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
Aug 20, 2012
In Detroit this summer, teachers waited to find out which of them would have a teaching job, where they would teach and what subject. Every single one of the system’s 4000 teachers was informed during the last school year that they were “terminated”–and would have to wait for sometime this summer to know what would happen.
Even as late as two weeks before teachers were scheduled to report, not a one of them had been notified who would come back, where they would go, and what they would teach.
Obviously, it’s an attack.
Teachers don’t know whether they will have a job. The churning can mean less income and it can interfere with their possibility of gaining tenure–and without tenure, they can be fired at any moment, based on nothing other than the whim of a principal or school board bureaucrat.
For the students, it’s a disaster. The teachers, not knowing what they will teach, can’t use the summer to prepare for the new school year. The schools, “reconstituted” every year, start out in chaos.
Yes, we hear that Detroit schools are in worse shape than elsewhere. But several years ago, teachers in New Orleans and Washington D.C. were junked in exactly the same way.
It’s part of a much wider attack being launched on teachers today–an attack prepared for and funded by some of the most reactionary, right-wing forces in the country: the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the Koch brothers’ Heritage Foundation.
Districts like Chicago, L.A. Unified and Baltimore County cut back on the number of teachers. Those who are left teach longer hours; class sizes get larger; classes are dropped; students get even less attention and lose any possibility for a real education.
All this is being done under the pretext that there is not enough money, that school systems are in deficit, and, above all, that the teachers cost too much.
Yes, school systems are in deficit–but it’s not the teachers who have drained money out of them. They do not get enormous pensions, they don’t even get very adequate pensions–those are reserved for the officials who head the school systems or the “consultants” the officials bring in.
If the pension funds require a lot of money today from school systems, it’s because for too many years, states and local boards didn’t put the necessary money into them. They had a bill, and they didn’t pay it.
So what did they do with the money? They didn’t build good new schools for the children of working people. They didn’t pay for adequate supplies and books. They didn’t put out the money to have smaller class sizes.
No, the money drained out of the schools went to bail out the banks; it went to bail out big corporations. Money that should have been directed from the federal government into inner city school systems, instead went to bail out the criminals who caused the sub-prime crisis, and are today creating the basis of a new sub-prime crisis in car loans.
Money that should have gone from the states to big-city and small-town school systems, instead was handed over to some of the wealthiest people in the world, the owners of big U.S. corporations and banks.
The ongoing vicious attack on teachers that fills the airwaves, TV channels and printed press is today aimed at drumming up support for the idea that the teachers are the cause of the mess in the schools.
No, the teachers are not. They are the ones who could bring some sanity back into the schools–if there were enough of them, if they had the supplies and the books and the libraries they need.
Let the reactionaries get their dirty, greedy, grasping hands off the schools. Hire more teachers. Reduce class sizes. Provide the teachers with the books and resources to teach. Let the children of working people have a chance for an education!
Aug 20, 2012
Banks use credit scores to rip off poor people and workers. And now, they’re doing it even more: They’re building a new bubble of “sub-prime” auto loans on the backs of people who can’t repay them.
A new study by Experian Automotive shows that banks have loosened the requirements for auto loans. The average credit scores of people issued auto loans have dropped to pre-recession levels. And loans to car buyers with “nonprime” to “deep subprime” credit scores have increased by 11.4%.
So, people with lower incomes can get auto loans–but at much higher interest rates than people with higher incomes and higher credit scores. The banks charge people with “bad” credit scores much more in interest than they charge people with “good” credit scores. For instance, someone with a “bad” credit score of 520 would have to pay about $110,000 in extra interest for a 30-year, $100,000 house mortgage, or an extra $300 a month, compared to someone with a “good” credit score of 720. The same holds true for a car loan or for purchases with a credit card.
So, just like with the real estate bubble before 2008, banks are pushing sales up–by pushing high-interest loans onto people least able to repay them. Which means more people will default, which means their credit score will get worse, which means they’ll have to pay still more interest.
And the banks make out like the bandits they are!
Aug 20, 2012
L.A. schools started early this year, and so did the shopping. Every company advertises a “back-to-school sale”–but sale or no sale, it’s a lot of money for clothes, uniforms, school supplies, not to mention the extra money schools ask parents to chip in for extra-curricular activities.
Once again, we are reminded how our wages don’t keep up with inflation.
Aug 20, 2012
Jim Crow is alive and well in the Detroit schools.
Fifteen Detroit schools have been split into their own separate school district, called the “Educational Achievement Authority” or EAA.
Officials say this school district will be state-wide; but so far, all schools in it are located in Detroit. The students in the schools are among the poorest in the state, and the vast majority of them are black.
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts say the regular public schools have been failing the students.
They may well have been–but the EAA is putting even fewer means into educating students.
Most of the teaching positions filled by the EAA will have “Teach for America” people–with little to no actual teacher training or experience. The EAA signed a contract for 200 of them. These staffers–let’s not call them teachers–will do very little actual teaching; instead, students will sit in front of computers provided by private companies, using software provided by private companies. The private companies will rip profit out of the system. The chancellor of these 15 schools will be paid $400,000! The TFA staffers will get low wages and some loans written off.
All special education programs will be eliminated from these schools, and students with special needs will be folded into regular classrooms, where they will sit in front of computers being babysat by the same untrained staffers watching over all the students.
Some of these schools are already being handed over to charter school companies, and chances are very good that more will go to charters in the future.
All the physical assets–all 15 school buildings and everything inside them–have been removed from the Detroit Public Schools, even though the DPS will continue to pay for earlier construction and repairs done at these schools. This will further impoverish the DPS itself, even as it isolates the district’s most impoverished students.
The EAA is one big gift to private interests, while stripping away any pretense toward any attempt at education. It’s educational Jim Crow at its worst.
Aug 20, 2012
Union workers at the Detroit Water Department have come under ferocious attack. Safe drinking water for four million plus metro Detroit residents is being put in jeopardy.
Why? To be blunt–big banks are taking 44% of the revenue from every water bill customers pay. These banks are pressuring for cuts to Water Department workers so that this loan shark situation can continue.
Recent front page attack headlines in the Detroit Free Press and News quoted as gospel a consulting firm study that recommends eliminating over 80% of all Detroit Water Department employees.
According to John Riehl, President of AFSCME Local 207, which represents 960 water department workers:
“There is no way in the world it is going to be able to operate. They don’t have enough people now. It’s a risk to the public.”
How ridiculous to hand nearly half the money over to banks for debt payments. Detroiters might as well make out their water bill payments to the banks!
So–inquiring minds want to know–which banks are bathing in profits from these loan shark deals?
In attacking water department workers, these banks will destroy the water supply.
The working class of the Metro Detroit area has every reason to join the fight of water department workers to push back these attacks. Otherwise, who wants to drink the water five years from now?
Aug 20, 2012
Republican Party officials chose Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, as their nominee for vice president.
Ryan espouses the most disgusting attacks against the working class and poor for the benefit of big business and the wealthy. He declared open season on every social program and entitlement, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He is for slashing them all, and turning what is left over to big business and the banks. Ryan supports enormous new tax cuts for big business and the wealthy, as well as big increases in military spending. And, by opposing women’s right to an abortion, even in the case rape and incest, Ryan openly foments the most backwards and reactionary attitudes in the population.
Obviously, Republican Party officials are using Ryan’s nomination to energize their right-wing base made up of religious fundamentalists and some parts of the middle classes. Of course, behind these reactionary forces are the usual financiers, like the infamous Koch brothers, who use their money and influence to gain a lot of publicity and credibility for what amounts to crack pot ideas of a tiny part of the population.
President Obama and the Democrats jumped at the Ryan nomination as ammunition to scare their voting base to come out and vote.
With good reason, the Democrats can’t really run on their own record of the last four years, during two of which they controlled the presidency, the Congress and most state governments. They presided over enormous attacks on social programs, vital services for working people, mass layoffs of government workers and employees, while they handed out trillions of dollars to big business and the wealthy.
From now until November 6th, Republicans will attack Democrats, and Democrats will attack Republicans. Starting November 7th, the day after the election, no matter who wins, they will join forces to attack the population. Congress is already scheduled right after the election to vote on enormous cuts to social spending and vital services for working people, including to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
We need to know that and to prepare to defend ourselves against both parties and the class they represent, the U.S. capitalist class.
Aug 20, 2012
Spark’s annual summer festival was held in Detroit in early August. Nearly 400 people, workers from the area with their families and friends, attended. They could participate in volleyball or dancing; play bid whist or chess; make a keepsake flower or butterfly; buy some books; laugh at the Spark Sunday night comedy troupe. Everyone enjoyed the full BBQ chicken, Polish sausage and grilled hot dog meal.
What follows are excerpts from three short speeches given during the festival about the current situation facing the working class. A number of other workers took part in the discussion afterwards.
Aug 20, 2012
It’s nice to be able to come together here today. For a few hours, we can eat, socialize, play cards, dance, enjoy ourselves. But when we leave here we are all going back to situations, neighborhoods, lives that have become increasingly desperate.
We will drive through neighborhoods where real unemployment is at the highest levels since the Great Depression, where young people have no hope for a job.
The high unemployment affects those of us with a job, who are often supporting friends, relatives, children or grandchildren who can’t get a job. And we are doing it with less money.
The bosses use the high unemployment as a threat against the people with jobs to hold down and reduce our wages.
Nine years ago, Ford workers like myself used to make a decent wage of $28/hour. Today we are still making $28/hour, but that $28 is worth about $15 or $16 as prices continually go up.
Worse yet is what they are doing to new workers.
I’ll give you just one example that some people here are very familiar with. There is an auto parts plant in Saline, built by Ford. The workers there all used to get a Ford paycheck of $28 an hour. Then Ford turned that plant into a Visteon plant, still building Ford auto parts, but with reduced wages for new hires as second tier workers, getting $14 to $18 per hour. Then the Visteon plant became an ACH plant, still making the same Ford parts, but new hires now are at a fourth-tier, starting at $11 an hour. But $11 an hour is not cheap enough for these greedy bosses. Because that Saline plant now is using workers from a temp agency, paying them fifth-tier wages of $9 an hour. Some McDonalds pay more.
The F-150 truck, which these workers help build, rolls off the assembly line every 53 seconds with a profit of $10,000 to $15,000 per truck. The beneficiaries of this cheap labor, Alan Mulally, Bill Ford and their friends, who profit from our labor, never built a truck in their lives. They make more money in one day than these lower tier workers will make in a whole year.
And what do we face when we go home from work? The cities we live in are becoming more and more unlivable. The street lights are off; the garbage is not picked up; the parks are closed; dilapidated, vacant homes are not torn down. Why? The city leaders of Detroit say they don’t have any money so they cut services AND cut wages and benefits for city workers.
But residents of Detroit pay a relatively high city income tax and the property tax rate is among the highest in the country, so where is the money going? Much of the money is going to the banks, paying off interest on bonds. These bonds were used to finance all the tax breaks given to businesses in Detroit.
What about the schools? They take money away from the public schools, cut teachers’ pay and benefits, have overcrowded classrooms without enough books or computers, or even toilet paper. Then they use all these cuts to say students aren’t learning, in order to justify turning public schools over to private companies, whose only interest is making a profit, not educating.
And if you are a worker and want to send your children to college, the only way you can do it is to put your kids in debt for the rest of their lives through student loans.
What about housing? Many people without much money desperately need an affordable place to live. A few weeks ago, the government had a sale of homes at affordable prices. They were going to sell hundreds of houses whose owners had been unable to pay their taxes. The houses were going to be sold at reasonable prices, if people paid off the delinquent taxes. But before the auction started, the government sold ALL the houses to ONE rich investor, who plans to turn around and sell these same houses for a much higher price. It’s a price many people won’t be able to afford. Is this insane or what?
How can this be happening? How can people be losing so much? How can people be living so impoverished? Isn’t this the richest country in the world? Yes it still is the richest country in the world. The problem is that every day more and more of the money is taken away from ordinary people, going into the hands of a few incredibly ridiculously wealthy people.
All this is not happening by accident. It’s the result of a system that puts profits ahead of people’s lives. It’s the result of decisions made by bankers and corporate bosses to enrich themselves at our expense. It’s the result of laws and regulations made by politicians to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. These politicians are from both parties, asking for our votes, but serving the rich and only the rich.
They want us to just lie down and accept that our lives and futures are being destroyed. I don’t think so!
Aug 20, 2012
I want to talk about what we need and what it could be like. So I need for you to forget about all the propaganda we hear.
They say there’s no work? Baloney! Produce the things we need. Look at all the things we need.
Vacant houses? That’s an easy problem: Hire people to fix, clear and build new ones.
Can’t get to work? Buses not running? Fix them! Now how in the world are we supposed to get to jobs in the suburbs when the buses can’t get us there? Or waiting over an hour for a transfer. Add buses. But better than buses, add trains! Trains have been around in other countries for over a hundred years. Do you know where our train system is? In Mexico City because GM didn’t want trains here in the Motor City. Don’t we have workers here who need jobs and can build and operate trains?
Health care services: Employ workers to assist nurses and doctors in every neighborhood. We have a right to health care, free and we can have enough doctors and nurses to provide it.
Schools? Put all the teachers and more back to work: Make school through college free.
That would stop putting our children into debt they will never get out of.
Water getting rusty and backed-up sewers? Yet the Water board is talking about cutting 81% of workers at the water department. No, double the number that currently work there.
How can they go on about renewing the city and don’t even have streetlights in downtown Detroit? Does anybody here know an unemployed electrician? We know how to fix these problems.
And if all that doesn’t put people back to work, shorten the work hours and spread the work around with everyone earning a decent wage.
And let our wages keep up with prices. Gas prices 29 cents higher in one week–really? Then our wages should go up immediately, as soon as prices we pay go up. And every worker’s wage should provide a comfortable living.
Detroit and Michigan, stop paying the damn banks and start paying for services needed by the population! Now that is a workers’ program.
What? You say it will never happen? Yes, it can! There is money to make it happen–the billions upon trillions of dollars the capitalist class rolled up in profit–then squirreled away.
We’re going to have to fight to take those billions back.
Who is it that builds everything? Provides all services? Makes everything run? Workers do, we do!
We are going to have to fight, so when we fight, let’s doing it for what we really need!
Aug 20, 2012
We can make the changes we need when we bring our forces together, when we fight.
We’re not there yet, with people ready to make an all-out fight. And we don’t yet have that party, a working class party, a revolutionary working class party, but that party can be built.
We will need a certain numbers of workers to know what has to be done to get there–and who will stick with the workers who are ready to fight, worker activists ready to take each fight as far as it can go.
If we want to fix and change things, we need to use our forces and power for what we need. That means taking the power out of the bosses’ and politicians’ hands.
Both political parties today work for the capitalists. Some of them may even want to see changes, but they are hired and paid to do a job and they carry out the policy of the bosses.
Families and friends will have to stand together and prepare for the fight.
We need people who have learned from history, who will know how to direct the fight.
I was here in the 1960s during the rebellions. It was sort of crazy. But I know that the rebellions changed the balance of power for awhile. The bosses couldn’t even run their plants. After the rebellions they set up hiring stations on street corners in Detroit like 12th and the Boulevard and hired blacks into the plants in mass hirings. So it did change things when black workers used their forces in the rebellions in Detroit and other cities.
But it could have gone further if more had been prepared. We need to get a bigger picture.
We are the majority. How do they control us? They use us against us. We are the police, the national guard, the army; these are all workers. They are our families. If they are on our side, we can win. We make everything run and we can make it stop.
We can use our forces today to slow down the attacks on working people. But it will take a revolution to change society at its roots.
We need more of us to know that, more of us who know about the revolutionary fights of the past.
We need to prepare ourselves right now for the fights that are going to come. I truly believe our class can take the fight to a level the bosses can’t control.
Aug 20, 2012
Caterpillar workers of IAM (International Association of Machinists) Local Lodge 851 in Joliet, Illinois, have been on strike against Caterpillar for nearly four months. Caterpillar basically forced them on strike by demanding concessions that would have taken workers back to non-union wages and conditions.
Cat wouldn’t feel any pinch even if they doubled the workers’ wages. Cat is phenomenally rich, reporting record profits last year of 4.9 billion dollars, and currently reporting more record profits. Cat’s CEO, Douglas R. Oberhelman, got a 60% raise in 2011.
But Cat pushed for more just because it believed it could get away with it.
Perhaps Cat expected workers to cave in because of the lack of jobs anywhere else. Instead, the workers voted to fight.
On Tuesday, August 15, in the sixteenth week of their strike, the workers’ struggle was suddenly undercut and sold out by regional officers of the Machinists union. The bureaucrats basically gave Caterpillar everything Cat wanted.
The strikers were furious. Local officers told reporters that they would recommend a No vote.
The vote was scheduled for Friday, August 17. But somebody read the tea leaves of the workers’ anger. On Thursday, August 16, the regional officials announced that Cat suddenly raised the $1000 signing bonus to $3100. On Friday, the officials announced that the workers voted yes–but they wouldn’t release the figures.
If a determined part of the Cat workers don’t want to stop their strike, they may decide not to stop. It would be a radical step. But in these times, radical steps are urgently needed, if workers are to defend themselves against the bosses’ radical attacks.
It may be Cat workers today, or it may be other workers tomorrow, who resolve to carry on a radical fight against a greedy boss and a lap-dog union leadership. When they do make their move, they need not stand alone.
Workers’ problems are the same all over. Workers’ anger and frustration are the same all over. Conditions are ripe for one group of workers in struggle to recruit others, and still others.
Under the combined weight of many thousands of workers, the dam currently protecting the bosses’ profits can burst, and be thoroughly washed away.
Aug 20, 2012
Since at least 1871, when it was banned in Paris by a workers’ government, night work has been known to kill.
In recent years, different studies have underlined the increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, as well as the danger of falling asleep on the job. Not that any of this has dented the bosses’ unabated enthusiasm to squeeze as much work as they can get out of every plant.
Now a new study from the Danish Cancer Society shows that women night workers have a 40% increased risk of breast cancer, providing yet more ammunition against this silently murderous form of exploitation.
Of course, some night shifts, in hospitals or transportation, for example, may always be necessary. But that could be compensated by extra days off, shorter shifts and early retirement.
Don’t we work to live rather than to die early from occupational disease? Non-essential night work must go: It should have been abolished long ago!
Aug 20, 2012
More than 73% of Chrysler workers at the Dundee Engine plant just voted NO! on their local agreement.
A UAW Local 723 official expressed shock at the NO! Vote, stating:
“I’m bracing for the fallout....I don’t know what happened. I thought we had a good win-win contract.”
This plant of around 600 workers was the first local to vote down a contract since Chrysler’s 2009 “quick rinse” bankruptcy.
On an internet message board, a Dundee worker complained of 11½ hour workdays and getting only one day off a week. A friend of a worker summarized this way:
“With the ridiculous hours they expect, it’s not a wonder why this contract didn’t get approved. A job is supposed to be family friendly. When you work the shifts they expect you to work, it prohibits any kind of normal family life.”
Company spokeswoman, Jodi Tinson, expressed Chrysler’s intention to ignore the workers’ no vote and proceed as if workers have no say in the matter.
“There will be no impact on production....They can’t strike....We are not going to reopen negotiations....We had an agreement we expected to be ratified. Now it’s back to the local to figure out what went wrong.”
The ball is in the workers’ court. Workers who want to resist can decide together what it makes sense for them to do.
To say that Chrysler workers cannot strike is a lie.
There is strength in every union when the members decide to mobilize.
Aug 20, 2012
Governor Pat Quinn called the Illinois legislature into a special session to take up public workers’ pensions. The governor calls for workers to pay more out of their checks for pensions and retire at an older age.
Last year, Republicans in neighboring Wisconsin attacked public workers’ pensions.
This year in Illinois, the Democrats control state government, and they are doing the same thing.
The capitalists are waging a nationwide campaign against public workers’ pensions, looking to steal the money for themselves. Politicians of both parties are helping them do it.
Aug 20, 2012
On August 16, South African police opened fire on striking workers at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana township, about 60 miles northwest of Johannesburg. According to media reports, they killed 34 people and wounded 78–reminiscent of state-organized violence carried out by the old apartheid regime.
About 3,000 miners walked off their jobs during the week before the police massacre, demanding that their monthly salaries, now averaging about $480, be tripled. It’s obvious that today they cannot decently support their families.
The massacre of the striking miners by the police draws attention to the desperate situation facing much of the South African working class, and the continuing post-apartheid role of the country’s security forces in keeping the workers in line when their state-sanctioned unions fail to do it.
The Marikana platinum mine is one of two in the country owned by Lonmin PLC, a British company. Lonmin is the third-largest producer of platinum in the world. Last year it had revenues of almost two billion dollars and profits of almost a third of a billion.
Official apartheid may have ended in 1994–meaning that a few middle-class blacks made their way into government and business posts. But the South African regime is still used to maintain exploitation of South African workers, by the same corporations who benefitted from apartheid.
Aug 20, 2012
On August 17, a new Afghan local police recruit shot and killed two U.S. Special Forces members at a small outpost in western Afghanistan. That same day in southern Afghanistan, a member of the Afghan security forces shot and wounded two other American soldiers.
These kinds of attacks by the U.S.’s own carefully selected and trained allies have become so frequent that the U.S. military now calls them “green-on-blue” attacks. So far in 2012, 39 U.S. and NATO troops had already been killed by their Afghan recruits, compared to 35 troops killed during all of 2011. And even the U.S. military has been forced to concede that these attacks are not the work of Taliban “infiltrators.” For example, the Afghan man who shot and killed the two U.S. soldiers in western Afghanistan was a 60-year-old local man, who had just been recruited two weeks before.
Instead, these killings by the U.S.’s own allies show how much the anger has grown inside the Afghan population against the U.S. war that has wreaked such horrendous destruction and suffering for so long. Not even the U.S. military, the mightiest military power on the planet, can quell this anger, no matter what it does.
The U.S. is being driven out of Afghanistan, just like it was driven out of Viet Nam, more than four decades before.
To find out more about the nature of these “green-on-blue” attacks and the Afghan war, read “Afghanistan: The U.S. Bogged Down in Its Longest War,” in Spark’s latest Class Struggle magazine, Issue 75. Buy a copy from a Spark distributor, or read it here: http://the-spark.net/csart751.html
Aug 20, 2012
Global food prices, as listed on the Chicago commodities exchange, have soared. It’s the drought, says the business press. Yes, there is drought, but that has been made much worse by what experts call “intense financial speculation.”
The severe drought in the U.S.–following the one that hit Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan (and, before that, threatened Argentina)–resulted in a decrease in production of grains in those countries–mainly wheat, corn and soybeans.
Yet, there has been no “real threat of shortages,” according to the U.N. Agency for Food and Agriculture. Stock reserves are large enough to meet needs. In fact, what’s really revolting is that overall global grain production has never been so high. This year it reached 2.4 billion tons, 500 million more than 10 years ago, an increase twice as fast as the growth in world population. But this latest drought represents an opportunity for banks and large financial funds to speculate on grains, causing their prices to shoot up throughout the world.
Over the last three months, corn prices jumped 17% and wheat soared 41%, and 70% in one year! The speculators are rubbing their hands with joy, as is agribusiness.
A dozen super-rich companies control 85% of world trade in food goods: for example, Monsanto controls corn and livestock feed, Cargill controls 25% of wheat, and Louis Dreyfus has 31% of the market for rice. Drought is great for business.
Grain prices are based on factors that have nothing to do with people’s needs. They are based on financial goals, first of all to enable the large producers, capitalist agriculture, to make a profit. In this economic system, grains like all food products are treated as commodities to be bought and sold.
A drought or a natural disaster unleashes speculation on these food staples, driving up the prices in the commodities markets, which then dramatically affects the poorest populations of the world. The poor are faced with basic foods that cost too much for them to buy.
Two centuries ago, Charles Fourier denounced capitalist society which was coming into being, where “poverty is born in a civilization of abundance.” Unfortunately, this remains true, and on a still greater scale. Fourier deduced from this the necessity to radically change society. This is still more urgent today.