Health Care and Detroit: Killed By Government
by Gary North
March 24, 2010
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north828.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DemoRub/message/122
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Brian Mattox" < [email protected] >
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2010
Subject: Re: Detroit Killed by Government
Rarely have I read anything so myopic, poorly researched and poorly thought
out. Once again, we see the right-wing capitalist apologists blaming
everything but the ruling class capitalists -- who own and control all major
industry, all major media (who, according to the author, is supposedly
remaining silent to protect unions and the capitalist-hated welfare aspects
of government) and they, in fact, own the God-damn government (as we all
know) as well.
One would think it should be understood without having to state, but we live
in a capitalist society with a capitalist government. Quite obviously, if we
had a socialist government, we would live in a socialist society. Everywhere
in America we have government that is inflicted upon us by the richest
capitalists. They own all of the politicians and government does their
bidding regardless of whether that government is national or local. Nowhere
is the government representative of the working class majority.
Democracy is a total fraud. The overwhelming majority of Americans are
working class people who would benefit greatly from a living wage law,
single-payer national health care, government funded higher education and
the outlawing of usury interest rates on credit cards. Yet every government
policy is a boon to the super-rich capitalist minority and an affront to the
working class majority.
What has really happened to the city of Detroit is a savage capitalist
attack upon the auto workers. As their jobs and wages are attacked, the city
must go into decline. The role of the unions is to facilitate the attack
upon workers. Unions are right-wing, capitalist organizations posing as
left-wing, worker organizations.
Right-wing columnists such as Gary North would benefit greatly from reading
a little of the history of the labor struggles in America. He would quickly
learn that the unions know exactly how to achieve gains for workers and how
to protect jobs and wages. And yet for 30 years they have done nothing but
negotiate concessions and layoffs.
The unions know fully well that solidarity works. Strikes need to be
extended to reach all aspects of an industry to the point that industry is
completely shut down. There is a historical record of this success. No
capitalist organization has anywhere near the potential power of labor. Not
even capitalist government. In order to prevent the collapse of capitalism
and the implementing of a working-class run society (true socialism) the
capitalist elites must control the labor unions. And what we see is that all
labor actions are isolated while the union hierarchy negotiates behind
closed doors with corporate and government leaders. After which, concessions
are inflicted upon the workers under the guise of "saving jobs." Later,
those jobs are eliminated anyway.
There is an old union battle-cry that goes, "An injury to one is an injury
to all." Clearly the union brass is aware of that quote and they know what
it means. It means that in a global capitalist world, American workers can
only be protected by a global labor movement that seeks to protect all
workers jobs and wages all around the world. But unions are capitalist
entities led by wealthy capitalists and they know that a global labor
movement could only serve to usher in world socialism in the fashion
prescribed by Leon Trotsky and they have no interest is helping facilitating
such a movement.
A full 80% of the world's workers toil long, hard days for $10 per day or
less. Almost half of all workers earn only $2.50 per day or less. Those
figures do not include the many millions more workers who work for poverty
wages in the developed nations. Capitalism rests upon a massive bed of
virtual slavery. The profits which go to the super-rich minority require the
severe exploitation of the overwhelming percentage of the working class. Any
type of global labor movement, even if it failed to reach all workers, would
utterly collapse the global capitalist system.
Small business owners are a group of the world's biggest chumps. The
majority of them like to believe that they are right-wing, capitalist,
success stories. Yet most small business owners are either victims of
capitalism or potential victims of capitalism in the future.
Detroit serves as a good example. When the real capitalists decided to
attack the auto workers, slash wages and roll back and consolidate
production, that becomes an affront to all of the small business owners in
Detroit. Workers who previously had disposable income that was spent at
perhaps the local Subway Sandwich shop for instance, is now gone and small
business owners are subsequently forced out of business. As we've seen time
and time again, small business owners have no capacity to save a city when
the major capitalists are in a predatory mood. Small business owners are at
the mercy of the real capitalists and those capitalists have no mercy for
anyone.
Capitalism is about one thing and one thing only: Profits for capitalists.
Nothing else matters. Not workers or small business owners or schools or the
development of society. When the real capitalists decided that the auto
industry profits were insufficient to satiate their greed, they attacked the
auto workers, slashed wages, rolled back production and increased prices.
The goal was not the selling of more cars but the selling of fewer cars for
higher profits. This is what has destroyed Detroit.
As noted previously, the majority of the world's workforce earns less than
$10 per day. The majority of the American labor force earns close to
poverty-level wages or below. As the bankster-led economic crisis began to
unfold and auto sales began to collapse, there existed a solution to the
auto crisis that went completely unspoken. It was unmentioned by the auto
industry, by Obama, by the Detroit local government and by the labor unions.
That solution was to raise worker wages around the world and implement a
living wage in the U.S. and all developed nations. With roughly 7 billion
people in the world, raising all worker wages to a living wage status would
obviously serve to generate a thriving economy for the underclass. Auto
production would surge all over the world. Suppliers would be hiring. All
other industries would be on fire. Subway Sandwich shops would be popping up
all over the place. Small business owners would be ecstatic. But such a
thriving economy would not produce sufficient profits for the real
capitalists. That requires the massive amounts of slave labor mentioned
previously.
A global capitalist society actually serves to put a brake on production and
the living standards of the majority working class. Production of everything
must be limited in order to restrict supply in an effort to keep prices at
profitable levels.
In the world's most rapacious capitalist society -- one so dominated by a
wealthy capitalist elite that they are able to get away with committing such
horrific crimes against the American people as 9/11 -- Detroit is hardly an
oasis of socialism for the underclass run amok. The collapse of Detroit is
the result of capitalist parasitism.
---------
See also:
Deindustrialization, the UAW and the Decline of Detroit
By Jerry White
25 March 2010
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/whit-m25.shtml
Obama's auto task force: a collection of Wall Street investors and asset
strippers
By Jerry White
24 March 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/auto-m24.shtml
Obama jobs summit: "No money for jobs"
By Barry Grey
5 December 2009
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/jobs-d05.shtml
Excerpt:
What Obama did not explain, moreover, is that expanding exports is central
to the global strategy of the US ruling elite for offloading the crisis of
American capitalism onto its economic rivals, and that the heart of this
strategy is a permanent reduction in the living standards of the American
working class.
The Obama administration is committed to a policy of using mass unemployment
as a weapon to bring the social position of American workers more in line
with that of super-exploited workers in rising Asian economies such as China
and India. By means of wage-cutting, speedup and cuts in social programs
such as Medicare and Social Security, the US is to be turned into a cheap
labor center for exports to the world market.
This is the class war agenda that underlies Obama's cynical and duplicitous
posturing at the jobs summit.
---- end of forwarded message ---
The Story Of Spending || "We Have Only One Party!"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DemoRub/message/125
America Without a Middle Class
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WakeUpClass/message/1449
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"ShadowGovernment" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/shadowgovernment?hl=en.
