The AFL-CIO and “nationalization”

Original article, by Barry Grey, via World Socialist Web Site:

The AFL-CIO Executive Council, at its annual winter meeting in Miami Beach, Florida, adopted a resolution Thursday urging the Obama administration to temporarily nationalize failing banks. What is the significance of this policy statement? Does it represent a radical reorientation by the AFL-CIO, which, after all, has been throughout its history an implacable foe of socialism and defender of the profit system?

Socialism = Nationalization (in part). Every time you hear "Obama is a Socialist," keep this in mind. Of course, it's wrong, but it's what we've been fed for so long we believe it.

It is nothing of the sort. There is not a trace of economic radicalism, or even independent thinking, in the statement of the labor bureaucrats. Rather, the AFL-CIO has merely joined a growing list of economists and political figures from across the spectrum of American establishment politics advocating a temporary government takeover of banking giants such as Citigroup and Bank of America as a more effective means of utilizing taxpayer funds to bail out the financial aristocracy and restabilize US capitalism.

When you hear 'nationalize the banks' from the right and center, this is what they're wanting. They're wanting to foist the bad debt from the bankster frauds and bosses upon you (unless you're a bankster fraud or a boss). Period.

The AFL-CIO resolution is a model of political evasion and outright dishonesty. It notes that the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall act has resulted in a "dramatic concentration of banking power," with 43 percent of US bank assets held by just four institutions—Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. The resolution does not mention that the repeal was endorsed by the Clinton administration, with whom the AFL-CIO was allied at the time. Nor does the resolution demand the breakup of these corrupt institutions, or even the reestablishment of the sort of regulatory controls that were set in place by the Roosevelt administration.

"An oversight" is what you'll hear. "It didn't need to be said" is what you'll hear. "Screw the underclasses" is not what you'll hear, but it's what's being done and what will be done. You can count on it.

The resolution's most significant passage asserts: "The most important goal of government support must be to get banks lending again by ensuring they are properly capitalized... In the case of distressed banks, this means the government will end up with a controlling share of common stock. The government should use that stake to force a cleanup of the banks' balance sheets. The result should be banks that can either be turned over the bondholders in exchange for bondholder concessions or sold back into the public markets."

Offload the debt to the sucker citizens and then sell the banks back (with clean sheets) to the very people who collapsed the system. You know it and I know it. The question is will we allow it to happen? So far, we have.

The absolute solidarity of the AFL-CIO with corporate America was highlighted by the AFL-CIO's tribute to Paul Volcker. "We commend President Obama," declared the resolution on financial regulation, "for convening the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, chaired by former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, author of the G-30 report on global financial regulation, and we look forward to working with Chairman Volcker in this vital area."

Grey points out that Volcker was in charge of the Fed when it pushed interests rates up high during the Carter years. This helped pave the way for huge cutbacks in workers. What's more...

Volcker famously declared that the single greatest contribution of Reagan to quelling inflation in the US was his role in breaking the 1981 strike of the PATCO air traffic controllers.

Sounds like the type of guy we need advising a labor friendly government, eh? Oooops! "Team of Rivals, Team of Rivals, Team of Rivals."

The very fact that the issue of nationalization has arisen testifies to the failure of the capitalist market system, which is unalterably defended by the union bureaucracy. All of the various schemes proposed to bail out the banks, including temporary nationalization, seek to make the working class pay for the breakdown of the profit system.

It tells you how scared the bankster fraud and the bosses are. It also tell you that they think they can get away with it. The fact that it's possibly going to happen (and/or is happening) during an Obama administration will just add icing to the cake. The scandalous fact that a union is carrying their water for them are the candles.

The Republican march toward oblivion

Original article, by Lance Selfa and subtitled "The Republican Party is hoping its screeds against "big government" will catch fire as patience with Obama's attempts to fix the crisis runs out. But that strategy may not work out the way the GOP hopes," via Socialist Worker (US):

PERHAPS ALL we need to know about modern conservatism and its party, the Republicans, was captured in Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's nationally televised response to President Barack Obama's February 24 address to a joint session of Congress.

Yep, another mention of 'Creative' Bobby Jindal. We shouldn't have been surprised, the Repugs have been being 'creative' for the past 40 years or so. So, it's appropriate that their wannabe spokesperson is of the 'creative' bent.

As he told the story, he and Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee bravely risked arrest to back down boneheaded government bureaucrats who were refusing permission for private-citizen boaters to rescue hurricane survivors.

I'm sure whoever was his creative writing teacher (if he had one) was proud, and yet horrified at the same time. Selfa points out that this is the age of Google. Needless to say, Bobby's 'creativity' was found out and he had to agree that his story was...created out of whole cloth.

David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, scathingly reviewed the content of Jindal's speech on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "To come up in this moment in history with a stale, 'Government is the problem, you can't trust the federal government,' is just a disaster for the Republican Party. It's not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is."

It's all they know. And the amazing thing is, it's all they can see. Obama's doing his best to keep the system the Repugs love intact, and the Repugs can't bring themselves to smile knowingly and support him.

The challenge for the elites that have benefited so much from the neoliberal era is to support a change in U.S. politics that will address the parts of these crises that impinge on their ability to reap profit and power, while containing popular demands for reforms to health care, workplace rights or military spending that would challenge them.

Hmmm...maybe that's why Rush doesn't want Obama to succeed. After all, he has the example of how New Labour in Britain won the favor of the City of London due to it's 'successful' adoption of neo-liberalism as it's driving force. What's more, Bubba was a good friend to the banksters and bosses while he was in office. Perhaps Rush knows something many of us don't want to admit. Sure...it's nefarious on the Democrats part, but then they had to learn something from the Repugs.

That's where the Democratic Party has proven its usefulness to the people who run U.S. society.

That's not you and me, for the most part.

In the language of Madison Avenue, which every pundit seems to have adopted these days, the Republican "brand" is damaged. And business knows when it's time to pull a bad brand off the shelf.

Read on, and you see how Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History, shows where the Repugs are headed. He also manages to point out that now may be the time for unionization of the South.

In an interview published in the March/April issue of International Socialist Review, socialist labor scholar Kim Moody suggests that economic inequality and the political rejection of the neoconservative agenda may produce "the next upsurge [of the labor movement] we [i.e. labor activists] talk about a lot."

Moody lays particular stress on the potential for organizing in the traditionally anti-union, but economically vital, South. If labor manages to organize significantly in the South--currently, the geographic base of the Republican Party--it will strike a blow for labor. And It will also likely consign American conservatism's main political institution to the shelf for a long time.

I suppose it's best to say that we live in interesting times, and that we may end up on a road neither the Democrats or the Repugs expects us to travel.

Stop giving our cash to bankers - Sack them!

Original article via Socialist Worker (UK):

Disgraced banker Fred Goodwin is going to keep his £16 million pension, despite some bluster from elements of the Labour government.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Even though it's on the other side of the pond, bankster frauds are getting away with millions of pounds. What's more, it's a Labour government who's turning a blind eye, all the while the British people are expected to pay for the bailout. Hmmm...sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) boss’s reward for leading the company to near collapse is just the tip of the iceberg of New Labour’s slavish devotion to the bankers.

Labour...pardon, New Labour is ostensibly the party of the working class in England. However, like a certain party in the US which is the rough equivalent, they threw their lot in with the banksters and the bosses in embracing neo-liberalism. Needless to say, their economy is crashing and may even be worse off then our own.

Lord Myners, Gordon Brown’s City minister, gave the go ahead for the pension of £693,000 a year. He didn’t realise it was an obscene amount of money.

The Pound Sterling is trading at $1.4031 today. Let's see...if the computer's math is right that's $972,348.30 per year. Hmmm. Not to bad a haul for a politico, eh?

Myners was chair of the Guardian Media Group and Land Securities Group, Europe’s largest property developer. He gave £12,700 to Brown’s leadership campaign in 2007. Brown appointed Myners as chair of the Low Pay Commission.

Myners was also a director of GLG, a hedge fund that speculated massively on the collapse of the Bradford & Bingley bank. The government then bailed out the bank.

Ah...that explains it. Even down to the hedge fund management. When will we all learn? Once we're out trillions of dollars, maybe.

No one knows how much public money will be given to the banks, because no one knows how much money they owe.

That's true for both sides of the Atlantic. We don't know how much we're going into hock in a chance to save the bankster frauds' backsides. And we're expected to accept it without question.

Read the rest of the article. It's actually pretty good, save for the bile that builds while your reading it. And, I guess, feel better about our situation in that the rest of the world is screwed, too. Well, I'm not sure about feeling better about that. The article does have a good suggestion at the end:

We shouldn’t be paying some banker’s pension. We shouldn’t be paying any of them at all. They should be paying back the money they have stolen from us. They should all be sacked and the banks should be run in the interests of the people.

Hear, hear!

The Last Picture Show

Original article, by Richard C. Cook, via dissidentvoice.org:

[The Last Picture Show was a 1971 film depicting the decay of small town America. It took place in the fictitious town of Anarene, Texas.]

We hear a distant tune reminiscent of America’s high and lonely places and the sound of a dry wind blowing. It’s March 2010 in the tiny West Texas town of Anarene. Nothing much happens here any more. The last business shut down a couple of years ago. It was a cement plant that went broke after the housing bubble burst and the banks stopped lending. The kids out of high school drive their jalopies from one end of Main Street to the other past boarded-up storefronts.

Not having seen The Last Picture Show, I'll trust Mr. Cook in that it's an apt comparison. You may or may not have seen towns like this. There's one in the township north of where I live. It's really a beautiful downtown for a small town, roughly 2x6 blocks of what you would think of in a small town's downtown area. About 1/5 of the buildings were occupied. There's a city of 60,000 where I used to work where the downtown is virtually dead except for the local library. They're not pretty sites to be sure.

But there is change in the air! President Barack Obama, who was elected president a couple of years ago, is in the middle of his fiscal year 2010 budget. The 2009 budget had a deficit of $1.75 trillion, a number no fool could even have imagined before the crash of 2008. The projection for 2010 is $1.17 trillion, due to the government’s hopes for an economic recovery. But the jury is out on whether a recovery will ever happen.

$1.75 trillion. The number is almost unfathomable. That was roughly the size of the entire budget during some of the Clinton years. I can remember Jimmy Carter being lambasted for running deficits of $70 billion. It tells me just how serious our economic crisis is. My guess is that they're trying, in part, to fight deflation by inflation.

A good measure of fiscal policy is federal government tax revenues. Revenues for 2009 are projected at $2.19 trillion, off 13 percent from a year ago, due to the recession. With the huge bank bailouts and Obama’s $787 billion economic recovery program, 2009 expenditures are estimated at $3.94 trillion, an increase of 33 percent over 2008.

Now, don't get me wrong. We need some sort of stimulus for the economy. We need something to create jobs and get people back to work. We can't trust the capitalist class to do so, so it's left to the government to try. They're trying. Whether the succeed or not only time will tell.

But don’t worry, the recovery program will succeed, and the economy will start growing again. THE GOVERNMENT PROMISES! Obama’s budget forecasts such a strong upsurge in economic activity by the end of 2009 that the net for the year will be GDP growth of 1 percent. (Yes, that’s what it says.)

Well...it may say a GDP growth of 1 percent. I'll believe that when an independent source verifies it. Until then, I think we all have a good idea which way the economy is headed.

It gets worse. The budget says growth will then continue as far as the eye can see—the projections go out to 2019, when we’ll have a GDP of $22.86 trillion, 61 percent higher than 2008. Happy days will be here again!

Where's that going to come from? Our industry is shot, and much of it shipped out of country. We know better than to trust growth in the financial sector. Our major exports of 'stuff' are arms and food. Where's the growth going to come from?

This means that the financial industry will soon be fixed, plenty of good jobs will be available, climate change and drought will be overcome, the government budget will be right-sized, and America and the world will be content and at peace. All because of the decisions being made by the Obama administration and approved by Congress during these few critical weeks we’re in the middle of right now.

But there are a whole swarm of flies in the ointment. I’ll mention just two.

I'll let you read the rest. Needless to say, once again, it's not a pretty picture. The debt is crushing. Our debt based economics have failed. What's the model for this growth Obama expects? These are questions we should be asking and demanding answers to. Cook calls Obama's budget a 'bubble' budget. We know all to well what ecnomic bubbles do. And when they pop, it's bad news for most of the citizens of not only the US, but the world as well.