We heard the story of a young apprentice. We heard how he'd struggled with various demons and was beginning to get his feet on the ground. He was a popular young kid for whom the union represented a step out of the dead end of poverty.

Last week he was traveling in the backseat of a friend's car. His friend got into a shouting match with another driver and guns were pulled. The young member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 713, received several wounds and later died.

Since the fall of the mass civil rights movement, almost 40 years ago, Oakland has been a War zone. As early as 1970 gangs were fighting it out and dozens were beginning to go to the morgue annually. Last year 148 Oakland residents were killed, largely as a part of the War here. With a population of just under 400,000, if Oakland's murder rate were the national rate it would equal 111,000 homicides annually in the USA. Or 10,260 people killed each year in Iraq.

Today, in Oakland, the leading cause of death for young men aged 15-24 is homicide.

The sound of gunfire every night is typical for most residents not living up in the hills. Sometimes it is near, sometimes distant. You learn to distinguish the sounds of fireworks from those of automatic gunfire. A couple of months back a neighbor one block from our house was shot in the face. Most African American friends I know seem to be always going to a funeral: the funeral of a cousin, a friend, or someone closer.

Capitalism does not give this War any weight. It denies the scale of this war. It offers no solutions. It has no solutions. Wars on a similar scale are going on in many of the world's major cities: except they are all in the poorer underdeveloped world.

Unlike the rest of the industrialized capitalist world, the US prefers to have a small slice of the 3rd world within its own borders. The rich, the Democrats and the Republicans, prefer to allow this situation to continue. They offer absolutely no alternative because, in reality, this war is not just as a byproduct of America's barely existent social welfare net or of deeply rooted racism. It is also a whip to use against the rest of the working class to remind them that if they don't toe the line, life could be way, way worse.