Labor // Current TV

St. Vincent's Hospital: Timeline of a Crime / March 2010 - March 2012 (on Prezi)

Related articles/sites: Healthcare For The 99% - Last Hearing on St.... more

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Unions Represent the 99%

For all of our all lives, we the3 99% have had someone representing out interests.... more

TomCat1948
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from Remarks by the President to UAW Conference.

OBAMA speaks to his heartland American audience: 'So, no, we were not going to... more

LOrion
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The Republican Party Is No Longer Relevant

I just read Santorum’s Gospel of Inequality By CHARLES M. BLOW. Mr. Blow has stated the obvious. Regressives are merely pandering to their own base, while they alienate the rest of the country. People realize that Ron Paul's Libertarianism will solve nothing other than ensure income inequality for all and a serf like condition for the middle class ans the poor. Santorum, on the other hand, is completely off the rails. He is so far off the rails that he begins to make Ron Paul look reasonable. Santorum somehow does not see the poverty that has been created in places like Detroit because of the economic meltdown caused by the greediest in this nation. Wealth should not be disparaged. However, wealth at all costs, at the expense of other human beings in this country, at the expense of jobs, at the expense of the destruction of the environment, that wealth should be condemned.

Detroit is a city that is in ruins. 90,000 abandoned homes or other structures. Neighborhoods retuning to the wild. Detroit, and this nation, has the opportunity to turn itself around, to rebuild and create the city of the future. Imagine a modern city with wild open spaces, with a modern public transportation system, with building that have style rather than uninspired glass rectangles. Detroit has the opportunity to build a European city with ultra modern conveniences; trams instead of buses; electric recharging stations for cars; trees and plants along the streets; places to congregate and relax; a place where business is not concentrated in just one area, but spread out in low rise buildings. Imagine Reims or Brugges.

As for Santorum's rant that “They [liberals and the president] are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.” What more is necessary to show that he has no concept of reality? When more than half of the country has the same laws in place regarding the churches and contraception, a state's rights issues mind you, the president is merely following the majority. Many of these laws have been enacted by bipartisan legislatures and have been in effect for 10 years or more. Where were the protests from the church and the Regressives then? Why has it taken so long for them to make this an issue? The reason that this is now an issue is because the Regressives have lost the economic narrative. It was the only thing that they could point to that they had a chance to win in November with. But the economy is improving. The private sector has created more jobs in 3 years of Obama's presidency then they did in all of Bush II's presidency. Unemployment is going down, corporate profits are up, and the Dow is about to pass 13,000. That is the point at which Obama took office as the economy Bush left was crumbling. All that is left for the Regressives is social issues that are not important to most Americans worried about the economy.

Romney has not backed off his claim that we should have let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt. What?!?! GM has turned in the largest profit in it's history last year. Because of the deal that Obama struck with the company in order to save it from bankruptcy, the UAW become part owner. Each union member will benefit for that profit by about $7000 in bonus checks. Imagine, workers receiving a bonus because they helped make the company money. What a concept. Not to be left out, Santorum said recently, “My feeling was that we should not support — the government should not be involved in bailouts, period. I think that’s a much more consistent position.” We should have bailed out the banks the same way. Saving the auto industry was good not only for the economy, for saving jobs, not just in Detroit but all those supplier jobs, but also for the country. We took possession of stock in GM and we still own a good amount. We have sold some, and it has just about paid for our investment and the American people will profit for GM as their stock price rises.

The Regressive Party cannot even claim to be a fiscally responsible party. Statistic show that when they are in power, deficits increase (http://jimcgreevy.com/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html sourced from the US Dept. of Treasury). Regressives are bad for the economy, bad for civil liberties, bad for society in general. They are out of touch with most Americans and they merely pander to their base of 25%. The follow the British colonial rule of divide and conquer. They are a fringe that should stay well on the fringes of society where they belong.I just read Santorum’s Gospel of Inequality By CHARLES M. BLOW. Mr. Blow has... more

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Apple’s China Comes Home to Haunt Us

Robert Scheer
Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple’s China operation, beginning to fully comprehend.

At the heart of the deal was a rejection of the basic moral claim of both egalitarian socialism and free market capitalism, the rival ideologies of the Cold War, to empower the individual as the center of decision-making. Instead, the fate of the citizen would come to be determined by an alliance between huge multinational corporations and government elites with scant reference to the needs of ordinary working folk.

It was understood by both parties to this grand concord that monopoly capitalism could be constructed in China to be consistent with the continuance in power of a Communist hierarchy, just as in the West capitalism was consistent with the enrichment of an ostensibly democratic ruling class. Sharp income inequality, the bane of genuine reform movements bearing the names populist, socialist and democratic, came to be the defining mark of the new international order.

The current controversy over Apple’s treatment of its 700,000 foreign workers, mostly in China, is a manifestation of that cross-ideological betrayal. The ironies are manifest. Not the least of which is that businessmen from Taiwan, the bastion of anti-Communist Chinese during the Cold War and still the pretend reason for a U.S. military presence in the region, are the essential organizers of mainland China’s workforce. But in the pursuit of profit, and at a time when the startling success of China’s hybrid communist-capitalist model keeps the U.S. Treasury afloat, few questions are asked.

Indeed, the pressure is now on to better emulate that model within the United States, to keep still more jobs from being shipped abroad. The human rights concerns of the U.S. have by now been opportunistically tailored to exclude any serious concern about the rights of workers to organize unions to make their job conditions more humane. China’s labor practices are now to be admired rather than scorned, lest the American economy decline further in the new world order.

As The New York Times pointed out last month in its devastating overview of Apple’s shift from its once proud claim of making its products in the USA to near total dependence on China: “It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

Parse that language to find the excuse to run roughshod over environmental protections, workers’ rights and occupational safety standards in order to allow “flexibility” at the massive Foxconn and other plants in China where robotic work is performed by humans under conditions that even Apple has conceded in an internal audit are unacceptable under modern industrial standards.

In reality the multinational corporations prefer China’s state-sponsored model of capitalism, which assures them an endless supply of docile workers unprotected by those pesky unions and restrictive government regulations. As Steve Jobs told President Obama last year, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” The reason that Jobs supplied in his 2011 approved biography is that the Chinese government is so wonderfully acquiescent to the development plans of foreign corporations. Not as in the U.S., where, Jobs claimed, “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for companies to operate. That the result of China’s deregulation is poisoned air, worker suicide and a massive waste of resources is deemed to be beside the point.

Oddly enough, Jobs, who succeeded in business without attending more than part of a single college semester, also blamed a U.S. educational system “crippled by union work rules” for what he proclaimed to be the sorry state of our domestic labor force. One of the basic human rights being violated by the Chinese government is that of workers to organize unions responsive to their needs; rather, they are at the mercy of phony organizations tolerated by the Communist government. It is sad, and not encouraging, that Jobs endorsed a blatantly anti-union position by claiming that until the teachers’ unions were broken, there would be almost no hope for education reform.

Considering the workforce employed by Apple, one has to question what sort of properly trained graduates Jobs had in mind. If the habits required of Apple’s workforce in China are to be emulated, the U.S. military, or perhaps our outsized prison system, should become the essential schooling system for American workers to better compete with the properly disciplined assemblers of iPhones in China.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/apples_china_comes_home_to_haunt_us_20120216/Robert Scheer Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican... more