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
Mar 2, 2015
Oil refinery workers belonging to the United Steelworkers Union (USW) began a strike on February 1. By the end of February, 6,500 workers had walked out at 15 oil refineries. While the workers are fighting against such takeaways as a reduction in health benefits, they say their main fight is to reduce overtime and gain a reasonable work schedule.
Like companies everywhere, the big oil companies and refiners have cut so many jobs, understaffing is rampant. To cover all the work, the companies have been forcing those who are left to slave away on 12 hour shifts with few days off. Even when the companies grant time off, they still require workers to be on-call, that is, be available to come in to work at a moment’s notice. And since schedules often alternate between days and graveyard, workers’ sleep and waking lives are constantly being disrupted.
These work schedules are inhuman and they have left workers exhausted, anxiety-ridden. It has ruined their family and social life, destroyed their health and taken years off their life.
Moreover, forcing exhausted, fatigued workers to operate and maintain giant refineries turns their workplaces into ticking time bombs that explode periodically. Government regulators officially concluded that “worker fatigue” was one of the main reasons for the giant explosion at the BP Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers in 2005. No doubt fatigue played a role in an explosion on February 18 at an Exxon-Mobil refinery outside Los Angeles. Officials say it was practically a miracle that “only” four workers were injured, as flames, harmful gases and ash were shot into the air and earthquake-like shock waves shook the giant refinery, as well as the surrounding homes, schools and buildings in the heavily populated neighborhood.
The strikers are also fighting against another pet practice by the oil companies: rampant outsourcing to temp agencies. Outsourcing provides the oil companies with a low wage workforce that comes and goes on the command of the company. The strikers point out just how dangerous this is. Since temps have few, if any rights on the job, the boss can more easily force them to hurry up the work or do more dangerous work. This is made worse by their lack of experience in the specific workplace.
What oil companies and refiners are doing is not any different from what companies and employers are doing absolutely everywhere, from public to private employers, from industry to services to schools and health care.
The big difference is that the refinery workers have chosen to fight against it, and their union has finally called a strike. This is extremely important.
But 6,500 strikers are going up against some of the biggest and richest companies in the world. Royal Dutch Shell, the company leading the contract bargaining for the oil industry, has operations in more than 70 countries and annual sales that approach half a trillion dollars. Another company, Exxon-Mobil, is even bigger! Besides that, the oil companies are tightly connected to the banks, and their interests are protected by governments worldwide, starting with the U.S. government.
To go up against this monster, the refinery workers need forces much greater than their own.
Those forces are in other refineries, factories, offices, hospitals, schools, in every city and town. Because workers everywhere are facing the same problems.
Of course, employers use all kinds of barriers to keep workers from uniting together, including contracts, courts and injunctions. That is why workers will have to ignore contract dates and whether or not they are in the same union and all the other barriers.
We will have to decide that we have to put our needs and interests first. They are a matter of life and death for us. When we do, we will find the way to join together so that we can meet the corporate giants head on.
Mar 2, 2015
Trash has not been picked up since February 6th in many D.C. neighborhoods. It is not only trash piling up in the alleys, on some streets and in people’s homes. It is also the critters that live off the garbage: Rats! Many rats.
What is D.C. Public Works’ response? “Again, we do recognize we are inconveniencing the residents when trash and recycling aren’t collected timely and hope that we have no more winter weather to impede our work.”
What?! Doesn’t winter, snow and ice come every year?
The two-legged rats that are making the decisions to not hire enough people and to not clear the alleys of snow and ice need gifts of garbage (which we have been accumulating) dumped in their front lawns!
Mar 2, 2015
Washington, D.C. plans to start running a streetcar that is dangerous and inconvenient. The one-car electric train will ride on two miles of rail tracks in the narrow traffic lanes of H Street NE and Benning Road NE. During testing, a number of cars have hit the streetcar. Buses are slowed down because they may only pass a streetcar that is stopped, yet buses carry ten times as many people as the streetcars will.
But the city has spent well over one hundred million dollars to install the track and buy a few trolley cars. Contractors like RATP and HDR are already in the D.C. budget to get tens of millions of dollars per year to run the program.
City officials stand for filling contractors’ pockets so the rich get richer. Safe, efficient, and cheap mass transportation? Not on their watch!
Mar 2, 2015
Some Baltimore Fire Department paramedics worked more than 2,000 hours of overtime last year–an average of more than 40 hours a week on top of their normal work schedule! Many others worked less overtime than this, but still a large amount.
This super-overtime was the result of the Fire Department not filling one-fifth of the Fire Department’s 23 paramedic positions. While the city might have saved some money by doing this, these paramedics are being worked to death. And it may have cost some other people their lives already: exhausted, wacked-out paramedics are not going to be able to perform at their best.
Their performance may make the difference between life and death for those under their care. Yet the city would rather play with our lives by cutting corners!
The city needs to hire more paramedics–NOW!
Mar 2, 2015
Last month thousands of Baltimore City residents and small businesses went without water, some for as long as a week or more.
Why? Because the city couldn’t repair leaks and breaks in water mains, smaller pipes and meters as fast as the cold weather caused them to happen.
Baltimore water and sewer bills have been going up and up and up. But clearly the water and sewer systems are failing more and more.
These systems need to be repaired or rebuilt now. But instead more and more city revenue is being given away in TIFs, PILOTs and other tax breaks and subsidies to real estate developers and corporations.
Our water main breaks are directly connected to their tax breaks!
Mar 2, 2015
The politicians in Michigan want everyone to vote to raise the sales tax on May 5th, from 6 to 7%. The tax money will supposedly go to fix Michigan’s roads.
Meanwhile, cities, counties and the state are all letting every pothole and crumbling road go unfixed in a brazen attempt to extort the population to tax themselves. The politicians are holding a gun to our heads: give us that vote, or we wreck your roads.
These same politicians voted to give businesses a big tax cut in 2011. And then, it was “discovered” that they didn’t have enough money to fix the roads!
That tax raise would keep the business tax cuts in place, while hitting the rest of us hard.
The money to fix our roads is out there. The corporations have it. They should be made to pay!
Mar 2, 2015
It was 50 years ago in February that Malcolm X was assassinated by a gunman while he was speaking in New York. Someone influenced by the Nation of Islam may have pulled the trigger, but it is certainly possible, as many believed at the time, that the U.S. state apparatus was involved in his murder. It had already tried–unsuccessfully–to marginalize Malcolm X because he was giving voice to what many in the black population had concluded and were acting upon in the streets: that to win their demands it was necessary to go beyond the turn-your-cheek tactics of the civil rights movement.
Born Malcolm Little, he had seen his father lynched. Like many others of his generation, as a teen he gained his first education in the streets, becoming involved in street crime like gambling and later burglary, for which he was convicted and sent to prison. While in prison, he read and learned from Elijah Muhammad’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, most importantly from Muhammad’s expression of the right of black people to defend themselves and be proud to be black.
When he got out of prison, Malcolm X joined the Nation of Islam. Over time, he built strong bases of support in several cities, particularly Harlem and Detroit.
He came into conflict with Elijah Muhammad, first because he took as a practical aim Muhammad’s call for self-defense. When he publicly described the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a case of “the chickens coming home to roost,” it set him apart from the road Elijah Muhammad was taking. Malcolm pointed to Kennedy’s assassination as a consequence of the violence carried out by the U.S. government. He made the connection between the violence here and the brutality carried out by the U.S. state around the world.
In doing so, Malcolm X went farther than Elijah Muhammad was ready to go, and when Muhammad attempted to silence him, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam.
Following the break, Malcolm X continued to articulate what many in the black movement were thinking. He spoke of “the ballot or the bullet.” As his daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz, said recently, “America sat up and took notice as he articulated the searing reality that, if not granted the right to participate in the system, black citizens would have no recourse but to fight. The long-suppressed fury that was beginning to boil over in black communities lent credence to this warning. And when voting rights laws and practices changed, it was in no small part because of powerful white Americans’ fear of what could happen if they failed to act.”
Malcolm said, in effect, to the white power structure, “Either you give us what we need to have a decent life, or YOU won’t have it.”
In speaking today about the fight against police murders of young black men, his daughter said, “I imagine he would applaud the ‘Hands Up’ gesture for its sheer dramatic effect, but would also critique it as rank capitulation that ironically accommodates the very goal of police brutality–to intimidate and immobilize black citizens, forcing them into a defenseless posture if they hope to survive. He’d agree that ‘Black Lives Matter,’ indeed–but also note that the uniformed police officers who disagree are not likely to be persuaded by a hashtag.”
At the time of his death, Malcolm X had not yet come to articulate the goal that the black population, in order get what it needs has to get rid of capitalism–and tie that to the key position black workers hold in the American working class.
But Malcolm X left behind a legacy which touches all those fighting against the racism and violence of this society. There’s a famous passage from his speech The Ballot or the Bullet that well explains that legacy:
“Any time you demonstrate against segregation and a man has the audacity to put a police dog on you, kill that dog, kill him, I’m telling you, kill that dog. I say it, if they put me in jail tomorrow, kill that dog. Then you’ll put a stop to it. Now, if these white people in here don’t want to see that kind of action, get down and tell the mayor to tell the police department to pull the dogs in. That’s all you have to do. If you don’t do it, someone else will.
If you don’t take this kind of stand, your little children will grow up and look at you and think ‘shame.’ If you don’t take an uncompromising stand, I don’t mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you’ve made me insane, and I’m not responsible for what I do. And that’s the way every Negro should get. Any time you know you’re within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don’t die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
Mar 2, 2015
Stock markets in the imperialist countries have hit record highs. On February 17th, the Standard & Poor index of the 500 biggest U.S. stocks hit its highest level ever of 2100 points. The next day, the Japanese stock market index set a new record. And the day after, it was the turn of big French companies. These indexes show the price of stocks and the growing wealth of stock holders.
The reason for these soaring stock prices is the trillions of dollars, euros and yen that the different central banks have given to the markets. A former banker, Jean-Michel Naulot, who is often cited in the press, said, “Taking into account the low level of investments and anemic demand of households, all this cash will once again feed financial bubbles.”
In January the head of the European Central Bank announced a program to pour cash into the financial markets by buying up 67 billion dollars of debt certificates each month until September 2016, adding up to 1.2 trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve in this country has been doing the same thing for some time.
Far from investing in new production, the speculators, that is the financiers, didn’t even wait for the first billions to come in to compete for the stock of existing companies. The flood of new buyers for the moment made stock market prices soar. The rise fuels itself. Speculators buy today to sell at a higher price tomorrow, and earn money as long as the price rise continues.
But this explosion doesn’t rest on anything real: nothing additional is produced, made or even sold. The billions fabricated by the banks will only make the next financial crisis more catastrophic.
Mar 2, 2015
McKinsey and Company, advisers to the capitalist bosses, just published a new study on worldwide debt. From 2007 until 2014, debt has risen by more than 50 trillion dollars to a dizzying total of 200 trillion dollars. This figure includes all forms of debt, public, corporate and private.
The richest capitalist countries are the ones that have increased their public debt the most. For example, it has risen by 35% in the United States; by 60% in Japan; by 50% in Britain. And this kind of debt has exploded all over the world mostly because states borrowed more money to ease the effect of a lack of investments by capitalists, or–as they pretend–to revive their economy. In reality, they are only helping their capitalists.
So how long can this go on? After the threat of collapse from the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and the public debt crisis of 2011, the heads of states talked of regulating the financial system. But this leading political class is incapable of playing the tiniest role to moderate the path toward the abyss to which the world is heading, driven by financial markets looking for more profit.
Mar 2, 2015
A record number of children from Central American countries are crossing the borders from Mexico into the U.S. Last year, around 51,000 children unaccompanied by an adult have come across with an additional 61,000 “family units,” which are most usually women with children.
Under U.S. law, these children are not supposed to be imprisoned or detained; they are supposed to be released to family or sponsors. But as early as 2005, the Bush administration began breaking these laws by long detentions of children and mothers. In 2009 the Obama administration took down detention centers after scandals arose regarding imprisonment and poor conditions for children and moms.
But today, again, in the face of an increase in the immigration from Central America of children and mothers, the Obama administration has set up new detention facilities. One such facility, in Artemia, New Mexico, has been the subject of exposés by legal rights activists due to its horrible conditions. One said “it’s a jail, and the women and children are being led around by guards.” Children were routinely malnourished, depressed and had contracted pneumonia, scabies and lice in the jail. Children were vomiting and refusing to eat cold food and old food that was offered to them. There was no attempt being made to provide the food of their own cultures, and no attempt to have Spanish-speaking people working in the facility.
Under U.S. law, the fact that these families are not from a nation whose borders touch the U.S. should give them the right to asylum and safety, if they are members of a group that is being persecuted or subjected to violence.
Well, they are.
Increasingly, in Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, there have been horrific, daily attacks against women and children by members of gangs that rape and murder and use the children as mules to transport drugs across the borders. Some of these gangs arose after the Mexican army drove guerillas across borders into Central America. Some are gangs that are part of the current state structures and work for government officials. The continued U.S. policy of exploitation of this region has devastated the economies and most severely affected the young, women and the elderly.
Clearly, the law should give these women and children a right to asylum. But instead, women and their children are being brought before judges en masse and then deported.
Recently, a federal judge ruled that these mass detentions are illegal–again. BUT–he ordered the authorities to consider each asylum case individually, meaning that all of these families will continue to be detained for a long, long time while they wait for their cases to be “considered.”
When legal advocates began to get support and publicity for these families and became more successful at obtaining release for women and children, the Artemia facility was abruptly shut down and the women and children were shipped out to a facility in Karnes, Texas. Officials in Karnes had implemented plans to expand the Karnes facility from 500 to roughly 1,100 beds. Two hours west of Karnes in Dilley, Texas, the federal government is opening up a detention center with 2,400 beds. While government officials make propaganda regarding how nice the facility will be with classrooms, libraries, play areas, etc., it will be run by the same prison company that ran the Hutto center that was ordered closed. In any case, the intention is clear: More women and children will be detained in jail conditions pending deportation, instead of released and aided while finding refuge in the U.S.
Deportation often means death for these children and the women who have bravely brought them out. What kind of a society turns children and mothers back over to butchers and dictators?
Capitalism has no solutions for the horrific population destabilizations it has caused, neither here nor in the countries made poor by its exploitation. Not much is told of the story of these immigrants, the children who are right in America’s “backyard.” The right wing can’t even rustle up the old lie about these immigrants “taking jobs away from real Americans.” A toddler is too little to walk, let alone work.
Despite its soothing rhetoric, the Obama administration has deported more people from the U.S. than any former administration. With 140,000 unaccompanied children expected to cross the border this year, this morally bankrupt government has no solution other than a worsening of life for these children before their lives have even begun.
When the U.S. working class realizes that workers have no countries, and that national borders have been set up only to benefit the capitalist class’ drive for profits, it will fight for the rights of all workers. And first and foremost, it will fight for the rights of mothers and children.
Mar 2, 2015
A measles outbreak involving at least 149 cases has been happening since December. Most of the cases have been linked to the exposure of unvaccinated people who visited Disneyland in California.
There has been a rise in the number of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated in recent years. Many have been swayed by the stupidity of anti-science attitudes expressed by celebrities like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy. Opponents of vaccination whipped up fears of a link between vaccines and an increase in the rate of autism, supported by a study published in 1999 in the British medical journal the Lancet linking the two.
Their fears were unjustified. The Lancet article has since been thoroughly discredited and the journal has retracted it, yet many parents are still refusing to vaccinate their children.
It is no accident that the lowest vaccination rates are happening in some of the wealthiest communities. Misinformed parents from these privileged areas motivated by fear and individualism are choosing not to have their young children vaccinated. In so doing, they are not only putting their own children at risk. They also put at risk other vulnerable young children too young for vaccination because their immune systems have not yet fully formed, and the elderly, whose immune systems may be compromised by their age or other illnesses.
As a result of the reduced rate of vaccination, the current measles outbreak is just the latest to occur in recent years. Others took place in 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2014 when there were more cases than usual. Last year there were 644 cases in all. There has also been an even bigger increase in the number of whooping cough cases in the U.S. in recent years.
There are effective vaccines against both measles and whooping cough, also known as pertussis. The recent measles outbreaks are happening even though the disease was considered eliminated in this country in 2000.
It’s true that most of the fall in many infectious diseases occurred before the development of vaccines due to improvements in sanitation in many places in the world. These improvements weren’t made out of the goodness of the capitalists’ hearts. It took social movements to win them for the majority of the population.
Vaccines have, in turn, helped bring about, or nearly so, the complete eradication of some infectious diseases.
In practice, no vaccine can be 100% effective. This is because vaccines do not take hold in all vaccinated individuals.
The effectiveness of any vaccine, therefore, depends on a very high rate of vaccination in the population. This produces what scientists call “herd immunity.”
If someone with measles enters a population from outside and everyone, or nearly everyone, has been vaccinated, the infected person is highly unlikely to infect those whose vaccine didn’t take, because they are protected by the surrounding “herd” who cannot contract the disease because they’ve been effectively vaccinated.
Vaccination, therefore, is a social obligation. In addition to young children and the elderly, unvaccinated people also put at risk those who fulfilled their social obligation but in whom the vaccine did not take hold.
Besides continuing to point to the now discredited link between vaccines and the rise in autism, some opponents of mandatory vaccination express a mistrust of government mandates and the medical establishment to justify exposing their own children and others to the risk of spreading deadly diseases otherwise practically eliminated.
There is plenty of reason to mistrust the bosses’ government, and to be skeptical of capitalist medicine’s high dependence on profitable pharmaceuticals to treat diseases, but not in the case of vaccines. While some vaccines recently became profitable, for many years they were not. For that reason, at times there were shortages of some vaccines, because no corporation wanted to make them.
Rather than pushing vaccination on the population, capitalism has stood in the way of vaccination.
The near elimination of some infectious diseases has been one of the success stories of modern medicine and public health–but only where people have access to proper sanitation and vaccines. Everyone should have a right to both sanitary living conditions and vaccines. Everyone should also have the right to expect that others be required to get vaccines that have been proven safe and effective.
Mar 2, 2015
On February 24, people in Chicago thumbed their noses at Rahm Emanuel who, so many times during his last four years as mayor, had thumbed his nose at them. Emanuel wasn’t able to pull the votes he needed to avoid a run-off in the mayor’s election. He had collected more than 30 million dollars since 2011, many times what the other four candidates altogether had collected. He was supported by most of the Democratic Party establishment, including some union bureaucrats, and by the wealthy people who run the city. President Barack Obama came to Chicago only five days before the election to open a national historic monument–and, by the way, to give Emanuel, his former chief of staff, a big hug for the cameras. And Emanuel still wasn’t able to avoid a run-off.
As the two Chicago newspapers put it, the vote was a solid embarrassment for Emanuel.
Arrogant to the core, he had never bothered to hide his contempt for ordinary people. In 2012, he told Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago teachers’ union, that he believed 25% of public school students in Chicago are never going to amount to anything–and he wasn’t about to throw away money on them.
That was Emanuel to the core–a condescending vulgar thug who took pride in being one.
Tuesday, February 24, election day, the ordinary people took their revenge. They denied Emanuel the victory he and all his wealthy patrons assumed was rightfully his. And they gave a surprisingly large vote to Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Cook County Commissioner who hadn’t even joined the race for mayor until late in the fall.
That was not the only public shame endured by Emanuel. Twelve city council candidates, heavily funded by Emanuel, were forced into run-offs. And a 13th was defeated. Emanuel’s support turned out to be a kiss of death for some aldermen who had proudly paraded around as flunkeys.
Then there was the vote for an elected school board. Ninety per cent of those allowed to vote on the measure agreed: they didn’t want the school board appointed by the mayor as it is now. Their vote was only a “non-binding advisory” vote. But they made it clear, they are fed up with how Emanuel’s appointed board has been destroying public school education.
Emanuel has lots of money left for the run-off election. And the people who coughed up 31 million dollars for him have plenty more money where that came from–they’ve been stealing it from the working population all along. In this capitalist society, what money wants is what money gets. Usually.
But, yes, Garcia could defeat Emanuel. After all, there was a solid base of support for him among Spanish-speaking voters, people like Garcia, who either came from Mexico or whose families came from there. Today, they make up an important part of the city. And they might well feel that it’s now “their time.” But in the February election almost three quarters didn’t vote.
There is anger against Emanuel in the black wards. Emanuel got 56% of the vote in these wards four years ago, only to use their vote against the people who supported him. Emanuel closed 50 schools in 2013–the very big majority of which served black neighborhoods.
In the February election, more than two thirds of the people in those same wards sat out the election. Of the ones who voted, more voted for Emanuel than for Garcia, or for Willie Williams, a black businessman. But Emanuel got much less than four years ago, less than half.
What will all those workers do–black, Mexican, other Spanish-speaking, white workers–all those workers who didn’t vote in February? Apparently they didn’t believe in the first round that their vote made any difference. And they were the big majority.
There certainly were workers who said just before the February election that they didn’t think that Garcia, finally, would be much different from Emanuel. But some of these same people, after saying that, said they didn’t care. They were still going to vote for Garcia, because they couldn’t stand Emanuel and his arrogant smirk.
Sometimes, that’s all that people feel they can do–vote out the thug who has been in office.
That’s fine. But let’s be realistic. The wealthy people who bought the office for Emanuel have plenty of other thugs to take his place.
By putting Garcia in office, what do the working people of Chicago get?
The real test of Garcia, and of anyone else who asks for the workers’ vote, is whether he tells us the truth. Does he say that he can do nothing, unless people prepare for a fight? Because that is the truth. Until working people are ready to tear up the political system, until we are ready to say, let the banks be damned, don’t give them one more cent of our money–until then, we won’t begin to answer our problems.
Chuy Garcia, good Democrat that he is, has never proposed that–not before when he was in office, not now when he is running.
But sooner or later, working people are going to have to find a way to express their own interests. To put it bluntly: the working class is going to have to fight. We are going to have to fight for ourselves. And no matter who is elected in April, unless and until the working class fights, we won’t have any way out of the trap we find ourselves in. Not in Chicago–and not anywhere in the country.
Mar 2, 2015
Six hundred and two people cast their vote for Ed Hershey in Chicago’s alderman election for city council. That was 8.23% of the people who voted in the 25th ward.
Ed has been a public school teacher for nine years–not your typical politician. He said he ran because he was outraged at what Mayors Daley and Emanuel took from the public schools in working class neighborhoods, ripping up the possibility of a decent education for many children of the working class.
Before running, he was active as a teacher, fighting against these attacks and against school closings. He was arrested, along with parents, in 2013 when Emanuel sent in heavy equipment to tear down a building used as a community center and library at Whittier school. He was a leader at his school in the 2012 teachers’ strike, which forced Emanuel to take a step back.
Ed, in his campaign, declared that money does exist in the city, money that could be used to provide decent schools, adequate services, pleasant neighborhoods. But, he also said, this money has been stolen by the banks and by the wealthy people served by Rahm Emanuel and the aldermen tied to him. That money went directly into the pockets of the capitalist class, greedily trying to protect itself from the crisis its system created.
There is no answer to the problems we face every day in the cities, unless the working class fights–just like there is no answer to the problems of unemployment, falling income and lack of opportunity for the next generation. But the working class has to fight, not simply to ameliorate some immediate problems. It has to fight to take back all that stolen wealth.
The money in the hands of the banks and the capitalist class today was stolen from the labor of working people. And it was stolen once again, through the tax and budget machinery of city and state government, taken right out of our paychecks and our bank accounts. All that stolen wealth has to be taken back, ripped out of the hands of the capitalist class, torn out of the coffers of the banks. That money has to be taken back and used to protect the interest of working people. That will happen only when the working class organizes itself to fight for its own interests.
Ed Hershey said he ran in order to say all that, to give a chance for all those working people who think the same way–to give them a chance to use an election to say what they really think. And, he said, the job of the alderman should be to use everything at his disposal to make it easier for people to organize a fight.
Many of the people who voted for Ed made a conscious choice to use their vote to say that the working class must fight. They were looking to the future with their vote.
Add to Ed’s 602 votes the 900 people who voted for Jorge Mújica, long-time immigrant rights and community activist who headed the Socialist Campaign, and it’s obvious that working people in the ward found a way to express their anger outside the framework proposed by the Democratic Party. Just over 20% of the 25th ward voters expressed themselves in favor of programs proposed by these two socialist campaigns.
The two candidates may have a different perspective of how the working class can protect itself. Jorge Mújica seemed to focus more on what he would do for people as an alderman, while Ed focused on the need for the working class to fight to win what it needs.
But whatever differences exist between them, the fact is 1502 people voted for these two socialist campaigns. This vote in a city long controlled by the Democratic Party is a welcome development.
Mar 2, 2015
On any given day in the U.S., 731,000 people are locked up in jails, according to a recent report by Vera Institute of Justice. And there are nearly 12 million jail admissions each year, staggeringly higher than any other country in the world.
Jails form an incarceration system separate from the prisons. These are more than 3,000 locally run facilities, mainly holding arrested but not yet convicted people.
Over the years many people have been trapped into the jail system for long jail times. People were jailed an average of 23 days in 2013. Around 75 percent of them were jailed for minor or non-violent offenses, related to traffic, property, drug, or public order related violations. More than a half of the jailed people were later found innocent–even by this “justice” system biased against working people.
One basic reason why people find themselves locked up for longer times is that they don’t have enough money to defend themselves or pay the bail. That is, they are mainly working or unemployed poor people.
By criminalizing poverty, jails and prisons are responses of this rich capitalist system to worsening economic and social conditions for the working people.
Mar 2, 2015
Six months after the death of Omar Abrego, Los Angeles County coroner’s office released his autopsy report. The report lists the cause of death as cocaine. And oh, the coroner bothered to add, there was also “physical and emotional duress while taken under custody.”
Is that what you call an extremely brutal beating by two cops, using their fists and batons, for 10 minutes? One of the cops even broke his hand beating Abrego! And there is a video, posted online, showing Abrego lying face down and bleeding, while two uniformed cops are holding him down.
The cops beat Abrego in front of his house in South L.A. on August 2. According to family members, the 37-year-old father of three was driving home from work, wearing an Amtrak uniform, when the cops stopped the company truck he drove. The savage beating took place in front of horrified witnesses. Abrego died of his wounds 12 hours later.
The two murderous cops, two LAPD gang unit sergeants, have never been charged with any crime. To the contrary, their bosses have sent them back into the street, as if to say, “Go ahead, do it again”!
Abrego’s murder had much in common with the police killings of unarmed black victims of murderous cop violence–and especially of Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old black man who was shot to death by cops just four blocks away, nine days later. They were working-class men murdered in the street, near their homes in a working-class neighborhood.
And the authorities have staunchly protected their murderers.
Mar 2, 2015
On February 10, a 35-year-old Mexican farm worker, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, was shot by the police in the city of Pasco, Washington. What happened was captured on a cell phone video. An autopsy showed he was shot seven times, twice from behind. Zambrano-Montes was executed because he had thrown rocks at cops, who chased him before killing him. He had no knife or gun.
The Mexican community carried out a number of protests after seeing the video. One drew 500 people, and another blocked the bridge over the Columbia River. Many motorists yelled or honked their horns in support.
The city of Pasco has 68,000 residents and is part of a tri-city area of 250,000. Pasco is 56% Hispanic and is a farm worker center, employing Mexican labor at very low wages and in very poor living conditions. The capitalist farmers want this labor supply–especially those without papers, who they can exploit especially hard.
The violence of the Pasco cops is used to keep the farm worker population in its place. Conditions in Pasco are like a prison labor camp. This was the fourth killing by the police since July.
Signs at the protests said, “Stop Police Brutality. It was just a rock.” The capturing of the killing of Antonio Zambrano-Montes on a cell phone and spreading it online brought out in the open the ordinary police brutality in Pasco and proved a trigger for the protests. If they continue and deepen, they are the way to push back the police.