WI Governor Attacks Union Workers Rights

Gov. Scott Walker stops at nothing to make his friends "richer"

By Patrick Martin

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature are moving to slash wages, gut health benefits and undermine pensions.

Walker will impose a legal straitjacket on public employees, stripping them of collective bargaining rights over anything but wages, and requiring any wage rise above the rate of inflation to be approved by a statewide referendum vote.

No such controls are proposed, of course, for the gargantuan salaries of corporate CEOs or the windfall profits of the banks and big business.

Nor will there be any limits imposed on the financial institutions that handle the issuing of state bonds—headed by Citigroup, the lead underwriter.

The “sacrifices” decreed by the governor apply only to working people: Walker has actually increased the state deficit to provide tax cuts for Wisconsin-based corporations.

The events in Wisconsin are a clear indication that the US is entering a new period of social upheaval.

The working class is driven into struggle by the objective crisis of capitalism and by the determination of the ruling class to defend its wealth through a ruthless attack on all the rights of working people—the right to a job, to a living wage, to education, health care and a secure retirement.

The budget deficit in Wisconsin is a tiny fraction of the wealth of the country’s billionaires. Indeed, the total budget deficit of all 50 states is about one-tenth of the net wealth of only the 400 richest Americans.

This wealth, and the trillions expended to bail out the banks, must be reclaimed to meet the basic social needs of vast majority of the population.

What is required is a political struggle, which begins from the understanding that nothing can be defended so long as the working class is subordinated to the Democratic Party and the capitalist two-party system.

The representatives of the capitalist class, in proclaiming that the preservation of capitalism requires the destruction of the jobs and living conditions of the vast majority of the population, are in fact acknowledging the historical bankruptcy of the system they defend.

The reemergence of the class struggle will bring with it a revival of the fight for socialism. As the American working class enters a new era of social upheaval, the critical task now is the building of a revolutionary party to lead these struggles.

Making Money off Your Back - prt 2

Capitalism continues to exploit people

(Symptoms you're a Marxist pr2)

  By David S. Pena

Capitalists want to maximize profits, and they do this by exploiting the working class. The basic method of capitalist exploitation is to pay workers the lowest wage they can get away with (as close to mere survival as possible) while forcing their employees to do the maximum amount of work.

More specifically, capitalists try to maximize the value they get out of you, in the form of the product or service that you produce, by increasing the period of time that you have to work beyond the time it takes you to produce enough to cover your wage or salary.

For example, take an auto parts worker who's paid $50 per 8-hour day. He's able to produce $50 worth of product in approximately 3 minutes.

It took him an insignificant amount of time to produce enough value to cover the day’s wage. If you consider only those 3 minutes, it looks like an even exchange between the worker and the capitalist. The worker produced $50 worth of product and will be paid $50 in return.

But don’t forget, our factory worker has to stay on the production line for a much longer time—another 7 hours and 57 minutes, just to get the $50.

If this had been an even exchange, in which the wage equals exactly what the worker produces, the workday would have ended after those 3 minutes.

But if that happened the capitalist wouldn’t make any profit, and maximizing profit is the whole point of capitalist production.

Nearly $10,000 worth of surplus value was produced during the additional 7-plus hours that the worker was forced to remain at work.

The capitalist steals this value from the worker; the worker is never paid for producing it. This theft of surplus value is what is meant by the term “capitalist exploitation.”

In Marxist theory, the amount of time you must work to cover your wage or salary is called necessary labor time.

The time beyond that, during which you are forced to continue working in order to receive your wage, is called surplus labor time, and the value produced during that time is called surplus value.

During surplus labor time you are working for free because the capitalist steals the time and the resulting product from you without paying for it.

In order to maximize profit, capitalists try to minimize the amount of necessary labor time and maximize the amount of surplus labor time, so they can profit from the surplus value that results.

That is why capitalists are always trying to keep wages as low as possible, extend the length of the workday, and increase through speedup the amount of work that you have to do in any given period of time.

This intensification of work is what capitalists really mean when they speak so benignly about “improving productivity.”

...workers are exploited and are literally victims of theft on the job... Read the rest of this article.

Detroit, City of Poverty

Wage-cutter in chief's 4 hour visit to Detroit

 Patrick Martin

Obama’s four-hour visit to Detroit on Friday brought him to the center of the economic catastrophe created by the profit system.

The “Motor City” was once a byword for decent-paying jobs in the auto industry. But Detroit is now synonymous with poverty, urban decay, mass unemployment and the virtual breakdown of a functioning society.

During his visit, Obama made no comment on the mass suffering stretching for miles in every direction. Instead, he gave a 25-minute stump speech to the 1,100 workers on the day shift at the Chrysler plant, and a briefer address to the work force at the GM plant.

He didn't mention the city’s staggering unemployment rate—estimated at 50 percent or more. Nor did he utter the words “poverty,” “homelessness,” “hunger,” “foreclosure” or “eviction.”

Instead, he took the occasion of his visit to the poorest city in America to boast of the great success of his administration’s economic policies. A more cold-blooded, arrogant provocation against working people can scarcely be imagined.

Obama delivered his two speeches to audiences of auto workers who have borne the brunt of the restructuring of the industry dictated by the White House.

Some 330,000 workers have lost auto-related jobs in the past two years, while tens of thousands of retired workers have lost health benefits and seen their pensions threatened.

Obama’s “car czar” went beyond even what General Motors and Chrysler thought advisable, and demanded a 50 percent across-the-board reduction in the starting wage for newly hired workers.

The result is that side-by-side on the assembly line some workers are making $28 an hour and others $14 an hour for doing the same job. Most workers on the second shift at the Chrysler Jefferson plant make $14 an hour, but Obama’s audience consisted largely of the higher-paid first-shift workers.

Obama could say little of substance to justify the claim that his administration’s policies were producing an economic recovery, except to describe the conditions under which he took office in January 2009, and assert that things had improved since then.

The main point of Obama’s remarks at both plants was that without the intervention of the White House both GM and Chrysler would have been forced into liquidation last year, going out of business entirely instead of the structured government-supervised bankruptcy that was a condition of the auto bailout.

“Independent estimates suggest that more than 1 million jobs could have been lost if Chrysler and GM had liquidated,” he said.

“And in the middle of a deep recession, that would have been a brutal, irreversible shock not just to Detroit, not just to the Midwest, but to our entire economy.”

But the bailout was not offered without conditions, he continued, “What we said was, if you’re willing to take the tough and painful steps necessary to make yourselves more competitive; if you’re willing to pull together workers, management, suppliers, dealers, everybody to remake yourself for changing times, then we’ll stand by you and we’ll invest in your future.”

Obama made no other reference to the draconian cuts imposed on auto workers, including the 50 percent cut in starting pay. As for “pain” for the corporate bosses, GM’s profits have rebounded and GM and Chrysler executives continue to rake in seven-figure salaries.

GM Chairman Edward Whitacre, for instance, makes a $1.1 million salary, earning in one week as much as a $14-an-hour assembly-line worker makes in a year.

And that grossly understates his income, since Whitacre is paid mainly in company stock and stands to reap a fortune from the upcoming initial public offering by GM.

Obama noted that 334,000 auto jobs were eliminated between June 2008 and June 2009, and claimed that 55,000 new auto jobs have been created since then. He did not point out, however, that the bulk of these new jobs pay wages that are barely above the poverty level.

The White House intervention has had the effect of completing the transformation of auto production from a high-wage, high-benefit industry to one of brutal exploitation at sweatshop wages.

For this, Obama has earned the thanks of the auto bosses and their industrial police force—which operates under the signboard of the United Auto Workers—as well as the entire local Democratic Party establishment.

Obama was welcomed to the city with a friendly editorial in the right-wing Detroit News. Lined up behind him on the podium were the state’s two Democratic senators, the local Democratic congresswoman, Mayor Bing, also a Democrat, and Chrysler, GM and UAW officials. There was not a hint of oppositional sentiment permitted.

The address to the auto workers was imbued with economic nationalism, which Obama used to flatter both his audience and himself. He referred to his opponents in the Republican Party, who deemed the bailout terms insufficiently harsh on the auto workers and wanted even deeper cuts or outright liquidation of the company.

“You are proving the naysayers wrong,” he said. “I wish they were standing here today. I wish they could see what I’m seeing in this plant and talk to the workers who are here taking pride in building a world-class vehicle. I want all of you to know, I will bet on the American worker any day of the week!”

Obama continued, harking back to World War II: “It was workers just like you, right here in Detroit, who built an arsenal of democracy that propelled America to victory.

"It was workers like you that built this country into the greatest economic power the world has ever known; it was workers like you that manufactured a miracle that was uniquely American.”

The constant references to American greatness were somewhat strained, given that circumstances now prevailing in Detroit, and the US generally, hardly resemble a “miracle.”

The nationalist phrases were not only reactionary, but preposterous. The auto industry is entirely globalized, and giant corporations conduct their operations on a world scale, pitting workers in country after country against each other.

Obama spoke at one factory run by Chrysler—now owned by Fiat, with the Italian CEO at his side—and at another operated by GM, which has sold more cars this year in China than in the United States. GM has 32,000 workers in China, while its US hourly employment has fallen from 468,000 in 1979 to only 52,000 today.

These figures suggest the reality facing auto workers and the working class as a whole: the only way forward in the struggle against corporate downsizing, wage-cutting and the destruction of all rights on the shop floor is to unite the working class.

This is a political fight against the Obama Regime, the Democratic Party, the two-party system and the capitalist ruling class whose interests they serve.

Unfettered Capitalism for the Rich

Rich fight to return workers to poverty

By Barry Grey

The past several months have witnessed a shift in social policy by the international bourgeoisie even further to the right, marked by a turn from economic stimulus policies to brutal austerity measures.

In the name of deficit reduction, the ruling classes of all the major capitalist countries are carrying out a frontal assault on the past social gains of the working class. The long-term aim of these policies is to eliminate the welfare state, reestablishing the competitiveness of the older capitalist powers by slashing workers’ living standards to the level of their impoverished counterparts in emerging economies like India and China.

That the living standards of the world’s people are to be equalized downward, rather than upward, is an indictment of the capitalist system.

The “Big Society” speech delivered Monday by British Prime Minister David Cameron exemplified this shift. It was a manifesto for a return to Dickensian conditions of working class poverty.

Seeking to camouflage the brutal implications of his plan to impose between 85 and 100 billion pounds in social cuts over the next four years, Cameron described his “Big Society” as a “huge cultural change” that will “empower” and “liberate” people. It will supposedly achieve this by privatizing and gutting government-run social services.

There has been a shift from the stimulus policy of 2008-2009, centered on the plundering of national treasuries to bail out the banks, without providing any serious relief to the working class.

The austerity programs of today coincided with the 750 billion euro bailout fund announced in May by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The fund was established to stave off default by euro-zone countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain and the threatened collapse of the euro.

It represents yet another massive transfer of public funds to the big banks. As Mohamed El-Erian of the bond investment firm Pimco put it:

“Through the ECB [European Central Bank], EU and IMF, the official sector has stepped in with its balance sheet to assume liabilities previously held by the private sector, thereby allowing private investors to exit in an orderly fashion.”

When the fund was established, the major European governments agreed that the cost of offloading the banks’ bad debts would be borne by the working class in the form of savage cuts in social programs, jobs, wages and pensions. Talk of stimulus to continue the “recovery” was dropped and replaced by the universal demand for “fiscal consolidation.”

The shift was signaled at the G20 finance ministers meeting the first week of June and formally ratified at the G20 summit meeting held at the end of the month in Toronto.

In working out its class policy, the bourgeoisie was emboldened by the experience in Greece, where the social democratic PASOK government has been able to push through a series of austerity measures in the face of massive popular opposition.

In Greece, the ruling class has relied on the trade unions to contain and dissipate working class resistance by means of token one-day strikes and protests.

The trade union bureaucracy has, in turn, been provided crucial assistance by the petty-bourgeois “left” organizations such as the Stalinist Communist Party and Syriza, which have insisted that popular opposition to the social cuts be subordinated to the unions.

The experience has been the same in Portugal and Spain, where social democratic governments have announced one set of social cuts, layoffs and wage cuts after another, and mass working class opposition has been suppressed by the unions.

A series of political changes have been carried out corresponding to the shift in economic and social policy and reflecting the growth of international tensions. In May, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government headed by Cameron was installed in Britain.

At the beginning of June, the same week as the G20 financial ministers meeting, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigned and was replaced by Naoto Kan.

He immediately announced an austerity program that includes a doubling of the 5 percent sales tax, combined with a cut in the corporate tax rate from 40 percent to 25 percent.

At the end of June, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted in a coup within the Labor Party apparatus and replaced by Julia Gillard.

In addition to reaffirming Australia’s commitment to the US occupation of Afghanistan, Gillard immediately scrapped a proposed tax on Australian mining companies and announced a turn to austerity policies.

In Europe, sweeping budget-cutting programs have been announced from Ireland in the west to Eastern Europe and Russia. Germany, economically the strongest European state, is imposing 80 billion euros in cuts. France has announced sweeping cuts in pensions and a 10 percent reduction in local government budgets.

The 750 billion euro rescue package and the launching of austerity programs to make the working class pay for it have revived the European bourgeoisie’s self confidence—at least for the present.

The euro, which fell 15 percent in relation to the US dollar in the first six months of 2010, has rebounded sharply over the past two months. Hovering around $1.30, it has recouped 10 percent of its loss.

While the Obama administration has been at odds with Europe over the timing and pace of European austerity measures, it has made a similar shift from stimulus to deficit reduction.

It has abandoned even its paltry proposals for new federal aid to the states. The weeks-long delay in extending federal jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed is the preparation for ending them completely.

The administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are tacitly encouraging a “debate” on jobless benefits.

Aid to the unemployed is being depicted as a “disincentive to work” and a “new entitlement.” This PR ofensive is an attempt to condition public opinion for depriving millions of laid off workers of any source in cash income.

In the US and internationally, mass unemployment is being used to bludgeon workers into accepting poverty wages and brutal speedup.

The international bourgeoisie is proceeding in a highly conscious manner to intensify its war against the working class.

It is keenly aware of the crucial service provided by the trade unions in stifling the resistance of the working class.

In his recent television interview over the Bettencourt scandal, French President Nicolas Sarkozy made a point of praising the unions for their “responsible” role in the economic crisis.

The ruling class is likewise well aware of the critical political role played by the various petty-bourgeois pseudo-left organizations, such as the Communist Party and Syriza in Greece.

Tere's also the CP and New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, and the International Socialist Organization in the US.

The central concern of these organizations is the danger that the working class will enter into struggle outside of and to the left of the social democratic, “labor party” and trade union bureaucracies. They are above all determined to prevent such a development.