It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, April 29, 2022
No fines against Amazon for warehouse collapse during tornado that killed 6 people
An Amazon distribution center is heavily damaged after a strong thunderstorm moved through the area Friday, Dec. 10, 2021, in Edwardsville, Ill.(AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
On Tuesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced that Amazon would not be held liable for the deaths of six employees in the collapse of an Illinois warehouse which was struck on December 10 by an EF-3 tornado.
According to OSHA, the DLI4 facility in Edwardsville, Illinois, “met minimal safety guidelines for storm sheltering” when it was leveled by the weather system. The warehouse was among several workplaces that were struck by the storm, which caused nearly 100 fatalities across the lower Midwest United States in the month of December 2021. The Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory near Louisville, Kentucky, was hit on the same night, leading to 8 fatalities.
Although declining to fine the corporation for the catastrophe, a letter published by OSHA pointed to several “risk factors” that it noted in conducting its investigation which was started following the disaster.
Of top concern was that a megaphone, which is cited by the facility’s Emergency Action Plan (EAP), was “locked in a cage and not accessible.” In addition, “some employees did not recall the location of the DLI4 designated severe weather shelter-in-place.”
According to the letter, “Amazon managers began directing employees to go to the restroom in response to local weather alerts and tornado warnings approximately 10 minutes prior to the tornado’s touch down.” The restroom which the six victims were directed to collapsed soon after they took up shelter in it. “I recommend that you voluntarily take the necessary steps to eliminate or materially reduce your employees’ exposure to the risk factors described above,” the letter concludes.
A CNBC report from December cites comments from Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA official currently working with the National Employment Law Project. “They [OSHA] will try to figure out what happened, but mostly their job is to see if there was a violation of any standard,” she said. OSHA’s investigation was a “formality” and likely to be “narrowly focused on things such as whether exits are accessible or if emergency action plans were in place.”
OSHA, according to comments cited in a Business Insider article last September, is “woefully understaffed” and has “always been very limited in the size of penalties that the agency can levy on employers they catch violating the law.” As of 2021, the agency has issued less than 300 health violations throughout the pandemic for violations of health and safety practices.
On the evening of December 10, 2021, employees at the DLI4 facility were told to shelter-in-place at the Amazon facility, which is listed as a “delivery station” by the company and employs 190 people. In texts exchanged with friends and loved ones, some workers who did not survive the storm said management wouldn’t let them leave or cancel their shifts, despite the many severe weather warnings that had been issued in the previous days.
CNBC cites the experience of Craig Yost, a delivery contract worker who also took up shelter inside the unsafe restroom. According to the report, Yost and co-worker Larry Virden, 46, “ran into the men's bathroom closest to the garage where the delivery vans are parked.” They had been made to believe that the room was built to withstand the storm. “Suddenly, the lights began to flicker. ‘Then the hit came,’” it states, citing comments from another worker.
Yost was buried under rubble and suffered multiple fractures and a concussion. Virden was not so lucky and was one of the six that lost their lives that night.
According to CNBC, “All the victims were contracted delivery employees for Amazon, with the exception of [Clayton] Cope, who was a maintenance mechanic at the warehouse.” Confirming this, the New York Times wrote at the time that “[o]nly seven people at Amazon’s [DLI4] site were full-time employees.”
The DLI4 delivery station is one of many such facilities run by Amazon throughout the country. To meet its requirements during the busy holiday season, Amazon will outsource its delivery services to any one of its more than 3,000 third-party contractors. Even while many of these workers “often wear Amazon uniforms and drive Amazon-branded vans,” states CNBC, they are not entitled to many of the benefits and protections of an Amazon associate.
According to the Times, this system “complicated the rescue effort in Edwardsville.” The newspaper said that authorities had “challenges” identifying who was actually present at the facility on the evening of December 10. A Bloomberg investigation last year notes “working conditions are so tough and unforgiving… that [Amazon delivery contractors] have been known to abandon their package-laden vans on the first day of work and disappear.”
OSHA’s decision to let Amazon off scot-free follows a $60,000 wrist-slap fine by the state of Washington for “willful and serious” health and safety violations. According to the state’s government, the work processes at Amazon’s warehouse in Kent, the closest fulfillment center to the corporation’s Seattle headquarters, “create a serious hazard for work-related back, shoulder, wrist, and knee injuries.”
In early April, members of the United States House Oversight Committee announced an investigation into Amazon due to concern over “recent reports that Amazon may be putting the health and safety of its workers at risk, including by requiring them to work in dangerous conditions during tornadoes, hurricanes, and other extreme weather.”
The Democratic committee members co-signing the letter of inquiry, which include chairperson Carolyn Maloney of New York as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Cori Bush (Missouri), called on Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to respond by April 14. While not publicly responding to the committee, Jassy falsely claimed in a letter to shareholders published April 14 that “[Amazon’s] injury rates are sometimes misunderstood” and that they were “about average relative to peers.”
In fact, regular studies have shown Amazon’s injury rates exceed the national average in the warehouse industry. A worldwide company incident report in January showed that even after minimizing incidents among its online retailing units, Amazon still had a higher injury rate than its competitors (6.4 injuries for every 200,000 working hours compared with a 5.5 injury average). This did not include figures among its numerous contractors.
Millions join Sri Lankan general strike to demand ouster of Rajapakse government
Millions of workers throughout Sri Lanka participated in a one-day general strike yesterday demanding the resignation of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government. The strike, which was almost total, involved workers from government and state-owned corporations and private sector companies.
A section of general strike demonstration in Colombo on April 28 [WSWS Media]
Government sector workers from the ports, electricity, petroleum, water, health, railway and education, as well as state administration, provincial government and local council employees, joined the industrial action. Only a handful of employees—members of the ruling party—reported for work at the port and petroleum corporations.
A majority of state and private bank workers walked out as did hundreds of thousands of estate workers from the island’s central plantation districts. Plantation workers, who are among the most oppressed sections of the Sri Lankan working class, have been hard hit by the economic crisis.
Workers from many of the country’s free trade zones (FTZ), including at Katunayake, Wathupitiwela and Koggala, also participated. Most FTZ workers are young.
Although limited by the trade unions to just one day, yesterday’s massive strike was a powerful and significant intervention by the working class into Sri Lanka’s deepening political and social crisis.
The debt-ridden Sri Lankan economy has been seriously impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, leading to sharp and ongoing price increases and shortages of food, fuel and other essentials.
The nationwide anti-government protests and demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people and yesterday’s general strike are part of a widening surge of working class struggles internationally in opposition to government attempts to impose cost-cutting and austerity measures.
The agitation erupted over the rampant inflation, shortages of essentials, including foodstuffs, medicines and fuel, and extended daily electricity cuts.
Workers and youth across the island began demanding the resignation of President Rajapakse and his government at mass demonstrations in early April. These continued throughout the month, including an ongoing three-week occupation of Galle Face Green in Central Colombo.
Sri Lanka’s official inflation rate is now 18.7 percent and food inflation is 30.2 percent. Last week, John Hopkins University Professor Steve Hanke estimated, however, that the country’s annualised real inflation rate was a staggering 119 percent, the third highest in the world.
Yesterday, striking workers protested in every major city, poor rural peasants joined some of the demonstrations, and there was support from small traders who closed their shops in many towns.
Health workers mobilised outside Kandy Hospital on 28 April [WSWS Media]
In Colombo, over 5,000 harbour, petroleum, railway, electricity and bank workers, as well as teachers, demonstrated outside Fort Railway Station and marched to Galle Face Green.
A worker from Katunayake told WSWS reporters that she and her fellow employees decided to join the strike because their unions had been silent. “The people of this country are suffering from the price hikes in essentials. We have tolerated so much but cannot survive on our current salaries. When people from all over the country started demonstrating we thought that we could not just wait and see,” she said.
A teacher who joined the Colombo protest said: “The cost of living is unbearable. Rice, dhal, sugar, petrol and cooking gas, everything has gone up. We cannot manage our family expenses on the salaries we’re now earning. A recent small salary increase has been washed away by inflation. Social inequality has widened in the country with a big portion of the national wealth heaped up by a handful of big capitalists.”
While millions of workers participated in yesterday’s general strike, the Rajapakse government is preparing even greater social attacks on working people. On April 12, it defaulted on $52 billion in foreign loans, and last week a government team headed by Finance Minister Ali Sabry held four days of talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to secure a bailout loan.
The IMF is demanding Colombo increase taxes, drastically cut state expenditure, and unleash an extensive privatisation program. These measures will see even greater increases in the price of essentials and the brutal slashing of jobs, wages, pensions and the remaining welfare programs.
The mounting anti-government protests and working class struggles have precipitated a political crisis for the Rajapakse government. It now has a fragile wafer-thin majority, after some partners of the ruling coalition withdrew.
Notwithstanding his weakened position, President Rajapakse is biding his time and preparing to take on the working class, conscious that the IMF-dictated assault on the working masses cannot be implemented peacefully.
On April 19, police opened fire on protesters in Rambukkana, killing one person and injuring two dozen others. The demonstrators were demanding fuel at a previous price. Last week, President Rajapakse ordered the mobilisation of the military in all 25 districts across Sri Lanka to “maintain law and order.”
In the face of these reactionary preparations, the trade unions are doing their utmost to politically disarm workers.
A leaflet issued by the collective of 100 unions and supporting organisations that called yesterday’s walkout declared: “As working people we must pressure to bring about a government with popular power that could fulfil the mass expectations and remove these failed rulers.”
But who should the workers “pressure,” who will bring about the next government and how will it “fulfil” mass expectations? None of these obvious questions are answered.
In fact, these unions are appealing to the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the other main capitalist parties, for an interim regime and elections to divert the mass working class opposition into parliamentary channels and the defence of capitalist rule.
These parties, and any interim government they might form, have no alternative to the IMF austerity policies, having demonstrated this in the past. They will be just as ruthless as the Rajapakse regime.
Koggala Free Trade Zone workers protest on 28 April [WSWS Media]
Members and supporters of the Socialist Equality Party powerfully intervened in many areas during yesterday’s strike, distributing thousands of SEP statements outlining the party’s socialist program of action for the working class.
Calling for the abolition of the autocratic executive presidency and the repeal of all repressive laws, the statement said:
Against the IMF’s austerity program that the Rajapakse government and opposition parties are all intent on carrying forward, we present a socialist program of action that puts the basic social needs of working people ahead of the profits of big business.
* Take the production and distribution of all essential goods and other resources critical for public lives under the democratic control of the workers! Nationalise banks, large corporations, large estates and other major economic centres under workers’ control!
* Repudiate all foreign loans! Reject the austerity demands of the IMF and the World Bank representing international banks and financial institutions!
* Seize the enormous wealth of the billionaires and corporations!
* Abolish all the debt of the poor and extremely poor peasants and small business holders! Reinstate all the subsidies including fertiliser subsidies for the peasantry!
* Guarantee jobs for all with decent and safe working conditions! Index wages to the cost of living!
The statement called on workers to take matters into their hands by building action committees, independent of all the capitalist political parties and the trade unions. These democratically controlled committees will provide the organisational foundations to rally the rural poor and fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government that will begin the socialist reorganisation of society.
In Colombo, SEP members joined the strikers’ demonstration, distributing over 2,500 SEP statements and discussing the party’s socialist program.
In the Central Plantation District, plantation workers action committees and SEP members organised two successful demonstrations. Strike action in Up-Cot, like other major plantation areas, shut down all production.
Glenugie Estate workers marching to Maskeliya town on April 28 [WSWS Media]
The Alton Estate Workers Action Committee organised a protest march in Up-Cot town with about 200 workers and youth participating. In the Maskeliya area, over 750 workers join a demonstration organised by the Glenugie Workers Action Committee and the SEP.
In Chilaw, Kapila Fernando, convenor of the Teachers-Students-Parents Safety Committee and a member of the SEP, addressed hundreds of striking teachers and government employees. Fernando explained the SEP’s program of action to fight the Rajapakse government attacks and the capitalist class as a whole.
Video report from funeral of Sri Lankan protester Chaminda Lakshan killed by police
The following video includes a brief interview with the wife and daughter of Chaminda Lakshan who was shot dead by Sri Lankan police on April 19 during a protest in Rambukkana, about 95 kilometres north-east of Colombo. Twenty-four other people were injured, three of them critically, in the vicious police attack on demonstrators opposing high fuel prices and shortages.
Video report from funeral of Sri Lankan protester Chaminda Lakshan killed by police
Protests are taking place throughout the island over acute shortages and high prices for food, fuel, medicines and other essential items.
Lakshan’s wife, R.N. Priyanganee, and her daughter, Piyumi Upekshika Lakshan, spoke to WSWS reporters before the last rites at her house at Karandagasthanne, Naranbedda in Rambukkana on April 23. The video also includes an eyewitness account of the police assault and a short speech to the funeral meeting by Socialist Equality Party Political Committee member W.A. Sunil.
An interview with Mark Kruger, author of The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland
TheWorld Socialist Web Siterecently spoke with Mark Kruger about his new book,The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Douglas Lyons: Mark, could you tell us something about your background and how you became interested in this little-known yet extraordinary and revolutionary event in American history?
Mark Kruger: Thanks very much for inviting me. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the late 60s and that was a life changing event, just being on that campus then. After that I went to law school at Washington University in St. Louis and then later received a PhD from Saint Louis University.
Through the years in reading labor history, I kept coming across these short remarks about how during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 workers seized power in St. Louis. I had to wait until my retirement when I had time to sit down and look at it to begin to try to piece together the answers to some of those questions. So, the subject was on my mind for a number of years but it was really about four years ago that I began to really research it and delve into it.
Mark Kruger
DL: Were you involved in left-wing, working class politics?
MK: I formed a group that would go after individual kinds of problems, political, environmental, that sort of thing. For a while I was involved with the Workers League [forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party]. They came down from New York and sponsored a talk on campus on the Vietnam War. And also, the YSA [the youth organization of the Socialist Workers Party]. I always liked the Black Panther Party because they had that class analysis, so I began selling their newspapers on the Washington University campus.
DL: What's so important about your book is that you put the St. Louis Commune in the international context of the First International, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1848 revolutionaries. I was wondering if you can explain more about this influence on the American working class.
MK: As I got into it, I realized that this was almost more of a European event than it was an American event, because the roots of the St. Louis Commune were in Europe and that you had to look at those events to understand the Commune. So, for example, you had the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe but especially in the German-speaking states and after that was suppressed those people moved to the United States and many of them settled in St. Louis because the city had a very long history of German immigration. It was very attractive to German immigrants to come here because there were a lot of people who spoke their language and had their culture. All of those things were present.
Workers’ barricade during the Paris Commune
You had all these revolutionaries from the German-speaking areas coming to St. Louis, as well as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago and other places. Then, in 1871, the Paris Commune was suppressed. A lot of those people also came to the United States, many of them settling in St. Louis because it was originally a very French city.
Marx formed the First International in 1864, and that moved headquarters to the United States in 1872. So, you had a thread between all these revolutionaries where they were all members, or mostly members, of the First International. And it came together in the city. St. Louis had a very strong section of the International with German, French, Bohemian, and British or English-speaking sections. You had all of these European influences that ultimately resulted in the St. Louis general strike that grew out of the Railroad Strike of 1877.
DL: What was the city itself like? Could you compare it to others such as Chicago or Pittsburgh?
MK: It was the fourth-largest city in the country and growing by leaps and bounds. There were even efforts to move the nation’s capital to St. Louis. The city was big in manufacturing. It had large iron ore deposits in the Carondelet area of the city. It rivaled Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Birmingham, Alabama in steel production. There was massive trade going through the city into the West and South. Hence, it’s claimed today to be the Gateway to the West.
St. Louis is sort of a mix between a northern and southern city and some people have joked that it combined the best of northern hospitality with southern efficiency. It was a racist city, but at the time it was a very racist country so that was not unusual. But before the Civil War, because of the German immigrants, there was a very strong anti-slavery feeling to the city and as a result there was strong support for the Republican Party and strong support for Abraham Lincoln.
A panorama of St. Louis in 1861
The state of Missouri on the other hand was very conservative, very Confederate in the southern and western parts of the state. St. Louis was kind of an island in this sea of Confederacy. The governor of Missouri during the Civil War was Claiborne Jackson who was a Confederate sympathizer, trying to get Missouri to join the Confederacy. St. Louis residents resisted, especially the Germans, many of whom became Union generals and very strong Unionists.
DL: Your book does a fantastic job covering Joseph Weydemeyer, a German revolutionary and friend of Karl Marx. Were there other prominent 1848ers in St. Louis?
MK: In St. Louis, the big hero was Franz Sigel. There is still a statue to him in Forest Park. He had been in the Prussian army and then took part in the 1848 revolutions and at one time considered going to Italy to fight in the revolution there, but instead came to the United States and fought for the Union during the Civil War. To this day he is still a hero among the German-descent citizens here.
Franz Sigel
DL: Why did these German revolutionaries support Lincoln?
MK: Lincoln kind of fit into the Marxist perspective of the capitalists taking control from feudalists in the South. Marx would support that as part of the progressive movement toward socialism. So, Lincoln was a very progressive figure and was supported by a lot of these German revolutionaries.
DL: You mentioned racism in St. Louis and Missouri, but, during the strike, white and black workers united along class lines, as did different nationalities.
MK: It’s always hard to put your yourself in the place of people 150 years ago. You get bits and pieces, like a puzzle, and you try to give an idea of what something looked like. But 1877 was a very racist time and you had a young working class in the United States. Slaves were only recently freed, and as a result, a lot of the early unions were racist in nature. Most unions did not allow blacks. Blacks formed their own unions in many cases. Only later did we overcome that. The Knights of Labor and the National Labor Union (NLU) were two unions that went out and specifically attempted to organize women and black people, which was very unusual 150 years ago. The NLU was immense in its membership, having about 800,000 members. They were two unions that tried to organize on the basis of class rather than race.
A poster featuring Knights of Labor leaders Terrence Powderly and other figures from the union
What emerged in St. Louis in 1877 was a coming together of black and white people in the general strike. You had black workers on the bargaining committee that met with the railroad owners. You had white workers supporting black steamship workers and helped them get a 50 percent raise in wages. You had blacks marching with whites through the streets. The newspapers at the time were full of descriptions of black hordes marching with white people and taking over society, so the Commune actually brought together black and white workers in a class focus.
DL: One episode which definitely showed the evolution of American society was when two former Union and Confederate generals united and took orders from the government to squash the revolutionaries.
MK: When I saw that a Union general and a Confederate general were both chosen to lead the forces against the St. Louis community, against the workers, I thought how symbolic is that: Two former enemies that were killing each other came together now to suppress the workers. In the antebellum South, the generals supported the southern plantation owners, the feudal interests. In the North, the capitalist class was emerging, and they controlled their own forces, so when the North won the Civil War and the northern capitalists took control of the American government, the army then was going to follow the orders and support the interests of that ruling class. The new enemy was not slaveowners in the South; the new enemy of those capitalists was the working class.
DL: Can you talk more about the labor movement after the Civil War and how it coalesced around the international trends you study?
MK: At that time, what was happening in Europe and in the United States was a big change in the working class with the industrial revolution and new machinery in the factories. A lot of the skilled workers were being forced into factories as wage earners. Before they were earning a pretty good wage and they controlled their own lives and working conditions. But now their skills were not valued, and as a result their higher wages were lowered because they were just running the machines like any unskilled worker.
Low wages and bad working conditions were ubiquitous all through American industry. This is a very young working class that really is searching for its consciousness. At the same time, you have all these German and French revolutionaries coming to the United States and joining the working class and trying to instill this class consciousness in the workers and unite them.
A shoemaker, a skilled worker of the 1840s, left, and a Scottish shoe factory later in the 1800s, right
DL: Why do you think the Great Railroad Strike followed a spontaneous course, and why did it draw in skilled and unskilled workers, white and black workers, and the unemployed?
MK: Conditions were so bad for the working class at that time. The railroad industry plays a big part in the book because the working conditions were so dangerous and with the three pay cuts in 1877. But the whole working class was really suffering. There was no social safety net. If you could not buy coal to heat your house, then you would freeze to death. If you could not buy food, you would starve to death, and that was a pretty general situation. All it took was one spark and then everybody who was in the same boat began to react. These strikes began happening in Martinsburg, West Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland, and then spreading west from there. It was all spontaneous and within a week it had reached California. That is how fast it was moving.
DL: But in St. Louis the Workingmen’s Party (WP) harnessed this eruption.
MK: Workers did form, out of the First International, the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, but in 1877 it was only a year old. You have got a young party that is watching this, and they are taken by surprise. In the eastern states it happened too fast—they could not react to it— but in St. Louis it took a few days to reach the city and the party tried to provide some leadership. They organized a general strike, and when the city was abandoned, they took it over. But they were not ready to take leadership and make it a national movement, rather than individual movements in different localities.
Maryland state militia open fire on workers, July 20, 1877
DL: The demands of the WP, such as nationalization of the railroads and telegraph industries under the control of the working class, underscore the influence of the First International.
MK: The 1848 revolutionaries that came to St. Louis provided the philosophy of class consciousness that was otherwise lacking among workers in the city. You had with the WP a radical leadership. James Cope was one of the leaders and he was a member of the London, England trades council before he came to the city. Albert Currlin was a member of the First International and a founder of the party. Twenty percent of the WP lived in St. Louis, so you had a lot of revolutionaries and radicals, and that had the effect of changing what was a strike over wages and working conditions into something broader. These were Marxists that recognized this was a struggle between classes that was emerging, and they tried to provide that leadership and that philosophy to educate the workers.
The WP held these mass meetings where a number of speakers were talking about not just wages and working conditions such as the eight-hour day and the end to child labor, but also planned out the takeover of these different industries to be run for the benefit of the working class rather than a few rich capitalists. They infused the philosophy of socialism.
DL: This era was termed the Gilded Age, and today the term “the Second Gilded Age” is being used to describe the state of society. What similarities do you see between 1877 and today and what do you think will happen when another working class uprising happens in the United States?
MK: There were so many things about the Gilded Age that are similar to today. The expansion of capitalism, the control of the government by the capitalists, the suppression of working class organizations. And today unions are at their weakest point they have been in many years. You have voter suppression and a tremendous gap in wealth between the capitalists and the workers. A lot of the conditions are there for a struggle to emerge.
When I was a kid, I grew up in a very working class town just north of Chicago which has become infamous in recent days— Kenosha, Wisconsin, the city of [fascist killer] Kyle Rittenhouse. The town was extremely working class. American Motors was headquartered there and so was Simmons Mattress. Everyone it seemed belonged to a union and all of my friends—all of their fathers belonged to unions, and they all lived in middle-class neighborhoods, a very middle-class life. That was the post-war period when the economy was good, and the unions were strong.
When I was a sophomore in Madison in 1968, I thought there was going to be a revolution before I graduated college. People were talking about what are you going to do after the revolution. But today is similar to 1877, nobody expected it to break out when it did and so that could happen at any time.
I think that what was lacking in St. Louis in 1877, which is lacking today, is a leadership that was socialist, was Marxist. There was a Workers Party there, which attempted to lead this uprising. But it was young and inexperienced. I think a socialist leadership is necessary if something is going to happen now.
Joseph Keppler’s The Bosses of the Senate (1889) depicts the power of capitalists over the American government
DL: We saw the immense power of the youth and workers after the horrendous murder of George Floyd. That was a huge spontaneous uprising sending shockwaves throughout the entire world. But I would have to disagree with you on the leadership, because we have the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party.
I would also have to argue that the trade unions have not done anything for workers. They are going along with the capitalist class to keep workers in COVID-infested workplaces and schools for profit. We are calling on the working class to create new organizations of struggle based on internationalism and socialism, rank-and-file committees. This will not come through the corporatist and nationalist AFL-CIO and other unions.
MK: I think you are right. When we talked about the earlier movements, leadership is so important. When the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged, one of the things that they stressed was a lack of leadership. And they were proud of that. The first thing that entered my mind was the Students for a Democratic Society meetings in the 1960s, where there was no leadership in those meetings. It went on for hours and hours and hours, and accomplished very little. The leadership of a socialist organization like yours I think is crucial to any kind of working class movement.
Marx talked about building up workers’ organizations and then a workers party, and he said that if workers supported any of the mainstream parties, the capitalist parties, they would be exploited by those parties for their votes but they would not get anything in return. And that seems to me to be exactly what has happened in this country. It is going to take some real leadership, I think, in order to point the working class in the direction of class interests rather than just a few more dollars or one hour less of a workday.
That is totally related to my biggest fear right now and that is the emergence of fascism in the United States. This is being fed by the Republican Party today. The threat is a lot stronger than I think a lot of people realize.
DL: This brings me to the other capitalist party that divides the working class through identity politics, the Democratic Party, which, through its main organ, the New York Times, has waged a falsification of history in the 1619 Project. What are your thoughts on this?
MK: I did read a number of those articles and interviews that are in your book, and to me it is so simplistic and wrong to say that race is the one factor that has defined all of history. History is so complicated, and there are so many different things going on at the same time. It takes a great deal of thinking and research to try to understand what forces are at work and what effect they were having.
To me, the 1619 Project is the logical consequence of identity politics. I do not say that looking at certain groups or focusing on them to understand those groups is not important, for example, the Black Power movement. I think it serves some ends in understanding what has happened to that particular group. Courses on women’s history helps women understand why they have been repressed in the society. But it is not the answer to the ultimate question.
The claim that the American Revolution was primarily in order to preserve slavery in the United States, is, to me, ridiculous. It totally ignores the Enlightenment. All the leaders of the American Revolution were students of the Enlightenment, children of the Enlightenment. The 1619 Project does not touch the issue that the purpose of colonies was to exploit them and provide profits for the mother country. You had the fledgling capitalist corporations in England setting up colonies, and the whole idea was to take as much from them as possible and line your pockets with that exploitation.
There are a number of factors that go into the American Revolution. A lot of the colonists were slaveowners. But we are talking about the 1700s, and there were slaves all over the world at the time, not just in what was to become the United States. So to say that a country’s entire history is based on its treatment of black people I think is very simplistic, very one dimensional. And what it has is the effect of dividing the working class into a number of different groups, each with their own interest, each with their own complaints, and failing to see the common denominator.
Malcolm X, 1964
I just read a book by Les Payne called The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. No one was more race conscious in his earlier years than Malcolm X. He attributed all the problems of black people to the blonde-haired blue-eyed devil, white people. An extremely racist-focused interpretation of history. But then he began to change in his later years. There were a couple of things in the book that caught my attention: Malcolm told [civil rights leader and later Congressman] John Lewis in Nairobi, Kenya, to shift focus from race to class. Malcolm came to a certain understanding that class and capitalism lead to racism, rather than it being some kind of natural thing, a natural conflict between white people and black people. I think that is where the 1619 Project goes wrong. It just focuses on one thing, tries to draw conclusions based on one element in American history, and that is much too narrow and much too simplistic to explain anything.
DL: Martin Luther King Jr. moved towards a class analysis of society as well, which the 1619 Project completely ignores.
MK: Right, they went from marches in the South for black civil rights to the Poor People’s Campaign, trying to unite black and white workers. It may be a coincidence, but that raises the question of his assassination, when he started this campaign. This raises a point with the Workingmen’s Party. For them the problem of racism and the repression of women would all be solved when capitalism was ended, the basic problem that led to both of those problems was capitalism.
DL: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this important book and subject.
MK: Thank you for having me. It’s not everybody that is interested in a weeklong event that occurred in St. Louis 150 years ago. But I always thought that the first general strike in American history, and the only time an American city was being run by communists, was pretty interesting.
US interest rate policies leading to major shifts in global currency markets
The rapid rise in inflation, which is pushing the US Federal Reserve to lift interest rates, is causing shifts within the global financial system reflected in the sharp rise of the dollar against other major currencies.
With inflation in the US running at more than 8 percent, the Fed is expected to lift its base interest rate by 0.5 percentage points at its meeting next month with further rises to come later in the year.
Acting US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announces interest rates increase on March 16, 2022 (Source: CSPAN)
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, the major central banks cut interest rates in unison to historic lows to support financial markets, sending stock prices to record highs. But now divergences have opened because not all of them want to proceed as rapidly as the Fed with interest rate increases.
This has led to a rapid rise in the US dollar which, according to the Financial Times (FT)“is ripping through markets as investors bet most central banks will lag behind the pace of rises” by the Fed.
Consequently, the dollar index, which measures its strength against a basket of other currencies including the euro, the yen and the pound, hit a 20-year high yesterday.
The euro is down to a five-year low against the dollar and could fall even further. In trading this week, it fell even further than in March 2020 when markets were in turmoil at the start of the pandemic.
While the European Central Bank (ECB) has indicated it is moving to tighten monetary policy, it is not expected to shift as rapidly as the Fed. This is because of the impact of the Ukraine war on the euro zone economy with fears that moves to impose a complete embargo on Russian energy supplies will have a recessionary impact.
The ECB must also tread very carefully lest a too rapid tightening of monetary policy causes major problems for the highly indebted southern European economies, especially Italy, and leads to a return of the sovereign debt crisis of 2012.
Last week, the British pound fell to its lowest level against the dollar since late 2020. While the Bank of England (BoE) has begun to raise interest rates, the developing contraction of the British economy is giving rise to expectations the rises will not be as large as the Fed.
Retail spending is down, with sales falling 7.9 percent in March compared to the previous month, consumer confidence is plunging, reaching a near all-time low and there are indications of a decline in business activity.
According to Chris Williamson, the chief business economist at S&P Global: “Orders received by manufacturers have almost stalled, driven by an increasing loss of exports, and growth of services has slumped to among the weakest since the lockdowns of early 2021.”
This has given rise to the expectation that the BoE will not raise its bank rate by 0.5 percent points when it meets next month, leading to a fall in the value of the pound.
The widest divergence in currency values is between the dollar and the Japanese yen. The Japanese currency has dropped to a 20-year low against the dollar with further falls likely. Yesterday the Bank of Japan made clear it is not moving away from its low interest rate regime and will continue to intervene to keep bond yields close to zero.
The yen, normally regarded as a safe haven in times of economic turmoil, has fallen 12 percent so far this year and is ranked the worst performer out of 41 currencies tracked by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)—worse than even the Russian ruble and the Turkish lira.
Reporting on the yen’s slide earlier this week, the WSJ noted that “if the yen were a smaller currency, its slide might have less importance to financial markets. But the yen is key to global finance, ranking as the third-most-traded currency in the world.”
The slide will have a significant effect on the $22 trillion US Treasury market where Japanese financial institutions are the largest foreign purchasers of US government debt.
But the capacity of Japanese finance capital to buy US debt, under conditions where the US is moving to sell off some of the financial assets it has purchased as part of its monetary tightening policy, is under strain.
When buying debt, purchasers take out hedges against currency movements to protect the value of their trades. But the currency movements have become so large that the cost of hedging means the additional return an investor would obtain from holding US rather than Japanese bonds has almost disappeared.
Earlier this month, Japanese finance minister Shunichi Suzuki warned of damage to the economy because of the falling yen. “Stability is important and sharp currency moves are undesirable,” he said.
While a weak yen had its merits, the demerits were “greater under the current situation where crude oil and raw material costs are surging globally” making these items more expensive.
China is also being adversely affected, amid a battle within the government, reported on by the FT, over how to deal with the effects of the crisis in the property market on the economy and the financial system.
A group led by Vice Premier Liu He is pushing for a loosening of the credit restrictions that have hit Evergrande and other large property developers. One government adviser, who shares Liu’s views, has warned that continuing problems “may cause bad debts to spike and the entire financial sector to go under.”
But this is being opposed by another faction in the cabinet which says that claims of a financial collapse are overblown, and the clamp down must continue.
These problems are being exacerbated by the US interest rate rises which have seen the renminbi depreciate. If China does loosen credit and monetary policy this fall, this could accelerate and lead to a movement of capital out of the country.
So-called emerging and developing countries are also being hit. The International Monetary Fund’s latest Global Financial Stability Report noted that a quarter of the countries that had issued hard currency debt had liabilities trading at distressed levels.
The higher interest rate regime being enacted by the Fed is leading to significant movements on Wall Street. Earlier this week, the Dow fell by 800 points with the S&P 500 index dropping by 2.8 percent to bring its fall for the year to 12 percent.
The decline in the tech-heavy NASDAQ index has been even sharper. It has lost 20 percent for the year and is now down to its lowest level since the end of 2020, wiping out all the gains for 2021.
Rising interest rates and the expectation of further increases is the main factor. This is because in the orgy of speculation that has been fuelled by the Fed’s financial support, the “valuation” of high-tech companies is not based on their actual profits—many of them are making a loss—but on the “expectation” of future earnings.
The “expected” flow of future earnings—in effect a gamble that the company will take off—are discounted at the prevailing rate of interest with a higher rate leading to a decline in the expected value of the company.
And in a warning of the developments in the real economy, yesterday it was announced that the US economy had unexpectedly contracted at an annualised rate of 1.4 percent in the first quarter of this year. That trend is set to continue if interest rate rises start to hit the housing market.
So far, the Fed’s rises have been small and even the planned rises are not great by historical standards. But the fact that even these small rises are leading to major problems is a further indication of the inherent instability in the US and global financial system.
States Spotlight Social Justice And Equity In Cannabis Industry
Apr 28, 2022
NBC News
Washington, D.C. and 18 other states have legalized recreational cannabis, many of them are prioritizing vendors with prior marijuana convictions. For example, in Massachusetts their model identifies areas in the state that have been most harmed by the war on drugs and qualifying those to be designated as social equity.
