from LABOR NOTES:

Two Years after Katrina Workers Center Organizes Day Laborers in New Orleans
— Matt Olson
[Editor’s Note: The following article is a longer, more detailed story than what appears this month in the print edition.]

In a modest office in the Central Business District of New Orleans, the Workers Center for Racial Justice continues to work in partnership with guest workers and day laborers two years after Hurricane Katrina and the failure of federal levees devastated the city. The center organizes to restore human rights to workers, putting their efforts both toward day-to-day gains and through systemic changes.

Most problems of worker abuse and exploitation persist among contractors, but earlier this year two worker organizations formed: the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity and the Congress of Day Laborers.

Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with the Workers Center, described the everyday abuses incurred by day laborers from contractors and police. “The level of intimidation and violence, it’s not only psychological, the social power dynamic, it’s very physical,” Gonzalez said, referring to contractors who threatened workers with guns to avoid paying wages. “People don’t get protective gear ever, people don’t get lunch breaks.”

DAY LABORERS
The day laborer population has tripled its pre-flood levels in New Orleans and surrounding areas, expanding from workers seeking employment on two or three corners to 19. The increase is a direct response to the new construction jobs available to repair some of the 200,000 homes flooded in the Greater New Orleans area.

The organizers focus on the five most attended corners to address harassment by local and national police, rights to seek employment and wage theft claims.

The Congress of Day Laborers, a worker-led organization established a year ago under the umbrella of the Workers Center for Racial Justice, facilitates conversations between workers about the issues that affect them and builds leadership within that community.

“A lot of the organizing we do is just to have workers have conversations with the police to resolve where they can stand. What their rights are, make arrangements with owners of private property around there,” Gonzalez said. “[For instance] tomorrow morning we’re going to have a meeting with the church that is located right across the street from the corner where workers stand” by Lowe’s on Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans.

In early August, a contingent of leaders in the Congress of Day Laborers went to the National Conference of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) in Washington, D.C. They attended several workshops to develop their leadership skills, including how they communicate workers’ rights.

The trip further prompted organizers to restructure how wage claims are processed due to both the number of claims reported and in consideration of the financial deficit often incurred when cases are taken to court. “Most workers have at least four or five cases of wage theft where they work from anything from a few hours to weeks where they don’t get paid,” Gonzalez said. “I met one worker who has gotten paid every day he’s worked in New Orleans.” Currently, with the assistance of NDLON, they are studying models other organizations use across the country.

The center also works to build solidarity between Latino and Black workers, considering it an investment in the long-term fight for racial justice. Similarly, they try to create spaces in which all workers feel safe from harassment. Black day laborers compose an estimated 30 percent of those seeking employment on corners.

Harassment is a problem for day laborers regardless of race. In an August police incident, three Black laborers and seven Latino laborers were arrested; in another, nine laborers, mostly Black, were handcuffed and left to stand in the sun for two hours.

Despite the similar experiences of workers on the corners, building unity remains a difficult process. “Interracial organizing, especially on day labor corners in a city, looks very different than it does when you have a more stable industry,” Gonzalez stated. “When a contractor pulls up, and Latino and Black workers run to the truck and they’re having a discussion over who’s going to go get a job that day and neither of them have worked all week, it has a higher level of intensity [than in other situations].”

There are simple things that go a long way: acknowledging and dignifying every person with conversation when organizing on the corner, making announcements in both English and Spanish and keeping an open invitation to “Know Your Rights” trainings and other political education provided by the Congress of Day Laborers. The Workers Center, for instance, is hosting a workshop on African American history in New Orleans. The Workers Center and the Congress continue to partner with several Black-led community organizations such as Safe Streets/Strong Communities, Survivors Council and Peoples’ Institute for Survival and Beyond to collectively address and unite the causes of Black and Latino workers.

The Workers Center has a long-term vision of a day laborer safe space, which would alleviate many of the organizing and communication difficulties that crop up in the day-to-day work from corner to corner among an inherently mobile population.

“A day labor designated area would mostly be a place where people could actually stand and not be harassed by police, have a space where they could organize and have a conversation. The most basic things that you need to organize are lacking in these scenarios,” explained Gonzalez. “You have high turnover, you have very unstable situations, you have the police, you don’t have people able to transport themselves to other locations to have meetings. So any meeting means you have to orchestrate pick up times for everybody.”

Many cities have successfully created stable safe spaces, but in New Orleans amid the other instabilities, finding a location remains a secondary goal. The problem is one familiar to post-Katrina New Orleans organizers, and as local teacher and writer Kalamu Ya Salaam said of that effort, “there is no substitute for face-to-face organizing around the needs of people within specific conditions…Our first priority is to survive. Our second priority is to struggle.”

GUEST WORKERS
Through the U.S. Government, contractors can hire foreign workers for domestic jobs if they certify no one will do those jobs locally. Workers in the H-2B Visa Program, commonly referred to as the guest worker program, are often the most desperate and vulnerable, paying thousands of dollars to recruiters to get a full-time U.S. job.

Guest workers in New Orleans and throughout Louisiana formed The Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity in late January 2007 in partnership with the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice. It is a membership organization led by guest workers from various professions who hold H-2B visas. They work closely with guest worker co-organizers of the Workers Center Daniel Castellanos-Contreras, an H-2B visa holder, and Jacob Horwitz.

“The story that the Allianza tells is that the guest worker program is basically a program that looks a lot like slavery,” Horwitz explained. “You have a recruiter that goes to another country—a slavecatcher—who brings people in under false promises. When people have gotten here, they’re put in situations where they’re completely controlled. The laws, or the visa, create and allow that situation and employers exploit it.”

In May 2007, guest workers won a “landmark” lawsuit against Decatur Hotels, a New Orleans hotel chain. Said Horwitz: “The lawsuit was one of the tactics that the workers used. It’s really exciting that we had the decision where the judge said guest workers are also people and also workers and the law applies to them as well as everybody else.”

The latest organizing campaign pivoted around the town of West Lake, Louisiana—more than 200 miles west of New Orleans—where recruited workers were put in run down houses and for weeks were not given work, at which point they decided to organize. When the stories were told to community organizers and Katrina survivors in New Orleans last February, they were spurred to stop what they recognized as modern slavery.

“Together with 40 workers, Katrina survivors from New Orleans came to West Lake and went into a citizens arrest action under slavery laws and the 13th amendment,” recalled Horwitz, who lived in West Lake for almost two months. “Black folks saying ‘we won’t stand for slavery, this is slavery.’”

The workers and supporters pressured local police to enter the office of Matt Redd, the offending recruiter, and impound the passports there. After marching over to the sheriff’s office, all of the passports were remarkably returned to the workers with evidence tags.

The tactic was extremely successful, but workers continue to demand an investigation into Matt Redd by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. They requested that Redd’s recruitment certification be revoked.

“Our whole framework here [is that] in the wake of Hurricane Katrina Black workers have been systematically locked out of jobs, locked out of the city,” Horwitz said. “And the guest worker program is a great example of that, whereas immigrants have been brought in but completely exploited.”

As members of the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity transfer to other locations, the workers center sees its role increasing nationally. “It’s not just in the Gulf Coast,” Horwitz emphasized, citing a group of guest workers that moved to Rhode Island. “One of the challenges of doing this organizing is workers are only here for a short time, that’s the whole nature of the beast. So as our members spread out, we’re still in touch with them and some of them are very well organized.”

A new campaign may revolve around how the Workers Center can turn its mobile membership network to an advantage in long-term organizing.

——————————————————————————–

For more information see the report “And Injustice for All: Workers’ Lives in the Reconstruction of New Orleans” at New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition.

from REVOLUTION newspaper [http://revcom.us/]:

On Racism and The System
Thoughts on reading Clarence Page’s “Hung Up on Noose News”

by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA

There is a piece by Clarence Page* on October 17, “Hung up on noose news”—whose title is more than a subtle hint as to its stance—which essentially criticizes the struggle to free the Jena 6, by lecturing people, particularly young Black people, about how the noose does not have the same symbolism as it did in the past. While assuming the posture of a veteran of the struggle (“I knew the ’60s”) and while seemingly taking an “even-handed” approach—saying it is not either Al Sharpton or Bill Cosby but the role of both that is needed—Page in fact promotes the Cosby line, including through statements such as: “Today’s young black males kill more young black males in a year than the Ku Klux Klan killed in its entire history.” Here we see constructed, in a way that is typical of these Black bourgeois types, the false and misleading—or, perhaps better said, misdirecting—device of posing the dichotomy (or contradiction) as between racism (or white people), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, lack of personal responsibility on the part of Black people (including parents as well as youth). This false posing of the contradiction is part of, or in any case generally serves, the argument to Black people: “Yes, there is racism, and yes many white people are racists—but get over it, you can overcome this if you apply yourself diligently enough and with enough discipline.” What is left out in this—or evaded, consciously or not—is the heart and essence of the matter: While racism, and racist white people, are a real problem, the fundamental problem is THE SYSTEM—a system which, under certain historical conditions, spawned and utilized the KKK (and similar forces) to terrorize Black people, and which today relies mainly on the police to carry out violent repression, brutality and murder, against Black people and Black youth especially. IT IS THE SYSTEM which has put, and maintains, Black people—and, yes, in a particular way Black youth—in the situation where they are brutalizing and murdering each other. And IT IS THE SYSTEM which must be taken on and fought against—resisted now, through mass political mobilization, and finally, when the change has come about to where there is a revolutionary situation, it must be swept aside and abolished through mass revolutionary struggle. Once again, the basic point must be emphasized: It is only in and through the process of carrying out this resistance, and ultimately revolutionary struggle, and becoming increasingly conscious of the need and possibility of a radically different and far better society and world, brought about through revolution, that the masses of Black youth, Black people generally, and other oppressed people, can also transform themselves—into the emancipators of humanity.

* Clarence Page is a Black syndicated columnist and member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.

from REVOLUTION newspaper [http://revcom.us/]:

Slave Labor in Today’s Capitalist China

The Real Face of the “Chinese Miracle”

July 30, 2007. A World to Win News Service. On July 17 the manager of a kiln in north China and one of his subordinates were sentenced to life imprisonment and death respectively. This followed the shocking news in June about the slave labour scandal, which revealed how people have been forced to work in brick kilns in Shanxi province.

These men were accused of holding workers in virtual slavery and forcing them to work in furnace-like brick kilns. The kiln owners ran the factory like a prison according to state media reports, using guard dogs and beatings to deter escapes.

During the trial of the accused it was also revealed that at this particular kiln they had enslaved 34 labourers, including nine who were mentally disabled. In the year before their arrest, 19 workers were injured. The state media reported that at least 13 died from overwork and abuse, including a labourer who was allegedly battered to death with a shovel. Their daily toil started at 5 in the morning and lasted for 16 to 20 hours. The slave workers were locked in a bare room with no bed or cooker, allowed out only to work in the red-hot kilns, from where they would carry heavy loads of newly fired bricks on their bare backs. Many were badly burned. They were fed once a day, given steamed bread and cold water during the only break of the day, lasting 15 minutes. Witnesses testified in court that the hard work was accompanied by lashes and beatings.

Worried that such scandalous news would tarnish the image of the so-called “Chinese economic miracle,” the authorities at first tried to give the impression that such incidents are rare and happen only due to the cruelty of some individuals and greedy kiln owners. However, it came out in various reports that working in brutal and sometimes slave conditions appears to be common, if not in all of China, at least in some inland provinces such as Henan and Shanxi. The authorities, at least on the provincial level, were aware of this situation but deliberately ignored it because of a commitment to boosting economic growth at any cost.

Hundreds of parents had been looking for their missing children and had reason to believe that they had been forced to work at the brick kilns. The government took action only when these parents posted an open letter on the Internet accusing the Henan and Shanxi authorities of ignoring them and even protecting the kiln owners and human traffickers. “A Henan reporter who had helped expose the business accused officials of keeping parents from finding missing children. ‘In our reporting, the biggest obstacle has been lack of cooperation from some authorities in Shanxi’, Fu Zhenzhong, a television reporter, told The China Youth Daily. ‘Some are still coming up with any number of ways to keep parents from rescuing their children.’” (Reuters, June 17) Finally, close to 1,000 workers were released in a series of police raids and inspections of 7,500 kilns in the central China provinces of Henan and Shanxi.

The traffickers connected with the kilns hunted children on the streets. They used false promises and even kidnapping to obtain children under ten years old and then sold them to kiln owners for less than 50 euros each.

As a result of this scandal, Shanxi courts convicted a total of 29 people for their role in this slavery. A dozen more are awaiting trial.

The Chinese government could not limit the scandal to one isolated case in one kiln, but did its best to limit the impact by punishing a score of low-level officials. Higher-ranking officials were cleared of wrongdoing. Disciplinary measures were taken against nearly a hundred so-called Communist Party members.

Contrary to what the Chinese authorities and their promoters in the West might want people to believe, there are reasons to think that working conditions in various places in China are not totally different from the situation that came to light in these kilns. For example, the UK Guardian reported June 18, 2007: “From the densely packed factory zones of Guangdong Province to the street markets, kitchens and brothels of major cities, to the primitive factories of China’s relatively poor western provinces, child labour is a daily fact of life, and one that the government typically turns a blind eye to… as Hu Jindou, a professor of economics at Beijing University of Technology, says, ‘Forced labour or child labour is far from an isolated phenomenon. It is rooted deeply in today’s reality, a combination of capitalism, socialism, feudalism and slavery.’”

(Actually, while capitalism, feudalism and slavery do mingle in contemporary China’s economy, socialism was abruptly overthrown there through a coup d’état in 1976 after Mao’s death, when those whom Mao called the capitalist roaders within the Communist Party took power by force. The continued existence of state-owned industries today is not a sign of socialism, but of a state capitalist sector of the economy in which the working people are just as exploited as in the private sector.)

The same report refers to a different case in Guangdong province. Middle school students from faraway Sichuan Province complained that they were being abused through a work-study programme that supplied young workers from western China to an electronics assembly plant in the southeastern industrial boomtown of Dongguan, where labour shortages are common. They were forced to work, supposedly to pay back their school fees. Students complained that they worked 14-hour days, including mandatory overtime. They also said that their pay was withheld from them. In some instances, those who wished to quit the programme had no way of telephoning their families or paying for transportation home.

A similar report of this sort appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel  February 6, 2005.  Ullrich Fichtner wrote that the two-decade long economic miracle of Shenzhen province, whose annual economic growth rate has hit 15 percent, rests on the shoulders of young women factory workers such as the malnourished Tang Shotsen, who works from early morning until late night seven days a week making coffee machines for 500 yuan (45 euros) a month, and the young women who assemble plastic dolls, put together watch bands from unfinished leather, make trainers and glass parts for copy machines and do numerous other jobs. In these factories the risk of injury is high. Labourers are often badly injured, losing a finger or burning part of their body, but there is no sign of insurance and medical care, only a few plasters and bandages.

The journalist Fichtner reports that women constitute 70 percent of the 5.5 million seasonal workers from all over China in Shenzhen and the factories in the surrounding area. In some parts of the province such as Nanshan, a high tech centre, this figure is even higher. The migration of young women started in 1980 when Deng Xiaoping called Shenzhen, a city in Guangdong province, a laboratory for the watchword he adopted for China: “To get rich is glorious.”  The march of young women searching for a better life coming from all over China to Shenzhen hit a peak in the mid ’80s and early ’90s, when the news of this place of “dreams” spread all over China. Soon these dreams turned out to be illusions and Shenzhen a place where life pours out of the workers and into the products they make.

One result was that a vast number of women ended up working as prostitutes in the city and surrounding area. The German report describes the lives ofwomen such as Chou Venil, who works in a massage parlour seven days a week from 8 am to 8 pm for 54 cents per hour. The report continues,  “Older women with bad teeth stand on the sidewalks holding photo albums. These albums are in fact catalogues of prostitutes, with page after page of passport photos of deformed and swollen faces indicating the vanished dream of the poor girls. The older women whisper, ‘Girls, mister, they are young, they don’t have AIDS, mister…’”

Prostitution seems to be an integral part of this economic boom. These women face huge problems. Their dreams have vanished, and now they have to fight for a job they never dreamed of: “In the southern boom city of Shenzhen, thousands of armed police were deployed earlier this week to quash a protest by more than 3,000 prostitutes and karaoke hostesses who were left without jobs after a crackdown on massage parlours and discos.” (Guardian, January 21, 2006) The city is notorious not only for the street prostitutes but the huge number of concubines kept as “second wives” by foreign businessmen, especially from Hong Kong.

Behind this reality is another bitter truth: many of those young women who came to Shenzhen are from families where female children were not welcomed. They come from places where giving birth to a girl once again is considered as a disaster and infanticide of baby girls is common. This evil disappeared or vastly diminished after the new democratic revolution in 1949 and China’s advance toward socialism. It has once again erupted in the last couple of decades in China, along with many other aspects of capitalism and other oppressive economic and social relations.

These examples from Guangdong are particularly important because, unlike Shanxi, where the slave labour brick kilns are located, Guangdong is not an isolated, backward area but a coastal province emblematic of China’s rapid growth and the success of its export industries. It is the country’s richest province. Guangdong’s success depends on the super-exploitation of workers from other, far poorer areas, especially the hinterlands, and, to a large extent, women. Without the kind of backward conditions in the countryside symbolized by slavery in the brick kilns, China’s modern industry would not be so profitable.

We often hear about the “Chinese economic miracle” after the socialist road was abandoned following the death of Mao in 1976. Since then China’s economy has achieved a growth rate of about ten percent a year. But this growth has been achieved at the cost of enormous and galloping disparities, among them the economic gaps between the cities and the countryside, agriculture and industry, and the better-off coastal provinces and the poor interior, as well as the reversal of the emancipation of women. These inequalities are the source of enormous profits and enormous suffering. They are also a sign of a radically different social system since Mao’s time.

Mao said that the real difference between capitalism and socialism is not what a society is called but what road it is on. Socialism could not just immediately abolish what it had inherited from the whole history of exploitation, including these and other major oppressive social differences, above all the division of society into classes, and all the ideas, customs and practices that came from those property relations. But when the proletariat held state power, the revolutionaries under his leadership fought to reduce the very same gaps that have become yawning chasms in China today. They did this by policies based not on what produced the most wealth in the short run, but what would bring about the balanced, equitable and liberating growth of society as a whole.

Socialist China did achieve economic miracles. Its sustained growth rate was enormous compared to comparable countries like India. In only a few decades the people’s average lifespan doubled. But the question was not how to produce the most, but the purpose of production and consequently how to produce. Should the wealth produced by labour increase social disparities and inequalities and further enslave the working people? Or should it increasingly allow the working people to become masters of production and all of society? Should the working people be beasts of burden, or should they lead the vast majority of people in the revolutionary transformation of China and turn it into a base area for world revolution to liberate humanity and bring about communism, a globe freed of the chains of the social inequalities and relations that bring such misery and hold back human potential?

The policies of the leadership of the communist party regarding these issues, Mao said, determine whether or not a country is really socialist, and whether or not that party is really communist. The truth of this idea is dramatically demonstrated in the contrast between China of today and of Mao’s day—the contrast between his China on the road to an enormously different future for the whole of mankind, and the hell-bound country of the 21st century that has brought back so much of the evil of the past.

Since the capitalist roaders enshrined private property, made profitability the highest goal and dissolved the collective forms of ownership and way of life in the countryside, much of the two-thirds of the population that is still rural has been abandoned. In the cities, the vast majority have become wage slaves—able to earn a living only as long as their labour enriches capital. Even the country’s most profitable and highest-tech industries are dependent on super-exploitable rural migrants, and most of those businesses are in the hands of foreign capitalists. Poverty and oppression is a condition for the wealth the country produces. China has replaced socialism with globalized capitalism.

While it is certainly true that the vast majority of people are not kept in the kind of literal slavery found in the brickyards, what has been happening in the poorest and most backward areas of China sheds light on the kind of society it has become. Most importantly, it shows what kind of social relations have come to characterize Chinese society. Where working people were once masters and liberators, now once again they are slaves.

from REVOLUTION newspaper [http://revcom.us]:

Reply to Heather Mac Donald on “Black-on-Black” Crime

Crime & Punishment…And Capitalism
by Li Onesto with Carl Dix

Heather Mac Donald is a high-powered “authority” on criminal justice and crime. She has clerked for federal judges, written editorials in major newspapers, and testified before Congress. She has ties to former New York City Mayor, now Republican presidential frontrunner Rudolph Giuliani, and her ideological and political views back his agenda. Mac Donald is a frequent “expert” commentator on Fox News and CNN.

In the wake of the historic Free the Jena 6 protest in Jena, LA on September 20, Mac Donald wrote “The Jena Dodge,” an intellectualization of the backlash that was unleashed in the wake of the Jena protests, arguing that even if the Jena 6 were victims of racist and unequal “justice,” the problem in America is not the criminalization of Black people, but out-of-control Black criminals. This article in the City Journal (9/25/07) is posted on FrontPage—the website of David Horowitz, who is leading a reactionary assault on critical thinking in academia.

Unequal “Justice” and Criminalization

Mac Donald targets what she calls an “army of racial victimologists and their media enablers,” saying Jena 6 supporters are dodging the real problem facing Black people—crime and specifically the criminal element among Black people. She says:

“But even if the worst possible interpretation of these events (surrounding the case of the Jena 6) is merited, the massive international attention to this tiny town would seem vastly disproportionate to the cause, unless Jena stands for a more widespread problem. The idea behind the protests and the politicians’ exploitation of them is that just as these five youths were overcharged, the hundreds of thousands of blacks in prison are also the victims of systemic abuse. But for institutional racism, the black prison population would be much smaller.”

Mac Donald then claims, “This is an old complaint, for which no proof has ever been offered.”

But in fact, proof has been offered. Over and over. To take one example that Mac Donald herself cites (after claiming there is no proof of institutional racism in law enforcement): “The usual evidence in support of the charge that the criminal laws discriminate against blacks is the far stiffer sentences for selling and possessing crack cocaine compared with powdered cocaine.”

Studies do show that people arrested for crack—usually poor and Black—are convicted more often and do much more time than those arrested for powder cocaine use—usually better-off white people. But while this is clearly an example of racial discrimination, Mac Donald says this is because the system cares more about Black people (!!)—that such unequal sentencing is “a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them.” Not penalize them!!! The system’s racist “war on drugs” is a big reason so many Black people are in prison. More Blacks are sent to state prison for drug offenses (38 percent) than for crimes of violence (27 percent). (Human Rights Watch, 2003)

And numerous studies show that systematic discrimination and racism do in fact result in an “unequal justice” of harsher sentences, higher incarceration rates, and rampant police harassment, brutality, and murder. To cite a few examples:

* A study in Pennsylvania found when factors like severity of offense and criminal record were similar, “white men aged 18-29 were 38% less likely to be sentenced to prison than Black men of the same age group.” (The Sentencing Project, “Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A review of the literature,” 2005)

* African Americans constitute 13 percent of all monthly drug users, but 35 percent of arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions, and 74 percent of prison sentences. (The Sentencing Project, “Drug Policy and the Criminal Justice System,” April 2001)

* Black youth are four times more likely than white youth to be incarcerated for the same offense. For drug offenses, Black youth are 48 times more likely and Latino youth nine times more likely than white youth to get locked up. (See: “America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline,” Children’s Defense Fund report)

And what about the systematic CRIMINALIZATION of Black youth, which Mac Donald doesn’t even address? Police profiling of Black youth—stopping and harassing them routinely for simply being out on the street with their friends. DWB (Driving While Black) stops as a daily condition of life for millions of Black people. Schools turned into prisons where youth are constantly treated like suspects and perps. Three strikes laws that unjustly send youth to prison for decades, sometimes the rest of their lives.

* In 1954, 98,000 Black people were locked up in prisons. 50 years later, in 2004, this figure is 910,000—nearly ten times as many.

* Over half a million people were stopped and frisked by the NYPD in 2006, more than 1300 a day. Reason most often given by police: “they were in a high crime area,” or “they fit the description of a suspect.” 55.2% of those stopped were Black, 30% were Latino. Less than 10% resulted in an arrest or summons. The police routinely stop Black youth for little or no reason at all—pulling them out of their cars, subjecting them to the cruel and humiliating ritual of “assuming the position,” getting down on their knees, and “kissing the pavement.” Such “routine stops” not only aim to demean and break people’s spirits—they can easily, in a second, lead to yet another case of police brutality and murder.

* From 1995 to 2000, there were almost 10,000 cases of police use of excessive force reported in the U.S.; African Americans made up 47.5 percent of them.

Mac Donald rationalizes and upholds discrimination and white supremacy by putting out the lie that America has “shed its racist past.” She says: “The opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not.”

But what does it show about the actual opportunities for Black youth to “roar ahead” in the economy when study after study shows discrimination in hiring practices? A Milwaukee study had Black and white applicants interview for the same jobs, reporting similar educational and employment backgrounds. Employers were twice as likely to call back white applicants with no criminal records as Black applicants with no criminal records. And they were MORE likely to call back whites who said they had criminal backgrounds than Blacks who reported no criminal records! In another study, two job applicants with comparable credentials, Greg Kelly and Jamal Jones, responded in writing to help wanted ads in Chicago and Boston. Jamal was 50% less likely to be given an initial interview because of his Black-sounding name.

And in just about every aspect of society—jobs, health care, housing, education, etc., study after study shows persistent and widening discrimination and inequalities. (For extensive examples of this, see The Covenant with Black America, edited by Tavis Smiley.)

Mac Donald’s Bad Methodology

But what about the heart of Mac Donald’s argument that “It is not racism that puts black men in jail, it’s their own behavior.”

The argument here is basically: There is high crime among Black people so the problem is the Black criminals who are committing this crime. This circular argument doesn’t explain or shed light on anything! It begs the question: WHY is crime so high among Black people? WHY are so many Black youth involved in crime? Mac Donald wants to start in the middle of the story. She refuses to look at the whole history of how and why things got to this point to begin with. She only looks at the effects and symptoms, not the reasons and causes.

To really understand “Black on Black crime”—and to really understand this problem, as well as the solution—we have to step back and get a materialist understanding of the bigger picture. What are the economic and social factors behind this phenomenon? The workings of the system impose all kinds of things on people, putting them in situations with a diminishing menu of bad and even worse choices. And then the system (and people like Bill Cosby) blames the people themselves for the conditions that the system has imposed on people to begin with.

It’s not that there are all these Black youth who are somehow “naturally” attracted to a life of crime and violence. We’re not talking about a community with HIGH rates of employment that are involved in criminal activity. No, there are huge economic and social factors that have made such a “choice”—which is really hardly a choice at all—the rational way to try and survive. Conservative writer Edward Luttwak, citing the fact that many Black youth will never find jobs throughout their lifetime, concluded that for many of these youth crime was a “rational choice”! (Turbo-Capitalism)

We have to look at the effects of the further and extreme globalization of the capitalist system over the last 50 years. The accumulation of capital, the ways in which capitalism exploits people, has gone through some big changes. And this has meant that the capitalist system doesn’t need Black proletarians in the same way it did in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. To the system, huge sections of poor Black people are now considered expendable. And all of this cannot be separated from, but in fact is the ground upon which “Black on Black crime” is a huge phenomenon.

Deindustrialization and Diminishing Options

Over the last couple of decades, there have been huge transformations in the way capitalists in the U.S. accumulate capital. Production and assembly is outsourced to factories all over the world. Technological developments mean many jobs require more training, education, and skills. And all kinds of jobs have just been wiped out by technological change.

There is the further and extreme globalization of production—where the constant chase for higher profits encompasses a global labor market. Black unskilled workers looking for jobs are now up against the fact that the capitalists can super-exploit immigrants or take their whole operation overseas. The system pits Black workers against immigrants in a “competition” over who will be exploited. And companies looking for cheaper and more “obedient” workers hire immigrants who, because of their desperate and precarious situation, accept extremely low wages and horrendous work conditions.

At the lower end of the U.S. workforce you have a situation where there is extreme competition for low-paying, high turnover jobs—jobs that are dead-end and offer no prospects of any advancement. For millions of Black workers, this has meant drastically diminishing job opportunities. And for a huge section of Black people, especially the youth, the doors to any kind of job—and any kind of decent future—have been simply slammed shut.

U.S. cities have been deindustrialized—jobs have shifted out of urban areas to the suburbs or to other parts of the world. Three million factory jobs have been lost in the U.S. since the end of 2000. And this has had a profound impact on inner-city Black neighborhoods. In the decades after World War 2, millions of Black people migrated from the South to cities around the country where they were able to get industrial jobs. For example, in the auto industry, 550,000 workers produced 3 million cars in 1947 and 750,000 workers turned out 8 million cars a year in 1972. By 1970 about one-fifth of all Detroit auto plant employees were Black, most of them young and male. There was blatant discrimination—just about all superintendents, foremen, and skilled tradesmen were white. But the auto industry, as well as other industries, did provide Black workers with jobs and a certain entry level ladder which could mean a certain level of job stability, training, and even mobility to higher paid positions.

Such jobs have basically disappeared from the cities. And what has this meant for millions of Black people? Think about what the options are for a 20-year-old Black man in Chicago or Detroit. There are hardly any decent paying jobs for low-skilled workers. Inner-city schools don’t provide real job training. If you’ve ever been locked-up, there’s a good chance you’ll be locked-out of the job market. There are some manufacturing jobs in the suburbs. But housing discrimination makes it hard for Black people to move to these communities. There is no good public transportation to get to these jobs, even if you could get one. And if you try to drive to such a job, you’d constantly get stopped by the cops for DWB and being in a white neighborhood. A lot of jobs are just gone—factories that used to be in U.S. cities have moved to other countries where they can pay workers incredibly low wages.

And there is another factor in this picture of employers not wanting to hire Black people. There’s a certain rebelliousness and defiance that’s developed historically among Black people. And a lot of racist employers won’t hire what they consider to be potential “Black troublemakers.” It’s not that people don’t want to work. But they don’t want to work for chump change. They don’t want to take a lot of racist and demeaning shit from the boss, other workers, or customers. Thomas Rush, an airline skycap, put it this way: “I look at everybody at eye level. I neither look down nor up. The day of the shuffle is gone.” A 1989-90 study of hiring in Chicago found that many employers “dismissed young black job seekers as too poor, uneducated and temperamentally ill suited for the rigors of modern office work.” (Rush quote and Chicago study cited in American Work—Four Centuries of Black and White Labor by Jacqueline Jones)

Job opportunities for Black youth today are worse than they were two generations ago. The jobs available to this 20-year-old are more likely to be at a fast food restaurant, a parking lot, or the Wal-Mart—jobs that are unstable, minimum wage, with no prospects of training or advancement. The boss treats you like you’re expendable. Such jobs are not only demeaning, but no one can survive on them. And they are certainly not a “way out” of poverty. This is what is meant by “crime is a rational choice.”

Look at the example of the Black community of Camden, New Jersey in the mid 1990s. It lost the Philadelphia Navy Yard, the Campbell Soup factory and a number of electronics companies. The jobless rate rose to 20 percent, and two-thirds of the residents were on public assistance. In 1995 the city had the highest murder rate in any urban area in New Jersey. Lonnie Watkins, a Camden resident, noted: “Long as there’s no jobs, people going to deal drugs. And if that’s how you make your living, then you protect your business any way you can, know what I mean?” (American Work)

People want to work—just look at the fact that whenever one of these big box stores opens in a city or some big hotel announces job openings, thousands and thousands of Black people line up to apply. Recently in Newark, New Jersey the Prudential Center Arena advertised 1200 jobs available—janitors, bartenders, cooks and other, mostly part-time positions that don’t include any benefits. The first day, September 6, over 3,000 people, overwhelmingly Black people, lined up for blocks, looking for a job.

The “prison-ization” of the Black community also contributes to “Black on Black” crime. The huge numbers of Black people going into, and then in some cases coming out of a prison system where guards and administrators set up “gladiator” type fights between inmates, and where a culture of do or die is enforced by the prison system that then sends people back into the cities inculcated with that system mentality, resulting in people shooting each other over nothing—which is an expression of what the system has done to them. And then there are instances of the police themselves promoting “Black on Black crime” and sabotaging efforts to stop it. One organizer of the gang truces after the 1992 L.A. Rebellion told an interviewer, “They’re always hollerin’ about ‘We need to stop all this violence,’ and then all these young people start joinin’ the gang truce and the first thing the police do is attack. The establishment attacks the truce…’ ”

And there are other intersecting social factors that enter into this whole picture. Government cutbacks of all kinds of social services. The deterioration of schools. The lack of recreational centers and after school programs. The persistence of highly segregated and unequal communities. All of this is NOT something of people’s own doing and NOT an aspect of life that Black people “choose.” These things are part of a whole economic and social structure that limits the actual options and choices that Black people have. And this all contributes to a situation where crime is a “rational choice.”

This is no “choice” at all for millions of Black youth. The system puts millions of Black youth in a hopeless, worsening situation where they are pushed to the edge by daily desperation and humiliation—which explodes in misplaced rage against one another and against other people in the Black community.

And then the media, schools, politicians, and churches constantly dog, degrade, and dehumanize Black youth—sending them a message that they aren’t worth anything and that society has no place for them.

Transforming the World and the People

Mac Donald refuses to acknowledge the fact that “Black on Black crime” is a horrendous crime generated by the workings of the system itself. She refuses to discuss the deeper structural causes behind crime in the Black community. She refuses to talk about how millions of Black youth are locked out of any kind of jobs, stuck in segregated, deteriorating neighborhoods where social services, if they existed at all, have disappeared, where police murder and brutality run rampant, where prison-like schools send youth the message that they are hopeless and have no future.

It is messed up and maddening that so many Black youth are in a situation where they are forced to prey on each other. But Heather Mac Donald could care less about that—she is only interested in defending, continuing, and reinforcing the very system that consigns and constrains these youth to such a hopeless future. And like others who blame the masses for the horrors of this system—or who apologize for it—she has no answer either.

In a socialist society, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the masses of people will be fully involved in figuring out and working through in an all-round way, how to revolutionize every aspect of society. All the exploitative and degrading economic and social relations and ideas under capitalism—including everything that produces “Black on Black crime”—will be dug up, struggled against and gotten rid of. And it is in this process of emancipating all of humanity—that the masses of people will be able to revolutionize and transform the world and themselves. This is a society and a life worth living and dying for. That is the “positive” answer to this horrendous thing of “Black on Black crime.”

And this is the challenge that has to be presented to the youth who face this horrible situation—to get out of preying on each other and get into fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution. The massive march to free the Jena 6 was an opening to challenge people in just this kind of way. This is one reason people like Heather Mac Donald attack it so viciously. And this is also a reason why those who want real and fundamental change should go further in fighting this battle and linking it to the struggle for revolution.

References:

American Work—Four Centuries of Black and White Labor by Jacqueline Jones (1999)

The Covenant with Black America, edited by Tavis Smiley (2006)

Black Picket Fences—Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class by Mary Pattillo-McCoy (2000)

When Work Disappears—The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson (1997)

from REVOLUTION newspaper [http://revcom.us]:

Bush the Liar Escalates War Threats Against Iran
by Larry Everest

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bush clashed over Iran, highlighting just how extreme tensions are and the danger of a U.S. attack (as well as the sharpening imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Russia overall).

Putin, on the first visit to Iran by a Russian head of state in over 60 years, denounced U.S. threats, declaring, “We should not even think of making use of force in this region…. Not only should we reject the use of force, but also the mention of force as a possibility.” Putin, who has so far resisted U.S. demands for more punitive sanctions against Iran, also stated there was no evidence that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.

Two days later, President Bush hit back and took the war threats to a new level: “I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War 3, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” The White House tried to downplay Bush’s remark, claiming it was just “a rhetorical point.” But the threat of world war was out there (implicitly directed at Russia as well!). And Bush was clearly demanding that Russia go along with his insistence that Iran be prevented from having even a nuclear energy program (which is legal under current treaties), because the technology needed could be used for weapons.

The Bush-Putin clash comes as the Bush regime, with support of most of the U.S. ruling class, has increasingly targeted Iran as the main obstacle to its Middle East agenda, and may be preparing for war. The administration has orchestrated a propaganda campaign centered on accusations that Iran is building nuclear weapons and directing attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. The House and Senate have both passed resolutions labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a “terrorist organization”—potentially a war trigger. The Bush regime is waging a “financial war” on Iran and trying to get other big powers to tighten economic sanctions. Nearly half the U.S.’s warships have recently been stationed near Iran. The Pentagon has been drawing up military plans for striking Iran for over a year. Earlier this month, the New Yorker magazine’s Seymour Hersh reported that “There has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning.”

U.S. Allegations Against Iran: Lies, Hypocrisy, and a Cover For An Imperial Agenda

What of U.S. charges that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and attacking U.S. forces in Iraq?

First, there’s the enormity of U.S. hypocrisy. The U.S. already has thousands of nuclear warheads, and while the Bush regime condemns Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, it refuses (in its negotiations with Russia) to accept any limits on the number of nukes the U.S. can build.

The U.S.—not Iran—illegally invaded and occupied Iraq. Yet Bush and company denounce Iran for “interference” in Iraq. Meanwhile, the U.S. is funding and organizing covert military and political operations inside Iran!

So the imperialist logic at work here is that only the U.S. has the right to threaten the world with nuclear weapons (and have more than anyone else), and to intervene and wage war against other countries.

Second, the U.S. has produced no conclusive evidence for its charges. Secretary of State Rice recently declared that Iran was “lying” about its nuclear program, but she offered no proof. People should remember that these are the same proven liars in the Bush regime who knowingly spread the lie that Saddam Hussein had WMD before the Iraq war.

After many inspections, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no proof that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. If, however, it is the case that Iran’s reactionary Islamic Republic wants to build nuclear weapons, and they are concealing such a program, who is the U.S. to declare itself the global enforcer of nuclear restraint? The United States is the only country in the world to have used the atomic bomb—twice, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to massacre civilians. And why does the U.S.’ massive current arsenal of nuclear weapons give it the right to threaten or carry out military aggression against Iran?

And what about Iran’s involvement in attacks on U.S. forces?

The U.S. military has held press conference after press conference displaying Iranian weapons allegedly found in Iraq. But none have provided any firm evidence that these weapons came from Iran, that they were used to attack U.S. forces, or that the Iranian government was directly involved. The captured weapons could have come from old Iraqi stockpiles or the region’s extensive arms black market. Former chief U.S. arms inspector David Kay told Hersh that his team had been astounded at “the huge amounts of arms” it found in Iraq right after the 2003 invasion, including “stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators” or “EFPs.” These are the weapons the U.S. has been claiming could only have come from Iran.

On the other hand, if it is the case that Iran is providing weapons to forces in Iraq, who is the United States, the country that has illegally occupied the whole country, to use Iranian interference in Iraq as a cause for war on Iran? It is as if someone carried out a home invasion robbery, ransacked a home, raped and brutalized the inhabitants, and continued to terrorize the people there. And then, because they suspected that someone else, in the house next door, was trying to steal from the house they were terrorizing, they threatened to go on and attack and carry out another home invasion of the house next door.

Nor is the U.S. being driven by its feigned concern for the very real suffering of the region’s people at the hands of Islamic fundamentalism, Iran’s Islamic Republic in particular. The U.S. sees Islamic fundamentalism as a major obstacle to their ambitions not because the U.S. imperialists have a problem with the repressive and obscurantist program of the Islamic fundamentalists. They work with and through such forces where they can do so in a way that fits their needs. But the problem the U.S. has with the Islamic fundamentalists is that they present a widespread counter-force and threat to what the U.S. is trying to impose on the world, and—to the U.S. imperialists—an intolerable threat to their interests.

Any U.S. Aggression Against Iran Is…
Aggression

Even if the Iranian regime is attempting to build nuclear weapons, or is behind some of the attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, or further intensifies its oppression of the Iranian people—none of this would justify any U.S. war on Iran. Such a war would make things much worse for the people in the region (and the world), including because it would further fuel Islamic fundamentalism and strengthen the current nightmarish framework in which imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism are held forth as humanity’s only choices. Any U.S. war would not be aimed at ending oppression or freeing the people; it would be aimed at perpetuating their enslavement—under a strengthened U.S. domination over the whole region.

This is not to say that the U.S. doesn’t have real—imperialist—concerns about Iran. Far too many people are downplaying the danger of a U.S. attack on Iran because they think Bush is too unpopular to launch another war, or too bogged down in Iraq, or not “crazy” enough to risk a regional conflagration. Or, that the stresses and strains on the U.S. “alliance” (including the withdrawal of British troops from Basra, and the increasing tension between the U.S. on the one hand, and Russia on the other) will deter the U.S. from launching an attack on Iran. Or they think the U.S. is simply making things up about Iran out of sheer arrogance or irrational belligerence.

Bush is certainly unpopular and a proven liar, and the U.S. is definitely bogged down in Iraq. Even many in the ruling class worry that attacking Iran could end up greatly weakening the U.S. position in the Middle East and the world (and these divisions may be one reason war hasn’t yet taken place). And there are both strains in the U.S. “alliance,” and increasing contention with other powers in the region.

But there are actual imperialist necessities and concerns driving the U.S. rulers. And some of the reasons that people don’t believe there will be a war on Iran are actually reasons why the U.S. rulers do see a need to attack Iran. They cannot, for example, just let other powers perceive their alliance as crumbling, and let their rivals of any kind make a move on “their” global domination. They cannot be perceived as having their asses kicked by the Islamic fundamentalists, any more than a big time mobster can let people see a small time gangster get away with defying his authority.

The US “war on terror” is not about ending “terror” as they claim, or “bringing democracy to Iraq” or anywhere else. It is essentially a war for greater empire. This war is focused on defeating Islamic fundamentalism and those who support or fuel it. It’s a war with many targets, employing many means. The Bush regime feels that victory would enable the U.S. to transform the Middle East-Central Asian regions, cut the ground from under anti-U.S. jihadism, and solidify and deepen U.S. control.

For decades, control of the Middle East—for its strategic location at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe and its vast oil reserves—has been a key component of America’s imperialist superpower status. Today, the U.S. rulers view the control of these regions as even more critical to perpetuating their status as global overlords, and to the future of their empire and rule at home. So for them, the stakes really are enormous.

It is this agenda, not “stopping terrorism,” that was behind the decision to invade and occupy Iraq, as a springboard to further asserting U.S. domination of the Middle East and crushing, or subordinating, Islamic fundamentalist forces that they perceive to be in their way. But things aren’t going as the Bush regime planned. Iraq has become a potential debacle that is tying down thousands of U.S. troops. Pro-Iranian forces have considerable influence in the Iraqi government. Iranian influence in Iraq is growing (last week Iraq signed a contract with Iran and China to build power plants, much to the Bush administration’s dismay). Islamic fundamentalism has been fueled across the region. As a sharp expression of the point that U.S. imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism both oppose and reinforce each other, one product of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has been the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Pro-Iranian forces could become dominant in Lebanon. In sum, the geopolitical “playing field” in the Middle East seems to be tilting against the U.S., and Iran stands to be the beneficiary—whether it is directly behind any particular development or not. And a nuclear-armed Iran would be an even bigger obstacle to U.S. regional hegemony and military dominance.

So the U.S. establishment—including both the hardcore around Bush and Cheney as well as the Democrats and others—is largely united on the need to confront Iran and roll back its influence, one way or another. (In a forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton writes, “If Iran does not comply with its own commitments and the will of the international community, all options must remain on the table.”)

For now, the U.S. is at the very least pursuing a full-court press of diplomatic, economic, political and military pressure against Iran designed to force the Islamic Republic to cave in to U.S. demands, and/or to trigger internal upheaval and the regime’s collapse. Britain’s Telegraph reported on September 16, “Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.” And many in and out of the Bush administration—particularly Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies—are aggressively pushing for strikes on Iran, which, according to Hersh, Bush is actively considering even as he claims to be striving for a diplomatic solution.

In any event, should the U.S. full-court press fail—and Putin’s visit to Iran apparently represented a blow to U.S. plans—the rulers may be forced to confront the choice “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” as the saying goes; a choice between seeing Iran emerge strengthened, seriously undercutting their entire “war on terror” and all its objectives, or “escaping forward” by rolling the dice of escalation.

A U.S. war on Iran might not even be a fully conscious, much less unanimous, decision of ruling class strategists. The huge U.S. buildup of warships in the Gulf, along with the presence of U.S. operatives inside Iran, has created a situation where war could break out by accident.

In early September, Israeli aircraft reportedly carried out an attack on Syria, which has a defense treaty with Iran. Commentators speculated on whether, and how, this attack might be connected to an Israeli attack on Iran, including whether Israel was testing new Russian anti-aircraft weapons recently acquired by Syria as part of assessing a possible air route for an Israeli strike on Iran. While Israel has its own distinct agenda, the larger framework for Israeli military aggression (and for the very existence of Israel) is the furtherance of U.S. interests. Israel is financially, politically, and militarily sponsored by the U.S. as its “trigger-happy cop” in the region, and it is highly unlikely that this raid on Syria took place outside overall U.S. strategic planning for a war on Iran. Shortly after the raid, Newsweek magazine reported that former Cheney Middle East adviser David Wurmser told a small group several months ago that Cheney was considering asking Israel to strike the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz. And Newsweek added that a military response by Iran could give Washington an excuse to then launch airstrikes of its own.

But regardless of the “trigger,” regardless of the particular role of Israel, and regardless of whether such a war was the result of an unplanned accident, or a conscious decision, a U.S. war on Iran would be an outgrowth of U.S. aggressive actions. It would still be an expression of U.S. imperial interests. And in the event of such an “accidental” war, even bitter opponents of the Bush regime within the ruling class like Zbigniew Brzezinski—who has said that he thinks such a war would be a disaster—have said that they would feel compelled to support it once begun.

The U.S. rulers have shown in Iraq that they are willing to destroy the lives of millions in pursuit of their reactionary ambitions. Those ambitious are unjust, oppressive, and in the service of a world of exploitation and oppression. They are not the interests of the people of the world, including people in this country, and it is the special responsibility of people in the United States to build a movement to oppose any attempt by the U.S. to attack Iran, under any pretense. The development of such a movement will inspire people all over the world, including in the Middle East, to see beyond the so-called “alternatives” of Islamic fundamentalism and U.S. imperialism.

Send us your comments.

from the NEW YORK TIMES:

October 19, 2007

Construction Means Debris; Gravity Means It Falls

By JOHN ELIGON

When a steel bucket tumbled 53 stories off the future Bank of America tower near Bryant Park on Wednesday, raining debris and sending people running for cover, it was hardly a novelty. It was the 74th time this year that something fell from a construction site in New York City, the Buildings Department said yesterday.

Hammers, pieces of concrete, plywood and glass window panes have fallen from unfinished buildings this year.

The incident on Wednesday was one of the more dramatic construction accidents in the city this year. Investigators said they believed that the bucket, the size of a bathtub, fell when it was struck by the cable of a crane. As the bucket tumbled, it shattered windows and left shards of glass and twisted metal on surrounding streets and sidewalks. People ran, and some cars even swerved onto the sidewalk.

The Buildings Department issued a citation yesterday to the Tishman Construction Company, the contractor in charge of the site, for “failure to safeguard the public and property from falling objects.” A stop-work order has also been issued. It will be in effect at the 2.1-million-square-foot site until the Buildings Department is satisfied that all necessary safeguards have been reviewed, officials said.

Eight people suffered minor injuries in the accident, bringing the total number of injuries from falling construction debris to 43 this year, 10 more than during the same period last year.

But several people yesterday chalked up such incidents as just another part of the city experience. Rarely, it seems, do the pedestrians in the city shift focus from their destinations to ponder the jackhammers, iron beams, cranes and other construction equipment being used high above them.

“I don’t worry about it more than anything else,” said Stacy Robin, 32, a consultant from Montclair, N.J., yesterday. She was in the area where the bucket had fallen on Wednesday, at 1111 Avenue of the Americas, at 42nd Street. “I think these are random events, and I’m more concerned about whose hand is in my bag.”

Fear may not pervade the thoughts of most Manhattan pedestrians. But some, like Novelette Bhorasingh, 55, who works in the financial district, said they avoided sidewalks below scaffolding.

“There’s a lot of construction,” she said. “I try not to think about it or else I’ll never go outside.”

One of the most prominent New Yorkers to admit avoiding sidewalks framed and covered by scaffolding was Patricia J. Lancaster, the commissioner of the Buildings Department, who said so in an interview with The Daily News this year.

Yesterday, the deputy commissioner, Robert LiMandri, stepped back from those comments.

“Are sidewalk sheds safe to walk under?” he asked. “Yes.”

Mr. LiMandri said there were currently 175 high-rise projects in the city. He said there had been 79 incidents of falling debris by this time last year. In all of 2006, there were 101 reports of objects falling from construction sites in the city, he said.

Those figures should suggest, he said, that such accidents are anything but endemic — though they should still be taken seriously.

“What you have to do is you have to put in additional precautions to mitigate risk,” Mr. LiMandri said.

The department has two primary regulations that safeguard against falling debris. One requires that netting be placed around all floors that are not enclosed with walls or windows. The other is the construction of sidewalk sheds to protect pedestrians from debris that might fall. The department said that it inspected every high-rise construction site in the city once or twice a week, and that each contractor was required to hire on-site safety coordinators licensed by the department.

Richard Kielar, a spokesman for Tishman, said yesterday that in response to the accident on Wednesday the company planned to tether all equipment used on the perimeter of the building, assign a site manager to specifically monitor the crane, and hire additional carpenters to repair all guardrails and netting on the building’s perimeter. Mr. Kielar added that these actions would be improvements to what he believed already was a safe system.

Louis Coletti, the chief executive of Building Trades Employers Association, which represents 1,500 contractors citywide, said falling debris was an issue that the industry had been discussing in depth for the last three months. A safety conference, where issues like the amount of netting around construction sites will be addressed, is scheduled for Nov. 20. “There’s just, unfortunately, inherent dangers in building high-rise constructions,” Mr. Coletti said. But, he added, “High-rise construction in New York City, we believe, is the safest in the world.”

Most people in the industry seem to agree, however, that there are no foolproof safeguards against falling debris.

In 1998, scaffolding at the Condé Nast building in Times Square buckled, sending part of a steel elevator tower across West 43rd Street and through the roof of a nearby hotel, killing a woman.

Last year, a three-foot-long pipe fell from The New York Times Company’s new building, at 620 Eighth Avenue, while it was still under construction, and landed on a vehicle. A family of three, including a 2-year-old boy, narrowly escaped serious injury.

Earlier this month, a piece of scaffolding fell from a high-rise on Madison Avenue at East 60th Street, damaging a United Parcel Service delivery truck.

Kate Hammer contributed reporting.

Did heat, rusted plates doom bridge?

Federal investigators are trying to determine whether 91-degree heat caused expansion that put too much pressure on the corroded gusset plates that held the I-35W span together.

Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroestar Tribune Staff Writers

Last update: October 17, 2007 – 10:24 PM

Ten weeks into their probe of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse, National Transportation Safety Board investigators have intensified their inspection of a long-corroded gusset plate that was located in the section of the bridge that fell first.In addition, authorities are analyzing what role the 91-degree heat on Aug. 1 might have played in increasing stress on the already-weakened L-11 gusset plate, which connected four steel beams located near the bridge’s south end.

In 1993, a state inspector found that the half-inch gusset plate had lost nearly half of its thickness in some spots due to corrosion along an 18-inch line, but no repairs were ordered, according to Minnesota Department of Transportation records.

Two structural engineers who have viewed the wreckage said in interviews this week that the L-11 gusset plate is one of three closely situated connections that could hold the secret of what caused the bridge to collapse. All three joints appear to have been damaged by some primary force — not from secondary impacts sustained during the collapse, the engineers said. They spoke to the Star Tribune on the condition that their identities would not be disclosed. NTSB officials declined to be interviewed.

The three damaged gusset plate connections can be clearly seen lying along the secured West River Road site where federal experts have laid out the bridge parts most critical to their investigation. Earlier this week, two officials spent hours examining and photographing the L-11 connection and the beams that were once riveted to that corroded plate.

Within a week of the bridge disaster, NTSB Chairman Mark Rosenker announced that stress on gusset plates may have been a factor in the collapse. A month later, he said that “a failure in one of these plates could have catastrophic consequences.” Now it appears that of more than 100 gusset plates on the bridge, the NTSB is focused on just a few.

One of the structural engineers who has viewed the wreckage and knows the design of the bridge said runoff of salt and de-icing chemicals from the bridge deck could have contributed to the corrosion in the L-11 gusset-plate connection. That’s because a diagonal, H-shaped beam running into the joint could have acted to channel the liquid toward the gusset plate, the engineer said.

Also, the engineer said that two of the three damaged gusset plates that appear to be of primary interest to the NTSB are half an inch thick. The thickness of gusset plates used in the bridge varied between half an inch and 1 inch. That could be an important issue, because a consulting firm hired by the state has said that some half-inch gusset plates may not have been strong enough to hold the bridge up.

According to MnDOT documents, state bridge engineers worried for years about fatigue cracking in the heaviest beams of the steel superstructure. As recently as January 2007, MnDOT engineers were planning to reinforce the beams that were deemed by a consultant to be most critical to ensuring the bridge’s safety. But MnDOT opted instead to closely inspect the beams every year. When the bridge collapsed, inspectors had completed only half of their 2007 inspection of the fracture-critical beams.

Both structural engineers interviewed by the Star Tribune said the issue of fatigue cracking is not currently at the forefront of the NTSB’s investigation. Rather, they say federal authorities are examining whether intense heat on Aug. 1 triggered a chain reaction of force that overpowered gusset plates in crucial locations — such as the one at L-11.

Flexing was planned

The I-35W bridge was designed to flex, to handle expansion in extreme heat and contraction in bitter cold. But that design assumed that roller bearings would move accordingly.

Roller bearings are mounted on top of bridge piers. They support the weight of the bridge and contain steel cylinders that allow the bridge to roll smoothly back and forth as it expands and contracts with temperature changes.

MnDOT officials had long known from their inspections that the bearings were not working correctly because of corrosion and buildup of debris. And in July 2006, a consultant’s report highlighted the problem. “The bearings are not allowing the structure to move linearly with changes in the … temperature,” the report said.

Roller bearings recovered from the river are stacked neatly in the NTSB’s secure area for inspection. One of the structural engineers who asked not to be named said the bearings appear to be lacking marks of wear, indicating they may have been locked up or their movement restricted by debris and corrosion.

The NTSB has provided occasional updates on its investigation, but the agency has said repeatedly that it could take 12 to 18 months to reveal a probable cause for the disaster, which killed 13 people and injured 144 others. While critical bridge components are expected to be laid out on the riverside until at least November, the NTSB has been shipping less important pieces of the wreckage to a gravel pit in Afton owned by the state.

tkennedy@startribune.com • 612-673-4213 pmac@startribune.com • 612-673-1745

© 2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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Initial Reports on O22 NDP to Stop Police Brutality

Initial Reports…

National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation

October 23, 2007

On October 22, 2007, protests against Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation were called in over twenty cities. Parents and families of people murdered by police, students, movement activists, and people of all nationalities marched. In New York City, Cindy Sheehan spoke of being brutalized by police, and of the death of her son in Iraq, and Marcus Jones, the father of one of the Jena Six spoke by phone of his son Mychal Bell being re-jailed. In Atlanta, the city’s main newspaper reported that as the protest went past the city jail, “prisoners could be seen waving white T-shirts inside in an apparent show of support.”

Protests were planned for Atlanta; Cleveland; Denver; Detroit; Eureka, CA; Flagstaff, AZ; Fresno, CA; Guelph, ON Canada: Houston; Kansas City, TX; Knoxville; Los Angeles; Louisville; Minneapolis; Montreal, QC (Canada); New Haven, CT; New Orleans, LA; New York City; Olympia, WA ; Pittsburgh; San Antonio, TX ; San Diego; Santa Rosa, CA; Seattle, WA; and St. Louis.

Following are some initial reports from correspondence received at Revolution and from other news sources:

LOS ANGELES

Protesters rallied at police headquarters at Parker Center, and marched to Mac Arthur Park where on May First, police shot rubber bullets at, and beat protesters and reporters at an immigrants rights demonstration.

Marchers carried signs protesting ICE raids on immigrants, and demanding Free the Jena Six. The march ended with a candle-light vigil for victims of police brutality.

NEW YORK CITY

At a rally of about 150 in Marcus Garvey Park, in Harlem Marcus Jones—whose son Mychal Bell, one of the Jena 6, was sent back to prison earlier this month—spoke to the crowd via a phone hook-up: “I just want to say thanks to everybody up there who are supporting Mychal. And I’ve been hearing about the racial profiling that the police have been doing up there. Jena is everywhere. I see that on a map of New York there’s no name Jena, New York—but I know it’s Jena up there somewhere.”

Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan told about how the Bush regime had stolen the life of her son Casey, a U.S. solider killed in the Iraq war, and said, “I’ve gotten in trouble with the mainstream media because I called George Bush ‘the No. 1 terrorist in the world.’ People say, oh, no, he can’t be because he’s an elected leader of a state. Well, first of all, who elected him? Did any of you vote for him? No. He is an illegitimate leader of this brutal state.”

Margarita Rosario, whose son and nephew were killed by the NYPD, said: “My son received 14 shots to his back while he was face down on the floor. And my nephew the same thing. They destroyed my life… I’m still standing and I will continue to stand… Let’s tell the community of Harlem today that we need to fight!”

As the multinational group of protesters took off on a march down 125th Street, 20 students from a charter school in the neighborhood, joined in, contributing their own chants on: “We stand with the Jena 6!” and “NYPD go to hell! We remember Sean Bell!” Members of the Harlem Revolution Club carried a colorful banner saying, “Humanity Needs Revolution. Stop Police Brutality. No More Nooses.”

At a rally during the march, Travis Morales of the Revolutionary Communist Party said, “The immigration police, la migra, with their cowboy hats and shotguns, busting down the doors of homes, rounding up people and deporting them, terrorizing and tearing families apart, leaving children and babies stranded with their neighbors… Nooses hung from a whites-only tree in Jena, Louisiana, on a Black professor’s door at Columbia University, outside a Black cultural center at University of Maryland. A wave of nooses across this country, and 6 Black youth facing decades in prison for standing up to the nooses, the symbol of lynching of thousands of Black people…Don’t tell me we don’t need a revolution!”

At a rally at the end of the march, Sean Bell’s father, William Bell, said he was happy to see a movement against police brutality and that it was crucial for more youth to become involved.

CHICAGO

In Chicago, family members rallied with signs and posters and t-shirts honoring loved ones murdered by police: Meliton Recendez, 15, shot going out for a juice. Johnny Goodwin, 21, shot in the back.  Lester “Roni” Spruill, 43, beaten and found dead in a jail cell.  Steve Womack, 22, killed from a high-speed police chase. A young man spoke with a broken arm, spoke, explaining how the police shoved him out a window when they raided his home. 

One man described how cops from the scandal-ridden “Special Operations Section” - known as “Shoot on Sight” put a bullet in his nephew’s neck while the young man lay handcuffed on the ground.  Deborah Thompson, who’s brother Fred Hendersen was shot by a suburban cop point blank in the side of his head, told the crowd of 200 she would not let the killer of her son intimidate her. Mae Green, made a promise to her son Tony, who choked to death after being arrested by the police, “They will not give the police department a standing ovation for killing my son.” 

Ashunda Harris who’s nephew Aaron Harrison was shot in the back as he ran away from the police, spoke clearly to the urgency of the situation:  “If we don’t make this movement and this revolution happen, it’s going to continue and it’s going to reach down to our grandchildren, and our grandchildren’s children.  We need to put an end to this…”

BAY AREA

Among the 150 people rallying and marching in Oakland were many family and friends of Gary King, Jr., the 20 year old youth who was murdered on September 20. Gary King was grabbed by the dreadlocks, brutalized tasered and shot in the back by officer Patrick Gonzales, who had mistaken King for someone else. Gonzeles, who has been responsible for shooting several other young Black men in the last few years, stood with his foot in Gary’s back as he lay dying on the ground.

Other family members of people killed by police present included Alade Djehuti-Mes (whose father, Charles Vaughn, Sr. was murdered by police in Seaside); Danny Garcia (brother of Mark Garcia, who died after being sprayed repeatedly with pepper spray and beaten by San Francisco police); Rashida Grinnage (whose husband, Raphael Grinnage, a well known jazz musician, and son, Luke Grinnage were both shot and killed by Oakland police); Cinnamon, (whose son, Lorante Studesville, was shot and seriously wounded by the OPD earlier this year); Frank Rosenberg (whose son Richard Rosenberg was shot and killed in front of his house); Meesha Irazarry, (mother of Idriss Stelley, a 23-year-old African American student killed by SFPD at the SF Sony Metreon Theatre in San Francisco in 2001); and Marylon Boyd (mother of Cameron Boyd killed by SFPD).

AROUND THE COUNTRY…

The October 22nd protest in Atlanta got significant coverage in the mainstream and alternative media. In an article titled, “‘We All Live In Jena’ Say Marchers Protesting Dekalb Shootings,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that protesters “wearing black T-shirts proclaiming ‘We All Live In Jena’ marched on Memorial Drive Monday to call attention to shootings by DeKalb County police and other cases of what they regard as injustice. One theme of the protest was the ‘criminalization of a generation.’ As demonstrators chanted ‘What do we want? Justice!’ in front of the county jail, prisoners could be seen waving white T-shirts inside in an apparent show of support.” Iffat Muhammad, who has organized protests over police shootings since her brother was shot and killed by police said, “This is a day of remembrance and a day of acknowledgment that brutality will not be tolerated.”

Among those rallying on October 22nd in Fresno, CA was the family of Everardo Toreres. Everardo had his life stolen on the night of October 27, 2002. He was arrested, handcuffed, and put into the back of a Madera, CA police car. A short time later, police officer Marcy Noriega came over to the car that Torres was in, pulled her service revolver and shot him to death. Noriega says she thought she was using her Taser gun. Torres’s family says Everardo was murdered by the police and they want justice.

Many protesters in Detroitwere family and friends of Jevon Royall, a young man killed in July on the 40th Anniversary of the Detroit Rebellion, blocks from where the rebellion started over police brutality, and they described how he was killed by police when he stepped outside of a family celebration. People marched to the site where Jevon was killed and held a Stolen Lives/Memorial service, with participants giving testimonials remembering and honoring Jevon and reading the names and stories of other victims of police brutality and murder.

In Santa Rosa, CA, organizers told Revolution that several hundred people were part of a rally and march. The march went through Roseland, a poor and mainly Latino community, where police have been setting up DUI checkpoints — not set up late in the evening when people might be leaving bars — but at rush hour when people are returning home from work. People in the community suspect that the roadblocks are aimed instead at immigrant workers without papers. Ben, an organizer with Copwatch in Santa Rosa, told Revolution that as the march went through Roseland, “There was an incredible response.  People were honking their horns and raising their fists. People pulled over on the spot and parked their cars and joined the march.” Over the past year nine people have been killed in Sonoma County by local police and sheriffs, and in a recent nine-week period, local police shot and killed five. At a rally after the march, Ann Gray Byrd, chairwoman of the Sonoma County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “The families of those shot down in our communities have not been heard.”

In Seattle, family members of people killed by the police joined activists and proletarians of all nationalities- many with experiences of being brutalized or harassed by police to march through Seattle’s Pike Place market. All the way, people chanted “Hey cops, whaddya say, how many kids did you kill today?” A Seattle cop had just shot a 13 year old kid in the leg the week before.

In Cleveland, Dorothy Chappell, whose grandson, Brandon Mc Cloud was murdered by Cleveland cops, September 1, 2005, called out the cops who killed her 15 year old grandson at the 4th district police station where the October 22nd protest was held.

A volunteer at Communities United Against Police Brutality in Minneapolis told Revolution that an October 22nd protest was held outside the Minneapolis Juvenile “Justice” Center in solidarity with the Jena Six, and because the police “are targeting and criminalizing the children.” Parents and youth coming out of the Juvenile Detention Center stopped and joined the rally and spoke out. Activists in Minnesota have worked to document 85 deaths at the hands of police over the past ten years. Among them are several Native Americans: Franklin J. Brown, a 21-year-old American Indian man, was killed May 15, 2005 in his home on the White Earth reservation when police entered to conduct a search. He was shot 17 times. Some of the shots went through a closed door. He was unarmed. David Croud, an American Indian, was slammed into a stone wall and otherwise abused as he was arrested by six Duluth police officers on October 12, 2005. He slipped into a coma and never recovered. He was 29 years old. Benjamin DeCoteau, a Native American, was killed on January 22, 2005. He was unarmed when he was shot by officer Mark Beaupre under suspicious circumstances. He was 21 years old at the time of his death. On November 6, 1994, Richard LeGarde, an Anishinabe rights activist, was illegally arrested and then driven home to by a deputy, who was the last person to see him alive.

Photo captions & credits (top to bottom):
Los Angeles. Credit:Marcus, IndyMedia LA
New York City - Margarita Rosario, Cincy Sheehan, Lynne Steward. Credit: IndyMedia, NYC
Chicago. Credit: Li Onesto, Revolution
Stolen Lives Wall in Oakland. Credit: IndyMedia SF Bay Area
Atlanta. Credit:Special to Revolution
Fresno. Credit: Mike Rhodes
Cleveland - Dorothy Chappell. Credit: Donald Black Jr

from WORKDAY MINNESOTA:

from the NEW YORK TIMES:

October 21, 2007

Few Answers About Nooses, but Much Talk of Jim Crow

By PAUL VITELLO

BALDWIN, N.Y., Oct. 19 — All the nooses are different, the police say. Some are coiled six times, some eight. Some are simple knots. The one found here the other day, suspended from a fence in a Highway Department yard, was wrapped with duct tape. All are blunt instruments of racial intimidation because of what they represent.

“They represent terrorizing black people and keeping them in their place,” said Ruth Roberson, a parks employee who is black, pausing on Friday morning while raking leaves. “Now they don’t lynch you. It’s all about jobs.”

At least seven times in the past few weeks, nooses have been anonymously tossed over pipes or hung on doorknobs in the New York metropolitan area — four times here on Long Island, twice in New York City, once at a Home Depot store in Passaic, N.J. The settings are disparate. One noose was hung in a police station locker room in Hempstead, where the apparent target was a black police officer recently promoted to deputy chief. Another was draped over the doorknob of the office of a black professor at Columbia University.

The question of why these things were happening — whether linked to events somewhere else, like in Jena, La., or part of some new homegrown vernacular of race hate — seemed to wait in line last week behind the question of where the next noose would be found.

Three noose episodes took place on Long Island in three days. On Wednesday, two were found at a sanitation garage in the Town of Hempstead — one of them looped around the neck of a stuffed animal with its face blackened. On Thursday, a noose was discovered hanging in a Nassau County highway department yard in Baldwin. On Friday, a worker at the Green Acres shopping mall in Valley Stream found one slung over a door at a construction site.

Public officials said they were outraged, determined to catch the culprits — and stumped.

“It would diminish the seriousness of these events to call any of them copycat situations,” said Kate Murray, the supervisor of the Town of Hempstead, a sprawling township of 750,000 residents, about 15 percent of them black, where all of last week’s incidents occurred. “But I’m not a sociologist. I am surprised by it.”

Elected officials called press conferences. They ordered training classes on racial sensitivity for employees. (A few in the “copycat” camp pointed to the Jena Six case in Louisiana, in which six black youths were arrested last year and accused of beating a white youth who they thought was involved in hanging nooses from a tree at Jena High School. The tree was a “whites-only” preserve.)

“I don’t know what the pattern is, if there is one,” said Thomas R. Suozzi, the county executive of Nassau County, which includes Hempstead. “Are people more hateful than they have been? I just don’t know.”

Like many other parts of the country, Long Island is not without a history of racial bigotry. Black people were barred from buying homes in Levittown until well into the 1960s. Some Long Island school districts are still among the most segregated in the country. The black population is about 12 percent of the total, but is highly concentrated in a half-dozen communities that are 95 percent minority. In 2004, in Suffolk County, it was still possible for an interracial couple to wake up in the night to find a cross burning on their lawn — it happened in a hamlet called Lake Grove.

Lynching was not part of that history. But to some of those sifting the evidence, the nooses of 2007 represent much the same impulse as lynchings did in the Jim Crow South.

“In the context of today, the noose means, ‘There is still a racial hierarchy in this country, and you better not overstep your bounds,’” said Carmen Van Kerckhove, the founder of a New York consulting firm, New Demographic, that specializes in workplace problems, including racial tension.

The most clear-cut example of that, perhaps, was the first episode in the cluster. The noose appeared the morning of Sept. 28 in the locker room of the Hempstead Village Police Department. Taped to the wall near the rope was a newspaper clipping referring to Deputy Chief Willie Dixon, the 57-year-old department veteran who was promoted to the rank in May. Chief Dixon, who is black, told investigators he had received anonymous letters containing racial epithets upon his promotion and felt sure the noose was intended for him.

Frederick K. Brewington, a Hempstead lawyer who has represented dozens of workers claiming racial discrimination in their jobs on Long Island, said competition over promotions is often a source of racially charged conflict. “The reality is that African-Americans are vying for positions in the work force in greater numbers, and I think there is a backlash — a cowardly backlash — from people who do not want more competition for the limited number of jobs,” Mr. Brewington said.

Willie Warren, an equipment operator at the Nassau County Public Works yard here, was among three workers in the garage on Thursday when an employee ran in to tell them he had found a noose hanging from a fence outside. Mr. Warren, 41, who has been with the department for 20 years, filed a racial discrimination suit in 2004, producing tape recordings of a supervisor referring to him with racial epithets. He won the case, got a promotion, still works for one of the supervisors named in his suit, and considers himself unflappable on the job.

The noose shook him. “It’s hard to explain, but it made me upset the whole day,” Mr. Warren said. One white co-worker was as upset as he was, he said. Another said, “What’s the big deal? It’s only a noose.”

Rachel E. Sullivan, an assistant professor of sociology at Long Island University’s C. W. Post College, said most people do not understand what lynchings were. “They think it was a few guys coming in the night, in their hooded sheets, taking you away,” she said.

She teaches a course on African-American history, including the killings of thousands by lynching in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the end of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“But in reality these were whole, big community events,” she said. “Children and families would come to watch. Hundreds of people attended. They would watch a man being burned and mutilated before he was hung. They would pose for pictures with the body.

“If people had a grasp of what really happened at these things,” Professor Sullivan continued, “they would understand the power of the symbol of a noose.”

The police are treating all the recent cases as hate crimes. No arrests have been made.