Bloomberg: de Blasio's campaign racist and class warfare

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.

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 7^thrichest 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

not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it's one group paying for services for the other." We should all be grateful to the Michael Bloomberg, Donald Trumps and Warren Buffets of this word for giving us miserable wretches an existence.

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.

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.

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Obama on Trayvon Martin: The Word and the Deed

by Jack Gerson

Several weeks before the 2008 presidential election, candidate Barack Obama gave a moving speech on the experience of black people in the U.S., their struggle for civil rights, and his personal encounters with racism growing up and living in the U.S. He appeared to be speaking from the heart, a departure from his frequently emotionless demeanor. The speech was widely hailed, and many liberals, left-liberals, and "anti-racist radicals" declared that we'd seen a glimpse of a new and different kind of politician, one whose experiences and heart-felt connection with the downtrodden masses would give substance to his slogan of "change we can believe in".

Then he was elected. And within days of the election, Obama appointed his transition team. Lo and behold, the foreign policy team was dominated by many of the same tired faces that had dominated policy in the Clinton administration -- Zionists, militarists, and Hillary herself.
 
The economic policy transition team featured Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers & Co. (the Goldman Sachs "Democrat" team, as opposed to the Goldman Sachs "Republican" team that takes the field during Bush administrations).  It's worth recalling that in 2008 Obama received several times the funding from Wall Street than did Republican John McCain, and that his liaison to Wall Street was Penny Pritzker of the Chicago Pritzker billionaires (I believe that all but one or two of Chicago's billionaires are named Pritzker). Soon thereafter, Obama appointed Timothy Geithner secretary of treasury -- Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, was a proven and craven servant of big Wall Street finance capital.

In education policy, Obama showed his commitment to "change we can believe in" by appointing as secretary of education Arne Duncan, then-CEO of the Chicago Public Schools who was the point person for the corporate assault on public education in Chicago (Duncan had closed many schools, grossly expanded charter schools, promoted high stakes test-based accountability, engaged in blatant victimization and harassment of veteran teachers as well as other forms of union-busting, grossly expanded outsourcing to private contractors while downsizing public schools, etc.).

We all know what followed: gross handouts of trillions to the banks ("They got bailed out; we got sold out") coupled with calls for "shared sacrifice"; moving the locus of war from devastated Iraq to Afghanistan (and then escalating the war there with "the surge"); a national Obama / Duncan education policy that actually deepens the damage done under Bush, advocating more charter schools, more test-based accountability, turning the development of national education standards over to the publishing and education conglomerate Pearson (whose chief education officer is one Sir Michael Barber, the "Speaking Clock" who was in charge of shutting down British schools in Tony Blair's first term and of pushing austerity across public sector programs in Blair's second term), and compelling states to compete with one another for federal funding. Not to mention expanding "Homeland Security" surveillance and harassment; rolling over to the big energy companies; etc. The victimization of black and brown youth -- and especially young black men -- has if anything increased.  (one example: last month Philadelphia announced over 3,000 layoffs of school employees in addition to closing 23 schools, citing as cause a $300 million deficit. A few days later, work began on the construction of a $400 million prison just north of Philadelphia).

Downsizing and privatization of public education. Punitive measures against students, teachers, and schools in the lowest-income communities (that's what high stakes test-based accountability enforced by school closures does). Increased surveillance and harassment. Austerity cuts to essential public programs in cities, counties, and states across the country. Continued and escalating police harassment in the black and brown working class communities (here in Oakland, unarmed black teenager Alan Bluford was murdered by Oakland cops right outside his home; unarmed young black man Raheim Brown was murdered by Oakland school police in a high school parking lot; unarmed young black man Oscar Grant was murdered by BART police while handcuffed and lying face down; etc.) Criminalization of young black men (in Washington DC, for example, three out of every four young black men under age 25 is or will be in the penal system). These are the conditions that breed the climate under which Trayvon Martin was executed by George Zimmerman. Conditions that cry out that it's open season on young black men in the U.S.

Now, in the context of the wave of indignation, anger, and revulsion at the freeing of Trayvon Martin's murderer, Obama has once again given a moving speech that draws on his personal experiences with racism in the U.S. What he says may well be heartfelt. It's important to recognize that. But what he says is intended to corral and confine sentiments within safe channels. We are guaranteed to hear more about the need for us to all pull together, but the goal will be to pull together for austerity (he will say, as he always does, "shared sacrifice"). And he will no more deliver on any aspirations raised than he did in the aftermath of that moving speech he gave in the fall of 2008.

Obama is not Bush. He is Obama. An extremely intelligent and formidable man, but a loyal servant of capital.

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Obama budget: Welfare capitalism – it’s just great!

by Michael Roberts

President Obama’s administration announced its proposed budget for the year beginning October 2014.  The US Congress is paralysed between a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a Democrat majority in the Senate.  So the Obama budget won’t get through in its present form.  Nevertheless, that is not a lot to choose between the two parties on their objectives for the budget and public sector spending for next year and onwards.  Both sides agree that governments deficits are too large and public sector debt levels must be reined in.  The difference is that the Republicans want no tax increases to do it, while the Democrats want some.  But both agree that welfare spending is ‘too high’.  So just as in the UK with the Conservative-led coalition, Obama proposes sweeping reductions in real federal spending on the poor, unemployed, the sick and the old.

One of the most pernicious measures proposed is to change the inflation index used to increase state social security pensions and welfare payments.  I have commented on the iniquity of this before (see http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/the-fiscal-cliff-okuns-law-and-the-long-depression/).  The impact of using the so-called ‘chained CPI’  to index pensions will be to reduce annual increases in pensions and tax thresholds by 5% over 12 years, hitting living standards for average American households six times more than the rich. Over a course of an average retirement, future pensions would be reduced by 10%.  Of course, it is even worse with the Republican proposals for the budget,which combine tax cuts for the better-off with a huge reduction in federal spending, by half in cash terms and by 20% of GDP by 2023.

But apparently there is no alternative as the US economy cannot afford decent pensions that people have paid into through social security contributions over their working lives and/or proper federal public services and Medicare etc.  We cannot afford them, even at their current meagre levels, because we are all getting older and living longer and the workforce as a share of the total population is shrinking, even if it was fully employed (which we know it is not).  So there is no way around either reduced pensions, or higher contributions or a longer period staying at work, or all three.  Across the major capitalist economies, pension and welfare ‘reform’ is the order of the day and on the agenda of every government, whether ‘centre-left’ or ‘centre-right’.

But is it unaffordable?  Well I wrote about this issue in an earlier post (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/the-pensions-myth-part-one/) and tried to show that if economies just raised their long-term annual output growth just a little, even just 1% a year more, the ‘problem’ would disappear. Recently, John Cochrane, a leading neoclassical mainstream economist and backer of the Republicans, came out with the same point (http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/fun-debt-graphs.html). As he put it: “Suppose growth is 1% and then 2% greater than the CBO (budget office) projects. What effect does that have? To keep it very simple, I assume that spending stays the same, and revenue stays the same fraction of GDP. Thus, I just divide spending/GDP by a 1% and then 2% growth rate (e^(0.01 t)) and we have the new spending as a fraction of the larger GDP. ” His graph repeated below shows that government spending (without ‘reform’) as a percentage of GDP falls from an expected 45% in 30 years time to below where it is currently (23%) if US real economic growth is just 2% pts a year faster than currently projected over the long term.  And the budget deficit (the difference between spending and revenues) would also be insignificant.

So just an increase in the US projected growth rate from 2.5% a year over the next 30 years to 4.5% a year would allow the Federal government to sustain current pensions and welfare spending without changing spending or taxation revenues as a share of GDP at all.

But of course, such a long-term growth rate in any of the major capitalist economies is a pipe-dream.  Long-term trend real GDP growth has steadily declined over the last 50 years and is likely to continue to do so over the foreseeable future (see my post, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/crisis-or-breakdown/).  In reality, the global capitalist economy is in a Long Depression, or as the FT put it, “stuck in a rut, unable to sustain a decent recovery and susceptible to a sudden stall”.  At least that is the estimate of the latest Brookings Institution-Financial Times Tiger (Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery) as it is called.  The world economy is sluggish with the advanced economies flat-lining and the emerging capitalist economies growing below trend compared to before the Great Recession (see graph below).

This estimate was repeated by Christine Lagarde of the IMF at a business economists meeting last week.  She said “We do not expect global growth to be much higher this year than last. We are seeing new risks as well as old risks….In far too many countries, improvements in financial markets have not translated into improvements in the real economy.”  This story is confirmed by another index of global economic activity complied by Bank America.  Their Globalcycle indicator which tracks business conditions in economies covering 80% of the world GDP suggested that the world economy was growing at about 3.5% a year but is beginning to ‘soften’ and go ‘below-trend’ in 2013 to 3.2% a year.  And remember this includes China and all the faster large economies.  And the World Trade Organisation also reported that world trade growth fell to 2.0% in 2012 — down from 5.2% in 2011 — and is expected to remain ‘sluggish’ in 2013 at around 3.3%. “The events of 2012 should serve as a reminder that the structural flaws in economies that were revealed by the economic crisis have not been fully addressed, despite important progress in some areas. Repairing these fissures needs to be the priority for 2013,” Director-General Pascal Lamy said.  So the chances of getting sufficient growth out of these economies to enable governments to protect pensions and living standards (even if they wanted to) are non-existent.

Of course, the likes of Paul Ryan in the US or the Conservatives in Britain would not improve pensions, welfare or Medicare anyway.  They would always argue that there was not enough money or resources to do so.  And it would be best for the poor, vulnerable and sick to have an ‘incentive’ to work by reducing their benefits or pensions.  That contrasts with the view that the best way to incentivise the rich is to reduce their taxes, raise their bonuses and stop trying to ‘regulate’ them.

So the myth of the social security ‘scroungers’ is perpetuated and promoted on both sides of the Atlantic pond.   I dealt with this issue in the UK context in a recent post (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/who-are-behind-the-blinds-george/).  But the New Economics Foundation has just released an excellent paper exposing the fallacies and lies perpetrated by the British government in its drive to persuade people that there are too many ‘shirkers and scroungers ‘living off the rest of us’ and unwilling to work (Strivers_vs._skivers_online).
As the authors of the paper put, the lies are :“There are two distinct groups of people, one good and one bad; individuals choose to be in one group or the other. ‘Strivers’ work hard and put money into the economy while ‘skivers’ are just lay-abouts who take money out. Claiming benefits traps people in dependency, which is a social evil, passed from one generation to the next. People not in paid work contribute nothing of value to society.”

In reality, people slip between employment and unemployment, often within the space of a few months, as the economy relies increasingly on short-term, low pay, insecure contracts. This happens even more in areas where the economy is especially weak.  The vast majority of those who are not in paid employment are unable to work because they are disabled or have caring responsibilities, or because there are no jobs available. Even in the best of times, it is harder for disabled people and carers to find suitable employment.  A far greater proportion of social expenditure is spent on people in paid work, through working tax credits, than is spent on the fit and able-bodied unemployed. Only 2.6 per cent is actually spent on the able-bodied unemployed (see graph).


For the first time ever in the UK, in-work poverty has overtaken workless poverty, with 6.1 million people in working households living in poverty. Instead of tackling the problem of low income, the government is subsidising employers offering poor quality employment through working tax credits. Taxpayers are picking up the bill by topping up wages so that paid workers can feed and house themselves and their families.  The vast majority of people claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance do not claim over the long-term. Less than half claim for more than 13 weeks and only 10 per cent of all claimants claim for more than a year.  And a great many people who are not in paid employment do valuable unpaid work, caring for others, bringing up children and looking after their families, homes and neighbourhoods.  The formal economy would grind to a halt without it. Even if time spent on child care and housework were paid no more than the minimum wage, it would still be worth the equivalent of 20 per cent of GDP. Many people are not in paid work because they have prior responsibilities that involve unpaid labour. These so-called ‘skivers’ contribute a great deal more than nothing for the something they receive.

So there it is.  Reduced pensions, reduced public services, reduced welfare and health services – because capitalism cannot afford them.

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Obama woos Democratic bigwigs, offers to cut social security benefits

Happy after lunch with the billionaires in SF

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

So President Obama was here in San Francisco this week meeting with his constituents, not the vast majority of people who vote for him, but the people who bankroll the party that represents their interests and that Obama leads.

He had two do’s Wednesday night, one at Tom Steyer’s house where 100 people turned up to hand over cash for the party and the other at the house of another billionaire, Gordon Getty.  Steyer is a coupon clipper worth $1.4 billion according to Forbes.com. Getty, worth $2 billion, has his money by virtue of being the product of a union between two folks one of them the oil magnate J Paul Getty.

Steyer is looking to get in to Democratic Party politics more actively and has been suggested as a candidate for governor.  The two events raised more than $3 million and part of this drive is to get more Democrats in to the House and Nancy Pelosi returned as speaker. Pelosi, from an established eastern bourgeois family is the poor one in the crowd worth anywhere from $26 to $58 million.  Like all of them though, Pelosi’s wealth comes from investments, real estate, stuff like that.

It might have been a bit tense at the Steyer’s as Tom is a “…vociferous opponent of the Keystone Pipeline..”,  according to the media.  But Steyer won’t make too much fuss over that.  With his eyes on political prizes, making an issue of the pipeline, by pointing out Obama’s hedging the issue, would not be useful.  Like a lot of billionaires, Steyer likes to dabble in areas that are of concern to millions of people but not seriously; at 55 he has high hopes of playing a major role in the Democratic Party in the period ahead. “He (Obama) is doing everything he can on the issues that we care about.”, he is quoted in the media as saying, “He has political limitations ----so we really have an obligation to help him.”

Obama was not shy on climate change but never mentioned the Keystone Pipeline, he is among friends with the billionaires that finance the Democratic Party and wants unity.  He pointed out that  the issue of the temperature of the planet is not the main concern of most workers, workers main concern is “How do I feed my family” “The politics of this are tough.” Obama said. They are indeed, and keeping people in a state of debt bondage and in everlasting insecurity is one sure way of keeping people’s attention focused on the immediate, necessities food, shelter, health.  His billionaire backers gave him the “most enthusiastic applause” when he pointed out the gains that have been made in LGBT rights.

This should come as no surprise, such advances in no way threaten the interests of the people he is talking to, the class whose interests the Democratic party represents.  This is not to say this is not an important issue to those who are denied rights the rest of us have due to their sexual orientation, it is.  But we have to clearly see that this and other issues are used by the parties to avoid the most important issues for all people regardless of their race, religion, sexual orientation etc. and that is food, shelter, education, a job (including for the immigrant population) instead of prison, health care, homelessness.

It is comical to hear politicians and supporters of the other party of the 1% harangue Obama for being, “On billionaire’s row” as a Republican Party ad did. The Republican Party is funded by the same class that funds the Democrats. After the two SF billionaires, Obama headed over to the Peninsula to meet with another coupon clipper that loves the environment, investor Mark Heising. He topped it off with lunch with Levi Strauss heir, John Goldman, and his wife Marcia. Goldman is a “philanthropist” apparently. For billionaires this means giving away other people’s money.  You don’t have too look far to see on whose backs Goldman’s wealth was made.

More often than not I have gotten in to some hot water with friends who vote Democratic because they are forced because they vote for this party to defend it.  Actually, they shy away from defending it because it’s impossible to defend it without admitting it is hostile to workers’ interests and defends the interests of the 1% ; so they simply omit the party at all when they’re voicing opposition to the capitalist offensive.  It is always the Republicans that are blamed for the offensive, for cuts in social services, wages, benefits etc. 

This morning (I started this yesterday) I see that Obama has opened the door to cutting social security benefits if Republicans will agree to higher taxes.  This horse trading is done under the cloak of shared sacrifice, us and Warren Buffet joining forces to save capitalism from the abyss.  The White House assures us that, "This isn't about political horse trading……it's about reducing the deficit in a balanced way that economists say is best for the economy and job creation."

How nice of them.  Their economic gurus limited to a perspective based entirely on capitalist economics want what’s best for the economy, for their economic interests that is.  Their interest in jobs, or setting the Labor process in motion is only if they control it and reap the benefits of it in the form of profits.

“He who pays the piper names the tune” as the old adage goes. The Democratic Party heavyweights Obama spent the last few days with are not the friends of workers and the middle class. We won’t be hearing loud protests from them on the reducing of social security benefits which Obama is offering to do by reducing the program's cost of living increases. They talked about that with him this week in private and gave him the OK   Our youth who are being driven deeper in to poverty, prison or the streets will not be dragged from the morass by these people.  But it is also not about Obama as an individual.

A political party does not exist in a vacuum, it represents forces in society, it is financed by those same forces, inextricably linked to them and the Democratic Party, like its counterpart across what they call “the aisle” is a party of the capitalist class.  The assault on workers and our living standards has continued under Democratic and Republican alike, the difference is a matter of degrees.

The 138 million or so eligible voters that opted out of the last election are not simply apathetic as many liberals claim. They have drawn the correct conclusion that neither party represents their interests.

Workers can only rely on our own strength, rely on it here and by linking with workers throughout the world under attack by the same forces. There is no way out relying on the generosity of billionaires, even the trendy ones.  Building a united mass movement in our workplaces, streets and communities using direct action tactics is what will bring results; is what can drive the austerity agenda back and build an offensive of our own against capital.  An independent political alternative arising out of such a movement is the answer to the betrayals and dead end of the Democrats.

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