DO YOU TRULY BELIEVE JOE BIDEN IS, OR EVER HAS, SERVED ANYONE WHO DOES NOT LIVE ON WALL STREET?
Chris Hedges: The Ruthless Corporate destruction of our Nation, Culture and Ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eQV0IuYQ2U&list=WL&index=36&t=119s
Prof. Richard Wolff: How Real is the Recovery?
10 Million Face Evictions And Foreclosures In 2021 As Federal Moratorium Ends
Illegal Alien Amnesty is the Ticking Time Bomb in 'Reconciliation'
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The one thing the infrastructure bill isn't about is... infrastructure.
Aside from all the poison green environmental pork, it's just the sideshow to a larger legislative push to ram a whole bunch of policy priorities through via a highly illegal strategy. But if Obama could use reconciliation to enslave millions of Americans to socialized medicine, his successor figures he can do the same with illegal alien amnesty.
Biden "reiterated that immigration reform should be included in the reconciliation bill. It’s a position he’s staked out before... but this is the first we’ve heard about it since there was movement on the bipartisan infrastructure framework. (Worth remembering: For this to happen, Dems would need a favorable ruling from the Senate parliamentarian, which hasn’t happened yet.)"
Then, Biden said that Sen. KYRSTEN SINEMA (D-Ariz.) — who said Wednesday that she would not support a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill — is “on board for passing [reconciliation] if in fact she sees all the pieces of it. That’s why she allowed the budget to go forward.”
The gimmick here is the same pseudo-DACA bid that Dems unveiled during the pandemic which slices the illegal alien onion by declaring a whole bunch of illegals to be 'essential workers'.
Americans were more willing to accept illegal alien amnesty if they were told, falsely, that it was going to apply to American teens whose parents just happened to have brought them here illegally.
With some businesses claiming to have trouble finding workers, Dems suspect the public may be willing to legalize another raft of illegal aliens because they're "essential workers".
Padilla, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, is pushing to pass a pathway to citizenship for essential workers, "Dreamers" and other undocumented immigrants as part of the spending bill — a move he said would benefit all Americans...
This comes after bills to legalize more than 4 million farmworkers, "Dreamers" and immigrants eligible for temporary humanitarian protections were approved in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year. But those measures would need at least 60 votes to succeed in the Senate, where they face a wall of opposition by Republicans.
That’s why for months now, immigrant advocates have pressured Democrats to use reconciliation to adopt immigration reforms that have proven elusive for decades.
The very fact that Dems are having trouble getting enough Senate Republicans on board for their latest amnesty is a minor miracle that can largely be attributed to the effects of the Trump era.
During a briefing with the American Business Immigration Coalition, Menendez recounted roughly a dozen “significant meetings” he had with Republican colleagues, “trying to plow through what would be possible” on immigration. But he said he was never able to identify the 10 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and pass legislation through the regular process.
Menendez accused his colleagues across the aisle of being “more interested in punishing immigrants than they are in recognizing their incredible contributions to this country.”
“The Republicans of 2021 are not the same Republicans I worked with in 2013 to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate,” said Menendez, a member of the so-called Gang of Eight that successfully ushered immigration overhaul legislation through the Senate in 2013, only to have the bill die in the Republican-controlled House.
Good.
The question is whether Senate Dems will be able to successfully detonate a demographic nuclear weapon through reconciliation.
Missouri Aviary Cafe workers strike, charge they are “overworked like slaves”
About a dozen non-union restaurant workers at the French-style Aviary Cafe in Springfield, Missouri, walked off the job July 25 and formed a picket line, saying they were “overworked like slaves.” Workers said the immediate cause of the walkout was an incident the previous day, where, during a hectic brunch, management left to relax at the local casino.
Perry Ashlock, who works in the kitchen, wrote on Facebook, “The whole intention with our walkout was to let them understand what it was like to be left understaffed during a crisis situation.”
Another striker, Brad Russell, told the Springfield News-Leader that throughout the pandemic, workers had been promised raises, “but it never happened.”
Ashlock added, “They have told us time and time again recently that we have smashed various sales records for the restaurant.”
Ericka Loredo, an Aviary sous cook, told the News-Leader she worked 65 hours a week and didn’t get benefits or vacation. “I often had 14-hour workdays. From 7:30 a.m. to the end of the day. But, once again, there were no breaks. The environment is extremely harmful in general. I felt as if I were a slave. We were treated like slaves because we were overworked.”
Loredo said she felt “unsafe” working in the Aviary’s “small kitchen so close together with so many people” as the COVID-19 Delta variant surged in southwest Missouri.
Nick Holland, a server and leader of the walkout, stated: “We just wanted higher wages—$20 an hour specifically for our back of house kitchen staff, who were making anywhere from around $10 to $15 an hour. We wanted healthcare and for them to stop overworking us.”
But management ignored the appeal and cracked down, firing seven workers and providing gift cards to mollify workers who remained on the job.
The Aviary strike is but a microcosm of the conflict between the restaurant industry and a growing militancy among workers demanding better working conditions, wages and benefits, and compensation for bearing the burden of the year-long pandemic.
As restaurants and the fast food industry have tried to restore operations, they are encountering a shortage of workers to staff facilities and a new militancy on the part of workers, who are not inclined to return to the cheap-labor, highly exploitative jungle of the food service industry.
The National Federation of Independent Business reports that 42 percent of their small business owners are reporting they are unable to fill job openings. This has made it impossible to resume longer business hours in order to recapture revenues they lost during the pandemic.
One reaction has been to try to compel existing workers to take up the slack. Kitchen workers are often assigned carry food out to customers tables and then to bus dishes back to the kitchen when meals are finished.
In some parts of the country, drought and excessively high temperatures have also exacerbated the situation, with some employees simply abandoning their jobs. Workers and a manager at a Burger King in Lincoln, Nebraska, left their posts and changed the sign outside the building to read: “We all quit. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Workers at the grill complained of working 50 to 60 hour shifts in temperatures of 90 degrees or more.
The crunch further intensified when retailers such as Amazon increased entry-level wages. McDonald’s responded by announcing a 10 percent immediate wage increase in June and that general wages of its workers will reach $15 an hour by 2024. But this affects only the 650 company-owned fast food restaurants. It has another 13,000 restaurants run by franchisees, and they are spread across various locations where profits can vary widely and pressure from the corporate office to raise wages may cut into profitability.
The promotion to a management position in a fast food restaurant used to be considered a perk, providing slightly higher wages and some benefits. But managers are now being driven to cover for labor shortages. A McDonald’s franchise operator who manages 45 restaurants in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia said one of his managers reported to him that after exhausting long shifts, she simply slept for three hours in her car rather than commuting home, waking up to immediately resume her next shift.
The manager, in a candid admission to CNBC, said of the wage increases, “If there wasn’t a huge shortage of labor, we might not have taken the action.”
For the smaller chains and independent restaurants, the current economic environment leaves little room for maneuvering under conditions where the bulk of government pandemic assistance has gone to the big chains. Strikes by workers have been quickly resolved by immediate wage increases by those operators who can for the moment afford it, firing the most militant workers or simply shuttering operations.
On the part of the political establishment and corporate media, the predominate reaction to the labor shortage has been to rail against pandemic unemployment stipends and other benefits. Some 26 states, including Missouri, have terminated the $300 supplemental federal unemployment assistance well before the September expiration in an effort to drive workers back into cheap-labor jobs.
The difficulties faced by employers in recruiting low-wage workers is tied to many other issues, including the lack of affordable child care and lack of health care benefits. The single-minded focus of the Biden administration on forcing the reopening of the schools to in-person learning is in large part motivated by the demands of employers to free up parents from child care in order that they can return to workplaces.
The shortage of workers willing to work for poverty level wages is not just an issue confined to the restaurant industry. The entire hospitality industry, including hotel and entertainment venues, face an intensification of class struggle.
Over 10 years ago, the trade union bureaucracy, in alliance with various pseudo-left organizations, launched the Fight for 15 campaign aimed at lobbying for an increase in the federal minimum wage. This was accompanied by the staging of a few token protest stunts aimed at diverting anger over starvation levels of pay, never at mobilizing the broad mass of low-wage workers in a militant struggle in alliance with the broader working class. The demand for a $15 an hour wage was inadequate when it was advanced 10 years ago and is even less adequate now under conditions of escalating inflation.
While the move by restaurant workers and other low-paid sectors to fight against super-exploitation is welcome, it requires a conscious program and leadership. Workers in the restaurant industry should follow the example of teachers, autoworkers, Amazon workers and others by organizing their own independent rank-and-file committees to wage a struggle against the fast food chains and the profit system as a whole in the fight for decent pay and conditions.
Volvo Group announces $1.1 billion second-quarter profits, after telling Virginia workers it could not afford wage and benefit improvements
On Tuesday, Sweden-based Volvo Group announced strong profits of over a billion dollars for the second quarter of the year. The earnings report comes shortly after the conclusion of a five-week-long strike at the conglomerate’s New River Valley heavy trucks plant in southwestern Virginia. Last week, the company, with crucial assistance provided by the United Auto Workers union, imposed a six-year contract that substantially raises workers’ health care costs and keeps wage increases for many below inflation, among other concessions.
While the aim of Volvo and the UAW has been to crush opposition through the shutdown of the strike and enforcement of the contract, workers have returned to the plant in an angry and defiant mood, telling the World Socialist Web Site that production has proceeded only haltingly since Monday.
In its earning statement, Volvo reported roughly $1.12 billion (9.7 billion Swedish kronor) in adjusted operating income, a key measure of corporate profit, for April through June. Combined with its first-quarter earnings, the company took in approximately $2.5 billion in profits for the first six months of the year.
The company also reported a second-quarter operating margin of 10.7 percent, near the upper end for the automotive manufacturing industry, albeit down from the first quarter’s high of 12.6 percent.
Although Volvo’s operating income for the quarter grew sizably compared to the amount for the same period last year, nearly tripling, it narrowly missed financial analysts’ projections of 9.84 billion Swedish kronor, sending Volvo’s share price down 2.9 percent for the day.
The response by analysts at some giant banking firms was nevertheless still favorable, with a research note by JP Morgan stating, “Volvo printed a good set of results, slightly below street estimates.”
Revenue also grew substantially, with net sales for the quarter of approximately $10.4 billion, a rise of 43 percent from the same period last year, when taking into account Volvo’s sale of Japan-based UD Trucks. But despite the growth in sales and profit compared to the second quarter of 2020, which was during the still-early stages of the pandemic and widespread economic disruption, the figures remained down in relation to two years ago, when Volvo reported roughly $13.9 billion in sales and $1.7 billion in adjusted operating income.
CEO Martin Lundstedt, in the company’s earnings statement, said that although Volvo faced “short-term challenges,” it is still “maneuvering from a position of strength.”
Lundstedt’s assertion of financial strength and Volvo’s continued billion-dollar earnings contradict the dishonest argument implicitly advanced by both the company and the UAW over the course of the past three months, namely, that there was simply not enough corporate money to meet workers’ demands and reverse the long-term decline of wages and benefits, and that workers would, in fact, have to accept even further sacrifices.
Commenting on Volvo’s profit report, a veteran Volvo worker said, “Goes to show you they have plenty of money and could have easily paid us what we were asking. They are looking out for the top investors and piss on the employees.”
In its earnings reports, the company largely sought to pretend as though the strike at New River Valley had never happened, referring only to “substantial production stoppages” due to semi-conductor shortages and other “disturbances in the supply chain.” The strike was referred to explicitly only once during a conference call with investors Tuesday, when an analyst for Goldman Sachs asked what profit margins would have been were it not for the walkout, to which Volvo’s chief financial officer, Jan Ytterberg, gave an evasive answer.
However, the ongoing semi-conductor shortage, which has plagued both the auto industry and other global manufacturers, presents a real problem for Volvo, and was the focus of much of the comments by Lundstedt.
“The global supply chain for semiconductors as well as for other components remains unstable and with low visibility,” Lundstedt said in a statement accompanying the earnings report. “There will be further disruptions and stoppages in both truck production and other parts of the group in the second half of the year.”
CFO Ytterberg told investors during the call that the ongoing shortage of semiconductors and other supply chain challenges means the company will “need to have continued focus on cost discipline and cash cautiousness going forward.” The attacks contained in the recently imposed contract are thus viewed by its executives as only the initial offensive in a broader campaign to restructure its operations, imposing the costs of supply chain shortages and the transition to electric vehicle technologies onto workers.
While such “discipline” is relentlessly imposed on workers, it does not extend to Volvo’s treatment of investors, whom it has handed nearly $6 billion in dividends and payouts this year. Nor does “cash cautiousness” preclude multimillion-dollar pay packages for the company’s executives, in their view, with CEO Martin Lundstedt receiving compensation of around $5 million in 2020.
Volvo has repeatedly sought to reassure investors that it will now attempt to dramatically ramp up production to fulfill its backlog of orders. Lundstedt said that “the short-term priorities in all parts of the organization” are to meet demand “as quick and precise as possible as order books are full” for the rest of the year.
As with other employers, Volvo is seeking to insulate its profits from the impact of the chip shortage by driving down labor costs, containing wages, shifting more health care expenses onto workers, and generally increasing the exploitation of its workforce. These were the primary objectives of each of the pro-company contracts pushed by the UAW, and which workers repeatedly rejected, the first two times by 90 percent.
After workers defeated a third, essentially identical, tentative agreement by nearly two thirds on July 9, the UAW announced that Volvo would move to impose its “last, best and final” proposal the following week. The union proceeded to facilitate this blatant corporate strikebreaking, forcing a revote on the deal one week ago, which the UAW dubiously claimed resulted in ratification by just 17 votes.
Summing up the experience of the struggle, the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee, which led the struggle against Volvo and the UAW’s concessionary demands, wrote in a statement Sunday, “The fight continues. Opposition and anger are inevitably going to reignite as the full reality of this new contract comes to light, and as the company tries to enforce speedup to make up for lost production.”
“The mood is tense. Over 200 quit yesterday,” a worker at the New River Valley plant told the WSWS Tuesday. “Now, not only do they have to place people in the open positions they already had, but Volvo is going to have to replace those who left because they felt unheard.”
Referring to the UAW’s collusion with the company, he said, “The UAW officials don’t seem to care about us as much as greasing their pockets. Anything Volvo sent them they just agreed to and brought it back.”
Another worker added, “These bastards are making record profits and forcing us to pay more for our insurance. Once people see what the UAW gave away, they are going to be mad. It’ll happen when they go to a doctor for some routine treatment and find out it’s going to cost them an extra $1,000.
“Volvo wants to ramp up production, but they’ve pissed people so much it’s not going to happen. We worked out asses off last year to make them their money. No one is going to take one for the team anymore when the team is against them.”
While the working class and broad sections of the population have suffered immensely since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant economic crisis, the ruling class has parlayed the devastation into a historically unprecedented bonanza of wealth, driven by the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of corporations and inflation of the stock markets engineered in March 2020, backed by all the major political parties.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal wrote that there were “brightening expectations for corporate earnings,” and that investment analysts expected profits for companies in the S&P 500 to have risen 71 percent in the second quarter compared to last year.
Significantly, the Journal stated that an increase in corporate profits would help maintain current stock prices, which have reached stratospheric levels, and delay growing concerns over a massive financial bubble. The run-up in share prices and growth in frenzied speculation have been driven in large part by the cheap money policies of the Federal Reserve and other central banks, which have implemented ultra-low interest rates and other cash infusions of equity markets.
“You really need the fundamentals, the earnings, to really pick up, and that’s really what we’re seeing,” said Larry Adam, chief investment officer at financial services firm Raymond James, according to the Journal. “If you get that momentum, then people get less worried about the valuations.”
In other words, the overinflated share prices can be maintained only through a relentless increase in the exploitation of the working class. The battle at Volvo is one sign of the response workers in the US and around the world will give to this ruling class policy.
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