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.

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.

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.

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.

The following is a republication of a series on the fifth anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, originally published in three parts on August 28-31, 2010.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast of the United States. The world looked on in horror as New Orleans, Louisiana, was struck by storm surges that breached nearly every levee in the low-lying city’s dilapidated system. Tens of thousands of mostly poor, black residents who had been unable to evacuate were trapped by floodwaters without food, drinking water, or rescue.

More than 80 percent of New Orleans, a city of 500,000 people, was submerged. The storm destroyed communities across more than 95,000 square miles of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. At least 1,836 residents of the region were killed by the hurricane and its immediate aftermath, and many more were never to be found.

As staggering as these figures are, they cannot in themselves reveal the full scale of the catastrophe and its aftermath. Across the region, over one million people were displaced, many never to return, including hundreds of thousands who lost all of their possessions.

The “Rebuild America: Jobs, Justice and Peace” march held in Detroit August 28, had nothing to do with rebuilding the devastated city, creating jobs, or achieving peace.

The event, called by UAW President Bob King and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, was little more than a campaign rally for the Democratic Party, which has overseen wholesale job and wage cuts in Detroit and nationally while escalating military violence around the world.

The demonstration was carried out under entirely false pretenses. Presented by Jackson, the UAW, and their backers among middle class ex-radical groupings as a focal point for popular opposition to mass unemployment and social devastation, the march was in reality quite the opposite. It was in fact a demonstration in support of the American ruling class drive, spearheaded by the Obama administration, to put in place a permanent lowering of wages and living conditions in the US.

The relatively small turnout, perhaps 2,000, in a city where the real unemployment rate is close to 50 percent, speaks to the high degree of alienation of the working class from the Democratic Party, the trade unions and the establishment civil rights organizations.

Two Detroit-area men have died recently after being Tasered for allegedly defying police orders. Fifty-year-old Michael Ford passed away August 25, nearly ten days after being Tasered by Livonia police on August 14. Stanley Jackson, Jr., 31, died on August 20, following a confrontation with officers in the nearby town of Ypsilanti. Both victims were African-American.

The deaths take place as area officials, including Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, have increasingly called for a law-and-order crackdown to deal with high levels of unemployment and social distress.

Local news media reported that on the evening of August 13, Michael Ford, who police claim was intoxicated, approached the cops during a response to a loud-music complaint. The officers told Ford to go back into his apartment after the complainant could not be located. A few hours later the police returned after another loud-music complaint.

According to the initial police account, Ford approached the squad car yelling and wielding a knife in each hand. A police backup was ordered, and when Ford allegedly refused orders to get on the ground, he was Tasered. The police claim that Ford then fell and hit his head.

The August 28 “March for Jobs, Justice and Peace” is a fraud perpetrated against the people of Detroit. The aim of the campaign is not to create jobs, but to promote illusions in the Obama administration, which has been chiefly responsible for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The clearest evidence of the real character of this “jobs march” comes from looking at its principal organizers: the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/Push Coalition; Bob King of the UAW; and the local Democratic Party elite led by Detroit’s multimillionaire mayor, David Bing. Each has played a crucial role in the devastation of Detroit.

The UAW has overseen the loss of 250,000 jobs at the Big Three and the auto parts industry since 2007. Last year Obama’s Auto Task Force shut down dozens of factories, tore up contractually-obligated benefits for auto workers and retirees, and forced new workers to hire on at $14 an hour, half what they used to be paid. Far from organizing any resistance to these attacks, the UAW worked hand-in-hand with the White House to force the measures on auto workers.

Members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) performed a free public concert Thursday at Campus Martius Park in downtown Detroit to reach out for community support as they resist massive and unprecedented concession demands by management.

Talks between DSO musicians and management broke off Friday without an agreement. No further talks are scheduled. In a statement to the press the players spokesman, cellist Haden McKay, said, “I don’t feel any closer to a settlement. I think we’ve gone about as far as we can go.” Orchestra members will meet Saturday to discuss the next step.

The 84 current players are being asked to accept a three-year agreement containing a 28 percent pay cut, a reduction in health care benefits, a permanent reduction in the size of the orchestra and other takeaways. The musicians gave up significant concessions in the previous agreement and many positions remain unfilled.

If no settlement is reached by the August 29 contract deadline, DSO management is threatening to implement a so-called Proposal B containing even more drastic concessions.

Since June of this year, 2,000 teachers and staff in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have been laid off. The mass firings are part of an effort to use the state’s education budget shortfall, estimated at $370 million, to privatize the public schools.

WSWS reporters attended a job fair held on August 24, one of two this year open only to Chicago Public Schools teachers laid off in 2010. The fair was described by several teachers who attended as little more than a stunt and a show for the media. Teachers expressed dissatisfaction with the organization of the job fair and the meager offerings. Many of those who left the fair’s morning session early told WSWS reporters that very few schools even participated. Furthermore, no one they had spoken with had been offered an afternoon interview.

Most of the teachers at the fair were tenured employees who had been laid off. They had not been reassigned to work at other schools and had even been denied the right to enter into the city’s pool of substitute teachers. On August 13, lawyers for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) filed suit in federal court, citing the layoffs without reassignment as illegal and requesting an injunction to restore 1,400 positions immediately.