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 16, 2015
August 7 was “Bloody Sunday,” the day 50 years ago that Alabama state troopers ambushed and violently attacked a peaceful march near Selma Alabama. Demonstrators were tear-gassed and beaten with clubs. One of the organizers of the march, Amelia Boynton, was savagely knocked to the ground. Lying unconscious on the bridge, she was kicked, her body further abused by county law enforcement. Nine days earlier, a state trooper had shot into another peaceful demonstration, killing civil rights activist and church deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson. Two days after “Bloody Sunday” another march set out from Selma, only to turn back when troopers threatened to attack again. Civil rights activist and Boston minister James Reeb was beaten to death that night by white racist vigilantes.
The politicians pretend that horror at this violence directed against peaceful protesters finally provoked Congress to act quickly. And it’s true, Congress, never known for speed, acted quickly. By August 6, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been introduced, gone through committee, voted on and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
But Congress was not reacting to the violence. Violence? There was an abundance, an overflow of violence all during the years when the black population was asking to have the same rights as other people, demonstrating peacefully for them. Thousands of peaceful people had been killed, tens of thousands injured permanently, untold numbers lynched, including by state troopers and other “guardians of order.” Where was Congress then?
No, Congress was not acting out of concern that violence rained down on those demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma. It was acting in response to anger in the black population threatening to explode.
After decades of demonstrating peacefully, paying an enormous price, the black population began to defend itself. In 1963, Birmingham Alabama was swept by an over-night rebellion after the SCLC headquarters was firebombed. In 1964, a rebellion against police who violently cleared the streets in Harlem spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and several New Jersey towns. Demonstrators in many cites began to echo the words of Malcolm X, who famously said: “You should never be non-violent unless you run into some non-violence.... 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.”
Congress did what it always does when the population begins to move. It passed a meaningless piece of legislation, the Voting Rights Act.
Five days after it was passed, the people of Watts gave their verdict on it: they went out into the streets of Los Angeles, the first of the really massive and powerful revolts, echoed in five other cities. 1966: 21 major so-called “riots.” 1967: 41 major “riots.” The rebellion in Newark spread to 13 other New Jersey cities; the enormous one in Detroit spread to eight other cities in Michigan and Ohio. 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King: hundreds of thousands of people rose up in cities all over the country, almost immediately and simultaneously, reflecting the increasingly radicalized consciousness of a very wide part of the black population.
The black population was not “given” the right to vote: the black population took it through its own massive struggles. Those struggles imposed a rapid change in every field: jobs, wages, voting, housing, Social Security coverage, medical coverage–vast improvements that also improved the situation of most white workers. And those struggles forced the American capitalist class to decide it could no longer pursue its war in Viet Nam.
The face of the country was changed–for a while. But only for a while. The population, which had gained so much, may have believed the gains were permanent. They were not.
As struggles receded, so did the gains. Those gains may not all have been lost. Not yet. But the push of the capitalist class to increase the exploitation of black workers and more broadly of the whole working class is ripping every gain to shreds. Today, for example, more black people are denied the right to vote as the result of a great number of laws, which, acting together, prevent people from voting. Public school education is so destroyed that children come out of school unable to read, North and South.
The black population did not make gains by being a victim. They won them through struggle. What was won through struggle will be reconquered the same way.
Mar 16, 2015
Two weeks ago, a California state agency cited many car wash businesses in the Los Angeles area for wage theft.
Such theft cases are neither new nor unusual. The federal and state government agencies have reported such thefts and issued citations for decades. There are laws in place against wage theft. But, as these latest wage theft cases show, these laws exist only on paper, but are not enforced.
Wage theft happens at a staggering level. In 2010, UCLA researchers found that almost 30 percent of L.A. workers were paid less than the minimum wage, close to 80 percent of workers were not paid overtime, close to 20 percent of workers were forced to work “off the clock,” 80 percent were forced to work on their meal break, and 45 percent experienced illegal deductions from their paychecks for items such as uniforms and work tools.
This study also indicated that businesses in other large cities, like New York and Chicago, also stole from their workers. Wage theft is an epidemic practice affecting the entire U.S.
These wage thefts are not limited to workers working in small size businesses such as restaurants, car wash businesses and auto repair shops. Big businesses are also involved in wage theft. In a court settlement in 2008, Wal-Mart agreed that it had forced employees to work “off the clock” without pay after their official shifts. This wage theft involved hundreds of thousands of current and former workers of Wal-Mart, across the country.
However, in most such cases, courts side with the businesses. In January of this year, in a case similar to that of Wal-Mart, all nine judges of the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that companies don’t have to pay their workers for the time they force workers to wait for security screening after work. The lawsuit was brought by warehouse workers in Nevada who are hired by a temp agency to fill orders for Amazon. The workers said that the wait often takes close to half an hour, amounting to two and a half hours a week they are not paid for.
Companies are relentlessly attacking workers to drive down their wages. The federal government and the states are in collusion with the companies in this attack. Wage theft is just one such standard business practice to drive down the wages.
But even without such practices, wages are already outrageously low. For example, in California, the state minimum wage is $9 an hour. Workers say that even $25 an hour is not a good wage for having a decent life. In other words, every day the capitalists steal from us legally.
Mar 16, 2015
Thanks to a jump of 14.5 billion dollars, Warren Buffet came in number 3 in wealth among the world’s billionaires according to Forbes magazine. Most of his 73 billion dollars in wealth comes from Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate which he’s run for 50 years.
Berkshire Hathaway is one of the biggest businesses in the world, thanks to its ownership of many companies, ranging from Coca Cola to IBM, the Burlington Northern railroad and energy. Buffet is called the “Sage of Omaha.” His wisdom is supposedly shown by his prudence and mistrust of bankers.
But this didn’t prevent him from investing in insurance companies and banks like Wells Fargo. He invested in the bank in 1990, when it was worth three billion dollars. Today it’s worth a hundred times as much. As a “sage” capitalist, he won big in 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, by investing five billion dollars in Goldman Sachs at a very good price, with the prospect of getting two billion dollars more profit in the years ahead.
A wise investor in the capitalist world is a man who successfully speculates.
Warren Buffet is only one example of those capitalist parasites who juggle with billions, whatever the consequences for hundreds of thousands of workers.
Mar 16, 2015
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart reported that more than one in three prisoners in his jail suffer from severe mental illness. They end up in jail because there is nowhere else for them to go in Chicago. There are almost no mental health services left for people without money to pay.
What does it say about a society that doesn’t provide treatment for the mentally ill and instead jails them? That is a society that is criminal! Capitalist society!
Mar 16, 2015
On the evening of March 1, about 100 people gathered in Downtown Los Angeles in pouring rain to protest the police killing of a homeless man on L.A.’s skid row. Two days later, a bigger group of protesters marched to LAPD headquarters to express their anger, not only over the shooting of 43-year-old Charly Leuneu Keunang, but also LAPD’s daily harassment of skid row residents.
Neighbors of Keunang said the cops had been after him for a long time, because he would refuse to remove his tent. A neighbor said Keunang, whom people called “Africa,” would tell the cops, “Ticket me; give me my day in court.” But instead, cops continued to harass him.
On March 1, cops came again and shook Africa’s tent “like a rag doll,” according to Ceola Waddell, one of the many who witnessed the murder. When Africa refused to get down, Waddell said, the cops first tasered him, and then shot him at least four times from close range. The incident was also videotaped, both by witnesses and security cameras.
And also by the cops’ own body cameras–the latest “innovation” that authorities tell us will help reign in the never-ending police shootings of unarmed men. But LAPD has been refusing to release those videotapes anyway, saying the case is “under investigation.” Just like the previous police murder on skid row, which is still “under investigation” 10 months later. Last May, cops tasered 54-year-old Carlos Ocana, a mentally-ill man, causing him to fall to his death from a rooftop.
No, once again, the higher-ups are protecting cops who killed an unarmed person in front of witnesses.
Behind the harassment–and murder–of homeless people is the gentrification of Downtown L.A. Expensive lofts, shopping malls, entertainment centers and hotels, all built on generous handouts by the City of L.A., have been pushing on the borders of skid row. So the city is trying to drive people out of there. Under a program cynically called “Safer Cities Initiative,” 150 cops are sent into skid row every day. That’s three cops per block, and a cop for every 10 residents, to rough up and arrest homeless people, destroy their belongings, ban people from living in their cars–when there are not nearly enough shelters for homeless people to stay at.
Instead of providing help for the homeless, many of whom are mentally ill, the authorities have set up another military occupation–this one within U.S. borders–so that the big corporations can continue to profit from gentrification, and the wealthy can live easy. This is the morality of class society.
Mar 16, 2015
As happens every year, International Women’s Day brings forth all sorts of official commemorations, accompanied by typical and depressing speeches about how women’s wages are unequal to men’s wages and about how we need to establish equality in all the institutions of society.
Given the number of laws in place about equal wages for equal work, it might seem surprising that women’s wages are NOT equal to men’s. But equality between the sexes is not just a question of laws, it is a question of the struggles that could impose such equality. And it’s not just that women experience lower wages, it is also that they experience layoffs that seldom allow them unemployment compensation; they frequently find only temporary jobs with worse pay and no benefits. They often miss time from work due to matters concerning their children–illness, snow days, accidents–and usually it is their careers that will suffer when they take time off to have a child. And the time they take off not only affects their wages, it carries over into their future pensions and Social Security payments, with the latter almost always lower than men’s Social Security.
What progress women have made is thanks to considerable struggle, for example, the right to a legal abortion or coverage by health insurance of contraception (both rights currently under attack by U.S. politicians). But to gain those rights in the first place, many women and men stood up to the religious, legal and political prejudices of society. Many women refused to accept “their place,” and that their place was somehow lower than that of the other half of the human race.
In 1973, the Supreme Court recognized, in Roe v. Wade, that women had certain rights to choose abortion. Almost immediately, under a Democratic majority in 1976, the Congress passed legislation denying coverage for abortion under Medicaid, directed against poor women. Women with money could always find a helpful doctor for a safe abortion, even when it was not legal.
U.S. politicians, well-financed by men like the Koch brothers, have chipped away at abortion rights, making it more and more difficult for poor women to have an abortion. In the vast majority of U.S. counties across the entire country, there is not a single clinic or doctor to provide abortion services. The constant attacks experienced by Planned Parenthood has meant fewer services for women, such as contraception counseling or help with sexually transmitted diseases.
Women will not establish the right to control what happens to their own bodies without fighting for themselves. Again!
Violence against women remains an enormous problem, especially in certain cultures where this violence from men toward women remains acceptable. For example, there are brave women from Islamic cultures, who despite their small numbers, have fought against the submission that some men demand from them–the seclusion, the hiding behind the veil or the burqa. Some women have waged a difficult battle against female genital mutilation, which continues in some cultures, and against forced marriages, even more widespread.
Even in so-called “advanced” democratic countries, violence against women is an epidemic. In 2014 in the U.S. three women were murdered every day by a current or former male partner. There are almost five million incidents of physical violence every year against women by their partners.
Historically, the battle for women’s rights is as old as the battle for workers’ emancipation. And in the U.S. women active in the abolition movements from the 1830s against slavery also organized to win their own emancipation. In 1910 at an international workers’ congress, the German militant Clara Zetkin was the first to propose, and then worked to organize, a day for women in March of every year.
On March 8, 1917, in the midst of a hideous world war, the women textile workers of St. Petersburg went on strike. That strike by women was the first act in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which would overthrow the czarist monarchy and the power of the Russian bourgeoisie. And that became the day that working women all over the world celebrated.
When the working class fights for its own emancipation, it fights for the rights of all women as well. And women will take the key position they have always occupied in the battles to finally rid the world of all oppression.
Mar 16, 2015
The appeal for Sony Laguerre and Raphaël Cécé, two militants of the revolutionary workers organization Combat Ouvrier in Guadeloupe and Martinique, took place on March 3. The two young men helped produce a journal for high school students called Rebelle (Rebel). They were charged with attacking the police and threatening them in an incident from 2012. They were sentenced to five to eight months in prison, suspended until after the appeal process is finished. The verdict will be given on April 21.
The whole matter began on May 18, 2012 when a high school student associated with Rebelle was brought up on charges of threatening the principal. On that occasion, the police had charged into the crowd, beating them with batons without the slightest provocation.
At the appeal this March, about 120 people (half of them high school students) went to protest at the courthouse in Basse-Terre, enthusiastically shouting to the beat of the drums. Half of them were able to push their way into a hearing chamber, which usually limits how many can attend. There were supporters from a number of groups, including unions, environmentalists, students, etc.
What’s important is that the whole trial was shown to be political, related to legal measures taken to repress opposition newspapers that denounce all sorts of injustices in the society. And it was also an attack on Laguerre and Cécé because they are openly displaying their revolutionary communist ideas.
The whole thing was too much for officials in the school system and the justice system, which led to the trial and appeal in the first place. This mobilization with the support it aroused made it possible to lift the veil of secrecy on certain injustices against young people in general but also against the havoc wreaked on too many people by unemployment.
Mar 16, 2015
It may be hard to imagine, given the recent cold that most of us have been living through, but last year was the hottest on earth since record-keeping began in 1880, according to a recent report by scientists who are tracking temperatures at many locations across the world. And the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1997.
All these findings indicate that the atmospheric temperatures have continuously been increasing at least within the last 130 years. And the pace of this warming is accelerating with every passing year. Scientists predict that continued warming will be utterly devastating to nature, humans and other living beings.
Since the temperature increase coincides with the rise of industrialization, it is very likely that the human activity linked with the industrialization, such as the use of fossil fuels producing carbon dioxide, is at least partially responsible for this global warming.
Aside from the discussion about human activity’s role in global warming, the global temperature is clearly increasing every passing year. Society should clearly be working to address this.
Doing nothing about global warming now is simply risking everyone’s future.
Scientists quite accurately predicted the effects of atmospheric events at the scale of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans years ahead of its devastation. But the federal government did nothing to prepare the people and the city for such hurricanes. Parts of New Orleans were destroyed, and many people were killed or left homeless.
But society is not run to serve a majority of the people. Today, the rich people control and run the society to endlessly enrich themselves. For this reason, they are very hostile toward any proposal for doing something to prepare for a rainy day. They are too busy making record profits now.
Mar 16, 2015
At the end of February, Judge Steven Rhodes, who had presided over the Detroit bankruptcy, declared that the huge cuts to retiree pension benefits he approved last year were only a first step. Said Rhodes, the money is just not there to fund regular pension benefits, not for any retirees. Cities and states will have no choice but to get rid of regular pension benefits altogether, at best to turn them into some kind of 401(k) style plans. So he said.
Even without bankruptcy, officials are preparing to decimate pensions. In 2013, the Illinois state legislature passed a law to cut pension benefits whenever the budget faces an “emergency.” The Democrats who passed this attack called it “pension reform.”
If pension funds are underfunded today, it is only because public officials have taken the money that should have gone into the pension funds, and used it for corporate tax breaks. They have been funneling billions to corporations through tax breaks and other “incentives.”
The news media and public officials like to pretend that pensions are some kind of gift given to the worker by the employer. What a lie! Pensions were part of the workers’ pay. They were deferred payment to all workers, young and old. In return, the states and municipalities guaranteed they would return this money to the workers when they retire.
No, the money for retiree pensions is money the workers already earned. Call bankruptcy deals and “pension reform” what they are: theft!
Mar 16, 2015
A 109-car oil train derailed and exploded 30 miles from Charleston, West Virginia on February 16th. Two nearby towns had to evacuate, and a water-treatment plant shut down after oil seeped into the Kanawha River.
This is the second derailment of an oil train along this CSX line in less than a year. In April 2014, a train crashed in Lynchburg, Virginia, caught fire and sent thousands of gallons of crude oil spilling into the James River.
These are not isolated incidents. Since 2006 there have been 17 major accidents involving trains carrying crude oil or ethanol in the U.S. and Canada–including the infamous explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec in 2013 that killed 47 people and destroyed the downtown area.
There are several reasons these incidents keep happening.
First of all, the oil being transported today is more volatile. Crude oil fracked from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota–where much of the new oil-by-rail is coming from–is lighter, more like gasoline, and rich in volatile natural gas liquids, including methane, ethane, propane and butane.
These natural gas liquids could be removed from the oil. But North Dakota installations don’t have the equipment or the pipelines to process and transport the gases for resale. So gas-laden oil is shipped to coastal refineries.
During the rail journey, the natural gas liquids separate from the oil and become gaseous, forming an explosive propane-butane blanket on top of the oil.
This brings up the next big problem: outdated rail cars.
The type of railcar typically used to carry North Dakota’s oil–the DOT-111–was never intended to haul volatile crude oil. Designed in the 1960s, the cars originally carried corn syrup and other less explosive cargo.
But even newer cars aren’t immune from spills. CSX said that the train that erupted and burst into flames in West Virginia was a newer model CPC 1232.
Then there is the issue of carrying this volatile oil on old, uninspected track and rail bridges. In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, there is a 116-year-old steel bridge with wooden trestles that supports oil trains as they cross the Black Warrior River into the city’s downtown–one small example. Worse still, there are only 76 track inspectors for 780 railroad companies that manage 140,000 miles of track and railroad bridges.
So now we have unsafe oil in unsafe rail cars traveling on unsafe track and bridges that aren’t inspected. Sounds like a recipe for disaster created by the never-ending drive for increasing profits at all costs.
Mar 16, 2015
One half of all car loans were for six years or more–an all-time record for length. That’s what Bloomberg News reported. Auto companies and banks pushed long loans as a way to ramp up sales. After all, who can afford new car prices with wages so low? People fell for the spiels rolled out by dealers, hoping they could at least afford the monthly payments.
What no one told them was that after about two years on these super-long loans, they will owe more than the car is worth. Get in an accident that totals the car, and they’ll owe the bank, with no car left to drive. Try to turn the car in on a newer model, they’ll discover they have no money to put down.
As if that’s not bad enough, consider this: More than a million people took out a “car title loan” last year as a way to cover their other bills.
It’s a new bubble waiting to explode–this time with the potential to send our cars to the junkyard.
And it’s brought to you by the same bankers who dreamed up sub-prime mortgages!
Mar 16, 2015
The Washington, D.C. public school system does not provide books for school libraries. The no-funding policy forces each school to keep up its school library on its own, by asking for donations from parents. The result is that schools in working class neighborhoods have fewer books, while schools in richer neighborhoods have more.
One elementary school in Ward Seven has only two books per student, ten times less than the recommendation. But in wealthy areas of Northwest D.C., one elementary school has 59 books per student and another has 40.
The no-funding policy is only one more way to deprive working class children of a quality education.
Mar 16, 2015
Just before he stepped down, former Detroit Public Schools “Emergency Manager” Jack Martin gave–and then got–special going away presents.
Martin authorized bonuses for three of his officers, of $12,000 to $18,000 each, on top of their salaries of up to $170,000.
The State of Michigan Treasurer and the Governor gave Martin bonuses totaling $50,000–on top of the $340,000 he raked in for only 18 months on the job!
A Treasury Department spokesman said that he got this money for stabilizing enrollment and saving money–which is odd, since enrollment continued to decline in his 18 months, from 51,000 to 47,000; and the DPS deficit grew from 93.8 million dollars to 169.4 million! That’s a heck of a job performance!
But he DID oversee an even greater increase in charter schools in the city–charter schools now contain as many students as the DPS does.
That’s what those bonuses were really for: helping to rip the public school system apart even more!
Mar 16, 2015
The GED test has provided a way to get a high school diploma for poor and working class people who dropped out of high school since it began in 1943. But the test was changed in 2014, supposedly to bring it up to date.
As a result, pass rates plunged from the longtime average of about 70% to less than HALF of that. In addition, 10 states stopped offering the GED test. And some reports show the number of people who took the test dropped by 90% from what it had been a year earlier.
The new test is harder. The new test costs applicants twice as much. And it is more difficult to take since it can only be done on a computer. The changes mean testing is less likely to result in high school diplomas for the hundreds of thousands who used to try the GED test every year.
Before the 2014 changes, the
GED covered the skills of reading, writing an essay, basic math plus algebra and geometry and other topics covered by high schools.
The GED has been accepted by employers for decades as proof that employees have basic skills. Even the military has been requiring a GED, if not a high school diploma, before accepting new recruits. Millions who had to or wanted to drop out of high school found a way forward by passing the GED.
The changes to the test hurt the very people the test was designed to assist, the 36 million people, according to the 2010 census, who lack a high school diploma.
The excuse given for the changes was to help prepare high school graduates to go on to college. That excuse ignores the reality today that fewer than half of those entering four year colleges and universities actually graduate; for community colleges three quarters will drop out or fail.
In other words, neither the GED nor thousands of high schools are graduating students able to succeed at college work. The problem does not lie in the GED test itself. These changes are only useful to gain more profit for the publishers supplying the tests and practice materials.
The problem–as seen in every school district that is NOT wealthy–is that schools are starved of the resources needed to graduate the vast majority of students with a real education.
Changes to the GED are part of the same attack that leaves the poorest part of the population uneducated. An uneducated work force is a cheap labor pool for the bosses.
To make it harder to pass the GED is another crime by the criminals who run this society, condemning more people to unemployment.
Mar 16, 2015
The justification for allowing charter schools has always been that they would be “authorized” by public educational institutions such as universities. So even if the schools were run by someone wanting to make a profit on them, authorization was supposed to guarantee SOMEBODY knew what they were doing.
Well, another study has come out, blowing that idea to hell. The Education Trust-Midwest has found that in Michigan, six charter authorizers of the 16 they studied received below-average to failing grades: meaning the schools they authorized consistently failed to do as well as the school districts they drew students from.
That doesn’t sound too bad–that means ten of the 16 authorizers did well. But those ten authorized only 13 charter schools among them, while the worst performing six authorized a whopping 153 schools!
What would be in it for public universities like Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan and Northern Michigan? A little thing called money: the authorizers take 3% of the annual state funding provided for every student at every school they approve.
The numbers tell the story: these schools have turned themselves into rubber stamps for all manner of sleazeball charter operators–just so they can get in on draining more of the children’s education money for themselves!