EDITORIAL
Don’t Leave the Criminals Who Created the Crisis in Control

Aug 2, 2010

Listen to the “experts”–people who study the way the capitalist economy works for the capitalists–listen to what even they say about the current economic “recovery.”

Here’s Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies: “I’ve never seen anything like this: Bosses threw out far more workers and cut more hours than they lost output. That kind of disconnect has never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.”

Or here’s the opinion of Robert Pozen of Harvard Business School and former head of Fidelity Investments: “Because of high unemployment, management is using its leverage to get more hours out of workers.”

And here’s the view of Ethan Harris, chief economist for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch: “There’s no question there is an income shift going on in the economy. Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”

Of course, we didn’t need the “experts” to tell us how bad things are for us. But it’s useful to get this reminder, from the “experts” themselves, that our misery is what provided these profits. Every job cut, every hour cut, ever bit of our wages cut, every furlough day provided those profits–which increased by 42% this year!

Productivity–this vicious push to squeeze more work out of each hour of our labor–ends up with more of us out of work, and with more money in the bosses’ pockets.

Having taken everything for themselves, the corporations are so awash in cash they don’t know what to do with it. They hand it over to the banks to speculate, and they speculate themselves–beginning the spiral that leads to the next financial explosion.

And, yet, there are people who tell us to wait, that things will get better. Obama dared to do that just last week when he dropped into auto plants to justify the concessions he wrung from the workers, bragging that he had saved their companies and their jobs, telling them, however, that the companies still weren’t stable, and so the workers had to ... wait!

Wait? No!

We have been waiting all this time, and where did it get us?

Waiting is a death sentence.

There is no hope for us, for our families and for the whole society unless we regain our readiness to fight.

As angry as people are, there could be a social explosion at any moment. You can feel it. But if we back off the capitalists and their politicians for a moment, that’s not enough. The question is, if we lash out in anger, then what? What do we fight for?

We have to insist there be no more lay-offs, not one more.

We have to insist that everyone out of work should get a job. If the capitalists don’t want to provide more jobs, than divide up the jobs that exist, put everyone to work, everyone working fewer hours, but with no loss in pay.

Everyone needs a decent paying job–no two-tier. Bring everyone up.

Everyone needs a decent retirement when they’ve put in their thirty or even forty years–no cuts in benefits, no scheming away what we get from our pensions or Social Security and Medicare.

The capitalists have made a mess of everything. Don’t leave them in control. We, those of us who do the work, can do a better job of making the society run.

Don’t leave their banks in control–their speculation has created the crisis. Make them open up the real financial books of every corporation and bank. Let’s see what really is going on. Let’s see how all the profits are made. Let us decide how society’s wealth shall be used.

We have created this society with our labor. We should decide how to run it.