Franklin's Focus 7/31/10

A Cynical Distortion of Reality by a Deceitful President

I sat down at my Mac to type another of my typical tirades against
another sample of Obama's outrageous, deceitful, misleading, barely
disguised right-wingism. I got well into it when I happened to take
break and visit the World Socialist Web Site. Voila. The lead piece
for today, written by the always able Patrick Martin, had tackled
exactly what was thematic in my sketchy Focus. I immediately dumped my
piece and copied Martin's article into today's Focus.

What Obama has done to labor in this country is absolutely outrageous.
He has been so anti-labor, he has sometimes even exceeded the goals of
the big three car makers in demanding huge wage cuts. When the heads
of the big three are shocked by the wage cuts demanded by Obama, it
strikes me as suggestive of who Obama is and where he is pointed. Not
even rightwing Republicans were going as far as Obama in proposing
wage cuts.

I once worked in a rubber factory. One job entailed standing at a
cutter all day cutting rubber sheets. The men doing the cutting were
habitually cutting off two or more fingers because the cutter did not
have proper safeguards. The owner of the plant would simply fire the
poor victim and hire another college student desperate for work. After
about a week, he would cut off some fingers. He left, and another poor
sucker would be hired. I tried to secretly warn the newcomers, who,
blinded by a need for work, did not believe my horror stories.

As for me, within one week of working in that filthy pit, I was
coughing up and spitting out gobs of pitch black saliva. That plant
was a nightmarish hell hole. It poisoned lungs, cut off fingers, and
so forth. Why it was not closed down baffled me. Of course, it was a
so-called closed shop. No union members were ever hired. The plant was
quit small and was apparently overlooked by the main unions which had
bigger fish to fry.

I mention this episode in my life to give you further insight into my
politics.

Today's Quotation

'The life of the poor man is valued as nothing by the rich. As the
owner of ships he places the lives of entire crews in jeopardy when
his object is to fraudulently obtain high insurance for half decayed
hulks. Bad ventilation, deep excavation, defective supports,
etc...etc, annually bring death to thousands of miners, but the
system of operation saves expenses, therefore augments the gains, and
gives the mine owners no occasion to be sorry. Neither does the
factory pasha care how many of 'his' laborers are torn and rent apart
by machinery, poisoned by chemicals, or slowly suffocated by dirt and
dust. Profit is the main thing.'

Johann Most 'The Beast of Property'

Most spend much of his life in American prisons due to his socialist
writings.
Socialists were often imprisoned for both their economic views and
their opposition to the American entry into WWI, which became one of
the bloodiest wars in human history. It was a war between
imperialistic nations fighting over raw materials in Africa and Asia,
so it naturally became a target for democratic socialists. Even Eugene
Debs, the head of the socialist party, was imprisoned for opposing
the American entry into the barbaric WWI.

Warmest regards,
Richard

=========================================

31 July 2010 wsws

Demagogy and economic nationalism from Obama

The wage-cutter in chief visits Detroit

by Patrick Martin

President Obama’s four-hour visit to Detroit Friday brought him to the
center of the economic catastrophe created by the profit system. The
“Motor City” was once a byword for decent-paying jobs in the world’s
biggest industry. But Detroit is now synonymous with poverty, urban
decay, mass unemployment and the virtual breakdown of a functioning
society.
In his first visit to Detroit as president, Obama landed at Detroit/
Wayne County Metropolitan Airport and his motorcade drove to the
Chrysler Jefferson North assembly plant on the city’s east side, then
to the General Motors assembly plant two miles to the north and west.
A columnist for the Detroit News noted that the route between the two
factories traverses one of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods,
past abandoned auto factories, shuttered storefronts, the Capuchin
Soup Kitchen, resale shops, vegetable gardens in vacant lots tended by
homeless men, and children playing amid urban debris.
The area is one of those targeted by Mayor David Bing for possible
transformation into urban park or farm land—with the remaining
residents forced to leave their homes by the cutoff of city services
like fire protection, garbage collection, water and street lighting.
During his visit to Detroit, Obama made no comment on the mass
suffering stretching for miles in every direction. Instead, he gave a
25-minute stump speech to the 1,100 workers on the day shift at the
Chrysler plant, and a briefer address to the work force at the GM
plant. He did not mention the city’s staggering unemployment rate—
estimated at 50 percent or more. Nor did he utter the words “poverty,”
“homelessness,” “hunger,” “foreclosure” or “eviction.”
Instead, he took the occasion of his visit to the poorest city in
America to boast of the great success of his administration’s economic
policies. A more cold-blooded, arrogant provocation against working
people can scarcely be imagined.
Obama delivered his two speeches to audiences of auto workers who have
borne the brunt of the restructuring of the industry dictated by the
White House. Some 330,000 workers have lost auto-related jobs in the
past two years, while tens of thousands of retired workers have lost
health benefits and seen their pensions threatened.
Obama’s “car czar” went beyond even what General Motors and Chrysler
thought advisable, and demanded a 50 percent across-the-board
reduction in the starting wage for newly hired workers. The result is
that side-by-side on the assembly line some workers are making $28 an
hour and others $14 an hour for doing the same job. Most workers on
the second shift at the Chrysler Jefferson plant make $14 an hour, but
Obama’s audience consisted largely of the higher-paid first-shift
workers.
Obama could say little of substance to justify the claim that his
administration’s policies were producing an economic recovery, except
to describe the conditions under which he took office in January 2009,
and assert that things had improved since then.
Before he boarded the presidential jet for his trip to Detroit, the
Commerce Department released figures showing an anemic 2.4 percent
annual rate of economic growth in the second quarter of 2010, down
significantly from a revised 3.7 percent growth rate in the first
quarter and 5 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Business investment was up sharply in the second quarter, but
concentrated in areas like software and equipment, where capital
spending largely substitutes for hiring new labor.
The 2.4 percent growth rate is below the level required to reduce the
toll of unemployment, meaning that the 20 million workers now jobless
or working part-time or short-time have little prospect of finding new
jobs, certainly not jobs that pay well.
But Obama hailed the second-quarter figure as though it was proof his
policies were working. He told the Chrysler audience, “This morning we
learned that our economy grew by 2.4 percent in the second quarter of
the year, so that means it’s now been growing again for one full year.”
The main point of Obama’s remarks at both plants was that without the
intervention of the White House both GM and Chrysler would have been
forced into liquidation last year, going out of business entirely
instead of the structured government-supervised bankruptcy that was a
condition of the auto bailout.
“Independent estimates suggest that more than 1 million jobs could
have been lost if Chrysler and GM had liquidated,” he said. “And in
the middle of a deep recession, that would have been a brutal,
irreversible shock not just to Detroit, not just to the Midwest, but
to our entire economy.”
But the bailout was not offered without conditions, he continued,
“What we said was, if you’re willing to take the tough and painful
steps necessary to make yourselves more competitive; if you’re willing
to pull together workers, management, suppliers, dealers, everybody to
remake yourself for changing times, then we’ll stand by you and we’ll
invest in your future.”
Obama made no other reference to the draconian cuts imposed on auto
workers, including the 50 percent cut in starting pay. As for “pain”
for the corporate bosses, GM’s profits have rebounded and GM and
Chrysler executives continue to rake in seven-figure salaries. GM
Chairman Edward Whitacre, for instance, makes a $1.1 million salary,
earning in one week as much as a $14-an-hour assembly-line worker
makes in a year. And that grossly understates his income, since
Whitacre is paid mainly in company stock and stands to reap a fortune
from the upcoming initial public offering by GM.
Obama noted that 334,000 auto jobs were eliminated between June 2008
and June 2009, and claimed that 55,000 new auto jobs have been created
since then. He did not point out, however, that the bulk of these new
jobs pay wages that are barely above the poverty level. The White
House intervention has had the effect of completing the transformation
of auto production from a high-wage, high-benefit industry to one of
brutal exploitation at sweatshop wages.
For this, Obama has earned the thanks of the auto bosses and their
industrial police force—which operates under the signboard of the
United Auto Workers—as well as the entire local Democratic Party
establishment. Obama was welcomed to the city with a friendly
editorial in the right-wing Detroit News. Lined up behind him on the
podium were the state’s two Democratic senators, the local Democratic
congresswoman, Mayor Bing, also a Democrat, and Chrysler, GM and UAW
officials. There was not a hint of oppositional sentiment permitted.
The address to the auto workers was imbued with economic nationalism,
which Obama used to flatter both his audience and himself. He referred
to his opponents in the Republican Party, who deemed the bailout terms
insufficiently harsh on the auto workers and wanted even deeper cuts
or outright liquidation of the company.
“You are proving the naysayers wrong,” he said. “I wish they were
standing here today. I wish they could see what I’m seeing in this
plant and talk to the workers who are here taking pride in building a
world-class vehicle. I want all of you to know, I will bet on the
American worker any day of the week!”
Obama continued, harking back to World War II: “It was workers just
like you, right here in Detroit, who built an arsenal of democracy
that propelled America to victory. It was workers like you that built
this country into the greatest economic power the world has ever
known; it was workers like you that manufactured a miracle that was
uniquely American.”
The constant references to American greatness were somewhat strained,
given that circumstances now prevailing in Detroit, and the US
generally, hardly resemble a “miracle.”
The nationalist phrases were not only reactionary, but preposterous.
The auto industry is entirely globalized, and giant corporations
conduct their operations on a world scale, pitting workers in country
after country against each other.
Obama spoke at one factory run by Chrysler—now owned by Fiat, with the
Italian CEO at his side—and at another operated by GM, which has sold
more cars this year in China than in the United States. GM has 32,000
workers in China, while its US hourly employment has fallen from
468,000 in 1979 to only 52,000 today.
These figures suggest the reality facing auto workers and the working
class as a whole: the only way forward in the struggle against
corporate downsizing, wage-cutting and the destruction of all rights
on the shop floor is to unite the working class on an international
basis.
It is impossible for American workers to fight the giant
multinationals on their own, just as it is impossible for the workers
in China, Europe or anywhere else to do so. Only by joining forces
with their class brothers and sisters throughout the world, in a
common struggle based on a socialist perspective, can working people
defend their jobs, living standards and democratic rights.

This is a political fight against the Obama administration, the
Democratic Party, the two-party system and the capitalist ruling class
whose interests they serve.

End