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“You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life.” --Odetta (1930-2008)
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UNITE TO PROTEST THE SIXTH YEAR OF U.S. WAR AND OCCUPATION IN IRAQ!
U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
MARCH 21, 2009
SIGN ON TO THE UNITY CALL!
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations:
Call for Unity
We hope that you and your organization agree that unified national March actions are sorely needed in these times of military and economic crises. We ask that you:
1. Sign the Open Letter to the U.S. Antiwar Movement.
2. Urge all local and national organizations and coalitions to join in building the mobilizations in D.C. in March and the mass actions on March 21.
3. Support the formation of a broad, united, ad hoc national coalition to bring massive forces out on March 21, 2009.
You can sign the Open Letter by writing natassembly@aol.com [if you are a group or individual. (Individual endorsers please include something about yourselves.)] or through the National Assembly website at www.natassembly.org [if you are a group endorsement only]. For more information, please email us at the above address or call 216-736-4704. We greatly appreciate all donations to help in our unity efforts. Checks should be made payable to National Assembly and mailed to P.O. Box 21008 , Cleveland , OH 44121 .
In peace and solidarity,
Greg Coleridge, Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC); Economic Justice and Empowerment Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Member, Administrative Body, National Assembly
Marilyn Levin, Coordinating Committee, Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace; New England United; Member, Administrative Body, National Assembly
On behalf of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY STATEMENT URGING UNITY OF THE
ANTIWAR MOVEMENT FOR THE MARCH 2009 ACTIONS
For more information please contact:
natassembly@aol.com or call 216-736-4704
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Bring the Anti-War Movement to Inauguration Day in D.C.
January 20, 2009: Join thousands to demand "Bring the troops home now!"
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) What Would Keynes Have Done?
By N. GREGORY MANKIW
Economic View
November 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/economy/30view.html?ref=business
2) A Reality Check on D.C. Checkpoints
By Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802303.html
3) A Team of Whizzes
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
December 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
4) The Jig is Up
By Lynn Henderson
Nov/Dec 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
5) Cashing the Obama Check: Will It Come Back Marked ‘Insufficient Funds?’
By Bruce Dixon
BlackAgendaReport.com
November 5, 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_02.html
6) Don’t Worry! Be Happy! A Little Poverty May Do You Some Good
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08.html
7) The Age of Katrina—Not Obama
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.
Black Agenda Report
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_05.html
8) College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.
By TAMAR LEWIN
December 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?_r=1&hp
9) Countering the Lies
Nationalize GM (Or At Least Think About It)
By ROBERT WEISSMAN
December 3, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.com/weissman12032008.html
10) Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
By TIM WEINER
December 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?hp
11) U.A.W. Says It Would Consider Modifying Contract
By NICK BUNKLEY
December 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/business/04uaw.html?hp
12) Pursuing U.S. Aid, G.M. Accepts Need for Drastic Cuts
By BILL VLASIC and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
December 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/business/03auto.html?ref=us
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1) What Would Keynes Have Done?
By N. GREGORY MANKIW
Economic View
November 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/economy/30view.html?ref=business
IF you were going to turn to only one economist to understand the problems facing the economy, there is little doubt that the economist would be John Maynard Keynes. Although Keynes died more than a half-century ago, his diagnosis of recessions and depressions remains the foundation of modern macroeconomics. His insights go a long way toward explaining the challenges we now confront.
According to Keynes, the root cause of economic downturns is insufficient aggregate demand. When the total demand for goods and services declines, businesses throughout the economy see their sales fall off. Lower sales induce firms to cut back production and to lay off workers. Rising unemployment and declining profits further depress demand, leading to a feedback loop with a very unhappy ending.
The situation reverses, Keynesian theory says, only when some event or policy increases aggregate demand. The problem right now is that it is hard to see where that demand might come from.
The economy’s output of goods and services is traditionally divided into four components: consumption, investment, net exports and government purchases. Any expansion in demand has to come from one of these four. But in each case, strong forces are working to keep spending down.
CONSUMPTION The Conference Board reports that consumer confidence is near its record low. It is easy to understand why consumers are so scared. House values have declined, 401(k) balances have shrunk and unemployment is up. For many people, the sense of economic uncertainty is greater than they’ve ever experienced. When it comes to discretionary purchases, like a new home, a car, or a washing machine, wait-and-see is the most rational course.
A bit more saving is not entirely unwelcome. Many economists have long lamented the United States saving rate, which is low by international and historical standards.
For the overall economy, however, a recession is not the best time for households to start saving. Keynesian theory suggests a “paradox of thrift.” If all households try to save more, a short-run result could be lower aggregate demand and thus lower national income. Reduced incomes, in turn, could prevent households from reaching their new saving goals.
INVESTMENT In normal times, a fall in consumption could be met by an increase in investment, which includes spending by businesses on plant and equipment and by households on new homes. But several factors are keeping investment spending at bay.
The most obvious is the state of the housing market. Over the past three years, residential investment has fallen 42 percent. With house prices continuing to decline, increased building of new homes is not likely to be a source of robust demand over the next few years.
Business investment has lately been stronger than residential investment, but it is unlikely to pick up the slack in the near future. With the stock market down, interest rates on corporate bonds up and the banking system teetering on the edge, financing new business projects will not be easy.
NET EXPORTS Not long ago, it looked as if the rest of the world would save the United States economy from a deep downturn. From March 2004 to March 2008, the dollar fell 19 percent against an average of other major currencies. By increasing the price of foreign goods in the United States and reducing the price of American goods abroad, this depreciation discouraged imports and bolstered exports. Over the last three years, real net exports have increased by about $250 billion.
In the coming months, however, the situation may well go into reverse. As the United States financial crisis has spread to the rest of the world, fast-moving international capital has been looking for a safe haven. Ironically, that haven is the United States. Since March, the dollar has appreciated 19 percent, a move that will put a crimp in the export boom.
GOVERNMENT PURCHASES That leaves the government as the demander of last resort. Calls for increased infrastructure spending fit well with Keynesian theory. In principle, every dollar spent by the government could cause national income to increase by more than a dollar if it leads to a more vibrant economy and stimulates spending by consumers and companies. By all reports, that is precisely the plan that the incoming Obama administration has in mind.
The fly in the ointment — or perhaps it is more an elephant — is the long-term fiscal picture. Increased government spending may be a good short-run fix, but it would add to the budget deficit. The baby boomers are now starting to retire and claim Social Security and Medicare benefits. Any increase in the national debt will make fulfilling those unfunded promises harder in coming years.
Keynesian economists often dismiss these long-run concerns when the economy has short-run problems. “In the long run we are all dead,” Keynes famously quipped.
The longer-term problem we now face, however, may be more serious than any that Keynes ever envisioned. Passing a larger national debt to the next generation may look attractive to those without children. (Keynes himself was childless.) But the rest of us cannot feel much comfort knowing that, in the long run, when we are dead, our children and grandchildren will be dealing with our fiscal legacy.
So what is to be done? Many economists still hope the Federal Reserve will save the day.
In normal times, the Fed can bolster aggregate demand by reducing interest rates. Lower interest rates encourage households and companies to borrow and spend. They also bolster equity values and, by encouraging international capital to look elsewhere, reduce the value of the dollar in foreign-exchange markets. Spending on consumption, investment and net exports all increase.
But these are not normal times. The Fed has already cut the federal funds rate to 1 percent, close to its lower bound of zero. Some fear that our central bank is almost out of ammunition.
Fortunately, the Fed has a few secret weapons. It can set a target for longer-term interest rates. It can commit itself to keeping interest rates low for a sustained period. Most important, it can try to manage expectations and assure markets that it will do whatever it takes to avoid prolonged deflation. The Fed’s decision last week to start buying mortgage debt shows its willingness to act creatively.
It is hard to say how successful monetary and fiscal policy will be in avoiding a deep downturn. But as events unfold, you can be sure that policymakers in the Fed and Treasury will be looking at them through a Keynesian lens.
In 1936, Keynes wrote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.” In 2008, no defunct economist is more prominent than Keynes himself.
N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and advised Mitt Romney in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
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2) A Reality Check on D.C. Checkpoints
By Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802303.html
In June, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, his attorney general and the D.C. police announced the introduction of a military-style checkpoint program under which police stop drivers and allow only those with a police-approved "legitimate reason" to continue on the public roadway. This strategy is sorely in need of a reality check -- or three.
Reality check No. 1: Let's say that you are driving home, exhausted from work, lugging groceries and carrying your child in the back seat. Lights, police and roadblocks await you. Your car is stopped, an armed police officer comes over and you must roll down your window. Your child begins crying. You must now prove to the police officer's satisfaction that you have the right to drive on your own block.
Visiting a friend? You are driving lawfully down the street when you find yourself blocked by police cars. The police suddenly approach your car, flashlight shining. Your license plate number is written down. The officer demands to know who you are, where you are going, what your purpose for driving is, and the name, address and phone number of your friend. He tells you that your reason for driving is not "legitimate"; now you cannot drive past the roadblock.
William Robinson, a retired schoolteacher, coach and 50-year resident of Trinidad, told me that former students simply stopped visiting him during the checkpoints. They turned around because they didn't want to have to answer to the police for just a social call. Robinson is among the plaintiffs suing to end the checkpoint program, which was endorsed in October by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia and is on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. According to Robinson, the checkpoints stigmatize the whole community: "It's like living under martial law in a police state."
Reality check No. 2: One might say that the checkpoint is an unfortunate inconvenience but that at least it is a way to reduce violent crime. A worthwhile trade-off of constitutional rights for security, so the argument goes. But that is not the case.
According to statistics that the D.C. police have filed with the court, comparing the initial Trinidad checkpoint period to the week immediately preceding it, violent crimes increased 100 percent, as did nonviolent crimes, during the checkpoint period. Also, the number of violent crimes committed during the checkpoint period in the police-designated "neighborhood safety zone" was 10 percent greater than the average for the nine weeks immediately preceding it and more than 40 percent greater than the average for the preceding seven weeks. Shootings surged elsewhere in the city while police were mobilized (or more accurately, immobilized) to stop lawful drivers at Trinidad checkpoints. The June checkpoints in Trinidad were suddenly halted after a night during which nine people were shot in other parts of the city. D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier has referred to some of her policing tactics, including the All Hands on Deck police deployment program, as primarily a public relations tactic. "Absolutely, it's a public relations stunt -- and it works!" she told a Post reporter in August.
Reality check No. 3: Eight years ago, the Supreme Court stated, "Without drawing the line at roadblocks designed primarily to serve the general interest in crime control, the Fourth Amendment would do little to prevent such intrusions from becoming a routine part of American life." Both the federal and local courts of this jurisdiction have described as unconstitutional attempts to impose crime control checkpoints on the public -- even without interrogation components or the refusal of passage. Seventeen years ago, a D.C. court ruled that the District's crime "deterrence rationale" for roadblocks was "antithetical to the Fourth Amendment."
The District is engaged in a dangerous and unprecedented expansion of police power. If the police could use the existence of crime to justify the suspension of constitutional protections, there would be no Constitution left to speak of.
The District needs more than photo-opportunity responses to problems, and its residents deserve respect for their most basic rights. Common sense and the Constitution demand no less.
-- Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Washington
The writer, a constitutional rights attorney and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice, is representing the plaintiffs suing to end the checkpoint program.
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3) A Team of Whizzes
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
December 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
Barack Obama appears to have put together an extraordinarily competent team to cope with the crises abroad and at home — and to begin cleaning up the mess of the past eight years.
So why do I have this uneasy feeling?
Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers ...
Competence is clearly trumping ideology in the next administration, and lord knows after two terms of Bush & Co. it’s time to get back to the idea of smart, capable people advising the president and executing his policies.
What I wonder is whether the members of this team, in addition to their grasp of the issues and success at achieving power, have a real feel for the needs of the people they are supposed to be representing.
I don’t doubt that they have the best of intentions. But the people at the pinnacle of power in Washington are encased in a bubble that makes it extremely hard to hear the voices of those who aren’t already powerful themselves.
On Monday, the president-elect introduced a national security team that will face a nightmarish array of challenges: the promised drawdown in Iraq; a worsening situation in Afghanistan; the crisis unfolding in India and Pakistan; and so on.
But it also has a responsibility to look out for the members of the military who are exhausted from years of valiant service. Many have served three and four (or more) tours in combat, and many thousands have been wounded in mind and body and are having a difficult time putting their lives back together.
So a challenge as important as the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan is to send the message — and make it stick — that more Americans need to share in the sacrifices required to keep the nation and its interests secure.
President-elect Obama campaigned on the mantra of change. For years the federal government catered increasingly to the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. This reached a destructive crescendo when the ideologues and incompetents of the Bush administration came to power.
That is what needs to change.
Will this new Obama team, as brilliant as it appears to be, begin addressing on day one the interests of those who are not rich and who have not had the ear of those in power?
I think about the cops and firefighters and factory workers and schoolteachers and hospital aides and bank tellers and truck drivers who are having trouble making ends meet, hanging onto their homes, sending their children to college.
Will this new administration really be looking out for them?
One of the reasons the economy is so deeply in the tank is that ordinary Americans have not received a fair share of the economic advances of the past several years. You don’t hear much about this. Americans have been working harder and harder, and more and more efficiently (we are now the hardest working people on the planet, having passed the Japanese in this category), but ordinary workers have not been paid for this enhanced productivity.
As my colleague at The Times, Steven Greenhouse, pointed out in his book “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” published earlier this year:
“Even though corporate profits have doubled since recession gave way to economic expansion in November 2001, and even though employee productivity has risen more than 15 percent since then, the average wage for the typical American worker has inched up just 1 percent (after inflation).”
That was part of a pattern of gross unfairness that has been unfolding for some three decades. No wonder people have depleted their savings and maxed out their credit cards.
The crisis now, of course, is not that wages are stagnant but that the jobs themselves are disappearing. It’s not just change that the nation needs, but big change.
President-elect Obama has talked of a “new dawn of American leadership.” Three-quarters of a century ago, Franklin Roosevelt promised a New Deal and said his biggest task was “to put people to work.”
That’s as appropriate a cue as any for the next president. I hope Mr. Obama’s “new dawn” portends more than just a few nibbles around the edges of change. We need change that brings about more shared sacrifice in wartime and tough times, and a more equitable distribution of the nation’s resources all the time.
I want to know who in the Obama administration will be listening to the young girl on the South Side of Chicago whose future is constrained by a lousy public school, and the factory worker in Toledo whose family’s future has been trampled by unrestrained corporate greed and unfair trade policies.
All the evidence is that the next administration will be competent and smart as hell. Now I’d like to know for whom they plan to deliver.
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4) The Jig is Up
By Lynn Henderson
Nov/Dec 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
The United States economy is in the greatest financial crisis since the stock market crash and great depression of 1929. This is not the assertion of a few radicals and political “lefties” but the virtually unanimous and sudden conclusion of economists, Wall Street financial experts, Democratic and Republican politicians, and the entire media industry. While the unanimous recognition of the crisis was reached with truly breathtaking speed, almost none of these experts and pundits saw it coming even a few weeks and months ago. And the crisis is not limited to the United States, but has rapidly spread through out the entire world financial system.
We also have virtual unanimity from these same folks on the causes of the financial crisis: The deregulation movement was taken to excess. The lack of government regulation and oversight led to the proliferation of new risky, exotic financial instruments—hedge funds, derivative securities, credit default swaps, securitized and bundled mortgages, etc. These new instruments lacked “transparency” we are told, and were too complicated for the market to accurately evaluate. The usually efficient invisible hand of the free market was unable to perform its normal functions and froze up.
In the housing market, unregulated sub-prime mortgages led to irresponsible lending and borrowing practices that allowed thousands of people to buy homes they really could not afford. When housing prices unexpectedly fell and the higher rates of the sub-prime mortgages kicked in, this triggered a cascading wave of mortgage defaults that led to a credit crunch that quickly spread throughout the entire economy.
There is also near unanimity on what the solution to this crisis is. First, “stabilize” the situation with immediate massive government bailouts of banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies and all other financial institutions “too big to fail.” Provide emergency government guarantees for all loans between banks and banks, banks and brokerage firms, banks and insurance companies—in other words, government guarantees for loans between all the major financial institutions of the country.
They also caution us that this stabilization process will take time, and will be painful. The question of course is—painful for whom? These are the most massive government bailouts in the history of this nation—or any nation, and there are more to come. They are not for free. In the final analysis, wealth will be channeled out of the pockets of the vast majority into the coffers of the financial elite.
But after an admittedly painful period, which will probably include recession, unemployment and other hardships, we are told the economy will be stabilized. Responsible regulations and government oversight will then be put in place which will curb future excesses of greed and speculation and the economy will return to its normal state of growth and prosperity.
None of the above accurately describes the nature, causes and roots of the present financial collapse. Even the comparison with 1929 lacks accuracy. The present financial crisis is more fundamental and more sweeping than the 1929 crash and depression. It is the end of an era. The end of the so-called American Century. The demise of the world financial system which American capitalism set up at the famous Bretton Woods conference in 1944 following WWII. And there is no agreement on what will or can replace it.
For some 50 years now the American working class, or the media’s preferred euphemism, the American middle class, has been the target of an intense class war in which real wages and income have been relentlessly reduced. This has been a one-sided class war with little effective resistance, especially from a hopelessly bureaucratized and conservatized trade union movement, which, in addition, has slavishly tied itself to one of the principle instruments of this class war, the Democratic Party. Everyone recognizes some of the more obvious results of this one-sided class war—an ever-increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of a thin layer at the top. CEO salaries have gone from 40 times that of the average employee to 300 times.
But there is an obvious contradiction here. Economists calculate that approximately 80 percent of the economy is driven by consumer spending. If real wages have been falling over the last 50 years, how has the economy, at least until recently, continued to expand and profits continue to grow? This was accomplished by a number of strategies designed to offset the effect of falling real wages on consumer spending.
The first of these was the simple expedient of drastically increasing the total number of hours worked. Overtime was increased, leisure time was decreased. The single wage earner family was largely eliminated. No longer did one partner work while the other, usually the female, took on the demanding job of running the home and caring for the children. The “Leave It To Beaver” family of the 1950s disappeared from American society.
When this proved insufficient, family members were forced into a second and even a third part time job. Grandpa and grandma were moved into the basement apartment, and shuffled off to Walmart earning extra bucks as greeters to supplement their Social Security check. This is why political and economic apologists for this policy no longer wish to compare individual wage rates over time but rather household income. But the number of extra hours an individual can work is limited, as is the number of additional family members that can be put to work. New steps had to be taken to offset the effect falling wages had on consumer spending and the economy.
The next move was a massive expansion of consumer debt. The credit card industry was born. It was not so long ago that credit cards were mostly limited to business executives who did a lot of traveling. New federal legislation was put in place ending the ability of individual states to regulate credit cards and eliminating all usury laws which capped the maximum interest that could be charged. The nation was flooded with credit cards carrying 20 percent plus interest rates, a return previously only available to Mafia loan operations. The average American family now holds seven of these cards. The banks issuing these cards made record profits and consumer debt soared to record levels. But it did mask the effects of falling real wages and produced a significant if temporary boost in consumer spending.
Paralleling the encouragement of ever more consumer debt was an even more risky policy, the massive and continuous expansion of government debt. We will address this crucial question in greater detail shortly but for now we can note that these record deficit budgets of necessity fueled inflationary pressures. One way these inflationary pressures expressed themselves was an artificial rise in the dollar value of houses—the so-called housing boom.
For most middle-class/working-class families, their home, if they own one, is by far their biggest financial asset. As credit cards maxed out and the size of consumer credit card debt became unsupportable, another particularly dangerous financial gimmick was floated. Consumers were encouraged, and driven by necessity, to take cash equity out of their inflated house value. Second mortgages, third mortgages, home equity loans, became the final desperate hope for keeping their heads above water—for meeting expenses and paying down credit card debt that was killing them with 20 percent plus interest rates. New home buyers were lured into predatory sub-prime and adjustable rate mortgages with the assurance that housing prices would continue to rise indefinitely, allowing them to refinance and even cash out increased equity in the foreseeable future. And again it propped up consumer spending.
The banks made big bucks out of the credit card ploy but it was peanuts in comparison to what they were able to accomplish with the new mortgage schemes. By highly leveraging their mortgage investments, bundling them together into tradeable securities and marketing these throughout the world, they were able to generate some of the largest banking profits in history. When the housing bubble burst, it triggered not just a crisis in the mortgage market but the collapse of a financial house of cards that had been building for decades.
Even more significantly, it exposed fatal flaws in the entire world financial system which had been in place for seventy years, ever since the famous Bretton Woods conference of 1944. When the United States organized the Bretton Woods conference, the U.S. was the largest creditor nation in the world; for all intents and purposes it was the only creditor nation in the world. Today it is the largest debtor nation in the world.
For decades the United States has run ever-larger deficit budgets fueling an ever-larger national debt. In the final analysis this was driven by the need to artificially stimulate an economy whose inadequate wage-driven consumer spending was less and less capable of keeping it on track.
But how was the United States able to do this? How was the United States able to run ever-larger deficit budgets driving an ever-larger national debt? Other nations are not capable of doing this. If Argentina, or Germany or France followed a similar policy it would eventually produce very dire results. The United States was able to pursue such a policy over an extended period of many decades because of the unique, privileged position of the dollar in the world economic system.
The United States won WWII. It won WWII big. It won WWII not just against the Axis powers but against its allies as well. The entire capitalist world came out of WWII in a shambles. Its industrial plants destroyed or in decay, its working classes reduced, dispersed, and demoralized, its political structures in turmoil and its national economies for the most part flat broke.
But the United States came out of WWII immeasurably stronger in every way than when it entered the war. Its industrial capacity had dramatically expanded, incorporating all the new technologies in electronics, chemicals etc. developed during the war. Its working class was intact with better skills and education than prior to the war. It was politically, militarily and financially the dominant capitalist economy in the world.
Prior to WWII, international trade and the settlement of international trade balances were accomplished primarily through the shifting of gold accounts. But by the end of WWII the United States ended up with all the gold, or most of it. A new basis for organizing international trade had to be found and found quickly.
At the 1944 Bretton Woods conference it was agreed that the dollar would replace gold in its international trade function. The dollar would be accepted as good as gold. The dollar would become the reserve currency for the entire capitalist world. This is how the U.S. dollar acquired its unique, privileged position. Or to use a term union members can appreciate, it acquired “super seniority.” This arrangement made certain sense for the world capitalist economy, but only so long as the U.S. economy remained a strong, dominant, expanding economy with a strong financial balance sheet.
What do the continuous deficit budgets and the exploding federal government debt mean? It means this debt has to be funded; the government has to borrow money. It does this by selling U.S. treasury bonds which are government IOUs. Today most of these U.S. treasury bonds are sold in the international market and held by such countries as Japan, the Middle East oil nations and especially China.
The United States has become utterly dependent on continued international purchases of these treasuries and the regular rollover of those already held. As the U.S. debt grows and the dollar becomes shakier these nations become more nervous about continuing these purchases. That’s on one side of the equation; on the other side, the collapse of the dollar as the world reserve currency with nothing to replace it would mean a world-wide crisis and a sharp contraction in international trade—trade on which these nations are very dependent. These are the considerations the holders of U.S. debt are constantly trying to weigh and balance.
This month saw a sea shift in how they weigh and balance the equation. As the crisis unfolded, and the government bailout and infusion of funds began to take place, Treasury Secretary Paulson suddenly and out-of-the-blue made a truly astounding demand that Congress immediately authorize 700 billion dollars to be dispensed by him, as he saw fit, with no congressional or judicial oversight. Despite some claims to the contrary, he essentially got everything he demanded. What provoked such a move?
David Rothkopf, an apparently well-connected scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lets the cat out of the bag in a major article entitled “9/11 Was Big. This is Bigger.” In the October 12, 2008 Washington Post he writes; “Reports from within the Treasury suggested that the U.S. government intervened in the financial sector, at least in part, in response to Chinese threats to reconsider their policy of buying U.S. debts unless Washington moved to stabilize the markets.”
This signals the end for the U.S. dollar’s status as the world reserve currency—the end of “super seniority” for the dollar. And national leaders throughout the world know it. They are demanding a new worldwide economic conference to deal with the crisis. This conference, explains French President Nicolas Sarkozy, would need “to rebuild the entire global financial and monetary system from the bottom up, the way it was done at Bretton Woods after World War II.” He goes on to conclude, “Laissez-faire—it’s finished. The all-powerful market that is always right, it’s finished.”
Germany’s finance minister offered a similar perspective in remarks to his parliamentary colleagues. “The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system,” Peer Steinbruck declared. “This world will become multipolar. The world will never be the same again.”
The strongly pro-market Financial Times of London chimes in declaring that, “We are at the end of the era of American laissez-faire capitalism.”
It’s all well and good to demand a new Bretton Woods but it ignores the fact that the utterly unique historical conditions allowing for the successful Bretton Woods conference of 1944 no longer exist, nor are they reproducible. There was little in the way of negotiations between equals or even serious two-way discussion at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. A completely dominant and victorious U.S. capitalism dictated, and the rest of the capitalist world acceded. The usual laws of capitalist international competition were uniquely and temporarily in suspension.
That is certainly not the case in the world today. The European nations calling for a world conference can’t even come up with a cooperative, coordinated response to the crisis among themselves. Ireland was the first to break, on September 30 unilaterally providing government protection for its banks. As funds flowed out of Europe to the protected Irish banks a howl of protest was heard from Germany, France, Britain etc. charging unfair competition. But they had no alternative other than individually extending protection to their own national banks.
Next was Iceland. In the recent decade Iceland had transformed itself into a mini Switzerland, soliciting deposits from all over Europe, especially Britain. Its profitable banking sector grew to ten times as large as its entire gross national product. As the world financial crisis unfolded, the small Icelandic economy was in no position to bail out its enormous banking sector.
When European governments turned down his desperate appeals for assistance, Iceland’s prime minister, Geir Haarde, declared that it was now “every country for itself.” He arranged a temporary loan from Russia, and promised to guarantee domestic depositors in Iceland’s banks while reneging on guarantees to foreign depositors. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown responded by suing Iceland and using counterterrorist legislation to take over Icelandic bank assets and operations in the United Kingdom.
As the stock value of their banks and companies plummet, all throughout Europe governments are unilaterally adopting restrictions to prevent outside capital and sovereign wealth funds from buying up their corporations at fire sale prices. In Italy, for example, the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has created a “national interests committee” to restrict the activities of sovereign wealth funds.
“This is unprecedented,” said Simon Tilford, chief economist for the Center for European Reform. “It has exposed the limits of European integration and coordination when presented with a crisis of this magnitude.”
It’s not unprecedented. It is merely confirmation of the basic law of capitalist competition, between firms and between capitalist nation states. In times of acute crisis, the law’s application becomes particularly brutal, it becomes: “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
What does this all mean for the American middle-class/ working-class? The enormous costs of the Wall Street and banking sector bailouts are unprecedented, with much more to come, including corporate bailouts. Someone will have to pay, and without the aid of a dollar with “super seniority.” How the pace of events plays out is hard to predict but we will certainly see a dramatic intensification of class warfare against the American middle-class/working-class. But it can no longer be a one-sided class war; they will have to resist; they will have no choice. They will not be able to just bare their breasts and accept the incoming rounds.
They are not in an advantageous position to fight this war. The trade union movement will be of little help as it is presently constituted, and it will take time and a tough fight to change it. Unlike most of the major industrial nations, America, has no socialist or labor party which in the heat of battle could be transformed into a fighting political instrument.
Such a party would have to be built from scratch and in the face of deep existing illusions about the progressive nature of the Democratic Party. But the American capitalist elite are not in good shape either. The crisis has shaken them; there is a growing sense of panic and demoralization. No one looks forward to this war. But the war will come. For everyone—the jig is up.
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5) Cashing the Obama Check: Will It Come Back Marked ‘Insufficient Funds?’
By Bruce Dixon
BlackAgendaReport.com
November 5, 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_02.html
“In a sense, we’ve come to the nation’s capital to cash a check...It is obvious that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.” —Martin Luther King, I Have A Dream, August 1963.
The vote for the First Black President wasn’t just about race and racism. For tens of millions, it was a vote for peace abroad, for economic and social justice at home. Barack Obama sold himself to the American people as a transformative political figure.
Despite those who now urge Americans to tone down their expectations, many are prepared to collect on the hopes that swept Obama into office. Those hopes and expectations are what we call the “Obama Check.”
The question is, can we cash it?
Election night 2008 was over by 11:00 P.M. eastern time. Only two hours after the polls closed on the west coast, pundits called it for Barack Obama. Now that we know a black boy can indeed grow up to be president, it’s time to get over ourselves, over our wonder and amazed self-congratulation about how far we’ve come, time to look around to see where we really are.
The First Black President carries with him into the Oval Office the hopes and dreams and aspirations of many people he will never meet, but who imagine they know his heart and intentions. Although these things were not on the ballot, and were kept largely out of the discussions by the media and the candidates themselves, the tens of millions who voted for Obama did so because in the main, they want an end to the war. They want to see the military budget and the prison population reduced. They want single payer national health care. They want a more just economy and they objected strenuously to Bush’s—and Obama’s—bailout of Wall Street.
Their expectations of social and economic justice at home and peace abroad are, in Dr. King’s famous language, a gigantic and long-overdue promissory note. A check. The Obama Check. Barack Obama was elected in the hopes that he could help us cash this check. That is the change his voters believed in, that’s what they expect to see, and that is how an Obama presidency will be judged by history.
Can we ever cash the Obama Check?
The day Obama takes office; there will be an incredible 1.1 million African Americans behind bars, a proportion eight times that of whites. Before the mortgage market meltdown the wealth of black families was about one eleventh that of whites. Since then, it’s fallen off a cliff. Whether we look at education, at wages, at morbidity, mortality, unemployment or mass incarceration the gaps between whites and blacks in the U.S. are wide and still growing. With the nation’s First Black President installed, many whites will solemnly assure us that the U.S. is not now, if it ever was, a racist society. The First Black President-elect seems to agree with them, having told us all a year before electing him that we were “90 percent of the way” to a non-racist society.
Will the First Black President be of any use cashing the check for real racial justice, not just for black faces in high places? The clock is already ticking, and every day is an opportunity to lead lost.
The day the First Black President is sworn in the U.S. economy will still be, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, a polite fiction, based on phantom assets, phony profits, inflated valuations, and outright fraud, a house of marked cards where even the bankers know not to trust each other. Millions of families will still face foreclosure, eviction and bankruptcy. Tens of millions more are in debt up to their necks, afflicted with ever-rising interest rates thanks to the tireless efforts of Obama’s running mate Joe Biden, sometimes known as the Senator from MasterCard.
In his first true test of presidential leadership, while still a candidate the First Black President lobbied reluctant Democrats and urged them to pass the Bush-Cheney trillion dollar no-strings-attached parting gift to Wall Street, money that could have been used to fund education, jobs, infrastructure, human needs, and debt relief for ordinary families.
Do we really expect Obama to help us cash the check on economic justice, to be an advocate of measures that lift up ordinary families? The outlook here is not bright either.
Dr. King told us more than forty years ago that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” On the day the First Black President, supposedly the fulfillment of King’s dream, takes office, the U.S. will be spending more on arms and the military than the rest of the planet combined. But by declaring that he would increase the Pentagon’s budget even over what Cheney and Bush spent at the expense of housing, education and whatever else, the First Black President has already stopped payment on this part of the check.
The day after the election, and the day the First Black President takes office, at least 44 million Americans will have no health insurance at all, and tens of millions more are underinsured. One third of every health care dollar spent in the U.S. goes to maintain private insurance companies, indisputable parasites on the process of health care delivery, making the U.S. health care system the most expensive in the world, even though it takes care of a smaller percentage of its population than any other advanced industrial country. But instead of single payer health care, the First Black President plans to borrow billions with which to pay the Obama Check directly to parasitic insurance companies, and call that “universal health care.”
The day the First Black President takes office there will be over 800 U.S. military bases spanning the globe, more troops in Iraq than were there in 2005 or 2006, U.S. fleets menacing Iran and intermittently bombing Somalia, and a war in Afghanistan. The First Black President will draw down troops in Iraq to send them to Afghanistan, his threats to Iran are identical to those of George Bush—though he hasn’t put them to song, as McCain did—and he does not speak of the ongoing U.S. military involvement in the Horn of Africa. Our First Black President, every bit as much as Dick Cheney, has embraced the phony “war on terror” as the organizing principle of American life.
The peace loving grandmothers who imagine they see God’s Hand on the First Black President will have time to take a longer and more careful look. There will be no peace dividend under an Obama administration. This is a debt our First Black President is unwilling even to acknowledge, much less help us collect on.
Many of the same voices who assured us that the First Black President would be a epoch-making breakthrough—who helped sell us the Obama Check—now caution us not to expect too much. He is after all, only a politician. He’s not president of the movement, he is President of All the People, including the very rich, and obliged to serve the interests of the Pentagon, of parasitic insurance companies, of soulless multinational corporations, and conniving investment bankers.
All indications are that the Obama Check is going to be a difficult one to cash. But it’s what the people voted for, and many of us do intend to collect. With the help of our First Black President, or without it.
Bruce Dixon, the managing editor at Black Agenda Report, is based in Atlanta GA and can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com
—BlackAgendaReport.com, November 5, 2008
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6) Don’t Worry! Be Happy! A Little Poverty May Do You Some Good
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08.html
In the midst of this profound economic meltdown that permeates our every conversation, and the information that is fed to us by the mass media, certain phrases pop forward and stick in your craw. How many times have we, the victims of the mortgage and credit crisis, been admonished for having “lived beyond our means”? How often have we been told we have “made foolish and frivolous spending decisions”?
Then, in that same media, the “economic experts” warn that if the American people don’t start spending again, the economy is going to go even further down the tubes! As usual, we workers are damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. But if we’re already living beyond our means, then how the heck are we supposed spend even more to bail out the wealthy? That would certainly be a foolish and frivolous spending decision!
Such condescending admonitions from the mouthpieces of capitalism are designed to justify a fresh assault on the living conditions of workers—not just here in the U.S. but around the world—in the form of massive bailouts of the wealthy by the poor.
From public schools to social services to the environment, capitalism’s profit-driven chaos is bringing nothing but disaster, devastation, and destruction. Not only are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continuing, but they are escalating and spreading to other countries—and more and more money is being pumped into them. According to the latest War Resisters League U.S. Federal Budget 2009 Pie Chart, total military expenditures, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, represent 54 percent of the Federal Budget, to the tune of $1,449 billion.
And now, due to the capitalists’ own profit-driven mismanagement, the bailout is escalating the theft of funds from all social services and infrastructure. Its effects are being felt in drastic cuts to public education and in the wanton destruction of our environment. Working people everywhere are feeling the pain and are expressing their outrage.
What we need to do is come together to use the power we have to actually do something about it.
Welfare for the rich
The wonderful comic Wonda Sykes put the bailout plainly in perspective in an interview with Jay Lenno when he asked, “The government bailout? Have you been following this stuff?” I transcribed her answer as best I could from a YouTube video. She answered:
Ah! You know, rich people got it good in this country! We refuse to let rich people not be rich! I mean, think about it! Broke people are gonna bail out rich people! . . . And then they don’t want any oversight! They want $700 billion and no oversight! . . . I want receipts, damn it! No oversight? What do you mean, no oversight? “Oh! Because you were so good with the other money . . . here’s some more money—we’re gonna close our eyes.” [She puts both hands over her eyes] . . . You know what? It’s rich welfare. It’s welfare for the rich and that’s all it is. So, to the average taxpayer it’s going to cost, like, two grand? [Lenno interjects, “No, $7,000 dollars every taxpayer.”] $7,000 every taxpayer. And you got the guy there busting his ass working two jobs, barely making $12,000 a year, and now he’s got to cough up something so a Wall Street guy can keep his swimming pool? . . . So the government’s gonna buy up all these bad mortgages, right? So now, in essence, you have rich people living in government housing.
I want them treated like they’re living in the projects. There aren’t any private swimming pools in the projects! Uh-uh! If you got a pool—open it to the public! I want everybody to go in, take a dip. Just treat it like the projects! I want them, every month, they got to go down to social services to pick up their paychecks! And stand in line! Make ’em all stand in line, pick up their paychecks, and they can only cash them at the check-cashing joint next to the liquor store.
Did you know poverty is good for you?
Wanda brings us back down to the earthly reality of the lives of working people, as opposed to the likes of Oprah and The New York Times, both of which are trying to pass this depression off as a quaint period of renewed family values.
Oprah told us the other day that we, i.e., ordinary working people—especially those whose mortgages are being foreclosed—have to accept responsibility for this crisis because we have been “living above our means.” (Her words, of course, were interspersed with commercials telling us what we should own and absolutely must buy today!)
Even more infuriatingly, Oprah, the billionaire, tells us: Heck, we (the poor) might even be better off for this economic crisis! Not only will we finally be forced to become economically responsible and learn to live within our means, but, parents who are out of work will be able to spend more time with their children and save money by playing board games instead of going to the movies; mothers will be forced to prepare more wholesome foods rather than ordering fast-food deliveries. No money and no job means burning less fuel, which will help the environment, and we’ll even drink less alcohol!
Oprah’s show parroted an October 7, 2008, New York Times article by Tara Parker-Pope, entitled, “Are Bad Times Healthy?” The author says:
Economic studies suggest that people tend not to take care of themselves in boom times—drinking too much (especially before driving), dining on fat-laden restaurant meals and skipping exercise and doctors’ appointments because of work-related time commitments . . . . “The value of time is higher during good economic times,” said Grant Miller, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford. “So people work more and do less of the things that are good for them, like cooking at home and exercising; and people experience more stress due to the rigors of hard work during booms.” Similar patterns have been seen in some developing nations.
Dr. Miller, who is studying the effects of fluctuating coffee prices on health in Colombia, says that even though falling prices are bad for the economy, they appear to improve health and mortality rates. When prices are low, laborers have more time to care for their children . . .. In this country, there are already signs of the economy’s effect on health. In May, the market research firm Information Resources reported that 53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before—in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods.
So, have no fear, cry the billionaires. Poverty is good for our health! Why, it might finally force us to lose some of those rolls around our middles; in danger of starving,
perhaps, but much better looking! (Some of us might be lucky enough to lose enough weight to fit into one of Sarah Palin’s hand-me-downs when she donates them to charity after the elections!)
In a Times article of October 19, 2008, by Nicholas D. Kristof, entitled, “The Downturn’s Upside,” the author encouragingly reports:
The economic misery is numbingly real, but it’s also true that a downturn isn’t uniformly bad and might even be good for you in several ways: A recession could save your life. Christopher Ruhm, an economist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, argues that death rates go down during economic slowdowns. Professor Ruhm’s research indicates that suicides rise but total mortality rates drop, as do deaths from heart attacks, car accidents, pneumonia and most other causes. For example, each one-percentage-point drop in unemployment in the United States is associated with an extra 3,900 deaths from heart attacks.
. . . Some experts are skeptical. But in downturns we drive less and so car accidents decline, while less business activity means fewer job accidents and less pollution. Moreover, in recessions people have more leisure time and seem to smoke less, exercise more and eat more healthily . . . .A bear market might benefit you, if you are in your working years and won’t have to sell your stocks soon. That’s because you’re probably accumulating stocks now in your retirement account, and you’ll accumulate more when share prices are low . . . .
Falling housing prices harm landlords and speculators but benefit renters and first-time buyers (if they can still get mortgages). These beneficiaries tend to be low-income families, thus in this respect the poor may benefit. Likewise, a recession lowers prices of gas, oil and food, which disproportionately affect the poor.
But what Kristof says next really bugs me the most. It’s just the kind of “conventional wisdom” you hear on Oprah all the time, and there’s nothing that infuriates me more than hearing it from a billionaire. Oprah frequently and sanctimoniously reminds her audience that “money can’t make you happy!” And here Kristof intellectualizes this very same idea.
Income doesn’t have much to do with happiness. Americans haven’t become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. . . .
This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don’t become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it’s still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.
“There’s pretty good evidence that money doesn’t matter much for how you feel moment to moment,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. “What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities.”
You might think these people are just out of touch with reality. After all, who doesn’t understand that if you’re sick and hurting you’re much better off under silk sheets and 24-hour care, with the finest physicians and nurses money can buy, than if you’re lying alone, homeless and cold, in a urine-soaked gutter. But propaganda like the Times and Oprah’s is designed to break down the self-respect of all workers, not to mention any respect workers may have for each other.
You’re poor because you’re stupid
What these capitalists are basically telling working people is that it’s your own stupid fault for believing all the lies you’ve been told to get you to sign on to that adjustable-rate mortgage (adjustable that is, by the lenders only—not the borrowers) or sign up for that additional credit card. And there’s nothing you can do about it, they say, so make the best of it. Besides, poverty isn’t such a bad thing anyway!
What else can we expect when the wealthy, who have been stealing and stockpiling the wealth that only working people actually produce, go on an accelerated rampage to steal even more from us by taking away all the things working people fought for to improve our lives and those of our children?
Working people are not only worried about whether or not we can afford a night at the movies. We’re worried about keeping our jobs, our hours, and our benefits. In the meantime, our adult children are trying to figure out how to leave the nest and live on their own. And they’re finding it impossible to do. In fact, they’re lucky if they’re working at all!
Working people are being forced to make much harder choices—between food and gas, or between rent and utilities. Meanwhile, Oprah and The New York Times tell us not to worry; that walking is better for us than driving and, that we should look on the bright side of life!
So not only do they blame us for this economic crisis and tell us we’re stupid for getting ourselves into this situation in the first place, they have the unmitigated nerve to tell us to sacrifice while the wealthy are asked to sacrifice nothing!
Meanwhile, we are only just beginning to feel the depth of poverty that working people are being propelled into.
Crumbling public education: a window into
capitalism’s dark soul
But our children have already begun to suffer from the downturn in the economy. The rate of youth unemployment and underemployment is very high. Among Black youth unemployment is as high as 50 percent. And all children have been experiencing the erosion of public education for years. In San Francisco they don’t call it “school closure”; they call it “doubling up.” It amounts to the same thing—two schools becoming one—but it doesn’t sound quite as bad. And there has been an accelerated deterioration of the public school system just in the last few decades.
In fact, today, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law has transformed the schools into test-regimented, military-entrenched institutions that are severely failing students.
Recruiting, praying, abstinence and testing
The NCLB law ties federal funding to those schools that allow the U.S. military to collect student’s personal and school records and permit them to wander the school grounds in search of fresh cannon fodder for the illegal and immoral wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. To put a moralistic patina on the law, NCLB also protects prayer in schools, and prohibits sex education that condones the prevention of pregnancy and disease other than by abstinence. Schools that can’t prove they comply with all aspects of this law do not receive federal funds.
But the most insidious thing NCLB does in addition to the above is to require standardized tests for students in all schools. Under this law, those schools whose test scores are low are shut down and the teachers fired. This process has already begun and has resulted in thousands of school closures throughout the country. There is no provision for putting more money where it is needed most. There are no funds for hiring more teachers and lowering class sizes or rebuilding crumbling school facilities or equipment. There is only a system of punishment for the children who need the most help and the teachers who have the hardest jobs! Again, the poor are made to pay for the failure of the system.
They want us to pay for everything: for the schools; our healthcare; our food, clothing, and housing; the repair of roads, bridges, and other infrastructure; for the wars and the entire Pentagon budget; and now to bail out the wealthiest in our society. This includes all those who personally made record windfall-profits from mortgages now being foreclosed, from the soaring credit card interest rates, and from the inflated prices of the shoddy merchandise workers are forced to spend their hard-earned money on!
Not only are working people supposed to stand for the gutting of public education and every other social-welfare program; not only are we supposed to foot the bill for the U.S. wars of occupation costing over $700-million a day and $7,000 per second; but we must pay to bail out those who stole billions upon billions of dollars to line their own pockets! But, as the commercials say, “that’s not all!” We’re supposed to look forward cheerfully to our newfound poverty, since it will bring us closer to our children and other family members and “raise our family values!”
Ending welfare as we now know it
Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we knew it” in 1996 when he forced parents to work in order to collect aid, i.e., work at jobs that pay so low that the worker also qualifies for welfare! The law also limits higher education for parents to two years while collecting aid. So parents without an education or job training or even a high school diploma have only two years to complete their education, condemning them to low-paying, go-nowhere jobs—jobs that, by and large, are now on the chopping block.
One could, of course, work full-time at two low-paying jobs, take care of one’s children, and go to school past the two years to earn a higher degree, but this would also mean taking on extra debt for college tuition, supplies, etc. One would also have to pay for someone to watch the children while fitting classroom time into a double-workday schedule. In fact, Clinton’s cutbacks have already put a tremendous strain on single parents. Very few have actually been able to get a higher degree since his dismantling of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Now we have a new kind of welfare altogether: welfare for the rich! Talk about ending welfare, as we knew it! Not only has this bipartisan government eliminated welfare for the poor (since it’s not welfare if you have to work for it), but it has completely turned the tables and is now charging the poor to pay for welfare for the rich! Who’d ’a’ thunk?
Back to the dark ages
But really this isn’t new at all. It’s an old, old story that goes back to the roots of capitalism. Working people have always footed the bill for the rich, with their hard work creating wealth for the employer as well as with the inflated price they must pay for their own and their children’s sustenance, above which they have never been paid.
There was a time when children themselves had to work long hours if they were to have enough to eat because their parents barely earned enough to feed themselves. Children were paid a pittance, but would starve otherwise; parents had no alternative but to put their own children to work. It wasn’t unusual for a family to be thrust out of their home by their landlord or boss because they hadn’t put their children to work!
Labor’s struggle has been long, hard, and brutal! Nothing that workers have today was handed to them by a kindly commander of capital. Every hour cut from a child’s day of forced labor was paid for in working-class blood and sweat. We must remember our roots, because that’s what the capitalists want us to go back to!
It’s been at most 100-or-so years since workers routinely labored for 18 hours a day, six days a week, along with their children. But isn’t that what we’re doing when we have to hold down two jobs to make ends meet, leaving kids home alone to care for younger siblings? Are they going to tell us next that if all children—even those as young as two and three—were put back to work it would bring families even closer together?
There is no limit to the depths of poverty the capitalists will force upon the world’s working class in their drive to maintain their rate of profit and accumulate personal wealth.
How can working people get out of this financial crisis?
The most logical way for working people to get out of the financial crisis is to hold responsible the corporations and their CEOs who profited outrageously from these despicable business dealings, and make them pay back the money they stole. All corporate books should be opened for examination by working people, and the swindled money returned.
Another big savings—especially to enable us to rebuild our infrastructure and improve public schools, healthcare, and all social services—would be to bring an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the Pentagon budget altogether. Bring all the troops home now! Disband all U.S. military bases throughout the world and redirect all their funding toward solving the massive needs of human beings around the globe—eliminating the causes of war in the first place.
Tax the rich, not working people! Tax all income over $100,000 at a progressive rate, i.e., the more money earned, the higher the tax rate you must pay. (Less than 20 percent of American households earn $100,000 or above. The median annual household income is around $50,000.) This simple solution alone could pay for all the things we need for everyone to live happy, healthy, free, and productive lives.
How can working people save themselves and the whole planet in the bargain?
First, we have to realize who we are. We are workers. We are essential to the production of all commodities and the excavation of raw materials necessary to manufacture them. Our labor is responsible for every penny of wealth accumulated by the capitalists, the private owners of the very means of production our labor built and fuels. We are responsible for producing all the profits—including that which the capitalists use to pay our wages. The capitalists pay nothing at all. They have gotten a free ride. Now it’s time for them to pay!
They own the factories, the farmland, the machines of industry, and the carriers of goods and supplies. They themselves produce nothing yet they take almost everything, leaving us the minimum they can get away with! They are not workers. They are the exploiters of workers and the commanders of capital, whose interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of working people the world over.
The capitalists survive by convincing us workers that we’re not smart enough or resourceful enough, and ultimately incapable of surviving without the bosses’ superior intellectual guidance and rule. The capitalists bank on convincing us that the reason they’re rich is that they’re better, smarter, and more capable human beings. Isn’t that the essence of American culture—to be esteemed on the basis of accumulated wealth and power, no matter how they were gotten?
Why do you think the poorest woman likes to own that designer handbag, even if she ends up paying three times as much for it on some high-interest department store credit card? It’s been beaten into our heads from birth and from every possible angle by mass advertising and shows like Oprah’s that carrying that purse or driving that car proves we are worth something!
This little myth that “rich equals better” is the rationale behind capitalist rule. And divide and conquer is the technique they use to establish the inferiority of everyone else. Their ultimate goal is to turn each worker against the other so none will join together to turn against the rich.
Divide and conquer is the only way a tiny capitalist minority can maintain rule over the overwhelming majority of workers. They represent less than one percent of the world’s population yet they own and control over 90 percent of all the wealth, land, and property on the planet. The interests of capitalists and workers could not be further apart.
This fact is the “ace in the hole” of the future of all humankind, because we working people are the overwhelming majority of people on the planet. We are the ones who know how to make and do everything. We don’t need the capitalists or their rotten system that uses up and exploits everything—especially human beings—in the pursuit of private profit. In fact, the capitalist system itself is standing squarely in the way of human advancement.
Ending capitalism is essential to saving the planet
The capitalist system puts the accumulation of vast sums of private profit and personal wealth above all else and is responsible for leading the world to the brink of ecological collapse. Here’s just one example.
The World Bank has bought up and clear-cut natural forests in Sao Jose do Buriti, Brazil, to plant eucalyptus trees, for which they receive “pollution credits.” They have sold these pollution credits to BP, whose Grangemouth oil refineries are poisoning the air and water in and around the town of Grangemouth, Scotland—theoretically “balancing out to zero” the pollution between the two cities. There’s only one catch—aside of course for the fact that the people of Grangemouth are still getting poisoned by the refineries (but that doesn’t count to the capitalists). The eucalyptus trees planted in the forests of Brazil have caused nearby streams and rivers to dry up because they suck up a lot more water than the natural forests, and this is devastating the local environment, drying up streams and rivers, and severely impacting indigenous farmers in the area. You can find out more about this in the documentary The Carbon Connection.1
In such ways does the capitalist profit motive breed chaos and disregard for anything but profits. They plunder and pollute the land. They lie, cheat, swindle, sow division and distrust among people. They make the laws, hire the police, and enlist the armies to maintain their control over the means of production. By maintaining their stranglehold and enslavement of the workers, they protect their exclusive ownership rights to the plentiful wonders of the world, which they wantonly squander.
For them there can be no rational planning in the interests of what is best for the health and welfare of the planet and the myriad forms of life on it.
Their decisions are all self-centered and single-minded. And make no mistake about it: while they may compete, bicker, even battle among themselves from time to time, capitalism’s collective interest lies in maintaining the class distinction between themselves and the masses of workers. They are compelled to do so to maintain their rule over us, over all the wealth we produce with our minds, hands, and backs, and over the land we walk on.
We workers must look after ourselves in the same single-minded way, but from a collective, working class-centered point of view, i.e., always looking out for our and our planet’s best interests. To do this, we must do away with the capitalist system and its chaotic profit motive, sending it straight to hell where it belongs!
Socialism is the answer
That’s all socialism really is: Workers taking over the means of production; democratically and collectively deciding what people need and want; using all our technological skill, know-how, and creativity to produce the best of everything; and eliminating all the waste involved in the production of inferior goods that are designed as a cheap substitute to sell to the poor.
With the fantastic worldwide communications network we already have in place, we could figure all this out—what things and how much of them we need—in no time, so that everyone would be provided with the best of everything. By eliminating the capitalist profit-driven mode of production and replacing it with a socialist mode of production, we could rationally plan and share the work, develop the best, safest, and most efficient production and distribution methods, and distribute everything free of charge to everyone. Without the profit motive tying the overwhelming majority of people to hours of drudgery a day just to keep a roof over their heads (if they’re lucky), all children born will have a chance to live free and develop their potential to the fullest.
Doesn’t it make sense? Allow all people to develop to their fullest; to pursue all their interests; to hone their skills so each one will be able to contribute at his or her fullest capacity to the common good. From each according to skills and abilities, and to each according to individual needs and wants.
In fact, the goal of socialism, or communism, is to eventually eliminate the need for money or any kind of exchange of one form of labor for another, or one thing for another. Instead, everyone just gets all they need and want, and contributes any talents they can develop to the fullest for the betterment of all!
It’s really simple. Under a rational, socialist, planned-economy, each machine that replaces labor, and each young worker joining the workforce, would not take someone’s job away but would simply reduce the total number of hours everyone would have to work, freeing up more time for each to, in turn, develop even more knowledge and skills.
The thing we workers need to comprehend is that together, in unity and solidarity with each other toward such goals, we do have the power to change this dog-eat-dog world into just such a society!
Capitalism? We just don’t need it!
1 The Carbon Connection, the video can be viewed online at CarbonTradeWatch.org
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7) The Age of Katrina—Not Obama
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.
Black Agenda Report
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_08/novdec_08_05.html
The more delusional Obama supporters behave as if “their candidate’s speech on Thursday will herald a crack in time, after which posterity will speak of Before-Obama (BO) and After-Obama (AO) eras, and the transcendental Age of Obama.” They draw straight lines from Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech to Obama’s nomination acceptance oration. However, the event that far more accurately defines the age is Katrina, the unfolding catastrophe that descended on New Orleans three years ago, this week. Katrina is “the most dramatic manifestation of an implacable racism coiled deeply in the ruling structures of American society, primed to remove concentrations of Blacks from places of value.”
Barack Obama supporters would have you believe that their candidate’s presidential nomination is the glorious, straight-line culmination of the Black Freedom Struggle whose previous high-water mark, they believe, was the 1963 March on Washington, the 45th anniversary of which coincides with this week’s Democratic National Convention. Obama’s public relations agents attempt to bracket the history of modern U.S. race relations within a marketable 45-year period that begins with a snippet from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and ends—for the time being—with the grand peroration of Obama’s acceptance speech before the cheering multitudes, in Denver. These dates are presented as the bookends of Black struggle—to be amended and extended when President Obama delivers his State of the Union Address, in January.
To the most hopelessly besotted Obamites, their candidate’s speech on Thursday will herald a crack in time, after which posterity will speak of Before-Obama (BO) and After-Obama (AO) eras, and the transcendental Age of Obama.
Having conjured up a nonexistent “mass movement” to describe what is actually a corporate financed and directed electoral campaign that has not championed a single issue worthy of historical note (don’t dare cite partial Iraq withdrawal and for-profit health care schemes), the Democrats now patch Dr. King’s speech into the prologue to the Book of Obama for the purpose of consigning real mass agitation strategies to the past, for all time.
Yet, the unedited version of history—the real deal—commemorates another imminent anniversary, one that starkly illuminates the true political character of the age: Katrina. The events that followed the hurricane’s arrival in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, would reveal the diabolical intentions of U.S. rulers towards African Americans: to methodically remove Blacks from the central cities of the nation. The ongoing, orchestrated catastrophe also demonstrated beyond doubt the moral bankruptcy and political impotence of Black national “leadership.” As I wrote in October, 2005:
“If Black America fails to configure its human, organizational and material resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to confront the existence of fundamental, crippling flaws in the African American polity.”
The “the man-made disaster in the Gulf” provided what may have been “the last chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the broadest sectors of Black America.” Certainly, a critical mass of “the people” were eager to intervene. Hardly a Black church was without some Katrina-aid project, thousands of students journeyed to New Orleans as soon as logistics were made available, and popular awareness of the raw injustice of government policy was universal. But pure rot pervaded national Black political circles—as was clearly evident within six months.
“The Congressional Black Caucus, which claims to be the ‘conscience of the congress,’ has shown itself to be an appendage of the White House leadership,” I wrote in February 2006. “They slavishly followed Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s command to make the Democratic Party look good—as opposed to the Republicans—rather than directly address the crisis that was affecting their own people.
“Forty-one of the forty-two Black members of congress obeyed Pelosi’s edict, that the House Committee on Katrina be boycotted. They accepted the order that Democratic legislators would not attend the meetings of the Katrina committee, because it was stacked against the Democratic Party.”
Only Cynthia McKinney, who was soon to lose her House seat from suburban Atlanta, bucked Pelosi’s edict to boycott the Katrina hearings. Pelosi’s unspoken, but transparent, motive was to distance the Democratic Party from issues considered too “Black” in the run-up to congressional elections in November 2006. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), as a body, weighed compliance with their party leader versus rescue of Black New Orleans, and chose Pelosi—who would continue to smother the Katrina issue after Democrats gained control of the House.
Katrina, that horrific assault on Black humanity, dignity and civilizational rights—the Right to Return and participate in the reconstruction of their city—was (and remains) the greatest test of Black leadership since the days of generalized White Terror in the South, following the collapse of Reconstruction. As the world watched, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were effectively evicted from their city and have since been prevented by every foul and evil means possible from returning.
There was method to this madness. The hurricane had simply provided “disaster capitalism” with an instant route to gentrification, a goal that takes years to accomplish by the usual methods of public and private urban coercion. As I wrote in May 2007, corporate Power had shown its hand:
“Corporate planners and developers believed they had been blessed by nature when Katrina drowned New Orleans, washing away in days the problem-people and neighborhoods that would ordinarily require years to remove in order to clear the way for ‘renaissance.’ Greed led to unseemly speed, revealing in a flash the outlines of the urban vision that would be imposed on the wreckage of New Orleans. As in a film on fast-forward, the ‘plot’ (in both meanings of the word) unfolded in a rush before our eyes: Once the Black and poor were removed, an urban environment would be created implacably hostile to their return. The public sector—except that which serves business, directly or indirectly—would under no circumstances be resurrected, so as to leave little ‘space’ for the re-implantation of unwanted populations (schools, utility infrastructure, public and affordable private housing, public safety, health care).”
Human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, who has documented the river of crimes perpetrated against the people of New Orleans since August 29, 2005, has compiled a “Katrina Pain Index—New Orleans Three Years Later.” It shows a city in which even the size of population is in dispute. The City Council claims 321,000 residents, the U.S. Census Bureau says only 239,000 remain—a loss of 132,000 or 214,000, depending on who you believe, from a pre-Katrina population of 453,000, 67 percent Black. No one can agree on the current racial breakdown.
Local, state and national forces, public and private, have conspired relentlessly to keep New Orleans unlivable to the unwanted classes. Public transportation is down 80 percent. A majority of Black residents were renters, yet no renters have gotten anything from the $10 billion Road Home Community Block Grant. Rents are up 46 percent, most public housing demolished or marked for destruction, while 71,657 “vacant, ruined unoccupied houses” anchor metropolitan New Orleans in social death. The city is number one in physical death by murder, while psychiatric hospital beds are down 56 percent. Three hundred Louisiana National Guardsmen patrol the streets, in lieu of cops.
Is it any wonder that only 11 percent of families have returned to the Lower Ninth Ward? The Katrina crisis continues because Power is determined that the Black and poor will not be permitted re-entry.
Barack Obama denies that racism plays any role in this. “There’s been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American. I’ve said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially based. The ineptitude was colorblind,” said Obama on his web site, September 6, 2005. He still says so.
For three years, Power has ensured that the New Orleans Black Diaspora remains scattered. For the forces of organized racism, it is a success story; there’s nothing inept about it. Barack Obama will do nothing to facilitate the return of Black New Orleans, since no “malice” was intended. “...I see no evidence of active malice, but I see a continuation of passive indifference on the part of our government towards the least of these.” But Obama is worse than “passively indifferent.” By denying the reality of racism, he transforms the monumental injustices of Katrina into motiveless mistakes that somehow continue to replicate themselves to the disadvantage of the same group of people.
There is no reason for the Black New Orleans Diaspora to expect any relief from an Obama presidency. In fact, there is no reason to expect anything historically unusual or unique from a President Obama other than his physical Blackness.
“Barack Obama will do nothing to facilitate the return of Black New Orleans.”
Katrina, on the other hand, is the most dramatic manifestation of an implacable racism coiled deeply in the ruling structures of American society, primed to remove concentrations of Blacks from places of value. This overarching imperative to “Negro removal” can become aggressively active in an instant—as we learned in the days following August 29, 2005—or proceed about its work block by block over years, until the offending population is eliminated. Fast or slow, the end results are the same: seven of the top 12 cities in Black population saw a loss in African Americans as a percentage of total residents between 1990 and 2000. (See BAR “No Black Plan for the Cities, Despite Lessons of Katrina,” May 9, 2007.)
The pattern becomes clear. As we reported:
“...the seven cities that became less Black in the Nineties [New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Atlanta] are all concentrated corporate headquarters locations or, in the case of Washington, DC, the headquarters of the federal government. These are places that corporate and finance capital are most keen to ‘make over’ in order to provide the urban ‘ambience’ believed most amenable to their employees, management and clients, and for the general sake of corporate prestige.”
Slow-acting Katrinas in the form of gentrification are what Black folks can expect—and must find ways to resist and defeat—from the ruling Lords of Capital for the foreseeable future, Obama or no Obama. There will be no “age” named after the handsome, articulate and oh-so-slick, but otherwise ordinary corporate candidate for president who used to call himself Barry. This is the Age of Katrina, and Barry is part of the problem.
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8) College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.
By TAMAR LEWIN
December 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?_r=1&hp
The rising cost of college - even before the recession - threatens to put
higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual
report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
Soaring College Tuitions
Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439
percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family
income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last
decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller
grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent
families. "If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won't have an
affordable system of higher education," said Patrick M. Callan, president of
the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher
education.
"When we come out of the recession," Mr. Callan added, "we're really going
to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and
the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we're
one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than
older workers."
Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr.
Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.
"The middle class has been financing it through debt," he said. "The
scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to
college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of
debt."
But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college.
Already, he said, the strains are clear.
The report, "Measuring Up 2008," is one of the few to compare net college
costs - that is, a year's tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial
aid - against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the
net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the
median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent
of the median family income.
The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid,
has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report
found.
Among the poorest families - those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent -
the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median
income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as
a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families' median
income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000.
The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying,
Mr. Callan said. "Most governors' budgets don't come out until January, but
what we're seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase,
Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase, and California with a
mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts," he said.
In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State
Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged
the looming crisis, but painted a different picture.
That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices,
from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to
private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000.
"We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we're
concerned that it won't be, if the changes we're seeing continue, and family
income doesn't go up," said David Shulenburger, the group's vice president
for academic affairs and co-author of the report. "The public conversation
is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major
public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000
bucks a year."
While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has
largely been to make up for declining state appropriations. The report
offered its own cost projections, not including room and board.
"Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family
budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that's pretty huge," Mr.
Shulenburger said. "We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the
only things we can control."
Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Mr.
Callan's concerns.
Mr. Shulenburger's report suggested that public universities explore a
variety of approaches to lower costs - distance learning, better use of
senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years.
"There's an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs
to go on," he said. "If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students,
does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it's difficult to
control costs in ways that don't affect quality."
Mr. Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states' approach to
higher-education financing.
"When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better
funded, we raise tuition as little as possible," he said. "When the economy
is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least
afford it. That's exactly the opposite of what we need."
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9) Countering the Lies
Nationalize GM (Or At Least Think About It)
By ROBERT WEISSMAN
December 3, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.com/weissman12032008.html
With the U.S. government offering trillions of dollars in supports for the financial sector, it is startling to witness the casual way in which many policy makers and opinion leaders suggest the U.S. auto companies should be allowed to go bankrupt.
In considerable part, this attitude reflects an anti-union and anti-blue collar animus. It also reflects the diminished economic power of what was formerly known as the Big Three (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler).
The stakes are too high for policy to be influenced by misinformation and ideological bias. The auto companies need to be saved, on terms that protect workers and communities, and advance public objectives. Congress and the country should be debating those terms, not dithering with unrealistic discussions of bankruptcy or demands to reduce already shrunken union wages and benefits.
How can we look at these issues sensibly?
First, one must note the awesome disparity in treatment for the auto industry and Wall Street. Government agencies have thrown literally trillions of dollars at the financial sector, with very light conditions, and virtually no discussion of industry salary structures (aside from limited restraints on top executive compensation). By contrast, there has been endless fulmination about supposedly excessively generous wages for unionized auto workers, and much more severe financial and oversight conditions proposed for an industry bailout.
Second, the costs of inaction to support the auto industry dwarf the cost of a bailout -- even if much more than the requested $25 billion is needed. The industrial Midwest has already been hollowed out by deindustrialization. Auto industry bankruptcy would be a crushing blow. A complete collapse of the U.S. auto companies would cost 3 million jobs -- about 240,000 employees of the companies, a million supplier jobs, and 1.7 million jobs lost from the overall economic effect -- according to the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research. In this scenario, the federal government would lose $60 billion in tax revenues and other costs in the first year alone. Even assuming something less than a complete collapse, costs would be devastating. And, as economist Thomas Palley has noted, industry bankruptcies would dramatically worsen the financial crisis.
Third, the idea that United Auto Worker members are receiving exorbitant wages putting the U.S. auto companies at competitive disadvantage is a lie.
In general, the Japanese plants in the United States ("transplants") pay wages comparable to those at unionized U.S. facilities. This has been central to their anti-union strategy. In some recent years, workers at the transplants have actually made more than their counterparts at the Big Three, thanks to profit-sharing deals.
The Big Three employers do have nontrivial healthcare and pension "legacy" costs for retirees, and this is the main employee-related difference in cost structure (the other is more generous healthcare for current Big Three workers).
It is true that, historically, auto industry jobs have paid well. Going forward, however, this will be less and less true. The concessionary UAW 2007 contracts call for many new hires to start at $14 an hour, and the UAW is preparing to offer even further concessions.
Fourth, manufacturing wages and salaries don't contribute much to the cost of a car. Total labor costs are less than 10 percent of list price. If UAW workers donated their time and all savings were passed on to consumers, it would only lower the cost of a car by $2,400.
Fifth, although the Big Three have done just about everything possible over the last decades to undermine their strength -- including making disastrous long-term product mix choices, and fighting against fuel efficiency standards -- but the proximate cause of their desperate status is the economic crisis. It is not true, as has been frequently suggested, that the Japanese companies are doing just fine. Overall auto sales in the United States have fallen by more than a third in just a year, and Toyota, Honda and Nissan have seen drops of 27 percent, 22 percent and 35 percent. It is true that the Japanese companies have a stronger base and are better prepared to weather the storm. But the storm is pouring rain on everyone.
Sixth, bankruptcy is no answer for fixing what ails the industry. It is almost certainly true, as the industry argues, that consumers will refuse, or at least be very reluctant, to buy cars from a company in or recently emerged from bankruptcy. Would you?
But at least as important for those who want to see the industry aggressively adopt fuel efficient and zero carbon emission technologies is this: Bankruptcy would limit the automakers' flexibility, and make it much harder for them to make expensive, long-term investment decisions. This is particularly true while oil prices are depressed. Things were different six months ago (and likely will be again in the not-distant future), but right now the market signals are wrong for investments in energy efficiency.
Focusing on the imperative to rescue the industry, there are two rational policy responses.
One is to give the industry loans and other supports, with tight conditions. Under consideration now in Congress is an oversight structure that would give the government authority to veto any investment over $25 million. In contrast to the free hand given to Wall Street, this would help ensure government funds are not diverted into inappropriate purposes. The existing proposal would also require the government be paid back with interest, and/or the right to benefit from subsequent improvements in company share value.
But more should be done. There should be requirements that the bailout beneficiaries invest in energy efficiency and safety technologies, with demands that they do much more than required by existing law. To give them a level playing field, these improved standards should be adopted as law, and required of all auto companies. And protections should be built in to protect workers' interests -- a key objective should be to preserve good-paying jobs, not drive everyone to Wal-Mart wages.
The second rational policy approach is simply to nationalize the companies. General Motors now has a market capitalization of $2.8 billion. Ford's market value is $6.1 billion. These are relatively small amounts compared to the $25 billion the companies are requesting -- and they are likely to come back for more later.
The government has certain advantages over the companies. It can access capital more cheaply, for example.
The biggest advantage of buying the companies is that it would enable the public to exert control over the companies commensurate with its investment. There would be no need to negotiate with management, or carefully monitor managerial actions, to review 9-point plans for viability, or create incentives to have them invest in fuel-efficient technology. It would make it possible to undertake long-term, transformative investments in R&D and new transportation technologies, irrespective of today's oil price.
It is true that nationalizing the companies implies a commitment to support them despite unknown future challenges. But a commitment of $25 billion itself implies a readiness to do more if necessary, as it likely will be.
On the other hand, nationalizing the companies would entail many complications and difficulties, including managing relations with workers and plants around the world, fair dealing with suppliers and workers at suppliers, and the inherent complexity of running multinational auto companies.
Is a true nationalization the best option? Maybe, maybe not.
But the public would be a lot better off if there could be a serious discussion of the reasonable policy choices, and a lot less breath wasted on overt and disguised attacks on unionized blue-collar workers.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and director of Essential Action.
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10) Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
By TIM WEINER
December 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?hp
Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.
The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.
Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.
Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. She replied, “All of the songs Odetta sings.”
Odetta sang at the march on Washington, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, in August 1963. Her song that day was “O Freedom,” dating to slavery days: “O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me, And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free.”
Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.
“They were liberation songs,” she said in a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word.” “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life.”
Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later, Odetta discovered that she could sing.
“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”
She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.
“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.
In a 2005 National Public Radio interview, she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”
In 1950, Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.
She began singing in nightclubs, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair.
Her voice plunged deep and soared high, and her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” resonated with an audience hearing old songs made new.
Bob Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” It was her first, and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Water Boy,” “ ’Buked and Scorned.”
Her blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together, she said in her interview with The Times. The words and music captured “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.”
Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But after King was assassinated in 1968, the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.
In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Odetta the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities.
Odetta was married three times: to Don Gordon, to Gary Shead, and, in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first two marriages ended in divorce; Mr. Minter moved to Germany in 1983 to pursue his performing career.
She was singing and performing well into the 21st century, and her influence stayed strong.
In April 2007, half a century after Bob Dylan first heard her, she was on stage at a Carnegie Hall tribute to Bruce Springsteen. She turned one of his songs, “57 Channels,” into a chanted poem, and Mr. Springsteen came out from the wings to call it “the greatest version” of the song he had ever heard.
Reviewing a December 2006 performance, James Reed of The Boston Globe wrote: “Odetta’s voice is still a force of nature — something commented upon endlessly as folks exited the auditorium — and her phrasing and sensibility for a song have grown more complex and shaded.”
The critic called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”
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11) U.A.W. Says It Would Consider Modifying Contract
By NICK BUNKLEY
December 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/business/04uaw.html?hp
DETROIT — The United Automobile Workers union will suspend its jobs bank, which requires carmakers to keep paying laid-off employees, and consider changes to its labor contracts as a way to help the Detroit companies avoid a collapse, the union’s president, Ron Gettelfinger, said Wednesday.
The union also has agreed, Mr. Gettelfinger said, to delay the payments that the automakers must make to a new retiree health care fund called a Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, or VEBA.
At a news conference, Mr. Gettelfinger said that the U.A.W. would be open to modifying the four-year contracts that it signed in 2007 but not to completely restarting negotiations. Changes could include cuts to wages, health care or other benefits, though he did not give details, and would require approval from union members, but the jobs bank suspension does not.
About 3,600 workers currently receive benefits under the jobs bank program, which the automakers created in the 1980s to win union approval for productivity improvements. The automakers have played down the need to eliminate it, but industry critics often cite it as a symbol of inefficiency for Detroit.
“The jobs bank has become a sound bite that people use to beat us up,” Mr. Gettelfinger said, who will join the auto executives at Congressional hearings starting Thursday. “It’s become a lightning rod that takes away the focus from what the real issue is, and the real issue is the backbone of America.”
The union’s decisions, announced after what Mr. Gettelfinger described as an “unprecedented” emergency meeting of U.A.W. leaders from across the country, should give the carmakers a lift as the Detroit chief executives prepare to make a second plea for federal assistance later this week in Washington.
On Tuesday, the car companies submitted plans to Congress detailing why they needed government-backed loans and how they would use the money, and they increased their request to $34 billion from $25 billion.
G.M. said it needed $4 billion this month merely to survive into 2009 and another $14 billion after that. The company plan calls for more plant closures and job cuts, along with the sale or elimination of four brands. Chrysler, which is requesting $7 billion, also said it could collapse soon without aid. Ford asked for a $9 billion line of credit but said it did not expect to access that money unless the economy worsens or a rivals fails.
“We have to get this loan,” Mr. Gettelfinger said. “Nobody’s kidding anybody.”
“Main Street, side street and rural America are all impacted by what the Congress does,” he said.
Congressional leaders are reviewing the plans from the automakers ahead of hearings on Thursday and Friday.
“I think it is plain that Chrysler and General Motors cannot survive without government help,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Fox. “The need now is to take a detailed look at their plan to see if they have a realistic opportunity to survive. The public mood, which I saw when I traveled the state recently, is very much against bailouts.”
Administration officials were also reviewing the plans.
“We have said that we want to try to help the automakers,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, said.
“We just got the summaries of those plans yesterday,” Ms. Perino said “and officials here are poring over them, as they are at the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department.”
At the U.A.W. meeting in Detroit, union officials described their members as extremely anxious about the prospect of more concessions but at the same time afraid of what would happen if the union did not aid the automakers.
“We’ve helped them before, but it seems like they always come back to us,” said Shane Colvard, chairman of Local 2164 in Bowling Green, Ky., where G.M. builds the Chevrolet Corvette sports car.
But a G.M. retiree, Frank Hammer, said looking to the union for givebacks does not resolve the automakers’ problems and compounds the bad economy.
“More concessions mean more foreclosures,” said Mr. Hammer, 65, who worked at G.M.’s transmission plant in Warren, Mich. “Concessions are not a solution.”
“We’re all getting smeared with this brush that we’re somehow greedy,” Mr. Hammer said. But if pay and benefits are cut, he told a group of reporters gathered outside the meeting, “what autoworker is going to be able to buy their product?”
David Stout contributed reporting from Washington.
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12) Pursuing U.S. Aid, G.M. Accepts Need for Drastic Cuts
By BILL VLASIC and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
December 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/business/03auto.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — General Motors, increasingly desperate for a federal bailout to stave off financial collapse, told Congress on Tuesday that it was willing to drastically shrink every aspect of its operations to ensure its long-term survival.
On the same day that the industry reported its worst sales month in 26 years, the three Detroit automakers delivered new business plans to lawmakers in the hope of winning support for $34 billion in federal loans.
While the timing was coincidental, the dismal November sales report underscored the perilous financial condition of G.M., the Ford Motor Company and Chrysler.
Their combined loan request was substantially higher than the $25 billion that the three companies had initially hoped to get from Congress two weeks ago.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said on Tuesday that she had spoken with President Bush by phone on Monday about the need to help the auto industry and that she believed some sort of rescue would be provided, either legislatively or by the Bush administration.
“I think it’s pretty clear that bankruptcy is not an option,” Ms. Pelosi said. But she said that the companies’ revamping plans must first pass muster among skeptical lawmakers who sent executives of the Big Three home from Washington empty-handed last month.
But G.M., the world’s largest automaker for decades, said Tuesday that it was in such dire straits that it would deeply cut jobs, factories, brands and executive pay as part of its plea to get $12 billion in federal loans and an additional $6 billion line of credit. G.M. also promised that it could be competitive on labor costs with Toyota by 2012.
G.M.’s president, Frederick A. Henderson, said the company would be insolvent if it did not receive federal assistance, including an infusion of $4 billion in cash before the end of the year.
“Absent support, frankly the company simply can’t fund its operations,” Mr. Henderson said in a call with reporters.
Chrysler, the smallest of the Detroit companies, is in similar difficulty, and asked Congress for a $7 billion loan before the end of December to ward off a potential bankruptcy.
Ford said in its plan that it could survive through 2009 with its current cash levels and by tapping its credit line with private banks, and that it could return to profitability by 2011. Even though it is better prepared for the downturn, Ford said it wanted $9 billion in loans to draw upon if necessary.
Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said the prospect of a failure of G.M. would cascade through the entire domestic auto industry and put millions of jobs at risk.
“We are very, very concerned, and that’s why we went with G.M. and Chrysler to Congress even though we think we have sufficient liquidity,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Mulally will appear at Congressional hearings Thursday and Friday in Washington along with Rick Wagoner, G.M.’s chairman, and Robert L. Nardelli, Chrysler’s chairman.
Together, they will try to persuade lawmakers to act quickly on the loan requests at a special lame-duck session of Congress next week.
There is only a narrow window for Congress to settle on any aid package for the automakers. Democratic leaders have said that they will not let the debate become a prolonged procedural fight, and they have little interest in keeping lawmakers in town past next Friday.
Senior Democratic aides say that if a deal cannot be sealed by then, they have little choice but to wait until after the new Congress is sworn in and, if there are still disagreements with the Bush administration, until after Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Congressional leaders were still reviewing the plans Tuesday. Ms. Pelosi said the companies had clear benchmarks that they needed to meet.
“We want to see a commitment to the future,” she said. “We want to see a restructuring of the approach, that they have a new business model, a new business plan. There has to be compensation reform.”
The White House so far has resisted calls for any new taxpayer aid for the automobile industry but instead has pushed for Congressional action to speed up $25 billion in federally subsidized loans that were authorized in an energy bill last year to encourage advanced fuel efficiency.
But in an apparent hint of flexibility in the Bush administration’s stance, Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that the White House would examine the proposals from the automakers.
“We’ll want to take a look at their plans in detail and see if they meet a credible test for viability,” Mr. Fratto said. “We’re pleased to see that everyone is now on board with what we’ve been saying for some time — that a credible plan for financial viability is necessary if we’re even to consider taxpayer assistance.”
The revelation that G.M. is on the verge of running out of cash will lend new urgency to the discussions.
While Mr. Henderson declined to say whether G.M. would file for bankruptcy protection if the loans were not approved, he made it clear that in a few weeks’ time, the automaker would fall below the minimum levels of cash it needed to operate.
“The first $4 billion is crucial,” he said. “We wouldn’t have asked for the $4 billion if we didn’t need it.”
To make its case for the loans, G.M. said it would make top-to-bottom cuts in its money-losing North American operations.
G.M. said it planned to focus on four core brands — Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC — and sell, eliminate or consolidate the Saturn, Saab, Hummer and Pontiac brands.
Despite having downsized its operations in the last three years, G.M. said it would cut more than 20 percent of its remaining jobs, shut nine factories, seek to renegotiate the terms of $66 billion in debt, and push to reopen contract talks with the United Automobile Workers to reduce labor costs.
The cutbacks will extend into the executive ranks as well. Mr. Wagoner and G.M.’s board members will reduce their compensation to $1 in 2009, and the company will sell its corporate jets. Despite widespread speculation about Mr. Wagoner’s job security, his board gave him another vote of support on Tuesday.
Mr. Wagoner is scheduled to drive to Washington in a Chevrolet Malibu hybrid vehicle, a concession to criticism from lawmakers who chided the Detroit executives for flying on private aircraft to last month’s hearings.
Mr. Mulally was en route to Washington on Tuesday in a Ford Escape hybrid, and Mr. Nardelli was set to leave drive in one of Chrysler’s hybrid S.U.V.’s.
The criticism from Congress about jet travel and big executive paychecks hit home, Mr. Mulally said during a telephone interview from the road, as he was traveling through the state of Ohio.
“Its all part of a learning experience for me,” he said. “I think it’s really important that I drive to Washington to show that Ford gets what Congress is saying.”
In their companies’ plans, both Mr. Mulally and Mr. Nardelli said they would take $1-a-year salaries if the loan packages were approved. Ford also said it would sell off its corporate aircraft.
In its plan, G.M. acknowledged “that it had made mistakes in the past,” but said its revamping costs since 2006 had consumed “a substantial portion of its resources.”
Still, the company said it would have been able to survive on its own if not for the continued deterioration of the United States vehicle market, because of the weakening economy and tight credit, which has made it difficult for consumers who do wander into dealerships to get loans.
“The company would not require government assistance were it not for the drastic collapse of the U.S. economy which has devastated the company’s current revenues and liquidity,” G.M. said.
G.M. said its plan would create a “new General Motors,” that will be significantly smaller and more competitive.
The company said it would sell off its Hummer and Saab brands, shrink its Pontiac brand into a niche vehicle division, and explore opportunities to sell, close or consolidate the Saturn brand that — when it was started in the 1980s — was supposed to be G.M.’s answer to the smaller, fuel-efficient cars sold by Japanese competitors.
G.M. also said it planned to reduce the number of salaried and hourly workers in the United States workers from 96,000 currently, to 65,000 to 75,000 by 2012. It will also reduce its North American factories from 47 to 36, and its dealers from 6,450 and 4,700.
While it moves to downsize its operations, G.M. is setting up tough negotiations ahead with its bondholders and the U.A.W.
Mr. Henderson said that G.M. would try to negotiate a reduction in its debt from $66 billion, to about $35 billion. While he would not elaborate, the company was expected to ask bondholders to take equity in exchange for reducing their payout on long-term bonds.
G.M. will also seek to cut its labor costs by reopening its contract with the U.A.W. Possible cost cuts in the contract include eliminating job security provisions, including the so-called jobs bank that pays idled workers when their plants close.
The union’s president, Ron Gettelfinger, is scheduled to meet Wednesday with top U.A.W. officials in Detroit to consider how to negotiate the concessions that G.M. says it needs to survive.
Both Ford and Chrysler will likely want similar concessions from the union.
Mr. Gettelfinger has said he is willing to go back to the bargaining table to help the companies survive the economic downturn.
In its request for $7 billion in loans, Chrysler said it would continue to cut costs through negotiations with its suppliers and unions. The company, which is privately owned by Cerberus Capital Management, expects to reduce its structural costs by another $4 billion next year.
In their plans, all three companies said they would accelerate their timetables to make more fuel-efficient vehicles, with Ford saying for the first time that it would bring out all-electric models within two years.
Nick Bunkley contributed reporting from Detroit.
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