When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Thursday, December 6, 2018
REP. TIM RYAN ON GM PLANT CLOSINGS - 'How much longer are we gointg to do this where the worker doesn't matter?' - THE DEMOCRAT PARTY IS DEDICATED TO DESTROYING THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS WITH ENDLESS HORDES OF ILLEGALS
REVOLUTION STIRS IN AMERICA
“It will more likely come on the heels of
economic dislocation and dwindling wealth to redistribute.”
"Between 2002 and 2015
annual earnings for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose
by only 4.5 percent, while earnings for the top 1 percent grew by
22.7 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Under the
Obama administration, more than 90 percent of income gains since the
so-called “recovery” began have gone to the top one percent."
*
“Our entire crony capitalist
system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
*
"A defining expression of
this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and
parasitism, to the point where
a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders
society’s resources in order to
further enrich itself."
THE BILLIONAIRES’S GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR WIDER
OPEN BORDERS
the true cost of all that “cheap” labor is passed
along to the middle class.
"This doesn't include the costs
of illegal immigration to society, which provides health care, housing, education, child
care, and legal services to illegal aliens. Even though immigration
advocates claim that illegal aliens do indeed pay taxes, the dollar
amount pales
in comparison to
the cost of the many services they receive."
Meanwhile, despite the
highest taxes in the nation, California is $1.3 trillion in debt – unemployment
is at a staggering 11%. California's wacko giveaways to illegals
include in-state tuition, amounting to $25 million of financial
aid. Nearly a million illegals have California driver's
licenses. L.A. County has
144% more registered voters than there are residents of legal voting
age. Clearly, illegals are illegally
voting.
THE CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY
The Democrat
Party’s secret agenda for wider open borders, more welfare for invading
illegals, more jobs and free anything they illegally vote for…. All to destroy
the two-party system and build the GLOBALISTS’ DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR WIDER OPEN
BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
Demonstrably and
irrefutably the Democrat Party became the party whose principle objective is to
thoroughly transform the nature of the American electorate by means of open
borders and the mass, unchecked importation of illiterate third world peasants
who will vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats and their La Raza welfare
state. FRONTPAGE MAG
Dem Rep. Ryan on GM Closures: ‘How Much Longer Are We Going to Do This Where the Worker Doesn’t Matter?’
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) on Thursday’s MSNBC broadcast of “Morning Joe” discussed General Motors’ closing of car plants in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland, which has been met with criticism by President Donald Trump.
Ryan asked how much longer will the working-class not matter “because it’s becoming impossible for them to keep their nose above water.”
“Where’s the social compact that we used to have between corporations and their workers? Where’s the social contract between the government and our workers?” asked Ryan. “I mean, it’s like the worker — there’s always an excuse that the worker is going to get hammered, that they’re going to lose their pensions, they’re going to lose their jobs, they’re going to have to move. Meanwhile, corporations, in this instance, General Motors got $157 million in tax cut just last year. I mean how much longer are we going to do this to where the worker doesn’t matter? And I hope this is a real wake-up call for us to say, workers, white, brown, black, gay, straight, working-class people have got to come together because it’s becoming impossible for them to keep their nose above water anymore.”
Global investors demand escalation of class war on workers’ jobs and wages
5 December 2018
Amid the havoc on the global stock exchanges Tuesday, triggered by concerns over a US-China trade war, signs of a global economic downturn and growing resistance by workers, the most powerful financial interests are demanding an acceleration of the war against the working class.
A week after General Motors announced the planned shutdown of five plants in the US and Canada and the elimination of nearly 15,000 hourly and salaried workers’ jobs, an analyst for Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley told investors that Ford would likely carry out even deeper cuts, eliminating 25,000 employees from its global workforce.
While Ford has yet to provide details of its $11 billion cost-cutting “Fitness Program,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in a note to investors, “We estimate a large portion of Ford’s restructuring actions will be focused on Ford Europe, a business we currently value at negative $7 billion. But we also expect a significant restructuring effort in North America, involving significant numbers of both salaried and hourly UAW and CAW workers,” Jonas said, referring to autoworkers who belong to the United Auto Workers and the Canadian Auto Workers, now known as Unifor.
The decision by GM to shut major assembly plants in Detroit, Lordstown, Ohio and Oshawa, Ontario, plus two transmission plants in Michigan and Maryland, led to a sharp spike in GM shares last week. The company, which is expected to make $10 billion in profits in 2018, is freeing up billions in cash to continue its stock repurchase program and dividend payments to wealthy investors.
After selling off its European operations and closing all its plants in Australia and South Africa, GM is closing an assembly plant in Gunsan, Korea, and two other, still unspecified, international plants in the coming year.
Despite eight straight years of profits, Wall Street has been punishing Ford stock, which has fallen by 25 percent this year, to only $9.24 per share. Last August, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Ford’s credit rating to Baa3, one notch from junk status, pointing to softening profit margins in North America, reversals in the Chinese market and large losses in Europe and South America.
The brutal downsizing by the US-based automakers is part of a wave of international job cuts.
German-based drug manufacturer Bayer AG has just announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs out of its global workforce of 118,000 by the end of 2021. On Monday, more than 1,000 Bayer workers protested at the company’s site in Wuppertal, in western Germany. The company, which plans to carry out a “significant number of reductions” in Germany, is also eliminating more than 4,000 jobs at its crop sciences division, a consequence of Bayer’s acquisition of US rival Monsanto earlier this year. The moves, which came after shares of the company fell by more than a third this year, are seen as an effort to mollify Wall Street.
French steel pipe maker Vallourec, which owns a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio, near the threatened GM Lordstown plant, announced plans last week to cut 1,800 jobs—1,200 at three sites in France and 600 in Germany. The company, which supplies the oil and gas industry, has struggled to recover since oil prices crashed in 2015. It has seen its shares plummet 56.6 percent over the last year.
Last month, Montreal-based train and aircraft manufacturer Bombardier announced the layoff of 5,000 workers by 2021 to reduce its long-term debt by $9 billion. The workers being terminated include 2,500 in Quebec, 500 in Ontario and another 2,000 in overseas operations, including 490 in Belfast, Ireland. The announcement follows the elimination of 14,500 jobs around the world over the last three years.
Toronto-based Thomson Reuters Corporation said on Tuesday it will cut its workforce by 12 percent by 2020, axing 3,200 jobs. The media and information company said it will buy back $9 billion in stock from shareholders starting Tuesday, sending its stock up 4 percent.
US corporations are expected to spend a record $1 trillion on stock buybacks this year, according to Goldman Sachs, up 46 percent from 2017. Global mergers and acquisitions hit a record $3.3 trillion in the first nine months of the year, eclipsing the previous high on the eve of the global financial crash more than a decade ago.
In its more recent report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded that the world economy would expand by only 3.5 percent next year, down from 3.7 percent this year. The 34 member states in Europe and North America would see an even sharper decline, with growth falling from 2.5 percent in 2017–18 to just under 2 percent by 2020.
Commenting on the report, the New York Times wrote that the OECD had “effectively concluded that the current situation is as good as it gets before the next pause or downturn. If this is indeed the high-water mark of global prosperity, that is likely to come as a shock to the tens of millions of people who have yet to recover from the devastation of the Great Recession.”
“It’s just going to exacerbate the tensions that have led to the socioeconomic and political problems we have seen in the United States and parts of Europe,” Thomas A. Bernes, an economist at the Center for International Governance Innovation, a Canadian research institution, told the Times. “Inequality is going to become even more pronounced.”
Over the last decade, the ruling class has relied on the trade unions and the ostensibly reformist and “left” parties to suppress opposition to an historic transfer of wealth to the super-rich, largely through the inflation of the stock markets. The unions have promoted economic nationalism as a means of covering for their collusion with the ruling class in the destruction of workers' jobs, wages and benefits.
However, after decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed, this year has seen a resurgence of strikes and mass protests, from the wildcat strikes of US teachers to recent mass strikes in Sri Lanka, Greece and now in the streets of Paris. If the Yellow Vest movement has gained momentum it is because it has not been under the control of the unions, which opposed it and are now colluding with Macron to suppress it.
The escalation of the social counter-revolution by the ruling class, under conditions of renewed economic crisis, points to an explosive intensification of class conflict in 2019, which will come into ever more direct conflict with the trade unions, the entire political apparatus and the capitalist system as a whole.
Destroyed for Nothing
The closing of GM’s Detroit plant—erected at the expense of a vibrant urban neighborhood—is a final twist of the knife in a tale of displacement and destruction.
General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now.
Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.
Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.
The neighborhood did not go down without a fight, however. Homeowners and their advocates mounted legal challenges, refused government offers, and hunkered down. Some patrolled their property, brandishing weapons and daring the government to come in and take their property. What happened next was chilling. To “encourage” homeowners to leave, Detroit began withdrawing city services. The city had managed to empty out some buildings, such as apartment houses, by paying off renters, who had little stake in the neighborhood. A few elderly residents took the money for their homes and moved on, creating a landscape dotted with abandoned buildings marked with a blue X—a prescription for chaos, which quickly ensued. Looters moved in and, in a strategy that became all too familiar in the 1970s in places like the South Bronx and Bushwick, they proceed to strip the buildings of sinks, wiring, pipes, furnaces—and then burn them. “There was virtually no trash pickup, no police presence, and before long the once-quiet neighborhood was a jumble of looters and demolition crews during the day and arsonists and fire trucks by night,” wrote filmmaker George Cosetti, who witnessed the neighborhood’s last days while filming the documentary Poletown Lives! “The night air was always smoke-filled and people slept with guns nearby.”
Residents sought to have the quick-take law declared unconstitutional, but the Michigan Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that taking private property and handing it over to a business to provide jobs for the unemployed and taxes to pay for city services qualified as a legitimate public purpose. One dissenting judge did warn that justifying government seizure of land in order to create jobs was an extension of eminent domain that “seriously jeopardized the security of all private property ownership.” Even then, however, some residents hung on, forming a redoubt in Immaculate Conception church, a focal point of much of the resistance, until police arrived to cart away the group, which included a handful of elderly Polish women.
General Motors opened the new plant, Detroit-Hamtramck, in 1985. It employed some 4,500 workers, about 70 percent of the original projection of 6,500 jobs. But the plant fell far short of the claims that city officials used to justify the property seizures. They had envisioned Poletown as a crucial step in a Detroit renaissance—the plant would attract other carmakers and auto-accessories manufacturers to the area, they believed, and spark a jobs boom. These scenarios never materialized. Detroit’s economy continued to decline, people fled the city, and today Detroit, with some 670,000 residents, is about half its size in 1980.
In 2004, Michigan’s Supreme Court overturned the “quick-take” provision that allowed the state to seize Poletown before demonstrating a public purpose for the land. General Motors got 34 years out of the plant, thanks to a $200 million government subsidy (what it cost Detroit to clear Poletown). No one can say whether Poletown, which had existed as a vibrant neighborhood for more than 100 years, would have endured longer, serving as at least one bulwark against the decline of the city, had GM not moved in. But neighborhoods have a way of outlasting manufacturing plants. That’s one reason we shouldn’t destroy them willy-nilly for the sake of a few jobs—or even a few thousand.
GENERAL MOTORS DUMPS THOUSANDS OF WORKERS AND CLOSES PLANTS - Stockholders celebrate!
"It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e., the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment."
“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documentsa sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”
"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."
GM Closing Five Plants in North America as Consumers Turn Against Cars
The turn of the American consumer away from cars in favor of SUVs and trucks has prompted General Motors to announce that it will shutter plants in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, and Ontario next year.
The company said Monday that it will stop production at five plants next year. The affected plants are Detroit-Hamtramck and Warren Transmission in Michigan, Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, Oshawa Assembly in Ontario, Canada, and Baltimore Operations in Maryland.
The closures will affect some 3,300 workers in the U.S., and another 3,000 globally.
In corporate-speak, these plants will become “unallocated.” That means they will have no product to produce.
The affected plants and the vehicles they make are:
Detroit-Hamtramck and Oshawa make the Chevy Impala.
Detroit-Hamtramck is the sole producer of the Cadillac CT6, Chevy Volt, and Buick LaCrosse.
Lordstown makes the Chevy Cruze sedan.
Oshawa is the only plant that builds the Cadillac XTS sedan.
The move by General Motors follows similar shifts by Fiat-Chrylser and Ford. U.S. automakers are shifting production away from sedans and smaller vehicles in favor of cross-over SUVs and trucks, reflecting the preferences of U.S. buyers. In recent years, consumers purchases have increasingly been concentrated in the larger vehicle market.
The reasons for the shift include improved fuel efficiency and cheaper oil, which both make fing the larger vehicles less costly. As well, many consumers perceive the higher carriage of the trucks and cross-overs as preferable and safer.
All five of the plants will cease production by the end of 2019, according to GM executives.
The company said that it is making these changes now, while the economy is strong, to adapt to “fast-changing market conditions.”
Shares of GM were up by more than 2 percent Monday morning before being halted while the company announced the changes.
GM Announces Cuts At Car Assembly Plants In Michigan, Ohio, Canada
Lordstown Assembly in Ohio, shown here in 2008, is one of the plants that General Motors plans to cut production in 2019.
Ron Schwane/AP
General Motors says it is planning to cease production of some models at three vehicle assembly plants in the U.S. and Canada in 2019. It also plans to cut production at two plants in the U.S. that make transmissions. The company said the moves are part of an effort to cut 15 percent of its workforce.
The decision, announced Monday, will impact Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly in Detroit, Lordstown Assembly in Warren, Ohio, and Oshawa Assembly in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. Two transmission plants — one in White Marsh, Md., and another in Warren, Mich. — are also set to stop production.
The company said it plans to halt production of the Chevrolet Cruze at the Lordstown plant in March. In Detroit, it plans to halt production of the Buick LaCrosse and Chevrolet Volt in March and the Cadillac CT6 and Chevrolet Impala in June. In Ontario, it plans to halt production of the Chevrolet Impala and Cadillac XTS by the final quarter of 2019.
The company says 5,901 hourly employees and 804 salaried employees work at these plants.
"We are announcing the cessation of certain products resulting in a number of plants being without allocated volume to produce," GM spokesperson Julie Huston-Rough told NPR. She added that shutting down or closing a plant is an issue that must be discussed in negotiations with the United Auto Workers.
GM added that it expects to save some $6 billion by the end of 2020.
"With changing customer preferences in the U.S. and in response to market-related volume declines in cars, future products will be allocated to fewer plants next year," the company said.
UAW Vice President Terry Dittes called it a "callous decision" that would be "profoundly damaging to our American workforce."
"The UAW and our members will confront this decision by GM through every legal, contractual and collective bargaining avenue open to our membership," the union said in a statement.
BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES PREPARE FOR THE WORST.
REVOLUTION IS IN LOOMING AND WILL MARCH RIGHT DOWN WALL STREET FIRST.
"A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”
*
"The ruling class was particularly terrified by the teachers’ walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for decades."
*“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”
*
"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
* "A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."
General Motors Says Factory Closings and Restructuring Will Cost 14,700 Jobs
The company said Monday that it would cut 15 percent of its salaried workforce in North America. That is likely to be around 8,000 employees.
In addition to the white collar job cuts, the company is shutting down plants that make models it is discontinuing. This will result in around 6,700 job cuts.
The closures and layoffs follow similar moves by other big U.S. automakers as the industry adjusts to lower consumer demand for passenger cars. While sales smaller cars temporarily boomed in the wake of the financial crisis, largely due to Obama administration subsidies and a steep rise in the price of oil, compacts and sedans have fallen out of favor with American consumers. Demand has shifted to trucks, vans, and SUVs.
The layoffs and closures will face protests from autoworker unions. The United Auto Workers union has said the move was callous.
General Motors employed around 180,000 employees worldwide at the end of 2017, with around approximately 103,000 in the U.S. Earlier this year, it offered a buyout package to some employees. It is not clear how many took the company up on the offer.
While the company has said that it believes tariffs on steel and aluminum will add about $1 billion in costs over the next year, there is little sign that the layoffs and closures are related to the tariffs. The company had around $145 billion in sales last year and costs of production of $118.7 billion, down significantly from $130.5 billion four years prior. So the overall additional costs of the tariffs is relatively small for GM.
Many of the cars that General Motors says it will cease producing were hailed as major break-throughs when introduced. The high-priced Chevy Volt, which initially benefited from enormous government subsidies intended to promote electric vehicles, and the more modestly-priced Chevy Cruze, however, both were sales disappointments. Both were derisively called “Obamamobiles” by some critics, based on the support the Obama administration through behind them.
Industry publication boasts: GM plant closures aimed at extorting more concessions from autoworkers
In its coverage of the General Motors plant closure
announcement, the has stressed that one of the central aims
of the job massacre is to intimidate 140,000 GM, Ford and
Fiat Chrysler workers whose contracts are expiring next
summer and break their determination to win significant
improvements in wages and working conditions from the
highly profitable automakers.
This has been confirmed by the chief industry publication Automotive News in an article published Thursday, headlined, "GM sends bold message to UAW with potential plant closures." In the article, Automotive News reporter Michael Wayland acknowledges that GM made the announcement, carefully timed to precede the start of negotiations, not only to undermine workers’ aspirations, but to soften them up for the imposition of even deeper concessions in the next labor agreements.
"While the negotiations don't officially kick off until next year, both sides have assembled their bargaining teams, and members are discussing what to focus on during the talks. As always, many UAW members want more: more raises, more profit-sharing, more everything," Wayland complains.
By announcing that no new products would be allocated to the Detroit-Hamtramck, Lordstown, Ohio and Oshawa, Ontario assembly plants, he boasts, "GM is managing UAW members’ expectations" and "changing the narrative from members wanting more to potentially just wanting to save jobs and plants."
He quotes Kristin Dziczek of the corporate think tank Center for Automotive Research, who adds, "These are real stakes in front of the bargaining team next year for the negotiations. It might actually help the membership focus on jobs and survival more than getting more, more and more in terms of raises, benefits and bonuses."
Like the Mafia, the corporate executives are using the threat of plant closings, which would destroy tens of thousands of direct and related jobs and decimate entire communities, as a gun pointed at the heads of workers. Either they accept less pay, fewer benefits and conditions of industrial slavery or the workers and their families will starve.
This "bold message" is directed at rank-and-file workers, not the UAW or the Unifor union in Canada, which are co-conspirators in this extortion racket. Wayland expresses the hope of the auto bosses that the threatened shutdowns might help the UAW reassert its control over rebellious workers who see the union as nothing more than a corrupt tool of management.
GM’s announcement, he says, "could actually be a blessing in disguise for UAW leaders, who are fighting an internal battle with members following a federal corruption scandal. If union leaders can save one, maybe two plants, they could be seen as heroes instead of company pawns, a view of several recent UAW leaders painted by federal prosecutors."
Any deal the UAW signs to keep a factory open, however, will come at a huge cost to workers. Wayland writes. "If any of the plants are saved, union members should read the fine print in the contract. Expect GM to demand untraditional employment practices such as an increase in temporary, subcontracted or outsourced workers."
"The UAW already opened the door for the practice at Orion Assembly in suburban Detroit with an Autonomous Vehicle Memorandum of Understanding that allows the automaker to offer reduced wages and benefits for some jobs," Wayland writes. This is a reference to the secret deal signed by then UAW Vice President for GM Cindy Estrada that allowed GM to contract work out to its wholly owned subsidiary GM Subsystems, which pays vastly lower wages.
Wayland continues: "The reality is GM has too many plants, legacy costs that remain unacceptable, and it doesn't see crunching metal as a long-term opportunity for growth and profits. The company likely wants to close the plants but could be persuaded to change its mind under the right circumstances."
He concludes, "Collective bargaining between the UAW and Detroit automakers is a theatrical chess match. GM just raised the curtain with a bold move that sets the stage for the next year of negotiations."
Indeed, the contract "negotiations" are a well-orchestrated play where the performers pretend to represent antagonistic parties when in fact both the corporations and their bribed union "partners" are on the same side and workers are across the barricades on the other.
For the past 40 years, the UAW and its Canadian counterparts have asserted again and again that concessions were necessary to defend jobs. The companies, for their part, pocketed workers' givebacks and carried out mass layoffs and plant closings regardless.
It should be recalled that in the 2015 contract talks workers were overwhelmingly determined to win substantial wage increases after a seven-year freeze, restore the eight-hour day and abolish the hated two-tier wage and benefit system imposed in 2007 and expanded under Obama’s 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler. On the eve of the opening of talks, Ford announced it was shifting production of its Focus compact and C-Max hybrid and plug-in models to Mexico after 2018, threatening the jobs of more than 4,000 workers at its Michigan Assembly Plant in the Detroit suburb of Wayne.
When the UAW came back with a contract that maintained the two-tier system and other concessions, including a proposal to shift current workers onto a union-run health care program, Fiat Chrysler workers rebelled, voting down the contract by a 2-to-1 margin in the first defeat of a UAW-backed national contract in three decades. The UAW was able to ram through a slightly refurbished deal and similar ones at GM and Ford only by resorting to lies and threats of more plant closures and layoffs amid allegations by workers of outright vote-rigging.
After relying on the UAW to do its dirty work, the auto executives boasted to Wall Street that the 2015 contracts kept labor cost increases below the rate of inflation and would facilitate the layoff of workers by vastly increasing the number of temporary part-time workers, who could be fired at will with no cost to the employer. The UAW also signed separate “competitive” agreements that included a third and fourth tier of lower-paid workers, supposedly to keep several GM and Ford facilities open.
The Automotive News article is a statement right out of the horse’s mouth. The auto executives and the Wall Street financiers have no intention of granting the slightest concessions to workers even though the ruling class is choking on billions in profits. On the contrary, the corporate and financial oligarchy is reacting to the growth of strikes and mass protests against social inequality in the US and around the world by doubling down.
The GM plant closings must be fought. This struggle must be guided by the principle that a good-paying and secure job is non-negotiable and must be a social right guaranteed to all.
This fight will not be carried out by the corporate stooges in the UAW. Nor will the struggle be advanced by making fruitless appeals to Trump or the Democrats, who, despite their phony protests, defend the capitalist system and insist that the corporations have the right to throw workers onto the streets to defend their profits. The unions and the big business politicians want American and Canadian workers to blame workers in Mexico and China for this threat, not the capitalist owners.
If there is to be a struggle, and there must be, then it must be carried out by workers themselves. New organizations of struggle, factory and workplace committees, must be built that are independent of the corrupt unions and democratically controlled by rank-and-file workers themselves. These committees should link up workers across the targeted factories and the entire auto and auto parts industry throughout the US, Canada and other countries. They must unite with workers and young people in Detroit, the cities around the Lordstown plant, and in Oshawa, Ontario to fight.
As the brutal actions of GM make clear, this is a class struggle, a war between two irreconcilably opposed classes. The capitalist exploiters have thrown down the gauntlet. Now it is time for the working class to fight.
Should economic growth be policymakers’ top priority? In The Once and Future Worker, published earlier this month, I argue no. Growth is important, to be sure, and rising material living standards depend on it.But I propose what I call the
Working Hypothesis: that a labor market in which
workers can support strong families and
communities is the central determinant of long-
term prosperity, and should be the central focus of
public policy. “While growth is necessary to a
prosperous society,” I write, “it is not sufficient.
Not all growth is equally beneficial, and the
policy choices that yield the most immediate
short-term growth don’t necessarily prepare the
ground for sustained economic and social
progress.”
Michael Strain and Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute have taken offense to this suggestion, and have launched a series of heated rebuttals in defense of the honor of economic growth. “The only thing [the book] really demonstrates is that it’s devilishly difficult to make sense out of nonsense,” writes Pethokoukis. “And trying to do so forces one to embrace the absurd.” They accuse the book of being “anti-globalization,” though the first sentence of its chapter on globalization observes that “practical objections to ‘globalization’ tend to be quite narrow.” The book, again, purportedly “downplay[s] growth,” though its discussion of how best to understand prosperity emphasizes that “this isn’t to say that economic growth isn’t important; of course it is.”
These critics are fighting the last war, without showing a clear sense of where the current dispute lies. Both men insist repeatedly that growth leads to rising material living standards, especially when paired with rising redistribution, a point no one is questioning here. This is the classic idea of the “economic pie,” which policymakers seek to expand so that everyone can have a bigger slice. The Once and Future Worker’s core argument is that while this view—which I call Economic Piety—is self-evidently correct on its own terms, it is incorrect in the unstated assumption that present consumer welfare is the correct measure of prosperity.
Rather, I contend, work matters. People’s well-being is more closely tied to their productive capacity, and their commensurate ability to support their families and contribute to their communities, than it is to their level of consumption. Further, growth is itself an emergent property of a healthy society; insofar as the goal is to maximize long-term growth, all segments of society must remain engaged in a broad-based economy. We should not simply adopt the policies that appear most growth-friendly at a given moment in time, because ensuring wide participation in economic productivity is foundational to a healthy society, not a nice-to-have byproduct.
So when Strain and Pethokoukis affirm their correctness from within their own consumption-maximizing perspective, they miss the point. They repeatedly attribute positions to the book that it does not take, avoid quoting from it, criticize none of its actual policy proposals, and fail even to acknowledge the existence of the question whether Economic Piety or the Working Hypothesis offers a better way to understand prosperity. Compare Pethokoukis’s claim that I argue “globalization has brought only stagnant living standards” for the non-“elite” with the book’s text: “we got exactly what we thought we wanted: strong overall economic growth and a large GDP, rising material living standards…” But as the book’s next sentence notes, “we gave up something we took for granted: a labor market in which the nation’s diverse array of families and communities could support themselves.”
Focusing on concrete points of disagreement might help us avoid talking past each other. How, for example, should we understand the present condition of the American working class—roughly, those who have not earned a college degree? If our standard is material consumption, they have never been better off: virtually all of them have microwave ovens, mobile phones, and other consumer products. If our standard is supporting their families and communities through productive work, however, the past decade has been the worst of the post-war era. So, is the working class thriving or not? I think the evidence points clearly toward a crisis. The working class is beset by withdrawal from the labor force, family collapse, rising dependence on government programs, skyrocketing substance abuse and suicide rates, and declining life expectancy. On what basis should we say things are going well?
Second, is all growth of equal value? An aggregate measure of GDP or productivity obscures the question of who is producing or becoming more productive. If the least productive 20 percent of a nation’s workers drop out of the labor force entirely, but the most productive 20 percent double their productivity, GDP will be higher. Is the nation better off? I would say no. Do my critics disagree?
Regarding globalization, Strain and Pethokoukis take particular issue with my suggestion that trade and immigration may not be always beneficial. My view is that they can be beneficial, but balance matters. An international market in which America imports $50 billion of cars from Japan and sends back $50 billion of airplanes is healthy. But if we send back $50 billion of IOUs (i.e., Treasury bonds) instead, American workers lose and the American economy suffers. Do my critics see these transactions as comparable, and voice no preference between them? Likewise, immigrants bring many positive assets to America, but adding unskilled workers to a labor market struggling to accommodate those already here is a mistake. Do Strain and Pethokoukis believe high levels of unskilled immigration have been and will continue to be superior to a skills-based system, either for American workers, or our long-run economic growth?
Obviously, there is much to discuss. I hope Strain and Pethokoukis will answer these questions and perhaps pose some of their own, but that in doing so they will take the time to understand what The Once and Future Worker actually says, and how it differs from their own views.
One million dead from suicide, drug overdoses since 2007
Casualties of the social counterrevolution in America
1 December 2018
This year’s report on mortality rates released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reveal that the American working class is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis.
The CDC’s findings show a staggering increase in the indices of social misery in just one year, from 2016 to 2017.
Life expectancy dropped from 78.7 to 78.6 years, the third consecutive year-by-year decline.
The age-adjusted death rate increased 0.4 percent, from 728.8 deaths per 100,000 people to 731.9 per 100,000 (including a 2.9 percent increase among young people aged 25-34).
Drug overdose deaths increased 9.6 percent (including a 45 percent increase in deaths from fentanyl). Drug overdose is the leading cause of death for those under 55.
Suicide rates increased in 2017 by 3.7 percent, from 13.5 per 100,000 to 14.0 per 100,000.
The report’s historical figures quantify the devastating impact on the working class of the financial crash of 2007-2008 and its aftermath.
From 2007 to 2017, suicide deaths rose from 34,598 to 47,173, a 36.3 percent increase.
Drug overdose deaths nearly doubled, rising 95.0 percent, from 36,010 in 2007 to 70,237 in 2017.
The total dead from suicide and drug overdose since 2007 alone is 954,365 people—equivalent to the population of America’s 10th largest city. This is more than the total number of US soldiers killed in all of America’s wars, excluding the Civil War. With 2018 nearly complete, the total dead has now likely crossed one million people.
The response of the political establishment to the report is entirely predictable: an article or two in the major newspapers, a quick segment on the evening news, and maybe a tweet from a handful of politicians.
But everyone knows that nothing will be done. The stock prices of the corporations peddling pills to disabled veterans and injured workers will continue to rise. By tomorrow, the CDC reports will be long forgotten, buried beneath the ruling class’s anti-Russia and anti-China campaigns, #MeToo hysteria, and demands for internet censorship.
The cause of the deaths of 100,000 people per year from social misery is not a great mystery. It is the product of the capitalist system and the intended result of policies of deindustrialization and social counterrevolution carried out for more than four decades by both the Democrats and Republicans, in collaboration with the trade unions.
This is a widely recognized fact among medical professionals. A 2018 study published by the American Journal of Public Health titled “Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to its Social and Economic Determinants” blames “a multi-decade rise in income inequality and economic shocks stemming from deindustrialization and social safety net cuts” for growing differences in life expectancy between the rich and the poor.
In particular, the study notes the devastating impact of the massive wealth transfer carried out by the Obama administration after the 2008 financial crash. “The 2008 financial crisis along with austerity measures and other neo-liberal policies have further eroded physical and mental well-being,” the report states.
While the banks and corporations received trillions in bailouts, millions of workers lost their homes, their jobs and their sense of dignity and purpose.
Last Monday, when General Motors announced that it was closing five auto plants and laying off 15,000 workers in the US and Canada, its stock soared nearly 7 percent. For the company’s affluent shareholders—including the bureaucracy of the United Auto Workers union (UAW)—this news means longer and more exclusive vacations, new and more expensive cars and homes, and plenty of jewelry and champagne for the holidays.
But for autoworkers, their families and the millions of residents of the impacted areas, it means desperation, drug addiction and death.
Those cities impacted by the GM plant closures—including Detroit and its Warren, Michigan suburb, White Marsh, Maryland and Lordstown, Ohio—are already among the most horribly affected by the opioid crisis after decades of cuts to jobs, wages and social services. The difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 25 percent is already 6.7 years in Youngstown, Ohio, near Lordstown. In metro Detroit the difference is 8.2 years.
GM’s move was hailed by the corporate press. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post (owned respectively by the multibillionaires Rupert Murdoch and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos) praised the decision as a stroke of genius. Automotive News named company CEO Mary Barra “Industry Leader of the Year.”
The duplicitous and staged anger among a relative handful of Democrats, Republicans and UAW officials to GM’s move is totally fraudulent. All those politicians and union bureaucrats who are pounding the podium with one hand are accepting company payoffs with the other.
GM gave billionaire CEO Donald Trump $25,000 for his 2016 presidential run and he reciprocated with massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich. That same year, GM gave more money to Bernie Sanders ($33,000) than to any other senator. In 2018, GM contributed to the campaigns of a majority of those elected to the House and Senate, in equal parts Democratic and Republican.
As for the UAW, this organization of bribe-takers and company agents is responsible for decades of concessions, which have transformed auto towns like Dayton, Toledo and Kokomo from relatively comfortable communities to epicenters of the opioid crisis. In return, the union bosses have been well compensated. A growing list of current and former UAW officials is under federal investigation for accepting bribes from GM, Fiat-Chrysler and Ford in exchange for helping the companies increase exploitation and cut labor costs.
Under capitalism, the working class is entirely excluded from the decision-making process. The political establishment makes nothing available to help the victims of factory closures and deindustrialization, leaving them to die.
Instead of meeting the needs of the working class, the ruling class pockets the wealth created by workers and allocates trillions of dollars to the military and intelligence agencies so that they can implement through military force the demands of the banks and corporations.
The Trump administration cut more than $200 million from health programs to help pay the cost of locking up 14,000 working-class children from Central America, whose only “crime” was to flee their impoverished homelands in search of a better life.
In September, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was transferring $16.7 million from the CDC, $9.8 million from Medicare and Medicaid, $87.3 million from the National Institute of Health and $80 million from refugee care to establish internment camps for immigrant children. And Trump wants workers to believe that immigrants—and not the government and corporations—are to blame for plant shutdowns and cuts to wages and social programs!
The CDC reports provide a quantitative expression of the immense social anger and desperation that have built up in the working class, for which there has been no progressive outlet. The decades-long suppression of the class struggle imposed by the trade unions has forced workers to channel their anger inward, and in their isolation, many are taking self-destructive measures.
But this long period of one-sided class war is coming to a close. This year, which has seen a major increase in strike activity, is only the beginning of a new period that will be marked by increasingly powerful strikes and protests in the US and internationally.
Workers must build their own organizations—rank-and-file committees—to unite and coordinate their struggles across industries and national boundaries. In this way, workers can harness their collective social dissatisfaction and channel it in a political direction in the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. By unleashing their immense social power, workers will storm the commanding heights of the capitalist system and free up trillions of dollars to meet the urgent needs of the human race.
Confirmed: Trump’s Housekeeper At His New Jersey Golf Course Is An Illegal
Well, that or he’s a hypocrite who’d betray one of his core nationalist principles to save a buck. I’m sure this, the 8,000th story about Trump placing his personal interests above all else, will be the one that sinks him, though.
According to the Times, not only is the current housekeeper here illegally, the person she replaced is too.
The two women said they worked for years as part of a group of housekeeping, maintenance and landscaping employees at the [Bedminster] golf club that included a number of undocumented workers, though they could not say precisely how many. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump or Trump Organization executives knew of their immigration status. But at least two supervisors at the club were aware of it, the women said, and took steps to help workers evade detection and keep their jobs.
“There are many people without papers,” said Ms. Diaz, who said she witnessed several people being hired whom she knew to be undocumented…
“We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about [illegals] when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” [Victorina Morales] said. “We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.”
It’s a brilliant new strategy for detecting illegals hiding among America’s workers: Denigrate them to the point where they can’t resist leaping out of “the shadows” to cry, “F*** this guy.”
The obvious defense, per the excerpt above, will be that the supervisors at Bedminster may have known what was going on but Trump himself did not, as our president would surely never knowingly bend rules in search of profit. The Times has circumstantial evidence to the contrary, though. For one thing, the golf course doesn’t use E-Verify (New Jersey law doesn’t require it) even though Trump made a point of noting on the trail in 2016 that his new hotel in Washington used it. Why he didn’t insist that it be implemented at all of his properties I leave to your own speculation.
Further, when the Times itself ran Morales’s ID numbers through a federal database it received no match, something that surely would have been noticed by hiring supervisors at the course. Last year, when Morales was forced to get new fake ID cards, it was allegedly a manager(!) who put her in touch with a maintenance worker who knew where to go to get them. There were also new rules instituted on the premises when Trump jumped into the presidential race in 2015, with Morales told not to clean Trump’s residence anymore (although she still does occasionally), a measure that seems designed in hindsight to create some form of plausible deniability. E.g., “Yes, illegals were working there, but Trump couldn’t have known because he never had direct contact with them.”
A question: Would supervisors have dared to retain a work force of illegal immigrants without Trump’s permission, knowing what might happen to their own jobs if they went behind his back to assemble one and were later found out? The risk of political embarrassment here was high. Why not start phasing out the illegal workers in 2015 and replace them with Americans before the boss discovered the truth? Unless, that is, the boss wanted them working there because the labor was cheap and he figured his fans would forgive him anything if the truth came out. Another obvious question, posed by Morales herself: “I ask myself, is it possible that this señor thinks we have papers? He knows we don’t speak English… Why wouldn’t he figure it out?” She and other illegals did have direct contact with Trump himself, she claims, and he was kind and generous to them personally. Did he really think the Latino workers around him who couldn’t converse in English were all American citizens or legal guest workers?
If that’s the new standard, that employers are off the hook in hiring illegals so long as they’re willfully blind to the hallmarks of illegal status that are right in front of them, what percentage of American employers should now be held blameless for hiring “the undocumented”? Ninety percent?
Normally Trump’s way out of a jam like this would be to play the game he played during the game when asked about donating to Democratic politicians. He’s just following the rules that the globalist elite have created for their own enrichment. If corrupt establishmentarians want to let rich people buy lawmakers, he’ll take advantage. If corrupt establishmentarians want to look the other way while untold millions of foreigners sneak across the border to work menial jobs, he’ll take advantage. Immigration isn’t an ordinary issue for him, though. It’s his signature issue, his populist-nationalist bread and butter. It should be harder for him to get cover from his base on this — in theory. In practice, he’s defended his habit of hiring seasonal foreign workers over Americans at Mar-a-Lago multiple times and it’s widely known that he settled a lawsuit a few years ago that accused him of hiring illegal Polish laborers on a construction project in the early 80s. Hasn’t hurt him a bit. This NYT story will be old news by morning.
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