https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJDw-o6aalQ&ab_channel=StatusCoup
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Tax evasion on stocks has gone on long enough - Richard Wolff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPIvAGR0VrA&ab_channel=DemocracyAtWork
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Democrats torpedo $15 minimum wage hike
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/01/pers-j03.html
Marcus Day
14 hours ago
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party effectively ended efforts to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of the COVID-19 stimulus package making its way through Congress. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not been increased since 2009, and the dropping of the raise will leave millions of workers in utter destitution.
The White House and congressional Democrats have falsely sought to present themselves as having their hands tied, holding up the advisory ruling of the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth McDonough, as an excuse. McDonough, an unelected official appointed to her role by the Democrats in 2012, ruled that the wage hike is not allowable in a bill using the budget reconciliation process.
But the decision by the Democrats to abandon the wage hike is one of choice, even preference, not necessity.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in her role as Senate president, has the ability to overrule the Senate parliamentarian. Or, if the Democrats had any inclination to press the issue, they could have fired McDonough and replaced her, as the Republicans did in order to move tax cuts through the Senate under then-President George W. Bush in 2001.
The Democrats have rejected these options out of hand, however. On the contrary, for weeks Biden has signaled his expectation—all but explicitly stating his desire—that the wage raise would not survive the Senate, and a White House official told CNN that the parliamentarian’s ruling is viewed as a positive development, “clearing the way” for the bill, now set to be watered down even more in the Senate.
Some Senate Democrats, including Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders, have subsequently sought to save face by saying they are exploring utilizing tax incentives to encourage major corporations to raise wages. However, such a proposal, in the unlikely chance it is approved by both the parliamentarian and all 50 Democratic senators, would inevitably be a toothless measure, exempting large sections of employers while subsidizing others.
Tellingly, Biden has shown that when it comes to defending the interests of US imperialism, he sees not the slightest need for deference to parliamentary or legal norms. While Democratic officials were taking to the airwaves to bemoan their powerlessness to overcome arcane Senate rules to raise the minimum wage, US missiles were raining down on Syria, in an attack ordered by Biden with no pretense of congressional authorization or respect for either US or international law.
Only weeks into the Biden administration, the Democratic Party is once again demonstrating its total subservience to the interests of the financial oligarchy and its opposition to any significant measures to address the needs of the working class.
The Democrats’ predictable cynicism, duplicity and spinelessness over the $15 minimum wage hike, a central campaign promise by Biden, at the same time exposes the bankruptcy of the perspective espoused by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and other pseudo-left promoters of the Democratic Party, based on the claim that it is a “lesser evil” that can be pushed to enact progressive reforms.
The $15 minimum wage itself would have been a poverty wage, grossly inadequate to meet the cost of living in large portions of the US. The Democratic proposal would not have seen the federal minimum reach $15 until 2025, by which point its buying power would have been even further eroded by inflation.
Had the federal minimum wage kept pace with inflation and productivity gains since 1968, it would now be at roughly $24, underscoring the paltry character of the $15 proposal.
But even this meager amelioration of desperate social need has been shown to be virtually impossible to enact under both Democratic and Republican administrations, both of which subordinate every decision to the needs of big business and the financial oligarchy.
The current federal minimum wage of $7.25—roughly $15,000 a year before taxes for a single worker—amounts to starvation rations. The nearly 12 years since its last increase is the longest stretch without a rise in the history of the federal minimum wage, going back to the first enactment of a national minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, amidst the explosive class battles of the Great Depression.
The extended freeze of the federal minimum wage over this time is not an accident. The period following the economic crisis and recession of 2008-2009 was characterized by an enormous redistribution of wealth upwards, from the majority of the population to the top of society, carried out by the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama and accelerated under his successor, Republican Donald Trump.
Social inequality skyrocketed from 2009 to 2020, seeing the longest rise in the stock market in US history, with the S&P 500 market index more than tripling during that time, and total US billionaire wealth ballooning from around $1.3 trillion to roughly $4 trillion.
The dizzying runup in share values and the fortunes of the very richest have been based upon on two processes: First, the virtually endless supply of cheap money by the Federal Reserve and central banks, which has been vastly increased since the onset of the pandemic. Second, the dramatic intensification of the exploitation of the working class, exemplified by Obama’s restructuring of the auto industry in 2009, slashing the wages of new-hires in half.
These low-wage conditions, perpetuated by both the Democrats and Republicans through the suppression of the minimum wage and other means, have become critical to the operations of American capitalism, the artificial inflation of stock values, and the maintenance and growth of the fortunes of the financial oligarchy.
The function of the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party, along with pseudo-left backers such as the DSA, Jacobin magazine and Socialist Alternative, is to cover up this basic reality and convince workers and young people that progressive reforms can still be achieved under capitalism in general, and the Democrats in particular.
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and leading DSA members supported Biden in 2020, holding him up as an alternative to the reactionary policies of Trump. In campaigning for Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff, Sanders presented Democratic control of the Senate as the road to far-reaching reforms, tweeting: “A $15 minimum wage, fighting climate change and expanding health care are at stake in today’s Senate runoffs.”
It has taken less than two months for this claim to be exploded, as has every fraudulent political guarantee by Sanders before it. Biden and the Democrats are neither able nor willing to raise the living standards of workers, meaningfully address climate change, put a stop to the US war machine, or resolve any of the other major social problems confronting humanity.
In control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Democrats will aggressively defend the same fundamental class interests as their Republican counterparts, namely, those of the capitalist ruling class. This will entail both increasingly brutal attacks on workers domestically—including the attempts to reopen schools and workplaces while the pandemic continues—and predatory and potentially catastrophic imperialist aggression abroad, as the airstrikes on Syria last week show.
The only alternative is one that is based on the working class, the development of the class struggle, and a socialist program. The decimation of workers’ living standards and the grotesque enrichment of the ruling class pose objectively the necessity of expropriating the oligarchs and placing the major corporations and banks under workers’ democratic control and redistributing this immense wealth on the basis of social need, as part of the fight for socialism internationally.
Australian union rams through sell-out at Coles Smeaton Grange
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/01/cole-m01.html
Oscar Grenfell
14 hours ago
After isolating 350 workers at Coles’ Smeaton Grange warehouse throughout a company lockout that spanned more than three months, the United Workers Union (UWU) has forced through a sell-out enterprise agreement that gives the supermarket giant everything it demanded.
The betrayal of the workers has a significance that goes far beyond their facility in southwestern Sydney. The lockout, among the longest industrial disputes of the past two decades, contains critical lessons for the working class as a whole. Chief among them is that any fight in defence of jobs, conditions and basic rights confronts the unions as an enemy force that serves the interests of company managements and privileged officials, against the workers they falsely claim to represent.
For some 14 weeks, the workers held out against the dictates of one of the largest companies in Australia as it refused to provide them with a wage or allow them inside their workplace. This was a courageous stand on behalf of not only their own jobs and conditions, but those of other warehouse staff across the country, who are also in the firing line, and the working class as a whole. It reflected a growing militancy and opposition among wide layers of workers.
But this struggle was systematically undermined and betrayed by the UWU. From the outset of the dispute, the union accepted that Smeaton Grange would be closed and virtually all of the jobs there destroyed. Initially, the UWU claimed to be fighting for a “just transition” and “fair redundancies.” Over the course of the three months, even that posture was abandoned, as the union adopted the company’s demands in full and insisted that workers had no option but to accept them.
Depending on how many of the dubious “indicative” union “polls” and “surveys” one includes, the company ballot on Saturday was the tenth or eleventh occasion on which workers were compelled to vote on an “offer” from Coles that remained fundamentally unchanged throughout the dispute, and that they had previously rejected on multiple occasions.
The immediate context of Saturday’s ballot was the company’s February 10 announcement of an indefinite extension of the lockout. This was declared in a video by Coles Chief Operations Officer Matt Swindells. He venomously denounced workers who had rejected the agreement in a vote on February 2, praised the UWU and warned against “extremist” and “anti-union” socialists, i.e., the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site, who were disrupting the company-union sell-out operation.
The union responded by declaring that it would do nothing, other than hold more closed-door discussions with management and organise further ballots on the same agreement. The UWU, which declared assets valued at over $300 million at the end of the last financial year, including more than $94 million in cash reserves, reacted to the February 2 “no vote” by again vehemently rejecting calls for its vast coffers to be opened to provide desperately-needed strike pay.
It was in this context, with workers confronting a united front of the company and the union, as well as the prospect of weeks or months longer without any pay, that a reported 71 percent voted the agreement up in Saturday’s ballot.
The UWU immediately sent a text message to workers, declaring that it was “great to see so many people supporting the EA [enterprise agreement.]”
The analogy that comes to mind is criminals thanking their victims, after beating them into submission. The union is well aware that the vast majority of workers remain intensely hostile to the agreement and view it as a sell-out. Many of those who voted “yes” did so because they had been pauperised. Given the circumstances, the most remarkable aspect of the ballot is that at least 29 percent of workers voted “no.”
Notwithstanding the union’s claims to have achieved some sort of victory on behalf of workers, the agreement is actually worse than previous versions.
The UWU abandoned almost the entire log of claims lodged at the beginning of the dispute. An initial demand of a 5.5 percent per annum wage rise was scrapped for the company’s “offer” of 3.5 percent; calls for redundancies capped at the equivalent of 104 weeks of service were dropped for Coles’ proposal of 80, and any talk of workers being given the right to redeploy to the new automated facility that is to replace Smeaton Grange was dispensed with weeks ago.
Management and the union touted a $1,000 sign-on bonus, which had been rejected by workers last month as contemptuous. Coles, which reported half-year profits of more than $500 million last month, dismissed any suggestion of increasing the payment, even to a paltry $5,000 per worker, under conditions in which it has denied employees tens of thousands of dollars in wages.
To cover over the fact that it was enforcing all the company’s dictates, the UWU resorted to outright misinformation.
The union joined the company in hailing “enhanced redundancy provisions.” These, it indicated, would allow workers to take a voluntary redundancy at any time until Smeaton Grange is closed. Those who have read the agreement, however, know that voluntary redundancies remain capped at 80 workers, meaning some 270, the vast majority, are going to be sacked.
A supposed ratio of 80 percent permanent staff to 20 percent casuals, prior to the closure, is also bogus. The agreement presents this as an aspiration only, and insists that Coles will require “flexibility” and a “pragmatic approach” from the union, as it “downsizes” the workforce.
The union was very quiet about one clause in the agreement, which was not contained in previous versions. It states that workers will not be disciplined for participating in pickets and protests during the lockout, on the condition that the UWU ensures that “no further action will be taken for the remainder of the dispute.” In other words, the union has signed an agreement to suppress any opposition from workers to management attacks against them.
With extraordinary rapidity, the union and the company moved to engineer a return to work. In its Saturday text message, the UWU added insult to injury by inviting workers to participate in a “voluntary clean up ... at the site to allow it to get operational.”
The company informed workers that some of them would begin returning at 7 a.m. today, but not for regular shifts. Those will not begin until next Monday at the earliest. Instead, workers, some of whom have been at the facility for decades, are being hauled in for “refresher training.”
The character of this “training” is indicated by the fact that it will begin with workers being handed a formal letter on “expected workplace behaviour standards.” In other words, they will be subjected to a management harangue.
The speed with which the company and the management have orchestrated the return is dictated by two considerations. First, they both know they are sitting on a powder keg of opposition, and want to begin the shutdown of Smeaton Grange as quickly as possible.
Secondly, they are making an example of the workers and setting a precedent that will be deployed against other Coles staff, not in the distant future, but in the coming weeks and months. Coles management has indicated that it will rapidly press ahead with a sweeping restructure, aimed at saving $1 billion over five years, of which the Smeaton Grange warehouse closure is one part.
The Eastern Creek distribution centre in western Sydney, the Goulburn warehouse in regional New South Wales and two facilities in Brisbane are slated for imminent shutdowns.
In other words, the struggle at Smeaton Grange is not the end of the fight, but the beginning.
The warnings of the Socialist Equality Party, that anger and opposition are not enough, have been painfully confirmed. It is impossible to defend anything within the straitjacket of the unions, which are corporatised, anti-working class organisations.
This poses the need for workers at Coles, Woolworths and throughout the warehousing industry to make a complete break with the UWU and the other unions. Independent rank-and-file committees are required to organise a fight against the closures and in defence of all jobs.
This is a political struggle, directed not only against company management, but the corporate elite as a whole, the government, Labor, the unions and the draconian Fair Work industrial legislation that is used to suppress any collective action. To defeat this line-up requires a broader political movement of the working class.
A new, socialist perspective is required. Workers cannot defend their jobs and conditions, if they accept the “right” of Coles to slash costs in order to drive up profits and shareholder returns. Fundamental social rights can be guaranteed only if industry is operated on a different principle, of serving the needs of workers and society. This means placing Coles, Woolworths, the major corporations and the banks under public ownership and democratic workers’ control. That requires the fight for a workers’ government and for socialism.
Violent crackdown on Myanmar protests leaves 18 dead
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/01/myan-m01.html
Owen Howell
14 hours ago
Protests against the military coup in Myanmar were violently attacked by security forces yesterday, leaving 18 people dead and more than 30 wounded, according to the UN Human Rights Office. The bloodshed signals a further shift by the military junta towards the use of repression to try to stamp out a growing nationwide movement of mass protests and strikes opposed to the dictatorship.
Police and soldiers opened fire on crowds of peaceful demonstrators, with live rounds and rubber bullets, in multiple locations across Myanmar. Large deployments of riot police, armed with batons and shields, charged into crowds in both cities and rural areas, indiscriminately attacking protesters and by-standers.
In Yangon, the nation’s largest city and a centre of the anti-coup movement, police were out in force early and took up positions at the usual demonstration sites, detaining protesters as they arrived.
At around 8:30 a.m., police moved on thousands of marching doctors, nurses, and students from the city’s medical universities, who had gathered near Hledan Centre intersection. Social media footage showed police beating protesters and shoving the injured into police trucks. Around 200 medical students were detained.
Similar assaults were conducted against a teachers’ rally in the Yankin district and elsewhere throughout the city. After tear gas and shots in the air failed to disperse crowds, police began firing live ammunition at protesters. Dozens were shot and three young men died from their wounds. A woman also died of a suspected heart attack, after police set off a wave of stun grenades, her daughter and a colleague said.
In the south-eastern city of Dawei, at least four people were shot dead and 40 injured, the Irrawaddy reported. An ambulance driver in Bago, the site of another bloody state clampdown, told Agence France Presse he had sent the bodies of two 18-year-olds, shot dead, straight to the mortuary.
As the day went on, a bystander on a motorcycle died after being shot in the head by police in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second largest city. Several volunteers providing medical aid to protesters were shot and injured. Later in the day, another passer-by was shot in the head and died instantly.
Meanwhile in Pakkoku, Magway Region, a man attempting to hide from soldiers in the street was shot dead. Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, also witnessed a determined crackdown in which 50 protesters were detained by authorities.
Despite such repressive measures, however, protesters were mostly undeterred by the deadly shootings and continued their marches in the afternoon. The exceptions were the towns of Lashio and Myeik, where police succeeded in breaking up protests.
The Myanmar protests have rapidly grown in scale over the past four weeks since the February 1 coup, when the armed forces—known as the Tatmadaw—seized control of the country and arrested leaders of the democratically-elected government, citing unfounded allegations of voter fraud in last November’s election. Protesters have demanded the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and her National Democratic League (NLD) and an end to the military dictatorship.
The junta’s methods of repression after the coup—internet shutdown, media censorship, a year-long state of emergency—took a decisively drastic turn on February 20, when a crackdown on a shipyard workers’ strike in Mandalay involved the direct firing of live rounds at protesters, resulting in at least two deaths and over 30 injuries.
The repression was stepped up on Friday as a troop of riot police charged protesters in the Hledan and Myaynigone districts of Yangon. Local media reported that shots were fired in the air near Yangon University, a main rallying point of the movement. Residents of the neighbourhood opened their doors to fleeing demonstrators. In Mandalay, four people were seriously wounded by shots from live rounds, with at least ten more injured by batons and slingshots.
In response, protesters and strikers have constructed barricades out of garbage bins and carts around areas of Yangon. They also began equipping themselves with hard hats, gas masks, and makeshift shields.
On Saturday, the crackdown intensified again. Police charges in Yangon targeted anyone in their path, including volunteer medics, trishaw drivers, and a pregnant woman. Bloody raids were reported nationwide. State-run television network MRTV announced that 479 protesters had been arrested on Saturday alone, among them numerous journalists.
In Monywa, the largest city of Sagaing Region in the northwest, one woman is believed to have been shot and seriously wounded. Witnesses of the Monywa protests, which comprised largely of teachers, told Reuters news agency that police surrounded the crowd and then used water cannon. Earlier, citizens of Monywa had reportedly declared a self-administrative city, accountable only to the representatives of the suspended parliament.
The current crackdown is taking place within the context of heightening political tensions. Thein Soe, chairman of the junta-appointed election commission, declared on Friday that the results of the November polls were officially invalid, despite the NLD’s landslide victory. On the same day, Myanmar’s Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun made a public appeal to the UN “to use any means necessary to take action against the Myanmar military.” He read the statement on behalf of Suu Kyi and her cabinet, who, he said, were still the legitimate government.
In the meantime, uncertainty has grown over Suu Kyi’s whereabouts, as the independent Myanmar Now website reported she was moved this week from house arrest to an undisclosed location. The next hearing in her case is scheduled for today.
It is not Suu Kyi and her NLD that are undermining the junta, but an extensive movement of the working class. The military is desperate to put a halt to a growing movement of striking workers that threatens to bring economic activity to a standstill. Loosely organised under the leadership of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), the widespread work stoppages and walkouts have effectively paralysed major sections of the economy: the civil service, healthcare, banking, education, and transport.
UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar Tom Andrews has estimated that around three-quarters of the country’s one million civil servants are on strike. Additionally, junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing revealed this week that one-third of the nation’s hospitals are no longer functioning due to disruptions.
The power of this movement was demonstrated during last Monday’s general strike, in which millions turned out and refused to work under the military regime. This drew together doctors, miners, electricity workers, garbage collectors, and supermarket employees.
After Monday, strikes appear to be expanding into new sectors. Truck drivers began a strike against the coup on Thursday, by refusing to transport goods from the docks at Yangon’s four main ports. Joint secretary of the Myanmar Container Trucking Association said he estimates that about 90 percent of the city’s 4000 drivers are on strike, and have promised to deliver only essential food, medicine and fabrics for factories.
The junta’s deep fear of an imminent economic crisis underscores the violence now being used, to try to suppress the upsurge of the working class as quickly as possible. Economic growth for the financial year 2020–21 is expected to be just 0.5 percent, due partly to Myanmar’s failure to attract significant foreign investment, but above all to the global downturn caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
NBC Still Pushing The Idea That Helping Americans Will Destroy The Country
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-m53exTZrU&ab_channel=HardLensMedia
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