AMERICA: One paycheck
and two illegals away from homelessness.
"The economists found that the pre-tax share of
national income
received by the bottom half of the US population has been cut
nearly
in half since 1980, from 20 percent to 12 percent, while the
income share of the
top one percent has nearly doubled, from 12
percent to 20 percent."
The class struggle in the US in 2017
The class struggle in
the US in 2017
By Jerry White
4 January 2017
4 January 2017
The year 2017
promises to be one of increasing class struggle in the United States and around
the world. In every country, the ruling elites and their political servants
want to make the working class pay for the global economic crisis and the costs
of war.
In the US, the
working class will confront a government unlike any other in American history,
which will continue and intensify a decades-long social counterrevolution
overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The incoming Trump administration is
manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries. It is a government of,
by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every remaining gain won by
workers over the past century.
Trump wants to “Make
America Great Again”
by eliminating any restrictions on corporate
profit, from minimum wage laws and
occupational safety, health and
environmental protections, to bedrock social
programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social
Security. Workers will fight against these
attacks, and any illusions sections of workers
may have had in Trump are already being
rapidly dispelled.
by eliminating any restrictions on corporate
profit, from minimum wage laws and
occupational safety, health and
environmental protections, to bedrock social
programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social
Security. Workers will fight against these
attacks, and any illusions sections of workers
may have had in Trump are already being
rapidly dispelled.
While hardly reported
by the mass media, 2017 opens with a series of strike threats and labor
contract expirations in the US. These include:
·
145,000 workers at the largest US railroads who have been
working without a new contract for a year. The workers are opposing sweeping
health care cuts, cuts to vacation time and unsafe working hours. They could
face a strikebreaking intervention by Trump.
·
More than 30,000 transit workers in New York City who are
holding a mass meeting this weekend and have a January 15 contract expiration
date with no agreement in sight. Another 460 bus drivers and mechanics for the
regional transportation system in Dayton, Ohio have voted to strike on January
9 over health care and work conditions. In addition, 10,000 Chicago Transit
Authority workers face a contract fight this year.
·
4,000 General Electric Appliance workers in Louisville,
Kentucky, who rejected a wage-cutting deal recommended by the local and
national leadership of the International Union of Electrical-Communications
Workers of America in November. The same month, 1,200 airline mechanics at
UPS’s super-hub in Louisville overwhelmingly voted to strike against health care
cuts.
·
38,000 Illinois state workers who are in a contract impasse with
Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s demands for sharp hikes in health care costs
and changes to overtime rules.
·
700 workers at Momentive Performance Materials in Waterford, New York,
north of Albany, and Willoughby, Ohio (near Cleveland) who have been on strike
for three months. It was recently revealed that a key advisor to
president-elect Donald Trump, Blackstone Group founder and CEO Stephen
Schwarzman, owns a stake in Momentive.
The assault on health
care, pensions and wages was at the center of Obama’s economic policies. This
will only be intensified under Trump. Some 120,000 retired coal miners and
their dependents face the cut off of health and retirement benefits, some as early
as April, because of the near-bankruptcy of the United Mine Workers funds.
Thousands of General
Motors workers are facing the elimination of their jobs over the next few
months, as the giant automaker, working with the UAW, seeks to slash jobs as
car sales slow. Trump has appointed GM CEO Mary Barra to his corporate
competitiveness board.
With great fanfare on
Tuesday, Ford and the UAW announced that the company was canceling plans to
build a new $1.6 billion plant in Mexico and would invest instead in expanding
a plant in suburban Detroit. Ford CEO Mark Fields said the decision was made
because, “One of the factors we’re looking at is a more positive US
manufacturing business environment under President-elect Trump and some of the
pro-growth policies he said he’s going to pursue. And so this is a vote of
confidence.”
Indeed, the Ford
executives and wealthy investors will certainly reap the benefits of tax cuts,
deregulation and other anti-working class policies the Trump administration
will pursue, while the UAW bureaucrats are more than willing to offer their
services.
The growth of class
conflict poses basic political questions for every section of the working
class.
First, the struggles
of workers must not be subordinated to the pro-capitalist trade unions, which
in the United States and around the world function as instruments of corporate
management and the state, not as workers organizations.
The past two years
have already seen a significant increase in the efforts of workers to resist
decades of declining real wages. In every case, they came into conflict with or
were smothered by the pro-corporate, anti-working class trade unions, which
worked closely with the Obama administration.
In late 2015,
autoworkers rebelled against sellout contracts pushed by the United Auto
Workers, which were only rammed through with a combination of lies, threats and
fraud. Last year began with a series of wildcat sickouts by teachers in
Detroit. The action of teachers was in defiance of the Detroit Federation of
Teachers and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers,
which shut them down and facilitated the passage of laws that deepened the
attack on public education.
These actions were
followed by the strike by 39,000 telecom workers at Verizon, a strike by 5,000
Minnesota hospital workers and a walkout by Philadelphia transit workers. All
were isolated by the unions, which pushed through contracts that attacked jobs
and living standards.
Workers must build
new organizations of struggle, democratically controlled by the rank-and-file,
and based on the methods of the class struggle. Every division used to weaken
the working class must be overcome and a common struggle waged to defend the
social rights of all workers.
Second, a real
struggle to defend jobs and living standards must reject the economic
nationalism that has long been promoted by the unions to subordinate workers to
the profit interests of their “own” corporate bosses.
The growth of the
class struggle must and will take on an increasingly international form. Over
the past year, major strikes and demonstrations broke out throughout Europe,
including in France against reactionary labor “reforms,” and in Portugal and
Greece in opposition to austerity measures dictated by the banks. India saw one
of the largest one-day strikes in human history against the right-wing agenda
of Narenda Modi, while in China the number of strikes and protests in the first
half of 2016 was up 20 percent from the year before.
Strikes by teachers,
oil workers and other sections of workers in defiance of state violence also
took place in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. In Canada, the year ended with
9,300 teachers in Nova Scotia, Canada walking out over wage freezes and to
demand increased educational funding.
Finally, the defense
of the basic rights of workers is fundamentally a political struggle. In the
incoming Trump administration, the reality of the state as an instrument of
class rule is exposed in naked form. Yet anyone under the illusion that a
Clinton administration would pursue a pro-worker policy need only look at the
record of the past eight years and the response of the Democratic Party to the
election of Trump. Rather than criticizing Trump for his right-wing agenda, the
Democrats have denounced him for not being aggressive enough against Russia
while pledging to work with him on imposing his policy of economic nationalism.
The political
radicalization of American workers and youth in 2015 was expressed in support
during the Democratic Party primaries for Bernie Sanders, who presented himself
as a socialist and opponent of social inequality. Sanders’ carried out his
assigned task of channeling this opposition behind the candidate of the status
quo, Hillary Clinton. However, millions of people backed Sanders not because of
his political treachery, but because they are seeking some way of opposing an
economic system dominated by the corporate and financial aristocracy.
The essential question confronting workers in 2017 is the
development of a socialist leadership for the momentous battles ahead. The
Socialist Equality Party is fighting to unite every section of the working
class and every struggle, for jobs, decent living standards, against police
violence, war and the attack on democratic rights, into a single political
movement to fight for socialism. We encourage all those who agree with the
fight for socialism to join and
build the SEP.
SOARING POVERTY IN AMERICA AS IT
HANDS MILLIONS OF JOBS TO
ILLEGALS AND BILLIONS IN
WELFARE!
America’s Economic Distress Belt
Income inequality and poverty used to be separate phenomena in America. Today, it’s a different story: More than forty percent of U.S. counties have high rates of both.
But until recently, a county with higher inequality did not necessarily have a high concentration of poverty.
A new study from the Population Reference Bureau by Beth Jarosz and Mark Mather tracks the dramatic growth in inequality and poverty across America’s 3,000-plus counties over the past two-and-a-half decades.
Today, 41 percent of U.S. counties suffer from high levels of combined poverty and income inequality, up from just 29 percent back in 1989. Worse, as the table below shows, just 28 percent of counties have low levels of poverty and low levels of inequality. In other words, more than 70 percent of counties have either high levels of inequality, high levels of poverty, or both.
The maps below trace the growth in poverty and inequality across U.S. counties over this time. Green represents places with low poverty and low inequality, gold represents low inequality and high poverty, blue represents low poverty and high inequality, and red indicates the disturbing one-two punch of high inequality and high poverty.
While some commentators continue to extol the Sunbelt’s rapid growth and low housing costs, a rising number of people and places there are falling further behind both in absolute terms and compared to the rest of the country. Inequality and poverty are more than class issues: They are geographic ones as well.
About the Author
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
Build the La Raza Democrat Party base with open borders, no ID to vote Democrat, no E-VERIFY and NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED TO APPLY.
Keeping wages DEPRESSED with endless hordes of looting Mexicans invading keeps these corrupt politicians’ paymasters on Wall Street generous$.
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS ALONG WITH BILLIONS IN WELFARE.... AND THE PARTY HAS JUST BEGUN!
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY PLATFORM:
NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!
VIVA LA RAZA FASCISM? THEN VOTE DEM!
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
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