Ricky Baldwin's Blog

GM, the new Conrail

2009-06-01T21:58:34Z

Here's a shock: the media are reporting this story all wrong. "GM files for bankruptcy protection," "...a low point in the carmaker's 100-year history...," "... a powerful reminder of how far GM has fallen ...," blah, blah, blah.

The closest they come to the real story is generally on the jump page: "To achieve the lower break-even point, GM will have to shed thousands of employees, several car brands, hundreds of dealerships, health care and pension benefits, and a mountain of debt."

Whoa, rewind there: " ... GM will have to shed thousands of employees, ... health care and pension obligations ..."

Lemme get this straight. The US Government now has controlling interest in GM. The same US Government that has been telling us we have to pump millions of our dollars into GM, et al., because if por exemplo the Big Three go down we could lose jobs big time. The same US Government has also been talking about creating jobs, public works, etc., etc. Now they own GM (mostly), and the jobs go down the toilet anyway? On their watch? On their orders?

Admittedly we're now talking 40,000 jobs instead of 2 million, but the game ain't over yet. We still have more bankruptcy tickets.

This is the wrong kind of restructuring, folks! This is the (now discredited?) IMF all over again, just the opposite of what we need, what we need being what we might call a Social Monetary Fund - that would fund job creation, not "job shedding"; expanded health care that would cover more people, not fewer; likewise pensions.

Instead we seem to be getting, as Greg Palast puts it, "Grand Theft Auto:" nevermind ERISA, nevermind the fact that the pension money isn't theirs to take, and how DO you walk into to the doctor's office and pay with a bankrupt car company's stock?

That's clearly what we should be pissed about. But I'd like to add one more little observation, while we're on the subject (or I am). A little history, just a sort of after dinner mint to tip us right over the edge. It concerns Conrail, pretty well named in retrospect.

You see, this has all happened before. Before 1975 there were a number of old private, for-profit railroad lines running in the Northeastern US. Only they went bankrupt. So the Government bought them, and restructured them, downsized them, "shed" some of their operations and the attendant workers, etc. At the same time, with the same Act, the Government began a program of "regulatory reform" - i.e. deregulation. Several such "reforms" followed, but that's another story.

The long and the short is, by 1980 Conrail turned a profit (NB: as a government run enterprise it became profitable). So the Government took the next logical step - claro. It re-privatized the company, the largest sale of public stock in US history!

Get it? Private enterprise not working - government/taxpayers assume debt, invest billions to rebuild and repair - then hand it back to the profiteers, this time with far fewer regulations, like, for example, secret contracts, etc., etc.

They call this 'socialism'? The smart guys have a better way to describe it: "Socialized risk, privatized profit." What it means is, socialism for the rich, while the rest of us get to take our chances with wild west capitalism.

My friend Isa

2009-01-04T20:21:50Z

I had a friend in the 1990s, a very gentle quiet man, who was killed in an automobile accident near Oxford, MS. His friends collected money to send his body home for burial, only the government there wouldn't accept it. My friend was Palestinian. His home was in Israeli occupied territory, illegally occupied in defiance of UN Resolutions calling for compliance with international law, against world opinion, morality and humanitarian considerations. His hometown was Bethlehem. His name was Isa, which I'm told would be anglicized as Jesus.

I attended the ceremony with some coworkers who had also known Isa. There was no sense of anger in evidence against Israel, or against the US government for its support and complicity in Israel's genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people, certainly no resentment of us as outsiders. In fact, we were treated as honored guests, though not one of us was Muslim and most of us weren't not religious at all. The Turkish coffee made us crazy.

But when I tell Isa's story to family or friends, regardless of their politics, they are almost always struck by sadness and outrage. I think it's because they know me, and I knew Isa, and he didn't deserve it. But when the news (http://www.amnestyusa.org/)reports that hundreds of women and children, or other civilians who don't deserve it, are being blown apart by that same government, with the same wink and material support from the US, what then?

And when we learn that the conflict occurs because Israel has cut off civilian access to food and other supplies, and jobs, etc., which are desperately needed (http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/downloads/oxfam_gaza_lowres.pdf), cut off because Israel disapproves over the Palestinian election of Hamas - an organization that Israel itself funded as an alternative to the more secular PLO and whose hand Israel has continually strengthened by refusing to deal fairly with more "moderate" representatives, and by its belligerence, including illegal "settlement" outposts in Palestinian territory - what then?

Does it make any sense to be any less saddened or outraged than aboout my friend Isa's story? Or more? Much, much more?

There was essentially nothing, beyond sympathy, that could be done about my friend Isa's final 'resting place'. It's here in the US. There is, however, something to be done about the ongoing crimes in Palestine. The US regularly supplies weapons, fuel, spare parts, and political support, to Israeli aggression. There is considerable evidence over the years, some of it very recent (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/1/2/132414/3479) that US influence can be decisive in Israel's policy decisions.

And, if we are determined enough, it seems the people who live in the US can influence its policies - at least to an extent.

Green but not Soylent Green

2008-11-25T16:14:50Z

"It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people."
- "Soylent Green" (Richard Fleischer, 1973)

For as long as there have been bailouts, people have known that bailouts suck. The rich play, we pay. "Privatized profit, socialized risk," it's called. So when Congress was debating the $700 billion TARP (fig leaf?) the resentment really should have come as no surprise. The S&L bailout, OK, was a long time ago in political terms, but we got a reminder because the Great S&L Protector John McCain was running for Commandant-in-Chief. And the privatized Freddie and Fannie were already sucking down the cash - cash we could have used for sick kids or bridges or even cars with European or Japanese mpgs.

What was a surprise was that the first version went down in flames. A trillion dollars slurped out of pension plans, etc., when the Dow took a dive, and Congress was ready to try to bang out a compromise. Now the auto industry bailout appears to be dying on the vine. With more bailout requests almost certainly in the pipeline and the President-Elect promising the mother of all stimuli, critics are girding for battle - and rightly so - but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There's no sense in even discussing "free enterprise" at this point, except to say it's myth. It doesn't work, never has. The industrial revolution was born in Britain on land stolen from peasant farmers, paid for with wages held down by national law. The US economy was built on stolen land by slaves, the Northeastern economy incubating side-by-side with the Southern (shipbuilding for slave ships and to move the product of Caribbean slave labor, bank loans and insurance for slave plantations, etc.). Government contracts and publicly funded research (TV, drugs, military technologies, Internet) are gifts from taxpayers to private business, not to mention all the tax breaks, industrial development funds and so on that business now so frequently require before agreeing to come to town and drive the locals out of business. Capitalism never works without massive government intervention, often including wars and coups to recover debts and protect investments or other business interests.

But there are critics on the left, too, some more insightful than others. US Sen. Bernie Sanders says if a corporation is "too big to fail," it's "too big to exist." He says the government should break them up. Sanders also says, "let the rich bail out the rich" by paying a surcharge on income over $1 million to cover the costs. Jobs With Justice, ACORN and others in the grassroots left are calling for a "People's Bail-Out." All good ideas.

But some of our friends, in their haste to fund "green infrastructure," sometimes forget who the effort is for.

Reede Stockton of Global Exchange, writes in an article on Common Dreams about a "new green economy" with massive public expenditure to rebuild the nation's rail network and support free public transportation using all clean energy. It's a great idea, but he says we should do it instead of rescuing the auto industry.

The US economy is on track to lose as many as a million and a half jobs by the new year. If even one of the Big Three car companies goes under, that failure and its ripple effects could add another 2-3 million jobs lost next year - not counting other job losses, already estimated as high as 300,000 a month by year's end. But they can go anywhere they want to go for free.

To be fair, the public investment in infrastructure Stockton proposes would create some jobs. But these are different jobs, very different. A comprehensive plan is needed, with public money for retraining, provisions for people who can't make the transition so easily - retirement, maybe a kind of G.I. bill for veteran of the workforce - etc.

But if the government decided to now turn its back and let an integral part of the economy collapse, millions of people fall into the dustbin of redundancy, buildings and machines tossed in the landfill or left to obstruct new development, that would be recklessly destructive. And it would gain the "new green economy" a generation of enemies that could have been allies. Why throw away the product of a hundred years of public subsidy and entrepreneurial ingenuity (albeit not "free")? The car industry could help, with the proper realistic incentives.

Call it a Social Monetary Fund, a restructuring plan that's the reverse of the IMF-style "austerity" package of eliminating public services, busting unions, forcing wages down, privatizing. Instead of paying the car companies to kick people out of work, the Social Monetary Fund would pay them to put people back to work - including a kind of retooled WPA or CCC. And it would require recipient companies to diversify, but again on a social agenda: instead of fighting public transportation, invest in it - with financial incentives for "green economic" investment, penalties for the old way. Likewise clean energy development, hybrids, etc.

But the stimulus must not become a glorified workfare program. A Social Monetary Fund would have to learn from the mistakes of the old WPA. These workers need union protections, too, so the Employee Free Choice Act now before Congress has to be part of the package. EFCA would allow workers to form a union with asimple majority of signatures on union authorization cards, without the lengthy and abusive election process. They also need OSHA coverage, overtime protections, and a living wage.

If we can put a man on the moon - if we can put an intelligent, well-spoken man in the White House, a black man no less, whose middle name is famously Hussein - we can do this.