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
Oct 13, 2014
With the 2014 elections just around the corner, Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican governors like Michigan’s Rick Snyder all claim credit for an economy supposedly in “recovery.”
It’s true, there is a recovery of sorts–a bigger share of the national income is today going to profit than at any time since such records were kept.
Those profits could have been put to socially valuable use: protecting the lives and welfare of the working population.
Instead the big capitalists hoarded their profits for the benefit of their own tiny owning class. They paid them out as dividends and stock buybacks, threw them into speculation, and just plain sat on the money. As much as eight trillion dollars today sits in accounts for the biggest capitalists, contributing nothing to the production of goods and useful services.
All of that accumulated money in the hands of a tiny, greedy class was made off the backs of the working population. The share of people with jobs is the smallest it’s been in decades–because this is a “recovery” only for the capitalist class and its hangers-on. Our standard of living is lower than it was in the 1970s.Working conditions devour more of our life’s energy. The schools in working class areas waste our children, the lack of public services degrade our lives.
This is why profits grew so rapidly. The capitalist class stole from everyone else.
This is the “recovery” for which both Democrats and Republicans are claiming credit, a recovery for the capitalist class.
There will be no recovery for ordinary people until the working class puts its hands on this stolen wealth, takes it back, uses it to provide jobs for everyone, an adequate income for everyone, and schools and public services that genuinely do serve the needs of the population.
That’s why SPARK says, the working class needs to fight and to put its own demands forward.
It’s why SPARK also says, the working class needs to express itself politically, not through the two big parties, both of whom serve the capitalist class. Workers need to express themselves through candidates that speak for their own class.
This year, in Michigan, workers have a chance to do just that, at least in some districts. Five independent candidates, linked by a common program, calling for a working class fight based on a working class policy, are defying the two big parties.
This slate of candidates is led by Sam Johnson, a retired Chrysler worker, running for Congress in Michigan’s 13th district, and Gary Walkowicz, a Ford worker, running for Congress in the 12th district. Sam has been known in the city of Detroit as a fighter for working people for a very long time. Some of his history–from Alabama to Los Angeles to Detroit–has been captured in his recently released book, A Fighter All My Life.
Gary is well known as the Ford union official who led opposition to UAW auto contracts that pushed the working class backwards. In 2009, he helped organize the solid rejection of a concessions contract jointly advocated by one of the auto companies and the UAW leadership. And he dared to contest for UAW president, letting the workers’ demands be heard in both the 2010 and 2014 UAW Conventions.
The slate also includes Mary Anne Hering and Kenneth Jannot, both teachers, running together for two of the three open slots on the Dearborn School Board, which also oversees Henry Ford (Community) College; and David Roehrig, running for the Wayne County Community College board. As teachers and public employees, all three have witnessed first-hand the damage caused by the severe cutbacks to the schools and public services. They are running to say that public money should be used to pay for schools and services, rather than to line the capitalists’ already bulging pockets.
Working people will not protect themselves until they begin to fight to impose their demands. But in voting for these candidates, workers can make their voices heard even today. And those who vote for these candidates will be saying that at least part of the working class today does not accept what this capitalist society offers us.
Oct 13, 2014
This article is from the Oct. 10th issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The presidents of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, three Ebola-stricken West African nations, made urgent pleas for money, doctors and hospital beds. The UN Ebola envoy said 20 times more was needed to counter the epidemic. The U.S. director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that unless action is taken, Ebola could become “the world’s next AIDS.”
But the response of the great powers is shameful. French President François Hollande announced that the French army was going to set up a military hospital in Guinea to fight the epidemic “in the coming days.” Three weeks later, not only has this hospital not been set up, but it turns out the Red Cross will have to do it. The Guinean government quotes French officials: “human resources are missing, because of the deployment of the French army in other countries.”
President Obama had promised 3,000 soldiers to Liberia. They are coming very slowly—so far only 300 have arrived. The Pentagon said that U.S. soldiers would have no direct contact with Ebola patients, but would support civilian agencies struggling against the disease.
The UN has created a mission with headquarters in Ghana’s capital Accra, 600 miles from the epidemic. How do you organize the fight against an epidemic from 600 miles away?
Meanwhile, the medical staff of the countries suffering with Ebola and the members of humanitarian organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) are struggling practically on their own. Doctors in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are dying from Ebola: They have not taken the necessary measures for protection, which they are well aware of, because they are overworked and exhausted and don’t have the needed supplies.
The UN is still waiting for the billion dollars it needs to halt the spread of the epidemic in Africa. This sum is ridiculous compared to what is spent by the great powers to wage war and impose their order. The U.S. defense budget is 661 billion dollars, i.e., 1.8 billion dollars a day. Half a day of the U.S. defense expenditure would be enough to save thousands of Africans who are going to die from this terrible disease.
When their imperialist interests are at stake, great powers can mobilize huge means, as they do today in the Middle East or Africa. But with Ebola, when the issue is to save thousands of human lives, their leaders display criminal inertia.
Oct 13, 2014
About two weeks before he died, Thomas Eric Duncan went to a hospital in Dallas. He had high fever, severe abdominal pain, dizziness, a headache, a lack of urine–all signs of Ebola. Tests ruled out several other illnesses that could cause such symptoms. Duncan also told a nurse he had arrived from Liberia a few days before. And yet, ER doctors told Duncan to take antibiotics and Tylenol, and sent him back home!
Could Thomas Duncan’s life be saved? Perhaps, given that at least three other patients in the U.S., who were treated for Ebola early on, have recovered. In any event, one thing is clear: whoever made the decision to send Duncan home on Sept. 25 was being extremely irresponsible, given the risks involved–not only for Duncan but the whole population.
And yet, this was the kind of decision that hospitals in the U.S. make routinely, hundreds of times, every single day. They turn away patients who don’t have insurance.
Hospital managers put pressure on doctors to make treatments more profitable–in total disregard of the well-being of patients. And many patients without insurance are denied treatment, period.
Government officials not only look the other way, but themselves show the same kind of contempt against working-class people. For example, look at what public health authorities did after Duncan was hospitalized. Instead of providing real medical attention for the four people who had stayed with Duncan, they ordered them imprisoned in a house–much like the way sick people, and their relatives, were turned into pariahs back in the Middle Ages.
And politicians joined the effort to divert the public’s attention. Republicans demanded that the U.S. shut its doors to foreigners–from certain countries, of course, in this case in Africa. Along the same lines, President Obama wagged his finger. “We have not seen other countries step up as aggressively as they need to,” he said. Never mind that the Dallas case has revealed the complete failure of the U.S. health care system to protect Duncan, and the population, from the risk of Ebola.
The U.S. has the most state-of-the art medical technology in the world. If Thomas Duncan–and his relatives who are now under house arrest–were billionaires, they would certainly have been treated differently. It’s quite likely they would even have been put up in some luxurious hospital suite, as hospitals tend to advertise for privileged patients these days.
Today, more than ever in history, humanity has the means to prevent, treat and cure illness. And we are in a better position than ever today to contain epidemics. If we are not doing all this, it’s because the capitalist system we live under puts profit above everything else, including human life.
Oct 13, 2014
Here’s how the City of Chicago steals money from working people. The City set up cameras to issue red-light tickets. Each ticket is $100. And to make sure they get more money, the city has shortened the yellow lights, in many cases below three seconds. Try to stop in less than three seconds going down a major artery at 45 mph with a semi right behind you!
Then there’s parking. First off, every car that parks in the city needs to have a city sticker, which costs $86 a year for a standard car, no matter whether it’s a $500 beater or a $100,000 Bentley. And if you live on a street that is zoned for residential parking, you need to pay an extra $25 for the right to park in front of your own house. Then, just about every commercial street, even small ones in the neighborhoods, has parking meters. The fees for these meters go up and up every year–up to $6.25 an hour downtown. This money doesn’t even go to the city. Since Chicago privatized its parking meters, the money goes to a private group led by the giant bank Morgan Stanley.
Chicago also has one of the highest sales taxes in the country–9.25%, unless you’re buying pop, in which case it’s 12.5%. The city even taxes food and drugs!
If you’re making a million dollars a year as a commodities trader downtown, the $100 ticket, $86 city sticker, and more expensive groceries don’t add up to much. But if you’re struggling to make it on a worker’s wages, they add up to a lot.
That’s how revenues from the working population pay for tax breaks and other subsidies big companies use to pad their profits.
Oct 13, 2014
After eight weeks of school, hundreds of students at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles are still not assigned to classes they need to graduate.
District officials blame this outrageous situation on the district’s computer system.
Really? Two months into the school year??
No, class schedules could have been made by hand, with paper and pencil, in a day or two.
After two months, California Superior Court Judge George Hernandez, Jr. said that students “have suffered and continue to suffer severe and pervasive educational deprivations.” He also observed that “there is no evidence of any organized effort” on the part of district or school officials “to remedy this shocking loss of instructional time.”
All very true, but will the problem be fixed now? Well, don’t hold your breath–the judge did not impose any sanctions on district officials. He let them off the hook, in fact, by “ordering” state officials to fix Jefferson’s problems instead.
In other words, Jefferson students are being told to wait, once again, as the big shots keep throwing the ball to each other.
The Los Angeles school district has some excellent schools–in affluent areas, as well as a few token “magnet” schools for a minority of students in working-class areas. As for the rest of L.A.’s working-class schools, Jefferson’s problems are nothing new. District officials and politicians who run the state have always short-changed working-class students–except that, these days they seem bolder in axing public education, and blaming it on a budgetary crisis.
Oct 13, 2014
Crain’s Detroit Business (9-17-14) reports the State of Michigan’s “financing plan for the [Ilitch Hockey Arena] is complex.”
In a nutshell, the State will work with Wall Street banks to raise money through bond sales.
The Detroit Downtown Development Authority (DDA) “will own the arena.” In other words, this puts NEW DEBT on DETROIT!
Oct 13, 2014
Frighteningly, Crain’s reports that the Detroit DDA is about to enter into a complex financing gamble called “interest rate swaps.”
Crain’s explains, “When they backfire, the results can be calamitous: The city of Detroit’s bankruptcy filing was, in part, because of interest-rate swaps in the mid-2000s that turned sour for the city.”
This deal is a repeat of the financial speculation that set up the bankruptcy Detroit is going through now!
Oct 13, 2014
There are five candidates running in Michigan as a slate calling for a working class fight based on a working class policy. They are Gary Walkowicz, for U.S. Congress Michigan district 12; Sam Johnson, for U.S. Congress Michigan district 13; Mary Anne Hering and Kenneth Jannot, Jr., candidates for Dearborn School Board (HFC); and David Roehrig, candidate for Wayne Country Community College district 2.
The following is excerpted from a speech that Gary Walkowicz gave recently in Detroit. In the next issue of the SPARK, there will be excerpts from the speech that Sam Johnson gave at the same meeting.
Sam and I are running for Congress to speak for the working class. We are running to say what many people feel—people are angry at what is happening to ordinary working people. We are running to insist that workers should not continue to pay the cost of the bosses’ crisis.
Some would say that since we are not running with the Democrats or Republicans that we can’t win. And, of course, it’s true that we don’t have what the two parties have—we don’t have millions of dollars to buy an election.
Some would say that if people vote for us, they are throwing their vote away. But I say that if you vote for either one of the two parties, then you are throwing your vote away.
Working people are facing a crisis in our lives and what kind of answers does either party have for us? Both parties pushed the Detroit bankruptcy, cutting the pay, pensions and health care of city workers, while giving away millions to Dan Gilbert and the Ilitch family. Both parties agreed to give trillions to the banks while ignoring the needs of ordinary people
Across the country, whether it was with Republicans or with Democrats in the White House and in Congress, working people have seen our standard of living go down. In every state and city, we are seeing our children’s schools get worse and the public services we depend on deteriorate. And it is happening under Democratic mayors and governors and Republican mayors and governors. Both parties have the same policies.
If we go along and vote for either of the parties, then we are saying that we agree with the attacks that the politicians are carrying out against working people. By voting for the two parties, we encourage them to go on attacking us. And that really is throwing your vote away.
Sam and I and Mary Anne and Ken and David are running to say that these attacks need to stop. We are running to say that things need to be turned in the 180-degree opposite direction. We say that the needs of working people should come first.
We are running to say that everyone should have the right to a decent life.
We say that everyone who wants to work should have a job, a full-time job. There is plenty of work that needs to be done. Hire back all the teachers and school workers who were laid off; they are needed to improve our schools. Hire back all the city and state workers who were laid off; they are needed to fix the streets and bridges and rebuild the sewer and water systems. In the factories and offices where people are working today, people are being overworked; so stop all the speed-up, divide up the work and hire more people. Put jobs back the way they used to be so that one person does the work of one person, not three or four people. This alone would create millions more jobs. And reduce the hours of work to something reasonable like 30 hours a week without losing a cent out of a 40-hour (or so) pay check.
We say that every worker should have an adequate standard of living. It is criminal that people are forced to work for 2nd-tier wages. It is an outrage that people are working for a minimum wage that today is beyond pitiful. Even double the minimum wage to $15/hour as some are calling for, would leave a family at the poverty level. Every worker needs raises that would allow their family to live decently.
We say that we should not lose out when prices go up. Our pay and pensions and Social Security and disability payments must be protected against rising prices. When companies raise their prices, our money should go up immediately and by an equal amount.
We say that every child should have the right to a good education. We say that our children are just as important as the children of the wealthy and have just as much right to good schools. Money for education must be increased everywhere, especially for those schools where our children are most in need.
We say that public services must be improved everywhere, especially in working class neighborhoods, where services have been cut the most. We pay more than enough in taxes to pay for decent services. We should not have to put up with our basements being flooded; we should not have to wait days to have our power back on after a storm. People should not have their house burn down because there aren’t enough firemen; people should not die because there aren’t enough ambulances.
The money is there to pay for all these things that working people need. We have the right to these things. The problem is that the wealth of this society is hoarded by a wealthy few. Large corporations, the big banks and capitalist class control most of the wealth. And they have been taking a bigger share for themselves for the past 35 years. Things weren’t great 35 years ago, but if we look back, we would be shocked by how much we have lost in that time.
The gap in wealth in this country between the rich and the rest of us has never been greater. Today the wealthy take everything for themselves. This wealth was not created by them. Working people created it. Our labor produced everything, we built everything, we make everything run. We can take back what we have produced, to use it so the whole population can have a decent life.
That’s what we say and that’s why we ask people to vote for us—to declare that we are fed up and that we intend to have what we need.
Oct 13, 2014
The following are excerpts from Sam Johnson’s book, A Fighter All My Life (reprinted with permission of the author and the publisher, Abecedarian Books).
OUR FIGHT TODAY IS FOR JOBS. Already in the 1970s, the fight was over jobs. We were fighting against speed-up. That’s about jobs. When they get you to do more work, they can get rid of other people. And that goes on year after year. It doesn’t take long, and they will have you doing two or three people’s jobs. That’s one of the reasons young workers can’t even get a job today. Or if they do, they can’t get enough money to raise a family.
It’s the capitalists’ policy: squeeze more work out of fewer workers, cut jobs. Profit first, profit before the workers’ lives. We’ve been going backwards and backwards.
There’s no way we should be catching hell. Why should we have to go through these things when it’s our labor that created the wealth, billions and trillions of dollars of wealth?
THE SCHOOLS ARE PART OF THIS CLASS SOCIETY. They keep the divisions going between rich and poor, not just in one place, but throughout the whole society. There are good schools in this country. But they’re mostly for the wealthy. They don’t put up schools like that for the working people and their kids.
Today, the bosses’ politicians are closing schools in the cities, getting rid of the teachers, packing more kids in the classroom.
They say they don’t have the money. Why don’t they have the money? They had it. We paid taxes. There’s money, but the government took that money and gave it to the big companies and the banks. They don’t use that money for the working people and their children. They don’t use it for schools for workers’ children.
WITHOUT JOBS, THERE WILL BE CRIME. These young people today can see there aren’t going to be any jobs for them. That younger generation that doesn’t have jobs and what they need to survive, they have to figure how to get money, and some of them turn to crime.
You see crime because this system is so rotten against the working class and the poor.
The young people out in the street, they’re a lot harder than young people used to be when I came up. They have to be, the way they come up. There’s so many more now out in the streets with no hopes, no possibilities.
They are some real fighters, but who do they fight today? Each other and maybe workers who live near them. They are fighting against themselves and against their class. But when there is a fight, when the working class really gets moving, we have to bring these young people along with us. They could fight tomorrow along with the rest of their class. Today, they’re just robbing other workers that have a few dollars. The problem is to go after the real robbers who put them in that condition.
WE’VE LOST MOST OF THE WORKERS in the plants who had experience in the fights. The workers today never went through fights. They haven’t seen that. Those of us who have been there have to reach out to the young generation, let them know how we got what we got. The older workers who came through the fights have to get to the younger ones, let them know what we did. But the younger generation has to become more active because you know the older generation will begin to slow down, and for some of us, the time is running out.
The workers in the 1930s and 1940s who went out on strike—they shut the plants and occupied them, they sent a message to the bosses: “You WILL give us what we want.” It’s the fight that made the changes. It was the workers who fought, not the politicians.
Workers today have to do the same thing, but this time workers have to take the plants over and not give them back. We have to take over and run these plants, run this city, run this country.
I SAW THE POWER WE CAN HAVE during the black rebellion. The black rebellion shut all those factories down. Black people on the street had enough force to shut this whole city down. That’s why the bosses hired more blacks, even off the streets. They created more jobs. And they couldn’t just bring blacks in. There also were a lot of poor whites out there without jobs. They had to create more jobs.
That’s what the capitalists are taking away from us today, jobs, because there is no fight.
You can’t just make a fight, get something and stop. We can see what happens when you stop, the bosses just take it right back to where it was or make it worse. When you see that, you know you can’t stop, you have to take it further, so the bosses can’t come back.
When we fight, we have to keep that fight getting bigger, keep it going. We can’t stop part-way, like the fights of the 1930s and the 1960s and 1970s did before. Take that power out of the capitalists’ hands. When you fight, if you leave them there, they’ll come back. When you stop fighting, they begin to creep back.
We can’t just think about this country. We’ve got to clean it all out, make it all right in one swoop, keep it going. Workers with a knowledge of history know not to stop part-way when the working class gets going.
SOME PEOPLE MAYBE CAN FIGHT, can defend themselves. I knew how to do that. But one person is not going to change anything about this system.
When the people being attacked, the working people come together, that’s what’s going to change it all. We’re the force that can get rid of this system we are living in. We are the force that produces the wealth. No way we should be living the way we are today, some people unemployed, homeless, starving. We should be having what that upper layer has. We all should have a decent place to live, transportation, schools for our kids like the best ones today, good clothes. We did the work that produced all those things.
We can take back the wealth our labor produced. If anybody can do that, we should be able to do it. We use our labor to make this economy work. We can organize our forces to set up a new economy and make it run for us.
When the working people see things from a class point of view, they will do that.
Oct 13, 2014
The State of California reported that seven independent oil companies might be contaminating drinking water near Bakersfield by injecting their waste fluid into underground aquifers. About 100 drinking water wells are located within a mile radius of these waste fluid disposal wells.
The oil companies generate waste fluids while extracting gas and oil from underground. The waste fluids contain pollutants such as chlorides, hydrocarbons, diesel fuel, and naturally occurring radioactive materials, which are extremely dangerous to human health and environment. The companies dispose of this fluid by injecting it into so-called “injection wells.” Every day in the United States, at least two billion gallons of such dangerous fluids are injected into more than 172,000 wells, according to a federal government report.
Federal and state governments allow companies to dump their harmful fluids into the injection wells, which are placed next to drinking water wells, like those near Bakersfield.
Drinking water is a precious resource for our existence. But, under capitalism, it is not our health, but profits that dictate everything.
Oct 13, 2014
This article is from the October 3rd issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
On September 26, in the state of Guerrero, the Mexican police carried out a massacre. Students from a school in Inguala, 60 miles south of Mexico City, who were training to become teachers, demonstrated against so-called “reform” measures detrimental to them. As they were getting on their buses to leave the demonstration, the police started shooting.
The police even targeted the bus of a soccer team, killing the driver and a 15-year-old soccer player. Six were killed on the spot, including three students, and more than 20 were injured.
On top of that, 46 students disappeared that day. They have most likely all been killed. Several corpses have been found in mass graves. Two drug traffickers have already avowed they killed 17 of these students. The likely scenario is that the mayor and/or the police asked these drug traffickers to kill the students. In Guerrero, 26 policemen have been arrested, and the mayor and the chief of the police have run away.
A few days before this demonstration, an officer and seven soldiers had been arrested for killing 20 people in June, in relation to drug trafficking.
The Mexican police and army are accustomed to using extreme brutality. The struggle against the drug cartels means daily murders and torture. Amnesty International recently noted that 7,000 complaints against the police and the army had been registered over the past four years, a 600% increase over 10 years.
The president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, comes from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has a long history of corruption. All he found to propose was the creation of a new armed force, the Gendarmeria Nacional. What will a new name and a new uniform do in the face of deals with the enormously rich drug cartel?
In a country where a large part of the population lives in poverty, seizing part of this drug money is a permanent strategy for the state apparatus, all the way from the top down to the rank and file of the police. Everything contributes to perpetuate the social violence we saw in the events in Guerrero.
Oct 13, 2014
On October 8, another young black man, Vonderrit Myers Jr., was shot and killed by an off-duty police officer, this time in St. Louis, Missouri. There was an immediate and angry response from those in his community. It was followed by other protests, including thousands coming out to protest this and other injustices on Saturday, October 11.
The young man killed was only 18, and lived only a few miles from Ferguson, where Michael Brown had lived and been killed by a police officer two months earlier.
Police were quick to claim the young man had a weapon he used to shoot at the cop–and the police produced spent shells and a gun. But if so many people didn’t believe it, it’s because the cops have regularly pulled out a weapon and planted it on their victims to justify their shootings.
But it’s not just the murder of Myers that people responded to. How many others have been murdered by cops? Jonathan Ferrell in North Carolina and Eric Garner in New York are only two among those who gained attention. But an estimated 400 people are killed by police in the U.S. every year, the vast majority of whom are black men. And this doesn’t include the vigilante shootings of recent years, like George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin.
Behind the events in Missouri, as in every other state, lies not just common police tactics but the whole desperate situation created by this capitalist society.
Today, among the poorer parts of the population, there are almost no jobs. An estimated HALF of young black men are unemployed, with no hope for a job.
They are deprived of a decent education. Schools in working class areas have for decades lacked the resources of wealthier suburban schools. But in the last 20 years, schools have deteriorated even more. Some exceedingly wealthy business people have spent millions to help destroy public schools. Sometimes the motive was simply profit, but other educational choices have been based on racism.
Young black men end up in prison in far greater numbers than their share in the population. A lot of money is spent keeping them in prison, much more than was ever spent in educating them.
The future looks bleak for many young black men. It is the result of a racism so deeply pervading the entire society that it goes beyond the despicable racist behavior of some individuals, including many cops.
Protests alone will not end this racism because it is so ingrained in capitalist society. But when people don’t protest, as the last 40 years have shown, their situation gets even worse. It is proof that only a large and angry response ever backs off the police–even if their caution is temporary.
Without response, there will be more deaths, especially of young black men.
Oct 13, 2014
Police brutalizing young black men on the streets of big cities is so common it is ordinarily ignored. But in Baltimore, the lawsuits resulting from this brutality were investigated by a reporter for the Baltimore Sun papers. What has been revealed concerns some 100 cases that were settled with the victims paid thousands of dollars to keep their mouths shut.
Since 2011, the city has spent almost six million dollars, paying from a few thousand up to $500,000 per case to victims who suffered broken bones, severe beatings, organ failure and at least two deaths at the hands of Baltimore city police.
The city settled, admitting the violent behavior of its police, but it also arranged to sweep such matters under the carpet. A law had been passed to prevent those who got a settlement from talking about their cases. If they talked, they risked losing the money. But even the small amount that came out is an admission of police brutality.
And the city expects its cops will continue to brutalize and terrorize the population. How do we know? There’s money for future settlements already put into the city’s budget.
The mayor of Baltimore claims the police will be investigated. In reality, police brutality is taken care of by city payoffs when the police occasionally get caught out.
All over the country, police officers still have the right to intimidate the people they supposedly serve. One man in Baltimore pointed out, “If I fight on any other job or beat up anybody I’m terminated. You beat up a citizen for no reason and had no real probable cause, and you still have your jobs. That’s crazy. These cops still have jobs.”
Oct 13, 2014
The following is another selection from Sam Johnson’s book, A Fighter All My Life, reprinted with permission from the author.
The racism I see today doesn’t look the same as what I grew up with. It’s at a different level. But it’s still there.
There are no jobs for black workers. In Detroit, in other cities, they moved the jobs out of the city. They moved them out where most black people don’t live. And there’s no transportation. Kids in the city can’t get out and back if they get a job. And the schools in the city don’t train the kids so they can get a job.
They don’t say they don’t hire blacks. But the way it’s set up, black workers can’t get hired. It’s the whole capitalist system that is racist.
The cops may not be KKK today, although some might as well be. But they have gotten much worse the way they treat people. The situation in the streets is tougher. And the cops are tougher. And when you see a cop kill someone, they may say he shouldn’t have done it, but the courts don’t do anything to him. They say he was just doing his job.
The cops kill a young black kid quicker than a young white kid, especially if the black kid speaks up. And a lot of them out there in the streets, they do speak up. So what if they go to jail, they’re already in jail—that’s how they feel. So they front off the cops. And sometimes the cops kill them. Or these young kids end up in prison. For what?
This monster of a capitalist system was born in slavery. Slavery may be over, but the racism it produced is not over. And the violence of this monster system against all working people is not over. We’re all of us, the working people, being treated like slaves.