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
May 26, 2014
There has been a growing call to increase the minimum wage. Even President Obama and other Democrats jumped on the bandwagon, proposing to raise it to $10.10 an hour.
Of course, the Democrats would propose it now, when the Republicans control half of the Congress. They knew Republicans would refuse to sign on. The Republicans said it openly.
The Democrats have proposed something that won’t be passed–but it gives them a campaign issue in the 2014 election.
The Democrats, however, have to be judged by their actions, and not their election maneuvers. From 2009 to early 2011 when the Democrats controlled not only the White House, but also the U.S. Senate and the House, they might have used their absolute control to increase the minimum wage, which was abysmal.
The Democrats didn’t increase it.
Today, the value of the minimum wage has fallen far behind what it bought in 1968–a time when workers’ struggles were forcing the capitalist class to step back, to improve the workers’ standard of living, including the lowest paid.
If the minimum wage that existed in 1968, $1.60 an hour, had kept up with inflation, it would be $9.40 today. And if it had kept up with increases in worker productivity–that is the increase in the amount of goods and services we all produce with our labor–it would be set at $18.30 today.
Instead the minimum is only $7.25.
That is how much we have ceded to this voracious capitalist class by not fighting back. Not only have we not kept even with inflation; what’s worse, the capitalists have grabbed every bit of the increased productivity that our labor created and taken it for their own use. For their profits, for their own personal wealth, for speculation, for buying up and selling companies–for completely useless things.
We need a raise–all of us. Forget this nonsense about a “minimum wage.” Every one of us needs an adequate wage–that is, one that allows each of us and our families to have decent housing; good nutritious food to eat; attractive clothes; effective medical care; transportation; money for our children’s education and our own further education; money for vacation and relaxation.
The labor each of us puts out allows the whole society to move forward. We should have the benefit of it. Our wages should be set so they reflect the true value of what we all contribute to society.
And wages need to be regularly increased to protect them against the ravages of inflation. They need to be indexed–that is, set up to be increased automatically whenever the prices that we actually pay increase. It should be automatic. And they should be increased–or our hours of work decreased, with no loss of pay–to reflect the increases in productivity.
This is what should happen. But it’s not what will happen so long as we let the capitalist class have a free rein to make all the decisions.
There is no answer to the current trap we find ourselves in unless workers begin to fight again. Maybe very few people are fighting today. Certainly, no one is able to call out a real struggle of the working class. But at least the truth can be told: that working people will continue to be pushed backward until a new fight breaks out, until it spreads, until it brings the whole working class back to life.
What would it take for that to happen? Perhaps no one can say for sure. But we can say that since workers found the way before to fight, under more difficult circumstances, we can find the way today. What it will take is what it took in the 1930s and the 1960s, a desire to fight.
May 26, 2014
The 2013 average salary for a CEO of a health insurance firm was $584,000. For a hospital CEO, the average was $386,000. In 2012, the head of Aetna got a salary of $977,000–and a few stock options worth 36 million dollars!
By 2012, the average pay for the presidents at the 25 largest public universities in the U.S. was $974,000. Ohio State and the University of Michigan each paid their top executive more than five million dollars.
If their salaries sound like the chief executives of the major corporations, it’s because these public services have been turned into profit-making entities.
May 26, 2014
Baltimore’s mayor and city council once again gave John Paterakis a little “gift” from the taxpayers. This time, it was only $200,000–for utility work on property he owns in east Baltimore. But the city, with financial problems that caused it to cut back on fire stations and recreation centers, has already helped turn Paterakis into one of the biggest developers in the region.
Paterakis may have made his first millions from his family bakery after it became a major supplier of rolls for McDonalds. But he made much more money when he turned his eyes on “redeveloping” the area near his bakery, around the city’s harbor.
In 1999 the first city tax break went to Paterakis for the Waterfront Marriott hotel. That project cost the taxpayers about 30 million dollars in property taxes over the next 25 years. A former Paterakis executive is now developing the Harbor Point waterfront project. It is receiving hundreds of millions in tax breaks called PILOTs (payment in lieu of taxes) and TIFs (tax increment financing).
All that money, including this last $200,000 could have kept fire services open and provided more hours at the city’s rec centers. Among other things.
May 26, 2014
On May 14, George King died a week after being shot with a Taser by Baltimore cop Thomas Hodas. Hodas and another cop had responded to a call from Baltimore’s Good Samaritan Hospital when King apparently had an allergic reaction to a drug he had been administered and was struggling with staff members. Hodas shot King with his Taser from a distance. Then with his Taser set on maximum, Hodas thrust it into King and shocked him four more times. Hospital staff gave King a sedative, but he went into a coma that lasted until he died.
This murderous police violence has not gone unanswered. With friends, church members, and others, King’s mother publicly protested her son’s murder. “Police are supposed to protect and serve, and this is not protect and serve,” she said. With assistance from an NAACP lawyer, she has sued the police department.
Baltimore Police Chief Anthony Batts responded with contempt. He is allowing Officer Hodas to remain on active duty during the “investigation.” And he threatened that police might stop responding to calls from hospitals. A supporter of Taser use by police, he announced months ago a plan to equip all 3,000 Baltimore City cops with them.
A Taser is not a mild, innocent weapon. It can kill–and often does. And the cops who use them know it.
May 26, 2014
Fix L.A., a coalition of labor unions, recently reported that the City of Los Angeles handed over 204 million dollars in “fees” to Wall Street banks in 2013, while it budgeted only 163 million dollars to fix and maintain L.A. roads. That is, the city paid Wall Street banks more in fees than it allocated for a vital service.
These Wall Street fees are charged under various categories including investment management fees, bond issuance costs, remarketing fees, letters of credit, interest rate swap payments, securities lending income split fees, and natural gas swaps. Such a rich variety of fees with colorful titles show that Wall Street is very inventive in charging the city.
Some fees are undocumented since they involve deals with “private” firms and cannot be disclosed due to secrecy clauses in the contracts. Fix L.A. predicts that these hidden fees can easily be twice as much as the documented fees.
This is how Wall Street sucks the life out of the city. To pay for these schemers, the city has cut hundreds of millions of dollars from critical services. It stopped inspecting sewers, resulting in twice the number of sewer overflows. Most roads are not maintained or repaired. The city also cut its work force, and imposed pay freezes and cuts to pensions and health benefits. And, it has not restored any services it cut since the so-called recovery began.
Working people paid for all these services. But, we are not benefitting from what we paid for. The reason is that the city officials channel this money to Wall Street thanks to various financial set-ups.
Pick-pockets would be jealous of these Wall Street scam artists.
May 26, 2014
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently approved construction of a new jail, at a cost of two billion dollars, only to lock up mentally ill people behind bars.
Los Angeles currently jails around 4,000 mentally ill people. These inmates have no real patient care in the jail and are horribly treated. They are frequently abused, assaulted and raped. The beating of inmates by jail guards is rampant. Suicide rates among mentally ill people are high. And such horrible conditions further aggravate their mental disorders.
When the mentally ill are released into neighborhoods, there are almost no services, and they have little or no income. Most of them are arrested all over again and locked up in jail. As explained by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, who presided over criminal cases for more than 31 years, “These inmates cycle in and out of lockups, often for petty violations related to their mental illnesses.... Being incarcerated is likely to exacerbate mental health problems and to increase the likelihood that inmates will commit new crimes upon their release.”
The mentally ill, like any people with biological illnesses, need treatment in a caring social environment. They also need decent jobs to survive, like any normal human being. Incarcerating them is not a solution.
But, starting in the 1970s, all the states including California closed down most of the public mental hospitals, reduced the number of treatment programs, and dumped large numbers of the mentally ill onto the streets. Thus, what few services existed were almost totally eliminated or drastically reduced.
Today, throughout the country the number of mentally ill prison inmates is 10 times the number of mentally ill people hospitalized. Thus, the behavior caused by mental illness is criminalized, like it was centuries ago.
The County of Los Angeles’ decision to spend two billion dollars more to lock up the mentally ill in jail instead of to provide hospitalization shows that this is not about to change. In this capitalist society, mentally ill people who don’t have the money to pay for their own treatment are usually either on the street or in jail. That is how much capitalist society is taking us backward to a more barbaric society.
May 26, 2014
JPMorgan Chase claims it will “give” 100 million dollars to Detroit to help in its revitalization.
This is the same JP Morgan Chase directly implicated in the mortgage rip-offs that decimated large areas of some big cities. Detroit, in fact, lost one quarter of its population in the ten years after the mortgage scam started, as people were driven from their homes by predatory loans.
If Chase now wants to invest in Detroit’s “revitalization,” we can be sure that it has figured out how to make some more money out of Detroit’s misery.
May 26, 2014
Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced with much fanfare the construction of a new high school in Chicago: Obama College Prep. This, less than a year after Emanuel closed 50 schools in working class black neighborhoods of Chicago, supposedly to save money. And most neighborhood schools saw significant budget cuts this year. But suddenly there’s money for a new school–for downtown.
The new school will be a selective enrollment high school–so only students who test well will be admitted. And it will be located on the Near North Side, on the site of the mostly demolished Cabrini Green housing projects, where most of the black residents have been pushed out in the last 15 years. The school would be less than a mile from Walter Payton, another selective enrollment high school. Because of both testing and the neighborhood, the school will enroll more middle class students.
The money for the construction will come out of TIF funds, that is, property tax money that’s been diverted from the schools and other city services, to be used for the mayor’s pet projects.
Rahm wants this new school and Payton to try to attract more middle class people to live downtown. At the same time, by closing schools, he’s pushing poor black people out of the city. So we see Emanuel using the school system the way the capitalists are using the whole society–taking more from the working class, to turn around and give gifts to the wealthy.
May 26, 2014
The following is excerpted from a presentation made at a Spark meeting in Los Angeles, May 3, 2014.
California has been in the midst of a drought for three years now.
Some powerful forces are not letting this drought crisis go to waste, capitalizing on people’s fears to push through a massive waterworks project that will pump more water to Big Agriculture, driving up people’s water rates. It’s nothing but political theatrics, a scare backed by big agribusiness to justify a big water grab. At its core, it is a war for water waged by California’s super-rich on everyone else.
At the core of this water grab is the most expensive public works project in California’s history, Governor Jerry Brown’s water project that goes by the name the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. This plan is estimated to cost up to 67 billion dollars, including interest on the bonds that would finance construction costs.
The plan includes building two massive 35-mile water tunnels to move water from the Sacramento River Delta. The tunnels would stretch under the delta, redirecting water from the Sacramento River all the way south to the huge farms of the San Joaquin Valley and the cities of Southern California. Estimates are that the construction of the tunnels will add $10,000 onto the water bills of each household in southern California.
Once completed, the tunnels would have the capacity to drain nearly the entire flow of the Sacramento River during parts of the year. This would have catastrophic consequences. By reducing the amount of clean water flowing into the estuary from the Sacramento River, it would make the delta dirtier and saltier, and thus less hospitable to plants and wildlife, eventually destroying the largest estuary on the West Coast.
Certainly, demand for water is increasing. But not because of population growth. As it is, urban areas use less than 20% of the water in the state. And that amount has held pretty steady, despite population growth. In Los Angeles County, demand for water has actually been reduced significantly over the last couple of decades, despite the rising population, because of conservation measures. Instead, there is increasing demand for water coming from big agribusiness, which today uses nearly 80% of the water.
Agribusiness claims that it needs more water in order to be able to produce the fruit and produce consumed by the people of this country. And they blame the hike in food prices on the drought.
In fact, prices have gone up because the San Joaquin growers have been reducing the amount of vegetables they produce. Over the last 15 or 20 years, the growers have shifted away from vegetable crops, and toward fruit and nut crops—like almonds, pistachios and grapes.
The bottom line is that San Joaquin Valley farmers can make much more money growing almonds, mainly for export, than growing vegetables for domestic consumption.
California produces 80 per cent of the world’s almonds. That’s right, in the whole world. But growing almonds in an arid climate requires lots of water. And that’s one reason why farmers are looking to get more water.
The farms that stand to benefit the most from more water are the biggest farms. And the very biggest farmer is a Beverly Hills billionaire named Stewart Resnick. Stewart and his wife, Lynda, own Roll International Corporation, a private umbrella group that controls many companies. One of them is called Paramount Farms, and it is the largest farming company in America and the largest pistachio and almond producer in the world. The farm in the San Joaquin Valley encompasses 188 square miles of land, which is four times the size of the city of San Francisco. There they grow oranges, almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates; their Pom Wonderful juice launched the pomegranate superfood craze.
This liberal power couple raises huge amounts of money for the Democratic Party. They hobnob with Arianna Huffington and anti-global warming activists. They are major “philanthropists.” A new 54-million-dollar pavilion at the L.A. art museum is named after them.
But behind the scenes, their company, Roll International, is also the largest private water broker in the country. They control a powerful entity called the Kern County Water Bank—an underground water reservoir in the hottest, driest, southernmost edge of the Central Valley. Kern County Water Bank is like the Bank of America of water. It has a capacity that is so large, it would be enough to convert the entire state of Rhode Island into a swampland or to supply the city of Los Angeles with enough water for two years.
Back in the 1980s, the state of California spent more than 100 million dollars building this water bank. But in 1995, California’s Department of Water Resources suddenly, and without any public debate, transferred it to a band of corporate interests led by Roll International.
As a result, Roll International gets a practically unlimited supply of water. They save up water during years of heavy rain, buying the water at a price that is very low, because it is heavily subsidized by the federal and state governments. They may use that water partly for farming. But during years of drought, like right now, they sell the water to other farmers or cities at a price that is 10 or 20 times what they paid for it. This way they book an instant profit of tens of millions—and for doing absolutely nothing.
Now Roll International is buying up land near San Luis Obispo and is trying to convert another water bank in that area to their own private control. For that, they’ll need more water. All this business, it’s just a big scam, a rip-off—which is the reason why so much of this stuff is done in secret.
These kinds of scams have been a part of the development of the enormous system to transport and store water for the last century.
Today, there are two great systems that convey water from the northern parts of California down to the farms and cities in the south.
The biggest water system, the Central Valley Project, was built in the 1930s and is run by the federal government. It reaches from the Cascade Mountains near Redding in the north and goes some 500 miles to the Tehachapi Mountains near Bakersfield in the south. It is comprised of 20 dams and reservoirs, 11 powerplants, and 500 miles of major canals as well as conduits, tunnels, and related facilities. It supplies water to irrigate approximately one-third of the agricultural land in California.
When the Central Valley Project was started, government officials and farmers alike promised that the people who used the water would pay the construction costs—eventually.
But the big farmers get a lot of breaks. First farmers sign 25 to 50 year contracts for water. And then, what the farmers pay is based on how much it would cost to pay back their share of the cost of the construction over 50 years. They don’t pay any interest and there is no adjustment for inflation. And so, what they are paying back is based on the price of the construction in the 1930s, using 1930s prices. And even that they haven’t paid back—yet. Finally, the profits from the sale of hydroelectric power produced by the dams are used to reduce the cost of the water for the farmers. So, that’s a great big gift from taxpayers to these farmers. And that’s not including other agricultural subsidies that they get.
The second big water system is called the California State Water Project, and it is state run. This system was started in the late 1950s, as an extension of the Central Valley Project. The state project was the biggest construction project carried out by a state in U.S. history. It is made up of 21 dams and more than 700 miles of canals, pipelines and tunnels. The State Water Project delivers perhaps only about half the amount as the federal project, depending upon the year.
About 70 per cent of all its water goes to urban areas, and people in those cities pay almost the entire cost of the water for the entire system, including for the water that goes to the farmers.
Both these systems were not only costly to build, they are costly to run. Water has to be pumped over mountains. It also has to be pumped through the San Joaquin Valley, which slopes upward in its southern part. Much of the land lies several hundred feet above sea level. Pumping this water takes about 5 to 10 per cent of the all the electricity produced in the state.
These water projects are also very destructive to the environment. All the rivers and lakes from which they take the water in the north have been destroyed. Often, the salts that had been suspended in the water evaporate, poisoning the land around. The same goes for the farm land that is irrigated. Salts and chemicals, when irrigated, leach into the ground water or collect downstream.
Water for the population should be free, or almost free considering that it literally falls from the sky. But at a time when the liberal-sounding governor and his liberal-sounding state legislature say that there is no money for education, no money to fix the roads and the rest of the infrastructure, the state of California is embarking on a vast new project that will further bankrupt the people and the government, and destroy even more of the environment. Why?
Because water, in capitalist hands, is transmuted into gold.
May 26, 2014
In the early 1900s, when Los Angeles experienced its first drought, the city government went out and drained the water from the Owens River, 250 miles north, sending it to Los Angeles. This created an environmental disaster in the north, turning a lush valley into a hard-scrabbled and poisoned desert.
The construction of the aqueduct that took the water through the desert for hundreds of miles was an engineering marvel. No one had built anything so large across such a merciless terrain. But this engineering feat was tied up in one of the most lucrative real estate scams in this country’s history. Just before the city announced its water grab, the wealthiest capitalists in the city formed a syndicate that bought up the entire San Fernando Valley. These capitalists included the two owners of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler; Henry Huntington and Edward Harriman, two railroad magnates, and William Kerckhoff, a power company executive. Also included in the syndicate was Moses Sherman, a trolley company owner, who happened to sit on the board of the Department of Water and Power, and therefore was privy to all the Department’s decisions before they were made public. The group paid little to buy up the land in the San Fernando Valley before the water deal was announced.
Once the water was brought to Los Angeles, those so-called “developers” made huge profits, while they presided over the Valley’s metamorphosis from desert to agricultural cornucopia. They used the profits to constantly acquire more land, extending development. They used the proceeds from these sales to assemble the third largest land empire in the history of the state, the 300,000 acre Tejon Ranch, straddling Los Angeles and Kern Counties.
“Development” in the hands of capitalists means only deprivation of the many for the profit of a very tiny well-connected few.
May 26, 2014
This was translated from an article appearing in the May 23rd, 2014 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
According to the official figures, 301 workers died in the mining accident in the Soma coal mines in Turkey on May 14th. Four days after the initial explosion, Alp Gürkan, owner of the conglomerate that rents the mine from the government in exchange for regular royalty payments, held a press conference with three managers.
At the conference, they said: “We still do not know how the accident happened. There is no negligence of ours in this incident.” The bosses, for whom workers are no more than simple tools of production, have the nerve to say: they know nothing, only that they are not to blame.
These workers died as a direct result of the conditions under which they make profits for the bosses. The miners had issued many clear warnings in the days before the accident. There was every indication that the managers pushed beyond the limits of safety. Instead of taking the necessary precautions, these bosses forced the workers to continue production. They even introduced new methods of work organization under the pretext that production was not fast enough. While the amount of coal dust continued to grow, the operators injected ever greater amounts of oxygen into the mine. All that was needed to set it off was a spark, which inevitably happened, causing the catastrophic loss of life.
In the earliest days after the explosion, the politicians and the supposed experts all declared that the mine was among the best, most modern, and safest, though since then, they have changed their story somewhat to add that this was not the case for some of the smaller subcontractors involved. The shameless bosses even showed the media the pitiful changing rooms they offer to the workers, daring to declare that they resemble “luxury hotels.”
The miners’ friends and loved ones waited for days at the entrance to the mine or at the hospital doors. The surviving miners showed their anger in protests. The government’s only response was repression—police fired on them with water cannons, and arrested some. However, Alp Gürkan continues to walk around as freely as before, as if nothing had ever happened! (Meanwhile three of his managers were detained.)
Of course—he’s the boss, a boss who, at the same time that the workers were dying in the mines, met with the government ministers who saw no problem in clearing him of all responsibility. He knows that the politicians, the laws, and the government with its police and all its officials work for him and others like him. These capitalists have thousands of ties with the highest government figures and with the most important politicians. Gürkan is simply among those who can smile to themselves and say “It’s all mine,” when thinking of workers’ lives and of the wealth accumulated from their sweat.
Even for work as hard and dangerous as mining, these bosses are contemptuous of human life. They only take measures to boost productivity. Two years earlier, these same bosses changed the so-called “Law on Workers’ Health and Safety” to the “Law on Workplace Health and Safety.” The government was giving the bosses a law better corresponding to their wishes, and the government has even bragged a great deal about knowing how to work with the bosses’ representatives. It speaks the truth.
The wealth that 5,000 miners produced under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions can end up in the hands of just one man, and he can use it according to his wishes—that is the logic of this system. If the workers’ voices had been heard, this money could have gone toward assuring their safety and protecting their health. Instead, this boss used it to build a skyscraper in Maslak, a wealthy neighborhood in Istanbul. This skyscraper is so luxurious that the money used to build just one of its floors would have been enough to save the lives of all the miners. This society grants him the right to do exactly that. And this is why what happened in the Soma mine on May 14th was no accident. It was a crime, plain and simple.
May 26, 2014
After 40 veterans in Phoenix died waiting for treatment from the VA, the politicians have “discovered” that wait times at VA hospitals are extremely long and that hospital bureaucrats have been cooking the books to make wait times seem shorter. Obama announced that “If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it.” Republicans want to launch an “investigation.”
What lying hypocrites! For many years, veterans’ groups have been saying that wait times for care at VA hospitals are outrageously long, that the hospitals are understaffed, and that there aren’t enough services especially for soldiers suffering from brain injuries and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In 2010, for instance, Iraq Veterans Against the War pointed out that “Because the military is desperate for warm bodies in the field, and the VA doesn’t have the resources to serve all those in need, too often service members are conveniently denied care....”
In 2012, the government’s own inspector general found that fewer than half of the veterans needing a full mental health exam got one within the required 14 days, and most waited about 50 days. All the while 22 veterans were committing suicide every day.
Back in 2007, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center was closed after the Washington Post publicized its systematic neglect of patients. After that scandal broke, the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs promised to fix the problem and give veterans the care they were promised.
But of course, they didn’t fix the problem, which is that the politicians underfund the VA health care system so much that it cannot provide decent care.
Soldiers are promised free healthcare for life, but the reality is that the politicians want them only as temporary cannon fodder. From the perspective of the politicians and the corporations they serve, spending on health care for veterans is a waste, because the veterans have already played their role for U.S. imperialism. The enormous military budget which is dedicated to protecting the looting of the world carried out by US corporations has no room in it for veterans’ healthcare.
May 26, 2014
Nearly a thousand Detroiters turned out for a memorial tribute to General Gordon Baker Jr., a black militant and opponent of U.S. wars, a long-time Detroit trade union activist and community organizer, among other things. He had died May 18, after a lingering illness.
From the time he was a young man, he stood up to power in this country, refusing to be inducted into the army in 1965 and helping to organize wildcat strikes at Chrysler Corporation. Those strikes targeted not only a company that long refused to hire black workers into anything but the dirtiest or most menial of jobs, but also targeted the leadership of the UAW, which in a clear way, despite its liberal veneer, demonstrated a racist disregard for the problems facing black workers.
He was arrested a number of times: from the time in 1963, when he booed during the national anthem to protest the refusal of the Detroit City Council to pass an open housing ordinance–for which he was acquitted–up to his participation on the picket lines of the Detroit newspaper strike in the mid-1990s. And he was fired several times for leading actions against company policies, from Dodge Main in 1968, and from Ford.
The letter he sent to the draft board in 1965 was a clear denunciation of U.S. policies around the world, and at the same time, it showed his refusal to give in to the government threats to jail him.
“How could you have the NERVE [to ask if I am qualified for military service] knowing that I am a black man living under the scope and influence of America’s racist, decadent society??? You did not ask if I had any morals, principles, or basic human values by which to live. Yet, you ask if I am qualified. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT, might I ask? What does being ‘Qualified’ mean: qualified to serve in the U.S. Army? . . . To be further brainwashed into the insidious notion of ‘defending freedom’?
“You stand before me with the dried blood of Patrice Lumumba on your hands, the blood of defenseless Panamanian students, shot down by U.S. marines . . . the blood of defenseless women and children burned in villages [in Viet Nam] from Napalm jelly bombs. . . With all of this blood of my non-white brothers dripping from your fangs, you have the damned AUDACITY to ask me if I am ‘qualified.’ White man, listen to me for I am talking to you!”
Instead of putting him on trial, the government declared him a “security risk” and refused to draft him!
Over the years, he was responsible for the formation of several different political organizations, some clearly nationalist, others on a communist basis, but usually aimed at what he had called the point of production. He ran for elected office–in 1976 as a Communist Labor Party candidate for the Michigan House, but two years later as a Democrat for the same position.
He had been chairman of the Coke Ovens unit in UAW Local 600, and known widely for his defense of workers who sought to fight.
Over the years, his broad political views, including on the UAW, may have shifted, but his commitment to black workers, and more generally to the working class never did.
His passing leaves a big hole in Detroit.