Oppose State Interference in the UAW. Build Rank and File Power

FBI and IRS raids UAW Presidents home. Source: Detroit Free Press

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The FBI, the investigative arm of a corrupt and degenerate state,  has stepped up its investigation in to corruption in the leadership of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) and searched the homes of current president Gary Jones and former president Dennis Williams. The Northern Michigan Conference Center has also been searched by the FBI.

These activities are part of an investigation that has led to convictions of 8 individuals already, including a labor relations officer working for Fiat/Chrysler. The investigations, according to reports, are in response to allegations of corruption, bribery and taking kickbacks.

The UAW leadership is presently in negotiations with the Detroit auto companies preparing to give more concessions to the auto bosses which is not a crime under US law fortunately for them and their colleagues at the helm of organized labor in the US.

Kristin Dziczek, a labor expert at the Center for Automotive Research says that this investigation, “….is a big heavy storm cloud hanging over them,” at negotiation time and is concerned that the scenario will erode “trust” among workers who are already on edge due to factory closures. 

It’s worth letting an expert like Ms. Dziczek know that union members’ “trust” in the leaders at the helm of organized labor has not simply been eroded but almost erased after decades of falling living standards, forced relocations, and shuttered plants. The majority of the leadership of organized labor in the US has failed miserably when it comes to defending the interests of the union rank and file and of the working class as a whole. They have no answer to technological innovation that has cost jobs as well as the offshoring and export of production to countries where unions are weaker or non existent often taking a protectionists position rather than an internationalist one, building international solidarity against global capitalism.

As working class families find it harder and harder to make ends meet, are forced to go in to more debt to survive, and the power of the landlords and other sections of the capitalist class strengthened, failed organizing drives and strike strategies that are designed simply to let off steam rather than actions that are designed to stop production and hurt the employer financially have added to workers’ wariness about going on strike. A result of the present leadership’s failed policies is that millions of workers have drawn the conclusion that we cannot win, that concessions are our only alternative.

The UAW leadership in particular has bent over backwards to help out the auto bosses at their members’ expense crushing any resistance from below that threatened their relationship with the employers based on the Team Concept and labor peace. The more they gave, (of their members wages, rights and benefits) the more aggressive the bosses’ become and this is the case with the majority of the leadership of organized labor in the US. The same pattern, the refusal of the labor leadership to seriously confront capitalism, is true internationally with a few exceptions like NUMSA in South Africa.

These investigations have picked up apace after Norwood Jewell, a UAW official who led bargaining for the UAW at Chysler/Fiat was sentenced to 15 months in a federal prison for violating the Labor Management Relations Act.  He was accused earlier this year of using a Fiat Chrysler-funded credit card to pay for a $7,570 dinner at a steakhouse in Palm Springs, Calif. and a $1,268 bill at a golf resort. Perhaps he was playing with the Predator in Chief, he’s not known for footing the bill.

The Assistant US Attorney General accused Jewell of undermining public confidence in the “country’s collective bargaining system”, according to reports in the media.  This is not because collective bargaining is such an advantage to workers; it is the bosses’ way of derailing workers collective power. We should remind ourselves that it was mass direct action, strikes, occupations, etc. that built the workers organizations and it was this same mass action that resulted in the collective bargaining process to derail mass action. It introduces this idea of two equal sides coming to a gentleman's agreement. The Assistant Attorney General is afraid that undermining confidence in the collective bargaining system will speed up the inevitable return to workers relying on our own strength and returning to the methods that built the unions in the first place.

As it is presently, without pressure from below, collective bargaining has been an opportunity for these very same union officials to offer up their members’ hard won gains at the bargaining table at contract time.

These activities, officials taking bribes, are no shock to workers although it is not bribes that are at the root of the betrayals and pro-management policies of the leadership at the top of the union movement. The problem is that they have no alternative to capitalism and when the system enters in to crisis they move to bail it out which means their members’ living standards must suffer. This world-view prevents them seeing their members and the working class as a whole as the force that can transform the balance of class forces and build a new society. As we have seen with the issue of offshoring, the only serious solution from the present labor hierarchy is to defend US capitalism in its struggle with foreign rivals pitting workers in different countries against one another.

With this ideological anchor, mobilizing their members (and the rest of the working class) whose unique position in the process of production has the potential to halt all economic activity, can only lead to chaos. In the workplace and society as a whole, there are only two sources of power. One is the organized working class, unified against racism sexism nationalism and all forms of division, and conscious of itself as a class with its own interests. The other is the capitalist class. It is to the capitalist class the heads of organized labor look for answers. And it is this that leads to the criminal activity we read about here which is small potatoes compared to the crimes of the business world and global capitalism. 

The disastrous policies, the defeats, concessions that have set us back decades, the combination of bosses and union heads in undermining militancy and at times cooperating in firing union activists, are all a product of this world view.

Oppose Government Interference in the Trade Unions
No doubt there will be workers and rank and file union members that will get some satisfaction knowing that those they consider sellouts and crooks will be getting their just rewards. I understand this to an extent but it is a mistake to welcome this interference on the part of the capitalist state and its agencies in organizations the US working class built through a century or more of heroic struggle. The FBI historically as been no friend to workers, minorities or the trade union movement from the Palmer Raids on; beatings, incarceration, deportations, defending the interests of the riling class, the 1%, this is the legacy of the FBI.

These raids and interference in trade union affairs must be seen in context. The capitalist offensive has continued with help from the heads of organized labor.  When workers have taken the first step in resisting concessions, voting down concessionary contracts, the officialdom uses every trick in the book to wear them down. The rank and file at Chrysler rejected a tentative agreement in 2015, showing, “…a great deal of spunkiness that forced the negotiating team back to the table resulting on an improved deal”, says Frank Hammer, a former UAW president and chairman of UAW Local 909 in Warren MI. Facts For Working People commented on this.

The teachers and educators have opened up a new era for organized labor that neither the labor hierarchy nor its left apologists make prominent. Most importantly, this movement that produced the highest number of strikes in a year in thirty years, was in conservative states with right to work laws and was rank and file led against the initial opposition from established leaders who followed the movement---- never initiated it. And we can be sure that the more astute sections of the US ruling class (not the Predator in Chief) are concerned that the US working class will at some point explode on to the scene in the US in a major way. History teaches us that, and to confound all the experts, none of them thought that West Virginia and other states, never mind teachers and others in public education would do what they did.

It is the rank and file of organized labor that can and must move to transform our unions, change the present leadership and our relationship with the bosses and capitalism, and to do that we have to build fighting rank and file caucuses in the workplace and the union halls that can build a generalized movement and openly challenge the present leadership and its policies. Such independent rank and file organizations are what should be investigating these activities.

Michael Roberts: The trade trigger

by Michael Roberts

Financial markets globally continue to gyrate on any news about the trade war between the US and China.  When President Trump announced that the Chinese had called him during the G7 summit meeting in Biarritz to agree on talks on a trade deal, the stock markets rose.  Within hours after China said no such call had been made and this was just another Trump ‘fake news’, markets reversed and went down again.

Clearly what happens in the ongoing trade battle has become a trigger point for a stock market collapse and a massive switch into ‘safe haven’ government bonds and gold.  But it is more than that.  Global growth has been slowing and corporate investment has dropped off sharply.  This is driven by a fall in corporate profits, a profits recession.

Take the earnings results of the top 500 companies by stock market value in the US, S&P-500.  With nearly all results in for the second quarter of 2019 ending in June, total earnings (profits) are up only 0.5% and sales revenues up only 4.7%.  After taking into account current inflation, real earnings were negative and revenues barely positive.  And that’s for the top 500 companies.

For the smaller companies, the situation is even worse.  Earnings are down over 10% from last year and revenues up only 2.2%, or flat after inflation.  Excluding the finance sector, earnings would be down 21%.  A sector analysis shows that the retail sector did best as the American consumer went on spending, along with the finance sector.  But productive sectors like technology saw a 6.3% fall in profits.  And that is key.


For the first half of 2019, the earnings are in negative territory compared to a 23% rise in the first half of 2018.  And the forecast for Q3 earnings is for a further fall of 4.3% yoy.

Everywhere, domestic production is dropping back.  The usual answer is to sell more overseas through exports.  But here the world trade picture is looking bleak.  The Dutch database company CPB provides monthly world trade figures.  And in June, world trade fell by 1.4% over May and compared to June 2018.  Indeed, world trade has fallen since October 2018 by 3.5%.



And now we have the trade war, which is intensifying.  Only last week, China announced that it was imposing tariffs on US imports in retaliation for the planned September tariffs on Chinese imports into the US already announced by Trump.  Trump promptly announced further tariff hikes in response.

JP Morgan economists now reckon that direct effect of these tariff measures on China’s growth, already slowing, would be to knock 0.2% of the growth rate and deliver a permanent loss of 0.5% of China’s GDP.  The extra hikes threatened by Trump would drive that loss up to 0.9%.  US growth also would take a hit, to the tune of about 0.25% to 0.5% in permanent loss of GDP.  Even more worrying is that uncertainty about how far this war is going, is making businesses, already suffering from slowing or falling profits, as we have seen, even more unwilling to make new investments.



Global investment growth is already down to just 1% a year, according to JPM.  If investment should go negative globally in the next few quarters, then global real GDP growth, currently around 2.5% a year (depending on how you measure it), would drop towards zero – in other words, a global recession.

The Opioid Crisis: Caused by the profit addiction of capitalism.

We publish this article below which deals with the hundreds of thousands of peoples lives which have been either ended or shattered by the Opioid Crisis as it is called. In this Blog we try to explain the causes of the problems presently faced by the human species and the planet. Capitalism and the capitalist class is in charge of things in the world today. They are responsible for the crises that we face. This includes the opioid catastrophe.

The capitalist class is addicted to profit. Nothing, neither life on earth as we know it or the existence of the human species, both of which are threatened by global warming, nuclear war and the degradation of the planet, can be solved under capitalism. Neither can the opioid crisis or whatever new drug capitalism will come up with to make a profit and to dope working people whose real problem is the alienation that is inherent in capitalist society. Capitalism must be ended and replaced with a rational, planned humane system of production with a democratic socialist society; a world federation of democratic socialist states. The collective power and the collective brain of the international working class is the only force that can do this. 

1. In 2017, health care providers across the US wrote more than 191 million prescriptions for opioid pain medication—a rate of 58.7 prescriptions per 100 people.

2. Despite guidelines to limit opioids as a first approach to managing most chronic pain, a study found primary care clinicians write 45% of all opioid prescriptions in the United States.

3. More than 11 million people misused prescription opioids in 2017.

4. Every day, more than 1,000 people are treated in emergency departments for misusing prescription opioids.

5. In 2017, prescription opioids were involved in more than 35% of all opioid overdose deaths: nearly 17,000.

6. From 1999 to 2017, almost 218,000 people in the United States died from overdoses related to prescription opioids.

7. The CDC estimates the total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse in the US is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of health care, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.  From the American Physical Therapy Association.  FFWP Admin

Reprinted From Freedom Socialist Party

The opioid crisis

Steven Strauss, M.D. August 2019

The current epidemic of opioid addiction and fatalities has been years in the making. With 130 Americans dying daily from opioid overdoses, understanding the causes and finding solutions is urgent.

A pharmaceutical industry high on super-profits and enabled by the government is fundamentally responsible. Their pain pills have led to more pain.

The script is a familiar one. From tobacco to fossil fuels to opioids, markets are manufactured, science is denied, problems are ignored, and working people suffer.

Pain is not a simple physical problem. It is made worse by the social pressures workers constantly experience. Treating it requires both a physical and social diagnosis.

Bogus science creates disaster. What is now called “the opioid crisis” began when Perdue Pharma introduced its blockbuster narcotic OxyContin in 1995. Entirely without scientific evidence, it claimed the drug had negligible addictive potential because of its slow release into the body.

In 1996, the American Pain Society, on Perdue’s payroll, proclaimed that pain was a vital sign, like temperature and blood pressure. This was simply untrue. Yet doctors felt pressured to write more pain prescriptions, at least to whites with excellent health coverage.

In 2001, with OxyContin now bringing in $45 million in annual profit, the Food and Drug Administration approved it for chronic pain, again with no scientific support.

The market for OxyContin grew exponentially. Other legal agents entered, as competing drug companies carved out their niches. Cheaper illicit substances like heroin expanded the street market, and were later cut with super-strong, deadly fentanyl.

The stage was set for true disaster.

A double-edged sword. Opioids very effectively relieve physical pain, greatly benefitting cancer, surgical, and trauma patients. But they also produce euphoria, which relieves emotional pain, a widespread symptom in a society with staggering amounts of stress and depression.

Studies show that work itself is society’s leading cause of stress. Financial difficulties are number two. Between 2014 and 2018, depressive symptoms rose more than 18 percent among U.S. workers, especially affecting the young.

Chronic pain increases risks, because of longer duration of treatment, a bonus for Big Pharma. One federal study found that 15 percent of U.S. workers, even sedentary ones, lived with pain most of the preceding six months. The National Institutes of Health reported that 25 million Americans have chronic pain. That’s an enormous market.

But opioid benefits must be carefully weighed. Being essentially heroin tablets, they carry real dangers of tolerance, addiction, and death.

Physical and emotional pain exacerbate one another. Antidepressants are among the most effective physical pain relievers.

Other safer alternatives, including over-the-counter analgesics and possibly medical marijuana, are often effective even though less potent than opioids. But for-profit opioid corporations are compelled to grow their market. So they push their products indiscriminately.

Both legal and illegal substances cause opioid fatalities. Most illicit opioid users started with the legal ones. Substances bought on the street don’t require a doctor visit or prescription and are relatively cheap.

To someone unemployed or without insurance, this may be the only option.

Race is also a huge factor in who gets treated for pain. Blacks are significantly less likely to receive pain prescriptions than whites, and are more likely to be criminalized for drug use.

What everyone needs is effective pain relief with minimal addictive potential. The industry has no incentive to work for this. Habitual opioid use is too profitable.

Who is dying?
A true social phenomenon, patterns of opioid deaths closely parallel the usual U.S. working class fault lines.

Initially described as a white epidemic, African American deaths have recently skyrocketed. The white opioid death rate was double that of Blacks from 2005 to 2013. From 2014 to 2017, the Black death rate rose twice as fast as that of whites.

Economically depressed areas suffer more. The entire Appalachian region has 55 times more drug overdoses than the rest of the country.

Nearly a million veterans live in poverty. They are twice as likely to become homeless. They suffer from inadequately treated mental health problems and high unemployment. So it is no surprise that from 2000 to 2016 there was a 65 percent increase in opioid deaths among veterans. Most of this increase was from heroin and other illicit agents.

Rates are high among Native Americans and growing faster among women.

Now, in a predictable knee-jerk response to the crisis, strict new regulations are frightening many doctors away from prescribing much-needed pain medications.

A working-class solution.
Those who caused the problem cannot be trusted to solve it.

Donald Trump’s national emergency scheme uses the crisis as a pretext to promote his anti-immigrant agenda, painting all migrants as drug smugglers.

Healthcare costs and criminalization are huge barriers to treatment for drug abuse or addiction and must be beaten down.

There are safe medicines that block cravings and overdoses. But whites are 35 times more likely than Blacks to receive Suboxone, a pill used to treat opioid addiction.

Counseling also plays a crucial role. For many, opioids must be provided free in a medically supervised, confidential setting. This would reduce rates of AIDS and Hepatitis C infection.

A dedicated payment account to meet the costs of the care must be set up and entirely funded by Big Pharma. The industry needs to be de-privatized and run by workers’ organizations committed to healthcare as a human right.

Healthcare must provide good care for chronic pain conditions, which may require extended physical therapy, home assistance, and other non-opioid treatments.

Crucially, we need to address the complex social variables which are part of the problem. This means comprehensive, socialized healthcare and a massive program to create well-paid jobs with fully funded retirement for all.

Recognizing that pain is both physical and emotional, Marx famously said that “religion is the opium of the masses,” who suffer in “a heartless world.”

Big Pharma tried to make opioids the religion of the masses, helping create our heartless world in its own heartless image.

Working people deserve better. Ultimately, the pain that is capitalism must end.

Send feedback to Dr. Steven Strauss at fspbaltimore@hotmail.com.

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Ten years on.......we still miss him.

Spike: What a beautiful creature

Animals are precious kin. I have had them all my life. I had pet pigs, sheep, ducks and geese, chickens and cats. I had a pet Jackdaw that I rescued and that could talk like Jays can. And of course,  I've always had dogs. Some people can't have them because losing them is so tragic and painful; like losing a family member  but a domestic animal is a family member. A guardian, a friend and companion. The problem is we never experience the incredible love, loyalty and humor they bring us if we don't have them. It's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. It's especially heartbreaking when its sudden. Spike went in for a teeth cleaning and never came out of anesthesia.  

I wrote this below the day after he died. It was one way of easing the pain, sharing it, getting it off one's chest as they say.

Spike,  born 12-26-96- died 8-24-09

8/25/2009

The little man has gone

We lost our precious Spike yesterday.  We buried him last night in the back yard.  We put pics and his favorite blanket in there with him along with a poem and two of his favorite treats.  The pain is excruciating; the little man has gone.

He was priceless.  He brought us great joy and pleasure, made us feel safer in our home.  He was a beautiful character.  We are so sad but know that the alternative to this pain would be that we wouldn’t have known him.  He took us in to the Redwoods.  It is because of him that I got to see the trails.

I couldn’t dig so two friends came over and John dug a hole for us.  Noah came and helped too, and Kisha, Mariah, Jerry and Isiah came and Jerry threw a shovel full of dirt over him as well.  Karen, who has looked after him as his Vet, came by as well.  He was on his favorite chair peaceful and beautiful.

John brought Birch leaves and we put down a bed of these for him to lay on.  Spike was a beautiful dog inside and out.  Animals are a part of us, or we are a part of them.  It is unbelievable that 18 pounds of flesh could have such a profound effect on those around him.  His presence is everywhere in this house.

Both Joanne and I are heartbroken but know it will pass and we will enjoy the memories of the times he brought us.  He is in the garden that he loved so much.

I am typing with only one hand due to my accident so I will say goodnight now.  Sorry to all the comrades and friends that tried to reach me yesterday and couldn’t, I was either too busy or incapable of talking (hard to believe I know).  And many thanks to those that knew about it and left messages.

Richard

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World Economy: It’s all going pear-shaped

by Michael Roberts

With perfect timing, just as the summit meeting of the leaders of the top capitalist economies (G7) met in Biarritz, France, China announced a new round of tariffs on $75bn of US imported goods. This was in retaliation to a new planned round of tariffs on Chinese goods that the US planned for December. US President Trump reacted angrily and immediately announced that he was going to hike the tariff rates on his existing tariffs on $250bn of Chinese goods and impose more tariffs on another $350bn of imports.

The US president also said he was ordering US companies to look for ways to scrap their operations in China. “We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them,” Mr Trump wrote. “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”

This intensification of the trade war naturally hit financial markets; the US stock market fell sharply, bond prices went up as investors looked for ‘safe-havens’ in government bonds and the crude oil price fell as China was going to impose a reduction on US oil imports.

These developments came only a day after the latest data on the state of the major capitalist economies revealed a significant slowdown.  The US manufacturing activity index (PMI) for August came in below 50 for the first time since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.

Indeed, the US, Eurozone and Japanese indexes are below 50, indicating a full-out manufacturing recession is here now.  And the ‘new orders’ components for each region was even worse – so the manufacturing index is set to fall further. Up to now, the service sectors of the major economies have been holding up, thus avoiding an indication of a full-blown economic slump. “This decline raises the risk that weakness in manufacturing may have begun to spill over to services, a risk that could generate a sharper-than-expected weakening in US and global labor markets.”  (JPM). Overall, JP Morgan reckons the world economy is growing at just a 2.4% annual pace – close to levels considered a ‘stall speed’ before outright recession.

Despite all his bluster about how well the US economy is doing, Trump is worried.  In addition to attacking China, he also launched again into criticising US Fed chair Jay Powell for not cutting interest rates further to boost the economy, calling Powell as big an “enemy” of the US economy as China!

Powell had just been speaking at the annual summer gathering of the world’s central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  In his address, he basically said that there was only so much monetary policy could do.  Trade wars and other global ‘shocks’ could not be overcome by monetary policy alone.  Powell’s monetary policy committee is split on what to do.  Some want to hold interest rates where they are because they fear that too low interest rates (and everywhere they are going negative) will fuel an unsustainable credit boom and bust.  Others want to cut rates as Trump demands to resist the recessionary forces descending on the economy.  Powell bleated that “We are examining the monetary policy tools we have used both in calm times and in crisis, and we are asking whether we should expand our toolkit.”

The trouble is that the central bankers at Jackson Hole are realising, as had already become obvious, that monetary policy, whether conventional (cutting interest rates) or unconventional (printing money or ‘quantitative easing’) was not working to get economies out of low growth and productivity or avoid a new recession.

Many of the academic papers presented to the central bankers at Jackson Hole were laced with pessimism.  One argued that bankers needed to coordinate monetary policy around a global ‘natural rate of interest’ for all.  The problem was that “there is considerable uncertainty about where the neutral rate really lies” in each country, let alone globally.  As one speaker put it: “I am cautious about using this impossible-to-measure concept to estimate the degree of policy divergence around the world (or even just the G4)”.  So much for the basis of most central bank monetary policy for the last ten years.

Another paper pointed out that “monetary policy divergence vis-a-vis the U.S. has larger spillover effects in emerging markets than advanced economies.”  So “domestic monetary policy transmission is imperfect, and consequently, emerging markets’ monetary policy actions designed to limit exchange rate volatility can be counterproductive.”  In other words, the impact of the Fed’s policy rate and the dollar on weaker economies is so great that smaller central banks can do nothing with monetary policy, except make things worse!

No wonder, Bank of England governor Mark Carney in his speech took the opportunity before he leaves his post to suggest that the answer was to end the rule of dollar in trading and financial markets.  The US accounts for only 10 per cent of global trade and 15 per cent of global GDP but half of trade invoices and two-thirds of global securities issuance, the BoE governor said. As a result, “while the world economy is being reordered, the US dollar remains as important as when Bretton Woods collapsed” in 1971. It caused too much imbalances in the world economy and threatened to bring down weaker emerging economies which could not get enough dollars.  It was time for a global fund to protect against capital flight and later a world monetary system with a world money!  Some hope!  But he showed the desperation of central bankers.

The impending global recession has also concentrated the minds of mainstream economics.  A division of opinion among mainstream economists has broken out over what economic policy to adopt to avoid a new global recession. Orthodox Keynesian, Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary under Clinton and Harvard professor, has argued the major capitalist economies are in ‘secular stagnation’. So he reckons monetary easing, whether conventional or unconventional, won’t work. Fiscal stimulus is needed.

On the other hand, Stanley Fischer, formerly deputy at the US Fed and now an executive of the mega investment fund, Blackrock, reckons that fiscal stimulus won’t work because it is not ‘nimble enough’ ie takes too long to have an effect. Also, it risks driving up public debt and interest rates to unsustainable levels. So monetary measures are still better.

The post-Keynesians and Modern Monetary Theory economists got very excited because Summers seemed to agree with them, finally, – namely that fiscal stimulus through budget deficits and government spending can stop ‘aggregate demand’ collapsing. It seems that the consensus among economists is moving to the view that central bankers can do little or nothing to sustain capitalist economies in 2019. 

But in my view, neither the ‘monetarists’ nor the Keynesians/MMT are right. Whether more monetary easing and fiscal stimulus, nothing will stop the oncoming slump. That’s because it is not to do with weak ‘aggregate demand’.  Household consumption in most economies is relatively strong as people continue to spend more, partly through extra borrowing at very low rates of interest.  The other part of ‘aggregate demand’, business investment is weak and getting weaker.  But that is because of low profitability and now, in the last year or so, falling profits in the US and elsewhere.  Indeed, US corporate profit margins (profits as a share of GDP) have been falling (from record highs) for over four years, the longest post-war contraction.

The Keynesians, post-Keynesians (and MMT supporters) see fiscal stimulus through more government spending and increased government budget deficits as the way to end the Long Depression and avoid a new slump.  But there has never been any firm evidence that such fiscal spending works, except in the 1940s war economy when the bulk of investment was made by government or directed by government, with business investment decisions taken away from capitalist companies.

The irony is that the biggest fiscal spenders globally have been Japan, which has run budget deficits for 20 years with little success in getting economic growth much above 1% a year since the end of the Great Recession; and Trump’s America with his tax cuts and corporate tax exemptions in 2017.  The US economy is slowing down fast, and Trump is hinting at more tax cuts and shouting at Powell to cut rates.  In Europe, the European Central Bank is preparing a new round of monetary easing measures.  And even the German government is hinting at fiscal deficit spending.

So we shall probably get a new round of monetary easing and fiscal stimulus measures, to satisfy all parts of mainstream and heterodox economics.  But they won’t work.  The trade and technology war is the trigger for a new global slump.

Insurance Companies Abandon Fire Areas in California

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Forest fires caused $24 billion in insurance losses in California in 2017 and US insurers are pulling out of much of the market in response. By 2018 insurers refused to renew 167,570 home insurance policies according to the WSJ, over half of them in the low density rural areas.  I would be interested in why the other 80,000 or so. *

When this happens, people have few options. One of them is to go to what they call “surplus” carriers or to “reinsurers” these are companies that sell insurance to insurance companies. In either case, the costs are higher and often the benefits or coverage less. We have these huge deductibles that insurance companies impose on people whether it’s health care, car insurance, home insurance and so on. It is no wonder that millions of Americans hate the insurance industry with a passion. This is something trade union leaders could use as an organizing tool and also as part of a struggle for our own political party, an alternative to the twin parties of Wall Street, the Democrats and Republicans.

Private corporations whether it’s the sickness industrial complex and its hospitals, big pharma or the insurance companies, do not invest for social need or for the public good; they throw money in to circulation in order for it to return to them in greater quantities than their outlay. They invest to make profit. It’s not simply a response to demand or need as people need lots of things, We need social infrastructure for example and the social infrastructure in the US is in dire straits. Business Week once called it the third deficit. That was many years before the $1.6 trillion US student debt crisis.

As with all failings of the so-called free market of which there are too many to list here, the state, through the two capitalist parties, and California is a very strong Democratic Party state, ensures that the taxpayer steps in to save the day. Here in California, the zip codes hit by severe wildfires in 2015 and 2017 had insurers decline to insure 8,751homeowners in 2018, a 9.6% increase from 2017 and many homeowners in fire areas, people are relying on the state insurer, the California Fair Plan to step in.

More and more Americans are seeing that socialism isn’t so unpopular when the capitalist class falls back on it. The state, as Marx once pointed out, is the executive committee of the capitalist class as a whole, the defender of that class and the system it governs and that was certainly clear in 2008 when socialist measures were introduced to bail out the system, to drag it from the edge of the abyss. Huge swathes of industry were nationalized although the capitalist mass media refers to it a “conservatorship” they don’t want workers getting any ideas about nationalizing major industries.

There is more to this issue than simply fires and home insurance. Let’s not forget that the building of what is in actuality human shelter, the housing infrastructure of society is also a business and, has to make profit. How we provide housing, how we build, where and when is determined by market forces and the private sector.  We will also never see the end of these unnatural fires (leaving aside climate change for a moment) as long as society continues to encroach in to the rural areas, the mountains and our great forests. The devastation is considerable not just to plant life but also animals. Here is some video I shot when I drove up to Paradise California after the huge fire up there.  And here’s some drone footage.

It is the so-called free market that is at the root of what is a national and global environmental catastrophe. It is only a democratic socialist rationally planned economic system of production that can reverse this situation. The millions of workers who suffer the most from the brutal legacy of capitalist production can bring this about. To do that we have to recognize ourselves as a distinct class with distinct interests separate from those whose life and wealth is dependent on the exploitation and commodification of everything. The planet, we must argue, is not for sale. Just like Greenland.

* Home Insurers Retreat From Scorched Areas WSJ 8-21-19 p A3

Kentucky MIners Can Link up With Educators. Unity is Power.

This is a report from Harlan County Kentucky about the miners that have been blocking railroad tracks for three weeks now.. What is important about this is not just that it is in Harlan County a historic place when it comes to union battles and working class history, but it is Kentucky where union teachers and their allies have fought major battles over public education and teachers working conditions.

The miners from what I can gather are, for good reason, trying to avoid partisan politics, but that doesn’t mean we avoid working class politics, the politics that affects all workers.

I read in the article that Kentucky Governor, Matt Bevin, the multi millionaire manufacturer and investment banker who manages money for rich people has visited the blockade. Bevin is the same individual who has savaged working people’s living standards as well as teachers wages and working conditions. He has publicly attacked teacher and other unionists in the state.

This is an opportunity for the unions that were involved in the teachers and parents battles in education earlier this year that shut down the schools for a week to make attempts to link with these miners in Cumberland. The trade union hierarchy should be organizing this and building links between the eastern part of Kentucky and the west including Louisville. Both the urban west and the rural east is suffering from the assault on working class people that is taking place throughout the country and under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The trade union leadership cannot be relied upon to initiate such actions and if they won't the many activists in Louisville in the west can take that lead if they haven’t already. Harlan County has a tremendous history and this great history can be reborn. The miners blocking those tracks would surely welcome support in any form from western Kentucky and the teachers and parents who have waged a huge struggle on behalf of workers in that state. At the very least, tenuous links can be built by sending messages of support from the teachers unions. Louisville Labor Council has 50,000 workers affiliated to it. This is a huge potential source of power and must be used, we all have the same needs and desires.

 

Truckers blocked a highway in Kentucky last week in solidarity with coal miners who were protesting over wages that were left unpaid when a mining company abruptly shut down.Credit CreditKristian Thacker for The New York Time

 Unpaid Miners Blocked a Coal Train in Protest. Weeks Later, They’re Still There.

 NY Rimes
Aug. 19, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/us/kentucky-coal-miners.html

CUMBERLAND, Ky. — A little after 4 p.m. on Friday, four hulking big-rig cabs, facing each other in pairs and taking up both lanes, brought the Kingdom Come Parkway to a standstill. On the highway between the trucks, a group of out-of-work coal miners raised a banner: “No Pay We Stay.”

That is the miners’ plan in its entirety, and for close to three weeks, that is what they have done.

A protest that began with five men blocking a train full of coal has grown into a small 24-hour tent city along some railroad tracks next to the highway. It has become a pilgrimage site for labor activists, a rallying point for the community — “a tailgate party on steroids,” as one local official approvingly put it. And it is the first organized miners’ protest that anyone can remember for decades in Harlan County, Ky., a place once virtually synonymous with bloody labor wars.

The railroad blockade began in late July, about a month after Blackjewel, the two-year-old company where the miners worked, suddenly declared bankruptcy. Blackjewel owned mines in four states, and employed over a thousand miners in central Appalachia.

Miners learned in the middle of an afternoon shift that Blackjewel was shutting down immediately and putting everyone out of work. It did so without filing a mandatory 60-day advance warning and without posting a bond, required by Kentucky law, to cover payroll.

Workers received no pay for their last week on the job. Then they learned that their paychecks for the previous two weeks had bounced. Bankruptcies and layoffs have become routine in the coal fields during a grueling industrywide decline, but no one seemed to recall anything quite like this.

“It’s no different from robbing a bank,” said Jeffrey Willig, a wiry 40-year-old father of six.

In Harlan County, hundreds of miners found themselves with negative bank balances, staring down mortgages, car payments and medication costs. Some were alerted to the news by ex-spouses who had not gotten automatic child-support payments. Lawyers representing the miners in the bankruptcy proceeding estimated that Blackjewel’s employees in central Appalachia were each owed $4,202.91 on average, for wages and benefits earned.

But the employees are just one party, fighting alongside Blackjewel’s other creditors over pieces of the company in federal bankruptcy court.

 

One of the company’s assets was a trainload of coal, over a million dollars’ worth, at the Cloverlick No. 3 mine in Harlan County. The coal, dug up by the unpaid workers, had been sold, but had not yet been transported to the buyer. On the afternoon of July 29, the train rolled slowly out of the mine. It did not go unnoticed.

“They was doing it as quiet as could be,” said Dalton Lewis, 20.

A fellow miner called him with the plan: “Come on down here, we’re going to stop this train.”

This instinct runs deep in Harlan County. In the 1930s, efforts to organize miners led to “Bloody Harlan” — currently a hashtag printed on protest signs — a deadly conflict pitting thousands of union miners against coal companies, law enforcement officials and strikebreakers. Blood was spilled again in the early 1970s during a bitter 13-month strike by workers at the Brookside mine, the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.”

But there had been little in the way of organized labor protest in Harlan for years before that July afternoon, when Mr. Lewis joined Mr. Willig and three other miners on the railroad tracks.

Nearly three weeks later, the coal train sits idle, back at the mine. Alerted by news of the Harlan standoff, the Department of Labor intervened, asking the bankruptcy judge to block shipment of the coal and deeming it “hot goods.” Blackjewel soon said it would earmark proceeds from the sale of the coal for its former employees, and would leave the coal where it was until there was an agreement on the amount. But the protesters say they will keep up their blockade until they have payment in hand.

Some of the laid-off miners have found work, often away from Harlan; Mr. Lewis has left for Alabama. Blackjewel’s mining operations in Harlan have been bought, and the new owners have pledged to pay the miners some of the money they are owed. The mines have not reopened, though, and no money has arrived — not from the new owners, and certainly not from Blackjewel.

So day in and day out, a small band of families waits in camp chairs alongside the tracks, while a million dollars’ worth of coal remains parked up and around a bend. A string band occasionally gathers on the tracks to play old mountain songs and labor ballads.

The tents have proliferated, some bearing the logos of the local funeral homes that provided them. There are portable toilets, delivered by the city and county, as well as a generator and a children’s tent with books, toys and portable cribs. A philanthropic foundation gave $2,000 to each miner, and the owner of a local Chinese restaurant has raised thousands of dollars for them on her own. Barbershops have offered free back-to-school haircuts, and the county probation and parole office has fielded donated toiletries.

The camp runs on Red Bull and soda — with ice courtesy of a local nursing home. Meals are cooked in an improvised kitchen that takes up two tents. Donated food has come in by the carload since the beginning of the protest.

“I’ve got some pizzas here from Bernie Sanders,” said a perplexed Pizza Hut delivery woman who pulled up on Friday afternoon. Someone involved with the protest had apparently gotten word about it to someone with the Sanders presidential campaign.

Politicians have flocked to the scene, including Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, and Amy McGrath, a Democratic candidate for Senate. But camp leaders, to maintain their eclectic coalition, have tried to curb explicit talk about partisan politics. This is particularly difficult when outsiders show up, like the solidarity-pledging truckers who drove in from all over the country last week as part of a group called Black Smoke Matters, one of them wearing a T-shirt celebrating President Trump’s building of a wall.

Much of the daily life at the tent city has been organized by a group of activists camping there, many of whom identify as transgender and anarchist. The activists came from around the region in the first few days of the blockade, some with experience operating these sorts of camps at environmental protests, and they quickly got to work running the kitchen and tapping networks of liberal interest groups for contributions.

In an echo of some unexpected protest alliances of the past, the activists have quietly blended in with the tent city’s daily traffic. Meanwhile, evangelical preachers stop by to hold impromptu prayer services, and union officials deliver stemwinders from the bed of a pickup truck.

There have not been union mines in Eastern Kentucky for decades, but the speeches allude to the old labor wars in Harlan County. It is not too far a reach: Out-of-work Blackjewel miners recall their fathers talking of dynamite and gunshots.

“History’s repeating itself,” said Mr. Willig, who stood on the pavement with the miners on Friday holding up the protest banner.

The highway blockade, arranged by the truckers, lasted about 10 minutes. There was no specific plan for what would come next, Mr. Willig said as he walked back to the tent city. No plan, that is, other than staying put.

Theodore Allen Centennial: The Invention of the White Race

Theodore W. Allen

From Jeffrey B Perry

100^th Anniversary of The Birth of Theodore W. Allen

His Major Collection of Papers is Now Available at UMass-Amherst (alongside those of W.E.B. Du Bois) and an initial Inventory is at http://scua.library.umass.edu/umarmot/allen-theodore-w-1919-2005/

Theodore W. “Ted” Allen (1919-2005) was an anti-white supremacist, working class intellectual and activist. He developed his pioneering class struggle-based analysis of “white skin privilege” beginning in the mid-1960s; authored the seminal two-volume The Invention of the White Race in the 1990s; and consistently maintained that the struggle against white supremacy was central to efforts at radical social change in the United States.  Born on August 23, 1919, in Indianapolis, Indiana, he grew up in Paintsville, Kentucky and Huntington, West Virginia and, after moving to New York City, lived his last fifty-plus years in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

Allen's two-volume The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997: Verso Books, new expanded edition 2012) with its focus on racial oppression and social control is one of the twentieth-century's major contributions to historical understanding. It presents a full-scale challenge to what he refers to as "The Great White Assumption" -- the unquestioning acceptance of the "white race" and "white" identity as skin color-based and natural attributes rather than as social and political constructions. Its thesis on the origin, nature, and maintenance of the "white race" and its understanding that slavery in the Anglo-American plantation colonies was capitalist and enslaved Black laborers were proletarians, contain the basis of a revolutionary approach to United States labor history.

Volume 1

On the back cover of the 1994 edition of Volume 1, subtitled Racial Oppression and Social Control, Allen boldly asserted "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years." That statement, based on 20-plus years of primary research in Virginia's colonial records, reflected the fact that Allen found no instance of the official use of the word "white" as a token of social status prior to its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691. As he later explained, "Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not 'white.' White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades" that the word "would appear as a synonym for European-American."

In this context he offers his major thesis -- that the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the latter (civil war) stages of Bacon's Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the "white race" and to implement a system of racial oppression, and 2) the consequence was not only ruinous to the interest of African Americans, it was also disastrous for European-American workers.

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Volume 2

In Volume II, on The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Allen tells the story of the invention of the “white race” and the development of the system of racial oppression in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Anglo-American plantation colonies. His primary focus is on the pattern-setting Virginia colony, and he pays special attention to the reduction of tenants and wage-laborers in the majority English labor force to chattel bond-servants in the 1620s. In so doing, he emphasizes that this was a qualitative break from the condition of laborers in England and from long established English labor law, that it was not a feudal carryover, that it was imposed under capitalism, and that it was an essential precondition of the emergence of the lifetime hereditary chattel bond-servitude imposed upon African-American laborers under the system of racial slavery. Allen describes how, throughout much of the seventeenth century, the status of African-Americans was indeterminate (because it was still being fought out) and he details the similarity of conditions for African-American and European-American laborers and bond-servants.

He also documents many significant instances of labor solidarity and unrest, especially during the 1660s and 1670s. Of great significance is his analysis of the civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion when thousands of laboring people took up arms against the ruling plantation elite, the capital (Jamestown) was burned to the ground, rebels controlled 6/7 of the Virginia colony, and Afro- and Euro-American bond-servants fought side-by-side demanding an end to their bondage.

It was in the period after Bacon's Rebellion that the “white race” was invented as a ruling-class social control formation. Allen describes systematic ruling-class policies, which conferred “white race” privileges on European-Americans while imposing harsher disabilities on African-Americans resulting in a system of racial slavery, a form of racial oppression that also imposed severe racial proscriptions on free African-Americans. He emphasizes that when free African-Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in Virginia and Governor William Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order "to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos," it was not an "unthinking decision." Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie and was a conscious decision in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it entailed repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century.

Key to understanding the virulent racial oppression that develops in Virginia, Allen argues, is the formation of the intermediate social control buffer stratum, which serves the interests of the ruling class. In Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry after Bacon's Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of laboring-class "whites." In the Anglo-Caribbean, by contrast, under a similar Anglo- ruling elite, "mulattos" were included in the social control stratum and were promoted into middle-class status. This difference was rooted in a number of social control-related factors, one of the most important of which was that in the Anglo-Caribbean there were “too few” poor and laboring-class Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were '’too many’' to be accommodated in the ranks of that class.

In The Invention of the White Race Allen challenges what he considers to be two main ideological props of white supremacy -- the argument that "racism" is innate (and it is therefore useless to challenge it) and the argument that European-American workers “benefit” from "white race" privileges and white supremacy (and that it is therefore not in their interest to oppose them). These two arguments, opposed by Allen, are related to two master historical narratives rooted in writings on the colonial period. The first argument is associated with the “unthinking decision” explanation for the development of racial slavery offered by historian Winthrop D. Jordan in his influential White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. The second argument is associated with historian Edmund S. Morgan’s influential American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, which maintains that in Virginia, as slavery developed in the eighteenth century, “there were too few free poor [European-Americans] on hand to matter.” Allen points out that what Morgan said about “too few” free poor was true in the eighteenth century Anglo-Caribbean, but not in Virginia.

"The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy" (Cultural Logic, 2010) describes key components of Allen's analysis of "white race" privilege. The article explains that as he developed the "white race" privilege concept, Allen emphasized that these privileges were a "poison bait" (like a shot of “heroin”) and he explained that they "do not permit" the masses of European American workers nor their children "to escape" from that class. "It is not that the ordinary white worker gets more than he must have to support himself," but "the Black worker gets less than the white worker." By, thus "inducing, reinforcing and perpetuating racist attitudes on the part of the white workers, the present-day power masters get the political support of the rank-and-file of the white workers in critical situations, and without having to share with them their super profits in the slightest measure."

As one example, to support his position, Allen provided statistics showing that in the South where race privilege "has always been most emphasized . . . the white workers have fared worse than the white workers in the rest of the country."

Probing more deeply, Allen offered additional important insights into why these race privileges are conferred by the ruling class. He pointed out that "the ideology of white racism" is "not appropriate to the white workers" because it is "contrary to their class interests." Because of this "the bourgeoisie could not long have maintained this ideological influence over the white proletarians by mere racist ideology." Under these circumstances white supremacist thought is "given a material basis in the form of the deliberately contrived system of race privileges for white workers." Thus, writes Allen, "history has shown that the white-skin privilege does not serve the real interests of the white workers, it also shows that the concomitant racist ideology has blinded them to that fact."

Allen added, "the white supremacist system that had originally been designed in around 1700 by the plantation bourgeoisie to protect the base, the chattel bond labor relation of production" also served "as a part of the 'legal and political' superstructure of the United States government that, until the Civil War, was dominated by the slaveholders with the complicity of the majority of the European-American workers." Then, after emancipation, "the industrial and financial bourgeoisie found that it could be serviceable to their program of social control, anachronistic as it was, and incorporated it into their own 'legal and political' superstructure."

Allen felt that two essential points must be kept in mind. First, "the race-privilege policy is deliberate bourgeois class policy." Second, "the race-privilege policy is, contrary to surface appearance, contrary to the interests, short range as well as long range interests of not only the Black workers but of the white workers as well." He repeatedly emphasized that "the day-to-day real interests" of the European-American worker "is not the white skin privileges, but in the development of an ever-expanding union of class conscious workers." He emphasized, "'Solidarity forever!' means 'Privileges never!'" He elsewhere pointed out, "The Wobblies [the Industrial Workers of the World] caught the essence of it in their slogan: 'An injury to one is an injury to all.'"

Throughout his work Allen stresses that "the initiator and the ultimate guarantor of the white skin privileges of the white worker is not the white worker, but the white worker's masters" and the masters do this because it is "an indispensable necessity for their continued class rule." He describes how "an all-pervasive system of racial privileges was conferred on laboring-class European-Americans, rural and urban, exploited and insecure though they themselves were" and how "its threads, woven into the fabric of every aspect of daily life, of family, church, and state, have constituted the main historical guarantee of the rule of the 'Titans,' damping down anti-capitalist pressures, by making 'race, and not class, the distinction in social life.'" That, "more than any other factor," he argues, "has shaped the contours of American history -- from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the Civil War, to the overthrow of Reconstruction, to the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, to the Great Depression, to the civil rights struggle and 'white backlash' of our own day."

Allen also addressed the issue of strategy for social change. He emphasized, “The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy.” He considered “white supremacy” to be “both the keystone and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy.” Based on this analysis Allen maintained, “the first main strategic blow must be aimed at the most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck, namely, white supremacism.” This, he argued, was the conclusion to be drawn from a study of three great social crises in U.S. history – “the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s.” In each of these cases “the prospects for a stable broad front against capital has foundered on the shoals of white supremacism, most specifically on the corruption of the European-American workers by racial privilege.”

Ted Allen died on January 19, 2005, and a memorial service was held for him at the Brooklyn Public Library where he had worked. Then on October 8, 2005, his ashes, as per his request, were spread in the York River (near West Point, Virginia) close to its convergence with the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Rivers – the location where the final armed holdouts, "Eighty Negroes and Twenty English," refused to surrender in the last stages of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Allen’s historical work has profound implications for American History, African-American History, Labor History, Left History, American Studies, and “Whiteness” Studies and it offers important insights in the areas of Caribbean History, Irish History, and African Diaspora Studies. With its meticulous primary research, equalitarian motif, emphasis on the class struggle dimension of history, and groundbreaking analysis his work continues to grow in influence and importance.

For writings, audios, and videos by and about Theodore W. Allen and his work see 

http://www.jeffreybperry.net/4__theodore_w__allen_br___b___font___font___center__86151.htm

For information on The Invention of the White Race Vol. I: Racial Oppression and Social Control [Verso Books] (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see 

http://www.jeffreybperry.net/5__the_invention_of_the_br_white_race__b___font___font___i__br_volume_1__br__i_ra_116386.htm

For information on The Invention of the White Race Vol. II: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America (including comments from scholars and activists and Table of Contents) see

http://www.jeffreybperry.net/6the_invention_of_the_br_white_race__b___font___font___i__br_volume_2__br__i_th_116387.htm

For the fullest treatment of the development of Theodore W. Allen’s thought see “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” at 

http://www.jeffreybperry.net/attachments/Perry.pdf