Obama promises the corporate CEO's tax breaks and a healthy environment for profit making.

Obama and Tom Donahue: friends at last

President Obama walked the two blocks to the US Chamber of Commerce yesterday to beg forgiveness from the unelected rulers of the United States for daring to imply they are unpatriotic, money grubbing and selfish. The C of C is the largest business-lobbying group in the US. Last October, after conducting focus groups to determine the mood in society in the aftermath of the crash, the Chamber decided its campaign to restore faith in capitalism better not use the “C” word. The term “capitalism” was not very well received by the general public as it was overwhelmingly viewed as meaning the “strong dominating the weak.”

Obama has gradually, well, perhaps not so gradually, picked up the Bush baton and ran with it, "We need to make America the best place on Earth to do business,” he told the crowd. “Let's get rid of those "outdated and unnecessary regulations," the onetime corporate scold said, and remove that "burdensome corporate tax code with one of the highest rates in the world." (1)

Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s president once accused Obama of making a "general attack on our free-enterprise system," so the president feels the need to make nice to the folks that actually run society, and he performed admirably, ingratiating himself beyond expectations. As we have pointed out in earlier blogs, the US capitalist class is on strike, sitting on some $2 trillion in cash. Profits are sky high as the Wall Street Journal put it yesterday (2) made possible by savage cuts and through terrorizing those workers still on the job “squeezing” more productivity out of them. The president issued a “gentle appeal” to the corporate bosses to invest some of that cash in the economy and “hire people”.

The same approach is not used against us when we go on a strike of Labor; when we withhold out Labor power. The courts, the police, and the military are all brought to bear. The courts are used to make our actions illegal, or throw out contracts the bosses don't like. This can be accomplished overnight if necessary, and the funds of our organizations are sequestered in fines, as punishment when we break the rules.

Obama begged the employers to “get in the game” and “invest in this nation.” But the capitalists don’t participate in the Labor process, hire workers and invest in machinery and raw material for the love of it. Capitalism is in crisis. Unemployment is still high with some 25 to 30 million workers unable to find work that can sustain a decent existence with more layoffs and cuts on the way, and housing and commercial real estate are still in the doldrums not to mention the chaos that the uprisings in the Arab world, especially Egypt have wreaked on US foreign policy, so they find better, more secure avenues for capital accumulation.

One CEO makes it perfectly clear in response to Obama’s appeals for the CEO’s to take the moral high ground and do the right thing for America, “I kind of resisted the implication that businesses have a moral responsibility to hire people,” He tells the Wall Street Journal. (3) The serious journals of capitalism are crucial for workers to read as the capitalist class talks freely and honestly to each other in them. These are the journals in whose pages the strategies for governing the system they rule are discussed and how profits can be guaranteed with the least interference from state regulation and workers' organizations.

Capitalists hire workers and engage in the productive process, as this is the only source of profit. By paying workers less value in wages than the sum of their investment they exit the process with more value, expanded value, which has its source in the unpaid Labor of they hire. This value is realized through consumption, through the sale, which is why we live in a 24-hour market place. The sale must be made, the profit realized and the process repeated over and over again. The obvious problem is that if the working class receives less value in wages than it produces through the Labor process, we cannot buy back what we produce; that’s what credit is for----for a while.

Obama promised the corporate chiefs he would get "Domestic discretionary spending down to the lowest share of our economy since Eisenhower was president." They are fairly confident that they can do this without much resistance, especially as the hierarchy atop organized Labor have shown no indication that they will organize any serious resistance to the business agenda; but their overconfidence is their weakness also. The US working class will not remain forever passive in the face of this savage offensive of capital being waged against us.

Some of those that voted for Obama try to justify his rapid betrayals on the forces around him or on personality flaws or argue that all politicians are simply crooks. While all or some of these things may be true, the explanation for these developments is political, not personal. A political party does not exist in a vacuum; it represents forces in society. The Democratic Party is a capitalist party and will always defend the interests of the boss and the CEO’s against workers. We all know what it means to make the US the best place in the world to do business and to make us more competitive. It means we must work harder and faster, and for longer hours than our bosses’ competitors and for less money; it’s a race to the bottom.

A lesson we can learn from the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East is that the working class will fight. The other important lesson as we pointed out on this blog is that when the working class does go on the offensive, organization and leadership are crucial. Capitalism cannot provide even the basic necessities of life for those that live in the heart of the most powerful and successful capitalist economy in history. Millions of Americans rely on government handouts for food and other necessities.

Out of the coming movement against the capitalist agenda an independent mass workers’ party must and I am convinced will be built as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. This will give workers a political arena in which to fight and will change the balance of class forces as it undermines the monopoly the capitalist class has over US political life.

Through this process, drawing lessons from the experience that capitalism cannot be reformed and will never resolve the crises that face workers and our communities many of us come to realize that only through the transformation of society, through the building of a democratic socialist society as an alternative to the dictatorship of capitalism can we guarantee a future for the children of the world.

(1) Obama makes corporate America his business, Washington Post 2-08-11
(2) No Rush to Hire Even as Profits Soar WSJ 2-07-11
(3) Obama Says Tax Breaks Should Now Spur Hiring: WSJ, 2-08-11