https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNBNbHK2jgw
Friday, April 30, 2021
Rzewski - The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (with score)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvestPHTuWc
Police Make MULTIPLE Arrests After Judge Denies Andrew Brown Bodycam Release to the Public
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIEHtIOij6I
One week after fatal accident killed crane operator Terry Garr, millwright dies of COVID-19 at Sterling Stamping Plant
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/28/ssp-a28.html
Our reporters
a day ago
One week after the death of crane operator Terry Garr at Stellantis' Sterling Stamping Plant north of Detroit, the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter has learned that another worker, millwright Mark Bruce, has passed away from COVID-19. Multiple sources confirmed the death to a reporting team during a shift change on Tuesday afternoon.
Sterling Stamping, the largest automotive stamping plant in the world, saw its largest one-month surge in new infections in March, with 28 confirmed cases, up from one in the entire month of February. This coincided with a record-breaking surge in cases throughout the state of Michigan, driven primarily by school reopenings. The Autoworker Newsletter had previously learned of severe cases in the plant which required hospitalization, but this is the first confirmed death in plant.
Sterling Stamping workers (WSWS Media)
While United Auto Workers Local 1264 has run several death notices of autoworkers and their family members over the last two months, it has yet to report on Bruce's death. One worker said the UAW and the company were concealing information about outbreaks of COVID-19 in the plant. He said he knew Mark Bruce for a long time. “Mark died of COVID last Friday and nothing is being said about it. I only learned about it because another worker texted me.
“We’re getting notices, sometimes seven times a week, about new COVID cases. But they aren’t saying where and what workers could have been exposed.”
Nationwide, the UAW has helped management impose a blackout on infections and deaths in the auto plants in order not to instill “panic.” This prevents workers who are potentially exposed to the deadly virus from taking the necessary measures to protect themselves, co-workers and family, ensuring even more infections and death. In addition to covering up infections, management is penalizing workers who contract the virus or stay home with symptoms, thus encouraging workers to report to the job when they are sick.
Amid widespread anger over the death of Garr, crushed to death during a die staging at the end of his shift last week, the UAW went into damage control on Tuesday, announcing a token, one minute of silence each shift to honor Garr on April 28, Workers Memorial Day.
While workers want to know the truth about the circumstances which led to his death, in a statement posted on the UAW Local 1264 Facebook page at the plant, LaShawn English, the local president, offered prayers and condolences but no new information on the tragedy. Neither did English outline what steps the UAW is taking to investigate Garr’s death or encourage workers with information to come forward.
While United Auto Workers Local 1264 has run several death notices of autoworkers and their family members over the last two months, it has yet to report on Bruce's death. One worker said the UAW and the company were concealing information about outbreaks of COVID-19 in the plant. He said he knew Mark Bruce for a long time. “Mark died of COVID last Friday and nothing is being said about it. I only learned about it because another worker texted me.
“We’re getting notices, sometimes seven times a week, about new COVID cases. But they aren’t saying where and what workers could have been exposed.”
Nationwide, the UAW has helped management impose a blackout on infections and deaths in the auto plants in order not to instill “panic.” This prevents workers who are potentially exposed to the deadly virus from taking the necessary measures to protect themselves, co-workers and family, ensuring even more infections and death. In addition to covering up infections, management is penalizing workers who contract the virus or stay home with symptoms, thus encouraging workers to report to the job when they are sick.
Amid widespread anger over the death of Garr, crushed to death during a die staging at the end of his shift last week, the UAW went into damage control on Tuesday, announcing a token, one minute of silence each shift to honor Garr on April 28, Workers Memorial Day.
While workers want to know the truth about the circumstances which led to his death, in a statement posted on the UAW Local 1264 Facebook page at the plant, LaShawn English, the local president, offered prayers and condolences but no new information on the tragedy. Neither did English outline what steps the UAW is taking to investigate Garr’s death or encourage workers with information to come forward.
Sterling Stamping
A preliminary report from the Michigan Occupational and Health Administration (MIOSHA) indicates Garr was staging a die, which was lifted by a crane. However, the die was not aligned with the locating pins.
While standing between the die and the press, the crane operator maneuvered the die onto the bolster pin. "The misalignment of the hoist to the center point of the die caused the die to swing to the home position, resulting in the die striking the crane operator," the report said. Garr was transported to an area hospital, where he later died, according to Sterling Heights police.
A full report from MIOSHA may take months to produce, according to the Macomb Daily, which originally reported on the preliminary findings.
A worker who contacted the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter in the wake of the accident suggested the tragedy had been caused by management pressuring die setters to “disregard safety over production.” The fatal accident was due, the worker wrote, because of “Management being in a hurry and pressur[ing] die setters to hurry up and get a job done that management assigned towards the end of shift.”
While Bruce and Garr died of different causes, the common factor in both deaths is management's determination to maintain production in the teeth of the pandemic. While Stellantis, like the other major auto companies, has been forced to idle much of its production due to a global chip shortage, the company is determined to keep Sterling Stamping Plant, which produces critical body panels for much of the company's North American assembly plants at all costs.
Across the street at Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, which produces the company's best-selling and highly profitable Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck, production workers have been on forced over time for most of the year, and skilled trades are working on a brutal new 12 hour day, 7 days per week work schedule.
During a shift change on Tuesday, workers said that the death of Garr coming at the time of surging COVID-19 infections underscored the fact that workers take their lives in their own hands every day they come in to work. “We are signing up for risk every day we work here,” one said.
Said another, “I’ve heard from other workers who said when the plant manager first heard about the accident, he asked if Garr was wearing a hard hat when he was killed, as if that would have saved him.
Other than that, “we haven’t heard anything. Maybe he was working alone when he shouldn’t have been. Maybe they were rushing him to finish a job. All I know is that it is being covered up and we’re not being told anything.”
The situation at Sterling Stamping underscores the urgent need for a four-week national shutdown of production, a demand raised in a statement by the Autoworker Rank-and-File Safety Committee Network. This is not only necessary to prevent new infections spreading outward from plants into surrounding communities, but to put an end to the reckless and dangerous regime of speedup and overtime imposed by management with the support of the UAW.
A veteran worker at the Warren Truck Assembly Plant commented, “Last March, workers stopped the line and that saved lives. We did it out of pure fear. We were afraid for our lives and the lives of our families, and we were asking, ‘Doesn’t anybody hear us?' Six workers have died at Warren Truck and the company and the union did nothing. The UAW are management’s spies and muscle. They are totally corrupt and in cahoots with the bosses.
“Workers getting killed in the plant and dying from COVID is like going back to the immigrant garment workers who were killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. It took a lot of tragedies before things changed. Today, there are tragedies and there are no improvements. Now we have two entities against us, the UAW and the company.”
We urge workers to support the call by Sterling Heights Assembly Rank-and-File Safety Committee Sunday for a full and independent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death of Terry Garr. For more information contact autoworkers@wsws.org .
A preliminary report from the Michigan Occupational and Health Administration (MIOSHA) indicates Garr was staging a die, which was lifted by a crane. However, the die was not aligned with the locating pins.
While standing between the die and the press, the crane operator maneuvered the die onto the bolster pin. "The misalignment of the hoist to the center point of the die caused the die to swing to the home position, resulting in the die striking the crane operator," the report said. Garr was transported to an area hospital, where he later died, according to Sterling Heights police.
A full report from MIOSHA may take months to produce, according to the Macomb Daily, which originally reported on the preliminary findings.
A worker who contacted the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter in the wake of the accident suggested the tragedy had been caused by management pressuring die setters to “disregard safety over production.” The fatal accident was due, the worker wrote, because of “Management being in a hurry and pressur[ing] die setters to hurry up and get a job done that management assigned towards the end of shift.”
While Bruce and Garr died of different causes, the common factor in both deaths is management's determination to maintain production in the teeth of the pandemic. While Stellantis, like the other major auto companies, has been forced to idle much of its production due to a global chip shortage, the company is determined to keep Sterling Stamping Plant, which produces critical body panels for much of the company's North American assembly plants at all costs.
Across the street at Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, which produces the company's best-selling and highly profitable Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck, production workers have been on forced over time for most of the year, and skilled trades are working on a brutal new 12 hour day, 7 days per week work schedule.
During a shift change on Tuesday, workers said that the death of Garr coming at the time of surging COVID-19 infections underscored the fact that workers take their lives in their own hands every day they come in to work. “We are signing up for risk every day we work here,” one said.
Said another, “I’ve heard from other workers who said when the plant manager first heard about the accident, he asked if Garr was wearing a hard hat when he was killed, as if that would have saved him.
Other than that, “we haven’t heard anything. Maybe he was working alone when he shouldn’t have been. Maybe they were rushing him to finish a job. All I know is that it is being covered up and we’re not being told anything.”
The situation at Sterling Stamping underscores the urgent need for a four-week national shutdown of production, a demand raised in a statement by the Autoworker Rank-and-File Safety Committee Network. This is not only necessary to prevent new infections spreading outward from plants into surrounding communities, but to put an end to the reckless and dangerous regime of speedup and overtime imposed by management with the support of the UAW.
A veteran worker at the Warren Truck Assembly Plant commented, “Last March, workers stopped the line and that saved lives. We did it out of pure fear. We were afraid for our lives and the lives of our families, and we were asking, ‘Doesn’t anybody hear us?' Six workers have died at Warren Truck and the company and the union did nothing. The UAW are management’s spies and muscle. They are totally corrupt and in cahoots with the bosses.
“Workers getting killed in the plant and dying from COVID is like going back to the immigrant garment workers who were killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. It took a lot of tragedies before things changed. Today, there are tragedies and there are no improvements. Now we have two entities against us, the UAW and the company.”
We urge workers to support the call by Sterling Heights Assembly Rank-and-File Safety Committee Sunday for a full and independent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death of Terry Garr. For more information contact autoworkers@wsws.org .
Capitalism prepares to fight wars, not the pandemic
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/28/pers-a28.html
Andre Damon
a day ago
Last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread from country to country, working people responded to each new outbreak of the disease, first in China, then Italy, then America, with sympathy and expressions of solidarity.
Workers around the world cheered the doctors of Wuhan and the nurses of Bergamo. Doctors corresponded with their international colleagues, sharing the latest knowledge and tips to save the lives of patients entrusted to them. And scientists closely collaborated across national borders to ascertain the origins of the disease, sequence its genome, and aid the development of vaccines.
U.S. Air Force F-35 stealth fighter jets drop bombs over the Korean Peninsula, South Korea. (South Korea Defense Ministry via AP)
But the world’s governments had other ideas. Last year, as more than 3 million people lost their lives amid a raging pandemic, governments around the world spent a record sum, nearly $2 trillion, on weapons and preparations for war.
Even though global economic output declined by 4.4 percent—the greatest economic collapse since World War II—military spending around the world surged by 2.6 percent.
The United States, the global leader in deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, with 587,000 and counting, is also by far the world’s greatest military spender. The US increased its arms spending by 4.4 percent last year, to $870 billion, more than the next 10 countries combined.
The US military is throwing around money with reckless abandon. Every branch of Washington’s bloated nuclear weapons program, from intercontinental ballistic missiles, to supersonic stealth bombers and nuclear missile submarines, is being rebuilt and expanded from the ground up. Perhaps most dangerously of all, the United States intends to double military spending in the Asia-Pacific region, using the money to ring the Chinese coastline with land-based ballistic missiles stationed in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
The US government’s spending on the military massively dwarfed all emergency federal spending on health care and vaccinations since the start of the pandemic. The CARES Act, passed in March of 2020, included only a few tens of billions of dollars in emergency health care spending, while the American Rescue Plan passed under current President Joe Biden was just one-eighth the annual US military budget for spending on emergency health care measures.
All the world’s imperialist countries are massively expanding their military spending. Leading the pack is Germany, whose aggressive quest for world domination helped trigger two world wars. Germany’s military spending increased by 5 percent last year and is up by nearly a third over the past decade.
France and Britain each increased their spending by 2.9 percent, significantly more than the global average.
The governments of the United States, France, Germany and the UK have all rejected the closure of non-essential businesses to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that society cannot afford these critical life-saving measures.
French President Emmanuel Macron declared that the population would have to “learn to live with” the virus. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in rejecting lockdowns, insisted that the alternative was better: to “let the bodies pile up in their thousands.” In the United States, claiming that mass infection would lead to a faster economic recovery, Trump administration officials declared, “We want them infected.”
But while claiming that containing the pandemic is too expensive, capitalist governments all over the world found $2 trillion for their armed forces and arms manufacturers.
The fight against the pandemic is by its very nature a global struggle. In its statement for the International Online May Day Rally, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) explained:
The emergence of new variants where the pandemic is spreading, potentially resistant to vaccines, demonstrates that the pandemic cannot be eradicated in any single country unless it is eradicated globally. National competition between the capitalist powers has blocked a globally coordinated response to the pandemic. Now the life-saving vaccine is being hoarded by the dominant capitalist countries and used as an instrument in their geopolitical intrigues.
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a ferocious eruption of nationalism, xenophobia, and militarism by capitalist governments and ruling elites around the world.
Former US President Donald Trump called the COVID-19 pandemic the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.” The Biden administration is continuing Trump’s efforts to demonize China, falsely claiming that Beijing is responsible for a cover-up and implying that the disease was a biological weapon created in a laboratory. As a result of these efforts to demonize China, racially motivated violent attacks against Asian Americans have surged over the past year.
The massive and record financing of the means of destruction and death, when what is necessary is a globally coordinated emergency program to save lives, exemplifies the historically outmoded and bankrupt character of the entire capitalist order.
In its criminal indifference to human life, in its efforts to desensitize the population to mass death from the pandemic, the ruling elites are at the same time seeking to prepare the population for the horrific consequences of world war.
All over the world, however, a different axis for politics and social organization is emerging. Workers are engaged in a wave of strikes and struggles in opposition to the subordination of all social and economic life to the enrichment of the capitalist oligarchy.
To unify these struggles and develop a counteroffensive against the homicidal policies of governments controlled by the capitalist ruling elites, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) statement called for the formation of an International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. The IWA-RFC will fight to unify workers throughout the world against all efforts to pit worker against worker, nation against nation.
The development of a powerful counteroffensive must be connected to the building of a socialist leadership in the working class. The fight against militarist violence, as with the fight against the pandemic, is at the same time a fight against the capitalist system and the oligarchy it serves. We urge all of our readers to join this effort and register to attend the International May Day Rally today.
But the world’s governments had other ideas. Last year, as more than 3 million people lost their lives amid a raging pandemic, governments around the world spent a record sum, nearly $2 trillion, on weapons and preparations for war.
Even though global economic output declined by 4.4 percent—the greatest economic collapse since World War II—military spending around the world surged by 2.6 percent.
The United States, the global leader in deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, with 587,000 and counting, is also by far the world’s greatest military spender. The US increased its arms spending by 4.4 percent last year, to $870 billion, more than the next 10 countries combined.
The US military is throwing around money with reckless abandon. Every branch of Washington’s bloated nuclear weapons program, from intercontinental ballistic missiles, to supersonic stealth bombers and nuclear missile submarines, is being rebuilt and expanded from the ground up. Perhaps most dangerously of all, the United States intends to double military spending in the Asia-Pacific region, using the money to ring the Chinese coastline with land-based ballistic missiles stationed in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
The US government’s spending on the military massively dwarfed all emergency federal spending on health care and vaccinations since the start of the pandemic. The CARES Act, passed in March of 2020, included only a few tens of billions of dollars in emergency health care spending, while the American Rescue Plan passed under current President Joe Biden was just one-eighth the annual US military budget for spending on emergency health care measures.
All the world’s imperialist countries are massively expanding their military spending. Leading the pack is Germany, whose aggressive quest for world domination helped trigger two world wars. Germany’s military spending increased by 5 percent last year and is up by nearly a third over the past decade.
France and Britain each increased their spending by 2.9 percent, significantly more than the global average.
The governments of the United States, France, Germany and the UK have all rejected the closure of non-essential businesses to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that society cannot afford these critical life-saving measures.
French President Emmanuel Macron declared that the population would have to “learn to live with” the virus. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in rejecting lockdowns, insisted that the alternative was better: to “let the bodies pile up in their thousands.” In the United States, claiming that mass infection would lead to a faster economic recovery, Trump administration officials declared, “We want them infected.”
But while claiming that containing the pandemic is too expensive, capitalist governments all over the world found $2 trillion for their armed forces and arms manufacturers.
The fight against the pandemic is by its very nature a global struggle. In its statement for the International Online May Day Rally, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) explained:
The emergence of new variants where the pandemic is spreading, potentially resistant to vaccines, demonstrates that the pandemic cannot be eradicated in any single country unless it is eradicated globally. National competition between the capitalist powers has blocked a globally coordinated response to the pandemic. Now the life-saving vaccine is being hoarded by the dominant capitalist countries and used as an instrument in their geopolitical intrigues.
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a ferocious eruption of nationalism, xenophobia, and militarism by capitalist governments and ruling elites around the world.
Former US President Donald Trump called the COVID-19 pandemic the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.” The Biden administration is continuing Trump’s efforts to demonize China, falsely claiming that Beijing is responsible for a cover-up and implying that the disease was a biological weapon created in a laboratory. As a result of these efforts to demonize China, racially motivated violent attacks against Asian Americans have surged over the past year.
The massive and record financing of the means of destruction and death, when what is necessary is a globally coordinated emergency program to save lives, exemplifies the historically outmoded and bankrupt character of the entire capitalist order.
In its criminal indifference to human life, in its efforts to desensitize the population to mass death from the pandemic, the ruling elites are at the same time seeking to prepare the population for the horrific consequences of world war.
All over the world, however, a different axis for politics and social organization is emerging. Workers are engaged in a wave of strikes and struggles in opposition to the subordination of all social and economic life to the enrichment of the capitalist oligarchy.
To unify these struggles and develop a counteroffensive against the homicidal policies of governments controlled by the capitalist ruling elites, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) statement called for the formation of an International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. The IWA-RFC will fight to unify workers throughout the world against all efforts to pit worker against worker, nation against nation.
The development of a powerful counteroffensive must be connected to the building of a socialist leadership in the working class. The fight against militarist violence, as with the fight against the pandemic, is at the same time a fight against the capitalist system and the oligarchy it serves. We urge all of our readers to join this effort and register to attend the International May Day Rally today.
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