Protest in Washington, D.C. to Demand the Right to a Job for All

 

 

Joblessness is as bad today as it was during the 1930s –It’s time to take the fight to D.C.

On April 8, 1935, Congress passed the legislation creating the largest public works program in history. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) created 8.5 million jobs during the depression of the 1930s.

Let’s mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the WPA by telling the government that today’s jobless crisis is as bad today as it was back then and that we need the same kind of bold, sweeping jobs program that the people demanded in the 1930s – Now!

Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated the final months of his life to starting a movement for the right of all to a job or a guaranteed income – we need that movement now more than ever.

It’s time to say no: to a jobless recovery – to an economy based on permanent high unemployment and low wages – to trillions of $ for Wall St., and trillions of $ for war but nothing but joblessness, foreclosures, evictions, layoffs, low wages, union busting, hunger and homelessness for workers and the poor.

There are more than 20 million unemployed and underemployed people in the country today. We need a real WPA-type program that is big enough to insure that those who need work get work – work that is socially useful that pays union wages and benefits.

Call issued by
the Bail Out the People Movement

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Filed under: Economic crisis

From the Department of Insults: Wall Street employees get flu vaccine, you can just die.

In the last year, I have probably used some variation on the phrase “adding insult to injury” more than at any other time in my life.  I’m sure I’m not the only one.  The capitalist economic meltdown means joblessness, foreclosure, eviction, homelessness, poverty and misery to millions of workers here in the U.S., and poverty, starvation and death to millions around the world.  So there’s plenty of injury to go around.

But it seems there is no shortage of insults to dish out to the victims of the global collapse either.  Here in the U.S., the same banks that received billions in bail out money are foreclosing on mortgages and putting working people’s belongings out on the curb like it was trash.  Workers with decades of service are being laid so that their bosses – who created the crisis with their greed and arrogance – can continue to rake in huge bonuses and lucrative golden parachutes.  Politicians are fawning over the insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants, careful to ensure that any health care reform doesn’t hurt their profits, while lack of access to health care kills 45,000 Americans every year.

But some insults to working people seem so gratuitous that it is hard to imagine that they don’t have a special bureau somewhere that thinks this stuff up.  In that category is the news that the Center for Disease Control authorized the allocation of H1N1 flu vaccines to some of the largest firms on Wall Street even while millions of Americans who are in high risk categories, such as youth and the elderly, are unable to get the flu shot.  As the website of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington points out, several states have already expressed concern that those that need it most will not be able to get the vaccine, or that it will be available too late:

The head of Alabama’s Department of Public Health testified that 62% of the vaccines ordered by the state will not be available until after December 1, 2009

The director of Minnesota’s St. Paul Ramsey County Department of Public Health said he is expecting only 7,800 doses for more than 20,000 children

Los Angeles County’s three public hospitals ordered 110,000 vaccines, but have received only about 18,000 doses, and UCLA’s two hospitals received 1,000 doses for 10,000 staff and 35,000 patients

We already have heard, ad nauseam, that these companies are “too big to fail,” while the rest of us are too unimportant to bail out.  Now it seems that the Wall Street giants must be protected from the flu while children and seniors die from it.

Filed under: Economic crisis, They're Not Like Us

CIT Group bankruptcy, stock market decline show recession far from over, but who gets bailed out next time?

As politicians and the American people are enmeshed in the debate over health care reform or are pondering the next steps in the escalating U.S. war in Afghanistan, no one seemed to be paying much attention to developments in the economy.  Until last week, a rising stock market seemed to be enough indication that the recession was over or nearly over.

This may be the week that we face the music, however.  On Friday, a 250 point dip in the stock market raised questions about whether the U.S. economy is actually in a recovery.  Today, there is the announcement that CIT Group, which provides financing to thousands of small and medium-sized businesses (including 60% of the apparel industry) is filing for bankruptcy.

The Guardian (UK) this morning describes the CIT Group bankruptcy as “one of the biggest corporate failures in U.S. history.”  The article points out that not only will the reorganization in bankruptcy reduce the financing available to small and medium businesses, but also that U.S. taxpayers will lose the $2.3 billion that the company received under the TARP program.

The bankruptcy follows on predictions by a number of capitalist economists that either the recession will continue or that we are about to enter a second, possibly deeper recession.  Perhaps most significantly, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz said recently that not only is the economy still in decline, but that the only thing that prevented a more rapid decline was Obama’s federal stimulus package.

There are three things that working people should be considering in the wake of this news.  First, of course, is that whether the recession is over according to the experts, 2010 will be a year of steep unemployment and continuing pressure by business and politicians to cut public spending on social programs that are vital to our survival.  Second, most economists agree that the federal stimulus program may have been the only thing to either slow or stop the economic free-fall that took place from last Fall until earlier this year.  Third, a new period of economic decline will certainly bring new calls for bail outs and stimulus of some kind…with the only question being whether we allow anther round of government hand-outs to big business or fight for a popular program of direct aid to working people and our impoverished communities.

Filed under: Economic crisis

Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Health Care Reform

I’m late in posting this but it is so compelling that, really, it’s better late than not at all.  On October 7, 2009, Keith Olberman devoted his hour-long show on MSNBC to a special comment on health care reform in the United States.  Really, I think it is more than a statement about health care legislation.  It is a passionate and obviously deeply felt commentary about fundamental human values and how we embody them – or fail to embody them – in government policy.  Today the National Academy of Science announced that it has finally, for the first time since the 1950’s, revised its criteria for determining who is “living in poverty” and as a result has determined that 15.8% or almost 1 in 6 Americans are living in poverty.  The news should only amplify Olberman’s denunciation of those who profit from human misery.

more about “Keith Olbermann’s Full-Hour Special C…“, posted with vodpod

Filed under: Economic crisis, Must read

And the survey sez: (bing!) No jobs

A survey of thirty-eight capitalist economists shows that most of them believe unemployment will get worse (over 10% before year’s end) and won’t get better any time soon (maybe 2010…but maybe as late as 2012).

Wanna know what a jobless recovery looks like:

Unemployment, which was at a 26-year high of 9.8% in September, is forecast to hit 10% during the last three months of this year, and stay there through the first quarter of 2010. By the end of next year, it’s only expected to fall back down to 9.5%.

Filed under: Economic crisis

Report from Pittsburgh: September 25

Day 6 – Sept 25 – G20 protests
Posted by Bail Out the People Not the Banks on Saturday, September 26, 2009
Day 6—Sept. 25

The permitted People’s March on G-20 attracted an estimated 10,000 people, largely young people. The organizers, the People’s Voices coalition, held two rallies during the march.

Following the closing down of the Tent City on the Hill in the morning, the Bail Out the People Movement organized a speak-out and then a contingent at Freedom Corner, which fed into the People’s March.

BOPM’s Larry Holmes spoke at the first rally where he defended the youth who were brutally attacked by the police on Sept. 24 in downtown Pittsburgh. BOPM’s Cheryl LaBash spoke at the second rally on the crisis in Honduras. The March organizers asked the BOPM contingent and its banner, “Message to G-20 – WE NEED JOBS NOW” with photos of Dr. Martin Luther King, to lead the second leg of the march.

Eyewitness report from Dante Strobino:

On Friday night, I was near U. of Pitt around 10:00 when we saw a huge crowd of about over 1000 students, most of which were not political at all and certainly not involved in G-20 protests, gathered in Schenedy Park where there was a concert going on with acoustic and rock bands as part of G-20 protest events. The police began to occupy the park and forcefully removed everyone from the park. As students began to gather around to check it out, the riot police got more hyped up. There were no chants, no signs, no banners, no folks dressed in black and no provocation and the police threw several tear gas and smoke bombs at the crowd again and pushed them further back down commercial streets where there bars and restaurants. They also began chasing people into the huge dormitory towers and attacking students as they left. Students were hanging out the windows, taking pictures in awe.

Forbes St. was blocked off by hundreds of riot cops while surrounding contingents of cops moved in on the other areas of the campus to corral people in. Police brutality had been witnessed — folks being thrown to the ground and shot with rubber bullets, media being pepper-sprayed and gassed. There have been 48 confirmed arrests (an estimated 175 arrests total) with more reports still coming in. Protesters and students alike are being held in the dorm towers unable to leave in fear of being arrested; other students cannot cross 5th Ave. to get to their residences without being thrown to the ground.

I got a chance to talk to several students who had never seen anything like this in their lives. It was really interesting hearing people say “F_ck the Police”, people who you would never expect to hear this from! Even some more conservative students that I talked to, were really angry too and just confused.

What is most striking about being here is seeing the incredible police repression both Thursday and Friday night in Oakland, a neighborhood which houses U. of Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University, two universities with mostly white, mostly middle class students. As Larry Holmes commented during our Tent City, at any given normal day the police usually target and harass the Black community, but these two days not only are they (Black people) under normal occupation, but the police are targeting young white folks.

Sept. 25 quotes from students on police violence:

“People have been saying mostly that the violence and any disruption by the protest were small fraction, most protesters were peaceful. It was the police who started the violence and ended up finishing the violence. … It felt like a war zone. The police became more and violent, taking over more and more of the street. I couldn’t get to my house even until 3am on Thursday. I saw there multiple people that needed to have pepper spray washed out of their eyes. The police wouldn’t let students cross the street or enter their dorm rooms. I saw violent use of police dogs that were used to intimidate.”
- Sean O’Sullivan, senior at University of Pittsburgh

“The night before in the same location there was a mass arrest of people walking by who were thrown to the ground, maced and arrested. We were gathering there because kids in a march earlier were there. We didn’t want to march tonight; we wanted to chill and have a nice night. As we did that, more cops surrounded area…We hopped the fence to get out over the hill… as we were doing that, that police officer was beating down a fence with his nightstick to get over it; a reporter got maced in face and we brought him to steps of chapel and we were distracted. They swarmed around us and arrested the guy who was injured; he could barely breathe, trying to get him away from crowd. As kids tried to run away they picked us off one by one. [The police told a woman] to shut the fuck up and get off the goddamn phone. As she was trying to say goodbye, he grabbed her by head and slammed her head into the ground. They were being way forceful and too aggressive. They put on handcuffs way too tight. They had us sit down for awhile and wouldn’t tell us what was going on. They put us in two lines for males and females. From that point they took our photos, held out papers in front of our face with another cop. They searched us, put us in vans and wouldn’t tell us what was going on. They wouldn’t read us our rights; they only had snarky comments to say to us. We were in transportation vans for about three hours; then we got to the State Correctional Facility where we were in the van for another five hours still with plastic handcuffs on. They turned up the air conditioning to 55 degrees to make us feel as uncomfortable as possible. There were girls on periods that they would not let go to bathroom; there were girls in tears because of how bad they had to pee. You can get urinary tract infection or Toxic Shock Syndrome. We were there until 6:30 in the morning. Then they searched us, had us take off all our jewelry but our hands were swollen from cuffs and they were being real aggressive taking off rings. As soon as we stepped off the bus, a guy was holding my arm and a cop said “Say G-20″ and snapped my picture. They didn’t tell us where we were going or how long that we would be there. They didn’t answer any questions we had.”

–Jillian Dowis, sophomore at Ohio University

VIDEOS OF POLICE REPRESSION:

college students trapped in stairwell and gassed, attacked

police assault couple in street

Police pose while taking picture of arrested student

front line of resistance on Thursday afternoon, youth hurl dumpster at cops

Filed under: Economic crisis, Fighting oppression, Police brutality, Whose streets?

Report from Pittsburgh: Sept. 24

Bail Out the People Movement

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Day 5-Sept. 24

The following special report was written by Dante Strobino from Raleigh Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST) youth group who attending this protest:

Over a thousand people gathered in Arsenal Park in Pittsburgh to resist the G-20 countries meeting in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center downtown. Young activists representing struggles against racism, gentrification, imperialist wars, gender oppression and environmental destruction gathered together in an effort coordinated by the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project. Protesters began their march through a working class neighborhood of Lawrenceville towards a bridge to get into downtown. The march continued down Liberty Avenue in an unpermitted demonstration taking over the streets with banners that read “No Hope in Capitalism”, “No Bailout, No Capitalism” and “No borders, No banks”.

Protesters were eventually stopped at the bottom of the street by police who confronted them with high frequency sound blasts and orders to disperse. Protesters then redoubled back and confronted cops again in the middle of a residential community. As resistance continued to mount up, anarchists grabbed a dumpster on wheels and hauled it down the hill directly into the police barricade, not harming anyone. The police reacted with more violence by attacking the entire neighborhood with several canisters of OC gas, Oleoresin Capsicum, a new police weapon meant to cause temporary blindness and breathing pain. From then on many different groups broke away in different directions and some marched together back towards Oakland, the neighborhood which houses University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

Police had been bused in from dozens of states including states as far away as Arizona and Florida, along with National Guard and SWAT units. Armed guards with camouflage humvees were stationed at every exit of the beltline around the city, blocking off entry. Most all businesses downtown including cell phone stores, apparel store, banks and restaurants were completely boarded up following Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s suggestions, putting many workers out of work for the two days while the G-20 meets. At the universities and museums all monuments were also boarded up or covered with bags to continue to promote an atmosphere of fear. Police had to be hauled around town in several city and school buses to head off protesters. Department of Homeland Security and police helicopters have been roaring overhead the city since Wednesday night.

On their way back to Oakland through the Birchwood neighborhood a few windows were broken by protesters including a cop car window, a window at a PNC bank, BNY Mellon bank and at a BMW dealership, all of which symbolically represent institutions that are responsible for the economic crisis. A few hundred protesters continued to take the streets and make their voices heard throughout the evening. At one point, the protesters stopped the police with a stream of projectiles. Police responded with brutal blows of bean bags, causing injuries. Protesters defended themselves by blockading the street with a large chain link fence obstructing the road.

At 10 p.m. BASH BACK! organized a protest for LGBTQ liberation in Oakland near Carnegie Mellon University. Nearby at University of Pittsburgh students were gathered close to the bridge to Schenley Park, where Obama had earlier visited Phipps conservatory.

Heavy-handed police repression ensued, including the usual electronic dispersal order and tear gas, but this only attracted more and more protesters and onlookers, and soon the crowd numbered up to 1000. Reports described students with t-shirts wrapped around their faces chanting “beer pong!” and “LET’S GO PITT!”

Through the next couple hours cops were chasing students into their dorms, attacking people leaving the bars and arresting folks who were not earlier participating in protests. By the end of the night more than 60 were arrested.

Help BOPM continue to mobilize to fight for jobs, housing, and health care for all – the week-long mobilization, including the national March for Jobs and the Tent City, was a enormous success, but we need your help to continue on to the next phase of the struggle. Please consider making an urgent donation at http://bailoutpeople.org/donate.shtml.

Filed under: Economic crisis, Fighting oppression, Whose streets?

A capitalist economist offers bitter medicine, but the bosses won’t swallow

Next week, representatives of the so-called G20 nations will converge on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to discuss the capitalist economic crisis. It may be of some significance that they are holding this gathering even as some capitalist economists are declaring that the recession is over, or is about to be over. Even if these economists are correct, it is widely accepted that the next year and possibly several more after that will see record levels of unemployment throughout the world. So the G20 meeting will remain as an opportunity for the rulers of the world to discuss how best to manage societies in which the rich will once again become richer while working people and poor people suffer more than ever.

But before anyone starts cheering the capitalist revival, or before progressives begin to think that the urgency of addressing the impact of the economic crisis has lessened, it would make sense to read a rather long article in last Sunday’s Boston Globe.  Titled “Why capitalism fails,” the article by history professor Stephen Mihm tells an interesting tale about Hyman Minsky, a little-known and marginalized capitalist economist whose work has suddenly become of interest to more mainstream economists.

It seems that Mr. Minsky for decades before his death in 1996 had been arguing that the financial industry was the  Achilles heel of modern capitalism.  He predicted that periods of capitalist stability and growth would of necessity cause a growing finance sector to constantly take more and more risk in order to perpetuate profits, and that ultimately this would lead to severe crises exactly like the current recession.  The author of the article points out that Minsky was not only practically alone among capitalist economists to take this view, but that he was actually ridiculed and ignored because of it.  Having now seemingly been proven correct, his work is suddenly receiving a great deal of attention.

Of course, it is only in the confines of pro-capitalist economics that Minsky’s view would be considered unusual.  Marxist economists have always held that capitalism will swing through cycles of overproduction that end in crashes, recessions and depressions.  The specific form of the current crisis was predicted by the late Sam Marcy, founder and chair of Workers World Party, back in 1986 in his work High Tech, Low Pay.  Indeed, WWP leader Fred Goldstein wrote extensively about the cause of the current crisis in his 2008 book Low Wage Capitalism.

Still, it is interesting to watch the masters of the most powerful economic system ever created flailing about looking for explanations for their current predicament.  And as the author of the Globe article points out, having found someone within their ranks who can seemingly explain the current state of affairs makes it no more likely that they will listen to what he had to say about how to fix the problem.

Seems that Minsky had this strange idea that one of the most important things for a capitalist government to do when faced with a melt-down of thus type was to spend money on jobs.  Not just a handful of  “shovel-ready” projects for skilled workers.  Jobs for everyone.  Minsky advocated a massive jobs program in which everyone who wanted to would have the opportunity to work, with the federal government acting as the proverbial “employer of last resort.”

Socialists and communists have historically rallied around the slogan “Jobs or income now” to respond to capitalist downturns. Of course, our goal is to organize working people to dismantle this system of capitalist profits, not to save it.  But it is a telling indictment of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the system that so few within its ranks have been able to correctly analyze the problem and prescribe the treatment . . . and that even when they do so, those prescriptions go ignored.

Filed under: Economic crisis

Is this only about health care reform?

More than any other issue, the fight for health care reform has become the touchstone of progressive versus reactionary politics in the United States.  Those who favor reform have a variety of opinions about the best way to carry it out – ranging from those who want no more than a tweak of our current system that benefits profiteering insurance companies and health care corporations, to those (like me) who advocate for a single-payer national health service.  Not only do we disagree among ourselves about health care reform, but we reflect a wide range of opinions on a host of other issues as well.

The most vocal opponents of health care reform don’t have this problem.  They are increasingly in lock-step with each other and with the corporate-funded right wing ideologues that set the tone for their “debates” with public officials.  And they are united not only in opposition to universal access to health care, but they also share a vicious contempt for everyone who doesn’t think, look, talk and act like them.  This vocal fringe looks more and more like a nascent fascist movement when you consider that not only is it thoroughly reactionary and militantly disruptive, but also that it totally fronts for the interests of Big Business while maintaining a pseudo-populist rhetoric that makes it sound like just the opposite.

Consider these two examples.  In the first, a wheelchair-bound woman is booed and heckled while trying to make a comment about how lack of access to health insurance is affecting her life and the lives of her family members, including the possibility that they will lose their home to foreclosure.

In the second, right here in Connecticut, Bishop Emilio Alverez of Stamford poses a question in Spanish to Congressperson Jim Himes (who speaks Spanish fluently).  The anti-health care crowd goes wild – screaming at, insulting and trying to shout down the bishop . . . finally breaking out in chants of  “English! English! English” to try to drown him out or force him to sit down.

Filed under: Economic crisis, Fighting oppression, Must read

NYT: Yep, it’s a jobless recovery

Today’s New York Times discovers what Fred Goldstein predicted  in his book Low Wage Capitalism, written on the eve of the economic collapse.  Goldstein pointed out that capitalist recessions are coming more and more frequently, and that in each case the “recovery” has been more fragile and of shorter duration.  He predicted that any recovery from the current crisis would not result in the creation of new jobs but would be the same jobless recovery that we witnessed in 2001.

From today’s article in the NYT:

“Many experts now see a high probability of another so-called jobless recovery, in which the economy expands but jobs continue to disappear — a replay of what happened after the last recession in 2001.”

So banks get bailed out.  Corporations get bailed out.  State and local budgets – especially social services, infrastructure, education, health care, aid to cities – get cut.  For the capitalists things gradually return to “normal.”  But millions of people remain out of work and millions more never had a chance of getting a decent job in the first place.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/economy/05jobs.html?_r=1&hp

Filed under: Economic crisis