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
Nov 17, 2008
At a recent press conference, Chicago mayor Richard Daley raised the alarm: “Huge layoffs are coming in November and December. And next year, there’s going to be [even more] huge layoffs. All the corporate CEO’s have come in to tell me.”
In the face of this disaster, it’s obvious that the government should be moving to create jobs. It should increase spending on public services. It should expand the social safety net. It should increase unemployment benefits, food stamps, housing and access to health care.
Cities like Chicago and states like Illinois should do everything possible not only to relieve the effects of the crisis for the working population and the poor, but to start the economy moving again.
So, what is Daley proposing? The exact opposite. His administration is laying off 929 workers, and imposing big increases in taxes, fines and fees. Meanwhile the Chicago Transit Authority is increasing one-way fares by 50 cents.
All these measures can only make the crisis worse!
The Daley administration is not alone. State and local politicians across the country are demanding big sacrifices from the working population. In California, for example, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he wants to cut billions in funding for public schools, cut health care for children and the poor, as well as make it more difficult for laid-off workers to qualify for unemployment benefits. He also says that he wants to cut the jobs and pay of state employees, and increase the state sales tax by 1.5%.
In New York, Governor David Patterson proposes to slash Medicaid and public education funding by billions. In Maryland, Governor Robert Ehrlich says he wants to cut almost 1,000 state jobs. In Michigan, Governor Jennifer Granholm says that she will use her executive authority to impose big cuts at the beginning of December in order to close a projected 600 million dollar deficit. At the same time, she says she is going to provide business with an extra 150 million dollars in aid!
Like all the wealthy CEO’s, the politicians are pushing the full burden of the crisis on the working class and poor. While politicians boost sales taxes and fees paid mainly by working people, nowhere are they proposing to cut any of the enormous tax breaks and subsidies to big corporations. Nor are they cutting back on all the expensive outsourcing of services to their corporate buddies, which is just another way to boost corporate profits with taxpayer money.
No–it’s even worse. They are showering trillions of tax dollars in taxpayer money on the very richest financial companies in the world–the very companies that, in their mad rush to make ever larger profits, created the financial crisis in the first place, by all of their insane speculative and debt-heavy gambles and schemes.
In the middle of the worsening economic crisis and loss of jobs, the government should be creating jobs, boosting social programs for the unemployed and poor, expanding education and health care. Taxes and fees paid by the working class and poor should be slashed and put on those who could afford to pay them, that is, the rich and the big corporations. Such programs would boost spending, thus providing jobs and work for other parts of the working population.
The politicians don’t do it–the very thing needed to get the economy going again. Nothing could show more clearly how bankrupt is this whole economic system and its government.
Nov 17, 2008
On November 4, 2008, an African-American was elected president of the United States for the first time.
It was a momentous event, one which had been a long, bitter time coming.
Almost four centuries ago, 1619, the first Africans were brought to the colony of Virginia in chains. Even before the first slave ship arrived, revolts broke out among human beings who would rather die than give in to conditions that demeaned them, treating them like beasts.
For the next two and a half centuries during which slavery endured, slaves resisted, through acts big and small. Despite atrocious conditions and the constant threat of death or horrifying retribution, there were always those who refused the indignity of slavery.
With the Civil War and the Reconstruction movement that followed, the ex-slaves gained emancipation and full citizenship rights. But, enshrined in the Constitutional amendments, those rights were never respected in practice.
Thus began the period over which the Ku Klux Klan presided, imposing lynch law on those who refused to accept “second-class” citizenship. Tens of thousands were killed, but still there were others who resisted. Almost every black family today conserves the memories of someone they knew who was lynched.
It was a bitter period–one which took vast fights of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the rebellions in the big cities in the 1960s to end it. Those struggles finally broke the back of the Ku Klux Klan and lynch law.
Legally, the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was little more than a restatement of the Constitutional amendments. But politically, it signified ruling class recognition of the power the black population had exerted through vast mobilizations.
The centuries of struggles carried out by generations of the black population opened up doors which a racist society repeatedly tried to slam in their face.
It is through those doors that an African-American finally, in 2008, walked into the White House.
This election may signify that a very few African-Americans have been granted entrance into all the privileged strata of white bourgeois society–into the White House and into the executive offices of big corporations and of big Wall Street banks.
But this election does not mean, despite what Barack Obama said on the night he was elected, that “all things are possible.”
This election did not fling open doors for the big majority of the black population, working class and poor–no more than the election of all those upper class white presidents over the last 220 years opened doors for the big majority of the white population, which remains working class and poor up to this very day.
The U.S. remains a society divided into classes.
Even if the worst unemployment and poverty has been imposed on black working people, capitalist exploitation weighs heavily on all workers–black, white and Hispanic. All workers are denied full access to the riches they themselves have created.
Workers black, Hispanic and white may have felt solidarity as they watched the results of this election come in, marking symbolically the historic falling of one barrier.
We have much more reason to join in solidarity with each other, joining all our forces to defend our common interests as working people.
Nov 17, 2008
The number of people losing their homes to the subprime crisis continues to grow. Between July and September, every day, 2,700 families in the United States lost their homes because they no longer could make their house payments. In the previous year, the figure had been 1,200 per day. The financial system had lured them into home ownership with all kinds of false promises.
Several television programs showed owners being kicked out of their homes. Often, they were absolutely furious. They knew that while the government is bailing out the financial companies hit by the crisis, ordinary home owners are getting nothing. Bush has made a few vague statements. But no serious measures have been taken to help homeowners, not even a moratorium on foreclosures.
The subprime crisis has struck five states particularly hard: California, Florida, Ohio, Georgia and Michigan. In Detroit, more than 70,000 families lost their homes over two years. In 2006, Detroit had more homes sold with subprime mortgages than any other city.
Brokers and mortgage companies certainly weren’t trying to aid people of modest means to become home owners. The subprime mortgages had low introductory teaser rates, which then reset to exorbitant levels that were sometimes twice as high. And the ever increasing gap between what people owed on their mortgage and the real value of the home, after housing prices collapsed, led many to give up making payments.
Real estate brokers used every trick in the book to get home buyers to take subprime mortgages. Some brokers lied to the buyers by pretending that a subprime mortgage was really a traditional fixed-rate mortgage. Or else they claimed that a subprime mortgage saved the buyers money.
The brokers and mortgage companies pushed subprime mortgages because they were paid much higher fees and commissions. There was little concern over whether the buyer could make the house payments. The loans were sold to financial institutions, which bundled the mortgages and sold them off to wealthy investors. Eventually, the whole market collapsed.
With all the vacant homes, entire neighborhoods have been devastated. Financial companies have put the houses up for sale or auction, offering speculators or ordinary private parties greatly reduced prices. But in many cases, the auctioneer has not even been able to get a bid, not even for a symbolic dollar. These homes are often in terrible shape, either because the angry former owners trashed them before leaving, or because looters came to take what they could–the metal pipes and wires, even the bricks from the walls.
Meanwhile, those who lost their homes have had to try to find a rental, live out of a trailer, or depend on the good will of a relative or a compassionate neighbor. Some have been reduced to living in a shelter so they do not have to pass the night on the street, while their old home remains empty and abandoned.
What an outrage!
Nov 17, 2008
Led by Barack Obama, the Democrats swept the elections. Winning eight and a half million more votes than John McCain, President-elect Obama trounced him in the electoral college, 365 to 162, with 11 votes yet to be decided. Only four states, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee, voted more heavily Republican this year than they did four years ago.
The Democrats increased their control of the new Senate, holding 57 seats to the Republicans’ 40, with three seats still too close to call. And they now control the House of Representatives, 255 to 175, with five other seats still to be decided.
Governors, state legislatures, county governments, and even some judicial bodies were swept by the Democratic wave.
Not only were the elections a repudiation of George W. Bush and Republican policies. Not only did the elections give the Democrats a mandate to junk those policies. With this big sweeping victory, the elections gave the Democrats the means to reverse direction.
George W. Bush, with much smaller margins of victory in 2000 and 2004, and with only a bare Republican control in Congress, moved rapidly to carry out his policies. The Democrats could move even faster with their much bigger 2008 victory–IF they wanted to do it.
And yet, already, Democrats tell us we have to be patient, that change won’t happen immediately.
It’s obvious that Obama and the Democrats can’t address all the problems immediately. But a party that represented working people’s interests would reverse directions immediately. It would let the big banks know it is going to tear up the 700 billion dollar deal benefitting only those who created this economic mess. It would make clear that it will do whatever is necessary to put an IMMEDIATE stop to the hemorrhage of jobs, a stop to the confiscation of people’s homes, to the stealing of retirees’ pensions.
Working people used their massive numbers to vote the Republicans out. Workers could use their numbers to hold the Democrats’ nose to the grindstone. Workers could push for changes they need, and they could organize a fight for their own changes.
Nov 17, 2008
Barack Obama has begun the “change” he promised, by choosing the following advisers.
Change?
There may be a new family in the White House–but those who set policies are some of the same ones responsible for today’s disasters.
Nov 17, 2008
This article is translated from the November 7 issue of Lutte Ouvri re (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary group of that name active in France.
Ninety years ago, on November 11, 1918, World War I ended. The pounding of artillery and the whistle of shells were finally silent on the Western front–in the countryside, the villages and cities devastated by more than four years of war.
One by one, the allies of the German empire signed an armistice: Bulgaria on September 30, the Ottoman empire on October 27, Austria-Hungary on November 3. Finally on November 11, an armistice was signed in France between Germany and French military representatives, acting in the name of the Entente Allies (France, England, the U.S. and Italy). The Central Powers came out of the war defeated, while the Entente emerged victorious, as much as this word can be used for such disastrous results.
The dead, wounded, permanently disabled, widows and orphans were counted in the millions. The historians count about nine million dead in uniform: 2,000,000 for Russia, 1,800,000 for Germany, 1,500,000 for Austria-Hungary, 1,400,000 for France, 900,000 for Britain, 600,000 for Italy, 400,000 Ottomans, 100,000 Americans ... In France, one soldier out of six didn’t return. Civilian populations didn’t escape the slaughter: there were 2,000,000 civilian dead in Russia, 1,000,000 in Serbia and Austria-Hungary, 800,000 in Germany and 800,000 in Rumania–dead from famine and bombing, without counting the massacre of the Armenians nor the ravages of the Spanish flu, which was all the more murderous since it hit exhausted populations.
Why did all this happen? In history texts, the start of these four years of mass murder is generally presented as the consequence of a crazy act by one person: on June 28, 1914, a Serb student assassinated the Habsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was due to inherit the Austro-Hungarian imperial crown. On July 28, Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, declared war on Serbia. Russian mobilized, and in response, on August 1, Germany declared war on the Russia of Czar Nicolas II, and on August 3 on France. One declaration of war followed another, with other countries sucked into the whirlpool: Great Britain, Japan, the Ottoman empire, and later, Italy. In Europe, the game of alliances led to almost 70 million men called up and, beginning in 1917, five million U.S. soldiers.
In fact, the June 28 assassination only furnished a pretext for the start of a conflict which had been brewing for a long time. Two camps had gradually formed, around Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one hand, around France, Czarist Russia and Great Britain on the other. There was never-ending conflict between the two camps: in 1905 France and Germany over Morocco; in 1908 Russia and Austria-Hungary over Serbia; with conflicts in the Balkans between 1912 and 1913.
The big powers carried out a frantic arms race, particularly between Germany and Great Britain for domination over the seas. Governments passed laws increasing the size of armies. The global competition between European states had arrived at a critical point.
By the second half of the 19th century, colonial conquests had placed Great Britain far ahead in plundering: in 1876, it had extended its domination to 8.5 million square miles and 250 million people. France was far behind, but dominated Algeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Madagascar, New Caledonia and Indochina. At the end of the 19th century, Belgium, Germany and Italy had also carved out space in the race for colonies. In Africa, by 1918, only Liberia and Ethiopia were still legally independent. 122 million Africans were dominated by one or another European state. The situation was the same in Asia and Oceania, while British imperialism dominated South America, with the U.S. dreaming of replacing it.
In this world, which had been entirely divided up, the only possibility for expansion was to redivide territory. Capital accumulated in the imperialist countries sought markets in colonial or semi-colonial countries, not with the goal of developing them, but first of all assuring themselves profits in return. Lenin wrote in 1916, “Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. And this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world plunderers armed to the teeth ... who are drawing the whole world into their war over the division of their booty.”
The end of the war might have brought the end of this system. In Russia in 1917, the workers succeeded in pulling down Czarism and in installing a workers power, that of the soviets. In Germany, in November 1918, came the fall of the Kaiser and the revolution of the workers councils. Other revolutionary movements followed throughout Europe, in Hungary and Italy. Unfortunately the bourgeoisie, with the aid of reformist Socialist parties, succeeded in getting the situation back in hand and in isolating revolutionary Russia, which became the USSR.
At the peak of the war, in the horror of the trenches, many had sworn that it would be the “war to end all wars,” for they thought that after this experience a reasonable humanity could never envisage falling back into such a degree of abomination. It wasn’t going to be. Neither the defeat of the Central Powers nor the “victory” of the Allies, nor the redivision of territory to redivide the plunder, would resolve the problems of capitalism.
In Italy, which emerged victorious but exhausted from the war, the failure of revolution allowed the fascist movement of Mussolini to take power in 1922. In conquered Germany, the defeat of the revolution opened the way to extreme right-wing movements advocating revenge which were inspired by the Italian example.
Hardly had World War I for the division of the world ended then people could feel the dawn of World War II, which was the attempt to redivide the world brought by the peace treaties of 1919. After the stock market crash of 1929, the generalized economic crisis opened the way to Nazism in Germany. The march to war resumed.
“Capitalism carries war within it like heavy clouds carry a storm,” said the French socialist Jean Jaur s. Two times in the 20th century, the capitalist system showed itself capable of precipitating the world into generalized wars. And if, since 1945, the incontestable superiority of the U.S. prevented any open conflict between the imperialists, the rivalries between them have supported, when they didn’t directly provoke countless wars in the underdeveloped countries, which taken together were almost as murderous and destructive as the two world wars.
In 2008, in this period of financial crisis, the imperialist system shows that it isn’t less crazy than it was in 1914 with World War I, 1929 with the Crash or in 1939 with World War II. This aberrant, unjust system, based on the frantic search for profit, still threatens humanity with a lunge into barbarism.
Nov 17, 2008
The following article is translated from the November 14 issue of Lutte Ouvri re (Workers Struggle), published by the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.
An international summit was held in Nairobi, Kenya on November 7 between the heads of African states from the region of the Great Lakes under the aegis of the U.N., which was supposed to find a solution to the crisis of North Kivu. It hardly ended when fighting resumed around Goma, the major city of the province. Rebel and government armed forces each rejected responsibility for the rupture of the cease fire.
For several weeks now, each picture and story which comes to us from the Great Lakes region of Africa is still more frightful. Rebel armed bands of Laurent Nkunda, the self-proclaimed “protector” of Congolese Tutsis, stepped up massacres. They forced refugees into the forests, so that the government and non-governmental organizations can’t use the camps as a pretext to intervene.
Following the example of the rebel forces, the government army massacres and pillages. Each time that it flees before the rebel advance, it leaves desolation in its wake. And when it retakes a city which was in the hands of the rebels, it causes a reign of terror, with the support of Mai-Mai militia auxiliaries, or even old Rwandan Hutu armed forces that caused the genocide in that country.
This army of soldiers, looters, rapists and torturers is considered “legitimate” by the Western powers. The United Nations Forces for Congo defended it when the rebels risked seizing Goma.
Today, as the Congolese conflict becomes visible to the eyes of the entire world, the U.N. feels obliged to raise its voice and denounce the “war crimes” ... of the rebels. The latter massacred dozens of civilians in the city of Kiwanja, to the east of Goma. But this selective indignation by Alan Doss, the head of the U.N. mission in Congo, poorly hides the passive complicity of the U.N. troops: In Kiwanja, where there was a U.N. troop base, they did nothing to stop the massacre.
The “indignation” of the leaders of the U.N. about the misfortune of the Congolese people resonates like a sinister farce. The U.N. has silently been complicit over the ten years that the war has lasted in North Kivu, resulting in four to five million dead and hundreds of thousands of underfed refugees who are surviving in the refugee camps and who risk being struck by epidemics like cholera.
For several years, non-governmental organizations like Human Rights Watch and Global Witness alerted the Western governments and the U.N. to put an end to the pillage. The U.N. troops let them occur, when they didn’t directly support the Congolese army generals who organized the theft of riches, controlled the mines, enriched themselves by trafficking in cassiterite or coltan and diverted pay from their soldiers to construct luxurious villas on the shores of Lake Kivu.
Today, the war is extended to South Kivu. Rwandan soldiers are even coming to the aid of the rebellion, while the Congolese government calls on the aid of Angolan soldiers, at the risk of the generalization of the conflict as occurred in 1998. At that time, it continued into 2003. The neighboring states which intervened in the war and the multinationals pillaged Congo with all their strength.
Today, the war for pillage continues.
Nov 17, 2008
We are teetering on the edge of a financial collapse as big as that of 1929.
Both were caused by the unbridled greed of capitalists ready to destroy their own economy in search of a quick buck to be made in speculation.
The current crisis was marked by all the crazy financial instruments that banks and brokers have created over the past ten years.
Like the mortgage-backed securities we started hearing about last March. Those “products” took bundles of mortgages, sliced them all up, mixed them all up, and re-bundled them so that no one knew what was in any of them. They sold like hot cakes, to wealthy investors who had more money than sense–until the mortgage defaults and foreclosures hit. Then, since no one could separate out good mortgages from bad ones–or even know if a particular security HAD bad mortgages in it or not–the whole pack of them became suspect. And banks and other investment companies that held them became suspect.
But that craziness comes nowhere near the insanity of the Credit Default Swap.
Credit Default Swaps (CDS’s) started out as a kind of insurance investors took out when they bought a bond, just in case the company that issued the bond couldn’t redeem it. But they morphed into a monster when Congress passed a law, and Clinton signed it, in 2000: the law made it possible for ANYONE to buy a CDS on ANY bond–whether they owned that bond or not. This turned the CDS market into a huge floating casino. The same bond could have many people taking out a CDS on it–and all expecting to get paid if it went belly up, even if they didn’t own it
It’s as if ten of your neighbors took out fire insurance on your house. They’d have a real incentive to see that your house burns down.
How huge did this crazy “insurance” system get? The total value of all the bonds “insured” by CDS’s is five trillion dollars. The total price of all of the CDS’s taken out to insure those bonds is somewhere between 50 and 60 trillion dollars–more than TEN TIMES the value of the bonds they insure!
No one really knows how many CDS’s exist, or who holds them. So once companies started defaulting on their bonds, the whole CDS market came into question.
Crazy? You bet. And until early this year, no one had even heard of either one of these crazy financial instruments that have caused so much wealth to go up in smoke.
Who knows what other bombs lie behind Wall Street’s curtain? Nobody knows–until they too start blowing up.
Nov 17, 2008
Voters in a number of states approved reactionary ballot proposals. Voters in California, Arizona and Florida approved measures banning gay marriage. In Arkansas, voters passed a proposal that targeted gay couples by barring unmarried couples from adopting children or becoming foster parents. Nebraska voters approved a measure banning affirmative action.
Other reactionary proposals were only narrowly rejected: one would have further restricted abortion in California; another would have eliminated all affirmative action in Colorado.
The various proposals were open denials of civil rights–or as Malcolm X once put it–of human rights.
In California, Proposition 8, the strongest support for denying gay people the right to marry came from black and Hispanic voters. According to exit polls, 78% of black voters would ban gays from marriage; as did 53% of Hispanic voters. People who said they attend church weekly supported the proposal 83% to 17%.
Few people putting themselves up for office in this election spoke out strongly against these reactionary measures. Barack Obama, when pressed, said he opposed the gay marriage ban in California, but he also strongly said that he believes “marriage is only between a man and a woman”–which only encouraged those who supported this anti-gay measure.
A company owned by Howard Ahmanson, Jr., heir to the Home Savings and Loan fortune, donated 1.4 million dollars in support of the gay marriage ban in California. John Templeton, Jr., son of the founder of the mutual fund company Templeton Funds, donated 1.1 million dollars. The Knights of Columbus, which acts as the political arm of the Catholic Church, donated 1.4 million dollars. And Mormon contributions made up 33 to 40% of donations for the measure.
In civil society, the expectation of having individual rights is based on the possibility that others can expect rights for themselves. When you vote to reduce rights for another group, you should expect they will vote to reduce rights for you.
In an earlier period when the black population was fighting for their own rights, they also began to oppose the Vietnam War and to link the struggle for civil rights for black people to the fight for rights for others and to the struggles of the working class against employers.
The same conviction of the need for full respect for others is required today. The reactionary values that have been pushed on us over the last decades serve only the interests of the ruling class that funded these measures.
Nov 17, 2008
Why can’t New York City get money for school repairs? Why can’t Baltimore City extend its transit system? Why can’t Billings, Montana repair its hospital? Why can’t Georgia upgrade its sewage treatment plants?
They’ve all been shut out of the capital markets because the big banks are hoarding their money. It doesn’t matter if the states have been selling their bonds before. It doesn’t even matter if the states’ credit rating are tip-top. The banks that got the big government bailouts–supposedly so they would start lending again–aren’t lending. And this is shutting down the whole economy.
Thousands of capital projects need doing everywhere and millions of people are looking for work. The Association of State Highway Transportation Officials estimates 3000 projects across the country are ready to start the minute the states can find the funding.
700 billion poured into such projects could create jobs and inject life into an economy which is dying.
Nov 17, 2008
The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler say that they will have to go into bankruptcy if they don’t get government bailouts. They use their weight in the economy as a threat. Give us the money, they say, or we will throw the economy into a total collapse.
Definitely, the auto industry keeps the U.S. economy humming. Enormous numbers of jobs, millions and millions, are necessary to produce and distribute and maintain 16 million vehicles per year. The jobs begin in coal mines or iron ore mines or chemical plants, grow through steel mills and catalytic converter factories and electronics factories, grow through tens of thousands of large and small supplier factories, to engine, transmission and final assembly plants, to dealerships.
Workers on these millions of jobs use their paychecks for housing, food, clothes, cars, entertainment and consumer goods. Because of this network, economists say that one of every ten jobs in the entire U.S. depends on the auto industry.
Yes, the economy depends on autos. But the CEOs don’t want bailouts to save the economy–they want bailouts so they can go on doing business as usual. Yet, it’s “business as usual” that brought us to the economic emergency we face today!
In the past 25 years the auto companies racked up enormous profits, tens upon tens of billions. Companies concentrated on pumping out the highest priced, very most profitable vehicles, paying no heed to the future of the economy. Whether making the famous “gas guzzlers” or cars for the luxury set, the companies abandoned the less profitable cars that ordinary workers could afford–without a five-year car note!
Decade after decade, companies demanded round after round of concessions from their own workers. Speed-up, outsourcing, lower wages, and job cuts continued year after year. Companies artificially declared parts of their system to be “independent” units and spun them off, “spinning” large groups of workers into second- and third-tier wages. In the early 1970s, the major companies produced about 75% of their own parts. The companies used the recession of the early eighties to reduce this to 60%, and today after Delphi and Visteon, only about 30% of parts production remains in-house. That is, only about 30% of the workers who produce cars and trucks are now paid at a level that allows them to finance a new one!
While workers’ buying power declined, corporate profits soared. Were these profits re-invested in production that would have enlarged the real economy? Were productivity gains put to work in creating more cars that more people could afford?
No! Those profits were drained out of production. Large dividends flew into the hands of big investors, who gambled with leverage, hedge funds, credit default swaps, and the other stock market schemes. Not to be left out, the companies drained profits into their own financial subsidiaries. And they wheeled and dealed in the same speculations–making money while keeping the money “off the books” of the parent corporations.
Today their gambles, collapsing like dominoes, have evaporated hundreds of billions of dollars.
Every big company, auto included, ran their businesses like that. They fed the casino economy. Now they have crashed the real economy. The banks, left holding bags of bad debt, have frozen the credit needed to grease the economy’s gears. Since no one can get credit, goods aren’t bought, inventories stack up, and factories stop producing. In the face of that, the biggest companies–AIG, the banks, the auto companies want bailouts so they can do the same thing, all over again!
The demands raised against workers are proof that the companies will not change their ways, nor do the politicians expect them to. Just the opposite! “Industry analysts,” congressmen and even president-elect Obama’s spokespersons suggest that more worker concessions should be part of the bailouts.
The corporate attack on workers–wage cuts, job eliminations, slashing pensions and benefits–has already sucked buying power out of the economy and contributed to the crisis today. Continuing the attacks on workers will do nothing but prolong today’s crisis.
Priming the economy for recovery means putting more people to work, first and foremost. Goods must be produced, useful goods, and there must be workers with paychecks big enough to afford those goods. If the factories don’t run, if the workforce is not at work, if paychecks are too small to support the economy, then wave after wave of layoffs will continue to spread further and further. No community will remain untouched.
The bosses who have run the factories and the economy into the ground cannot be allowed to direct this economy, repeating their same old cycle over and over again.