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
Nov 14, 2011
In early November, Jefferson County with 700,000 residents and home to Alabama’s biggest city, Birmingham, became the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. It had crumbled under the weight of four billion dollars of debt.
This bankruptcy came out of a sewer project that went wildly over budget. Cost overruns by construction companies and contractors that overcharged for building the sewers created the first mountain of debt. That debt was multiplied by Wall Street banks, notably JP Morgan. The bank cooked up so-called “creative” financing schemes, which were designed to hide the rising debt for a short while. In reality, these schemes drove up the debt astronomically–and the cost to finance it.
Jefferson County was driven into debt and bankruptcy by bankers, contractors, local officials and middlemen, who turned a local sewer project into a multi-billion dollar gold mine for all these criminals.
The working population and public sector workers have already been footing the bill for this boondoggle. Local officials have quadrupled sewer rates, with more increases coming. They slashed the county budget by a third, cutting more than 500 public sector jobs in the process. They closed several court houses, ended all road maintenance, and stopped the sheriff’s department from responding to car accidents.
Now that county is in bankruptcy, what does that mean? Do the banks, contractors and other blood suckers, who made enormous fortunes off the sewer project and financial schemes, have to give the money back?
No. They will continue to drain more money out of Jefferson County. Chapter 9, that is, the federal bankruptcy law for municipalities, protects them. It specifies that municipal governments cannot reduce their debt or debt payments to the banks and the wealthy. For JP Morgan, which holds 1.2 billion dollars in debt on the Jefferson County sewers, will continue to profit greatly. And the same goes for all the other wealthy bondholders.
No, bankruptcy was invented so government officials can more easily attack working people: to reduce spending, as well as jobs, pay and benefits. And sure enough, next in line for cuts by January 1 are senior citizen centers and the jobs of building inspectors. Using bankruptcy, municipal officials in Jefferson County are shrinking the budget of an important metropolitan area to that of a few rural villages.
What is happening in Jefferson County is only part of a wide ranging attack that governments and agencies in big cities and small towns across the country are carrying out against the population. Sometimes they use bankruptcy filings to gut municipal employee pensions, as they did in tiny Central Falls, Rhode Island and in Vallejo, California. But most commonly, the yawning budget deficits created by the plunder of big companies and the banks is used to slash services, jobs, pay and benefits. In Michigan, a new state law allows officials to use the budget deficit as the excuse to create an “emergency financial manager,” who wields dictatorial powers to get rid of union contracts, and slash spending, including for school districts.
This is capitalism’s answer to the crisis it created: destroys jobs and reduce the standard of living of the working population. The vital infrastructure and services that working people depend on and which allow the entire society to function is being destroyed.
This is the cost of capitalism run wild.
Nov 14, 2011
Friday is Veterans Day. President Obama is pledging to help post 9-11 veterans get jobs. Official unemployment in the U.S. is 9.1%. For veterans it is 12.1%.
How is Obama planning to help veterans? More tax breaks for corporations.
Yeah, that should help. It will help veterans as much as bailing out the banks got everybody’s jobs and homes back. Their answer to everything is to give more money to wealthy people, while the rest of us go broke!
Nov 14, 2011
A November study by the Citizens for Tax Justice found that 280 of the largest companies in the U.S. paid on average half the tax rate under which the bosses claim they are suffering. Their average rate over the last three years was half the official rate and in fact a quarter of these large companies paid less than 10% in federal taxes.
General Electric and Wells Fargo had billions in profits but paid no taxes thanks to tax benefits from their buddies in Congress. In all, 30 companies owed nothing and, thanks to tax laws riddled with loopholes, they got tax benefits or credits on future taxes owed.
Despite their constant whining, U.S. corporations pay overall a quarter of what they paid in the bustling 1950s, another era of corporate profit. While the unemployment rate remains enormous, while the country suffers in a recession, these corporate “citizens” add to the deficit and to the tax burden of everyone still working.
Nov 14, 2011
The Obama administration presented its “Race to the Top” as a way to encourage schools to do better. Schools in Murfreesboro, Tennessee know the truth about where it leads.
Tennessee was one of the first two states to win a federal Race to the Top grant, worth 501 million dollars. But administrators in Murfreesboro say its schools have been destroyed by the things they had to do for the state to get that money.
Every single teacher in the state has to be evaluated four times a year, no matter how excellent they’ve been judged to be in the past. That means principals spend so much time evaluating teachers and filling out paperwork that they have no time to really know what’s going on in their schools.
Because there are no standardized student test scores that can be used to evaluate Kindergarten through third grade teachers, as well as art, music and vocational teachers–over half of Tennessee’s teachers face crazy sets of rules to assess their work. Teachers can be assessed with student scores in subjects that have nothing to do with what they teach: writing scores for music teachers, for example; or fifth grade test scores for first grade teachers. One teacher said, “My job can be at risk, and I’m not even being evaluated by my own work.”
Will Shelton, principal of Blackman Middle School in Murfreesboro, says teachers have told him, “Morale is in the toilet. This destroys any possibility of building a family atmosphere. It causes so much mistrust.”
And this is in the best schools in a state that did everything Race to the Top asked it to do!
And it’s had a negative effect on student achievement, not a positive one. Tennessee’s latest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are actually lower than they were in 2009–before these “reforms” were implemented.
Race to the Top is a race to the bottom. It punishes ALL teachers, harasses administrators–and ultimately, it destroys education for all the children touched by it.
Nov 14, 2011
The American Farm Bureau Federation announced on November 10 that the cost of Thanksgiving dinner is up this year by 13%. The average cost for the turkey and all the fixings for 10 people will be just over $49.
In fact, prices of fresh turkeys are up by 22%; pumpkin pie mix is up 15%; the green peas are up 16%; even the whipped cream is up 15%.
Today’s paychecks don’t stretch that far. Don’t pretend we have something to be thankful for!
Nov 14, 2011
Herman Cain has been accused of serial offenses against women.
No surprise then that his campaign has been bought and paid for by the Koch brothers, two billionaires who made their original fortune in oil.
The Koch brothers are well-known for their support of a number of extreme right-wing causes, including the Tea Party and numerous anti-abortion campaigns.
Just the good old Billionaire Boys Club–with their usual rotten attitudes toward women.
Nov 14, 2011
There has been a huge ruckus in the Detroit area recently about the $200,000 severance Wayne County development official Turkia Mullin got when she voluntarily left to take over as Metro Airport CEO. But Mullin was hardly the only county official to get such a sweet deal as a result of a plan set up by Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano.
Forty county appointees took up similar offers of severance pay if they retired in the 6 months after an election. Then twenty of the officials who took the severance pay went back to work for the county as part-timers or “consultants.” One official who helped devise the policy providing the payouts, Tim Taylor, returned to work part-time for over $50,000 a year.
The severance pay was also included in calculating the officials’ average annual salary that determined the level of their pension payments. Some of the pensions for the retired officials paid them between $70,000 and $159,000 a year. That’s a lot more than most county workers get; the average pension for a county retiree last year was $22,373.
Union workers for the county were understandably outraged about the huge payouts, considering Ficano pushed through cuts in their wages of 10 to 20% during the past two years.
The story caused enough public outrage to force Ficano to fire Mullin and some others involved, but information about practices of the county government continues to get out. The latest news is that Mullin and her department set up three corporations that did business with the county.
Deals like this show just how much worth there is to all the politicians’ talk of “shared sacrifice”!
Nov 14, 2011
Last Tuesday, voters in several states finally got a chance to express their opposition to attacks on the population.
In Arizona, voters recalled Russell Pearce, the architect of the state’s harsh anti-immigrant law, from the State Senate. In Michigan, State Rep Paul Scott, who led cuts in public education, was recalled. And in Ohio, voters overturned a law curtailing collective bargaining rights.
It’s obvious that these votes will not change very much. But they expose the lying propaganda we’ve been told: that the population supported attacks on immigrants, on women’s rights, on unions and on teachers. When given the chance to weigh in on those attacks, the voters said NO!
The Democrats will surely try to take advantage of this discontent in the next election. But Democrats are behind recent attacks just as much as Republicans have been. In state after state, and nationally, nothing could have passed without Democrats’ approval or at least acceptance.
Democrats might be more careful not to tread on the toes of the union apparatuses the way Republicans have in Wisconsin and Ohio. But they have been passing measures that attack workers just as much as Republicans have.
Democrats will tell us that we need to vote for them in order for things to change–but that’s a lie. Neither the recalls nor the referendums would have succeeded without the mobilizations of immigrant rights activists, teachers and union members. Only mobilizations will truly change our situation in the future.
We’ve been told we can’t mobilize. The results of these votes show we can.
Nov 14, 2011
Late last month President Obama assured homeowners facing foreclosure that he understood the problem. Speaking in Nevada, where the foreclosure rate is the highest in the country, Obama said, “Probably the single greatest cause of the financial crisis and this brutal recession has been the housing bubble that burst four years ago. Since then average home prices have fallen by nearly 17%... Now this is a painful burden for middle-class families. And it’s also a drag on our economy.”
Obama announced he had a plan to address the crisis, saying his plan,“is going to help a lot more homeowners refinance at lower rates, which means consumers save money, ... it gets those families spending again. And it also makes it easier for them to make their mortgage payments, so that they don’t lose their home and bring down home values in the neighborhood.”
In fact, Obama’s plan will help very few homeowners. The only borrowers eligible for Obama’s mortgage refinancing plan are those whose loans are owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and have been since at least May 31, 2009, who have less than 20% equity in their homes, who have not missed a payment in the last six months and haven’t had more than one late payment in the past year.
That’s only about 1.5 to 2 million out of 14.5 million people whose homes are underwater, according to the New York Times. The plan does nothing to reduce what these few people owe, it simply allows more of them to refinance into loans with lower interest rates.
Once again, Obama’s plan has more style than substance. He hopes voters won’t look closely enough to realize that.
Nov 14, 2011
Despite dividend levels that once again reached 110 billion dollars, that is, the same as before the recession, large British companies continue to announce wage cuts and other attacks.
The eight largest companies dominating the construction industry, for example, want to impose a wage cut for electricians between 14 and 37%.
The workers of the British subsidiary of Ford Motor have discovered a hidden clause in the contract that will reduce wages of new hires by 20% beginning in April of 2012 and kick them out of the pension plan beginning in 2013.
Other companies have found sneaky ways to cut workers’ wages. The railroad company East Coast, a spin off from a state enterprise to the private sector, employs temp-agency workers, whose wages are 37% lower than workers already working there. A new European Union agreement says temporary workers must be paid the same wage for the same work after 12 weeks. So East Coast will use new job classifications to put one group of workers next to another, doing exactly the same work–at 37% lower wages. It will be no surprise when East Coast decides to keep only the lower paid workers.
Jaguar Land Rover employs 800 temp-agency workers at the minimum wage in its Halewood factory. (The regular workers don’t get all that much more.) Jaguar has proposed that the temp workers voluntarily renounce benefits from the new European agreement, for which they promise to give the first 300 volunteers a guarantee of five days work each week. Others only get part-time work. And at least 200 temp workers will be out the door immediately!
There have been many other such attacks from 2008 to the present, but now we may be seeing a reaction. In London, the electricians in the construction industry organize to block one large work site each week. And at Ford, where the vote is taking place on the new contract, three factories out of seven have already voted against the contract by large majorities.
The chief executive of Barclays Bank, the second largest bank in Britain, expressed concern that increasing social inequality could create social troubles. He may be right!
Nov 14, 2011
At least six hundred people died and 2,000 were wounded on October 23rd, when an earthquake that registered 7.2 on the Richter scale hit Van, a Kurdish region in eastern Turkey. Almost half of the buildings in the area were destroyed or made uninhabitable.
The population is facing winter and snow in this mountainous area. The Turkish government barely acted in the first 24 hours, although it has been very quick to move against Kurdish guerrillas. Meanwhile, thousands of families were forced to sleep outside as the temperature fell to freezing, without enough tents for everyone who needed shelter.
Since 2003, some 30 billion dollars has been collected in taxes, supposedly to finance earthquake-proof construction throughout Turkey, much of which has experienced quakes. But it turns out the money was used for something else!
The truth is that corruption has long been tied to anti-earthquake measures. When the earthquake of 1999 killed 19,000 people in the Istanbul area, the Kurds could not be blamed. But the developers could, since more than half of all buildings in the region were built WITHOUT permits. In the face of the outrage back then, laws were passed so that this wouldn’t happen again. But obviously it’s not enough to pass laws.
The Van earthquake once again showed what builders have been allowed to get away with–economizing on cement, iron, foundations, etc. On October 27th, the daily paper Milliyet printed a photo showing a building built in 1952 which remains upright and intact, despite the earthquake. Next to it was another building built in 1998 completely collapsed.
Since October 23rd, the press has spoken of the risks to all Turkish people, especially in the region of Istanbul, with a population of more than 13 million. Yet, thanks to government corruption, half the area’s buildings are dangerous or built without permits. That means at least half the population is in buildings unlikely to withstand a major earthquake.
Seismologists predict such an earthquake will hit Turkey again in the next few years or decades. If the negligence continues, the risk is that the death toll might not be in the thousands but in the hundreds of thousands of lives.
Postscript: An after shock of 5.7 magnitude hit the Van region again on November 9, leaving at least 33 more people dead. Snow has begun to fall as some men in Van protested over the distribution of tents.
Nov 14, 2011
Twelve years ago, GM spun off its major parts plants, calling them “Delphi” and then GMCH. Ford did the same with its “Visteon” and then ACH plants. Workers were told that if they stayed with Delphi and Visteon, they would still be covered under the UAW’s master contracts with GM and Ford.
That promise is now null and void. The new contracts stipulate that any remaining GMCH or ACH workers can stay under GM and Ford terms only if they transfer back to a GM or Ford plant–only with the company’s consent–and only as entry-level two-tier workers!
The contract highlights given out before the vote were cleverly worded to make it appear that GMCH or ACH workers could come back–but only when workers looked at the last lines did they find out the bitter truth.
Nov 14, 2011
Two days after the UAW declared the Chrysler contract ratified, Chrysler/Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne said that two-tier wages were “not a viable structure” long-term.
Sergio of course meant that the first-tier wage earner has to get ready to plunge down. But in fact the plunge is already taking place.
First-tier workers have not had a meaningful base wage increase since 2003, and the cost of living allowances have been by stages diverted, frozen, and eliminated. Meanwhile inflation erodes the wage: a worker making $28 an hour in 2003, in order to maintain that buying power, would have to make $34.53 an hour this year!
Sergio’s goal is being pursued from both ends. The second-tier workers are gradually to be brought up to merely the average U.S. manufacturing wage of $19.28; the buying power of the frozen first-tier wage is falling toward that level, every week, every month, every year.
Nov 14, 2011
A skilled trades worker at Chrysler who objected to the UAW International’s decision to declare the contract had passed despite skilled trades workers rejecting it, had this to say in a leaflet workers circulated: “I’ve seen two International Reps, our current Local President, and a number of local officials try to strong arm this contract.
“Now, I don’t think asking for a fair agreement makes us overpaid, under worked, or greedy. We are not getting International rep pay, or routinely logging 7 days a week, 12 hours a day paychecks to make ends meet. I just think we need a raise in base pay for everyone, real COLA in our hourly rate, and Skilled Trades workers need protection from Sergio’s (Chrysler CEO Marchionne) plan to cut our numbers…”
Nov 14, 2011
UAW members often accuse their leadership of acting too much like a business. It certainly looks that way to the members of OPEIU, which is the union of the secretaries and clerical workers employed by the UAW.
In 2010, the UAW reopened its contract with the OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International Union) and cut 4.5 million dollars out of their wages and benefits. The UAW said it was either the cuts, or layoffs.
In early 2011, the UAW again threatened layoffs–unless the clerks and secretaries increased their work week by 2.5 hours with no increase in pay. Again the OPEIU agreed.
Now in late 2011 the UAW again demands layoffs–unless a big number of office staff take early-retirement buyouts.
A clerical worker told the Detroit News, “We keep giving and giving, but they keep coming back at us with the threat of layoffs.” And in fact part of the “giving” has been job eliminations–more than 140 jobs out of 400 have been cut since 2009, and the UAW now wants another 100 gone.
A vice-president of OPEIU commented, “We know times are tough, but they’re spending like the Housewives of Beverly Hills.” She mentioned hiring small armies of consultants, spending on foreign travel, and remodeling Solidarity House. Certainly, the secretaries and clerks are the essential labor force for handling all the union’s paperwork, bill paying, and travel plans–so they do know exactly which closets hold which skeletons.
But the worst damage to the UAW’s membership would not be the exposure of its leadership’s financially frivolous ways. The worst damage would be the disappearance of the only part of its staff with experience in proper filing of required paperwork, meeting deadlines, and keeping records in good order.
An attack on the clerical staff is also an attack on the membership; an injury to one is an injury to all.
Nov 14, 2011
Last week voters in Mississippi rejected by 59% to 41% a proposed law that would call a fertilized egg in a woman’s body a “person,” so as to stop the right to abortion or even some forms of contraception. The rejection was a significant push back against the constant introduction of anti-abortion measures in state legislatures.
This past summer, Kansas lawmakers passed a new law to prevent health insurers from covering abortions. They also passed a law to prevent Title X federal funds from going to health care clinics in Kansas that provide abortion services.
Kansas is hardly an exception to state legislators attacking women’s right to abortion. Several states have used the tactic of ridiculous guidelines, for example, the size of the janitor’s closets in health care facilities. In the first eight months of 2011, sixty-one laws were passed similar to the ones in Kansas, all deciding to further restrict the right to abortion.
The problem is not only at the state level. The federal government was not slow to attack abortion rights after Roe v. Wade passed in 1973. As soon as it passed, a “liberal” Democratic senator, Frank Church, shepherded through a bill to allow hospitals to “opt out” of performing abortions if abortions went against their “moral or religious beliefs.” The Catholic Church quickly made sure that Catholic hospitals no longer provided abortion services. Four of the ten biggest hospital chains or health care systems are owned or under the control of the Catholic Church. In 1976, the Hyde Amendment passed in a Democrat-controlled Congress to restrict federal funding for abortions provided to poor women. Better-off women could still have abortions under their health plans. (Today several states besides Kansas have passed laws to tell health insurers they may not pay for any abortions in their states.) The Republican-controlled House of Representatives in May 2011 passed a bill called the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” in a 251-175 vote. Again, it is poor women who will suffer the most if this bill gets through the Senate.
All these measures passed in state legislatures and in Congress helped to create a climate in which violence against those favoring abortion was acceptable. Thousands of health care clinics were attacked by anti-abortion extremists. Nine abortion providers have been murdered and attempts made on the lives of others; over the past 30 years the attacks have included bombs, arson and throwing acid at people working in clinics.
The violence has had its impact. By the year 2000, seven out of eight counties in the U.S. had not a single abortion provider. In rural areas, the blockade was almost total: 97% of rural counties have no doctor who performs abortions.
Yet poll after poll shows that the majority in this country are in favor of women having access to abortion. The recent Mississippi vote was further proof, if any was needed, that it is only a religious minority that wants to end the right to abortion and other medical services that impact women.
These anti-abortion extremists would take women back to the days before Roe v. Wade when 90% of abortions were performed illegally, resulting in hundreds of deaths each year.
If we don’t want to be pushed back to those days of illegal abortions, women must defend their rights the same way they got them–by the enormous mobilizations of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time, the demand was that abortion be a decision made by a woman privately, without interference from the religious, medical or government institutions.
Put an end to religious minorities imposing their backward views on the rest of us!
Nov 14, 2011
The announcement by the Obama administration that it was withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year was no surprise. It was only following the timetable laid out by the Bush administration. But it was assumed that the U.S. would maintain a massive presence in Iraq, using military contractors and mercenaries directed through the massive embassy in Baghdad and a network of consulates throughout the country.
But in late October, the Obama administration announced that it was drastically scaling back the State Department presence, also. This is supposedly due to budget cuts, even though Congress had specifically excluded spending for Iraq and Afghanistan from those cuts.
No, the U.S. military is being chased out of Iraq by the very violence that it had created. The U.S. war that destroyed the Saddam Hussein regime left a power vacuum that was filled by virulent rivalries, Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds, as well as rivalries inside those ethnic groups. At the same time, other powers in the region, especially Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, compete for influence inside Iraq.
There might be an official government headed by Nouri al-Maliki and a large Iraqi state apparatus. But they are part of an ongoing civil war, marked by regular terrorist attacks, bombings and assassinations, violence also aimed at U.S. forces.“An invasion is never a very good basis for forming an alliance,” said Christopher Hill, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
Caught in the middle of this ongoing violence is the Iraqi population. They have already suffered millions of casualties and impoverishment that is among the worst in the world.
While the U.S. pulls back from Iraq, it is shifting more forces into the countries surrounding Iraq, starting with Kuwait, along Iraq’s border. The U.S. still has a huge stake in Iraq. The major U.S. oil companies continue to suck the oil wealth out of the country. And Iraq remains at the center of the vital, oil rich Persian Gulf.
“We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region,” Secretary of State Clinton assured the world after Obama’s announcement.
The violence and misery created by U.S. imperial domination of Iraq and the Persian Gulf will continue.