UAW: OPERATING FOR THEIR WALL STREET MASTERS LIKE A PACK OF THUGS! - Lessons of the autoworkers’ battle

 OBAMA-CLINTONomics: There is a reason why unions are behind Hillary Clinton. They like the smell of her promise of AMNESTY to 40 million Mexicans. The stench of those dues paying new union members smells good!

"Never have the rich increased their wealth so quickly as in

America since the financial crash of 2008. But side by side

with the amassing of previously unthinkable private fortunes,

the infrastructure of America is crumbling, education, health

care and other social services are starved of funding, and the

living standards of the vast majority of the population, the

working people who produce the wealth, are declining."

Lessons of the autoworkers’ battle

"Far from giving workers a democratic voice to assert their interests, the “negotiations” between the so-called unions and the corporations are nothing but a conspiracy to suppress the aspirations of the working class."

Lessons of the autoworkers’ battle

23 November 2015

The claim by the United Auto Workers that it eked out a 51 percent “yes” vote at Ford is the capstone to a contract process that has exposed the limitless skullduggery of this corporate-labor syndicate.
The auto bosses prevailed in forcing through pro-corporate deals at the Big Three not because workers lacked determination or resilience. On the contrary, throughout the month-long battle—which included the first defeat of a national contract backed by the UAW in 32 years (Fiat Chrysler), a split vote (General Motors) and a dubious 51 percent ratification (Ford)—autoworkers have demonstrated their tenacity to struggle and their incredible ingenuity.

The ability of the companies to overcome the widespread opposition of the 140,000 autoworkers was due to the deliberate sabotage of the UAW, which from day one waged a relentless war not against Ford, GM and FCA, but against the workers the UAW falsely claims to represent.

On the eve of the Ford Rouge vote, the UAW held a hastily-called press conference at the Dearborn local union, where a UAW Vice President James Settles told the pro-corporate media that “things looked dark” but that they “might look brighter in the morning.” He denounced young workers in particular for making wage demands that would put Ford at a “competitive disadvantage.” A rejection of the pact would lead Ford to close plants or would force the UAW to call a strike, which Settles warned would result in financial ruin for workers or their replacement by scabs.

Fearing any opposition to its conspiracy with the auto companies, the UAW barred WSWS Autoworker Newsletter reporters from the press conference and forcibly removed them. The thuggish behavior was then meted out to Ford Rouge workers the next day. Workers reported that they were forced to walk through a gauntlet of local UAW officials to vote at the union hall, while UAW committeemen took to the shop floor with ballots in hand to pressure recalcitrant workers to vote “yes.”

Late on Friday, the UAW announced that it had miraculously achieved a 74 percent approval by Ford Rouge workers giving it the necessary 51 percent nationally to ratify the deal. Workers replied in angry disbelief, charging the UAW with vote rigging and demanding a recount, a demand that has been ignored by the UAW and the media. The UAW was “lawless and back stabbing,” “a bunch of scabs,” and no better than the “Mafia,” workers exclaimed.

The same day, the UAW ran roughshod over its own constitutional bylaws and ratified the GM deal, even though 60 percent of skilled workers rejected it two weeks ago.

With consummate cynicism, UAW Ford Vice President Settles declared Friday night, “There is no higher authority than the membership. Through a fair and democratic process UAW-Ford members have delivered job security and strong economic gains for their families and communities.”
In fact, the whole experience has shown that the UAW is completely unaccountable to workers and impervious to their needs. It resorted to extreme measures because it was impossible to attain a majority for deals that workers clearly understood would only deliver “strong economic gains” to the corporations and their UAW henchmen.

UAW-backed concessions over the last decade have reduced the per-vehicle costs to a minuscule 7 percent, allowing the auto companies to amass tens of billions in profits and to squander billions on executive bonuses and stock buybacks and dividend payments to their richest Wall Street investors.
The new deals will lead to an almost negligent increase in hourly labor costs over the next four years. By eliminating all caps on second-tier workers (now dubbed “in progression”), they pave the way for the establishment of a permanently lower wage and benefit scale after older, higher-paid workers are driven out of the industry. The UAW will also be further integrated into the structure of corporate management under a “living agreement,” which can be modified at any time to slash the jobs, wages and benefits of workers.

The corporate executives and the UAW are celebrating… for now. Gushing over the conclusion of the vote, the Detroit Free Press wrote, “With the new contracts in place, GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles can look forward to four years of labor peace and prosperity as the industry heads to record US sales and healthy profits margins.”

Having barely survived a rebellion, a UAW Local 600 bureaucrat at Ford Rouge told campaigners from the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter on Saturday, “You might as well go home. The vote is over and we won.” The “we,” of course, refers to the UAW and the company, not the workers.

A Pyrrhic victory! Such boasts and celebrations of “labor peace” are wishful thinking at best. Many more struggles will follow—of autoworkers as the terms of the agreement are implemented, and of other sections of the working class as the ruling class targets them. As for the UAW, its resort to gangster-like methods has only further discredited this deeply hated organization, while teaching large numbers of workers that the only way they will be able to defend their interests is by casting off the dead weight of this reactionary, pro-company organization.

To carry forward the struggle, however, it is necessary to work through the broader significance of the experience through which autoworkers have passed.

The auto contract struggle has demonstrated once again that the trade unions function as vital props of the corporate and political establishment in suppressing the class struggle and imposing the dictates of the financial aristocracy. Just as every other institution of bourgeois democracy has been hollowed out under the weight of class tensions and unprecedented levels of social inequality, so has the institution of “collective bargaining.” Far from giving workers a democratic voice to assert their interests, the “negotiations” between the so-called unions and the corporations are nothing but a conspiracy to suppress the aspirations of the working class.

The decades-long degeneration of the UAW and the other unions in the US—a phenomena that is repeated in other countries throughout the world—has it roots in the pro-capitalist and nationalist programs of the trade unions and their political subordination of the working class to the big business parties. Even at the height of the influence of the trade unions in the post-war period, they worked to shackle the working class to the capitalist system and the Democratic Party.

The globalization of production and the historic crisis of American capitalism pulled the rug from underneath the national reformist program of the trade unions. By the 1980s and 1990s, the unions had abandoned any resistance to the demands of the corporations, while the upper-middle class bureaucrats that ran them secured their interests by joining corporate boards and receiving billions in cash transfers to do the bidding of big business.

The experience of the last few months has also exposed those who promote the myth that that the UAW can be pressured, through “no” votes on their own, to take up a fight against the auto companies on behalf of workers. The UAW is not a workers’ organization susceptible to pressure from below, but a labor-corporate syndicate with business interests that are entirely hostile to workers.

As early as 1993, the Workers League, predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, wrote that it “rejects entirely the idea that the AFL-CIO, as the organizational expression of the interests of the labor bureaucracy, can be ‘captured’ and turned into an instrument of revolutionary struggle.” The aim of our work, we explained, was not the “reform” of the UAW and AFL-CIO but “the destruction of its political influence and organizational control over the captive members.”

The WSWS Autoworker Newsletter has been guided by this perspective and the struggle for an alternative program: the fight for the international unity of the working class, its political independence from the big business parties and the socialist transformation of society, including placing the global auto industry and the banks under the collective and democratic ownership of the working class.

The months-long battle of the autoworkers foreshadows the reemergence of mass class conflict in the United States and internationally. New forms of genuinely democratic and self-representative organizations of the working class, including the factory committees fought for by the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, will emerge as means for the working class to defend its interests.

The corruption of every institution of capitalist society and their imperviousness to the interests of the vast majority of the population only means that the fight to defend the most elemental needs of the working class will thrust them into a revolutionary struggle directed at the entire economic order.

Jerry White

The workers will never forget what happened here”

Dearborn Assembly workers allege fraud in UAW-Ford contract vote

By Tim Rivers
23 November 2015

Autoworkers reacted with disbelief, anger and profound skepticism over the weekend to the United Auto Workers’ announcement Friday that its agreement with Ford had been ratified with 51 percent support.
Going into the final days of voting, the contract appeared headed for defeat, with major plants voting early in the week by a 2-1 margin against. In order to pass the contract, the UAW had to secure an overwhelming majority of the vote at the last remaining plants in the Rouge Dearborn Assembly complex. This is what they claimed to have accomplished on Friday, resulting in a ‘yes’ vote by a razor-thin margin.

“Most of the people I talked to voted ‘no.’ It had to have been rigged,” a worker with more than 20 years seniority told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter at the Truck Assembly Plant in the Rouge complex.

Of the contract, he said, “I would have been happy with just a few of the things we gave up over the last 10 years, but we got nothing.”

“Of all the years to strike Ford, this was the one,” his coworker said. “They made billions. The plant was retooled for the new truck. This was the time.”
“The vote was fixed. We all think it was fixed,” added another assembler with high seniority.
Speaking about the video of UAW thugs ejecting WSWS reporters from the press conference at Local 600 last Wednesday, he said, “Why should Jimmy Settles be throwing anybody out of a union hall? What right does he have? He is supposed to talk to the media and answer questions.
“I voted ‘no,’ and most people I talked to did, too. Are they saying that 6,000 people in the plant are all a bunch of liars? They all said they voted ‘no.’ I don’t believe them.”
His revulsion at the strongarm tactics of the UAW was similar to that of many workers who spoke to the WSWS. “When I went in to vote, the committeemen were all standing around the door saying, ‘Vote “yes.” It’s a good contract.’ I asked them, ‘Good for who? Good for you. Because there is nothing in it for me.’
“They want to push us out the door and get a rookie to do the job. Then they want to pay them $18 an hour. They get no retirement. The co-pays [for medical coverage] are out the roof. They get no representation in the plant. They are going to say, ‘The hell with the UAW.’
“Right now I have four medical bills that are not covered by insurance. I am going to be slammed with bills. I am leery of everything the UAW does. If they get involved with our medical, who knows what will happen?
“We all know the strike fund is a slush fund for the UAW. They say they would only give us $200 a week if we went on strike. [The strike fund] has $600 million. They could pay us all $1,000 per week. Where is all our strike fund money going? They put it in their general fund to pay themselves.
“The workers will never forget what happened here. There will be no UAW. We need somebody that is independent of the UAW and independent of Ford Motor Company.”
The UAW thuggery at Local 600 has backfired and only contributed to the growing respect for the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter. “You guys are brave,” an older worker commented on Saturday. “I’ll give you that.”
He added, “I don’t know if they rigged the vote, but it certainly seems like it because there is so much stuff for their side and not ours.
“The world is just getting so ugly. They are cutting the main workers. The UAW used to be over a million workers and now it’s down to 200,000. That is a big cut.”
“It was totally rigged,” said another worker with 15 years seniority. “My buddy said to me as we were leaving work on Thursday night, ‘You watch. It’s going to pass by 51 percent to 49 percent.”
Jimmy Settles, the UAW vice president who came from Local 600 and was in charge of the team of bureaucrats who negotiated the Ford deal, was the target of particular anger. “That is why they held this plant until last. They know that it was totally corrupt. Nobody believes them.”
Another worker passing by said, “They took away the ballot box and came back with a stuffed one. Nobody saw them count the votes. It was absolutely rigged.
He added, “A signing bonus of $8,500 taxed at 42 percent. That is nothing. We haven’t had any raise in 10 years. They lied to us. They said that when the company made money, we would get everything back. The executives got everything, but we got nothing.”
Another worker said, “I heard it passed by 51 percent. I think it was going to pass no matter what. They were going to make it pass. They think we are stupid.”
On Friday, before the outcome of the vote was reported, a tier-two worker at Dearborn Truck told the WSWS, “The contract is unfair. I voted it down. It’s unfair for everyone, for the second tiers, the legacy workers, the retirees. There is no guarantee for anyone. The UAW works for the
company, they have screwed us.”
She said that UAW officials were walking the production line asking everyone if they voted and how they voted, or how they were going to vote. “They tried to scare some of the employees by claiming if they voted ‘no,’ they would lose their job. They walked the line, they were at the doors. ‘Hey, did you vote? Well vote yes, for your future.’”
“What a debacle! Everything they did regarding this vote is wrong! We heard they attacked your reporter at the press conference. As I said, this is a debacle!
“The union had two buckets set up for the ballots. You voted in the hallway, folded the ballot and dropped it in the bucket. It was not very private. In my opinion, if the contract passes here, it is because the union manipulated the count.”

UAW scabs do bidding of US auto companies

UAW scabs do bidding of US auto companies

9 November 2015

The United Auto Workers is seeking to rush through a new contract on Ford workers and wrap up its months-long campaign to break the resistance of 140,000 US autoworkers and impose contracts dictated by the auto executives and Wall Street.
The UAW announced the Ford deal on Friday, even before the resolution of the vote by 53,000 General Motors workers on a similar agreement. A majority of skilled trades workers (59.5 percent) rejected the UAW-backed arrangement, while it was ratified, according to the UAW, by a narrow margin (55 percent) of production and skilled workers combined. To impose a contract after such a split vote is a violation of the UAW’s constitutional bylaws, but it had no problem running roughshod over Fiat Chrysler workers’ rights during similar circumstances in 2011.
Like the Fiat Chrysler and GM deals before it, the Ford agreement paves the way for the establishment of a permanently lower pay and benefit scale in the auto industry after the UAW colludes in driving out older, higher paid workers through speedup, victimization and supposed voluntary retirements.
Far from eliminating the hated two-tier wage and benefit system—the major demand of workers—the contracts will give the auto bosses free rein to introduce a third-, fourth- and fifth-tier of temporary and contract workers earning poverty level wages, inferior pensions and health care. Meanwhile, the insulting 1.5 percent annual wage increases for traditional workers will leave them with a two-decade decline in real wages of 25 percent by 2019.
The auto companies are already reaping record profits and a staggering 10+ percent profit margin in the US after the deals in 2007, 2009 and 2011, which reduced per vehicle costs by more than half. However, the money-mad speculators on Wall Street want even more, and the UAW, which owns a substantial portion of the automakers’ stocks, has been more than eager to comply.
The “transformative” character of the contracts goes beyond wages, however. After dumping their retiree health care benefits into a UAW-controlled trust, which promptly slashed medical coverage for hundreds of thousands of retirees and their dependents, the new agreement will slash the coverage of current workers. This has been worked out in conjunction with the Obama administration, which wants to shift the cost of health care from the employers to the backs of workers who are already making barely subsistence wages.
Throughout the course of the contract battle, the UAW has proven not to be a “trade union” or “labor organization” in any sense that workers traditionally understand such terms. Instead, it has functioned as a corporate-labor syndicate and an industrial police force for management, thoroughly hostile to the needs and interests of the workers it falsely claims to represent.
At every stage the UAW has kept information from workers and lied to them, using threats and economic blackmail to beat back rank-and-file workers. UAW officials have unabashedly spouted the company line, insisting that the corporations have nothing more to give and that if workers press for any improvements then the companies will simply shut their factories and move to Mexico and other low-wage countries.
The UAW has transformed the strike from a weapon of workers against the corporations into a weapon against the working class. If workers rejected the contracts, like the Fiat Chrysler workers did last month, the UAW would be forced to call a strike, UAW officials threatened, which would leave workers on the picket lines for weeks or months with only $220 a week from the UAW’s $600 million strike fund. Autoworkers would receive no public support, the UAW insisted, and in the end they would be forced to settle for even less.
The UAW hired a New York City public relations firm to sell its lies to workers, while during ratification votes it made workers run the gauntlet of local union functionaries who denounced them as “greedy” and “stupid” if they were planning to vote against the deal. As for the final vote counts, the UAW is more than ready to rig them to get the “right” result.
When the unions, despite their pro-capitalist leadership, still increased or at least protected the income of workers from diminution they could be termed “workers organizations.” But as Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Fourth International, explained in 1937, should the labor leaders “defend the income of the bourgeoisie from attacks on the part of the workers; should they conduct a struggle against strikes, against the rising of wages, against help to the unemployed; then we would have an organization of scabs, not a trade union.”
This is a description of the UAW, the AFL-CIO and the Coalition to Win organizations to a tee. They do not unite workers but divide them. They are hostile to the class struggle and socialism and endlessly preach “class harmony” while the capitalist class wages a relentless war against the working class. In the factories, the UAW ignores the grievances of workers, enforces speedup, and oversees a dictatorial regime that resembles the darkest days of industrial slavery in the early twentieth century.
Whatever the outcome of the Ford vote—and workers should reject it with the contempt that it deserves—the outcome of the 2015 contract battle will be a further discrediting of the UAW. It is also an exposure of the numerous pseudo-left groups that insist on the organizational dominance of the “unions” and denounce as illegitimate any efforts by workers to rebel against their authority.
The transformation of the UAW and other unions into the tools of management—which is not just an American but international phenomenon—is the result not simply of the perfidy of the corrupt and bureaucratic officials who control them. It is rooted in the failure of the pro-capitalist and nationalist program of these organizations and their political subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party.
The long-term decline of American capitalism and the growth of transnational production pulled the rug from underneath these organizations. They responded to by embracing corporatist “labor-management partnerships” and transforming from entities that pressured management for concessions into organizations that spared no effort to destroy the jobs and living standards of workers to make the corporations more profitable.
There is immense opposition and a desire by workers to fight. The fact that the UAW has had such difficulty in getting these sellout agreements through, despite the relentless propaganda campaign backed by the corporate media, is an expression of the mass opposition not just of autoworkers, but the entire working class.
The class struggle is beginning to emerge into the open The aspirations of workers to secure their most elemental rights—for decent paying and secure jobs, for safe and humane working conditions, to collectively organize to defend their interests—will find an independent expression.
As the World Socialist Web Site and its Autoworker Newsletter has advocated, workers must form their own organizations that are democratically elected and controlled by rank-and-file workers themselves. The establishment of genuinely representative factory committees, based on the methods of the class struggle not subordination to the dictates of the capitalist system, will prove to be a powerful weapon for the working class.
Nothing has ever been won by workers outside of mobilizing their strength against the corporations and their political servants. Today vast sums of society’s wealth—created by the collective labor of workers all over the world—are monopolized by the super-rich few and squandered on war and other socially destructive purposes. That is why the struggle to secure the social rights of the working class is above all a political struggle, which can only be resolved when the working class take the reins of economic and political power in its own hands.
Jerry White

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES  FASTER under Obama than Bush... Is that news to you???

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/12/obamanomics-at-work-depressed-wages-and.html

Never have the rich increased their wealth so quickly as in  America since the financial crash of 2008. But side by side with the amassing of previously unthinkable private fortunes, the infrastructure of America is crumbling, education, health care and other social services are starved of funding, and the living standards of the vast majority of the population, the working people who produce the wealth, are declining.


“All of Obama’s policies have been geared toward increasing social inequality. … The claim that the health care overhaul is an oasis of progress in this desert of social reaction is simply a lie”—


Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) began November 1 for plans taking effect January 1. The coming year will be the third in which the ACA, signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, will be operational. The World Socialist Web Site’s assessment five years ago that the “reform” commonly known as Obamacare would usher in a frontal assault on the health care available to working people is being richly confirmed.
The ACA has nothing in common with universal health care. That was merely the slogan initially advanced to disguise a corporate-designed scheme to dramatically shift health care costs onto the working class.
The central component of the scheme, the “individual mandate,” requires that individuals and families without health insurance through their employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid obtain insurance or pay a tax penalty. Low-income people can qualify for modest tax subsidies to go toward premiums.
The uninsured are required to purchase coverage from private, for-profit insurance companies on the health care “exchanges” set up under the law. This vastly increases the market for private insurance firms without placing any real restraints on the prices they charge—a formula for windfall profits.
By the government’s own forecast, enrollees will face a 7.5 percent average premium rate increase in 2016. Other sources project rate hikes in excess of 20 percent. A recent study showed that many insurers are requesting double-digit rate increases next year and state insurance commissions are approving them.
A frenzy of mergers in the health care industry will fuel further premium increases. In the space of a few weeks in July, Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. merged in a $37 billion deal, and Anthem Inc. agreed to acquire Cigna Corp. for $54 billion. As a result, the five largest health insurers in the US were consolidated into three.
Drug makers Allergan and Pfizer are in the advanced stages of talks to merge and form the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, valued at $330 billion. The price of top brand name prescription drugs are already surging, having increased by 12.9 percent in 2013, the last year for which data is available.
Last week the giant drug store chain Walgreens announced a deal to take over one of its main competitors, Rite Aid, creating a mega-chain to compete with CVS for total domination of the market.
Premiums and drug costs are only one aspect of the burden to be borne by those purchasing coverage under the ACA. The average deductible for the lowest tier “bronze” plans on the exchanges was $5,200 in 2015, and the prevalence of such “high-deductible” plans is sure to expand in 2016. This means that aside from mandated “essential services,” such as certain forms of wellness care and screenings, no medical care is covered until the entire deductible is paid out of pocket. Co-payments for doctor visits and other services are also required.
Research published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 135 health plans in 34 state marketplaces available during last year’s open enrollment period. The study found that as of April 2015, 18 plans in nine states lacked in-network specialists for at least one specialty. These included obstetricians/gynecologists, dermatologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, oncologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists and pulmonologists.
What all of this means is that a substantial portion of the 12 million people who have purchased coverage on the health care exchanges will be forced to self-ration medical care due to economic necessity. Workers and their children will forego doctor visits, prescriptions for life-saving medicines will go unfilled, needless suffering and deaths will occur.
This appalling state of affairs is not an unfortunate byproduct of the ACA. By design from its inception, the legislation has been crafted to cut costs for the government and corporations and boost the profits of the health insurers, pharmaceutical corporations and health care chains.
According to the big business parties and their corporate sponsors, Americans are living too long and health care costs are sucking up too much of the national wealth. There is a calculated drive to lower life expectancy for working people.
That is why the introduction of Obamacare has been accompanied by a concerted drive to restrict access to basic medical tests—that is, to ration health care for workers. In recent months, official bodies have called for reducing or delaying mammograms, pap smears, prostate tests and other standard screening procedures.
One indication of the catastrophic implications of the assault on health care is a recent study showing that since 1998, the death rate for middle-income white Americans age 45-54 has risen sharply, resulting in half a million deaths, comparable to the 650,000 Americans who have lost their lives from AIDS since 1981. Researchers point to suicides and substance abuse, driven by increasing financial stress, as the main contributing factors. The ACA will only increase the number of such tragedies.
The implications of Obamacare go far beyond those buying insurance on the ACA exchanges and extend to all segments of health care. The legislation is serving as a model for the assault on employer-sponsored health care coverage as well as the bedrock government-run programs Social Security and Medicare.
Today, approximately half of all Americans receive their health care coverage through their employers. Employer-paid health benefits was an important social gain wrested from the corporations by the struggles of workers in the aftermath of World War II and has been central in raising the living standards of working class families.
But the workings of Obamacare aim to destroy these gains. As Ezekiel Emanuel, a close ally of Obama and key architect of the ACA, predicted in 2009: “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance.” These plans will give way to vouchers handed out to employees to purchase coverage on insurance exchanges, either those set up under the ACA or others.
In the current contract struggle of US autoworkers, the drive by the auto companies and their union partners to dismantle the “cradle-to-grave” medical coverage won by autoworkers and retirees is in line with the Obama administration’s policy of shifting health care costs to workers.
The recent budget deal between Obama and congressional Republicans rolls back a significant provision in the ACA, the requirement that businesses with more than 200 workers automatically enroll their employees for health insurance. And while employers are basically absolved of responsibility for providing insurance, fines for individuals for not obtaining insurance will rise substantially in 2016—to $695, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher.
Paul Ryan, the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, has advocated transforming Medicare into a voucher program and partially privatizing Social Security. That he is now presented as a “moderate” unifying force by the ruling elite and the media is an indication of how far to the right the political establishment in America has veered. The foundations are already being laid for the dismantling of Medicare and Social Security.
As the real content of Obamacare becomes clear to millions of workers and middle class people, who suddenly discover that they cannot get access to drugs or doctors and standard medical procedures are no longer covered by their insurance plans, there will be an explosive growth of social opposition.
The third year of the Affordable Care Act is the occasion to call the reactionary legislation by its rightful name: a health care counterrevolution. The only rational and progressive solution to the health care crisis in America is to replace the privately owned and controlled system with socialized medicine, in which the health care industry is nationalized, restructured, and placed under the democratic control of a workers government. This will make possible the provision of quality health care for all as a basic social right.
Kate Randall

"Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of 

employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious 

for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-

Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson 

Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4 

billion fortune is extracted from his international network of 

sports apparel-producing sweatshops."

OBAMA-CLINTONomics is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the American middle-class!

"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere. Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich. The corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/obama-clintonomics-protecting-rich.html

“As a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”

OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class

"Obama expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a low-wage economy."

"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."

Wealth of America’s super-rich grows to $2.34 trillion

Wealth of America’s super-rich grows to $2.34 trillion

By Nick Barrickman 
3 October 2015

The wealth of the 400 richest Americans 

continues to soar, according to the results of 

the new Forbes 400 list, published annually 

by the business magazine of the same name. 

At $2.34 trillion, the total net worth for the multi-billionaires on the list set new records, displacing last year’s all-time high of $2.29 trillion.

 

OBAMA-CLINTONomics: MELTDOWN!

 

Did their crony banksters ultimately destroy the global economy?

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/global-ponzi-scheme-threatens-to-implode.html

Richest one percent

 

controls nearly half of global wealth

 

In 2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion. Today, nearly six years into the so-called economic “recovery” fostered by the Obama administration, the wealthiest Americans have nearly doubled their hoard. The total wealth of the richest 400 Americans managed to reach new heights even while financial markets have been roiled by tumultuous swings.

The Forbes report notes that in 2015, “It was 

harder than ever to join the 400. The price of 

entry this year was $1.7 billion, the highest

it’s been in the 33 years that Forbes has

racked American wealth.” Forbes makes note

that the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.

While a majority of billionaires have prospered, their wealth underwritten by the massive government bailouts of financial institutions and near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a significant fraction of the wealthy elite have lost ground in the turbulent stock markets of recent months.

The ratio of winners and losers among the billionaires was ten to one last year, but this year was much closer to 50-50. Forbes noted that the top three position-holders on the list, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, each saw a drop in their total net worth of at least 5 percent in the last year. This did nothing to threaten the position of Gates, number one at $76 billion, or Buffett, number two at $62 billion, but Ellison’s third-place position, with $47.5 billion, left him “only” $500 million ahead of the fourth-place multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.

The majority of those on the Forbes list were associated with some form of financial speculation, or with computer software and the Internet. According to the industry breakdown supplied by Forbes, its 400 include 126 engaged in investment, real estate and finance, 81 from computer technology and media, 36 from food and beverage, 32 from retail and fashion (including five members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart), 31 from oil & gas, 20 from health care, 19 from miscellaneous services (including six members of the Pritzker family, owners of Hyatt Hotels), and 19 from sports and gaming.

This left only 35 listed as making their fortunes in manufacturing, automotive, construction, and logistics. The largest manufacturing fortune is the $7.4 billion of Harold Kohler, whose company makes toilets and other plumbing fixtures. Perhaps that is symbolic, given the state of manufacturing in the United States, once the world leader in industry, but no longer.

The growth of financial parasitism has underwritten the wealth of many on the Forbes 400. In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list saw figures directly involved in finance making up only 4.4 percent of the total wealth on the list. As of today, this group now makes up more than 21 percent of billionaires on the list.

Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has held the number one spot on the Forbes 400 for 22 years, has less than 13 percent of his fortune in stock in the company he founded. According toForbes, the majority of Gates’ wealth is bound up in Cascade, the software mogul’s investment firm, which specializes in “investing in stocks, bonds, private equity and real estate.”

Besides the well-known super-rich of Silicon Valley like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with $33.3 billion and $32.6 billion, respectively) and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social media web site Facebook, the seventh wealthiest man in America with $40.3 billion in total assets, there are numerous other newly minted Internet billionaires, including the owners and co-owners of Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, GoPro and GoDaddy.com.

Jeffrey Bezos, owner of the online retailer Amazon, saw the largest gain in wealth for the year, making $16 billion in 2015, placing his total net worth at $47 billion and catapulting him to fourth place. Nearly half of Bezos’ gains came within a single day last July, when his company announced gains in the second quarter, leading to a speculative frenzy which bid up stock values for Amazon by over 18 percent.

Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of 

employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious 

for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-

Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson

Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4 

billion fortune is extracted from his international network of 

sports apparel-producing sweatshops.

While safeguarding the ill-gotten wealth of the Forbes billionaires remains an ironclad principle of both the Republican and Democratic parties, working people throughout the US continue to suffer the brunt of attacks on their living standards. A US Census report released earlier this month shows that 14.8 percent of the US population lives in poverty; a figure that is unchanged from a year earlier. The Census findings show that 6.6 percent of the population lives in “deep poverty,” or less than half of the already unrealistically low official poverty line in the US.

Obama’s crony banksters face the guillotine

AMERICA’S DRIFT TOWARDS

REVOLUTION:

The American people stand up to crooked politicians’ cronies, crooked unions

and the Mexican occupation, crime TIDAL WAVE and welfare state in our open

borders.

"The American elites, comfortable in their

current lifestyle, had better wake up to the


rumbling beneath their feet before the

volcano erupts." http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-coming-revolution-not-since.html

The nation’s population has grown by 35% since 1988;

however the number of employed Americans has only

increased by 27% while those who have dropped out and are

no longer in the labor force has escalated by 50%.  Further

the number of Americans living in poverty has increased by

61%.

OBAMA-CLINTONomics…. will it destroy this

nation or will they simply hand us the tax bills for

their newest bailouts and crimes?

THE RISE of BARACK OBAMA and the FALL of AMERICA:

WHO WILL ULTIMATELY PAY FOR HIS LIES AND

CRIMES?

Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate

socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate

America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory

robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/obama-clintonomics-who-pays-for-their.html

These are only the most striking of a barrage of numbers reported in recent weeks,

demonstrating that for the US financial aristocracy, the Crash of 2008 has been used to

engineer a historic redistribution of wealth.

THE COMING GLOBAL MELTDOWN:
 

a nation pays the ultimate price for OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the death of the American middle-class

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-world-convulsed-by-crises.html

OBAMA-CLINTONomics: Their cronies loot…

 “This is Obama’s new “middle class,” working for half the wages of their grandparents and barely keeping one step out of a homeless shelter.”

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/perpetrating-obamanomics-at-michigan.html               

 
"Corporate profits are at their highest share of GDP since World War II, while the portion of national economic output going to labor has fallen to the lowest postwar level." 

THE OBAMA DOCTRINE:

BUILD A DICTATORSHIP BY DESTROYING THE AMERICAN

MIDDLE-CLASS.

HIS CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED TRILLIONS IN HOME

EQUITY, HIS ILLEGALS HAVE BUILT A TRILLION DOLLAR LA

RAZA WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS…. AND ALL JOBS GO TO

NON-AMERICANS!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/temporary-visas-surge-under-obama-in.html

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES 

FASTER under Obama than Bush.

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/12/obamanomics-at-work-depressed-wages-and.html

 “By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”

US poverty rate and income growth stagnated in

2014

By Niles Williamson
19 September 2015

The US Census Bureau released its annual income and poverty report this week which showed that median household income and the national poverty rate held steady between 2013 and 2014.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/millions-of-jobs-for-illegals-along.html

The report found that 14.8 percent of the country’s population lived in poverty in 2014, statistically unchanged from a year prior. Blacks had the highest poverty rate in 2014 at 26.2 percent, which was a one percentage point increase over 2013. Among children and teenagers under the age of 18, approximately 15.5 million, or 21.1 percent, lived in poverty.

OBAMANOMICS: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses…and Muslim Dictators

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/11/obamas-crony-capitalism-obama-was.html

OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class

"Obama expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a low-wage economy."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/assault-on-american-worker-obama.html

"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."

OBAMA-CLINTONomics is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the American middle-class!

"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere. 

Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich. The corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/obama-clintonomics-protecting-rich.html

“As a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”

THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON OUR PENSIONS

BIGGER PROFITS FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS IF PENSIONS ARE SLASHED

 http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-obama-doctrine-destroy-american.html

“Feinberg, who as the Obama administration’s “pay tsar” rubber-  stamped multimillion-dollar executive bonuses to Wall Street  banks bailed out with taxpayer funds, will now be given power to slash workers’ benefits at his discretion.”

Top 1 percent own more than half of world’s wealth

By Patrick Martin 
14 October 2015

A new report issued by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse finds that global wealth inequality continues to worsen and has reached a new milestone, with the top 1 percent owning more of the world’s assets than the bottom 99 percent combined.

Of the estimated $250 trillion in global assets, the top 1 percent owned almost exactly 50 percent, while the bottom 50 percent of humanity owned collectively less than 1 percent. The richest 10 percent owned 87.7 percent of the world’s wealth, leaving 12.3 percent for the bottom 90 percent of the population.

The Credit Suisse report focused not on the top 1 percent, but on a slightly smaller group, the 0.7 percent of adults with assets of more than 1 million US dollars. This figure includes both financial assets and real assets, such as homes, small businesses and other physical property.

The report’s eye-catching “Global Wealth Pyramid” divides the human race into four categories by wealth: 3.4 billion adults with net assets of less than $10,000; 1 billion with net assets from $10,000 to $100,000; 349 million with net assets from $100,000 to $1 million; and 34 million with net assets over $1 million.

The lowest category comprises 71 percent of all adults and owns only 3 percent of total wealth; the next-poorest group comprises 21 percent of adults and owns 12.5 percent of the wealth; above this is a group comprising 7.4 percent of adults and owning 39.4 of the wealth; and finally the top layer, 0.7 percent of adults owning 45.2 percent of the wealth.

This top layer, defined by the report as “high-net-worth individuals,” is itself divided very unequally, as shown in a second pyramid: 29.8 million with assets of $1 million to $5 million; 2.5 million with assets of $5 million to $10 million; 1.34 million with assets of $10 million to $50 million; and finally, 123,800 with assets over $50 million.

These 123,800 “ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” as the report calls them, are the true global financial aristocracy, exercising decisive sway not only over banks and corporations, but over governments and international institutions as well. Of these, nearly 59,000, almost half the total, live in the United States. Another quarter live in Europe (mainly Britain, Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy), followed by China and then Japan.

The Credit Suisse report notes the particularly rapid rise in inequality since the Wall Street crash of 2008 and relates it directly to the stock market boom that followed the bailout of the banks, initiated by the Bush administration and greatly expanded by the Obama administration. A key passage reads:

“There are strong reasons to think that the rise in wealth inequality since 2008 is mostly related to the rise in equity prices and to the size of financial assets in the United States and some other high-wealth countries, which together have pushed up the wealth of some of the richest countries and of many of the richest people around the world. The jump in the share of the top percentile to 50 percent this year exceeds the increase expected on the basis of any underlying upward trend. It is consistent, however, with the fact that financial assets continue to increase in relative importance and that the rise in the USD (US dollar) over the past year has given wealth inequality in the United States—which is very high by international standards—more weight in the overall global picture.”

In other words, deepening global economic inequality is being driven above all by American capitalism, with the United States being both the wealthiest and by far the most unequal country in the world. The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but a staggering 46 percent of the world’s millionaires.

Far from demonstrating the health of the US economy, this disproportionate growth of the super-rich resembles the spread of a cancer that is rapidly metastasizing, with fatal consequences for the entire social organism.

Never have the rich increased their wealth so quickly as in

America since the financial crash of 2008. But side by side

with the amassing of previously unthinkable private fortunes,

the infrastructure of America is crumbling, education, health

care and other social services are starved of funding, and the

living standards of the vast majority of the population, the

working people who produce the wealth, are declining.

The Credit Suisse report also calls attention to significant regional differences within the structure of global capitalism, focusing on the diverging fortunes of three main regions: North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific.

Total global wealth declined slightly in 2015, according to the report, but only because the bank’s calculations were in US dollars, and thus were affected by the depreciation of the euro, the Japanese yen, the Russian ruble, the Canadian dollar and many other currencies against the US dollar.

US wealth rose $4.6 trillion, despite a global decline of $12.7 trillion, with Japan, Russia and the European Union countries showing the biggest drops, largely because of currency depreciation. Australia and Canada lost $1.5 trillion in wealth between them, a substantial drop for the two mid-sized economies, which are heavily dependent on resource extraction.

China, whose currency is loosely pegged to the dollar, saw a $1.5 trillion gain. But this has likely already evaporated, since the report is based on figures ending June 30, 2015 and the Chinese financial markets have plunged 25 percent since then, as the report’s foreword notes.

These disparities between countries, like the growing social disparities within countries, have immense significance for world politics. They are a major factor in the increasingly explosive character of international relations, particularly the conflicts between the major imperialist powers—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain—and countries like Russia, China and Iran that are being targeted for their huge natural and human resources.

US imperialism uses both its preeminent military position and the role of the dollar, still the world’s main reserve currency, as weapons in seeking to offset its economic decline relative to its major rivals. America is both a social powder keg, with class tensions at home approaching the breaking point, and the most destabilizing force in world politics, seeking to maintain its position of global dominance by increasingly reckless and militaristic methods.