Sit-Downs Not SOUR Lines!
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. WfJRIlERS VIIN(JIJIIR' 25¢ No. 320 :~) X-523 31 December 1982 Sit-Downs Not SOUR Lines! • Soup lines are back. Tent cities have sprung up'around the country as the over one million homeless crisscross the nation in search of work until their cars and their hopes break down. Three hundred thousand will have their heat cut off in the dead of winter. The number of unemployed is the highest in American history. Half the 13 million official jobless are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits. The "American Way of Life" has become a nightmare for millions-especially blacks-as the country begins to look like the depression-ravaged. land of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Detroit-Mayor Young declares a "state of emergency" in this heavily black city of 25 percent unemployment. while his appointed budget director announces that city workers will face massin: ia\otfs when their contracts c,:nl l c i'l 19:-13 ..\OW tens ofthousands ,J , "1" 1 la\Q-Gli a.u"\,.) v,,;'-..Ji.l\.\"'..i.J iUlUI~ii...J dU,,,,, .1......-."1, their medical henefits. the city's infant mortality rate is as high as any Central American country. and thousands of families literally face freezing to death this winter because of heat shutoffs. "Liberal" Republican Michigan gover nor Milliken-who has slashed $16 million in state aid to the city-chimes in that there is indeed a "human emergency" in Detroit. Phoenix-The unemployed and UPI homeless are told to "keep moving" in Depression '83: Hunger in black proletarian Detroit. no uncertain terms. A new law makes lying down in public a crime. (No "equal thousand steel workers will lose their working people of this Southern black only one choice: fight or starve. And right" for the poor to sleep under jobs in an area already ravaged by over city: five thousand demonstrators re every worker who's been laid off knows bridges here.) Garbage is declared city 13.6 percent unemployment. But a sit-in spond to the call of the Spartacist the time to fight is while you've still got a property, and garbage picking is now a in the plant could break the union League-initiated Labor/Black Mobili job. One sitdown strike in Detroit is crime as well (some upstanding citizens bureaucrats' class truce and begin to zation and run the KKK out of town on worth more than all the soup kitchens have suggested spraying the refuse with turn things around for working people. November 27. and relief programs you can imagine. poison). Washington, D.C.-Reagan pro Class Struggle ys. "Let 'em What is needed are strike actions and Miami-The cops' answer to jobless poses to tax jobless benefits to make Eat Soup" factory occupations that can enlist the black youth is to shoot them down in unemployment "less attractive." And a support of the multitude of unem What is to be done? Everybody's cold blood. But when they shot 21-year special holiday treat for black youth: ployed, not only for immediate de against unemployment. The question is old Nevelle Johnson in a video game reduction of the minimum wage. Con mands for relief, but for jobs for all. And how to fight it. The union bureaucrats, room on the night of December 28, the gress, eager to adjourn for Christmas, that means a fight against the boom like Fraser, say "concessions" is the ghetto community of Overtown ex hurriedly debates a jobs bill that won't bust capitalist system. answer. He sold out the Chrysler ploded in justified and desperate fury. create any jobs. A court victory won by workers for a song. The bureaucrats The question of unity of the employed Buffalo-Bethlehem Steel announces a bunch of liberals forces the Giant and unemployed in this country is the the closure of its Lackawanna, New Food supermarket chain to donate its work hand-in-glove with the Democrats like Mondale, who scream for anti race question. Deep rooted and vicious York works-a giant complex that garbage to the poor. However, there's racial oppression ensures that blacks employed 22,000 in the 1960s. Seven been one genuine victory for the Japanese protectionism. They try to force Reagan's racist anti-labor austeri suffer twice the unemployment of ty down workers' throats: wage freezes, whites. Black youth unemployment has ~ billions in "concessions" to shore up gone over 50 percent. A whole genera "U or company profits, mass layoffs. Conces tion has no future. Racist terror groups o SIT o sions were supposed to save jobs. But like the Klan and Nazis target blacks and the layoffs and plant closures continue. foreigners in their scapegoat solution. A DOWN Now Ford's threatening to dismantle fighting labor movement must oppose FoR (Tr{\l{}~,' the giant River Rouge complex near the deadly growth of the KKK/Nazi Detroit. terrorism with labor/black defense , ,.~, Flint auto For the working class there is really continued on page 11 ~~BS workers, both employed and unemployed, protest layoffs Hard Times for the SWP at GM headquarters in Detroit. Barnestown, U.s.A. Se~ pages 6-10 · Co~s to die." Why, he actually threatened Frustrated D.C. Shoot Peacenik "violence" (against a building!). But he did have one point, which wasn't so nutty: the world could very well be blown to irradiated rubble in a nuclear The Washington Monument Kill holocaust by the madmen running this country. For over ten hours the Washington, figure who had picketed the White this cold-blooded execution was One of them, George Bush, Rea D.C. police and the media blasted the House daily for months before to "ban done by the Park Police just a week gan's VP and former CIA chief, got nation with horrific bulletins of a the bomb," bidding tourists, "Have a after over 5,000 anti-Klan demonstra some kicks out of Norman Mayer's mysterious terrorist "holding Wash Nice Doomsday." When he drove up tors frustrated the plans of Reagan and slow death that night. Hosting a fancy ington hostage" last December 8. The to the Washington Monument he his tremendous police forces, who had dinner for the monstrous dictator feds played the terrorist scare to the demanded that a discussion of nuclear sworn the race-terrorists would parade General Zia of Pakistan, he an hilt. Government employees were sent war become the "No. I priority," a through the nation's capital. On nounced, "We're relieved ... I don't home early, all day TV played clips of demand politically not very different November 27 the KKK was run out know how to put this delicately-the the "helmeted, jump-suited" mystery from the call of the American Catholic and the police were stymied by a person is no longer with us." The man pacing around his van said to bishops. massive, militant and disciplined audience of mass murderers, torturers, contain 1,000 pounds of dynamite. Even if the police really believed outpouring of the decent citizens of spies, bureaucrats of death, laughed. Then, after they had milked it for all it Mayer had the dynamite, they knew Washington, overwhelmingly blacks And the secretary of the army doesn't was worth, when the "terrorist" tried only he and not the Monument with its and trade unionists. The cops them even want to bury Mayer decently in to drive away, the Park Policejust shot 15-foot walls would get destroyed by selves did the rioting that day, tear Arlington National Cemetery, his him down like a dog. A hail ofgunfire the blast. Mayer had earlier released gassing the crowds, arresting scores right as a veteran (honorably dis flipped the van over. Using infrared the half-dozen tourists and two park and beating black youth, but it didn't charged from the Navy in 1946). night-sights they got him in the head, employees stuck inside. At most an take away the sting of defeat. So on At the Washington Monument, the chest and arms. Federal agents rushed explosion might rattle the windows of December 8 they had a cornered, old man handed a reporter a note to handcuff their victim to the steering the White House a half-mile away. lonely victim at hand-and they asking for "an act of sanity" from the wheel, and there they left him for an And for that they shot the old guy blasted him away, in a vindictive government. Marxists know better.' hour until he had bled to death. down in cold blood. No warning, no bloody assertion of their power to kill We know who the crazy killers are in The cops were no doubt filled with attempt to block the driveway or shoot at will. this society-from Reagan's White pride when their boss, Ronald Reagan, his tires out. What about the supposed In the aftermath, the disgusting line House and his foreign puppets to the caIled them later that night to say he dynamite which would have blown the from the cops and the bourgeois press murderous Ku Klux Klan at home was "pleased" with how they handled van sky-high when police sharpshoot right through the big anti-nuke groups and how to fight them. The Spartacist the "siege." Some siege. As facts ers fired into it? They just blew him and "respectable" left was that Nor ,League is determined to build a mass, trickled out in bits and pieces it turned away. Later it was reported that a man Mayer had it coming. Groups like revolutionary workers party in this out there were no explosives, and the \"command decision" had come down SANE and Ground Zero washed their country to end racist terror and the "terrorist" was no Darth Vader but a to "shoot to kill" (New York Post, 9 hands of him; the Guardian (22 nightmare of nuclear annihilation.