WALL STREET PLUNDERS - CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE OF BOEING TO DUMP 7,000 WORKERS - Boeing intends to make these cuts despite receiving $17 billion in federal bailout money earlier in the year.

NAFTA MAN JOE BIDEN VOWS THE SOLUTION TO ALL THESE CUTS IS AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS.

Boeing announces 7,000 additional layoffs

Boeing, the giant US commercial and military aviation manufacturer, has announced 7,000 layoffs, bringing its total to 30,000 for the year. The company cited the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the airline industry as the underlying cause, and also announced that there were no orders forthcoming for the entire month of October, the second consecutive month where this occurred. Boeing intends to make these cuts despite receiving $17 billion in federal bailout money earlier in the year.

Additionally, 37 orders of the 737 MAX, the airliner whose serious technological defects were covered up by the company, and led to two separate crashes and 346 deaths, have been taken off the books.

The collapse in new orders is driven by the crippling of the airline industry by the coronavirus pandemic, with the amount of passengers declining 65 percent. This in turn has led to a wave of route consolidations and closures. According to OAG Aviation Worldwide, the airline industry reduced 47,756 air routes operating in January to 33,416 in November, a 30 percent decline.

In March, while haggling with Congress for a share of the trillion-dollar corporate bailout under the CARES Act, the airline industry held workers’ jobs for ransom, threatening tens of thousands of job cuts unless the federal government intervened. In the end, the airline industry promised only to delay any layoffs until September 30. The industry group Airlines for America announced that US carriers have shed 90,000 of the 460,000 industry jobs since March, a 20 percent reduction. Southwest Airlines is also threatening layoffs for the first time in its history unless workers accept 10 percent wage cuts.

Indicating the worsening position of the airline industry, 25 of the 37 canceled orders for the 737 MAX were dropped by Boeing because of the financial weakness of the purchasers.

Southwest Airlines traditionally uses variants of Boeing’s 737 aircraft and was the largest customer for the 737 MAX. It was forced to cancel thousands of flights after the 737 MAX was grounded, and as a result Southwest is considering purchasing A220 aircraft from Airbus, Boeing’s European rival. Boeing, the largest US exporter, and Airbus are at the center of trade war measures between the US and Europe. In retaliation for increased US tariffs, the EU last week slapped 15 percent tariffs on US aircraft.

However, Airbus, as with all major manufacturing companies, maintains operations all over the world, including the United States. In 2015 it opened a plant in Mobile, Alabama with the capacity to produce 40 to 50 A220 and A320 aircraft per year.

In attempt to cut labor costs, Boeing has announced plans to shift all production of its new 787 Dreamliner from Everett, Washington to North Charleston, South Carolina.

The International Association of Machinists, which has 35,000 members at Boeing, has done nothing to mount a defense of jobs at the Everett facility, calling on workers instead to wait until 2024 when the contract is up for renegotiation. In 2014, under the bogus pretext of “job security,” the IAM forced through a vote on a concessions-laden contract, which had eliminated pensions for new hires, after it was initially rejected by the membership.

Mass layoffs are also taking place at other aviation companies. Raytheon Technologies, which is the product of the April merger between Raytheon and United Technologies, announced last month it is cutting its workforce by 15,000, blaming the dramatic downturn in commercial passenger airline demand.

The company has also announced that it is moving all production from Connecticut to Asheville, North Carolina, where the company expects significantly cheaper labor costs.

GE Aviation announced in May it would eliminate up to 13,000 jobs, a quarter of its workforce. Of this total, 10,000 cuts are taking place at two locations, Cincinnati and Dayton. David Joyce, the head of GE Aviation, said of the layoffs: “[The] comprehensive strategy we are developing for resizing the business is consistent with the forecast of our commercial market.”

US food banks and homeless shelters struggle to meet record demand ahead of Thanksgiving

With the Thanksgiving holiday less than two weeks away, food banks and homeless shelters across the United States are struggling to meet the growing demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Dallas, Texas, thousands of people lined up in their cars in what has been described as the largest mobile food distribution in history. The North Texas Food Banks handed out 7,000 turkeys and 600,000 pounds of food on Saturday. Organizers said it was enough to feed 25,000 people.

The state of Washington has seen the number of people who rely on food banks double from one million to 2.2 million this year. Linda Nageotte, the CEO of Food Lifeline, told the Seattle Times that she expects that “by the end of this year one in five Washingtonians could be facing hunger.”

People line up and check-in for a food giveaway at Harlem's Food Bank For New York City, a community kitchen and food pantry, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

The pandemic has also placed an extra burden on food bank workers, who now need to prepare and box food packages together before they can be distributed. It is labor intensive work that is even more difficult during a health crisis. In an attempt to lighten the load on food banks, the Washington National Guard has sent 550 soldiers to 26 distribution sites to help.

In Rochester, New York, the food bank Foodlink is working to feed a line of 50-100 people on any given day. The organization Dimitri House, which operates a food pantry and homeless shelter in Rochester, has had similar issues and has also decided to prepare meals ahead of time and distribute them to families for pick up.

Laurie Prizel, the executive director for Dimitri House, told ABC13 WHAM that “we’re getting a large number of working poor individuals coming through as well, not just the typical somebody on a fixed income trying to survive. It’s people who are holding down two jobs or lost their jobs. We’re saving the average family at least $100 on a Thanksgiving meal, and it’s allowing at least the families to come together.”

Every year, thousands of volunteers in Albany, New York work to feed thousands of people in need. This year, however, the Equinox Thanksgiving Day Community Dinner has found a creative solution to the problem of social distancing. Instead of hosting a large event, the organization raised $100,000 to deliver meals directly to the homes of people in need. To accomplish this the organizers will work with restaurants to purchase and prepare food, enabling them to feed needy people and support local businesses in the process.

In Santa Rosa, California, the Redwood Empire Food Bank has done what it can to keep up with the significantly higher demand than usual. During a normal year, the food bank would hand out around 11 million meals. This year, however, Redwood has already produced 22 million meals.

The wealth disparity in Santa Rosa, 55 miles north of San Francisco, in California’s wine country, has been rising for years, resulting in a poverty rate of 11.5 percent. According to the Census Bureau, the top 5 percent of households make an average of $331,000 a year, with the bottom 20 percent making just $16,000. It is no wonder that food banks in this area would see such high demand for food assistance.

The San Francisco Bay Area has some of the highest levels of income inequality in the country. In San Francisco County the top 5 percent earn an average of more than $800,000 a year while the bottom 20 percent average just over $16,000. The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is currently providing food aid to 55,000 households—nearly double its pre-pandemic total—and is planning to give away 1,000 turkeys to families in need on Thanksgiving.

Similarly, the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley has reported a 53 percent increase in demand in Westchester County, New York. Food shipments used to arrive twice a month, now they come once a week and are still barely keeping up with the need.

Westchester is often mistaken as a wealthy county with pockets of poverty, but it is actually the opposite. Islands of ultra-wealthy neighborhoods inflate the general cost of living, making otherwise typical working class wages barely enough to survive on.

The pandemic has made it especially difficult to operate homeless shelters and offer large communal Thanksgiving meals for the homeless. Restrictive capacity requirements to limit the number of people interacting indoors have forced shelters to limit the amount of beds they can fill.

In many cases, shelters and food aid organizations have moved their events outdoors to compensate for the restrictions on indoor events. In Charlottesville, Virginia, the organization Volunteers from Charlottesville is making “blessing bags” that will include a Thanksgiving meal and materials to help people survive the winter.

After almost canceling the event, the organizers decided to push through and host it outdoors at Washington Park, where they plan to hand out 100 bags the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Albany’s Capital City Rescue Mission in New York has done its best to continue with indoor activities throughout the pandemic. Doing its best to maintain social distancing and mask wearing, the organization has continued sheltering and feeding those in need and expects to feed thousands this holiday season.

The need to provide meals to struggling families and the homeless grows every year, but the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic has placed a demand on charity organizations that can barely be kept up with. Such immense social distress, even as Wall Street soars to record highs and trillions in bailouts have been handed over to the banks and corporations, is a damning indictment of the capitalist system and the two parties who represent it, the Democrats and Republicans.

Without the intervention of the working class to shut down non-essential production and demand full pay for workers to stay home in order to suppress the pandemic, the need will only grow as the ruling class continues to pursue its murderous “herd immunity” policy, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans and pushed millions into poverty.