Category: Class War

Class war

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

I was at brunch yesterday with a group comprised mostly of friends, and one of them was a retired banker. We talked about the half-million people who showed up for the labor and UKUncut march, and the banker tsk-tsked that it was a shame “some people” had to be violent and attack businesses.

I ventured a comment that things were so bad, nothing would change until the powers that be were actually scared. One of my friends smiled and said, “I have no problem with that.”

When corporations indiscriminately attack the workers, workers will defend themselves. Eventually we’ll even see it here, in the good old U.S. of A.

Link:

Earlier that morning, the feeder marches, all condemned as unauthorised by the TUC made their way largely unhindered to greet the masses gathered at Embankment. A half-hearted attempt by cops to put a line across Westminster bridge in front of the Radical Workers block that had left from Kennington Park was shrugged aside.

The anarchist block split from the main march past Embankment Station, as a voice over a megaphone beckoned marchers to come with them for a sight-seeing tour around London. The break off bloc poured past Trafalgar Square, past the front of the TUC demo where hundreds of disenchanted activists decided to sack off the A to B marching exercise and join the black bloc. By the time the bloc had made its way through Covent Garden to Oxford Street it numbered several thousand.

Trudging along with the masses, other anarchists filtered through the crowd to UK Uncut’s pre-arranged meet up on Oxford St at 2pm. UK Uncut had called for occupations of corporate tax dodgers. The police tactic for the day was clearly the protection of known UK Uncut targets, with lines of police in front of branches of Boots, Vodaphone and Topshop. The cops even seemed willing to protect Topshop at the expense of more traditional anti-capitalist targets, with unfortified McDonalds and Starbucks getting done over anyway, showing that this was far from a single issue demo.
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Tactics

~ susie

“If the economy disrupts our lives, then we must disrupt the economy”. — UKUncut

I think this is a conversation worth having, because sooner or later, this Uncut movement will continue to spread across the Atlantic and reach critical mass here. This is about yesterday’s march in London:

On Saturday, around half a million people took action in response to the coalition government’s public sector spending cuts. This is how I witnessed it.

The largest group disrupted traffic across a large section of central London, as they marched from Embankment to Hyde Park, chanting their slogans, banging pots and pans and blowing whistles and vuvuzelas. The cost of the damage caused by people littering and tramping across the grass in one of the country’s best-loved public parks has yet to be assessed.

A much smaller group, perhaps of around a thousand, staged sit-ins at a number of West End shops in the early afternoon. This was followed by a rally in Soho Square where campaigners were entertained by stand-up comedians and a well-known newspaper columnist. They then staged a final, peaceful sit-in, en masse, in the upmarket grocery store Fortnum and Mason. These people were arrested on leaving the shop, kept in the cells overnight and charged with aggravated trespass. (This illiberal law was introduced in 1994 as part of the widely-opposed Criminal Justice Bill, and can be applied to anyone who “trespasses on land with the intention of disrupting, or intimidating those taking part in, lawful activity taking place on that or adjacent land.”)

A smaller group still (the BBC’s Paul Mason estimates 600) smashed the windows of and threw paint at shops and banks in the West End. From what I saw, there was no serious attempt to arrest those causing the damage.

There are two lessons that I think the anti-cuts movement (by which I mean anyone who turned out on Saturday) should take from this. First, there has been a great deal of sneering among advocates of “direct action” in the past few months at “a to b marches”. I hope Saturday’s march, which left me feeling exhilarated and hopeful for the prospect of building a sustained opposition to the cuts, proves that bringing together a huge cross-section of society valid and necessary action. Of course it doesn’t change anything in isolation, but just think about how many people returned to their workplaces today, sharing their experiences with colleagues, realising that they’re not alone in their fight, and with any luck, thinking about what to do next.

Second, there is a narrative developing among some sections of the left that UK Uncut wrecked Saturday’s protest by diverting attention from the rally in Hyde Park and are somehow responsible for the “anarchist violence” focused on by the majority of the media. This plays into the hands of the right and needs to be stopped.
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G.E.

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Mike Elk at Think Progress:

Last week, the New York Times reported that, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, General Electric, the largest corporation in the United States, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010 and actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion dollars. The article noted that GE’s tax avoidance team is comprised of “former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.”

After not paying any taxes and making huge profits, ThinkProgress has learned that General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions.

This year, 14 unions representing more than 15,000 workers will negotiate a new master contract with General Electric. Among the major concessions GE has signaled that it will ask of union workers is the elimination of a defined contribution benefit pension for new employees, a move the company has already implemented for its non-union salaried employees. Likewise, GE is signaling to the union that it will ask for the elimination of current health insurance plans in favor of lower quality health saving accounts, a move the company has already implemented for non-union salaried employees as well.

In addition, General Electric may ask some workers for a wage freeze. Since the recession began in 2007, GE threatened to close plants in Schenectady, NY and Louisville, KY unless workers took wage concessions and adopted two-tier wage structure. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Mark Haller, a machinist at General Electric locomotive factory in Erie, PA, said:

The company I work for paid no federal taxes last year, but we all get these mass emails from GE asking us to call our Congressman to fund the useless, alternative GE engine for the F-35. As taxpayers, we are subsidizing the profits of this company to a huge extent and now after making the company even more profitable, they are asking us to make concessions on pensions, benefits, and perhaps even wages. You wonder why there is a jobs crisis in this country with a guy like G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt heading the President’s Jobs Commission.

In 2003, union workers at 16 different General Electric factories engaged in a strike when G.E. proposed to cut their health care. Workers are mobilizing again this year. They have planned a rally that is expected to attract 10,000 workers from all over the country at the General Electric Locomotive Factory in Erie, PA on June 4th.

Quote of the day

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Joe Bageant, 1946-2011:

Life is lived anecdotally, not algorithmically. And anecdotal evidence is not allowed in the new digital corpocracy. As one poster on Democratic Underground put it, “Anecdotal now has this enforced meaning such that no one is supposed to believe what they experience, what they see, hear, taste, smell, etc. The Powers That Be have basically extinguished the notion of inductive reasoning. Everything has to be replicated in a laboratory and since 90% of all the labs in this nation are operated by Corporate Sponsored monies, not much truth comes out of them.”

Chump change

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

But hey, it’s important to punish the people who need it most:

Last year, 53,000 children in the state attended full-day kindergarten funded in part with the grants, which began under Gov. Ed Rendell in 2004-05.

Now Gov. Corbett, who campaigned as a supporter of early-childhood education, has proposed eliminating the grants to save $260 million. Last year, about $200 million of that went to early-education programs, including to expand kindergarten to full-day.

Enrollment in full-day kindergarten has grown from 35 percent of students to more than 68 percent since the state started the grants, according to Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. Philadelphia could lose $55 million in block grants, of which the city used about 90 percent to fund full-day kindergarten for nearly 13,000 students.

Corbett wants to cut funding for public schools by 11 percent, a prospect that leaves districts scrambling to figure whether they can preserve full-day kindergarten.

In a part-day program, Citerone said, there was not enough time to do much writing. The difference by the end of the year is dramatic, she said. Previously, Citerone said, she might have one student in a class reading by the end of the year.

“I didn’t have readers for 22 years,” she said. “Now, over 80 percent go into first grade reading on level or above level. There’s really no comparison. I never thought I’d have children reading.

And right across the bridge, we’re also taking away their health care.

Goodbye, Joe

~ susie ~ 8 Comments

(UPDATE: This one’s for the Robert Stacy McCain readers who followed his link.)

Joe Bageant, author, blogger and fire-breathing class warrior, died yesterday after a short bout with cancer.

The financial success of Joe’s first book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, shocked and, I think, embarrassed him. He tried to give away as much of the money as he could, as fast as he made it, but felt compelled to hang onto at least some of it because he figured sooner or later, his drinking and smoking would catch up with him and he’d be at the mercy of the American healthcare system.

He was right.

I don’t think I ever felt so comfortable, so fast with anyone as I did with Joe. We were fans of each other’s work, and corresponded back and forth for years. I still remember our first phone call, which lasted a couple of hours and covered everything from class stratification to the consciousness-raising wonders of LSD. I always intended to visit him, either in Winchester, Virgina where he was first born and returned decades later, or in Belize and then Ajijic, Mexico, where he’d been spending a lot of time and was trying to lure his many friends down to form a community of like-minded ex-pats. But I never had a reliable car, or enough money to travel.

And then he got sick.

After a vibrant life, Joe Bageant died yesterday following a four-month struggle with cancer. He was 64. Joe is survived by his wife, Barbara, his three children, Timothy, Patrick and Elizabeth, and thousands of friends and admirers. He is also survived by his work and ideas.

According to Joe’s wishes, he will be cremated. His family will hold a private memorial service.

Did I mention that Joe was, in fact, an actual socialist? He wrote so powerfully about the tyranny of owning things, but also had a deep well of compassion for fellow Americans who were caught on the wheels of the economic machine. He was always urging me to stop looking for a job and “just write, goddamnit!”

He was my friend, a mentor, and a fellow traveler on the road to enlightenment. He was no doubt easier from a distance, but really, aren’t we all?

I have a review copy of his latest book, Rainbow Pie, sitting on my desk. I’ve been edging my way toward it, sad because I knew it was his last book. I think I’ll read it this week, in his memory.

Bless you, brother. See you on the other side.

(More tributes here and here.)