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.
Sunday, 8 September 2013
We share this piece for our reader's interest. Reprinted from AlterNet.org
5 Acts of Terror By the People We Chose to Protect Us
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/ Suzanne Tucker
September 8, 2013 |
Every clear-thinking American knows that education and jobs are needed more than armed guards in poor neighborhoods. But average Americans are led to believe in a terrorist threat that may or may not exist, and that in any case is greatly exaggerated, while the corporate/military/political complex creates new forms of terror to safeguard the assets of the rich.
1. War Terror
It started with our leaders comparing notes on Iraq:
Cheney 08/26/02: There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney 09/14/03: We never had evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.
Powell 02/05/03: Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agents.
Powell 09/13/04: I think it's unlikely that we will find any stockpiles.
Bush 05/29/03: We found the weapons of mass destruction.
Bush 10/08/04: I wasn't happy when we found out there wasn't weapons.
In the first Iraqi war, two air missions per minute were conducted over 43 days, with the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombsdropped on a largely defenseless country. Much of the slaughter was caused by "dumb bombs" that fell on civilian areas. U.S. troops attacked retreating Iraqi soldiers with cluster bombs and napalm as American pilots, adopting metaphors such as 'turkey shoot' and 'fish in a barrel,' conducted target practice from above. Some Iraqis were buried alive by bulldozers that spread tons of sand over them.
In the end, at least 190,000 Iraqi lives were destroyed in a war that cost over $2.2 trillion. A Johns Hopkins study puts the tally much higher, with an estimate of 650,000 Iraqi deaths.
2. Drone Terror
In Pakistan, civilians can hear the droning in the sky all day long. Said one resident: "I can't sleep...when the drones are there...I hear them making that sound, that noise. The drones are all over my brain." A humanitarian worker added, "I was in New York on 9/11...This is what it is like."
When bombings kill townspeople, their family and friends are often afraid to run to their aid, because standard procedure is to bomb the first responders. Afterwards the funerals are sometimes bombed.
A Pew survey reported that 75%of Pakistanis consider us their enemy. A former advisor to General Petraeus stated, "Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement.." Indeed, militant groups have rapidly been forming, such as Lashkar, which has been attacking U.S. troops across the border in Afghanistan. The sentiment goes beyond Pakistan. A spokesperson for Yemen, also under attack, told a U.S. Senate committee, "What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America."
The disease is spreading. There are now 737 U.S. Military Bases around the world, and over 2.5 million military personnel. Since 9/11 about 100 new generals and admirals have been added to the ranks of top brass, all with private jets and chefs and guards and secretaries and drivers.
Africa, already swollen with a U.S. military presence, is under further siege by the Pentagon. The Economist speaks of "Afrighanistan," calling it "the next front of the global war on terror."
3. Unconstitutional Terror
The Fourth Amendment guarantees the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
Since 9/11, numerous measures have been employed in the name of national security: The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, and the National Defense Authorization Act. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has facilitated the monitoring of foreign communications in the name of anti-terrorism.
Internet privacy has been threatened by proposals like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Privacy is at risk with the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), passed in the House.
In addition, new techniques such as Iris Scans, License Plate Recognition, GPS devices in pharmaceutical products, and Facial Recognition Technology invade our privacy. Drones are flying over our homes. The National Security Agency is building a data centerbig enough to store every email, text, phone call, web search, and video in the United States. With the Electronic Communications Privacy Act on its side, government is authorized to take anything it can get.
4. Terror against Opponents of Unconstitutional Terror
In 1778 the Continental Congress created the first whistleblower protection law by declaring "it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states."
In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned with a pledge to "strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government."
But Bradley Manning was found guilty of espionage for reporting extreme cases of war misconduct. And Edward Snowden faces prison for reporting abuses of the 4th Amendment by the NSA.
The hypocrisy continues with the proposed Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, which would have made it an act of terror to report on the terrorizing of animals. And with the efforts of TransCanada Corporation to convince law enforcement agencies that pipeline protestors are terrorists.
Going even further, FBI documents reveal that the agency repeatedly monitored Occupy Wall Street activities, viewing them as possible acts of terrorism.
5. The Terror of Poverty
The largely imagined threat of foreign attacks is diverting billions of dollars into a Homeland Security fund that safeguards the assets of the rich, while the poverty rate for black children has risen to almost 50 percent, and unemployment among blacks has almost doubled the rate of whites.
Meanwhile, paranoia has infiltrated our schools. As K-12 education has been cut by $20 billion over f ive years, and as funding for guidance counselors and school psychologists has dropped to all-time lows, the Department of Justice's COPS Office has awarded over $750 million for the hiring of more than 6,500 police officers for schools, even though studies show that placing armed police in schools actually increases physical dangers to youth.
People burdened by economic oppression and authoritarian rule can begin to understand Frederick Douglass' bitter words to his own country, on behalf of the American slave: To him your boasted liberty [is] an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.
The piece below was sent to us from a retired CAW member in Canada. Not being in Canada it is hard to determine how much of a good thing this merger might be. The author points out that when it comes to organizational details, nothing has changed and women, a huge section of the working class and union membership throughout the world are visibly absent. Sister Hinshelwood points out that there was some progress in that she received 17.49% of the vote in a challenge for the union's first national president and correctly pointed out that the bosses' austerity agenda cannot be halted without international solidarity. This is not an insignificant result and shows the potential for a genuine fighting opposition developing in Unifor.The most important thing of course is whether the strategy and tactics of this new union and its leadership are going to change. What is the leadership going to do differently from what has been done in the past? Will the present world-view of the union hierarchy, that the market and capitalism is the answer to all things, be discarded and a working class offensive be built that can drive back the austerity agenda and open up a new period of struggle?
By Lindsay Hinshelwood
Over the Labour Day weekend two of Canada's largest industrial unions, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP), merged to become the country's largest private sector union, Unifor.
At this founding convention, facilitated by retiring CAW President Ken Lewenza, the new union leadership moved forward by engaging in exactly the same kind of rhetoric it engaged in the day before when the CAW held its final convention: the usual "we fought for this, we fought for that." So if we ask the question "what kind of union is Unifor likely to be?" I'm going to say it will be just a larger, more tightly controlled Old Boys' club.
I had the privilege of being a first-time delegate at this merger convention and I wasn't expecting anything more than the same words I've been hearing for the 15 years I've been a CAW member. I expected sycophants giving their orchestrated standing ovations and speeches as expected. But the unexpected happened: the delegates offered some criticism and even some democracy, rarities in these patriarchal organizations that are traditionally plagued with appointed reps, nepotism and tokenism.
A sister, Kerry Ann Taylor, from the former CEP Local 232 spoke out about the lack of women and people of colour in the presentation of the new union. This led other delegates to say that it was only the Old Boys playing starring roles, and that this was the underlying culture of this historical event: the CAW leaders, all men, were controlling the democracy. This set the stage for the elections of the new national leaders of this new union, as Dave Coles, retiring President of the CEP, opened the nominations.
The anointed prince for the position of Unifor's first National President was the CAW's Jerry Dias. He is a careerist official who has been a union representative for most of his working life in the CAW, a self-titled "rank and file man" who spent most of his time in office. Then a challenger was
Over the Labour Day weekend two of Canada's largest industrial unions, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP), merged to become the country's largest private sector union, Unifor.
At this founding convention, facilitated by retiring CAW President Ken Lewenza, the new union leadership moved forward by engaging in exactly the same kind of rhetoric it engaged in the day before when the CAW held its final convention: the usual "we fought for this, we fought for that." So if we ask the question "what kind of union is Unifor likely to be?" I'm going to say it will be just a larger, more tightly controlled Old Boys' club.
I had the privilege of being a first-time delegate at this merger convention and I wasn't expecting anything more than the same words I've been hearing for the 15 years I've been a CAW member. I expected sycophants giving their orchestrated standing ovations and speeches as expected. But the unexpected happened: the delegates offered some criticism and even some democracy, rarities in these patriarchal organizations that are traditionally plagued with appointed reps, nepotism and tokenism.
A sister, Kerry Ann Taylor, from the former CEP Local 232 spoke out about the lack of women and people of colour in the presentation of the new union. This led other delegates to say that it was only the Old Boys playing starring roles, and that this was the underlying culture of this historical event: the CAW leaders, all men, were controlling the democracy. This set the stage for the elections of the new national leaders of this new union, as Dave Coles, retiring President of the CEP, opened the nominations.
The anointed prince for the position of Unifor's first National President was the CAW's Jerry Dias. He is a careerist official who has been a union representative for most of his working life in the CAW, a self-titled "rank and file man" who spent most of his time in office. Then a challenger was
nominated by Bruce Allen, militant activist and Vice President of former CAW Local 199. After a compelling introduction he nominated me for National President, not only the first rank-and-file member to contest the top position in Unifor or the CAW before it but also a woman.
Instead of controlled democracy we had democracy forced from the floor. This developed further: when Coles wouldn't allow the candidates to speak, the delegates spoke out and demanded it. I received 17.49% of the vote, a great indication that many delegates were not happy founding a new union on old guard practices. I campaigned on a platform that we must be the change we want to see, with One Member One Vote for national officials and nominations open to the rank-and-file. My leaflet stated "Lindsay Hinshelwood recognizes that solidarity knows no borders and the struggle
Instead of controlled democracy we had democracy forced from the floor. This developed further: when Coles wouldn't allow the candidates to speak, the delegates spoke out and demanded it. I received 17.49% of the vote, a great indication that many delegates were not happy founding a new union on old guard practices. I campaigned on a platform that we must be the change we want to see, with One Member One Vote for national officials and nominations open to the rank-and-file. My leaflet stated "Lindsay Hinshelwood recognizes that solidarity knows no borders and the struggle
against the austerity agenda cannot be effectively fought just in this country. She does not endorse reducing workers to being competitors, competing for lower wages, undercutting each other and impoverishing all, rather she believes in forging international solidarity."
With the election over and the other 24 nominees acclaimed, it was time to review and adopt the new Constitution and Vision, and this is where the union remains the same. There are few changes in the policies and procedures except that the role that the Public Review Board played in the CAW, as a body to which rank-and-file workers can make appeals, becomes diminished. The new vision implies that concessions are sometimes necessary, a frightful statement coming from the collaborationist, concession- seeking CAW officials. There is a plan to somehow include workers who work in non-unionized workplaces or who do not have jobs. This is a twisted irony for the Unifor members who are low-waged supplemental workers on General Motors' assembly lines who pay union dues but are not protected under the collective agreements.
Overall, the microphones were stacked with servile officials harping on about how good the union has been for them and these performances were always met with thunderous applause. However, there were also many delegates who addressed the floor on issues which concerned workers, issues which Dias just glossed over.
The merger does come with a glimmer of hope for change, and that will come from future delegates and members who demand change, contest the tradition of appointments and acclamations for national level positions, continue to publicize their critique of the union and raise the issues which concern them. The delegates of the founding convention forced a historic election, which has been more or less ignored by the new Unifor. I fear the driving down of workers will only accelerate before any progress is made.
Lindsay Hinshelwood is a member of Unifor Local 707 (Ford Oakville). She has been referred to as "the most outspoken critic of the CAW."
With the election over and the other 24 nominees acclaimed, it was time to review and adopt the new Constitution and Vision, and this is where the union remains the same. There are few changes in the policies and procedures except that the role that the Public Review Board played in the CAW, as a body to which rank-and-file workers can make appeals, becomes diminished. The new vision implies that concessions are sometimes necessary, a frightful statement coming from the collaborationist, concession- seeking CAW officials. There is a plan to somehow include workers who work in non-unionized workplaces or who do not have jobs. This is a twisted irony for the Unifor members who are low-waged supplemental workers on General Motors' assembly lines who pay union dues but are not protected under the collective agreements.
Overall, the microphones were stacked with servile officials harping on about how good the union has been for them and these performances were always met with thunderous applause. However, there were also many delegates who addressed the floor on issues which concerned workers, issues which Dias just glossed over.
The merger does come with a glimmer of hope for change, and that will come from future delegates and members who demand change, contest the tradition of appointments and acclamations for national level positions, continue to publicize their critique of the union and raise the issues which concern them. The delegates of the founding convention forced a historic election, which has been more or less ignored by the new Unifor. I fear the driving down of workers will only accelerate before any progress is made.
Lindsay Hinshelwood is a member of Unifor Local 707 (Ford Oakville). She has been referred to as "the most outspoken critic of the CAW."
by Sean O' Torrain
Over the past years tens of millions of people have taken to the streets of the world to protest the conditions in which they are forced to live by the capitalist offensive. These movements have not all been conscious but they have been full of anger and rage. At the same time increased tensions have developed between the major capitalist powers. During the decades of the cold war the world had a certain equilibrium based on the balance between US imperialism and its rival Stalinism. With the end of the Soviet Union this equilibrium began to collapse. With the move of China towards capitalism this also weakened this equilibrium and moved the world not towards more stability but towards more tensions and more instability. The staggering arrogance of US imperialism is that with its massive debt and while at the same time driving down its own working class into poverty it has continued to believe it can still rule the world. It can still have its new world order, it can still have its "full spectrum domination." I could be premature. I remember the many times in my own revolutionary past when I and other Comrades announced that we were at a "turning point," but with the present events around Syria things are definitely looking a little shaky for imperialism's offensive.
I would like to raise two points for consideration. US imperialism has backed itself into a corner over Syria. I believe it has to strike Syria or its credibility and influence in the region will be very significantly weakened. As well as other factors that would result if it did not strike would be that this would increase the likelihood of its proxies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia and others plus the many militias going off half cocked on their own. Maybe Israel bombing Iran. If the vote goes against Obama to strike Syria this will enormously weaken US imperialism's authority over the whole region and increase the tendency of the many regimes and militias in the area to go it alone. Even if Obama wins the vote it will be only by a slim margin and this too will weaken US imperialism in the region.
When looking at the crisis developing in the entire Middle East and the coming apart of the entire region I find it useful to keep in mind Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution. The weak capitalist classes in the entire Middle East were not able to pull together and develop cohesive capitalist nations. Arab capitalism in spite of its tremendous oil wealth was not able to develop a cohesive Arab capitalist state. Imperialism instead cut the area to pieces and installed dictator after dictator to rule the many states it created. This is now coming apart. But because the working class, which was held back by Stalinism and Social Democracy, is not organized for the international socialist revolution, the result looks like being sectarian conflict and the redrawing of the map of the Middle East along sectarian lines. In my opinion only a united revolutionary international movement of the working class throughout the entire region can prevent this.
One way or another US imperialism will be weakened, is being weakened in the present situation. This is strengthening Russian imperialism, and also strengthening the Chinese regime as it drives for increased influence and control in Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. This in turn will increase tensions between China and Japan.
If US imperialism strikes Syria it is hard to say what will happen in any detail. But from what happened in Libya we can have a good idea. That country is in a shambles and oil production has plunged from 1.4 million barrels a day earlier this year to just 160,000 barrels a day at present. Rival militias rule. Strike or no strike I believe that Syria is sliding inevitably into all out prolonged sectarian civil war. And with this a further leap forward in the destabilization of the entire Middle East.
The other point I would like to raise is this. And it gives ground for optimism. There is a tremendous opposition amongst the US masses for any strike at Syria. For the first time in a long time and to an extent not experienced in a long time and also assisted by social media, the US masses are having their say. US politicians are being inundated with emails, and posts demanding they oppose any strike.
For Comrades who read our blog, weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com, you will have seen the recent photo of US cops in full body armor and armed with automatic weapons surrounding unarmed peaceful protesters calling for a $15.00 an hour minimum wage and union rights at a Walmart store. There have been protests and strikes in 60 cities in the US recently for the minimum wage to be doubled to $15.00. There is anger developing in the US on a myriad of issues, health care, jobs, racism, sexism, police brutality, political corruption, climate change, pollution, fracking, attacks on education. These are all issues related to and originating from the offensive of the US capitalist class against its own working class. US imperialism cannot keep on as it is doing, funding its wars and occupations abroad, and allowing its own working class at home to have the living standards it has. It is going after its own working class now in a serious way. We need to remember that when the Occupy Movement emerged it was confronted immediately with cops in full body armor in every city and of course using chemical weapons against the protesters. US imperialism has been preparing to take on its own working class now for decades.
Most US politicians are desperately trying to work a way to vote for bombing Syria. The reason they are having such difficulty is that the US masses have moved very strongly against any strike. Solve the problems at home, spend the money on Detroit, on education on health care, on jobs, not on spending billions on bombing Syria. The mood of the US masses is now against the interests of US imperialism on an issue of very great and international significance. This is a major development. It looks very like we could have arrived at the point where the US masses are saying: we are not prepared to fund US capitalism's wars and occupations abroad when we are being driven into poverty here at home.
Whether this is happening now and will be maintained we will see, But happen it will. It might be now over the issue of bombing Syria. Whenever it happens at some stage the US masses will take to the streets and say enough is enough, spend the trillions on the problems at home and not on defending US corporations' interests abroad. When this happens the world balance of forces will change. This is not to say there will not be great confusion and as well as movements towards revolution as well as movements towards counter revolution in such a process. But what it is to say is that the masses will take to the scene of history in the major capitalist countries such as the US and act to take on the capitalist offensive. The US working class will enter the scene of history with all that this will mean. One affect it will have will be the shock wave it will send through the ranks of the US capitalist state, both its military and its state apparatus at home.
Whenever this happens it will be up to those who oppose capitalism to overcome our own weaknesses and find the road to building this mass movement into a conscious organized movement to end capitalism and establish a democratic socialist world.
Over the past years tens of millions of people have taken to the streets of the world to protest the conditions in which they are forced to live by the capitalist offensive. These movements have not all been conscious but they have been full of anger and rage. At the same time increased tensions have developed between the major capitalist powers. During the decades of the cold war the world had a certain equilibrium based on the balance between US imperialism and its rival Stalinism. With the end of the Soviet Union this equilibrium began to collapse. With the move of China towards capitalism this also weakened this equilibrium and moved the world not towards more stability but towards more tensions and more instability. The staggering arrogance of US imperialism is that with its massive debt and while at the same time driving down its own working class into poverty it has continued to believe it can still rule the world. It can still have its new world order, it can still have its "full spectrum domination." I could be premature. I remember the many times in my own revolutionary past when I and other Comrades announced that we were at a "turning point," but with the present events around Syria things are definitely looking a little shaky for imperialism's offensive.
I would like to raise two points for consideration. US imperialism has backed itself into a corner over Syria. I believe it has to strike Syria or its credibility and influence in the region will be very significantly weakened. As well as other factors that would result if it did not strike would be that this would increase the likelihood of its proxies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia and others plus the many militias going off half cocked on their own. Maybe Israel bombing Iran. If the vote goes against Obama to strike Syria this will enormously weaken US imperialism's authority over the whole region and increase the tendency of the many regimes and militias in the area to go it alone. Even if Obama wins the vote it will be only by a slim margin and this too will weaken US imperialism in the region.
When looking at the crisis developing in the entire Middle East and the coming apart of the entire region I find it useful to keep in mind Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution. The weak capitalist classes in the entire Middle East were not able to pull together and develop cohesive capitalist nations. Arab capitalism in spite of its tremendous oil wealth was not able to develop a cohesive Arab capitalist state. Imperialism instead cut the area to pieces and installed dictator after dictator to rule the many states it created. This is now coming apart. But because the working class, which was held back by Stalinism and Social Democracy, is not organized for the international socialist revolution, the result looks like being sectarian conflict and the redrawing of the map of the Middle East along sectarian lines. In my opinion only a united revolutionary international movement of the working class throughout the entire region can prevent this.
One way or another US imperialism will be weakened, is being weakened in the present situation. This is strengthening Russian imperialism, and also strengthening the Chinese regime as it drives for increased influence and control in Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. This in turn will increase tensions between China and Japan.
If US imperialism strikes Syria it is hard to say what will happen in any detail. But from what happened in Libya we can have a good idea. That country is in a shambles and oil production has plunged from 1.4 million barrels a day earlier this year to just 160,000 barrels a day at present. Rival militias rule. Strike or no strike I believe that Syria is sliding inevitably into all out prolonged sectarian civil war. And with this a further leap forward in the destabilization of the entire Middle East.
The other point I would like to raise is this. And it gives ground for optimism. There is a tremendous opposition amongst the US masses for any strike at Syria. For the first time in a long time and to an extent not experienced in a long time and also assisted by social media, the US masses are having their say. US politicians are being inundated with emails, and posts demanding they oppose any strike.
For Comrades who read our blog, weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com, you will have seen the recent photo of US cops in full body armor and armed with automatic weapons surrounding unarmed peaceful protesters calling for a $15.00 an hour minimum wage and union rights at a Walmart store. There have been protests and strikes in 60 cities in the US recently for the minimum wage to be doubled to $15.00. There is anger developing in the US on a myriad of issues, health care, jobs, racism, sexism, police brutality, political corruption, climate change, pollution, fracking, attacks on education. These are all issues related to and originating from the offensive of the US capitalist class against its own working class. US imperialism cannot keep on as it is doing, funding its wars and occupations abroad, and allowing its own working class at home to have the living standards it has. It is going after its own working class now in a serious way. We need to remember that when the Occupy Movement emerged it was confronted immediately with cops in full body armor in every city and of course using chemical weapons against the protesters. US imperialism has been preparing to take on its own working class now for decades.
Most US politicians are desperately trying to work a way to vote for bombing Syria. The reason they are having such difficulty is that the US masses have moved very strongly against any strike. Solve the problems at home, spend the money on Detroit, on education on health care, on jobs, not on spending billions on bombing Syria. The mood of the US masses is now against the interests of US imperialism on an issue of very great and international significance. This is a major development. It looks very like we could have arrived at the point where the US masses are saying: we are not prepared to fund US capitalism's wars and occupations abroad when we are being driven into poverty here at home.
Whether this is happening now and will be maintained we will see, But happen it will. It might be now over the issue of bombing Syria. Whenever it happens at some stage the US masses will take to the streets and say enough is enough, spend the trillions on the problems at home and not on defending US corporations' interests abroad. When this happens the world balance of forces will change. This is not to say there will not be great confusion and as well as movements towards revolution as well as movements towards counter revolution in such a process. But what it is to say is that the masses will take to the scene of history in the major capitalist countries such as the US and act to take on the capitalist offensive. The US working class will enter the scene of history with all that this will mean. One affect it will have will be the shock wave it will send through the ranks of the US capitalist state, both its military and its state apparatus at home.
Whenever this happens it will be up to those who oppose capitalism to overcome our own weaknesses and find the road to building this mass movement into a conscious organized movement to end capitalism and establish a democratic socialist world.
Saturday, 7 September 2013
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| The "racist" campaign literature |
by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
You gotta laugh at politics in America. The race for mayor of NYC is heating up. Present mayor, Michael Bloomberg who is owner of Business Week magazine and is described in the media as a “self made”billionaire, has accused one of the candidates hoping to replace him of running a “racist” campaign based on “class warfare.” In an interview with New York Magazine Bloomberg said that Democrat Bill de Blasio’s is "in some ways ... a class-warfare campaign……..class-warfare and racist.”.
What the hell is a “self made” billionaire anyway? Is there a collectively made billionaire? A billionaire by committee? What does “self made” mean? Is there anyone that believes you can accumulate billions of dollars all on your own, working lots of overtime and stashing away savings. But I must let that sidetrack me.
Afscme Local 444, retired
You gotta laugh at politics in America. The race for mayor of NYC is heating up. Present mayor, Michael Bloomberg who is owner of Business Week magazine and is described in the media as a “self made”billionaire, has accused one of the candidates hoping to replace him of running a “racist” campaign based on “class warfare.” In an interview with New York Magazine Bloomberg said that Democrat Bill de Blasio’s is "in some ways ... a class-warfare campaign……..class-warfare and racist.”.
What the hell is a “self made” billionaire anyway? Is there a collectively made billionaire? A billionaire by committee? What does “self made” mean? Is there anyone that believes you can accumulate billions of dollars all on your own, working lots of overtime and stashing away savings. But I must let that sidetrack me.
When asked what is racist about Democrat Bill de Blasio’s campaign, Bloomberg says, according to the Associated Press, "Well, no, no, I mean he's making an appeal using his family to gain support. I think it's pretty obvious to anyone watching what he's been doing. I do not think he himself is racist. It's comparable to me pointing out I'm Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote."
Is Bloomberg Jewish? I’d never have thought it. Bill de Blasio is married to a black woman and apparently his campaign ads have featured his family. Have we ever seen such a thing in American politics, a candidate having their partner, kids and dog on stage with them or in campaign ads with them?
I would say its one of the standard sickening practices we see every election time as these people try to appeal to the conservative elements in society showing that they are “normal” people in a normal god-fearing marriage, a man, a woman, two kids and a dog.
The real issue is not that de Blasio has an interracial family. It’s that he’s striking a bit of a populist tone. He’s not obscuring the fact that there is a class war, that’s the problem. De Blasio has attacked Bloomberg for not doing enough to help the poor and that New York has become “two cities”, one for the rich and one for everyone else. De Blasio is well aware of the mood out there in the aftermath of the Great Recession and is tapping in to the anger and hatred for the rich that lies beneath the surface, but so is Bloomberg which is why he has reacted so strongly. Bloomberg, a coupon clipper, is the 7thrichest man in the US worth about $27 billion. He is as detached from American working class life as Putin is.
He comes to the defense of his coupon clipper colleagues, many of whom live in NYC. But first he attacks the poor in NYC, “By most of the world’s standards, you ain’t poor,” he says reminding us that when compared to most places in the world “…our poor are wealthy.” You see, you don’t have to be bright to be wealthy and won a major magazine.
Bloomberg is quite hurt by de Blasio’s assault on the NY City’s billionaires as they contribute so much to the city in the form of tax revenue. "The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills. The people that would get very badly hurt here if you drive out the very wealthy are the people he professes to try to help," Bloomberg says.
He gets a little madder and reveals to us his real view of the world when he says that “…this city is
 |
| Bloomberg, worth $27 billion |
The fact that poverty and unemployment and all the negative aspects of their so-called free market hits black folks, as a percentage of the population, far worse than most groups, with the exception of Native Americans perhaps, is definitely an issue when a white candidate with a black wife, a multi-racial family, is speaking about how the world actually is, is raising the class divide as Jesse Jackson did in his first presidential campaign before the Democratic Party hacks gave him a good talking to before the national convention. Plus, the Great Recession has hit a lot of people who thought they were safe; pointing fingers at the 1% in this climate is a dangerous game.
De Blasio has been getting a lot of support from the black community according to reports but I’ll wager it is predominantly for his populist rhetoric. Were his wife to take a cue from Bill Cosby and chide black folks for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and going out there and “gettin’ it” as opposed to complaining all the time, there’d be no accusation of racism from Bloomberg then.
I saw a plug for “Crossfire” on TV tonight as I was flipping through channels and it had two Democrats and two Republicans in the plug and it was making the point about issues and differences being discussed. But there is not significant difference between these two parties on the fundamentals. They both agree that workers and the middle class must pay for their crisis and would both oppose a real candidate that made the class war that is forced on us daily an issue. It’s as if there is only a Democratic and republican view of the world.
This support that Occupy initially got and the support that de Blasio is getting is an indication of the mood that exists in society and that a genuine mass party of working people could have significant success in the political arena. The 128 million or so of Americans that didn’t vote in the last election cycle aren’t all asleep, they have simply given up, recognizing correctly that on the basic issues, food, shelter, health care, workplace and civil rights, both parties are against them.
As for Bloomberg threatening that if you attack those “more fortunate” we will have no services or they’ll leave town, our response is that we won’t let you, or we won’t let you with all the money you’ve stolen from those who work and create the wealth in society. His solution to poverty, he says, is to make more rich people.
This support that Occupy initially got and the support that de Blasio is getting is an indication of the mood that exists in society and that a genuine mass party of working people could have significant success in the political arena. The 128 million or so of Americans that didn’t vote in the last election cycle aren’t all asleep, they have simply given up, recognizing correctly that on the basic issues, food, shelter, health care, workplace and civil rights, both parties are against them.
As for Bloomberg threatening that if you attack those “more fortunate” we will have no services or they’ll leave town, our response is that we won’t let you, or we won’t let you with all the money you’ve stolen from those who work and create the wealth in society. His solution to poverty, he says, is to make more rich people.
Every human being deserves a secure and productive life. A society that cannot provide that is not a civilized society. It is not simply the billions they waste on predatory wars and such that we must take and allocate more efficiently in a humane sense, but the personal billions they have stashed away, what they call private money or their “personal” wealth. They never earned that money; it’s a collective product. Michael Bloomberg should be guaranteed a decent and secure life, and most socialists and ordinary workers would agree, just not off the backs of the rest of us. We would guarantee them what they deny us.
Friday, 6 September 2013
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| Which elected official sent these guys along? |
In response to the protests/strikes by WalMart workers and their supporters yesterday, WalMart spokesperson Brooke Buchanan said that the protests were, just, “…another stunt to garner attention, it's the same old cast members trying to get some attention for their cause." The protesters are just a lot of “…union activists and professional protesters - not a lot of Wal-Mart associates,'' Buchanan added.
WalMart has 4600 stores in the US employing 1.3 million workers, many of then part-time workers earning $8 or $9 an hour. With no union therefore very few rights on the job, the fact that any workers walk of the job is a feat of courage in itself. Buchanan’s comments are standard from the 1%’s spokesperson’s---there’s no problems at WalMart, workers are happy, there are merely a few disgruntled folks and outside agitators.
The coalition leading these protests includes community groups, non-profits and the UFCW, are demanding WalMart pays full-time workers $25,000 a year. Organizing one million workers would bring in a huge revenue stream for the UFCW even if these members were low waged workers that’s how the strategists atop organized labor look at it. It’s possible that WalMart might throw a few crumbs on the table in response to these activities which would add some momentum to the movement perhaps. The UFCW leadership, like the entire leadership of organized Labor is not willing to build a real, militant movement to unionize WalMart which would mean involving trucking (deliveries), the community, and other sections of the class that could force through direct action and strikes, WalMart to accept union recognition.
Sometimes though, mobilizations can get out of control of those who initiate them, the mood can be such that the limits put on them by the leadership are discarded and we know there is much anger and discontent beneath the surface of US society that can break the bonds of acceptable behavior at any time.
In fact what motives this short commentary is the picture included. This is how the cops turned up to one of the WalMart workers’ peaceful protests. It is standard these days and part of the beefing up of state security forces where regular cops and SWAT teams are indistinguishable from each other. The use of drones domestically and the massive spying apparatus that Edward Snowden thankfully revealed to us is also part of this increased state security. The bosses were a little shaken up by the Occupy Movement that showed direct action and defiance of the law is a necessary part of the struggle for a decent life. The object is to intimidate workers with these thugs, terrify us in to submission.
The politicians that make the decisions to send these characters to a peaceful protest by workers earning starvation wages, no doubt receive money and support at election time from the heads of organized labor. Meanwhile, the Walton family heirs have as much wealth as 100 million Americans and Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke earned nearly $20 million in 2012, including pay, stock awards and incentives. That works out to about $9,600 an hour. He got another $21.4 million from exercising stock options and vested shares.
But the more astute political representatives of the bankers recognize the explosive and volatile nature of the present period and their increased security measures are a necessary precaution from their point of view. One has to think that there is no way any politician or public figure that has anything to do with sending a force like those in the picture to protect the rights of the WalMart family are anything but enemies of workers and the poor.
The ongoing crisis of capitalism and the declining influence of US capitalism on the world stage will bring more attacks on workers at home as Washington’s imperialist adventures have to be paid for. All the gains won over the last century are to be taken back. As we have explained many times on this blog, the refusal of the labor leaders to fight and the violent nature of the US authorities has delayed the response to this offensive of capital, has held back a movement of the working class that would introduce an offensive of our own to the equation, but the bosses will not stop, driven as they are by the nature of their system. Our offensive will come, it will not be pretty, it will contain much confusion but it will arrive.
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