After locking out 465 members of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Local 27 in London, Ontario, Caterpillar decided last Friday to close its 62-year-old locomotive facility there and move production to newly “right-to-work” Indiana, where American workers will work for half of what Canadian workers would make. Caterpillar’s decision to close the plant after workers refused to agree to major wage concessions has provoked outrage across Canada in light of the fact that Illinois-based Caterpillar made a record $4.8 billion in profits in 2011.
CAW members, who have already been blockading a completed locomotive from leaving the London plant, have vowed to continue blocking any products from leaving there as they attempt to extract a better severance from the company. The CAW local is also considering occupying the plant. “The CAW has occupied workplaces when employers have shown disrespect,” Canadian Auto Workers Union President Ken Lewenza told Bloomberg. “It’s a tool. It’s an option.”
As I reported last week, under the Investment Canada Act, foreign companies taking over Canadian companies must demonstrate a “net benefit” to Canada. Critics claim that the government allowed a foreign-owned company (Caterpillar) to buy a Canadian company without having any intention of providing any “net benefit” to Canada.
I really hope the CAW follow through with that occupation, because fuck Caterpillar and because Stephen Harper won’t stand up for them. They might not be able to save their jobs, but they might be able to make this a Pyrrhic victory for Caterpillar.
In addition, don’t think that the recent dues freeloading law passed by Indiana has absolutely nothing to do with this decision by Caterpillar, because it has everything to do with it. Caterpillar is staggeringly profitable, and the wages paid at this plant aren’t insane. They are decent, skilled-labor wages, but the environment in the US is conducive to a race to the bottom, the jobs go away and lives get just a little better for those in Muncie and a whole lot worse for those in London.
This whole sad story yet again proves exactly how morally bankrupt the existing economic system is. This plant closure will ruin people’s lives. It will unhome people, it will impoverish people, it will cause a whole swath of societal ills that won’t be addressed because of Mike Harris’ public sector cuts in the nineties. I remember very clearly supporting my teachers’ picket line in 1997 because of what Harris was looking to do was so repellant. What’s happening in London is the inevitable continuation of that neoliberal effort. There is literally no reason, none at all, to do any of this aside for sheer naked avarice.
The Liberals will probably try to make hay over this, but they have supported similar efforts in the recent past under Martin. The only party that’s in a position to really slam Harper and the Tories on this is the NDP, recently ascendant to the Official Opposition after the last election. However, I fear that the leadership vacuum within the New Democrats after Layton’s passing will leave them unable to really go after Harper for allowing and even supporting this kind of asset stripping. If Layton was still alive, they would have easily been able to absolutely shellack the Tories on this bullshit, but with their leadership election taking up all the air in the room, it will be an afterthought at best.
In the end, I’m hoping for the best, but I don’t think this turns out happy for the CAW workers. It’s really fucking sad. I hope someone burns down the house of Caterpillar’s CEO.
Ever since Obama took office, everyone on the far right seems to bleat endlessly about ‘class warfare’. Mitt Romney does it when he talks about the politics of envy. Newt Gingrich does it when uses Dinesh DeSouza’s bullshit line about Obama being a Kenyan anti-colonialist. Paul Ryan does it when people call him on his shit-awful Medicare plan. All the various bloviating Fox News talking heads go on and on about it whenever a moderately fair tax rate is proposed for the wealthy.
On Saturday, workers violated a court order preventing them gathering within two hundred metres of the factory. The protests turned violent, workers set company cars on fire, and clashed with the police. The Police used sticks to beat back protestors, and then opened fire when their initial attempts at dispersing them had failed.
Murali Mohan a union leader and main agitator in the dispute was attacked by the police. Has was battered with batons, and died from his injuries whilst in police custody.
Nine workers required hospital treatment due to receiving bullet wounds, all of whom are said to be in a ‘critical’ condition.
After the news of Mohan’s death reached the workers, four hundred of them stormed the house of senior company executive, K. C Chandrekhar, and beat him to death.
Please note that there’s not a single mention of higher taxes or increased regulation in this story.
The far right is trying to tar President Obama, and it’s somewhat successful because no one in the American polity actually knows what class war looks like. This is mostly because what remains of the Left in the US is relatively quiescent or blends into the background whenever a larger issue comes to the fore until very recently. As examples, I’d point towards the lack of strikes by labor unions and the gays rights movement, respectively. Likewise, their rhetoric completely ignores the fact that there has been a sustained class war waged since 1980, only it’s been top-down as opposed to the scary bottom-up class war that has all the various Fox News luminaries so concerned.
Reagan breaking PATCO and advocacy for supply-side economics was class warfare. Clinton’s destruction of welfare and deregulation of financial derivatives was class warfare. Virtually the entirety of George W. Bush’s presidency was class warfare. Obama’s deficit commission and support for cuts to Social Security and Medicare is class warfare. The police repression of Occupy across the country is class warfare. It’s all class warfare, only waged against people like me on behalf of people like Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein and not the scary kind that’s the other way around.
That said, I think the era of an inactive Left is coming to an end. The mass protests in Madison was just the first hint that things were shifting. Then Occupy came about and now there’s an uptick in activity by and interest in the unions that can only do some good. And while the employing class continues to attack the working class (most recently in Indiana with their bullshit union dues freeloading law), you are finally starting to see those attacks galvanize (instead of shred the morale of) the Left.
We’re a long ways from India and storming an executive’s house to beat him to death with lead pipes (and I don’t think it’s really necessary to do that here unless you see striking workers get gunned down), but I think showing whiners like Romney and Ryan what class warfare actually looks like is coming so long as we get off our asses and get down to the hard work of waging it.
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
As with my previous piece about Apple, this is par for the course and an inevitable outgrowth of capitalism, particularly neoliberalism. When people are talking about making America more competitive in the global market, this is what they are talking about: making everyone live in company barracks so that a foreman can come and wake you up in the dead hours of night to work twelve hours straight with no break on the whim of some egomaniacal asshole who doesn’t like that his phone screen can scratch when he has his metal keys in his pocket. This is barely a quarter step up from chattel slavery.
Let’s not forget that the contractor in question (Foxconn) has had to put up anti-suicide nets because it treats its workers in such a degrading and horrific fashion, and that recently two hundred workers threatened to commit suicide in the face of a manager breaking an agreement. It’s this kind of degradation and autocratic behavior that enable the kind of ‘flexibility’ that has Apple’s executives going on about how they can’t onshore these jobs again.
Fuck every single one of these people and those that benefit from the wealth they gain by abusing their workers. They should be reviled for doing this. They shouldn’t be able to show their fucking faces in public. They shouldn’t be allowed to eat out at restaurants. Their children should be ostracized in school. People should turn their backs on them when they speak, and every single business that isn’t a gigantic conglomerate should turn away their custom, because if they had their way, these executives would bind us so thoroughly to a cycle of poverty and serfdom that it would be impossible to escape from.
However, these people are beyond shame. As I said earlier, they don’t eat at restaurants and drink at the bars we do. They don’t fly aboard the same planes as us, they don’t live in the same neighborhoods as us, and their kids don’t go to the same schools as us. You can’t embarrass these people because they aren’t a part of the community. The only answer is to dispossess these bastards by taking control of the system so it can be run communally and for the benefit of the worker, and not the executive.
The way forward is organizing the industries that remain here, and building new ones under communal control. Until we break the control these wannabe feudal lords have on our lives, nothing will get better. For my part, I’m done ever giving my money to Apple ever again. I will not put my money in the pockets of scum like this, not a dime, not ever again. I’ve used a Mac since I was 3, and I can’t stomach making the people who are unapologetically doing this any richer.
Trumka, one of two union leaders on the council, said the body is too narrow to provide recommendations to President Obama that are balanced between the interests of business and other groups such as labor.
He specifically took issue with the report’s calls for lower corporate taxes and fewer regulations, saying they would not lead to more jobs.
“Overall, I disagree that reforming our regulatory system and reducing the statutory corporate tax rate are crucial elements of ‘competitiveness’ for the United States going forward, nor does empirical evidence support the claim that significant net new job creation would result from such ‘reforms,’” he said.
If I were Trumka and wanted to build on this, I’d invest my resources in both new organizing and modernizing the AFL-CIO. Part of the problem is that the labor movement has waned in relevance to most people, and the only way to change that is to increase the number of people affiliated with the unions and to open up the AFL-CIO’s decision-making process. My generation is starving for this kind of progressive advocacy, and the labor movement is the logical group to push for these causes. If they don’t take up the banner, then some other entity will come into being to do so.
The pessimistic side of me wants to say, “no, nothing will happen, death is certain,” but I hope Trumka realizes that if he doesn’t get the unions moving soon they will cease to be relevant. He’s not a dumb man and managed to carry off one of the more militant strikes in modern American history when he ran the UMWA, so I think he realizes the necessity of breaking the unions away from the establishment as much as possible. In any event, it’s good news and I hope more comes of it.
For context, La Senza is a subsidiary of Limited Brands that specializes in high end underwear and lingerie, similar to Victoria’s Secret. The workers in question were basically fired in a snap after La Senza UK filed for bankruptcy. Through some legal fuckery, La Senza was restructuring in a way that would allow them to reduce the amount of money it owed in wages already earned by sales associates for their hard work. These women weren’t going to take this news without a fight, nor were they going to wait for a legal system slanted against them to make its decision. Several workers took over their now-empty stores in protest, and occupied them for all of a day and a half until the bankruptcy administrator announced that they would be paid their back wages.
This story echoes the success of the Republic Windows And Doors occupation in late 2008. In both cases, workers getting screwed out of wages and severances took over their former jobsite and held it until they got satisfaction. While both stories are inspiring, the La Senza story is especially inspiring to me, as I work in the service sector. To see people working a similar job to myself undertaking a collective action that would protect their interests stirs my heart and gives me hope that such tactics can be used to boost wages, restore cuts to hours, and end abusive practices by management.
This is what I was talking about when I discussed occupying closed workplaces in this post. The actions of the La Senza workers in the Liffey Valley are exactly the kind of thing needed to get society working for average people again and not the wealthy. Now I’m waiting on fired workers to take over a shuttered workplace and start it back up again. That’s the next inflection point, the shift from occupation to reclamation, and it will be beautiful to see when it comes.
Last week, more than six years after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began mailing out notices to victims of the storm that ripped through the Gulf region. The message: Give us our money back.
FEMA is asking more than 83,000 recipients of aid to reimburse the government an average of $4,622 each, BlackAmericaWeb reports. The agency says that clerical or employee errors may have resulted in some victims receiving more compensation than what may now be allocated.
David Bellinger, a 63-year-old legally blind former New Orleans resident who moved to Atlanta after his home was leveled by the storm, said he “nearly had a stroke” when he received his $3,200 bill, with 30 days to pay. “I’m totally blind; I subsist entirely on a Social Security disability check. If I have to pay this money back, it would pretty much wipe out all the savings I have.”
I don’t know even to say about this that doesn’t reduce me to angrily sputtering an excessive amount of profanity. These people have suffered enough already. New Orleans is gradually being turned into a Disney version of its previous self that includes much fewer poor folk and minorities, and these people who have had their communities and support network shredded by the storm, the flooding, and the evacuation all across the United States have suffered enough. These folk had to get their feet again in strange cities in the middle of the worst economic crisis since 1929. If they got a bit more cash than they were supposed to through no fault of their own, LET THEM KEEP IT. Hell, it will probably do more to stimulate the economy than any of the tax cuts Obama has put through.
I don’t know why this is even being considered as an option. Someone should have considered exactly how shit-awful it’d look when this went out. It’s good to know that FEMA continues its tradition of incompetence no matter who is in the White House.
Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents hold this view; a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans do as well. For historical perspective, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view in a 1941 Gallup poll.
Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say that the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy; just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents share this view. In contrast, a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.
Even if the media is right and Occupy is on its way down, it means the movement is coming off the field having not finished its work, which means there’s an opening for further efforts to emerge and take shape. Income inequality and the enthrallment of the political system to the employing class aren’t issues that have been resolved. Even if Occupy is flickering out and lacks sufficient support, these polls mean that Occupy’s organizational shape was insufficient for the task ahead of it and not that there isn’t a sizable amount of agreement with the general energy behind the movement.
As I’ve said before, Occupy is, to me, a transitional form. It might have been impossible for it to be a permanent structure, but Occupy is a fantastic way to get the discussion going right now about the past twenty-five years of neoliberalism and how it has ruined lives. The organizations that start to chop down the problems choking our society will have to, at least initially, take relatively conventional forms like industrial unions and (to a lesser extent, in my opinion) political parties. This won’t always be the case as society is changed to be more participatory in nature, but at the start it will be absolutely necessary because these organizational forms have a proven track record of engendering change.
In any event, I’m waiting to see how the media covers these polls and what it will mean for the political campaigns ahead. The answers to those questions are probably, “they won’t,” and, “nothing,” but a man can hope.
Anti-terrorism resources are being used to target environmentalists, peace, animal and political activists who hold different views than the government.
It was recently revealed that a counter-terrorism firm spied on individuals who attended film screenings of the documentary Gasland. The film focuses on the practice of natural gas fracking and what impact it has on the environment and in the communities where it is used.
The FBI and other government agencies are cracking down on those who are not willing to say in line with the status quo.
In Pennsylvania, activists have faced terrorism charges for writing slogans in chalk on sidewalks. In California, 27 individuals are set to go on trial stemming for protest actions Elsewhere 23 anti-war, pro-labor and international solidarity activists may face a grand jury on trumped up charges. The FBI boasts 164,000 suspicious activity reports that are made up of activists who do not follow the governments view on matters.
Ask any left-liberal and they’ll probably blame this kind of behavior on the War on Terror. To hold this opinion requires significant historical amnesia. There’s a long and ugly history of the FBI using its massive power and budget to bludgeon political dissidents. Its forerunner, the Bureau of Investigation, had J. Edgar Hoover in charge of its newly-created General Intelligence Division, which was then used to investigate radical groups during the Palmer Raids. Then, under Hoover and formally created as the FBI, it was the primary apparatus of scouring the federal government during the Second Red Scare. It frequently ruined lives on little more than hearsay and never allowed the victims of this persecution to face their accusers. In addition, it carried out illegal burglaries of the National Lawyers’ Guild for having the temerity to defend the aforementioned people whose lives the FBI ruined and helped purge the labor movement of anyone with ideas more radical than those of a centrist Democrat.
Then there’s COINTELPRO. Born out of Hoover’s frustration with having the judiciary restraining his efforts to persecute people for their political beliefs, COINTELPRO existed from 1956 to 1971. Targeting mostly left-wing organizations like the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Students for a Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, and the Black Panthers as well as prominent Americans like Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein, COINTELPRO sought to disrupt and break apart these organizations. While a small amount of COINTELPRO’s resources were brought to bear against right-wing racist groups like the KKK and the National States’ Rights Party, it was primarily an organization designed to destroy any group that pushed for genuine left wing change.
In its fifteen year run, COINTELPRO did a lot of damage, the true extent of which is impossible to gauge because its files remain mostly sealed and what is released is thoroughly redacted. In addition some of attacks made by the organization against these groups defy quantification: would a group broken apart by racial tensions exacerbated by an FBI plant have done so anyways without any effort by the FBI? It’s an question that can’t easily be answered, so to avoid such ambiguity I’ll focus exclusively on the things that can be quantified as they are repellant enough to any free society.
The FBI is like any other secret police organization in the history of modern governance. It operates free of oversight while violating people’s rights. The Bureau uses its power to gather information about dissidents and works to ruin them. It doesn’t protect you from terrorists, only occasionally protects you from criminals (presuming they aren’t wealthy), and will try to destroy any effort at systemic change that gets big enough to be scary to those in charge.
Put simply. the FBI is not your friend. Remember this always.
New Hampshire Republicans are taking textual originalism to a whole new level: three lawmakers have proposed a bill that requires that all legislation find its origin not in the U.S. constitution, but an English document crafted in 1215.
When the legislature reconvenes this month, Republicans want their colleagues to justify many new bills with a direct quote from the 800-year-old Magna Carta:
I’m rendered literally speechless by this. I could babble on about this being the net result of worshiping at the altar of traditionalism, but the thing speaks for itself. The hard right in the US wants to take us back to the 13th century.
This is the most significant danger to hegemony. When a material crisis becomes an ideological crisis, the elite pay attention. There are two ways to deal with a crisis of legitimacy. One is repression, censorship, and outright ignoring the problem entirely- omission. The first two have significant drawbacks. Repression and censorship often strengthen the opposition by increasing curiosity and the “forbidden fruit” effect as well as solidifying the conviction of radicals. Whats more, the US simply cannot afford to tighten information flows given the nature of the service economy. As a consequence, omission also becomes impossible at both the level of information and material reality. You can’t ignore unemployment (although you can hide it), and you can’t ignore the faults of economic dogma when you’re face-to-face with its contradictions.
That leaves one other option: co-option. This method has become the primary means of maintaining ideological hegemony, at least in the core states. By absorbing the opposition and reframing it’s critique into something more edible, the system consumes dissent and embodies it- without the harsh, radical element. Opponents become reformers, and radicals are sidelined.
The whole piece is worth a read-through, though I think the examples raised by the author lend themselves more towards obfuscation of what Marx says and not actual co-opting of Marx’s ideas.
The system is built to protect the people at the top from the people at the bottom, and no amount of obfuscation by some jackass in the Economist about the ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’ will change that. And more than that, the system is built to absorb radicals and turn them into reformers. By doing this, the system makes them into advocates for a system they would scorn and fight against before they gained power. Look at the caricatures of themselves most “left wing” parties in the West have become if you doubt this.
To paraphrase Lucy Parsons, the employing class won’t let you vote away their wealth. It doesn’t matter how good a candidate is on paper, the only way shit changes is through people taking action that directly addresses the injustices that they are fighting. The Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act were magnificent pieces of legislation, but they tailed the March on Washington and Montgomery Bus Boycott and the other brilliant actions that resisted Jim Crow South. Without courageous direct action like the Selma to Montgomery Marches, the CRA and the VRA wouldn’t exist.
Power has always rested in the hands of the people and not the parliament. If the system we have doesn’t work for us anymore, then it’s time to build a new system that does and ignore the old one.
This Isn’t Progress
Posted: January 23, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: anticapitalism, commentary, current events, socialism, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, apple, child labor, civil rights, labor, labor union, organizing, politics, progressive change, progressive politics, socialism | Leave a comment »And no, tech companies won’t be the ones that save the economy. Just take a look at Apple’s attitude.
As with my previous piece about Apple, this is par for the course and an inevitable outgrowth of capitalism, particularly neoliberalism. When people are talking about making America more competitive in the global market, this is what they are talking about: making everyone live in company barracks so that a foreman can come and wake you up in the dead hours of night to work twelve hours straight with no break on the whim of some egomaniacal asshole who doesn’t like that his phone screen can scratch when he has his metal keys in his pocket. This is barely a quarter step up from chattel slavery.
Let’s not forget that the contractor in question (Foxconn) has had to put up anti-suicide nets because it treats its workers in such a degrading and horrific fashion, and that recently two hundred workers threatened to commit suicide in the face of a manager breaking an agreement. It’s this kind of degradation and autocratic behavior that enable the kind of ‘flexibility’ that has Apple’s executives going on about how they can’t onshore these jobs again.
Fuck every single one of these people and those that benefit from the wealth they gain by abusing their workers. They should be reviled for doing this. They shouldn’t be able to show their fucking faces in public. They shouldn’t be allowed to eat out at restaurants. Their children should be ostracized in school. People should turn their backs on them when they speak, and every single business that isn’t a gigantic conglomerate should turn away their custom, because if they had their way, these executives would bind us so thoroughly to a cycle of poverty and serfdom that it would be impossible to escape from.
However, these people are beyond shame. As I said earlier, they don’t eat at restaurants and drink at the bars we do. They don’t fly aboard the same planes as us, they don’t live in the same neighborhoods as us, and their kids don’t go to the same schools as us. You can’t embarrass these people because they aren’t a part of the community. The only answer is to dispossess these bastards by taking control of the system so it can be run communally and for the benefit of the worker, and not the executive.
The way forward is organizing the industries that remain here, and building new ones under communal control. Until we break the control these wannabe feudal lords have on our lives, nothing will get better. For my part, I’m done ever giving my money to Apple ever again. I will not put my money in the pockets of scum like this, not a dime, not ever again. I’ve used a Mac since I was 3, and I can’t stomach making the people who are unapologetically doing this any richer.
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