One of the political ads against Democrat Jerry Brown, who is running for governor against Meg Whitman, the Republican former CEO of e Bay, warns the electorate that Brown is in thrall to the public sector Unions. He gave them “collective bargaining rights” the ad warns us and accompanies this with a graphic showing a forearm and fist representing Unions getting larger and larger, stronger and stronger. To counter this of course Brown, who is the Union hierarchy’s candidate, boasts about how tough he’ll be on public sector Unions and will scale back pensions. Democrats and Republicans have begun this process already through the legislature, and the truth is that while the potential power of the Union movement is considerable, the leadership’s concessionary policies have weakened us considerably.
Brown’s pandering to Unions, Whitman’s ad informs us, has allowed employees in the public sector to retire at 54 with most of their full pay “for life”. I retired at 54 and am one of those greedy public sector workers that has a retirement I can actually live on for the most part although it would be much harder if I wasn’t in a dual income family. The ad then tells us that the under funded pension obligations will put the taxpayer on the hook for $100 billion
You can read more about the public sector here but what an organizing tool this right wing Republican’s anti-Union ad, or the information in it, could be for Unions and independent worker’s candidates running for office on a program designed to meet our need and not the needs of Wall Street and the corporations. The central plank of Democratic and Republican party alike is creating a healthy stable environment for profit making which includes making us more “competitive”.
Firstly, all workers should have the option to retire at 54 if we wish to. We should be able to retire with a pension that can afford us a decent and secure existence. That means, housing, transportation, good schools, health care, and the ability to afford a vacation to France once in a while to learn from the workers there. What worker would oppose such a thing unless it deprives us of basic necessities?
But it doesn’t have to deprive us of anything. It would create more job opportunities for the young for one thing. But what we have to drum in to our heads is that society can afford it easily.
Where the money is.
Citi paid one of its top execs $98.9 million in 2008. Pete Peterson is one of the co-founders of Blackstone group, another cancer on society, and a coupon-clipping outfit that played a major role bringing us the present crisis. Peterson, walked away with $1.8 billion in Blackstone's 2007 IPO and is using $1 billion of the fortune he made screwing the US taxpayer in a personal crusade to drive workers deeper in to a hole. He opposes extending unemployment benefits because “lazy” workers won’t bother to get a job. They think we are like them you see.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are the billions in bonuses Wall Street coupon clippers received, $175 billion for one firm one year. But even these amounts pale when compared to the trillions of dollars doled out by the government advancing the interests of US corporations at home and abroad. Five or six years ago, the Tax Justice Network released a report stating that the world’s richest individuals (it give Lakshmi Mittal and Rupert Murdoch as examples) had placed $11.5 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. “This $11 trillion does not include the vast amount of money stashed in tax havens by multinational corporations” the report concluded. This is a staggering sum.
Saving US capitalism from the abyss has cost the US taxpayer in the region of $2 trillion. The Obama administration likes to talk about the government making profit and talks about how little of the TARP money has been used etc. But when we talk of bailouts we have to include more than the TARP handouts, “Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com, made this exact point in a recent interview. He argued that in order to really get a good idea of all the taxpayer money spent relating to bailouts and the economy we would need to add the cost of the Fannie and Freddie bailout, plus the auto bailout, plus the $787 billion stimulus package, plus automatic government payouts (i.e. unemployment insurance), plus TARP. Once we add together all these figures, then and only then, do we really get a full picture of how much the government spent on the recent financial crisis. As Zandi stated in the interview, "You take all of that together, and you come up with a number that's pretty close to $2 trillion, and I think that is more representative of what the costs are to taxpayers from this." *
And then there’s the bailout of the auto bosses. There was a phony charade in Washington where the auto bosses went before Henry Waxman and his committee where a deal was made that if they promised to lay off thousands of workers and get tough with those remaining which they have done with the help of the leaders of the UAW, they would be handed a few billions in aide. According to a report published by the National Taxpayer’s Union in November 2009, by 2011, the auto bailout will cost the US taxpayer “$12,200 for every General Motors vehicle sold and $7,600 for every Chrysler vehicle sold”.
Then there are the wars that are supposed to protect us from all the evil people that hate us because we are free. When Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes published their book, “The $3 trillion War” a couple of years ago it was accused of being an exaggerated account of the costs. But now, it is generally accepted that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the taxpayer some $4 trillion and could reach $6 trillion if things continue to go badly.
So it would not be difficult to provide a decent retirement at 54 for all workers and with an income we can live on. Objectively it is easily affordable. We just have to allocate resources differently. It also shows that the so called “tab” the capitalist politicians claim the Californian taxpayer is on the hook for, is a smoke screen. They have us on the hook for trillions more than that, money that would eliminate that puny $100 bn.
At the time of the auto bailout even capitalist commentators were calling for the nationalization of the auto industry and some called for the nationalization of the banks. Capitalists do this in tough times, save their private capital and use public money to run industry, socializing non-profitable concerns. Such an idea should be supported, as it would undermine the ideology, so prevalent in the US, that only the private sector can run things. But beyond this, the public ownership under workers control and management of not only the means of producing society’s transportation needs (we’d definitely shift away from the inefficient, environmentally destructive auto) but also of the banks and finance houses in order to efficiently allocate the surplus wealth we create through our Labor is what we have to do to live our lives in a more humane way and in harmony with nature. We are not free when we cannot determine how the wealth we create is allocated and used.
The Wall Street Journal today has an editorial attacking the French workers. It’s titled, “Where France Goes….” And below the title in a little box below it states, “…other Western entitlement nations are likely to follow.” The editorial then goes on to warn the capitalist class of the dangers if the French workers win. In order to get us on their side they always say that if we win this or that it means layoffs or pay cuts etc. Well, if we do nothing we’ll get all those things. But where does it say that human society cannot function unless a few private, wealthy individuals own the banks, industry and every other means by which we produce the necessities of life? Only in their propaganda does it say this.
The greatest obstacle we have here in the US is the view that we can’t change things for the better; that we can’t win. If you think you can’t win, why fight? This view is strengthened by the refusal of the heads of organized Labor to mobilize the forces that they control and build a movement that can drive this capitalist offensive backwards, a movement that would include building an independent mass workers party that could also attract small business, freeing them from the clutches of the corporations; providing cheap loans for example and relieving them of the burden of medical care and excessive insurance. Retirement at 54 and paying for it by taking back from the rich and the corporations all the money they steal from us would give the Unions a new lease on life and a party of our own a huge activists base.
These are goals we have to struggle for. No one wants conflict; the French workers don’t want conflict, but their cause is just, they are fighting for all of us, the WSJ recognizes that very clearly. We need to also.
* National Taxpayer’s Union: http://www.ntu.org/governmentbytes/more-than-you-paid-for.html
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