Employers Are Doing Irreversible Damage to Older Workers' Lives

Peter Gosselin

JAN 03, 2019

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-irreversible-damage-being-done-to-older-workers/

[…]

“Nobody plans to lose their job. If there’s work to do and you’re doing it, you figure you’ll get to keep doing it,” he said recently. But once employers start pushing people out, no amount of hard work will save you, he added, and “nothing you do at your job really prepares you for being out” of work.

For 50 years, it has been illegal under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act, or ADEA, for employers to treat older workers differently than younger ones with only a few exceptions, such as when a job requires great stamina or quick reflexes.

For decades, judges and policymakers treated the age law’s provisions as part and parcel of the nation’s fundamental civil rights guarantee against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, ethnic origin and other categories.

But in recent years, employers’ pleas for greater freedom to remake their workforces to meet global competition have won an increasingly sympathetic hearing. Federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have reacted by widening the reach of the ADEA’s exceptions and restricting the law’s protections.

Meanwhile, most employers have stopped offering traditional pensions, which once delivered a double-barreled incentive for older workers to retire voluntarily: maximum payouts for date-certain departures and the assurance that benefits would last as long as the people receiving them. That’s left workers largely responsible for financing their own retirements and many in need of continued work.

“There’s no safe haven in today’s labor market,” said Carl Van Horn, a public policy professor and director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Even older workers who have held jobs with the same employer for decades may be laid off without warning” or otherwise cut.

[…]

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Silence follows Trump attorney’s statement that Julian Assange did nothing “wrong”

By James Cogan

4 January 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/01/04/assa-j04.html

During a December 30 interview on the US cable television talk show “Fox and Friends,” Rudy Giuliani, the right-wing Republican former mayor of New York and now attorney for President Donald Trump, blurted out some basic truths about WikiLeaks and its founder and publisher, Julian Assange.

Giuliani said: “Let’s take the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers were stolen property, weren’t they? It was in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Nobody went to jail at the New York Times and the Washington Post.”

Giuliani was referring to the 1971 publication of a mass of leaked documents that exposed decades of lies and crimes committed by successive American governments throughout the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration went to the US Supreme Court to outlaw the publication but the court ruled that the US Constitution’s First Amendment, guaranteeing free speech, protected the media outlets.

Once leaked information was provided to a “media publication,” Giuliani stated, “they can publish it for the purpose of informing people.”

He continued: “You can’t put Assange in a different position. He was a guy who communicated. We may not like what he communicated, but he was a media facility. He was putting that information out. Every newspaper and station grabbed it and published it.”

Giuliani was discussing, not the 2010 leaks published by WikiLeaks exposing US war crimes and diplomatic intrigues, but the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Lurid and absurd allegations have been made that WikiLeaks was part of a nefarious conspiracy with Russia to assist the Trump campaign.

In July 2016, WikiLeaks published leaked emails revealing that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had sought to undermine self-styled “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders and ensure that Hillary Clinton was nominated as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

In October 2016, WikiLeaks published leaked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, which included transcripts of speeches Clinton had given to corporate audiences during which she pledged support to Wall Street and boasted of her role in organising the murderous US-led war on Libya in 2011.

WikiLeaks has denied that Russia was the source of the leaks and, in November 2016, Assange correctly defended its decision to publish them in the public interest.

Giuliani categorically denied there was ever any relationship or contact between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. He stated on “Fox and Friends”: “I was with Donald Trump day in and day out throughout the last four months of the campaign. He was as surprised as I was about the WikiLeaks disclosures, sometimes surprised to the extent of ‘oh my God, did they really say that?’ We were wondering if it was true or not. They never denied it.

“The thing that really got Hillary is not so much that they were revealed, but that they were true… She really did completely screw Bernie Sanders. Every bit of that was absolutely true. Just like the Pentagon Papers put a different view on Vietnam, this put a different view on Hillary Clinton.”

He continued: “No press person or person disseminating that, for the purpose of informing, did anything wrong.”

Nothing Giuliani said is new or even controversial. Assange is a journalist and editor. WikiLeaks is a media organisation. When it was entrusted by whistleblowers with leaked information, WikiLeaks published it “for the purpose of informing people.” Assange has committed no crime. The attempts under Obama’s administration and now Trump’s to have him extradited to the US to stand trial on charges of espionage or conspiracy constitute a fundamental attack on freedom of speech and an independent and critical media.

Since 2010, when the American state apparatus launched its vendetta, every genuine defender of democratic rights has been obliged, as a matter of political principle, to stand behind Assange and WikiLeaks, and the fight for his unconditional protection from US-led persecution.

Indeed, from this standpoint, the most noteworthy aspect of Giuliani’s statements is that they were made by a ruthless representative of the American financial and corporate elite, and on Fox News, the station that in 2010 broadcast calls for Assange to be assassinated.

Giuliani, a fervent supporter of Trump’s fascistic “America First” agenda of war with China and the destruction of workers’ rights and civil liberties in the US itself, does not have the slightest concern for freedom of speech or democracy. His only motive in telling the truth about Assange and WikiLeaks is to rebut the claims circulating around the Mueller investigation and the possible use of accusations of collusion with Russia to impeach the president and replace him with Vice President Mike Pence.

A wing of the American ruling class, represented by the Democratic Party, factions of the Republican Party and sections of the military-intelligence apparatus, are outraged by Trump’s seeming lack of concern with confronting Russia.

Even before he was inaugurated, that wing of the establishment demanded that Trump escalate a confrontational policy against Moscow, from the standpoint that conflict with China could be best pursued if Beijing were denied any ability to seek assistance from Russia. They believe Pence, a Christian fundamentalist and extreme right-wing ideologue, would be a more malleable figure than the erratic and unstable billionaire real estate speculator.

On a world scale, the allegations of Russian “interference” have been used as the pretext for a massive campaign of censorship, directed by companies such as Google and Facebook against, above all, left-wing, anti-imperialist and anti-war websites and social media postings.

The American state apparatus also has used them to bully the Ecuadorian government, which in 2012 provided Assange with asylum in its London embassy, to turn against the WikiLeaks publisher. In April 2017, Mike Pompeo, then CIA director and now Trump’s secretary of state, declared—after WikiLeaks published the explosive “Vault 7” leaks exposing criminal CIA operations—that the media organisation would be treated as a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors such as Russia.”

In March 2018, on the dictates of Washington, Ecuador cut off Assange’s right to communicate with the outside world and has taken other punitive measures to try and pressure him to leave the embassy and hand himself over to British police to face imprisonment and extradition to the US.

A multitude of media publications, political parties and trade unions—from the New York Times and the Guardian, to the Australian Labor Party and an array of pseudo-left organisations internationally—refuse to defend Assange and WikiLeaks because they support the plans of US imperialism for confrontation and war with Russia and China. They are hostile to the democratic rights of the working class because they represent the capitalist elite and upper middle-class layers, whose privileges and positions depend on the historically unprecedented levels of social inequality and the concentration of global wealth in the hands of a parasitic financial oligarchy centred in the US and other imperialist countries.

Predictably, not a word about Giuliani’s statements has been said by the political and media establishment in the US, Europe or Australia.

The silence in Australia is of particular significance. Assange is an Australian citizen. In the face of persecution by the governments of other states, he has always been entitled to, but denied, the full diplomatic, legal and political support of the Australian government.

The categorical statement by a figure as repelling as Giuliani, that there are no grounds to prosecute Assange, serves only to expose the perfidy of the current Liberal-National Party Coalition government, the Labor Party, the Greens, as well as the media, the trade unions and civil liberties organisations. Their refusal to defend Assange testifies to the utter rot of democracy in the country.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Australia announced last month that it will organise and seek the broadest support for political demonstrations in Sydney on March 3 and Melbourne on March 10.

The rallies will demand that the Australian government end its collaboration with the US-led persecution of Assange and immediately intervene, using the full scope of its diplomatic and legal powers, to insist that the British government allow the WikiLeaks publisher to leave the Ecuadorian embassy and unconditionally return to Australia, if he chooses to do so. Assange must be given a blanket guarantee that any request by the Trump administration to extradite him from Australia to the US would be rejected out of hand.

In the forthcoming Australian election, the SEP will raise these demands as one of the main policies of its candidates for both upper- and lower-house seats in parliament. It will conduct the widest campaign in the working class and among youth, in Australia and internationally, to compel the Australian government to act to secure the freedom of Julian Assange.

The global slowdown: US trade war comes home

4 January 2019

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/01/04/pers-j04.html

The term “decoupling,” referring to the severing of trade ties between the United States and China, has, to quote one commentator, become the “talk of Washington.” The two countries are embroiled in what has been widely described as a “new cold war,” in which, in the words of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, an “iron curtain” has descended over the Pacific.

In place of what the Washington Post called a “bipartisan consensus in favor of broad engagement with China,” substantial sections of the American foreign policy establishment are supporting the Trump administration’s policy of disentangling the myriad economic links between the world’s two largest economies amid the growth of protectionism and military conflict.

But Thursday’s events have given a hint of what such a “decoupling” will look like in the 21st century globalized economy. Amid bear markets in Germany, China and Japan, a relentless fall in commodity prices, signs of slumping consumer spending and mounting layoffs and plant closures in auto and other industries, the American ruling class fears that the global slowdown is spreading to the United States.

For the first time in 16 years, Apple Inc, the world’s most profitable company, was forced to cut its sales projections for the coming year, citing the deepening economic slump in China and attributing it to the US trade war.

The announcement prompted a 660-point selloff on the Dow. After closing the worst December since the 1930s, the US markets have had their poorest two-day start for a new trading year since the collapse of the dot.com bubble.

Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote, “While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in greater China.” He continued, “We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States.”

A trader cited by the Wall Street Journal was more direct: “All of it is coming home to roost more directly in the United

States… the slowdown is here and happening.”

The speed of the reversal in sentiment is striking. “Just weeks after Federal Reserve officials penciled in two interest rate increases in 2019, half of investors now expect the central bank to cut rates this year, up from about 10 percent a day earlier,” wrote the Wall Street Journal.

The same day as Apple’s warnings, the ISM manufacturing index for the US posted its biggest one-month fall in factory activity since the 2008 financial crisis.

These figures have prompted warnings that US growth will not merely see a gradual slowdown over the course of several years, as is broadly predicted by global institutions, but could follow China and other developing countries into a sharp and deep recession. Such a recession, international in scope and intensified by trade war, could spark a global financial crisis on the scale of, or larger than, the 2008 crash.

This is because none of the fundamental causes of the 2008 crisis have been addressed. The holes in the banks’ balance sheets were simply filled with money spit out by central banks through quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates. The economic “recovery” since 2008 has been financed by an expansion of global debt, which, according to figures published by the International Monetary Fund last month, has hit an all-time high of $184 trillion.

Meanwhile, events like Malaysia’s 1MDB scam, in which global financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs extracted hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to facilitate the theft of billions of dollars, show that the types of large-scale fraud that led to the 2008 financial crisis remain prevalent.

But unlike the 2008 crisis, in which the major economies vowed to cooperate and pledged to avoid trade war, the United States has initiated trade war measures against not just China, but also against dozens of other countries, including its European NATO allies. As in the 1930s, these trade conflicts have the potential of magnifying the scale of a global recession.

The growth of “great power competition,” and the resulting trade and military conflicts do not arise from the mind of US President Donald Trump. Rather, they represent the assertion of a fundamental and insoluble contradiction of capitalism: the conflict between global production and the nation-state system. That is why, despite the unprecedented worldwide integration of economic life, communications and scientific research, the ruling elites all over the world are pursuing nationalist trade policies and military rearmament.

Writing just months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North observed: “The most essential feature of a historically significant crisis is that it leads to a situation where the major class forces within the affected country (and countries) are compelled to formulate and adopt an independent position in relationship to the crisis.”

The ruling elites in the United States and all over the world responded to the 2008 financial crash by seeking to make the working class bear the full brunt of the crisis. The investments of the financial oligarchy were made whole, then doubled and tripled, as a result of bank bailouts, deregulation and tax cuts.

Meanwhile, the working class faced a decade of stagnant and declining wages, spearheaded by the expansion of low-wage production at the US automakers as part of their restructuring carried out by the Obama administration and its trade union partners.

With the eruption of a new global recession, the ruling elite will operate on the basis of the same playbook—intensifying the ruthless policy of austerity it has pursued since the financial crisis.

But the past decade has not been in vain. The year 2018 saw a substantial growth of the class struggle, including a wave of strikes and protests by teachers in the United States, strikes by delivery and logistics workers, airline pilots, auto workers and others on virtually every continent, and explosive protests by workers from Iran to Latin America. The year concluded with the eruption of mass anti-austerity protests in France, independent of the trade unions, and moves to form rank-and-file committees by auto workers in the United States and plantation workers in Sri Lanka.

The ruling elites, with their legitimization of trade war and “great power conflict” and their efforts to rehabilitate the fascist legacy of the 1930s, are paving the way for a repeat of all the horrors that characterized that decade.

Only the independent revolutionary movement of the working class offers humanity a way forward out of this morass. In the face of renewed attacks by the ruling elite, workers all over the world must enter into struggle under the banner of socialist internationalism, with the aim of overthrowing the capitalist system and securing a peaceful and prosperous socialist future.

Andre Damon

Apparently, clubs now need to hire consent guardians – clearly we've misunderstood human sexuality

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/consent-sex-clubs-house-of-yes-consenticorns-sadomasochism-freud-capitalism-a8705551.html

The conservative right often attributes the excesses of political correctness to the destructive influence of cultural Marxism which tries to undermine the moral foundations of the Western way of life.

But if we take a closer look at these “excesses,” we can see that they are, in fact, signs of the unbridled reign of what, decades ago, political theorist Fredric Jameson called cultural capitalism: a new stage of capitalism in which culture no longer functions as a domain of ideological superstructure elevated above economy but becomes a key ingredient of the ever-expanding reproduction of capital.

One of the clearest imaginable examples of cultural capitalism is surely the commodification of our intimate life. This is a permanent feature of a capitalist society, but in the last decades it’s reached a new level. Just think about how our search for sexual partners and for good sexual performance rely on dating agencies or websites, medical and psychological help, and so on.

House of Yes, in Brooklyn, New York, adds a new twist to this game: the intricate problem of how to verify consent in a sexual interplay is resolved by the presence of a hired controlling agent. The club is a hedonistic playground where “anything goes”. Time Out voted it as the second best thing to do in the world and The Sun described as “the wildest night club on the planet”.

One of its most popular features is the introduction of “consenticorns”, people whose job it is to monitor the goings on and ensure no one’s consent is being violated. In the House of Yes, customers can do anything from naked hot tubs to drag wrestling, but they have to adhere to a strict consent policy, which is ultimately enforced by “consenticorns,” the “consent guardians” who wear light-up unicorn horns.

They observe interactions and look for signs that someone might feel unsafe. In most cases, making eye contact is enough to prevent trouble. Sometimes, a more direct intervention is needed: the consenticorn dances up to the couple and inquires if there are any problems. If it is necessary, the person responsible for the trouble is asked to leave.

The ideal that motivates the House of Yes was formulated by the nightlife impresario Anya Sapozhnikova, who celebrated there her 32nd birthday with a massive party. In a short speech, she asserted that the true goal of the House of Yes is to make consenticorns obsolete: “Imagine a world where sexuality is celebrated. Pretend that equality and inclusivity are mainstream. Envision a place where people dance together instead of ripping each other apart…” This seems to have gone down well in liberal circles. Arwa Mahdawi even wrote in The Guardian that: “House of Yes’s success is an important reminder that the stricter we are about consent, the more fun everyone can have.”

I must confess that I don’t want even to imagine such a place. Remember we are talking about having (intimate, sexualised) fun, and the implication of Mahdawi’s claim is that, in today’s society, the consent required for pure fun can only be enforced through tight control – the stricter the control over us is, the more fun everyone can have.

The majority of us still prefer intimate sexual interplay, while the House of Yes practices something more akin to group sex. So, to let ourselves go to an evil imagination, will somebody propose also a consenticorn to observe and control a single couple’s sexual interactions?

Perhaps the partisans of the House of Yes imagine a future state where consenticorns will no longer be needed since individuals will leave behind their egotist aggressivity. However, if we learned anything from psychoanalysis it is that masochism and sadism, pleasure and pain in all its diverse forms, is an irreducible ingredient of our sexual lives, not just a secondary effect of social domination perturbing pure consensual joy. We would thus need consenticorns able to distinguish consensual sadomasochism from the exploitative one – an impossible task.

But there is an even greater complication that emerges here. The lesson of psychoanalysis is that in exhibitionism – a third witness – can be a condition of one’s pleasure. So what if one needs a consenticorn to fully enjoy a sexual experience? And what if one wants to involve a consenticorn into the erotic interplay with a partner, either as a witness who scolds or as another active participant? The basic point of psychoanalysis is that a controlling agent who exerts control and oppression can become itself a source of pleasure. In short, the entire vision of the House of Yes is based on the total ignorance of what we learned from Freud.

The idea of consenticorns is problematic for two interconnected reasons. First, it offers to resolve the problem of non-consensual sex by way of delegating the responsibility to an external hired controller: I can remain the way I am, the consenticorn will take care of me if I go too far. And if I do behave properly, it is because I fear of being caught by the controlling eye. Second, the idea of a consenticorn totally ignores the perverse implications of its practice, the unpredictable way the figure of consenticorn itself may get eroticised.

But, maybe, this is our perverse future. Maybe, our wish to the readers for the New Year should be: enjoy happy free sex with consenticorns.