Wednesday 11 September 2013
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| Jorge Lemann: won't eat what he produces |
by Richard Mellor GED
Afscme local 444, retired
In a previous piece I commented on New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, having a certain worldview. He believes that the city’s services and no doubt the existence of the city itself, is made possible through the financial generosity and sacrifice of billionaires like him. In response to the accusation that NYC has become two cities, one for the rich and one for the poor under his governance, Bloomberg denies it and says, “if to some extent it is, it's one group paying for services for the other." This reflects two separate and distinct views of the world based on class.
People like Bloomberg, Warren Buffet and their colleagues, are ruthless thugs really. You cannot accumulate $27 or $45 billion dollars without being so, excepting a lottery win. They believe they are where they are because they are special; because they are smarter than those who get up and work for a wage all of our lives. How can they not be smarter, they’re rich and don’t work.
Every ruling class justifies its rule this way and each member of the ruling class accepts that they are where they are through their hard work and diligence. For the rest of us, just get off your butts and be prepared to take the risks.
But like all ruling classes, they are where they are through their control of the forces of production in society, something that overwhelmingly comes to them through family ties. Functioning as owners of society’s productive forces and wealth is a set up that their state, or what most workers call government, keeps in place through violence, and coercion. Just look at that photo of the heavily armed police at that peaceful WalMart protest. What are the police there to protect? They are not there to ensure that the workers demands are met, that they get a better deal than starvation wages from the owners of WalMart who do no work yet posses more wealth than 90 million Americans. The police are there to defend the Walton family’s wealth.
These people have nothing in common with workers. They may be Americans in name like us, or British, Japanese or South African. On days like today, remembering the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, they call for national unity; we are all together they claim. But they have a different view of the world. This difference is greater than any religious, racial or national differences workers have between each other. Despite all the weaknesses and horrific things workers can resort to as society degenerates or as non-owners, we are far more collective creatures by nature of our daily existence in capitalist society.
I was reading in Bloomberg’s magazine, Business Week, about one of the 1%’s heroes. Not Gates or Buffet, one of their heroes from abroad, a Brazilian. His name is Jorge, Paulo Lemann; he’s also Swiss. Lemann is a coupon clipper that runs an outfit called 3G Capital. Lemann and his partners have been on a bit of a buying spree and now own H.J Heinz , Burger King, and Anheuser-Busch. Burger King was once owned by another bunch of coupon clippers in a club called Cerberus that had the imbecile Dan Quayle on its board; the connection to established political families is a plus in the business world.
Lemann’s 3G and Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway have equal stakes in Heinz despite Buffet putting up three times as much cash according to BW. So Buffet trusts this guy. Not only that, Buffet refers to him as, “classy” and admits that Heinz will be, “Lemann’s show” according to BW. Buffet recognizes ruthlessness when he sees it.
Lemann has already proved to Buffet how “classy”he is firing 600 of Heinz’s office
staff in the US and Canada, about 350 of them in Pittsburgh PA. And when they bought Burger King from Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital of Mitt Romney fame and a couple other coupon clipping outfits Lemann was even classier, ridding the firm of 28,000 employees, or putting it in business lexicon, shoving “…28,000 employees off Burger King’s balance sheet.”
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| Buffet with one of his employees |
Lemann brought in a former railroad executive to run Burger King, the man knew nothing about fast food, but that doesn’t matter as the food is not the object of this exercise. Whatever form of production the owners of capital choose to engage in, it is not the finished product as an object of consumption or use that they’re after, it is the surplus value contained in the commodity and realized in its exchange that matters. “What’s important is not knowing hamburgers, it’s knowing how to lead a company” says a former colleague; “It’s the kind of intelligence that transcends any specific business segment”. It’s about profits.
Could Marx have been any clearer when he wrote:
“A schoolmaster is a productive laborer when, in addition to belaboring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”
Yep, Jorge is a real hero. He surfs, (30 foot waves says BW) plays tennis even playing in a Wimbledon event. In fact, Jorge admits that it wasn’t the things he learned at Harvard that gave him, “…a certain confidence when it came to taking risks.” It was that 30-foot wave he surfed in Copacabana. It all comes down to be prepared to take risks, take a chance. If you’re bold enough to take a chance you can become rich and famous like Jorge and others like him. The more than $30 million his dad left him wasn’t what got Trump started of course, and that Lemann’s Swiss father was a dairy entrepreneur didn’t give him a certain confidence, a willingness to take a risk someone without that sort of backing might pass on. When you fail, as George W. Bush did in most of his ventures, the moneyed interests, family or friends are there to rescue you. Who won’t take risks with that backing? They’re not risks at all.
Lemann went to the American School of Rio de Janeiro. This school is an institution designed to develop and strengthen Brazilian capitalism and its ties to US corporate interests. Its creation was made possible by funding from the U.S. Department of State, the Ford Foundation, private individuals, corporations, and the American Chamber of Commerce. So Jorge is not just an ordinary guy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He’s not a self made man, there’s no such thing. Everyone has help and people like Lemann have the most help, the most handouts, have all the connections in the right places.
Jorge Lemann places money above all things, not in the same way as workers do, to pay the rent or mortgage or feed the family or for that little extra cash for pleasure. People like Lemann seek to accumulate capital, live through the profit of capital as opposed to productive labor. He places the accumulation of money above social needs. This is why Warren Buffet and Sam Walton, the retail outlet’s founder, gave him an audience. Lemann subscribes to hatchet man Jack Welch’s business philosophy, the 20-70-10 rule on how to deal with employees, “Promote 20 percent…maintain the middle 70, and fire the rest.” A simple thing really.
Lemann may be a capitalist involved in the production of food and beverages, an important aspect of productive life for human society. But he doesn’t eat the stuff he produces. He ate a Burger King hamburger once and wasn’t impressed. “What he liked about Burger King was how it generated cash.”, He admires the Goldman Sachs model as well, “Innovations that create value are useful” is one of the favorite maxims. We must be clear that by “value” capitalists mean surplus value, the value created above that paid out for wages, value for which the capitalist gives nothing in return and that is the source of their profits: “People say that the customer comes first and all that”, says Vincent Falconi, a management consultant hired by Lemann when he owned the Brazilian beer company AmBev that provided the seed money for the purchase of AB InBev “but actually it’s cash”
And cash flowed in to InBev which sells one in every five beers in the world according to BW. But most of it went in to Lemann and his partner’s bank accounts. This no doubt helped replenish the $6.4 million Lemann and his partners were fined by the Brazilian regulators for crooked dealings at AmBev.
According to Business Week, Heinz is different as there is “less fat to trim”, so “How then, to wring more value from Heinz” is the question Business Week poses. As workers we know about how bosses “squeeze”more value from a company only too well; how they “trim the fat.” We experience it in the unemployment line, longer hours for those that don’t get laid off, less pay, increased pace of work as job cuts mean fewer hands doing more.
So far production, jobs at Heinz are still intact, but “workers are nervous” says one Union official, and so they should be. This perpetual insecurity and fear is another cause of stress and the by-products of it, poor health, family break ups, drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Waiting to be fired is not freedom. But that’s the market. The Union official has no alternative to the waiting, or the unemployment that follows “fat trimming”. Fighting back, taking the production of society’s necessities out of the hands of the Jorge Lemann’s of this world is not something they consider.
Maybe I’m being a bit selfish here because writing about this is a sort of catharsis for me. It keeps me on my political toes, reminding me (and hopefully some who read it) of how the world really works and how absurd it is that the production of a social necessity like food is in the hands of private individuals and that production is set in to motion only if profit accrues to the owners of capital like Lemann, the moneylenders and other coupon clippers. It reminds me of who my enemies really are.
Lemann could have, as the quote from Marx stated above, invested his capital in condom production or a mining concern, it matters not to these people. What matters is the end result, more money coming out of the process than went in.
A friend I talk to about these things worried that to take these important social functions out of the hands of private individuals would mean a bloodbath, that we will deny them life itself. That is not necessarily so. It has not been workers that initiated violence in the historical struggle for some control over our lives at work and the respect and dignity that comes with it. It has been the bosses and their government that resorted to violence, who hired gun thugs and entire armies to keep working people down. The violence against strikers; the black folks who fought to eliminate Jim Crow and the apartheid south, and all Americans who fought for equality was always initiated by the state and its agents.
The Jorge Lemann’s , Warren Buffets and Donald Trumps of this word are all welcome as productive contributors in the society so many activists are fighting to build. They just aren’t going to continue to live off the labor, poverty and misery of the vast majority of humanity.
Tuesday 10 September 2013
A Poem by Kevin Higgins
At Union Station hope is a t-shirt on sale
At Union Station hope is a t-shirt on sale
at seventy per cent off. Yesterday,
all the bow-tied barristers gathered
in the Hilton Hotel.
At the end of the street
the man from JP Morgan told Congress
investors prefer trophy real estate:
Manhattan office blocks to houses
for the little people.
Out here, the tuxedo gives way
to the pick up truck. Red winter fields
dotted with cattle that will soon be
hamburgers; demolition yards
full of cars that were once
somebody’s dream.
Out here, the taxi drivers are all local
in tiny white towns, each of which
glowers on its mountain side
like a schoolmistress.
Out here, guys
who’d have been happy
to point you in the direction
of the hunting supplies store
if they hadn’t got
killed in whatever war.
KEVIN HIGGINS
A short CNA clip from Kaiser nurses. The AFL-CIO convention was apparently ready to applaud kaiser as the model health care provider. The California Nurses Association (now an AFL-CIO affiliate) contacted the AFL-CIO complaining about Kaiser's anti-worker anti-patient practices and published this statement:
Nurses once again let Kaiser Executives know that we will not be idle while Kaiser Cancels Our Patients’ Care. Kaiser was slated to be spotlighted as a model healthcare company at the AFL-CIO convention. When we let the AFL-CIO know about Kaiser's plans to cancel our patients' care Kaiser was cancelled themselves.
"Our patients have too much at stake for us to allow Kaiser Executives to move forward with their plans. Patient care should always be first." CNA states.
Unfortunately, the same AFL-CIO leadership pushed the Team Concept on Kaiser employees when John Sweeny was president and Sal Roselli's Local 250 was still in SEIU. The CNA was not in the AFL-CIO at the time and did not join the team to my knowledge. Naturally, there will be no internal debate about the disastrous consequences of the Team Concept and the idea that bosses and workers have the same interests or that the same AFL-CIO pushed it with gusto. Cancelling a glowing presentation from the bosses at the AFL-CIO's convention won't do much to turn the tide either.
by Richard MellorAfscme Local 444, retired
What a tragedy. A beautiful little boy who should be experiencing all the pleasures that a healthy and well fed young life can offer. I can barely look at it without wanting to take him in my arms and caress the little man; hold him like I have my own little ones, or the way we hold our pets. A mother or father whose kisses and hugs bring such joy to the recipient and the giver is waiting for that moment when starvation and lack of water, ensures he breathes his last breath. It's not a nice death is it? Look at the body and the physical pain it brings to the child and the emotional pain to the adult, herself, not far from death's door.
The scene in the picture is indeed horrific. It is heart wrenching, sad, makes us angry and makes us want to cry at the same time. But let's get something clear in our heads. What we see in the picture, a starving boy being given water by his equally deprived mother, or female guardian, is not something that occurs because of a lack of resources or money. The condition prevails not because people in that particular part of the world are lazy or stupid or can't govern themselves. It is not as some might argue, god's wrath, or the devil's work or the work of any supernatural beings or ghostly demons. It is not because of overpopulation or that there's too many people on the planet.
This young boy will die of starvation amid plenty. He will die of diseases that were cured long ago. The cause of these events is political and economic. Society has infrastructure and that infrastructure is put in place by directing capital and labor power to do so. The trillion or two the US has spent in Iraq would solve world hunger, would eliminate what we see here forever.
The infant mortality, disease and starvation that engulf millions of people in this world is a product of the market, of capitalism. The communities in which these people live have little public infrastructure, no water system, no sewage system and instead unsafe water and sewage flows openly in the streets if at all. There is no medical and health care system in place. Diet is poor and shelter is inadequate. The money is there to remedy this. But the owners of capital, capitalists as the Wall Street Journal calls them as opposed to many anti-capitalists who choose words like corpocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, oligarchy and other terms to avoid calling them what they are, will not allocate capital to buy labor power and the necessary materials necessary to end this savagery.
According to Global Issues:
10.6 million children died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy
1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation
A conservative estimate for 2010 finds that at least a third of all private financial wealth, and nearly half of all offshore wealth, is now owned by world’s richest 91,000 people – just 0.001% of the world’s population.
The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).
The world spent close to $2 trillion on military hardware in 2012 with the bulk of that coming from the US, the worlds largest arms dealer by far. Corporations are hoarding trillions, private capitalists have stashed away some $26 trillion or more in offshore tax havens. Poverty and most disease can be eliminated, but capitalism cannot do it; it is the cause of it.
The US president Obama, Hilary Clinton and all the other representatives of wall Street and the system that perpetuates the misery we see in the graphic, are prepared to bomb Syria because of the deaths of less than 2000 people. But the policies that these people institute and defend to the teeth kill millions of children and adults yearly; their deaths are not accidents, they are the product of conscious decisions by human beings.
These conditions and the endless wars that we currently see begun by primarily by the US government cannot be eradicated under the present economic system we know as capitalism. It is not simply that they cannot be eradicated in what is often called the developing world, they are on the increase in the advanced capitalist countries also. As an earlier blog pointed out, the cost of making the world safe for US corporations is not only causing untold environmental damage and misery for the world's populations, it is also driving US workers further in to poverty and debt. Even the US troops are facing cuts to necessary services. This will hasten the crisis in the US military much like the crisis that occurred during the imperialist war against Vietnam.
It is pointless feeling guilty about having a better life than the woman and her child in the picture. We are not individually responsible for it and guilt is a pointless emotion that accomplishes little. We can collectively end it though. I was talking to a group of young men the other night, they were all well educated and relatively financially secure. They had good jobs but when it came to understanding the forces at play in society and what was going on in the world around them, especially US capitalism's role in it, they were clueless and actually accepted that they were oblivious to much of what is going on. This is nothing to be proud of even though, the forces against us in the US are considerable as we are faced day in day out with an ideological offensive from the 1% about the merits of their system and how there's opportunity for all if we take the bull by the horns.
Throughout the world, workers are fighting back against the capitalist offensive. Working class women that fill the factories of Bangladesh have waged street battles against factory owners and their hired thugs. Chinese workers have struck foreign multinationals for higher wages and better conditions and won raises of as much as $20% and this is without independent unions.
Indigenous people throughout Latin America, India, Indonesia and the entire world are leading the struggle against the environmental devastation caused by the energy giants and mining companies.
Greek workers, Portuguese workers, women and gays in Russia, are all refusing to be cowed by the worshipers of the market. And we saw the rise of the Occupy Movement in the US that challenged the repressive laws of the 1% and battled the new beefed up security apparatus built in anticipation of the resistance that will occur to the increased offensive of capital.
And here in the US, we should not underestimate the developments that have occurred around Obama's eagerness to bomb Syria. The outpouring of opposition has been intense and this has caused the 1%'s representatives in Congress to push back against Obama's war drive. In a twist of irony, it looks like old Putin might have thrown Obama a lifeline brokering a deal with Syria's Assad to have the UN take charge of that country's chemical weapons stash.
This development is very positive and when we consider the ongoing global resistance to the capitalist offensive we should be inspired and optimistic about it. But we must take the bull by the horns, we must accept firstly in our own consciousness that the present state of affairs will eventually lead to the end of life as we know it, market driven wars and environmental catastrophe all in the pursuit of profits will ensure it. We must recognize that the most destabilizing force in society today and the reason for much of world poverty is US capitalism. American's cannot find a solution to our problems within the borders of our own nation state. The solution to the starvation we see in the graphic, the endless wars and driving back our own 1%'s austerity agenda lies in the building of a global movement. Capitalism is global and the fight against it's destructive effects must be global.
Replacing an economic system of production where a tiny minority of individuals own the means by which we produce the necessities of life and who set these forces in motion only for personal gain, is our goal. Capitalism is an anarchistic unplanned system of production, it cannot advance humanity. It is, as we say here, past its expiration date. Only a democratic socialist economy and political system can solve the crises that capitalism creates.
A couple of things to remember:
The Soviet union was not a socialist or communist society.
Socialism is not a utopian idea it's just a different way of constructing human society
Sweden, Finland or a national health service is not socialism or communism
Obama is not a socialist (for my American brothers and sisters only)
Capitalism overthrew feudalism and socialized production
Socialism will take it one step further and socialize ownership of the process of production, distribution and exchange. It brings economic democracy.
The organizers of this blog have explained that US capitalism cannot afford to keep its massive military machine working at its present level without driving its working class at home into poverty. This latter is happening all around us as we see wages and benefits being slashed and services in city after city being reduced or removed altogether. Now we see the reduction of the living standards of the military in the field. Marines at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan are now about to lose a daily meal, causing some to fore go a hot breakfast and others to work without cooked food for six plus hours.
The midnight ration service — known there as “midrats" — supplies breakfast to Marines on midnight-to-noon shifts and dinner to Marines who are ending noon-to-midnight work periods. It's described as one of the few times the Marines at Leatherneck can be together in one place.
The base, which is located in Afghanistan’s southwestern Helmand Province, flanked by Iran and Pakistan, also will remove its 24-hour sandwich bar. While no Marine at Camp Leatherneck agreed to speak on the record, many are privately angry about the hit on base morale.
"This boils my skin. One of my entire shifts will go 6.5 hours without a meal. If we need to cut back on money I could come up with 100 other places,” one Leatherneck-based Marine wrote in an email this week to his wife and shared with NBC News. (The Marine declined to speak on the record.) “Instead, we will target the biggest contributor to morale. I must be losing my mind. What is our senior leadership thinking? I just got back from flying my ass off and in a few days, I will not have a meal to replenish me after being away for over 9 hours.”
“The fact is our force in Afghanistan is shrinking fast and all the creature comforts and services deployed military-members have grown accustomed to over the past decade are going to be reduced," A leading officer Gilmore wrote in an email to NBC News.
Back home, spouses and friends of the troops in Afghanistan are criticizing the loss of hot meals as a poor logistical choice that will impact the service members' overall nutrition, energy and spirits.
The midnight ration service — known there as “midrats" — supplies breakfast to Marines on midnight-to-noon shifts and dinner to Marines who are ending noon-to-midnight work periods. It's described as one of the few times the Marines at Leatherneck can be together in one place.
The base, which is located in Afghanistan’s southwestern Helmand Province, flanked by Iran and Pakistan, also will remove its 24-hour sandwich bar. While no Marine at Camp Leatherneck agreed to speak on the record, many are privately angry about the hit on base morale.
"This boils my skin. One of my entire shifts will go 6.5 hours without a meal. If we need to cut back on money I could come up with 100 other places,” one Leatherneck-based Marine wrote in an email this week to his wife and shared with NBC News. (The Marine declined to speak on the record.) “Instead, we will target the biggest contributor to morale. I must be losing my mind. What is our senior leadership thinking? I just got back from flying my ass off and in a few days, I will not have a meal to replenish me after being away for over 9 hours.”
“The fact is our force in Afghanistan is shrinking fast and all the creature comforts and services deployed military-members have grown accustomed to over the past decade are going to be reduced," A leading officer Gilmore wrote in an email to NBC News.
Back home, spouses and friends of the troops in Afghanistan are criticizing the loss of hot meals as a poor logistical choice that will impact the service members' overall nutrition, energy and spirits.
Monday 9 September 2013
40 years ago this week I was at a Labor Party conference in Ireland. The news came in. The US military and CIA thugs had carried out their military coup in Chile. The US economic thugs at the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Boys, drew up the agenda and the Chilean working class entered a nightmare of mass killings and mass poverty. All in the name of and organized by US capitalism and its profits and power and control.
It is these same thugs who lied to get the US people to agree to attack Iraq and Afghanistan. It is these same thugs who are now trying to convince the US people to attack Syria. It is sickening to watch talking head after talking head leave out any mention of the use by the US of chemical weapons in places like Vietnam and Iraq.
There are a few lessons to be learnt.
You cannot believe a word that comes out of the mouth's of the capitalist representatives and powers. They will say whatever they think will further their cause. They will not mention anything they think might hurt their cause. They insist that Syria hand over chemical weapons but there is never a word about the massive stock pile of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Zionist regime next door in Israel.
There is another lesson to be learnt from remembering the Chilean coup. Social democracy and the Stalinist parties and forces at the time were adamant that Allende was carrying out the right policy by not confronting the Chilean capitalist state, by leaving the Chilean capitalist state intact. A few of us disagreed and said the the Chilean capitalist state organized and backed by US capitalism would not respect the vote of the Chilean people. They would organize a coup. We explained that capitalism only believes in what we could call bourgeois democracy. That is it only tolerates democracy if capitalism and the capitalist class rules. As soon as it begins to lose its control then it will move to other means, military coups, civil wars, fascist methods. This remains true today. US and world capitalism are gearing up to confront the international working class and put it down in blood if it can. See the full body armor and automatic weapons on the cops surrounding peaceful pickets here in the US on this blog a few days ago.
The international working class must be clear on this. It only has a future if it organizes to overthrow the capitalist state and overthrow capitalism. We have to end the system and its state apparatus entirely and replace it with a democratic socialist world.
Sean.
It is these same thugs who lied to get the US people to agree to attack Iraq and Afghanistan. It is these same thugs who are now trying to convince the US people to attack Syria. It is sickening to watch talking head after talking head leave out any mention of the use by the US of chemical weapons in places like Vietnam and Iraq.
There are a few lessons to be learnt.
You cannot believe a word that comes out of the mouth's of the capitalist representatives and powers. They will say whatever they think will further their cause. They will not mention anything they think might hurt their cause. They insist that Syria hand over chemical weapons but there is never a word about the massive stock pile of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Zionist regime next door in Israel.
There is another lesson to be learnt from remembering the Chilean coup. Social democracy and the Stalinist parties and forces at the time were adamant that Allende was carrying out the right policy by not confronting the Chilean capitalist state, by leaving the Chilean capitalist state intact. A few of us disagreed and said the the Chilean capitalist state organized and backed by US capitalism would not respect the vote of the Chilean people. They would organize a coup. We explained that capitalism only believes in what we could call bourgeois democracy. That is it only tolerates democracy if capitalism and the capitalist class rules. As soon as it begins to lose its control then it will move to other means, military coups, civil wars, fascist methods. This remains true today. US and world capitalism are gearing up to confront the international working class and put it down in blood if it can. See the full body armor and automatic weapons on the cops surrounding peaceful pickets here in the US on this blog a few days ago.
The international working class must be clear on this. It only has a future if it organizes to overthrow the capitalist state and overthrow capitalism. We have to end the system and its state apparatus entirely and replace it with a democratic socialist world.
Sean.
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