Bankers and Corporations Doing Well in the Great Recession

The Real Terrorists

As transportation, education, and jobs are being cut, we must consider this: US corporations are sitting on what is referred to in the press as a "Mountain of cash". This "mountain" is a big one, $1.8 trillion. In one sense it is all our money  as wealth is the creation of Labor.  It is only through human Labor power in use that surplus over what we consume is created.  So even before the bailouts, the cash they hold is ours.  The bailouts are easier for us to see, and they are not lending that either, they consolidated market share with it.  They aren't lending, aren't hiring, and while they are squeezing more out of those workers still employed, they are not increasing their wages either; it's a good time for them.

And as I write this blog in my local coffee shop another regular, a teacher, sits down and complains about his medical premiums going up. He has Blue Cross, but "Kaiser is increasing theirs as well" he tells me.

"What can you do? You can't stop them?" he adds.

A survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation last week revealed that employee premiums increased 13.7% over the last year but employers contributions fell 0.9%

It is easier to fire workers in this country and we have among the worst benefits in the industrialized world as we have pointed out on this blog, here .and here.  If it were not for the public sector there would hardly be anyone in Unions at all in the US.  Only 12% or so of US workers are Unionized compared to 30% or so when the AFL and the CIO merged in 1955, under the domination of the AFL's conservative craft mentally/business Union model. When we take the public sector out of the picture, only about 7% of private sector workers are Unionized.  The capitalist class, aided by their Great Recession are now intent on doing to public sector workers what they have to the private; they are being assisted in this effort by the Labor leadership at the highest levels.

The setbacks, the loss of membership,wages, rights that took decades to win, are a direct result of the catastrophic policies pursued by those at the helm of organized Labor.  Their worship of the market, relying on the Democrats rather than building an independent party for working people,  refusing to organize strikes that actually shut down production by mobilizing the ranks of the movement; and failing completely to organized the unorganized, these are the policies that have brought us this far.   Big business is feeling very confident. This is why trail European workers when it comes to social benefits.

The Europeans have better social services than us and better benefits and a generally more healthy lifestyle; look at the difference in maternity leave in previous posts.  It is the power of the Unions and the fact that European workers have had their own political parties that helped bring this about.

I was sitting on a plane coming back from Chicago last night and began a conversation with the guy next to me.  He must have been in his late 20's I would think and he was from Seattle.  I asked him if he knew about the Seattle General Strike when the workers of that city controlled it for five days or so. As I expected, he had no knowledge of it.  I described it to him. the committee of 100 and the situation in the docks and the hospitals and other areas that workers ran. I talked about the Everett Massacre and the IWW struggles in Spokane.  There is no excuse for this, that this young working class man new nothing of his own history, but he is not to blame.

I spoke to a flight attendant who was disgusted with both political parties.  She told me , as other women have that she was hoping her son would be able to help her in her old age.  We make sacrifices for this hope.   "I'll be working till I'm 90" she said. Another female friend said to me only a few days earlier: "I'll never be able to retire.  I work my ass off now in the hope that one of the kids at least will get a decent job and own a home with a mother-in law unit so I can have a place to live in the back."

War is an integral part of capitalism

What's so good about this situation?

It paints a rough picture but things never stay the same.  We can learn lessons from history, that is why they hide our history from us. We have to accept that the spoils do go to the victor, and that does mean controlling the flow of ideas and the accounts of history.  The world is more connected now than ever before. 

Paul Mason in his excellent book, Live Working Or Die Fighting talks of how connected the world was in the late 19th century when the Knights of Labor struck Jay Gould's Southwestern railway system.  Gould's railway system was as crucial to the world economy then as cheap goods from Asia are today as cheap US food entered the world market, Mason points out.  The recent strikes in China outside the official government controlled Unions have won major concessions from the foreign companies like Honda.  It is likely that in the factories of  Bangladesh, China, Vietnam and other "developing" economies the great clashes will occur as industry has shifted eastward as the capitalists seek cheaper and cheaper Labor power. We have pointed out on this blog the rapid pace of developments as capitalists are already shifting production from China to Vietnam where workers are cheaper.

Today, the working class in the US has changed since Gould's day. Women both here and in the rest of the world are a huge percentage of the workforce.  The strikes in Bangladesh were composed to a great extent of women workers, Muslim women workers.  The strikes in China are an exciting development and there will no doubt be huge clashes ahead and, more so than Jay Gould's railways, the connectedness of the world economy and globalization of the working class will mean what happens in China will not stay in China. 

It would be easy to be pessimistic and there is no doubt a lot to be pessimistic about but I cannot see that there will not be significant and exciting struggles over the horizon, against exploitation in the workplace as well as the destruction of the environment, something that has devastating effects on workers lives as well as the natural world.  It is not Utopian but an absolute necessity that working people send the capitalist model packing and build a democratic socialist alternative to the madness of the market.

As I have said before.  History has set this task for us and we must take it up. We have no choice if we want our children to have a future.