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Friday 13 July 2012, by Robert Paris

Elections in the U.S. – No Choice for the Working Class

In the U.S., the contest for President has begun again, once again coming down to a choice between two candidates who both represent the interests of the bourgeoisie – Barack Obama, from the Democratic party, and Mitt Romney, from the Republican party. So far, this election is playing out like most other elections. Both candidates are raising record amounts of money as they try to carry out their strategy of saying whatever they think will win them the greatest number of votes.

Elections During A Backdrop of Attacks on the Working Class

This is the first U.S. Presidential election since the latest global economic crisis and the severe attacks it has led to on the working class by the bourgeoisie. Since 2007 about 25 million jobs have been lost – with no signs of improvement. For those with jobs, workers are doing more work than at anytime since 1929. Businesses are scaling back production in the U.S. as they chase cheaper wages in poorer countries. And for the jobs that remain in the U.S., there are on average fewer workers doing more work, as they are getting wage cuts, health care coverage cuts, and pension cuts.

All of these cuts have meant record profits for corporations. The 500 largest corporations in the U.S. on average have the highest profits since 1929, along with record amounts of what is called “cash on hand” (money in accounts that is not invested in any sort of capital). And the average profit made from each worker, has never been higher. So for the bourgeoisie in the U.S. this crisis has given them the opportunity to speed up the workforce, the chance for the biggest corporations to either buyout the smaller companies or push them out of the markets, and ultimately, to come out of the first stage of this crisis in their best situation in decades.

At the same time, after around $12 trillion has been given to banks as either hand outs or zero interest loans, and after over a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. federal budget has the largest deficit ever – something close to $15 trillion. So, this deficit, imposed by the bourgeoisie, has been used as the excuse to cut spending at the federal level on all sorts of social services. The same strategy is happening across the U.S. in individual states – where the state governments have cut taxes for the corporations and the super rich, and paid for it with massive budget cuts throughout the states to education, health care, poverty assistance, transportation and more.

On the whole, banks, corporations and the super rich have never been wealthier in the U.S. Currently, there is the greatest gap in wealth than at any time in U.S. history. On average, the richest 1 percent controls more than 38 percent of the wealth in the U.S. The 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together. And at the same time, the bottom 99% of Americans have had their incomes drop an average of 17% since 2007.

Candidates Hand Picked By the Corporations

As in every other election, the candidates are pre-selected by the bourgeoisie. In the vast majority of elections in the U.S., the candidate with the most money raised becomes the president. And this year, this election is likely to be the most expensive election in U.S. history. It is the first presidential election since the passing of a new law called “Citizens United” in January 2010. This was a law backed by most of the largest corporations and banks in the U.S. to remove any limits to campaign financing. With the passing of this law, the amount of financing for campaigns has increased enormously, over 338% since 2006. So, for this election, the amount money being poured into each candidate is at levels never seen before. For example, Mitt Romney, the presumed nominee for the Republican Party, raised 3 and 4 times as much as the other candidates during the Republican primaries. It was no surprise when he came out the winner.

Nothing But Political Theater

Amidst the backdrop of continuous attacks on the working class, both candidates have to play the game of pretending to be on the side of working people while clearly carrying out and representing policies that support the bourgeoisie.

For Obama, despite all his promises of hope and change in his first bid for the presidency, after nearly four years of bailing out the banks, the corporations, and the rich, after continuing to slash funding for health care, education and social services while increasing funding for wars, after all of that and much worse – this time he promises he will really represent working people.

Obama’s current sales pitch for working people is that he can promise jobs to workers. He points to his so-called successful bailout and subsequent recovery of the auto industry. He says that his policies saved the auto companies and can be used throughout the country to help the economy recover. What he leaves out is that the only thing the auto companies have recovered are their profits.

This auto bailout was more than a bailout – it was an attack on workers. It forced the auto workers to make huge sacrifices. The Obama administration imposed wage cuts, health care cuts, pension cuts, and massive layoffs on auto workers. All newly hired auto workers now make 50 percent less than the older workers working side-by-side doing the same work. And a year later, auto companies made record profits because they pushed more work onto fewer workers and paid them less to do it. If this policy were carried out across the country it would not be a solution for working people – it’s would be a nightmare.

Ever since the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last fall, Obama has been under pressure to at least pay lip service to the growing wealth inequality in the country. It seems the angrier people are at the amount of money flowing into the pockets of the super rich, the more Obama has to pretend to suddenly transform into a champion for working people. Lately in his campaigning he has been promising to raise taxes on the richest Americans, who are among the wealthiest people in the world. He says they should pay the same tax rate as working people. In fact, this is an insult. The richest people in the world should pay way more than working people. But even if this proposal was ever passed – which is highly unlikely because the majority in Congress opposes it – there are so many tax tricks and loopholes that the super rich would continue to get out of paying more money. Even now, through loopholes, they regularly get away with paying less than their official rate. But that doesn’t matter because at the same time Obama is proposing to lower the taxes of corporations from 35 percent to 28 percent. So as working people are doing more work than ever recorded in U.S. history, and as U.S. corporations are making the most money ever recorded – Obama promises to lower the taxes of corporations.

Romney, on the other hand, isn’t even able to pretend to be on the side of workers. He is a long-time investment banker with a personal fortune of over $250 million. He made over $20 million dollars for the last two years in a row. The last corporation he headed, Bain Capital, was notorious for its takeovers of struggling corporations. Bain capital would lend failing companies money, reorganize the workforce, impose layoffs and cutbacks, and takeover the company if it succeeded, and bankrupt it if it failed. Either way, the companies would have to pay back the loan to Bain capital.

In his campaigning, Romney’s strategy can be reduced to just being against Obama. He is trying exploit the feelings od dissatisfaction with Obama in the population. In the majority of his speeches he simply reminds his audience of the false promises of Obama’s past campaign and makes the blanket promise that he will make it all better. One difference for Romney is that as Obama feels compelled to speak against the growing wealth inequality, Romney sympathizes with the rich. He argues that even greater tax cuts for the super rich is what is needed to increase jobs in the U.S. So, he has promised he will not increase taxes on the super rich but plans on lowering them. And when it comes to banks and corporations, Romney says he will cut their tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent (three percent greater cut than Obama’s proposal).

No Choice For The Working Class

In this election, the working class is looking for a way out of this crisis – but neither candidate has even been able to pretend to offer this. Despite this overwhelming disappointment, and without any chance to vote for an alternative, workers will most likely show up to vote in their usual way. Even as workers acknowledge that both candidates represent the same corporate interests, still, the workers who usually vote for the Democrats will vote for the Democrats and those that vote for the Republicans will vote for the Republicans because they don’t see any other options.

Obama’s Executive Order – Playing Political Games With Young Immigrants’ Lives

On Friday last week, President Obama made an announcement that his administration would put an end to the deportation of young immigrants who were brought to this country as children. On the surface this seems like a move to correct a serious wrong that is being done to these young people. But in fact it is simply a political maneuver against the Republican Party and Mitt Romney. In fact Obama’s administration has had one of the harshest anti-immigrant policies in recent history. Many young immigrants have grown up in the United States. They have spent their childhoods here, gone to school here, and this country is the only one that they know. Are we supposed to punish children for the immigration status of their parents? It is shameful that even one such young person would be deported to a country which they have never really known. But thousands of young people without legal status are deported every year. Obama’s executive order is the most limited possible solution to this injustice. Obama himself has said “This is not amnesty. This is not immunity. This is not a path to citizenship. It’s not a permanent fix.” In other words, this is just a gesture to make it seem like he is doing something. But what else can we expect? The Obama administration’s record on immigration stands for itself. Under the Obama administration the number of deportations of immigrants has been twice as many as during the Bush administration. Obama has increased funding and troop deployment to the Southern border of the United States. Today there are thousands more border control agents and National Guard troops patrolling the border with Mexico. In addition the Obama administration has begun using Predator drones at the border. This is the type of unmanned military aircraft used in Afghanistan. If anything Obama is the most anti-immigrant president in recent history. The executive order that the Obama administration issued last Friday changes none of this. All it does is put Mitt Romney and the Republicans in a difficult position. Many politicians in the Republican Party have made anti-immigrant scapegoating a central theme of their campaigns. But they still want Latino voters who are dissatisfied with Obama to vote for Mitt Romney in the election this November! The real problem is that undocumented immigrants are abused in this society. They work the worst and most difficult jobs. Then in an economic crisis, they are blamed for competing with workers who are U.S. citizens. Undocumented immigrants make up five percent of the total U.S. workforce. But these immigrants make up a quarter of the workers in industries like construction, agriculture, and meatpacking. What’s more, undocumented immigrants pay seven billion dollars into the Social Security fund every year – money they will never collect. None of these facts stop the politicians from placing blame on immigrants for the high unemployment numbers. Mitt Romney has appealed to this feeling during his campaign. Speaking about the problems facing young immigrants he dismissed them saying “our kids have enough competition.” While this racist blame might distract some voters, it doesn’t work on the thousands of Latino voters in states like Florida where Romney hopes to win votes. Obama’s executive order puts Romney in a difficult position. Either he must attack Obama’s executive order and lose the Latino vote, or take back the anti-immigrant statements he has made in the past. Regardless, this executive order changes very little for immigrants. Some young people will be allowed to remain in this country where they grew up, and that is good. But this is nothing compared to what immigrant workers deserve. It is an insult that the politicians are playing this political game with people’s lives, especially the lives of young people. It is above all an insult to young immigrants and their families, but it is also an insult to the rest of us who are supposed to believe this has anything to do with the economic crisis we are suffering. We should not be fooled by the political game being played by Obama and the Democrats, or by the Republicans and Mitt Romney. The problem in this economy is not immigrant workers, it is the wealthy corporations who are making all of us pay for their crisis, regardless of our immigration status.

Working Families Are Getting Poorer

It is no surprise for workers to find out that our wallets have been getting lighter and lighter over the past few years. With the rising cost of goods, the mounting debt, and wages that won’t go up, we know that we’re working more for less. But it is still shocking to see how much less.

According to new data from the Economic Policy Institute, American families on average experienced a 39 percent drop in wealth between 2007 and 2010, and younger families (ages 35-44) saw a 54 percent drop. This is an average loss of about $50,000 per household, sending most working families back to the lowest level since 1992.

Some of that $50,000 loss comes from the decline in home values, which have decreased by an average of 50 percent since 2007. Also, workers lost record amounts from their retirement accounts, averaging from ten to thirty percent since 2007.

But the main reason workers are getting poorer is because they are actually earning less and less. According to the IRS, by 2011, the average income of working families fell $2,699 since 2000. That’s the equivalent of losing a month’s worth of income. Since 2000, wages have gone down about 4.3 percent. Today most wages are at the same level as in 1999, with half of workers earning less than $507 a week. And the bottom 50 million workers averaged only $116 a week in 2010.

If wages would have simply stayed at the level they were in 2000 and not gone down during this time, Americans would have had about $3.5 trillion more, about $26,000 per tax payer. That was money we should have earned. But it didn’t just disappear.

During the same period, the richest 1 percent have been the only ones getting richer. Just in 2010 alone, their income increased by more than 12 percent. And for the last three months of 2011, they became $554 billion richer. And while workers have been earning less per week, corporations have been earning more. For the top 500 U.S. corporations, profits have increased 23 percent since before the crisis hit in 2007.

Everywhere, the bosses are taking advantage of this crisis for themselves. With so many workers out of work, desperate to find jobs, the bosses have gone on the offensive. Where workers are seeing more misery, the bosses see an opportunity to make even more money.

In May, there were officially about 23 million workers, or 14.8 percent, who were unemployed or what is called “underemployed” (it means workers with a part-time job that doesn’t pay enough, and so they are looking for another one). But in fact, the real number is much higher, estimated to be about 30 million people who are jobless or underemployed – that’s about one out of five workers.

But the number of job openings each month has not made any major dent in the number of unemployed since 2007. On average, given any month, there are only 3.4 million job openings for about 30 million people who need work – that’s ten applicants for every new job.

So this is the current situation workers find ourselves in. Wherever we work, we are facing greedy bosses anxious to take advantage of the desperation that workers are in. The bosses want to lay more of us off, or threaten us with lay offs. They tell us we are lucky to even have jobs. Then they want to dump the rest of the work onto fewer workers while they cut our wages at the same time. If they do hire new workers, the bosses are doing their best to make sure it is for a part-time or temporary position, making less than the previous workers.

Our poverty, our uncertainty, our desperation – to the bosses, all of it is just a chance to make more and more money. To the bosses, the lives of workers are nothing more than dollar signs.

California’s Budget – More Attacks on Workers and the Poor

The latest budget signed by Governor Brown is an outrage. The nearly $16 billion budget deficit has once again been paid for by huge cuts to workers and the poor.

For years, the state government, whether Democrats or Republicans, have been cutting taxes to corporations and the super rich while millions of workers have lost their jobs and had their homes reclaimed by banks. And so, as California brings in less revenue from income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes, the state protects the rich, creates a budget shortage, and then makes us pay for it.

Have any of largest companies in the world headquartered here in California been forced to pay to cover any of this? Wells Fargo or Google or Intel or Hewlett-Packard or Apple – have they had to pay any more over the years? And the oil companies, making record profits year after year, have they ever had to pay an extra dime? Or have any of the billionaires or multi-millionaires here been forced to pay to for this? Never! Corporations and the rich have been protected every step of the way.

The only ones who have had to pay for this crisis have been working families and the poor. We’ve paid through cuts to education, health care, our wages, our retirements, through losing our houses, losing our savings, and through having the assistance we rely on slashed away. And once again California has gone after the poorest in the state.

CALWORKS, financial assistance for low-income families, has been cut in half. Weekly benefits will now only last 24 months instead of 48. This is a huge blow to the unemployed in California who are out of work for an average of 37 months at a time. This means many families could now have no assistance at all for years.

Over $1 billion has been cut from Medi-Cal, the state health insurance for the poor. Most of this cut will come from kicking about 1.4 million poor families and seniors off of Medi-Cal and onto private plans with extremely reduced coverage. This also includes eliminating the Healthy Families program, which means 880,000 of the state’s poorest children will only be able to rely on Medi-Cal with its extremely reduced services.

Other cuts include $240 million from child care services, $90 million from In Home Health Services, which provides care for the disabled and the elderly, and $402 million from 182,000 state workers, which is about a 5 percent pay cut.

In addition to these huge cuts, Governor Brown has already agreed to massive cuts to education if his tax bill doesn’t pass in November. These cuts would be devastating – $5.5 billion from K-12 schools and community colleges, and $500 million from California’s universities.

Many people in California are starting to feel they must vote for the November tax bill. This plan would raise the sales tax from 7.25 to 7.5 percent, which would be the highest in the entire country. And it would mean workers pay about $2.5 billion more every year to the state. This tax initiative would also raise income taxes between one and three percent on people earning $500,000 or more. Not only is this a tiny increase, but with all of the past tax breaks handed out to the rich, it’s not even an increase at all.

It’s understandable that many people feel forced to vote for this bill when huge cuts are promised if they don’t. It’s like blackmail – vote yes or get cut. But whether this bill passes or not – this fight is not over. Even if it passes, the amount of money raised will do nothing to restore the decades of past cuts. Either way, the state is not through making workers pay for this crisis. The corporations and their politicians want to take a lot more from us.

It’s going to take more than five minutes in a ballot box to fight against these cuts. It’s going to take workers up and down the state organizing together in massive numbers to show our force. These are our lives, our families, our futures, and these attacks can’t keep going on without a fight!

In This System We Have Democracy, Except When it Really Matters

Everywhere you look today, from the national level down to our cities and our workplaces, all of the decisions that impact our lives are being made behind our backs, over our heads, and without our agreement. From the decisions made by the Supreme Court about health care, to the massive attack on pensions and benefits for workers, we are on the receiving end of someone else’s decisions. And it’s not easy to see who is making these decisions – the big banks and corporations, and the politicians who serve them.

Look at the decision which was just made by the Supreme Court regarding the Affordable Health Care. First we should remember that this bill was written for the Obama administration with the help of the big pharmaceutical and health care companies. This bill provides certain protections and expanded coverage for people. But it guarantees the big health care companies’ profits by mandating that everyone must purchase insurance from them.

In the last months we have seen this bill taken to the Supreme Court. This court, a group of nine judges, sat and made a decision which impacts every single person in the whole country. Who gave them the right to do this? They weren’t elected. Supreme Court justices are appointed for life by whichever president happens to be in power when they are chosen. And here these people are deciding the fate of millions.

What did they decide? They decided that the bill would remain as law, and that people would have to buy insurance or face penalties. But they also decided that the part of the bill that expands Medicaid coverage was unconstitutional because it threatened the rights of state governments.

And we all know what that means. State governments are slashing budgets, and forcing people to pay for this economic crisis. Just look at California. Every year since 2008 we have seen drastic cuts to education, social services, and attacks on state workers. This year we are faced with an election. What decisions about the budget are we allowed to make? This November will we be able to vote to raise taxes on the corporations who profit from the wealth of this state?

No, Jerry Brown’s tax proposal is set up so that we have a choice between taxing ourselves with additional sales tax, or losing a huge amount of funding for schools and social services. A token amount will be taken from individuals who make over $250,000 per year, but companies who operate in California will keep making huge profits.

If we could actually decide on the questions that matter would we allow what is happening to Stockton? Stockton has gone bankrupt due to the economic collapse. But who is made to pay for this bankruptcy? City workers who are living on pensions. People who worked hard all their lives are being told – Now you have to pay for your own health care. Libraries are being closed. Roads aren’t being fixed. In other words the citizens of Stockton are being forced, against their will, to pay.

There is nothing democratic about how this system runs. From the federal government down to the details of our lives, we are being forced to pay for a crisis we didn’t create. The only choices we are given are false choices. It’s about time we started to say enough is enough. No one should be forced to suffer consequences that they didn’t choose themselves. We did not choose to create this crisis, and we shouldn’t be forced to pay.

Revolutionary Workers Group

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