Feed the cities, starve the Pentagon

The hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the Pentagon on the illegal war and occupation of Iraq have meant more poverty, more cutbacks and a plummeting standard of living for the workers, poor and people of color in the U.S.

Now a national call has been issued for a broad, multinational, united fightback movement to push back the White House and the military generals.

This fightback response comes from Black elected officials as well as trade unionists and community activists, based mainly here in Detroit. The call is for a national conference to “Reclaim Our Cities and Fight the Bush Budget that Starves the Cities to Feed the Pentagon”—to be held this coming fall in Detroit.

The initial endorsers of this call range from unionists to community leaders to elected officials.

They include Maryann Mahaffey, president of the Detroit City Council; JoAnn Watson, Detroit City Council member; Marian Kramer, co-president of the National Welfare Rights Union; Millie Hall, president of Metro-Detroit Coalition of Labor Union Women; Nathan Head, president of Metro-Detroit Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; David Sole, president of UAW Local 2334; Maureen Taylor, chairperson of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and Sylvia Orduno of the same group; Tom Stephens, staff attorney of the Guild/Sugar Law Center; and Clarence Thomas, national co-chair of the Million Worker March and a leader of Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

The call expresses the frustration of so many who are burdened with the budget cuts:

“Many cities are facing devastating budget crises. We are tired of accepting further cutbacks, more layoffs and pressure to privatize. We need a national movement to demand that the billions wasted on war and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan be used instead to meet the needs of the people here at home.

“The new Bush budget cuts 150 domestic programs while it pushes the spending for war to over half a trillion dollars a year! Tax breaks for the rich, attacks on our Social Security, and skyrocketing health care costs (with tens of millions having no health coverage at all) all add to the crisis. Debts to the big banks strangle our cities with tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in interest alone each year.

“It is time to launch a struggle to win our right to health care, quality education, decent housing, food, utilities and a job. The money is there to guarantee everyone a decent life. This is the richest country in the world.”

A May 14 strategy meeting called by the Million Worker March leadership will take place in Detroit to take up this conference initiative, among other important issues.

There are plenty of good reasons for holding an important conference of this kind in large cities and even small towns. Detroit, once the heartland of the auto industry, has come to symbolize a crisis that is creating a seething anger from the workers and oppressed population in many parts of the country.

Black city ready for struggle

For instance, on April 6, Detroit city workers closely watched the aftermath of a 42-inch water main break on Jefferson Avenue. Round-the-clock emergency crews swung into action to restore pressure to a hospital, four schools, residences and the General Motor’s headquarters in the Renaissance Center. But it wasn’t employees of the city out there—a private contractor got the job.

Those privately contracted crews were a sneak peek of what to expect from the 2005-2006 proposed City Budget, to be announced April 12. City workers and residents will be told to pay for the budget deficit through layoffs, service cuts, health and pension benefit cuts and
privatization.

Already, shortened hours at Neigh borhood Services offices are hurting the homeless and other desperate Detroiters. Layoffs have robbed almost 1,000 workers of their secure livelihood. The Belle Isle Aquarium, a 100-year-old cultural institution, has closed down.

City workers and the community won’t accept the wage and service cuts quietly. Resistance has already prevented or reduced some of the city administration’s attempts to balance the budget at the expense of the people.

Reflecting the mood and concerns of the residents, half the members of the Detroit City Council question and oppose the proposed budget cuts. That is why the word “receivership” is appearing more often in the media. Right now it’s a threat to cool the resistance.

Under receivership, the state appoints an Emergency Financial Manager to run the city’s financial affairs in place of the elected representatives.

Some 86 percent of Detroit’s residents are African American. They remember well the hard and bloody battles only 40 years ago for the right of Black people to vote. Even fresher is the memory of thousands of disenfranchised voters in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004.

In November 2004, Detroiters refused to accept a second-class school board any longer, voting down Proposal E by a two-to-one margin. The vote followed an unrelenting, five-year grassroots struggle to regain control of the School Board from a state-appointed “reform” board.

Why should a representative of the bond traders or banks take over a financially troubled city? Isn’t that the fox guarding the chicken coop? Why not a community/labor committee to run the city’s financial affairs instead of a state Emergency Financial Manager?

Wouldn’t the first order of business be to protect and expand city jobs and services, to implement a policy of no utility shut-offs for households, to open up vacant public housing units for homeless families and to stop evictions? What about implementing free universal health care and reducing class sizes in the schools?

Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick’s “right-sizing” city government is the public sector version of industrial restructuring in auto, steel, electric, telephone and the news media. The result is union busting, lower wages, slashed benefits and a nomadic future as workers try to cobble together an economically secure life. Only 12 percent of U.S. workers have union protection. The public sector has the highest rate of union jobs.

General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and the City of Detroit point to traditional defined benefit pensions and health care costs as the root of financial woes. Instead of demanding national health care and better social security programs to equal their capitalist competitors overseas, their solution is to attack benefits and shift the financial burden to the working class.

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Workers, who watched their work go to outside contractors this week, told their union for the first time that they want to do something to fight back. In the coming weeks, as the class lines and issues get even clearer, they’ll get their chance to do just that.

These developments and many more speak to the need for a national conference that demands “Feed the Cities, Starve the Pentagon.”

For more information about the National Conference to Reclaim Our Cities, call UAW Local 2334 at (313) 680-5508

or email national_conference_of_cities
@earthlink.net.