Arne Duncan is telling no lies when he says they are having us do more with less, and he doesn’t mean fewer students in the classroom. But it’s not just in education where we are doing more with less. Corporate profits have risen for seven consecutive quarters as the present climate allows employers to force existing workers to produce more. In the third quarter of 2010, American businesses earned profits at the highest annual rate ever recorded over the last 60 years. This is workplace terrorism in action as close to thirty million unemployed wait in the wings for the worn out to fall by the wayside.
At a cost of $700 billion Democrats and Republicans have just extended the Bush era tax cuts for the rich that were a major contributor to the deficits. And despite tonight’s business news on my local channel telling me that things are looking good, the S&P’s up and all that, the reality is that the crisis is far from over as the US capitalist class wages war on its own workers and middle class.
Last week, Obama met with corporate CEO’s to try and coax them to get their collective asses off the $2 trillion in cash they’re sitting on. But the wasters won’t invest until the government ensures them that their returns will be worthwhile. After all, they don’t produce for the betterment of society but for their own personal gain.
US cities and municipalities are facing a massive debt crisis. Meredith Whitney, the US financial analyst told 60 minutes Sunday that as many as 100 US cities could go bust in 2011. All the mouthpieces of capitalism are whining that social spending has to be cut further. The American Dream, which only existed for a few anyway, is officially over never to return. Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor had this to say: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder." *
What they are telling us is that capitalism has reached its limits. It cannot provide a secure and decent life even in the richest and most powerful capitalist economy in history. It’s interesting that if we consider the $2 trillion in debt that the cities are faced with equals the amount of accumulated profits in cash that US non-financial corporations are sitting on.
The latest issue of Business Week is full of praise for the market and its resilience. But it has no resilience. The mortgage industry is basically public. GM was nationalized. There is the TARP and other monies that we gave to the private sector. The FDIC has taken over 319 banks since 2007. Where is the resilience of the market might I ask? Plus, “Congress and the Obama administration has cut taxes $240 billion since 2009” Business Week points out. This is on top of the $700 billion tax cut gift they just gave to people earning upwards of a million a year.
Our existence is determined by moneylenders and crooks. Whether we have fire protection, schools, public transit, parks, or jobs is up to moneylenders. They will use this crisis and are using it to raise taxes. We live beyond our means you see, with our cities spending a half million dollars more than they take in in taxes. The Guardian UK points out that “California has raised state university tuition fees by 32%. Arizona has sold its state capitol and supreme court buildings to investors, and leases them back.” One investor adds, "It's all part of the same parcel: public sector indebtedness needs to be cut, it needs a lot of austerity…"
We live in a dictatorship of Capital.
We have plenty of money. They conduct all their business in secret. We have no access to their plans, we have no access to their business decisions. This is why they are so determined to shut down Wikileaks. They do everything in secret. Writing in Business Week, the financial journalist Michael Lewis said of the investment banks, “What’s really striking is how little ability the outside world retains to find out what is going on inside these places, even after we have learned that what we don’t know about them can kill us.” He's no radical. They speak more freely in the journals they publish for themselves.
It can kill us and kill our environment, and certainly kill workers throughout the world as they are doing now. This blog will not let us forget Brandley Manning, the heroic 23- year old soldier accused of sharing the war criminal's secrets with the rest of us. This blog thanks Wikileaks and Manning, if he was the whistleblower, for their courage and dedication to the truth. There must be a massive crisis in the US military that at some point will burst through to the surface for all to see. Think of this; the war criminals are free, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush, these types, and those who expose them are in prison or hounded like Julian Assange.
The thugs that rule society will never share their secrets willingly with us. Democracy is a sham for them, a hollow phrase. We reject their view of the world. We reject their worship of the market and rapacious thirst for profit. Capitalism is a thoroughly bankrupt system. There is corruption everywhere. The US Congress is corrupt. The accountants that knew Lehman Brothers were cooking the books are corrupt. The banks that underwrote the homes and foreclosed on them are corrupt. And the generals in the Pentagon are corrupt.
The massive waste of resources and squandering of the wealth we create through our Labor under capitalism can end world hunger and disease. It can provide everyone with shelter, health care and a future. But only if we take it from them: We stand for a democratic socialist world.
* Guardian UK 12-20-10
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