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
Sep 29, 2014
A tragic crash on a Detroit freeway that cost a truck driver his life brought a heavily used pedestrian bridge crashing down. It’s typical of the conditions working people face everywhere. TLC Waste Haulers had retrofitted an old dump truck to haul trash. Unknown to the driver, the truck malfunctioned and the hauler began to extend itself while the truck was running on a freeway. When the top struck a bridge, the bridge collapsed.
Another driver working for TLC Waste Haulers had just been electrocuted three weeks before, when he was dumping scrap metal. The company continues to operate, business as usual. But it’s not just TLC. Companies everywhere squeeze as much as they can out of old, outdated machinery.
The government manages the infrastructure in the same way. After the crash, people in the Detroit neighborhood said they had complained for years about the old bridge. Yet officials ignored these complaints and put off tearing it down until 2017. That bridge is two blocks from a high school. Needless to say, if the crash had happened a little later in the morning, many, many more people would have been killed.
That’s how private and public officials put all of our lives at risk. They let the entire vital infrastructure rot, decay and crumble. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the infrastructure a failing grade on its annual report card. The civil engineers say that one-third of all the bridges are “deficient,” that is, have at least one thing significantly wrong with them. Even if they don’t collapse on their own, they are certainly very vulnerable when something unusual happens. Back in 2007 when a bridge in Minneapolis over the Mississippi River collapsed, 13 people were killed and 145 were injured.
Apart from the deaths and injuries, we pay other costs. Drivers pay hundreds of dollars a year in repair costs because potholes aren’t filled. Because water pipes are often more than a century old, they leak like a sieve; water main breaks erupt as regularly as Old Faithful and basements flood. The electric power grid is so decrepit there are blackouts from almost anything: storms, heat waves, branches breaking power lines.
The dangers are huge. Leaky gas lines are like ticking time bombs. USA Today found that deadly gas line explosions happen almost every day because private utilities drag their feet replacing 85,000 miles of corroded and rusting gas pipes, and gas mains that are over a century old.
It’s not enough that those responsible let the needed infrastructure rot and crumble. They use the disasters they create to demand big tax increases and rate hikes. And they demand big concessions from the workforce in those sectors.
They try to act like there isn’t enough money! What a laugh! The public utilities stretch the power grid to its limits, in order to fork over more dividends to make their rich stockholders even richer. The government claims there is no money to carry out repairs, as it forks over trillions to bail out the banks, trillions more on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and trillions more to station troops all over the world in order to impose the interests of the big oil companies, banks and weapons makers. Just last week, the Obama administration announced a new project for which the government is going to spend more than a trillion dollars on the entire nuclear weapons stockpile.
No, there is plenty of money to repair and expand the vital infrastructure. If the government were run in the interests of the population, it would do exactly that. And by immediately employing millions of workers to do so, it would get rid of unemployment at the same time.
But the capitalists won’t do it. They are out to make more profits, no matter what happens to the population or the environment. And neither will the Democrats or Republicans. They use the government to prop up the capitalists’ profits.
To reverse the decline, to make society livable, workers have to fight for it. That is no other answer. And the only political leaders worth supporting are those who tell workers this truth. In Michigan this year, there are five candidates doing that. Running on a common program, they are calling for a working class fight based on a working class policy.
Sep 29, 2014
One of the owners of RMI sometimes waltzes into the Paramount headquarters wearing his fancy Armani suit, brimming with stories about his latest European vacation.
All those guards coming to collect their measly checks of $12 per hour don’t believe it when he says that they can’t afford to pay more.
Sep 29, 2014
On the night of September 22nd, the U.S. Air Force bombed the positions of the “Islamic State” (IS) in Syria for the first time, Up until this, all U.S. air strikes since they were first initiated on August 8th, had only targeted IS in Iraq.
The U.S. got the approval of imperialist countries and quite a few Arab states: Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. U.S. imperialism has thus dragged its “allies” into another intervention in this part of the world, following those in 1991 and 2003, which created the current chaos.
The advance of the militias of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIS), now “Islamic State” (IS), has been going on for months. The consequences have been devastating for the people in these conquered territories. 130,000 Syrians under attack, mostly Kurds, have fled the town of Kobane (Ayn al-Arab in Arabic) in Kurdistan, to that of Suruç, on the Turkish border, where they have been confronted by the Turkish army. In Iraq, the offensive of IS in the North West region has made hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people flee and find refuge only in precarious camps where water, food and drugs are lacking.
Chaos is threatening to spread to other countries in the area. IS imposes a medieval dictatorship on its population, beheading people, cutting off hands, enslaving women. It’s understandable that the people who are undergoing such barbarism see U.S. intervention as a relief, should it be temporary. But nothing good is to be expected from it.
Imperialist leaders are not concerned with the fate of civilian populations, but with the business of capitalist corporations that may be threatened by instability. One should remember that all imperialist interventions have worsened the situation, from the dividing up and sharing of the Middle East between France and Britain in 1916 up to now. Each time, imperialism tried to divide and rule, consciously relying on the most reactionary forces to preserve its political and economic domination. Nothing will come out of this latest intervention but new divisions, new contradictions opposing maybe even more barbarous forces. Afghanistan, which U.S. imperialism was supposed to save from fundamentalists, is today a testimony to this.
Imperialism, which presents itself as the savior of people who are the victims of barbarism, is the most responsible for it. Down with imperialism!
Sep 29, 2014
Omar Gonzalez was arrested for entering the White House after scaling the fence on September 19th.
Why would he do this? No one can say what was going on in his head. But what we do know is that he served in Iraq from October 2006 to January 2008. He was prescribed several medications for PTSD. His wife split up with him in 2010 because she was afraid of him. “He was so paranoid he was starting to make me paranoid.” He carried a gun with him at all times. He had lots of weapons.
To any reasonable person, it looks like he was suffering from PTSD as a result of his tours in Iraq. But for the media and government officials the only focus was on the security breech and the Secret Service. Is that because the U.S. is starting a new war, the fourth in a little over two decades, and they don’t want people focusing on the consequences of these wars?
Gonzalez took those consequences straight to the front door of the White House!
Sep 29, 2014
On September 23, Maryland lowered projections for state revenues by almost half a billion dollars. The problem, according to state officials, is the bad national economy.
Yes, there certainly is a bad economy. Too many people have been laid off. Too many workers have had their pay cut. The vast majority of young workers can’t find a single decent-paying job.
So of course incomes are “stagnant,” and of course there is a “weak housing market” in Maryland–as well as in almost every other state. And there are tax losses.
But public officials have repeatedly taken the money that has come in and spent it on increased subsidies and tax breaks for rich developers, big corporations and banks, further reducing tax revenues. Making everything worse.
When officials announce budget shortfalls, all they mean is that they want to take away from public funds in order to give more to the banks, the corporations and the wealthy people who own them.
Sep 29, 2014
Between 2004 and 2008, when Richard M. Daley was still mayor of Chicago, the vast majority of the city’s TIF funds went to rich neighborhoods. More than 40 percent of all TIF spending went to three wards downtown and some of the richest gentrified areas nearby. Meanwhile, the poorest neighborhoods in the city like West Englewood, Roseland, Little Village, and Auburb-Gresham, got almost nothing in TIF funding.
When Emanuel was elected, he said he wanted to change the TIF program. He even set up a TIF reform panel. And then he appointed Carole Brown, managing director of Barclays Capital, to chair this “reform” panel. Barclays is one of the biggest investment banks in the world–so you know who Carole Brown looks out for, and it’s not working class children.
Under Emanuel, the TIF program has grown, its slush fund has grown, and the money continues to go into wealthy neighborhoods and the profits of companies that get the money.
What a surprise!
Sep 29, 2014
Big headlines: Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued an executive order raising the minimum wage to $13 an hour. Behind the big headlines was this much bigger fact: only 1,000 workers will benefit, while there are 400,000 workers in Chicago getting under $13.
In other words, it’s only a stunt by Emanuel who thinks it will earn some credit before his run for re-election in February.
You know what, Rahm? We can’t eat headlines! And our kids can’t get an education on them!
Sep 29, 2014
This article appeared in the September 26th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
On the night of September 19th, angry vegetables growers stormed the tax office and the farmers’ mutual insurance offices in Morlaix (Finistère, in Brittany) and set them on fire. Prime Minister Manuel Valls was indignant and pledged that those responsible would be prosecuted. He cut off state support to their farming businesses and argued that dialogue is the only solution.
Farmers are complaining that their production costs, their social security contributions and their taxes have been rising continuously, while sales prices have stagnated or decreased.
This situation is worsened by a good harvest year, so abundant that it lowers prices; plus the embargo on selling to Russia. So for farmers there is not enough left to live decently.
These farmers are caught between large chemical and farm equipment corporations on the one hand, and big retail and export/import companies on the other. Their untenable position explains why they are attacking the state, which is responsible for them not being able to secure decent incomes on the national and global market, at the same time they are claiming the state should help them.
Vegetable growers are right to defend themselves because the current government, like those that preceded it, is devoted to big capital and makes light of their desperate situation.
The discontent of farmers periodically flares in a sometimes violent form. A few months ago, it happened in the so-called Breton “Red Hats” revolt against the environmental tax. The focus is sometimes taxes, or the low price of raw milk, or the prices of fruits and vegetables. But the fundamental reason for these outbreaks is that an economy based on competition and profit crushes small producers.
Like all struggles, the current fight of vegetable producers in Finistère gathers various people and interests behind a common goal. As always, the biggest producers take advantage of the anger of smaller producers to promote their own material, and sometimes political interests. But the struggle of the peasant producers—caught between the big wholesale distributors, the banks and market forces—is legitimate. From this point of view this fight is not opposed to the demands of the workers, but on the contrary, is consistent with their demands.
Sep 29, 2014
Thousands of Los Angeles students came back to school last month to find their schools in total chaos. This is how a student at a South Bay high school described it: “Students have the same three classes back to back. Some kids don’t even have a schedule at all. And most of us had to wait weeks to get into the right classes and change our programs.” She added that as many as 60 students were crammed into classrooms “like sardines.”
L.A. school district officials blamed the disaster on glitches in the computer system that tracks the students and makes their schedules. But some of the worst problems that students face–for example the overcrowding of the classrooms–are certainly nothing new. For years, the L.A. school board has been consistently raising the bar for the maximum number of students allowed in a classroom, exceeding 40, and even 50 in some high schools. And in past years, there was no “computer glitch” for district officials to blame that on–it was because they eliminated teachers, consistently, year after year.
This failing computer system cost the district 20 million dollars. And it’s not the first time district officials are spending big on junk. The previous computer system, which has been thrown out, had cost the district 112 million. Just last month, amid a corruption scandal, the school board suspended a 500-million dollar contract with computer-maker Apple and publishing company Pearson to supply hundreds of thousands of overpriced iPads. A few years ago, the district spent $95 million on an automated payroll system which underpaid teachers and led to lawsuits. … It’s a long list.
It’s all in plain sight: Big corporations keep milking L.A. school district’s six billion budget, for hundreds of millions of dollars at a time, without even bothering to half-way provide the services they are supposedly getting paid for. And the district officials, who shovel all that money to these companies, turn around and say “there is no money,” laying off teachers and other staff, and cramming 60 students into dilapidated classrooms.
To these officials, these lackeys of the capitalist class, public money is there only for handouts to their bosses–not for the education of working-class children, who depend on public schools.
Sep 29, 2014
The city of Los Angeles recently disciplined more than 100 sanitation truck drivers for protesting deals between Los Angeles and Wall Street banks. In early July, drivers with their trash and wastewater trucks had staged a protest at downtown L.A.
The city of Los Angeles last year handed over more than 290 million dollars to Wall Street. These mostly bloated and inventive fees are the tip of the iceberg of the taxes funneled to the Wall Street banks and firms. The amount paid by the city in fees to the banks was almost double the 163 million dollars the city paid out for maintenance and repair of its streets.
After the protest, City Council member Bernard C. Parks said, “I don’t know if you could have a more blatant misuse of city resources than to demonstrate in city vehicles, using city gas, on city time ... And at the same time, [they were] blocking ... the financial industry from getting to work.”
Yes, there has been a “blatant misuse of city resources”–by Parks and the rest of the City Council who gave away public money to the benefit of Wall Street banks.
Sep 29, 2014
The following is the presentation made by David Roehrig, a Detroit city worker, running for Wayne County Community College Board of Trustees, District 2, at a meeting in Detroit. He was joined by the other two candidates whose speeches are reprinted in these pages and by Gary Walkowicz, running for Congress, District 12, and Sam Johnson, District 13. All the speeches were taken from the website www.workingclassfight.com.
Detroit looks like a war zone because it is one. It’s a casualty in an escalating war on working people: failing public schools, services, neighborhoods and a lack of decent paying jobs, if there are any jobs at all. The infrastructure of the city and many surrounding suburbs is often 80 to 100 years old. It’s crazy to think that in a hundred years one government after another has not been able to update something as basic and necessary as sewers. So rains often bring flooded streets and basements. The electrical system is a mess.
Driving down Woodward into downtown, you might think things are improving, but if you live in the neighborhoods you know better.... Millions go to “help” Mr. Ilitch build an arena and a stadium, because apparently he doesn’t have enough money to build it himself. The money for that arena was taken from a fund for infrastructure development, yet the infrastructure everywhere in workers’ neighborhoods is collapsing. Snow sits, water rushes out of broken mains....
Millions are paid to the bloated staffs of the emergency financial managers and their consultants, while our lights are repossessed by DTE, water is cut to thousands of households. What—in 2014, they can’t clear snow? They can’t provide electricity? Surrounded by water, people still struggle to drink and bathe? In 2014? Seriously?
You hear the refrain, all the time, that government can’t do it, it’s too inept, there isn’t enough money. Well when the government wants to organize hundreds of thousands to go to war, it seems to do it just fine. To bail out the banks, it found trillions of dollars. Public schools work very well in rich neighborhoods. It’s not can they—it’s whether the Democrats and Republicans want to do it. It’s whose interests they are committed to serving.
They pretend that the whole purpose of government is to take care of society’s members. To do publicly what each individual can’t do alone. That’s the problem though. The Democrats and the Republicans, bought by the banks and big business, carry on government essentially to take care of the needs of the banks and big business—with a little bit left over for the politicians themselves.
Detroit, Inkster, Hamtramck, Highland Park, Allen Park and other cities where workers live are broke only because the bosses, banks and big business were given money taken from city and social services, taken out of our tax money, taken out of our wages and benefits.
What if instead of paying for Ilitch’s new stadium, the money went to fix broken roads and bridges? What if the money spent dealing death overseas was used to invigorate the public education system? What if the trillions both parties gave to the banks were used to fund free college, social programs, modernize infrastructure, fund culture, and clean up the parks and pollution from the environment! Imagine how many jobs this could create! Imagine how many more people would be employed! Instead of rotting in poverty and demoralized, people could truly be productive. No one would want for work. Put everyone to work so none of us would have to work so much. If good well-paying jobs, jobs you could really live on, were created to solve the problems we face … imagine what a world it would be. We could get rid of the desperation that drives many to crime, the stress over money that tears apart many families.
There are trillions and trillions of dollars, just sitting there right now, money that could be used to do those things! Economist David Cay Johnston estimates the amount of liquid capital of big U.S. companies, capital that could be turned quickly into cash, is between six and eight trillion dollars at least. This doesn’t even take into account what the banks control. So the money is there that could be used for our needs.
But we have to put our hands on it, put it to use, for us, for our interests! Take the money the capitalists took from us, the wealth our labor produced.
I’m running to say that wherever we are, we must say enough! No more sacrifices, no more layoffs! We need to start to build our forces so we can fight to have neighborhoods that are safe and maintained, schools that don’t just warehouse but imbue children with a love of learning and an access to culture, a college education that doesn’t turn you into an indentured servant, and most importantly jobs, not minimum wage jobs—even ten and eleven dollars isn’t a living wage—but decent jobs.
Because in 2014 we shouldn’t be living like this. We don’t have to, the money is there. But it’s up to us, and only us, it’s up to working people to fight to put our hands on that money. Let’s not wait till everything is gone ... let’s get to work now, preparing for a working class fight, based on a working class policy.
Sep 29, 2014
The following is part of the speech made by Ken Jannot, running for the school board of the Dearborn Public Schools (which includes Henry Ford College). It also was taken from the website, www.workingclassfight.com.
I am running because I am horrified by how the public schools are being dismantled to give the money away to private interests. Especially in working class districts! Detroit has seen the worst of it, but it’s not just in Detroit—it’s happening in Dearborn and in school districts across the state and the country. Public schools get closed, then reopened as corporate-run charter schools. School budgets get cut; experienced teachers get fired—class sizes increase past 40, 50, 60 students.
As a longtime teacher in the public schools and community colleges, I’ve seen the results of these attacks. Whole generations of working class children are being tossed on the educational scrapheap because the two big parties serving the capitalists won’t spend public money to really educate working class children. Those parties—Democrats and Republicans—use the money to bail out the banks and to cut taxes and give outright subsidies to the corporations. Use that money on the schools.
The answers for how to improve the schools are EASY: decrease class sizes—15 in elementary, 20 to 25 in secondary, max. Hire MORE teachers, as well as support staff, cafeteria workers, custodial workers, nurses, social workers, counselors. Make sure each and every building is fit for human habitation—fix, repair, renovate, rebuild if necessary. Build MORE schools. Stock them with ALL the materials necessary for student learning AND comfort throughout the day: textbooks, computers, art and music supplies, not to mention chairs, paper, pens, pencils and, yes, toilet paper.
Putting money into the schools, by the way, would also have a big impact on the local economy. Hiring more people at decent wages to do all this work could raise the standard of living of all workers in the area because more people would be spending more money locally.
Start with early childhood education, for every child! All children enter school already having experienced some kind of education from their families. The children whose parents received a very good education—those coming from money, in other words—start school with a greater education than those coming from families without money, who had been cheated of an education themselves. Children of privilege start school with a “head start” in other words....
All children should get that “head start” from the schools. Start early and continue all the way through high school—and beyond. Schools should NOT be about just the basics, teaching to the tests. They should educate and enrich the whole person, with all sorts of extracurriculars—sports, music, art, theater, robotics, chess club, and on and on. And parents should not have to pay extra fees for their child’s participation!
And yes, free education should continue even beyond high school. Pundits and politicians keep saying that young people need to get an education to get ahead in this society—and then they make it impossible for people to get one, at least not without being in debt for the rest of their lives! Why shouldn’t young working class people get a FREE college education? Why shouldn’t ALL education be free? Why shouldn’t every COLLEGE be well-staffed, with full-time teachers, with reasonable class loads?
We all know that the children of the wealthy have access to all those things, and more. If it can be done for those kids—if it can be considered NORMAL, just and proper by those parents for their kids to have all that, why shouldn’t it be NORMAL for the kids of the working class? Why shouldn’t public money be spent to provide just that? ...
I’ll say it again—the money is there. The wealth is there. Workers deserve to benefit from that wealth—their labor created it. It is CRIMINAL that the children of the people who have made all this wealth, who make society run every single day should be thrown on the scrapheap.
And it’s all possible from a purely material standpoint. Make the Ford family or Sergio, all the capitalists who live off the labor of working people, sell a yacht or a mansion, or two or three… but that’s not what THEIR policy is. The policy of the wealthy, the corporations and the banks—and the politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who represent them—is to drain money from the schools. It’s their policy and it’s what they do. They accumulate wealth at the cost of our lives, our children’s lives and futures. They solved their crisis by taking more from us. It’s time we reversed that equation.
Our campaign doesn’t have a lot of money—we don’t have any big contributors to our campaign. But WE have something much more important from the standpoint of the working class—a REAL policy in the interest of the working class. We know that a vote won’t bring that policy into existence. It will require a fight, a fight by working people, for us to begin defending ourselves, including in the matter of education for workers’ children. But everyone who votes for us can send a message in this election—that there is a part of the working class today that understands the need for that fight.
Sep 29, 2014
The following is part of the speech given by Mary Anne Hering, candidate for Dearborn School Board/Henry Ford College at the meeting in Detroit, downloaded from www.workingclassfight.com.
We have been living through a crisis the capitalists created and a social crisis created by the push of the capitalists to protect themselves by driving working people backwards.
For the working class, it’s an emergency. It couldn’t be more obvious: emergency measures are needed.
First, jobs. The previous two speakers already said it: if money were put into repairing, upgrading and providing the roads, schools and public services needed, millions of jobs could be created. But to the extent that’s not enough, layoffs and job cuts should be banned. The work that exists should be shared out among everyone, with no loss in pay. If the companies say they can’t provide the jobs and the wages, then let’s look at their accounts. If they refuse, then their whole business should be taken away from them.
Second, income. Everyone who works should have a decent wage. Everyone on a pension, Social Security, disability, and other income support should have enough to live comfortably. And our incomes should be indexed, tied directly to prices so the money we get increases just as soon as prices increase.
Public money should be spent on public services and education. Money accumulated in private accounts from years of profit should be used to provide jobs and incomes NOW. But that money has to be taken out of the hands of the capitalists who use it for themselves only.
Workers, acting together, collectively, can open up all these financial deals that are carried out in secret. All of us, taken together, can find where the money is hidden, money for jobs and wages, money in the public treasury for good schools for our children, money for decent public services.
We can show that the money is there, but we will have to fight to take it....
You and I know that voting, that elections in general don’t change things. Elections, like the rest of this political system, are held firmly under the control of the capitalist class. We see that the two big parties dominate. They’re twin parties, both serving the capitalists.
But we intend to use this election to say things that no one else is saying. We intend to use it to put forward a program based on what the working class needs, to let working people have something to vote for that they can really agree with.
Our situation won’t be changed with a vote—we know that, and we will go on saying it. But a vote for candidates who stand for a working class policy based on a working class fight can help prepare for that fight. In fact, it is the only useful vote. When workers vote for the Democrats or Republicans, both of whom go on serving the capitalist class, that really means throwing their vote away....
No, the problem is not will the working class fight. The problem is, for what goals? Too many times before, when people fought, the fights were diverted, the struggles were led into a dead end. Despite gains made by the movement, finally the organizational results of the movement were used against the very people who had risen up and fought. The working class movement faced a trade union apparatus that was imposed over the head of that movement to control it, divert it, divide it. The black mobilization, including the urban insurrections, found itself facing a Democratic party that presented itself as the spokesman for the movement, absorbing some of its leaders, taming its militancy.
Both movements, which at one point had challenged the very framework of the capitalist system, were used to pull people who had fought back into that system.
That’s why we say, the issue is not whether we will fight, but what we fight for.
This capitalist class, grabbing for every drop of profit, will push people to fight. And our problem, then, will be to make the bosses pay for their own crisis; our problem will be to win what WE need, to protect our lives, the lives of ordinary people.
Where it will start, or what will impel it, we don’t know. Will it be another Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown murder; another Right to Work Legislation; another water shut off so that people can’t use a toilet or have drinking water; another attack on retirees’ pensions and health care? Or something else entirely?
We don’t know. But what we do know, is that the next time, we cannot do the same things again—make a big fight, only to hand back everything we fought for. We do know that in this next fight the working class has to fight under its own banners, for its own policy, its own program. This time we have to fight for what we really want.
This is why we are running. To say these things that no one else is saying. To give working people something to vote for—not the lesser of two evils, but something they can really agree with.