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
Jan 21, 2013
It appears that the House Republicans have backed away from their second “fiscal cliff” threat, agreeing to raise the debt ceiling for another three months. This pushes the potential confrontation about the government budget back from March to June.
Many people who had worried that the politicians would attack Social Security and Medicare are greeting this news with sighs of relief.
Don’t believe it! The Republicans may be the more vocal about cutting programs, but in fact the Democrats, including President Obama, are in basic agreement with them about the “need” to balance the budget and to cut social programs. All this means is that the threat has been pushed down the road another three months. That’s three months the Republicans and Democrats will spend to figure out just how they will screw us over–and three months they can spend to try to convince us that further cuts are necessary.
We know that both parties have their sights set on Social Security, and they have for a long time. And for a long time, they’ve been feeding us lies about Social Security, trying to soften us up to accept the idea that cuts are inevitable.
They tell us that the deficit is too big–and Social Security is part of the reason. This is three lies in one: One, the deficit is not our problem; money going to the wealthy creates the deficit, so let them pay for it. Two, Social Security is not even part of the budget that creates the deficit–it is completely separate; it receives funds from payroll taxes, and pays them out. And three, Social Security is not even in deficit! It’s running a surplus! So why the heck would it need to be cut?!
Well, the politicians say, the fund will start running out of money in 2030, or 2040, so we need to start preparing now. Never mind that projections that far in the future are notoriously uncertain; the fact is that Social Security is currently running a surplus, and will be for the foreseeable future. So why would it make sense to cut it now, because they’re worried they’d need to cut it in the future?
If they’re really worried that Social Security might run out of money, all they have to do is raise the cap on income subjected to the payroll tax, currently at $113,700. No income above that amount gets taxed for Social Security, meaning ordinary workers pay a much higher percentage of their income to Social Security than wealthy people do. Double that cap, or wipe it out completely, and their potential problem disappears. But of course they wouldn’t want to do THAT–that means taxing the wealthy!
No, instead, what they HAVE done has been to raise the payroll tax by 2%. Everyone who works for a living will see two percent less in their paychecks, beginning immediately.
At the same time that they’re taxing us more, they’re putting in place a financial trick that will cut benefits immediately and compound those cuts for decades in the future: they plan to change the index they use for cost of living adjustments to Social Security payments. The current consumer price index (CPI) is already artificially low; the new one they want to use will under-report the rate of inflation even more. Retirees’ cost of living adjustments won’t even come close to the real cost of living!
And this is even before they get to the direct cuts they’re talking of making.
In fact, the politicians’ real problem is that though the Social Security fund is supposed to be completely separate from the rest of the budget, the government has been borrowing from it for years. The REST of the government is in debt because of the trillions they’ve been handing to the banks, to military contractors, and to other members of the capitalist class to bolster THEIR economy. They have a problem because the Social Security fund is full of IOUs, and to pay back those IOUs, they’d have to get that money back from the banks. But why should we accept that those IOUs won’t be paid?
Don’t let these two lying parties put their hands on Social Security OR Medicare. Those are programs that working people once fought to win.
The working class movement in the 1930s–out in the streets, organized, determined–imposed its will and made the capitalist class agree to Social Security, unemployment benefits and welfare benefits for people unable to work.
The Black movement of the 1950s and ’60s–equally organized and determined–got rid of Jim Crow and forced that same capitalist class to provide Medicare and Medicaid, as well as food stamps. For all working people.
Now the capitalists and their government are preparing to take these social programs away from us. They would reduce the elderly to poverty, so the wealthy can live in still more luxury.
How do we defend ourselves? How do we keep what our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents once won?
Not by hoping the politicians back away from the latest “fiscal cliff,” that’s for sure.
Isn’t it obvious? We have to do what was done to get those benefits in the first place. Fight!
Jan 21, 2013
The following article comes from the January 18, 2013 edition of Lutte Ouvriere [Workers’ Struggle], the paper of the revolutionary group of that name active in France.
In early January, French President Hollande announced French troops would assist in putting down the Islamic rebel force holding northern Mali. The first troops and air strikes began January 12, with troops from other African nations also entering Mali.
Some inhabitants of Mali hoped that French military intervention might protect the population in the north of Mali from the armed bands that terrorize them in the name of religion. These fundamentalist fanatics, well-armed since the fall of Qaddafi’s regime by mercenaries chased out of Libya, have used “sharia”–Islamic law–to reinforce their power, especially against women.
Hollande claimed the troops were sent “solely in the service of peace.” But the Malian population will get no real protection from French troops, who supposedly are going to stop the rebels from moving southward. In reality, this war against so-called jihadists is a method for French imperialism to keep control in one of its zones of influence. Whether the troops come from France or from Burkina Faso or other African capitals, these two or three thousand men don’t represent the interests of the Malian population.
Since the end of colonialism, the whole region has been kept under the control of French and other imperialist powers, in order to obtain the riches under its soil, be it oil or gas or gold or uranium. And this pillage by the multinationals results in the misery of the populations of the whole continent, deprived of their lands, chased out of regions by the armed bands that feed off the crumbs falling from the banquet tables of the great powers.
This entire situation, no matter which side controls power in Mali, forces the population against their will to submit to pillage and violence. These so-called “liberators,” are, from the viewpoint of the population, occupiers.
We must say “NO” to the military intervention decided by the Hollande government, to serve the multinationals. Bring the French troops back home–for they have no business in Africa.
Jan 21, 2013
Nine years of war in Iraq, which were supposedly to bring democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people, have only made the country more ungovernable.
More than a year after the official retreat of the U.S. army’s last troops, the country is divided between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and is being devoured by corruption. The population has been decimated by the war with officially 122,000 civilians killed–1.5 million deaths according to certain estimates–and seven million people who fled and took refuge in camps. The population is paying a high price for the instability generated as a consequence of the “divide and rule” policy and the bloody confrontations between rival militias. All of 2012 was marked by terrorist bombings.
If officially U.S. troops have left, U.S. imperialism keeps a massive presence in Iraq. U.S. troops have been replaced by the large army of 35,000 mercenaries paid by the U.S. and its corporations. The U.S. embassy in Baghdad is the biggest in the world, with no less than 17,000 employees.
U.S. imperialism protects what it came looking for and which it got after nine years of war: close control over oil production. The divisions which have been maintained in the country allow such control. A part of the oil wealth is controlled by the central Iraqi government, the other part by the Iraqi Kurdish regional government, to the great satisfaction of the oil companies, and in particular the biggest in the world, Exxon Mobil. Iraqi oil production has now surpassed its peak of the pre-war years.
The fact that Iraq is racked by misery and bloody chaos as a result of U.S. intervention does not change their intention to remain present and dominant over the Iraqi population.
Jan 21, 2013
During an official visit to Washington by Afghan President Hamid Karzai on January 10, President Barack Obama promised to withdraw most of the 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of the year and end the war.
End the war? Think again. John Allen, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, recommended that the U.S. keep from 6,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops and Special Forces in Afghanistan after the 2013 deadline, possibly to carry out commando raids and even patrols.
For the U.S. the war has been a disaster. In the latest Pentagon “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” military officials found that the much hailed surge of American forces two years ago has provoked more violence in Afghanistan–levels of violence higher than before the surge.
And they’re not about to hand the country over to their puppet government. As the report said, government in Afghanistan is still “weakened” by widespread corruption. The Afghan military, which the U.S. has been building up and “training” for over a decade, is completely unable to operate independent of U.S. forces. Finally, armed resistance against the U.S. occupiers and their allies continues to grow.
The U.S. has also not succeeded in subduing the population. This war has instilled such hatred that 62 U.S. troops were killed by their own Afghan allies this year, more than twice as many as the year before. In one incident on September 29, U.S. and Afghan soldiers battled each other, leaving two Americans and four Afghans dead. In December, an Afghan policewoman shot and killed an American civilian adviser at national police headquarters in the capital, Kabul.
And not only are Afghan troops and police killing U.S. soldiers, they are also killing each other–in much higher numbers than before.
The disastrous U.S. war in Afghanistan is now in its twelfth year–the longest war in U.S. history–and shows no signs of ending.
Jan 21, 2013
A record number of U.S. soldiers committed suicide while on active duty in 2012. The 349 suicides was greater than the number of U.S. troops, 295, killed in combat in Afghanistan for the year. The number of active-duty suicides has been increasing every year since 2006, with the exception of two years when it temporarily leveled off.
The military pretends the increase is some kind of mystery, since the U.S. is supposedly winding down its war campaign in Iraq. But these suicides should come as no surprise when you consider the conditions these soldiers find themselves in.
Not only is the war in Iraq not over, but soldiers in Afghanistan are fighting a war in a country where the population opposes their presence. Many are on their third or fourth tour of duty, and large numbers are dealing with both physical and mental traumas of war, broken personal and family relationships and financial problems at home.
This is what war brings. These soldiers who took their own lives are casualties of America’s imperialist war efforts–every bit as much as those killed in combat.
Jan 21, 2013
The banks have cut another deal with the government to escape their responsibilities for the mortgage crisis of 2008; a crisis that resulted in lost homes and/or bankruptcies for 4.4 million U.S. homeowners.
The deal, announced January 7, was spun to the public as if the government had extracted a huge pile of money from the banks, $8.5 billion, to help compensate victims of the mortgage fiasco of 2008. It was a bunch of lies and flim-flam! Only $3.3 billion is for “direct payment to eligible borrowers.” Divide the 3.3 billion dollars by the 3.8 million homeowners eligible for help, and it comes to a whopping $868 each. A great help when you owe a $150,000 mortgage on a home now valued at $50,000 or less!
The 10 banks protected by the deal can now stop reviewing their mountains of robo-signed and “ninja” loans (no income, no job) and consider all cases closed. The victims have no more legal claims, even though they were led to believe–one year ago–that the government would force the banks to compensate them for their losses.
The banks are also expected to write off the entire cost as a “business expense.”
If you’re a big bank, you don’t need to worry about defrauding millions of people. You have an entire government working day and night to protect you. But if you are one of the millions, it’s a different story, isn’t it?
Jan 21, 2013
On January 22, 1973, the famous Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade, was handed down. The ruling set the standard for women’s right to abortion and for many years prevented state legislatures from attempting to limit the right to abortion. Today, we are witnessing a siege on abortion rights by the right wing and a broad spectrum of politicians that include Democrats as well as a majority of Republicans. The State of Michigan is one of the most recent to jump on the anti-abortion bandwagon.
On December 28th, Michigan Governor Snyder signed a new law that has the potential to dramatically reduce the number of clinics available to women seeking abortion effective April 1st of this year.
Under the pretext of ensuring that clinics are safe for women, Snyder imposed stipulations that may very well force the closure of 20 of the 32 existing Michigan clinics providing abortion services. The new regulations would require that a provider performing more than 120 abortions per year while publicly advertising outpatient abortion services meet the same requirements as surgical outpatient clinics that perform serious invasive surgeries like gall bladder or hernia surgery. Abortion clinics would be expected to have large hallways and rooms that can accommodate stretchers. The law is designed to force existing clinics to close unless they carry out expensive renovations. Another part of the law forbids the transfer of clinic titles to new operators or owners by sale or when the current owner dies. This is an obvious move to shut down the clinics permanently.
The new law claims that large hallways and rooms are necessary to accommodate stretchers and that medical personnel must be on site for up to three hours following the procedure. But the vast majority of women undergoing abortion procedures walk in and out on their own two feet. Abortion procedures remain one of the safest medical procedures available to women. Only about 1% of women have complications with abortions.
Another part of the new law passed in Michigan forces doctors to badger women patients. The law requires a set of mandatory questions regarding the reason for the abortion under the guise of preventing anyone from being “forced” into terminating pregnancy. Also, women will be forced to answer questions regarding disposal of the remains of the fetus. These practices are designed to shame women and make the process of terminating a pregnancy more emotionally painful.
Finally, doctors can no longer prescribe medicines from a distance (over telephones or electronic services) to a patient to induce abortion. This has been a standing practice available to women in remote or rural areas without medical facilities. This will obviously force many poor and/or isolated women to accept pregnancies they don’t want and/or are unable to support.
The right wing in this country has mounted a continuous campaign to make abortions illegal. This has included attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade, a law in place for 40 years. Before the ink was dry on that famous decision, those opposed to legalizing abortion looked for ways to prevent state or federal funding of abortions and ways to block access to abortions.
Some were organized disruptions like attacks on abortion clinics or on doctors who performed abortions. Originally, Roe v. Wade was the standard for measuring the constitutionality of state abortion laws. But increasingly, in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed states to restrict abortion rights, and many states now have enacted laws to limit access to abortion. Michigan is only one of the latest states to attack women’s rights.
According to recent studies, between 2000 and 2011, the number of states hostile to abortion increased from 13 to 26. Currently, fully one half of all states have passed major anti-abortion legislation of one type or another. In 2011 alone, state legislators in all states adopted 92 provisions to restrict abortion.
Statistics on abortions show clearly that making abortions illegal or interfering with a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion does not stop women from obtaining abortions. The numbers of women obtaining abortions remains constant, but the mortality rate of the women involved increases dramatically when abortion is made illegal.
Those who run the government are fully aware that they are condemning women to serious health complications and even death. If the abortion debate were really about women’s health and well-being, those in authority would push for access to free and safe birth control and free access to care for all women.
Obviously, abortion procedures are not pleasant for women and are a last resort that most women dread having to go through. Recent statistics show that 50 percent of pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, and that two out of 10 are terminated by induced abortion.
By age 45, fully one half of American women will experience an unwanted pregnancy, and at current rates, one third of these older women will have the pregnancy terminated. Is it any mystery that the overwhelming majority of Americans support legalized abortion?
The abortion rate is highest among women earning less than $19,000 a year. How dare these wealthy politicians have a say over the right to abortion! These are the very people who have been carrying out economic attacks against the working class and women: monsters who leave the majority of women without adequate means to feed and raise a child!
While most women have faced abortion decisions individually, restrictions on abortions are making it imperative for women to begin looking at these decisions and the right to make them collectively. This will not be the first time that women have organized in defense of their rights. The most recent movement gained momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s, coming out of the period of back-alley abortions. The current population lives in a period of history in which the termination of a pregnancy is legal. But older women remember the horrors of back-alley abortions before Roe v. Wade and the movements that were necessary to legalize abortion.
Interestingly enough, most women don’t know that for most of U.S. history, abortion was legal. Only in the mid to late 1800s did states begin to restrict abortions. One of the strongest forces against abortion was the medical establishment. Doctors in the American Medical Association (AMA) attempted to eliminate competition from midwives and other non-physicians by controlling access to abortion.
Modern medicine and technology have made it unnecessary for women to have to struggle to avoid unwanted pregnancies. What stands in our way is a system dominated by the drive for profit in which representatives of the dominant class seek to control our every decision. In the wealthiest society in the world, a society with advanced technology and all the means to provide good, safe pregnancy prevention for women, it is unspeakable that women are forced to go through the stress of abortion except as a last resort. This capitalist system can push profitable electronics into the hands of everyone (at a cost, of course), so that even our kids are demanding iPhones and iPads at the age of five, but it refuses to figure out safe, affordable birth control. Ridiculous! It is, of course, all about profit, and women’s reproductive issues are of little interest to Wall Street.
To allow our futures to remain in the hands of these people is not an acceptable option. Women constitute over half of the population and are major players in the working class. Women will make reproductive rights an essential part of the struggle to free this society from its backwardness.
Jan 21, 2013
Roe v. Wade said the constitutional right to privacy protects abortion as a healthcare decision between a woman and her doctor. Since then, two watershed rulings have inserted the government into that private decision.
The first–in 1992 –Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, made it legal to “burden” women by throwing up legal roadblocks to abortion.
The second–in 2007–the ban on “partial birth abortions,” made a particular type of late-term abortion illegal, even if the mother must die as a result of this law.
Jan 21, 2013
Anti-abortion reactionaries have carried out stealth attacks on access to abortion by pushing through burdensome state legislation.
According to the Guttmacher Policy Review (2012), the following are the top 10 laws used to make it harder for women to have access to abortion:
1. Mandatory parental involvement prior to a minor’s ability to have an abortion, no matter what danger this poses for the minor.
2. Requiring medically inaccurate counseling prior to an abortion.
3. Requiring an extended waiting period plus in-person counseling so that two trips must be made to the facility.
4. Mandating a non-medically necessary ultrasound prior to an abortion.
5. Prohibiting Medicaid from paying for abortion, except in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.
6. Restricting abortion coverage in private health insurance plans.
7. Putting medically inappropriate restrictions on the use of an abortion pill.
8. Placing expensive requirements on abortion facilities that have nothing to do with patient safety.
9. Requiring that abortions be performed very early in a pregnancy or limiting circumstances under which an abortion can be performed after fetal viability.
10. Putting a state law in place now that would immediately ban all abortions if Roe v. Wade is ever overturned.
Jan 21, 2013
A detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland outside Washington, D.C. was convicted of reselling guns seized from criminals–29 machine guns, shotguns, and handguns.
Corporal Juan Carter was assigned to a task force created to take firearms from repeat gun offenders and gun traffickers. So how could he go 13 months without turning in a gun or a report? At the very least, others in the system were complicit with his actions.
Carter was apprehended after a fellow P.G. police officer was shot by a car-jacker using one of the resold guns. An investigation resulted in a guilty verdict for this one dirty cop–three years later!
Gun control? The situation is already so out of control!
Jan 21, 2013
The Regional Transportation Authority in Chicago recently accused United Airlines and American Airlines of running “sham business operations” that have cost taxpayers more than 300 million dollars during the last seven years.
The airlines set up fake offices in the tiny suburban town of Sycamore, where they supposedly buy the fuel for their operations at O’Hare airport in Chicago. Sycamore has a much lower sales tax than Chicago.
In a sweetheart deal to attract the fuel business, Sycamore gives the airlines back most of the tax money it does collect. But Sycamore doesn’t have an airport, and at least one of these offices doesn’t even have a computer!
United and American claim that this sham tax-dodge is totally legal–and they might be right. It’s just one more example of a system set up to let the corporations avoid taxes.
Jan 21, 2013
A recent study put out by the Chicago Teachers Union and Stand Up! Chicago, a group tied to the SEIU, shows just how badly low wages and poverty affect the city’s children. One in twenty-five Chicago Public School students, meaning on average more than one in every single class, is homeless. And the problem is getting worse. Between 2008 and 2011, the child poverty rate in Chicago increased almost 20%, so that now more than one third of all children in the city live in poverty. And most of these live in households with at least one working parent, but that parent’s wages are so low that they still fall into poverty.
According to this study, family income is the most significant predictor of academic success. Low wage workers can’t afford books, school supplies, health care, quality food, after school care, a stable place to live, or to take off work to deal with their children’s issues. Poor kids struggle with more emotional and health problems and have a harder time focusing on school work.
Of course, the city needs to put money and resources into poverty-stricken schools to help deal with the issues caused by poverty that children bring to school.
The heart of the problem, though, is that the corporations have pushed wages down so low that hundreds of thousands of Chicago workers can’t afford what their kids need.
Handing over education dollars to charter schools does nothing to address these issues and in fact just makes the problem worse. It simply diverts more tax money to corporate subsidies and to lining the pockets of charter school operators.
Jan 21, 2013
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, backed by his newly appointed schools CEO and his handpicked school board, plans to close more than 100 schools in Chicago. They say there are too many “underutilized” schools in the district, and that they need to save money.
These are lies: to them, underutilized means less than 30 students in a classroom–but 30 is way too high. Students need smaller class sizes, not bigger. And even closing 100 schools will only save 40 million dollars, by their own estimation, a drop in the bucket next to the supposed one billion deficit next year.
It’s just an excuse to clear even more buildings for charter schools.
Jan 21, 2013
Parents and teachers at Crenshaw High School in South Central Los Angeles have carried out big protests against the decision that the Los Angeles Board of Education made on January 15 to break the school up and reorganize it into three magnet schools. The decision includes firing all the teachers and making them reapply for their jobs, a ploy to get rid of higher salaried teachers.
Parents and teachers pointed out that it was the district itself that was responsible for past disorganization at Crenshaw. In fact, the campus had suffered through a parade of administrators–more than 30 principals and assistant principals over seven years. As a result, in 2005, the school lost its accreditation and in 2008, the school failed to receive a state academic rating simply because it failed to test enough students.
Ironically, over the last couple of years, under a new principal, who worked closely with teachers and staff, things were beginning to turn around at Crenshaw. The student test scores were rising in both math and English. The school had won prestigious grants and praise from the Ford Foundation. Jeannie Oakes, who oversees Ford’s education philanthropy, said, “We’re very impressed with the education model they were developing and we were disappointed when it looked like that would not continue.”
By blowing up Crenshaw, the school board will destroy all that has been done to improve the situation. Students’ education will be further disrupted and disorganized.
It’s good to see a fight against these attacks.
Jan 21, 2013
According to a new “Strategic Framework Plan” commissioned by the mayor, Detroit has two problems: too much vacant land and too few people.
Yes, there is vacant land in the city of Detroit–but the problem is that the city and some of the biggest banks and corporations drove people out of the city.
In the 1990s, the city cleared hundreds of acres of land for three casinos, two sports stadiums and a hockey arena (yet to be built)–taking people’s homes and apartments. Even before that, in the 1950s, the city destroyed Black Bottom, Paradise Valley and Hastings Street, ripping out the very heart of the black community for an expressway to the suburbs. In the 1980s, it did the same thing to Hamtramck’s Polish community, giving people’s land as a gift to General Motors.
Over the last two decades, the city itself vacated land and buildings–closing down public housing, neighborhood centers, offices, clinics and schools.
The city school board and later the “emergency financial manager” not only closed neighborhood schools, they and the state of Michigan starved the remaining schools of needed funding.
Companies like GM, Chrysler, and American Axle closed plants and offices–leaving them vacant and decrepit. Jobs were moved out of the city, often to far-off suburbs, where no buses went. Today, there is only one job in the city of Detroit for every four adult residents.
During the sub-prime mortgage scam, the banks laid the groundwork for taking the homes of nearly 100,000 people in a few short years. Whole neighborhoods began to resemble bombed-out cities. Speculators moved in to grab up vacant houses, and did nothing to keep them up.
Of course, people left the city.
And, as more people left, the city stopped repairing street lights and roads in many neighborhoods. It stopped mowing grass or removing dead trees from closed parks and city-owned vacant land. Large trash removal was almost eliminated. The city practically stopped picking up stray dogs, allowing packs of wild dogs to roam some areas.
The amazing thing is not that so many people left the city, it’s that so many stayed. Detroit is their city, and they won’t be pushed out!
Jan 21, 2013
The mayor’s “strategic plan” dares to claim that Detroit–whose infrastructure was supposedly built for two million people–now with 770,000 doesn’t have enough people to support it.
As with almost everything else in the “strategic plan,” it’s a gross exaggeration, bordering on an outright lie. The city arrived at its current land size in 1927, when it had about 1.3 million people. And almost every bit of the city’s infrastructure–sewer lines, water lines, public lighting, public transportation–had been put in place by that time, much of it even earlier, when the city was much smaller. In fact, already, in 1927, that infrastructure was being pushed to its limits by a rapidly growing population, which had tripled in size in 17 years.
So, no, the city was not “built for two million people.” In fact, when it hit its peak population size of 1.8 million, just after World War II, it was bursting at the seams, its infrastructure systems strained to overcapacity.
The problem of the city’s infrastructure is, quite simply, the lack of money devoted to maintenance and upgrade, over several decades. In just three years’ time from 2009 to 2012, for example, the city cut 1/3 of all budgeted positions, not counting police and fire. And that came on top of already major cuts.
One mayor after another has stolen money from the city’s infrastructure in order to give it in subsidies and tax breaks to thousands of companies, including some of the biggest corporations in the world: General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Blue Cross, Quicken Loans, Fisher Real Estate, Compuware, American Axle.
The city went in debt to give all these special deals away to big business–a debt that amounts to more than 14 billion dollars today.
With the city already deep in debt, the banks jumped in for the kill, selling the city on so-called “hedging”–supposedly designed to make money for the city through its own borrowing. It was a fool’s bargain, and the city played the fool. These “hedging” deals that the city cut in 1999 and 2005 ended up costing the city three times what the city originally borrowed. And that forced the city to go even deeper in debt–to the same crooked bankers.
That’s why the city has no money for the infrastructure, that is, for public services. The city gave it away to the biggest corporations and the biggest banks–thieves, every one of them!
Jan 21, 2013
In glowing terms, with dozens of beautifully colored maps, the mayor’s commission describes a marvelous city their plan can create—in 50 years.
But in the short term, the next five years, the plan envisions something else entirely.
Move people out of some areas. The land people are “encouraged to leave” is to be turned over to industrial farms, industry, and to warehousing. The plan proposes to push working people out of other areas of the city, transforming those areas into residential areas for the wealthy.
Hand over public lighting to private industry. In a city where more than 40% of the lights don’t work today, the commission’s plan envisions even fewer working lights: less than half of today’s total. The areas working people live in will be darker still.
Hand over the sewer and water departments to private industry. Detroit water and sewage rates are among the lowest in the country—today. Bring in for-profit businesses to run them, rates will go up, as they have in other cities that privatized these functions.
Privatize the public transit system. The city already beat them to it, giving the buses this year to a for-profit company to run. We’ve seen what that means: fares went up, bus routes were cut, waits for buses became worse.
“Deregulate city inspections.” No longer will there be even a slap on the wrist when businesses run roughshod over the population.
This is not a plan to improve the city for its population. It’s a plan to finish handing over what remains of the city to the wealthy class that looks on the city as its personal bank account.