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
Oct 17, 2011
Bank of America has now told us it will charge a five dollar monthly fee if we use a debit card, charging us simply for spending our own money. Banks also charge us for taking our own money out of ATM’s. And they slap us with a fee for not keeping enough of our money with them.
The banks have practically stopped paying us any interest for depositing our money in accounts with them, that is, money we loan the banks. But when it comes to borrowing from them, the banks charge us high interest rates and fees. To take out a loan or mortgage, or keep a balance on a credit card, what the banks charge can easily come to two or three times the original purchase price. That is how the banks enslave millions to their debt.
These are the same banks that ran the mortgage scam that tricked millions into taking out outrageous amounts of debt to buy a home. When the housing and debt bubble burst, the banks took the homes of millions of people. Millions more lost their jobs and all their savings. Tens of millions lost their neighborhoods. But the banks had profited greatly.
Banks could play a necessary role by providing credit to finance investment and trade. But banks use their position to grab the cream of the wealth produced by our labor. The banks take it right off the top. And they are taking more and more of it.
To get ever richer, the banks smother the consumer and strangle production and investment. The banks are predators.
So, what do these predators do with all their ill-gotten wealth? They pour it into speculation. They make money off of money. They create debt and profits out of thin air. And they also produce speculative manias, bubbles and crashes.
In 2008, when the housing bubble burst and the economy crashed, the banks didn’t pay for their crimes. Instead, governments all over the world rushed to hand the banks trillions of dollars. The governments claimed they were saving the economy. No, they were increasing the wealth hoarded by the banks. And the governments had to go into debt to give those trillions to the banks. And who did the governments borrow the money from when they went into debt? The very same banks. The banks lent the government’s own money to the government–which then gave it as a bailout back to the banks. So the banks keep the money in this circular deal–and then profit off the interest the governments pay on the debts they ran up!
With all that extra money in hand, what did the banks do? They speculated. And this time they are doing it on government debt, driving up the cost of many governments’ interest payments still further.
To pay for this ever increasing debt to the banks, governments everywhere have gone after the laboring population. They imposed austerity. They cut jobs, wages, benefits, vital services and social programs and education. They imposed higher taxes and fees.
To pay off the banks, governments strangle the economy still further. This is sheer madness.
Union officials and activists in the anti-Wall Street demonstrations are calling for greater government regulation of the banks. By whom? By the very same governments that just fed the banks trillions of dollars. The banks own the governments! This proposal is madness on top of madness.
Working people must protect themselves from the banks and Wall Street. But workers can do this only by putting their own essential needs first.
And what are our essential needs as human beings in the midst of this crisis? A job and a wage that lets us live decently.
Facing the unemployment pushed by the banks, industrialists and the government, there is only one answer: everyone who wants a job should have one. The bosses have the money to provide a job for everyone. If the bosses won’t provide those jobs, then divide up the available work–with no loss in pay for anyone.
Today, our wages are losing out to inflation–inflation created by this vast government debt and speculation. Rising prices constantly eat away at our standard of living. So, wages should be indexed to inflation, increasing as prices rise.
Workers didn’t create the unemployment or the inflation. The bosses did. Take some of the money they and their bankers have squirreled away.
Decent jobs and wages for everyone: these are basic, essential goals in a society run by blood suckers.
Oct 17, 2011
Week after week the reports came in: cantaloupes tainted by listeria, sprouts contaminated with salmonella, strawberries with E. coli , leafy green vegetables making people sick. In fact 18 deaths, at least, were attributed just to the cantaloupes this summer.
Foods move freely throughout the U.S. but so do some deadly bacteria or viruses associated with them. This summer is hardly the first time deaths have been attributed to fresh foods. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 3,000 people die every year from food contamination and millions are sickened.
In response, what has Congress proposed? More than 200 million dollars in cuts to the Food and Drug Administration budget. That means fewer FDA inspectors to check food safety. There are hardly too many–only 1,100 for the entire country.
The politicians are quite willing to cut programs that protect the public–so that businesses won’t feel “over-regulated.” Once more, it’s all about the profits.
Oct 17, 2011
In Florida, people applying for welfare have to take a drug test at their own expense in order to complete their application
Governor Rick Scott’s argument for signing the measure is that welfare recipients are more likely to use illegal drugs. But so far only 2% of those tested have come up positive, with 96% testing clean and 2% declining to complete the application process.
Governor Scott pointed out that it is “unfair to Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction. We don’t want to waste tax dollars.”
Fine. We shouldn’t “waste” tax dollars. Never mind the costs in reimbursements to applicants and administrative costs of running this stupid program.
How about all that welfare that went to bailout the banks? Drug-test all those fat bankers before they get a bailout. That would save a few trillion dollars!
Oct 17, 2011
Chicago transit workers are the latest to be in Rahm Emanuel’s crosshairs. Emanuel and his head of the Chicago Transit Agency, Forrest Claypool, claim that transit workers are the cause of the system’s deficit. Archaic union “work rules” are supposedly costing millions of dollars.
Calling it “coffee time,” Emanuel wants to get rid of the 15 minutes that train operators have to get things ready before they take their first train out. He doesn’t want customer service workers to have paid bathroom breaks, or drivers working long split shifts to have a shift differential for the second part of the shift.
The president of the Amalgamated Transit Union said: “I find it incredible that Rahm Emanuel, who personally made 18 million dollars in two years trading his influence in the industry that has brought our nation to financial collapse is now saying that people who work on the tracks and in buses and subways should not be allowed to go to the bathroom. Does Rahm take himself off the clock when he uses the urinal–or is he just using bus drivers and train workers as urinals?”
The local president said of Democrat Emanuel’s tactics: “If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was in Wisconsin dealing with a Republican governor.”
And that’s as true as can be because Democrat and Republican alike are busy trying to drive down wages and conditions of workers in every state in the country.
Oct 17, 2011
At the start of the school year last month, more than 140 Los Angeles schools reported overcrowding. At Venice High school, for example, there are more than 50 students in some math classes, and more than 75 students in some P.E. classes.
Year after year, class sizes have been increasing in California’s public schools, as school boards laid off teachers and other school workers.
In well-to-do areas, parents raise money through “booster clubs,” and even foundations with hired staff, to cover for the cuts.
But in working-class neighborhoods, students bear the brunt of the cuts. It’s no different at the charter schools, which government officials from Obama on down portray as the answer to the “crisis” of the public schools. For example, at Manual Arts High School in South Los Angeles, which is run by a non-profit charter group, 3,200 students are crammed into a space built for 1,000. On opening day, the school didn’t have enough desks and textbooks. Some students did not get their class schedules. Many students were not able to get through the lunch line.
The “crisis” of the public schools has been caused by the lack of money. They have been starved of it for years, and it’s getting worse.
At every level–federal, state and local–government officials are using the economic crisis as an excuse to slash the money for services, including education. And school district officials follow suit. The Los Angeles school board, for example, laid off 1,200 teachers and support staff last spring, even though it had a 55-million-dollar surplus.
This is an ongoing, deliberate attack on working people and their children, and on the very idea of public schools: that all children deserve an education.
Oct 17, 2011
The death of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple (the richest company in the world today with a market capitalization of 352 billion dollars) was an opportunity for one head of state after another to pay tribute to this “visionary” and “captain of industry.”
Steve Jobs may have had brilliant insights–but they were primarily business insights. The iPhone or iPad inventions are obviously due to the collective work of those who work at Apple. Steve Jobs of course played his role–as the marketing chief.
Steve Jobs made a fortune for himself–but not due to his computer genius. Like all bosses who succeed, Jobs had a “genius” for exploitation.
This businessman was without scruples, manufacturing his products in China with the company Foxconn–which employs 900,000 workers and which made front page news when 13 of its employees committed suicide because of the extremely harsh working conditions. Also in China, the touch screens for the iPhone are produced by the company Wintek, where the solvent used to clean the screens contained n-hexane, despite the fact that its dangers have been known since the 1960s. This solvent attacks the nervous system, and has resulted in the known deaths of 137 workers.
Apple, like other companies, outsources work to achieve the lowest possible manufacturing cost. Steve Jobs could not have been ignorant of the fact that his production took place in factories that are run like prisons, in which the workers face a slow death.
This is the type of “visionary” that capitalist society produces–and praises!
Oct 17, 2011
UAW President Bob King sat down to dinner with Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally at the White House, where President Obama feted the president of South Korea.
They dined on butternut squash bisque, honey-poached cranberries, pumpkin-seed pralines, Virginia cured ham and crPme fraiche–that was the first course! Second course was a fall harvest salad on daikon sheets. Then came the main course: orange-ginger fondue, sauteed kale, roasted kaboche squash and Texas waygu beef. Dessert was that to-die-for cake! Undoubtedly they clinked glasses with some outrageously expensive bubbly in toasts to their partnership–and the newly passed free-trade agreement with South Korea!
Gorging all that food, they must have suffered a little indigestion watching no-votes come in at Ford!
Oct 17, 2011
On October 13, a prisoner advocacy group announced hundreds of inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison and several other correctional facilities in California had agreed to end their hunger strike. Between a hundred and two hundred prisoners still remain on strike at two locations.
In September, inmates at the Pelican Bay prison had resumed an earlier strike and were joined by inmates at seven other California prisons. At its height in late September, as many as 12,000 inmates were participating in this second strike.
These inmates are protesting being kept in isolation in windowless soundproof cells, 7½ feet by 11½ feet, for more than 22 hours a day. They are only allowed to leave their cells to go for a lonely 90-minute break each day in barren exercise pens with a limited view of the sky. They can rarely see or talk to other human beings and have very limited access to visitors. They eat their meals in their cells, have nothing to do to fill their time, and no means to actually get out of these barbarous conditions.
At the “supermax” Pelican Bay prison, located north of San Francisco, the average length of isolation for the 1,111 inmates is 6.8 years, according to the California Department of Corrections. Some prisoners have been isolated for more than 20 years.
Such isolation degrades human mind and body. It is nothing but torture–inflicted on inmates by prison officials.
Inmates are kept in these conditions to extract information or punish them for bad behavior. Prison officials claim the isolated inmates are gang members and isolation can force them to inform on other gang members, a process known as “debriefing.” In fact, prison officials themselves have implicitly encouraged the formation of racial and ethnic gangs.
To get out of this trap, prisoners started a first hunger strike in July that at its height involved 6,600 inmates from different backgrounds–black, Latino and white. They demanded an end to their classification into gangs (which enforces racial segregation) and abolition of the debriefing process, an end to long-term solitary confinement, an end to group punishment, to be given adequate and nutritious food, and to have some privileges in isolation (including at least one phone call per week).
Prison officials negotiated with the striking inmates, reaching an agreement to end the strike after three weeks. But, the prisoners said nothing changed. So they resumed their strike.
Now most of the inmates have agreed to end this second strike after receiving renewed promises from prison officials. “But as you know, the proof is in the pudding,” a lawyer representing the prisoners said.
Oct 17, 2011
The following quote from Shuttlesworth was published by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.
“When one considers the original demands of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights when it formed in 1956, a remarkable number of them have been at least partially achieved. The buses are desegregated, and so are the parks with the shameful exception of the closed swimming pools. School segregation has been broken, even though integration is still token. Public eating places are integrated if one can afford to eat in them; Negro police have been hired, although in token numbers. At least a few Negroes are working in jobs never open to them before; the bars to Negro voter registration have been torn down.
And, all important, white police cannot with impunity terrorize and brutalize Negroes on the streets and in their homes as they once could and did in Birmingham.
But no one here feels that the struggle is over or that the perfect society has arrived. The integration that exists is still token, for the great masses of black people jobs are still nonexistent or at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. And the old and dilapidated houses along the streets of Birmingham’s inner city stand as a reminder that this city has slum ghettos as depressed as any in the South or the nation.
In short, the Birmingham movement stands before the problem that the movement faces everywhere: the fact that our society simply has not found the way to provide great numbers of its citizens with a chance for a decent life. . . .”
Oct 17, 2011
What does Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Fiat, want? What are his true plans for the business and its workers? One thing is certain: he wants to have the right to decide alone, he and his Board of Directors, without being held to obligations of any sort, whether from the law or union contracts.
On October 3rd, Marchionne made a big announcement: Fiat will leave Confindustria, the Italian bosses confederation. In other words, Fiat won’t feel itself bound by agreements signed between the bosses’ organization and the Italian unions, and will in fact make its own laws.
Marchionne, in his Italian factories, had already imposed changes in working conditions that violate national bargaining agreements and even the law. He began with the Pomigliano factory near Naples, declaring that he would run the factory only if workers accepted total flexibility and renounced the banning of overtime. He also threatened that unions that didn’t agree to these conditions would be excluded from representing the workers.
After extorting acceptance from the workers, using the threat that their factory would close, he carried out the same operation in the Mirafiori plant in Turin, and then in the Bertone factory, also in Turin. In all three cases, the workers ended up working not for Fiat but for a “new company” created for the occasion so that Fiat could get rid of its prior obligations.
The start up of production at Mirafiori of a 4x4 for the U.S. market was announced and then withdrawn, then promised again, but in 2013. The Pomigliano factory still hasn’t started up, and another Fiat factory, Termini Imerese in Sicily, will be closed at the end of 2011.
These are the maneuvers of a man who, at the time he was appointed, was saluted as a modern captain of industry who would save Fiat. Certainly he will save the capital of the Agnelli family and big stockholders, after having put thousands of workers out into the street.
From Turin to Sicily, workers try to defend themselves as they can. At the gates of Fiat Mirafiori, which opens only a few days each month, the workers of two small rank-and-file unions have set up a tent to affirm that, whatever are Marchionne’s maneuvers and intentions, the workers must live, with full wages, not lowered pay coming from the unemployment funds, and a guaranteed job for the future. It’s through struggle against this industrial giant that workers can impose what they need.
Oct 17, 2011
The following article is a translation from La Voix des Travailleurs (Workers Voice), the newspaper of Haitian comrades of the Revolutionary Workers Organization (OTR). It concerns the United National Stabilization Mission in Haiti (Minustah), an armed force that has occupied Haiti since 2004.
Five Uruguayan soldiers stationed in Port-Salut, in the south of the country, raped an 18-year-old girl. The scene was filmed on a cell phone and went around the world on the Internet. The revelation of this gang rape by U.N. soldiers angered many parents and youth. A protest demonstration was organized in front of the soldiers’ barracks, demanding justice and reparations.
This rape follows numerous violent acts committed by U.N. soldiers. Knowing that they are stationed in the poorest country of the Americas, these soldiers have continuously engaged in the most reprehensible activities: organizing prostitution, trafficking in all types of illegal goods, and rapes, both publicized and hushed up by the Haitian State in the name of security. U.N. soldiers came from Nepal infected with cholera, which led to the death of 5,000 Haitians and sent 20,000 people to the hospital.
People have demanded that these soldiers simply be sent home. The new Haitian president, Michel Martelly, made an issue of this in his electoral campaign last April. But once elected, he’s quieted down. Undoubtedly, he understood that Minustah is the only armed force available to protect his new power and the private property of the bourgeoisie, the big landlords and well-off people.
Rapes, corruption and epidemics–this is the price the Haitian population pays for the presence of this armed force, whose sole objective is to maintain the system of capitalist exploitation.
Oct 17, 2011
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth died on October 5th of this year. In 2008 the city of Birmingham, Alabama renamed its principle airport Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. That speaks to the vast differences imposed on the Jim Crow South by a mobilized black population led for decades by militants like Shuttlesworth.
Shuttlesworth was active long before 1963, long before the Kennedy’s and other political figures pushed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. forward. He helped direct the NAACP in Birmingham in the early 1950s, at a time when to be active was an invitation for assassins. In 1956, he survived an attack in which sixteen sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his bedroom window. He was arrested 30 to 40 times.
In May of 1956, after the state of Alabama formally outlawed the NAACP, Shuttlesworth helped form the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR).
He organized, led and stood in front of many protests. In fact, the day after he survived the explosion that destroyed his house, he led a protest to integrate Birmingham’s buses.
The demonstrations which finally changed things in Birmingham were the ones in 1963. In contrast to many other Civil Rights’ leaders, Shuttlesworth called on the population to confront the police. When people were arrested and filled the jails, he called more people out. “We wanted confrontation, nonviolent confrontation, to see if it would work. We were trying to launch a systematic, wholehearted battle against segregation, which would set the pace for the nation.”
Diane McWhorter said Shuttlesworth “was King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory–meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”
The demonstrations that Shuttlesworth led resulted in massive arrests and hundreds of injuries including Shuttlesworth himself. Shuttlesworth never had an illusion that the racists and the state authorities would be non-violent. But he rested on a population ready to mobilize itself in demonstration after demonstration. Those demonstrations finally brought down Bull Conner, most noted for his use of fire hoses and police attack dogs against demonstrators. It was de facto the beginning of the end of Jim Crow in the urban South.
Shuttlesworth fought for civil rights. The renaming of the Birmingham airport is symbolic of the gains won in that fight. But Shuttlesworth was the first to say that much more remained to be done. [See the quotation on this page from Shuttlesworth.]
Oct 17, 2011
As a major selling point to get the 2011 contract passed, General Motors made various product commitments, and promises of retaining and bringing in new jobs at plants all over the country
But GM has already torn up one of those promises. It announced that at its Detroit Hamtramck plant it had “delayed”–by at least a year or two–the opening of two additional shifts. 2,500 promised jobs–disappeared!
Guess this is what GM’s spokesperson Cathy Clegg meant when she told reporters that promises in the contract did not apply if the situation changed.
What changed–just eight days after the contract was approved?
Oct 17, 2011
Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Chrysler, has found a way to take a bad UAW pattern contract and make it worse.
With the Chrysler tentative agreement, both Chrysler and top UAW leaders are pushing the lie that the Chrysler contract has to be cheaper, pretending that Chrysler has no money.
All that Chrysler has committed to with this contract is a signing bonus of $1,750 up front plus $500 each year in bonuses–only $3,750 total–stretched out over 4 years. Additional bonuses come with strings attached. These Chrysler bonuses resemble a marionette puppet–they are designed to be easily yanked away.
Confronting the reality of Ford workers’ national No! vote in 2009, Ford dangled $10,000 in bonuses–ALL guaranteed by December 201l–to try and entice workers to ratify the Ford contract. This amounts to almost 6 times more than the up-front bonus being offered at Chrysler.
Chrysler’s flimsy excuse for offering so little to workers is that they reported a “loss” of 254 million dollars for the first half of 2011. They conveniently fail to mention that this “loss” occurred because Chrysler racked up a one-time expense this spring–when they paid off their government loans 6 years early.
Why were the loans paid back early? Doing this gave Fiat immediate control of Chrysler. How did this benefit Fiat?
An article in Automotive News Europe (10-12-11) provided one explanation. It explained that once Fiat gained majority control of Chrysler, they increased their cash holdings:
Chrysler’s cash holdings were rolled into Fiat’s for a total of $27 billion. And in a sign of their strength, Fiat leads the industry with the highest cash-to-revenue ratio, at 36.2%.
Does THAT sound poor to you?
What about profitability? Reuters reported on 9-13-11 that entire year profits for Chrysler for 2011 will top 2 billion dollars. Sergio has also been stating that profits of 3 billion dollars are expected for 2012.
Chrysler workers have MANY reasons to be angry about this tentative agreement–first of all the lies about Chrysler’s so-called poverty!
Oct 17, 2011
Some union leaders have said they are supporting the protests–by dropping off food and water to help out the protestors, or by turning out a few staff people at the demonstrations.
How nice!
What workers need are unions that organize a fight back. And this is exactly what the top union leaders haven’t done.
The bureaucrats who lead the unions today have put the profitability of the corporations ahead of the interests of their own members, not to speak of the working class as a whole. Their cowardice, in the face of the economic crisis, is part of the workers’ problems today.
The banks may have created this crisis, but the unions, in refusing to organize a real fight, have demoralized and disorganized the working class.
Union leaders may try to avoid responsibility for this disorganization by talking about food and water. But they are responsible for the trap in which most workers feel themselves caught today–the trap of partnership–with the bosses, our enemies.
We are in the midst of a crisis which strangles the working class and large parts of the population. It will continue to strangle us until workers mass their collective power to shut down the production of goods and services on which capitalist society depends.
The workers’ forces need to be mobilized to make a fight. The unions need a fighting policy, and leaders who will prepare for a fight.
Oct 17, 2011
“We Are the 99%”–it’s the slogan that has popped up all across the country as part of the “Occupy” protests, so clearly it’s being pushed by someone.
It’s certainly true–while the big majority have been hurt in this crisis, the top layer has actually done very well. It’s outrageous that the top one% of the population owns 35% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 80% holds only fifteen%!
A lot of the “Occupy” protesters have picked up this slogan as an expression of anger toward that one% who have benefitted from the Wall Street bailouts and tax breaks for the rich.
But while the slogan taps that anger, it hides important class differences in the population. It hides first of all the fact that within this 99%, not everyone is suffering the same way.
It’s true that some lawyers and even some stockbrokers may have been out of work for a while, or middle-class college students may not find the jobs they expect when they graduate (and may even be deep in debt when they do).
But the problems facing this layer of the population dim by comparison to the problems all parts of the working class have faced: the large number out of work for over a year and have run out of unemployment checks; those who were forced onto welfare because they ran out of money, only to have welfare pulled out from under them; those whose wages have been cut in half; those who have lost their homes to a mortgage scam that was consciously directed at them; those whose children are pushed into ever more crowed and dilapidated schools; those who literally starve a little every day.
Everyone in this so-called “99%” may have their own reasons to protest. But–as the saying goes–some have more reasons than others.
In fact, there’s an even more basic problem with this “99%” formulation. Especially in an imperialist country like the United States, a significant number of those in the upper tiers of the “99%” make their money from allying themselves with the capitalist class and doing its dirty work. They are the corporate executives and top managers, the Federal Reserve directors and economists, the newspaper publishers and editors who push the corporate propaganda, the university “professors” who justify capitalism, the politicians who hand over the keys to the treasury to the one%–and the big name doctors, lawyers and drug company researchers. The nineteen% just below that top one% own over fifty% of the nation’s wealth themselves! Clearly they do not have the same interests as working people.
We ignore these class differences at our own peril. To put everone together into the same “99%” disarms those who would fight, in much the same way that the unions forging partnerships with the bosses disarm the workers.
Lumping everyone together in the “99%” clouds the questions of which class, which social force, can have real power in that fight, the potential power to strip away the bankers’ hold over the society. That class is gathered together–in large and small workplaces, factories, offices, hospitals. Its force comes from the fact that it produces the goods and services that the whole society needs. That class–the working class–makes the economy run. The workers’ position in the economy gives the working class the possibility of shutting it down.
It’s important for people to protest and make their voices heard. And many people can protest the evils of this capitalist society together. But what a difference it would make to see workers occupy the workplaces: the places where profit is made for that one%.
A fight made by the working class, with its own forces and for its own interests, can change things massively. In their fight for jobs and a decent wage–the essential basis of any fight–they can attack the problem not only for themselves, they can pull behind them some other PARTS of the 99% to join in making that fight.