Nov 20 2008

The War On The Worker

Republicans are, apparently, an unremitting party of war. Now that they have oh so deservedly lost the power to take America to war in foreign climes, they have turned their attention back to their time honored historical foe, the American worker. Now that the campaign is over, they have declared war on Joe the Plumber, instead of just exploiting him for political purposes. Fortunately for everyone who likes the convenience of not having to go he nearest stream to get water, the plumbing industry has not been run into the ground by the stupid, arrogant, incompetent “captains of industry” like those in the American auto industry that have blindly and blithely run their industry into a ditch. While insisting on polluting the atmosphere and poisoning the planet for profit.

So….war against the autoworker is the marching order of the day. Bailout the white collars to the tune of 700 billion, while insisting that the auto industry be forced into bankruptcy. WHY should the auto industry be forced into bankruptcy? So the auto industry can “renegotiate” (translation, renege on) their union contracts. WHY do they want to renege on their union contracts? Because obviously, HA!, if the evile American worker didn’t insist on making a decent wage and would consent to live in poverty while working twelve hours a day until their bodies broke down and you could just fire them instead of giving them health care, the American auto industry would be a thriving beacon of profit generation!!!

How dare the American worker put their welfare over the welfare of the Corporation! Why, if it wasn’t for having to PAY workers, just THINK how much profit we could make!!! Too bad we haven’t yet (just you wait!) figured out how to actually produce goods without workers! Then the whole world could be overseers middle managers and executives!!! There IS no symbiosis between labor, management and capital, there simply cannot be. We cannot find a way to run industry for the Greater Good of All, then how would we be….superior, and get ….more? We must DEFEAT the Workers and their unions, not cooperate with them. No, it MUST be WAR!

                                      Photobucket

What’s that you say? The American worker is who we sell our product to and if they don’t make enough to buy it we all suffer? Piffle! Pure piffle! Screw Henry Ford and his wild ideas of producing goods that our workers can afford, to the benefit of all!

What’s that you say? We proudly wave the banner of the Free Market (all kneel) and labor costs are just part of the expense of the free market and therefore WE have to adjust to the Free Market realities of organized labor and be competitive any way? Baaaaalderdash! Obviously we can’t be competitive while being forced (oh woe, oh WOE is us) to pay the kind of living wage that created the American Middle Class that drove the engine of the American economy ….until we decided to declare war on it (see: Reagan, Union Busting by) and now through our incompetence, greed, arrogance and insistence on living large off the backs of the folks who actually do the work to produce the goods that we (attempt to) sell. Why, that would mean that WE would have to work harder and be smart enough to produce a product that people actually wanted to buy!!!

In fact, if we can’t blame the workers and their damnable unions, that would  < gasp! > mean that WE were the ones to blame for all these decades of failure!!!

No, it is obvious. The American worker is the problem, not our bloated incompetence. It is obvious that the  only way for the Corporation to survive and build cars for middle managers and executives to buy is to impoverish those who build them. THEN you will see how wonderful American Industry is! THEN we can be profitable DESPITE our own incompetence and refusal to adapt to the actual world and marketplace we live in all of the woes not of our own creation.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! Punish the hard working folks that PRODUCE stuff, it is all their fault, not ours. The Workers are to blame, not the stuffed but empty suits who actually make the decisions. That have gotten us to this sorry point. WE are the Captains of Industry! And despite all evidence to the contrary, WE can do no wrong.

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  1. Photobucket

    A couple of  relevant links

    Digby on card check

    Michael Moore, http://rawstory.com/news/2008/…

    But Moore did see a “hypocritical” reluctance to do anything to help workers as being behind the inability of Congress to act. “[Reid] can’t get the votes to bail out the auto companies because that’s going to help a lot of blue collar people, people that don’t have a voice,” he told King.

    “As soon as the banks or the financial institutions or the people that just gambled the money away — as soon as they were wanting some dough, boy, the trough just was laid out for them,” complained Moore. “But when it came time, now, to help the people, the working class of this country, it’s like, ‘Ah, I don’t know about that.'”

    snip

    “I’ll tell you what it really has proven to me,” Moore observed. “These guys, after all of that stuff they’ve been telling us all these years about capitalism, free market, free enterprise — they don’t believe in any of that. They don’t believe in free enterprise or a free market. They want — they want socialism for themselves. … To hell with everybody else, but give it to them. And I think, really, what we’re seeing here right now with them, with the banks, we’re seeing the end of capitalism — the end of capitalism as we know it. And I say good riddance.”

    • robodd on November 20, 2008 at 20:01
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    Fail. Major Fail.

  3. Let the automakers go into bankruptcy liquidation.  Have the government then go in and buy them (rather than the Chinese Red Army).  Then give control of the companies to the workers themselves.

    It can’t go much worse than it already is.

  4. Just announced: Loan the big three the money they need to last until 20 January from part of the DOE upgrade funds, require the upgrades (money for new hybrid batteries…) to be part of the measures to salvage their companies, require the preservation of the unions, and then pay back the DOE fund out of whatever they loan them after Obama gets in.  

    They’ve asked for a plan from the big three by Dec.

    As the funds are already allocated, this one has a better chance of going through.  

  5. … just a few of the costs that the GOP’ers are willing to inflict on main street peons.  Because, as long as the peons keep making it possible for bailout kings to retire with $18 million pensions that’s all they’re needed for.  Besides, the GOP’ers, like Romney, Paulson & Shelby have “got their’s” and they can just say the hell with all us little people.

  6. everyday there are fewer and fewer chairs…..

    cull from  the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid….

    cull from the bottom……

    the game is to stay on top as the pile settles…..

    and it would appear that the game is afoot……

    • RUKind on November 20, 2008 at 23:20
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    Saddam took out revenge for his failure on the Kurds internally. The Repugs are taking out revenge for their failure on the working class internally.

    It’s all so simple when you look at it right.

    Satya.

    Oh yeah, with Romney and the UAW it’s a generational revenge thing, too.

    • Edger on November 21, 2008 at 01:34
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    By Nicholas von Hoffman

    The Nation, November 18, 2008

    Now it is the auto parts suppliers who want government money. They employ 600,000 people, more than work for the automobile companies themselves.

    If the standard for giving out money to companies is the threat of lost jobs, the auto parts suppliers’ claim is as good as that of General Motors. The argument against subsidizing money-losing companies to preserve employment is that it would be impossible to think up a more expensive way of helping people.

    There ought to be another way–and there is. Unemployment compensation should be expanded to ensure those losing their jobs will not lose their houses or their health insurance. Helping people on that scale will not be cheap, but helping them by propping up corporate losers is infinitely more costly: sooner or later people will find other employment, but the automobile companies will never turn a profit.

    They have been steadily losing money for a generation. Their predicament has nothing to do with today’s credit crunch or the stock market crash. It has to do with their being incorrigible foul-ups.

    Their record for money-losing is beyond comprehension. David Yermack, professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has calculated how much  capital the car companies have destroyed over the last few decades.

    He writes, “General Motors and Ford…between them…destroyed $110 billion in capital between 1980 and 1990…. GM has invested $310 billion in its business between 1998 and 2007. The total depreciation of GM’s physical plant during this period was $128 billion, meaning that a net $182 billion of society’s capital has been pumped into GM over the past decade–a waste of about $1.5 billion per month of national savings. The story at Ford has not been as adverse but is still disheartening, as Ford has invested $155 billion and consumed $8 billion net of depreciation since 1998. As a society, we have very little to show for this $465 billion.”

    the rest is here…

  9. …do you know anything about the UAW or its contract with GM?  Did you know that they have a program where UAW workers who aren’t working are paid 90% of their wages, making it more economical for GM to make cars it can’t sell rather than pay them to not work?

    This is pure polemic, based no where in reality.  I don’t even feel it deserves the bother of looking up the links for you.  Read Yglesias, or any number of other non-free market absolutists to read why.

    • Valtin on November 21, 2008 at 03:01
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    I’d wanted to write something just like this, but am at work and not enough time.

    The class war is becoming THE war of our time!

  11. they are just ‘sorting it out’. They are the MARKET. Not so free however when you look at the money the feds are handing them.

    Our economy is measured in terms of GNP and labor is just a factor that cuts into profits for investors and owners. This market was never free it was sold as the ownership society and it like all Ponzi schemes fell. They seem to have left out not just the workers but the consumers (one and the same). They do not realize that they stand alone with their/ our money and refuse to even admit this doesn’t work for even them. Capitalism run amok has ate itself. Beware the Chicago boys the ones Obama has dusted off from the Clinton era.

    Naomi Klein:  Class is back in the US as the ownership society crumbles

    ….Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First, the dotcom bubble burst, then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now America has a sub-prime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their pension pots – their piece of the stock market – to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November, Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private-equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100m. In short order, yesterday’s ownership society has morphed into today’s members-only society.

    The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48% of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots – nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45% see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a dramatic return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society attempted to erase. Class is back. And the free-market ideologues have lost their most potent psychological tool.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm…

     

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