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
Dec 12, 2011
2011 is ending, just like the year began: unemployment is decimating the working class.
Oh, yes, the government did announce, cynically, that the “official rate” of unemployment went down in November. But that was only a statistical sleight of hand, expunging 315,000 unemployed people from government records—because they had been unemployed too long!
In the real world human beings inhabit, the number of people without a job continues to go up. Today, there are 6.2 million fewer people working than there were at the beginning of 2008, as the recession was beginning. Given the growth of the population, there should be almost five million MORE working. We’re missing more than 11 million jobs!
Economists have now begun to call this “the great recession,” hinting even that we might be on the verge of another “great depression.”
No matter what they call it, it’s a catastrophe. And there is no reason for it—other than the unquenchable greed of the bankers and industrialists whose main means of amassing wealth is to reduce the income and jobs of the working class.
Here’s an example: Six members of the Walton family own 70 billion dollars—about equal to the wealth held by 94 million people, the 30% of the population with the smallest holdings. Where did they get their wealth?
Where else than from the hard work of millions of people—1.4 million of whom today toil in Wal-Mart stores in the U.S., paid near minimum wage, cheated of benefits, subjected to quasi-military discipline and horrid working conditions. Tens of millions more toil in factories in some of the lowest wage areas of the world, often paid barely a dollar a day, sometimes even just cents, under near slave labor conditions—producing for Wal-Mart stores.
Wal-Mart and its Walton family owners provide the perfect picture of 21st century capitalism: on one side of the picture, unbridled greed; on the other side, growing impoverishment.
This system outwore its usefulness long ago. Capitalism hangs on only because the working class has not yet massed its forces for the fight that could put capitalism in its grave.
But in its grave capitalism must be put. It does not do what it has the wealth to do: that is, provide a job, at a decent wage, for everyone who wants to work. It does not put to productive employment all the millions upon millions of people who could be building the schools our children need, repairing the roads and infrastructure that are the basis of any functioning society, replacing dilapidated housing stock, and so on. And yet, there’s more than enough wealth produced every day to do all those things, and much more—if this wealth were put to productive use, instead of left to accumulate and even mold in bank vaults. Worse, today it’s thrown away in the circuits of speculation, threatening a collapse of the whole financial system.
But that brings us back to the starting point: capitalism itself, and the absolute, pressing need to rip it out.
The working class has the forces that could bring capitalism to a crashing halt; and it has the position in the productive economy that could lead to the creation of a new economy, whose main and essential aim would be to satisfy the needs of the population.
For a century and a half, the working class has been close to storming the gates of capitalism, taking the economy into its own hands, using it to build up a socialist society, a communist society.
This transformation has never been more urgent.
Dec 12, 2011
Three years ago this week, the Federal Reserve gave a total of 1.2 trillion dollars in secret loans to the big banks, according to Bloomberg News. The Fed never disclosed the loans, which were made at the same time the politicians were arranging the massive TARP bailouts. Since the Fed’s monetary policy is not regulated by Congress, they never had to disclose the loans. The deals only came to light because Bloomberg filed a Freedom of Information Act request and went to court over it. Bloomberg says the banks that received the loans have made 13 billion dollars off the money.
The same politicians who tell us the government has no money for social programs, road construction or schools have no problem finding trillions for the country’s biggest banks.
Dec 12, 2011
Opponents of Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager law are close to having collected enough petition signatures to put a referendum overturning the law on the ballot in November 2012. As soon as their signatures are verified, the law would be suspended until the election decides the issue.
Members of unions, community groups and churches around the state have been involved in the petition campaign. They are trying to overturn a law that allows the governor to appoint emergency managers over cities, counties and school districts, with dictatorial powers to break union contracts, set wages and benefits as they please, and sell off assets.
It’s very likely that if the referendum makes it to the ballot, the law will be overturned. It is wildly unpopular among teachers and city workers likely to face deep concessions from emergency managers–not to mention people who know how the law destroys their children’s schools.
Faced with the risk that the population might interfere with their plans, State Treasurer Andy Dillon, a Democrat, and Republican Governor Rick Snyder are scurrying to rewrite the law before the petition campaign can be completed.
Democracy? What’s that?
Dillon and Snyder are too busy doing the dirty work for the wealthy to observe little niceties like the will of the people!
The fact is the politicians of both parties have a problem. They have been squeezing the population year after year, cutting services, cutting jobs, attacking wages and benefits–all in the quest for more money from the state treasury for the biggest bosses in the state. But public workers and teachers have been saying NO.
So the politicians need a dictator–and if they have to tear up the few democratic rights people have in order to get one–well, that’s what they’re ready to do.
Dec 12, 2011
The City of Detroit is refusing to pay the yearly Christmas bonus to retirees. The City saw how easy it was for GM, Ford and Chrysler to steal Christmas bonuses from their retirees and also the active workers. So the City said, why not?
The trail of broken promises gets longer daily, and it will go on, as long as we let it go on.
Dec 12, 2011
For the first time ever, an appointed head of the Department of Health and Human Services overruled the scientists in the Food and Drug Administration. In this case, she refused to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter to teenagers.
Even the media reports understood this decision was about next year’s election–not about drug safety, as Obama’s appointee cynically claimed. By making the decision against selling the over-the-counter Plan B One-Step, the department’s secretary, Kathleen Sibelius, endangers young women who have sex without any contraceptive protection and are therefore at risk of becoming pregnant. This pill has been shown to cut the risk of such pregnancies in half. It has already proven its safety and value to the thousands who have used it.
The women who were put at particular risk by this decision are teenagers, who must now have parental consent to get a prescription or procedure to terminate a pregnancy. In other words, by the time they go through that, it will be too late for this “morning after” pill.
How many teenagers will be condemned to pregnancy at too young an age? In exchange for how many votes Obama secured for himself from reactionaries?
Dec 12, 2011
The rape of a young girl shone a bitter light on the disaster that is vacant housing in Baltimore. She was dragged into one of the thousands of empty houses in east Baltimore, then fell to the basement where her attacker beat her in the face and ribs.
The Department of Public Works, trying to squirm out of its responsibility, claimed it had boarded up more than 5,200 houses this past year and in each of the past several years. Maybe so–but the total of abandoned and vacant buildings in Baltimore City is more than 16,000–by the city’s own admission and probably worse.
Here is work that needs to be done in a city where the unemployed need work. The Baltimore waiting list for low-income housing is closed because so many people are already on it and so few houses or apartments are available. And an estimated 4,000 people are homeless every night. Here is a desperate need that the city does not begin to meet.
Houses are vacant and could be rehabbed or pulled down with new housing going up. And thousands of unemployed construction workers could be put back to work.
Instead, housing has been pulled down in one place–the blocks and blocks of east Baltimore where the people were pushed out so that Johns Hopkins Hospital could expand. In other places, like in this impoverished east Baltimore neighborhood, the vacant houses worsen the already desperate situation for people living there.
Capitalism, with all the wealth in the world, has no answers for the problems of the population.
Dec 12, 2011
On November 22nd, a thousand workers went on strike at Jingmo, an electronics factory in Shenzhen, a south China city of ten million people. This factory is owned by the Taiwanese Jingyuan Computer Group and makes keyboards and other accessories for Apple, IBM and LG.
Angry workers protested a huge increase in work hours. After the normal work day from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. with a two-hour lunch break, the bosses wanted workers to work to 6 p.m. or even midnight or 2 a.m. This report comes from China Labor Watch, a not-for-profit organization in Hong Kong.
When the workers heard the news, they left work and demonstrated in the street, denouncing bad working conditions that cause many accidents. They protested the systematic laying off of older workers and the behavior of managers, who often insult workers. They went back to work only when management promised to reduce the overtime hours.
On November 16th, in the same province, 400 women workers from Top Form Underwear making bras went on strike for five days against a wage cut and the imposition of piece rates. Their anger had increased after a foreman insulted a worker who didn’t understand an order given in Cantonese–because the common language is Mandarin.
On November 17th, in Dongguan, 7,000 workers from an industrial complex in Guangdong province near Canton went on strike against layoffs and pay cuts at Yucheng, a shoe factory. These workers are contracted to such corporations as Adidas, Nike and New Balance. Clashes with the police left several wounded. Workers feared the plant would be moved to Jiangxi province, where workers are paid even worse wages than in Guangdong.
This month-long strike wave mainly affected Guongdong province, which is highly industrialized and very populous. Tens of millions of migrant workers employed in the factories there suffer the heavy consequences of the world economic crisis.
The Vice Prime Minister in charge of finances recently warned that the Chinese economy was about to enter a long recession. Since the beginning of 2011, exports have hardly increased, which has led to a production slow-down. Production in China has recently declined at the sharpest rate in 2½ years.
When orders decline, the Chinese bosses react like bosses do throughout the world: they make the workers pay. Most of these bosses are contractors for big Western corporations, and these corporations make enormous profits from the fierce exploitation of Chinese workers.
Though Chinese workers are more exploited, they have the same problems as U.S. and European workers: low wages, layoffs, run-away plants. Often they have the same bosses. Their fight is an encouragement for all workers everywhere.
Dec 12, 2011
This article is from the paper Workers Power (Le Pouvoir aux Travailleurs), put out in Ivory Coast by comrades of the African Union of Internationalist Communist Workers (UATCI).
When Prime Minister Soro Guillaume visited Yopougon, he decided to force out lower income people from the area. He gave as the excuse the “anarchic occupations” of the zone of “urban settlement.”
Those living in the area are workers with few choices, given their low wages. How can they feed themselves, get about and take care of themselves with these low wages? Even worse, more and more workers living in distant neighborhoods must sleep in their factories all week long, in bad conditions, to save on travel. Some build little shacks for their family, not because they want to, but rather because they are forced to do so.
Pretending to care about the living conditions of the poorest, the minister of Construction, Improvement and Urbanism claimed the government would request that those who are going to develop the land put aside 5% of the area for low income people. We notice the minister said they would “request,” not “require.” As if he didn’t know the developers are in it for profit–showing their scorn for the poor, beginning with their own employees.
Dec 12, 2011
Public workers struck in Britain on November 30th, the first time since December 1978. It was the third time for an important mobilization since the beginning of the crisis.
This time, unlike the strike of last June 30th, which included only teachers, students and national government employees, the union apparatuses called out big battalions of health and city government workers to join the strike. Some three million union members voted for this strike day with their feet.
The strike was a success, as even the government had to recognize. The rallies and demonstrations of strikers took place in a hundred cities and brought together hundreds of thousands of participants. Unlike other times, a significant number of workers from the private sector joined these strikers, although certainly not invited by the union apparatuses. And passers-by applauded the demonstrators.
Like the preceding mobilizations, the union leaders chose to limit this to only the issue of attacks against the public workers’ pensions. These attacks include raising the age of retirement from 60 to 67 for everyone, an immediate increase in workers’ contributions (3% more of their pay, while public sector wages are frozen for two years), and a series of changes in the way of calculating and indexing pensions, which will lead to an average cut of 15% to 25%. Since half of public sector retirees already get pensions of less than $700 a month, there are obvious reasons for anger.
Since the November 30th strike, the union leaders have kept silent. Negotiations have occurred at the highest level between the union apparatuses and the government, without a word leaking out. Some workers remember a similar set of negotiations in 2008, under the preceding Labor Party government, during which these same union leaders accepted an increase in the retirement age from 60 to 65, without getting a thing in return.
Workers are also angry about other austerity measures of the Conservative government. But the union apparatus chose not to oppose any of these attacks, and sometimes assisted the government in putting these measures into effect.
On November 30th there were a number of hand-written signs protesting job cuts. This year 240,000 public jobs are being cut. Other signs opposed big wage cuts imposed by some city governments. These cuts have gone through with the aid of the union apparatuses, in particular in the big Labor Party-run cities like Birmingham.
So, despite the success of November 30th, British workers can hardly trust the union leaders to lead the necessary test of strength against the attacks of the bourgeoisie. To make that challenge, there must be an explosion of anger sufficiently strong to shake off the control the union apparatuses maintain over labor’s biggest battalions.
Dec 12, 2011
According to United Nations statisticians, the good planet Earth now has more than seven billion residents–give or take ten million or so.
This new record shows that all those horror stories the so-called “experts” told about runaway population growth and catastrophes resulting from “overpopulation” are nothing but lies. Essentially, demographic growth has slowed, and current projections estimate only a gradual increase, and even an eventual stabilization of the total number of human beings.
Despite the horror stories, the experts have never worried much about too many people. Their worry is about too large a population of poor people. About 2,500 years ago, in slave-holding Athens, certain Greek philosophers feared that the number of free men and property owners would be incapable of controlling and keeping in subjugation the poor, if their numbers became too large.
At the time of the Industrial Revolution in England, the economist Malthus worried at seeing so many workers milling about outside his windows. He wanted to limit their fertility and their numbers, by starving them if necessary.
Forty years ago, certain Western demographers, fearing the arrival of hordes of starving Third World poor coming to devour bowls of cereal from their well-stocked groceries, predicted the explosion of the “population bomb” at the start of the 21st century. Even today, some commentators claim that the poorer countries are poor mainly because their population is too large. The so-called “anti-growth” theoreticians pretend the high number of human beings will destroy the planet.
All these supposed demographic theories share one thing in common: fear of the poor, an eternal reflex of the wealthy.
The problem is not and never has been the number of human beings–it is the way in which society is organized. The serious demographers, U.N. agronomists, and even the U.N. Secretary General, all said on the occasion of the birth of our seven billionth contemporary: rationally organized, the Earth can feed, clothe, educate, and care for well more than seven billion human beings.
But–and obviously the United Nations does not say it–in order to accomplish this, the elimination of oppression is necessary, that is, the elimination of the capitalist organization of society with its law of profit, that impedes all human development and has caused it to go backwards. We must welcome and prepare a different future for the seven billionth human and all those that follow.
Dec 12, 2011
U.S. officials found that banks are helping drug cartels to move money between countries. They estimate that size of the laundered drug money could reach as high as 50 billion dollars. Among the banks involved were Wachovia and HSBC.
Should come as no surprise! This is what banks are good at: hiding all the money they themselves make!
And if swindling us through mortgages or bank fees is no longer profitable enough, they have other schemes to earn more money, for example, from drug cartels.
Hey, this is capitalism at its finest.
Dec 12, 2011
The skilled trades who voted NO on the contract are supposed to be allowed to see the minutes of the meeting where the International Executive Board decided to disregard their vote.
As everyone knows, what is SUPPOSED to happen is not always what DOES happen. No one should be allowed this power to make a NO vote come out as a YES!
The trades are persisting. Good for them!
Dec 12, 2011
Ford Motor Company revealed where they will send the money that they squeezed from workers in last October’s contract. Ford will resume paying a five-cent dividend on its stock in 2012.
Five cents per share sounds small, until it’s multiplied by millions. Take Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally, for instance. He holds 17.2 million shares. His 17.2 million nickels will ring up to $860,000, every three months, for doing nothing but holding stock–an extra 3.4 million dollars a year!
Mulally can’t be allowed ahead of his bosses, however. The Ford Family owns 70.85 million shares of special Class B stock. Their 70.85 million nickels will net them 3.54 million dollars, every three months, 14.2 million a year. In addition they will get undisclosed dividends on the undisclosed amount of common stock they sit on.
But it’s all small potatoes compared to the Wall Street funds that own blocks of hundreds of millions of shares. State Street Bank and Trust, Ford’s largest institutional investor, holds 398 million shares and will bank 19.9 million dollars per quarter–merely for holding shares. No labor required!
Evercore Trust with its 271 million shares will bank 13.55 million bucks; BlackRock’s 195.2 million shares will net it 9.76 million bucks. Every three months.
And there are many, many more of these gluttonous hogs lined up at the trough.
This is exactly what becomes of the concessions extorted from workers in these last contracts, extorted by using all manner of lies, deceit, treachery, threats and manipulation to get “Yes” votes. Workers must still endure two and three tier wage scales, suffer inhuman work loads and work schedules, fall further and further behind the cost of living, pay more for health care–even give up break time!–merely so that leeches from private equity companies to the Ford Family can stack greater wealth on top of their already incredible wealth.
Unconscionable exploitation!
Dec 12, 2011
Alpha Natural Resources has cut a deal to avoid prosecution with the U.S. Attorney’s office by paying a 209-million-dollar fine. Alpha is the name of the company Massey Coal transformed itself into after its dangerous Big Branch coal mine killed 29 miners.
After the underground explosion, investigations cited flagrant ongoing safety violations, including deliberate interference with methane ventilation and with coal-dust control. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), too little and too late, issued 369 violations–after the fact.
The violations were clearly so deliberate as to be criminal conduct. Yet only one low-level supervisor has been indicted. Eighteen Massey executives cited their Fifth Amendment rights and refused to be interviewed by federal investigators.
The deal means that no one high up at Massey is going to face hard time for the miners’ deaths. Every mine operator understands the meaning of this deal: they can go on like before.
The next Big Branch disaster is inevitable.
Dec 12, 2011
Prosecutors in Pennsylvania announced they will not request a new sentencing trial to impose the death penalty on Mumia Abu-Jamal, falsely convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. This doesn’t mean that Mumia has finally been freed–only that he will spend the rest of his life in jail.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, now 58 years old, has already spent more than half his life behind bars, his conviction based on falsified evidence and on the testimony of witnesses who now admit the police coerced them to lie at the trial.
The Philadelphia police and prosecutors worked for decades to put this man to death, despite all the evidence of his innocence, for the same reason they framed him up in the first place–because as a radio journalist, he had exposed their racist and criminal behavior.
The prosecution did not back down out of any concern for justice–but because of a worldwide movement that has fought for decades to save Mumia’s life and have this gross injustice overturned.
This decision is little more than an attempt by the U.S. government to bury the case. A new sentencing trial would allow Mumia’s attorneys to present everything that has come to light since the original trial–everything the justice system has ignored based on technicalities. And that could only underline the hypocrisy and viciousness of a U.S. government that criticizes the denial of human rights in other countries, but puts innocent men to death knowingly in this country.
Those who have worked to support Mumia know that he did not get justice with this ruling–but they should also know that his life has not been saved.
How many other men have been killed in prison with the complicit agreement of authorities or even on their explicit orders? No one should ever forget George Jackson, assassinated by California prison authorities in 1971 or the many other victims of officially authorized prison violence.
Don’t let the prosecution bury this case–and Mumia along with it. The work must continue to free Mumia!
Dec 12, 2011
Against the background of the Occupy protests across the country, it’s useful to recall an earlier “occupy” movement: the occupation of Washington, D.C. in 1932 by more than 20,000 World War I veterans and their families.
For years, the veterans had demanded a bonus to make up for the extremely low pay they received in the military. In 1924 Congress had voted them the bonus, but withheld payment until 1945, which led veterans to sarcastically call it the Tombstone Bonus.
In the spring of 1932, the march to demand the bonus was started by unemployed and penniless veterans in Portland, Oregon who started to trek across the country. As word spread of their march, they were joined by thousands more vets. By late May, the first contingents had arrived in Washington.
The veterans and their families set up camps at various places around the city. The largest camp was in a muddy, swampy flat across the Anacostia River from the Capitol. Approximately 10,000 veterans, women and children built shelters from materials dragged out of a junk pile nearby–old lumber, packing boxes and scrap tin covered with roofs of thatched straw. The veterans laid out streets, dug latrines, set up kitchens, sick bays, libraries, classes, entertainment. Music of all sorts was everywhere. And the veterans carried out regular lively demonstrations and rallies demanding their bonus.
Not often mentioned was the fact that the occupation was integrated at a time when segregation was still the law of the land in Washington, D.C., a southern city, as well as in the military. To the horror of officials of government and military big wigs, the black and white veterans broke down those barriers. As Roy Wilkins reported in Crisis magazine, “Black men and white men, veterans of the segregated army that had fought in World War I, lined up equally.... For years, the U.S. Army had argued that General Jim Crow was its proper commander, but the Bonus marchers gave lie to the notion that Black and white soldiers–ex-soldiers in their case–couldn’t live together.”
Less than a month after the veterans arrived, Congress hurriedly put a Bonus Bill up for a vote. On June 15, the House voted in favor. Two days later, with 10,000 people waiting anxiously outside, the U.S. Senate defeated it overwhelmingly, 62-18. The crowd reacted with stunned silence. A silent “Death March” began in front of the Capitol.
Over the next weeks, the veterans continued to hold regular demonstrations to demand that President Herbert Hoover grant them their bonus. But Hoover refused and instead prepared to forcibly end the occupation. In the early morning of July 28, he ordered the police to remove the Bonus Army veterans squatting in some abandoned buildings near the Capitol. Thousands of veterans from around the city joined the fight.
Immediately after a policeman shot and killed two veterans, Hoover used the violence created by his police as the pretext to bring in the U.S. Army. Later that afternoon, more than a thousand cavalry, infantry, as well as several tanks and armored vehicles, under the command of Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur and Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, drove the veterans and their families out of the camps, setting the camps on fire. Two babies were killed and the nearby hospitals were overwhelmed with casualties.
Despite this crushing blow, the veterans organized a second, smaller occupation in Washington, D.C. in 1933. The new president, Franklin Roosevelt, who had defeated Hoover in 1932, also opposed the bonus. Instead, Roosevelt got the veterans out of Washington by pushing tens of thousands of them into the WPA programs–with little money and no security.
But the vets finally did get their bonus. In the face of a real working class revolt, with factory occupations and mass strikes, Congress overrode Roosevelt’s veto in 1936 and granted the veterans their bonus.
Dec 12, 2011
On Labor Day, September 1935, 265 veterans were killed during an enormous hurricane, while building a road in the Florida Keys. In an article about this disaster, Ernest Hemingway bitterly condemned the Roosevelt administration: “Wealthy people, yachtsmen, fishermen such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt, do not come to the Florida Keys in hurricane months.... There is a known danger to property. But veterans, especially the bonus-marching variety of veterans, are not property. They are only human beings; unsuccessful human beings, and all they have to lose is their lives. They are doing coolie labor for a top wage of $45 a month and they have been put down on the Florida Keys where they can’t make trouble. It is hurricane months, sure, but if anything comes up, you can always evacuate them, can’t you?”
Dec 12, 2011
President Obama is on the campaign trail–dusting off some populist rhetoric he’d put in cold storage since the 2008 election.
Obama spoke in Osawatomie, Kansas, site of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” speech in 1910. Obama echoed that speech, and borrowed some themes from the Occupy movement. He talked about fairness and income inequality and attacked “you’re-on-your-own economics.”
It seems that Obama is hoping to pull in many of the people mobilized by the Occupy protests, getting them to work for his reelection. Just like Democratic Party front groups like MoveOn.org pulled young people into his 2008 campaign.
Obama can spout populist rhetoric all day long–but his actions show whose side he’s on. It’s the same side as all the Republican candidates: the side of the rich.