The Spark

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

Issue no. 986 — April 27 - May 11, 2015

EDITORIAL
Systematic Terrorism Used to Enforce Joblessness

Apr 27, 2015

A young man is dead in Baltimore, killed by six murdering cops. In the same week, a murdering cop goes free in Chicago when a prosecutor and a judge tie up his trial in the knots of a legal technicality. Different cities, different parts of the “justice system,” but part of the same big picture.

With his hands cuffed behind his back, with his legs in shackles, Freddie Gray was thrown into the back of a Baltimore police van, no seatbelt, nothing to secure him in place, and then ridden around for 42 minutes, over bumpy roads, around sharp fast turns, punctuated by sudden reversals and stops, tossing him around the back of the van, bouncing him off its walls, unable to protect or brace himself with his feet or his hands. It’s what Baltimore cops call a “rough ride,” and what Philadelphia cops call a “nickel ride.”

By the end of that murderous ride, Freddie Gray was for all practical purposes dead, although it took him another seven days to die. His spinal cord had been almost severed, three neck vertebrae were fractured, his larynx crushed.

And why was he in police custody? Because, according to the police account, a cop “made eye contact” with him, and he ran.

And wouldn’t you, knowing what the cops are capable of? Wouldn’t you run, instead of letting yourself be brutalized once again?

Freddie Gray is not the first person to be condemned to a “rough ride.” It’s a favorite cop trick to teach young men a lesson–especially young black men who don’t stand at abject attention when a cop looks at them.

Freddie Gray “made eye contact.” And Freddie Gray is dead.

The police everywhere enforce a vicious order on a society that cannot provide enough jobs for everyone.

Behind the police stands the whole “justice system,” united in its aim of controlling a surplus population.

For more than four decades, American capitalism, in pursuit of profit, has been throwing a growing proportion of the working age population onto the scrap heap. That means growing poverty. It means young men who are bitterly angry, denied any chance for the kind of life everyone wants, denied the possibility to provide for their children.

For American capitalism, their anger makes them a potential problem.

The solution to that problem, originally devised in the 1970s by Nixon’s attorney general Edwin Meese, was to use any and every pretext to criminalize and imprison a large share of the people capitalism could not provide jobs for.

It is quite simply a campaign of terror, aimed against all those jobless young men.

In fact, it was a campaign very consciously aimed at the black population, which had been at the head of struggles in the 1960s and early ’70s. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, explained it this way in one of the diaries he kept for Nixon: “The President emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

Nixon’s “system” was the so-called “war on crime,” “war on drugs,” and the buildup of the prison system.

Nixon’s “system”–a system of terrorism used against the population–has been built on, refurbished and used ever since by the administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama.

Today, one quarter of the whole world’s prison population rots behind bars in the U.S. The number killed by police in one big American city in one month is many times the number killed by police in any West European country in a year. This is the grotesque and bloody picture the U.S. presents to the world.

This is the grotesque and bloody travesty, which it calls “democracy,” that American capitalism has imposed on its own population.

Pages 2-3

El Salvador:
Jailing Women for Miscarriage

Apr 27, 2015

Recently, women’s rights groups were finally able to force El Salvador’s Supreme Court and Legislative Assembly to release Guadalupe Vásquez after eight years of imprisonment.

Vásquez was raped by a neighbor of the house where she worked as a maid. She became pregnant at 17, but wanted to keep the baby. Later, during her pregnancy, she started to bleed, but her employer wouldn’t let her leave the house to get medical care. The baby died shortly after he was born. When the bleeding continued, her employer sent her to a hospital, saying she did not want to "deal with two dead in my house." Vasquez passed out, and when she woke up, she was handcuffed to the bed at a state hospital. The police had arrested her.

El Salvador has an absolute ban on abortion, with no exception, including the cases of rape, incest or danger to the mother’s health. Vásquez’s prosecutor sought a jail sentence of 75 years, the maximum at the time. After two brief hearings, the court sentenced her to 30 years for homicide.

Her rapist went free.

The women’s rights groups identified 17 similar cases. All the women involved are young and poor and were convicted for killing babies who were stillborn or died through miscarriages or for reasons unknown.

In El Salvador, medical staff are required to report suspected abortions to the police. However, as one activist, Rosa María Hernández explained, a wealthier woman can leave the country to have an abortion, or go to a private clinic that may not report her. Most working women, who are poor, don’t have such options. She adds: "If you are poor and want an abortion, you are waiting for jail or death."

The rich use morality to suppress workers, and above all, working class women.

Syria:
Palestinians Attacked by Assad and by ISIS

Apr 27, 2015

Since the first of April, ISIS militants have tried to take control of the Palestinian camp at Yarmuk, a suburb of Damascus, the capital of Syria. Media images show haggard, starving refugees–terrorized, recounting horrors.

Few can escape, as the camp is encircled and bombed by the army of president Bashar Assad. The population is chewed up between two warring forces, both of which, ironically, claim to support the Palestinian cause.

The camp at Yarmuk has existed since 1957 and used to have 150,000 inhabitants before this civil war began. It was begun by Palestinian refugees in Syria after they were expelled by the war in 1948 and the terrorism organized by the founders of the Israeli state. Since then, Yarmuk has been a Palestinian quarter with a certain autonomy under the Syrian state, where the population is politicized, and with the presence of international organizations. This super-crowded quarter has its own schools, hospitals, and social centers.

But since the current civil war began, Assad’s army has encircled this camp, bombed it, starved its inhabitants, cut off the electricity and forbidden entry to UN relief convoys.

So the area has emptied out, leaving only about 18,000 people, ones who stay in their own homes, risking starvation, rather than risk getting bombed if they try to flee. In a devastated area where people are already dying of hunger, ISIS militants come to finish the ugly work of reducing to nothing the little bit of autonomous life remaining to the Palestinians.

These little dictators, like all the other ones, want to destroy everything not under their control, even to the point of destroying the population itself.

The UN has demanded access to Yarmuk to evacuate the civilian population that’s left. Western media and diplomats deplore these horrors. Yet it is the big imperialist powers that put in power and armed and supported successive regimes that use torture–against people who at one moment are enemies, the next are allies, changing according to the relationship of forces in the Middle East.

Imperialism must maintain its power in the region, particularly concerning oil, using armaments and dictators, leading now and always to more martyrs like those of Yarmuk–whose fate is what awaits entire peoples, whether in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine.

Crooked Mortgage Schemes

Apr 27, 2015

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing Quicken Loans for knowingly submitting insurance claims to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) on bad mortgages made by Quicken. The FHA says Quicken encouraged its employees to disregard FHA rules on lending, saying it routinely miscalculated or misrepresented borrowers’ credit standing and falsely certified that the loans met FHA requirements.

The Justice Department says the government paid “millions of dollars in insurance claims on hundreds of bad loans” due to Quicken’s practices and many more loans have become delinquent and could lead to more claims. It says the Department of Housing and Urban Development paid more than 500 million dollars in claims to Quicken on almost 4,000 defaulted loans; and more than 8,300 more FHA-insured loans made by Quicken, worth 1.1 billion dollars, are delinquent by at least 60 days.

The DOJ says the company “systematically concealed the underwriting defects” it knew of from its own audits. The suit includes internal emails acknowledging improper loans.

Quicken naturally denies any wrongdoing and says the DOJ was looking for a quick payoff by the company, which may in fact be true; but the company has denied accusations frequently in responding to past lawsuits, only to settle later.

Quicken Loans and its billionaire owner, Dan Gilbert, have been made out by politicians and the media to be the grand heroes of the re-building of a “New Detroit” being played up around the country. Gilbert now owns 70 buildings, garages and parking decks in downtown Detroit. Quicken received more than 200 million dollars in city and state tax incentives to move its headquarters downtown. Many of Gilbert’s buildings are located in the area of the city’s Downtown Development Authority, which controls all of the property taxes for the area completely separate from the budget of a city that recently went bankrupt.

This shows what the “New Detroit” is really about. People like Dan Gilbert take money scammed from poor people through crooked mortgage deals, and buy up buildings they don’t have to pay taxes on, leaving it to poor people in the city to pay even more in taxes. Then they get the government to pay for a new entertainment district, all the while leaving the rest of the city to rot.

Scapegoating Atlanta Teachers

Apr 27, 2015

Eleven Atlanta educators were convicted of “racketeering” for participating in systematic cheating in the city’s schools. All but one were immediately handcuffed and taken to jail. They received harsh sentences, with three receiving seven years in prison, a $25,000 fine, and 2,000 hours of community service.

These sentences don’t fit the crime. Atlanta was not the only school system in which such scandals occurred. Similar ones took place in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Houston and El Paso, Texas.

They were a product of unrealistic standards set up for scoring on standardized tests used to decide school funding. The rules were handed down by the Bush and Obama administrations. Such harsh demands, which take no account of the impoverishment in some districts compared to others, virtually guaranteed some teachers and administrators would resort to playing the system.

Higher placed white collar criminals, Wall Street bankers, and even some murderers receive lighter treatment. This looks like the old system of Georgia “injustice” raising its ugly head yet again.

FBI Hair Forensic Unit Guilty of Lying and Murder

Apr 27, 2015

FBI examiners in the microscopic hair comparison unit exaggerated matches of hair found at the crime scene to the hair of the defendant in more than 95 percent of the 324 trials reviewed so far. Federal authorities launched an investigation in 2012 after The Washington Post reported that bogus forensic hair matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people since at least the 1970s.

The so-called science behind hair matching is seriously flawed because there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. This is NOT a DNA match. There are 2,500 targeted cases involving an FBI hair match. But the FBI examiners whose work has been called into doubt taught 500 to 1,000 state and local crime lab analysts to testify in the same ways. In other words, the FBI taught them to fabricate evidence and then lie on the stand to get a conviction. This means there are thousands upon thousands more of these cases that are not under review.

Thirty-two of the defendants in the 342 cases already reviewed were sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison based on the lies FBI examiners told court. This is not justice. But it IS a clear example of how the entire “justice” system is based upon lies.

Pages 4-5

Michigan Proposal 1:
Highway Robbery

Apr 27, 2015

The following is the transcript of a talk given at the April SPARK public meeting in Detroit.

We are here today to talk about Proposal 1, the tax increase proposal, which is on the ballot, in fact the only thing on the ballot, for the May 5th election. You may have heard governor Snyder and other politicians say how this extra money is needed: For the roads especially, but for other things too.

So let’s start with the roads:

Yes, it is true, money is needed to fix the roads. No one in their right mind would dispute that. If you travelled here today from any distance, you drove over disintegrating roads. For example, do you ever drive over the Rouge River Bridge on I-75? If so, you didn’t have to wait for the news reports to know it’s in terrible shape. But that is only one of many problems with the roads.

It’s no exaggeration to say that 12% of all bridges in Michigan—1100 bridges—are in immediate need of rebuilding, which is what the news media reported recently, three times as many as in 2000. Or that 38% of all roads in Michigan are in poor shape, meaning they have to be completely rebuilt, and 42% in fair shape, meaning they need major repairs. Just look at your own route to work. It’s a struggle every day to get your vehicle where it’s going without blowing a tire or breaking an axle!

There is also no dispute that Michigan needs increased funding for public transportation. The bus system is horrible where it exists at all. Just look at the embarrassment over the issue of the “walking man,” James Robertson, who is as hard working a person you will ever find, yet he had to walk 21 miles a day to work due to the lack of any real public transportation in the region and the lack of good, well-paying jobs.

Roads Are a Mess Because Money Wasn’t Spent

So, all that being said, yes, of course, money needs to be spent to fix roads, bridges, public transportation, and more. The whole national infrastructure of our bridges and roads seems to be falling apart.

The question then becomes, why are the roads in such a mess? It is due to a lack of maintenance over a long period of time. Roads don’t go bad overnight. It takes many years of neglect to get to the disaster we have today.

Quite simply, not enough money has been spent to maintain roads and bridges for YEARS. And today, Michigan spends less on its roads per capita, that is compared to the number of people, than any other state in the country. That doesn’t mean other states have roads in good shape—it just means Michigan has disastrous roads.

So why is there no money for roads? Michigan is a wealthy state, and it has some of the biggest corporations in the world centered here. There should be enough money to keep up the roads.

But Michigan doesn’t pay to keep up its roads and bridges because the Democrats and Republicans have been giving away billions of dollars to big business. It’s very simple. The money handed over to corporations is money that isn’t spent on roads—and many other things we need, like schools. The money the corporations DON’T pay in taxes is money that CAN’T be spent on the population’s needs.

Tax Cuts to Corporations Destroy Roads

You may remember when Governor Snyder came into office, he promised to cut taxes to businesses. That’s one promise he kept—to the tune of cutting taxes for businesses by 1.7 billion dollars in 2011.

Yes, he did—and he raised the money to pay for that enormous tax cut to business, by increasing taxes on retirees, increasing taxes on low wage workers, cutting tax deductions for children, and cutting the amount ordinary people were refunded for property taxes. All of that came to a total of 1.4 billion dollars more in taxes on us, so the corporations could have their taxes cut. But even that wasn’t enough to keep up with what was cut in corporate taxes. So that’s why it didn’t pay for roads, schools and many other things.

That’s not all. More tax breaks are just coming to light. Those breaks, which were hidden from sight, date back to the Republican Engler administration and the Democratic Granholm administration. They’re only coming to light now because companies are cashing in on them now. They are called MEGA grants. No one even knows the exact amount, but the best estimate so far is that these tax breaks are worth 11.7 billion dollars promised to 240 companies. Keep in mind, these are on top of other tax breaks given in previous years and Snyder’s 2011 tax cuts for these same companies.

The state will lose more than 800 million dollars just this year alone from these hidden tax breaks—which is almost 10% of the state’s total General Fund budget for the year. And the state will keep losing this money year after year, all the way up to 2029.

That’s why the roads are so bad, and why, by the way, there isn’t enough money for schools, Medicaid, emergency services, public services, and other things funded by taxes, like libraries. One administration after another in the state has been giving away money like it’s going out of style.

Tax Breaks Don’t Create Jobs

The politicians always claimed that tax breaks and tax cuts for business would create jobs or save jobs. That’s a big fat lie.

Here is one example that hit the news last year, how companies lie about jobs to get tax breaks, and what it means for you and me. Most of you have probably seen the Marathon refinery, downriver, if you drive down I-75 on the southwest side of Detroit. In 2007, Marathon got 175 million dollars in tax breaks from the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan, on the promise they would specifically create jobs for Detroit residents. In 2014, a study was done on the results. Marathon got the 175 million, but there were exactly 15 more Detroit residents working there than before. That comes to exactly 11.6 million dollars per new worker. They might as well have just given the people the money!

Another example of corporations trying to hold us hostage for OUR tax money: this was just in the news last week. General Motors wants MORE tax breaks from the city of Warren and the state, for the GM Tech Center in Warren. Just remember, they make it sound so simple, it’s just a tax break. But the money has to come from somewhere. It’s not robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s robbing us to pay General Motors. It’s not Robin Hood, but it’s Robbing the Hood.

Forbes magazine—a magazine written especially for business—had this to say about jobs and tax breaks: “The history of job creation tax credits in Michigan is a story of corporate welfarism.” That is EXACTLY right.

It’s a lie, when they say that tax breaks create jobs. What they do is create MONEY for the corporations, big money.

Proposal 1: One More Giveaway

They are telling you today that they need you to pay for the roads. They really do want YOU to pay, they want YOU to vote for Proposal 1—because they gave away the bank to all the big rich corporations. They gave away what they should have been spending on roads.

Of course, they don’t put it quite that way. They tell you to vote for Proposal 1, so you can have safe roads. They tell you to vote for Prop 1 so that schools will have more money, and localities starved for funds will get more revenue sharing from the state.

So, just for a minute, let’s look to see what’s in this referendum on the ballot May 5.

If you vote for Proposal 1, you will actually vote to authorize or amend 15 laws that you don’t see on the ballot. And those laws will do a lot more than just provide some money for roads.

First of all, sales taxes will go up from six cents on the dollar to seven. That is a 16% increase in the sales tax. We will pay more for almost everything we buy. That’s just like a pay cut—our paycheck won’t go as far. And a flat sales tax like this hits people with low wages the hardest—those of us who are already scraping just to get by.

But that’s not all. We will also pay more for gasoline, because taxes on gasoline will go up. Another hit to our paycheck.

We will pay more to register a car. And people who itemize on their Federal Income Tax will lose a deduction they used to be able to use for their car registration fee—so that also will cost people more money.

Part of the money currently going to the regular Kindergarten through Grade 12 school fund from now on will be allowed to go to privately run for profit business schools—which means another hit to school funding.

The state roads fund for counties and townships can be forced to contract out more of the road work currently done by their own employees—which means, to give that work to some company making a profit by paying lower wages.

Railroads, which are required by law to fix railroad crossings, are to be given a three million dollar a year subsidy to fix their own crossings—which means three million dollars a year will be deducted from state road funds, local road funds and public transit.

How Could Anything this Bad Be Good?

You may also hear from some politicians that there are some GOOD things in this proposal for common everyday people. Such as an increase in the Earned Income tax credit. That is true. But what they don’t tell you is that this is just reinstating some of what we lost in Snyder’s 2011 tax increase for us—and they didn’t increase other credits tied to that.

They tell us that if we pass Prop 1, we will see better roads. Not any day soon. For the first two years, the biggest share of the money going to roads is actually going to pay off the banks for debt service on past projects. In the first year, at least two thirds of the money, if not all, will go to the banks.

But even if some money does go to roads, the question is, which roads? One of the projects on their drawing board is to widen a six-mile stretch of I-94 coming in from the east side—to the tune of 2.7 BILLION dollars, and a lot of neighborhoods torn up. And why? To funnel people from the suburbs downtown to the stadiums.

They tell us that Proposal 1 will increase money to the schools and to local city services. In fact, while some parts of the proposal will increase money to the schools and local services, other parts will cut money going to the schools and local city services.

They pretend that mass transit will get an increase in funds. Maybe. But which mass transit? On one project, more than 137 million dollars is being spent to put in just over 3 miles of mass transit that will mainly be used by people going downtown to the stadiums and other places—like that, when much MORE is needed just for people to get to work, and in the neighborhoods.

Plan B: Make the Bosses Pay!

I come back to where we started. Yes the roads need to be fixed, and the bridges need to be rebuilt, yes the schools need more money.

We say that it’s only common sense that the big corporations that got all this money from the state, should give some of it back so roads can be fixed, schools can have more money.

But you don’t see any of those thieves lining up to give money back, do you?

And you don’t see many politicians proposing a radical idea like that. No, they come back to their same old refrain. They want us to pay more.

Why should we? We already paid for the roads and schools in our state income taxes, our gasoline tax, our sales taxes, our property taxes.

They hold these bad roads over our heads like a bludgeon, they make no repairs, they let the potholes get worse, they let bridges crumble more—it’s nothing but extortion, trying to get us to do what we KNOW we should not do.

It would be a big mistake to vote for Proposal 1. It would be an invitation to the politicians to come back and try to take more from us.

Governor Snyder was asked what will happen if Proposal 1 fails. He said he didn’t know because there is no Plan B.

I have one simple answer to what Plan B could be—let those who HAVE THE WEALTH pay for the needed infrastructure and public transportation repairs!

Of course, it’s true, that just voting NO won’t stop them. They’ll look for another way to get their hands on more money from us. They’ll put it back on the ballot again. They’ll let the roads rot even more.

They won’t stop coming for us until we back them off. And it will take a lot more than a vote to back them off. It will take a real mobilization of working people in this country to push back.

But one thing the NO vote could do, it could show just how many people in this state are fed up, how many are unwilling to go on paying the cost so the big corporations and the wealthy can get wealthier still.

A big NO vote could show just how many people there are—people who don’t agree to pay the cost any more, people who could be a force in the future.

Pages 6-7

Who Are the Real Crooks?

Apr 27, 2015

According to the news, banks and prisons are profiting by charging fees to inmates through so-called “release cards.” It is becoming a common practice. Prisons deposit inmates’ money into these debit cards before they release the inmates.

There is a banking fee, whether the card is used or not: a fee for managing the card, a fee every time the card is used at an ATM, fees for transferring the money to a bank and closing the account, an inactivity fee if the card is not used for 90 days, and on and on.

These fees drastically deplete inmates’ already meager balances. As one former inmate said: “I left prison with $120. Because of the fees I was only able to use about $70 of it.”

Banking giants like Chase and other financial institutions design and issue these cards. All correctional facilities, federal, state and private prisons alike, use them. As a common practice, the banks send a cut of the collected fees directly to the prison agencies and jails as “legalized” kickbacks. So, these cards are a bonanza for the banks AND prisons.

So, then, who are the real crooks?

U.S. Senate Workers Walked off, Demanding a Living Wage

Apr 27, 2015

Last week, workers employed at the Senate’s cafeteria walked off their jobs demanding a living wage for their work. Last year, the cafeteria workers from the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, and employees from the Smithsonian museums, the Pentagon and other sites also waged a one-day strike demanding better pay and conditions.

Bertrand Olotora, a cook at the Senate cafeteria, very clearly stated the strikers’ reasons: “I am walking off my job because I want the presidential hopefuls to know that I live in poverty. Many senators canvas the country giving speeches about creating ‘opportunity’ for workers and helping our kids achieve the ‘American dream’–most don’t seem to notice or care that workers in their own building are struggling to survive.

“I’m a single father and I only make $12 an hour; I had to take a second job at a grocery store to make ends meet. But even though I work seven days a week–putting in 70 hours between my two jobs–I can’t manage to pay the rent, buy school supplies for my kids or even put food on the table. I hate to admit it, but I have to use food stamps so that my kids don’t go to bed hungry.”

So, in the Congress of the richest and most powerful country of this earth, workers do not get a living wage. This is not surprising. After all, the main task of all these politicians is to keep workers’ wages and conditions down for the companies.

Walmart’s Plumbing Excuse

Apr 27, 2015

Walmart closed five of its stores for up to six months on April 13. Walmart gave 2,200 workers just a few hours notice that they were losing their jobs. Walmart’s excuse: these stores need “extensive repairs” for their “plumbing” problems. But Walmart later admitted that they have not sought any permits to perform plumbing work at those locations.

Its workers correctly stated that the company was retaliating against them because they were organizing for better pay and conditions, and joining a union. The Pico Rivera store in California, one of those shut, was at the center of worker action and had seen the first U.S. Walmart strike in 2012.

Walmart resorted to such retaliation tactics in the past many times to prevent its workers from unionizing. For example, Walmart closed a store in Quebec, Canada in 2005, seven months after workers voted to unionize for the first time in Northern America. The store was never reopened.

Walmart calls it “plumbing,” but it is a plain and simple lockout to prevent workers from organizing. It’s not Walmart’s pipes that are full of crap!

Minimum Wage:
Democrats Say $12 ... In 2020

Apr 27, 2015

Following the April 15th protests in some 200 cities for a $15 minimum wage, the congressional leadership of the Democratic Party announced it would introduce a bill to raise the minimum wage ... to $12 in 2020! They don’t even expect the Republicans to allow this bill to pass. They just intend to use the issue for the elections in 2016. As if we needed any more proof that the Democrats aren’t really the “friends of Labor” they pretend to be.

Selling MTA Land below Market Rates

Apr 27, 2015

Recently, MTA (the Los Angeles public transit system) announced it will set aside 35 percent of its own land for “affordable housing.” Metro will sell the land at below-market rates.

What nice folks, these MTA managers–helping low income people. In reality, low income people aren’t getting the land. Real estate developers are–huge areas of public land at cheap prices.

The developers must already be salivating over their loot.

Page 8

Capitalist Europe Condemns Migrants to Death

Apr 27, 2015

The following article is a translation from Lutte Ouvrière, the publication of the revolutionary group active in France.

How many children, women and men drowned on April 19 when the boat they were traveling on capsized off the coast of Libya? Were there 700, 800 or 900 people on board, as some survivors said? We may never know. But this ship wreck follows others that were just as horrible.

When will this mass slaughter end? How many Syrians, Ethiopians, Sudanese or Somalians will have to die at the gates of Europe before the European Union decides to lift a finger?

The European Union knew ahead of time how dangerous the situation had become, given the multiplication of smugglers and influx of migrants on the Libyan coast. So, what did the European Union do? It refused to help finance the Italian government’s rescue operations, which had already saved 150,000 lives.

By both reducing the number of the patrols and scaling back where they operated, the EU leaders chose to allow people to drown when they tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea. There was no help for those in danger. Adding to the insult were the 18 naval vessels and two helicopters that were sent only after the boat filled with refugees had already sunk.

After drying their crocodile tears, these same leaders agreed to harden their criminal policy against migrants. They want Europe to “cooperate”—not to save the migrants—but to keep them away! Their most pressing problem is to find someone in Libya like Khadafi, who had kept the country’s borders well-guarded.

Plenty of people would prefer to use secure and legal ways to gain refuge. Instead, they are hounded like pariahs and forced to depend on unscrupulous smugglers. French president Hollande and the other European leaders can denounce the smugglers. But they are the ones who expose the migrants to bigger and bigger risks.

Close to four million Syrians have fled their country, which has been torn apart by war since 2011. But last year, France welcomed only 3,000. The vast majority of refugees forced out of their countries are in Turkey or Lebanon, that is, neighboring countries.

Only a tiny fraction of them try to make it to the developed European countries. But that is enough for demagogues like the National Front to talk about a “migrant bomb,” a revolting fantasy, especially when children, women and men die under real bombs. The European leaders try to outdo each other in keeping away those who are poorest. But the system that they serve multiplies the misery, wars and persecution.

They always speak of “democracy,” “peace” and “development.” But what have they brought to Africa, but continuing pillage of its riches? As for France, it has intervened militarily dozens of times in Africa and the Middle East, leaving in their wake a succession of dictatorships and devastation.

The last wars carried out by the imperialist powers in Iraq, Syria or Libya resulted in the dismemberment of the states and governments by armed militias. To condemn people who are stripped of everything and keep them trapped in a situation of exploitation is part of the war carried out by the bourgeoisie against the poor. The fight that the rich states carry out against migrants is one vile aspect of this war. The exploited from here should not protect themselves from the very poor, but the very rich, that is, the capitalists. Their power over society creates such inequalities and injustices. For the last century, the means of production have been more than sufficient to satisfy the needs of all of humanity, without people having to fight each other to gain access to vital necessities.

Europe itself has concentrated a huge amount of wealth. But that wealth accumulates in the pockets of a tiny minority. It is wasted on the whims of the rich or in speculation, while cruelly denying the majority a way to satisfy their needs.

With the parasitic bourgeoisie in power, this system will never grant everyone the right to a life with dignity. To put an end to this barbarism, workers will have to snatch the means of production from the hands of the capitalist minority and take control of it themselves.

Another Surge of Central American Migrants

Apr 27, 2015

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske has assured Congress that fewer children and families are fleeing Central America and crossing the U.S. border “illegally” than last year. He said there won’t be a repeat of the political crisis that came out of the surge of unaccompanied children held by the U.S. Border Patrol and very often deported.

But that is only because, under orders from the Obama administration, the Mexican government has stepped up its hunt of migrants from Central America before they reach the U.S., often holding them in big, miserable detention centers that are more like concentration camps. One of the main modes of transport 1,500 miles through Mexico for those who couldn’t afford the very high price demanded by smugglers had been by riding on top of giant freight trains. But under orders from the U.S. last summer, that was also closed off by Mexican authorities. “The Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border,” bragged Alan Bersin, the U.S. border czar. Of course, Mexican and Central American gangs, each controlling different territories along the route and often working with government authorities, continue to prey upon, kidnap and murder thousands of Central American migrants, with estimates that more than 80 per cent of all females making the journey continue to be raped.

But none of that violence and hardship has stopped the same number or even more migrants from Central America from taking their chances anyway. Obviously, they are being driven by the harsh, often violent conditions that afflict large areas of Central America. Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, has the highest murder rate in the world.

Living conditions in these countries, long plundered by U.S. imperialism, have gotten much worse over the last years of worldwide economic crisis. But beyond that, gang violence against working people and the poor in the cities has also gotten much worse. For example, gangs don’t just kill the kids if they don’t join up “willingly,” but the entire family.

So, the migration crisis out of Central America continues: stay or leave, hundreds of thousands of people face a high possibility of violence and even death.

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