REALITY CHECK:
Obama’s first 100 days and counting have been nothing but selling us out to WALL STREET, BIG BANKERS, SAUDIS, and now, ILLEGALS, just as we were victimized by 20 years of BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH!
Obama’s first 100 days and counting have been nothing but selling us out to WALL STREET, BIG BANKERS, SAUDIS, and now, ILLEGALS, just as we were victimized by 20 years of BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH!
NAME ONE PROMISE HE MADE THAT HE HASN’T ALREADY BROKEN!
OBAMA’S next agenda when he finishes KISSING BIG BUSH SAUDI
CARLYLE GROUP ASS ENOUGH: AMNESTY!
He’s already backed-off E-VERIFY per orders from the U. S.
Chamber of Commerce, LA RAZA, “THE RACE”
the political party of the Mexican occupation, and the WALL STREETERS HE
REALLY WORKS FOR!
*
THIS IS OBAMA’S REAL BAILOUT OF
G.M.:
“The record profits owe
largely to the cuts imposed on auto workers in the United States and Canada,
under the auspices of the United Auto Workers and Canadian Auto Workers unions,
including a new starting wage of barely $14 an hour, half the basic wage for
longtime workers, and cuts in health benefits, pensions and health care for
retirees.”
GM posts record profits, prepares
more cuts
By Patrick Martin
18 February 2012
18 February 2012
General
Motors reported a record $7.6 billion profit for 2011 Thursday, but the largest
US automaker made clear that it would continue to pursue cuts in jobs, wages
and benefits for its worldwide workforce, with the direct assistance of the
United Auto Workers.
It
was the eighth consecutive quarterly profit for the company since its forced
bankruptcy in 2009, but the smallest during that period, a signal that further
cost-cutting measures will be demanded by the financial markets. Worldwide
revenues rose 11 percent to $150.3 billion, but profits soared 62 percent
compared to 2010.
GM
was fueled by record pretax profits of $7.2 billion in North America. Asian
operations also posted a significant profit, about $1.8 billion, but GM lost
money in South America and particularly Europe, where its subsidiaries have
accumulated losses of $14 billion since 1999.
Global
sales rose 7 percent to 9.03 million vehicles, putting GM once again in first
place, surpassing Toyota. But fourth quarter revenue was only $500 million, or
28 cents a share, significantly below analyst expectations, which averaged 42
cents a share.
Chairman
and CEO Dan Akerson—whose own salary and bonus approach $10 million—hailed the
results of 2011, which included cost-cutting measures that had the effect of
“reducing our break-even level in Europe and South America and driving higher
revenues around the world.”
The record profits owe
largely to the cuts imposed on auto workers in the United States and Canada,
under the auspices of the United Auto Workers and Canadian Auto Workers unions,
including a new starting wage of barely $14 an hour, half the basic wage for
longtime workers, and cuts in health benefits, pensions and health care for
retirees.
While
the company made a $7.2 billion profit in North America, nearly $150,000 for
every one of its 47,500 US production workers, these workers will receive a
derisory $7,000 in profit-sharing checks in March.
No sooner than it broke its
previous record for profits, than the company announced a new attack on
white-collar workers.
GM said Wednesday it would freeze its pension plan for 19,000 US workers hired
before 2001, shifting them to a 401(k) plan with a defined contribution and no
guaranteed benefit. Salaried workers
hired after 2001 are already denied a pension. The company will also
institute annual bonuses rather than pay increases for its 26,000 salaried
employees.
GM
spokesmen emphasized the company’s focus on improving margins in its European
operations, which lost $727 million last year. Last month Akerson placed Vice
Chairman Steve Girsky in charge of the European management board, and shifted a
group of US-based executives across the Atlantic.
Particularly
critical will be the role of United Auto Workers President Bob King, who is to
be named to the supervisory board of GM’s German subsidiary, Adam Opel AG,
according to a report Monday in the German publication Handelsblatt. The
supervisory board has 20 seats divided equally between GM management and the IG
Metall union, which will nominate King as one of its representatives.
Press
coverage of the King nomination suggested that his selection was “another sign
of how serious the Detroit automaker is about restructuring Opel,” the Detroit
News observed. “The company is reportedly working on a major restructuring
of Opel and its broader European business that will likely entail plant
closings and significant concessions from unions—the same sort of concessions
that GM won from the UAW during the economic crisis in the United States.”
The
Detroit Free Press headlined the same decision: “GM putting new team in
charge of Europe; UAW President Bob King to join Opel board.” As the title
demonstrates, King is regarded as an integral part of the GM “team” that will
spearhead the company’s cost-cutting drive at its German subsidiary.
Reuters
news agency put it even more bluntly, reporting the selection of King under the
headline, “As Opel losses mount, GM seeks union-backed cuts.” The article noted
that an IG Metall leader visited King in Detroit before his appointment,
confirming that the German trade union executives are joining forces with their
American counterparts and the corporate bosses to gang up against the workers
on both continents.
The
most likely outcome of these backroom consultations is a decision to close
several GM plants in Europe, most likely the Opel plant at Bochum in the Ruhr,
with 3,100 workers, and the Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port near Liverpool in
Britain’s blighted industrial northwest, with 2,100 workers.
The
collaboration of the unions is essential to GM to strangle resistance from the
workers. An analyst for HIS Global Insight wrote Wednesday, in a research note,
that the shakeup in GM’s European leadership “would indicate that the company
is foreseeing some major industrial unrest as a result of the expected
restructuring plan.”
Under
the impact of the global financial collapse and the crisis in the euro zone,
car sales have fallen 15 percent in 2011 compared with 2007 and are projected
to decline another 6 percent this year.
“There
is increasing frustration with Opel and a feeling that the cuts two years ago
did not go nearly deep enough,” one company official told the Wall Street
Journal. “If Opel is going to get fixed, it is going to get fixed now and
cuts are going to be deep.”
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corporate rape and pillage slant!
*
Obama offers nothing to states,
cities devastated by GM plant closures
By Tom Eley
3 June 2009
3 June 2009
Plant
closings resulting from Monday’s forced bankruptcy of General Motors will cause
spiraling unemployment and deep cuts in social services in many cities and
states across the country. The Obama administration, whose Auto Task Force
dictated the terms of the bankruptcy, has offered no serious aid to the
affected workers and their communities.
GM
is carrying out at least 21,000 job cuts and the closure of 14 plants and
warehouses in eight states. In addition, the company has announced its
intention to dump franchise agreements with 2,300 dealerships by the end of
next year. Many of these will be forced to close, eliminating as many as
100,000 jobs in all 50 states.
The
gutting of GM, once the most powerful corporation in the world and a symbol of
US industrial might, will send shock waves through the economy, cascading into
more layoffs at parts suppliers and financial ruin for thousands of small
businesses.
The
bankruptcy will immediately result in state and local cuts in social services,
health care and education, with city and state workers targeted for layoffs,
wages cuts and other concessions. It will accelerate the foreclosure crisis and
further drive down home prices, as tens of thousands of workers are no longer
able to meet their mortgage payments.
The
Obama administration is using the concessions and layoffs, agreed to by the
United Auto Workers, to attack the wages and benefits of the entire working
class. Corporations will take the concessions imposed on auto workers as a
signal for similar measures against their own workers.
The
state of Michigan, which already has the highest unemployment rate in the
nation at 12.9 percent, will bear the brunt of the closures, with 42 percent of
all national GM layoffs taking place there. Nearly 9,000 jobs will be lost in
Michigan from Monday’s announced plant closures. The shutdowns are concentrated
in southeast Michigan. They will be carried out in Flint, Livonia, Orion
Township, Pontiac and Ypsilanti Township. On Friday, 700 workers were laid off
when GM shuttered a stamping plant in Grand Rapids, in southwest Michigan.
It
is estimated that since 2000, Michigan has lost 17 percent of its jobs—about
three quarters of a million in all—as a direct result of the crisis in the auto
industry. Now the state anticipates 520,000 job losses this year and next.
The
consequences for the state’s limited social welfare system will be disastrous.
According to one estimate, Michigan could lose an additional $18.3 billion in
income. It already faces a $3 billion two-year budget shortfall, and officials
recently revised downward their revenue estimate for the 2010 fiscal year by
$1.7 billion, calling for an across-the-board spending cut of 8 percent.
“It’s
clearly going to impact the safety net,” Governor Jennifer Granholm warned. “People,
who are hurting, need services more, and we have fewer dollars.” Michigan has
already carried out $300 million in budget cuts for the current fiscal year.
Oakland
County in suburban Detroit will lose three factories and 6,600 jobs, the most
of any county. Oakland County was already in difficult financial straits due to
declining property tax revenue, a result of layoffs and the foreclosure crisis.
The loss of GM-related tax revenue will result in layoffs for county workers
and sharp cuts in social programs, said Bob Daddow, Oakland County’s deputy
executive. “I will be going to war,” Daddow told the Detroit News. “We
will need to make cuts in all departments. We have been doing these cuts all
along...but the worst is yet to come on governmental revenues.”
The
closure of the GM Truck and Bus plant will deepen the social crisis in
impoverished Pontiac, Michigan. About 1,100 workers will lose their jobs, and
the city will lose 20 percent of its current tax base, or $10 million, said
Fred Leeb, the city’s emergency financial manager. Leeb made clear that
Pontiac’s working class would pay the price for the shutdown. “We fear that we
are going to have to cut even more deeply,” he told the Detroit News.
“And there will be concessions to ask from the (city) unions.”
Flint,
Michigan has lost about 50,000 GM jobs in 30 years. One thousand more were
added to the grim tally when GM said Monday it would close its Powertrain Flint
North plant. Monday night, the Flint City Council met to enact a series of
measures to bridge a $13 million budget deficit, including the layoff of about
90 firefighters and police and the shuttering of a fire station.
The
city of Livonia, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit, will lose its GM engine
plant, and with it $474,000 in annual tax revenue, about 1 percent of its
total. City workers have already been asked to accept pay cuts. The
Detroit-Livonia-Warren area had an unemployment rate of 14 percent as of May.
Ypsilanti’s
Willow Run transmission plant laid off 600 workers on Monday, and 500 more jobs
will be shed by December 2010. The township will lose 4.4 percent of its tax
revenue, and Washtenaw County will see a loss of $3.8 million in tax receipts.
The Ypsilanti Public Schools confront a $1.4 million deficit, which will be met
primarily through teacher layoffs. The city faces a budget deficit of almost a
half million dollars.
In
Livingston County, Michigan, the GM bankruptcy may lead to a number of parts
suppliers shutting down. Already hundreds of auto parts workers have lost their
jobs in recent months, according to the county’s Economic Development Council
director, Fred Dillingham. Metaldyne, which employs 100 workers in the county,
last week filed for bankruptcy protection. “We have a number of companies with
as much as 90 percent of their business from GM. We have an awful lot of
trickle-down effect from GM,” Dillingham told Livingston Community News.
The
closure of GM Mansfield in Ontario, Ohio is likely to result in the elimination
of city jobs and pay cuts for municipal employees. With revenues already down a
quarter million dollars, the city is bracing for disaster.
Spring
Hill, Tennessee, which has seen its Saturn plant idled, most likely to be
closed permanently, was a single-industry town. When GM opened the plant in
1990, fewer than 1,500 people lived there. Now it has 24,000 inhabitants.
The
collapse of the Big Three has brought with it a sharp decline in funding for
the arts and culture. The General Motors Foundation, which contributed $31.4
million to the arts in 2007, has told many art and cultural organizations,
“mostly in Detroit,” not to count on any contributions this year, the Financial
Times reported last week. Toledo, Ohio, recently announced that its
three-day jazz festival, the Art Tatum Jazz Heritage Festival, would be
cancelled this year after Chrysler said it would no longer provide $100,000 in
annual funding.
In
the face of this mounting social crisis, President Barack Obama has offered
little more than rhetorical palliatives, telling workers that their
“sacrifices” will ensure the future for coming generations. But for the auto
workers’ children, the future foretells poverty amidst a crumbling social
safety net.
On
Tuesday, Obama sent Edward Montgomery, his director of recovery for auto
communities and workers, along with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, to tour a
Romulus, Michigan GM plant that thus far has not been slated for closure. This
was followed by Solis’ appearance at a “worker round table” at Eastern Michigan
University in Ypsilanti, the ostensible purpose of which was to discuss the
retraining of workers for new jobs in the “green economy.”
The
meeting was little more than a media stunt organized by the Democratic Party
and UAW executives to present the Obama administration as a defender of jobs
and divert working class anger along nationalist lines.
In
her remarks, Solis outlined a series of “job training” programs that will
supposedly equip workers for new high-tech and environmentally-friendly
industries. But as Solis and Obama well know, these token programs cannot
possibly provide decent employment for the vast majority of the workers who are
losing their jobs as a result of the administration’s auto industry policy.
In
what is shaping up as the worst job market since the Great Depression, even
college graduates—many with degrees in engineering, computer science, robotics
and management—face the highest rate of unemployment for those with a four-year
degree in decades.
Among
the Obama administration initiatives Solis outlined was $49 million in
assistance to Michigan workers who have lost jobs due to “international trade,”
federal assistance for the weatherization of homes, and summer youth programs.
These are already existing programs. She could not announce any new programs to
deal with the social crisis created by the bankruptcy of GM because the Obama
administration has no plans for such programs.
After
Solis spoke, the panel discussion was turned over to a number of local
Democratic Party politicians and union officials. Don Skidmore, the Willow Run
UAW local president, set the “America first” tone, declaring, “We’ve got to
stop the bleeding of American jobs south of the border!” Another speaker
demanded to know why Toledo, Ohio was able to keep its GM engine plant open.
UAW
official Donnie Enersen denounced immigrant workers. “They’re coming into
America, not paying taxes, not paying into Social Security,” he said.
The
union officials are seeking to divide workers along national and even regional
lines, in order to deflect attention from their real enemies—the Obama
administration and the Wall Street financiers who are behind the carve-up of GM.
The
World Socialist Web Site spoke with a small number of workers, most of
whom were recently retired, who came to the meeting to demonstrate against the
closure of the Willow Run plant. Corky, a GM worker with 12 years, said, “We
thought we were going to stay open until 2010. On Friday when we walked out of
work we thought we would be coming back in mid-July. I got a call from a fellow
worker that night saying we were no longer going to work there.
“It’s
unfair. We’ve made enough sacrifices. I’m tired of it. This was my seventh GM
plant. For two-and-a-half years I was driving down to Toledo, Ohio to work,
even when gas was $4 a gallon. I’ve made sacrifices. My dad is a retired GM
worker and his benefits are being cut. I put my blood and sweat into every transmission
that comes off the line.
“Yesterday
when they announced the bankruptcy and plant closing I was all tears and
emotions. Now I’m angry.”
*
Obama prepares sweeping cuts in
social programs
8 January 2009
Barack
Obama took the occasion of his first press appearance in Washington as
president-elect to declare his determination to impose policies of budgetary
austerity, including the elimination of entire federal programs and
cost-cutting in the entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid that are of vital importance to tens of millions of elderly and poor
people.
Obama
announced his appointment of Nancy Killefer, a director at the management
consulting firm McKinsey & Co., to a new White House post of chief
performance officer. Killefer, a Treasury official in the Clinton
administration, will be in charge of setting performance standards for federal
agencies and enforcing them on agency officials. Those programs that fail to
meet these standards will be targeted for reorganization or elimination.
The
president-elect made the statement on the eve of a speech Thursday in which he
will make the case for a proposed stimulus package. It was a clear effort to
appease both congressional Republicans and the sizeable faction of fiscal conservatives
among the congressional Democrats, reassuring them that while unlimited funds
are to be provided to bail out big business, there will be a tight rein on
spending for programs that support the needs of working people.
Obama's
remarks on Wednesday shed light on the basic character of his stimulus plan,
which is tailored to the demands of the financial and corporate elite and will
provide hundreds of billions in additional public funds to prop up corporate
profits, while doing little to provide relief for tens of millions of working
people facing the deepest slump since the Great Depression.
Obama
noted the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate released Wednesday that
the federal deficit for the current fiscal year will top $1.2 trillion, without
counting any additional spending for the economic stimulus plan that the Obama
administration and Congress will enact after his inauguration. "Trillion
dollar deficits will be a reality for years to come," he warned, declaring
that containing the deficit and putting the lid on federal spending must become
"fundamental principles of government."
When
a reporter from the Wall Street Journal asked about Medicare and Social
Security, noting that these were among the largest federal expenditures, Obama
replied, "We are beginning consultations with members of Congress around
how we expect to approach the deficit. We expect that discussion around
entitlements will be a part, a central part, of those plans." He added
that once the stimulus package was adopted, by mid-February, "we will have
more to say about how we're going to approach entitlement spending."
These
remarks and comments by Democratic congressional leaders are a warning of what
is to come: a frontal assault on the most important components of what remains
of a social safety net in the United States—the programs that provide at least
minimal retirement benefits and medical coverage for tens of millions of
elderly people, as well as medical coverage for millions of low-income
families.
While
both Social Security and Medicare are solvent, currently taking in more tax
revenues than they pay out, the Social Security Trust Fund, which represents
the accumulated contributions of three generations of working people, has been
effectively plundered to pay for the Bush administration's tax cuts for the
wealthy, two wars and the immense US military establishment.
Out
of $10.7 trillion in total federal debt, about 40 percent, or $4.3 trillion, is
borrowed from Social Security. The Trust Fund is the largest holder of federal
debt, followed by US private investors, who hold $3.4 trillion, and foreign
investors, many of them governments, who hold $3 trillion.
The
CBO figure of $1.2 trillion likely underestimates the current year's deficit by
a significant amount. It includes nothing for the stimulus package which has
yet to be spelled out in detail by the incoming administration, and assumes no
emergency spending to finance Obama's promised buildup of US military forces in
Afghanistan. Reuters reported Wednesday that Obama's secretary of defense,
Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, is requesting an
additional $70 billion for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not
counting the additional cost of a doubling of US forces to some 60,000 in
Afghanistan.
The
CBO estimates that the US unemployment rate, at 6.7 percent in November, will
rise to 9 percent by the end of this year, although many economists project a
rate of 10 percent or more. Double-digit unemployment would drive up spending
on jobless benefits, food stamps and Medicaid, among other programs, swelling
the deficit even further.
The
CBO also placed the cost of the Treasury bailout of Wall Street at $180 billion
in 2009, although Congress is expected to authorize an additional $350 billion
on top of the $350 billion already expended since October. The bailout of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored mortgage finance
companies brought down by the subprime mortgage crisis, will add another $240
billion to the deficit.
Senate
Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, Democrat from North Dakota, echoed
Obama's warning of trillion-dollar deficits for several years, as well as his
pledge to tackle long-term problems in the financing of Social Security and
Medicare. He told the press, "It would send a very healthy message to the
markets and the American people if President-elect Obama were to simultaneously
announce an economic recovery package and the beginning of a bipartisan process
to deal with our long-term imbalances."
House
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who has close ties to the right-wing faction of
House Democrats, the so-called Blue Dogs, added his voice to the chorus calling
for long-term deficit-reduction measures, going so far as to suggest that the
Obama administration might have to follow the example of the Republican
administrations of the 1980s, when White House budget officials engaged in
across-the-board budget cuts by executive order, a process called
"sequestering."
Congressional
Democrats opposed sequestering 20 years ago, pointing out that there was no
constitutional authority for such executive action without congressional
authorization. It is a measure of how far to the right the Democratic Party has
moved that one of its top leaders now embraces such a policy.
Robert
Bixby, director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates
fiscal austerity, provided an indication of what is being contemplated, saying,
"I would analogize it to what the government is doing with the auto
companies. Congress said, we'll give you the money but you have to show us a
plan for sustainability." In return for emergency loans to the US auto
companies, Congress demanded tens of thousands of layoffs, the closure of
dozens of plants and draconian cuts in auto workers' wages and benefits.
Four
years ago, George W. Bush began his second term as president by proposing a
sweeping privatization of Social Security, a measure which was never formally
introduced in Congress due to overwhelming popular opposition. The plan was
quietly shelved after the debacle of Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the Bush
administration's gross incompetence and utter indifference to the plight of
poor and working class Americans. It has thus been left to Obama, who
occasionally postures as the heir of Franklin Roosevelt, to take responsibility
for dismantling the last legacy of the New Deal.
Patrick
Martin
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corporate rape and pillage slant!
*
REALITY: FROM HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE, WALL ST-OWNED BARACK
OBAMA HAS SERVICED THEM ON HANDS AND KNEES USING THE SAME OBAMA PARADIGM OF
PROTECTING THE CRIMINAL MANAGEMENT OF THESE BIG BUSINESSES, AND MAKING SURE THE
EMPLOYEES GOT THE SHAFT BIG TIME!
IN A PERFECT LA RAZA MOMENT, OBAMA WOULD HAVE HIS HORDES OF
ILLEGALS IN EACH AND EVERY JOB TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED TO THIRD-WORLD LEVELS.
OBAMA HAS SABOTAGED E-VERIFY AROUND THE NATION TO IMPLEMENT THIS!
OBAMA – HE’S A WALKING CON JOB!
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