Saturday, November 12, 2016

What's Important and What's Really Imporant



1. See this article in the NYT   It is an important article

2.  It is important to note that the article confirms Insurgent Notes' argument that the turn to Trump was a measure of desperation by workers, and that neither racism, nor anti-immigration were the selling points to the Carrier workers.

3.  It is important that none of the African-American workers interviewed could bring themselves to vote for Trump.

4.  It is important to note that "holding Trump to his promises"  is where you get the full measure of the desperation-- that despite the actual record of Trump as a businessman, where breaking agreements, contractual obligations, promises of payment to suppliers, vendors, and workers was his default procedure-- there is the "wish to believe."

5. It's important to grasp that the reduction in manufacturing jobs with a higher wage rate, the increase in service jobs with a lower wage rate; the increase in part-time and temporary employment; the destruction of benefits, is not the result of globalization or "open borders" or NAFTA, or the WTO or free trade agreements, but is inherent in the "productivity of labor"-- the substitution of machinery for living labor that capitalism demands of, by, and for the capitalists.  The incessant substitution drives down the profitability of production, leads to overproduction, precipitates the attacks on wages and benefits, is the source of the demands for "give backs" and further "productivity gains" leading to successive drops in profitability and attacks on wages.

6.  It's important to note that this death spiral is not intrinsic to technological advance.  It is intrinsic to the advance of capitalism.  It is intrinsic to technology deployed and constrained in and only in the service of profit.  We are not Luddites.  Not even the Luddites were Luddites. Technology, when attacked, is attacked as the embodiment of capital, as the property of oppression and oppressors

7. It's really important to note that the African-American workers smelled a rat in the  "program" of Trump. The rat is that big capital uses attacks on the the poor, on the marginalized, on the undocumented,  by both the "centrists" and  the "alt-right" not as a "social medium" but as a street force in a mobilization exercise, an organizing principle to be used against  all workers regardless of what promises are made, what promises are broken.  The Clinton attacks on black youth as "super-predators" and the Trump full page-ads calling for execution of the Central Park Five were siblings in the same litter. 

8. It's important to note that in the 2Q 2016, profits for the S&P 500 declined approximately 3 percent on a year-over-year basis.  This is the fifth consecutive quarterly decline. The last time the S&P 500 experienced five straight quarters of decline was 2008-2009.  Carrier intends to begin layoffs at the Indiana plant this summer.  The workers don't have that long. The layoffs will begin before that whether or not production is transferred to Mexico.

9. Against all promises.  Against all layoffs.

S.Artesian
November 12, 2016


5 comments :

  1. Anonymous11:19 PM

    "See this article in the NYT It is an important article."
    What article? Date, page, and title please.

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    1. There's a link embedded in the text "NYT." Click on NYT in the first line.

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  2. I'm sorry that I don't recall the exact reference, but I definitely read that, in exits polls on Nov. 8, 1 in 3 black males voted for Trump. Does that fit into your analysis? Point 3 above seems to have a different take, but it could be due to the skewing of the methodology.

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    1. From what I've been able to piece together-- and I haven't researched information specific to African-American men-- it appears that Trump did about as well with the "traditional" Republican groups as Romney did; that Clinton performed significantly less well with African-American and Latino voters than Obama had.

      According to Pew Research, the greatest spread was the vote of non-college whites, with margins greater than the margins of non-college whites who had voted for Romney, continuing the "tradition" but widening the spread as non-college whites supported both Romney and McCain over Obama.

      College graduate whites also supported Trump over Clinton, in proportions that matched the support McCain received from this group.

      The vote of all those with college degrees favored Clinton over Trump.

      I think it's difficult to claim that race wasn't a factor in this vote:-- that is to say the increasing pressure on younger whites drove them to Trump in greater numbers than in previous elections.

      And that the failure of a "recovery"-- the greater inequality that has been both the basis and the result of the "recovery"-- significantly cut into Democrats "core" support.

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  3. I would add, however, that we don't know the impact of the voter suppression actions on African-American voters, and that class mobilization of workers must include program, and action, independent of the Dems, against voter suppression and jerry mandering by state legislatures, as states are going to use the current conditions to advance programs for breaking union contracts and union certification; for abolishing pension obligations, etc. Anti-voter suppression would be key to organizing a workers' party.

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