http://www.uaw599.com/forum/ Sat, 19 May 2012 00:43:13 +0000 MyBB http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1095 Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:02:48 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1095 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1094 Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:57:17 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1094 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/tobacco-com...d=14635963

Just another reason not to trust corporations, and their elites.
and why we need MORE Government health regulations.]]> http://abcnews.go.com/Health/tobacco-com...d=14635963

Just another reason not to trust corporations, and their elites.
and why we need MORE Government health regulations.]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1093 Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:00:08 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1093
30 minutes on hold last night - just to put a $10 charge on my credit card. and things went down hill from there.

and then learned that i could have bought the meds locally and saved the hassle.]]>
30 minutes on hold last night - just to put a $10 charge on my credit card. and things went down hill from there.

and then learned that i could have bought the meds locally and saved the hassle.]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1092 Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:57:45 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1092 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
In many ways, Homer Martin seemed like an unlikely figure to head the UAW. Born in Marion, Illinois, on August 16, 1902, Martin was a star track athlete in college before doing post-graduate work at a seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, experiences that had dubbed him "The Leaping Parson." After uttering pro-labor sentiments from the pulpit, he lost his pastoral position in a Kansas City suburb and began working for GM's Chevrolet plant. Martin was laid off from his GM job in 1934, became active in the UAW, and quickly rose to the presidency of the organization. Martin was a gifted orator who "made men feel that in organizing a union they were going to battle for righteousness and the word of God" (Fine 78).

Notice that, near the end of the document below, Martin once again decries the debilitating effects of the "speed-up" on workers. The language he uses in some ways recalls a passage from John Dos Passos's novel, The Big Money, which was published the previous year: "At Ford's production was improving all the time; less waste, more spotters, strawbosses, stoolpigeons (fifteen minutes for lunch, three minutes to go to the toilet, the Taylorized speedup everywhere, reach under, adjust washer, screw down bolt, reachunderadjustscredownreachunderadjust until every ounce of life was sucked off into production and at night the workmen went home grey shaking husks)."


More:
http://www.dhr.history.vt.edu/modules/us...index.html]]> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
In many ways, Homer Martin seemed like an unlikely figure to head the UAW. Born in Marion, Illinois, on August 16, 1902, Martin was a star track athlete in college before doing post-graduate work at a seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, experiences that had dubbed him "The Leaping Parson." After uttering pro-labor sentiments from the pulpit, he lost his pastoral position in a Kansas City suburb and began working for GM's Chevrolet plant. Martin was laid off from his GM job in 1934, became active in the UAW, and quickly rose to the presidency of the organization. Martin was a gifted orator who "made men feel that in organizing a union they were going to battle for righteousness and the word of God" (Fine 78).

Notice that, near the end of the document below, Martin once again decries the debilitating effects of the "speed-up" on workers. The language he uses in some ways recalls a passage from John Dos Passos's novel, The Big Money, which was published the previous year: "At Ford's production was improving all the time; less waste, more spotters, strawbosses, stoolpigeons (fifteen minutes for lunch, three minutes to go to the toilet, the Taylorized speedup everywhere, reach under, adjust washer, screw down bolt, reachunderadjustscredownreachunderadjust until every ounce of life was sucked off into production and at night the workmen went home grey shaking husks)."


More:
http://www.dhr.history.vt.edu/modules/us...index.html]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1091 Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:58:24 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1091 Wednesday, January 4, 2012

The Powers That Be constantly try to pull the wool over people's eyes, but sometimes the wool blinders are so itchy that people rip them off and clearly see the scam.

One of the itchiest ever is the Kafkaesque fiction, put forth by America's right-wing power establishment, that corporations are "persons' with the Constitutional right to control our elections with their bottomless troves of corporate cash. This is an absurd perversion of nature itself. A person, after all, has a navel. Where's the corporate navel – or its heart, brain, or soul?

Also, if a corporation is a person, shouldn't it be subject to front-line military duty, to jail for its criminal violations, and even to the death penalty? As a reader pointed out to me in a recent email, many states do not allow persons under 18 years of age to marry (or, in corporate terminology, to merge). Plus, such young persons are subject to curfews and cannot legally be served alcohol. If you see a young corporation violating any of these teen laws – call the cops on them!

When a corporate and governmental cabal makes such a power play that the very idea of it becomes a national joke, both the idea and the cabal are in trouble. That's the case with the comical claim of "personhood" for corporations. All across the country, beneath the radar of American's clueless elites, a savvy and scrappy grassroots coalition is mobilizing to overturn the anti-democratic effort by the Supreme Court, corporate front groups, and political sell-outs to enthrone corporate money over the people. On January 20th and 21st there will be two national days of action to rally public support for a Constitutional amendment to reject the farce of corporate personhood.

To join the rebellion, connect with http://www.United4ThePeople.org.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7628]]> Wednesday, January 4, 2012

The Powers That Be constantly try to pull the wool over people's eyes, but sometimes the wool blinders are so itchy that people rip them off and clearly see the scam.

One of the itchiest ever is the Kafkaesque fiction, put forth by America's right-wing power establishment, that corporations are "persons' with the Constitutional right to control our elections with their bottomless troves of corporate cash. This is an absurd perversion of nature itself. A person, after all, has a navel. Where's the corporate navel – or its heart, brain, or soul?

Also, if a corporation is a person, shouldn't it be subject to front-line military duty, to jail for its criminal violations, and even to the death penalty? As a reader pointed out to me in a recent email, many states do not allow persons under 18 years of age to marry (or, in corporate terminology, to merge). Plus, such young persons are subject to curfews and cannot legally be served alcohol. If you see a young corporation violating any of these teen laws – call the cops on them!

When a corporate and governmental cabal makes such a power play that the very idea of it becomes a national joke, both the idea and the cabal are in trouble. That's the case with the comical claim of "personhood" for corporations. All across the country, beneath the radar of American's clueless elites, a savvy and scrappy grassroots coalition is mobilizing to overturn the anti-democratic effort by the Supreme Court, corporate front groups, and political sell-outs to enthrone corporate money over the people. On January 20th and 21st there will be two national days of action to rally public support for a Constitutional amendment to reject the farce of corporate personhood.

To join the rebellion, connect with http://www.United4ThePeople.org.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7628]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1090 Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:55:30 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1090 WISHING YOU AND YOURS A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A BETTER NEW YEAR!!]]> WISHING YOU AND YOURS A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A BETTER NEW YEAR!!]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1089 Sat, 17 Dec 2011 14:41:33 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1089 http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/w...03932.html]]> http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/w...03932.html]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1088 Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:10:26 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1088
any info we need to know?]]>
any info we need to know?]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1087 Sun, 04 Dec 2011 17:24:15 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1087

Rules for Teachers 1872

1.Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.

2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for
the day's sessions.

3. Make your pens carefully, You may whittle nebs to the individual
taste of the pupils.

4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes,
or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.

5. After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time
reading the Bible or other good books.

6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be
dismissed.

7. Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his
earnings fo his benefit juring his declining years so that he will not
become a burden on society.

8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or
public halls or get shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to
suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.

9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for
five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in
his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.


Rules for Teachers 1915

1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.
2. You are not to keep company with men.
3. You must be home between the hours of 8pm. and 6am.
unless attending a school function.
4. You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores.
5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have
the permission of the chairman of the board.
6. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man
unless he is your father or brother.
7. You may not smoke cigarettes.
8. You may not dress in bright colors.
9. You may not under no circumstances dye your hair.
10.You must wear at least two petticoats.
11. Your dresses must not be any shorter than two inches
above your ankles.
12. To keep the school room neat and clean, you must:
Sweep the floor daily, scrub the floor at least once a week
with hot, soapy water, clean the blackboards at least once
a day, and start the fire at 7am. so the room will be warm
by 8am.]]>

Rules for Teachers 1872

1.Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.

2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for
the day's sessions.

3. Make your pens carefully, You may whittle nebs to the individual
taste of the pupils.

4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes,
or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.

5. After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time
reading the Bible or other good books.

6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be
dismissed.

7. Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of his
earnings fo his benefit juring his declining years so that he will not
become a burden on society.

8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or
public halls or get shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to
suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.

9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for
five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in
his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.


Rules for Teachers 1915

1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.
2. You are not to keep company with men.
3. You must be home between the hours of 8pm. and 6am.
unless attending a school function.
4. You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores.
5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have
the permission of the chairman of the board.
6. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man
unless he is your father or brother.
7. You may not smoke cigarettes.
8. You may not dress in bright colors.
9. You may not under no circumstances dye your hair.
10.You must wear at least two petticoats.
11. Your dresses must not be any shorter than two inches
above your ankles.
12. To keep the school room neat and clean, you must:
Sweep the floor daily, scrub the floor at least once a week
with hot, soapy water, clean the blackboards at least once
a day, and start the fire at 7am. so the room will be warm
by 8am.]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1086 Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:28:53 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1086 December 1, 2011 | by Jim Hightower

In response to the Supreme Court's freakish decision in 2010 to bestow political "personhood" on corporations, I got an email from a guy named Larry, screaming that "Big money has plucked our eagle."

Yes it has – and the Powers that Be tell us that we shouldn't even try to undo this theft of our people's democratic authority, but should just try regulating corporate money, like maybe requiring then to disclose how much they're spending on campaigns. Now there's a bold stand for democracy: "Give us campaign finance reporting regulations or give us death!"

Come on, we’re bigger than that. Here are just a few actions for real change that you can take, teaming up with others right where you live:

AMEND. Two major coalitions are organizing to overturn the court's corporate money edict by amending the Constitution. One is FreeSpeechForPeople.org and the other is MoveToAmend.org – and both have action kits for raising the issue locally, petitions to be circulated, video and other good graphics to educate people in your community, and a wealth of other organizing ideas.

LOCALIZE. Pass your own local and state laws to stop the wholesale corporate purchase of our government. These include outlawing any corporate claim of personhood in your area, providing the alternative of public financing for your local and state elections, and banning campaign donations by corporations that try to get government contracts and subsidies. For information and help, check our PublicCampaign.org and ReclaimDemocracy.org.

CONFRONT. Yes, get in the face of power. Ask all candidates where they stand on corporate personhood and demand that top executives of big corporations located in your area publicly agree not to spend corporate cash on your elections.

Remember, the Constitution plainly says "We the People," not We the Corporations.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7603]]> December 1, 2011 | by Jim Hightower

In response to the Supreme Court's freakish decision in 2010 to bestow political "personhood" on corporations, I got an email from a guy named Larry, screaming that "Big money has plucked our eagle."

Yes it has – and the Powers that Be tell us that we shouldn't even try to undo this theft of our people's democratic authority, but should just try regulating corporate money, like maybe requiring then to disclose how much they're spending on campaigns. Now there's a bold stand for democracy: "Give us campaign finance reporting regulations or give us death!"

Come on, we’re bigger than that. Here are just a few actions for real change that you can take, teaming up with others right where you live:

AMEND. Two major coalitions are organizing to overturn the court's corporate money edict by amending the Constitution. One is FreeSpeechForPeople.org and the other is MoveToAmend.org – and both have action kits for raising the issue locally, petitions to be circulated, video and other good graphics to educate people in your community, and a wealth of other organizing ideas.

LOCALIZE. Pass your own local and state laws to stop the wholesale corporate purchase of our government. These include outlawing any corporate claim of personhood in your area, providing the alternative of public financing for your local and state elections, and banning campaign donations by corporations that try to get government contracts and subsidies. For information and help, check our PublicCampaign.org and ReclaimDemocracy.org.

CONFRONT. Yes, get in the face of power. Ask all candidates where they stand on corporate personhood and demand that top executives of big corporations located in your area publicly agree not to spend corporate cash on your elections.

Remember, the Constitution plainly says "We the People," not We the Corporations.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7603]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1085 Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:39:49 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1085 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jensenl/v.../michigan/]]> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jensenl/v.../michigan/]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1084 Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:53:10 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1084 Their able to show where they live in Michigan on their hand]]> Their able to show where they live in Michigan on their hand]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1083 Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:56:24 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1083 http://signon.org/sign/protect-our-fresh...by=1742695]]> http://signon.org/sign/protect-our-fresh...by=1742695]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1082 Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:33:35 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1082 http://blog.politicalpartytime.org/2011/...aign-cash/


way to go supercommittee!!

sure glad none of them were my congressman - time to bring them home.]]> http://blog.politicalpartytime.org/2011/...aign-cash/


way to go supercommittee!!

sure glad none of them were my congressman - time to bring them home.]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1081 Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:33:36 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1081
Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream
by Kevin Danaher

Just about every day we hear something about globalization. The mass media give us the impression that the impersonal forces of the "free market" are knitting together the peoples of the world into a seamless quilt. We are led to believe that things will steadily get better if we can just keep governments from meddling with the market forces that lead to more growth and efficiency.

Yet we also know that jobs are being lost to global competition. We know that the global environment is being threatened on a number of fronts, from global warming and the deterioration of the ozone layer to the extermination of species and the poisoning of the world's water supply. We see refugees and immigrants by the millions roaming the planet, in search of jobs and protection from armed conflict. We also know that inequality is getting worse: fewer and fewer large corporations own more of the world's productive resources while millions of people are unable to sustain their families. Many of us have a gut feeling that the global economy has gone awry. We would do well to trust our feelings. This booklet addresses this crucial issue: how the globalization of the economy undermines the quality of life in the United States. The decline in our standard of living can be seen in numerous areas:


As U.S. corporations have expanded their global reach they are better able to put the U.S. workforce in direct competition with foreign workers, thus increasing their profits while driving down our wages and general standard of living.

Global corporations are better able to use technology to downsize their workforces, thus creating anxiety among working people who no longer feel secure about the future of their jobs.
As global corporations become less dependent on any particular nation, they have less interest in supporting any government with taxes. This results in a shrinking tax base and what is referred to as a "fiscal crisis of the state" (the tendency for government expenses to outrace revenues).

By using the rationale of "global competition" to drive down the living standards of the majority, the corporate class has shifted more and more wealth from our pockets to theirs. This growing inequality is producing resentment and rebellion-here and abroad.
Yet all is not gloom and doom. The globalization of finance, production and trade is being followed by the globalization of grassroots democracy. Individuals and grassroots groups are gradually building an alternative society guided by social justice and environmental sustainability rather than by greed. We conclude with ways for you to get involved in this movement to construct alternatives to top-down globalization.

Do We Want Just a Market, or a Just Market?

When the U.S. came out of World War II as the dominant industrial country, it was logical that the dollar would become the global currency, that U.S.-based corporations would dominate world markets, and that the U.S. would have the strongest hand in shaping global institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This dominance allowed U.S. transnational corporations to expand to gigantic proportions. Many of the Fortune 500 companies now have annual revenues larger than the gross national product of most Third World countries, and even larger than the GNP of industrial countries such as Finland, Denmark and Norway.

The global reach of large corporations has disconnected them from national needs and desires. Business Week points out that "As cross-border trade and investment flows reach new heights, big global companies are effectively making decisions with little regard to national boundaries. Though few companies are totally untethered from their home countries, the trend toward a form of 'stateless' corporation is unmistakable.

As corporations have developed their ability to tap into a huge global labor pool, they have less need for the social welfare policies of any particular nation. Global companies may want various kinds of subsidies from the government, but when it comes to government regulations that could allow the people to exert control over big business, corporate ideology preaches "free trade," deregulation and the downsizing of government. The possibility of a truly democratic government is the most serious threat to the power of large corporations-so government must be dismantled!

With a global labor pool at their disposal, transnational corporations are less dependent on any particular national workforce. The facts show that in recent decades U.S. corporations have been cutting jobs here while expanding employment abroad. And the percentage of their total profits that derive from overseas operations has been rising sharply.

The old dictum, "What's good for General Motors is good for America" has a hollow ring in an age of globalization and corporate downsizing. After laying off more than 70,000 workers since 1993, General Motors now ranks as the wealthiest U.S. corporation, raking in more than $168 billion in revenues in 1995 alone-that's equal to the annual wages of more than 19 million Americans earning the minimum wage.

The increasing globalization of U.S. corporations gives them the leverage to hold down wages and resist unionization. Average real wages (corrected for inflation) have been falling since the early 1970s. By 1992, average weekly earnings in the private, non-agricultural part of the U.S. economy were 19 percent below their peak in the early 1970s. Nearly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce now earns less in real terms than the 1968 minimum wage! The trend toward less unionization is evident in the third graph below, which shows a steady decline in union membership since the 1950s. This is a chicken-and-egg relationship because weaker unions are less able to restrict corporate behavior and the resulting freedom of action for global corporations means unions will be weakened further by companies putting their workers here in competition with low-paid workers abroad.

Working People Feel Insecure

The restructuring of our political and economic life due to globalization may be as significant a process as the industrial revolution. In early 1996 the mainstream media- incited by the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan-focused an unusual amount of attention on the plight of U.S. workers in a globalizing economy. As the New York Times editorialized on February 25, 1996: "voters are clearly unnerved by corporate restructurings and the search for cheaper labor overseas." The Times went on to point out that "between 1991 and 1995, nearly 2.5 million Americans had lost their jobs because of corporate restructuring" and these job losses occurred "as the top pay for corporate executives has soared to nearly 200 times that of the average worker."

The February 26, 1996 issue of Newsweek ran a blaring cover story on corporate downsizing entitled "Corporate Killers." The piece was blunt in its criticism of corporate insensitivity: "Something is plain wrong when stock prices keep rising on Wall Street while Main Street is littered with the bodies of workers discarded by big companies like AT&T and Chase Manhattan and Scott Paper. Once upon a time, it was a mark of shame to fire your workers en masse. Today, the more people a company fires, the more Wall Street loves it, and the higher its stock price goes."

One would expect nicer behavior from the corporate chieftains who run our economy. Over the last 15 years transnational corporations have gotten basically everything they wanted: the collapse of communism, free trade agreements, deregulation, lower taxes, the weakening of trade unions and the pushing down of wage rates. Yet while profits and the stock market soar, the standard of living for most Americans is plummeting. There is a dangerous dynamic at work. In an effort to cut costs and boost profits, AT&T announced in September 1995 that they were laying off 40,000 workers. The company's share price on Wall Street immediately jumped higher. Because the salaries of top AT&T executives are partly made up of share ownership, the executives are personally benefiting from the suffering of thousands of dislocated families.

Technology Turned Against Us

Amid the media hype about job losses due to corporate downsizing, a key fact was ignored: a large part of the unemployment afflicting our country is due to a centuries-old drive by companies to replace workers with technology.

Top management sees technology as a way to dump workers-who make demands and question authority-and replace them with machines, which have not been known to form unions.

The trend is evident when you consider that employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector has declined over the past 30 years from 33 percent of the total workforce to less than 17 percent, even though our manufacturing sector has steadily increased output. As this trend continues we will see the elimination of most U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Contrary to what we've been told, the service sector (telecommunications, banking, insurance, real estate, retail and wholesale trade) will not replace the jobs lost in the manufacturing sector. First, the pay tends to be lower in the service sector. And second, technology is also replacing workers in the service sector. Whole layers of white collar office workers are being replaced by small, highly skilled teams using the latest computer technology. Thousands of postal workers have been made redundant by optical scanners and computerization. Between 1983 and 1993 banks in the U.S. replaced 179,000 human tellers with automated teller machines, and even more bank employees will be cut in years to come. It's not that technology is bad, but when technological innovation is used to get rid of workers, with no systematic program to create meaningful replacement jobs, the result is widespread insecurity that saps worker morale. Is it just a coincidence that the U.S. Postal Service has imposed years of high-tech speedup on its workers-thus boosting profits to record levels-yet is also notorious for its workers being among the most severely alienated in the world?

Our government hides unemployment by defining it away. The common sense definition of unemployment-people wanting a job but unable to get one-puts the number of unemployed in 1994 at 15.9 million, or 12.5 percent of the workforce. The official rate (6.1% in 1994) is reached by not counting the 6 million workers who want jobs but are so discouraged they've stopped looking, and counts as fully employed some 30 million who are only working part-time.

Although employers may no longer need us as workers, they do need us as consumers. As a recently laid-off veteran of Bendix Corp. put it: "If they had their way, management would have robots doing everything in the plant, but they forget that robots don't buy anything." If each individual corporation stays focused on climbing the profit ladder in an increasingly global marketplace, it will shed workers for any reason that makes the company more profitable. At the micro-economic level of the company this makes sense. But when all these micro-economic decisions to cut workers are added up, the macro-economic impact is stagnation and all the social ills that go with it.

The Casino Economy

Another key dynamic of the globalized economy is the massive shift of capital from productive investment in the "real economy" to speculative investment in the "casino economy."

It's quite logical. If you have a few million dollars to invest, there are two basic approaches you can take. You could invest in the real economy by building a factory to make bread or shoes or some other product or service that meets a human need. On the other hand, you could invest your money in paper assets: stocks, bonds, mutual funds or a wide range of financial instruments that may not create many jobs or useful products but they do pay you a good rate of interest without all the bother of investing directly in production. Also, these speculative investments tend to be more liquid (able to be converted to cash) than investments in the real economy.

In recent years we have seen explosive growth in a new form of financial speculation: the "derivatives" market that is even one more step removed from the real economy. These investments 'derive' their value from underlying assets such as stocks, bonds or currencies, but they are merely bets as to whether the value of the underlying asset will rise or fall over a given period of time. So you might bet that the Japanese yen will fall over the next 6 months relative to Thailand's currency, the bhat. There are an endless variety of derivatives, designed merely to help investors hedge against risk, not to produce anything real. To see how important the derivatives market has become, compare it to global trade in real goods. The annual value of global merchandise trade is about $4 trillion. The global derivatives market equals this dollar volume of transactions in just two days! The globalization of capital markets and the shift of investments from the real economy to the casino economy has weakened the power of government to control national economies and protect people's jobs. Washington and other national governments are held hostage by the mobility of globalized capital. Companies can threaten to move out when confronted with higher taxes or stiffer environmental regulations.

Bankrupting Our Government

As less workers are gainfully employed, income tax revenue to the government dries up at the same time as the demand for government services such as unemployment insurance and food stamps increases.

The squeeze between declining government income and increasing government expenses has produced record budget deficits and an expanding mountain of government debt. Federal government debt stood at $4.9 trillion in early 1996. The interest we pay to the owners of that debt ($232 billion in 1995) is now one of our largest federal budget expenditures: without this expenditure, there would be no budget deficit. During the 1990s, we the taxpayers will transfer more than $2 trillion to the wealthy few here and abroad who own the Treasury bills that make up the national debt.

In the heated debate over the federal budget, Congress and the media have focused our attention on the spending side of the ledger. But the other side revenue coming into the government is just as important. Conservatives have convinced many Americans that excessive spending on social programs is the key reason for the fiscal crisis of the state. Yet a more crucial problem is that the wealthy corporations that dominate our government and our social values are able to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Both major political parties are uncritical supporters of the "free market" and globalization of the economy. Yet this very process of increasing economic gigantism is behind the budget crisis and the long-term insolvency of our government. As corporations have grown in size they have expanded their capacity for lobbying our elected leaders to reduce corporate taxes and remove restrictions on the international movement of commodities and money. Plus, innovations in computers and telecommunications allow financiers to move billions of dollars around the world instantly, making it more difficult for governments to monitor and tax international transactions.

As the corporate share of the tax load was cut, who picked up the slack? A big portion was shifted to working people. In the early 1950s, corporations paid 76 cents in taxes for every one dollar paid by families and individuals. By 1992 corporations were paying just 21 cents for every one dollar in taxes paid by families and individuals.

The World's Biggest Debtor

Not all of the tax load could be pushed onto the current generation of workers. Some of it was financed through deficit spending: issuing government bonds to borrow from the capital markets in other words, taxing our children and grandchildren.

It is odd that the Republicans have made a big issue of the deficit and the national debt, seeing as it was Republican presidents (Reagan and Bush) who created the record deficits that produced most of the national debt. When Ronald Reagan took office on January 20, 1981 the national debt was under $1 trillion. By the end of the Bush administration, on January 20, 1993, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion. The interest we taxpayers fork over to bondholders on this additional $3 trillion in debt (figuring at an average of 7 percent) comes to $210 billion: far more than the current budget deficit of $172 billion. If Reagan and Bush hadn't splurged on the military while giving huge tax breaks to their corporate backers, there would be no budget deficit.

One of the long-term effects of budget deficits and skyrocketing debt is a large transfer of wealth upward in the class structure of our country. During the 1980s, the U.S. taxpayer transferred $1.1 trillion in interest payments to the wealthy corporations and individuals who own the national debt. In the 1990s some $2 trillion will be redistributed upward on the social ladder via interest payments on the national debt.

Is the U.S. Becoming a Third World Country?

Just to review, a combination of factors U.S. companies moving jobs abroad, thousands of workers being replaced by technology, the weakening of the U.S. trade union movement, changes in tax legislation to favor wealthier taxpayersÑhave produced a widening gap between a wealthy elite and the majority of Americans. Business Week reports: "The gap between high- and low-income families has widened steadily since about 1980, hitting a new high every year since 1985."

Growth is not a panacea. "Between 1977 and 1989 the 1 percent of families with incomes over $350,000 received 72 percent of the country's income gains while the bottom 60 percent lost ground." A key reason for the decline in the majority's income share has been the steady fall in real wages. In 1992, average weekly earnings in the private, non-agricultural part of the U.S. economy were 19 percent below their peak in the early 1970s. Nearly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce now earns less in real terms than the 1968 minimum wage! Add another 5-10 percent of the population who have no jobs at all, and you've got a significant portion of the population living in poverty. Hence Newsweek's conclusion that "millions of Americans believe they're being screwed by corporate America and Wall Street."

Yet corporate profits and the salaries of top management have soared. Corporate profits are up 40 percent since 1993, and, as Business Week reported, the average pay of Chief Executive Officers at the 362 largest companies in the U.S. jumped 30 percent during 1995 to an average of $3,746,392.

The sharp growth in inequality caused U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to warn: "We have the most unequal distribution of income of any industrial nation in the world ... we can't be a prosperous or stable society with a huge gap between the very rich and everyone else." But data on income is not the best indicator of inequality. Wealth measured by ownership stocks, bonds, savings accounts, real estate is a far better measure of real power in society.

A 1995 study by the Twentieth Century Fund shows that since the late 1970s wealth inequality in the U.S. has been increasing. By the 1990s, the richest one percent of Americans owned twice as much wealth as the poorest 80 percent!

Contrary to what the Republicans have been preaching, it is not big government that is undermining Mainstreet, USA. Rather, mainstreet is being undermined by the fact that our government is dominated by monied interests and those monied interests are increasingly global, owing no allegiance to any particular country.

http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/...Dream.html]]>
Globalization and the Downsizing of the American Dream
by Kevin Danaher

Just about every day we hear something about globalization. The mass media give us the impression that the impersonal forces of the "free market" are knitting together the peoples of the world into a seamless quilt. We are led to believe that things will steadily get better if we can just keep governments from meddling with the market forces that lead to more growth and efficiency.

Yet we also know that jobs are being lost to global competition. We know that the global environment is being threatened on a number of fronts, from global warming and the deterioration of the ozone layer to the extermination of species and the poisoning of the world's water supply. We see refugees and immigrants by the millions roaming the planet, in search of jobs and protection from armed conflict. We also know that inequality is getting worse: fewer and fewer large corporations own more of the world's productive resources while millions of people are unable to sustain their families. Many of us have a gut feeling that the global economy has gone awry. We would do well to trust our feelings. This booklet addresses this crucial issue: how the globalization of the economy undermines the quality of life in the United States. The decline in our standard of living can be seen in numerous areas:


As U.S. corporations have expanded their global reach they are better able to put the U.S. workforce in direct competition with foreign workers, thus increasing their profits while driving down our wages and general standard of living.

Global corporations are better able to use technology to downsize their workforces, thus creating anxiety among working people who no longer feel secure about the future of their jobs.
As global corporations become less dependent on any particular nation, they have less interest in supporting any government with taxes. This results in a shrinking tax base and what is referred to as a "fiscal crisis of the state" (the tendency for government expenses to outrace revenues).

By using the rationale of "global competition" to drive down the living standards of the majority, the corporate class has shifted more and more wealth from our pockets to theirs. This growing inequality is producing resentment and rebellion-here and abroad.
Yet all is not gloom and doom. The globalization of finance, production and trade is being followed by the globalization of grassroots democracy. Individuals and grassroots groups are gradually building an alternative society guided by social justice and environmental sustainability rather than by greed. We conclude with ways for you to get involved in this movement to construct alternatives to top-down globalization.

Do We Want Just a Market, or a Just Market?

When the U.S. came out of World War II as the dominant industrial country, it was logical that the dollar would become the global currency, that U.S.-based corporations would dominate world markets, and that the U.S. would have the strongest hand in shaping global institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This dominance allowed U.S. transnational corporations to expand to gigantic proportions. Many of the Fortune 500 companies now have annual revenues larger than the gross national product of most Third World countries, and even larger than the GNP of industrial countries such as Finland, Denmark and Norway.

The global reach of large corporations has disconnected them from national needs and desires. Business Week points out that "As cross-border trade and investment flows reach new heights, big global companies are effectively making decisions with little regard to national boundaries. Though few companies are totally untethered from their home countries, the trend toward a form of 'stateless' corporation is unmistakable.

As corporations have developed their ability to tap into a huge global labor pool, they have less need for the social welfare policies of any particular nation. Global companies may want various kinds of subsidies from the government, but when it comes to government regulations that could allow the people to exert control over big business, corporate ideology preaches "free trade," deregulation and the downsizing of government. The possibility of a truly democratic government is the most serious threat to the power of large corporations-so government must be dismantled!

With a global labor pool at their disposal, transnational corporations are less dependent on any particular national workforce. The facts show that in recent decades U.S. corporations have been cutting jobs here while expanding employment abroad. And the percentage of their total profits that derive from overseas operations has been rising sharply.

The old dictum, "What's good for General Motors is good for America" has a hollow ring in an age of globalization and corporate downsizing. After laying off more than 70,000 workers since 1993, General Motors now ranks as the wealthiest U.S. corporation, raking in more than $168 billion in revenues in 1995 alone-that's equal to the annual wages of more than 19 million Americans earning the minimum wage.

The increasing globalization of U.S. corporations gives them the leverage to hold down wages and resist unionization. Average real wages (corrected for inflation) have been falling since the early 1970s. By 1992, average weekly earnings in the private, non-agricultural part of the U.S. economy were 19 percent below their peak in the early 1970s. Nearly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce now earns less in real terms than the 1968 minimum wage! The trend toward less unionization is evident in the third graph below, which shows a steady decline in union membership since the 1950s. This is a chicken-and-egg relationship because weaker unions are less able to restrict corporate behavior and the resulting freedom of action for global corporations means unions will be weakened further by companies putting their workers here in competition with low-paid workers abroad.

Working People Feel Insecure

The restructuring of our political and economic life due to globalization may be as significant a process as the industrial revolution. In early 1996 the mainstream media- incited by the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan-focused an unusual amount of attention on the plight of U.S. workers in a globalizing economy. As the New York Times editorialized on February 25, 1996: "voters are clearly unnerved by corporate restructurings and the search for cheaper labor overseas." The Times went on to point out that "between 1991 and 1995, nearly 2.5 million Americans had lost their jobs because of corporate restructuring" and these job losses occurred "as the top pay for corporate executives has soared to nearly 200 times that of the average worker."

The February 26, 1996 issue of Newsweek ran a blaring cover story on corporate downsizing entitled "Corporate Killers." The piece was blunt in its criticism of corporate insensitivity: "Something is plain wrong when stock prices keep rising on Wall Street while Main Street is littered with the bodies of workers discarded by big companies like AT&T and Chase Manhattan and Scott Paper. Once upon a time, it was a mark of shame to fire your workers en masse. Today, the more people a company fires, the more Wall Street loves it, and the higher its stock price goes."

One would expect nicer behavior from the corporate chieftains who run our economy. Over the last 15 years transnational corporations have gotten basically everything they wanted: the collapse of communism, free trade agreements, deregulation, lower taxes, the weakening of trade unions and the pushing down of wage rates. Yet while profits and the stock market soar, the standard of living for most Americans is plummeting. There is a dangerous dynamic at work. In an effort to cut costs and boost profits, AT&T announced in September 1995 that they were laying off 40,000 workers. The company's share price on Wall Street immediately jumped higher. Because the salaries of top AT&T executives are partly made up of share ownership, the executives are personally benefiting from the suffering of thousands of dislocated families.

Technology Turned Against Us

Amid the media hype about job losses due to corporate downsizing, a key fact was ignored: a large part of the unemployment afflicting our country is due to a centuries-old drive by companies to replace workers with technology.

Top management sees technology as a way to dump workers-who make demands and question authority-and replace them with machines, which have not been known to form unions.

The trend is evident when you consider that employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector has declined over the past 30 years from 33 percent of the total workforce to less than 17 percent, even though our manufacturing sector has steadily increased output. As this trend continues we will see the elimination of most U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Contrary to what we've been told, the service sector (telecommunications, banking, insurance, real estate, retail and wholesale trade) will not replace the jobs lost in the manufacturing sector. First, the pay tends to be lower in the service sector. And second, technology is also replacing workers in the service sector. Whole layers of white collar office workers are being replaced by small, highly skilled teams using the latest computer technology. Thousands of postal workers have been made redundant by optical scanners and computerization. Between 1983 and 1993 banks in the U.S. replaced 179,000 human tellers with automated teller machines, and even more bank employees will be cut in years to come. It's not that technology is bad, but when technological innovation is used to get rid of workers, with no systematic program to create meaningful replacement jobs, the result is widespread insecurity that saps worker morale. Is it just a coincidence that the U.S. Postal Service has imposed years of high-tech speedup on its workers-thus boosting profits to record levels-yet is also notorious for its workers being among the most severely alienated in the world?

Our government hides unemployment by defining it away. The common sense definition of unemployment-people wanting a job but unable to get one-puts the number of unemployed in 1994 at 15.9 million, or 12.5 percent of the workforce. The official rate (6.1% in 1994) is reached by not counting the 6 million workers who want jobs but are so discouraged they've stopped looking, and counts as fully employed some 30 million who are only working part-time.

Although employers may no longer need us as workers, they do need us as consumers. As a recently laid-off veteran of Bendix Corp. put it: "If they had their way, management would have robots doing everything in the plant, but they forget that robots don't buy anything." If each individual corporation stays focused on climbing the profit ladder in an increasingly global marketplace, it will shed workers for any reason that makes the company more profitable. At the micro-economic level of the company this makes sense. But when all these micro-economic decisions to cut workers are added up, the macro-economic impact is stagnation and all the social ills that go with it.

The Casino Economy

Another key dynamic of the globalized economy is the massive shift of capital from productive investment in the "real economy" to speculative investment in the "casino economy."

It's quite logical. If you have a few million dollars to invest, there are two basic approaches you can take. You could invest in the real economy by building a factory to make bread or shoes or some other product or service that meets a human need. On the other hand, you could invest your money in paper assets: stocks, bonds, mutual funds or a wide range of financial instruments that may not create many jobs or useful products but they do pay you a good rate of interest without all the bother of investing directly in production. Also, these speculative investments tend to be more liquid (able to be converted to cash) than investments in the real economy.

In recent years we have seen explosive growth in a new form of financial speculation: the "derivatives" market that is even one more step removed from the real economy. These investments 'derive' their value from underlying assets such as stocks, bonds or currencies, but they are merely bets as to whether the value of the underlying asset will rise or fall over a given period of time. So you might bet that the Japanese yen will fall over the next 6 months relative to Thailand's currency, the bhat. There are an endless variety of derivatives, designed merely to help investors hedge against risk, not to produce anything real. To see how important the derivatives market has become, compare it to global trade in real goods. The annual value of global merchandise trade is about $4 trillion. The global derivatives market equals this dollar volume of transactions in just two days! The globalization of capital markets and the shift of investments from the real economy to the casino economy has weakened the power of government to control national economies and protect people's jobs. Washington and other national governments are held hostage by the mobility of globalized capital. Companies can threaten to move out when confronted with higher taxes or stiffer environmental regulations.

Bankrupting Our Government

As less workers are gainfully employed, income tax revenue to the government dries up at the same time as the demand for government services such as unemployment insurance and food stamps increases.

The squeeze between declining government income and increasing government expenses has produced record budget deficits and an expanding mountain of government debt. Federal government debt stood at $4.9 trillion in early 1996. The interest we pay to the owners of that debt ($232 billion in 1995) is now one of our largest federal budget expenditures: without this expenditure, there would be no budget deficit. During the 1990s, we the taxpayers will transfer more than $2 trillion to the wealthy few here and abroad who own the Treasury bills that make up the national debt.

In the heated debate over the federal budget, Congress and the media have focused our attention on the spending side of the ledger. But the other side revenue coming into the government is just as important. Conservatives have convinced many Americans that excessive spending on social programs is the key reason for the fiscal crisis of the state. Yet a more crucial problem is that the wealthy corporations that dominate our government and our social values are able to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Both major political parties are uncritical supporters of the "free market" and globalization of the economy. Yet this very process of increasing economic gigantism is behind the budget crisis and the long-term insolvency of our government. As corporations have grown in size they have expanded their capacity for lobbying our elected leaders to reduce corporate taxes and remove restrictions on the international movement of commodities and money. Plus, innovations in computers and telecommunications allow financiers to move billions of dollars around the world instantly, making it more difficult for governments to monitor and tax international transactions.

As the corporate share of the tax load was cut, who picked up the slack? A big portion was shifted to working people. In the early 1950s, corporations paid 76 cents in taxes for every one dollar paid by families and individuals. By 1992 corporations were paying just 21 cents for every one dollar in taxes paid by families and individuals.

The World's Biggest Debtor

Not all of the tax load could be pushed onto the current generation of workers. Some of it was financed through deficit spending: issuing government bonds to borrow from the capital markets in other words, taxing our children and grandchildren.

It is odd that the Republicans have made a big issue of the deficit and the national debt, seeing as it was Republican presidents (Reagan and Bush) who created the record deficits that produced most of the national debt. When Ronald Reagan took office on January 20, 1981 the national debt was under $1 trillion. By the end of the Bush administration, on January 20, 1993, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion. The interest we taxpayers fork over to bondholders on this additional $3 trillion in debt (figuring at an average of 7 percent) comes to $210 billion: far more than the current budget deficit of $172 billion. If Reagan and Bush hadn't splurged on the military while giving huge tax breaks to their corporate backers, there would be no budget deficit.

One of the long-term effects of budget deficits and skyrocketing debt is a large transfer of wealth upward in the class structure of our country. During the 1980s, the U.S. taxpayer transferred $1.1 trillion in interest payments to the wealthy corporations and individuals who own the national debt. In the 1990s some $2 trillion will be redistributed upward on the social ladder via interest payments on the national debt.

Is the U.S. Becoming a Third World Country?

Just to review, a combination of factors U.S. companies moving jobs abroad, thousands of workers being replaced by technology, the weakening of the U.S. trade union movement, changes in tax legislation to favor wealthier taxpayersÑhave produced a widening gap between a wealthy elite and the majority of Americans. Business Week reports: "The gap between high- and low-income families has widened steadily since about 1980, hitting a new high every year since 1985."

Growth is not a panacea. "Between 1977 and 1989 the 1 percent of families with incomes over $350,000 received 72 percent of the country's income gains while the bottom 60 percent lost ground." A key reason for the decline in the majority's income share has been the steady fall in real wages. In 1992, average weekly earnings in the private, non-agricultural part of the U.S. economy were 19 percent below their peak in the early 1970s. Nearly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce now earns less in real terms than the 1968 minimum wage! Add another 5-10 percent of the population who have no jobs at all, and you've got a significant portion of the population living in poverty. Hence Newsweek's conclusion that "millions of Americans believe they're being screwed by corporate America and Wall Street."

Yet corporate profits and the salaries of top management have soared. Corporate profits are up 40 percent since 1993, and, as Business Week reported, the average pay of Chief Executive Officers at the 362 largest companies in the U.S. jumped 30 percent during 1995 to an average of $3,746,392.

The sharp growth in inequality caused U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich to warn: "We have the most unequal distribution of income of any industrial nation in the world ... we can't be a prosperous or stable society with a huge gap between the very rich and everyone else." But data on income is not the best indicator of inequality. Wealth measured by ownership stocks, bonds, savings accounts, real estate is a far better measure of real power in society.

A 1995 study by the Twentieth Century Fund shows that since the late 1970s wealth inequality in the U.S. has been increasing. By the 1990s, the richest one percent of Americans owned twice as much wealth as the poorest 80 percent!

Contrary to what the Republicans have been preaching, it is not big government that is undermining Mainstreet, USA. Rather, mainstreet is being undermined by the fact that our government is dominated by monied interests and those monied interests are increasingly global, owing no allegiance to any particular country.

http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/...Dream.html]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1080 Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:00:29 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1080 http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story...e-building]]> http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story...e-building]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1079 Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:14:33 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1079 November 10, 2011 | by Jim Hightower

The Bible doesn't say that money is the root of all evil – rather, it condemns the love of money.

Today, that insidious love (taking the form of greed and excess) is celebrated in our country and has even exalted into official public policy, marring our economy with inequality and injustice. The reigning ethos of our nation's upper crust is that too much is not enough. They're not merely out to make loads of the money they love, but to make a killing, everyone else be damned.

New numbers from the Congressional Budget Office confirm that as the moneyed elites have been making their killing, wealth disparity has become extreme in a country that once prided itself on trying to build a more egalitarian society. Analyzing 30 years of income data, the non-partisan CBO reports that the richest one percent of our population has enjoyed a stunning 275 percent increase in their income during that time. As a result, these privileged few have more than doubled the slice of America's income pie that they consume, going from eight percent to 17 percent of the whole in just three decades.

From whom did these richest one-percenters get their extra-big slice? From us, the 99 percent. The share going to middle class and poor families shrank in this period, which is why there is such broad support today for Occupy Wall Street's "We are the 99%" movement.

At the tippy-top of America's wealth pyramid are the multimillionaire CEOs and billionaire Wall Streeters. They are the richest one one-hundreth of the one-percenters (a mere 14,836 households). These few now take six percent of all U.S. income – the biggest piece ever consumed by America's megarich.

The widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us is transforming our country from a society to a jungle – and not even billionaires will enjoy living there.

"It's Official: The Rich Get Richer," The New York Times, October 26, 2011.

"The Wall Street Protesters May Have Picked The Right City for Their Campaign," The New York Times," October 26, 2011.

"New Poll Finds A Deep Distrust Of Government," The New York Times, October 26, 2011.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7588]]> November 10, 2011 | by Jim Hightower

The Bible doesn't say that money is the root of all evil – rather, it condemns the love of money.

Today, that insidious love (taking the form of greed and excess) is celebrated in our country and has even exalted into official public policy, marring our economy with inequality and injustice. The reigning ethos of our nation's upper crust is that too much is not enough. They're not merely out to make loads of the money they love, but to make a killing, everyone else be damned.

New numbers from the Congressional Budget Office confirm that as the moneyed elites have been making their killing, wealth disparity has become extreme in a country that once prided itself on trying to build a more egalitarian society. Analyzing 30 years of income data, the non-partisan CBO reports that the richest one percent of our population has enjoyed a stunning 275 percent increase in their income during that time. As a result, these privileged few have more than doubled the slice of America's income pie that they consume, going from eight percent to 17 percent of the whole in just three decades.

From whom did these richest one-percenters get their extra-big slice? From us, the 99 percent. The share going to middle class and poor families shrank in this period, which is why there is such broad support today for Occupy Wall Street's "We are the 99%" movement.

At the tippy-top of America's wealth pyramid are the multimillionaire CEOs and billionaire Wall Streeters. They are the richest one one-hundreth of the one-percenters (a mere 14,836 households). These few now take six percent of all U.S. income – the biggest piece ever consumed by America's megarich.

The widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us is transforming our country from a society to a jungle – and not even billionaires will enjoy living there.

"It's Official: The Rich Get Richer," The New York Times, October 26, 2011.

"The Wall Street Protesters May Have Picked The Right City for Their Campaign," The New York Times," October 26, 2011.

"New Poll Finds A Deep Distrust Of Government," The New York Times, October 26, 2011.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7588]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1078 Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:24:39 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1078 There will be a special informational meeting about health care, and other options that we might want to make on December 12, 2011 at the hall at 10:00 a.m. Come to the meeting and have your questions, concerns answered. Service providers and benefit reps will be there.]]> There will be a special informational meeting about health care, and other options that we might want to make on December 12, 2011 at the hall at 10:00 a.m. Come to the meeting and have your questions, concerns answered. Service providers and benefit reps will be there.]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1077 Sat, 05 Nov 2011 10:37:03 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1077 http://thirdbranch.crooksandliars.com/su...follow-koc]]> http://thirdbranch.crooksandliars.com/su...follow-koc]]> http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1076 Sat, 05 Nov 2011 10:34:39 +0000 http://www.uaw599.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1076 November 1, 2011 | by Jim Hightower

America's power elites on Wall Street and in Washington have been stunned by the sudden surge of the Occupy movement. Some 600 U.S. communities have Occupy groups, thousands of middle-class people have taken to the streets, and recent polls show that nearly six out of 10 Americans support what the protesters are saying and doing. "Why is this happening?" wail bankers, CEOs, and their pet politicos, "What is upsetting all these people?"

You'd think that the superrich could afford to buy a clue, but apparently not. So, to help them grasp the situation, I've gathered a mess of news clips from just the past few weeks that pretty much spells it out for them. They needn't read the actual stories, just scan the headlines. Better yet, I’ll do it for them (no need to thank me, I'm always delighted to edify the rich):

"Slumping wages, rising health costs cause strain."

"Top earners double share of nation's income."

"Snapshot of poverty's surge in the suburbs."

"Banks to make customers pay debit card fee."

"Record high 4.5 million haven't worked in a year or more."

"House GOP spending plan cuts money for job training."

"U.S. income levels sink... leaves fragile consumers in a bind."

"Outsize severance packages continue for executives."

"More 'new poor' going hungry."

"Bank of America to cut 30,000 jobs."

"Banks are awash in cash."

Even a Wall Street banker ought to be able to understand the message that these headlines are delivering. Such daily headlines reveal the depth of inequality and rank injustice that's propelling the Occupy uprising. As we say in Texas, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked. America's middle class and the poor are tired of being kicked – and now they're kicking back. This is just the start.

"Protests spotlight a stressed middle class," USA Today, October 10, 2011.

"Top earners double share of nation's income." The New York Times, October 25, 2011

"Outside Cleveland, Snapshot of poverty's surge in the suburbs." The New York Times, October 25, 2011.

"Banks to make customers pay debit card fee." The New York Times, September 30, 2011.

"Record high 4.5 million haven't worked in a year or more." Austin American Statesman, October 7, 2011.

"House GOP spending plan cuts money for job training." Austin American Statesman, September 30, 2011.

"U.S. income levels sink... leaves fragile consumers in a bind." Fresno Bee, October 1, 2011.

"Outsize severance packages continue for executives, even after failed tenures." The New Times, September 29, 2011.

"More 'new poor' going hungry." Chicago Tribune, October 10, 2011.

"Bank of America to cut 30,000 jobs," Austin American Statesman, September 13, 2011.

"Banks are awash in cash." The New York Times, October 26, 2011.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7581]]> November 1, 2011 | by Jim Hightower

America's power elites on Wall Street and in Washington have been stunned by the sudden surge of the Occupy movement. Some 600 U.S. communities have Occupy groups, thousands of middle-class people have taken to the streets, and recent polls show that nearly six out of 10 Americans support what the protesters are saying and doing. "Why is this happening?" wail bankers, CEOs, and their pet politicos, "What is upsetting all these people?"

You'd think that the superrich could afford to buy a clue, but apparently not. So, to help them grasp the situation, I've gathered a mess of news clips from just the past few weeks that pretty much spells it out for them. They needn't read the actual stories, just scan the headlines. Better yet, I’ll do it for them (no need to thank me, I'm always delighted to edify the rich):

"Slumping wages, rising health costs cause strain."

"Top earners double share of nation's income."

"Snapshot of poverty's surge in the suburbs."

"Banks to make customers pay debit card fee."

"Record high 4.5 million haven't worked in a year or more."

"House GOP spending plan cuts money for job training."

"U.S. income levels sink... leaves fragile consumers in a bind."

"Outsize severance packages continue for executives."

"More 'new poor' going hungry."

"Bank of America to cut 30,000 jobs."

"Banks are awash in cash."

Even a Wall Street banker ought to be able to understand the message that these headlines are delivering. Such daily headlines reveal the depth of inequality and rank injustice that's propelling the Occupy uprising. As we say in Texas, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked. America's middle class and the poor are tired of being kicked – and now they're kicking back. This is just the start.

"Protests spotlight a stressed middle class," USA Today, October 10, 2011.

"Top earners double share of nation's income." The New York Times, October 25, 2011

"Outside Cleveland, Snapshot of poverty's surge in the suburbs." The New York Times, October 25, 2011.

"Banks to make customers pay debit card fee." The New York Times, September 30, 2011.

"Record high 4.5 million haven't worked in a year or more." Austin American Statesman, October 7, 2011.

"House GOP spending plan cuts money for job training." Austin American Statesman, September 30, 2011.

"U.S. income levels sink... leaves fragile consumers in a bind." Fresno Bee, October 1, 2011.

"Outsize severance packages continue for executives, even after failed tenures." The New Times, September 29, 2011.

"More 'new poor' going hungry." Chicago Tribune, October 10, 2011.

"Bank of America to cut 30,000 jobs," Austin American Statesman, September 13, 2011.

"Banks are awash in cash." The New York Times, October 26, 2011.

http://jimhightower.com/node/7581]]>