The Spark

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

Issue no. 933 — February 18 - March 4, 2013

EDITORIAL
Capitalists’ State of the Union Address

Feb 18, 2013

To hear President Obama’s State of the Union speech it would appear that we are all on an upward path. He stated, “Together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is stronger.”

But for workers living in the heart of this nightmare of lost jobs, lost homes and ruined communities, this statement rings false. What is he talking about? Why is he saying this? It sounds very presidential, but it is patently untrue.

We are in the midst of a seemingly unending crisis. The recession that began at least five years ago has lingered unremittingly; the authorities and experts have the audacity to call it a “jobless recovery.” How can you speak of real recovery in a situation where almost 8 percent of the working class is unemployed with millions of others working for poverty wages?

The President’s speech touched on many, many aspects of the current situation. And, unlike many politicians, he is not afraid to describe the problems we face, sometimes in great detail. But the answers are not there, not in his speech, and certainly not in the plan that he puts forward for the future.

“A growing economy that creates good middle-class jobs–that must be our North Star,” he says and infers that “we” can make this happen. But the “we” Obama represents is not creating good middle-class jobs: far from it. The capitalist class is slashing jobs and replacing them with lower paying, no benefit, far-from-middle class ones. To infer that raising minimum wage to nine dollars per hour will lift millions from poverty is dishonest at best. First of all, the bosses are not hiring. Secondly, nine dollars an hour is not a livable wage.

On immigration, he puts forward a reactionary policy that makes it harder, not easier, for non-documented workers to ever have an equal footing here. They might reach citizenship in one or two decades, but in the immediate future, these workers will be constantly under the gun, in fear of deportation for crossing their employer in the slightest way.

On the war, he speaks of removing 34,000 troops from Afghanistan–only half the current troop level–nearly two years from now. In other words, he plans to continue the same troop levels for two more years, and the war WILL continue after that.

Protections from the violence of assault weapons? Protections from global warming? The answers are nowhere in sight. And in fact, promises to work on these problems into the future hide the policies that today allow the capitalist class to further pollute, further profit from the sale of assault weapons.

In fact, the speech was an expertly fabricated web of lies designed to placate a population that is more and more angry, more and more unable to stay above water. Raising the minimum wage and providing for early childhood education are nice-sounding solutions for Obama’s liberal supporters–but he knows they will never be passed, not with this Congress. If he had really wanted them passed, he’d have pushed them in his first two years, when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress!

In fact, even as Obama throws out these meaningless liberal tidbits, he continues to talk about the need to “cut the debt”. In other words, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are still very much on the table for this president.

We cannot afford the luxury of being put to sleep by a warm and comfortable bedtime story. If the working class is ever to see a day when full employment; decent education; decent wages; and protection from pollution, from destructive climate change and from violence come true–it will be because it begins to struggle for its own agenda, build its own party, find its own leadership.

There IS wealth within this society that can be used to address all of our needs, wealth that we created. That wealth has been stolen from us and hoarded by the capitalist class, with help from Obama and all the politicians.

There is wealth–but we will need to take it back.

Pages 2-3

California Now Has Money, but Not for Schools

Feb 18, 2013

California is back, its budget is balanced, and we are on the move. Let’s go out and get it done.”

With these words, California Governor Jerry Brown broke the “good news”: no budget deficit, for the first time in many years.

You would think schools now would get enough money to make up for years of massive teacher layoffs and class-size increases. Especially since Brown and his fellow Democrats sold a sales-tax increase to California voters last November with the promise of more money for schools.

Not only that, but the November election also gave the Democrats a two-thirds supermajority in the State Assembly and Senate. The Democrats can now pass any law they want. They can now spend as much as they want on education.

But no, they aren’t even proposing to bring school funding back to its level before the recession–not even close. School funding is supposed to increase a little, from $7,300 per student in 2011-12 to about $8,100 in 2012-13, but that’s nowhere near the $9,158 per student in 2007-08 (accounting for inflation), when state politicians started to chop the education budget with a big axe, year after year.

So where’s the money going?

It’s going where it went during all those years of “budget deficits,” and the years before: to the big contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks for big business and the wealthy.

If the Democrats wanted, they could now bring the corporate income tax and the income tax on wealthy individuals back to the rates they were in 1981. If the Democrats overturned all the tax cuts for the wealthy from the last 30 years, the state could collect more than 10 billion dollars in taxes each year–and use that money to boost education, as well as social programs and services.

But no–all the Democrats have to offer is more belt-tightening for schools–so that they can shovel more money to big business. Just like their twin brothers, the Republicans.

California Prisons:
Profitable to Businesses

Feb 18, 2013

Last month, more than 400 people protested against the overcrowding, the deteriorating health conditions of prisoners and their persistent lock-downs in the women’s prisons at Chowchilla, California.

California is converting Chowchilla Valley State Prison for Women into a men’s prison. And they are squeezing more than 1,000 women into the two remaining women’s prisons. The population of women in these prisons is now close to 4,000, even though their maximum capacity is 2,000.

In California over the last three decades, many “tough-on-crime” laws were enacted extending prison terms many times, even for minor crimes. In 1994, the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law caused life imprisonment even for people who are convicted of three minor felonies.

As a result, many people were sent to prison for too long relative to their offenses. People were sentenced to 25 years to life for shoplifting a VCR, breaking into a soup kitchen, stealing a few videotapes, taking cookies from a restaurant or submitting a false application. Others were imprisoned for very long terms for non-violent crimes–using drugs, which hit the poor very hard but don’t affect the rich, who use drugs that were exempted from these laws.

Prison population skyrocketed. In 2011, California’s 33-prison network confined more than 160,000 people, although it was designed for 80,000.

Prisons became a booming “industry.” Today’s existing prison network was built through a massive prison construction program. Winners of this cruel deal were companies that built, operated or were involved in operation of these prisons. The companies also used this burgeoning prison system as a cheap source of labor for manufacturing goods like jeans. Prisoners were also used outside the prisons in some industries, for stacking warehouse shelves, for example.

Building more prisons only enriched the companies while cutting into other essential services, like education, infrastructure, health care and pensions. It was not an answer to crime. And in fact, the horrible conditions in these severely overcrowded prisons only served to turn people sentenced for minor offenses into hardened criminals. Today, California, like the rest of the U.S., imprisons more people than any other country in the world. One quarter of the world’s prisoners are in the United States.

The ills of crime and imprisonment can only be solved by addressing real economic and social problems like providing necessary and useful education and having well paid, decent and secure jobs.

But this capitalist system and its politicians only offer more prisons and prisoners. Under this system, workers will lose to the crime it causes and pay for the prisons it builds.

Michigan:
Poor Families Attacked

Feb 18, 2013

While Right-to-Work demonstrations were in the news, the Michigan Legislature sneaked through a huge attack that went under the radar. Quietly signed into law by Governor Snyder on January 9th, Public Act 607 of 2012 allows the Michigan Dept. of Human Services (DHS) to drop thousands of families off cash assistance on March 1, 2013.

The new law targets families with children who have no resources and little way to survive. In the middle of winter, families with children will be thrown to the wolves by the State of Michigan.

Michigan previously operated under “Welfare Reform” rules that were passed during the administration of Republican Governor John Engler. The old rules provided better protections than federal rules did.

When Democratic President Bill Clinton signed Federal Welfare “Reform” legislation into law in 1996, guaranteed support that kept families at least at 50 percent of the poverty level was eliminated. Help became only temporary, with a 60-month time limit.

Michigan, however, had allowed help beyond 60 months, for special circumstances. This help was only available to victims of domestic violence, to households caring for disabled family members, to people over age 55 who are less employable, and to incapacitated people applying for SSI–Social Security income for the disabled poor. The new legislation throws people in these dire situations out into the cold by holding everyone to that 60-month limit.

When Michigan previously cut off 13,000 families in October 2011, a lawsuit was filed. A judge ordered reinstatement of all who wanted to re-apply. Roughly 8,000 families were able to be reinstated. This time, the law has been changed to make cutting families off “legal.”

DHS Director Maura Corrigan has stated publicly: “We cannot afford to provide lifetime cash assistance to recipients who are able to work. Enforcing lifetime limits for cash assistance ensures that available funds are targeted toward those recipients who need a helping hand while they find employment.”

What lies! Michigan politicians could “afford” to give almost two billion dollars in tax breaks to corporations recently. Compare that to the 2013 DHS Budget which apparently estimates the cost of these cuts at just under 500,000 dollars. So Michigan is taking from those who have next to nothing in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

Nationwide statistics indicate that only about 2 percent of poor families with children ever hit the 60-month time limit. This 2 percent are usually so severely disabled–mentally or physically–or so disadvantaged–that they cannot hold a job.

For Maura Corrigan to say these are “recipients who are able to work” is like that old Queen of France saying to the starving poor of her day “let them eat cake!

Societies are judged by how decently they treat their poorest, their sickest, and their most vulnerable. For Michigan to eliminate such a pittance of help to children living in such distressed situations is too monstrous for words!

Chicago Schools:
Stop the Closings!

Feb 18, 2013

Chicago Public Schools officials are holding “hearings” to get “public input,” supposedly to help decide which schools they will close–the latest episode in their highly scripted privatization drama. They got a “warmer” reception than they had expected!

At a hearing in Uptown, near Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home, members of the audience did not even let Board officials finish their opening presentation, when it did not address the concerns of working parents. More than 1000 participants at a west side hearing made sure the Board heard their message loud and clear–“NO school closings!”

At a far Southside hearing, parents at DuBois Elementary showed photos that put the lie to CPS’s “underutilization” claims. DuBois has two classrooms with holes in the ceiling, broken windows and crumbling tile–rooms that CPS counts as usable space. DuBois also has an entire building on its campus that is unusable, but CPS counts that as usable space too.

How many other lies have they told in their drive to hand schools to charter operators? Parents are right to vent their anger at the Board, and to expose any lie they can.

Price of Gas Soars

Feb 18, 2013

The price of gas for our cars is soaring. From January 27 to February 11, the price in the Chicago area went up 36¢ a gallon. The financial sharks drove up the price of oil, giving an excuse for the wholesalers and gas stations to raise the price we have to pay.

When gas goes up like this, we have a lot less to spend on other necessities. It’s why all workers need an automatic increase in our wages hitched to the real increase in the prices we pay.

Pages 4-5

France:
PSA Losses—Juggling Books to Prepare Future Profits

Feb 18, 2013

The following is a statement of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the revolutionary workers organization active in France:

After ArcelorMittal announced big losses, the Peugeot (PSA) bosses did the same–a loss of 6.7 billion dollars announced on February 12. How handy to get people to believe that PSA can’t do anything but close factories and lay workers off. Except that most of the loss–6.3 billion dollars–is an accounting trick that, according to PSA’s financial director, will allow it to start up on a “healthy basis.” And he adds that these losses are “reversible, so if the economic outlook gets better, we’ll do a reverse accounting trick.”

In other words, they cook the books! For example, they write off 400 million dollars as closing costs at Aulnay-sous-Bois and getting rid of 11,000 jobs. In reality, at the end of 2012, PSA had 14 billion dollars in “financial security,” an increase of almost two billion dollars for the year. Its financial statement declared, “the financial structure of the industrial and commercial companies is solid.”

Whatever they say to justify getting rid of jobs, the PSA corporation is hardly penniless. Even if its management juggles with billions of dollars of the company’s money, we can’t let them juggle with the jobs of Peugeot-Citroën workers!

100 Years ago, Workers Strike for Better Conditions

Feb 18, 2013

A century ago, from February through July 1913, eighteen hundred silk workers in Paterson New Jersey carried out one of the most important strikes in U.S. history. Mostly immigrants from different European countries, they were demanding shorter working hours and better working conditions.

Textile was one of the largest, most profitable industries in the U.S. at that time. The bosses even sent recruiters to Europe to find more workers. The hours were long–the day could stretch to 14 hours; the pay was low; the machines ran fast and dangerous.

Factory workers scarcely earned enough money to live. One third of workers didn’t live past 25 years of age in this era. And children as young as five tended machines in the textile industry–just as young children in that era were sent down to work in the mines.

Only a year earlier, almost 20,000 textile workers from the plants of the American Woolen Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike on January 12, 1912. Their meager pay checks had been cut when a new law in Massachusetts reduced the work week from 56 to 54 hours.

As an example of the dangers of working in the Lawrence mills, a teenager, Camella Teoli, got her hair caught and pulled into a machine she was operating. She was hospitalized for seven months.

The 1912 strikers invited into Lawrence prominent organizers, like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Bill Haywood from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), along with other militants not so well known–Joseph Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti and Margaret Sanger. The IWW connections brought the strikers money and the support they needed in the working class movement.

In both the Lawrence strike and in the Paterson strike a year later, workers had to overcome enormous divisions. The languages spoken by strikers included Italian, Polish, Russian, German, French, Yiddish and sometimes very little English. They came from countries and from differing religious backgrounds with long histories of antagonism, even war. The bosses had been hiring women and children in order to pay lower wages than they paid the men. There were divisions by skill. Still they were able to go on strike together.

In addition to mass picketing, with IWW help the workers organized Sunday meetings for supporters of the Paterson silk strike in the spring of 1913. Some 20,000 people would show up at these meetings in Haledon, New Jersey. Nearby New York artists, writers and socialists joined strikers and their families, raising money and spirits.

By May of 1913, the Paterson silk workers were beginning to face real desperation and hunger. Workers decided they had to go back to work in Paterson in July. But the fight they made in 1913 helped them win the eight-hour day by 1919.

The fight for safer conditions, better pay and fewer hours played out over a long period. U.S. workers had been making these demands since the early 1800s, with strikes and demonstrations.

Only their fights would force the bosses to improve conditions in the factories and mills and mines.

Littler Swindlers and Bigger Swindlers

Feb 18, 2013

What a scandal! A number of soccer matches at the highest level were fixed! How? By a vast international network that successfully bribed umpires and players in more than 450 matches in Europe and Latin America over several years.

What makes it possible is the legalization and spread of betting on sports. That is the first swindle, even if it’s legal. It consists, like all lotteries, in collecting the money of a large number of gamblers, in order to pay back a small part of the money collected to some of them.

And guess who pockets the rest!

France:
No to the Bosses’ Vandalizing Factories!

Feb 18, 2013

The following article is translated from the February 15th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.

In 2012 in France, 266 factories of more than 10 workers were closed, one for every working day. And this policy continues with PSA at Aulnay, Goodyear, Arcelor’s steel mills, Petroplus, Virgin, Sanofi and Candia. Renault’s management boasts about not closing a factory, but it wants to get rid of 8,000 jobs, the equivalent of one or two factories.

The rhythm of closures is accelerating. So much for the usefulness of the ministry of “Productive Recovery”! So much for the hypocrisy of Hollande’s administration, which pretends to make the battle for jobs a priority!

The only ones fighting for jobs are the workers: at the Peugeot car company at Aulnay, the workers have refused to see the last big factory in the Seine-Saint-Denis department close. This department is hit with high unemployment and poverty. Goodyear workers also refuse to let their region become an industrial desert. There are the Renault workers and many others. And the ministry is hardly on their side when it comes to factory closings!

In this period of crisis, jobs and wages must be protected. Layoffs must be prohibited. It’s necessary for the survival of the workers and society, because factory closings lead to the bankruptcy of many small businesses and ruin the entire economy.

Instead, Arnaud Montebourg, the Minister for Industrial Renewal, sabotages the workers in struggle, and Interior Minister Valls prepares his troops to suppress them, as he did during the ArcelorMittal workers’ demonstration in Strasbourg, where a demonstrator lost an eye thanks to a rubber bullet.

The administration isn’t content to preach that the workers submit. It attacks them, on the side of the bosses. The flexibility law that the administration is preparing will be a new weapon for the bosses. It will give them the possibility to lay off more quickly and cheaply. It will permit them to lower wages, force workers to travel a longer distance to work and lengthen the hours of work. Workers will have the choice of “working more to earn less” or being laid off! This is the proliferation and legalization of the bosses’ blackmail. And, under the pretext of saving jobs, profits are going to increase.

Big business is ready to announce its results for 2012. The TOTAL corporation and Renault will have problems hiding their profits, but Arcelor and Peugeot have found a trick to show record losses: the depreciation of assets.

No, let the books of businesses be public and be controlled by everyone. Let’s get rid of opaque financial manipulations! Let the bookkeepers and employees say everything they know about businesses’ true accounts. No one is better placed than they are to see how much profit is made and what the stockholders get. The owners of the top 40 companies received 55 billion dollars in profits in 2012. Let us find out who got what!

And when the losses are real, let’s look where the profits of prior years went, what stockholders and owners got enriched by them.

The money is there. It’s necessary to take it to preserve jobs, wages and pensions.

Argentina:
Little Thieves and Big Usurers

Feb 18, 2013

In December 2001, Argentina declared bankruptcy since it was unable to deal with the financial crisis. The big international financial institutions, rather than completely interrupt profitable relations with a debtor nation, accepted to renegotiate Argentina’s debt. Three fourths was written off and the remainder was spread out over a number of years. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) guaranteed the procedure. Inside Argentina, the workers paid for the deal, despite their resistance, with a brutal cut in their standard of living. That solved the debt problem with no pain for international finance.

Argentina was then “banned from banking” on the international financial market, except for making annual payments on its restructured debt. Since then, the Argentine economy has gotten somewhat back on its feet.

But the debt has returned–the part not renegotiated in 2001. At the time, Argentine debt was completely written off; no banker would have agreed to loan money to the Argentine state and still less to buy any of the country’s debt certificates.

But two U.S. hedge funds bought up the remaining debt for a tenth of its value. The “vulture funds” are trying now to get Argentina to pay the full price, increased by ten years of interest, amounting to 1.3 billion dollars. They obtained a New York court ruling and are seizing Argentine state assets to get paid back. The bailiffs showed up to seize an Argentine navy training ship at an African port and to grab the president’s official airplane!

These vultures threaten Argentina–which is incapable of paying everyone–with a new crisis, for which the workers alone will have to pay the costs. Further, they threaten the international financial system that’s already destabilized by the current shock waves.

Armies of lawyers paid a pretty penny for their great competence amass mountains of files to figure out who has the right to pressure the Argentine workers, and in what proportions.

The discussion takes place among their own bourgeoisie, the biggest corporations in the world through the IMF, and of course the vulture funds. And no one questions their criminal “rights,” exercised against the Argentine population.

Meteor Crash:
A Rare Occurrence

Feb 18, 2013

A meteor fell to the Earth on the morning of Friday, February 15. It exploded as it entered the atmosphere, miles above Russia, sending down a shower of small pieces.

The explosion, which scientists estimate to have had 20 to 30 times as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, caused a powerful shock wave. Thousands of buildings in several Russian cities had shattered windows. More than 1,200 people were injured, most of them by flying glass.

Scientists estimate that before it exploded, this meteor was 55 feet across and weighed 10,000 tons. There are billions of such rocks traveling in outer space, and thousands of them have hit the Earth in the past. Those relatively big in size have caused changes on our planet–like the one that fell on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula about 65 million years ago, covering the sky with dust and causing a dark, cold spell in the Earth’s climate, which scientists think led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

But still, given our planet’s long history–4.5 billion years–and its place in the universe (the Earth is nothing but a small speck compared to the size of a galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies in the universe) a meteor crash is rare during a human being’s lifetime.

Just a reminder of how tiny our place in the universe is.

Pages 6-7

Corruption?
Kilpatrick Is a Small-Time Hustler!

Feb 18, 2013

The federal prosecutor in the corruption case of Kwame Kilpatrick, his father Bernard Kilpatrick, and his close friend Bobby Ferguson says they used the mayor’s office as a private source of profit for themselves.

They well may have, but they didn’t invent municipal corruption. These people learned their chops in Wayne County government under a famous corrupt white politician: Ed McNamara.

Former Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox saved McNamara from a state investigation into the matter. No surprise! Cox also got his training in McNamara’s administration, as did, incidentally, Bernard Kilpatrick, who was McNamara’s front in Detroit. Two of McNamara’s aides were, in fact, convicted of extortion, bribery and money laundering for work they did for McNamara. McNamara himself escaped federal prosecution–he died of cancer before the charges came down!

Public corruption comes to light occasionally–especially when officials like McNamara or Kilpatrick are so arrogant they think they can take whatever they want and never get caught.

But their corruption is nothing compared to the real corruption going on: the plundering of cities around the country by big corporations and the banks.

Why, for example, did Compuware chief Peter Karmanos, Quicken Loans head Dan Gilbert, racing magnate Roger Penske, and chemical company executive Jim Nicholson rush to hand Kilpatrick $150,000 after he was indicted? Why did Karmanos give him a job–in Dallas? Were they hoping to keep their links with him from coming out into the light?

All four of them received enormous handouts from Kilpatrick when he was in office. The city “sold” Karmanos and Compuware the land for its new headquarters for $1. And it gave Compuware 70 million dollars in tax breaks. Dan Gilbert and Quicken Loans got one and a quarter million dollars from the city for a parking structure. Penske got the use of Belle Isle for his Grand Prix; the city tore up some of the nicest areas of the island for him. Nicholson’s company PVS Chemicals got a 13 million dollar contract in 2011 from the city water department.

Should Kilpatrick be prosecuted? Sure! But what about prosecuting the big thieves behind him? What about prosecuting those corporations that benefitted for decades from tax breaks, subsidies and work the city did for them–during Kilpatrick’s administration and before him?

General Motors, for example, got money to build a new plant, money to tear down an old plant, money so it could move its headquarters–and it still has its hand out. Chrysler got tax breaks on plants that have practically stopped production. The Fisher family real estate interests not only got 100% tax breaks on new investments, the city then paid to take their “investments” off of their hands. The Ilich family, with all its “entertainment” holdings, has practically turned the city into its own private checkbook.

Some of the biggest banks in the country threatened that Detroit’s bond rating would be reduced if the City Council didn’t sign on to one of these “exotic” loan deals–a deal which will cost the city four times what it borrowed in the first place.

Corruption? Kilpatrick is a small-time hustler when it comes to corruption. The big guys are all those respected CEO’s who have turned the city’s budget into their very own paymaster.

Baltimore:
Speed Cameras Take the Money and Run

Feb 18, 2013

A dispute between Xerox and local contractor Brekford over running Baltimore’s traffic cameras has put the spotlight on how much these contractors are paid.

The city has a new contract promising Brekford $11.20 of each $40 fine collected–and thousands of speed and red light tickets are issued daily. Xerox had made more than nine million dollars in profit from the program last year!

The dispute arose when the Baltimore Sun showed Xerox’s cameras were issuing too many wrong tickets–including one given for speeding to a stopped car.

Can you say, Ca-ching?

Page 8

A Real Workers State of the Union

Feb 18, 2013

With fanfare and drum rolls, every politician from the President of the United States to the State Governors to the Mayors rolled out their State of the Union, State of the State, State of the City speeches. And in spite of all the pretty rhetoric they all came up with, each speech included just one big attack after another on poor and working people.

Working people need their own State of the Workers Union agenda. And Item One would be to send all of these politicians packing and begin the process of recouping the losses we have suffered under this rotten capitalist economy in crisis.

The Second Item would be a “To Hell with the Banks” to stop the nonsense of continuing to transfer every bit of cash out of our pockets and into theirs.

The Third would be to make the bosses, banks and politicians pay for what they have created. Instead of raising our taxes, it should be the corporations and the rich that pay. Let them put the money back into the public coffers that they stole from us. Stop the tax increases on us for Social Security and other programs.

And put an end to the wars that are draining the economy and killing working class men and women. That would more than cover the current deficit.

Put people to work fixing the infrastructure problems like the ruined roads and highways; the electric grids that have fallen into neglect. Unemployment would be virtually eliminated if our program was to expand and improve transportation, public services, tear down dangerous buildings or better yet rehabilitating them.

Cleaning up the neighborhoods and improving housing would be a first priority. And the capitalists should pay for it. The minimum wage discussion should be replaced with a discussion to provide all workers with good wages. And wage increases should be tied to prices. If wages are indexed to prices it would stop the inflated price gouging that is going on.

Health care can be provided for everyone. We can ensure that the poor and disabled and old are the first to receive the very best treatment. What kind of government allows cuts in Dental, Vision and Hearing benefits for the elderly, the people who need them the most?

This would be a real Workers State of the Union agenda. Of course, the politicians and their capitalist employers would scream “Impossible! There is no money for that.” But they lie. It is the working population that has produced all of the wealth that they garner to themselves. They have stolen and squandered it. Their speeches and promises to throw on a band aid while they rob us to death are insulting at best. There would be money in all the public coffers if they hadn’t stolen it.

Chris Dorner:
A Ticking Time Bomb Created by the LAPD

Feb 18, 2013

In the middle of its manhunt for Christopher Dorner, a black former cop who had snapped and gone on a vengeful murder spree, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that it was officially re-examining the reasons why it had fired Dorner back in 2009.

Sure, this was a token gesture. But it was not what one expects from the LAPD, especially not when it was hunting for someone who had declared war on it and was killing innocent people. But this token gesture was a recognition by the LAPD heads of the public anger and distrust of the department. Sandy Banks, a Los Angeles Times columnist, wrote that even where she lives, the middle class suburban community of Northridge, people expressed greater fear of the LAPD than of Chris Dorner.

Few believed the LAPD when they tried to dismiss Dorner’s charges of LAPD racism and brutality as the ravings of a lunatic. After all, right after Dorner’s manifesto appeared on Facebook, L.A. cops shot and wounded two people–a middle-aged Hispanic woman and her 71-year-old mother delivering newspapers. Police riddled their truck and the surrounding cars and houses with gunfire, saying they thought it was Dorner’s truck. The truck was neither the color nor the make of Dorner’s truck. Shortly afterwards, L.A. cops rammed another truck of a very different make and color than Dorner’s, this time injuring a slim white man.

Over the last 20 years, following the Rodney King riots and the Ramparts corruption scandals, Los Angeles officials have regularly claimed that their police force was being reformed–that it was no longer the same overtly brutal and racist army of occupation in the large poor and working class neighborhoods. They say they had hired more “minorities,” and that the cops now have to go through “diversity training.”

But in no way did the cop violence end, as the videos of cop beatings of ordinary people that appear regularly on YouTube show. Only a few months ago, five cops beat to death Alesia Thomas, an unarmed black 35-year-old mother of two.

Neither did the racism inside the department against black cops end, especially when they reported the ongoing violence and racism of many of the police.

Brian Bentley, who had been in the LAPD for 10 years, described how black cops were regularly belittled, harassed, threatened and forced to shut up about what they witnessed. Anyone who tried to play the role of whistle-blower, like Dorner, was run out of the department.

If the police themselves go through this, what does it say about the violence the population faces at the hands of L.A. police?

No, the LAPD hasn’t reformed. It is still the same brutal army occupying poor and working class neighborhoods it has always been.

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