the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 14, 2015
Almost 11 million people have fled their homes in Syria, driven out by the bombing and butchery of a terrible war. This is almost one half the whole Syrian population, children, women and men.
CNN put it in terms such that no one in this country could miss its significance: “Imagine every man, woman and child leaving home in 29 states in the U.S. West and Midwest–everyone west of Ohio and Kentucky and north of Texas, all the way to California. The 158 million people living in those 29 states make up the same share of the U.S. population–49%–as the proportion of Syrians that have fled the carnage there.”
Every sanctimonious politician–including many of those bigots who regularly carry on an anti-immigrant crusade–rushed to get their sound-bite TV minute or Tweet, lamenting the fate of those refugees, but then recoiled at the suggestion that the U.S. open its borders wide.
But nowhere in official discourse has there been any admission of the role the U.S. has played in this disaster. No admission, no discussion.
The U.S., nonetheless, is at the center of this horror.
U.S. policy toward the Middle East and North Africa led to today’s wars in Syria and Iraq. For more than four decades, the U.S. government–under Republicans and Democrats–has provoked or directly carried out one war after another in the region. Supported by the other big capitalist powers, it has reinforced dictators and armed and funded militias, using them against the population of countries in the region. Those militias are the ones that developed, first into al Qaeda, then into ISIS–and to many other armed forces throughout the region. Always reactionary, always viciously bloodthirsty, the militias simply reflect the big power that has let them loose in the region: the United States of America. Sometimes, the U.S., when it saw no other path, itself invaded countries, using the most horrifying high-tech means of warfare. Always, the U.S. carried out bombing campaigns, destroying large areas of countries, making even larger areas uninhabitable. This carnage and annihilation carried out by the preeminent military power in the world was paid for by diverting resources from the needs of the population in this country. Several generations of young people went off to those wars, often believing the propaganda about their mission, only to come back dead, wounded, or traumatized from what they were really sent to do.
All of this war and destruction was carried out in order to reinforce the hold of large U.S. multinational corporations over the Middle East and North Africa’s oil. War and destruction, in fact, is capitalism’s essential way to put its hands on the profit produced by the labor of working people in other countries.
This is why there are so many migrants in the world today. Capitalism, destroying their countries in war and impoverishing them by theft, has created the migrants.
Working people in this country have two choices in front of us. Either we can recognize the migrants as allies in a common fight against a voracious capitalist class that exploits us viciously while carrying out one war after another–or we can fall for the propaganda put out by bigots that migrants and immigrants are our enemies. To fall for the lies pushed by bigots can only mean we erode our own humanity and we lessen the power that working people potentially can have.
The migrants will be heard. They are forcing themselves on the rest of the world–and have every right to do so. They are part of our class, the working class of the whole world.
Sep 14, 2015
Just Mercy, written by attorney Bryan Stevenson, which came out last year, is a showcase for the U.S. injustice system, particularly but not only, toward poor black people. His book looks back over some incredible cases he took during the past 30 years.
Stevenson, near retirement, has spent his entire career helping people on death row, particularly in Alabama, which has NO public defenders.
He quickly understood the U.S. system of incarceration, with the highest rate in the world.
Eventually he and others created the Equal Justice Initiative as a way to fight the death penalty, especially as it is applied to poor black prisoners in the U.S. If a victim of murder is white, most states give the death penalty five times more often to a black person convicted in the crime, even ten times more often, than a white person convicted of a similar crime.
And it would be his organization that finally got the Supreme Court to end life imprisonment without parole for children.
Stevenson does not only write of death row cases; he also has chapters on the growth of imprisoning mentally ill people. Those mentally ill in the U.S. might get a bed in a rehab hospital. Fifty years ago there was one bed for every 300 people; now there is one rehab bed for every 3,000 people, so it is little wonder that half of all prisoners are diagnosed as suffering mental illness. Some death row prisoners are deeply mentally ill, but if the state chooses, it can simply ignore the evidence. These are cases Stevenson highlights.
He also shows the growth in the incarceration of poor women. For example, poor women who lose a child at birth or shortly thereafter, women who can’t afford pre-natal care, may end up accused of murdering their child. Women may end up in prison when they defend themselves against abusive partners. And once in prison, they face rape and beatings from prison guards.
At one point, Stevenson writes that with tears running down his cheeks after losing another person to the death penalty, “As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix these situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore.
“For the first time I realized that my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear and anger.
“We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.”
Finally Stevenson writes, “The true measure of the character [of a society] is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
As this book shows, American capitalist society condemns itself: A system that creates poverty and brokenness, and then locks up, tortures, and kills those it creates.
Just Mercy appeared in paperback this August. It does not make for light reading, but it makes for better understanding of what it means to be caught in a justice system where there is no justice.
Sep 14, 2015
Only six schools out of 1,000 in the entire L.A. school district will be “ready to make good use of computers” based on the district’s own requirements, district officials admitted last week.
This is three years after district officials announced, with great fanfare, that each and every one of the district’s more than half million students would get a tablet computer issued by their school.
Apple got a very lucrative, 1.3-billion-dollar contract from the district to supply iPads to schools. When it was revealed that Apple was charging more than the retail price for the iPads, district officials said it was because Apple’s sub-contractor, publishing giant Pearson, was also getting paid to supply instructional software.
Then, last year, district higher-ups publicly admitted what tens of thousands of students and teachers already knew: most of the iPads could not be used for instruction because, among other things, Pearson had not bothered to supply most of the software it was being paid for!
Even when a few tablets were first distributed two years ago, students, especially those in working-class neighborhoods, were quickly told they had to return the iPads they were issued. Supposedly students were using the devices for entertainment at home. As if a tablet used to listen to music could no longer be used for learning!
In fact, what district officials have been doing with the tablets is no different than what they do with textbooks. Publishing companies make huge profits, charging high prices for the books. In affluent areas, every student is issued a textbook for each class. But in working-class areas, students are often denied the textbooks, with all kinds of excuses.
When district higher-ups promised a computer for each student, it sounded good of course, especially to working-class kids and their parents who can’t afford expensive computers. But this promise turned out to be another lie–like so many other lies politicians and public education officials have told workers before, including the biggest lie of them all: that they would provide every child in this country with a good education.
Sep 14, 2015
Nearly 2,000 people have recently signed an online petition supporting “our hallowed school names” in Fairfax County, Virginia.
That is, school names chosen to reinforce legal segregation.
In the 1950’s, new white-only schools in Fairfax County were set up as a way to prevent black students from enrolling. They were named after known segregationists or Southern Civil War generals. Robert E. Lee High School, for example, opened in 1958. J.E.B. Stuart High School opened in 1959. (Stuart was a Confederate general who had led the raid against John Brown at Harpers Ferry.) W.T. Woodson High opened in 1961. It was named after the segregationist who had led the Fairfax County school system for thirty years.
After the shootings in June of nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina by Dylann Roof, a few students at J.E.B. Stuart High School started a petition to change the names of these three high schools. But their petition has been out-numbered by the counter-petition that seeks to keep the names the same.
The petitions are addressed to Fairfax School Board member Sandy Evans. She told the Washington Post last week: “This is something that can’t be rushed through. It’s a significant change. It needs to be carefully considered.”
Her words, and the counter-petition itself, reek of slavery, lynching, and the racist history of these schools themselves.
Virginia politics was controlled in the 1950’s by the Democratic Party machine of Senator Harry Byrd. He called his school program “Massive Resistance,” and implemented it state-wide. The key legislative piece was that any school that integrated would simply lose its state funding and be shut down.
The most notorious result was in Prince Edward County. For five years between 1956 and 1961, authorities closed the county’s entire public school system.
To do that, they used both charter schools and tuition vouchers–two opposite ends of the same battering ram, against public education. The voucher program helped wealthier white students attend any private school of their choice. But the majority of white students ended up in publicly funded private schools–what we would now call charter schools. Those schools were known as “Segregation Academies.” They were funded by way of tuition vouchers and property tax deductions. But they were administered outside the public school system.
As for black students in Prince Edward County–they became what was known as “the lost generation.” Some were sent away to live with relatives in other counties and states for the entire five years. But for the poorest students, who were needed at home and on farms, moving wasn’t possible. Some were able to attend church schools or training centers for part of the time. But many didn’t attend school at all. And when schools finally reopened, having been out for such a long time–it was too late for them to start.
In Fairfax County, “massive resistance” took a less dramatic form but was carried out nonetheless. It wasn’t until 1960 that a “pupil placement board” began accepting applications from black students to attend white schools. Within two years, around 108 black students had dared to integrate a school system of around 25,000 white students. Even after being admitted, these students were officially prohibited from joining school clubs and athletics. Every individual school and classroom, every sports team, every drama club had to be “broken” by courageous young people who were willing to be the first.
Those are the people the schools should be named after!
Sep 14, 2015
Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, the association that has specialized in revealing information that the big economic and political powers don’t want revealed, has offered 100,000 euros (more than $100,000) to anyone who can get hold of the text of the TAFTA accord. This trade agreement between the U.S. and Europe has been in negotiations for more than two years.
The content of these trade negotiations between the big corporations and the governments defending their interests on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean has been kept secret, with few leaks of the details of the public-private partnership coming out.
One leak caused the European Union commission on trade in Brussels to announce that from now on nothing about the negotiations would be transmitted by electronic means OR on paper. The few people authorized at the negotiations had to go into a special room where they could not use their cell phones or anything similar, and could not even take notes.
The European minister for the economy had to go to Paris to find out the state of the negotiations.
This extreme desire for secrecy during the negotiations between European and American companies shows that nothing good is planned for the populations on either side of the ocean.
But then, this is nothing new in capitalist society, to keep commercial secrets, financial secrets, business secrets–not to mention military and diplomatic secrets among the big powers. This is the normal scheming of capitalism, which keeps its control carefully hidden from the population.
Sep 14, 2015
Since the U.S. began bombing Iraq on August 8, 2014 and Syria on September 23rd in the struggle against ISIS, it claimed the bombing was the “most precise and the most disciplined ... in the history of air war.” This statement recalls the U.S. bragging about “surgical strikes” during the 1991 Gulf War.
The reality was the opposite. A group of journalists called Airwars, collected a lot of data on the ground and had a very different assessment. It said there were between 489 and 624 civilian deaths due to the bombing.
But the catastrophic consequence for the civilian population of Iraq and Syria can’t be measured by the number of dead alone. The advance of the Jihadists of the Islamic State is the unintended consequence of the policy led by imperialism, which aims to impose by violence its hold over the region. The war the U.S. launched in 2003 against Iraq and the eight years of occupation that followed aggravated the poverty and suffering of the population and opened the way for the reign of the militias, including ISIS.
For years, the Iraqis lived in fear of terrorist attacks by car bombs and the extortions of militias of various affiliations. The interventions carried out by imperialism to extinguish the fires that it itself set can only lead to more deaths and fan the flames still more.
Sep 14, 2015
Stock markets around the world, including in this country, have engaged in a dizzying see-saw up and down that has led many economists to predict a new stock market crash and even a new crash of the world economy.
During the month of June, the Shanghai stock market fell more than 37 percent. The Chinese government tried to stop this fall, including by injecting 117 billion dollars into two Chinese banks. But this couldn’t slow down the speculators from pulling their capital out of the market. It couldn’t slow down the irrationality and sheep-like behavior that are inherent in financial speculation. This same Shanghai stock market had seen an equally irrational growth of 150 percent during the preceding year.
Similar speculative waves have hit the markets where raw materials are traded. In recent months there has been a general fall in the prices of primary goods like oil, metals, or coal. But primary materials, like all goods and anything that can be exchanged, are also objects of speculation. The swings in their prices only very distantly reflect changes in the actual economy.
Yet, while speculation is disconnected from the real economy, it is not separate. It is one of the ways the capitalists take society’s riches. These riches are obviously the product of concrete human labor.
Today, there is a never-ending growth in the share of capital devoted to speculation, at the expense of that devoted to investment. The capitalists don’t have confidence that their own economy can produce enough profits. They know that the market, that is to say consumption, is not growing. And that is even more true since the crisis of 2008, since the growth in unemployment and the austerity measures carried out by every government have impoverished the world’s populations.
The capitalists didn’t stop making profits during all the years of the crisis, taking a bigger and bigger share of all the riches produced, super-exploiting the workers and lowering their standard of living. In 2013, the profits of the 500 biggest companies grew to two trillion dollars. This astronomical sum came from taking ever more through exploitation, a veritable war waged by the capitalists against the working class. And all of this accumulated profit feeds the madness of financial speculation. On top of which, the trillions of dollars handed over to the banks since the 2008 crisis by every government have also swollen this flood, creating new, even bigger speculative bubbles–and along with them, the ever-present risk of stock market crashes all over the world.
Will this latest stock market crash lead to a “systemic” crisis, like the pretended experts say? No one knows. The only sure thing is that the billions of dollars used by the various governments to try to dam up the fall in the markets was taken from the pockets of the workers–like the billions that came before, that allowed the speculators to accumulate their fortunes.
It is also sure that there is no other way out of the financial madness of capitalism than to overthrow this system, and the parasitism that it fastens on all of humanity and threatens us all with catastrophe, regression, and ruin.
Sep 14, 2015
Over the last several years, children have been the main victims of the chaos and war in the Middle East and North Africa. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that 13.7 million school-age children from the countries most affected by war in that region didn’t go to school.
In Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya more than 8,850 schools have been destroyed or taken over for soldiers or their commanders. In this region, the UN reported 214 attacks against schools in 2014. Even when the schools are still standing, parents don’t send their children because of the risk. In the countries that have received refugees, there are too few schools for the number of children who have fled the wars.
Despite all this, there are still politicians who want to prevent Syrian refugees from reaching Europe!
Sep 14, 2015
This article is a translation of the editorial in the September 11 issue of Lutte Ouvrière, the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
The surge of solidarity supporting the refugees is heartwarming. In Germany, where Chancellor Merkel has let them in and where refugees poured in all weekend long, people massed at the stations to receive them with warmth. Have these demonstrations of sympathy cut into the climate of hostility toward migrants? We hope so.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t be taken in by the European leaders. Behind their humanitarian speeches and their change of policy in favor of the Syrians, there are all sorts of sordid calculations.
By opening the doors of her country, Merkel appears almost as a saint. But she is only doing this because the influx of new manpower is very convenient for the German bosses! As for French President Hollande, he is using this wave of sympathy not to open the borders, but to justify air strikes against ISIS in Syria—that is to say, to reinforce his war policy!
He told a press conference, “It does France honor that it has always received the persecuted,” before announcing that 24,000 Syrians could come in over the next two years. Compare that to the 20,000 that arrived in only one weekend in Germany. Holland puts “France’s honor” very low. Much lower than his predecessors in office who received 450,000 Spanish refugees in 1939 and 130,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian boat people beginning in 1979.
The migrant tragedy isn’t the result of a natural catastrophe. It’s the result of the Great Powers’ imperialist policy which consists of pillaging the poorest countries of the planet while exploiting their natural resources and strangling them through debt to the profit of the big bourgeoisie. It is the result of their maneuvers, their political rivalries and their wars.
The European leaders have contributed to transforming a part of the planet into a hell for their populations, and those leaders do everything so that people can’t escape it. By transforming Europe into a fortress, they are responsible for the death of thousands, people drowned in the Mediterranean, asphyxiated in trucks, or electrocuted near the entrance to the tunnel under the English Channel.
And this repellant policy is going to continue. For if the Syrians will officially have the right of entry, so-called “economic” migrants will have the right to barbed wire, billy clubs and deportations. As if being killed by poverty is more acceptable than being killed by bombs! As if the millions of children, women and men condemned to poverty aren’t also part of the persecuted!
In all of this, what are the interests of the workers? Certainly not to reject the migrants. And it’s not only a question of being humanitarian. It’s due to the general interest of the working class. For the migrants make up part of the working class. Even if a fraction of the refugees were doctors, lawyers or merchants in their country, in their immense majority, what awaits them is the life of a worker, a life of exploitation, our life. And the workers have an interest in making them allies.
The migrants ask for freedom to move from one place to another and to settle in Europe. The working class of France must support this demand, which is valuable for all workers.
Many ask if it’s possible to receive the migrants with dignity in the context of the crisis we’re living through. But unemployment, insecurity and low wages don’t depend on the arrival of immigrants. They depend on the relation of force between the workers and the bourgeoisie. Because the more money is allowed to accumulate in the hands of a tiny minority, the more poverty there is in France and Europe.
There are six million people today who are looking for work, which has nothing to do with the arrival of migrants. And all those who spend time pointing a finger at the immigrants would be better off taking on those who lay people off.
How many workers could live with the 16 million dollars in the golden parachute severance package of the CEO of Alcatel? By using only half of the profits of the big capitalist corporations for the creation of jobs, hundreds of thousands of the unemployed could have a job. With the billions planned for the Olympic Games, tens of thousands of homes could be built.
But for that, the workers need to reject the false claim that “we can’t receive all the world’s miserable,” to say instead, “we can no longer sacrifice for the bourgeoisie.”
Sep 14, 2015
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed to increase property taxes by about 500 million dollars in his new budget. This would mean an extra $500 a year for someone who owns or rents an average apartment. He also wants to add a garbage collection fee. All this on top of the increases he’s already imposed this year in taxes for 911 services, cable TV, and for renting movies or services like Netflix.
Working class people all over Illinois already pay more of their income in taxes than the rich. On average, the richest one percent pay less than 5 percent of their income in city and state taxes. Workers making between $19,000 and $38,000 a year pay almost 12 percent!
And while the city government wants workers to pay more taxes, they are cutting money for schools and services in working class neighborhoods, attacking the teachers and other city workers, and going after the pensions.
They say there’s no money. But they can find plenty of money for big business.
Over the last few decades, wealthy businesses have paid less and less to the city and state. The CME Group gets 77 million dollars a year in tax breaks. MillerCoors got 24 million to move to Chicago. Boeing, United Airlines, the big hotels, big developers, and big office buildings get property tax “refunds,” or tax “abatements,” or find ways to reduce the taxed value of their buildings–all with the help of the politicians.
And these corporations also suck more and more out of the city and public school budgets. They do this through privatized contracts, like the privatized parking meters or the Aramark deal to take over school cafeterias. Or they do it through crooked banking deals, like the toxic swaps that cost the city tens of millions, or the 2009 Sales Tax Bond for which the city paid the banks 300% interest.
There could be money for decent services and decent schools, AND lower taxes on workers, not higher–if we can find a way to make the corporations and rich pay, instead of giving them free gifts.
Sep 14, 2015
In the months and weeks leading up to contract deadlines with the Detroit 3 auto companies, UAW workers received zero information from International Union negotiators.
While the news reported on general approaches put forward by the UAW, the workers, who are the union, were not a part of the conversation.
When workers questioned or complained about the lack of information, union officials and experts trotted out the same old line that it is better to negotiate in secret. They quoted workers, who were hand-picked, to say that they “trust the bargaining committee 100 percent.” This is the same song that has resulted in concession contracts for the past several decades.
The fact that workers have to ask what is being negotiated is the clear indication that workers are not organized and on their feet ready to fight for their rights. No doubt workers are fed up and want more. But unless the list of union demands, the negotiations and the decisions to engage in a fight come from the workers themselves, the companies will continue to dance around giving any real gains.
Sep 14, 2015
There was a front-page article in the local paper about the VEBA for UAW retirees’ health care saying it was a great success. Really?!! Ask any UAW retiree, and most of them will tell you how they are paying more out-of-pocket every year.
More than $100 is deducted every month from their check for Medicare B, which used to be paid for by the companies–no longer. They have to pay a deductible amounting to $1,395 in network and $5,500 out of network per family per year before most procedures are covered. They pay a premium every month, which they didn’t pay before. Prescription costs are higher even for generics–and much higher for non-generics, even when there is no generic version.
They pay larger co-pays to see their doctor or pay a “facility fee,” or both–which they didn’t pay before. The dental and vision covers less. All told, they pay $200 a month more out of pocket–at a minimum, if they have very few prescriptions.
What kind of success is this for auto workers?
And the VEBA is still badly under-funded. (60 billion dollars is currently in the VEBA when 88 billion dollars is needed for current and future retiree health care costs.) The VEBA is always dependent on investments in things like the stock market. What happens when the stock market takes a big hit, like it did recently? It was reported that the GM VEBA lost 252 million dollars when GM stock went down a couple weeks ago.
The VEBA was a horrible concession when it was negotiated and it is a horrible plan today. Any attempt to tell people differently is just a piece of pure company propaganda.
Sep 14, 2015
The UAW was born out of the strike struggle of 1937. But even before the ink was dry on the first contracts, workers discovered that the new contracts carried controls limiting what they could legally do. One union–the UAW–was recognized and given the right to speak for the workers. And it agreed to limit strikes.
Controls over the workers were made more and more solid in contracts that followed in all three auto companies and soon spread even further. Any worker who engaged in a sit-in, slow-down or any form of strike action faced the threat of discharge. Then came “Management rights” clauses which restricted the workers’ rights to only a few items in the contract book.
The companies offered to physically separate union representatives from the workers they represented–they no longer had to work on the line. They also no longer had to collect the dues, insulating them from the workers’ displeasure.
The International Union was a willing partner in the process of separating union officials from the workers they represented. Of course, there were, and still are, union representatives who are willing to fight and lead fights. But they organize and fight in opposition to the International Union’s policy.
Today, most auto workers have become accustomed to the cycles of three or four year contracts. The goal was to keep an orderly production schedule running uninterrupted by any workers’ strike actions.
The result was to dilute the workers’ power. But without the power of the workers united for a fight, union bureaucrats continued for decades to deliver less and call it more.
When the sleeping giant that is the real union–the mass of auto workers–when it wakes up, we will see the ball start rolling in the opposite direction. Workers will tear up the contract provisions and straitjackets of scheduling and secrecy that today confine them to being spectators in their own game.
Sep 14, 2015
Early this month, a group of workers protested wage theft outside the California Cartage Company, a transportation and storage company. In California, hundreds of thousands of workers don’t get their breaks, or they receive less than minimum wage, or they don’t get paid for overtime, or they simply are not paid at all. Los Angeles is “The Wage Theft Capital” of the country, according to a 2010 University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) study.
Workers have the right to sue the company at court or appeal to a labor commission. Maria Vasquez, for example, worked long hours cleaning, washing dishes, cooking, preparing food at Art’s Wings and Things. She told KCRW that this work often went unpaid. Vasquez appealed to the California Labor Commission. The commission found that she was owed close to $85,000. But Vasquez is still waiting for the money she’s owed, eleven months after the court order. The company simply ignores the commission’s order.
Among those who complete the lengthy process of winning a judgment for unpaid wages, only 17% recover any of their stolen wages, according to a UCLA study.
Businesses steal from workers in broad daylight. They know that the state, the city, the courts, and the labor commissions are often on their side against the workers.
Sep 14, 2015
After years of hunger strikes and lawsuits, prisoners and prisoners’ rights advocates won an agreement from the State of California to reduce the use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons. The state has kept nearly 3,000 inmates in “isolation units,” where they are often kept alone for 22 hours, often for years, sometimes for decades. Some cells have no windows.
Even under the agreement, however, the state will continue to keep more than 1,000 prisoners in solitary confinement, and can do so for up to 10 years! And this agreement is only for California. Across the country there are around 80,000 prisoners in solitary.
Humans, like many animals, are social beings. To deprive them of human contact is torture of the worst kind. While giving some comfort and a feeling of victory for some of the prisoners who have employed their last resort in carrying out hunger strikes this agreement is an admission that California intends to continue this type of torture.
Stop this torture! End the use of solitary confinement altogether.
Sep 14, 2015
Five months after Baltimore city police killed Freddie Gray, the city has agreed to pay his family 6.4 million dollars. The Gray settlement exceeds the combined total of more than 120 other lawsuits brought against Baltimore police for brutality and misconduct since 2011.
In addition, a judge decided to keep the criminal trials of the police officers in Baltimore.
There’s one reason these moves have been taken: This is happening because young people went out into to streets and made themselves heard–by the whole world. What was done to Freddie Gray was no worse than what was done to many others in recent years. Dondi Johnson, for example, also had one of those now famous Baltimore police van rides in 2005. His neck was fractured, he was paralyzed and he died two weeks later. His family only received $219,000 in compensation for his life–And NO criminal charges were brought against the cops who killed him.
City officials are trying to put a big STOP FIGHTING sign up. “The justice system works: the cops will be tried–in the city and a big payout for the family. So there is no need for any more upheaval and rebellion. Cease and desist.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. If Baltimore shows us anything, it shows how you get something. The answer isn’t to not fight. The fight is not over. The problems that led to the rebellion are definitely not over. There are still no jobs. Black people are still being criminalized for not having jobs that don’t exist. People still have every reason to fight.
Sep 14, 2015
A mother recently won her lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Human Services. She was awarded 2½ years worth of back benefits.
As reported on The Daily Beast website (7/21/15), a Michigan law that ends cash assistance when kids miss school led to homelessness for a mother who was caring for her daughter dying of brain cancer.
During a 2½ year battle with brain cancer, the fragile child was enrolled in middle school but could not attend. The child had numerous seizures and strokes after surgery and lost all control over her bowels and bladder. Because the child needed 24 hours a day care, the mother applied for welfare but was denied, due to her dying child not going to school!
This shows what these policies do to people. It’s ridiculous that state officials won’t back down without court intervention.
Sep 14, 2015
Unemployed workers in Michigan were “found guilty” of fraud by a computer—without any human intervention. The new software program, called MiDAS, automatically finds a claimant guilty of fraud if a single discrepancy or mistake is detected, even if the individual was eligible for benefits.
According to a Metro Times article on 7/1/15, one low wage unemployed worker, who applied for benefits but never collected a dime, was mistakenly fined $7,300 for “fraud.” She took a butcher knife and slit her wrists. Fortunately, she survived. Another woman, wrongly fined $50,000 and destroyed by the experience, took her own life.
As understanding of the injustices of the new software system spread, previously isolated unemployed workers have begun to fight back. They have filed a federal lawsuit. A reporter at Fox 17 news in Grand Rapids, Michigan has let many unemployed people tell their story on the evening news. State workers have aided reporters in understanding the worst aspects of the system. Pressure on legislators and the governor is starting to build.
In July, the State of Michigan sought to dismiss the federal lawsuit, claiming that no harm had been done. But in August, a top official for the State of Michigan appeared to back off a bit. She stated in a television interview on August 6th, “Before any fraud determinations are issued, a staff person from the unemployment insurance agency is gonna take a look at the facts of the case, see what additional information we might need.” She indicated that the State was moving toward having a real person, and not a computer system, determine if there’s fraud.
While this would be the right thing to do, the State of Michigan would need to hire more people to implement this plan.
But according to the Lansing State Journal (2/11/15), the Unemployment Agency workforce has actually fallen by 34% since 2010. This is the largest drop of any state department.
A call has gone out to support this fight by the unemployed. The first federal hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, October 20 at 3:30pm at the Federal Building at 211 W. Fort St. in Detroit. The unemployed and all who are on their side are encouraged to attend.