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Collier campaigning in Detroit

The mayoral campaign of D’Artagnan Collier continued this weekend, as petitioners collected signatures at various locations around Detroit to place Collier on the mayoral ballot. Campaigners have presently collected almost 800 signatures. This is well over the 500 required for ballot access, but the campaign has pledged to collect 1,000.

Collier and a campaign team petitioned at Eastern Market, which is Michigan’s largest open-air marketplace, where tens of thousands of people buy fresh produce and flowers and enjoy outdoor music each Saturday.

Collier and campaigners emphasized that the issues facing Detroit were not unique to the city; rather, the attack on Detroit is a part of a global process. The appointment of an emergency manager in Detroit was seen by the ruling class as a model for similar efforts across the country and around the world.

More than 300 people are dead, mainly garment workers, and many more are injured following the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh this week. The tragedy is one of the world’s worst industrial disasters, but it will not be the last, as global corporations constantly drive for greater profits through the exploitation of sweatshop labour.

The Rana Plaza complex was typical of the multi-level buildings that have been thrown up by the massive expansion of Bangladesh’s clothing industry—now second only to China—with scant regard for the country’s limited safety and building codes. It housed five garment factories, employing thousands of workers, as well as a maze of shops. The owner, a local politician connected to the ruling Awami League, only had permission to erect a five-storey building, but was not stopped from adding three more floors.

Charges by the White House and US secretaries of state and defense Thursday that Syrian government forces used chemical weapons have brought Washington to the brink of another war in the Middle East.

One decade after the Bush administration invoked the infamous pretext of “weapons of mass destruction” to launch a war of aggression against Iraq, the Obama administration is preparing to follow the same route to launch its own war for regime-change in Syria.

In a letter to members of Congress Thursday, the White House said that US intelligence believes “with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.”

The letter reiterated Obama’s threat that any use of chemical weapons “is a red line for the United States of America,” adding that the White House “has communicated that message publicly and privately to governments around the world, including the Assad regime.”

The lockout of tens of thousands of Danish teachers by the state marks a new stage in the class struggle in Europe. It makes clear that the ruthless assault on the basic rights and past social gains of the working class is not limited to Greece and other heavily indebted countries.

In a Scandinavian country whose education system and social policies were for decades seen as models of progressive reform, the state has locked out 90,000 school teachers for almost a month. Teachers responsible for educating all pupils aged 6 to 16 have lost a month’s pay. Most working parents of the almost 900,000 children affected have had either to take time off from work or pay for private day care.

With the lockout, the Social Democratic Party government is seeking to force teachers to agree to a drastic extension of work hours without any increase in pay. This would not only make teachers’ work loads intolerable, it would also seriously affect the quality of teaching. The attack on teachers is the prelude to the imposition of similar measures throughout the public service sector.