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Parents and Students Protest For-Profit School Closures

By Dylan Borne

They Demand: “Arrest the Board!”

On December 20th, 200 parents, teachers, and students packed the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) meeting to demand that McDonogh 35 Senior High School remain direct-run by the Board. They exposed the OPSB for intentionally letting McDonogh 35 fail so that a for-profit charter corporation could take it over.

“The School Board is coming as a business man. It’s not that they don’t know what they’re doing, it’s that they don’t care… OPSB has never raised an arm or eyebrow to their word, they shy away from it” –Alex, parent

“We’ve been told so many untruths, the word ‘lie’ isn’t strong enough… Pres. Trump has a better track record.” –Woodson, McDonogh class of ’85 graduate

Statement from youth organization Rethink New Orleans: “Equitable education for all young people to stand in solidarity with all students in New Orleans, and we want to make sure we keep McDonogh 35 direct-run”

“The police officers around here remind me of the charter I went to… y’all prepared us more for prison than anything else… for me this is life or death” –Antonio Travis, Black Man Rising

“Any school district worth its salt would jump at the opportunity to work with parents that are this involved… don’t say it’s about children if you don’t respect the voices of their parents”—G 2 Brown, Journey 4 Justice Alliance

“The time for us pleading, begging crying is over, the time now is to fight… we’re gonna recall the entire board. They refuse to listen to children, parents, and community. We’re done. We’re done begging and making our case. We sent them reports, we sent them data, we had people from Chicago come and talk about what happened to them, we’ve done it all. So if you’re still not listening, it’s over…we don’t wanna wait until it’s time to vote.”—Ashana Bigard, Families and Friends of Incarcerated Children

Paid representatives of Inspire NOLA, the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, and other pro-charter organizations tried to make speeches. Audience members drowned them out with boos and chants. Parents and youth yelled “Whose Schools? Our Schools!” and “Arrest ‘em and do the time it took to make ‘em!”

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Congress of Day Laborers Fights Back Against Wage Theft And Police Discrimination

By Dylan Borne

On September 21st, over 100 people showed up in a playground in Kenner for a vigil called by Congreso de Jornaleros (Congress of Day Laborers) against wage theft and police discrimination. This protest was a response to a local employer, Santos Silva, refusing to pay his employees $700’s worth of wages. When the workers brought up that they could sue, Kenner police responded by taking the employer’s side and attempting to intimidate the workers. Multiple pastors, community leaders, and activists spoke up in support. Among them were representatives from the teachers’ union Jefferson Federation of Teachers and the construction workers’ union Laborers’ International Union of North America. They called for the unity of all workers, regardless of skin color, gender, or nationality, in the fight against the bosses that exploit us all. Many immigrant workers spoke up about their struggles with Louisiana police departments. Local police forces routinely arrest immigrants and beat detainees, even injured ones (one worker spoke about how he was beaten even though he was on crutches because of his broken pelvis). Kenner police also routinely turns immigrants into Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport them. But, as one worker, María, put it: “I am not afraid, I am angry because of everything that’s been done to us.”

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Black Cyclists Fined 5 Times the Rate of Whites

By Dylan Borne

Recent reporting in the Times Picayune by Chelsea Brasted has dug up some disgusting, but not surprising, statistics about the NOPD’s treatment of Black bicycle riders.

Based on information from the “Regional Planning Commission’s 2015 New Orleans Pedestrian and Bicycle Count Report” and the New Orleans Municipal and Traffic Court: Black people make up only 26% of overall cyclists while whites make up 69%. Yet Black cyclists get hit with 63% of the fines for biking violations while whites only get 32%.

In other words, cops are over 5 times more likely to give citations to Black cyclists than white ones.

Most of these violations are totally harmless, and the ones that can cause problems don’t merit a huge fine of hundreds or thousands of dollars (a penalty that can suck working class people into debt traps and deepen poverty).

These fines are just another example of the laws being on the books for the purpose of the police using them to attack black working class communities. In this respect, it’s no different than how the police in Louisiana are three times more likely to arrest black people for marijuana than white people (Southern Poverty Law Center), or how black teenage boys nationally are 21 times more likely to get killed by police than white ones (ProPublica).

It’s also a way of raising revenue for the city without stepping on the toes of the rich. Instead of taxing hotels, casinos, and restaurants that profit from the workers of New Orleans, the city government taxes ordinary working people through these fines.

These fines, just like traffic cameras do not make us safer, just more desperate. The city can provide free education to all riders and car drivers, rather than further impoverishing them with another oppressive fine.

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Student Hunger on U.S. College Campuses

By Dylan Borne

36% of students are food insecure, according to a national study published by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab in April of this year. Out of the 40,000 students surveyed at 66 schools, another 36% are housing insecure and a full 9% of university students and 12% of community college students are homeless.

This means tens of thousands of students nationally have to pick between food, a roof, and textbooks. In other words: either you get a meal now or a paycheck later.

On a historical level, what these numbers show is that greater numbers of working class people are attending college. Being a student isn’t just for the privileged anymore, and bosses are becoming more and more demanding for workers with degrees.

But while colleges might be opening their doors to low-income youth, they’re not lowering tuition for them. In fact, they’re taking advantage of working class students’ desperation. Tuition rates are skyrocketing and university administrators are raking in 6 figures or more. The UL system’s President makes $400,000, and at the highest end Tulane’s last president stepped down with an ending salary of $1.6 million.

Pretending they’ve found the end-all solution, some colleges, like Southeastern and LSU, have set up food pantries. But these are just breadcrumbs. LSU only lets students use their food pantry twice a week (when their president is bringing home a $600,000 salary!).

Even with food pantries, what will students do about housing? Healthcare? Crushing debt?

Pantries are surely helpful, but they’re clearly not enough– they don’t grasp the root of the problem.

When schools are run like businesses for administrators’ profit, working class students suffer. Colleges should be run to provide education before anything else, and students need real decision-making power to make sure that happens. A Students’ Assembly should have a say in whether or not a tuition hike or food limit gets passed. It’s impossible to get a real education while you can’t even meet your basic needs, and the school leadership’s greed shouldn’t be getting in the way.

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Trump Threatens World With Nuclear War

DISMANTLE U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARSENAL

By Dylan Borne

It’s very clear that everyone in Korea wants peace. On January 2nd, North Korea offered an olive branch to the South: they asked to attend the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. South Korea accepted and responded with its own offer—diplomatic talks— which the North accepted. To many Koreans, peace and reunification might be possible.

Yet the United States government, controlled by its capitalist ruling class, continues to press for war. Korea sits on trillions of dollars’ worth of mineral wealth and tens of millions of laborers. The rich that run the US see them like they see their workers— as possible resources. And the US government is stopping at nothing to wage war to take those resources. That’s why:

  • It’s the US, not North or South Korea, that split the country by imposing the 38th parallel in 1945 (a divide and conquer approach)
  • It’s the US that continues to occupy the peninsula with almost 30,000 troops and forced the South to give the US permission in their constitution (Koreans can’t even call their country their own!)
  • It’s the US that continues to make nuclear threats (Trump screaming “my nuclear button is bigger!”)

The corporate media has no right to make North Koreans look like they’re the ones that are war-crazy. Nor does it have a right to make it look like the South supports the US government. The US has over 4,600 nuclear weapons and North Korea has no more than 20. Koreans in the South have been protesting every part of the US military occupation for decades. North Korea pledged that it would never strike first in nuclear war, and it even promised it would stop testing weapons if only the US stopped conducting military drills. But the US refuses when Koreans on both sides ask for peace.

The ruling class in the US wants war for the same reason that it wants to raise our rents and lower our wages: money and wealth. Every bullet, rifle, tank, missile, and warship commissioned by the US military adds to arms contractors’ profits. That’s not even counting all the looting US corporations could do after a war. And our taxes pay for it all. Meanwhile, the rich line their pockets, workers still live from paycheck to paycheck, and the government’s so focused on war that it hasn’t done a thing for our roads or schools.

The Workers Group stands in solidarity with the people of Korea, both for their sake and so we can see money being spent on workers at home.

Let’s see schools built before the next bomb.

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Student Debt Slavery: the Ruling Class’s Latest Shackles on Workers

by Dylan Borne

“I am a 60 year old mom and I work as a janitor to help my son pay his student loans. I have arthritis which makes my job even harder.”

A woman named Darlene posted this on studentdebtcrisis.org. She’s one of the 44 million Americans carrying crushing student debt. In the past decade, student debt rose to the highest it’s ever been. Now more than $1.4 trillion, it has overtaken auto loan, home equity, and even credit card debt. The average student graduates from college with $35,000 to repay—and counting. In just three years, between 2010 and 2013, the number of “seriously delinquent” loans (loans too high to repay) doubled. Many indebted workers are college dropouts, pressured to go to college by the competitive economy but ending up even worse off than if they had never gone to school.

But lenders and college administrators are laughing their way to the bank. More loans mean more people paying for college, so colleges take advantage and raise tuition. High tuition means more students take out more loans. The cycle continues, stacking up to a debt mountain nearly the size of Texas’s economy.

Yet real wages and salaries are declining. The value of a college degree now is less than half its value than in the early 2000s, according to the Pew Research Center. Students will have to stop paying; the tower of debt will have to fall.

When this happens, the banks won’t suffer. Whether there’s a Republican or a Democrat in office, the government will bail them out like both Bush and Obama did during the mortgage crisis.

But a solution is possible.

The New Orleans Workers Group demands that the government bail out the people instead of the banks. Cancel student debt. The billionaire bankers can afford to downsize the mansions we bought for them with our interest payments.

College should be free for everyone—like it is in socialist countries like Cuba—so the student debt can’t be amassed in the first place. Banks should be replaced by People’s Banks, overseen by ordinary workers to give out low-interest loans based on helping people sustainably pay for what they need, instead of exploiting them for the bankers’ profit.