the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 8, 2007
"Street Salivates Over VEBA Cash Pile"–this was the headline in the September 28th Wall Street Journal. The same high finance that helped create the "mortgage crisis’ mess is looking for new money to pounce on.
The new GM VEBA may be it. In the words of one Wall Street analyst quoted by the Journal, the GM VEBA gives money managers the potential for "new, large pools of money."
In theory, the VEBA health care trust is to be used to pay for medical care for retirees–for the next 80 years, according to Ron Gettelfinger, UAW president.
In reality, the money will go into a large fund, which will be managed by people whose principal goal is to make more money for themselves, for their brokerage house or investment bank–and for those who invest in the brokerages and the banks. And how do they make that money? According to the Journal, "consultants and money managers usually get apercentage of assets and, in some cases, of profits." Notice–"of assets," meaning right up front, off the top, they take some of the money in the VEBA.
It wasn’t so long ago that these same "money managers’ were speculating in houses, condominiums and real estate. They drove up prices so rapidly that ordinary working people were being priced out of the market. So, clever "money managers’ devised new types of mortgages and financial instruments based on those mortgages–so housing could be sold at inflated prices.
A few years down the road, when these slick new mortgages suddenly produced astronomically higher payments, default followed default. That produced a glut of houses on the market, pushing down prices and owner equity, and that only produced more defaults, etc.
Some of these very clever "money managers’ got caught in the middle of their own scam. Brokerages and investments houses have been declaring one loss after another.
These are the people whose "expertise" will now be used to protect retiree medical care for the "next 80 years"!
Protection? NO, it’s only one more slick financial deal, the main importance of which is that NOTHING is guaranteed. No medical insurance, no medical coverage. NOTHING. It can all disappear in another one of the financial crises that Wall Street has regularly been producing every few years or so over the last 35 years.
This VEBA, if it were to pass, would be the end of the line for guaranteed retiree benefits–not just in auto, but in every industry, every job. Over the years, one industry after another has already suppressed those benefits–sometimes for new hires, sometimes for current workers too. By 2003, only one company in five offered such benefits–only half as many as ten years earlier. And in the years since, the situation has only gotten worse.
Workers at the Big 3 auto companies were among those who still kept guaranteed benefits. If their benefits collapse into this VEBA which guarantees nothing, it will mark the end of a whole era. For more than half a century, the unionized parts of the working class were relatively protected in retirement. And those protections were extended much more broadly to other parts of the working class, in the bosses’ attempt to maintain labor peace.
If this new contract is finally imposed not only at GM, but also at Chrysler and Ford, it will really mark the beginning of the end. Whoever else retains protections will face a new attack almost immediately.
Those benefits were never given to workers. They were won through fights–bitter, tough, ferocious fights. Those benefits will be protected or won back in the very same way–at GM, or at Chrysler, or at Ford, or at any other workplace.
Workers who want the benefits their labor entitles them to won’t get them by begging, only by fighting for them.
Oct 8, 2007
On September 23, twenty-seven thousand Egyptians struck the publicly-owned Ghazi al-Mahalla company. The factory is an industrial city in the Nile Delta, 60 miles north of Cairo.
Last December, thousands of these textile workers had gone on strike for several days demanding bonuses from the large profits the company had declared. The strike ended only after the Egyptian government promised to pay each worker a month and a half in wages.
But management squirmed out of what it promised, and the problems of the Ghazi al-Mahalla workers continued. Their wages are extremely low, about 200 to 250 Egyptian pounds a month, while the cheapest apartments in the city cost 300 pounds a month. Even with the bonus, wages don’t begin to cover expenses.
To calm the workers down, two government officials promised profit-sharing equal to 150 days of wages. But when management stalled on the payout, giving workers only part of what was promised, thousands decided to strike. They occupied the factory, some children joining their mothers on strike. Some children had already been sent home from the school because parents have to pay school fees, money they didn’t have.
The police arrested some strikers, with the excuse that they were “interrupting production and inciting disorder.” To help out, management declared the factory on vacation so that the workers’ occupation was illegal.
But one striker arrested with several others the day after the strike began told a journalist that workers felt betrayed by all the unfulfilled promises. The workers continue to demand the 150 days’ bonus. In addition, they want the bonus to become part of their base wage so they will no longer be paid piece-rate. And they want a housing bonus and a minimum wage that takes into account the high prices they face. They are also asking payment for their transit fares and for decent medical care.
Some workers even want real workers’ elections that would allow them to replace the official union leaders who are in management’s pockets. The workers have also denounced the government’s stance.
Other Egyptian workers have expressed solidarity with the strikers. One was in another textile factory, Kafr al-Dawar. Some workers sat in at some flour mills in Cairo over the same issues. Some railroad workers made similar demands.
European financial interests that profit off low-wage textile production in the Nile Delta, thanks to Mubarak’s government, and the parasites feeding off the labor of millions of Egyptian workers should be a little worried....
An Egyptian union militant, Kamal Abbas, was just sentenced to a year in prison for the publication of an article challenging a candidate of Mubarak’s party.
The CTUWS (Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services) that he leads had already been closed down after the strike wave of December 2006. When Egyptian workers mobilize to make demands, the government seeks to silence those who represent the possibilities for workers to be organized.
The CTUWS announced that it will appeal this sentence, which is, of course, against freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Oct 8, 2007
The United Nations recently voted a declaration recognizing the rights of “Indigenous People” to “be autonomous, to not suffer forced assimilation or the destruction of their culture.”
Those who are today called “Indigenous People,” not so long ago were derogatorily called “savages.” They include the Inuits or Eskimos living in the Arctic, the Papuans of New Guinea and the Aborigines of Australia. They have all managed to survive contact with the colonizers, more or less conserving traces of their ancestral way of life.
The survival of their culture and simply the survival of these few people is due especially to the fact that they occupy or have been confined to territories that for a long time were unexploitable by the colonizers: too hot, too cold or too dry. But, there are few living traces left of “indigenous people” elsewhere–those who lived in the Caribbean before the arrival of the colonizers, for example, or most of the Native Americans who once peopled North America.
Today, the so-called civilized nations, to ease their guilty consciences, create museums to display the cultures of those disappeared people. Today, they call them “human beings”; yesterday they hunted them like animals, herding together the survivors.
Today, they issue purely verbal declarations, like this one by the U.N. But, even so, the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand voted against this resolution, as formal as it was. If oil or uranium were to be discovered on territory allotted to “indigenous people,” it might create a problem!
In a society based on the search for capitalist profit, “civilization” means all too often only expropriation and despoilment, when it should mean the free and unconstrained offer of access to education, culture and medical care.
Oct 8, 2007
Burma, like many other ex-colonies, has been submitted to a regular fleecing by the big imperialist corporations even after getting independence. The companies are happy to get along with the military dictatorship since it permits them to pillage the natural resources of the country and to profit from very cheap manpower. In fact, revenues tied to heroin sales and foreign currency paid by capitalist corporations prop up the regime while enriching the soldiers in power and financing arms purchases for the repressive forces.
Foreign investments are concentrated in two sectors: exploitation of natural resources (gas, oil, copper, gold, precious stones and teak) and tourism. One of the biggest investors in Burma is Chevron, the number two oil company in the U.S. Its oil pipeline in Burma was built by thousands of villagers forced to work by the army at gun point, while 30,000 people were tossed out of their villages. Chevron’s partner in this oil development is the French oil company Total. All the main imperialist powers are in on the action, including many British companies (the former colonial power in Burma), as well as Japanese and Canadian companies.
In recent years, foreign investments in Burma have gone down, in part because of campaigns led by humanitarian organizations. The British Premier Oil withdrew from Burma, as did Accor, KookaV, Reebok and others. But above all, these investments simply became more disguised, with capital flowing in from dummy companies based in Singapore or other tax havens.
Oct 8, 2007
On September 27, in Burma (or as it’s called, Myanmar), the generals in power moved to crush the protest movement that had been growing steadily over several weeks. The army opened fire on demonstrations and broke them up. Demonstrators were beaten, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, were arrested; many were killed. The government cut the country off from the rest of the world, breaking telephone and Internet connections.
This repression put an end to the protests that were triggered on August 15, after the military rulers raised prices sharply on petroleum products. They increased the price of gas by 66%, doubled the price of diesel fuel, and hiked butane by 535%. What followed were big increases in public transit fares and the cost of living. These price increases fell heavily on the population, the vast majority of whom live in dire poverty.
The military rulers tried to stop the demonstrations, at first unsuccessfully. The protests grew, moving from protests against price hikes to a call for democracy. Buddhist monks, who constitute a political and moral force, and who lead a privileged life compared to others in Burma, went into the streets in greater and greater numbers. This protest was a blow to a regime which had been supported by the monks.
The military, which took power in a 1962 coup, have imposed a ferocious dictatorship. The generals savagely repressed the official opposition, whose leaders until this day are imprisoned or under house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi, spokeswoman of the National League for Democracy, is a famous example. The generals have also repressed ethnic minorities, like the Karen and the Mon people. In 1988, a popular uprising against the high cost of living was put down with many thousands killed.
Today, the army has 400,000 men in a country of 42 million people. It absorbs 35% of the state budget. Meanwhile, the part of the budget for health care is less than one%.
On September 27, when the regime again turned to repression, the big powers and the U.N. made mild protests. They threw responsibility for the support of the dictatorship on China! They conveniently ignored the 40 years during which their international corporations reaped high profits under these same generals. Now that the opposition was dispersed by force, the imperialist powers call for a settlement of the conflict and demand that the generals show “restraint” in the repression. In other words, crack heads, but do it nicely!
No doubt, the Burmese dictatorship is murderous. But the imperialist powers, which share responsibility for these massacres, care nothing about that–so long as business continues as usual.
Oct 8, 2007
Simi Valley’s mayor and city council have attacked a church offering sanctuary to an immigrant trying to keep her family together.
The United Church of Christ in the California town has been protecting a woman known only as Liliana. Liliana’s husband and three children are all U.S. citizens, but her application for an immigrant visa was denied.
After the church took Liliana in, a right-wing group called “Save Our State” held a protest that drew 120 protesters and counter protesters to the church last month. According to news reports, an anti-immigrant protester sprayed an immigrant-rights activist in the face with a chemical agent.
Did the city go after the aggressors who had caused this violence? No–after the protest, the city presented the CHURCH with a bill for $40,000, to cover the cost of the police presence at the protest!
The city council must have heard from lawyers who told them they’d be crazy to try collecting on the bill, because they decided to set it aside. But even so, the mayor continues to say the church has a “moral obligation” to pay, since it is “harboring an illegal immigrant.”
The city continued looking for ways to harass the church. The mayor wrote a letter to the Homeland Security department–and then flew to Washington, D.C. on the taxpayers’ dime, to meet with officials to get this woman deported.
A number of small towns across the country passed anti-immigrant laws last year. Simi Valley is yet another group of local officials trying to appeal to the most disgusting, reactionary part of their populations, with political grandstanding meant to get them publicity. Even if they end up pulling back, they help to stigmatize and attack a victimized population.
The people who should be sanctioned are not the woman–or many millions more like her–just trying to survive. Nor those in this country who would support them.
Those who deserve to be condemned are the virulent racists and do-nothing fools who work to divide the laboring people of this country.
Oct 8, 2007
Ford is well under way with its own copy of GM’s tricky script. The day after the GM-UAW contract settlement was announced, newspaper articles read, “Ford is in worse financial shape,” and “Ford may seek deeper cuts.”
Ford has been pretending financial trouble even though it has nearly 40 billion dollars in ready cash. Actually Ford Motor Co. has much more money than that. It’s just in other places. The company makes the money, and then they take it out.
For instance, depending on which of Ford’s various press releases one reads, in 2000 Ford Motor Company paid out a special dividend of somewhere between 10 and 20 billion dollars in cash and stock to the Ford family and other major stockholders.
Ford in trouble? It has no trouble putting its private fleet of jets at the disposal of CEO Alan Mulally and his family and friends. It has no trouble paying Mulally 39.1 million dollars in cash, stock and perks for four months of work in 2006.
Judge people by their actions–not their words.
Oct 8, 2007
“While the Devil will be in the detail, our first reaction is that GM captured a much broader set of concessions than we previously anticipated.” That’s what an analyst for JP Morgan, the big Wall Street bank, said about the auto contract.
The Devil IS in the detail–and here’s the detail.
New workers on “certain” jobs will be hired in with a wage that is less than half what current workers make, and they will never catch up. Which jobs? Anything from material handling to machining to sub-assembly to inspection to truck driver to the infamous “others”–to be specified later. These new workers will never get a pension, never get medical care at retirement, never get full medical coverage. How many low-wage jobs? Apparently at least 20,000 out of 70,000.
Other workers will be hired in as “long-term” temporaries, making a little more money, with very few benefits, liable to be fired at will. How many? There are no limitations on the number of temps GM can use.
Finally, still other jobs will be outsourced to companies paying still lower wages. Despite public pledges made about “no outsourcing,” “job security,” and “no plant closings,” there are lists of jobs to be outsourced and plants to be closed–buried away deep in the part of the agreement most workers never see, many of them skilled trades jobs.
This is the shape of things to come in auto, and not just auto, but every other industry in the country. Workers are being asked to sell out their children, leaving them no jobs except ones paying only half as much money.
Sell out your children? That’s not all. Sell out your parents too, since this contract–with its so-called VEBA–rips retiree medical care to shreds. Despite promises given to retirees that they would have the same level of medical care “for life,” the new contract specifies that the trustees of the plan can raise premiums for retirees, decrease coverage, and/or require active workers to contribute more to the plan–any time after January 1, 2012.
And the plan was short-funded, getting, as the UAW itself admitted, only 58% of the money needed to continue medical coverage at its current level. And 58% as much money means only 58% as much medical care.
Sell out your kids, sell out your elders–and sell out yourselves. Because this contract has provisions to drive current workers out. The somewhat easier jobs that older workers once took to get off the line are the ones to be outsourced or paid at half wages–every single one of them. Workers who are laid off can be forced, after a while, to move anywhere in the whole country to keep their jobs. There’s a new discipline system for attendance set up for one purpose: to fire workers.
This–with many more such “details”–is what GM workers are being asked to ratify.
Will they do it? Despite all the company propaganda in the media, there certainly aren’t a lot of workers fooled into thinking it’s a good deal. In the plants, there’s heavy unease–and not just at GM, but at Ford and Chrysler.
The question now is whether that unease gets expressed. In a massive company that spreads across the country, it may be difficult for workers to let each other know what they think and what they are ready to do. Difficult, but not impossible.
In fact, there is a simple way for workers who oppose this contract to let others know: Vote NO! Turn out, vote and verify that the votes are counted accurately.
Voting won’t be enough to stop this drive for concessions, which spreads across all industries, aimed at every worker. But voting NO can let other workers know they aren’t alone. That can be the beginning of a backlash by the workers–by GM workers, other auto workers, workers at many other companies.
The auto contract is a warning about what Big Business is planning, the next attacks on the whole working class. The attacks won’t stop until workers make them stop. And for that to happen, someone has to take the first step. Why not GM workers? Why not Chrysler workers? Why not Ford?
Oct 8, 2007
Will GM and Ford and Chrysler go overseas? Sure, they have. But, as is true everywhere, auto companies go overseas to build cars for the markets in those countries. Ford builds cars in Brazil, for the Brazilian market. In China, for the Chinese market. And those markets are small. Plus, as the Wall Street Journal said on July 31, “Overseas profit margins tend to be razor thin, despite low production costs.”
The fact is that the biggest, most profitable market for vehicle sales, is in the United States. Why have Japanese companies come here? Why are German companies building plants here? Because here is where the money is.
Are companies like General Motors so foolish as to turn their back on a market of 16 million vehicles per year for up to 10 or 15 thousand dollars in profits each? Not unless they are suicidal–or lying to us about it.
We vote for the latter.
Oct 8, 2007
One worker at the Ford Rouge Truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan, said in response to this UAW GM contract: “They have always tried to divide us. White against Black. Men against women. Old against young. Now they are doing it with two tier.”
He is right. When you agree to let companies like GM bring in workers and pay them half of your wages, with no pension, and with measly health care benefits–you can be sure these lower paid workers aren’t going to be so keen on defending your health care, or your wages, next time around.
That’s what workers at Delphi found out. In 2003, top UAW leaders told Delphi workers that this kind of low two-tier deal would eventually help new workers to catch up.
Now we see what a lie that was. This year’s UAW Delphi contract brings the higher paid workers DOWN. And the next one would go further.
Solidarity doesn’t mean a thing if it isn’t solidarity of all workers, no exceptions.
Oct 8, 2007
The UAW agreed to a VEBA with Caterpillar in 1998, under which the company agreed to fund a health care trust.
This fund ran out in six years! Said one Caterpillar retiree, “God, did we get stuck ... Initially the VEBA worked OK, but it just got eaten up by the astronomical rise in medical insurance.”
This same worker said “I wouldn’t want anybody to go through what we’ve gone through.”
Nor would any GM worker want to go through it–if they only knew!
Oct 8, 2007
The UAW tells its retirees that “Even if GM were to someday file for bankruptcy, the money in the VEBA would be secure.” Secure? How about the GM stock that the UAW intends to stuff the VEBA fund with? How secure would GM stock be in a GM bankruptcy? How secure would the unsecured 4.4 billion dollar “convertible note” that GM intends to give be?
This fund is so loaded with GM promises to pay that the UAW and GM will have to petition for a federal court exemption from the 10% rule. This rule prohibits any retirees’ fund from holding more than 10% of the retirees’ own company’s stock, bonds, notes or other holdings. But the VEBA agreement with GM shows that perhaps as much as 20 could be in GM securities.
If the UAW were truly worried about a GM bankruptcy, would it take all this potentially worthless GM paper?
Talk of a future bankruptcy is only a way to let GM dump its responsibilities for medical care today.
Oct 8, 2007
There’s a new, very harsh attendance program.
Doctors’ notes are no longer acceptable excuses for being absent!
Under the new rules, it’s possible that a worker could have six different occurrences in eighteen months, with a total of eleven missed days and be fired.
The new program chains every worker to the job, then fires them easily when wear and tear begins to take its toll on their bodies.
So the new hires won’t have a regular pension or health care? No matter. The attendance program assures that no one will make it to retirement anyway!
Oct 8, 2007
The GM Highlights claim the new VEBA health insurance fund for retirees “will remain solvent for decades” and will “protect your retiree medical benefits–at current levels.” UAW President Gettelfinger actually said the fund is good for “80 years.”
Read the small print in the VEBA Memorandum of Understanding. The fund is guaranteed only until January 1, 2012. Section 17(c) reads, “The Committee (the VEBA trustees) will be required to maintain benefit levels ... until January 1, 2012.” That’s only four years and three months from now!
Oct 8, 2007
The UAW tells its members that their “cost-of-living protections formula is maintained.” The formula may be maintained, but a lot of the money never hits the paycheck.
Ten cents per hour in the first pay quarter, twenty cents per hour in the second, thirty cents per hour in the third, and so on through 15 pay quarters of the contract, are deducted to go to the health-care funds.
By the end of the contract, workers will be losing $1.50 per hour in COLA, giving it back to GM to help cover GM’s previous obligations. In the final year of the contract, workers will give back more than $3000; in the whole contract, more than $6000 total.
Oct 8, 2007
On the very same day the UAW and Chrysler announced they were resuming contract talks, Chrysler announced a whole series of plant shut-downs in Michigan and Illinois. Workers in some plants were told the vote could come when the plant is down.
How convenient, if Chrysler workers aren’t at work, it will be harder to put their hands on anything more than the Highlights? How can they find out what’s hidden? Why not go to Ford next–which was working?
Scheduling a vote when no one knows anything is hardly democratic. Sometimes those who violate democratic principles find that maneuvers backfire.
Oct 8, 2007
To be able to read sections of the actual UAW GM contract which provide information not in the Highlights, you can go online to www.soldiersofsolidarity.com or www.factoryrat.com or www.futureoftheunion.com
Oct 8, 2007
A large headline in the GM Highlights proclaims, “Skilled Trades Protections Strengthened.”
Exactly the opposite! No overtime pay for Saturday and Sunday work–is that what they call “strengthening”? Eliminating ten or more types of work for trades and contracting it out–is that “strengthening”?
Ten work “elements” to be “exited”–that is contracted out–are listed in the Letter of September 25, including building construction, painting and glazing, carpentry, building maintenance, specialty maintenance, certified welder maintenance, voltage electrical distribution, building mechanical, building electrical, and crane hoist repair and inspection.
Strengthening? No way! They want to further collapse skilled trades into as few classifications as possible, increasing work loads on each tradesperson far past the limits of training and safety.
The only one “protected’ is GM.
Oct 8, 2007
The UAW claims the new contract “protects UAW jobs.”
But at what wages?
In fact, this contract has exactly the same language as the last nine auto contracts. And under those nine GM, Ford and Chrysler contracts 547,000 jobs were lost. Only 178,000 were protected.
The only thing guaranteed in this contract is the loss of 11 plants–eight by closure, three by sale or closure.
The contract also claims to have a “moratorium on outsourcing.” But in fact, the real promise to keep jobs is to keep those paying half as much money–more than 20,000 of them.
Oct 8, 2007
The FAA just hired United’s old VP of Operations as its new Chief Operating Officer. The FAA is run by the same people as the companies. No wonder air traffic is so messed up.
Oct 8, 2007
On August 16, two planes at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) came within 37 feet of crashing into each other. An air traffic controller mistakenly cleared a WestJet Boeing 737 to taxi across a runway where a Northwest Airlines A320 was taking off. Luckily, the pilot of the Boeing 737 spotted the oncoming A320 on the runway that his plane was about to cross.
Thus a potential tragedy at LAX was narrowly averted–again. Over the last 6 years, the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) admits that at LAX there have been 55 near misses, or, as they call them, “runway incursions.”
It’s obvious this was going to happen–just as it’s obvious there will sooner or later be a “near-miss” that doesn’t miss. There are many fewer experienced air traffic controllers handling ever more air traffic. Over the last three years, the number of certified air traffic controllers working at the LAX control tower has dropped from 46 to 33. An understaffed control tower means longer working hours and more duties for fatigued air-traffic controllers. This can only increase the likelihood for serious mistakes on the runway.
The staffing shortage and lack of safety at LAX is no different from what is going on at airports all around the country. As air traffic has increased year after year, the number of experienced controllers has dropped steadily. Currently there are only 11,467 experienced controllers left in the U.S., an 11-year low. In 2006, the FAA unilaterally imposed on controllers a new contract with major take-aways in both wages and benefits. Effectively, the FAA forced out 800 experienced controllers so it could fill air traffic towers with trainees making only $8.82 an hour.
It’s no different than the attacks government agencies and private companies are carrying out against employees all across the country. And, as everywhere, it can only lead to worsening health and safety for employees and the general public alike.
Oct 8, 2007
Five workers died at a hydroelectric plant in Colorado on Tuesday, October 2. These workers, and four others who were injured, were trying to escape a fire that broke out in a 3,000-foot tunnel they were doing maintenance on. One of the dead was only 18 years old.
The hydroelectric water plant near Denver, Colorado, was owned by XCel Energy. They had subcontracted their maintenance work to a California company. A first preliminary inspection by OSHA turned up the fact that the sub-contractor, RPI Coating, had been fined 90 times over 20 years, operating under another name. One of their workers had died during bridge work in California. RPI had also been fined for violating hazardous waste rules.
The company had paid only $135,569 in fines, an average of $6,000 per year. For them it was just a cost of doing business. For the workers, the cost could be their lives.
A spokesman for XCel said of the subcontractor, “... They were the experts and that’s why they were hired.” No, XCel Energy hired RPI because it could pay them less than what it would cost XCel to run their own maintenance department with decently paid and experienced workers–workers who knew their way around the plant, using somewhat adequate equipment.
In the American way of doing business, no amount of violations stops a company from seeking to maximize profits, no matter by what means. It doesn’t matter how dangerous their methods or how poor their training of their work force. It doesn’t matter if they change their name to hide their abysmal safety record. What matters is profit. And RPI was hired because its violation of basic security procedures adds to profit.
Oct 8, 2007
After a long drawn out drama about a threatened government shutdown, the Michigan legislature and Governor Jennifer Granholm went ahead and did what they intended to do all along.
They increased the state income tax from 3.9% to 4.35%. They expanded the 6% sales tax to cover more services such as landscaping and janitorial services. Then they agreed in principle to cut social programs, public services and school funding by 440 million dollars. And they declared that state workers–whose contract is being negotiated right now–will have to take cuts.
They did this all under the guise that the state had a “budget crisis.” They should know–they created it!
They were the ones who repealed the state’s Single Business Tax, just over a year ago. At the time, they did not replace it with anything. After a nearly year-long debate about what to put in its place, they passed a new business tax. The new tax included all the same tax breaks to the corporations as the old one had–but it added 600 million dollars in new immediate tax cuts to businesses, as well as billions more over the years.
It’s obvious, the politicians were too embarrassed to give business a break while raising our taxes, so they played out the “budget crisis” and the threat of a state shutdown for nearly a year.
Oct 8, 2007
A recent study shows how remarkably fast CEO pay at the top defense contractors increased since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Close to the top of the list were the CEOs at Boeing. Their pay increased from three million to four million dollars per year in 2002 and 2003, up to 28 million and sixteen million dollars in 2005 and 2006. In other words, their pay multiplied by close to 10 times.
War and death on a mass scale sure pays off big for the boys at the very top.
Oct 8, 2007
The fight in Congress over funding health insurance for poorer children involves 35 billion dollars over five years, that is, an additional seven billion dollars per year.
What is seven billion dollars today?
According to the IRS, a tax break that goes to people with incomes over half a million dollars a year handed out 67 billion dollars.
In other words, wealthy tax filers got nearly TEN times the amount needed to fund S-CHIP. And that was just one of the special tax breaks for the wealthy.
There’s plenty of money in this government–it just goes to the wrong people!
Oct 8, 2007
In Iraq, over four million people have been forced from their homes, about one-sixth of the entire population of that country, and the number is still growing. This estimate comes from U.N. sources on refugees. It is the largest displacement of people in the Middle East ever. About half of them have fled to nearby countries–Syria and Jordan in particular. The other half have moved from one neighborhood or region to another within the country, sometimes more than once.
Hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee during U.S. military sweeps and bombings of their neighborhoods. One of the most well-known examples came in November 2004, when nearly the entire population of Fallujah, more than 200,000 people, fled from U.S. attacks on their city. But three times this many people have been forced out of their homes in smaller, less publicized, U.S. or joint U.S.-Iraqi army attacks. Even more people have been forced to flee by Shi’a, Sunni and Kurdish militias establishing areas of domination and control, effectively dividing up the country into parts.
Sunni’s and Shi’as are both being terrorized, tortured and murdered by the militias of the other side, trying to drive them out and establish their own domination over more areas.
It’s ethnic cleansing pure and simple–accepted, approved, and in some cases openly carried out by U.S. military forces themselves. U.S.-imposed curfews, Iraqi electricity cutoffs, and U.S. and Iraqi army blockades are encircling people in particular neighborhoods. The U.S. military has built walls, creating “no man’s land” in the middle of Baghdad, dividing Sunni and Shi’a areas.
For centuries before the U.S. attacks on Iraq, members of Iraq’s main religious groups worked and lived together in many areas, most importantly in the huge Baghdad region where much of the population was concentrated. Under Saddam Hussein, whom the U.S. supported for many years, Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’as were played off against each other. Nonetheless, large urban parts of Iraq remained a secular society. Despite Saddam’s use of religious differences to divide and conquer the population, before the 2003 U.S. invasion began, it’s estimated that one-third of all marriages were still mixed marriages.
Thousands of Iraqis died under Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands were forced out of certain villages and towns.
But what happened under Saddam looks like child’s play today. Hundreds of thousands are dying now. And millions of Iraqis are being turned into refugees even within their own country.
The only thing the U.S. can do for Iraq is to get out! Immediately.
Oct 8, 2007
George Bush vetoed a bill that would have expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The Democrats promised to override the veto.
Bush says the bill would have expanded coverage to too many undeserving children. The Democrats say Bush is mean and miserly. Both avoided the real questions.
Even if this bill were passed, there is nothing in it that challenges the basic assumption that health care should be limited to those who can pay. This bill is simply about extending a band-aid to a few more people.
Just as government is obligated to provide schooling for the population, so it should be obligated to provide health care for EVERYONE! And if health care were organized, funded centrally and administered by the government, service could be extended to everyone and expenses reduced at the same time.
As it stands now, the U.S. spends more on health care than any other industrialized country in the world and gets less for it–and all because private interests own, run and profit from the health care system: insurance companies, hospitals, nursing homes, rehab facilities, home health care companies, ambulance services, etc. And there are gigantic administrative costs because of all these multiple layers.
This private system spends two trillion dollars per year, or 16% of the Gross Domestic Product on medical care. Yet despite all that spending, a smaller portion of the U.S. population has coverage for health care than in any other industrialized country.
The consequences are clearly seen: the U.S. ranks only 38th in the world in life expectancy, according to the United Nations. Thirty-one countries have proportionately fewer infants dying in their first year of life than does the United States.
In other words, the United States comes in at the bottom of the industrialized countries and even behind many so-called underdeveloped countries. Even tiny, underdeveloped Cuba has a higher life expectancy and a lower infant death rate than the U.S.
That’s not to say there are not problems with health care in countries with national health care programs. They too still exist within a profit making system, and government still works in the interests of that system. But countries with a centralized, government-run system spend much less than the U.S. and get more.
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are ready to call into question this U.S. system of health care organized to produce vast amounts of profit. For both parties, the current deliberations on children’s health care are essentially a political charade.