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Fires burn throughout Detroit

September 8, 2010

Dozens of houses burned down in Detroit Tuesday as fires blazed through all parts of the city, overwhelming the local fire department.

Firefighters were brought in from the surrounding cities of Harper Woods, Warren, Dearborn, Grosse Pointe and Highland Park, the first time the city called in outside firefighters since the 1967 riots.

Residents and firemen said that the majority of the fires were caused by downed electrical wiring. According to residents, DTE, the city’s main electrical company, failed to respond in a timely manner to complaints about the failure of the electrical infrastructure.

A total of 85 structures caught fire after heavy winds downed over 700 power lines, according to statements by Detroit Fire Commissioner James Mack and DTE officials.

The largest fire, which destroyed at least a dozen houses, took place on Robinwood Street on the city’s East Side. The blaze was apparently set off when a power line or transformer, which had been shooting sparks for days, ignited and set fire to a garage.

Shirley and J.T. Hargrave, who owned the home where the transformer was located, had been calling DTE since Friday. The company refused to send a technician, they said, telling the family to “call 911” if there was a fire.

Detroit fires expose criminality of DTE and Bing administration

September 8, 2010

The house fires that have swept through sections of Detroit Tuesday evening, destroying or damaging at least 85 homes and other structures, are a product of the actions of the Detroit city government and energy giant DTE. Decades of budget-cutting have starved essential city services, such as fire protection, of needed funds. At the same time, DTE has neglected the upkeep of basic electrical infrastructure, focusing instead on raising utility rates and ruthlessly cutting people off from gas and electricity.

In a press conference Wednesday Mayor Bing claimed the fires were simply a “natural disaster” that no one could have predicted or prepared for. This is a crude lie aimed at concealing the criminal actions of DTE—on whose corporate board Bing served for twenty years—and the Democratic Party, which subordinates the needs of the city’s working class residents to the profit interests of big business.

BP warns Congress offshore drilling regulations will threaten compensation fund

September 6, 2010

In the past week, oil giant BP has begun warning Congress that if legislation placing limitations on offshore oil drilling were to become law, it would endanger the ability of the company to finance the $20 billion compensation fund for victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

BP’s threats come, in part, as a reaction to recent legislation passed by the US House of Representatives known as the CLEAR Act. Ostensibly an offshore oil drilling reform program, the act contains provisions that would effectively prevent BP from acquiring further offshore oil leases or drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico.

The provisions, added by Democratic Representative George Miller of California, would prevent any oil company from drilling in the American Outer Continental Shelf that has been shown to have a record of worker safety violations five times the industry average and at whose facilities more than 10 deaths have occurred. Currently, BP is the only oil company that would be affected by such regulations.

The Nation on the Detroit march for “Jobs, Justice and Peace”: Deceit and self-delusion

September 5, 2010

On August 28, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Bob King and a host of other union leaders and Democratic Party politicians addressed a crowd of several thousand people in Detroit. The march and rally were held in the name of “Jobs, Justice and Peace.”

More than 40 organizations—which on paper still have hundreds of thousands of members and supporters—sponsored the rally, but it was largely boycotted by the population. The participants, for the most part, were lower-ranking union officials, officials of the Michigan Democratic Party (which was holding its convention in Detroit), and representatives of the local African-American elite.

In the most impoverished city in America, with a real jobless rate of about 50 percent, the fact that only a few thousand turned out to hear Jackson and King, despite a major buildup for the event by the local media, testifies to the lack of significant popular support for or belief in the two figures and the organizations they represent.

Letters from auto workers on Indianapolis struggle

September 3, 2010

The following letters were sent by auto workers in Indianapolis and Michigan to the WSWS in response to the ongoing struggle by workers in Indianapolis, Indiana. The workers in Indiana are resisting efforts by General Motors and JD Norman, backed by the United Auto Workers, to push through a 50 percent wage cut. For full coverage, click here.

The Editorial Board encourages auto workers to write in to the WSWS with their experiences, comments and questions, and to participate in this critical discussion on a new strategy for the working class.

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Life and Times at the Indianapolis Metal Fabrication plant

Support the socialist campaign for Michigan House of Representatives

September 3, 2010

The following statement has been issued by D’Artagnan Collier, a member of the Socialist Equality Party who is running in the Detroit area for state representative in Michigan’s 9th District in Detroit. The WSWS encourages all its readers in the Detroit-area to support the campaign. Click here to get involved. For a leaflet version of this statement to download and distribute, click here. For more information on how to join the SEP, click here.

I am a member of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) running for the Michigan State Legislature in Detroit’s 9th District. I am fighting for an independent political movement that advances the social rights of the working class—including the right to a job at a good wage, health care, decent housing, and an education.

The crisis in Detroit is the sharpest expression of the breakdown of the global capitalist system. A city whose name was once synonymous with the auto industry and the industrial might of the US is now the poorest big city in America.

Oil rig explodes off the Louisiana coast

September 2, 2010

An offshore oil rig exploded and caught fire Thursday morning off the shore of Louisiana, sending 13 workers jumping into the water to be rescued by boat. Firefighters battled the flames on the rig’s platform throughout the day and had extinguished the fire by Thursday afternoon.

The explosion comes a little more than four months after the April 20 blowout of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, which left 11 workers dead and resulted in the largest environmental disaster in US history.

The vessel catching fire on Thursday, Vermillion Oil Rig 380, was operating about 100 miles south of Louisiana’s Vermillion Bay, about 200 miles west of the BP site, in about 340 feet of water. The rig is operated by Houston, Texas-based Mariner Energy, the 8th largest natural gas producer and 24th largest oil producer in the US outer continental shelf.

The fire was first reported by a nearby rig at about 9:20 a.m. local time. Thirteen workers, reportedly wearing floatation suits, jumped from the rig’s production platform into the water after the explosion and were evacuated by boat, according to a Mariner spokesman. Although it had been reported earlier that one worker had been injured, Mariner reported later that there were no serious injuries.

SEP candidate denounces wage-cutting attack on Detroit city workers

September 2, 2010
Collier speaks to an Autoworker in Hamtramck

D’Artagnan Collier is running in the November 2 election as the Socialist Equality Party candidate for state representative in Michigan’s 9th District in Detroit. Collier was placed on the ballot in late July, after the SEP submitted nominating petitions with the signatures of 1,129 Detroit voters.

Collier, 42, joined the socialist movement as a Detroit high school student in 1984 and has spent his entire adult life fighting for the working class. He was the party’s candidate for Detroit mayor in 2009 and a founding member of the Committee Against Utility Shutoffs (CAUS).

As a city worker in Detroit, he has opposed Mayor David Bing’s demands for deep wage and job cuts to be imposed on the city’s 13,000 municipal workers. He has fought to mobilize the working class to defend jobs and living standards and oppose public service cuts being demanded by the Democratic Party-controlled city and state governments. He has opposed the treachery of the city worker unions in collaborating in these attacks and fought for workers to organize independently of the union apparatus.

Obama administration, media intensify campaign to hold teachers “accountable”

September 1, 2010

Over the past weeks, the Obama administration, with the full-throated support of the corporate media, has launched a campaign against public school teachers, blaming them for the failure of the US education system.

This propaganda campaign has as its principal objectives the justification of mass layoffs of teachers, various privatization schemes, and broad cuts in spending cloaked by “incentives” as part of the so-called “Race to the Top” program.

The Obama administration, having squandered trillions on war and Wall Street bailouts, is determined that the working class should pay for the economic crisis, including by reductions in public education.

Spearheading the campaign is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of the Chicago Public Schools and an alumnus of the Chicago Democratic Party machine. Earlier this week, Duncan was dispatched on a four-state “Courage in the Classroom” tour, during which he congratulated those states that had most slavishly instituted the regressive “reforms” demanded by the Obama administration.

One million US public school students homeless

September 1, 2010

A report released in July by the advocacy groups National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) and First Focus reveals the explosive growth of homelessness among public school students during the economic crisis.

Based on Federal data from the US Department of Education, the number of students identified as homeless by public school districts rose by more than 40 percent between the 2006-2007 school year and 2008-2009, to 956,914. The figure has almost assuredly passed one million in the current school year.

That well over one million public school students are homeless is a damning indictment of the entire social order. The staggering growth in student homelessness took place simultaneously with the transfer of trillions of dollars in public funds to Wall Street, overseen by the administrations of former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama.

No part of the country was spared. NAEHCY and First Focus found that 70 percent of school districts reported an increase in homelessness since 2007-2008, and 39 percent reported enrolling more homeless students in the first six months of the 2009-2010 school year than in the entire previous year.