NOVEMBER 2005

Major alert from the New World Democracy ; pension and union destruction.
A BAD OMEN BY jUNIOUS r. sTANTON

Delphi: A Helluva Bargaining Chip
GM bets the ailing parts maker will win big labor savings -- and it can follow suit

Delphi Corp. had barely filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 8 when all eyes turned to General Motors Corp. (GM ) It's not hard to see why. In the weeks leading up to Delphi's announcement, many analysts had figured GM would never allow its former parts unit to file for Chapter 11. Doing so meant the already troubled auto maker could inherit up to $11 billion of Delphi's pension and health-care obligations. Even worse, a bankruptcy judge could force GM to pay more for some of the $14 billion in Delphi parts that it buys each year.

Cadillac STS: Willkommen in Europa 07.07.05 – Cadillac steht für alles, was die Welt unter automobilem Komfort versteht - nur auf amerikanisch. Bei uns fristet die Tochter des größten Automobilherstellers der Welt General Motors ein eher bescheidenes Dasein. Das soll nun endlich anders werden, und das hat sich GM fest vorgenommen. Man möchte weg vom Image der luxuriösen Betulichkeit, die Cadillac bei den gut betuchten Über-Sechziger in den USA so beliebt gemacht hat und hin zu den jüngeren technikorientierten "early-adopters" (wie man die Frühnutzer neuer Techniken heute nennt). Diesem Zweck dient der rundum renovierte Cadillac STS als neues Flaggschiff der Marke. Please note the date of this welcome message to Delphi Corporation in Germany!!

8th October 2005 Delphi Corporation file for Bankruptcy
The Delphi Corp's filing of bankruptcy last Saturday sent shock waves through the AmeriKKKan economy. It is a harbinger of ill, a bad sign and a harmful omen for the unionized working class. By going into bankruptcy Delphi is looking to restructure its debt, and get out from under its wage, benefit and pension obligations which will not bode well for factory workers who earn as much as $27 an hour now. This is a form of class warfare. While Delphi seeks wage reductions from its factory workers, it is putting together generous packages for its upper management. As grossly unfair as this is, Delphi's strategy may set the tone for negotiations with the rest of the auto workers who will be involved in negotiation with Ford, GM and Chrysler in the very near future.

"If Delphi, which filed for Chapter 11 protection on Saturday, gets what it seeks in wage and benefit reductions from union members, the pay for members of the United Auto Workers could shrink to as little as $10 an hour from the current $27. Their benefits almost certainly would drop as well. Those drastic cuts would come not only as a blow to thousands of Delphi workers, but they also could set the pattern for negotiations between the union and the Big Three domestic automakers, which for years have struggled to find ways to lower their costs on the assembly line. 'In one fell swoop, U.S. auto workers are going from being solidly in the middle class to being part
of the working poor by earning $10 an hour,' said Harley Shaiken, a University of California-Berkeley labor expert."

We are watching the vaunted US industrial economy come unglued and collapse under the weight of globalization and fascism. What this means for the average unionized auto worker, is a drastic change in lifestyle due to a drop in hourly wages, job losses and benefit cuts. Trade unions which have been under assault since the Reagan era are taking a pounding from a myriad of forces: globalization, the outsourcing of factories to places like Mexico and China, the corporatist agenda of the fascist Republican Party and it's Democratic Party clones who have abandoned their traditional organized labor constituency. Hank Hardhat won't be making the big bucks working the
assembly line any more, his benefits package will be pared down and his pension may be either defaulted or passed off to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation which is itself facing a $30 billion deficits thanks to the steel, airline and auto industries who have dumped their pension obligations on the PBGC! Auto workers may soon find themselves in a similar situation to the Enron employees several years ago, left out in the cold with severely reduced pensions or none at all to fall back on.

The union leadership is in a bind. They can't play hardball because there isn't any wiggle room to negotiate, they are going to have to give back and give back a lot! The Tribune article also said, "'The power of the union has been altered, and their negotiating power is gone,' said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research. 'Their wages and benefits are now going to be defined by the bankruptcy judge, which basically means wages and benefits will be defined by the global market where if you aren't competitive, you have a problem.' UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, who Saturday described Delphi's filing as 'an extremely bitter pill,' had no additional comment Monday... Labor expert Shaiken said high productivity and low wages in countries such as Mexico and China are shaping wages in the United States, where auto workers in the future may not be able to afford the cars they build." With the judges Bu$h and his Democratic Party sycophants are appointing to the federal bench who sympathize with the capitalist class (owners and stockholders), look for more bankruptcy rulings where the benefits and pension obligations of the corporations are allowed to be restructured, terminated or defaulted. The sad part about all of this is it will create a ripple effect throughout the industry and will be the death rattle for unionized labor as we know it.

G.A.T.S.
The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is one of many separate agreements in the World Trade Organization package of agreements. The U.S. has already signed the GATS agreement, but negotiations are underway to allow corporations to come out the winner. The GATS contains rules governing trade and investment in services--from air travel to water delivery‹for all WTO members, currently over 140 countries around the world. The expansion goes beyond geographic boundaries. Powerful new rules expand to the other 70% of the economy that falls under "services."
Services rules also put education laws and regulations at risk. Rules on "national treatment" and "domestic regulation" would allow foreign corporations or governments to challenge laws or regulations that "impact the conditions of competition" or are "more burdensome than necessary" to ensure the quality of service.
Proposed services rules will place regulations on staffing, worker health and safety, and licensure and certification at risk. The proposed rules on "domestic regulation" could allow foreign corporations and governments to challenge a wide range of U.S. health care regulations as "more burdensome than necessary." The likelihood of such a challenge is high given that employers already argue that many health care regulations, including staffing ratio and occupational health and safety laws, are unnecessary.
Currently, we can often persuade the Congress, the state legislatures, and the courts that employers are wrong about this. But under the proposed services rules, decisions about challenged laws would be made by a three-person tribunal of corporate trade experts operating outside the public view. Workers and consumers would have no right to observe the proceed-ings or present their perspective. In most cases decided under the WTO and NAFTA trade tribunal system to date, corporate interests have won and the public interest has lost. These rulings are backed up with a powerful enforcement system.
Service rules could also facilitate corporate efforts to gain control of the profitable portions of public services. "Market access" rules prohibit governments from limiting the number of service providers providing particular kinds of services. Market access rules could thus limit the ability of governments to ensure viable public services and to ensure decent service in both profitable and unprofitable areas.
Rules on government procurement of services in the WTO and FTAA put prevailing wage laws at risk. These rules are likely to prohibit local, state and national governments from setting requirements regarding working conditions when they spend public money on construction projects.

Rules on "domestic regulation" put worker health and safety regulations and licensure and certification programs at risk. These rules would al-low corporations and governments to challenge our worker health and safety laws and our licensure and certification programs as "more burdensome than necessary."

The decision as to whether the law or program is "more burdensome than necessary," would be made based on the opinion of three corporate trade experts meeting in private. This means that critical labor laws could be ruled in violation of trade rules just because business thinks they are too strong, even though workers may have good evidence showing that the laws are actually too weak or just right.

Is it because it is too simple to find one cause(GATS) and risk the public outcry? or merely politically expedient to control the public by manifesting complex and even contradictory causes of the present malaise that is affecting blue collar workers as significantly as the workwers on the factory benches? Thus Junious R Stanton reviews another aspect:

             From The Ramparts

                                                            Junious Ricardo Stanton

                                             Globalization and the Making of Third World USA

            “With the emergence of China, India and Eastern Europe, the dam of Socialism that held back two billion workers has been removed. If two swimming pools are joined, the water level will eventually equalize. That is what is happening with globalization. Manufacturing has already been placed in competition across countries, with dire consequences for manufacturing workers. The internet promises to do the same for previously un-tradable services, and higher-paid knowledge workers will start feeling similar effects. Not since the industrial revolution has there been a transformation of this magnitude, and that revolution took one hundred and fifty years to complete. By comparison the new revolution is a mere 25 years old. These developments have a significance that goes far beyond the currency manipulation and WTO rules violations that have been the focus of trade deficit policy discussions. There is no reason to think the end is in sight, and American workers can look forward to the international economy exerting downward pressure on wages and work conditions for the next several decades. As is so often the case, workers have understood the new reality long before economists and policymakers.”- Labor Threat Thomas Palley http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=13&ItemID=8867

          The media disseminated images of poor stranded black folks on tops of roofs attempting to survive amidst squalid condition during Hurricane Katrina alarmed many AmeriKKKans and people around the world. Many in their indignation and shock compared what they saw to “third world countries”. Well I have more alarming news for you. The horrific conditions of poverty and marginalization Hurricane Katrina revealed are going to get worse! As the US economy unravels from the deliberate globalization policies  that have been foisted upon the AmeriKKKan people by elected officials who have sold their souls to the multi-national capitalist class. Legislation like NAFTA broke down existing trade barriers and made it so AmeriKKKan factory jobs could be shipped off to Mexico as well as places like Eastern Europe and Asia (China, India and the Pacific). AmeriKKKan workers at Delphi Corp, Ford and GM are now experiencing the negative side of the globalization coin, that industrialized “advanced” countries’ workers will suffer because it is more profitable to build factories in third world countries where the owners can now pay next to nothing in wages and benefits. It is a variation of the stratagem the owners used here in the late ‘60's and early ‘70's when they moved plants, factories and jobs from the industrialized areas in the North to the South to take advantage of non union “right o work” laws; or their move to the suburbs to take advantage of tax abatements and other cost saving incentives. During the late ‘60's urban areas like Philadelphia Chicago and New York lost literally hundreds of thousands of jobs. William Julius Wilson in his enlightening book When Work  Disappears The World of The New Urban Poor states, “The problems of joblessness and social dislocation in the inner city are, in part related to the processes in the global economy that have contributed to greater inequality and insecurity among American  workers in general and to the failure of U.S. social policies to adjust to these processes. It is therefore myopic to view the problems of joblessness ghettos as if they are separate from those that plague the larger society.” p 220. The same issue facing jobless inner city dwellers will soon be on the door step of their blue collar working class urban and suburban peers!

            In an article written by Thomas Palley which appeared on Znet states, “If the United States were to add two billion low-wage workers(immigrants), you'd expect that wages would fall across the board, right? Well, there is a famous theorem in international economics--the Stolper-Samuelson theorem--that says when a rich capital-abundant country (such as the United States) trades with a poor labor-abundant country (such as China), wages in the rich country fall and profits go up. The theorem's economic logic is simple. Free trade is tantamount to a massive increase in the rich country's labor supply, since the products made by poor country workers can now be imported. Additionally, demand for workers in the rich country falls as rich country firms abandon labor-intensive production to the poor country. The net result is an effective increase in labor supply and a decrease in labor demand in the rich country, and wages fall. The relevance of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem is clear. For the last two decades, U.S. policy makers, from both major political parties, have worked assiduously to create a global market place in which goods and capital are free to move. Over the same period, two and a half billion people in China, India, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have discarded economic isolationism and joined the global economy. Now, these two tectonic shifts are coming together in the form of a "super-sized" Stolper-Samuelson effect, and they stand to have depressing consequences for American workers. Much attention has been devoted to the adverse impacts of the U.S. trade deficit, particularly with China. And the U.S. government has been rightly criticized for failing to apply adequate pressure to get China to remedy its unfair and illegal trading practices. However, no one in Washington is talking about the deeper question of what happens to wages when two billion people from low-wage countries join the global labor market.” We are seeing the Stolper-Smauelson Theorem being played out in AmeriKKKa  now. AmeriKKKan law makers enacted trade legislation against the best interests of their working class hourly wage earning constituents ( NAFTA and the recent CAFTA favor the multi-national corporate elite) and now low wage earning foreign nationals are taking jobs away from U.S. workers as it becomes more profitable for AmeriKKKan companies to build offshore factories in “developing countries”  and hire native workers for next to nothing. This is causing downsizing, unemployment, wage stagnation and bankruptcies in major industries like steel and auto that are affecting the wages and lifestyles of their U.S. workers. This coupled with the reverse Robin Hood  wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich of the Bu$h administration, the future for unionized AmeriKKKan workers looks bleak. If you doubt what I’m saying, talk to blue collar workers in the steel, airline and auto industries; especially since the recent Delta, Northwest and Delphi Corp bankruptcy filings. This is the down side of globalization for AmeriKKKan workers and families.

Right-Wing Judicial Activism October 13, 2005
By Michael Parenti
ZNet Commentary
Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts assured the senators that he would not be one of those noisome activist judges who inject their personal values into court decisions.

He would behave like "an umpire calling balls and strikes." With a completely open mind, he would judge each case solely on its own merits, with only the Constitution to guide him, he said.

None of the senators doubled over with laughter.

A fortnight later, while George Bush was introducing another Court nominee---his right-wing Jesus-freak crony Harriet Miers---he prattled on about his "judicial philosophy" and how he wanted jurists to be "strict constructionists" who cleave close to the Constitution, as opposed to loose constructionist liberals who use the Court to advance their ideological agenda.

It is time to inject some reality into this issue. In fact, through most of its history the Supreme Court has engaged in the wildest conservative  judicial activism in defense of privileged groups.

Be it for slavery or segregation, child labor or the sixteen-hour workday, state sedition laws or assaults on the First Amendment---rightist judicial activists have shown an infernal agility in stretching and bending the Constitution to serve every inequity and iniquity.

Right to the eve of the Civil War, for instance, the Supreme Court asserted the primacy of property rights in slaves, rejecting all slave petitions for freedom. In the famous Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Court concluded that, be they slave or free, Blacks were a "subordinate and inferior class of beings" without constitutional rights.

Thus did reactionary judicial activists---some of them slaveholders---spin racist precepts out of thin air to give a constitutional gloss to their beloved slavocracy.

When the federal government wanted to establish national banks, or give away half the country to speculators, or subsidize industries, or set up commissions that fixed prices and interest rates for large manufacturers and banks, or imprison dissenters who denounced war and capitalism, or use the U.S. Army to shoot workers and break strikes, or have Marines kill people in Central America---the Supreme Court's conservative activists twisted the Constitution in every conceivable way to justify  these acts. So much for "strict construction."

But when the federal or state governments sought to limit workday hours, set minimum wage or occupational safety standards, ensure the safety of consumer products, or guarantee the right of collective bargaining, then the Court ruled that ours was a limited form of government that could not tamper with property rights and could not deprive owner and worker of "freedom of contract."

The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868 ostensibly to establish full citizenship for African Americans, says that no state can "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," nor deny any person "equal protection of the laws."

In another act of pure judicial invention, a conservative dominated Court decided that "person" really meant "corporation"; therefore the Fourteenth Amendment protected business conglomerates from regulation by the states.

To this day, corporations have legal standing as "persons" thanks to conservative judicial activism.

By 1920, pro-business federal courts had struck down roughly three hundred labor laws passed by state legislatures to ease inhumane working conditions.

Between 1880 and 1931 the courts issued more than 1,800 injunctions to suppress labor strikes. No trace of conservative restraint during those many years.

When Congress outlawed child labor or passed other social reforms, conservative jurists declared such laws to be violations of the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment says that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people. So Congress could not act.

But, when states passed social-welfare legislation, the Court's right-wing activists said such laws violated "substantive due process" (a totally fabricated oxymoron) under the Fourteenth Amendment. So the state legislatures could not act.

Thus for more than fifty years, the justices used the Tenth Amendment to stop federal reforms initiated under the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fourteenth to stymie state reforms initiated under the Tenth. It's hard to get more brazenly activist than that.

A conservative Supreme Court produced Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), another inventive reading of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. Plessy confected the "separate but equal" doctrine, claiming that the forced separation of Blacks from Whites did not impute inferiority as long as facilities were equal (which they rarely were). For some seventy years, this judicial fabrication buttressed racial segregation.

Convinced that they too were persons, women began to argue that the "due process" clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment (applying to state governments) and the Fifth Amendment (applying to the federal government) disallowed the voting prohibitions imposed on women by state and federal authorities.

 But in Minor v. Happersett (1875), the conservative Court fashioned another devilishly contorted interpretation: true, women were citizens but citizenship did not necessarily confer a citizen's right to suffrage. In other words,  "due process," and "equal protection" applied to such "persons" as business corporations but not to women or people of African descent.

At times, presidents place themselves and their associates above accountability by claiming that the separation of powers gives them an inherent right of "executive privilege." Executive privilege has been used by the White House to withhold information on undeclared wars, illegal campaign funds, Supreme Court nominations, burglaries (Watergate), insider trading (by Bush and Cheney), and White House collusion with corporate lobbyists.

But the concept of executive privilege (i.e. unaccountable executive secrecy) exists nowhere in the Constitution or any law. Yet the wild-eyed right-wing activists on the Supreme Court trumpet executive privilege, deciding out of thin air that a "presumptive privilege" for withholding information belongs to the president.

Bush just recently talked about "how important it is for us to guard executive privilege in order for there to be crisp decision making in the White House." Crisp? How can Bush represent himself as a "strict constructionist" while making claim to a wholly extra-constitutional juridical fiction known as "executive privilege"?

With staggering audacity, the Court's rightist judicial activists have decided that states cannot prohibit corporations from spending unlimited amounts on public referenda or other elections because such campaign expenditures are a form of "speech" and the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech to such "persons" as corporations.

In a dissenting opinion, the liberal Justice Stevens noted, "Money is property; it is not speech." But his conservative colleagues preferred the more fanciful activist interpretation.

They further ruled that "free speech" enables rich candidates to spend as much as they want on their own campaigns, and rich individuals to expend unlimited sums in any election contest. Thus poor and rich can both freely compete, one in a whisper, the other in a roar.

Right-wing judicial activism reached a frenzy point in George W. Bush v. Al Gore.  In a 5-to-4 decision, the conservatives overruled the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount in the 2000 presidential election. The justices argued with breathtaking contrivance that since different Florida counties might use different modes of tabulating ballots, a hand recount would violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

By preventing a recount, the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush.

In recent years these same conservative justices have held that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause could not be used to stop violence against women, or provide a more equitable mode of property taxes, or a more equitable distribution of funds between rich and poor school districts.

But, in Bush v. Gore  they ruled that the equal protection clause could  be used to stop a perfectly legal ballot recount. Then they explicitly declared that Bush could not be considered a precedent for other equal protection issues. In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment applied only when the conservative judicial activists wanted it to, as when stealing an election!

We hear conservatives say that judges should not try to "legislate from the bench," the way liberal jurists supposedly do. But a recent study by Paul Gewirtz and Chad Golder of Yale University reveals that conservative justices like Thomas and Scalia have a far higher rate of invalidating or reinterpreting Congressional laws than more liberal ones like Byers and Ginsberg.

By this measure, too, the conservatives are the more activist.

In sum, the right-wing aggrandizers in black robes are neither strict constructionists nor balanced adjudicators. They are unrestrained power hustlers masquerading as sober defenders of lawful procedure and constitutional intent.

If this is democracy, who needs oligarchy?

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Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Assassination of Julius Caesar  (New Press), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press), all available in paperback; also visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-10/13parenti.cfm