NAME: Ira Grupper
EMAIL: irag@iglou.com
DATE: 12/20/2008
TITLE: The woes awaiting Obama, the shoulders he stands on
LABOR PAEANS—December 2008 - January 2009
by Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )
The Woes Awaiting Obama, the Shoulders He Stands On
In the 1960’s, be assured, activists in the Civil Rights Movement across the South did not have the prospect of an African American becoming president of the United States on the radar screen. What was on the radar screen? Removing the humiliating “colored” sign from the water fountain, and the waiting room, and the bathroom, and the back entrance to the restaurant, and the upstairs section of the movie theater.
An African American friend told me recently about her painful toothache. We are talking about small-town Mississippi in the 1960’s. Her mother took her to the dentist very early in the morning. Why? Because not only did she and her mother have to sit in the sparsely-furnished “colored” waiting room, but the white dentist would only see her if a white patient did not show up, or a white patient was finished early. Such was the humiliation of separate-but-equal.
Then there is the terror. “This may be the last time” was a song sung in the Civil Rights Movement at that time. It literally, not just figuratively, meant: this may be the last time you see us alive. That’s the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan and other murderous hate groups.
And now, in the year 2008, we prepare for the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States. The oft-repeated statement about standing on other peoples’ shoulders could never be more true.
The problems our President-elect has inherited are profound. After all, the world is not, if you’ll excuse the play on words, just black and white. We are also dealing with class, the differentiation of people according to who owns and who is owned. So, while we are elated at the rupture in the color line, allowing an African American in, we must also look at how people will survive the current economic catastrophe.
There is production, and there is speculation. There is the production of needed and unneeded commodities, using brain, and using muscle. And then there is this endless paper shifting and shuffling, incessant gambling on futures, on stocks, on bundling usurious mortgages and selling them to still-other speculators, on banks cannibalizing other banks.
“Financial crimes have been committed,” said Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio. “Now Congress is being asked to bail out the culprits” (N.Y.Times 9.29.08).
There is also the individual corporate guesswork about how many cars, or rolls of toilet paper, each individual company can sell at a profit, as opposed to what is the total need for cars or toilet paper for society to function most efficiently and productively. If the owners guess right, profit. If they guess wrong, bankruptcy, and economic dislocation for the workers.
In addition, production for profit is cyclical. There is the boom, when many, but far from all, invest and earn. Then there is the bust, when valueless speculation meets up with economic exigencies—and, boom, the economy is in the toilet.
Says the New York Times (Nov. 24): “Federal regulators approved a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses at the struggling bank…
“The complex plan calls for the government to back about $306 billion in loans and securities and directly invest about $20 billion in the company. The plan, emerging after a harrowing week in the financial markets, is the government’s third effort in three months to contain the deepening economic crisis and may set the precedent for other multibillion-dollar financial rescues.”
Now, let me see if I got this right. One of the largest banks in the world loses big bucks in the casino, and U.S. taxpayer money is going to pay off their gambling debts. But, of course, the government will then own Citibank, right? Wrong. Government will have some say, but ultimately the same whores who peddled their diseased financial corpuses for economic gain will be able to continue to solicit and profit therefrom.
Oh, by the way, this is only part of the 700 billion dollar bailout. Are the markets really calm?
And then we come to the auto industry. The CEO’s of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler fly to Washington DC in their private jets and ask Congress to let them drink 25 billion-dollar’s worth from the public trough, making the total federal funneling of public monies for private profit $725 billion.
Look back a few years, when the auto industry, then mostly GM, Chrysler and Ford, used every trick in the book and prevented mass production of the electric car. This opposition was based on perception, or rather mis-perception: they couldn’t extract as many hard-earned dollars from this car, the public good be damned.
Yet, if regretfully, this corporate bailout must be critically supported. Ron Gettelfinger, president of the UAW, described the enormous pain and suffering awaiting current and retired auto workers, workers in the parts supply sector, and the literally millions of workers who will lose jobs and retirement benefits in the face of the US auto industry going belly-up. “Who will have money in their pockets to buy what other workers still produce?”
The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism lays out some conditions the auto industry should fulfill to get this public money: produce energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly, low-cost automobiles; promote single-payer healthcare (John Conyers’ HR 676); end out-sourcing to non-union plants; end the drive to cut UAW wages and support unionization of the whole auto industry; guarantee current and retiree benefits; radically reconfigure CEO salaries; end threat of bankruptcy proceedings particularly as they might relate to breaking union contracts.
On election night President-elect Obama told the world: "Our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand." Mr. Obama will have to show this both domestically and internationally, by freezing home foreclosures and restructuring mortgages; creating jobs through massive investment in infrastructure; requiring bailout recipients to pay back, in full, to taxpayers; restoring government oversight and strict regulation of banks; and supporting enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act .
Internationally, Mr. Obama must close Guantanamo Bay prison; protect Iraqi refugees; stop the flow of arms to Darfur; end the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody; recognize, negotiate and trade with Cuba; and free the Cuba 5.
The Democrats now control the executive and legislative branches of our national government. Unfortunately, here in Kentucky, not only did a majority of voters support McCain, they returned to the U.S. Senate Mitch McConnell, the powerful, and reactionary, point person in the U.S. Congress for the Republican Party.
Sen. McConnell has opposed pension protection, prevailing wage, Davis-Bacon, and fair trade laws. His Democratic Party opponent, Bruce Lunsford, supported the above protections. Unfortunately, his personal fortune came from healthcare bloodsucking, and so he was attractive only as an anyone-but-Mitch alternative.
If Sen. McConnell is a revanchist, and Mr. Lunsford makes bland seem less so, Studs Terkel was anything but bland or revanchist. He was a media giant, the great chronicler of ordinary workingclass people. Studs died recently, and Chicago lost a champion.
We close with a posting fromTed Pearson, a friend from Chicago: If you had purchased $1,000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have $42 left. With Lehman Brothers, you would have $6.60 left. With Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, you would have less than $5 left. But if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer and then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have had $214.
Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. It’s called the 401-Keg...
Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com
April, 2008 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Apr08.html
March, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Mar08.html
February, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Feb08.html