EVEN WITH THIS NATION’S STAGGERING
UNEMPLOYMENT, OBAMA’S ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKERS WILL CONTINUE WITH HIS
NUMEROUS NON-TRANSPARENT AND DISGUISED FORMS OF AMNESTY FOR THE 38 MILLION
ILLEGALS IN THIS COUNTRY AND OUR JOBS!
“On the same day as his visit to the
Chrysler plant the Commerce Department reported that American businesses earned
profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter—the highest
figure since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago.”
*
“The central aim of the administration is not providing
skills or decent-paying jobs, but closing the gap between the wages of US
workers and their brutally exploited counter-parts in Asia, Latin America and
Eastern Europe. In this they have the full support of the UAW.”
*
At
Indiana Chrysler plant Obama hails revival of auto industry profits
By
Jerry White
24 November 2010
24 November 2010
President Barack Obama and Vice
President Joe Biden made a joint appearance at a Chrysler transmission factory
in Kokomo, Indiana Tuesday afternoon to promote last year’s bailout of General
Motors and Chrysler.
Facing popular anger over his
administration’s indifference to the victims of mass unemployment and
foreclosures, the president’s handlers no doubt hoped the event would help
Obama “reconnect with the people,” particularly after the Democrats’ debacle in
the mid-term elections.
Instead, the event underscored the
chasm between an administration that has done everything to defend the banks
and corporations, and the working class, which has faced an unrelenting attack
on jobs and living standards beginning with the forced bankruptcy and
restructuring of GM and Chrysler.
On the same day as his visit to the
Chrysler plant the Commerce Department reported that American businesses earned
profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter—the highest
figure since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago.
As always, the audience of “workers”
was a carefully vetted group guaranteed to raise no criticism. These included
UAW officials in Obama T-shirts, supervisors and state and local politicians
who gave the president and vice president a standing ovation as they entered
and applauded on cue during the speeches.
Before speaking, Obama welcomed
Chrysler/Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne. According to a recently published account,
during the auto bailout Marchionne declared that auto workers needed to accept
a “culture of poverty” rather than a “culture of entitlement,” attacking, among
other things, retiree health care benefits.
The president also gave a warm welcome
to UAW President Bob King. The White House awarded the UAW a majority ownership
stake in Chrysler in exchange for its collaboration in the destruction of the
jobs, living standards and working conditions of workers at the third largest
US automaker. Last week King celebrated the launching of the General Motors’
IPO—a stock sale that netted more than $3 billion for the UAW executives—by
joining GM CEO Dan Akerson for the opening bell ceremony at the New York Stock
Exchange.
Finally, there was the Democratic Party
congressional delegation from Indiana. This included Congressman Andre Carson,
who recently demanded that workers at GM’s Indianapolis metal stamping plant
accept a 50 percent wage cut in order to attract a new buyer for the factory.
In his introductory remarks, Biden said
the administration came into office amidst the worst economic crisis in
generations and had outlined an economic plan to “help communities, save and
create jobs and lay the foundations for a sustained growth of the US economy.”
But the vice president made it clear
that the foundation for this growth was a drastic and permanent reduction in
the wages and benefits of industrial workers. Before bailing out the auto
companies, he said, the White House insisted they “had to change things, get
leaner, tougher competitively.” The auto industry was in a “new era,” he said,
and was “hiring again.”
In fact, new auto workers throughout
the industry are being hired at $14 an hour, half the wages traditionally paid
to auto workers. This and other attacks on health care, pensions and working
conditions was the precondition set by the White House to bail out GM and
Chrysler.
Biden boasted that the auto and auto
parts industry had created 75,000 jobs over the last year—a figure that pales
in comparison to the more than a quarter of a million jobs Detroit automakers
alone have wiped out over the last seven years.
The situation in Indiana is
particularly dire. Over 100,000 industrial jobs have been wiped out in Indiana
since the recession began. The Indianapolis Star reported Tuesday that
560,000 state workers—18.1 percent of the workforce—was drawing unemployment,
had fallen out of the labor force, or was being forced to work part-time.
In his remarks, Obama asserted that the
economy was heading in the right direction. He said he was happy that “after a
couple of tough years the plant is running at full capacity.” This evoked a
delayed applause, perhaps because—as one worker at the plant told the
WSWS—there are now only 3,000 workers employed at the transmission and casting
complex in Kokomo, down from 6,000.
The president acknowledged that success
at one plant “does not mean that people in Kokomo are not still hurting” and
that throughout the country “millions are still looking for work.” As a sign of
progress, he said, the city’s unemployment rate had fallen from 20 percent to
12 percent—an indication of what the administration apparently considers the
new normal.
In a brief review of events leading up
to the bailout Obama indicated that his administration was concerned over the
potential economic and social upheaval that would have resulted from the
outright liquidation of GM and Chrysler. “We knew millions of jobs were in the
balance and that the collapse of the auto industry would lead to a deeper
collapse of the economy,” he said.
In fact, the administration and the
Wall Street investors it put in charge of the Auto Task Force decided to
exploit the crisis to push through a historic rollback in the wages and
conditions of auto workers. This succeeded in making the auto industry an
attractive investment for the same financial speculators who precipitated the
economic meltdown in 2008.
“We decided to stand behind the auto
industry if the CEOs did what was necessary to be competitive and if they had
the cooperation of the workers taking pride in what they made. Today we know
that was the right decision,” Obama said, pointing to increased profits and
“stock investors” who “expressed their confidence” in the GM IPO last week.
In remarks that won loud applause from
the UAW officials, Obama played the “Buy American” nationalist card. “The most
important contest we face is not between Democrats and Republicans but between
America and our economic competitors,” Obama said. “We don’t want to cede
anything to China—we want to make sure workers have the skills to compete.”
The central aim of the administration is not providing
skills or decent-paying jobs, but closing the gap between the wages of US
workers and their brutally exploited counter-parts in Asia, Latin America and
Eastern Europe. In this they have the full support of the UAW.
Obama concluded by announcing that
Chrysler had decided to invest another $800 million in the Kokomo facility,
without mentioning what concessions the UAW had granted in return or what other
plants would be shuttered or face layoffs instead.
“There’s always a price to be paid,”
Chris, a Kokomo transmission worker, told the WSWS. “We would like to know what
the UAW gave up. They are already hiring temporary workers whose top wage is
$16 an hour and outside contractors who only make $14.
“The union is more interested in
profits than in people. They measure success in profitability, not how many
workers are employed or the wages and benefits they receive. That has all been
taken away with a stroke of a pen. The $28 an hour wage is gone forever. With
all that Bob King has said about ‘partnership’ it’s just a matter of time when
we all see wage cuts—we expect that in the next contract.”
As for the claims that things were
getting better in Kokomo, Chris, who was born and raised in the city, told the
WSWS, “Kokomo used to be booming with industry and was called little Detroit
because of the iron, steel, canning and printing industry. Now all of that is
non-existent. Delphi has less than 1,000 workers and there is no work other
than a bunch of restaurants. Throughout my life I’ve seen the
deindustrialization of the city.”
*
“A union-free America. Growth down a little, employment down
a lot. Profits and productivity up, wages flat. Health-care costs up for
workers, down for employers. The return of a thriving middle class? Dream on.”
*
Hard times for workers on Labor Day
2010
By Harold Meyerson
Monday, September 6, 2010; A15
Monday, September 6, 2010; A15
On Labor Day 2010, the state of
America's workers is appalling.
Millions have lost their jobs. Millions
have had their lives put on hold or thrown into reverse.
Granted, it's a global recession. The
state of the world's workers -- at least in the advanced democracies -- should
be equivalently appalling. But it's not. The Great Recession has taken a far
greater toll on our nation's workers than on workers in similar countries, even
those whose economies have dipped more steeply than ours.
Consider: As of this year, U.S. gross
domestic product is about 1 percent beneath its 2008 peak, compared to a drop
of roughly 2 percent in France and Germany and 5 percent in Britain and Japan.
But U.S. unemployment has increased roughly 5 percentage points since 2007, compared
to just 1 point in France and Japan and 2 in Britain. In Germany, unemployment
has actually dropped a point since the recession began.
No wonder Christina Romer confessed
bewilderment at the scope of American job losses in her valedictory speech as head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers
last week. American employers have responded to recession with far more layoffs
than their counterparts in comparable or even worse situations in other
nations.
One reason for this anomaly is that
productivity has surged in the United States, enabling employers to maintain
output with far fewer workers. For those workers still on the job, though, this
story seemingly should have a happy ending: Sustained production with fewer
workers should equal higher wages, should it not?
It should, but it hasn't. As Andrew Sum
and Joseph McLaughlin of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market
Studies have documented, pretax corporate
profits increased $388 billion from the low point of the current recession, the
second quarter of 2009, to the third quarter thereafter, while wages increased
just $68 billion. At a comparable point in the 1981-82 recession, corporate
profits came to just 10 percent of the combined uptick in profits and wages.
This time around, they amount to 85 percent.
If you've wondered how big banks'
profits have rebounded to pre-crisis levels and how American corporations have
come to be sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash -- even as unemployment remains
well above 9 percent -- wonder no more. They have pocketed their revenue,
neither resuming lending (if they're banks), nor rehiring laid-off workers nor giving
raises to those who have continued to work for them.
A similar tale can be told about
employers and health insurance, the costs of which have continued to rise. It's
not the employers, however, who have borne those increases. A survey, released
Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational
Trust, shows that employee premiums rose 13.7
percent over last year, while the amount that employers contributed dropped --
dropped! -- 0.9 percent.
Only a purblind ideologue could miss
the pattern here. American employers -- more than employers in other nations
and more than American employers in earlier downturns -- have imposed the costs
of the recession and, increasingly, the costs of doing business, on their
workers, and kept for themselves damn near all the proceeds from doing
business.
What gives? Are American employers
meaner than their European counterparts and American forebears? I doubt it. The
difference is that American workers have markedly less power than their
European counterparts and their American forebears.
That's partly because unemployment
remains so high here. More fundamentally, though, the U.S. private sector is
almost entirely -- 93 percent -- nonunion. Unlike European workers, unlike
their own parents and grandparents who lived in a much more heavily unionized
America, U.S. workers are now powerless to stop their employers from pocketing
all the change.
The source of this problem is outlined
in two reports scheduled for release Monday from two very different
organizations, the liberal Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, an organization
with a staunch Lane-Kirkland-esque antipathy toward authoritarian regimes left
and right: Through the weakness of our labor laws, the reports say,
private-sector American workers can no longer form unions. Human Rights Watch
documents how corporations that are model (and highly profitable) employers in
Europe and frequently collaborate with unions there descend to American employer
norms -- denying workers the right to join unions -- when they come over here.
Freedom House, citing the near-impossibility of forming unions in this country,
laments that the United States cannot be classed among the 41 nations that
afford their workers full freedoms.
A union-free America. Growth down a little, employment down
a lot. Profits and productivity up, wages flat. Health-care costs up for
workers, down for employers. The return of a thriving middle class? Dream on.
And a happy Labor Day, one and all.
*
THE ONLY OBAMA JOBS PLAN THAT HAS EVER BEEN, OR EVER
WILL BE IS CALLED AMNESTY!
“Obama’s rejection of any serious jobs program is part of a
conscious class war policy. Two years after the financial crisis and the
multi-trillion dollar bailout of the banks, the administration is spearheading
a campaign by corporations to sharply increase the exploitation of the working
class, using the “new normal” of mass unemployment to force workers to accept
lower wages, longer hours, and more brutal working conditions.” WSWS.ORG
BIG BANKSTERS PROFITS ARE SOARING!
OTHER THAN SERVICING HIS BANKSTERS, OBAMA’S SOLE
PASSION IS AMNESTY! OFFICIAL, OR CONTINUING THE LA RAZA DEMS’ bit by bit
amnesty.
HE’S FOUGHT HARD TO LEAVE OUR BORDERS OPEN,
ASSAULTED LEGALS IN AZ FOR HIS ILLEGALS, SABOTAGED E-VERIFY, TURNED I.C.E. INTO
A LA RAZA AGENCY, AND HOMELAND SECURITY IS NOW HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO
CITIZENSHIP with LA RAZA OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE JANET NAPOLITANO!
THE CULTURE
OF CORRUPTION!
Wsws.org
Obama
on Labor Day: No measures to address jobs crisis
7
September 2010
In a speech delivered to mark Labor Day
in the US, President Obama made clear that there will be no significant
government measures to address the most severe jobs crisis since the Great
Depression of the 1930s.
Speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on
Monday, Obama trumpeted a plan for investment in infrastructure and
transportation as a significant jobs program. Despite efforts by the media to
play up the announcement, it quickly emerged that the administration is simply
asking Congress to reauthorize a bill that is routinely passed every five
years. His proposal for spending is little changed from previous years.
According to a White House fact sheet,
the administration is proposing that Congress “front load” the Department of
Transportation spending bill by about $50 billion, saying that this would
create jobs as early as 2011. The administration did not propose a total figure
for the bill, which will likely not be debated until after the mid-term
elections in November. In 2005, the Bush administration signed a transportation
bill that cost $286.4 billion over five years, or just under $50 billion a year.
The money goes to states and localities to fund road and infrastructure
projects and regular upkeep.
The figure proposed by Obama is not
only grossly inadequate in comparison to the decayed state of American
infrastructure, it will not begin to address the jobs crisis. It even pales in
comparison to the administration’s own inadequate $787 billion dollar
“stimulus” bill last year, which consisted largely of tax cuts and handouts to
private companies.
Administration officials have
repeatedly stressed that there is no new major stimulus bill in the works, let
alone a program of direct government hiring. Obama is expected to announce a
number of additional “jobs” measures later this week, including the extension
of tax cuts for corporations and small businesses.
The administration has also pledged
that all these measures will be “fully paid for,” continuing on the theme of
budget cutting and fiscal austerity. While hinting at ending various tax
loopholes for energy companies, payment will also likely include cuts in social
programs—like those carried out with the last extension of unemployment
benefits, which was accompanied by a reduction in funding for Food Stamps.
Obama’s rejection of any serious jobs program is part of a
conscious class war policy. Two years after the financial crisis and the
multi-trillion dollar bailout of the banks, the administration is spearheading
a campaign by corporations to sharply increase the exploitation of the working
class, using the “new normal” of mass unemployment to force workers to accept
lower wages, longer hours, and more brutal working conditions.
The latest jobs report—showing a loss
of 54,000 jobs in August—underscores the bleak outlook. The official
unemployment rate, which vastly underestimates the real number of jobless
workers, is expected to remain at around 10 percent at least through 2011. Of
the 15 million who are officially unemployed, 42 percent have been out of work
for more than six months, while millions are running out of their meager
unemployment benefits.
To the extent that the administration
has a jobs policy, it is the revival of a section of US manufacturing on the
basis of closing the wage gap between US workers and their brutally exploited
counterparts in Asia. Already, the level of exploitation of American workers
has increased significantly. While labor costs for companies are falling at the
sharpest rate in decades, productivity has surged—that is, workers are being
forced to do far more for much less.
Sergio Marchionne, the head of the
Italian auto company Fiat, summed up the thinking of the corporate elite in
remarks recounted in a soon-to-be-released memoir by Steven Rattner, the Wall
Street investor turned head of Obama’s Auto Task Force. According to Rattner,
Marchionne told then-United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger that
workers needed to accept a “culture of poverty” rather than a “culture of
entitlement.” Fiat was negotiating a partnership with Chrysler at the time,
under the direction of the Obama administration, which was demanding that
workers accept massive concessions and job cuts.
The determination to force workers to
submit to a “culture of poverty” is shared by both political parties—and, for
that matter, the UAW, which is presently doing everything it can to enforce
such a “culture” on workers in Indianapolis.
Labor Day in the US has always been
about containing class struggle. It was invented as a replacement for
International Workers’ Day, May 1, in a deliberate attempt to separate American
workers from their class brothers and sisters around the world, who are facing
similar conditions. The day has become an empty ritual, allowing trade union
officials to join hands with political representatives of the capitalist class
in a hypocritical celebration of the American worker.
No amount of posturing, however, can
conceal the fact that all these figures—including the president of the AFL-CIO,
Richard Trumka, who joined Obama on Monday in Milwaukee—are engaged in an
all-out offensive against the working class.
Politics in America is characterized by
an immense vacuum. There is an enormous disparity between the social and
economic strength of the working class—which today represents a far higher
proportion of the population than ever before—and its political influence.
Over the course of US history, American
workers have engaged in insurrectionary class battles and were able to win
significant concessions in the face of the bitter resistance of the capitalist
class. Politically, however, the working class has remained tied to the Democratic
Party, and through it, to the capitalist system. The Obama administration is
once again demonstrating the consequences of this subordination: in all its
policies, foreign and domestic, it has upheld the interests of the corporate
and financial elite.
There exist many organizations that
continue to seek to bolster support for the Democratic Party—from the trade
unions and Obama’s liberal supporters, to supposedly “left” or “socialist”
groups such as the International Socialist Organization. These tendencies,
however, have today a marginal political influence in the working class itself.
This was demonstrated by the negligible turnout at the “jobs” march organized
last month in Detroit by the UAW and sections of the Democratic Party
establishment, with the full support of the Democratic Party’s various
auxiliary organizations. (See, “The Nation on the Detroit march for ‘Jobs
Justice and Peace’”)
The growth of the class struggle is
inevitable. New mass struggles of the working class will develop outside of the
existing framework of political life. To lead these struggles, the building of
an independent political party of the working class, in opposition to the
corporate-controlled Democratic and Republican Parties, and based on the fight
for socialism, is the most pressing necessity.
Joe Kishore and Jerry White
*
Michelle Malkin
The U.S. Department of Illegal Alien Labor
President
Obama's Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is supposed to represent American workers.
What you need to know is that this longtime open-borders sympathizer has always
had a rather radical definition of "American." At a Latino voter
registration project conference in Los Angeles many years ago, Solis asserted
to thunderous applause, "We are all Americans, whether you are legalized
or not."
That's
right. The woman in charge of enforcing our employment laws doesn't give a hoot
about our immigration laws -- or about the fundamental distinction between
those who followed the rules in pursuit of the American dream and those who
didn't.
While in Congress, she
opposed strengthening the border fence, supported expansion of illegal alien
benefits (including driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced
sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate with federal homeland security
officials to enforce immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass
amnesty. Solis was steeped in the pro-illegal alien worker organizing movement
in Southern California and was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups
led by the Service Employees International Union. She has now caused a Capitol
Hill firestorm over her new taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign
to illegal aliens regarding fair wages:
"I'm
here to tell you that your president, your secretary of labor and this
department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay --
especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often
dangerous hours," Solis says in the video pitch. "We can help, and we
will help. If you work in this country, you are protected by our laws. And you
can count on the U.S. Department of Labor to see to it that those protections
work for you."
To be
sure, no one should be scammed out of "fair wages." Employers that
hire and exploit illegal immigrant workers deserve full sanctions and
punishment. But it's the timing, tone-deafness and underlying blanket amnesty
agenda of Solis' illegal alien outreach that has so many American workers and
their representatives on Capitol Hill rightly upset.
With
double-digit unemployment and a growing nationwide revolt over Washington's
border security failures, why has Solis chosen now to hire 250 new government field
investigators to bolster her illegal alien workers' rights campaign? (Hint:
Leftists unhappy with Obama's lack of progress on "comprehensive
immigration reform" need appeasing. This is a quick bone to distract
them.)
Unfortunately,
the federal government is not alone in lavishing attention and resources on
workers who shouldn't be here in the first place. As of 2008, California,
Florida, Nevada, New York, Texas and Utah all expressly included illegal aliens
in their state workers' compensation plans -- and more than a dozen other
states implicitly cover them.
Solis'
public service announcement comes on the heels of little-noticed but far more
troubling comments encouraging illegal alien workers in the Gulf Coast. Earlier
this month, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, according to Spanish language
publication El Diario La Prensa, Solis signaled that her department was going
out of its way to shield illegal immigrant laborers involved in cleanup
efforts. "My purpose is to assist the workers with respect to safety and
protection," she said. "We're protecting all workers regardless of
migration status because that's the federal law." She told reporters that
her department was in talks with local Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) officials who had visited coastal worksites to try to verify that workers
were legal.
No word
yet on whether she gave ICE her "we are all Americans, whether you are
legalized or not" lecture. But it's a safe bet.
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
From the above blog,
email articles to those concerned about Obama’s endless push for amnesty.
FAIRUS.org
No comments:
Post a Comment