Wednesday, February 19, 2020

BERNIE SANDERS IS RIGHT! THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS ARE DESTROYING THE NATION EVERY DAY FOR MORE PROFIT

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
"This week the Washington Post reported that the US retail giant Walmart is planning to cut jobs as part of a restructuring to develop online sales to compete with Amazon. In the brutal language of the corporate world, it said store managers should follow “standard termination procedures” for any “active associate who has not been selected for another position in the company.” This edict will potentially affect thousands of workers, sometimes with decades of service."

Markets soar as companies announce mass layoffs

19 February 2020
As stock markets around the planet, led by 
Wall Street, climb to record highs, increasing 
the wealth of the ultra-rich by billions of 
dollars every day, growth in the world 
economy is falling to its lowest levels since 
the global financial crisis of 2008. Once again,
the working class is being made to pay, with
announcements of major job cuts.
Economic data from the major capitalist economies point to an accelerating downturn. In the US, the world largest economy, growth is little more than 2 percent. This is the lowest for any “recovery” in the post-war period, despite President Donald Trump’s claims of the greatest boom in history.
The closed Bayou Steel Group factory in LaPlace, October 2019. The Louisiana steel mill unexpectedly laid off 376 employees and says the factory will shut down in November [Credit: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert]
China, the world’s second largest economy, experienced its lowest growth rate for 30 years in 2019. Large areas of the economy are still in lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, with estimates for first-quarter growth being slashed, in some cases to zero.
Japan, the world’s third largest economy, has been delivered a shock by the announcement that it contracted at an annual rate of 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019. While this was mainly the result of an increase in sales taxes, the hit was far larger than expected and the downturn is set to continue, due to the effects of the coronavirus.
Growth in Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has flat-lined, with predictions that it could enter a recession, dragging down the rest of the Eurozone, which showed growth of just 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter last year.
In South Korea, one of the world’s major manufacturing centres, the government has called for “emergency” measures because of the downturn in China and Japan. Australia, the world’s 12th largest economy, looks set to end its 28-year run without a recession.
The class logic of the process underway 
stands out in stark relief. As the wealth of the 
financial elites is boosted by the rise of the 
stock markets, fueled by the provision of 
trillions of dollars from the world’s central 
banks, and the promise of still more to come, 
the working class is being made to bear the 
burden.
Job cuts are sweeping through manufacturing industry, particularly auto production. Every week brings new announcements. Last week, French car producer Renault unveiled a $2.2 billion cost-cutting program to include job cuts. Last month, Volkswagen pledged to slaughter “sacred cows” as it announced 20,000 job cuts in Germany alone.
By the latest estimates, around 100,000 jobs will be eliminated in the global auto industry in 2020. This is on top of more than 500,000 job cuts in auto-related industries around the world last year. In India, there are warnings that as many as 1 million of the country’s 5 million auto parts industry jobs could be at risk.
This worldwide job massacre is being driven by two processes: the fall in the market for cars, as a result of lower growth and falling demand, due not least to the stagnation of wages around the world and sweeping changes in technology. Companies are preparing for a future of electric cars and self-driving vehicles by slashing costs in order to try to remain competitive in the new conditions.
BLOG: IN THE NEW CAPITALISM PROFITS ARE MADE BY USING "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS. THE TRUE COST OF THEIR WELFARE AND CRIME WAVE IS PASSED ALONG TO MIDDLE AMERICA IN THE FORM OF TAXES. CALIFORNIA HAS THE LARGEST NUMBER OF ILLEGALS, AND HANDS OUT $40 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES. 
Karl Marx laid out the essential logic of this process more than 170 years ago. The industrial war of the capitalists, he wrote, “has the peculiarity that its battles are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of labour” as the generals “compete with one another as to who can discharge most soldiers of labour.”
This process is not confined to auto production but is sweeping through all sections of the economy.
This week the London-based Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) said it would reduce its workforce by 35,000 in the coming period as part of what its chief executive Noel Quinn called one of the “deepest restructurings” in the global bank’s 155-year history—which his management team was “committed to executing at pace.”
The HSBC announcement followed last year’s decision by Germany’s Deutsche Bank to slash 18,000 jobs as part of a restructuring process.
The retail industry is likewise being devastated. Tens of thousands of so-called brick-and-mortar stores in the US and around the world have been shut down, with more job cuts to come.
This week the Washington Post reported that the US retail giant Walmart is planning to cut jobs as part of a restructuring to develop online sales to compete with Amazon. In the brutal language of the corporate world, it said store managers should follow “standard termination procedures” for any “active associate who has not been selected for another position in the company.” This edict will potentially affect thousands of workers, sometimes with decades of service.
The contrast between the situation confronting the working class and the accumulation of wealth on the heights of society is exemplified by the dizzying enrichment of Elon Musk, the owner of the electric car company Tesla.
Due to a spectacular surge in Tesla’s share 
price this month, Musk’s net worth rose by 
$4.5 billion in just one day, making him the 
fastest-rising global billionaire. Over just six 
weeks his wealth has risen by $13.9 billion—
$316 million every day so far this year. There 
are even predictions that Musk could overtake
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos as the richest 
man in the world.
The devastation of working-class jobs and conditions is not some unfortunate or accidental outcome of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a rapacious financial oligarchy. There is a causal connection.
BLOG: IN THE NEW CAPITALISM PROFITS ARE MADE BY USING "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS. THE TRUE COST OF THEIR WELFARE AND CRIME WAVE IS PASSED ALONG TO MIDDLE AMERICA IN THE FORM OF TAXES. CALIFORNIA HAS THE LARGEST NUMBER OF ILLEGALS, AND HANDS OUT $40 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES. 
The stock price of major corporations, from which the elites derive their fortunes, depends on the extent to which the financial markets judge they are successful in reducing costs by gutting their workforces and intensifying the exploitation of the remaining workers. The stock market and the entire financial system function as an institutionalised mechanism for siphoning up wealth.
Vast new developments in technology, associated with the advance of artificial intelligence and its use via the Internet, increase productivity and have the capacity to lift the social and economic conditions of the mass of the population. Instead, through the operations of the capitalist profit system, they are being utilised to concentrate socially produced wealth in the hands of a tiny minority.
There is no cure for this ever-worsening social disease through patchwork reforms or band-aids. It must be tackled at its source and overcome through the unified struggle of the international working class to establish a higher and necessary socioeconomic system. That is international socialism, in which the productive forces, created by the labour of the world’s producers, are publicly owned and used for the benefit of all.





Bernie Sanders Says Mike Bloomberg Stands for ‘Oligarchy, Not Democracy’

Joel B. Pollak
Volume 90%
3:29

RENO, Nevada — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) attacked billionaire oligarch Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, directly in an address at the University of Reno, Nevada on Tuesday morning.
Sanders took direct aim at Bloomberg, saying that “we have a corrupt political system which allows billionaires to buy elections.” The crowd booed.
“People who have enormous amounts of money can make incredible contributions. They can contribute hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process to elect candidates who represent the rich and the powerful,” he continued.
“And in [some] cases, they can even run for office themselves!”
He continued: “Anybody here worth 60 billion dollars? You can run for president, and you can buy the airwaves.” The crowd booed again.
“My friends, that is called oligarchy, not democracy.”
Bloomberg is currently running second or third behind Sanders in the latest national polls, and will appear with Sanders onstage at the Democrat debate on Wednesday evening in Las Vegas.
Sanders spoke to roughly 200 people in a hall on campus. Supporters came from the local community and from neighboring states.
Becca, from Nevada City, California, told Breitbart News that she supports Sanders because of “consistency over time, seeing someone who has a vision and following it over time.”
“Integrity,” chimed in her friend, Bethany, also from Nevada City.
A local Sanders precinct captain, Laurel, confided that she would vote for Bernie but would also consider alternatives.
She was nervous, she said, about whether Sanders could win the general election.
“We need to get ’45; and fascism out of the White House,” she said.
“I’m a former philosophy instructor, so truth is important to me,” she explained, adding that the country needed an alternative to what she saw as Trump’s climate of “fear” and “ignorance.”
Asked whom she might be considering as an alternative, she said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
“She has a lot of the same positive energy, but would actually speak to the middle in ways [Sanders] will not,” she said.
Part of problem, Laurel said, was the “socialism piece — even just calling himself that.”
Her 9-year-old son, however, who was attending his first political event, had no doubt that Sanders was the strongest Democratic candidate to defeat Trump.
After his speech, Sanders led supporters on a march to a polling place at the university’s student union, where the last day of early voting was being held.
Joel B. Pollak
Volume 90%
The actual caucuses will be held at noon on Saturday, Feb. 22
The debate will be held at the Paris Theater in Las Vegas at 6:00 p.m. PT / 9:00 p.m. ET, and will be hosted by MSNBC.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Growing class conflict in the US and the resurgence of socialism

13 February 2020
According to a report released Tuesday by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), working class struggles in the US are at their highest levels in decades.
There were 25 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers in 2019. This is the largest number in nearly two decades. Ten of these strikes involved 20,000 or more workers, the largest number since at least 1993, when data on the size of walkouts began to be systematically tracked by the BLS.
Workers walk the picket line during a demonstration outside the GM Warren Tech center in October 2019
The number of workers involved in strikes is increasing as well. There were 425,500 workers who took part in major work stoppages last year, down slightly from 2018 (485,000). The 2018 figure was a near 20-fold increase over the previous year. Combined, 2018 and 2019 saw the largest number of workers involved in a major work stoppage, over a two-year period, in 35 years.
Over the past two years, teachers have engaged in major strikes in West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Oregon and other states, and in major cities like Los Angeles, Oakland and Chicago. The unrest among manufacturing workers was expressed in the 40-day strike by 46,000 workers at General Motors last year, the first national strike by autoworkers in decades. More than 30,000 Stop and Shop grocery workers in the US Northeast also walked out last year.
In many cases, these strikes have developed outside of the official trade unions, and in all cases have come into conflict with these nationalist and pro-capitalist organizations. The United Auto Workers succeeded in shutting down the GM strike, even as its executives were under criminal investigation and indictment for stealing workers’ dues money and accepting bribes from the auto companies.
The intensification of the class struggle is the essential factor underlying the shift to the left among workers. Numerous polls express the broad-based support for socialism, and hostility to capitalism and inequality, particularly among young people. In the 2020 elections, this political radicalization has found its initial and, as yet, politically limited expression, in support for the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has won the popular vote in the first two contests in the Democratic primary campaign—Iowa and New Hampshire.
The impulse toward socialism is derived not only from social discontent and the outbreak of strikes, but from a complex interaction of the domestic and international crisis of American capitalism.
The principal objective factor that allowed the ruling class in the United States to suppress the growth of socialism was the strength of American capitalism. So long as the United States was an ascending economic power, with a sufficient share of the national income going to rising living standards, American workers were not convinced of the necessity for socialism.
The objective conditions for this American “exceptionalism,” however, have thoroughly eroded. Over the past 40 years, the American ruling class, responding to the decline in the dominant global position of American capitalism, has been working systematically to destroy everything that had been won by workers through bitter struggle. The “land of unlimited opportunity,” which always had a semi-mythical character, has given way to the land of low wages, debt and economic insecurity. The “American Dream” has turned into the “American nightmare.”
Particularly since the crash of 2008, the concentration of wealth has enormously intensified class and social divisions. The 400 richest individuals in the US now possess more wealth than the bottom 64 percent of the population, and social inequality is greater than at any time since the years preceding the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Anticipating this development, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, the Socialist Equality Party predicted: “The reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society.” This is now taking place.
The growth of social unrest and interest in socialism has frightened and shocked the ruling class and its political and media mouthpieces. The Trump administration has responded with frenzied anti-communism. Trump frantically denounces “socialism” and the “radical left.” His effort to build up a movement of the fascistic right is directed, above all, at the growth of social opposition in the working class to the policies of the financial oligarchy.
The Democratic Party and media are working relentlessly to undermine support for socialism. The hostility of dominant factions of the Democratic Party to the Sanders campaign expresses their determination to prevent an election that raises, even in a limited way, the mass hostility to social inequality and corporate dictatorship.
While posturing as a popular party, the entire program of the Democrats is based on the suppression of class consciousness. Through the mechanism of racial and gender politics, the Democrats and their affiliated organizations seek to divide the working class. With the growth of the class struggle, these efforts are intensifying.
Sanders, while the immediate beneficiary of the movement to the left among workers and youth,  seeks to direct anger and opposition back into the Democratic Party itself, to prevent it from breaking out of the bounds of capitalist politics.
The development of the class struggle, and the radicalization of workers and youth, will inevitably come into conflict with Sanders and those, like the Democratic Socialists of America, that are promoting him. In terms of his program, Sanders seeks to combine proposals for minor social reforms, impossible under capitalism, with economic nationalism; a shameful silence on the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, and support for the imperialist foreign policy of the Democratic Party.
The growth of the class struggle, and the political radicalization of workers and youth, is in its initial stages. Millions of people, in the United States and internationally, are looking for a way to oppose inequality, exploitation, dictatorship and war. They will go through political experiences and must draw the necessary conclusions.
“We must patiently explain,” Lenin once wrote, under similar conditions. The workers must be imbued with a consciousness of the logic of the struggles they are waging. They must understand the role of different political tendencies, to distrust those who make empty and false promises. They must be encouraged to have confidence in their own strength and the possibility of independent action. They must be trained to analyze politics in class terms, and to reject all efforts to promote racial, gender and national divisions.

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