Escarlet Ramos and Kevin Ramirez, both three-year-olds, will never again sit together to watch television. Idaly Ramirez, age six, will never play sports. His sister Suzette, age 10, and brother Erick, age 12, will never attend high school. Vanessa Ramirez, age 14, will never be able to obtain her drivers license or go to college.
All six children died in a fire in the Rogers Park area of Chicago on Sunday, Sept. 3. The fire began shortly after
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Augusta Ramirez, mother to all the children except Escarlet, was released from the hospital on Sept. 4. Ramirez’s eighteen-year-old daughter Yadira, who was staying overnight at a friend’s house when the fire occurred, said, “Like any mother who has lost her children she feels bad, she feels destroyed. She didn’t lose one. She lost five.” The children’s father, Amado, was not at home at the time of the fire.
The house’s electricity had been out of service since May when utility giant ComEd cut it off. Candles used to light the house are believed to have caused the deadly blaze. ComEd is short for Commonwealth Edison. It is the main energy provider to Chicago residents. ComEd is a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corporation, one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, with more than $15 billion in annual revenues.
The Ramirez’s apartment also had no smoke detectors in it. In fact, there wasn’t any place in the apartment to hook-up a smoke detector. The landlord, Jay Johnson, is well known in Rogers Park as a wealthy developer who refuses to maintain his many apartment buildings.
The community of Rogers Park, a multinational neighborhood primarily made up of African Americans, Latinos, African immigrants and working class whites, has responded with large donations of food, clothing and money for the survivors. The community raised $5,000 for the Ramirez family one day after the fire.
ComEd has been under a rate-hike freeze for nearly 10 years. But the skyrocketing prices of other public utilities, along with gas, food, clothing, health care and rent, has forced workers to do without some basic necessities. This stark reality contributed to the Ramirez’s plight and why they had to use candles instead of having working electricity.
Some ruling-class apologists may seek to fault the Ramirez’s for not working harder to provide for their family, but this would be wrong. Both Augusta and Amado Ramirez work two jobs to try to make ends meet for their family. Thousands of other working-class families in Chicago and elsewhere face the same dire circumstances each day.
Help is not on the way
The ComEd rate-hike freeze expires this year, and utility bills are expected to rise up to 20 percent in 2007. This is bad news for Chicago workers.
In 1997, the year of the last federal minimum wage increase, gasoline cost $1.43 a gallon. Gasoline now averages over $3.00 a gallon. Meanwhile, an employee earning minimum wage and working 40 hours per week will earn a paltry $10,712 per year—far below the poverty level for a family of three.
Latino, African American and other working-class communities in the United States suffer the most under these economic conditions. Immigrant families like the Ramirez family are also less likely to ask for or receive help from government agencies in the current anti-immigrant atmosphere being whipped-up by the Bush administration and right-wing politicians.
The corporate media coverage of the terrible tragedy suffered by the Ramirez family has been seemingly sympathetic but woefully incomplete. Missing is any serious discussion of how race and class played primary roles in the deaths of these six children.
How exactly does a family of ten end up living without electricity for months in the wealthiest country in the history of the world? The corporate media wouldn’t dare pose the question or seek to answer it. But the answer is clear: Energy companies in the capitalist system do not provide needed services like gas and electricity unless they can make a profit. Under capitalism, profits always come before the safety needs of people.
Sadly, Escarlet, Kevin, Idaly, Suzette, Erick and Vanessa died needlessly. The landlord and ComEd should be put on trial for the deaths of these six children.
Human needs like electricity, heat, water, food, shelter and more should be inalienable human rights for working-class people like the Ramirez family. Workers create all the wealth in society; the capitalist owners just enrich themselves at our expense.
Fundamental human rights will not be granted or guaranteed to workers by the capitalist class without a fight. We need to join together in common struggle to win the rights that the Ramirez family and all workers deserve.
