Saturday, December 01, 2012

It is class war

 We, the 99%, had the Occupy Movement and have our unions. Now the 1% are uniting. They have the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a cabal of the business elite organising for spending cuts and austerity policies. Bankers and billionaires are telling workers that we should lower our expectations. The organization’s “CEO Council” now consists of roughly 150 executives, many of them from Wall Street’s upper echelons in Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Citigroup.

Fix the Debt prefers to keep its behind-the-scenes operations under wraps. Most on-the-record comments are a mishmash of platitudes about shared sacrifice and working together for the good of the country. But interviews with a number of organizers and CEO council members point to a massive networking effort among one-percenters — one that relies on strategically exploiting existing business relationships and appealing to patriotic and economic instincts. Fix the Debt’s growth is easy to understand as a social phenomenon, especially given the various personal and professional webs that have connected many of its members for decades.
 “These CEOs are supporting the effort more than financially,” Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and one of the co-founders, said. “They’re willing to do the work.”

“Fix the Debt is a PR campaign that appears as a very sensible, very bipartisan effort. But at its core, all of it is window dressing for a very ideological, partisan policy position, which is the destruction of Social Security,”
Alex Lawson, the executive director of Social Security Works explained

If manufacturing is returning to the US as claimed then it’s not creating many jobs, and the jobs it is creating are not the good jobs which people want to have.

Corporate executives and financial employees make up just  one-half of 1%  of the workforce, but with nearly a trillion dollars of annual income ( 11.3% of $8.12 trillion ) they make more than ALL 15 million unionized workers in the United States, and almost as much as ALL  21 million  government workers.

The CEOs of the 50 firms that laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home 42 percent more pay in 2009 than their peers did -- largely because cutting workers boosts short-term profits. Since the crash of 2008, banks have paid out more than $80 billion in bonuses.

 According to the Sunday Times, the combined fortunes of the richest 1000 individuals now exceed the pre-crash total of £413bn, standing at a record £414bn. The pay of directors of FTSE 100 companies has similarly grown, rising by at least 10 percent in the last year, despite static wages for most of their staff.

1 comment:

CogitoErgoSum said...

Is your "job" helping you to become independent and become free of labour? If not, its probably wage slavery or class-based warfare, and you're working for very little gains as opposed to the gains made by your employer.