the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 12, 2015
After one and a half years of denying that the Flint, Michigan water supply was contaminated, state and city authorities were ready to announce a public health emergency. The population was advised not to drink the water. Michigan Governor Snyder wants the City of Flint reconnected back into the Detroit water system and that he has “found” 12 million dollars to pay for it.
Last year, Snyder’s Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz decided to disconnect Flint from the Detroit water supply and to start drawing water from the Flint River. According to this “Emergency Manager”, the water was “free” and would be sufficient for water consumption until a new pipeline drawing water from Lake Huron could be built.
Ever since, the residents of Flint have been complaining about the foul taste and odor of the water, skin rashes and loss of hair–and they have been regularly ignored. Finally, in late September of this year, researchers determined that there were much higher than expected levels of lead in the blood of Flint children. These researchers were not brought in by the federal, state or local authorities who, as early as the first week of October, were still saying the water was fine. Independent researchers were found by the community.
Tests found that the number of Flint kids under the age of five years old who had above average lead levels nearly doubled city-wide, and in some cases tripled, following the connection of water services to the Flint River.
Lead poisoning compromises the immune system. It is especially harmful to the developing brain and causes permanent behavioral and learning disabilities. Lead is most harmful to pregnant and nursing women and children under six. It causes kidney damage and can interfere with the production of red blood cells.
Flint’s “Emergency Manager” disconnected GM from this poisonous water system in 2014 when the auto maker complained it was rusting newly machined parts. But this Manager of Emergencies allowed Flint’s children to go on being destroyed.
The governor, Republicans, Democrats, city and state officials are all responsible for the poisoning of the population, as are the wealthy capitalist owners of business and resources of Michigan. No doubt, the costs of constructing the new pipeline are providing this upper class with millions in profits. No doubt that the costs of the “new” pipeline, with its water intake on Lake Huron merely a stone’s throw from the existing Detroit Water and Sewerage Department site, at a projected cost of 600 million dollars, will be passed on to all Michigan tax-payers.
But the biggest cost will be borne by the children of Flint, poisoned by this criminal decision to use and keep using water known to be extremely corrosive.
And it’s not just Flint! Last summer, people in Toledo, Ohio, got sick from their drinking water. Cities like Chicago, with lead pipe systems, are a ticking time bomb.
In 2013, the American Society for Civil Engineers concluded that the U.S. would get a “D” grade in the drinking water category: most of the nation’s pipelines are “nearing the end of ... useful life.”
The deliberate negligence of U. S. capitalism toward the infrastructures we depend on–be it roads, rail, bridges, water pipes, electrical grids or gas lines–is threatening us all. Flint, a working class city abandoned by capitalism after decades of exploitation by the auto industry for super profits, may be ahead of the curve. But other cities and working class communities are awaiting their own disasters and tragedies if left in the hands of the ruling class barons and their criminal politicians.
Oct 12, 2015
We are supposed to be in the midst of a searing drought requiring water conservation in California. But it is not the same for the rich, according to the news. One home in West Los Angeles’ ultra-rich Bel Air neighborhood used an astonishing 11.8 million gallons of water in one year, enough for 90 households. Around 100 other filthy rich people living in this neighborhood used more than four million gallons of water per year on average.
It’s the same story throughout urban California. Rich neighborhoods from the Bay Area to San Diego use incredible amounts of water.
These rich people seem to decorate their houses with water fountains, rivers and lakes. For the commoners, what’s left is bottled water!
Oct 12, 2015
The median rent for a one bedroom in Los Angeles in August was $1,830 and a two bedroom was $2,640. Workers have to fork out 50% of their paychecks just to pay the rent.
Economists recommend that no more than a third of a person’s income go toward housing cost. Beyond that, cutting corners is what’s left. But sometimes, there aren’t even any corners left to cut.
Downtown Los Angeles is going through a construction boom, with no less than 13 massive construction sites and 19 huge cranes. On top of that, there are two mixed-use developments near Staples Center that will create an additional five high-rise buildings.
But they are all luxury buildings for the work and play, use and enjoyment of the very rich.
This is what the capitalists call a “recovery!”
Oct 12, 2015
Traffic fatalities overall have declined. But for those who are 25 and older with less than a high school diploma, the rate has increased.
Why? A degree or diploma does not make someone a better driver. But making less money means owning an older car with fewer safety features like side air bags or rear cameras. And the number of trauma centers has declined in poor and rural areas.
The gap between rich and poor shows itself in more than money and wealth.
Oct 12, 2015
Mumia Abu-Jamal, former journalist and Black Panther Party militant, has been imprisoned since 1981 for a crime which is widely acknowledged he didn’t commit. In 2001, the court system recognized that he didn’t receive a fair trial. At the time of his trial the prosecution had excluded most black people from the jury. And the presiding judge, Albert F. Sabo, had said to the police, “Yeah, and I’m gonna help ‘em fry the n ....” But Mumia wasn’t retried. He was only re-sentenced. Even though his death sentence was changed to life imprisonment in 2001, the court system seems to be trying to impose the death sentence in another way.
In fact, a short time ago, Mumia finally got out of his cell in a Pennsylvania prison, where he had lived for years and had written books and articles defending himself. But it was only because he was confined to the prison hospital. His health has been ruined. He already had eczema and diabetes, but now he has Hepatitis C.
There is a treatment for it. Gilead Sciences has pills which sell for $1,000 per pill but only cost $3.50 per pill to produce. The treatment lasts for three months, so he needs $84,000 to cover it. The State of Pennsylvania has refused to pay. Other states pay for it, including the very reactionary Texas, which loves to use the death penalty, but which gives this medicine to prisoners, some of whom are able to get well. But not Pennsylvania. A judge, minimizing the effects of Hepatitis C, rejected a suit that demanded that he be treated.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, who lost 88 pounds, continues to stand up against this oppression. Early in 2015, a Pennsylvania law was passed to deprive him of the right to speak or write, but after protests, this repression was dropped.
Contributions toward Mumia’s medical costs can be made to:
Mumia Abu Jamal’s Medical and Legal Defense Fund
c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074
San Francisco, CA 94141
or on the internet to: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mumia-abu-jamal-in-danger-treatment-now#/story
Oct 12, 2015
A 24-year-old man arrested in Portsmouth, Virginia, was found dead in his cell after spending four months behind bars. Jamycheal Mitchell stopped taking his medication for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder prior to stealing a Mountain Dew, a Snickers and a Zebra Cake totaling all of $5.05 from a 7-Eleven.
After Mitchell was arrested and charged with petty larceny, a misdemeanor, bail was set at $3,000. Later the judge revoked bail and ordered Mitchell to a state mental hospital. Court officials explained to his incredulous family members that it was so he could get help. Help was the last thing Mitchell got.
Officials are claiming Mitchell died from “natural causes.” But fellow inmates on Mitchell’s cellblock tell a different story. “I watched a physically healthy young man grow into a physically broken old man in a matter of months,” an inmate on his cellblock wrote in a letter to Mitchell’s family.
Justin Dillon, an inmate who delivered food and worked in Mitchell’s cellblock, warned prison employees that Mitchell’s condition was worsening. He said he saw Mitchell naked and muttering to himself. “He was all skin and bones. He looked like a stick.”
When Mitchell was arrested he weighed 180 pounds. After he was found dead on his cell floor he weighed 144 pounds.
The day before Mitchell died, he told a fellow inmate to get help, that he couldn’t move. Several inmates said something to prison employees. No help arrived. Mitchell was found dead on his cell floor the next morning.
Clearly the jail did not do all they could do. But there is something else going on here. The assistant superintendent acknowledged that Mitchell deteriorated during his stay–as do many mentally ill prisoners. The jail has a staff of four people who specialize in mental health care for roughly 370 inmates with psychological problems. “Our jail has become a de facto mental health facility in lieu of beds being available in the state,” according to Taylor.
Civilized societies provide mental health care and health care for all their members. The society we live in does not. This broken down rotting society throws its most vulnerable members away. Criminalizing the mentally ill and warehousing them in jails and prisons because it is less expensive than having skilled, trained professionals and staff and facilities to care for them is not civilized. What happened to Mitchell and what has and is happening to countless others in jails and prisons is nothing less than barbaric.
Oct 12, 2015
Ninety percent of countries have laws stating that women cannot be discriminated against. Yet in two thirds of the countries surveyed, women are excluded from certain work simply because they are women. There are no laws against sexual harassment on the job in at least a third of the countries. There is no legal protection against domestic violence in 46 countries. Half of the countries looked at don’t have family leave for pregnancy.
These are the facts as reported by the World Bank. This report shows a sad disparity between the laws passed and how they are carried out.
Of course, the worst laws and the most reactionary treatment of women happen more often in underdeveloped countries, like Saudi Arabia or India.
But in rich countries, where such laws exist, there are laws that seem to mean very little. In the U.S. women earn on average only 75 cents on the dollar compared to men doing the same jobs. Women overwhelmingly are hired in the lower paid jobs, the ones with the fewest or no benefits and the highest likelihood of being laid off. Every nine seconds a woman is abused or beaten. One in five women experiences rape in her lifetime–according to official figures. Some advocates for women say it is more like one out of every three, or even two. In at least one of every six emergency room cases, those injured are women attacked by domestic partners. In four out of five U.S. counties, state and local politicians have made it impossible for a woman to get an abortion, even though abortions are legal in this country.
The progress obtained by women in the past came from difficult fights. This fight is still to be continued.
Oct 12, 2015
Workers at Fiat Chrysler voted heavily to reject the proposed UAW-FCA tentative agreement.
Many of them made it clear that they did not believe any promise made by UAW leaders–not after learning that the promise made by UAW leaders in 2011 that second tier workers would begin to move up this year was nothing but a lie. A big, fat lie.
The rejection was overwhelming, 65% “NO.”
UAW leadership was quick to announce new negotiations; then announced a strike call for just a little more than 24 hours away; then at the last minute came back with a new contract–that is, new promises!
Was there really something new in it?
Certainly, they put a tiny bit more money where workers could see it in this new version. A few second-tier workers will soon make it into the first tier–those with seven or eight years seniority. A few more, those with five or six years may make it by end of this contract.
But there are very few with eight or seven or six or even five years seniority. Remember what happened to the auto industry after the financial collapse of 2008-11. Hiring was almost at a standstill. There aren’t all that many two-tier workers with enough seniority to benefit from this change. For all the others, they got only another promise: in the next contract, the one negotiated in 2019, they might finally make it.
Lied to once, who is so foolish to believe what liars say the second time?
The biggest hook in this contract, just like in the first version, will come in health care costs. And that’s harder to see. The negotiators may have gotten rid of the “health care co-op.” So Chrysler and the UAW leadership will decide how to cut health care. And an old letter (C-14) authorizes them to do it. It’s a letter that’s been in the contract, and it has been used before–in 2000-01 and in 2005, when they imposed deductibles, increased co-payments on doctor and hospital visits and prescriptions, and dropped doctors and plans.
By voting for this contract, workers would be giving a blank check to Chrysler’s boss, Sergio Marchionne, and the UAW’s top man, Dennis Williams, to make the new cuts in health care they decide on.
So now what? Chrysler workers who don’t want to sign a blank check, who aren’t ready to put their trust in people who lied to them before, will vote “NO.”
After decades of saying “yes,” decades of swallowing concessions, auto workers finally already said “NO” once. With that vote, they declared that their lives and their children’s lives are more important than company profits and Sergio Marchionne’s big houses.
But voting “NO” once is not enough. It’s obvious these scoundrels didn’t listen to what the workers were saying the first time.
So, then what? Go back and vote NO again? Well voting “NO” is never enough, no matter how many times you do it–not unless you make it clear you mean it. That is, not unless you use the forces you have.
Going out on strike would not be enough either–not if that strike is left in the hands of the very people who negotiated this contract. It is apparent that the leaders of the auto workers union at the very top level don’t want to lead a fight–and can’t! The only fight they are leading is a fight against the workers, lining up with Chrysler (and Ford and GM) to do it.
So if auto workers want something better than this contract, if they want everyone at the same, higher wage level, and no tricks and trade-offs on essential health care benefits, they will have to take the fight into their own hands.
The first thing–and this is essential–workers who want to fight have to get together with all the workers around them, all the workers in their own plant. Already that sets up a network leading out to other plants, because everyone knows someone else working at Chrysler, someone in their family, among their friends, in their neighborhood.
Once workers get together, it doesn’t have to take long to decide what they will do.
But wouldn’t UAW leaders be opposed to such an action? Well, of course.
The leaders of the UAW, like the top leaders of all the unions today, are the assistant guardians of the capitalist economy–an economy that has piled up those masses of profit, precisely because the workers’ standard of living has been driven down.
So, yes, workers, if they want to fight, need a new leadership, a fighting leadership. But they can develop that leadership. In the course of organizing their own fight, workers can push aside all those leaders who put the company first. Then they will be able to find the leaders they need.
Oct 12, 2015
The media managed to find at least a few of the 65% of the Chrysler workers who were not satisfied with the first contract. Now they seem unable to find even one single person who might say the slightest negative remark.
There’s some fine balanced reporting! Could they be in bed with the auto companies?
Oct 12, 2015
BP and the Justice Department recently settled suits concerning the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. BP caused this spill by speeding up the work to reduce drilling costs. The drill rig exploded, 11 workers were killed and more than five million barrels of oil were released into the Gulf of Mexico.
According to the settlement, BP would pay 20.8 billion dollars to repair environmental and economic damage it caused. They say that this is the largest penalty in U.S. history for a company.
But, as usual in such settlements, there is a catch. BP can write off this penalty as a business expense, decreasing its taxes by more than five billion dollars. We, the public will end up paying for the damage caused by this huge oil company’s drive for quick profits. Our taxes will increase and more public programs will be cut.
BP will be making the settlement payments over the next 15 years. BP easily will delay its payments claiming this and that, drag recipients of the settlement into courts again and again, and wait for inflation to erode the value of payments. Exxon did all these to avoid payments after it settled for environmental and economic damages caused by its ship, Exxon Valdez’s spill in Alaska in 1989–which it still hasn’t completely paid for.
Even when the capitalists lose in this system, they seem to win!
Oct 12, 2015
El Faro, a container ship, sunk on October 1st with 33 workers on board, in the midst of Hurricane Joaquin. It was on route from Florida to Puerto Rico. The last message from the ship said the engine had failed, making it impossible to steer, and it was listing 15 degrees. When the ship went down, there were 140 mile per hour winds and 50 foot waves.
The ship’s captain was apprised of the developing storm, but family members who gathered at the seafarers’ union hall said the captain was under pressure to deliver the cargo on time to avoid financial penalties. Quartermaster Bruer said, “They were always hurrying.” And Captain William Doherty, a former commander of tankers and container ships said, “That ship was 40 years old. In spite of all that anybody tells you, this ship was on extended life support.”
El Faro was owned by the large shipping conglomerate Saltchuck Resources, a privately owned company with two billion dollars in assets. It is involved in all kinds of domestic and international shipping, the distribution of oil, interstate trucking and air cargo. El Faro was just one small piece of its empire.
The hurricane may have been the immediate cause of this tragedy, but for-profit shipping sank the ship.
Oct 12, 2015
Many Teamsters Union retirees received letters informing them of possible drastic cuts of up to 60 per cent in their pension checks starting in July 2016. For some retirees this will mean a drop in their checks from $3200 to less than $1300.
The immediate reason for the cuts is that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which provides benefits when pension funds fail, has deemed the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund (CSPF) as likely to go broke within 15 years. The CSPF is what the PBGC calls a multiemployer pension fund, since unions like the Teamsters represent workers from many different employers, and pooled their members’ pensions as a way to provide stability to their funds.
In late 2014, the politicians in Congress passed the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act (MPRA), and President Obama signed it into law. The MPRA gives the Treasury Department, the PBGC, and the Labor Department the power to oversee reductions in retirees’ benefits as a means to keep so-called “failing” pension funds solvent.
The Teamsters are not the only union facing such drastic cuts to their pensions. Experts believe there may be 100 to 200 other union funds benefitting up to 1.5 million retirees that could face similar cuts in the future as a result of the MPRA.
In passing the MPRA, the politicians put the burden of solving the pension funds’ crisis on the backs of retirees. But the real cause of the funds’ insolvency is the failure of the companies that employed these union workers to properly fund their pensions. Union workers gave up wages in exchange for promises of receiving pensions when they retired.
In the case of the Teamsters, many of the companies they worked for have gone bankrupt. Their employees, known to the pension funds and government agencies as “orphan retirees,” still are owed benefits. These companies used bankruptcy as a way of passing on money to the people who owned them, while cheating the pension funds out of money they owed.
The government has chosen to go after the Teamsters first because they are an easy mark. The media point to “corruption” in the Teamsters Union as the reason why their pension is underfunded.
They give the example that the Teamsters pension fund loaned money to Las Vegas casinos in the early 1960s. They’re using “corruption” from 50 years ago to convince other workers that the attack on the Teamsters’ pension is somehow justified!
Workers should not fall for these lame attempts to justify the theft of pension benefits promised to workers, many of whom worked 30 years or more for their pensions.
The attack on the Teamsters’ pensions, and on the hundreds of other plans likely to be cut, is part of a more general attack on union pension funds, like the attack on City of Detroit retirees and other public employee unions across the country. With the MPRA, the politicians went after multiemployer plans. But it’s only a matter of time before they apply the same methods to single employer plans.
Nothing is safe. All those promises that workers believed–what were they but hot air? The only thing that will allow workers to protect themselves is the willingness to fight for themselves–to fight collectively along with all those other workers who find themselves also under attack.
Oct 12, 2015
On October 3, a hospital run by the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders came under attack by U.S. warplanes in Kunduz, Afghanistan. More than 100 patients and caretakers were in the hospital at the time, along with 80 doctors, nurses and other staff members. At least seven patients and 12 staff members were killed. At least 37 people were wounded. A week after the attack, nine patients and 24 staff members were still missing.
At first, U.S. authorities claimed they attacked because U.S. and Afghan troops were under fire from militants who were in the hospital. Doctors Without Borders said this simply wasn’t true. Then the U.S. shifted stories, claiming that militants were threatening their troops from areas near the hospital.
Finally, three days after the attack, President Obama apologized to the head of Doctors Without Borders, but claimed the attack had been a “mistake.”
This attack was no “mistake.” When the bombing began, Doctors Without Borders notified both Afghan and U.S. military officials that the hospital was being bombed and gave them the exact coordinates of the hospital–yet the attack continued for 30 minutes.
This hospital was treating wounded fighters in the area no matter what side of the conflict they were on, or if they were civilians simply caught in the crossfire. In the week before the attack, 394 war-wounded were treated and during the past four years between 20,000 and 25,000 people received care, soldiers and civilians combined.
Doctors Without Borders has been forced to withdraw its staff from the severely damaged hospital. Now the people in this war-ravaged region have no hospital to treat them. This is the result of what Obama calls a mistake!
No, it’s part of a policy carried out by the U.S. to control a whole large area of the world involved in the production and transport of oil.
Oct 12, 2015
Two weeks ago, Chicago Public Schools announced yet another round of cuts, this time targeting schools with enrollment that was lower than projections–in other words, schools where classes were not quite as over-packed as administrators want. Roosevelt High School, which had already lost 16 teachers in the round of cuts over the summer, lost ten more–a month into the school year.
When Roosevelt High heard about the latest round, they had a meeting in their school. Teachers explained what was happening. A number of students at Roosevelt, along with students at other North Side high schools, decided they would walk out on Monday, October 5th. At Roosevelt, 200 students walked out at 10 AM. They carried signs, with slogans like “I’ve Got 99 Problems, and CPS Is All of Them”; “The Less You Invest, the More We Protest”; and “Cut It with the Budget Cuts.” Students explained to the media that the cuts would mean even bigger class sizes, and a big loss in elective courses. At Foreman High, practically every student left school at 10 AM, and some of them walked over to Roosevelt, as a show of solidarity.
Working people in Chicago have no reason to accept the destruction of their children’s education.
Oct 12, 2015
The new “Common Core” test results are out in California, and they show the same thing that the old standardized tests showed, year after year: students who go to school in affluent neighborhoods do better than students who go to school in working-class neighborhoods.
In fact, the new tests strengthened this trend: the gap between the high-income and low-income schools was even bigger with these new tests.
That’s not surprising. Since the new style tests were being given for the first time, test scores depended less on students being specifically “taught to the test.” Instead, students had to rely more on knowledge and skills acquired over their entire education. And there, social class is the decisive factor. Middle and upper-middle-class children, whose parents have more education, already begin first grade with a much larger vocabulary, and general knowledge, than do working-class children. Instead of trying to use schools to overcome the gap, this country increases it. The more privileged children continue to get a better education, having access to more books, more culture, more technology, etc., at school–all paid for by public school systems that favor the children of the wealthy.
Federal, state and local funding of education is organized in such a way that schools in working-class neighborhoods are starved for the funding and resources they need to provide a decent education to all of their students. It’s common within a state to see schools in wealthy areas spending two or even three times as much on the education of those children as what is spent on the children of the poor.
This society run by the capitalist class is not willing to provide a decent education to the children of the working class.
If these new, supposedly improved, tests did anything, they showed this fundamental problem of education in capitalist society even more starkly than before.
Oct 12, 2015
On July 23rd, hundreds of people packed the auditorium of Kelly High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side to voice their anger at plans for a new Noble Street charter school in the Brighton Park neighborhood.
But instead of listening to the residents of the neighborhood and canceling its plans, the school board organized two meetings on the proposed new charter school outside the neighborhood, at a community college a few miles away. The Noble Street organization packed these meetings by busing parents and students from other Noble charters in other neighborhoods. But opponents of the new charter mobilized as well. The Brighton Park Neighborhood Council brought about 100 people to each event, and teachers from at least six nearby schools also came to protest.
Dozens of Brighton Park residents later packed the local alderman’s office to ask him to pull support for the Noble Street expansion and to support neighborhood schools.
Then last Thursday, hundreds of opponents of the new charter faced off against another crowd mobilized by Noble Street at a hearing at Chicago Public Schools headquarters. At this hearing, the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council presented the school board with 6,500 letters against the new charter.
The media made it seem like these were just competing demonstrations–but the reality was that the people FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD were overwhelmingly against the new charter school. Noble Street is a massive organization. The fact that it can use its resources to mobilize a few dozen or even a few hundred people has nothing to do with whether the people in Brighton Park want a new charter school.
At one of these events, teachers’ union organizer Rebecca Martinez expressed the sentiment of those opposing the new charter school: “The community is clearly saying we don’t want a Noble charter school on the Southwest Side, am I correct? Thousands of people have said no to Noble but you continue to disrespect the community.”
Parents, teachers, and students on the Southwest Side are angry because the city has been cutting funding for education for years. Kelly High School has had millions of dollars cut from its budget in the last two years, and dozens of teachers have been laid off. Nearby Kennedy High School had $305,000 cut from its budget this year, after millions more in cuts over the last four years. It’s the same all over the city. These cuts mean more kids in a class, fewer decent supplies, and fewer of the programs that engage students, from art to sports to a range of academic subjects.
Chicago Public Schools’ administration justifies these cuts by saying funding is linked to enrollment. In other words, these schools have had their budgets cut because their classes aren’t crowded enough!
But the proposal for a new charter school in the same neighborhood proves their lie. If the schools were really “underutilized” as CPS claims, how would it help to add one more school to compete for students?
No–the reality is that CPS has been cutting every school’s budget because the government at every level wants to hand that money over to the corporations. The push for charters is part of the broader attack against public education. And that attack is falling on all of us, not just in Brighton Park, but in the rest of Chicago and in the rest of the country.