign to destroy workers compensation in Illinois. Cat CEO Doug Oberhelman complained that it has to pay out $28,000 for a shoulder injury in Illinois but only $4,000 in Indiana. Of course, Oberhelman had 22.5 million dollars in compensation last year, and never has to suffer from shoulder injuries.
May 30, 2011
Unfortunately, in Palestine, as in other parts of the Middle East, so-called “honor crimes” enjoy an intolerable leniency.
A relative can kill a woman suspected of having betrayed the family’s so-called honor code if she has committed adultery or even simply because she speaks with a man who is not a family member. According to the law this relative may risk only a few months in prison.
In 2005, Souad Marie, a woman in a Palestinian village, wrote a book titled Burned Alive: A Survivor of an “Honor Killing” Speaks Out, telling her story. Her family condemned her to death because she became pregnant by a young man who didn’t want to marry her. Her brother-in-law doused her with gasoline, but she succeeded in escaping the flames that engulfed her and survived. This brother-in-law has never been punished. A human rights organization ended up taking care of Souad Marie, whose family abandoned her in the hospital.
But times change, and a similar story provoked the anger of an entire village in the West Bank, to the west of Hebron recently. Ayah Baradeya was drowned by her uncle because he disapproved of her marriage plans. In ordinary times, he would have gotten some months in prison, since he intended to invoke “family honor.” But the young woman’s brother didn’t want this outcome. Braving the “what people say” attitude which prevailed up to then, he made her story known in the public square and roused the village to demand justice. He refused to let the family of the murderer be banished from the village as custom demanded, arguing that this served nothing, and instead demanded an exemplary prison sentence for his sister’s murderer. His actions amounted to demanding a change in the Penal Code.
The mobilization went way beyond the village, involving thousands of people in the streets for several days in a row. Up to then, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas resisted the demands of women’s rights organizations, who have been denouncing the increase of these crimes in recent years. In 2010, 10 such deaths were registered officially. But facing the pressure of the street, the President ended up giving in and decreed the end of leniency for “honor crimes.”
So far, two articles of the Penal Code exempting men for these kinds of murders have been annulled, leaving one more significant article that needs to be tossed out. It is a victory for the population of this village, which knew how to conquer prejudices to get rid of this barbarism, and a victory for all women.
May 30, 2011
On May 15th, thousands of Palestinian demonstrators, the majority refugees coming from Syria and also from Jordan and Gaza, rallied on the Golan Heights, near the Syrian-Israeli border, as well as the Lebanon-Israeli border. They demonstrated in remembrance of the day 63 years ago, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were chased from their lands, their villages, their homes, at the time of the establishment of the state of Israel.
In East Jerusalem–where a 16-year-old young man was killed–and even in the streets of Tel Aviv, Israeli Arabs, the descendants of the exiles of 1948, demonstrated in big numbers, despite a prohibition on demonstrations, demanding the end of the occupation of the territories and the discrimination they suffer and demanding the “right of return to Palestine.”
This year, demonstrators were especially numerous, encouraged by the revolts spreading throughout the Arab world and infuriated by the apartheid-like situation that has lasted for several decades. In the Golan Heights, hundreds of refugees from Syria even began to cross the border crossings. The Israeli army tried to prevent them by opening fire. Its intervention against young demonstrators armed with Palestinian flags ended in the death of 15 people, and 300 wounded, according to the head of the Israeli general staff, who admitted on the radio that it was a “bad toll.” Even people in Israel were shocked by the images of soldiers armed to the teeth, shooting on young demonstrators, sometimes at point-blank range, as well as the massive deployment of military force, like the seven extra battalions sent to the occupied West Bank.
Beyond this territorial dispossession and this massive expulsion, called by the Arab world the Nakba–the catastrophe–the demonstrators protested Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s pending visit to the United States, as well as the insupportable situation imposed on the inhabitants of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Successive Israeli administrations have pursued the policy of Israeli settlements and Netanyahu encourages the progressive eating away at the territories by new settlements. As a result, East Jerusalem has been emptied of its Arab population, with Palestinians often obliged to live in illegal structures due to the small size of the so-call “authorized” zone.
The Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz (The Land) recently spoke of “ethnic cleansing” to characterize the pursuit of the policy of settlements in the West Bank. It revealed that between 1967 and 1994, the state of Israel used a tortuous but systematic technique to reduce the Palestinian presence in the West Bank. It consisted of revoking the right of residence of Palestinians who went abroad for studies or a job, by giving them provisional travel documents good for six years, in exchange for handing in their identity card. Not warned of the risk they ran in the case they came back late, they lost their right of residence. This strategy alone reduced the Palestinian population in the West Bank by 14% during that time.
Following the May 15th demonstrations, the Prime Minister decided to release 87 million dollars in taxes due to the Palestinian Authority that had been frozen to “punish” Mahmoud Abbas for his reconciliation with Hamas. The Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on television that he feared that the protest would spread and not only to the borders.
The Palestinian population, denied its right to existence on their own land, has many reasons to spread its anger.