Day: December 18, 2008

What Are “They” Afraid Of?

By now, everyone has heard that Caroline Kennedy is after Clinton’s senate seat.  We have been bombarded with all the pros and the cons, depending on what side of the political spectrum you sit.  But the question that needs to be asked is, What are they really afraid of?

Is it the name?  Is it her lack of political savvy? Just what is it?

My opinion is that she is not a political animal that the others are.  They are all spilling their guts about her political dues have not been paid.  Please!

Political dues?  She is not a “professional” politician and that means that she would most likely not be controllable by the party.  And take a good hard look at your country.  Are you happy with the shape it is in, politically as well as economically?  If not then you may thank all those so called “professional” politicians.

The media is as full of crap as the politicians.  They, the media, are worried about access and stuff, when they should be asking her about policies she would work on.  The media is aiding the “Pros” in their attacks on Kennedy.  It looks like the old “you scratch my back, I will scratch yours” type of thing.

The truth is if she is appointed she will probably be a better representative of the people of New York than any of the “Pros” with their hands in the pockets of lobbyists.

If she is an independent rep then she would be a breath of fresh air in Washingtonm.  God knowes does not look like it will come from the Obama team.

Why Economic Nationalism?

This is a perspective written by Jerry White.

The naked class character of the proposals for a so-called “bailout” of the US auto makers has become increasingly clear. The crisis of the Big Three companies is being seized upon as an opportunity to drive auto workers back to conditions of poverty and exploitation not seen since the Great Depression.

As a condition for federal loans to avert the imminent bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler, politicians of both big business parties—who handed over trillions of dollars, with no strings attached, to Wall Street—are demanding that auto workers accept mass layoffs and a cut in pay that would lower their wages, in real terms, to less than half that earned by their fathers and grandfathers forty years ago. The United Auto Workers union is fully collaborating in this attack on rank-and-file workers.

With anger among auto workers against the politicians, the companies and the UAW leadership growing by the day, both the Democratic Party and the union are attempting to whip up economic nationalism as a reactionary diversion to pit workers at the Big Three plants against their fellow workers at foreign-owned, non-union plants in the US as well as against auto workers in other countries. The aim is to politically disarm the workers, line them up behind their “own” employers and pre-empt any struggle in defense of jobs and living standards.

Auto workers have a long and bitter experience with the snake oil of America-first chauvinism peddled by the UAW bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. It has been nearly 30 years since the UAW, in league with CEO Lee Iacocca, initiated its flag-waving “Buy American” campaign during the 1979-80 Chrysler bailout, which marked the beginning of three decades of wage and benefit concessions.

Economic nationalism went hand-in-hand with corporatism and the claim by the UAW that workers had no independent interests separate and apart from those of the auto bosses. In the name of “labor-management partnership” the union suppressed all resistance to plant closures and demands for lower wages and speed-up. To oppose concessions, the UAW argued, was to undermine the “competitiveness” of the American auto companies and give the advantage to foreign companies.

The economic nationalism of the UAW has produced nothing but a disaster for auto workers, who have seen the destruction of more than 600,000 jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler since 1979 and unending demands for concessions.

For the union bureaucracy, it has been a different story. It has profited from union-management slush funds and joint investment schemes. Although the union has lost two-thirds of its membership, the UAW officialdom has managed to increase its income. Last year it was handed control of a multi-billion-dollar retiree healthcare trust fund and large amounts of company stock in exchange for its agreement to cut new-hires’ wages in half.

It is an historic fact that the last global economic depression led to the outbreak of world war and the deaths of tens of millions of people, as the various imperialist powers fought for control of markets, raw materials and access to cheap labor. Something even more terrible is being prepared today behind the nationalist demagogy of big business politicians and their allies in the union bureaucracy.

As events in the US and all over the world are demonstrating, the fundamental division in society is not nation, race or religion, but class. Auto workers in the US face the same basic conditions and the same attacks as their brothers and sisters all over the world. In every country, the corporate-financial elite is seeking to impose the full burden of the failure of its economic system on the backs of the working class.

Fed May Have Shot Its Wad!

With U.S. rates now in a zero to 0.25 percent range, the Fed said it would employ “all available tools,” echoing Japan’s policy of nearly a decade ago when it flooded banks with money to promote lending.

The U.S. is mired in a recession and has dragged much of the world with it, following the meltdown of its housing market in 2007 and the crippling bank losses that resulted.

The Fed has tried and tried to head this recession off at the pass and so far nothing is working.  If this latest attempt is a dismal failure what has the Fed got up its sleeve next month?  The Fed rate is near zero, T bills are near zero, what else can the Fed destroy?

Nothing is working, Mr. Bernanke.  All your attempts are doing nothing for the economy. it is helping investors a bit, but as far as the rest of us, we are doomed with this band of lunatics.

Lunatics?  Yes I said it,  I meant it!  They keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.  That is a sure sign of stupidity!  They are most concerned with liquidity, as I have said on numerous occassions, they should be concerned with the creation of demand.  Why?  Without demand, liquidity is not worth the time it takes to talk about it.

These ongoing interest rate cuts are obviously achieving nothing, so why persist with them? People who are in debt and feel insecure about spending their money are not suddenly going to rush to the shops to buy things that are not essential, and certainly not with borrowed money, at any interest rate. In fact, anyone sensible person enjoying an interest rate cut will continue with the same repayments and clear their debt quicker.

Bernanke and the Fed have been masturbating the economic all year and I think that they have gotten their last wad.

copyright:  CHUQ/Info Ink

UAW Is Not The Enemy…Congress Is.

After about a week of total BS we still do not have a deal to save jobs in the auto industry.  Why?  Repubs say that they are not trying to break the union, while doing everything they can to break the union.  This is just should be unacceptable.  You people realize that we are talking about “REAL” people losing “REAL” jobs, right?  This is not some BS being flashed around, these are families that could l;ose everything and yet some Americans do not care.  That in itself is truly SAD!

Shall we look at reality?

Unions have secured higher wages in particular trades without lowering wages in other trades or reducing the rate of profits. Wages affect an employer in comparison to other employers. The first employer who succeeds in reducing wages gains an advantage; the first compelled to pay more is put at a disadvantage. But the differential ends when the competitors are also included in the change. Any gain or loss is purely relative, and disappears when the whole community is considered.

Sounds like what the foreign companies have done in the South.

Therefore, most of the objections to trade unions are groundless. Their success cannot reduce other wages, nor decrease the profits of capital, nor injure national prosperity. Nevertheless, the difficulties confronting effective combination of workers are so great that the good they can accomplish is limited. In addition, there are inherent disadvantages in the process. All any union has done is to raise wages in a particular occupation. This is a task that grows in difficulty. As wages of any particular kind rise above the normal level of other wages, there is a strong tendency to bring them back.

Sound familiar?  NO?  Try what Sen. Shelby and his cohorts are trying to do.

I want to thank economist Henry George for the ideas in this post.

Happy Birthday, Adolf

This Hitler youth is blond-haired, blue-eyed and just turned three.

Adolf Hitler Campbell is the middle child of three kids given Nazi-themed names by their parents, including a dad who denies the Holocaust occurred and decorates his home with swastikas.

“They’re just names, you know,” father Heath Campbell told the Easton Express-Times. “Yeah, they (the Nazis) were bad people back then. But my kids are little. They’re not going to grow up like that.”

Adolf has two sisters, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie. The latter, just eight months old, was named for Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler.

The bizarre names came to public attention after a local ShopRite declined to provide the Holland Township, N.J., family with a cake inscribed “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler.”

The kids are growing up in a home festooned with a swastika in every room. The father wears boots that once belonged to a Nazi soldier, and claims a relative was a member of Hitler’s feared Schutzstaffel.

The parents insist they are not racist, although they don’t believe in mingling the races.

And Heath Campbell claims he doesn’t understand why people are shocked when they hear his son’s full name.

First it was Musssolini and now this………what were they thinking?