WORKERS OF THE WORLD

UNITE!

Happy International Worker's Day! Did you know that 01 May, or May Day, as it is also known, is a holiday in 80 countries? Similar to our Labour Day. And what a beautiful spring day it has been, here around Anchorage, as we went for our weekly long run, around 3:15, to train for our warm-season marathons. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day

As you know from reading our articles here on the A.P.R., or if you browse any other progressive media, workers world-wide, and especially now, are under threat of the loss of all the labour movement fought, suffered, and died for, over the past 150 years, at the hands of vicious, parasitic and sociopathic unrestrained capitalism.

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-turning.html

Things like the 40 hour work week, vacation and health benefits, and the right to collective bargaining. As well as a living wage, and safe working conditions. 

Why is this? Because our system in the U.S. is based on greed, large corporations are in existence to maximise short-term profits, no matter what the human and environmental cost. And as they get larger and more influential, they, through their lobbying and campaign contributions, buy off politicians so that legislation will continue to favour them, as well as the tax structure, at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of the country, and planet. All people have innate qualities of empathy, compassion, and concern for others, to some extent. But when people become part of a group, like a corporation, that acts in harmful ways, it's natural that they look for some kind of affirmation, so that they can justify their actions. One source that the ultra-right Republicans and Libertarians often like to discuss, are the principles laid out by Ayn Rand, who wrote several books in the 1940s and 1950s. Who is Ayn Rand, and what are these principles?

http://prorevnews.blogspot.com/2011/04/real-ayn-rand.html

April 27, 2011

The real Ayn Rand

Think Progress - Ayn Rand -- Russian emigre, founder of the mid-century objectivist movement, putative philosopher, writer of the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged , and the inspiration for a small but intensely devoted band of acolytes -- has been enjoying a resurgence of late on the American right. The cultural capstone to this resurgence arrived with the release of a filmed adaptation of the first third of Atlas Shrugged, independently financed by a wealthy devotee of Rand's work and pitched explicitly at the Tea Party demographic.

Glenn Beck praises Atlas Shrugged regularly on his various shows, and even held a panel dedicated to asking if Rand's fiction is finally becoming reality. The Economist reported several sharp spikes in sales of Atlas Shrugged since 2007. And according to the Ayn Rand Institute, sales of the novel hit an all-time annual record that year, then reached a new record in 2008, with possibly another peak in 2009. By all accounts, Ayn Rand is now one of the central intellectual and cultural inspirations for the base of the Republican Party.

"For over half a century," says Jennifer Burns, a recent biographer of the novelist, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right." And with good reason. Besides her prominence in the Tea Party's intellectual and cultural lexicon, some of the Republican Party's leading lights have cited Rand by name as an inspiration. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said she was the reason he entered public service. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called Atlas Shrugged "his foundational book." Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an avowed fan and quotes extensively from Rand's novels at Congressional hearings. His father Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) told listeners that readers ate up Rand's Atlas Shrugged because "it was telling the truth," and even conservative Supreme Court Just ice Clarence Thomas references her work as influence in his autobiography -- and apparently has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of The Fountainhead.

The philosophy, such as it was, which Rand laid out in her novels and essays was a frightful concoction of hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. She opposed all forms of welfare, unemployment insurance, support for the poor and middle-class, regulation of industry and government provision for roads or other infrastructure. She also insisted that law enforcement, defense and the courts were the only appropriate arenas for government, and that all taxation should be purely voluntary. Her view of economics starkly divided the world into a contest between "moochers" and "producers," with the small group making up the latter generally composed of the spectacularly wealthy, the successful, and the titans of industry.

On the level of personal behavior, the heroes in Rand's novels commit borderline rape, blow up buildings, and dynamite oil fields -- actions which Rand portrays as admirable and virtuous fulfillments of the characters' personal will and desires. Her early diaries gush with admiration for William Hickman, a serial killer who raped and murdered a young girl. Hickman showed no understanding of "the necessity, meaning or importance of other people," a trait Rand apparently found quite admirable.

For good measure, Rand dismissed the feminist movement as "false" and "phony," denigrated both Arabs and Native Americans as "savages" (going so far as to say the latter had no rights and that Europeans were right to take North American lands by force) and expressed horror that taxpayer money was being spent on government programs aimed at educating "subnormal children" and helping the handicapped. Needless to say, when Rand told Mike Wallace in 1953 that altruism was evil, that selfishness is a virtue, and that anyone who succumbs to weakness or frailty is unworthy of love, she meant it.

Is it any wonder then that we have an accelerating trend now in this country to turn back the clock to the year 1900, toward becoming a vastly unequal third-world-like state? With the majority of the population working in unsafe, low-paying jobs, struggling and fighting each other, just for the chance to hold onto them, while the environment deteriorates, with increasing air and water pollution, and eventually, environmental collapse? I remember, as an undergraduate, at the University of California, Davis, from 1982-86, sometimes rather  strangely-dressed looking young white males would write on our classroom chalkboards "Read Atlas  Shrugged!", one of Rand's most popular books. They were cult-like in this, not much different than the Mormons, out prosletyzing. And really, conservative "free-market" enthusiasts are no less driven by their fanatic beliefs, than any fundamentalist Christian or Mormon. We really think it is because these unfortunate and destructive beliefs, espoused by the likes of Ayn Rand, allow people to feel good about what they are doing, to justify their greed and selfishness.

We have to rebuild the solidarity among all people that our consumerist culture has deliberately tried to destroy. We who understand what is happening must reach out to the working people in the US who have traditionally been voting for conservative politicians, completely against their own interests. We all know, work with, are related to, or are neighbours, with such people. One way to do this is to describe current events and political policies in ways that are completely logical, and understood by them. That we do not have a "free market". Which is completely clear by looking at who holds top positions in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Corporate chieftains, bankers, high-ranking military officers, all people vested in maintaining the system that drives U.S. policy to continue to support policies that enrich them.

We found this article the other day to be very illuminating, and worthy of sharing.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/27-3

It’s Time to Revive an Old Rallying Cry: Labor Is Not A Commodity!

For America's labor movement to survive, it must recommit to—and defend—the principles that once defined it

by Joe Burns

During last year’s strike against Mott's, the apple juice maker, Tim Budd, an employee on the bargaining team, heard a plant manager say across the bargaining table that employees were “a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities goes up and down.” Mott’s management quickly disavowed their errant manager’s statement. After all, comparing workers to soybeans is not smooth, even for a unionbusting employer.

The verbal slip-up did, however, reveal a fundamental belief of management which has much to do with the future of the labor movement. To management, human labor is a simply commodity—nothing more, nothing less.  A commodity is an object traded in the marketplace without differentiation, such as lumber, oil, or soybeans. In this context, commodities are inputs into the production process. They are things.

To the traditional labor movement— from the 1880s up through the 1960s—the notion that human beings were mere objects to be used up during the production process was highly offensive. As Samuel Gompers, the conservative head of the American Federation of Labor in the first part of the 20th century, melodramatically stated, “You cannot weigh the human soul in the same scales with a piece of pork.”

In fact, labor activists spent decades lobbying Congress, eventually winning inclusion into the 1914 Clayton Act the simple declaration that “The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.” While that legislation did not serve its intended purpose of stopping courts from issuing anti-strike injunctions, the ideas underlying labor’s push proved vital in reviving the labor movement during the Great Depression.

During the 1930s, a powerful form of unionism rejected the idea that workers were mere objects holding no rights to the workplaces their very labor created. According to historian Sidney Fine, during the sit-down strike at Flint, Mich., in 1937, the United Auto Workers “contended that the strike was legal since the worker enjoyed a property right in his job.”  As one sit-down striker explained, “Our hides are wrapped around those machines.”

Workers took over their workplaces, blocked scabs at their plant gates, and prevented management from removing equipment from their plants. “The property right of the worker in his job,” explains Fine, “was superior to the right of the company to use its property as it saw fit since the workers had invested their lives in the plant whereas the stockholders of the company had invested only their dollars."

For the last several decades, formerly mainstream trade union principles—such as the ideas that labor is not a commodity, and that labor creates all wealth—have been marginalized within the labor movement. With rare exceptions, such as the United Electrical workers union's takeover of the Republic Windows plant in Chicago, the labor movement has failed to challenge the illegitimate, management-inspired viewpoint embedded in the legal system.

Trade unionists have come to accept a system where workers can spend their entire lives toiling in a plant, and in return, investors can ship their jobs across the world.

Unions cannot win operating under management’s framework. In Wisconsin alone, Mercury Marine, Harley Davidson, and the Kohler Corp. all extracted concessions from unions by threatening to move plants. As Working in These Times contributor Roger Bybee points out, “Without the national labor movement contesting every threat of plant relocation as an act of greed and disloyalty, workers sense no broader movement against de-industrialization and are unable to see any way out through a protracted battle.”

And it is not just in the private sector that this corporate ideology prevails.    The ongoing attack on public-sector unionism is not only an attack on unions and unionism; it is an attack on the very idea of a public sphere not controlled by the market.

Anti-labor conservatives envision a world where capital reigns supreme; where the market rules every sphere of human activity.  So hand in hand with attempts to gut public sector union rights, come attempts to destroy public education and public service. To anti-labor conservatives, everything should be a commodity, human labor, education, and even the water we drink.

As the struggle in Madison shows, the revival of the labor movement is about big ideas and bold action. Through heroic struggle, workers in Wisconsin transformed the terms of debate. Rather than debating public sector pay and benefits, the focus became the very right of workers to collectively bargain and issues of corporate control of the economy. The signature chant of the protesters, “This is What Democracy Looks Like,” pitted people power against a political system fueled by corporate dollars. 

As long as we allow management’s ideas to prevail on the big questions—how wealth is accumulated, the role of labor in production and the rights of capital versus labor—unionism will continue to be on the verge of extinction. Successful trade unionism must, by its very nature, challenge corporate control over the economy.

© 2011 In These Times

Joe Burns, a former local union president active in strike solidarity, is a labor negotiator and attorney. He is the author of the forthcoming book Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America (IG Publishing, 2011) and can be reached at joe.burns2@gmail.com

There are a few countries where the resources in them are being used to meet the needs of the majority of the population. Naturally, several are in South America.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/28-4

Published on Thursday, April 28, 2011 by Associated Press

Venezuela Institutes Windfall Oil Tax to Support Social Programs, Education

by Fabiola Sanchez

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela is imposing a windfall profits tax on royalties from oil projects when crude prices are above $40 a barrel, seeking to squeeze as much as $16 billion mostly out of foreign oil companies, the government said Tuesday.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (C) attends to a ceremony with representatives of various industrial sectors of the country at Teresa Carreno theatre in Caracas April 26, 2011. Revenue from the oil tax will not be used for investment in the oil industry, but rather will be funneled into the government's social programs and projects aimed at improving health care, education, housing, agriculture and infrastructure. (Credit: Reuters/Miraflores Palace/Handout) Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said the tax, which was decreed by President Hugo Chavez last week, will allow the government to collect between $9 billion and $16.3 billion this year.

A 20 per cent tax will be in effect when the price of a barrel of Venezuelan oil is between $40 and $70 a barrel, Ramirez said. When the price is between $70 and $90, the tax rises to 80 per cent. Between $90 and $100, the tax reaches 90 per cent, and if the price tops $100 a barrel, a 95 per cent tax will be imposed.

The price of Venezuela's heavy, sulfur-laden crude reached $94.60 a barrel Tuesday, Ramirez said.

The tax will be imposed on Venezuela's state-run oil company as well as foreign oil firms operating in Venezuela's crude-rich Orinoco Belt, Ramirez said.

If Venezuelan crude remains above $90 throughout 2011, an estimated $9 billion will be funneled into a development fund, Ramirez said. If Venezuela's oil prices top $110, an estimated $16.3 billion could be collected.

Ramirez said revenue from the tax will not used for investment in the oil industry, but rather will be funneled into the government's social programs and projects aimed at improving health care, education, housing, agriculture and infrastructure.

"It's a powerful tool the state has designed to acquire windfall income," Ramirez said.

He denied the fund would exclude projects launched by state governors and mayors as some government critics have alleged.

Ramirez told journalists that the tax won't be imposed on "the development of new oil fields," projects aimed at boosting oil production and agreements such as Petrocaribe program, which provides oil and natural gas to some Latin American and Caribbean nations at preferential prices.

It also will not apply to a deal signed last year between Venezuela and China, under which Venezuela ships oil to the Asian giant in exchange for goods and services, Ramirez said. Under that agreement, China lent $20 billion to Venezuela in exchange for shipments of 100,000 barrels a day over a 10-year period.

Ramirez, who is also president of Venezuela's state-run oil company, known as PDVSA, said the company has a $4 billion debt owed to contractors.

PDVSA is negotiating with the owners of 74 oil service firms for compensation after the government expropriated the companies in 2009. Ramirez said negotiations have been slow because authorities believe some of the companies failed to pay taxes. If talks break down, the disputes will be settled in Venezuelan courts, he said.

PDVSA is awaiting a ruling from the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in a dispute with Exxon Mobil Corp. The case was brought by the Irving, Texas-based company in 2007 over the government's nationalization of the Cerro Negro heavy oil project.

Exxon Mobil has also sought to recoup increased royalties and taxes imposed by the government starting in 2004. Exxon Mobil's oil project was one of four taken over by Chavez's government in May 2007 as he brought the oil industry under majority state control.

© 2011 Associated Press

I'm not sure how this article, which is fairly impressive, in that it is unbiased, made it through the corporate media structure of the Associated Press. Some things do slip through the cracks occasionally.

If only things like this could be done in this country! If we had a nationalised oil industry. Instead of the greedy, murderous ones now that drive US policy, and are responsible for the deaths of millions of people globally over the past 50 years, from outright wars over resource control (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Kuwait), to support of murderous dictators (Indonesia, most of the Middle East), and serious environmental destruction (Nigeria, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Gulf of Mexico, Prince William Sound Alaska). These kind of policies that Hugo Chavez are enacting are why "Christian" minister Pat Robertson publicly stated in 2006 that he should be "taken out" by the CIA. Because these are bad examples, if allowed to continue. People in other countries, and God forbid, this one, might start getting ideas! But we can have things like this, if we just start working for them.
 

Whenever I'm in the Lower 48, I always try and buy gas at Citgo stations, because they are partially owned by the Venezuelan PDSA national oil company. And I know that at least some of that money is going to something useful and constructive. We don't have those here in Alaska though. Happy International Workers Day! Cheers.