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
Mar 4, 2013
On March 1, the federal government imposed 85 billion dollars more in spending cuts over the next seven months. This was supposed to be because of some fake deadline, called the sequester, that the Republicans and Democrats supposedly couldn’t meet.
For more than two years, the politicians have pushed this crap. They set one fake deadline after another. First it was the debt ceiling. Then it was the fiscal cliff. Each time, the Democrats and Republicans blamed each other. They shed crocodile tears.
Most of all, they lied through their teeth.
Together, the Democrats and Republicans increased our taxes, while slashing more than two trillion dollars in spending over the next 10 years. They cut thousands of programs and services that reach every person in the country through education, health care, infrastructure maintenance and construction, environmental protection, as well as workplace, food and drug safety, to name just a few.
They targeted the working class and poor. Now, with the latest cuts, they are slashing benefits for the long-term unemployed and the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers and other employees. In the coming months, they are threatening furloughs to cut the pay of hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
Both parties are using the threat of even more cuts in domestic spending to set the stage for their biggest assault of all: Social Security and Medicare benefits. These programs are huge sources of money, the biggest ones left. And the politicians of both parties have made it clear that they intend on targeting them for cuts.
Don’t believe all the lies about how the politicians want to reduce the national debt. Yes, the national debt is huge. At close to 17 trillion dollars, it is almost as big as the debt of all the other governments in the world combined!
But that debt was taken on by the politicians coming to the aid and support of the biggest capitalist class in the world that has sucked the wealth from the biggest and richest companies and banks in the world.
The government spent trillions bailing out the banks, auto companies and other big companies. It spent trillions more cutting corporate taxes. Today many of the biggest companies and banks pay little or no federal taxes, and many even get billions of dollars in tax rebates. And finally, the government burnt up trillions of dollars in two big wars, as well as all the other wars on every continent in the world that they have fueled–all for the profits of the oil companies, weapons makers and banks.
Both parties expect the working population to pay the humongous bill. All those budget cuts and tax increases are merely being used to funnel even more money from the working population into the pockets of the big corporations.
There is no reason we should. The big companies and the wealthy created the debt. So, let them pay for it.
Working people have to put our needs first. We need more jobs, decent pay, health care, retirement, schools, government services. Our work has created more than enough wealth for that and much more.
Of course, to get those things will take a fight, a big fight against not just the politicians, but the capitalist class that they serve. That may sound hard. But if workers let the capitalists and the politicians continue to do what they have already done, they will take everything from us.
The only alternative is to fight–and that opens up the possibility that workers can win and change everything.
Mar 4, 2013
Wall Street profits are soaring. The brokerage operations of New York stock exchange member firms rose to about 24 billion dollars in 2012–three times the 2011 total! The entire New York securities industry will dole out 2012 cash bonuses of about 20 billion dollars, up 8 percent from 2011.
Of course, the biggest rewards are going to the top dogs. Private equity firms Apollo Global Management, Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group and KKR and Co. all specialize in corporate buyouts that usually cost thousands of workers their jobs. For 2012, the nine top executives at these four firms alone will take home a combined total of more than one billion dollars in dividends–plus their regular “pay” and so-called “deal profits!”
These vultures are making out like bandits because they are bandits. Their wealth is being stolen from the millions of workers who created it–workers who are being left with reduced pay and benefits, if they have any jobs at all.
And this is what they call the “economic recovery!”
Mar 4, 2013
Private Bradley Manning admitted in court recently that he provided classified information to WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy organization, so the public could know what was really happening in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information . . . this could spark a domestic debate over the role of the military and our foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Manning argued in a prepared statement to the military court.
Manning was arrested and charged in Iraq in 2010 with, among other things, providing national defense information to an unauthorized source and aiding the enemy–a capital offense. He is facing at least 20 years in prison with his guilty plea.
Manning used his time in front of the court to say what he thought about the wars and about what he described as an obsession with “killing and capturing people.”
One of the many things Manning leaked is the now infamous 2007 video depicting American forces using helicopter gunships to kill a group of men, including two Reuters journalists, and then firing on a van that pulled up to help the victims. Private Manning was justifiably troubled with the video because of the shooting of the second group of people, who “were not a threat but merely good Samaritans,” and because of the “seemingly delightful blood lust” expressed by the airmen in the recording.
Of course the population is deliberately kept in the dark about what is really going on with the justification that these are “military secrets.” But in reality the government doesn’t want us to know the truth because then we might oppose the wars. In fact, many people did and do oppose these wars. On this, the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War, it is good to have people like Bradley Manning, with the courage to think for himself and the courage to act on that thinking.
Mar 4, 2013
As high as 90% of foreclosed properties are held off the market nationwide, according to the AOL Real Estate blog. Banks and other real-estate agencies, such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, own these foreclosed homes, but they are only selling 10% of them.
The banks are waiting for a surge in home prices to reap huge profits when they dump the inventory back into the market. At the same time, some real estate companies with big pockets are buying rental property, including single family rental homes in large numbers, and betting on the possibility that the property prices will go sky high again or rents will increase.
All these real estate schemes are forcing home prices and rents to go up. And media celebrates this manufactured hike as a housing market “recovery.”
We need homes. But, the capitalist economy is not organized to respond to the basic needs of workers. Capitalists’ sole goal is to make more money from workers by any means possible. This scheming may lead to exorbitant prices, another bubble and collapse. But, they don’t care. These banks and companies are again setting us up for another round of rip-offs and bail-outs.
Mar 4, 2013
On February 23rd, once again thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in 16 Spanish cities to protest and denounce budget cuts which increasingly worsen public services.
In Madrid, four columns of protestors came together at Neptune Square, where the different “tides” as they are called mixed together: green for education, white for health and black for public administration. Besides banners showing cutting scissors, there were “envelopes,” a clear allusion to the famous payoff envelopes distributed to Popular Party leaders that have come to symbolize business’s corruption of politicians.
There is increased disgust with new revelations of corruption. Organizers, community groups, the movement of the indignant people 15-M (like Occupy in the U.S.) and political parties like Izquierda Unida (United Left), are denouncing budget cuts. As well, they advocate the struggle: “for true democracy” and “against the loss of legitimacy of institutions.”
In order for workers not to pay for the crisis, they have first of all to advance their own interests, not an abstract “democracy.” Democracy in Spain (as elsewhere) has always meant the defense of capitalist interests.
While companies throw thousands of workers onto the streets, the bosses receive subsidies, don’t pay taxes and benefit from tax amnesties. They place millions of dollars outside the country in tax shelters. This is true today under the Popular Party, as it was yesterday under the Socialist Party administration of Zapatero.
At this moment, Iberia Airlines workers have begun a strike movement to stop the layoff of 3,800. Many more Spanish workers need to organize to oppose budget cuts and layoffs. It would be a first step to get rid of the bourgeoisie’s gigantic theft of social wealth.
Mar 4, 2013
After the results of the February 24th to 25th election, the Italian politicians will certainly have a big headache, and we’ll see if they’re able to relieve it. The result of the election was a “no confidence” vote for any one group of politicians.
One party, the Democratic Party, has a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but not in the Senate. Silvio Berlusconi, the discredited former right-wing Prime Minister, and his center-right coalition made a spectacular recovery. This was at the expense of Professor Mario Monti, the most recent Prime Minister, who is worshiped by the bourgeoisie for imposing austerity, who lost his own center-right voters. Most successful of all was the Five Star Movement of the comedian Beppe Grillo, who said that all Italian politicians were incompetent and that he was going to kick them out. His coalition got 25% of the vote.
For now, this result shows the profound distress, indeed rage, of a part of the population.
This result is first of all due to the crisis and the policy of austerity which the Italian population has been subjected to. A little more than a year ago, the discredited Berlusconi was replaced by the “technical” administration of Professor Mario Monti. He increased the age at which workers can get Social Security pensions, changed labor legislation to make layoffs easier, imposed big budget cuts for public services and added a flurry of new taxes. All these measures only made the crisis worse.
Purchasing power is in free fall, workplaces are being closed, youth unemployment is way up and the despair of workers thrown on the streets has pushed some to suicide.
The left, represented by Pier Luigi Bersani’s Democratic Party, has nothing to promise other than continuing the same policy.
Comedian Beppe Grillo began his political success with “f--- you” days, where he gave the finger to politicians before a delighted public. He slowly assembled the program of his “non-movement,” which he didn’t want to be a party. They stand against government waste; for the environment; for people’s participation in affairs; for renewable energy; for a minimum wage; against Italy using the euro currency and against Merkel’s Germany.
It’s true that Italian politicians of all stripes offer a sad spectacle and their corruption is shocking. All the denunciations of the press are centered on the politicians’ incompetence. Grillo strikes a chord with the fantasy that bosses, workers and the entire population could agree to work together and could pull through, if the obstacles created by the political system and its rottenness were removed. But with this focus, those who are truly responsible for the crisis–the capitalists, the banks and the financial system–are ignored, as if the crisis could be averted simply by electing new politicians like Grillo.
But what the success of the Grillo forces indicates is primarily the incapacity of the Italian left to offer any perspective to the masses, and first of all the workers, who are the victims of the crisis. This left has done what it could to convince them that the class struggle didn’t make sense. It has carried out a government policy equal to that of the right, which has disoriented the workers, who ended up rejecting the left in a desperate search for a savior who doesn’t exist.
But the class struggle exists and is going to continue, above all on the part of the capitalists and financiers against the workers, who have no choice but to fight back–but on the basis of their own program, their own interests, to save themselves.
Mar 4, 2013
The following is the speech you would have heard if you had attended the Spark Winter dinner in Baltimore on February 23.
You would also have enjoyed a great potluck dinner–everyone brought something: BBQ ribs, fresh salmon, grilled shrimp, kielbasa, chicken, chili, casseroles and lots of sides and home-made desserts.
A great time was had by all, with a chance to compare notes with people from other workplaces and renew old acquaintances.
To listen to the President’s State of the Union Address two weeks ago, one might think we are all doing great.
“…There is much progress to report…after years of grueling recession, our businesses have created over six million new jobs…. We have cleared the rubble of crisis and can say with confidence that the state of our Union is stronger.” End quote.
Good thing Obama wasn’t hooked up to a lie detector–he might have blown a fuse! A fact checker for the Washington Post politely referred to the six million new jobs as “fact-challenged.” He went on to explain that “since the start of Obama’s presidency 1.2 million jobs have been created and the number of jobs in the economy is about 3.2 million fewer than when the recession began in December 2007.” There are fewer jobs today than before the recession began. Moreover, the potential workforce has grown by 8 million. At the current rate–it will take close to 10 years to return to a pre-recession unemployment rate!
Look at Baltimore. Last year Baltimore lost almost 3% of its manufacturing jobs. That ranks 3rd in the U.S. for percentage of manufacturing jobs lost. RG Steel (used to be Bethlehem Steel) laid off 2,000 workers alone. But this hemorrhaging of good paying jobs that used to have something called a pension didn’t just start last year or even in 2007 when the Great Recession started.
No, this bloodletting has been going on for decades. Between 1950 and 1995, Baltimore lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. At its peak in 1959, Bethlehem Steel employed 35,000 workers. Generations of workers worked at the Sparrows Point plant. These were decent paying jobs with pensions and health care. Steel workers could buy homes. They could send their children to college without accumulating an avalanche of debt. Bethlehem Steel may have been the largest, most important workplace, but many others also employed thousands of workers over decades. GM, which closed in 2005–for 70 years it employed thousands, sometimes 7,000 at a time. General Electric. Western Electric. Solo Cup. London Fog. And so on.
This catastrophic loss of jobs wasn’t some natural event, beyond human control. On the contrary, the lost jobs are the direct result of the normal mechanisms of capitalism seeking to increase profit through speed-up and consolidation. Big capital buys and sells companies over and over, in order to make money–instead of producing goods. All this buying and selling leads to accumulating more and more debt–running companies into the ground–like Bethlehem Steel for example. There is still steel being produced in the U.S.–just as much as before but with many fewer workers, so companies close. Productivity increases and speed-up ate up these jobs. The bosses get rewarded with big bonuses for ruining a productive company while the workers get pink slips!
Of course, the very means the bosses use to increase their profits hasten and magnify the crisis. And so the bosses hasten and magnify their attacks on us. Our jobs and our wages have been ground up in the bosses’ drive for ever increasing profits!
Corporate profits increased by nearly 46 billion dollars in the third quarter of last year alone; bank profits increased by more than 68 billion dollars in the same period! The combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans was 1.7 TRILLION dollars in 2012, that’s “trillion” with 12 zeroes! And that’s an increase from the year before. The stock market is back up above 14,000, gaining back nearly every point it had lost in the crash of 2008–making the richest investors richer.
The Democrats and the Republicans are ganging up on us in order to protect, serve, defend and help increase the massive, record-breaking profits the bosses have made during THEIR recovery.
The politicians of both parties are finding more ways to attack Social Security and Medicare. These are programs paid for through payroll taxes–deducted from our paychecks. We PAID, in advance, for these programs. This money is not supposed to be part of the regular spending budget. However, the government has been raiding the Social Security and Medicare funds, leaving behind a pile of IOUs. More than four trillion dollars of the 16 trillion dollar debt is owed to Social Security, Medicare and other “trust funds.” That’s one quarter of the debt!!! Those programs are not running out of money. The government stole the money to give it to the wealthy in tax cuts. The government wants to cut Social Security so it won’t have to pay back the money it owes to Social Security. And it will get away with that theft if they can get us to agree to enormous cuts in Social Security. This is what is behind all the bogus fiscal cliffs and the outright lies the politicians are saying about Social Security–Democrats and Republicans alike.
The same thing is happening here in Baltimore. The mayor says there is a budget crisis. Well why? The big corporations got huge tax breaks so now there is less income tax money coming in to the city. There are fewer jobs. So less tax money is paid. Whose fault? The bosses. But what solutions to the budget woes did the mayor propose in her State of the City Address?
She doesn’t propose to make the bosses pay. No. She proposes many attacks on city workers and residents like having people pay for garbage collection and reducing collection of garbage to once a week–good for the rat population–not so good for the human population. She would like 10 “model” rec centers. There are currently 55, although funding for them is already cut. Rawlings-Blake is also proposing cuts in street lighting, tree maintenance, library hours and book purchases. While at the same time the mayor continues to increase tax breaks to developers, which amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.
One example of this is regarding the “Superblock” in West Baltimore–the mayor has proposed two ways to cut the developers’ taxes by 95% over the next 15 years–using a payment in lieu of taxes or a cut in property taxes. Great! She can cut our property taxes by 95% for 15 years!
How dare she propose all these cuts that affect working people while she hands fistfuls of our hard earned money over to the people that are responsible for the mess in the first place. She is making us bail out the rich! These are just a few examples of the attacks on working people that she is proposing–and she is a Democrat.
At a certain point we have to draw a line in the sand and say “No!”
Democrats and Republicans don’t get to throw us under the bus while making sure the wealthy live in luxury.
Where I work, workers took a stand on something and drew a line in the sand. During the Christmas rush, we get one extra day of paid vacation for every consecutive seven days worked. This was something we had fought for and won many years ago. One Friday during this past Christmas rush, the supervisor had a meeting with us to tell us we were not working Saturday, the seventh day, and therefore would not get an extra vacation day. Mind you, people had already worked six days.
All hell broke loose. Picture 50 angry women shouting down the supervisor. The supervisor tried to threaten us by saying “Do you want me to get the manager?” To that we all shouted back, “Yes! Get the manager!” She did and he repeated the same thing. But we had drawn the line. And no matter how many times they came back to tell us the same thing, to try to wear us down and get us to give up and believe the situation hopeless, we did not give in. Workers were yelling and shouting at the manager. While we waited for the manager to return with the correct response, lively discussions continued. One worker chanted “revolution, revolution!” (No, it wasn’t me). After several attempts to make us give in, the bosses gave in. We got our extra day. Okay, this is a very small example, but it shows that the bosses don’t always win. When we fight, we don’t always win. There are no guarantees. But when we don’t fight, we lose–always. That is guaranteed!
We don’t have to give up more of our standard of living just so the wealthy can be more wealthy. We can have jobs. We can have decent wages. It is up to us. Workers made big fights in the past [in the 30s for Social Security and in 50s and 60s for Medicare, Medicaid and Food Stamps]. We absolutely can do it again. But this time when we do it, we shouldn’t leave the bosses in control anymore. We should run things.
Mar 4, 2013
The Social Security Administration and developers JBG, Clark Construction, and Klein Enterprises signed a 20-year, 427 million dollar lease for a new office for 1,600 workers, the biggest lease ever in Baltimore. The rent is more than 50% higher than average–almost $39 per square foot compared to $24. This scandalously high rent means the developers will take 130 million dollars more from Social Security than from normal businesses.
So much for the lie that the Social Security fund is broke when there is always enough money for outright robbery by these sharks!
Mar 4, 2013
The Maryland Public Service Commission just allowed BGE, the gas and electric company, to start charging residential customers $6.00 more per month.
BGE recently became part of Exelon, a 19-billion-dollar-a-year corporation, paying its executives millions. When promoting this latest corporate takeover fiasco to people in Baltimore and Maryland, Exelon and BGE talked about lower costs. Now they want us to pay for maintenance they have stopped doing, thanks to laying off part of the work force!
They must think we are fools who are made of money.
Mar 4, 2013
Los Angeles schools superintendent John Deasy has ordered principals to count student scores on standardized tests as 30 per cent of a teacher’s evaluation.
This is an open attack on teachers. Standardized test results alone don’t show how well a teacher teaches, because they depend on many factors–such as how much money a school spends on classroom resources, for example. Or what the class sizes are. Or whether a student lives in poverty or not.
Deasy also happens to be an advocate of getting rid of seniority rules in teacher layoffs. So he wants to be able to lay off older teachers, who are paid more than teachers with less seniority. He wants to “reduce cost” by firing higher-paid employees, in other words.
Not surprisingly, some well-known big bosses in the country agree with Deasy–like Bill Gates, the self-declared “school reformer,” for whom Deasy worked before he got his current job; not to mention Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad and A. Jerrold Perenchio, among others.
They are attacking teachers so viciously because they want to cut the money this country spends on public education–so that they themselves can put their hands on that money.
That’s why this systematic attack on teachers is also an attack on workers’ children, who depend on public schools.
Mar 4, 2013
The State of California recently informed long-term care insurance policyholders that there will be an 85% rate increase in 2015. This insurance is run under the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). This type of insurance covers around 148,000 public pensioners in California and supports payment for nursing-home stays, home-health visits and other residential care, which are generally not covered by Medicare. Main claimants of such insurance are people afflicted by dementia and stroke.
This rate increase is shocking for people retired from the state with fixed and limited income. For example, a math teacher belonging to the Los Angeles Unified School District was notified that his rates will rise to about $5,000 a year in 2015! This is not affordable for most of the public retirees. And people expect that there will be many such hikes in the future.
Increases like this will force most of the retirees out of this system. As a result, they will not be able to claim any benefits when they are in need, although they have paid into this system for many years when they were healthy.
Elders and the poor are most in need of health care. What kind of a system puts benefits like this out of reach when most needed? A system that should be junked immediately along with its administrators.
Mar 4, 2013
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman, has donated one million dollars to the “Coalition for School Reform”—to be used in the March 5 elections for three Los Angeles school board seats.
Two other billionaires, real estate investor Eli Broad and media magnate A. Jerrold Perenchio, have also made big donations, $250,000 each, to the same organization.
The money is going to three candidates who support charter schools. One of them, in particular, is running to unseat incumbent Steve Zimmer, whom the Coalition definitely wants out.
Zimmer is not necessarily against charter schools either. But after numerous scandals—such as charter bosses stealing money and telling teachers to cheat on state tests—Zimmer proposed that the board grant no new charters until it develops a new monitoring system for charter schools.
Even this little caution is enough for the billionaires to want to unseat Zimmer—because charter schools offer possibilities for capitalists to profit.
To these filthy rich bosses, public schools are just another “investment opportunity”—that is, another one of society’s assets they think they can plunder.
Mar 4, 2013
Determined workers from Chrysler’s Warren Stamping plant organized a spirited protest outside their Mound Road factory on February 28.
Despite icy winds and freezing temperatures, a few dozen Warren Stamping workers along with workers from three other Chrysler factories–Sterling Heights Stamping, Jefferson Assembly, and Warren Truck–expressed their opposition to new work schedules. Many other Chrysler workers blasted their horns in loud shows of support as they drove by.
The “Awful [Alternate] Work Schedules” (AWS) will have a harsh impact on workers’ family lives and health.
Top UAW leaders and the Chrysler Corporation teamed up to implement the AWS which will mean a workday stretched to 10½ hours, four days a week, without any overtime pay. With this schedule, the company gets maximum production for minimum overtime cost.
While the hated schedules still will start in March, workers’ morale was lifted by a chance to make an irreverent and public show of opposition.
Mar 4, 2013
The Supreme Court is ready to toss a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 into the dumpster. They are hearing a suit brought by Shelby County, Alabama, to allow Shelby County to make its own voter-eligibility rules, outside of federal oversight.
The Court’s reactionary attitude was on belligerent display when Justice Antonin Scalia asked if Section 5 of the Act wasn’t an extension of “racial entitlement.” As if he weren’t sitting up there as a prime example of “entitlement” himself! He could just as well be saying, “Let’s go back to the Old South when only white male property owners like me could vote!”
It’s been a long while since judges and other officials who thought these things in private would utter them in public. The civil rights movement, and even more importantly the major urban rebellions of the mid-1960s, forced racists to shut their traps and pretend to be on the side of equality and progress, if they wanted any political future. Clearly we need to shut their traps again!
To stop courts and legislators from chiseling away essential rights, important parts of the working class will have to display a fighting spirit once more.
Mar 4, 2013
The City of Chicago wants to sell 105 city-owned lots to Norfolk Southern railroad for the fire-sale price of 1.1 million dollars. The railroad plans to use these lots to expand their yard in the impoverished Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side. The proposed yard will move containers between trains and trucks, and will spew air pollution into a poor neighborhood that already has extremely high rates of asthma and lead poisoning.
Some Englewood residents and environmental groups are demanding that the deal be delayed until the company addresses their health and safety demands. These include putting particulate filters on all the diesel engines that will be operating at the site, traffic planning, air filters in local schools and daycare centers, and regular testing of neighborhood children for lead poisoning.
But the Chairman of the city council committee charged with approving the deal said he has no intention of slowing down the process. And Norfolk Southern has promised to meet with area residents, but it’s making no promises either. The company spokesman said the project is critical for the city and for Norfolk Southern to “increase the efficiency of our inter-modal operations in Chicago.”
The company and the city council couldn’t be clearer: they’ll do whatever it takes to make business more efficient, in other words more profitable. And the health of poor children be damned!
Mar 4, 2013
Sales at Walmart in January were so bad that an executive e-mailed his buddies, asking “Where are all the customers? And where’s their money?”
The customers are at home, cold, broke, and hungry. Their money is gone, gobbled by taxes, rent, gas, utilities, and all the other sharks in line ahead of Walmart.
Any other questions?
Mar 4, 2013
The film Searching for Sugar Man won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The movie tells the story of a Detroit musician, Sixto Rodriguez. Rodriguez, the single name he goes by when performing, made a couple of records in the early 1970s that went nowhere on the American pop charts. Unbeknownst to Rodriguez, though, one of his albums, Cold Fact, was a huge hit elsewhere in the world, most notably in South Africa, where the rebellious lyrics of some of the songs on Cold Fact struck a chord among young white Afrikaners opposed to the oppression of black South Africans.
As a testament to the power of his music, attempts by the apartheid government to block it only served to raise the musician’s stature to mythical proportions. Rodriguez became as popular in South Africa as Elvis Presley was here.
The film explains how radio disc jockeys and music librarians discovered that the vinyl on their copies of the song “Sugar Man,” a song about a drug dealer in Detroit, had been secretly scratched, apparently by government agents, to prevent its being played.
Rodriguez was the victim, like so many blues and jazz musicians were before him, of the capitalist music industry. Royalties generated by the huge sales of his record disappeared in the finances of the record company of a former Motown executive.
Rodriguez went on to live as a construction worker, earning a living tearing down homes, raising a family in Detroit, and occasionally playing his music in bars around town.
Through the words of his daughters, Rodriguez is a worker who is proud of his class, who brought the rich culture and history of working class Detroit to them—with frequent trips to the libraries, museums, and the famous Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Museum of Art.
The film tells the story of how a couple of his fans abroad worked to solve the mystery of Rodriguez’s whereabouts from a reference to Dearborn, Michigan in his song, Inner City Blues. The film has given Rodriguez some long deserved recognition. Searching for Sugar Man still plays in some movie houses and is now available on DVD.
Mar 4, 2013
The Detroit News reported that nearly half of Detroit’s property owners did not pay their property taxes last year.
Big surprise! With all of the cuts in city services recently, Detroit residents get nothing for their tax money. One owner said it outright: “Why pay taxes? Why should I send them taxes when they aren’t supplying services? It is sickening.... Every time I see the tax bill come, I think about the times we called and nobody came.”
Not only that, but Detroit’s tax rate is the highest among big cities in the country. Many homes are assessed at more than ten times their market price! OF COURSE people aren’t paying their taxes!
If Detroit wants property tax money, maybe it should start with the corporations which have received hundreds of millions of dollars in tax BREAKS!
Mar 4, 2013
Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder has declared his intention to appoint an Emergency Financial Manager to take control of the city of Detroit. That move is disgusting, for many reasons.
The people of Michigan just voted in November NOT to accept an Emergency Financial Manager law. No sooner were the votes counted than the legislature passed another law just like the one the voters had rejected, giving an EFM the power to gut budgets, cut services, sell off assets and rewrite union contracts wherever the governor appoints one.
Before the ink was even dry on the new law, the governor decided to use it on the biggest city in the state, Detroit. So much for the illusion of democracy in Michigan!
Snyder declares that Detroit’s elected officials have wrecked the city’s finances. He’s right—but he doesn’t say how.
For decades, Detroit’s officials have handed billions of dollars worth of tax breaks, land, and wealth to major corporations like GM and wealthy real estate investors like Matty Moroun.
Then, when the budget slid increasingly into debt, officials borrowed money from the biggest of banks in “creative” financial deals that caused that debt to balloon: In 2002, Detroit’s debt was less than five billion dollars; in 2011, it had more than doubled to more than 10 billion; and now state officials put that amount at 14 billion! Thanks to the “creative” deals, all state revenue-sharing money to Detroit and all of Detroit’s casino taxes go to pay the banks—for the next 20 years.
Then, in order to keep bailing out big business and the banks, the city has been progressively cutting services like public lighting, buses, police and fire protection, EMS, and health centers and clinics, letting the city itself fall to pieces. They’ve made large sections of the city uninhabitable. They have imposed 10% wage cuts on city workers and begun layoffs.
Concerned with that 14 billion dollars owed to the banks, Snyder has appointed an Emergency Financial Manager to act as a dictator and dismantle the city even further, leaving the population with less than the nothing they already have.
It’s a criminal attack on the population that deserves every bit of push-back the workers of Detroit can muster.
There IS wealth to meet the needs of Detroit’s population, but it has systematically been handed over to the banks and corporations. That’s why workers need to insist to Snyder and the rest of the politicians: “The banks and the corporations are responsible for the city’s debts. Get the money from them! And if they won’t pay it, expropriate it!”
For a more detailed exposé of how the banks, corporations and politicians have strangled the city of Detroit, read the article in the latest issue of the Class Struggle magazine.