People Before Profit blog

When housing dreams become nightmares

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 06:31:00 +0000

“Why keep paying all that money to make your landlord rich, when you can buy a house while interest rates are low and build up your nest egg?” is heard around kitchen tables, water coolers and in locker rooms across the country.

“Buy a house and it is yours” is a powerful dream. However the deregulation of the banking industry, one of capitalism’s more mysterious and predatory creatures, started by the Reagan administration, is a large pin pricking the dream bubble. Ability to move capital around the world, at the click of a computer mouse, made real estate one of the 21st century’s growth industries. And interest rates that balloon after two or three years of buying a home, along with stagnant wages and job losses, have created a gushing hole.

In February, RealtyTrac, an online catalogue of foreclosures, reported that in one month 130,000 families lost their homes across the country. That is a 12 percent increase over February 2006. In January, banks foreclosed on 136,113 homes. At that rate, many real estate experts say 1.5 million families will be in the street with their sofas, beds and children’s toys on the curb by the end of the year.

RealtyTrac reports that 1 in every 884 U.S. households are in some stage of the foreclosure process. Those steps include late payment notice, auction sale or bank repossession. The numbers mask the scale of human distress.

“The rise in foreclosures over the past year probably only marks the beginning of the problem,” Jan Hatzius, a Goldman Sachs economist, warned in a March 23 report. “The main reason to expect further deterioration is that house prices are likely to fall significantly in 2007, with further declines possible in subsequent years.”

In February, home sales fell to lowest level in seven years, and the number of unsold homes skyrocketed to the highest rate in 16 years, according to the Commerce Department.

Florida led the foreclosure process in February with 19,144 families losing the roofs over their heads. California was next with 16,273, followed by Texas with 12,386 families forced into homelessness.

Much of the media reporting has compared the deepening housing crisis to the dot-com mess, implying that “well, we got through that, it wasn’t pretty, but it did not signal a full-scale recession.” In sheer size, mortgages represent over $1 trillion, far exceeding the dot-com companies. When the bank forecloses on a family’s home, the family loses everything. Not the case with dot-com companies, many of whom were protected by pro-corporate bankruptcy laws. The high-tech debacle did not see children and moms separated from their dads, spending the night in shelters, or U-Haul trucks pulling up in the dead of night with families furiously loading up as many of their possessions as possible.

If a Martian were following media stories on the housing crisis, he or she would conclude that only the stock market took the hit, not the next-door neighbors.

dwinebr696 @ aol.com

Immokalee workers may launch boycott of McDs

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 05:08:00 +0000

CHICAGO — Imagine waking up every morning, still dark outside, and then have to pick tomatoes for a typical 10-hour workday, seven days a week, in sweatshop conditions with armed guards watching over you.

Sound back-breaking or nerve-wracking?

Well, you’re a farmworker, an immigrant working 60-70 hour weeks with no rights or labor protections and you live in very poor conditions. Tomato workers are not covered by many labor laws. They have no overtime pay, health insurance, sick leave, paid vacation or other benefits.

Farmworker leaders from Immokalee, Fla., the state’s largest farmworker community and the source of more than 90 percent of fresh winter tomatoes produced in the U.S., say such exploitation is a form of modern-day slavery and indentured servitude.

“It’s true, slavery still exists,” said Cruz Salucio Perez, 22, originally from Guatemala and now a leader with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). “Workers are forced to work in slave-like conditions and are constantly watched by armed guards and cannot have visitors. Some have been threatened, others beaten.”

The CIW is a community-based worker organization largely composed of Haitian, Mayan and other immigrants from Latin America. It is leading a campaign to press McDonald’s, the top leader of the $100 billion fast-food industry, to address farmworker exploitation in its tomato supply chain.

During a recent presentation here, Perez said governmental action has been limited, but “the people, the consumers, have the real power to resist and pressure McDonald’s.”

The Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA), a national network of students and youth, arrived in Chicago in January, along with the Campaign for Fair Food and CIW, to rally support for an April 13 demonstration outside McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., where they may declare a national boycott of the “Golden Arches.” On April 14 the groups plan to lead a parade in front of the Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s in downtown Chicago, which will end at Federal Plaza with fun activities full of music and protest.

SFA national coordinator Marc Rodriguez, 25, said CIW and his group have given nearly 100 presentations to city elementary, high school and college students. They have also visited churches, labor and community groups. Rodriguez said the response has been “great,” especially when people draw the connections between what’s happening in Immokalee and their own communities. Since fast-food corporations target young people, Rodriguez said, they will have to pay attention to a revolt by that strategic consumer market.

CIW, formed in 1993, has over 2,500 members who work for large agricultural corporations, traveling the entire East Coast following the tomato and citrus harvests. In the past six years the group has played a key role in the discovery, investigation and prosecution of five modern-day slavery cases and immigrant smuggling operations.

The organization is popularly known for leading a successful four-year national boycott of Taco Bell and its parent company, Yum Brands. In 2005, Taco Bell agreed to establish a code of conduct and guarantee farmworker participation in protecting their rights along with a wage increase. CIW hopes to establish the same agreement with McDonald’s, and set a precedent the whole fast-food industry will follow.

CIW says McDonald’s has not recognized the serious abuse the tomato pickers endure and has so far refused to work with the organization to address the issue.

Most Immokalee farmworkers work on small, individually owned farms. They are paid about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of fruit they pick. CIW and its allies are urging McDonald’s to pay 1 cent more per pound of tomatoes they buy from contractors hiring the farmworkers. This would raise the farmworkers’ pay to 77 cents per bucket, a 72 percent increase.

Tomato pickers average $10,000 per year and have not had a raise in nearly 30 years. They must pick nearly 2.5 tons of tomatoes just to earn minimum wage in a 10-hour workday, or harvest 181 pounds to afford a “Big Mac” sandwich at McDonald’s.

“We all know how big and powerful McDonald’s is, but they achieved that on the back of farmworkers sweat and labor, directly contributing to their exploitation,” said Rodriguez.

“It’s about time McDonald’s takes some responsibility,” he concluded.

plozano @ pww.org

Party of hope archives show living history

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 04:23:00 +0000

NEW YORK — This wasn’t your usual trip to the library. At New York University’s Tamiment Library, March 23, people jammed in to sit on folding chairs or stand shoulder-to-shoulder and listen to speakers tell of the Communist Party USA’s contributions to American labor and democratic rights. The crowd studied display cases full of photos, buttons, leaflets and letters from the 2,000 boxes of archives donated by the Communist Party to the Tamiment, which specializes in left and labor history.

Labor and civil rights historians, Communist Party leaders, librarians, peace activists, elected officials and trade unionists celebrated the gift, which includes 1 million photos from the archives of the People’s Weekly World and tens of thousands of books and pamphlets.

The archives include Joe Hill’s will and his goodbye letter to “Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. The crowd heard comments by African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois from the archives’ audio collection, and watched a piece of a film on the 1926 Passaic, N.J., textile strike. The film is the only complete copy in the country and will be preserved by the Library of Congress with copies available at Tamiment.

“It’s going to take us years before we know everything in those boxes,” Tamiment Library director Michael Nash said. The donation will spawn a whole new generation of historical scholarship exploring a people’s history, he said.

Rutgers University professor Norman Markowitz called the CPUSA a “party of hope,” borrowing a term used for pre-Civil-War activists who “fought for free schools, prison reform, asylums for the mentally ill, and most of all the abolition of slavery.”

Markowitz said CPUSA leaders and members “built the first real integrated political party in American history, as they developed mass organizations like the National Negro Congress, the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Civil Rights Congress,” which “made a central contribution” to placing civil rights “on the political agenda.”

Steve Kramer, executive vice president of Service Employees Union Local 1199, spoke of the party’s role in building and maintaining his union.

Recounting 1199’s “disastrous” 1984 strike and internal strife in which “the union almost tore itself up,” Kramer said that but for the party’s efforts, “1199 would have been a small union.” Today, with nearly 300,000 members, it is the world’s largest union local.

New York State Sen. Bill Perkins told how during eight years in the New York City Council, he sat in the seat once occupied by Communist Councilman Ben Davis, who never lost an election but was removed from office in chains under the McCarthyite Smith Act.

“His record in the council,” Perkins said, “is one that many of us are still trying to live up to, because he was among the first to champion laws for workers, for housing rights and for civil rights in the City Council.”

Leslie Cagan, a leader of United for Peace and Justice, the national anti-Iraq-war coalition, said of the party’s peace activism, “We have so much to learn from the history of the Communist Party about how this work has been done.”

The presence of dozens of party and Young Communist League members in the crowd indicated that the Communist Party continues to be an important and growing part of the American political scene.

New York State Assemblyman Richard Gottfried spoke humorously of representing a district that includes Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood where the Communist Party has its offices.

“Is Estelle Katz here?” Gottfried asked, looking for the well-known Chelsea retiree and Communist peace activist. “My district may be the most unique in the nation where the ‘red-baitees’ out-number the ‘red-baiters,’” he said.

The party has a great past, PWW editor and CPUSA leader Teresa Albano said, but “we are part of the present and future.”

“We are making the promise of America real for everyone,” she said, citing the party’s involvement in current battles against the extreme right, racism, sexism and war, continuing the fight for peace, equality and socialism.

While articles on the archives in The New York Times, New York Post and others called the party an agent for the Soviet Union, CPUSA Executive Vice Chair Jarvis Tyner demolished these claims.

“I have been in the party for 47 years, and in the leadership for 40 years and I can tell you that I’ve never gotten an order from Moscow,” he said.

Tyner outlined the fascist-like provisions of the McCarran Act, passed by Congress in the late 1940s — over Truman’s veto — and later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. He also described the influence of European and U.S. Communists in developing the popular “united front” policies against fascism and war.

“So maybe it should be said, we didn’t take orders from Moscow — Moscow took orders from us,” he said.

As supposed evidence of ties to Moscow, the Times article cited documents in the archives in which party members had coded their messages. Tyner noted that in its early days the Communist Party was illegal, like union organizing and racial integration. But Communists organized for unions and against racist terror and segregation. So “powerful financial interests were against them,” Tyner said. “They faced labor spies, provocateurs, KKK terrorism and government thugs. Thousands were rounded up, jailed and many deported in the Palmer raids of the 1920s.

“Those comrades wrote in codes,” Tyner exclaimed. “It would have been foolish not to!”

Among the historians who spoke were American Communist History editor Daniel Leab and University of Houston professor Gerald Horne. The event was co-sponsored by the Labor and Working Class History Association.

Pregones, a Latino theater group, performed part of a recent production “The Red Rose,” based on the life and writings of Puerto Rican and Communist Party leader Jesus Colon.

Afterward, Nash told how he had grabbed a random box to show the Times reporter, and found letters written by Colon to the New York Board of Education lobbying for bilingual education in the 1940s and ’50s. The reporter was “blown away,” he said, saying she thought this was a 1980s and ’90s issue.

“But a Communist, Jesus Colon, advocated for it decades before,” Nash said.

dmargolis @ pww.org

Students sit in to save schools

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 04:12:00 +0000

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — As hundreds of students, parents and concerned citizens chanted “No takeover,” the Missouri Board of Education voted 5-1 to strip accreditation from the 32,000-student St. Louis City Public Schools March 22.

A three-person board will oversee the work of the district starting June 15. The board will be appointed by Republican Gov. Matt Blunt, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and newly elected Aldermanic President Lewis Reed. Local, elected school board members will remain in place but have no real power.

On March 18, just days before the takeover, high school students wearing T-shirts that read, “Please don’t SLAY our future,” ended a five-day sit-in at the mayor’s office.

At the sit-in, Kaylan Holloway, a 15-year-old sophomore from Soldan International Studies High School, told the World, “What happens to our schools affects our future. This is our chance to voice our opinion. This is the only way that Mayor Slay would listen to us.”

The school crisis is not unique to St. Louis. Around the country, meat-cleaver cuts in the federal education budget have opened the door for state governments to trample the rights of urban school boards, local residents, parents and students to govern their schools. In no instance, however, have such moves improved the quality of education.

Over the past few months, a debate has raged, largely without student input, regarding the St. Louis school district’s future. Currently, it is operating at a $23 million deficit. According to Missouri law, school districts must have balanced budgets.

Parents and students alike are concerned that the loss of accreditation will affect college applicants. According to students, some colleges have stricter admission requirements for students who graduate from unaccredited schools.

During the sit-in, Alderman Terry Kennedy of the 18th Ward said, “The African American Aldermanic Caucus opposes a state takeover of our public schools and supports the right of these students to peacefully demonstrate and have their grievances addressed.”

Before the vote, officials of the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said the St. Louis school district had failed to meet both academic and financial standards.

However, Donovan Jackson, a 17-year-old junior from Gateway High School, told the World, “The state says we are in educational and financial distress. We are not in educational distress! There are 12 other school district doing worse than we are. They aren’t being taken over.” However, he added, “we are in financial distress, due to Mayor Slay’s policies and support for vouchers.”

Jackson said, “They want to use public money for charter schools.” Mayor Slay has repeatedly said that he supports the state’s takeover and the passage of SB 564, a bill introduced in the state Senate last month that would allow him to sponsor charter schools in St. Louis.

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, do not have the same data-reporting and accreditation mandates as public schools. They are usually anti-union. They can only operate with a sponsor, usually a university.

School board member Donna Jones, who is also a member of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 420, told reporters that the mayor’s office was the perfect sit-in site because he backed a slate of school board candidates who wanted to “destroy” public schools.

According to the AFT, the state takeover will affect teachers’ contract and seniority rights. Many teachers expect layoffs to come as well.

“To replace elected board members with politicians appointed by other politicians is just un-American,” school board member Bill Purdy told reporters. Purdy, along with other board members, plan to sue the state to stop the takeover. Community control of the public school system and its board is a concern for students and community residents alike.

St. Louis Superintendent of Schools Diana Bourisaw expressed disappointment with the vote and insisted the district was improving.

While the state has decided to take over the school district, students and teachers aren’t lying down. AFT Local 420 President Mary Armstrong told reporters, “I’m disappointed, upset and ready to fight.”

Devin Jackson, a 15-year-old also from Gateway High, told the World, “We proved to the city and to the state that kids care about our public schools. We’re going to keep fighting. This isn’t over.”

tonypec @ cpusa.org

My Landlord Likes Lenin

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 04:25:00 +0000

One morning last week, a tired-looking businessman named Richard Du was pacing around the partly renovated space that would soon house Dumann Realty, his commercial real estate brokerage.

“We’re moving in this Friday,” Mr. Du said with conviction, despite the missing ceiling tiles, the wooden planks leaning against the walls and the whine of the power saw. He glanced over at Roberta Wood, a representative of the building’s owners, who was standing nearby. “She’s a lovely landlord,” Mr. Du said. “So far.”

But Ms. Wood is not just any landlord. She is a project manager for Advance Realty, a corporation affiliated with the Communist Party USA. And the building with the elegantly ridged facade at 235 West 23rd Street, near Eighth Avenue, where Mr. Du has just signed a 10-year lease, has been the party’s headquarters since 1977.

For just over a year, the party has gradually been withdrawing from four of the building’s eight floors. The freed space is being rented out — to Mr. Du, to a record label, to an art supply store and to various other capitalists. Leases have been signed for all but one of the rentable floors.

“They weren’t being utilized,” explained Ms. Wood, a former electrical worker who is the labor editor of the People’s Weekly World, the party’s newspaper. “We were just kind of spread out.”

The Communists of West 23rd Street do not see a problem in renting out their property for cash. “We live in a capitalist system,” said Libero Della Piana, the party’s bearded, bushy-haired communications director. “We know that in order to function, you have to get by in the system. We’re not going to change the world by not charging rent for our space.”

The move has entailed sacrifices. Although some of the party’s files were put into storage, most were given to the Tamiment Library at New York University, which announced last week that the party had donated 12,000 cartons of its records. The newspaper’s editorial staff had to decamp to Chicago.

Other offices, including those occupied by the Young Communist League and the party’s book publishing arm, have moved to a cramped warren of rooms on the building’s seventh floor, where Sam Webb, the party’s national chairman, shares space with one of the newspaper’s proofreaders.

And how does Mr. Du feel about renting from avowed enemies of capital? “I come from Vietnam myself,” he said, grinning. “It’s the best party ever, in my book.”

Stop raids on immigrant workers

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:07:00 +0000

The following is a statement issued by the Communist Party USA on March 13.

On March 6, the Bush administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, carried out a brutal immigration raid on Michael Bianco, Inc., in New Bedford, Mass., arresting 350 workers. The company received nearly a million dollars in military contracts to produce backpacks being used by soldiers in Iraq. The raid caused a humanitarian crisis in southwestern Massachusetts with hundreds of small children, some of them U.S. citizens, stranded at day care and school with no idea where their parents were.

Similar raids have been carried out in the last weeks at the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, N.C.; at Swift plants in Colorado, Texas, Iowa and Oklahoma; and in California, Indiana, Arizona, Illinois, Connecticut and elsewhere. The raids at Smithfield and Swift had a strong “union busting” element in the raids.

The raids expose the lie of Bush’s hypocritical statement that “family values do not end at the Rio Grande.”

Such vicious raids have escalated following massive demonstrations for immigrant rights across the country last spring. The increase in raids this month is timed to come as the debate on immigration begins in Congress, to serve as a many-tailed whip to force through new and expanded guest worker programs. In the guise of reforms, guest worker programs will establish a separate system of second-class workers with unequal rights.

These Bush anti-immigrant initiatives are also used to divert and divide the growing movement for a new direction in the country.

The long-term solution to the immigration issue includes an end to trade and economic policies that enrich corporations while impoverishing workers and small farmers of other countries. As well it includes the establishment of equal rights for immigrant workers to end the special exploitation of these vulnerable workers.

A united response led by the labor movement and involving civil rights, women, youth, religious, environment and civic organizations is needed to stop government policies that hurt workers of all nationalities in our country. Demands for decent wages and working conditions and the right to organize will improve living standards for all workers.

We join with elected officials, unions, church groups and others who have spoken out to call for immediate action:

• Arrested immigrants from New Bedford, Mass., and all other raid locations must be released and reunited with their families immediately.

• There must be an immediate moratorium on all immigration raids, arrests, deportations and use of Social Security “no-match” letters for immigration enforcement.

• Congress must pass, and the president must sign, legislation which does the following:

1. Legalize undocumented immigrants in the United States as quickly and easily as possible.

2. Increase the number of permanent resident visas instead of proliferating and expanding guest worker programs for immigrant workers of the future.

3. Uphold family unity by preventing the deportation of hard-working parents of minor children. Rep. Jose Serrano’s Child Citizen Protection Act (HR 1176) is a start in this direction.

4. Repeal employer sanctions that are used to hurt workers. Instead, strengthen and enforce labor law to guarantee that just wage and working conditions are met. Require all government contracts to include standards for wages and working conditions.

5. Repeal legislation that restricts immigrants’ legal rights and access to public services paid for by their tax dollars.

6. Stop Bush administration barriers to expeditious due process for permanent residency and citizenship.

7. Stop violence and cruelty against border crossers by the Border Patrol and private vigilantes. End militarization of the border.

8. Pass the Employee Free Choice Act to allow all workers to organize into unions without harassment and intimidation.

No, Texas is not all about Bush: Lone Star State has proud socialist past

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:01:00 +0000

Anyone who can unsnarl honest Texas history from domination by myths and outright lies will find a proud working class with socialist leaders as advanced as any in the nation. Of course, they are well hidden.

Socialists from Europe were arriving in Texas while the Communist Manifesto was still in its first printing. The revolutionary battles of the 1840s produced strong-willed men and women who arrived in Texas even as they were scourged in Europe. Victor Considerant, an exile from France and a contemporary of Karl Marx, was one of them. He helped establish the La Reunion community that brought culture to Dallas.

Similar utopian settlements arose here and there, especially in the Hill Country near Fredericksburg. Surviving history books tell us that they were “freethinkers” as opposed to being religious, and that they were devoted to their socialist principles even in difficult frontier conditions.

Misleading reasons are given as to why the communities broke up, but the glaring unmentioned facts are that their disappearances unanimously coincided with the formation of the Confederate States of America, and that all of the socialists opposed slavery. The actual gun battles that took place are hardly mentioned, except for the “Battle of Nueces” in which Confederates massacred the socialists from Comfort, Texas, who were trying to escape to Mexico rather than be drafted to fight for the slavocracy. So fierce was the anti-abolitionist climate that the mothers and wives of Comfort dared not even gather the martyrs’ bones until after federal troops liberated Texas in 1865. From 1998 to 2000, their bones lay under a tall monument in downtown Comfort inscribed with the defiant words (in German) “True to the Union.” Unfortunately, in 2000 right-wingers succeeded in getting the monument removed.

For an idea of what these progressive Europeans had to put up with, note this statement from an editorial in the Austin newspaper of the time: “[T]he socialist is an abolitionist everywhere. … We note this advent of socialism in Texas as foreboding us no good; and we wish them to have a fair understanding before they reach our soil, that as a political sect our whole people are against them.”

Among the individual socialists who came to Texas from Europe was newspaper editor Adolf Douai of San Antonio. Like other socialists, he was driven out of Texas by racist slaveholders around 1856. In 1883, Douai was so prominent in America that he was chosen to deliver the eulogy for Karl Marx at Cooper Union in New York.

Of all Texas socialists, E.O. Meitzen and his son E.R. Meitzen stand out. They were prominent in the People’s Party of Texas, which was founded in Dallas in 1892 and played a leading role in the progressive movement. The Texans distinguished themselves among populists with antiracism. They welcomed African American members and spokespersons.

After the Socialist Party was formed in the early 1900s, the Meitzens published outstanding socialist newspapers from their printing press in Halletsville. When virtually all socialist publications, including a number in Texas, were shut down by reactionary legislation in 1917, the Meitzens’ paper, “The Rebel,” enjoyed the second largest socialist subscription base in the nation. Its militancy was evident on every masthead, which proclaimed, “The great appear great to us only because we are on our knees. LET US ARISE!”

Eugene Victor Debs, the best national spokesperson that the Socialist Party ever had, visited Texas and posed with the Meitzens and other progressives. Debs achieved big votes in Northern Texas and Oklahoma when he ran for president. E.R. Meitzen won a large block of votes when he ran for governor as a socialist. He continued as an outstanding spokesperson for justice and civil rights until his death in 1937.

In the 1930s, members of the Communist Party took leadership roles in bringing industrial unionism to Texas. The best known of them all was firebrand Emma Tenayuca, spokesperson for the pecan shellers’ strike in San Antonio. It was credited with first establishing the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the state.

Other communists took leadership roles in bringing industrial unionism throughout Texas. Their efforts were particularly noteworthy among Spanish-speaking workers in the southern region. Union singer Anne Feeney has done Texas a great service by recording the remembrances of Manuela Solis Sager. Sager and her husband were central in union organizing south of, and including, San Antonio during the 1930s and 1940s. A transcript of the recording is available at tx.cpusa.org/mela.htm. Other aspects of Texas history can be found easily at www.labordallas.org.

Traditional Texas history sources also include the workers’ role, but you really have to dig for it!

Jim Lane (flittle7 @ yahoo.com) is a labor activist in North Texas.

EDITORIAL: Housing bubble criminals

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:44:00 +0000

Economists are warning that a crisis is looming in the home mortgage industry that could eclipse the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies seven years ago. It has the potential of plunging the nation into a recession.

The alarm bells started to ring when New Century Financial (NCF), a huge Southern California mortgage lender, announced that it would stop making loans and needed emergency financing, signs that the company is on the brink of bankruptcy. More than two dozen other mortgage lenders have already collapsed. A shiver went up the collective spine of Wall Street bankers because this crisis is hitting at the heart of the $6.5 trillion mortgage securities market, an engine that is propping up the entire U.S. economy.

NCF is a “subprime lender,” meaning that it floats adjustable “liar loans,” whose interest rates start low or at zero but ratchet sharply higher in later years. These loans are floated to cash-strapped buyers with little documentation, cash or collateral. African American borrowers are 3.8 times more likely and Hispanic borrowers 3.6 times more likely than other borrowers to be forced into these predatory loans.

Seeking to escape increasingly exorbitant rents, and lured by the American dream of home ownership, many working-class borrowers face a desperate struggle, each month, to pay mortgages that consume half or even two-thirds of family income. Now, foreclosure and delinquency rates are skyrocketing. In February, 117,259 homes were foreclosed, 68 percent more than a year ago. Ohio, Michigan and Indiana suffered the highest rate in the nation, the result of “family economic distress” including “job loss and divorce,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

A front-page analysis in The New York Times showed that NCF and other such lenders, seeking to attract Wall Street investors, hid all the “bad debt” with Enron-style phony book-keeping.

Americans need protection from these corporate criminals. Congress and the states should step in. They should declare a moratorium on home foreclosures, and outlaw these predatory Enron-style lending practices. We need both rent control and mortgage control.

Mayor Bloombergs demolition derby for New Yorks public schools

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:12:00 +0000

With the Bush administration under fire from all directions, even his “signature” education bill, No Child Left Behind, is losing support, including from Republicans. NCLB has produced a huge shift towards standardized testing, using test scores to narrowly gauge success of teachers, principals and schools, increasing bureaucratic constraints, and, perhaps most significantly, pressures towards privatization.

Test preparation companies (Kaplan, etc.) have experienced a boon in recent years as worried parents spend money they can ill afford to help their children pass the array of tests (to which New York City’s Department of Education has now added science).

One only has to look at the test booklets themselves and notice who publishes them — none other than McGraw-Hill, a major contractor with the DOE. McGraw-Hill and Voyager have also been big donors to the Bush administration. Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the national grant and founding board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

Corporate model

McGraw-Hill executives have been recently appointed by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to sit on a committee to address “middle school reform.”

Bloomberg’s core cabinet doesn’t include a single educator, but does include an investment banker, a foundation executive, a telecom CEO, a music industry lawyer, a former state deputy comptroller and the son of Klein’s former law partner.

The approach taken by Bloomberg and Klein has been sharply criticized for years for everything from heavy-handedness and tone deafness when it comes to parent and community input, to the failure to significantly lift graduation rates, to cuts in special education. On the overriding issue of overcrowding, the Bloomberg DOE has done little to nothing, even going to great lengths to oppose campaigns for smaller classes and only recently agreeing to contribute towards settling the longstanding lawsuit that charged the NYC’s public schools were underfunded.

Not surprising for a businessman, Bloomberg has been hostile to labor, including the teachers and other school workers and their unions, both of whom went without contracts for years.

The profit motive

Bloomberg and Klein have made many decisions that abdicate their responsibility for running the schools by turning them over to corporate consultants and for-profit “providers.”

The latest example is the no-bid contract with the consulting firm of Alvarez and Marsal, brought in to help the city cut the DOE budget. Their first project was to “restructure” the school bussing system, resulting in kicking off 13,000 children from their school buses in the middle of winter. Five-year-old children were given Metrocards to ride city buses and subways to school. Some children were instructed to take up to three city buses; others had to cross multi-lane highways to get to their new school bus stops. Siblings attending the same school were put on different buses. Many children waited for buses that never came. And other children were picked up after the start of school, missing the breakfast program and the reading lessons that begin every school day.

Alvarez and Marsal specialize in corporate restructuring via downsizing. Before coming to New York, they had been contracted to cut the budget of the school system in St. Louis with similarly disastrous results.

Yet despite the bus fiasco, this firm is in charge of coming up with budget-cutting measures, including downsizing special education services, delivery and quality of school food and supplies, and counseling services.

Other DOE luminaries include William Robert, formerly the CEO of Brooks Brothers, now an interim superintendent, and Sajan George, a former Defense Department contractor and oil executive, now the city schools’ chief restructuring officer (for which he is paid $450 an hour).

Christopher Cerf, former head of Edison Schools Inc., and for several years a consultant to the DOE, hired by his old friend Klein, was recently made a deputy chancellor. Despite the embarrassment to Klein when it was revealed that up until just a few weeks ago, Cerf had significant financial interest in Edison, he remains on the city’s payroll.

Klein also recently announced a five-year, $80 million contract with IBM to develop a database that would track the city’s 1.1 million students.

Another new reorganization plan

At his State of the City address in January, Bloomberg surprised everyone when he announced another school reorganization plan. This is the third such effort, and it has met with across-the-board opposition. With this plan Klein aims to put on the backs of teachers the entire burden of having children pass the high stakes tests, and to take yet another step towards delivering the largest school system in the country on a platter to for-profit corporations and agencies. Critics point out that this restructuring plan, coming so soon after the last one in 2003, will create big problems for parents and students just as that earlier effort did.

At the heart of the plan is requiring principals to quickly choose between three “School Support Options.” The first is to choose to work with one of four new “super supervisors,” and the second is the “Empowerment School” route. Critics point out the Empowerment pilot project on which this option is based is only a year old and has not been evaluated.

The third option is the one that smells of privatization, as it arranges for schools to “partner” with private agencies. Among those that have indicated interest in these partnerships is Edison Schools, Inc. Several years ago an effort to bring Edison into New York City to take over troubled schools was defeated after a big community campaign.

But Bloomberg and Klein may have gone too far. Opposition to the new plan has been sharp and broad, from parents (including the chancellor’s own Parents’ Advisory Council), teachers, community leaders and elected officials. All are protesting the speed of the change, the lack of input, and perhaps most ominously, the inclusion of elements that move further toward privatization.

At a church hall rally two weeks ago headlined, “Put the Public Back in Public Education,” the packed room rang with chants of, “Klein resign, Klein resign!” The event was called by a coalition of groups that is criticizing the corporate takeover of the school system, and included the Working Families Party and the United Federation of Teachers.

The “Put the Public Back in Public Education Coalition” has called on Chancellor Klein to “stop the reorganization and listen to parents,” saying it agrees with the “goals of fair funding, accountability, and quality teaching in all schools, but believes the current plan will not accomplish them. Instead, it will lead to chaos once again in the day-to-day life of NYC’s struggling schools.”

A resolution passed by the Citywide Council on High Schools calls on the city to halt the reorganization process, pointing out that it “focuses on overall structure rather than proven initiatives that directly impact the classroom, such as smaller class size,” and calls for public hearings.

Charter schools

Another aspect of the Bloomberg/Klein privatization push is increasing the number of charter schools. This is also under fire, including by the UFT and others. In an article entitled “Charter Schools: A quick fix for an old wound; the attack on public education,” by Veronica Montgomery-Costa, president of the AFSCME local of DOE employees, urges “every member to mobilize and act as a voting block to defeat the privatization of our public schools.”

What about class size?

Smaller classes are universally considered to be the single most important factor in improving children’s learning and achievement, yet this factor gets short shrift in the latest reorganization proposal.

At public hearings around the city, when asked about smaller class size, Klein has steadfastly ducked, claiming that class sizes have gone down under mayoral control (though there are no figures to support this) and ignoring the fact that the DOE has no plans for reducing class sizes above third grade. Education advocates, including the Alliance for Quality Education, are calling on the public to put pressure on the state Senate and the DOE to pass Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s budget and to ensure that the new funding is spent on class size reduction.

Class Size Matters has called for lobbying against the plan as well: “Instead of experimenting with more untested reorganization schemes, likely to cause even more chaos and uncertainty, the mayor and chancellor should listen to parents and teachers about how to spend the additional $5 billion that our schools are due to receive — on a proven reform that is guaranteed to work: class size reduction.”

Maria Ortiz is a member of the United Federation of Teachers. Elena Mora contributed to this article. Both have children in the N.Y. public schools and are activists in the struggle to save public education.

Chicago officials urge end to raids, deportations

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 05:54:00 +0000

CHICAGO — By a 45-0 vote, Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council approved a resolution March 13 calling on President Bush to issue a moratorium immediately on all immigration raids and deportations not related to national security or criminal activity, and especially those involving immigrant parents with U.S.-citizen children.

“My mother was born in Mexico, came to the U.S. as an immigrant and became a naturalized citizen,” Alderman Manny Flores of the 1st Ward told the World at a recent rally for immigrant rights.

Flores introduced the resolution along with Aldermen Danny Solis (25th Ward), Ed Burke (14th Ward), Billy Ocasio (26th Ward) and Ricardo Munoz (22nd Ward).

“I understand firsthand the challenges of immigrants, the dreams and aspirations they share for this country,” said Flores. “In the end we were all immigrants, and we can’t forget where we came from.”

Flores said he believes it is important that people are reminded about their history and know that immigrants are seeking a better future for their families. “We have to have rallies and marches to raise people’s consciousness and to understand and not forget,” he said.

Elected officials are calling for comprehensive immigration reform to provide legalization and a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the country. The resolution condemns the recent nationwide escalation of raids and deportations, including 17 workers currently being held in Chicago with excessive bonds.

The resolution denounces the cruelty of separating families and supports the reunification of immigrant households. It states that mothers with infant children and fathers who are the sole supporters of their families are among those being detained. The resolution also reaffirms the council’s support for the introduction of a private bill granting legal permanent residency for Elvira Arellano, a single mother fighting deportation, and others like her.

The City Council has set April 29 as “Family Unity Day” in Chicago and is urging all residents to participate in a day of prayer, peaceful gatherings and petitioning of representatives for pro-immigrant legislation.

The official resolution will be presented to President Bush, Homeland Security officials, members of the Illinois congressional delegation and Elvira Arellano.

Meanwhile a group of 50 Chicago elementary, high school and college students from over a dozen area schools traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby members of Congress on March 15, urging them to pursue pro-immigration reform.

The busload of students, some immigrants and others whose parents are undocumented workers, presented thank-you letters and artwork to Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and Hilda Solis (D-Calif.). The students were well received by the office staff.

“We want legalization for everybody,” said Anita Rico, an organizer of the trip and leader with Centro Sin Fronteras, a Chicago-based immigrant rights group.

“Immigrant youth want to go to college, and their parents want to have jobs, and not to feel scared when leaving their homes,” said Rico. “Until we get that, we need a moratorium.”

Rico added, “The youth are the future, but we are being affected now, and it’s time for youth to step up and that’s why we are asking all youth to walk out on May 1 and join the nationwide boycott.”

plozano @ pww.org

Behind the firings: GOP assault on one person, one vote

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 05:51:00 +0000

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Behind all the furor around U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, one of eight federal prosecutors who were fired by the Bush administration, was an effort by the Republican Party to suppress massive voter registration in New Mexico during the 2004 election.

According to reporter Michael Coleman of the Albuquerque Journal Washington Bureau, Mickey Barnett, a former Albuquerque Republican national committeeman, sent an e-mail message to Iglesias in September 2004 chastising him for “appointing a task force to investigate voter fraud instead of bringing charges against suspects.”

During the 2004 election campaign, New Mexico ACORN engaged in a huge voter registration drive in which individuals were paid to bring in valid voter registrations. It only took one informant to come forth and “confess” to obtaining registrations fraudulently for the whole New Mexican Republican machinery, along with its daily mouthpiece the Albuquerque Journal, to proclaim that this mass voter registration was illegal.

It should be noted that the trumped up “voter fraud” claims have racist and anti-working class aspects. The first to be challenged on voter eligibility are usually Latino, Black, immigrant or low-income – or a combination of any of these.

The end result was that the state Democrats became so frightened of being tarred with a smear charge that, in the 2005 legislative session, they altered the state voter registration law to such a point that before a person could be registered to vote, they had to swear on a double affidavit that they were not committing any fraud. This cut out the street-level voter registration drives. As a result, despite union and community efforts for rank-and-file people to increase voter registration, the number of newly registered voters decreased from the previous year.

It seems Iglesias had not done enough on behalf of his bosses. He followed the traditional legal process of appointing an investigating task force to check out the GOP claims of voter fraud, rather than making flaming accusations that would become grist for the local media, confuse the public, turn down the Democratic edge, and then later be retracted on page 24 of the Journal in small print. In pursuing this process of investigating charges to determine their merits, he was following normal textbook procedure. As did former state Attorney General Patricia Madrid — a Democrat — during the statewide corruption scandal involving former State Treasurer Robert Vigil — a Democrat — who was found to be taking bribes on various state projects.

Apparently, neither Republican Sen. Pete Domenici nor Republican Congresswoman Heather Wilson was satisfied with Iglesias’ methods, because they constantly complained to the Justice Department about the slowness of his work, despite the fact that in regular merit reviews he was given high marks.

According to the Journal, a number of state Republicans were unhappy with Iglesias because he did not use the Vigil bribery case as a platform for making scattershot charges against state Democrats. In last fall’s U.S. House race between Wilson and Madrid, GOP officials were hoping that it would be a perfect fit to smear Madrid with complicity in this corruption.

Instead, what happened was that, despite refusals by Iglesias or Madrid to make inflammatory charges about Vigil until the jury had decided his guilt or innocence, the case finally came to a sorrowful conclusion. A number of Vigil associates, under FBI pressure, turned state’s evidence against him, but out of some 23 counts against him, after a protracted mistrial and a second trial, Vigil was found guilty of only a minor charge, resulting in a few years in jail. And despite these smear efforts, Madrid lost by only 868 votes.

In story after story, it seems that all the way up to the top of the Republican hierarchy, Iglesias and the other federal prosecutors, appointed in the early days of the Bush regime, were supposed to be proactive in fostering the Bush agenda rather than doing normal legal work to protect the democratic rights of citizens of this country. One can deduce from this that, had Iglesias and the seven other prosecutors throughout the country engaged in inflammatory rhetoric attacking anyone not agreeing with the Bush agenda, they would not have been fired. Instead, they chose to follow their oath of office and are paying the price for it now.

Emil Shaw is a labor and peace activist and the New Mexico state chair of the Communist Party USA.

Whos watching our backs?

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:30:00 +0000

Forty-five dollars for a six-pack of Pepsi; $99 to wash a load of clothes. You’d have to be crazy to pay such prices. Right? Wrong. This is what Halliburton has been charging in Iraq. Soldiers interviewed in the documentary “Iraq for Sale” further complained about laundry coming back filthy, waiting in line for an hour to get a meal and showering in contaminated water. Out of 67 Halliburton water treatment plants, 63 were not providing safe water.

Media reports of billions wasted by Halliburton, Blackwater and other contractors undoubtedly were a factor in the Democrats’ 2006 victory. Now that they control Congress, we can expect continued airing of these outrages, and calls for accountability. In January, Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced a bill to criminalize war profiteering. On Feb. 6, Rep. Henry Waxman convened hearings on waste in Iraq.

Will increasing awareness of corporate greed and incompetence lead Americans to question the belief that government is inept and the private sector does everything better and cheaper? Will it raise doubts about the Republican credo of minimal government and minimal regulation of large corporations, as exemplified by the extreme lack of government oversight of companies in Iraq and consequent loss of billions?

Our longstanding tradition of rugged individualism and antagonism to concentrated power has led to a “government off our backs” mentality, and to blinding many to the need for the federal government to protect us from exploitation by powerful corporations. We need to ensure the safety of our basic needs and rights that they often threaten.

Americans have never wanted government completely off their backs. We have long recognized the need for regulations ensuring clean drinking water and air, sanitary standards in the handling of foods, and free education from elementary through high school. As concerns about corporations increase, will Americans start asking for change?

Our mainstream media’s failure to inform us about conditions in other countries plays a role in our demanding so little. How many are aware that while the spiraling cost of tuition in the United States is making college less accessible to many middle class and working class young people, most wealthy countries offer free or low-cost college education to all students?

A Feb. 14 United Nations report on the well-being of children in 21 wealthy countries ranks the United States last in health and safety. When it comes to health care for the entire population, a World Health Organization 2001 study of 191 countries ranks the United States 37th. The countries that lead the list — France, Spain, Italy — have single-payer health care. How long can we hang on to the myth that corporations are more efficient when Medicare’s overhead is less than 4 percent, while insurance companies keep 15 percent to 25 percent of health care dollars for overhead and profit?

The mining industry provides an excellent example of how lack of government regulation helps corporations and harms ordinary people. In January of last year, 11 of 12 miners trapped in a West Virginia mine perished. A few weeks later, all 70 Canadian miners trapped underground for 24 hours survived, thanks to government regulations requiring sealed off “refuge stations” with oxygen and other supplies lasting up to 36 hours. No such protective regulations exist here. Davitt McAteer, former head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, described U.S. mine safety as being in “the dark ages.”

In response to the highly publicized West Virginia tragedy, the Senate approved a mine safety bill in May. Even though 26 coal miners died in mine accidents nationwide in 2006 alone, few of the bill’s provisions (which require far fewer safety measures than in many other countries) have been enacted.

Corporate America does not fully buy into the notion that government intervention should be avoided. They just want to control it. Whether it’s insurance companies ensuring that government never enacts single-payer universal health care, or mine owners ensuring that government not enact many safety regulations, or agribusinesses blocking regulations that prohibit giving health threatening hormones and antibiotics to farm animals, or big farmers who enjoy government subsidies, or an airline industry dependent on government bailouts — large corporations do indeed welcome government intervention, as long as it’s in their favor.

Myriam Miedzian is a New York-based researcher. This article was distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.

EDITORIAL: Mistakes were made

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 08:23:00 +0000

“Mistakes were made,” intoned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, attempting to explain away the mass firing of eight U.S. Attorneys last year. The real reason was not their job performance but rather their failure to display sufficient loyalty to George W. Bush and his drive to clamp permanent Republican control on the White House and the nation.

Gonzales’ empty phrase will not put out this latest firestorm engulfing the Bush-Cheney White House. Bush may be forced to fire Gonzales, who authored Bush’s memo justifying torture and green-lighted the vast political surveillance of law-abiding citizens. But dumping Gonzales is already too late. The White House is exposed as the instigator of the vast purge of federal attorneys. The paper trail includes Karl Rove, and apparently Bush as well.

At one point, then-White House counsel Harriet Miers wrote to Gonzales’ closest aide, Kyle Sampson, asking if all 93 U.S. attorneys could be fired en masse so Bush could appoint handpicked stooges whose only qualification was their loyalty to him.

U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was fired after her success in prosecuting former GOP Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, now serving an eight-year prison sentence for accepting bribes from Pentagon contractors. She was pressing ahead with probes of other Republican crooks.

In New Mexico, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired because he would not make his office a cog in the Republican machine. Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, both New Mexico Republicans, called Iglesias last October and pressed him to move quickly to announce an investigation of corruption within the state’s Democratic Party, knowing it could help Wilson defeat her Democratic opponent. According to Iglesias, Domenici demanded, “Are those [charges] going to be filed before November?” Wilson asked, “What can you tell me about sealed indictments?” Iglesias told a Senate hearing that he informed Wilson he is bound by law not to divulge the contents of a sealed indictment.

Congress should subpoena Gonzales, Rove and Bush and interrogate them on what they knew about this drive to transform the Justice Department into a Republican political crime syndicate.

Life and times of Claudia Jones: Telling herstory

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:36:00 +0000

Claudia Jones (1915–1964), an Afro-Caribbean woman born in Port of Spain, British West Indies (Trinidad), was a Communist activist in the U.S., holding several responsible positions within the Communist Party and for its publications until her deportation in 1955 to Great Britain. There, based in London, she played a leading role in the West Indian community, editing the left-wing West Indian Gazette, and founding (in 1959) the Caribbean Carnival, a cultural event now attracting some two million people each year.

Below is an excerpt from a letter Jones wrote to then-CPUSA National Chair William Z. Foster, dated Dec. 6, 1955. The letter is part of a small file of material donated to New York University’s Tamiment Library by Howard “Stretch” Johnson, an African American communist, which also contains a letter (London, April 21, 1956) from Jones to Johnson, her friend and former lover.

As part of Women’s History Month, the People’s Weekly World is honored to publish a brief autobiographical glimpse of this extraordinary woman.

Dear Comrade Foster,

As a child of eight, I came to the United States from Port of Spain, Trinidad, British West Indies. My mother and father had come to this country two years earlier, in 1922, when their economic status (which were middle class land owners on my mother’s side and hotel owners on my father’s side) had been worsened as a result of the drop in the cocoa trade (on the world market) from the West Indies which had impoverished the West Indies and the entire Caribbean. Like thousands of West Indian immigrants, they hoped to find their fortunes in America where “gold was to be found on the streets,” and they dreamed of rearing their children in a “free America.”

This dream was soon disabused. Together with my three sisters, our family suffered not only the impoverished lot of working class native families, and the multinational populace, but early learned the special scourge of indignity stemming from Jim Crow national oppression.

Early education

My formal academic education on American soil began when I entered public school. I have early recollections of being hurt by youngsters of my own age who mouthed anti-West Indian propaganda against me and my sisters. But by the time I reached junior high school, I had formed friendships and became integrated in the student body, and was nominated in Harriet Beecher Stowe Junior High for the highest office in the school and was subsequently elected Mayor. (The form of student administration of this particular junior high was patterned after the then-established pattern of the NY City administration).

One incident I recall with some pride today. Namely that running with me then as President of the Board of Aldermen was a young Chinese girl. Numerous teachers tried to pressure me to refuse her as a running mate, on the grounds that she was Chinese, and that had the situation been reversed, this would not happen in China of that day. I refused to be drawn in or to accede to any such narrow concept — choosing instead to have her as my running mate. (To use the phrase, I exercised my “preemptory challenge!”) We were elected by an overwhelming majority of the students, proving the teachers wrong, and showing the internationalist approach of the student body.)

Lessons from capitalism

I began to wonder why there was wealth and poverty; why there was discrimination and segregation; why there was a contradiction between the ideas contained in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights which contained its precepts of the pursuit for all of “life, liberty and happiness.”

My mother had died two years earlier of spinal meningitis suddenly at her machine in a garment shop. The conditions of nonunion organization of that day, of speedup, plus the lot of working women who are mothers and undoubtedly the weight of immigration to a new land where conditions were far from as promised or anticipated, contributed to her early death at age 37.

My father, who together with her had come earlier to America, was left to rear four young girls, the oldest of whom was 14. I was the second child of my parents. Because of my pride, I didn’t ask friendly teachers to help provide me with a graduation outfit, at which I was to receive high honors (including the Theodore Roosevelt award for good citizenship), and officiate as Mayor of the school, choosing instead to stay away, sending them some lame excuse while I bawled my eyes out in humiliation and self-pity.

I was later to learn that this lot was not just an individual matter, but that millions of working-class people and Negro people suffered this lot under capitalism – if not identical, in one degree or another.

Confronting Jim Crow

Following my graduation from junior high school, I entered Wadleigh High School. Here I was confronted with Jim Crow in the classrooms and in the social life of the school. White kids would borrow notes from me in school, and then on leaving the school would turn their faces the other way under pressure of the Jim Crow society. Teachers with audacity would hold Negro students after school, asking if they wanted to make an extra dollar by doing domestic work for them or as they not-so-quaintly put it, whether I wished to “wear a pretty white apron” at their own social affairs. Or they would select poems in dialect and ask Negro kids to read these pointedly. While I even then had, as do other Negro youth, a searing indignation about these things, I didn’t know that they were part of a conscious plan designed to perpetuate the national oppression of the Negro people in the U.S. of which these incidents were reflections of the badge of inferiority perpetrated on the Negro people in the North, with the more hideous features of lynching, poll taxes, (crop lien laws) and economic strangulation devolving on the (Negro people) in the heartland of their oppression in the Black Belt of the South.

Great Depression

My formal academic education in a bourgeois sense ended with my graduation from Wadleigh High School. One year before my graduation, however, in the midst of the Great Depression, where I was one of the so-called “lost generation” of American youth, I contracted tuberculosis of the lung.

My family’s economic condition had worsened as had millions of American families, native and foreign born, second generation, etc. My dad, who was an editor of an American West Indian newspaper, lost his job; as later also when he became a furrier, and to guarantee our support, became a superintendent of an apartment in Harlem where I lived all my life in the U.S. In the room where I slept, it was later discovered that an open sewerage flowed, and undoubtedly it was this dampness that contributed to my contraction of TB.

Sea View Sanitorium

I was sent to Sea View Sanatorium from Harlem Hospital at the age of 17, where, with pneumothorax treatment for my condition, I fully recovered since fortunately my sputum was never positive. I was there for one full year. There, too, I had an opportunity to read avidly, to think deeply, about the social ideas instilled in me by my mother and father. My mother had left the Catholic church, in which faith we were baptized from early childhood, choosing to become a Bible student, since her alert mind rejected early the hierarchal teachings of Catholicism. My father’s social ideas instilled in us were that of a pride and consciousness of our people, of our relation to Africa, from which my antecedents sprang, to our interrelationship to Caribbean independence, the dream of San Simeon, great Caribbean patriot; to the new recognition of the struggle for Negro equality in the U.S., linked indissolubly as I later learned with the freedom and equality of the American trade unions and working class as the future class of society.

One incident, I remember, while in Sea View — namely when I gave a blood transfusion voluntarily (since I was her blood type) to a young Italian woman patient. This created quite a stir in the hospital on the question of “black blood” and “white blood.” Many of the white patients looked for days to see if the young Italian woman, who was eternally grateful (to the point of my embarrassment!) to me, had turned “black.” One of the first hospital speeches I ever heard was from a young Jewish doctor who in the midst of this scientific lecture stood in the middle of the ward and gave a lecture to the interracial patients asserting the inviolability of blood types as the antithesis of any false teaching on “race.”

First job

Upon recovery, I completed the last term of high school at Wadleigh. (During my teens I was active in numerous social clubs in the community, in Junior NAACP, in tennis clubs, and also studied dramatics at the Urban League. I performed in this capacity with a troupe in many churches in the Harlem community and in Brooklyn.) Upon graduation, I went to work in a factory, since college was out for me and I had to help support myself and contribute to the family larder.

My first job was in a laundry, where I observed, under the incredible (to me then) conditions of overwork, speedup, etc., in the heat of summer young Negro women fainting regularly because of the unbearable conditions. I didn’t want to become like them, so I went to work in a factory. But being unskilled, my job was setting nail heads — with a toothpick, a small jar of paste and placing these in the nail head setting. Boredom and ennui set in and I quit this job. Besides the pay was about $14 a week. Next, I got a job in a Harlem millinery store and lingerie shop as a salesgirl. This continued for quite a while — about two years or so.

Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia

These were the years of the Ethiopian war and the invasion of Mongolia. During this period (1935-36) I worked on a Negro nationalist newspaper (circulation about 4-5,000 copies), where I wrote a weekly column called “Claudia’s Comments.” My job consisted there also of writing precis [summaries] of the main editorial comments on Ethiopia from the general commercial press, Negro press, trade union press, etc. To my amazement, on attending one of their meetings (of the nationalists), I saw my boss reading my precis to the applause and response of thousands of community people in Harlem, men and women. When the next day, he would come in and tell me what a “Big Negro” he was, I would challenge his facts. What he did was to read books on Ethiopia all day and fuse his accumulated knowledge with my precis which were listened to by thousands of people in the mass rallies held by nationalists in Harlem.

I spent a lot of time coming from work listening also to the street corner meetings of the various political parties and movements in Harlem. These were the days of the famed Scottsboro Boys frame-up.

I was like millions of Negro people and white progressives and people stirred by this heinous frame-up. I was impressed by the Communist speakers who explained the reasons for this brutal crime against young Negro boys, and who related the Scottsboro case to the struggle of the Ethiopian people against fascism and Mussolini’s invasion. Friends of mine who were Communists began to have frequent discussions with me. I joined the party in February 1936 and was assigned to work in the Young Communist League shortly after. My first assignment was secretary of the YCL executive committee in Harlem and it was about this time, I got a job in the Business Dept. of the Daily Worker. This job coincided with my application for a $150 a week job in the field of dramatics with the Federal Theatre Project under WPA. I took the job at the Worker for $12–15 a week instead.

— Claudia Jones

Continuing her story

Jones went on to be elected to the national leadership of the Communist Party and many peace and early civil rights organizations. She edited and wrote for numerous publications including Spotlight, the publication of American Youth for Democracy, and the Daily Worker. Jones wrote a column on women’s issues for the Daily Worker, called “Half the World.”

“From 1947 to 52,” Jones wrote, she was “active in national women’s movements and united front movements such as Congress of American Women; National Council of Negro Women; I toured the nation — 43 states in connection with work among the masses of women, particularly working-class and Negro women in struggle against the Korean war, for peaceful coexistence between nations, for peace, national dignity, full equality for women and the equal rights of women.” And urging “American women, Negro and white, to unite lest their children like those in Korea suffer the fate of Hiroshima’s atomic destruction.”

Jones was arrested three times during the McCarthy era anticommunist witchhunts. She was among the 17 Communist leaders arrested in 1951 under the Smith Act, eventually serving nine months in prison in 1955, alongside “Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Shortly after her release, she was deported to Britain under the provisions of the McCarran Act.

In Britain, she continued her struggles against racism and for peace despite the ill-health she suffered. Claudia Jones is listed as one of the 100 Great Black Britons for her “lasting legacy” as a founder of the Notting Hill Carnival, which she helped launch in 1959 as an annual showcase for Caribbean talent. These early celebrations were held in halls and were epitomized by the slogan, “A people’s art is the genesis of their freedom,” according to the 100 Great Black Britons website.

Jones died on Christmas Eve, 1964, aged just 49, due to a heart condition and tuberculosis. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery, where Karl Marx is also buried.

Special thanks to Peter Meyer Filardo, who published Jones’ full letter, with introduction and bibliography, in the journal American Communist History, 2005.

18 months after Katrina, little progress

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:09:00 +0000

Eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, broke the levees and flooded his home in the city’s Lower 9th Ward, Allsee Tobias and 20 of his relatives, including 10 children, are relocating once again. Last week the Federal Emergency Management Agency forced 58 families, including Tobias’, to evacuate their trailer homes in Hammond, La.

The trailer park has been plagued by chronic problems of open sewage and electricity shut-offs. FEMA said the owners of the park were delinquent in paying their bills; the owners charge FEMA didn’t pay its rental fees on time.

Meanwhile, Tobias is again without a home. “They know how to put me out, but they don’t know how to help me out,” he said.

A recent report titled “Eighteen Months After Katrina,” written by Bill Quigley, a fellow evacuee and a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, confirms what many residents, evacuees and groups like the NAACP have charged for some time — namely, that the plans to rebuild the Gulf Coast involve abandoning Black and poor people.

New Orleans now has a much smaller, older, whiter and more affluent population. The casinos in Biloxi, Miss., have been rebuilt, but the low-income people who were forced out of their homes there remain in distress.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, The Wall Street Journal reported that 40 members of the Conservative Congressional Caucus had developed a plan titled “From tragedy to triumph: principled solutions for rebuilding lives and communities.”

The plan included vouchers for private schools, more deregulation and tax breaks for big business, social service cuts, limits on a victim’s right to sue and weakened anti-discrimination, wage and environmental laws. It did not include rebuilding the predominantly African American 9th Ward.

Events to date have generally followed this script.

Like other cities with large Black populations, New Orleans was a troubled city even before Katrina, with high rates of poverty, unemployment, crime and low-achieving schools. The hurricane and the breeched levees just exacerbated conditions and exposed them to the world.

Since the hurricane, the city’s population has decreased from 484,000 to about 188,000. The African American population plummeted by 73 percent, from 325,000 to 89,000. Many will never be able to return. No schools, housing, health care or jobs are available for them.

Only 27 percent of the city’s buses are running, so people can’t get to work if and when they find jobs. Day care is scarce.

The water is still not safe to drink. The public hospital that served 350,000 people a year will not be reopened. Seventy-five percent of the doctors, dentists and pharmacists are gone. The suicide rate has tripled and depression is at epidemic levels, but there are few spaces for psychiatric patients.

Before Katrina there were 56,000 students in 100 schools. Now there are less than 25,000. The state took over the schools. The teachers were decertified and fired. Most schools were turned into charter schools. It took a January 2007 court order to force New Orleans to provide teachers and classrooms for 300 students on a waiting list.

Thousands of people are living in their gutted-out houses because they can’t afford contractors. Before Katrina, 53 percent of people in New Orleans were renters. Rents have increased 39 percent. Hundreds had to seek court orders to prevent evictions. Others became homeless. Five thousand people lived in public housing before Katrina; only 1,040 have been allowed to return.

Congress approved $100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast, but residents ask, “Where is the money?” For example, Louisiana received $10 billion to repair homes. More than 109,000 homeowners applied for this aid, but only 700 received assistance. Meanwhile, corporations and developers are making huge profits.

Residents are organizing to fight for basic services and affordable housing. A suit has been filed against the Army Corps of Engineers for the way it built the levees. ACORN, the NAACP and the AFL-CIO are defending workers’ rights and want local workers to be given jobs in the rebuilding of the city.

Prior to the November elections, Democratic Party leaders promised the first 100 hours of the new Congress would include bills to assist New Orleans, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “New Direction for America” did not mention post-Katrina needs. President Bush pointedly omitted any reference to Katrina in his State of the Union speech.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has criticized federal, state and local “foot-draggers” and promised a new day.

The Gulf Coast is waiting.

phillyrose623 @ verizon.net

With 100 dead, action urged to curb house fires

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 06:22:00 +0000

Jim Harmes, president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, told the World he has been a firefighter for over 35 years, and “I don’t remember when there have been so many multiple-death house fires as we’ve had so far this year.”

Last week, he said, “10 people in two families died in New York City. By now we’re well over 100 people who have died in house fires this year, and that’s the cases that have been written up.”

Harmes was referring to the fire that swept through a four-story Bronx, N.Y., row house March 7, killing 10 members of two Malian immigrant families. It was the deadliest house fire in New York City in 17 years.

Moussa Magassa lost his five children in the blaze. Thousands of grieving neighbors turned out for the funeral March 12. His housemate, Mamadou Soumare, lost his wife and all four of his children.

The fire was blamed on a frayed electrical cord on a space heater they were using in the extreme winter cold. Soumare was driving his taxicab two miles from home the night the fire erupted.

In a house fire in Waynesburg, Pa., on Feb. 17, Rebecca Eddy, 26, died as she struggled unsuccessfully to save her three daughters and three stepdaughters. A neighbor, Heidi Harbarger, told reporters at the funeral, “They were lovely and caring people. Their gas furnace did not work and they were using electric heaters and a wood-burning stove.

“They were hardworking people but just not making enough,” she said. “The furnace was broke; they asked the landlord to fix it but I guess he never did.” Equitable Gas had turned off their gas in 2005.

Harmes, speaking by telephone from his fire department office in Grand Blanc, Mich., also cited the deaths of six in a house fire in Louisiana, two in house fires in Tennessee and one in his own community.

“These are not just numbers,” he said. “These are personal tragedies that each of us as a fire chief feels every time a life is lost. We have got to do something.”

Harmes underscored the importance of maintaining residential smoke detectors. At the same time, he deplored President Bush’s 2008 fiscal year budget for requesting “zero” funding for SAFER (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response). SAFER, which allots federal funds to subsidize added staff at local fire departments, received $547 million in this year’s budget.

“If the SAFER program goes to zero, my fear is that fire prevention will be the first thing to go,” Harmes said. “We lose an average of 3,000 lives each year from house fires. With working smoke alarms we can erase this problem. IAFC will join with other fire-service organizations to restore funding to ensure these programs benefit all-hazards-preparedness.”

His own fire department will conduct a survey of “lower-income, multiple family dwellings” in Grand Blanc considered at high risk for house fires, to determine the best strategy for preventing fires.

In a groundbreaking report several years ago titled “Not Safe at Home,” a team of pediatricians at Boston Medical Center wrote, “Fires are the third leading cause of death among children under the age of 14,” exceeded only by auto accidents and drowning.

“For approximately 10 million American families,” the report continued, “housing is too expensive or substandard or both.”

For immigrant workers or native-born “working poor” who fork over half or even two-thirds of their income in rent, heating with space heaters is often the last, fatal option.

greenerpastures21212 @ yahoo.com

Profit for some or care for all

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:00:00 +0000

The health insurance industry is full of surprises, but history and experience show that insurers will never surprise us with a good, affordable health care system for America. No cocktail of regulations, subsidies and tax credits will provide health security to the uninsured, underinsured and anxiously insured — virtually all Americans.

Two dirty little secrets about the insurance industry reveal why offering Americans a publicly administered alternative like Medicare is the only way to guarantee Americans good, affordable health care:

Dirty Little Secret #1: If for-profit insurers were forced to provide good health care coverage to all Americans, they would still try as hard as possible to avoid insuring the people with the costliest conditions and charge premiums even higher than they currently charge.

That’s why Medicare was established. The health insurance industry was either unwilling or unable to offer affordable coverage to half of America’s seniors. It’s too costly for them. So, to rein in costs and ensure every older adult had coverage, the federal government offered the coverage directly.

As predicted, Massachusetts is now seeing that requiring insurers to cover everyone in the state costs almost twice as much as projected. The way to reduce costs is not to eliminate benefits as some are suggesting; it is to eliminate insurance industry waste.

Dirty Little Secret #2: Eliminating insurance industry waste in our health care system — administrative waste and excessive prices — would cut our health care costs substantially.

Check out the health insurance systems in France, Germany and Japan. They spend half as much as we on health care and deliver better results by relying on a publicly administered integrated health care system that pools risk and negotiates rates on behalf of their entire citizenry.

Right here in the U.S., Medicare demonstrates that we can eliminate some 17 percent in administrative expenses alone through a publicly administered system. Medicare also shows the power of large group purchasing to achieve substantially lower health care prices; Medicare pays about 15 percent less than private insurers for the same services.

Unlike private insurance, Medicare works for older and disabled Americans because it pools risk and does not punish people financially because they need costly health care services. It works because it has predictable benefits and offers reliable coverage. And it works because coverage is automatic, unlike Medicaid and SCHIP, ensuring all eligible persons coverage and protecting them against the risk of losing coverage for failing to sign up or recertify.

Of course, every health policy expert out there knows that a publicly administered system would guarantee all Americans good, affordable health care at far less cost than we can ever achieve through private insurers, and they’ll say so at the dinner table. It’s time they went public.

The truth about the health insurance industry should be at the heart of the public debate, not the short-sighted and misguided calculus of what people think is feasible. While they keep silent, an ever-growing number of Americans are pushed into bankruptcy because of a medical need or, worse still, forced to forego necessary care. And employers who offer good coverage to their workforce see their ability to compete in the global marketplace, and their profits, eroding.

It would be un-American to force Americans to give up their private insurance coverage if they like it or to undo a multi-trillion-dollar insurance industry in one fell swoop. But it is inhumane and unconscionable to offer solutions that we know will not work and wish this health care crisis away, while tens of millions of Americans suffer. That’s why recent polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans — including white, middle-class Republican men — favor health care reform that gives them the option of a publicly administered health plan as an alternative to private insurance.

That’s the route offered by Yale professor Jacob Hacker in his Health Care for America plan: let the private insurers continue as they will for anyone who wants their coverage but force them to compete with a publicly administered plan that pools risk, negotiates rates and guarantees affordable coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who elect it. Through this American solution, we could rein in costs and ensure that everyone in the country has good affordable health care.

This is also what former Senator Edwards has proposed. In exchange for paying your fair premium share, you get coverage, choice of doctors and hospitals, reliable benefits at an affordable price and, if you would prefer, you can buy private insurance to cover your care. It makes so much sense.

So here’s a call to arms for a publicly administered health care plan for America. Join the action.

Diane Archer is the founder and past president of the Medicare Rights Center . This article is reprinted from TomPaine.com.

The female experience of racism

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:49:00 +0000

I was intrigued when I heard another Black woman use the phrase that is the headline of this article. It sounded different from sexism. And it could just be all words at this point, but whenever I see the larger-than-life ads for Eddie Murphy’s new movie “Norbit,” the phrase rises to the surface again. The ad features two images of Murphy — one as a meek, glasses-donning version of himself and the other as a severely overweight Black woman who’s pinning him down. This particular image of a Black woman is where I have to acknowledge the female experience of racism.

She is the fat, dark-skinned, loud and unattractive bitch. She is positioned in “real” life and in the movie as the opposite of the Thandie Newton-ish slimmer, lighter and sweeter Black woman. She is comic relief. She is who no one, even those of us who are, wants to be. She is undesirable. She has her historical predecessors, from early American television and cinema.

She ain’t new.

Her image, however, consistently gets green-lighted as an appropriate form of comedy for the masses. Comedian Mo’Nique, bless her soul, had a popular television show in which she essentially was that woman — fat, loud and undesirable to the desired man of the show. She has one foot in those old Tom & Jerry cartoons — she’s always screaming. She’s been the character of countless comedic routines for an easy and reliable laugh.

This version of oppression is completely de-politicized, as is anything once you bring being female into the conversation, particularly when it has to do with looks. Be assured though, that if the traditional experience — the male one — of racism were displayed on billboards as if it were comic, the usual suspects would raise hell. When Jesse, Al, and some women, begin marching and addressing a movie like “Norbit,” I’ll believe that we’re getting somewhere.

I don’t know if I can wait for a march though. The mainstream representation, if there ever was one, of the female experience of racism is limited to trite debates where light-skinned and dark-skinned Black women are positioned against each other — à la India Arie/Alicia Keys of a few Grammys past, or Jennifer Hudson/Beyoncé of “Dreamgirls,” or, hell — and this one probably slipped past the radar of most — Angela Bassett/Halle Berry when Bassett explained that she passed on Berry’s “Monster’s Ball” role because she felt it was one of a prostitute.

With these instances as the context, is it any wonder that people might scoff at the notion of “the female experience of racism”? It has been the challenge of Black feminists galore to take on something people don’t realize exists. How do you explain the irony of “Norbit” opening to the number one spot on its first weekend while “Dreamgirls,” a movie that at least attempts to consider different versions of Black womanhood, stood at number 10? Or that “Dreamgirls” has helped restart Murphy’s career, and he follows with “Norbit”? We barely have the tools to consider that, once they are absorbed into the mass media marketplace, there is not much difference between Mo’Nique, Big Momma from the Martin Lawrence movies and Nell Carter from the ’80s sitcom “Gimme a Break.”

It doesn’t make a difference if it’s an actual woman, or men performing in suits, it doesn’t matter if a white person produced the image or not. The totality of these images reaching our eyes and minds via Viacom, GE or Disney all have racist and sexist implications.

It is political. Don’t be fooled by the fact that it seems like this is about looks. It’s not. It’s about humanity and economics, as racism has always been. I know Black women who look like Murphy’s female character Rasputia in “Norbit.” They are all beautiful, complex women who, as a result of real conditions in this world brought on by racism and capitalism, are overweight.

To repeatedly exaggerate us on the big screen as if it were reality and just to entertain everyone is wrong. As is being told in a multitude of ways that being Black, female and overweight is synonymous with being loud, unattractive and undesirable. It is not merely a matter of depoliticized self-esteem. It is an unacceptable, systematic practice of disregarding and disrespecting a significant and specific part of the population.

With the limits that this notion of Black womanhood imposes, everyone misses out. We narrow who we consider for a number of roles, from who we can date to who can lead all of us. So, while a number of us fixate on whether a “Black” man or a white “woman” has a shot at the White House, I refuse to act as if we, or our experiences, don’t exist or matter.

Tokumbo Bodunde (tbodunde @ hotmail.com) is a video producer and educator. She recently completed her M.A. in media studies.

EDITORIAL: Wall Street tumbles ...

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 10:58:00 +0000

The question, “Are we heading into a recession?” has been hanging like a dark cloud over Wall Street since the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 416 points Feb. 27, the stock market’s worst day since Sept. 11, 2001.

Economist David Leonhardt headlined his column in the Feb. 28 New York Times, “A Recession that Arrived on Cats’ Paws,” saying the plunge has its roots in a little-talked-of downturn centered in manufacturing. “Is the entire United States economy in danger of going the way of the manufacturing sector?” he asked.

Since the mid-1990s, fears of a recession were postponed by the “dot.com bubble” and later by a “housing bubble” so wild that then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called it “irrational exuberance.” Now both those bubbles have burst.

… Main Street feels it

Steelworkers felt the crisis in manufacturing decades ago. Autoworkers faced huge layoffs for decades and now General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have announced elimination of thousands more jobs. The same plague has decimated millions of jobs in appliance, electric and electronics, textile and garment industries.

Wall Street analysts rushed to media outlets to calm investors’ nerves, spinning the market plunge as a “correction” or an adjustment in the “volatile” China markets. But workers — employed or unemployed — whose jobs have been shipped off or permanently eliminated by labor-saving technology and who face soaring health care, rent or mortgage payments know that something is radically wrong with this economy.

This crisis is not just a cyclical downturn. It is a structural crisis that flows from giant corporations and banks that can move capital investments around the country and the globe in a nanosecond. Congress must enact curbs on this mobility of capital. Start by closing loopholes that give corporate runaways billions in extra profits by exempting their foreign earnings from taxes.

In many ways, this is a classic “crisis of overproduction.” Wages lag so far behind productivity that workers cannot buy what their labor power produces.

This crisis, too, was masked by runaway consumer debt that hit $2.1 trillion by the end of 2005, or $51,062 for every person over age 18. The bankruptcy rate has quadrupled since 1985. More than 1.6 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in the 12 months ending June 30, 2005, double the number of filings a decade earlier. And George W. Bush’s answer is a law that virtually closes the door to bankruptcy protection for working families, many ruined by ill-health, while keeping the door wide open for corporations and the rich to file for Chapter 11 protection.

A sharp increase in worker purchasing power is a priority in order to accelerate growth and economic prosperity for the masses of people. It will take “union power” to win those higher wages and benefits. It’s time to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to make it easier to organize and to raise the minimum wage — with no corporate strings attached.

An end to the Iraq war, and no war with Iran, will free countless billions now devoted to destruction. These funds can then be dedicated instead to health, education, housing and other needs of working families, and to providing union jobs in rebuilding our country’s broken infrastructure and developing renewable alternative energy industries. Special attention must be given those working families who face racist discrimination or severe poverty.

These are some of the government economic policies that we need to get this country on a sound economic footing.

Labor making its voice heard

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:08:00 +0000

Effects of organized labor’s drive for action on a working families agenda continued to be felt last week even though Congress was not in session.

Among numerous indicators of labor’s new impact on the political scene since the November elections was a federal appellate court ruling Feb. 20 ordering the Bush administration to explain why it has stalled for eight years on rules that would require companies to provide protective equipment for their workers.

Also last week, the Democratic presidential candidates made strong pitches for labor support at a Nevada forum sponsored by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Former Sen. John Edwards declared, “The most important anti-poverty program is the organized labor movement.”

At a press conference in San Francisco, meanwhile, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said debate on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would be a top priority when Congress reconvened after the Presidents’ Day recess. The free choice act would require companies to recognize a union once a majority of employees indicate support by signing cards. It would stymie long, drawn out certification processes stacked in favor of the companies.

Just before the congressional recess Ron Blackwell, an economist testifying for the AFL-CIO, told the House Banking and Finance Committee that the Federal Reserve Bank should shape its monetary policy to promote employment as well as to prevent inflation. He said, essentially, that the Federal Reserve, by primarily manipulating interest rates to fight inflation, has ignored its “other mandate” to promote full employment.

“The Federal Reserve’s concentration on fighting inflation to the exclusion of almost everything else ... hurts workers,” he said. “We must restore full employment as the foundation of our country’s economic policy … if we are to reconnect productivity and wages and assure broadly shared economic growth.”

The committee, as a result of last November’s elections, is now chaired by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who had promised before the elections that he would hold such hearings to “answer the question of why the economy isn’t working for working families.”

The Feb. 20 federal court ruling on protective equipment gave Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 30 days to explain why they have failed for eight years to impose a rule requiring companies to buy protective equipment and clothing for workers.

The ruling is a victory for millions of workers whose employers refuse to pay for safety essentials such as goggles, hard hats and gloves. At least 400,000 injuries and 50 deaths over the last eight years can be traced directly to the absence of these types of equipment, according to records maintained by OSHA itself.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union and the AFL-CIO had filed the successful lawsuit.

At the AFSCME presidential candidates forum in Nevada, five candidates — Sen. Hillary Clinton, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who since dropped out of the race, Edwards, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich — pledged to fight for universal health care. Kucinich specifically called for single-payer universal health care, eliminating insurance companies. Sen. Barack Obama did not attend.

Edwards went into the greatest detail on issues of workers’ rights. He endorsed the EFCA, saying, “We need to make it easier to join unions. If a Republican can join the party by signing their name, someone should be able to join a union by signing their name.” He also called for a law that would ban companies from permanently replacing striking workers.

Observers see these developments as indicators of labor’s new post-election clout, and its determination that the mandate of working families voters be fulfilled. If American workers have their way, this will be only the beginning.