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 14, 2012
We are now in the fifth year of grinding unemployment. The Republicans tell us that unemployment is devastating people under Barack Obama. They are right. But guess what: this unemployment devastated people under George W. Bush too. Both of them, Republican and Democrat alike, presided over big increases in unemployment.
They are both to blame: they both used their control over the government to support the corporate drive for profit.
It’s that drive for profit that produced the unemployment.
Some of the biggest companies in the country have been shifting their cash reserves into the money markets in order to make money off of money, that is, off of speculation. Instead of producing goods and services they have gone on a gambling spree. That drove up unemployment.
Some of the biggest banks invented crooked mortgage schemes, which eventually brought the whole economy to a crashing halt. That meant more unemployment.
Today, with the collapse of the financial markets, some companies are pushing out production again. But they are doing it with fewer workers.
And that means still more unemployment, pure and simple.
Every bit of speed-up means someone without a job. Every added little piece onto your job means someone else without a job.
No, unemployment is no accident. It is a product of the capitalist drive for profit, of all the assorted ways the bosses use to squeeze one more drop of profit from the workers’ sweat and blood.
Within the framework of capitalism there is no answer to unemployment. And there is no politician serving the capitalists–no Democrat or Republican–who will provide it. The workers themselves have to impose it.
There is, in fact, a simple remedy for unemployment: share out the work, with no loss in pay.
It wouldn’t be difficult to do–look how hard we work today. Every one of these jobs on an assembly line could be split in two or in three, and we would still be working too hard. Jobs answering phones in an insurance company or state offices or hospitals need to be split up–workers don’t have enough time to get people the answers they need. Look at the lines we stand in to get anything done–that’s because companies don’t hire enough people to do the work.
There’s more than enough work to provide a job for everyone who wants to work–at a decent wage for everyone. Why not? There’s more than enough money floating around this economy to provide a decent wage for everyone, more than enough to keep our wages going up, directly and immediately, whenever prices go up.
The main reason for the mortgage scam was an excess of money sitting in the accounts of the big banks–money they couldn’t find anything to do with. It’s still sitting there. Well, use that money productively. Put people to work, pay a decent wage.
Will the bosses want to do it? Of course not.
Will they even admit they have the money? Of course not.
But it is reasonable and necessary. And it could be done–it just has to be imposed on the bosses and their bankers, imposed by the collective activity of working people who decide no longer to pay the price for the bosses’ mess.
Maybe we are not yet to the point that workers are ready to carry out such a struggle. Maybe, in fact, such a prospect seems very far away. But things can change very quickly in a time like this. In any case, it’s necessary to have goals and aims in mind when we do begin to fight. It’s important that there be people who say to their fellow workers: every one of us should have a job; every one of us should have a decent wage.
May 14, 2012
Junior Seau shot himself in the chest three weeks ago. He retired in 2009 after playing in the NFL for 19 years. Given the recent spotlight on CTE, Seau’s suicide raised speculation that CTE was a factor.
Last year former Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson also shot himself in the chest, leaving a hand written note stating: “Please, see that my brain is given to the NFL’s brain bank.” Duerson, who played 11 seasons as a battering ram, wanted his brain tested for chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. CTE is a progressive degenerative disease, diagnosed after death in individuals with a history of multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. It is thought to be caused by the accumulation of tau proteins in the brain that kill cells in the regions responsible for mood, emotion and planning. Tau proteins are also found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease but the patterns of deposits differ between the two conditions. Individuals with CTE can show symptoms of dementia such as memory loss, aggression, confusion, poor judgement and depression, which can appear within months of the trauma or many decades later.
In 2010 a 21-year old college football player hung himself. The autopsy revealed that Owen Thomas had CTE. Thomas was a lineman, a position that endures as many as 1,000 hits to the head per season. Even though he had never been diagnosed as having a concussion, this young player had brain damage more often seen in NFL veterans.
In fourteen brains of late NFL players studied, thirteen of them showed signs of CTE.
It is no accident that team owners turned a blind eye to CTE–and still do. The players are expendable even if they are highly paid. The owners have no problem with using up players to fill seats only to throw them in the garbage heap when they can no longer play.
May 14, 2012
The Rawlings-Blake administration has announced it will close four city recreation centers on August 10, all in West Baltimore, and ten more scattered around the city when summer ends–unless “qualified” organizations step forward to take them over.
Shortly after this announcement, the Baltimore Development Corporation announced it was recommending tax breaks for another downtown developer.
That’s where the money saved by closing rec centers is going.
May 14, 2012
Washington DC’s historic Howard Theater reopened after more than 30 years. Named after Howard University, it was the first music hall built for black people during the days of Jim Crow–older than the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Marvin Gaye and Ella Fitzgerald got their starts there, and all the major black musicians played there. Many black people remember seeing James Brown and B.B. King there in the 1970s.
Ticket prices at the “new” Howard Theater will exclude many people who grew up nearby, once enjoying music at this historic hall.
Tickets for Chuck Berry’s upcoming show cost $95. Michael Bolton, $158.
But the reopening was a success for a local developer, a former public relations officer in the Clinton White House and son of a city judge. D.C. gave him an eight million dollar grant and a four million dollar tax break.
May 14, 2012
The Detroit Department of Transportation announced with big fanfare a new plan which it calls the “415 plan.” It trumpeted the plan as “improving” bus service.
DDOT promises that buses on the 4 busiest bus lines will run every 15 minutes between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Though, that means the other bus routes will run less frequently. And about that “15 minute” guarantee for the 4 busiest routes: That will actually mean worse service. The Woodward bus ran every 8 minutes less than a year ago! And it ran 24 hours a day. No longer! And three more routes are discontinued.
Buses provide the only public transportation in the city, and the only means for many workers to get to and from their jobs. Riders already face wait times of as much as 60 minutes on many routes, and that’s when they run according to schedule! DDOT had completely eliminated 4 routes in the last year and already increased wait times and reduced hours of service on many others.
Students and senior citizens, who once rode for free, now pay $0.75 and $0.50, respectively–each way–a lot of money for low-income households. Now the company managing the system wants to require riders to buy a “stored value card,” adding yet another burden to riding a bus.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has been quite open about his desire to completely privatize the bus system. He already has outsourced its management to a private company. His budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes a nearly 23% cut in the city’s subsidy to DDOT.
Cutting DDOT’s budget is criminal. The cuts already implemented have practically destroyed what bus service previously existed. They have wilfully imposed malicious neglect on this system–in order to justify turning it over to private hands.
Bus riders did not cause Detroit’s financial crisis and should not pay for it. Get the money from the banks and other big corporations who have bled the city dry!
May 14, 2012
Oil Worker’s Life Worth $350
The State of California cited the Chevron Oil Company in the death of a 55-year-old veteran oil field worker killed on the job.
When he was doing routine work, the ground beneath him gave way, and he fell into a sinkhole filled with boiling liquids. It took seventeen hours for the fire department to retrieve his body.
The authorities found that the steam Chevron injected into the ground to extract oil created this sinkhole. The state fined Chevron $350—less than you can get for running a red light in California.
The director of the California Department of Conservation defended this minuscule fine, saying that the process to extract oil by using steam can be “very tricky” and “the industry itself is learning [this process] as it’s going along”.
So, Chevron is “learning,” and a worker was boiled alive because of Chevron’s rush to make a profit, with the consent of the state of California.
May 14, 2012
Three hundred thirty-three D.C. public school teachers were notified this week that they’ve been “excessed.” Their jobs were eliminated due to budget cuts. That’s on top of the 384 who were laid off in 2011, and 373 in 2010.
Meanwhile, a look at just one D.C. public charter school gives a clue to where the budget is going.
Imagine Southeast Public Charter School is a not-for-profit institution, at least on paper. In 2011 the school received enrollment-based funding of 6.8 million from the D.C. government. And it received another half a million in grants from the federal government.
So what did the school do with the money? In 2011 alone, the school turned around and paid nearly two million dollars in various “operating fees” to a private corporation. That corporation is a for-profit, nation-wide, “charter school operator” called Imagine Schools, Inc.–along with its shady real estate subsidiary, Schoolhouse Finance.
And what about the teachers and staff? In other words, the people who actually operate the school? Not one penny of those operating fees went to them! The teachers and staff who operate the school are left to make do with whatever is leftover after the Virginia-based “operating corporation” is paid.
No wonder–in a system like this–teachers themselves are considered as “excess!”
May 14, 2012
The newspapers around Detroit are filled with stories about corruption surrounding former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his gang. What rarely gets mentioned is the much more enormous and vicious corruption linking him to his rich backers who have bled the city white.
People like Dan Gilbert, CEO of Quicken Loans, for example. Gilbert got a little unwelcome press, recently, when he applied for a gambling license for a casino he wants to open in Cleveland. A background check revealed a $60,000 “loan” he made to Kilpatrick–just part of a $240,000 “loan” from him, Roger Penske, Compuware CEO Peter Karmanos, and PVS Chemicals CEO Jim Nicholson, to get Kilpatrick to shuffle off to Houston.
Kilpatrick, by comparison to these guys, is a choir boy.
May 14, 2012
According to the Detroit News (May 4, 2012), GM has avoided paying U.S. federal income taxes since exiting bankruptcy and will likely pay no income taxes for many years to come.
That was one benefit of the way the government wrote the bankruptcy deal. It let GM dump what it owed–but use those past debts to reduce its future tax bill.
When companies, from GM to GE, don’t pay taxes, we end up paying the bigger share.
When the government gives tax breaks to the wealthy and to big corporations, it cuts services. Roads don’t get repaired. Schools and parks and libraries are closed. Tuition for college skyrockets.
The tax break given to GM is just one more “concession” imposed on working people.
May 14, 2012
The Greek politicians demand that the population pay for the huge budget deficit. What they don’t say is that a major cause of that deficit is Greece’s enormous military budget and weapons purchases. Over the past decade, Greece, with a population of 11 million, has been one of the top five arms importers in the world.
In the five years up to 2010, the Greek government purchased more of Germany’s arms exports than any other country, accounting for 15% of all German weapons makers’ exports. The Greek government is also the top buyer in Europe of France’s arms manufacturers. These huge weapons purchases continued when the big debt crisis hit in 2008. In fact, the Greek government increased its military spending from 6.24 billion euros in 2007 to 7.1 billion euros in 2010.
This was no accident. It is well known that the German and French governments, acting in the interests of their own big weapons manufacturers, imposed new arms deals on the Greek government, even as politicians the world over bemoaned the Greek debt crisis. In particular, there was concerted pressure from France to buy several stealth frigates. Germany sold 223 howitzers and completed a controversial deal on faulty submarines. Not to be left out, U.S. weapons makers have sold the Greek military F-16 jets and M-1 Abrams tanks.
All the austerity measures imposed on the Greek population–the enormous cuts in social spending, jobs, the minimum wage, pensions–are just a way to rob the Greek working population and the poor in order to enrich the biggest capitalists all over the world.
May 14, 2012
The following is translated from the May 11th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of comrades in France. It comes from a report from Martinique, an island in the Caribbean which is a French overseas department. The word béké in the article is a Creole word referring to the descendants of the former white European slave owners, but has come to mean any exploiter, whatever their race.
On May 3rd, Ghislaine Joachim-Arnaud, the secretary general of the General Confederation of Labor of Martinique (CGTM) and a member of the leadership of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the West Indian Trotskyist organization, won her appeal in court against her conviction for “inciting racial hatred.” She had been put on trial as the result of a complaint made by Jean-François Hayot of the Respect DOM (Overseas Department).
The original court found her guilty–because she had signed the guest book of the TV station ATV with one of the slogans of the 2009 strike that tens of thousands of demonstrators chanted in Creole: “Martinique is ours, it’s not theirs, a band of békés, thieves, profiteers, we’ll kick them out. We’ve got to continue this fight.”
The béké and other bosses’ lobby wished to take vengeance for the 2009 general strike and to prevent her from expressing herself freely. The 2009 strike had cost them a great deal.
This is above all a victory for all the workers mobilized around Ghislaine Joachim-Arnaud , for her comrades at work, her comrades in the CGTM–the principal organizers of the committee to support her. It was also a victory for the militants of some political and union organizations in Martinique which had supported her, including those of her own organization, Combat Ouvrier.
Finally, the defense lawyers, by their legal and militant defense against injustice, made an important contribution toward the acquittal.
May 14, 2012
France’s newly elected President François Hollande declared that “growth” is the alternative to generalized austerity in the European Union. Some of his counterparts, Mario Monti in Italy and Mariano Rajoy in Spain, say the same. More or less openly criticizing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Monti called for a European summit to study how to revive “growth.”
But behind all this talk about “growth” is only another attack on the workers’ standard of living. Look at what Monti has done since taking over the Italian government last November, when he replaced Silvio Berlusconi. He pushed a new austerity plan, on top of the two previous plans adopted during the summer. Calling it “Save Italy,” he increased the age at which workers can take Social Security pensions, increased the national sales tax and other taxes on the population and cut public services. The entire population has paid to save–not Italy–but the profits of bankers who speculate on the country’s debt.
Monti then announced a new stage preparing for “growth.” He claimed the main obstacle to “growth” was Article 18 of the Labor Law, protecting workers against layoffs. He engaged, with the complicity of the union leadership, in a “reform of the labor market,” which was supposed to encourage businesses to hire... by letting them lay off without hindrance.
This new talk about “growth” is nothing but a new pretext to give money and opportunities to the bankers. It’s been at least twenty years now that these people have been saying that to hire, they first have to be able to lay off. The sole result of this has been the aggravation of the crisis.
But in all the countries of Europe, the workers are beginning to be fed up with suffering under such a swindle.
May 14, 2012
Total student loan debt in the U.S. has exceeded one trillion dollars. For the first time, it’s bigger than total credit card debt or auto loan debt.
Banks seem to have decided that student loans are the next big vein to mine. They play on the desire of young people to get an education.
Desire or not, there’s a problem: most young people these days can’t afford it.
With the cuts in state funding for education, college tuition rates have been skyrocketing. Students and their families have been forced to borrow more and more to cover the costs. In 2010, two-thirds of college students needed student loans, and they carried, on average, over $25,000 in student loan debt. Some students finish college with loans totaling up to $100,000. Except for the election-year reduction to 3.4%, interest rates now range from 6.8% to 8% or even more–and that’s just for the government-backed loans; don’t even mention the privately-backed loans, with interest rates that vary all over the place–just like subprime mortgages. Typically, by the time they pay off their debt, students will have paid more than twice as much as they borrow.
College graduates with so much debt put off buying a house or car and having a family. These college degrees that were supposed to be their ticket to a brighter future, have instead become their ball and chain.
Today, three out of ten student borrowers are at least 30 days behind on their payments. Default rates are climbing toward ten%.
But the banks don’t worry about getting their money–the loans are guaranteed by the government, which means the taxpayers are on the hook to bail out the banks yet again.
And the government doesn’t worry–because, unlike other kinds of loans, student loans can’t be discharged if a person declares bankruptcy. The borrower is on the hook for life.
Defaulting doesn’t hurt the banks or the government, but it makes things worse for the borrower. When the borrowers default, late fees and collection costs get added on to what they already owe. Their paychecks, sick pay and even unemployment checks can be garnished, leaving very little behind to actually live on. And if they live long enough while still owing money, they’ll find even their Social Security checks garnished.
College–a financial salvation? No. More and more students–and even their parents and grandparents–are trapped in a pit of debt for the rest of their lives.
Young people, signing away their lives to chase a college degree, are sentencing themselves to a debtors’ prison as soon as they graduate!
May 14, 2012
Since February, almost half the 400,000 university students in the province of Quebec have been on strike. The provincial government is trying to impose a large tuition hike: from $2,168 per year to $3,793 or a 75% increase spread out over five years.
Already forced to pay a lot to get a university diploma, 57% of the province’s students have to go heavily into debt. This new increase didn’t pass unnoticed. Demonstrations broke out. On March 22nd in Montreal, 25,000 students and teachers were in the streets. Many other demonstrations followed, but the government ignored them. On May 4th in Victoria, where the ruling Quebec Liberal Party was holding its convention, there was a demonstration the police violently repressed, seriously wounding two protestors. Three days later, the fourteenth evening protest occurred.
According to the strikers’ spokespersons, an increase in the cost of education would automatically lead to a reduction in the access to higher education, despite loans and scholarships.
Faced with this mobilization, the Quebec Liberal Party proposed to spread out the increase ... over seven years instead of five. “It’s not an offer, it’s an insult” thousands of demonstrators shouted in the streets.
Forced to receive student union representatives, an Education official announced that an “understanding” had been reached, so the strike must stop. But at the same time, the Quebec Liberal Party announced that the tuition increase was part of the “understanding.”
Students at only two schools resumed classes and adopted the agreement. But tens of thousands of students voted again by a large majority to continue the strike. They weren’t deceived by propositions that added up to a cut in university expenditures, but not in their tuition.
May 14, 2012
The UAW International has helped organize rallies protesting people’s houses being foreclosed. It is certainly true that the banks are behind the mortgage crisis. And it is certainly right to protest foreclosures.
But today, people working for lower wages, which the top UAW leadership pushed through, may not even be able to buy a home in the first place.
Auto workers haven’t had a raise in nine years, and some of us are struggling to hold on to our homes.
The best way to fight foreclosures, is to fight against concession policies that lead to people losing their homes. The best way is to organize a fight so everyone has a decent standard of living.
May 14, 2012
On Monday, April 30, Chrysler Canada had to abruptly shut down production at its minivan assembly plant in Windsor. Workers at Dakkota Integrated Systems, a supplier, had unexpectedly gone on strike. Due to the just-in-time parts-delivery system, Chrysler suddenly had no more instrument panels to install.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. The Canadian Auto Workers’ contract was up for renewal, and the local leadership had unanimously recommended the new contract’s terms. All that remained was to vote. The vote was held on Sunday afternoon.
Surprise! The workers voted more than 60% NO. And then they did the next logical thing: they upset the apple cart, and went on strike after the midnight shift.
CBC news reported the CAW local president as saying, “Absolutely I was surprised.... It was a little bit of a shocker. To me it’s like committing suicide.”
The workers had done the logical thing, but evidently, not what the officers had intended!
In less than 24 hours, management changed their offer, to improve the hated “short shifting” rule. “Short shifting” at Dakkota meant that workers were sent home early, unpredictably, without compensation, whenever the Chrysler plant used less than a full shift’s production. After the improvement, the workers then accepted the new contract.
It’s not often, these days, that workers find a way to break through the wall of company-union “partnership” and impose a demand or two of their own. True, this action was very small and very brief. But it shows that the rank and file does have leverage – more than it realizes – when it seizes the time to act, over the heads of timid union leaders if necessary.
May 14, 2012
On April 29, 780 Caterpillar production workers voted NO on a takeaway contract and went on strike at their plant in Joliet, Illinois, near Chicago. As of May 13, they were still on strike.
The workers, members of the International Association of Machinists, Lodge 851, are going up against a monster. Caterpillar has long been one of the most ruthless corporations.
Cat was one of the earliest companies to force major concessions on its workforce.
In the early 1990s, it provoked workers covered by a UAW Master Agreement to go on strike, then used scabs and professional strikebreakers to break their strike. Cat routinely threatens to do the same thing again to any workers who dare to strike or it simply shuts their plants.
The 1992 defeat imposed two-tier wage scales on active workers and shifted retiree healthcare benefits into a quickly dwindling VEBA fund that soon ran out. Those 1992 concessions became the pattern for the GM, Ford, and Chrysler contracts from 2007 on.
Yet some Caterpillar workers decided to strike, in this economic climate. The Wall Street Journal cannot understand it! “Are you crazy?,” writes the Journal.
It may be true that the odds are long. And it’s true that strikes have been very rare in the U.S. for decades–with the result that the working class standard of living has dropped like a rock.
The contract rejected by the workers would have frozen their wage and increased their health care costs, to the point that second tier workers would be working for eight dollars an hour. As one of the workers quoted by the Journal said, “It’s a good wage here, but if you take it away, why work here?”
All we hear these days is: “You’re lucky to have a job.” The Cat workers of IAM Lodge 851 in Joliet, Illinois seem to have decided that it isn’t worth keeping that job without fighting for something better.
When that attitude catches on more widely, the businessmen and their Wall Street Journal will have some real problems to cry about.
May 14, 2012
In April, Obama gave the CIA and the U.S. military greater freedom to use drones–supposedly as a way to destroy al-Qaida. The U.S. intensified drone attacks in Pakistan and extended them to Yemen.
There will be a big increase in so-called “collateral damage,” that is strikes against the civilian population.
That’s not going to stem al-Qaida recruitment, quite the opposite. Al-Qaida was reinforced when one of its heads, Anwar al-Alex was killed last September. The Wall Street Journal reported that drone strikes constitute “a powerful recruitment tool for Al-Qaida and its allies.”
Obama is as much a warmonger as Bush was, like him in the service of U.S. imperialism.
Under the pretext of waging the war on terror, the U.S. sows death among the civilian population, but at the same time it sows hatred and the desire for vengeance throughout the world.
May 14, 2012
After a 27-year-old Iraq War veteran committed suicide, an autopsy showed that he had suffered from a brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). It’s a physical condition that has been observed in boxers, football players and other athletes who are likely to experience repeated concussions.
Since that first case, doctors have found CTE in about a dozen war veterans whose bodies were autopsied–leading experts to suggest that PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), which today is treated as a “mental” disease, could instead be a physical ailment caused by permanent brain damage. This might also help explain why there are so many suicides among veterans–18 every day, now, more than 6500 per year.
The real number of war casualties is far higher than the official figure, because the official figure ignores the thousands of soldiers who kill themselves after the war. Not to mention the thousands and thousands of veterans, who can no longer have full lives because of injuries, whether authorities call them “physical” or “mental.”
May 14, 2012
The Obama administration is staging a NATO summit in Chicago on May 20-21 in order to promise to bring the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history, to a close. The Chicago NATO summit caps a month of summit meetings about Afghanistan. There was a NATO summit in Brussels in mid-April. Then there was President Obama’s own surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he held court with the U.S.’s puppet ruler, Hamid Karzai.
All these summits, prime time speeches and repeated briefings for the press allow Obama to go into the presidential election campaign on a platform of ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
There is only one problem: the Obama administration is NOT ending the war.
The U.S. continues to bomb Afghanistan from the air. Just a week before the NATO summit, the U.S. apologized for “mistakenly” killing six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan. The toll on Afghan lives continues to provoke outrage amongst the Afghan population. Recently, hundreds of Afghans, carrying the bodies of four children aged eight to 12 who had been killed in fighting in southern Afghanistan, blocked the Kabul-Kandahar Highway in protest against the U.S. war.
This outrage is also reflected in the sharp rise in the number of attacks on U.S. and NATO soldiers by Afghan soldiers and police. U.S. officials admit that these attacks from the U.S.’s own Afghan “allies” account for 20% of the total U.S. and NATO fatalities.
Neither is the U.S. withdrawing all its troops from Afghanistan by 2014, as promised. On the contrary, the Enduring Strategic Partnership that Obama signed with Karzai specifies that the U.S. will continue to have access to bases inside Afghanistan until at least 2024–that is, a decade later. U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan under the cover of being “advisors” and “trainers.” U.S. jets, drones and helicopters will continue to drop bombs and fire missiles inside Afghanistan. And U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) will continue to carry out night raids on private homes.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan will continue, just like the U.S. war in Iraq is continuing in a similar form. It will just be more hidden.
This is not a peace treaty. It’s simply an agreement between the U.S., its NATO allies and its puppet Afghan government to continue the war.
And it’s an election year trick. Remember 2008, when Obama ran as the peace candidate and promised to get out of both Iraq and Afghanistan? Once he got into office, he turned Bush’s wars in both countries into his own.
This war, like all wars in this capitalist system, serves the interest of the oil companies, the weapons systems contractors and the banks. And Obama, like Bush before him, are carrying out their dirty work. Obama assumed Bush’s timetable for fighting the war in Iraq. And Obama carried out his own troop surge in Afghanistan, tripling the number of U.S. troops.
There are currently 89,000 U.S. troops there. Obama promises that he will reduce troop levels in Afghanistan by 20,000 by the end of 2012. But that will still leave more than twice as many troops there as when Obama took office.
Fall for a politician’s lie one time, bad enough–but a second time is downright foolish.
May 14, 2012
In 1965, Mitt Romney pulled together a gang of Cranbrook students to assault a younger student. Romney was in his last year at Cranbrook–a private school for the sons of the elite. His father was then governor of Michigan.
Mitt Romney says he doesn’t remember the incident.
Maybe not. Bullies often don’t remember their victims!