http://www.hollywire.com
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Bush’s “victory” visit to Iraq meets with contempt and protest
After years of the Bush administration's attempts to control the images of the Iraq war, an Iraqi journalist turned the tables Sunday through an act of protest that drew broad popular support throughout the Arab world.
From the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square to the landing of the US president in a flight suit for his "mission accomplished" speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, to the ban on media photographs of coffins being offloaded at Dover Air Force Base, the Bush administration has sought relentlessly to manufacture and control the images from the US war in Iraq.
The aim has always been to mask the predatory and criminal nature of this war and promote the phony pretexts upon which it was launched and the false propaganda about its supposed aims: democracy and liberation, rather than oil and US global hegemony.
To the extent that this effort enjoyed partial and temporary success, it was due in large measure to the active assistance of the corporate-controlled media. It was none other than Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan who described the US media as "complicit enablers" in "spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies."
Now, a member of the Iraqi media has turned the tables, providing through a courageous act of protest an image that tells an essential truth about the US war of aggression. It is an image that will endure.
The journalist was Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the senior correspondent for the al Baghdadia TV station. In uncontainable fury, he threw first one of his shoes and then the other at the head of President George W. Bush during a Sunday press conference in Baghdad.
As he carried out this act, a gesture of utmost contempt in Iraqi culture, al-Zaidi shouted in Arabic, "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog. This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq."
Many of those who knew the 28-year-old reporter said that they believed his actions were a spontaneous eruption of fury over the effects of the more than six years of US war and occupation in his country. They have reported that al-Zaidi was deeply affected by covering the US bombardment of Sadr City, the teeming Shia slum neighborhood of Baghdad in which many civilians were killed. He also was at one point detained without cause by US occupation forces.
The protest came immediately after Bush concluded his remarks at a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called on the occasion of the two men signing a Status of Forces agreement (SOFA) that is supposed to end in the withdrawal of all US military forces by 2011 as well as a "Strategic Framework Agreement" that, in Bush's words, "formalizes ‘a relationship of friendship and cooperation' between our two countries in the economic, diplomatic, cultural, and security fields."
The signing was entirely for propaganda purposes, as US Ambassador Ryan Crocker had already initialed the documents on Washington's behalf last month. The event was staged as one more attempt by the administration in its closing days to cast its disastrous war in Iraq as a "success" and the country as "secure."
As with such previous visits, however, Bush was compelled to sneak into Iraq with no prior announcements and was able to appear in only heavily fortified areas and US bases. At the press conference where the incident took place, reporters were subjected to multiple searches by both US and Iraqi security.
Bush claimed in his remarks that the agreements were setting the stage for the "future of what we've been fighting for...a strong and capable democratic Iraq that will be a force of freedom and a force for peace in the heart of the Middle East." He continued, however, by adding that "the war is not over."
After suited Iraqi security guards wrestled al-Zaidi to the floor and dragged him out of the press conference, Bush and Maliki continued speaking, over the sounds of the reporter being brutally beaten in the next room.
As the New York Times reported, "They kicked him and beat him until ‘he was crying like a woman,' said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki."
Both Bush and sections of the American media tried to spin the incident by casting it as a demonstration of Iraq's new-found "freedom" and commenting that anyone carrying out a similar protest under Saddam Hussein would have been put to death.
Yet, the whereabouts and conditions of al-Zaidi remain unknown. The Iraqi regime issued a statement that it was holding him for investigation and reported that it was trying to determine whether someone paid him to throw his shoes.
Al-Zaidi's Al-Baghdadia television channel, which broadcasts from Cairo, issued a statement demanding his immediate release.
"Al-Baghdadia television demands that the Iraqi authorities immediately release their stringer Muntadhar al-Zaidi, in line with the democracy and freedom of expression that the American authorities promised the Iraqi people," said the statement.
It continued, "Any action taken against Muntathar will remind us of the actions and behaviors taken by the reign of the dictator and the violence, the random arrests, the mass graves and confiscations of freedom from the people."
"We fear for his safety," said Muzhir al-Khafaji, the channel's programming director. The station suspended its regular schedule, broadcasting continuous appeals for his release and messages of support together with footage of devastation wrought by the US war and music denouncing it.
After the incident, Bush commented, "I don't know what the guy's cause is."
If the US president genuinely remained clueless, the same could not be said for people all over Iraq, throughout the Arab world and indeed around the globe.
The "cause" is an unprovoked war that has cost more than a million Iraqi lives, left 2 million Iraqis wounded, turned 4 million into exiles or internal refugees and laid waste to the fabric of an entire society.
As al-Zaida's brother Dhirgham explained to the media, the reporter—who signed off his broadcasts with "reporting from occupied Baghdad"—hated what the US war had done to his country, both in terms of the US military presence and in the rise of reactionary Shia clericalist forces aligned with Iran. "He hates the American material occupation as much as he hates the Iranian moral occupation," said Dhirgham.
In Iraq itself, thousands took to the streets of Basra City, many of them waving shoes and carrying signs demanding al-Zaidi's release. The demonstration, in which American flags were burned, was as much a celebration of the reporter's actions as a protest over his treatment at the hands of the Maliki regime.
Similar protests were reported in Basra in the south and in Najaf, where protesters, apparently inspired by the report from Baghdad, pelted a passing American military patrol with shoes.
Newspapers in most Arab countries led with the protest against Bush and television stations replayed tape of the reporter hurling his shoes at the US president over and over again.
In press interviews, Iraqis and people throughout the region voiced their support for the reporter.
"I am happy for what happened because that will reflect how we do not like Bush." said Mohamed al-Hili, a 35-year-old policeman. "And our government has a different attitude and belief than ours. And I'd like to add that Mr. Muntader is a hero and he must be our president or at least P.M. [prime minister]. We need to replace al-Maliki with the real Iraqi—Mr. Muntader."
"I swear by God that all Iraqis with their different nationalities are glad about this act," said 45-year-old Yaareb Yousif Matti, a teacher from the northern city of Mosul.
In Nablus, on the Palestinian West Bank, Wafa Khayat, a 48-year-old doctor, called al-Zaidi's action "a message to Bush and all the US policy makers that they have to stop killing and humiliating people."
And in Jordan, businessman Samer Tabalat, 42, hailed the reporter as "the man.... He did what Arab leaders failed to do."
Even as the controversy swirled over the shoe-throwing, there were strong indications that the agreements that Bush came to sign will not bring about the promised withdrawal of American troops and have set the stage for the protracted continuation of the US occupation and the formalization of the Baghdad regime's status as a US client state.
Speaking on Saturday, the US military commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, said that although the US-Iraqi SOFA sets a June 30 deadline for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraqi cities, he anticipates them remaining well past that date.
"It's important that we maintain enough presence here that we can help them get through this year of transition," said Odierno. "We don't want to take a step backward, because we've made so much progress here."
American troops would remain in joint military bases set up in Iraqi cities fulfilling "training and support" roles, Odierno indicated.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office issued a statement in response, acknowledging that provisions of the agreement can be renegotiated: "We can change the date or articles if that is necessary." But he declared that Odierno's predictions about US forces remaining in the cities "premature."
The exchange followed last week's controversy over remarks made by Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh in Washington, in which he said that the regime in Baghdad would be willing to extend the 2011 deadline for a full US military withdrawal and predicted that Iraqi security forces would not be able to control the country for another decade.
In response, Maliki issued his own written statement claiming that Dabbagh was expressing "his personal point of view and that it does not represent the opinion of the Iraqi government."
The parliamentary bloc loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadar, which opposed the SOFA, said that the statements exposed the reality behind the claims made by both Washington and the Maliki regime.
"This confirmed our view that US forces will never withdraw from the cities next summer, and they will never leave Iraq by the end of 2011," Ahmed al-Masoudi, a spokesman for the Sadr bloc, told the Washington Post. "Iraqis will discover that the government has bamboozled them about this agreement."
The continuation of the US occupation is entirely in line with the policy of the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has clarified in recent weeks his intention to maintain a "residual force" in Iraq consisting of tens of thousands of US troops.
Via:
http://www.wsws.org
From the staged toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square to the landing of the US president in a flight suit for his "mission accomplished" speech on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, to the ban on media photographs of coffins being offloaded at Dover Air Force Base, the Bush administration has sought relentlessly to manufacture and control the images from the US war in Iraq.
The aim has always been to mask the predatory and criminal nature of this war and promote the phony pretexts upon which it was launched and the false propaganda about its supposed aims: democracy and liberation, rather than oil and US global hegemony.
To the extent that this effort enjoyed partial and temporary success, it was due in large measure to the active assistance of the corporate-controlled media. It was none other than Bush's former press secretary Scott McClellan who described the US media as "complicit enablers" in "spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies."
Now, a member of the Iraqi media has turned the tables, providing through a courageous act of protest an image that tells an essential truth about the US war of aggression. It is an image that will endure.
The journalist was Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the senior correspondent for the al Baghdadia TV station. In uncontainable fury, he threw first one of his shoes and then the other at the head of President George W. Bush during a Sunday press conference in Baghdad.
As he carried out this act, a gesture of utmost contempt in Iraqi culture, al-Zaidi shouted in Arabic, "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog. This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq."
Many of those who knew the 28-year-old reporter said that they believed his actions were a spontaneous eruption of fury over the effects of the more than six years of US war and occupation in his country. They have reported that al-Zaidi was deeply affected by covering the US bombardment of Sadr City, the teeming Shia slum neighborhood of Baghdad in which many civilians were killed. He also was at one point detained without cause by US occupation forces.
The protest came immediately after Bush concluded his remarks at a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called on the occasion of the two men signing a Status of Forces agreement (SOFA) that is supposed to end in the withdrawal of all US military forces by 2011 as well as a "Strategic Framework Agreement" that, in Bush's words, "formalizes ‘a relationship of friendship and cooperation' between our two countries in the economic, diplomatic, cultural, and security fields."
The signing was entirely for propaganda purposes, as US Ambassador Ryan Crocker had already initialed the documents on Washington's behalf last month. The event was staged as one more attempt by the administration in its closing days to cast its disastrous war in Iraq as a "success" and the country as "secure."
As with such previous visits, however, Bush was compelled to sneak into Iraq with no prior announcements and was able to appear in only heavily fortified areas and US bases. At the press conference where the incident took place, reporters were subjected to multiple searches by both US and Iraqi security.
Bush claimed in his remarks that the agreements were setting the stage for the "future of what we've been fighting for...a strong and capable democratic Iraq that will be a force of freedom and a force for peace in the heart of the Middle East." He continued, however, by adding that "the war is not over."
After suited Iraqi security guards wrestled al-Zaidi to the floor and dragged him out of the press conference, Bush and Maliki continued speaking, over the sounds of the reporter being brutally beaten in the next room.
As the New York Times reported, "They kicked him and beat him until ‘he was crying like a woman,' said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki."
Both Bush and sections of the American media tried to spin the incident by casting it as a demonstration of Iraq's new-found "freedom" and commenting that anyone carrying out a similar protest under Saddam Hussein would have been put to death.
Yet, the whereabouts and conditions of al-Zaidi remain unknown. The Iraqi regime issued a statement that it was holding him for investigation and reported that it was trying to determine whether someone paid him to throw his shoes.
Al-Zaidi's Al-Baghdadia television channel, which broadcasts from Cairo, issued a statement demanding his immediate release.
"Al-Baghdadia television demands that the Iraqi authorities immediately release their stringer Muntadhar al-Zaidi, in line with the democracy and freedom of expression that the American authorities promised the Iraqi people," said the statement.
It continued, "Any action taken against Muntathar will remind us of the actions and behaviors taken by the reign of the dictator and the violence, the random arrests, the mass graves and confiscations of freedom from the people."
"We fear for his safety," said Muzhir al-Khafaji, the channel's programming director. The station suspended its regular schedule, broadcasting continuous appeals for his release and messages of support together with footage of devastation wrought by the US war and music denouncing it.
After the incident, Bush commented, "I don't know what the guy's cause is."
If the US president genuinely remained clueless, the same could not be said for people all over Iraq, throughout the Arab world and indeed around the globe.
The "cause" is an unprovoked war that has cost more than a million Iraqi lives, left 2 million Iraqis wounded, turned 4 million into exiles or internal refugees and laid waste to the fabric of an entire society.
As al-Zaida's brother Dhirgham explained to the media, the reporter—who signed off his broadcasts with "reporting from occupied Baghdad"—hated what the US war had done to his country, both in terms of the US military presence and in the rise of reactionary Shia clericalist forces aligned with Iran. "He hates the American material occupation as much as he hates the Iranian moral occupation," said Dhirgham.
In Iraq itself, thousands took to the streets of Basra City, many of them waving shoes and carrying signs demanding al-Zaidi's release. The demonstration, in which American flags were burned, was as much a celebration of the reporter's actions as a protest over his treatment at the hands of the Maliki regime.
Similar protests were reported in Basra in the south and in Najaf, where protesters, apparently inspired by the report from Baghdad, pelted a passing American military patrol with shoes.
Newspapers in most Arab countries led with the protest against Bush and television stations replayed tape of the reporter hurling his shoes at the US president over and over again.
In press interviews, Iraqis and people throughout the region voiced their support for the reporter.
"I am happy for what happened because that will reflect how we do not like Bush." said Mohamed al-Hili, a 35-year-old policeman. "And our government has a different attitude and belief than ours. And I'd like to add that Mr. Muntader is a hero and he must be our president or at least P.M. [prime minister]. We need to replace al-Maliki with the real Iraqi—Mr. Muntader."
"I swear by God that all Iraqis with their different nationalities are glad about this act," said 45-year-old Yaareb Yousif Matti, a teacher from the northern city of Mosul.
In Nablus, on the Palestinian West Bank, Wafa Khayat, a 48-year-old doctor, called al-Zaidi's action "a message to Bush and all the US policy makers that they have to stop killing and humiliating people."
And in Jordan, businessman Samer Tabalat, 42, hailed the reporter as "the man.... He did what Arab leaders failed to do."
Even as the controversy swirled over the shoe-throwing, there were strong indications that the agreements that Bush came to sign will not bring about the promised withdrawal of American troops and have set the stage for the protracted continuation of the US occupation and the formalization of the Baghdad regime's status as a US client state.
Speaking on Saturday, the US military commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, said that although the US-Iraqi SOFA sets a June 30 deadline for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraqi cities, he anticipates them remaining well past that date.
"It's important that we maintain enough presence here that we can help them get through this year of transition," said Odierno. "We don't want to take a step backward, because we've made so much progress here."
American troops would remain in joint military bases set up in Iraqi cities fulfilling "training and support" roles, Odierno indicated.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office issued a statement in response, acknowledging that provisions of the agreement can be renegotiated: "We can change the date or articles if that is necessary." But he declared that Odierno's predictions about US forces remaining in the cities "premature."
The exchange followed last week's controversy over remarks made by Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh in Washington, in which he said that the regime in Baghdad would be willing to extend the 2011 deadline for a full US military withdrawal and predicted that Iraqi security forces would not be able to control the country for another decade.
In response, Maliki issued his own written statement claiming that Dabbagh was expressing "his personal point of view and that it does not represent the opinion of the Iraqi government."
The parliamentary bloc loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadar, which opposed the SOFA, said that the statements exposed the reality behind the claims made by both Washington and the Maliki regime.
"This confirmed our view that US forces will never withdraw from the cities next summer, and they will never leave Iraq by the end of 2011," Ahmed al-Masoudi, a spokesman for the Sadr bloc, told the Washington Post. "Iraqis will discover that the government has bamboozled them about this agreement."
The continuation of the US occupation is entirely in line with the policy of the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has clarified in recent weeks his intention to maintain a "residual force" in Iraq consisting of tens of thousands of US troops.
Via:
http://www.wsws.org
Dog is "The" Best Friend
While human beings couldn't care less about their peers...animals show us how it's done...
Hero Dog Tries To Help Wounded Dog - Click here for the funniest movie of the week
Hero Dog Tries To Help Wounded Dog - Click here for the funniest movie of the week
The Clash Bio
The Sex Pistols may have been the first British punk rock band, but the Clash were the definitive British punk rockers. Where the Pistols were nihilistic, the Clash were fiery and idealistic, charged with righteousness and a leftist political ideology. From the outset, the band was more musically adventurous, expanding its hard rock & roll with reggae, dub, and rockabilly among other roots musics. Furthermore, they were blessed with two exceptional songwriters in Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, each with a distinctive voice and style. The Clash copped heavily from classic outlaw imagery, positioning themselves as rebels with a cause. As a result, they won a passionately devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic. While they became rock & roll heroes in the U.K., second only to the Jam in terms of popularity, it took the Clash several years to break into the American market, and when they finally did in 1982, they imploded several months later. Though the Clash never became the superstars they always threatened to become, they restored passion and protest to rock & roll. For a while, they really did seem like "the only band that mattered."For a band that constantly sang about revolution and the working class, the Clash had surprisingly traditional roots. Joe Strummer (born John Graham Mellor, August 21, 1952) had spent most of his childhood in boarding school. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had busked on the streets of London and had formed a pub rock band called the 101'ers. Around the same time, Mick Jones (born June 26, 1955) was leading a hard rock group called the London SS. Unlike Strummer, Jones came from a working-class background in Brixton. Throughout his teens, he was fascinated with rock & roll, and he had formed the London SS with the intent of replicating the hard-driving sound of Mott the Hoople and Faces. Jones' childhood friend Paul Simonon (born December 15, 1956) joined the group as a bassist in 1976 after hearing the Sex Pistols; he replaced Tony James, who would later join Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. At the time, the band also featured drummer Tory Crimes (born Terry Chimes), who had recently replaced Topper Headon (born Nicky Headon, May 30, 1955). After witnessing the Sex Pistols in concert, Joe Strummer decided to break up the 101'ers in early 1976 in order to pursue a new, harder-edged musical direction. He left the band just before their first single, "Keys to Your Heart," was released. Along with fellow 101'er guitarist Keith Levene, Strummer joined the revamped London SS, now renamed the Clash.
The Clash performed its first concert in the summer of 1976, supporting the Sex Pistols in London. Levene left the band shortly afterward. Hiring as their manager Bernard Rhodes, a former business associate of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, the Clash set out on the Pistols' notorious Anarchy Tour late in 1976. Though only three concerts were performed on the tour, it nevertheless raised the Clash's profile and the band secured a record contract in February of 1977 with British CBS. Over the course of three weekends, the group recorded their debut album. Once the sessions were completed, Terry Chimes left the group, and Headon came aboard as the band's drummer. In the spring, the Clash's first single, "White Riot," and eponymous debut album were released to great critical acclaim and sales in the U.K., peaking at number 12 on the charts. The American division of CBS decided The Clash wasn't fit for radio play, so it decided to not release the album. The import of the record became the largest-selling import of all time. Shortly after the U.K. release of The Clash, the band set out on the whirlwind White Riot tour supported by the Jam and the Buzzcocks; the tour was highlighted by a date at London's Rainbow Theatre, when the audience tore the seats out of the venue. During the White Riot tour, CBS pulled "Remote Control" off the album as a single, and as a response, the Clash recorded "Complete Control" with reggae icon Lee "Scratch" Perry.
Throughout 1977, Strummer and Jones were in and out of jail for a myriad of minor indiscretions, ranging from vandalism to stealing a pillowcase, while Simonon and Headon were arrested for shooting racing pigeons with an air gun. The Clash's outlaw image was bolstered considerably by such events, but the band also began to branch out into social activism, such as headlining a Rock Against Racism concert. Released in the summer of 1978, the single "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" demonstrated the band's growing social consciousness. Shortly after the single peaked at number 32, the Clash began working on their second album with producer Sandy Pearlman, a former member of Blue Öyster Cult. Pearlman gave Give 'Em Enough Rope a clean but powerful sound designed to break the American market. While that didn't happen -- the album peaked at 128 on the U.S. charts in the spring of 1979 -- the record became an enormous hit in Britain, debuting at number two on the charts.
Early in 1979, the Clash began their first American tour, entitled "Pearl Harbor '79." That summer, the band released the U.K.-only EP The Cost of Living, which featured a cover of the Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought the Law." Following the later summer release of The Clash in America, the group set out on its second U.S. tour, hiring Mickey Gallagher of Ian Dury's Blockheads as a keyboardist. On both of their U.S. tours, the Clash had R&B acts like Bo Diddley, Sam & Dave, Lee Dorsey, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins support them, as well as neo-traditionalist country-rocker Joe Ely and the punk rockabilly band the Cramps. The choice of supporting acts indicated that the Clash were becoming fascinated with older rock & roll and all of its legends. That fascination became the driving force behind their breakthrough double album, London Calling. Produced by Guy Stevens, who formerly worked with Mott the Hoople, London Calling boasted an array of styles, ranging from rockabilly and New Orleans R&B to anthemic hard rock and reggae. Retailing at the price of a single album, the record debuted at number nine on the U.K. charts in late 1979 and climbed to number 27 on the U.S. charts in the spring of 1980.
The Clash successfully toured the U.S., the U.K., and Europe in early 1980, during which time the pseudo-documentary Rude Boy was released in England. During the summer, the band released the Dutch-only, dub-inflected single "Bankrobber," which they recorded with DJ Mikey Dread; by the fall, the British branch of CBS was forced to release the single due to popular demand. Shortly afterward, the band went to New York to begin the tension-filled, self-produced sessions for their follow-up to London Calling. In November, a U.S.-only EP of odds and ends entitled Black Market Clash was released. The following month, the triple-record set Sandinista! appeared in the U.K. and the U.S. The critical reaction to the album was decidedly mixed, with American critics reacting more favorably than their British counterparts. Furthermore, the band's audience in the U.K. was shrinking slightly -- Sandinista! was the first record the group released that sold more copies in the U.S. than the U.K.
After spending much of 1981 touring and resting, the Clash reconvened late in the year to record their fifth album, with producer Glyn Johns, a former engineer/producer for the Rolling Stones, Who, and Led Zeppelin. Headon left the band shortly after the sessions finished; the press statement said he parted with the group due to political differences, but it was later revealed that the split was due to his heavy drug use. The band replaced Headon with their old drummer, Terry Chimes, around the spring release of Combat Rock. The album was the Clash's most commercially successful effort, entering the U.K. charts at number two and climbing into the American Top Ten in early 1983, thanks to the Top Ten hit single "Rock the Casbah." During the fall of 1982, the Clash opened for the Who on their farewell tour. Though the tour helped Combat Rock scale the U.S. charts, the Clash were routinely booed off the stage on every date of the tour.
Although the Clash were at the height of their commercial powers in 1983, the band was beginning fall apart. Chimes was fired in the spring and was replaced by Pete Howard, formerly of Cold Fish. During the summer, the band headlined the U.S. Festival in California; it would be their last major appearance. In September, Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon fired Mick Jones because he "drifted apart from the original idea of the Clash." Jones formed Big Audio Dynamite the following year, while the Clash hired guitarists Vince White and Nick Sheppard to fill his vacancy. Throughout 1984, the band toured America and Europe, testing the new lineup. The revamped Clash finally released their first album, Cut the Crap, in November. The album was greeted with overwhelmingly poor reviews and sales; it would later be disowned by Strummer and Simonon.
Early in 1986, Strummer and Simonon decided to permanently disband the Clash. Several years later, Simonon formed the roots rock band Havana 3 A.M., which released only one album, in 1991; following the record's release, he concentrated on painting. After reuniting with Jones to write songs for Big Audio Dynamite's second album, 1986's No. 10 Upping Street, Strummer drifted between a musical and film career, appearing in Alex Cox's Straight to Hell (1986) and Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989). He also scored Permanent Record (1988) and Cox's Walker (1987). Strummer released a solo album, Earthquake Weather, in 1989. Shortly afterward, he joined the Pogues as a touring rhythm guitarist and vocalist. By 1991, he had quietly drifted away from the spotlight. For the remainder of the decade, Strummer was quiet, appearing on only one other recording -- Black Grape's 1996 Top Ten hit "England's Irie."
Though Strummer and Simonon were both quiet, and Jones was busy with various incarnations of Big Audio Dynamite, rumors of a Clash reunion continued to circulate throughout the '90s. When "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" appeared in a Levi's television commercial in 1992, the song was re-released in the U.K. by CBS, and it shot to number one, fueling reunion speculation. The rumors appeared again in 1995 and 1996, when the Sex Pistols decided to reunite, but the Clash remained quiet. Live: From Here to Eternity, assembling material recorded between 1978 and 1982, was released in 1999, shortly followed by the documentary film Westway to the World.
By:
Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
Friday, December 12, 2008
Osteoporosis Drug Seems to Shrink Breast Tumors
Researchers continue to test the mettle of breakthrough breast cancer drugs, three decades after tamoxifen changed the medical landscape by drastically reducing the risk of recurrences in women with estrogen receptor-positive tumors.
Encouraging findings on several different drugs were presented Thursday at the CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in Texas.
First in the line-up, the osteoporosis drug zoledronic acid (Zometa) appears to shrink breast tumors in patients who undergo chemotherapy.
The drug is already approved to treat breast cancer that has spread to the bone and, earlier this year, was reported to lower the risk of breast cancer recurrence in pre-menopausal women with early estrogen- or progesterone-positive tumors.
In an analysis of slightly more than 200 women, those who received Zometa in addition to chemotherapy had better results than those receiving chemotherapy alone. After compensating for variables such as estrogen receptor status and treatment duration, residual invasive tumor size was 42.4 millimeters in the chemotherapy alone group, and 28.2 millimeters in the combination group.
"This data suggests that zoledronic acid is doing something more than protecting bone," said study senior author Dr. Robert Coleman, a professor of medical oncology at the University of Sheffield in England. "It's not practice-changing. It's hypothesis-generating, which will lead to the design of new trials to look at this in detail. But this is the first patient-related evidence."
Coleman spoke, along with researchers involved with other trials, at a Thursday teleconference. Other studies showing promise included:
Postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor- and/or progesterone receptor-positive breast cancer who took the aromatase inhibitor exemestane (Aromasin) had a 15 percent relative reduction in recurrences and a 19 percent reduction in the risk of distant metastasis, compared with those taking tamoxifen alone. "Exemestane is very effective at preventing recurrences," said Dr. Stephen Jones, medical director of U.S. Oncology Research in Houston. Exemestane, like other aromatase inhibitors, blocks production of estrogen, while tamoxifen, long the gold standard in breast cancer therapy, inhibits the hormone's effects in the body.Seventy percent of women receiving Herceptin (trastuzumab), a drug used to treat HER2-positive breast cancer, plus chemotherapy before surgery survived three years without a recurrence. Only slightly more than half of women receiving chemotherapy alone survived that long. The incidence of major heart problems was low. "Herceptin given before surgery with chemotherapy significantly [reduces the likelihood] of a recurrence in patients with advanced HER2-positive cancer, and most likely will translate into a benefit in terms of survival," said Dr. Luca Gianni, director of medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute in Milan, Italy. "We think that this data establishes preoperative Herceptin with chemotherapy as a standard treatment option for women with advanced HER2-positive breast cancer."Combining lapatinib (Tykerb), another HER2 inhibitor, with an aromatase inhibitor (in this case, letrozole) prolonged progression-free survival from three months among those taking letrozole (Femara) alone to 8.2 months in women taking both drugs. These patients had HER-2-positive metastatic breast cancer. "The combination shows benefits in controlling the disease and controlling it for longer than using endocrine therapy alone," said Stephen Johnston, a consultant in medical oncology and reader in breast cancer medicine at Royal Marsden Hospital and Foundation in the United Kingdom. "The suggestion is that combined therapy may be the best approach."Finally, aromatase inhibitors may be poised to replace tamoxifen as standard treatment to prevent breast cancer recurrence in women who have already undergone conventional therapy, according to a new meta-analysis. The analysis looked at two groups: women with postmenopausal estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer who took tamoxifen for five years after standard treatment and women who took tamoxifen but then switched to an aromatase inhibitor after initial treatment. "The data are still early but it does show a statistically significant advantage in [women who were switched from tamoxifen to an aromatase inhibitor] but not in [women who took tamoxifen for the full five years]," said Dr. James Ingle, director of the breast cancer program at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn. "But you have to remember our experience with tamoxifen. It took 10 to 15 years to see the full effect of tamoxifen."
Source:
Bettie Page, 1950s pin-up queen, dies in L.A.
Bettie Page, one of America's most photographed pin-up girls during the 1950s, died in Los Angeles on Thursday from pneumonia, her agent said. She was 85.
www.reuters.com
Page was a ubiquitous sight during the 1950s, propelled to stardom when she posed for Playboy as Miss January 1955. Soon her image was gracing playing cards, record albums and bedroom posters across the country.
She stopped modeling in 1957, retreated from the public spotlight and turned to religion. She enjoyed a renaissance of sorts in the 1980s, as a new generation of fans became obsessed with her legacy.
Her agent, Mark Roesler, said Page was admitted to a Los Angeles-area hospital four weeks ago. She never regained consciousness after suffering a heart attack earlier this month.
With her dark bangs, alluring blue-gray eyes and wide smile, Page cultivated an innocent girl-next-door persona. The one-time school teacher was nice, but clearly also naughty. Some of her photos featured spanking and bondage.
"Bettie Page embodied the stereotypical wholesomeness of the Fifties and the hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface," authors Karen Essex and James L. Swanson wrote in their 1996 book "Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend."
Page professed to be mystified by all the attention, saying she never felt particularly attractive and had to wear a lot of makeup to cover up her large pores. After she found God, she was initially ashamed of having posed nude.
"(B)ut now most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude," she told Playboy last year. "So I'm not ashamed of it now, but I still don't understand it."
Bettie Mae Page was born on April 22, 1923, in Nashville, one of six children. She and two sisters were sent to an orphanage after her father went to jail and her mother could not cope on her own. Page later described her father as "a sex fiend" who started sexually molesting her when she was 13.
Page, armed with an arts degree with Peabody College in Nashville, did her first modeling work in the 1940s after moving to San Francisco with the first of her three husbands. After they divorced in 1947, she pursued modeling in New York. Photos from a shoot with Miami photographer Bunny Yeager ended up in the pages of Playboy.
The layout featured Page winking at the camera wearing only a Santa hat as she decorated a Christmas tree. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner described it as "a milestone in the history of the magazine," which he had founded less than two years earlier.
Later in life, Page was furious that Yeager made a fortune from the photos and never compensated her.
Some American lawmakers were not as impressed with her modeling abilities. Page was served with a subpoena to appear before U.S. Senate investigators trying to discover a link between juvenile delinquency and pornography. Page never appeared. Soon after, she completely disappeared from the scene.
After two other brief marriages failed, Page battled acute schizophrenia beginning in the early 1970s. Her comeback gathered momentum with the 1991 movie "The Rocketeer," based on a comic book where the hero's girlfriend was Page. Fan clubs and websites proliferated, and Page made a good living signing memorabilia at conventions. On the rare occasions that she gave interviews, she insisted that she not be photographed.
Page had no children. There was no immediate information about funeral plans.
Via:www.reuters.com
US: Relatives of September 11 victims condemn Guantánamo show trial
In a letter released December 10, 33 relatives of people killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks have condemned the Guantánamo military tribunals as illegitimate and politically motivated.
Issued in response to positive remarks made by a half-dozen family members selected by the Pentagon to attend hearings this week, the statement reflects strong opposition within the US population to the policies carried out by the military at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere over the past five years.
The letter, published on the American Civil Liberties Union web site, stressed the fact “that many of us do not believe these military commissions to be fair, in accordance with American values, or capable of achieving the justice that 9/11 family members and all Americans deserve.
“We believe that the secretive and unconstitutional nature of these proceedings deprive us of the right to know the full truth about what happened on 9/11,” the letter stated.
“These prosecutions have been politically motivated from the start, are designed to ensure quick convictions at the expense of due process and transparency, and are structured to prevent the revelation of abusive interrogations and torture engaged in by the US government. Unfortunately, any verdict borne of these proceedings will lack legitimacy and leave us wondering if true justice has been served. No comfort or closure can come from military commissions that ignore the rule of law and stain America’s reputation at home and abroad.”
The statement concluded with a reference to the assurances given by the incoming Obama administration to close down the Guantánamo operations and expressed the desire for “a fresh start for these and all other Guantánamo prosecutions in US courts worthy of American justice.” The full statement can be accessed here.
Since Monday, pre-trial hearings in a death penalty trial have been underway at Guantánamo against five prisoners charged with planning the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000. The Pentagon has allowed limited numbers of relatives to attend the hearings, selected by what its spokespersons described as a random lottery.
Among the defendants before the military tribunal is so-called September 11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the CIA admitted to torturing. The men have been held for nearly seven years, denied basic legal and democratic rights and subjected to inhuman conditions and torture. During the hearings, secret and hearsay evidence and confessions obtained through torture will be admitted.
Over a month before the hearings, the five submitted a letter to the military panel saying they “wished to enter pleas in what was termed confessions” and be executed. (See “9/11 guilty pleas expose Guantánamo kangaroo court” ) On Monday the judge, Army Colonel Stephen Henley, postponed these pleas because of outstanding motions regarding questions of the mental instability of two defendants.
After Monday’s proceedings, a handful of September 11 relatives spoke at a Pentagon-organized press conference outside the Guantánamo prison, unanimously characterizing the trial process as democratic and just.
According to a December 10 Associated Press report, more than 100 families applied to attend the hearings. After selecting “at random” the nine relatives in attendance Monday, according to the AP, the Pentagon told several families they could watch the hearings via remote video at military facilities in the US, but they hadn’t been accommodated.
As a December 9 New York Times article by William Glaberson noted, the military has been unsuccessful at presenting its commissions as “fair and open”: “They were outmatched by human rights groups and defense lawyers, with their inflammatory accusations about torture and secret evidence. … The half-dozen family members who spoke to reporters gave the Pentagon the counterpoint it had been lacking.”
The article noted, “Pentagon officials have a track record of trying to line up pro-Bush-administration observers.”
Thomas Durkin, a defense lawyer representing one of the defendants, told the Times that the September 11 families’ praise was, in the paper’s words, “an effort to make it politically risky for Mr. Obama to close the military commissions by making it appear that abandoning the military commissions would be abandoning the victims too.” Durkin added, “This show trial is nothing more today than an effort to blackmail him politically.”
Via:
www.wsws.org
US jobless claims soar to 26-year high
The Labor Department reported Thursday that the number of US workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits last week jumped 58,000 to a seasonally adjusted total of 573,000—the highest figure since November 1982.
The increase was more than twice the figure forecast by economists, showing that the recession in the US is developing far more rapidly than anticipated.
The four-week average of new claims also neared a 26-year high, rising 14,250 to 540,000.
The total of continuing claims, those drawn by workers collecting benefits for more than one week, also rose, climbing 338,000 to 4,429,000. The increase in continuing claims was the biggest in 34 years, showing that laid-off workers are finding it increasingly difficult to find new employment.
Also on Thursday, the Federal Reserve Board reported that the total net worth of US households fell 4.7 percent in the third quarter from the second quarter. The decline was the fourth in a row, indicating the degree to which the recession is driving down the living standards of the population.
These figures, and other newly released data on retail sales, home foreclosures and US exports that show a dramatic decline in the American economy and growing social distress, coincide with economic reports documenting the emergence of a global recession on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.
The World Bank on Tuesday issued a report saying that the world is plunging into a recession likely to be more protracted than any since the 1930s. The bank projected that world trade would actually contract next year, marking the first year of negative growth since 1982. It noted that North America, Europe and Japan are already in recession, and predicted that economic growth in the so-called developing world would fall sharply. The bank forecast that capital flows to developing countries will plunge by 50 percent.
“We know that the financial crisis is now likely to be the worst since the 1930s,” said Justin Lin, the chief economist of the World Bank.
The bank forecast that the global economy will grow by a mere 0.9 percent in 2009, down from 2.5 percent this year and 4 percent in 2006.
The volume of world trade, which grew 9.8 percent in 2006 and an estimated 6.2 percent this year, will contract by 2.1 percent in 2009. That drop would be deeper than the last major contraction in trade—1.9 percent in 1975.
The bank noted as particularly ominous a sharp contraction in China’s growth rate. It forecast that the country, which grew 11.9 percent in 2007, will slow to 7 percent this year and 6.6 percent in 2010.
Deutsche Bank this week issued an even more dire forecast, saying the global economy would actually contract by 0.2 percent in 2009, with the US, Europe and Japan in recessions of roughly equal severity.
“Global trade is reversing course because it is a function of industrial production, and we’re seeing the biggest coordinated slump in industrial production since the early 1930s,” said Philip Suttle, director of Global Macro Analysis at the Institute of International Finance.
In an article Thursday on the global crisis, the Washington Post noted that the credit crunch and near-collapse of consumer spending in the advanced countries are reverberating across the globe. South African miners are being laid off because of the collapse in platinum prices, which is bound up with the slump in auto sales in North America, Europe and Japan. In India, thousands of textile workers are losing their jobs as global clothing sales plunge. While November auto sales were down 37 percent in the US, they were also down 15 percent in India and 30 percent in South Africa.
In the two days since the release of the World Bank report, economic data has emerged that indicates the bank has, if anything, underestimated the depth of the crisis. On Wednesday, the Chinese government reported that Chinese exports last month registered their sharpest drop in nearly a decade, falling 2.2 percent from a year earlier. That compares to a 19.2 percent rise in October and a nearly 26 percent increase in 2007.
Imports into China fell even more sharply. They were down 17.9 percent in November from a year earlier. Particularly indicative of the impact of the recession in the West on Chinese manufacturing, the country reported a steep decline in oil imports. China also reported that direct foreign investment fell 36.5 percent in November from a year earlier.
The Chinese government was itself shocked by these figures, which it had not anticipated. The dramatic decline in the Chinese economy revealed by these figures dashes hopes in the advanced countries that China could serve as the catalyst to pull the world economy out of recession.
Elsewhere in Asia:
• Japan’s gross domestic product contracted much more rapidly in the third quarter than previously thought, figures published Tuesday showed. Data showed a quarter-on-quarter decline of 0.5 percent, compared to a preliminary estimate of 0.1 percent. Japan’s economy contracted at an annualized rate of 1.8 percent.
• Taiwanese exports last month fell by almost a quarter from a year ago, the sharpest drop since September 2001.
• Korea reported that its November shipments dropped 18 percent from the previous year.
In Europe:
• Ford, Volkswagen and Renault have idled their plants in Russia, and Standard & Poor’s on Monday cut the country’s debt rating for the first time in a decade, warning of a “rapid depletion” of Russia’s reserves.
• German manufacturing orders plunged in October by 6.1 percent after a record decline of 8.3 percent the previous month. Economists had forecast a rise of 0.4 percent for October. Deutsche Bank chief economist Norbert Walter told a newspaper that German GDP could contract by up to 4 percent in 2009.
• In France, manufacturing excluding energy and agriculture dropped 3.2 percent in October compared to September. Auto production dropped 14.3 percent after a 5.9 percent drop the previous month. Over 12 months, auto production has dropped 29.2 percent, the biggest drop since 1991.
Also in October, production of metal and metal products declined 5.5 percent. Rubber and plastics dropped 3.6 percent.
In the Americas:
• New auto sales in Brazil dropped 25.7 percent in November from the previous month. Auto production fell 34.4 percent.
• Statistics Canada reported December 5 that 70,600 jobs were lost in November, the biggest monthly job loss since 1982.
Other data on the US economy released this week showed retail sales in November, excluding autos, falling by 5.5 percent from the previous year, the biggest monthly drop in five years. November sales were down 3 percent from October.
The real estate firm Realty Trac reported that US home mortgage foreclosure activity jumped 28 percent last month compared with the same month a year ago. The company predicted that foreclosures would surge even more sharply beginning in January, when temporary foreclosure moratoria end and mass layoffs take their toll on family incomes.
More than 1 million homes have been lost to foreclosure since the housing crisis broke in August of 2007, and Realty Trac predicts that another 1 million homeowners could be forced out of their homes next year.
Last week, Credit Suisse issued a report forecasting 8.1 million foreclosures by the end of 2012, accounting for 16 percent of all US mortgages.
Finally, the US trade deficit unexpectedly rose in October, after having consistently fallen as a result of the falling value of the dollar and the resultant reduction in the relative price of US exports. The 1.1 percent rise in the trade gap was mainly the result of a precipitous 2.2 percent drop in US exports resulting from falling demand in Europe, Japan, China and elsewhere.
Harm Bandholz, an economist at UniCredit Markets & Investment Banking in New York, commented, “The last bastion of the US economy has collapsed. The US economy will contract by 4.5 percent in the current quarter.”
Economists at Morgan Stanley projected the US economy will contract at a 6 percent annual pace this quarter, upping the estimate from 5 percent.
US and global financial markets, meanwhile, continue to be in turmoil. One measure of the fear that continues to grip the markets is the fact that investors on Tuesday accepted a zero percent rate in the US government’s auction of $30 billion worth of short-term securities. Demand was so great that the government could have sold four times as much.
“The last time this happened was the Great Depression, when people were willing to accept no return on their money, or possibly even a negative return,” said Edward Yardeni, an independent analyst.
Every day continues to bring reports of new mass layoffs. Over the past several days the following have been announced:
• Bank of America announced plans Thursday to cut 30,000 to 35,000 jobs over the next three years as a result of its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and the weak economy. This represents more than 10 percent of the combined workforce of the merged firms.
• Rio Tinto, the mining giant, said Wednesday it will cut 14,000 jobs, 13 percent of its workforce.
• Sony on Tuesday said it will close five or six factories and cut 8,000 jobs worldwide.
• Wyndham Worldwide Corp. announced it will cut 4,000 jobs. The New Jersey company owns hotel brands such as Ramada and Days Inn.
• Goldman Sachs this week will lay off as many as 250 European staff, with most cuts coming in London.
• KB Toys, an 86-year-old toy retailer, filed for bankruptcy with plans to shut its 277 stores, employing 11,000 workers.
• Stanley Works, a Connecticut-based diversified maker of tools for construction and do-it-yourself use, said Thursday it is eliminating 2,000 jobs and will close three of its 45 factories.
• Office Deport plans to close 112 stores in North America over the next three months, eliminating 2,200 jobs.
• National Public Radio will cut its workforce by 7 percent (about 60 employees).
• SKF, the Swedish engineering company and world’s biggest bearings producer, said Wednesday it will cut 2,500 jobs, or 6 percent of its workforce.
Via:
www.wsws.org
The increase was more than twice the figure forecast by economists, showing that the recession in the US is developing far more rapidly than anticipated.
The four-week average of new claims also neared a 26-year high, rising 14,250 to 540,000.
The total of continuing claims, those drawn by workers collecting benefits for more than one week, also rose, climbing 338,000 to 4,429,000. The increase in continuing claims was the biggest in 34 years, showing that laid-off workers are finding it increasingly difficult to find new employment.
Also on Thursday, the Federal Reserve Board reported that the total net worth of US households fell 4.7 percent in the third quarter from the second quarter. The decline was the fourth in a row, indicating the degree to which the recession is driving down the living standards of the population.
These figures, and other newly released data on retail sales, home foreclosures and US exports that show a dramatic decline in the American economy and growing social distress, coincide with economic reports documenting the emergence of a global recession on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.
The World Bank on Tuesday issued a report saying that the world is plunging into a recession likely to be more protracted than any since the 1930s. The bank projected that world trade would actually contract next year, marking the first year of negative growth since 1982. It noted that North America, Europe and Japan are already in recession, and predicted that economic growth in the so-called developing world would fall sharply. The bank forecast that capital flows to developing countries will plunge by 50 percent.
“We know that the financial crisis is now likely to be the worst since the 1930s,” said Justin Lin, the chief economist of the World Bank.
The bank forecast that the global economy will grow by a mere 0.9 percent in 2009, down from 2.5 percent this year and 4 percent in 2006.
The volume of world trade, which grew 9.8 percent in 2006 and an estimated 6.2 percent this year, will contract by 2.1 percent in 2009. That drop would be deeper than the last major contraction in trade—1.9 percent in 1975.
The bank noted as particularly ominous a sharp contraction in China’s growth rate. It forecast that the country, which grew 11.9 percent in 2007, will slow to 7 percent this year and 6.6 percent in 2010.
Deutsche Bank this week issued an even more dire forecast, saying the global economy would actually contract by 0.2 percent in 2009, with the US, Europe and Japan in recessions of roughly equal severity.
“Global trade is reversing course because it is a function of industrial production, and we’re seeing the biggest coordinated slump in industrial production since the early 1930s,” said Philip Suttle, director of Global Macro Analysis at the Institute of International Finance.
In an article Thursday on the global crisis, the Washington Post noted that the credit crunch and near-collapse of consumer spending in the advanced countries are reverberating across the globe. South African miners are being laid off because of the collapse in platinum prices, which is bound up with the slump in auto sales in North America, Europe and Japan. In India, thousands of textile workers are losing their jobs as global clothing sales plunge. While November auto sales were down 37 percent in the US, they were also down 15 percent in India and 30 percent in South Africa.
In the two days since the release of the World Bank report, economic data has emerged that indicates the bank has, if anything, underestimated the depth of the crisis. On Wednesday, the Chinese government reported that Chinese exports last month registered their sharpest drop in nearly a decade, falling 2.2 percent from a year earlier. That compares to a 19.2 percent rise in October and a nearly 26 percent increase in 2007.
Imports into China fell even more sharply. They were down 17.9 percent in November from a year earlier. Particularly indicative of the impact of the recession in the West on Chinese manufacturing, the country reported a steep decline in oil imports. China also reported that direct foreign investment fell 36.5 percent in November from a year earlier.
The Chinese government was itself shocked by these figures, which it had not anticipated. The dramatic decline in the Chinese economy revealed by these figures dashes hopes in the advanced countries that China could serve as the catalyst to pull the world economy out of recession.
Elsewhere in Asia:
• Japan’s gross domestic product contracted much more rapidly in the third quarter than previously thought, figures published Tuesday showed. Data showed a quarter-on-quarter decline of 0.5 percent, compared to a preliminary estimate of 0.1 percent. Japan’s economy contracted at an annualized rate of 1.8 percent.
• Taiwanese exports last month fell by almost a quarter from a year ago, the sharpest drop since September 2001.
• Korea reported that its November shipments dropped 18 percent from the previous year.
In Europe:
• Ford, Volkswagen and Renault have idled their plants in Russia, and Standard & Poor’s on Monday cut the country’s debt rating for the first time in a decade, warning of a “rapid depletion” of Russia’s reserves.
• German manufacturing orders plunged in October by 6.1 percent after a record decline of 8.3 percent the previous month. Economists had forecast a rise of 0.4 percent for October. Deutsche Bank chief economist Norbert Walter told a newspaper that German GDP could contract by up to 4 percent in 2009.
• In France, manufacturing excluding energy and agriculture dropped 3.2 percent in October compared to September. Auto production dropped 14.3 percent after a 5.9 percent drop the previous month. Over 12 months, auto production has dropped 29.2 percent, the biggest drop since 1991.
Also in October, production of metal and metal products declined 5.5 percent. Rubber and plastics dropped 3.6 percent.
In the Americas:
• New auto sales in Brazil dropped 25.7 percent in November from the previous month. Auto production fell 34.4 percent.
• Statistics Canada reported December 5 that 70,600 jobs were lost in November, the biggest monthly job loss since 1982.
Other data on the US economy released this week showed retail sales in November, excluding autos, falling by 5.5 percent from the previous year, the biggest monthly drop in five years. November sales were down 3 percent from October.
The real estate firm Realty Trac reported that US home mortgage foreclosure activity jumped 28 percent last month compared with the same month a year ago. The company predicted that foreclosures would surge even more sharply beginning in January, when temporary foreclosure moratoria end and mass layoffs take their toll on family incomes.
More than 1 million homes have been lost to foreclosure since the housing crisis broke in August of 2007, and Realty Trac predicts that another 1 million homeowners could be forced out of their homes next year.
Last week, Credit Suisse issued a report forecasting 8.1 million foreclosures by the end of 2012, accounting for 16 percent of all US mortgages.
Finally, the US trade deficit unexpectedly rose in October, after having consistently fallen as a result of the falling value of the dollar and the resultant reduction in the relative price of US exports. The 1.1 percent rise in the trade gap was mainly the result of a precipitous 2.2 percent drop in US exports resulting from falling demand in Europe, Japan, China and elsewhere.
Harm Bandholz, an economist at UniCredit Markets & Investment Banking in New York, commented, “The last bastion of the US economy has collapsed. The US economy will contract by 4.5 percent in the current quarter.”
Economists at Morgan Stanley projected the US economy will contract at a 6 percent annual pace this quarter, upping the estimate from 5 percent.
US and global financial markets, meanwhile, continue to be in turmoil. One measure of the fear that continues to grip the markets is the fact that investors on Tuesday accepted a zero percent rate in the US government’s auction of $30 billion worth of short-term securities. Demand was so great that the government could have sold four times as much.
“The last time this happened was the Great Depression, when people were willing to accept no return on their money, or possibly even a negative return,” said Edward Yardeni, an independent analyst.
Every day continues to bring reports of new mass layoffs. Over the past several days the following have been announced:
• Bank of America announced plans Thursday to cut 30,000 to 35,000 jobs over the next three years as a result of its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and the weak economy. This represents more than 10 percent of the combined workforce of the merged firms.
• Rio Tinto, the mining giant, said Wednesday it will cut 14,000 jobs, 13 percent of its workforce.
• Sony on Tuesday said it will close five or six factories and cut 8,000 jobs worldwide.
• Wyndham Worldwide Corp. announced it will cut 4,000 jobs. The New Jersey company owns hotel brands such as Ramada and Days Inn.
• Goldman Sachs this week will lay off as many as 250 European staff, with most cuts coming in London.
• KB Toys, an 86-year-old toy retailer, filed for bankruptcy with plans to shut its 277 stores, employing 11,000 workers.
• Stanley Works, a Connecticut-based diversified maker of tools for construction and do-it-yourself use, said Thursday it is eliminating 2,000 jobs and will close three of its 45 factories.
• Office Deport plans to close 112 stores in North America over the next three months, eliminating 2,200 jobs.
• National Public Radio will cut its workforce by 7 percent (about 60 employees).
• SKF, the Swedish engineering company and world’s biggest bearings producer, said Wednesday it will cut 2,500 jobs, or 6 percent of its workforce.
Via:
www.wsws.org
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Songs from a modern lover: Jonathan Richman at The Southgate House
American singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman performed an outstanding set at Newport, Kentucky’s Southgate House on October 24.
Richman is best known as the founder and leader of The Modern Lovers, a band formed in 1970 which had a significant influence on the punk rock musicians who emerged near the end of that decade. The band split just a few years into its career when Richman chose to pursue more melodic music and experiment with different rhythms that allowed for more freedom and improvisation.
Performing a stripped-down brand of pop music influenced by 1950s rock and doo-wop, Richman remained something of a cult figure for several decades until 1998, when he was introduced to a new generation of listeners with his appearance in the Farrelly Brothers’ film There’s Something About Mary.
Even more than in his recordings, one gets the best sense of Richman as an artist in his live performances. His concerts today have an intimate quality. They are spontaneous, in the best sense of the word, and performed without a set list. Richman improvises lines and verses, sings in several languages and translates line after line into English for his audience. The instrumentation is limited to Richman’s own acoustic guitar and the drums of his longtime collaborator Tommy Larkins. Richman often steps away from the microphone while performing and moves to the front of the stage to sing and play directly to the audience. His voice carries surprisingly well, and he often sets aside his guitar altogether in favor of singing unaccompanied, typically with his hands held over his heart.
The singer opened his Southgate show with the title track from his latest album Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild. His set drew heavily on material from this 2008 work, a moving collection of songs which deal primarily with themes of love, loss, and the value of experience and discovery.
In “The Lovers are Here and They’re Full of Sweat,” also taken from his latest album, Richman sang of a couple who make their way through a number of emotional states, struggling one moment, happily in love the next. Whatever ultimately became of them, he sang admiringly of the way the couple were going to “take this sterile place and make it live.”
With his sense of humor fully intact, Richman stopped the song suddenly near its end and said to that crowd, “I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking ‘Okay, Jonathan, but what does it sound like in French?’” He then began the song’s French-language “twin,” a radically different version of the work called “Le Printemps Des Amoureux Est Venu.”
It was the love songs, above all, that had the greatest impact that evening. Richman has a gift for writing them. In “Her Mystery Not of High Heels and Eye Shadow,” one of the highlights of the concert, he sang “she rocks, she swings, she delights in the faded things/Her mystery not of high heels and eye shadow.” As is evident in this composition, Richman has little use for official definitions of beauty and often sings of his love for “real” people and real things.
As he sang “My Baby Love Love Loves Me” with its line “even more than I prayed for” repeated over and over, Richman would drop to his knees, looking upward with his hands stretched far out to his sides, singing once again without his microphone. One was taken by the sincerity and sense of elation communicated in his performance. There were many such moments to be found throughout the evening.
Along with these songs taken from his two or three most recent albums, Richman occasionally reached farther back into his catalogue. To the delight of the audience he sang “Pablo Picasso,” one of his best-known compositions from his time with The Modern Lovers. It’s a well-loved, fan-favorite but ultimately a slight composition when compared to his more mature work. Richman, now 57 years old, perhaps feels an obligation to touch on some of his past work, but clearly feels more at home performing newer songs. He politely declined to play a number of older works requested by audience members near the front of the stage.
Perhaps the most moving song performed during the show was “As My Mother Lay Lying,” both the last song played and the last song from Because Her Beauty is Raw and Wild. The song, written about the death of his mother, clearly affected Richman as he sang of her time in a nursing home, “Now just bones and silver hair, my restless twisting mother sleeping there/As my mother lay lying, I learned/As my mother lie dying, I learned some more.” It’s a haunting composition, with a simple melody which reveals itself slowly and is perfectly suited to the song’s lyrics. It deserves to be counted among Richman’s very best work.
Jonathan Richman showed himself to be a sincere and thoughtful artist during his performance at the Southgate House. He continues to be an energetic and able performer. His best work, much of it on display that evening, contains a sense of humor free from cynicism and, in his more serious efforts, a sober and accepting approach to life in its best and least moments. He is a genuine talent.
Milk, identity politics and Gus Van Sant’s art
The subject of Gus Van Sant's new movie is Harvey Milk, a 1970s liberal activist and the first major openly gay politician to be elected in the US.
Milk opens with footage of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, a violent protest by homosexuals against police brutality. Other images of men being beaten by police and crammed into paddy wagons—or hiding their faces from the camera to protect their identities—speak to a time when being gay was illegal or semi-legal in many places and, in general, there was widespread harassment and victimization of homosexuals.
Harvey Milk was born on Long Island, New York, in 1930, the son of Eastern European Jews. The Korean War veteran held jobs on Wall Street and in 1964 worked for the presidential campaign of right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater. Swept up by the "counter-culture" of the 1960s and 1970s, Milk openly acknowledged his sexual orientation and eventually fell in with a bohemian milieu in San Francisco. He became an advocate of gay rights, and finally, ran for public office.Elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, Milk was assassinated in November 1978, along with the city's mayor, George Moscone. Van Sant's film essentially recounts Milk's six-year career in San Francisco politics.
Milk (Sean Penn) first appears, toward the end of his life, speaking into a tape recorder in a darkened room. He explains, "If a bullet should enter my brain, let the bullet destroy every closet door" (i.e., impel gays to come "out of the closet".) Milk is recording a personal testament in response to death threats he has been receiving since his unsuccessful campaign for the California State Assembly in 1976.
Full color washes over the screen and the film backtracks to the origins of Milk's career as an activist and eventually, a politician—his meeting a handsome young hippie, Scott Smith (James Franco) in 1970, who will become a long-time lover. Milk starts growing his hair and exchanges his business suits for jeans and T-shirts. The couple leave New York for San Francisco in 1972, where they open a camera shop in the Castro district. (By 1969, San Francisco had more gays per capita than any other American city.)
The storefront business soon becomes the hub of neighborhood political activity and Milk decides to run for political office. He starts assembling a core team, often by pulling people off the street. One such recruit is the enthusiastic Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), a gay teenager and former prostitute from Phoenix.
In order to get elected, Milk forms alliances with various organizations, including the local Teamsters' leadership. In exchange for a pledge by union leader Allan Baird to help in the hiring of more gay truck drivers, Milk becomes instrumental in organizing a boycott of Coors beer by gay bars. (The AFL-CIO began the boycott of Coors products in 1977, when 1,500 members of Local 366 of the Brewery, Bottling, Can and Allied Industrial Union walked off their jobs in a dispute over the company's desire to subject its employees to polygraph, or lie-detector, tests.)
Because of his outspokenness about his sexuality, Milk's efforts to seek support from the more established, and wealthier, figures in the gay community are rebuffed. Their attitude was summed up by Rick Stokes, a gay rights attorney: "I'm just a businessman who happens to be gay."
In both 1973 and 1975, Milk loses his bid for the city's Board of Supervisors, but he is an effective speaker and his popularity is growing. "My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you," is his pitch directed to the non-gay segments of the population.
Lesbian activist Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill) takes over as campaign manager from a disillusioned Scott. Milk then successfully pushes for a ballot initiative, approved by newly-elected Mayor Moscone (Victor Garber), that replaces the old set-up in which members of the Board of Supervisors were elected on a citywide basis—with the top vote-getters winning seats—by a system under which supervisors were elected by district. Milk crows over the fact that now all groups—Blacks, Chinese, Hispanics and gays—will have their own representatives.
Moscone also supports Milk in 1978 in his opposition to Proposition 6, an ordinance that would have excluded gay teachers and their supporters from the public schools. This extremely right-wing measure was even opposed by Ronald Reagan, as well as President Jimmy Carter.
We see television footage of orange juice spokesperson and anti-gay bigot, Anita Bryant, pushing the Christian fundamentalist campaign. In California, Proposition 6 is being forcefully promoted by State Senator John Briggs (Denis O'Hare). Milk challenges Briggs to a debate in his Orange County territory and argues: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around."
On his third try, Harvey wins a supervisor's seat in the district that includes The Castro, and Proposition 6 is resoundingly defeated, including in Orange County. Fellow supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin), a former cop and Irish Catholic, is both attracted to and repulsed by the flamboyant gay man, leading the latter to suspect that White is "one of us."
White first resigns as supervisor, then lobbies unsuccessfully to get his job back. On November 27, 1978, Dan White enters City Hall and murders Moscone and Harvey Milk. Tens of thousands of mourners march from The Castro to City Hall in a candlelight vigil.
(Ironically and tellingly, one of the most important consequences of the Milk-Moscone murders was the rise of Diane Feinstein, who, as president of the Board of Supervisors, succeeded Moscone as mayor of San Francisco. Her subsequent record as a US Senator has had an unrelentingly pro-business and pro-war character.)
The movie's epilogue states that White served five years in prison. His defense, dubbed the "Twinkie Defense," claimed "diminished capacity" due to the ingestion of junk food. The police and prosecutor sympathized with White, while gays and other minorities were excused from the jury pool. Riots greeted the verdict. The ex-cop committed suicide two years after his release from prison.
Milk's strength lies in its performances and its feeling for the marginalized and oppressed. Penn, Hirsch, Brolin and Franco are on point. Brolin's Dan White, a Vietnam veteran, is played as a frustrated, tormented soul, not an irrational lunatic. Pill, as a secondary character, also shines.
To its credit, the film is consistently hostile to the police and official authority. After White resigns from his supervisor's job, there is a secret meeting at police headquarters where police higher-ups pressure White to withdraw his resignation. Milk implies that the cops, wanting to keep their man in City Hall, bore some responsibility for the tragic events stemming from White's change of mind.
Van Sant, born in 1952, has had an odd and chameleon-like career. (See A convenient vagueness: Elephant, directed and written by Gus Van Sant)
His best films so far remain his earliest ones, Drugstore Cowboy and portions of My Own Private Idaho. However, there are intelligent and sensitive moments in all his films, even the most misguided. He has seemed attracted to the Beats and other anti-establishment artistic trends, to various nether worlds, to the down-and-out and excluded. These somewhat amorphous sentiments, however, do not add up to a coherently worked out critique of contemporary society.
Milk is conscientiously made, but it ends up, almost inevitably, in unsavory political territory. While the director is no Democratic Party hack, and not necessarily a particularly fervent advocate of identity politics, a certain politics inevitably fills up the film's intellectual space.
Concern for the plight of young people, their fears, alienation and disenfranchisement, makes itself felt in Milk—as it does in Van Sant's aforementioned works, along with films like Elephant and Jerry.
On numerous occasions, Milk (and the filmmaker, clearly) points his supporters in the direction of the desperate young person struggling in isolation with his sexuality. "I represent the gay street people—the 14-year-old runaway from San Antonio. We have to make up for the hundreds of years of persecution," he declares. Milk himself had lovers who attempted suicide and he found his last lover, Jack (Diego Luna), hanging by a rope from the ceiling of his apartment.
This seems to be the impulse that finds most personal expression in Milk. This is perhaps what Van Sant feels most deeply. But the matter doesn't end there.
Harvey Milk was a politician and he operated in a big business party that would shift far to the right. He was without doubt an honest and courageous individual and believed sincerely that "‘All men are created equal.' No matter how hard you try, you can never erase those words." However, his own middle class position and the lack of a genuine left-wing perspective left him firmly in the camp of liberal reformism.
In fact, the politics associated with "community control," "affirmative action" and similar slogans, whatever the immediate intentions of those advocating them, like Milk, had nothing progressive about them. They diverted attention from a head-on confrontation with the economic and political status quo and were employed to dispense perks to privileged layers among various racial and ethnic constituencies and women, while the majority of the population, men and women, white, black and Latino, suffered stagnating or declining living standards.
From the early 1970s, as the prospect of rising living standards for all faded away and a generalized decline of American capitalism set in, the Democrats refashioned themselves as the party of various interest groups. Racial and gender diversity became the vogue as any mention of class issues was smothered.
Milk became the city's first gay supervisor. Also sworn in were the first single mother, the first Chinese-American and the first African-American woman. There is no consideration by the filmmakers of an alternative method of tackling the oppression of minorities as part of the conditions facing the entire working class under capitalism. To be frank, the identity politics espoused by Milk would be taken for granted by the vast majority of gay rights supporters.
So, whether Van Sant is critical of Milk joining the establishment or not (and there are hints that he is), the latter's politics are the film's default setting.
The artistic consequence of all this is a distinct unevenness. There are moments that feel quite heartfelt and acute, especially those dealing with the conditions of gay youth and with Milk's embrace of his sexuality. At other times the director seems to be doing what he thinks people expect him to do, celebrate this or that minor electoral victory, and everything feels rather bland and predictable; at such moments Van Sant seems to be going through the motions.
One of the problems is that Van Sant, for all his quirkiness and offbeat inclinations, shows no particular interest in making an independent exploration of the historical context. He is all too content to borrow that from relatively conventional Democratic Party sources. He has ‘handed over' his film, at important moments, to the official version of events. Intuitively or otherwise, the artist in him goes dead at such moments. The overall results are thereby much weakened.
Via:
www.wsws.org
Chrysler 1979: Lessons from an early corporate “bailout”
In 1979, Chrysler Corporation, the third largest US automaker, hovered on the verge of collapse, a victim of sharply declining revenue and cash-on-hand that had reached the level of threatening daily operations. In August 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary, G. William Miller, proposed a government intervention in the form of $1.5 billion in guaranteed loans. The sum was considered an astonishing total. It was by far the largest government bailout in US history. On September 7, 1979 Chrysler formally petitioned the US government for the loans, and on December 20, 1979 Congress ratified the appropriation in the “Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act,” which Carter subsequently signed into law.
The loans stipulated major concessions from Chrysler’s workers, represented by the United Autoworkers Union (UAW). The political and media elite had successfully shifted blame for the corporation’s collapse—and by extension the overall decline of US capitalism—onto the working class. The UAW and the AFL-CIO buckled to the concession demands, a capitulation that cleared the path for an onslaught on working class living standards that has continued to this day.
There were profound pressures at play in the near-bankruptcy of Chrysler. The reemergence of the US’s capitalist rivals, especially Japan and Germany, was felt keenly in the auto industry through declining market share. Even the more immediate cause of Chrysler’s demise—the oil shocks of the 1970s that reduced demand for the large and inefficient vehicles that had been Chrysler’s stock-in-trade—testified to the declining influence of the US, which was reflected in its inability to dictate production quotas to the oil states.
Now, in the midst of the proposed bailout of the entire US financial industry, the experience of Chrysler in 1979 holds critical lessons for the working class.
The Chrysler bailout set in motion processes that have only intensified to this day. First, the working class would henceforth have to foot the bill for the decline of US capitalism through its own impoverishment, carried out in the name of “competitiveness.” Second, the corporate and financial elite, who bore primary responsibility for this decline, would henceforth reap windfall profits not only in spite of this decline, but precisely because of it.
These processes found embodiment in Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, who soon after the bailout was making millions of dollars, even as he ruthlessly axed tens of thousands of jobs.
A special place of shame must be given to the national media and political elite. In 1979 they raised a hue and cry about the need for Chrysler’s workers to “sacrifice” and extolled the virtues of the free market. Today they offer few such sermons to the financial elite responsible for the current crisis. But they continue to insist, as they did in the days of the Chrysler bailout, that the working class must pay the bills for the failures of American capitalism. The working class is being asked to fork over trillions of dollars—the sum would have been unfathomable in 1979—to bail out a criminal financial aristocracy that has bankrupted American capitalism, and very nearly the state itself.
The Chrysler bailout
When the bankruptcy of Chrysler appeared imminent, an intense debate developed within the ruling elite over how to approach what was viewed as the most disastrous sign to date of the decline of US capitalism. Should the nation’s third largest automaker and tenth largest industrial employer be allowed to fail? Or should there be a bailout? And, if so, under what conditions should Chrysler be “rescued”?
Ultimately a bailout prevailed over what had been quite intense Congressional opposition. The new consensus in favor of federal intervention was based on pressing wage and benefit concessions on Chrysler workers.
By late October 1979, UAW President Douglas Fraser had already agreed to substantial concessions. The UAW would allow Chrysler to defer $200 million in payments to the union’s pension fund, and it would hand over nearly all of the UAW’s $850 million pension fund to Chrysler as a loan. He also indicated that the UAW might accept a pay cut.
But in November, as the bill to bail out Chrysler hung in the balance, Alfred E. Kahn, chairman of the Carter Administration’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, testified before the Senate Banking Committee that the proposed $1.5 billion loan would be almost totally consumed by the UAW’s three-year contract with Chrysler. Kahn’s testimony was considered quite surprising, inasmuch as it appeared to undermine his own administration’s proposed bailout.
In fact Kahn was supplying the Senate with a new rationale for supporting the bill. In his testimony, he took the position—shared by the Carter Administration—that Chrysler workers had to sacrifice still more in the way of wages, benefits and conditions in order to rescue the corporation’s profit margins. The leading Democrat and Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Jake Garn of Utah, who had previously opposed the bailout, then fell in line. Soon the Banking Committee was proposing stipulations to the package that included a renegotiation of the UAW contract, $525 million in concessions from workers, and a three-year wage freeze.
As New York Times correspondent Judith Miller put it in 1979, “there was widespread agreement ... that workers must make sufficient ‘sacrifices’ to help their employer recover.” The senators bullied, cajoled, and blackmailed the UAW, Garn threatening the union—in words eerily similar to current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—that “if they’re not willing to act in response to an extreme situation quickly, then let Chrysler go.”
In the weeks that followed, the national media and leading politicians launched a propaganda campaign demanding that Chrysler workers “sacrifice” in order to “save” Chrysler. The Times editorial page weighed in on December 10 (“What Price Chrysler Jobs?”), sanctimoniously declaring that “Chrysler workers should contribute significantly to their own rescue.” “The possibility of corporate failure,” the Times lectured, “is crucial to the health of a free economy. Without the market’s discipline, incentives for efficiency and innovation disappear.”
If Chrysler were to collapse, the editorial continued, “some workers would lose their jobs; most would be forced to renegotiate their wages downward. But the economy as a whole would benefit: Chrysler’s inefficiency would be removed as a drag on productivity... [i]t makes no sense to put the taxpayers at greater risk than Chrysler’s workers. If saving jobs is the most important rationale for a bailout, surely the public should expect major sacrifice from those with the most to gain.” The editorial then went on to denounce the UAW concessions already on the table as insufficient, warning that if the union “really prefers bankruptcy to a wage freeze, the public would have no reason to decide otherwise.”
(The Times’s idolatry of the free market, as expressed in 1979 when Chrysler workers’ jobs were at stake, is in noticeably short supply in 2008 as the government intervenes to bail out wealthy financiers—albeit once again at the expense of the working class!)
Out of this increasingly belligerent environment, a “compromise plan” was ultimately worked out that required, in exchange for the $1.5 billion guaranteed loan to Chrysler, $462.5 million in wage cuts and benefit concessions from workers.
Lessons from history
The 1979 Chrysler bailout was a significant turning point in US history.
Chrysler had been a major and iconic presence of US industry for decades. Its collapse was a milepost in the long-term decline of US capitalism, which had resulted from the reemergence of major capitalist rivals and the enormous quantities the US spent on its military and related industries. The reemergence of Europe and Japan was the outcome of long processes that had been set in motion much earlier, when in the wake of World War II US capitalism—as a means of forestalling world revolution—rebuilt its major rivals.
At the helm of Chrysler stood Lee Iacocca, the human embodiment of another new historical process: the celebrity CEO whose personal wealth and prestige grows in inverse proportion to the decline of the corporation that he nominally represents.
At the helm of the country was the Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and Congress. In the bailout, the Democrats joined with the Republicans in isolating the UAW. In so doing, they distanced themselves from the limited reformist agenda that the party had championed between the 1930s and 1960s. Since the 1970s the Democratic Party has been an equal partner with the Republicans in the steady rollback of the social gains and democratic rights won by the working class in the preceding decades.
Finally, the capitulation of the UAW and the AFL-CIO without a fight in order to “save jobs” gave the green light to what has been a three-decades-long assault on the living standards of the working class. The UAW’s plan to “save jobs” has failed miserably—hundreds of thousands of auto jobs have been wiped out since 1979—but much like Iacocca and the managerial elite, the bureaucracy has prospered in spite of its pitiful track record. The Chrysler concessions were a major step toward the open conversion of the bureaucracy into a profit-making enterprise, a process that has come to full fruition in the UAW’s recent ascension to the management of the auto industry’s enormous health care liabilities.
The Bulletin, the forerunner to the World Socialist Web Site, warned in 1979 that “there is one essential question that arises out of the Chrysler bankruptcy: Who is to pay for the breakdown of the capitalist profit system, the working class or big business? The answer of big business, the banks, the Democrats, the Carter administration and the UAW bureaucracy is, of course, the working class.”
In 1979, Chrysler Corporation, the third largest US automaker, hovered on the verge of collapse, a victim of sharply declining revenue and cash-on-hand that had reached the level of threatening daily operations. In August 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary, G. William Miller, proposed a government intervention in the form of $1.5 billion in guaranteed loans. The sum was considered an astonishing total. It was by far the largest government bailout in US history. On September 7, 1979 Chrysler formally petitioned the US government for the loans, and on December 20, 1979 Congress ratified the appropriation in the “Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act,” which Carter subsequently signed into law.
The loans stipulated major concessions from Chrysler’s workers, represented by the United Autoworkers Union (UAW). The political and media elite had successfully shifted blame for the corporation’s collapse—and by extension the overall decline of US capitalism—onto the working class. The UAW and the AFL-CIO buckled to the concession demands, a capitulation that cleared the path for an onslaught on working class living standards that has continued to this day.
There were profound pressures at play in the near-bankruptcy of Chrysler. The reemergence of the US’s capitalist rivals, especially Japan and Germany, was felt keenly in the auto industry through declining market share. Even the more immediate cause of Chrysler’s demise—the oil shocks of the 1970s that reduced demand for the large and inefficient vehicles that had been Chrysler’s stock-in-trade—testified to the declining influence of the US, which was reflected in its inability to dictate production quotas to the oil states.
Now, in the midst of the proposed bailout of the entire US financial industry, the experience of Chrysler in 1979 holds critical lessons for the working class.
The Chrysler bailout set in motion processes that have only intensified to this day. First, the working class would henceforth have to foot the bill for the decline of US capitalism through its own impoverishment, carried out in the name of “competitiveness.” Second, the corporate and financial elite, who bore primary responsibility for this decline, would henceforth reap windfall profits not only in spite of this decline, but precisely because of it.
These processes found embodiment in Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, who soon after the bailout was making millions of dollars, even as he ruthlessly axed tens of thousands of jobs.
A special place of shame must be given to the national media and political elite. In 1979 they raised a hue and cry about the need for Chrysler’s workers to “sacrifice” and extolled the virtues of the free market. Today they offer few such sermons to the financial elite responsible for the current crisis. But they continue to insist, as they did in the days of the Chrysler bailout, that the working class must pay the bills for the failures of American capitalism. The working class is being asked to fork over trillions of dollars—the sum would have been unfathomable in 1979—to bail out a criminal financial aristocracy that has bankrupted American capitalism, and very nearly the state itself.
The Chrysler bailout
When the bankruptcy of Chrysler appeared imminent, an intense debate developed within the ruling elite over how to approach what was viewed as the most disastrous sign to date of the decline of US capitalism. Should the nation’s third largest automaker and tenth largest industrial employer be allowed to fail? Or should there be a bailout? And, if so, under what conditions should Chrysler be “rescued”?
Ultimately a bailout prevailed over what had been quite intense Congressional opposition. The new consensus in favor of federal intervention was based on pressing wage and benefit concessions on Chrysler workers.
By late October 1979, UAW President Douglas Fraser had already agreed to substantial concessions. The UAW would allow Chrysler to defer $200 million in payments to the union’s pension fund, and it would hand over nearly all of the UAW’s $850 million pension fund to Chrysler as a loan. He also indicated that the UAW might accept a pay cut.
But in November, as the bill to bail out Chrysler hung in the balance, Alfred E. Kahn, chairman of the Carter Administration’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, testified before the Senate Banking Committee that the proposed $1.5 billion loan would be almost totally consumed by the UAW’s three-year contract with Chrysler. Kahn’s testimony was considered quite surprising, inasmuch as it appeared to undermine his own administration’s proposed bailout.
In fact Kahn was supplying the Senate with a new rationale for supporting the bill. In his testimony, he took the position—shared by the Carter Administration—that Chrysler workers had to sacrifice still more in the way of wages, benefits and conditions in order to rescue the corporation’s profit margins. The leading Democrat and Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Jake Garn of Utah, who had previously opposed the bailout, then fell in line. Soon the Banking Committee was proposing stipulations to the package that included a renegotiation of the UAW contract, $525 million in concessions from workers, and a three-year wage freeze.
As New York Times correspondent Judith Miller put it in 1979, “there was widespread agreement ... that workers must make sufficient ‘sacrifices’ to help their employer recover.” The senators bullied, cajoled, and blackmailed the UAW, Garn threatening the union—in words eerily similar to current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—that “if they’re not willing to act in response to an extreme situation quickly, then let Chrysler go.”
In the weeks that followed, the national media and leading politicians launched a propaganda campaign demanding that Chrysler workers “sacrifice” in order to “save” Chrysler. The Times editorial page weighed in on December 10 (“What Price Chrysler Jobs?”), sanctimoniously declaring that “Chrysler workers should contribute significantly to their own rescue.” “The possibility of corporate failure,” the Times lectured, “is crucial to the health of a free economy. Without the market’s discipline, incentives for efficiency and innovation disappear.”
If Chrysler were to collapse, the editorial continued, “some workers would lose their jobs; most would be forced to renegotiate their wages downward. But the economy as a whole would benefit: Chrysler’s inefficiency would be removed as a drag on productivity... [i]t makes no sense to put the taxpayers at greater risk than Chrysler’s workers. If saving jobs is the most important rationale for a bailout, surely the public should expect major sacrifice from those with the most to gain.” The editorial then went on to denounce the UAW concessions already on the table as insufficient, warning that if the union “really prefers bankruptcy to a wage freeze, the public would have no reason to decide otherwise.”
(The Times’s idolatry of the free market, as expressed in 1979 when Chrysler workers’ jobs were at stake, is in noticeably short supply in 2008 as the government intervenes to bail out wealthy financiers—albeit once again at the expense of the working class!)
Out of this increasingly belligerent environment, a “compromise plan” was ultimately worked out that required, in exchange for the $1.5 billion guaranteed loan to Chrysler, $462.5 million in wage cuts and benefit concessions from workers.
Lessons from history
The 1979 Chrysler bailout was a significant turning point in US history.
Chrysler had been a major and iconic presence of US industry for decades. Its collapse was a milepost in the long-term decline of US capitalism, which had resulted from the reemergence of major capitalist rivals and the enormous quantities the US spent on its military and related industries. The reemergence of Europe and Japan was the outcome of long processes that had been set in motion much earlier, when in the wake of World War II US capitalism—as a means of forestalling world revolution—rebuilt its major rivals.
At the helm of Chrysler stood Lee Iacocca, the human embodiment of another new historical process: the celebrity CEO whose personal wealth and prestige grows in inverse proportion to the decline of the corporation that he nominally represents.
At the helm of the country was the Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and Congress. In the bailout, the Democrats joined with the Republicans in isolating the UAW. In so doing, they distanced themselves from the limited reformist agenda that the party had championed between the 1930s and 1960s. Since the 1970s the Democratic Party has been an equal partner with the Republicans in the steady rollback of the social gains and democratic rights won by the working class in the preceding decades.
Finally, the capitulation of the UAW and the AFL-CIO without a fight in order to “save jobs” gave the green light to what has been a three-decades-long assault on the living standards of the working class. The UAW’s plan to “save jobs” has failed miserably—hundreds of thousands of auto jobs have been wiped out since 1979—but much like Iacocca and the managerial elite, the bureaucracy has prospered in spite of its pitiful track record. The Chrysler concessions were a major step toward the open conversion of the bureaucracy into a profit-making enterprise, a process that has come to full fruition in the UAW’s recent ascension to the management of the auto industry’s enormous health care liabilities.
The Bulletin, the forerunner to the World Socialist Web Site, warned in 1979 that “there is one essential question that arises out of the Chrysler bankruptcy: Who is to pay for the breakdown of the capitalist profit system, the working class or big business? The answer of big business, the banks, the Democrats, the Carter administration and the UAW bureaucracy is, of course, the working class.”
In 1979, Chrysler Corporation, the third largest US automaker, hovered on the verge of collapse, a victim of sharply declining revenue and cash-on-hand that had reached the level of threatening daily operations. In August 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary, G. William Miller, proposed a government intervention in the form of $1.5 billion in guaranteed loans. The sum was considered an astonishing total. It was by far the largest government bailout in US history. On September 7, 1979 Chrysler formally petitioned the US government for the loans, and on December 20, 1979 Congress ratified the appropriation in the “Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act,” which Carter subsequently signed into law.
The loans stipulated major concessions from Chrysler’s workers, represented by the United Autoworkers Union (UAW). The political and media elite had successfully shifted blame for the corporation’s collapse—and by extension the overall decline of US capitalism—onto the working class. The UAW and the AFL-CIO buckled to the concession demands, a capitulation that cleared the path for an onslaught on working class living standards that has continued to this day.
There were profound pressures at play in the near-bankruptcy of Chrysler. The reemergence of the US’s capitalist rivals, especially Japan and Germany, was felt keenly in the auto industry through declining market share. Even the more immediate cause of Chrysler’s demise—the oil shocks of the 1970s that reduced demand for the large and inefficient vehicles that had been Chrysler’s stock-in-trade—testified to the declining influence of the US, which was reflected in its inability to dictate production quotas to the oil states.
Now, in the midst of the proposed bailout of the entire US financial industry, the experience of Chrysler in 1979 holds critical lessons for the working class.
The Chrysler bailout set in motion processes that have only intensified to this day. First, the working class would henceforth have to foot the bill for the decline of US capitalism through its own impoverishment, carried out in the name of “competitiveness.” Second, the corporate and financial elite, who bore primary responsibility for this decline, would henceforth reap windfall profits not only in spite of this decline, but precisely because of it.
These processes found embodiment in Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, who soon after the bailout was making millions of dollars, even as he ruthlessly axed tens of thousands of jobs.
A special place of shame must be given to the national media and political elite. In 1979 they raised a hue and cry about the need for Chrysler’s workers to “sacrifice” and extolled the virtues of the free market. Today they offer few such sermons to the financial elite responsible for the current crisis. But they continue to insist, as they did in the days of the Chrysler bailout, that the working class must pay the bills for the failures of American capitalism. The working class is being asked to fork over trillions of dollars—the sum would have been unfathomable in 1979—to bail out a criminal financial aristocracy that has bankrupted American capitalism, and very nearly the state itself.
The Chrysler bailout
When the bankruptcy of Chrysler appeared imminent, an intense debate developed within the ruling elite over how to approach what was viewed as the most disastrous sign to date of the decline of US capitalism. Should the nation’s third largest automaker and tenth largest industrial employer be allowed to fail? Or should there be a bailout? And, if so, under what conditions should Chrysler be “rescued”?
Ultimately a bailout prevailed over what had been quite intense Congressional opposition. The new consensus in favor of federal intervention was based on pressing wage and benefit concessions on Chrysler workers.
By late October 1979, UAW President Douglas Fraser had already agreed to substantial concessions. The UAW would allow Chrysler to defer $200 million in payments to the union’s pension fund, and it would hand over nearly all of the UAW’s $850 million pension fund to Chrysler as a loan. He also indicated that the UAW might accept a pay cut.
But in November, as the bill to bail out Chrysler hung in the balance, Alfred E. Kahn, chairman of the Carter Administration’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, testified before the Senate Banking Committee that the proposed $1.5 billion loan would be almost totally consumed by the UAW’s three-year contract with Chrysler. Kahn’s testimony was considered quite surprising, inasmuch as it appeared to undermine his own administration’s proposed bailout.
In fact Kahn was supplying the Senate with a new rationale for supporting the bill. In his testimony, he took the position—shared by the Carter Administration—that Chrysler workers had to sacrifice still more in the way of wages, benefits and conditions in order to rescue the corporation’s profit margins. The leading Democrat and Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Jake Garn of Utah, who had previously opposed the bailout, then fell in line. Soon the Banking Committee was proposing stipulations to the package that included a renegotiation of the UAW contract, $525 million in concessions from workers, and a three-year wage freeze.
As New York Times correspondent Judith Miller put it in 1979, “there was widespread agreement ... that workers must make sufficient ‘sacrifices’ to help their employer recover.” The senators bullied, cajoled, and blackmailed the UAW, Garn threatening the union—in words eerily similar to current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—that “if they’re not willing to act in response to an extreme situation quickly, then let Chrysler go.”
In the weeks that followed, the national media and leading politicians launched a propaganda campaign demanding that Chrysler workers “sacrifice” in order to “save” Chrysler. The Times editorial page weighed in on December 10 (“What Price Chrysler Jobs?”), sanctimoniously declaring that “Chrysler workers should contribute significantly to their own rescue.” “The possibility of corporate failure,” the Times lectured, “is crucial to the health of a free economy. Without the market’s discipline, incentives for efficiency and innovation disappear.”
If Chrysler were to collapse, the editorial continued, “some workers would lose their jobs; most would be forced to renegotiate their wages downward. But the economy as a whole would benefit: Chrysler’s inefficiency would be removed as a drag on productivity... [i]t makes no sense to put the taxpayers at greater risk than Chrysler’s workers. If saving jobs is the most important rationale for a bailout, surely the public should expect major sacrifice from those with the most to gain.” The editorial then went on to denounce the UAW concessions already on the table as insufficient, warning that if the union “really prefers bankruptcy to a wage freeze, the public would have no reason to decide otherwise.”
(The Times’s idolatry of the free market, as expressed in 1979 when Chrysler workers’ jobs were at stake, is in noticeably short supply in 2008 as the government intervenes to bail out wealthy financiers—albeit once again at the expense of the working class!)
Out of this increasingly belligerent environment, a “compromise plan” was ultimately worked out that required, in exchange for the $1.5 billion guaranteed loan to Chrysler, $462.5 million in wage cuts and benefit concessions from workers.
Lessons from history
The 1979 Chrysler bailout was a significant turning point in US history.
Chrysler had been a major and iconic presence of US industry for decades. Its collapse was a milepost in the long-term decline of US capitalism, which had resulted from the reemergence of major capitalist rivals and the enormous quantities the US spent on its military and related industries. The reemergence of Europe and Japan was the outcome of long processes that had been set in motion much earlier, when in the wake of World War II US capitalism—as a means of forestalling world revolution—rebuilt its major rivals.
At the helm of Chrysler stood Lee Iacocca, the human embodiment of another new historical process: the celebrity CEO whose personal wealth and prestige grows in inverse proportion to the decline of the corporation that he nominally represents.
At the helm of the country was the Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and Congress. In the bailout, the Democrats joined with the Republicans in isolating the UAW. In so doing, they distanced themselves from the limited reformist agenda that the party had championed between the 1930s and 1960s. Since the 1970s the Democratic Party has been an equal partner with the Republicans in the steady rollback of the social gains and democratic rights won by the working class in the preceding decades.
Finally, the capitulation of the UAW and the AFL-CIO without a fight in order to “save jobs” gave the green light to what has been a three-decades-long assault on the living standards of the working class. The UAW’s plan to “save jobs” has failed miserably—hundreds of thousands of auto jobs have been wiped out since 1979—but much like Iacocca and the managerial elite, the bureaucracy has prospered in spite of its pitiful track record. The Chrysler concessions were a major step toward the open conversion of the bureaucracy into a profit-making enterprise, a process that has come to full fruition in the UAW’s recent ascension to the management of the auto industry’s enormous health care liabilities.
The Bulletin, the forerunner to the World Socialist Web Site, warned in 1979 that “there is one essential question that arises out of the Chrysler bankruptcy: Who is to pay for the breakdown of the capitalist profit system, the working class or big business? The answer of big business, the banks, the Democrats, the Carter administration and the UAW bureaucracy is, of course, the working class.”
In 1979, Chrysler Corporation, the third largest US automaker, hovered on the verge of collapse, a victim of sharply declining revenue and cash-on-hand that had reached the level of threatening daily operations. In August 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary, G. William Miller, proposed a government intervention in the form of $1.5 billion in guaranteed loans. The sum was considered an astonishing total. It was by far the largest government bailout in US history. On September 7, 1979 Chrysler formally petitioned the US government for the loans, and on December 20, 1979 Congress ratified the appropriation in the “Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act,” which Carter subsequently signed into law.
The loans stipulated major concessions from Chrysler’s workers, represented by the United Autoworkers Union (UAW). The political and media elite had successfully shifted blame for the corporation’s collapse—and by extension the overall decline of US capitalism—onto the working class. The UAW and the AFL-CIO buckled to the concession demands, a capitulation that cleared the path for an onslaught on working class living standards that has continued to this day.
There were profound pressures at play in the near-bankruptcy of Chrysler. The reemergence of the US’s capitalist rivals, especially Japan and Germany, was felt keenly in the auto industry through declining market share. Even the more immediate cause of Chrysler’s demise—the oil shocks of the 1970s that reduced demand for the large and inefficient vehicles that had been Chrysler’s stock-in-trade—testified to the declining influence of the US, which was reflected in its inability to dictate production quotas to the oil states.
Now, in the midst of the proposed bailout of the entire US financial industry, the experience of Chrysler in 1979 holds critical lessons for the working class.
The Chrysler bailout set in motion processes that have only intensified to this day. First, the working class would henceforth have to foot the bill for the decline of US capitalism through its own impoverishment, carried out in the name of “competitiveness.” Second, the corporate and financial elite, who bore primary responsibility for this decline, would henceforth reap windfall profits not only in spite of this decline, but precisely because of it.
These processes found embodiment in Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, who soon after the bailout was making millions of dollars, even as he ruthlessly axed tens of thousands of jobs.
A special place of shame must be given to the national media and political elite. In 1979 they raised a hue and cry about the need for Chrysler’s workers to “sacrifice” and extolled the virtues of the free market. Today they offer few such sermons to the financial elite responsible for the current crisis. But they continue to insist, as they did in the days of the Chrysler bailout, that the working class must pay the bills for the failures of American capitalism. The working class is being asked to fork over trillions of dollars—the sum would have been unfathomable in 1979—to bail out a criminal financial aristocracy that has bankrupted American capitalism, and very nearly the state itself.
The Chrysler bailout
When the bankruptcy of Chrysler appeared imminent, an intense debate developed within the ruling elite over how to approach what was viewed as the most disastrous sign to date of the decline of US capitalism. Should the nation’s third largest automaker and tenth largest industrial employer be allowed to fail? Or should there be a bailout? And, if so, under what conditions should Chrysler be “rescued”?
Ultimately a bailout prevailed over what had been quite intense Congressional opposition. The new consensus in favor of federal intervention was based on pressing wage and benefit concessions on Chrysler workers.
By late October 1979, UAW President Douglas Fraser had already agreed to substantial concessions. The UAW would allow Chrysler to defer $200 million in payments to the union’s pension fund, and it would hand over nearly all of the UAW’s $850 million pension fund to Chrysler as a loan. He also indicated that the UAW might accept a pay cut.
But in November, as the bill to bail out Chrysler hung in the balance, Alfred E. Kahn, chairman of the Carter Administration’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, testified before the Senate Banking Committee that the proposed $1.5 billion loan would be almost totally consumed by the UAW’s three-year contract with Chrysler. Kahn’s testimony was considered quite surprising, inasmuch as it appeared to undermine his own administration’s proposed bailout.
In fact Kahn was supplying the Senate with a new rationale for supporting the bill. In his testimony, he took the position—shared by the Carter Administration—that Chrysler workers had to sacrifice still more in the way of wages, benefits and conditions in order to rescue the corporation’s profit margins. The leading Democrat and Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Jake Garn of Utah, who had previously opposed the bailout, then fell in line. Soon the Banking Committee was proposing stipulations to the package that included a renegotiation of the UAW contract, $525 million in concessions from workers, and a three-year wage freeze.
As New York Times correspondent Judith Miller put it in 1979, “there was widespread agreement ... that workers must make sufficient ‘sacrifices’ to help their employer recover.” The senators bullied, cajoled, and blackmailed the UAW, Garn threatening the union—in words eerily similar to current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—that “if they’re not willing to act in response to an extreme situation quickly, then let Chrysler go.”
In the weeks that followed, the national media and leading politicians launched a propaganda campaign demanding that Chrysler workers “sacrifice” in order to “save” Chrysler. The Times editorial page weighed in on December 10 (“What Price Chrysler Jobs?”), sanctimoniously declaring that “Chrysler workers should contribute significantly to their own rescue.” “The possibility of corporate failure,” the Times lectured, “is crucial to the health of a free economy. Without the market’s discipline, incentives for efficiency and innovation disappear.”
If Chrysler were to collapse, the editorial continued, “some workers would lose their jobs; most would be forced to renegotiate their wages downward. But the economy as a whole would benefit: Chrysler’s inefficiency would be removed as a drag on productivity... [i]t makes no sense to put the taxpayers at greater risk than Chrysler’s workers. If saving jobs is the most important rationale for a bailout, surely the public should expect major sacrifice from those with the most to gain.” The editorial then went on to denounce the UAW concessions already on the table as insufficient, warning that if the union “really prefers bankruptcy to a wage freeze, the public would have no reason to decide otherwise.”
(The Times’s idolatry of the free market, as expressed in 1979 when Chrysler workers’ jobs were at stake, is in noticeably short supply in 2008 as the government intervenes to bail out wealthy financiers—albeit once again at the expense of the working class!)
Out of this increasingly belligerent environment, a “compromise plan” was ultimately worked out that required, in exchange for the $1.5 billion guaranteed loan to Chrysler, $462.5 million in wage cuts and benefit concessions from workers.
Lessons from history
The 1979 Chrysler bailout was a significant turning point in US history.
Chrysler had been a major and iconic presence of US industry for decades. Its collapse was a milepost in the long-term decline of US capitalism, which had resulted from the reemergence of major capitalist rivals and the enormous quantities the US spent on its military and related industries. The reemergence of Europe and Japan was the outcome of long processes that had been set in motion much earlier, when in the wake of World War II US capitalism—as a means of forestalling world revolution—rebuilt its major rivals.
At the helm of Chrysler stood Lee Iacocca, the human embodiment of another new historical process: the celebrity CEO whose personal wealth and prestige grows in inverse proportion to the decline of the corporation that he nominally represents.
At the helm of the country was the Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and Congress. In the bailout, the Democrats joined with the Republicans in isolating the UAW. In so doing, they distanced themselves from the limited reformist agenda that the party had championed between the 1930s and 1960s. Since the 1970s the Democratic Party has been an equal partner with the Republicans in the steady rollback of the social gains and democratic rights won by the working class in the preceding decades.
Finally, the capitulation of the UAW and the AFL-CIO without a fight in order to “save jobs” gave the green light to what has been a three-decades-long assault on the living standards of the working class. The UAW’s plan to “save jobs” has failed miserably—hundreds of thousands of auto jobs have been wiped out since 1979—but much like Iacocca and the managerial elite, the bureaucracy has prospered in spite of its pitiful track record. The Chrysler concessions were a major step toward the open conversion of the bureaucracy into a profit-making enterprise, a process that has come to full fruition in the UAW’s recent ascension to the management of the auto industry’s enormous health care liabilities.
The Bulletin, the forerunner to the World Socialist Web Site, warned in 1979 that “there is one essential question that arises out of the Chrysler bankruptcy: Who is to pay for the breakdown of the capitalist profit system, the working class or big business? The answer of big business, the banks, the Democrats, the Carter administration and the UAW bureaucracy is, of course, the working class.”
In 1979, Chrysler Corporation, the third largest US automaker, hovered on the verge of collapse, a victim of sharply declining revenue and cash-on-hand that had reached the level of threatening daily operations. In August 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s Treasury Secretary, G. William Miller, proposed a government intervention in the form of $1.5 billion in guaranteed loans. The sum was considered an astonishing total. It was by far the largest government bailout in US history. On September 7, 1979 Chrysler formally petitioned the US government for the loans, and on December 20, 1979 Congress ratified the appropriation in the “Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act,” which Carter subsequently signed into law.
The loans stipulated major concessions from Chrysler’s workers, represented by the United Autoworkers Union (UAW). The political and media elite had successfully shifted blame for the corporation’s collapse—and by extension the overall decline of US capitalism—onto the working class. The UAW and the AFL-CIO buckled to the concession demands, a capitulation that cleared the path for an onslaught on working class living standards that has continued to this day.
There were profound pressures at play in the near-bankruptcy of Chrysler. The reemergence of the US’s capitalist rivals, especially Japan and Germany, was felt keenly in the auto industry through declining market share. Even the more immediate cause of Chrysler’s demise—the oil shocks of the 1970s that reduced demand for the large and inefficient vehicles that had been Chrysler’s stock-in-trade—testified to the declining influence of the US, which was reflected in its inability to dictate production quotas to the oil states.
Now, in the midst of the proposed bailout of the entire US financial industry, the experience of Chrysler in 1979 holds critical lessons for the working class.
The Chrysler bailout set in motion processes that have only intensified to this day. First, the working class would henceforth have to foot the bill for the decline of US capitalism through its own impoverishment, carried out in the name of “competitiveness.” Second, the corporate and financial elite, who bore primary responsibility for this decline, would henceforth reap windfall profits not only in spite of this decline, but precisely because of it.
These processes found embodiment in Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, who soon after the bailout was making millions of dollars, even as he ruthlessly axed tens of thousands of jobs.
A special place of shame must be given to the national media and political elite. In 1979 they raised a hue and cry about the need for Chrysler’s workers to “sacrifice” and extolled the virtues of the free market. Today they offer few such sermons to the financial elite responsible for the current crisis. But they continue to insist, as they did in the days of the Chrysler bailout, that the working class must pay the bills for the failures of American capitalism. The working class is being asked to fork over trillions of dollars—the sum would have been unfathomable in 1979—to bail out a criminal financial aristocracy that has bankrupted American capitalism, and very nearly the state itself.
The Chrysler bailout
When the bankruptcy of Chrysler appeared imminent, an intense debate developed within the ruling elite over how to approach what was viewed as the most disastrous sign to date of the decline of US capitalism. Should the nation’s third largest automaker and tenth largest industrial employer be allowed to fail? Or should there be a bailout? And, if so, under what conditions should Chrysler be “rescued”?
Ultimately a bailout prevailed over what had been quite intense Congressional opposition. The new consensus in favor of federal intervention was based on pressing wage and benefit concessions on Chrysler workers.
By late October 1979, UAW President Douglas Fraser had already agreed to substantial concessions. The UAW would allow Chrysler to defer $200 million in payments to the union’s pension fund, and it would hand over nearly all of the UAW’s $850 million pension fund to Chrysler as a loan. He also indicated that the UAW might accept a pay cut.
But in November, as the bill to bail out Chrysler hung in the balance, Alfred E. Kahn, chairman of the Carter Administration’s Council on Wage and Price Stability, testified before the Senate Banking Committee that the proposed $1.5 billion loan would be almost totally consumed by the UAW’s three-year contract with Chrysler. Kahn’s testimony was considered quite surprising, inasmuch as it appeared to undermine his own administration’s proposed bailout.
In fact Kahn was supplying the Senate with a new rationale for supporting the bill. In his testimony, he took the position—shared by the Carter Administration—that Chrysler workers had to sacrifice still more in the way of wages, benefits and conditions in order to rescue the corporation’s profit margins. The leading Democrat and Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Jake Garn of Utah, who had previously opposed the bailout, then fell in line. Soon the Banking Committee was proposing stipulations to the package that included a renegotiation of the UAW contract, $525 million in concessions from workers, and a three-year wage freeze.
As New York Times correspondent Judith Miller put it in 1979, “there was widespread agreement ... that workers must make sufficient ‘sacrifices’ to help their employer recover.” The senators bullied, cajoled, and blackmailed the UAW, Garn threatening the union—in words eerily similar to current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—that “if they’re not willing to act in response to an extreme situation quickly, then let Chrysler go.”
In the weeks that followed, the national media and leading politicians launched a propaganda campaign demanding that Chrysler workers “sacrifice” in order to “save” Chrysler. The Times editorial page weighed in on December 10 (“What Price Chrysler Jobs?”), sanctimoniously declaring that “Chrysler workers should contribute significantly to their own rescue.” “The possibility of corporate failure,” the Times lectured, “is crucial to the health of a free economy. Without the market’s discipline, incentives for efficiency and innovation disappear.”
If Chrysler were to collapse, the editorial continued, “some workers would lose their jobs; most would be forced to renegotiate their wages downward. But the economy as a whole would benefit: Chrysler’s inefficiency would be removed as a drag on productivity... [i]t makes no sense to put the taxpayers at greater risk than Chrysler’s workers. If saving jobs is the most important rationale for a bailout, surely the public should expect major sacrifice from those with the most to gain.” The editorial then went on to denounce the UAW concessions already on the table as insufficient, warning that if the union “really prefers bankruptcy to a wage freeze, the public would have no reason to decide otherwise.”
(The Times’s idolatry of the free market, as expressed in 1979 when Chrysler workers’ jobs were at stake, is in noticeably short supply in 2008 as the government intervenes to bail out wealthy financiers—albeit once again at the expense of the working class!)
Out of this increasingly belligerent environment, a “compromise plan” was ultimately worked out that required, in exchange for the $1.5 billion guaranteed loan to Chrysler, $462.5 million in wage cuts and benefit concessions from workers.
Lessons from history
The 1979 Chrysler bailout was a significant turning point in US history.
Chrysler had been a major and iconic presence of US industry for decades. Its collapse was a milepost in the long-term decline of US capitalism, which had resulted from the reemergence of major capitalist rivals and the enormous quantities the US spent on its military and related industries. The reemergence of Europe and Japan was the outcome of long processes that had been set in motion much earlier, when in the wake of World War II US capitalism—as a means of forestalling world revolution—rebuilt its major rivals.
At the helm of Chrysler stood Lee Iacocca, the human embodiment of another new historical process: the celebrity CEO whose personal wealth and prestige grows in inverse proportion to the decline of the corporation that he nominally represents.
At the helm of the country was the Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and Congress. In the bailout, the Democrats joined with the Republicans in isolating the UAW. In so doing, they distanced themselves from the limited reformist agenda that the party had championed between the 1930s and 1960s. Since the 1970s the Democratic Party has been an equal partner with the Republicans in the steady rollback of the social gains and democratic rights won by the working class in the preceding decades.
Finally, the capitulation of the UAW and the AFL-CIO without a fight in order to “save jobs” gave the green light to what has been a three-decades-long assault on the living standards of the working class. The UAW’s plan to “save jobs” has failed miserably—hundreds of thousands of auto jobs have been wiped out since 1979—but much like Iacocca and the managerial elite, the bureaucracy has prospered in spite of its pitiful track record. The Chrysler concessions were a major step toward the open conversion of the bureaucracy into a profit-making enterprise, a process that has come to full fruition in the UAW’s recent ascension to the management of the auto industry’s enormous health care liabilities.
The Bulletin, the forerunner to the World Socialist Web Site, warned in 1979 that “there is one essential question that arises out of the Chrysler bankruptcy: Who is to pay for the breakdown of the capitalist profit system, the working class or big business? The answer of big business, the banks, the Democrats, the Carter administration and the UAW bureaucracy is, of course, the working class.”
Via:
www.wsws.org
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