From: Sara D. Roos Fwd: Senate to Middle Class: Drop Dead ...message from Michael Moore
GO MICHAEL! From: "Michael Moore" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Senate to Middle Class: Drop Dead Friday, December 12th, 2008 Friends, They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers start building only cars and mass transit that reduce our dependency on oil. They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers build cars that reduce global warming. They could have given the loan on the condition that the automakers withdraw their many lawsuits against state governments in their attempts to not comply with our environmental laws. They could have given the loan on the condition that the management team which drove these once-great manufacturers into the ground resign and be replaced with a team who understands the transportation needs of the 21st century. Yes, they could have given the loan for any of these reasons because, in the end, to lose our manufacturing infrastructure and throw 3 million people out of work would be a catastrophe. But instead, the Senate said, we'll give you the loan only if the factory workers take a $20 an hour cut in wages, pension and health care. That's right. After giving BILLIONS to Wall Street hucksters and criminal investment bankers -- billions with no strings attached and, as we have since learned, no oversight whatsoever -- the Senate decided it is more important to break a union, more important to throw middle class wage earners into the ranks of the working poor than to prevent the total collapse of industrial America. We have a little more than a month to go of this madness. As I sit here in Michigan today, tens of thousands of hard working, honest, decent Americans do not believe they can make it to January 20th. The malaise here is astounding. Why must they suffer because of the mistakes of every CEO from Roger Smith to Rick Wagoner? Make management and the boards of directors and the shareholders pay for this. Of course that is heresy to the 31 Republicans who decided to blame the poor, miserable autoworkers for this mess. And our wonderful media complied with their spin on the morning news shows: "UAW Refuses to Give Concessions Killing Auto Bailout Bill." In fact the UAW has given concession after concession, reduced their benefits, agreed to get rid of the Jobs Bank and agreed to make it harder for their retirees to live from week to week. Yes! That's what we need to do! It's the Jobs Bank and the old people who have led the nation to economic ruin! But even doing all that wasn't enough to satisfy the bastard Republicans. These Senate vampires wanted blood. Blue collar blood. You see, they weren't opposed to the bailout because they believed in the free market or capitalism. No, they were opposed to the bailout because they're opposed to workers making a decent wage. In their rage, they were driven to destroy the backbone of this country, not because the UAW hadn't given back enough, but because the UAW hadn't given up. It appears that the sitting President has been looking for a way to end his reign by one magnanimous act, just like a warlord on his feast day. He will put his finger in the dyke, and the fragile mess of an auto industry will eke through the next few months. That will give the Senate enough time to demand that the bankers and investment sharks who've already swiped nearly half of the $700 billion gift a chance to make the offer of cutting their pay. Fat chance. Yours, Michael Moore [email protected] www.MichaelMoore.com *** From: "Bill Totten" <[email protected]> http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/foster251008p.html Postscript to "The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis" by John Bellamy Foster Monthly Review (April 2008) Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis - the roots of which were explained in this article. Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world. We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history of capitalism. More than a mere financial panic, what is taking place is a major devaluation of capital of still undetermined dimensions. Marx explained that capital was invariably over-extended in a boom and that in the crisis that followed a part of that capital was devalued, enabling the rest to return to profitability and to the process of accumulation and expansion. However, we are now to some extent in uncharted territory: a phase of monopoly-finance capital that is in many ways unprecedented. Even at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes explained that after a crisis modern capitalism might return to profitability without a return to full employment, full utilization of existing capacity, and strong growth. Our experience of the last half-century has shown that capitalism at its core was able to avoid stagnation only by vast military expenditures and, when that proved insufficient, by an enormous inflation of asset values and speculation, ie "financialization". This growth multiplied by the boom psychology on the way up (the "wealth effect") turned out to also have a contracting multiplier effect on the way down. These factors help to explain why the economic crisis in the real economy is so severe at present, and why there is no chance of an immediate restarting of the growth process. Many people first woke up to the seriousness of the crisis only on September 18 2008, when US Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson told Congress that the US financial sector was within days of a complete meltdown and that a $700 billion bailout for the banks was urgently needed. Since then (and indeed even before) vast amounts of government dollars have been poured into the financial structure (all told the financial exposure of the US government alone in the entire crisis has exceeded $5 trillion at this writing), including direct injection of capital into major banks and partial nationalizations {1}. Yet, still there is little sign of the crisis abating. Insolvency is spreading through the economy from consumers to banks, to non-financial firms, back to consumers, in a vicious cycle. The fact that the economy in recent decades was being lifted mainly by financialization makes the problem all that much more severe. The entire world economy is now affected. Already one economy in the European sphere itself - Iceland - has experienced a meltdown, requiring rescue from outside, and some have called Iceland the "canary in the coalmine". Over this last neoliberal epoch, the United States and its European allies have forced upon the entire globe a model of the free flow of capital across borders. The result today is the free flow of catastrophe. Only by the imposition, first, of capital controls and the establishment, second, of non-market based "South-South" cooperation can "emerging" economies avoid becoming the worse victims of the crash. In these dire economic circumstances we should of course be careful not to fall into an exaggerated frame of mind. It is important to remember that a breakdown of capitalism as a whole will not occur by mere economics alone. Given time to work things out on its own terms the system will no doubt recover - though a full recovery could be many years away, if possible at all. The real historical issue before us is to what extent the world's population is willing to wait for this crisis to be resolved on capitalist terms, so that the whole irrational process of exploitation and boom and bust can gain steam again - or whether they shall decide to insert themselves into the process to say Enough! It is this political insertion from below that the powers that be most fear. From their Olympian position at the top of the system they know perhaps better than anyone else that the conditions exist for the possible renewal of socialism on a global scale. Capitalism has reached its limits as a progressive force and its famous "creative destruction" has turned into a destructive creativity in which both the world's people and the planet are now in jeopardy. Indeed, for the world's population and the earth taken a whole there is today no real alternative - to socialism. _____ 1 "Government's Leap into Banking Has Its Perils", New York Times (October 18 2008). John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. This postscript was written for the Portuguese translation of "The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis" that will appear in Revista Outubro, Brazil. TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Rad-Green mailing list [email protected] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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