the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Aug 5, 2013
The essential aim of the Detroit bankruptcy is to cut the pensions of city workers already retired and to eliminate the city’s obligation to cover their medical costs.
Yes, Detroit’s finances are a disaster. Yes, the situation for the population is catastrophic. And, yes, Detroit is using the catastrophe its population is living through as the pretext to strip former city workers of the retirement they earned through long years of work.
But no one should believe that the attack on public sector retirees will be restricted only to Detroit. Detroit is simply the battering ram, setting a precedent to be used against all public sector workers.
Detroit had underfunded its pension trust by 3.5 billion dollars. Other cities are in worse shape. A study by the Pew Research Center shows that the 61 largest cities in the country owed 217 billion dollars toward their retiree pensions in 2011. In fact, the actual amount–once all the “creative” book-keeping is removed from city balance sheets–totals up to almost 650 billion dollars owed.
States’ debt to their retirees is even worse–they’ve shorted their pension accounts by 1.4 billion dollars (or four billion under new, more accurate accounting rules).
The State of Michigan, which pushed Detroit into this bankruptcy, actually has a greater share of its pension costs underfunded than does Detroit!
Legally, cities and states don’t have to go into bankruptcy court to junk pensions and retiree health care. They don’t need an “emergency financial manager” to push it through. Nothing guarantees public sector workers that they will have a pension when they retire; nothing guarantees them that pensions will continue to be there after they retire.
Guarantees? What guarantees? Union contracts? They come to an end every three years. Legislation or constitutional guarantees? The Michigan Court of Appeals effectively tore that up in Detroit’s case–the constitutional guarantee is only a “policy statement.”
There is no Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation for public sector workers, only the promises made by cities and states, that their workers would have a pension and health care for life. But the Supreme Court has already ruled in a case involving GM salaried workers that such a promise, even when put in writing, does not have the same weight as a “proper contract.”
There is no guarantee, only the willingness of cities and states to live up to their promises. Willing? Just how willing are those cities and states, which have systematically underfunded their pensions, while passing out tax breaks and subsidies to big corporations?
Every tax break given to a corporation was paid for by a chunk out of some public sector worker’s pension, out of their future health care. As you watch the courts tear up promises made to generations of workers in Detroit, know that you are watching your own future.
The problem of pension underfunding is not too many retirees and too few active workers. The pensions shouldn’t be underfunded. Period. They should have been paid for all along. The funding for them was part of the wage bill that cities and states agreed to years ago. If they didn’t fund those pensions it’s because they were giving the money away to Big Business.
Well, it’s time they got that money back. It shouldn’t come from the active workers. It shouldn’t come from the population of cities, counties and states. It should come from those who got the money, year after year: Big Business.
Workers in Detroit know who got money from the city, they know about all those big companies and all those petty real estate speculators who have been living large off the city’s buck. The city workers’ aim, just like the population’s aim, should be to get those bucks back.
Today, the wealthy are holding hostage the pensions of all workers. Well, take over and hold the buildings of GM, Ford, Chrysler and the little rats who scurry along behind them–take the buildings hostage, hold them. Make it clear that business as usual is not going to go on any more. Not in Detroit, not in any city in the country.
Aug 5, 2013
The other shoe has dropped. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school board announced an additional 2,100 layoffs, including more than a thousand teachers. This comes on the heels of the 850 layoffs from closing fifty schools.
The 65 million dollars thus “saved” on the schools will be available for TIF districts, that is, areas where a portion of the property taxes are diverted into “development funds” controlled by the mayor, handed over to business. More than 200 million dollars of money earmarked for schools is thus diverted from the schools every year!
In other words, Emanuel is stealing still more money to give away to business.
Hundreds of teachers rallied at July’s Board of Education Meeting. Many parents, students and teachers addressed the board, pointing repeatedly to the TIF money pot and the mayor’s misplaced priorities.
In protest, 73 of city’s Local School Councils have rejected the budgets sent them by the Board of Education. Local School Councils represent most public schools; they are elected, and include a school’s principal, parents, and community members. They are right to raise a stink–because this deal smells.
Aug 5, 2013
Michigan’s Governor Snyder says education funding has increased under his watch. This is a lie.
He fails to mention the ONE BILLION DOLLAR CUT to education funding he pushed through in his first year in office. At the rate he has been “increasing” education spending over the last three years, it will take until 2021 before funding might FINALLY crawl back up to the level it HAD been at when Snyder first took office!
No wonder 20 percent of the state’s public school districts are in deficit!
Aug 5, 2013
“Downtown Becomes Boom Town.”
“Teens in T-shirts Clean Up Detroit.”
“Thousands of Volunteers to Clean Up the Neighborhoods.”
The Detroit newspaper headlines would make a poor soul jump for joy ... things are so much better! But then comes the question that keeps going unanswered: “What about my neighborhood?”
What about the hundreds of real Detroit neighborhoods where homeowners get no assistance from anybody, no volunteers in matching T-shirts, and no dollars from the banks or the city or the state?
Why if our neighborhoods could get some real financial assistance, we’d fix them up ourselves! Detroit has enough unemployed builders, painters, steelworkers, landscapers, you name it, workers to do the job (the ones who built Detroit in the first place, remember?). And we’d even have a few bucks left over for some matching T-shirts!
P.S., 10% wage cuts against police and firefighters and chopping pensions surely won’t help us keep our neighborhoods in better repair!
Aug 5, 2013
The new plan for the Ilitch Hockey arena is that the City of Detroit will own it. This will cut down on the amount of taxes the wealthy Ilitch family will owe.
State workers wonder: How can the City of Detroit afford to own that new hockey arena when they just went into bankruptcy?
The politicians are bailing out the Ilitch family and not the city. It’s a crying shame.
They do what they want for who they want.
Aug 5, 2013
Caterpillar’s profits for the three months ending in June were 960 million dollars. Over the last year, Cat’s profits were a high 10% of its stockholders’ investment. Cat CEO Doug Oberhelman recently told Business Week, “We can never make enough profit.” But this means always getting it at the expense of Cat workers, who are suffering from contracts with years of no wage increases.
Aug 5, 2013
People in Washington, D.C. are noticing hundreds of lamps lighting the scaffolding over the Washington Monument at night. This expensive show is part of a fifteen million dollar deal to repair damage from the 2011 earthquake. You could think the parks have survived the recession.
But 10% of the Mall’s maintenance positions are vacant and will not be filled. The free concerts at Fort Dupont and Carter Barron are being cut to only five total this summer, down by ten from last year. The National Arboretum is closed Tuesday through Thursday.
These cuts are part of 183 million dollars slashed from the federal National Parks Service budget in 2013. Nationally there are 900 fewer full time parks workers and 1,000 fewer seasonal workers, and less money for travel, supplies, and equipment.
All those pricey lights downtown don’t make up for these brutal cuts in services and jobs.
Aug 5, 2013
The tentative contract covering 225,000 UPS workers nationally but not in Chicago was voted down, as workers voted NO on 18 regional and local supplements. The union’s international constitution requires all of them to be ratified for the contract to go into effect. The proposed contract doesn’t deal with low part-time wages, harassment, and forced overtime for drivers. And it would shift a lot of health care costs onto workers.
Good for the workers who voted NO. It can be the first step in fighting to get what workers need.
Aug 5, 2013
At the end of July, the U.S. Senate was patting itself on the back for resolving the dispute over how much college students would pay for loans.
At first, Congress threatened to double the rate students would pay, going from 3.4% on student loans to 6.8%. Then they proposed 3.8% on loans–as if they were giving students a gift. The reality is that the current rate is tied to the “market,” meaning when bank interest rates rise, the cost of the loans will also go up. In fact, the cost of loans could go as high as 8.25% for undergraduates and 10.5% for graduate students.
These changing loan rates are just like the mortgage scam being played out 5five or ten years ago–the changes benefit the banks, not the person owing money. The average student debt in 2012 was $28,720 and whether a student gets a job after college or doesn’t, or even if a student goes bankrupt–the college loan MUST be paid back.
That’s what Congress really has done to students today. And why? Because it is profitable for the U.S. government. Last year the government gained more than 50 BILLION dollars in profit from all student loans–higher than the profits of ExxonMobil.
These loan profits go straight to the wealthiest–in the form of tax breaks given by both the Bush and Obama administrations as they rip off the student population.
Aug 5, 2013
Russia has just granted asylum for one year to Edward Snowden, who exposed the vast network of domestic spying carried out by the U.S. government against the American people.
The secret documents provided by Snowden to journalist and human rights advocate, Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that the government collects ALL private communications by telephone and internet–of the ENTIRE population in the U.S. and most of the rest of the planet.
For almost 12 years, the U.S. government has put through one repressive law after another, using the 9-11 terrorist attacks as justification. For years, large parts of the population seemed blind to what was happening. The Snowden documents finally seem to have blasted through this vast propaganda machine. Recent polls show that a majority see Snowden as a whistle-blower, not a traitor.
That explains why Congress suddenly became defenders of “civil liberties.” The House of Representatives nearly passed an amendment to de-fund the bulk collection of data by the National Security Agency. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, the arch-reactionary Republican who was one of the sponsors of the Patriot Act, said he wanted to rein in surveillance programs set up by that act. Even Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the strongest backers of these repressive police powers, now says she might accept some changes.
No one should have illusions about any “reforms” that Congress might soon pass. They are the ones who pushed the reactionary policies through in the first place.
As for the Obama administration, it continues to pursue Edward Snowden to the ends of the earth. Their vicious actions prove the basic mission of the NSA and other spy agencies used against the American population has not changed.
Aug 5, 2013
Private Bradley Manning received numerous guilty verdicts in his espionage trial for releasing military documents and videos to WikiLeaks. He was found not guilty on the most serious charge, “aiding the enemy,” which carried an automatic life sentence. But the sentences on the multiple other charges could still add up to 136 years.
Manning simply published the truth about what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world–in the government’s own words and images.
But that’s exactly what these murderers in the government do not want to get out: the truth about the atrocities and murders they’ve committed around the world. They’ll seek to punish anyone who exposes that truth.
Aug 5, 2013
The United Nations counted more than 1,000 people killed in Iraq in July. They were mostly civilians. It was the worst month for violent deaths since April of 2008.
The U.S. war on Iraq was false, fraudulent from the start. Iraq was not involved in 9/11. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. There were no babies thrown from cribs and murdered. There were absolutely no plans whatever for U.S. intervention to improve the country in any way. There were only plans to break down this Mideast power, to fragment it and weaken it. Weaken it so that the U.S. and other imperialisms could divide and rule easily. Weaken it so that Western oil companies could have easy pickings in the end.
Now those plans have come to fruition. Sectarian and tribal forces cut each other to pieces in a life-and-death struggle for tiny pieces of land, oil, and power. The oil companies have their contracts and their guarded pipelines. The population, which in 2003 greeted the toppling of Saddam Hussein with such joy, now cowers in its homes, afraid to go out.
In the very capital, Baghdad, a man said: “You go to the café, you get killed. You go to your car, you get killed. You go to the supermarket, you get killed.”
In that same capital, a U.S. staffer told a reporter, “All the embassy is interested in is packing up and getting out.” Yes. Pack up and get out. Mission accomplished!
Aug 5, 2013
This article is translated from the July 6 issue of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of comrades in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean.
The terrible tragedy in Tabanon in Guadeloupe at the end of June profoundly moved the people of Martinique and Guadeloupe. A man killed six people in his family, his wife, two children, two uncles and his cousin. The reason he did it is unclear. But this family tragedy occurred in the context of increased violence on the island that is stirring up discussions and questions.
Some days ago, a young man was killed in cold blood while leaving a night club, for simply approaching a young woman. Almost every day there is an armed robbery in Guadeloupe. There are fewer in Martinique, but in both islands the number of violent acts is growing. Murderous violence directed against women really stands out.
Certainly, this violence isn’t always of the same kind. There is a difference between armed robbery and a family tragedy. But what they have in common is how commonplace the risk of loss of life and the loss of life itself have become. Is life itself so trivial that one can lose it and people do lose it so easily? We have to believe that for many the answer is, yes.
As for juvenile crime, there’s no reason to give a complicated explanation to find its major causes: unemployment, poverty, the lack of prospects.
As for the Tabanon murder, confusion and moral distress were causes of this crazy act.
But in any case, we find ourselves faced with a moral crisis in which the current society is incapable of providing a response and remedy. It’s completely understandable that a sick society—based on inequality, unemployment, selfishness and increased individualism—produces sick and psychologically damaged individuals.
We’ve seen and heard politicians speak with a serious face about the tragedy. But these same people are part of this rotten system that constantly throws more people into distress. Some said there should be reinforced patrols, radar on the sea to surprise drug or human traffickers. But the Tabanon tragedy wouldn’t have been prevented by more police.
Against such a tragedy, when a man in distress has lost his mind, another remedy is needed. It means changing life, making it sufficiently rich that it’s enough to provide for everyone’s happiness. For tragedies like Tabanon are also the expression of a more general social demoralization that will only worsen if there is no radical change.
What is striking about the succession of violent acts is the actual trivialization of death and of life also!
In order to give everyone the feeling that life is worth the trouble of being lived, material conditions have to change. But that will only be possible in the framework of another type of society founded, not on the domination of a minority of profiteers over the great majority of people, but on the priority of satisfying the needs of this majority. Fighting collectively together for this change would be the first step in this change!
This is the battle of those who fight for another society, which will favor the material and intellectual flourishing of everyone. This is the fight of revolutionary militants. It is our fight at Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight).
Aug 5, 2013
This article is from the July 26th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
On July 11th, about ten days after the beginning of winter vacations in Brazil and the end of the great demonstrations of June against the high price of transit fares, the union federations called for a day of struggle with strikes and demonstrations.
There was a widespread response to this appeal. There were several million strikers, not only public workers. And more than 80 freeways and major highways were blocked. The port of Santos, the most important in Latin America, was paralyzed, as also was the industrial complex and port of Suape with 75,000 workers in the state of Pernambuco. The movement also affected oil refineries, big construction sites and auto factories, like Ford and Volvo.
There was a true general strike in some big cities, in particular in public transit, in Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre. In the latter city, a day earlier students occupied the city council buildings. At the end of a week, two bills were introduced, one setting up free bus service for students and the unemployed, the other opening city transit accounts to inspection. These bills still have to be voted on, but the mobilization continues for completely free transit in the city.
This day of struggle, which was the most important in 20 years, marked the return to the scene of the working class. But the demands of the union federations are diverse and in general modest. So the CUT (Unified Workers Central), linked to the Workers Party and the current administration, remains vague and advocates a “dialogue with society.” Força Sindical (Union Force), linked to the right wing opposition parties, calls for economic change and a struggle against inflation. These federations above all remind everyone that they are present. They called for a new day mobilization on August 30th, indicating again that it wasn’t a call for a general strike.
The federal government had trouble tackling the problem. President Dilma Rousseff, whose popularity in June fell in the polls from 60% to 30%, proposed only the reform of the election system and party financing. She said she wanted more stable presidential majorities (some thirty parties are present in the Brazilian parliament.) Her proposals were rejected by the parties she bases herself on, which are the product of this electoral system and are fed by dubious financing. Now, she speaks of resolving the problems of health, but above all it seems she wants to cure her own popularity, one year before the presidential election in October 2014.
Some people, in the Workers Party and in the country, hope for the return of Lula. The former unionist led the country from 2003 to 2010 in a long period of economic prosperity. His popularity is intact and he enjoys it, remarking good-naturedly that the recent mobilizations were the result of the economic success of the country and that it was natural for more of the better educated youth to demand better conditions of life.
The economic and social situation of the country doesn’t depend on the talent or the mistakes of its government. Dilma Rousseff enjoyed a popularity almost equal to that of Lula, up until the transit crisis in June. It seems that the world crisis is hitting Brazil hard, and that the working class will need to mobilize to refuse to pay the price for it.
Aug 5, 2013
Masao Yoshida, the former head of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, died on July 9.
In March 2011, three reactors at Fukushima suffered meltdowns after a massive earthquake and tsunami. Yoshida led the initial effort to cool down the reactors. The workers who stayed in the plant in those days were exposed to high levels of radiation. In December 2011, nine months after the disaster, Yoshida quit because of illness–cancer of the esophagus in the throat, which eventually killed him.
Officials of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, denied that Yoshida’s illness was caused by radiation. They dared to say that he may have gotten the cancer from smoking!
But who can believe a word of these TEPCO executives anyway? To this day, they have not admitted their own responsibility in the disaster. They still try to hide the true extent of the radioactivity leaking from the plant.
It was these same TEPCO bosses who ordered Yoshida not to use sea water to cool down the overheating reactors, because they said it would make the reactors unusable. Yoshida disobeyed–which experts believe prevented more explosions, and an even bigger radioactive disaster.
Unlike his bosses, Yoshida took some responsibility for the disaster. For example, he apologized for not raising the plant’s tsunami walls when he was the head of the plant (for less than a year in the plant’s 40-year history, by the way). Yoshida also risked his own life to help limit the effects of the disaster. So did hundreds of workers, who stayed at the plant to cool it down and clean it up. How many of them have gotten ill, and perhaps died? And how many thousands, perhaps millions, of people in Japan are suffering the effects of severe radiation?
We don’t know, because those who would have this kind of information, TEPCO executives and government officials who protect them, continue to hide it. They continue to put TEPCO’s interests above the interests of the population–endangering the health, and lives, of millions of people.
Aug 5, 2013
Thousands of California prisoners are participating in a hunger strike and refusing to work to protest against solitary confinement and other inhumane conditions. This is the third time California prisoners have done so, following two such strikes in 2011.
The hunger strike has wide support, with an estimated 30,000 of the state’s roughly 120,000 prisoners taking part when the strike began on June 8. By July 11, more than 12,000 had skipped at least nine consecutive meals, prison officials’ definition of a hunger strike. As of July 18, more than 2,000 were still participating, according to inmates’ lawyers and relatives, despite severe retaliation by prison officials and guards.
The prisoners are again demanding an end to arbitrarily being assigned to “Special Housing Units” (SHUs) despite no charges being filed against them. SHUs are small windowless, soundproof cells in which prisoners are kept for over 22 hours per day. They can leave their cells only for a lonely 90-minute break in barren exercise pens. They can rarely see or talk to other human beings and have very limited access to visitors. They eat their meals in their cells, have nothing to do to fill their time and no means to actually get out of these barbarous conditions.
Many are kept in isolation for years. At the “supermax” Pelican Bay, the average length in isolation for the prison’s 1,111 inmates is 6.8 years, state prison officials said in 2011. Some have been isolated for more than 20 years.
Such isolation degrades the human mind and body. It is nothing but torture—inflicted on inmates by prison officials.
After the 2011 strikes, California prison officials promised changes, but prisoners’ advocates say nothing has changed. Statewide, the number of prisoners in SHUs has actually increased by 15% in the past year to 4,257, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Prison officials are responding to the current strike by retaliating against the strikers. They moved 14 leaders from SHUs to “administrative segregation,” an even more complete form of isolation. They are blasting cold air into prisoners’ cells, confiscating confidential legal documents, and in one case, banned a lawyer who was a member of the mediation team, Marilyn McMahon, from state jails.
Crime, which put many of the hunger strikers in prison, is the inevitable outcome of a capitalist system unable to provide a decent life to all its members. The conditions that exist inside these prisons simply mirror the viciousness of the capitalist system magnified a hundred times. And California prison officials continue to demonstrate the emptiness of their “promises,” exactly what one would expect from people who impose torture on a daily basis. Stop the torture of prisoners!
Aug 5, 2013
Daniel Taylor was just released from prison, exonerated after spending 20 years in prison for a double murder police knew he couldn’t have committed–because he was in police custody when it happened! Taylor was a 17-year-old black teenager when Chicago police arrested him for a double murder in 1992 and coerced him into signing a confession, even though they had records showing he had been in custody on a disorderly conduct charge at the time.
“The level of trickery that they used at the police station with a 17-year-old with a 2nd grade education was beyond me at the time,” Taylor said, describing being handcuffed to a wall and beaten until he confessed.
Taylor is certainly not alone. He is the 90th person exonerated in Cook County since 1989, and the 34th proven to have been wrongfully convicted because of a false “confession.”
No cop or prosecutor will be charged with kidnapping this teenager off the street and locking him away for 20 years. Deon Patrick, convicted of the same crime as Taylor, remains locked up, even though his prosecution was linked in detail to Taylor’s, and Taylor’s innocence proves Patrick’s confession is also false. And hundreds if not thousands more young men from Chicago, mostly poor and black or Hispanic, undoubtedly rot in prison or have felony convictions that make it almost impossible to get a job because of similarly coerced confessions.
Taylor’s 20 years in prison and Patrick’s continued imprisonment show once again that the “criminal justice” system in Chicago is criminal itself, and has nothing to do with justice.
Aug 5, 2013
The media, trying to find an excuse for the outrageous acquittal of George Zimmerman, explain that the reactionary Florida “Stand Your Ground” law made it impossible to convict Zimmerman.
That’s certainly what the local prosecutors said when they first refused to put Zimmerman on trial, and what the police said when they didn’t arrest him. It’s also what several of the jurors said in justifying their acquittal.
All of them–all of these whites and Hispanics–agreed that race was not an issue, not in the murder, not in the acquittal.
What bullshit!
If the case really had been decided based on Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, Zimmerman would have been convicted. Because the person to whom that law applied should have been Trayvon Martin. He was the one who was stalked, followed through his own father’s neighborhood. He was the one threatened by a man with a gun.
Yet, none of the jurors thought the law supported Trayvon Martin, only Zimmerman. They actually believed that an unarmed young black teenager was a danger to a much larger, older white man carrying a gun.
They turned the victim into the threat, the murderer into the victim.
It’s a perfect example of the racism that widely pervades this society, so widely that every young black man knows there is a risk when he’s in the street in the midst of whites.
Most whites and Hispanics may believe they aren’t racist–maybe so. But like the jurors who wanted to convict, but didn’t have the backbone to do it, how many of them fail to stand up to the whites who are racist?
No “apology” afterwards makes up for that enormous deficiency.
Aug 5, 2013
Fruitvale Station is based on the fatal shooting of an unarmed 22-year-old black man in Oakland, California in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009.
The movie opens with images many of us may remember: the actual shaky cellphone footage of Oscar Grant’s encounter with the Oakland transit police who had detained him and some of his friends after an altercation on the train. The director, Ryan Coogler, then cuts to the beginning of the previous day (December 31, 2008) to show us Oscar Grant’s last day. (He is played by The Wire’s Michael B. Jordan.)
We are presented with a complex and contradictory person. Fun, loving, compassionate and quick-tempered. We learn that Grant is the father of four-year-old Tatiana who he adores. We learn he was incarcerated for drug dealing. We also see him trying to turn his life around. He struggles to get and keep a legal job.
At one point when Grant is buying seafood for his mother’s birthday party, there is a white woman in the store. She is attempting to buy fish for her boyfriend’s fish fry. She is totally clueless. So Grant offers to help her. She is uncomfortable and moves slightly away from him. She sees a young black man in a hoodie and baggie pants and her initial reaction is fear. That changes quickly as Grant hands her his cellphone so his grandma can tell her everything she needs to know about frying fish.
Racial profiling goes on all the time. It can be subtle like the white woman in the store. Or it can be deadly as all the Oscar Grants and Trayvon Martins know. And everything in between.
When the movie arrives at the platform we are outraged by the behavior of the police, not the group of friends. In fact, the bystanders are so outraged by the police treatment of the young black men that many have pulled out their cellphones to record and document the incident. The cop that shot Grant in the back while face down on the platform and restrained by fellow cops, claims he thought it was his taser. Liar. He can’t tell the difference between a gun and a taser?!
In the movie one of Grant’s friends said it best: “They shot Oscar for no reason.”
Released just weeks after the not guilty verdict in Trayvon Martin’s murder trial, this must-see-movie raises similar issues of racism and racial profiling, of the history and experience of young black men in a still racist society.
Aug 5, 2013
In the middle of July, a 44-year-old black man was pulled out of his car by the police in a traffic stop. The man ended up dead, with the police claiming they stopped him because they suspected the man had drugs in his socks. And we are supposed to believe the man’s socks were seen by the police pulling him over?
A long-time friend of West’s said it best, “I know he was profiled. A black guy with dreadlocks in a Mercedes-Benz–he must be selling drugs.”
Family and friends protested at a candlelight vigil, asking witnesses to come forward to dispute what the police have implied. Police have said they are waiting for autopsy results, but as one angry protester said, “You know what’s not complete? The cover-up that’s being orchestrated by the police and state’s attorney.”
The police dragged out a conviction used against West from 13 years ago! They are trying to ruin his character after ending his life.