The United States has only 4% percent of the world’s population but the highest number of cases and deaths in the world. “It is what it is,” Trump said in August. Meanwhile socialist countries around the world have pursued a different path: “We have a responsibility to protect human lives and the entire social fabric with serenity, realism, and objectivity,” said Cuban President Díaz-Canel.
Socialist States Put People Over Profits
The U.S. government’s COVID-19 policy is geared towards protecting the profits of billionaires. Meanwhile, socialist states have taken a scientific approach aimed at protecting life and avoiding social trauma and desperation.
Vietnam, population 96 million, has had only 26 deaths and 989 infections due to swift, scientific measures instituted immediately by the Vietnamese Communist Party, including a country-wide lock down, information campaign, mask mandate, free hand sanitizer, early closure of schools and religious institutions, and extensive testing. At the same time, they continued to meet the needs of the population.
While certain parts of the U.S. have enacted preventive measures such as mask mandates, free testing, contract tracing, and the closure of all but essential businesses, these policies are doomed to fail if people are not guaranteed essential means of survival such as housing, food, and healthcare. U.S. residents have to weigh potential financial ruin (and for some of us, deportation) against the need to self-isolate or to seek out medical care.
Socialist states showed another way. The Indian state of Kerala— governed by the elected Communist Party of India (Marxist)—made testing and treatment free and available to everyone in the state. For those unable to safely quarantine at home, centers were set up, and temporary housing was constructed for migrant workers needing safer housing and healthcare.
Socialist countries provide cash assistance, food, housing, and medical care. There are no evictions. This is in stark contrast to the U.S. policy of providing temporary and partial relief to some while showering private corporations and banks with trillions of dollars.
PPE, Health Care for the Public Good Not Profits
At the onset of the pandemic, the U.S. flat-out rejected test kits from the World Health Organization. Socialist countries, including China and Vietnam, directed their public sector to produce PPE and healthcare equipment for their own people and also sent these products around the world. China built hospitals in as few as ten days.
Socialism: A System of Solidarity and Internationalism
In Kerala, government employees, trade union members, youth and student activists, participate in relief efforts. Through government sponsored and civilian organized Social Volunteer Forces, hundreds of thousands of youth identify needs and coordinate the provision of goods and services to communities and hospitals.
Socialist countries demonstrate solidarity at home and internationally. Cuba has dispatched doctors around the world, as has China. Vietnam sent hundreds of thousands of units of PPE to the United States. These countries understand that if humanity is going to survive this pandemic and future disasters, worldwide cooperation is required.
Workers Must Get Rid of the Murderous Capitalist System
The causes of the high rate of deaths and illness in the U.S. predate the virus. We must reject the centuries-old U.S. policy of sacrificing workers at the altar of capitalist profit, with the worst harm falling on our Indigenous and Black siblings. We must stand up and get rid of a system that says our lives and our families are disposable. Together, we must dispose of the capitalists for the sake of all humanity and the planet.
Capitalism creates a world of haves and have-nots. The many suffer, while the few prosper—that’s the way of capitalist AmeriKKKa. Stop and think: Why do people go hungry? Why doesn’t everyone have a home? Why isn’t there universal quality education & healthcare? Why are more and more privately owned prisons popping up? Why does the economic inequality gap widen year after year? All this in the self-proclaimed “richest/most powerful nation the world has ever seen!” Why do people regard the rich as if they’re so much more deserving of nice things than we are?
I want us to rethink how we approach the world. Think about why you do what you do daily. We do it to fit into the structure of capitalist society. Our labor generates much more value than the portion we get as wages. But since the rich privately own the land and the factories where we work, they take the bulk of that value for themselves. We as the working class are literally working ourselves to death. People are more stressed, and they have little if any leisure time. We have to get rid of the false notion that economically poor people “don’t work hard” and that’s why they are poor. That notion is bullshit, perpetuated by the ruling class and their media henchmen. Working class people are the hardest workers that do the most crucial work for the betterment of society. Shout-out to the sanitation workers, the school cafeteria workers, bus drivers, service workers and day laborers. They deserve vacations, sick days, livable wages, time to spend with their children and much more.
The working class masses pay the salaries of the cops, judges, and politicians at every level of government. We have to get rid of the notion that they’re better or do more than us! Politicians are crooks that get bankrolled by the capitalist class to do their bidding, repressing the masses of people economically and socially. Electoral politics was best described by Karl Marx who said, “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”
This is a pattern of programming that must end! We are the vast majority, we create everything, we deserve to live a rewarding life. We deserve livable wages, good housing, education and healthcare. Through mass struggle these goals are more than attainable. This planet is full of resources for every living creature to coexist in harmony. We, the majority, MUST rise up—it is the only salvation for this planet. We, the workers of the world, are powerful beyond measure. It is our duty to fight to win the class struggle. All Power to the Proletarians!
Barack Obama and close advisor Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris
Dow Chemical
On being named chief of Trump’s National Manufacturing Council, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris said, “the U.S. is not a red tape country, but a red carpet country for businesses.”
Dow Chemical is a massive transnational monopoly—the second largest producer of chemicals in the world.
For much of its history, Dow has profited from the U.S. warfare state at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. Most infamously, Dow manufactured napalm for the U.S. military. Hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm were dropped on Vietnam, and tens of thousands of people were burned alive as a result. With Monsanto, they also produced Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 400,000 Vietnamese men, women, and children as well as 500,000 birth defects. Thousands of U.S. soldiers were also affected.
In 1984, a toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide (a subsidiary of Dow) plant in Bhopal, India poisoned more than 600,000 people, killing 16,000 people.
In 2009, a Dow plant in St. Charles Parish leaked 26,720 pounds of vaporized ethyl acrylate (EA), a Class II toxic air pollutant, into the atmosphere. Dow has faced no penalties for this action.
Since 2008 Dow has received $230,028,546 in subsidies from the State of Louisiana.
For cutting safety costs and for shielding the company from lawsuits, shareholders at Dow awarded Andrew Liveris $65.7 million in salary and benefits in 2017.
Former Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant got a $77 million ‘exit package’ from the company.
Monsanto
Like many of the giant monopolies in charge of the global capitalist economy, Monsanto—which was acquired by Bayer in 2018—came to dominate production by war profiteering. Monsanto was a key player in the development of atomic bombs for the Manhattan project which produced the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands of people and poisoning many more. They also profited from the production of Agent Orange.
In 2018 the German pharmaceutical company Bayer purchased Monsanto for $60 billion. Bayer descends from the industrial monopoly IG Farben, which among other things, produced poison gas for Nazi concentration camps. Bayer-Monsanto now controls more than a quarter of the world’s seed and pesticides market.
Monsanto is among a handful of companies that dictate global agricultural production. For example, Monsanto controls more share of the global production of soy and corn seeds than any other company. These seeds are patented by the company and engineered as “Roundup Ready” crops which are intended to be grown in conjunction with Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide. The UN International Agency of Research on Cancer has recognized an increased risk of cancer among farmworkers who are routinely exposed to glyphosate.
By enforcing its patents on corn, soybean, and cotton seeds, Monsanto has consolidated its market while driving many peasant farmers into destitution. In the past 20 years since the introduction of Monsanto-patented cotton into India, 290,000 farmers have committed suicide due to the loss of their livelihoods.
Since 2008, the State of Louisiana has awarded Monsanto $215,074,865 in tax subsidies.
Nestlé “Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value.” —Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, CEO Nestlé
The United Nations predicts that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live with dire water shortages, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under “stressed” water conditions. According to Nestlé, this will only increase the market value of its commodities.
Nestlé is the largest food company on the planet and the world’s biggest bottler of water. Across the world, Nestlé steals precious natural resources from the Earth’s Indigenous inhabitants in order to turn a profit. For example, Nestlé extracts up to 3.6 million liters of water daily from Six Nations treaty land (near the North American Great Lakes) without paying the people of the Six Nations a dime. Meanwhile, at least 63,000 Indigenous people in the region haven’t had drinkable water for at least a year. Similarly, in order to profit from cocoa production, Nestlé has illegally deforested much of West Africa. In the Ivory Coast, the rainforest cover has been reduced by more than 80%.
Nestlé paid Peter Brabeck-Letmathe 5.93 million Euros a year to steal from and enslave workers across the world.
Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is the largest arms manufacturer in the world and chief supplier of fighter jets to the U.S. Air Force, which is responsible for more than half of the emissions from the Pentagon. The U.S. military consumes more fuel than most countries on the planet, totaling almost 270,000 barrels of oil bought every day as of 2017. Lockheed’s F-4 Phantom Fighter burns more than 1,600 gallons of jet fuel per hour.
In addition, Lockheed profits from the development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons. The company gets an annual $2.4 billion in tax-payer money to run nuclear weapons complexes in Albuquerque and Livermore for the Department of Energy.
Their F-35 jet program will cost U.S. tax-payers at least $406 billion.
Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson was paid $21,516,545 last year to supply weapons to the capitalists’ largest private army, the U.S. military.
Rex Tillerson, seated: “My philosophy is to make money.”
ExxonMobil
A descendant of Rockefeller’s monopoly Standard Oil, ExxonMobil is the second largest company in the United States. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, ExxonMobil is among the 5 privately held companies that have alone produced 12.5% of all industrial carbon pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
Since 1998, Exxon has given tens of millions of dollars to organizations, ’think-tanks’ and politicians to promote climate change denial in contradiction to the scientific evidence that the company has had since at least the 1970’s. A 1980 corporate report states that the company had “no doubt” of the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change and yet the company has doubled its production of oil and gas in years since. A senior researcher for Exxon even reported in 1992 that “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the melting Arctic Sea.
Rex Tillerson retired as CEO of ExxonMobil to become U.S. Secretary of State for Trump from 2017 to 2018. Tillerson never stopped working for Exxon, attempting to impose an oil embargo on Venezuela with the hopes of ousting the democratically elected government of President Nicolas Maduro. He had orders to regain for Exxon the massive oil reserves that it lost when the Venezuelan government nationalized its oil. Like any other U.S. Secretary of State, Tillerson was only looking out for his fellow capitalists. He made no effort to conceal this.
As of 2019, Tillerson has amassed $350 million from the labor of the thousands of workers that he has exploited.
Since 2012 Exxon Mobil has received $443,892,345 in tax subsidies from the state of Louisiana alone. Since 2000 they’ve received nearly 4 billion dollars in federal awards.
After developing the mortgage-back securities that sent the economy into a nosedive in 2008, billionaire Larry Fink became chief advisor to U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve on the bank bailouts. Now his private firm invests principally in oil, prisons, and arms
BlackRock, Inc.
BlackRock is the “world’s largest asset manager” according to the big business newspaper, the Economist. This corporation is heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, arms manufacturers, private prisons and others to the tune of more than $6 trillion. The firm is among the top three investors in BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips. The company holds a 6.72% stake in Lockheed Martin and a more than 10% stake in private prisons corporations GEO Group and CoreCivic.
BlackRock stands to gain from deforestation efforts around the world, most notably in Brazil where Amazonian rainforests are being burned to benefit companies like JBS, the largest animal protein company in the world.
BlackRock is the largest shareholder in JBS who with the help of Brazilian President Bolsonaro has egged on the theft and clearing of land for pasture.
Only a global organization of the working class is up to the task of halting the climate and environmental crisis. We must fight to meet the needs of all peoples of the world equally.
By Gavrielle Gemma
Youth climate strikers have forced the environmental crisis on to the world stage. They have also forced the capitalists and all the governments they control to scramble to come up with plans that sound responsive while they protect the profits of the fossil fuel and weapons industries along with the politicians in their pockets.
We must keep the movement going strong in the streets but to succeed, we need to honestly size up the opposition.
President Trump is an enemy of the planet and the people, but the Democratic Party politicians also personally benefit from the status quo. For decades they’ve been totally bought out by the capitalists in charge of oil, chemical, agribusiness, banking and military industries.
We must recognize that though they rule by different methods—one more openly fascist, the other more deceptive—both uphold the rule of capitalism, private property and oil profits. Hillary Clinton received millions from the oil industry and the Saudi Monarchy.
Why do millions starve when there is a global surplus of food? Why are countries bombed for oil? Why is a trillion U.S. tax payer dollars going to war profiteers every year? Why do we continue to use fossil fuels when clean and sustainable energy alternatives are available?
Because capitalists do not care how many millions die and suffer as long as they prosper.
More than ever the movement needs the leadership of those with the most to lose from the global ecological crisis—the workers, the displaced, and the oppressed nations of the world. That’s why we must fight to end capitalism, imperialism, and racism. We must fight for global economic equality.
United Nations is not the answer.
While 193 countries belong to the United Nations, it is controlled by the security council which is made up of superpowers and is dominated by imperialist countries. The United Nations gave cover to the invasions of Iraq and Libya – both wars for oil.
Were the United Nations a real force for the people, its delegates would have marched out of the UN headquarters to a nearby meeting of oil executives and ordered a mass arrest for crimes against humanity and other species. The oil executives had called this emergency meeting to figure out how to rebrand themselves and co-opt the movement.
“The change that needs to take place—the trillions of dollars of investment—is only going to come from companies with resources and scale,” said Ben van Beurden, chief executive of Shell. In other words, please don’t come after us.
If the climate change movement rose up against the $1 trillion a year U.S. military budget, we would have plenty of resources to be used for all the needs of humanity, other species, and the planet. The obscene profits they are sitting on need to be seized by the masses and used for survival, jobs and the environment. Clean energy, water, air, food and medical care cannot be under the control of private profiteers; it must belong to the people.
The climate struggle must recognize the inequality caused by imperialism in order to build solidarity and strengthen the movement.
We cannot fix the climate disaster with individual efforts or by thinking technology is the problem. Posing less air conditioning or more bike-riding as solutions fosters the right-wing phony claim that the movement is elitist. Air conditioning is a health necessity and should be available free to all people in every part of the world that needs it. Safe bike riding is important, but we need clean mass transportation for all. Poor people here and around the world lack these necessities.
Climate struggle and anti-imperialism are two wings of the same bird. The U.S. Military is a private army for the oil barons, not for democracy.
The U.S. budget is looted for a trillion a year that could be used for social benefits and earth repair. Politicians that support a “Green New Deal” but vote to increase the military budget are dangerous. We cannot fight for the earth without fighting for peace, against the weapons industry, imperialism, inequality, and racism.
Sheer numbers won’t do. On June 12th, 1982 a million people demonstrated in New York city against nuclear power. But its leaders were silent on nuclear weapons and U.S. wars. On the very day of the protest Israel was using U.S. weapons to bomb people in Palestinian refugee camps. A million voices were ignored easily by the government which said, “Let them march and sing, in the end they support us.” No struggle succeeds unless the rulers feel threatened by economic loss or fear that they may lose the people’s allegiance to their rule.
The movement must understand the root cause of the crisis; this will guide us in knowing where and how to build alliances among communities of all nationalities, and between youth and the working class.
The fight to save the planet must be the fight to uproot the cause of the environmental crisis. To win this fight we have to harness the enormous untapped power of the working class who once they know which side they’re on will be unstoppable. Organized, the working class can decide for itself what we will and won’t produce.
A worldwide day of outreach to the workers is the next step.
Let future strikes be led by youth and workers.
We should fight against pipelines and pesticides, and we should fight to save all species threatened by extinction. By mass action we can force change to some laws and this is important. But to save the planet, the human race and all species, to guarantee a healthy future for all the people of the world, it will take an overthrow of the capitalist system which puts profits above life itself.
Unions are joining the effort against climate change; workers are asking why they can’t have jobs that are safe for their communities and grandchildren. Youth of all countries have taken the lead once again, just like they did in the fight for civil rights in the U.S. displaying great courage and determination.
But a strong movement needs to think ahead, think strategically and understand that only with the workers on their side can we win. We will win.
Do Not Let the Rich Control Who Lives and Who Dies!
On July 25, 2019, the U.S. “Justice” Department reinstated the federal death penalty after a 16 year break. This comes at a time when people are being held without trial in concentration camps, states are trying to make abortion and miscarriage a capital crime, the government is criminalizing protest, and workers’ rights are being stripped away one by one.
Under the capitalist state, the death penalty is a weapon against the working class. The rich should not be deciding who lives and dies.
The United States has nearly 3,000 people on death row. Most of them are working class whites and working class people of color (41% of death row inmates are Black, while only 13% of the population of the U.S. is Black). Many of them are women who stood up for themselves against abusers, many are disabled. Some of them were sentenced as children. Since 1973, 144 have been found to be innocent.
The U.S. capitalist class uses the death penalty not for justice, not to make communities safer, not to prevent serial killers, rapists, and pedophiles from preying on us, but to terrorize the working class. The death penalty is used selectively. The rich and powerful never suffer the consequences of their actions, and those who hurt the poor and oppressed often get away with it. This benefits the ruling class by keeping us controlled by fear, divided against one another, and allowing the ruling class to get rid of those that oppose them.
The deaths of migrants in concentration camps go unpunished. Police murder black people with impunity. Trans women of color are being murdered and almost none of their killers have been caught. Gay panic and trans panic laws are legal in 45 states. Stand Your Ground laws don’t seem to apply to women defending themselves against abusers. Banks, bosses, and landlords take peoples’ homes, and medical and insurance companies deny poor patients life-saving drugs and procedures. Corporations murder thousands through the destruction of the environment, creating cancer-causing zones like in Gordon Plaza, where 54 Black households are still fighting for relocation. And the U.S. military is destroying whole nations around the world. There is little accountability for those who prey on or divide the working class.
The announcement that the four people chosen to be executed are child murderers is a distraction from the true intent of this policy reversal. They want to be able to deflect criticism of the death penalty by claiming that its opponents support child murder or other horrible actions. This is cruel exploitation of terrible circumstances to justify the use of capital punishment and misdirect from the truth: this is an act of terror against the working class.
We must stand up against their continued war on the working class and the control of the death penalty by the rich. This will be used against innocent people. This will be used against those who organize for liberation. This will be used against immigrants, the homeless, the mentally ill, and others who the current U.S. capitalist regime is targeting. This is part of their preparation for the inevitable economic crisis that will hurt millions of workers and the fascist policies they will enact in its wake. They fear our power, and they want to be able to protect their wealth and power at any cost.
The capitalists cannot have this weapon. We must stand up against it and demand it be abolished.
Trump’s tax cuts went into the bank vaults of billionaires, instead of creating jobs. The treasury is being looted by military war profiteers, banks are reaping record profits, and wages can’t buy the products workers need to get by. Around the world capitalists are sending workers on a race to the bottom. These factors are intensifying the inherent tendency of capitalism to produce crisis after crisis with the working class and oppressed picking up the tab every time.
The monopoly for-profit media (in all, six companies) are sounding the alarm of an imminent new recession. Hundreds of articles are being written but not one considers what a crash would mean for working people, only how best to save the capitalist system and the obscene profits that it guarantees the rich.
While imperialist countries cooperate to occupy and loot other countries and scour the world for arms contracts and cheap wages (enforced by U.S. weaponry given to local puppets), they also are fierce rivals for market domination. This led to both WWI and WWII, which left hundreds of millions dead. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are united in their devotion to the imperialist cause. That is why both vote to increase the military budget time and time again. Different style, same outcome.
In 2008, the “Great Recession” began.
The last inevitable bust happened when Bush Jr. was in office, and the capitalist government ran to bail out the banks and others who caused the crash. First, they instantly found $700 billion ($700,000,000,000) of our money and gave it out to the banks and insurance industry in a program called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program).
Obama was elected in 2008 and many workers, Black and white, believed he would feel their pain already under way. Instead, Obama continued the bank bailout and allowed the Federal Reserve Bank (the Central Bank of the U.S.—with our money in it) to hand out $14.4 Trillion dollars ($14,400,000,000,000) of free money, without interest, to desperately prop up the teetering capitalist system. A University of Missouri study says $29 Trillion, but the true figure is kept a state secret. Other Central Banks around the world did the same. Nothing was done to stop the bleeding in the working class.
Immense suffering of the people ignored.
Demonstrations by workers and youth demanded to bail out the people, not the banks, but this did not happen with the force needed, a point we’ll come back to again. Here’s what did happen.
30 million jobs were lost. Nine million homes were foreclosed. (The current Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin was named “foreclosure king” for his role in this massive swindle). Pensions were cut by more than 25%, and in some cases completely wiped out. Across the globe more than 90 million jobs were lost and poverty soared.
Recovery for corporate profits not workers’ wages.
While many jobs have replaced those that were lost, most are at much lower wages and without benefits, and millions are temporary or part-time jobs. Banks, however, are reporting record profits of $240 billion, with just six raking in $100 billion, in part because of the sickening tax cuts and handouts to the rich, sold to us as incentives to create jobs, which is a lie. The banks also make massive profits from low wages, opioid deaths, destruction of the environment, mass incarceration of U.S. and migrant workers, and the warfare capitalist state. The banks and corporations either hoarded tax savings or used it to buy their own stocks. Goldman Sachs Bank (GS), best friend to Trump, Obama and the Clintons, scored especially big from the tax cuts. The current Trump cabinet has 5 Goldman Sachs executives running our lives. The ex-president of GS, Gary Cohn, is president of the Economic Council.
Repeat history or organize?
It is often said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Whether in 2020 or 2022, capitalist recession or depression is inevitable. Relying on saviors such as the Democratic Party, warfare or bailing out bosses is not the way to go. We need to understand how capitalism is a dying system of total anarchy meant only for the 1%.
The global workforce produces all the wealth in society which is stolen by capitalist free loaders who scapegoat the poor and immigrants while they hide in their gold-encrusted mansions. The election of social democrats to capitalist government will not stop this, and most often they collaborate with the capitalists to enact anti-worker measures and cuts to social programs. It is this collaborationist policy that has led millions of workers in Europe who have historically voted socialist to look to the fascist parties as happened during the period of depression in Germany when the Nazis rose to power.
As revolutionary socialist workers, the New Orleans Workers Group is building an independent organization of workers fighting for our own class interests. We need to prepare now in our minds and work to get this message of struggle, global solidarity, workers unity and independent action out. Join us.
The companies included IBM, Netflix, General Motors, Chevron, and more. Despite reporting profits of $11.2 billion without paying a cent in taxes, Amazon actually applied for a refund of nearly $129 million.
Companies that claimed tax cuts would create jobs have laid off thousands.
A partial list of these mega greedy companies include AT&T, Capital One, Cox Enterprises, Ford, General Dynamics, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, Lockheed Martin, Macys, Northrop Grumman, T-Mobile, Verizon, Viacom, Walmart, Walt Disney, Union Pacific, CSX, Toys R Us, Sears/Kmart, and JC Penney.
ITEP is the industrial tax exemption program put into Louisiana state legislation in 1974, and for the past 45 years, it has been the most notorious property tax abatement program in the United States. It’s sold as a way to bring jobs to the state by luring corporations and large businesses with rebates on their taxes or by totally exempting these companies from paying their property taxes. In fact, over the last twenty years, Louisiana based companies have dodged $23 billion in taxes through this program while cutting net employment by more than 26,000 jobs.
The state is generous with tax abatements, offering corporations 10-year 100% tax exemptions. The tax dollars these corporations are not paying could be used to provide us workers with better living and working conditions. These tax dollars should be going to state and local government and streamed into schools, infrastructure, public transportation, etc. Responding to public outrage over this theft of public money, in 2016 Gov. Edwards announced changes in ITEP through an executive order, allowing for local governing bodies (like school boards) to weigh in on the decision-making when corporations submit ITEP applications for property tax exemptions.
Less than 6 months ago, members of two teachers’ unions in East Baton Rouge unanimously voted to hold a 1-day strike when they found out ExxonMobil would be submitting their routine request for a $6.5 million-dollar property exemption. Shortly after the teachers and school employees declared their threat, ExxonMobil withdrew its request for tax abatement. Power to the people! Go Louisiana Association of Educators and East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers!
As a result of the school board having a seat at the Board of Commerce and Industry meetings, and voicing their objections to these thieving corporations, now two LA state legislators are proposing legislation for the upcoming session that would limit local involvement in ITEP. This was announced in January 2019. So—news flash—it is 100% obvious where our state legislators stand: with the million- and billion-dollar corporations, not with the people.
Both Democrat and Republican politicians are making their objective apparent: to keep their campaign donations flowing, while teachers are underpaid, schools do not have resources to provide the necessary attention and education to our children, our roads have sinkholes, healthcare/sick pay/vacation pay are considered “benefits” and people are struggling. We are smart though! When workers get together to study, discuss, and strategize (like the teachers’ unions did), we can overpower the corruption! Local involvement is necessary to ensure we workers are taken care of, because the business government ain’t doin’ it!
Banks are the biggest profiteers from the drug trade. But bank owners are never jailed. HSBC, Western Union, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Citigroup, Wachovia among many others have allegedly failed to comply with American anti-money laundering (AML) laws.
While some poor youth has to spend 20 years of their life in Angola for possession, Wachovia Bank only has to pay a fine for laundering $378 billion in drug money over three years.
Charles A. Intriago, president of the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists, observed, “If you’re an individual, and get caught, you get hammered. But if you’re a big bank, and you’re caught moving money for a drug dealer, you don’t have to worry. You just fork over a monetary penalty, and then raise your fees to make up for it.”
“Until we see bankers walking off in handcuffs to face charges in these cases, nothing is going to change,” Intriago adds. “These monetary penalties are just a cost of doing business to them, like paying for a new corporate jet.”
U.S. Military Protects Drug Profits
Afghanistan—while occupied by the U.S. military—increased poppy production by 50% according to the 2013 Afghanistan Opium Survey by the United Nations. The U.S.’s only friends there are the opium producers, so the U.S protects them.
The head of the NRA, Oliver North, used military planes to bring in drugs to fund right-wing death squads in Nicaragua. The U.S. military and CIA were well known as a source of drugs during the Vietnam War era. Now they hide it better.
Pharmaceutical Companies Make a Killing from Addiction
The super wealthy Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma. Purdue Pharma plead guilty to federal criminal charges for misleading doctors, regulators, and patients about the addictiveness of Oxycontin yet the company continues to rake in billions every year. Opioids like Oxy kill an average of 200 people every day across the U.S. More than 400,000 people have died from overdoses in the last 20 years.
PUT THE BANKERS, MILITARY AND DRUG COMPANY OWNERS IN JAIL AND SEIZE THEIR MONEY!
