RICH, MEXICO AND EMPLOYERS OF
ILLEGALS WANT LA RAZA HILLARIA.... She
has promised them amnesty within 100 days!
IT'S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED
"In recent weeks, an increasing number of workers in the United States have been engaged in strikes, lockouts, contract rejections and other struggles. Social inequality is at historic highs, and workers are suffering the longest period of wage stagnation since the Great Depression, producing a radicalization that is in its initial stages."
Growing signs of a resurgence of class conflict in the US
Growing signs of a resurgence of class conflict in the US
By Jerry White
24 May 2016
In recent weeks, an increasing number of workers in the United States have been engaged in strikes, lockouts, contract rejections and other struggles. Social inequality is at historic highs, and workers are suffering the longest period of wage stagnation since the Great Depression, producing a radicalization that is in its initial stages.BLOG: POVERTY HAS SOARED UNDER OBAMA JUST AS PROFITS HAVE SOARED FOR HIS CRONY BANKSTERS AND ILLEGALS HAVE FLOODED OUR BORDERS
According to President Obama, life has never been so good in America, and an Internet search for the word “strike” brings up far more coverage in the news media of murderous “air strikes” by the US military than of workers’ struggles. Despite the best efforts of the trade unions to suppress the class struggle, however, workers in the telecom, manufacturing, airline and supermarket industries, as well as public sector workers, are entering significant battles.
Developments in the US are part of an international tendency. Recent months have seen mass protests and now an oil refinery strike in France; a three-day general strike by Greek workers against austerity; a week-long strike by Nigerian workers against rising fuel and electricity prices; a strike by Mexican teachers to defend public education; a one-day strike by train conductors in the United Kingdom; and the first strike by Kuwaiti oil workers in two decades.
In the US, the strike by 1,700 telecom workers at AT&T West in San Diego, California has undermined the efforts of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and other unions to isolate the six-week strike by 40,000 workers at Verizon. The CWA was forced to call the strike—which involves only 10 percent of the 16,000 AT&T West workers who have had no contract since April 9—because of growing rank-and-file opposition to giant telecom company. AT&T made $13.2 billion profit in 2015 and spent billions on acquisitions and dividend payments to its richest investors and top executives.
The CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are currently involved in secret negotiations under the auspices of Obama’s labor secretary and a federal mediator to shut down the strike at Verizon as soon as possible on management’s terms. Despite being put on starvation strike pay rations by the CWA and IBEW, Verizon workers remain determined to beat back the attack on their living standards.
In the working class as a whole, there is widespread support for a unified struggle. “We stand with our brothers and sisters on the East Coast,” an AT&T worker in San Diego told the World Socialist Web Site. “What happens to them can happen to us—corporate America is taking away our rights and we have to take them back.”
A worker at the GM Hamtramck Assembly in Detroit told the WSWS on Monday, “I truly feel all workers should support the Verizon and AT&T workers. There is nothing on the news. They don’t want anyone to know. They look at it like a cancer that should be stopped from spreading.”
An estimated 8,788 collective bargaining agreements, covering 2.2 million workers, are due to expire or be modified in 2016. The chief obstacles to a fight against the companies are the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions, which are allied with the Obama administration and the Democrats. The unions function as an arm of corporate management and the state. They support the policy of lowering wages and cutting health care and pension costs to make US corporations more “globally competitive.”
The unions have long abandoned the principle of “no contract, no work,” keeping workers on the job for months or even years without a contract. On Friday night, the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) announced that it would continue negotiations with the US Post Office past the contract expiration date for 204,000 city letter carriers. Another 370,000 USPS workers were forced to accept arbitration by the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and other unions.
The United Auto Workers barely survived a rebellion by autoworkers and required a campaign of lies, threats and vote fraud to get sellout contracts past the resistance of the rank-and-file last fall. This year has already seen sick out protests by Detroit teachers organized in defiance of the union, opposition to a union-backed concessions deal by Chicago teachers and a wave of student walkouts in Detroit, Chicago and Boston.
Earlier this month, hundreds of Honeywell workers rejected a “last, best and final” offer containing massive health care concessions by a nine-to-one margin at factories in South Bend, Indiana and Green Island, New York. The UAW forced workers to continue to labor past the May 3 contract extension, allowing the world’s largest aircraft parts manufacturer to lock out workers and bring in a notorious strikebreaking firm, Strom Engineering.
Four hundred workers have been on strike for two weeks at Triumph Composite Systems in Spokane, Washington, another parts supplier for Boeing, after overwhelmingly rejecting a company ultimatum. The International Association of Machinists, which rammed through an eight-year contract extension on 25,000 Boeing workers in 2014 by less than a 400-vote margin, is now isolating the Spokane workers.
Five thousand retail workers at Macy’s four New York stores, including in mid-town Manhattan, voted last Thursday to strike when their contract expires on June 15. The workers are fighting attacks on their health care, pay and the right to opt out of working on holidays. Thousands of workers at Kroger’s, the largest traditional grocery store in the US, have also voted to strike 41 stores in Virginia, Tennessee and West Virginia unless the company offers better pay and health benefits for retirees. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has forced them to continue working after the contract expired May 8.
Two thousands pilots for five cargo companies contracted by DHL Express have voted to strike the German-based package delivery company because their wages are below those of workers at competing firms, UPS and FedEx. Meanwhile, thousands of UPS pilots and aircraft mechanics could strike after nearly three years of federal mediation.
Hundreds of thousands of other workers at United Airlines, Costco, Safeway and Albertson’s supermarkets face contract expirations. Across the border in Canada, some 23,500 hourly workers at Ford, General Motors and FCA Canada have a mid-September contract expiration.
In the US elections, the radicalization of workers and young people is expressed in the widespread support for Bernie Sanders, who has centered his campaign on social inequality and opposition to the “billionaire class.” Sanders role, however, has been to try to channel growing anti-capitalist sentiment back behind the Democratic Party, which, under the Obama administration, has overseen a historic transfer of wealth from the working class to the corporate and financial elite.
The Socialist Equality Party is running in the US presidential election to fight to unify every section of workers in an industrial and political counter-offensive. We call for the formation of rank-and-file committees, independent of the pro-capitalist and nationalist trade unions, in order to fight for common actions to defend the Verizon and AT&T workers and organize a joint offensive against the attack on jobs, benefits and working conditions.
Above all workers need a new revolutionary leadership, the Socialist Equality Party, to transform these struggles into a conscious political fight against the capitalist system, which is the root cause of social inequality, war and the drive towards dictatorship.
"Orienting to the Republican right is nothing new for Clinton. She and her ex-president husband were among the pioneers of the so-called New Democrat faction that openly repudiated the social reform policies of the New Deal and Great Society. Bill Clinton’s second term was dominated by his so-called triangulation strategy of adopting traditional Republican policies, including abolishing federal welfare and enacting law-and-order legislation that condemned millions of working class and minority youth to long prison terms for drug offenses and other non-violent crimes."
"Along with the final deregulation of the banks and hedge funds, these policies were richly rewarded after the conclusion of the Clinton presidency, as the couple took in more than $150 million for giving speeches to corporations, most of it coming from Wall Street."
And the bribes keep coming. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Democratic frontrunner has raised $4.2 million from Wall Street thus far, $334,000 in March alone. A total of 53 percent of her campaign donations in March came from Wall Street firms.
Clinton campaign lurches to the right
Clinton campaign lurches to the right
By Barry Grey
10 May 2016
Since last week’s Indiana primary and the emergence of Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, the campaign of Hillary Clinton has veered sharply to the right, setting the stage for arguably the most right-wing presidential contest in modern US history. This is under conditions where the primary season has been dominated by the eruption of popular anger and disgust with the entire political establishment.No sooner had Trump’s remaining rivals for the Republican
nomination, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, dropped out of the race
than Clinton began to downplay her populist-sounding rhetoric,
aimed at countering the appeal of Democratic rival Bernie Sanders
to frustration over social inequality and Wall Street criminality. She
is focusing on overtures to Republican leaders and donors wary of
Trump’s unilateralist foreign and trade policies and general
unpredictability.
With an apparently insurmountable lead over Sanders in both pledged and so-called super delegates, Clinton is preparing to run in the general election as the trusted and experienced candidate of the corporate and political establishment, the Pentagon and the CIA. She is cynically assuming that the young and working class voters who have rallied behind the self-described “socialist” Sanders will in the end support her over the fascistic Trump, and concentrating on winning the votes of wealthier and more-privileged social layers who make up a large part of the independent and Republican voter base.
BLOG: LIKE THE OBOMB, HILLARY CLINTON IS A CLOSET REPUBLIAN!
Already on Wednesday, the day after the Indiana primary, Clinton told CNN, “I invite a lot of Republicans and independents who I’ve been seeing on the campaign trail, who’ve been reaching out to me, I invite them to join with Democrats. Let’s get off the red or the blue team. Let’s get on the American team.”
Clinton’s first line of attack against Trump was to brand him a “loose cannon” on foreign and national security policy. This is in part an appeal for endorsements and support from leading figures in the military, intelligence and foreign policy establishment, including Republicans, on the basis of her long record as first lady, senator and secretary of state in aggressively promoting the interests of American imperialism abroad. The Clinton campaign and its media backers, such as the New York Times, have made a point of stressing her central role in the wars in Libya and Syria that have destroyed entire societies and brought the United States to the brink of war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Interviewed on the Sunday news show “Face the Nation,” Clinton told program host John Dickerson, “Well, I have to say, the Republicans themselves are raising questions about their presumptive nominee. And I think that’s in large measure, John, because they do understand how hard the job of being president is.
“When you have former presidents, when you have high-ranking Republican officials in Congress raising questions about their nominee, I don’t think it’s personal, so much as rooted in their respect for the office and their deep concern about what kind of leader he would be. … You see, at the end of the day, John, I really believe that Americans take their vote for president seriously because they know it’s not only the president, but the commander in chief who they are selecting.”
The New York Times, which has functioned as an unofficial organ of the Clinton campaign, published a front-page article Saturday advertising the Democratic frontrunner’s bid for Republican support. Headlined “Clinton Moves to Lure Votes from GOP, Aiming at Republicans Who Reject Trump,” the article began by reporting that Clinton was “hoping to gain the support of Republican voters and party leaders including former elected officials and retired generals disillusioned by the party’s standard-bearer. …”
It noted that Priorities US Action, a pro-Clinton super-PAC, intended to “reach out to Republican megadonors disillusioned by their party’s presumptive nominee.” It continued: “More broadly, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is repositioning itself, after a year of emphasizing liberal positions and focusing largely on minority voters, to also appeal to independent and Republican-leaning white voters turned off by Mr. Trump.”
The Times reported that after spending the past year seeking to mobilize the “liberal wing and labor leaders” in the Democratic Party, Clinton, “confident that the young people and liberals backing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will come around to support [her] in November,” would concentrate on appealing to suburban voters, including well-off women “whose most important issues are national security and terrorism.”
BLOG: EVEN AS OBAMA'S HORDES OF ILLEGALS AND THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS OPERATE IN OUR OPEN BORDERS, HILLARY SAYS OUR BORDERS ARE SECURE.
THE BIGGEST THREAT TO AMERICA IS MEXICO! ONLY OBAMA HISPANDERS MORE THAN LA RAZA HILLARIA!
The article noted that the Clinton campaign plans to assemble a “Republicans for Hillary” group and had already obtained the endorsement of Mark Salter, a top adviser to the 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain. It would also, the Times suggested, seek the endorsement of Republican national security figures such as former defense secretary Robert Gates and former CIA director and Iraq War commander David Petraeus. Gates oversaw Bush’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq and continued to head the State Department during Obama’s first term. Petraeus was quoted as saying Clinton would be “a tremendous president.”
One indication of the general election strategy of the Clinton campaign is the treatment being accorded, at least to this point, by the party bureaucracy, firmly in the Clinton camp, to the Sanders campaign in regard to this summer’s Democratic National Convention. Sanders sent a letter Friday to Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz complaining that the DNC was virtually excluding Sanders supporters from the main convention committees. He said his campaign had submitted 40 names for inclusion on the rules, credentials and platform committees, as well as the platform drafting committee, and only 3 had been chosen between all four bodies.
Pointing out that to date he had won 45 percent of the pledged delegates, he threatened to conduct a floor fight at the convention and “force as many votes as necessary to amend the platform and rules.”
An extraordinary column appearing Saturday in the Financial Times by right-wing journalist, author and Republican think tank veteran Anne Applebaum vouches for Clinton’s right-wing and militarist credentials. Applebaum is a ferocious anti-communist. She is married to Radoslaw Sikorski, who was foreign minister in the nationalist, anti-Russian government of Polish prime minister Donald Tusk between 2007 and 2014. Last August, she penned a commentary in the British Telegraph raising the need for Ukraine and its eastern European allies to prepare for “total war” against Russia.
In her column, she poses as the question facing American conservatives: “Who should they support? Who is actually the more conservative candidate in this election?”
Considering the categories “fiscal conservative,” “free-trade conservative,” and “national security conservative,” she concludes that on balance Clinton is the clear choice. On fiscal policy, Applebaum praises Clinton as “a person who believes in balanced budgets and careful spending,” and cites her web site as calling debt a “national security threat” that she is opposed to increasing.
On national security, Applebaum writes, “whether realist or interventionist, there is no nuance at all. … Mrs. Clinton is the only possible candidate.”
Orienting to the Republican right is nothing new for Clinton. She and her ex-president husband were among the pioneers of the so-called New Democrat faction that openly repudiated the social reform policies of the New Deal and Great Society. Bill Clinton’s second term was dominated by his so-called triangulation strategy of adopting traditional Republican policies, including abolishing federal welfare and enacting law-and-order legislation that condemned millions of working class and minority youth to long prison terms for drug offenses and other non-violent crimes.
Along with the final deregulation of the banks and hedge funds, these policies were richly rewarded after the conclusion of the Clinton presidency, as the couple took in more than $150 million for giving speeches to corporations, most of it coming from Wall Street.
And the bribes keep coming. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Democratic frontrunner has raised $4.2 million from Wall Street thus far, $334,000 in March alone. A total of 53 percent of her campaign donations in March came from Wall Street firms.
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