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
Jun 9, 2014
Last week, Michigan’s state senate, Governor Snyder and Detroit’s city council all signed off on the so-called “Grand Bargain” bankruptcy deal for the city. Now pressure is being placed on city workers and retirees to accept cuts to their pensions.
The state legislature passed, and the governor signed, a package of 9 bills designating 195 million dollars to the city, while setting up a board to oversee the city’s finances for at least thirteen years. In addition, the Detroit Art Institute (DIA) and charitable groups have pledged money–spread out over twenty years. And this money may never arrive. It’s a pledge, a promise.
Within days of this deal, the city council okayed the transfer of all DIA assets–valued at BILLIONS of dollars–to a private foundation. What a bargain!
Politicians say all of these contributions–a fraction of what the pension funds are owed–somehow make it fair for general retirees to agree to cut their pensions by 4.5%. This “bargain” somehow makes it fair to get rid of future Cost of Living adjustments–meaning further cuts of several percent every year in the future as prices rise.
About 32,000 city workers and retirees received ballots in mid-May; they have until July 11 to vote on this pension proposal. They are being told that if they vote No, the whole “grand bargain” will be tossed out–and they might get their pensions cut by 27% or more.
This is blackmail!
Why should workers be robbed of even a penny from their pensions? They paid into it! THEY didn’t create Detroit’s debt in the first place! EVERY bit of their pensions should remain!
But the politicians–and the banks they REALLY represent–can’t help but slaver at the sight of 3.5 billion dollars in pension money that they want to grab hold of.
Workers and retirees are told it’s only fair to vote to cut themselves; that other “creditors”–the banks–are also taking a hit. THOSE creditors should get NOTHING. They created the financial instruments draining the city of all its resources, and continue to pocket the profits. In fact, this whole bankruptcy “grand bargain” is really designed to keep paying them, not protect the pensions. All the money pledged from the state, charities and DIA will eventually go to the banks. And if the pensioners agree to the deal, they will also be agreeing to eventually hand their pensions to the banks.
One of the bills passed last week sets up an “investment committee” to oversee the Detroit pension funds. Once that committee gets its hand on those funds, there will be no limit to how much will be swallowed by the banks. Four percent today? More and more tomorrow!
This is no bargain for the workers. This is a great big rotten package designed to convince Detroit retirees and workers to vote to screw themselves.
If they do, it will be a big game of dominoes: get Detroit workers and retirees to fall, and the capitalists, who are the ones benefitting right now in Detroit, will try to see what other groups of workers they can knock down behind them.
It’s in the interest of EVERY group of workers to keep that first domino from falling.
Absolutely, this is blackmail. And the ONLY reasonable response to blackmail is to refuse.
And then prepare to fight. Because a NO vote is only the beginning. To vote NO will change nothing, until there are people ready to lead a fight to defend that decision.
Jun 9, 2014
This is the editorial from the May 30th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France. France just held a vote for delegates to the European Parliament. The Socialist Party, which runs the Parliament and includes the President of France, got only 13.98%. The conservative party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), which held power before the Socialists, got 20.80%. Coming in first was the National Front with 24.85%. This party is openly anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner. Lutte Ouvrière received 1.17% of the vote, with 222,491 voters.
The National Front is far ahead in the election results, and the Socialist Party is at lowest level in decades. This was accompanied by a very high abstention rate. These are the important elements in the election for the European Parliament.
As in the municipal elections, the Socialist Party was rejected by its usual voters. It is paying the price for its policy, which is totally dedicated to favoring the interests of the corporations and bankers, by increasing measures worsening the conditions of the working classes.
The National Front succeeded in diverting to its profit the disgust aroused by the Socialist Party. Marine Le Pen triumphantly announced that this meant the end of the two party system—that is to say, the left and right succeeding each other in power.
If this comes true, it will only mean the fraud of the back and forth in power between the UMP and the Socialist Party will be replaced by that of three parties.
But however they combine, those in power will carry out a policy in the interests of the wealthy, the big industrial, commercial and bank corporations who hold the true power.
The National Front, like the other two parties, represents a policy for the bourgeoisie, but with still more brutal methods and by pushing reactionary, retrograde, anti-foreign and racist ideas. Further, there is the threat that even the simple reinforcement of the National Front on the electoral plane will encourage an anti-worker influence not content with voting, but ready to pass to acts, first against immigrant workers and then against workers, period.
How have we arrived at this point? Right off, there is the crushing responsibility of the Socialist Party, and the despair and loss of bearings that this has given rise to among the working classes.
But there is the more general responsibility of the big parties that came out of the workers’ movement. Over time, they completely sacrificed the interests of the working class to come to governmental power, where they could lead no other policy than that of the big bourgeoisie.
If the National Front became the outlet for the discontent in the working classes, it is because there is no longer in front of them parties which represent the interests of the exploited.
It is in this context that the results of Lutte Ouvrière, as modest as they are, preserve a political perspective for the workers. They confirm the presence of a political current which used the two elections of this year to reject the false choices between parties which are their oppressors. They express the conviction that the exploited, those who have neither capital nor rent and only their labor to live, can constitute a political force opposed to the parties of the bourgeoisie.
This force will only really weigh on political life when the working class finds once again its combativeness and its means of struggle: strikes, demonstrations and collective action.
The thousands and men and women who voted for our lists of candidates acted to express their approval of the objectives that must be imposed by struggle to prevent working people from falling into unemployment and poverty. They represent a minority, but a minority that is conscious that the fights to come must clearly oppose the collective fight of the workers to the big bourgeoisie and the government that serves it. This is the first condition for this struggle to be effective.
Those who voted for Lutte Ouvrière raised a flag, that of the revolutionary tradition of the workers’ movement. The main task in the period to come is to reinforce this current, give it the force to intervene in the daily class struggle, on the job and in workers’ neighborhoods. This is the only way to oppose the rise of reactionary forces that are threatening to engulf society.
Finally, it is this current which can give rise to a true communist party capable of acting so that the working class seizes from the capitalists the power over the economy and politics, creating a society without exploitation or oppression.
That may seem utopian after the success shown by the National Front, further emphasized by the disappointment of the other parties and by the commentators. But this is the only way for workers.
Jun 9, 2014
This article is translated from the May 23rd, 2014 edition of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
After a voting process spread out over five weeks, the Indian parliamentary elections resulted in a devastating defeat for the ruling Congress Party, which got only 19 percent of the total vote.
The Congress Party, which has governed the country for more than 54 years since its independence in 1947, has never fallen so low, either in terms of votes or in seats in parliament. This demonstrates the extent of its discredit in the eyes of the population, due to its corruption and policies favoring capital, which have brought about increasing misery in the wake of the economic crisis.
As a result, the Congress Party’s main rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’s Party), will see its candidate, Narendra Modi, become the prime minister of India.
The way that these elections unfolded is in itself an insult to the poorer classes. The total cost of the various parties’ campaigns comes to more than five billion dollars. This is equal to about half of the annual budget of the government’s support program for India’s 90 million poorest households!
Although one of the main campaign themes this year was the struggle against corruption, the elections themselves were nevertheless a showcase for corruption in all of its forms. For example, nearly one fifth of all candidates were charged with various crimes while they were running for office, often for motives linked to corruption, but also for crimes such as rape and murder.
Finally, in this poor country that the Western media dares to describe as “the world’s largest democracy,” all of the standard forms of fraud and violence came into play. An Indian human rights organization described them in this way: “Theft of votes and ballot stuffing, voter identity fraud, armed gangs preventing voters from going to the voting booths and using intimidation; campaign workers beat up, tortured, even assassinated; frequent use of clubs, firearms, and even bombs in place of electoral arguments.”
These elections did not permit the poor and working population to express itself, since none of the parties at the national level represented their interests. The elections were little more than a referendum for or against the Congress Party. If the BJP has been the main beneficiary, this is in part due to its being the only credible opposition in many areas, and also due to the considerable means at the BJP’s disposal.
The BJP is basically the parliamentary wing of the coalition that forms the Hindu nationalist far right. This coalition includes multiple religious and cultural organizations, small groups with all of the attributes of Western neo-Nazi gangs, and a union confederation with locals that act more like company unions than like true workers’ organizations. But its backbone is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, or National Volunteer Association), an organization of several million members that, under the cover of Hindu cultural tradition, trains in squads resembling a regular military apparatus. Its members have been in the front ranks of the anti-Muslim riots of the past.
The new Indian Prime Minister Modi, himself a dignitary of the RSS, has been heavily implicated in the 2002 riot that left 2,000 dead in Gujarat. This took place just before his reelection on the basis of a campaign heavily charged with anti-Muslim demagogy.
This year, the BJP did not focus on this aspect of its politics, instead presenting itself as the only party capable of moving India away from corruption. This was a cynical move, given the long series of scandals that marked its rise to power between 1996 and 2004. But the BJP has above all promised to bring the country out of a crisis that weighs more and more heavily on the population. Modi has capitalized on the methods that, according to media commentators, have permitted him to make Gujarat one of the richest states in India. This translates to the creation of tax-free zones, the lowering of wages, and the freezing or elimination of all social programs.
The BJP’s victory is clearly not good news for the working class and the poor. But it’s easy to understand the enthusiasm of the Bombay Stock Exchange, which leapt up by 5% after the results were announced!
Jun 9, 2014
Gary Walkowicz, a bargaining committeeman from Ford and one of the leaders of the movement to reject all demands for concessions, was nominated for the presidency of the UAW at its convention held in Detroit. This is the second convention in a row that Walkowicz has challenged the entrenched leadership of the UAW over its concessions policies.
In one sense, it was a replay of the 2010 convention. In both conventions, Walkowicz made the union’s acceptance of concessions his chief issue. He pointed out that not only does the acceptance of concessions not save jobs, it costs jobs. The proof was stark: in the eight years since the last wave of concessions began, the UAW has lost 200,000 members–and this despite the fact that GM, Ford and Chrysler are all putting out cars today at a near record pace.
He also denounced the readiness of the UAW leadership to split the membership by agreeing to a “two-tier” wage policy for new hires–a wage rate little more than half of what is paid to established workers–and by letting the corporations junk the promises they had made to their retirees.
But what was different about this convention was the fact that the leadership, facing that steep membership loss, could propose nothing other than a dues increase–something strongly opposed in the plants. It was obviously not so much the amount of money–it amounts to one-half of one hour’s wages a month, about $16 an hour for the older workers, $7 to $8 for second-tier workers. It was the thought that this leadership, which has done nothing to organize any kind of resistance to the attacks on the workers’ standard of living, would itself put its hands in the workers’ pockets.
Many rank-and-file workers oppose this increase; and many delegates were elected to the convention based on that opposition. At the convention, during a debate that went on for two hours, they stood and argued against it. Ultimately, around one fourth of the delegates voted against the increase, an opposition not seen for several decades. This shows the possibility of a rank-and-file movement to take back control of the union.
Before Walkowicz’s two candidacies, there had been only two other challenges for the top spot of the union in 64 years.
It was obvious, given the permanent and monolithic hold over the union by the apparatus, that Walkowicz would not get many votes. And he did not, getting 49 to 3215 for Dennis Williams, the new president.
The issue was never whether he could win. Just like four years ago, it was whether anyone would stand up in the convention and say what so many workers and even many of the delegates were thinking. It’s obvious that if no one does, things just continue on as before, with the appearance that everyone agrees.
Now, it is clear that many don’t agree.
Jun 9, 2014
What follows is a leaflet put out on the opening day at the 2014 UAW convention by Gary Walkowicz and his supporters.
“For more than a decade, some of us have argued that the UAW should fight rather than accept the corporations’ demands for concessions. We insisted that concessions would not save jobs; they would only decimate the standard of living of our members. This is exactly what has happened.
I don’t know how many delegates will be willing to speak up and say what they really think. I don’t know how many votes I will get. But I am running for UAW President in order to speak for all the UAW members whose voices are usually not heard.
I am running because someone has to say what all of us know: what the UAW has been doing is not working. I am running to say that the UAW needs to become a fighting union once again!”
Jun 9, 2014
The following is a transcript of a speech that Sam Johnson gave at a book-signing in Detroit to mark the publication of his memoir, A Fighter All My Life.
“In the early 1970s, I began to see that one person fighting alone cannot change things. I began to get a bigger picture. I got that from people who came before me. That’s when I began to talk to workers around me, I began to pull them together so we could stand together.
At Dodge Main, we had lunch time meetings. If workers had a problem we sat down and talked about it, and about what we could do to back the company off. Maybe some people won’t think that’s a big thing. But that’s exactly what doesn’t happen, the workers getting together and deciding what to do about their problems. It is a big thing.
We passed out flyers, standing at the gate with different nationalities, letting other workers know about our problem and what we could do about it. That got past the divisions created by the company.
When you come together, you increase the weight of the workers. When you increase the numbers, that puts more power in the workers’ hands.
To fix the problems that working people face, we’re going to have to fight again. If we don’t fight, then it will go on just like what’s happening now. Things are going backwards, especially for the younger generation.
Today, there’s no jobs for young people. The bosses and the union leaders create a division with this two-tier. When you don’t oppose it, then those young people won’t support you.
A lot of those young people today will fight, but it’s the wrong fight. They attack their friends, rob people around them in the neighborhood.
It takes a different fight, when we stand together. That’s what can change things, what can stop all these attacks—on the young people, on the schools, on the teachers.
The young people today need to know the history, know how we got what we have.
When workers begin to fight we’ll need a few people who understand why these attacks are coming, people who have that bigger picture, people who will be able to direct that fight against the attacks.
What working people need to know now, it’s the capitalists and their policy that is the problem. That whole policy is nothing but an attack on working people.
The Democrats and the Republicans push this policy. Then the trade union leaders turn around and push this policy on us. It’s going to keep getting worse if we don’t stand up against the people attacking us.
The forces that the capitalists use, that’s us. They use us against us, to protect them and to carry out their attacks. We need to understand that and stop doing what they want.
We have the forces to change what’s happening to us, to stop the attacks that are coming toward us. We have the forces we could use for us, not for what the capitalists want.
What forces? Workers, we are workers. From our labor we make this whole system run, but we run it for the capitalists today.
The forces that protect them, the army, the police, the national guard, that’s us, working people. We’re being used against us. To change this, we’ll have to understand this and take our forces and use them to organize a fight for what we need and for what we want.
And we’ll have to build a working class party to do that, a party that speaks for the working class, a party that gives the workers a voice.”
Jun 9, 2014
Sam Johnson’s book has finally been published. Compiled from taped conversations that were then transcribed over a ten-year period, it tells the story of one man whose life spanned many of the important social struggles going back to the 1940s. Sam’s life spans the Alabama of Jim Crow, the rebellions in Watts in 1965 and Detroit in 1967, the auto plants of Detroit in the period of wildcat strikes and large mobilizations, and all the years since, right up to today, when militants like Sam have kept the spirit of resistance alive as the movement receded.
All these different periods come to life in the book, as do many of the people Sam writes about, including his mother, Sadie B. Ware. In Sam’s words, “I didn’t have that fear. I think I learned that from my mother because she was a fighter. She wasn’t afraid of the cops. She was a strong person. A lot of men don’t give women respect, but they gave my mother respect.”
Facing a Southern police that acted like and often were the Ku Klux Klan, Sam was sent to Los Angeles by his mother when he was 20. She hoped thus to protect him from the common deadly fate of young black men in the South who refused to back down in the face of police and Klan violence. He discovered in Los Angeles only a different kind of racism, and big city police little different from Southern sheriffs.
By his own account, Sam tells of running with the “fast crowd” in Los Angeles, then going to Detroit, only to be pulled into heroin and the street life there.
Detroit was where he began to get what he called “the big picture.” He had long respected the Nation of Islam for their readiness to stand up for themselves and the black population. But in Detroit he came in contact with communists, who gave him an understanding of the class nature of the racist society in which he lived, as well as of the power the working class could hold.
From that point on, through the rest of the book, Sam tells of his life as a militant, becoming active in the union in the auto plants, taking part in strikes and political campaigns, and always trying to speak to the young people, trying to convey “the big picture” to others.
Much like Malcolm X’s Autobiography, it is the account of a man whose contact with political forces transforms him from a man of the streets into a militant whose goal is the self-organization of oppressed people: in Malcolm’s case, of the black population; in Sam’s case, of the working class, although Sam also saw the key role that black workers would play in any social struggle.
Sam concludes his introduction with the following words: “I have been active as a union militant and a revolutionary militant in the working class, trying to get other workers to see and understand what needs to be done, trying to bring workers to stand together to use the force they have. And I always tried to give them the bigger picture, where we fit in, to get them to understand how things could change if working people stood together, what we could do to defend ourselves and to build a different society.”
Jun 9, 2014
The last week in May, Michigan legislators passed a “compromise” law to gradually increase the minimum wage to $9.25 by 2018. Lauded by the Democratic Party House minority leader as a tremendous win for Michigan’s working families, nothing could be further from the truth.
It was a cynical ploy by politicians to circumvent the petition drive in which more than 300,000 people had signed in support to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. They did it in response to this petition drive and to the protests by workers to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The average pay for CEOs crossed $10 million dollars in 2013. In the last four years, CEO pay packages, on average, climbed more than 50 per cent! A chief executive now makes about 257 times the average worker’s salary, up sharply from 181 times in 2009.
This is the system we live in—where millions of people struggle just to get by—from minimum wage workers, who can barely put food on the table, let alone buy a house, rent an apartment or buy a vehicle—to workers like us—living pay check to pay check. And a few others are wallowing in luxury.
It’s a system, like old fruit, that is rotten, and needs to be tossed out.
Jun 9, 2014
Finding a job these days means dodging lots of scams. Snagajob.com is one of the biggest. They list a few real jobs. But their real business is collecting personal information from job seekers that they can sell.
To attract as many people as possible, Snagajob lists many jobs that don’t exist in addition to the small number that do. When you sign up to apply for these jobs, you have to give them all kinds of personal information. Then you start getting calls from people trying to sell you an education. Don’t worry if you can’t afford to go to school, they say, student loans are available.
Snagajob gets rich from the schools. The schools get rich from government-backed student loans. And the unemployed get scammed out of money they haven’t even made yet!
In 2008, the founder of the company, Shawn Boyer, was named National Small Business Person of the year. The Small Business Association was right: this is business at its finest.
Jun 9, 2014
In Kettleman City, a farming community of 1,500 people in Central California, eleven babies were born with physical deformities between September 2007 and March 2010. Three of them died.
Do you think this unusually high rate of birth defects could be caused by the large toxic waste landfill located three miles from Kettleman? A landfill that has been fined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over and over during the past 30 years for hazardous waste violations?
Any government agency concerned about people’s health would have shut down this landfill a long time ago. But the EPA didn’t–and in fact it issued such ridiculously low fines that it actually encouraged Chemical Waste Management, Inc., the company that operates the landfill, to continue to poison the soil and groundwater around the facility.
State officials, too, turned a deaf ear to the complaints of Kettleman residents. They claimed “surveys were inconclusive,” and continued to allow the landfill to operate. AND, last week, state regulators gave the company a new 10-year permit, which allows for an expansion of the landfill’s capacity by five million cubic yards, or about 50 percent!
These officials, hand in hand with the capitalists they serve, might as well spoon-feed the poison to the people in Kettleman and other communities nearby!
Jun 9, 2014
In a horrible job market, hiring in one sector has been booming: temporary jobs. There are now about three million temp jobs throughout the economy, almost twice as many as there were in 2009.
Behind this hiring boom are big companies that now outsource millions of jobs, ones previously considered “permanent,” to temp agencies, including Walmart, Amazon, Nissan, and BMW. Today, one in five manual laborers who move and pack merchandise is a temp, as is one in six assemblers, who often work in auto plants. Almost 40 percent of all temp jobs are now in traditional manufacturing industries.
The system of temp work has a number of advantages for these companies. It provides them with a workforce that is both “cheap” and “flexible,” workers that can be paid the very least and who can be terminated for any reason. The system also insulates companies from having to pay for health care, workers’ compensation claims, or unemployment taxes.
It provides companies with a workforce that is expected to accept the most dangerous and unhealthy working conditions and most inhuman schedules. Just to keep their jobs, they are forced to endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that can depress their pay below the minimum wage. Many temp workers cycle between being unemployed and barely employed.
Of the three million temps who are working at any time, there are many times more temps out of a job. And because of their low wages and irregular employment, many of these temps can be found crowded into tiny apartments or ramshackle houses in neighborhoods known as “temp towns” that dot the entire country.
Together with the growing ranks of those who are completely jobless or work part-time but want full time work, temps make up what Karl Marx called “the reserve army of the unemployed.” This reserve army is an increasingly vast part of the workforce that lives so precariously, the capitalists are able to use them to help drive down the wages of what is left of the permanent workforce. The bosses can force permanent workers to accept worse everything . . . or be replaced by someone sent from a temporary agency.
The growth of the temporary workforce is part of the historic decline in working and living conditions that is taking the working class back to a situation comparable to centuries past. This increasingly horrible wage slavery further enriches the capitalist class.
Jun 9, 2014
Chicago Public Schools announced that it is spending $21 million to hire 168 teachers over the next two years–84 arts teachers and 84 physical education teachers.
This is just in time for the election–and it will disappear just as quickly.
The 164 teachers to be hired do not even bring the schools back to where they were two years ago. On top of that, there’s a catch. The art teacher positions are only funded temporarily. The money pays for their salary their first year, but only pays three quarters the second year, half the third year and so on. By the fourth year, the schools have to come up with their own money if they want to keep the teachers–money they don’t have, of course. So the job and the teachers will be gone. Maybe it has something to do with what happens this year: state elections are this fall, and the city elections are next spring!
Jun 9, 2014
For almost two years, San Francisco Community College, the largest community college in California, has been under a state of siege. In July 2012, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges dropped a bombshell. It put the college under a “Show Cause” status, the highest level of sanction short of stripping it of accreditation–saying to the college, “Show us why you shouldn’t be closed.”
The commission found no problems with the college’s quality of education. On the contrary, it praised the college for the quality of its educational programs, libraries and counseling services. Instead, the commission condemned the college for a “lack of governance,” that is, mainly for running a budget deficit.
Of course, the main reason for the deficit was the fact that over the previous three years, between 2008 and 2011, the California state government–with Democrats in control of both houses of the state legislature–slashed funding to all its community colleges. This forced those colleges to drastically reduce the number of classes that they offered, while carrying out mass layoffs, causing enrollment throughout the system to plunge by hundreds of thousands of students.
But apparently, the class reduction at San Francisco Community College was not as severe as at other schools–which led the commission to threaten to close the entire school. So, the chancellor of the state community college system appointed a “Special Trustee with Extraordinary Powers” in order to supposedly “rescue the college.”
He proceeded to cut programs and classes drastically. Enrollment was quickly slashed from close to 90,000 down to 80,000 students. Hundreds of teachers and staff were forced out. Poorly paid part-timers took the place of many full-time staff. And everyone–except top administrators–was forced to take big pay and benefit cuts.
The Accrediting Commission continued to threaten it would yank the community college’s accreditation. At that point, some Democratic Party liberals intervened. In November 2013, the San Francisco City Attorney filed suit against the commission. In January 2014, a Superior Court judge granted an injunction to keep the community college open through a trial, now set for October 2014.
But even if the community college is allowed to remain open, it continues to shrink under blows coming from two sides.
On the one hand, San Francisco Community College is under a full attack by the Accrediting Commission, a private company that operates under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Education. In fact, the commission is little more than a stalking horse for some of its big financial contributors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is pushing the same kind of agenda at community colleges as it has at K-12 schools–that is, to increasingly gut and privatize education. The commission also gets financial support from the Lumina Foundation, which is funded by the biggest student lender, Sallie Mae–which obviously has every interest to push more and students out of community colleges into expensive private schools, in order to sell more student loans and make a greater profit.
But on the other hand, there are the false friends in the Democratic Party who promise to “save” the college and keep it open, even while they have imposed one budget cut after another, bleeding the community college system of money and resources.
For the working class population that depends so much on the community college system, this is a fight for the education, job training and culture that the capitalist class continues to try to take away.
Jun 9, 2014
John Covington, the man appointed by Michigan’s governor to run the Educational Achievement Authority (EAA), has used his position to pay for almost a quarter of a million dollars in travel expense, hotel expense, furniture expense, gasoline for his chauffeured car and other odd bills.
The EAA was set up–supposedly–to improve Detroit’s worst performing schools.
Covington and his staff claimed they had to go to places like Las Vegas, Orlando and New York–in pursuit of what Covington calls “training”!
Training for what, though? That is the question! Learning to rip off public funds, perhaps!