SOME HAVE REFERRED TO THE BANKSTER BOUGHT PRESIDENT AS A “SOCIALIST”. HE IS OF SORTS. OBAMA’S “CHANGE” REALLY MEANT AN ACCELERATED VERSION OF WALL STREET’S RAPE AND PILLAGE, ALONG WITH OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED, THAT WE LIVED UNDER DURING THE 20 YEARS OF BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH, AND THEIR WAR PROFITEER-DONOR, DIANNE FEINSTEIN!
DURING THIS PERIOD 38 MILLION ILLEGALS FLOODED OVER OUR BORDERS. WE ARE NO MEXICO’S WELFARE, BIRTHING CENTER, JOBS AND JAILS PLAN.
IT’S ALL WORKED NICELY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. ERGO, MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE MAJOR DONORS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA AND THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE IS A MIGHTY ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO WALL, AND NO ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS AGAINST HIRING ILLEGALS, EVEN IF THEY HAVE STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS! IT IS IN FACT BARACK OBAMA’S LA RAZA ASSAULT ON THE AMERICA MIDDLE CLASS!
HERE’S WHAT OBAMA DID FOR WALL ST, AND AGAINST THE AMERICAN WORKER IN DETROIT.
OH, AND HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN THE MEXICAN LA RAZA – OBAMA ASSAULT ON LEGALS IN ARIZONA?
The “return of Detroit”
Wall Street celebrates the destruction of workers’ jobs and wages
17 August 2010
The announcement by General Motors last week that it recorded a $1.3 billion second-quarter profit—its second consecutive gain after ten quarterly losses—has been hailed as the “return of Detroit” by financial analysts, government officials and the media.
A little more than a year after the US automaker emerged from the “quick and surgical” bankruptcy ordered by the Obama administration, GM is expected to file papers this week for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock later this fall. Wall Street experts say GM’s share value and earning potential have risen exponentially, and the IPO is expected to be one of the largest stock sales in history.
The New York Times set the celebratory tone last week, declaring, “After a dismal period of huge losses and deep cuts that culminated in the Obama administration’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, the gloom over the American auto industry is starting to lift.”
Previous cost-cutting efforts had failed or stalled, the Times complained, but “auto analysts say the current makeover has a more permanent feel, largely because of the presence of the outsiders at the top and the lessons learned from the near-death experience of last year’s bankruptcies at GM and Chrysler.” The industry, the Times noted approvingly, has gotten rid of “the excesses of the past,” including over-production, and “shed workers, plants and brands.”
A “new breed of management” has taken over, the newspaper wrote, who are “determined to keep the Big Three lean, agile and focused on building better cars that earn a profit.”
For workers, the “gloom” has certainly not been lifted from Detroit, where the real unemployment rate is 50 percent and suburban areas face record demand for emergency food assistance.
The return to profitability at GM has been accomplished through brutal cuts in labor costs, included the shuttering of dozens of plants and the elimination of 50,000 jobs—20 percent of GM’s global workforce—including 30,000 hourly and salaried positions in North America.
The most important factor in GM’s rebound is its success in imposing a 50 percent cut in the wages of newly hired workers. The reduction of US auto workers’ wages to the near-poverty level of $14 an hour represents a historic retrogression to the levels of exploitation that existed in the darkest days of the Great Depression, prior to the mass struggles that established the United Auto Workers.
The end of so-called “middle-class” wages in auto was the centerpiece of the bailout of GM and Chrysler engineered by the Obama administration’s Auto Task Force last year. It established a new benchmark for the permanent slashing of wages across the entire economy and the lowering in US workers’ living standards towards those of super-exploited workers in Asia and other parts of the “emerging world.”
This historic assault on working class living standards is at the core of the administration’s pledge to double exports in five years and revive US manufacturing as a cheap-labor export platform.
This is what Wall Street and the New York Times are celebrating.
These wage cuts, moreover, are only the beginning. In order to maintain profitability, Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland, told the Times, the automakers “need to reduce their costs more if they’re going to be competitive in the long term with the Japanese, the Koreans and ultimately the Chinese.”
One of the new “outsiders” in control of the auto industry is Daniel F. Akerson, who was named to succeed Edward Whitacre as CEO of GM last week. Akerson has no experience in manufacturing. He is the managing director and head of the global buyout division of the Carlyle Group, a powerful and politically connected private equity firm. He specializes in buying distressed companies, stripping them of their assets and slashing labor costs, before re-selling the companies, generally for returns of 20 percent or more for big investors.
“Many on Wall Street regard Mr. Akerson as the right kind of executive to reassure investors that GM will continue making tough decision and avoid reverting to its plodding, spendthrift ways,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Akerson was brought onto GM’s board last year by Obama’s Auto Task Force, “which liked his reputation and thought he could be a good option if a new CEO were needed at some point,” the Journal wrote.
The White House has essentially handed over the auto industry to the most parasitic sections of the financial elite—speculators and fast-buck artists whose corporate “turnaround” schemes have left millions of workers without jobs or pensions, and Detroit and other industrial cities in ruins.
Obama chose two Wall Street financiers—Steven Rattner and Ronald Bloom—to head his Auto Task Force. In forcing the bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler, spinning off unprofitable factories and dealerships, wiping out tens of thousands of jobs, dumping health care obligations and other “legacy costs,” and halving wages, the Democratic administration moved even more quickly and ruthlessly than the private equity firms.
The end result of this assault on auto workers and their communities will be a multi-billion-dollar windfall for Wall Street insiders and rich investors, who will make out like bandits from the sale of GM stock in the upcoming IPO.
From day one, the Obama administration, the auto bosses and Wall Street have depended on the United Auto Workers union to impose these attacks on the workers. Not only did the UAW suppress all opposition from the workers, it functioned as the direct instrument of Wall Street and the government in the impoverishment of its own members. In return, the UAW executives were given major ownership stakes in the auto companies. They will get their cut, worth many millions of dollars, from the IPO bonanza.
In a speech to an industry gathering earlier this month, newly installed UAW President Bob King made clear that the union was committed to removing all obstacles to profit-making. Disparaging the “20th century UAW” for seeing the employers as “adversaries rather than partners” and negotiating contracts that stipulated work rules and job classifications, King declared that the “21st century UAW recognizes that flexibility, innovation, lean manufacturing and continuous cost improvement are paramount in the global marketplace.”
No struggle to defend jobs and living standards is possible without a complete break with the UAW and the building of rank-and-file committees to mobilize workers in the factories and neighborhoods to fight.
This struggle is in essence a political struggle and requires a new political perspective. The disaster facing auto workers is the result of the long-standing support of the unions for the capitalist system, their hostility to socialism, and their subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party. The unions combine a policy of labor-management “partnership,” which denies that the workers have any interests independent of those of the corporations, with economic nationalism, which seeks to pit American workers against their class brothers and sisters internationally.
The most basic needs of the working class—jobs, decent wages and working conditions—can be defended only through a political struggle against the two big business parties and the profit system which they defend.
Jerry White
WSWS.ORG
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TRY AMNESTY FOR 38 MILLION MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS!
FAIR Slams Administration and Congressional Leadership for Rejecting Permanent Reauthorization of E-Verify
(Washington, D.C. October 8, 2009 ) House-Senate conferees finalizing the Homeland Security Appropriations bill, yesterday, undermined the long-term security of American workers by removing language that would have made the E-Verify program permanent. Instead, the conference agreement limits reauthorization to just three years.
E-Verify is the nation’s essential worksite verification tool that allows employers to voluntarily determine whether workers are legally authorized to work in the U.S. by electronically verifying their Social Security numbers. Over 140,000 employers are using the system, 1000 are joining each week, and according to the Department of Homeland Security, E-Verify has a 99.6 percent accuracy rate.
The decision to extend E-Verify for only three years is further evidence of the Obama administration's and the congressional leadership's effort to raise a smokescreen while it dismantles all effective controls against illegal immigration, charged the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
Conferees also stripped other safeguards in the Senate bill that were intended to protect American workers from losing jobs to illegal aliens. These provisions included a requirement that federal contractors use E-Verify to determine the employment eligibility of new and existing employees working on federal contracts, and language to prevent the repeal of a rule that required employers to take action upon the receipt of "no-match" letters, issued to employers whose workers' Social Security data cannot be confirmed. A third provision would have ensured all employers can use E-Verify to determine employment eligibility of existing workers in addition to new hires.
"A three-year extension of E-Verify was the bare minimum this administration and the congressional leadership could support and still make any credible claim that they are prepared to enforce U.S. immigration laws," said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "All that would have been required to make E-Verify a permanent federal program is for conferees to have adopted provisions that were already part of the Senate bill. The fact that they did not speaks volumes about the priorities of this Congress and the Obama administration."
"Unfortunately, at a time when American workers most need the full commitment of their government to protect their jobs, what they got was a half-hearted gesture. E-Verify is the real meat and potatoes of worksite enforcement and dries up the jobs magnet which is the reason illegal aliens come and the reason they stay. The program offers a meaningful solution to our immigration crisis and needs a permanent reauthorization, not a temporary stay of execution. The Obama administration and congressional leaders demonstrated, once again, that their goal is to minimize the enforcement of laws against illegal immigration," concluded Stein.
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THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO LA RAZA – THE MEXICAN FASCIST POLITICAL PARTY. THESE FIGURES ARE DATED. CNN CALCULATES THAT WAGES ARE DEPRESSED $300 - $400 BILLION PER YEAR!
“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” Christian Science Monitor
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