War at home and abroad
The editorial on the bombing of Iraq [in the Dec. 26, 1998,
Militant] states that the U.S. rulers' bombardment of Iraq is
an extension of their barbarity and assault on the rights of
workers and farmers at home -it is right on. As Washington and
Britain had just ended the bombings campaign on the people of
Iraq, the next day at 4:30 a.m. a police force of 600 troopers
carried out a raid on 30 people who are protesting a highway
being built through Minnehaha Park and sacred Indian land. The
local press is proud to let us know it was the largest law
enforcement action in Minnesota State history, which the
demonstrators characterized as brutal force in which they were
treated like terrorists, as are the Kaiser Aluminum strikers by
the FBI, and anyone who asserts their rights or challenges the
social order.
The ongoing war on Iraq, the attacks on workers and farmers, and the impeachment of the president are all connected to the crisis of the system - President Johnson was the last to be impeached for his stance on stopping Black Reconstruction and connected with that industrial capitalism. Today it's in reverse, with the right wing invoking "Christian morality" just as the Spanish monarchy did with the Inquisition, but they were fighting against history. People's consciousness are being raised and it is a historical fact that the most oppressed sectors of society will be the power in the struggle for liberation, the second half of the Civil War, the American revolution that wasn't allowed to happen. All of these real antagonisms and contradictions are resurfacing and it is in this that the Socialist Workers Party is crucial as a vanguard leader in the struggles to come.
P.K.
Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota
Liberals back U.S. war
I wanted to comment on the January 11 article titled,
"Clinton impeached by Congress." I was surprised to find not
one mention of the liberal Democrats' response during the
impeachment debate. The liberals wrapped the American flag
around the president and said you can't criticize "our"
president while "we" are at war with Iraq (not a long trip to
"nobody can speak against the war").
There were political rallies during the bombing where Jesse Jackson and union heads called for supporting the president as well as the bombing of Iraq. These liberal and "progressive" forces make war moves more palatable to the working class.
Pointing out rightist attacks against the Clintons is fairly easy. Printing something about those that speak in the name of the working class while dragging us into war is more fruitful.
Rick Young
Chicago, Illinois
Detroit snow disaster
Mótown sure isn't any home to motors or people these days.
Given the 12 inches of snow last weekend (January 2-3) - not
the biggest in the nation - the official policy of city hall is
to let "mother nature" clear residential streets, i.e. wait
until the thaw comes. In practice, this means workers living in
Detroit have to struggle to get out of their neighborhoods
through vast masses of snow and ice and abandoned cars.
Emergency services will find it virtually impossible to get
through to many places and people will suffer and some die as a
result of the delay in treatment.
The city prioritized clearing the mayor's mansion, the area around Cobo Hall, home to the big-money Detroit Auto Show, and has committed itself to clearing bus routes. In practice, the clearing of bus routes isn't done some five days after the storm, and we have more snow falling. Given that there is virtually no public transportation system to begin with, you can see some of the problems. Travel by private vehicle from anywhere in the region is taking at least three times the normal time, causing considerable stress to people moving to places of work.
I work in an axle assembly plant with some 3,000 workers from the Detroit area. Co-workers are late for work daily. One of the main assembly lines was held up as parts being trucked in under the "just in time" production plan weren't received until four hours after their due time. Part of the street leading into the complex of plants has been cleared by the company, but the rest has not been touched by any city servicing of the area. It is a bus route and an important industrial thoroughfare. Major roads around and through Detroit have jack-knifed trucks all around.
This is not a simple story of a typical northern city getting hit by snow. Nature can be a big political question. There is a big social cost to working people of local government not providing the necessary services that permit people to get to work, to get to the food store, to get to the hospital.
Here's what the January 6 Oakland Press had to say about the situation, comparing the response of Chicago to its snow emergency with Detroit's. "Then there's Detroit, which doesn't even pretend to clear such streets, and never has. Live there, and you're on your own until the storm melts.
"The storm reached Chicago a day or so before it got to Detroit and TV coverage of the city showed streets plowed and salted incessantly throughout the weather crisis. That may be because Chicago had more than 700 trucks in service, compared to about 60 in Detroit. Chicago is a bigger city, about three times the size of Detroit, but not more than 10 times."
While the Oakland Press lit into Detroit, one coworker wasn't thrilled with Oakland County's performance. He declared that "they've got millions of dollars for the public prosecutor's office, but nothing for the road clearing." There's probably another story there, but we won't go down that road.
Toni Gorton
Detroit, Michigan
Tax cuts under capitalism
In an article on the recent Quebec elections (December 14
issue of the Militant) it is stated that one of the contending
parties "campaigned on a program to the right of the other
parties, centered on tax reductions and cuts in social
services."
A similar association of the right wing, unspecified tax cuts, and attacks on workers was made in a November 9 article on Quebec. "(Quebec Liberal leader Charest) proposes a 10 percent tax cut over five years.... He has repeatedly given as model the Conservative government of Michael Harris in Ontario, which cut taxes by 30 percent in three years and laid off thousands of working people."
No details are given on what taxes, on which social classes are affected. Do those working people in Ontario who kept their jobs have a higher standard of living now thanks to Harris?
In Belgium, both the right and left wing of bourgeois politicians want workers to believe that there is a necessary relationship between high taxes on workers' wages and decent social security.
Right-wingers try to win support among better paid workers by blaming unemployed workers and other social security recipients for high taxes on wages. The left wing, with the union tops in tow, tries to convince us we should accept both existing income taxes (on fuel, on waste disposal, etc.) in order to "save social security and public services."
Communists are not opposed to really cutting taxes on working people. "The only tax should be a sharply graduated income tax on the wealthy - on those who live off the labor of working people," Minnesota SWP candidate Tom Fiske is quoted as saying in the November 9 Militant.
Eric Wils
Antwerp, Belgium
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