Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honorable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. — Charles Dickens
Here is a tale of three cities best illustrating our times. The first city is New York. Gretchen Morgenson has a piece digging further into the back door bailout of the banks accomplished with Washington DC’s, our second city, funneling billions through AIG. Morgenson shows despite Wall Street denials, some of the largest banks were saved from great losses, if not insolvency, by our government’s backdoor largess. Continuing in Washington, our so-called pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, announced that using tax-payer bailouts, the banks lavished themselves with bonuses, claiming $1.6 billion in bonuses the most egregious, but also stating the government would do nothing about it, as, it was “not contrary to the public interest.” Some Czar. Some public interest.
But these are old stories and the machinations of New York and DC really come to full flower in our third city Detroit. The Post has an excellent must read story about the results of the GM bailout concocted by our two other cities. Most interesting is the fact wages for new hires were cut 50% under the deal, making a two-tier labor system, with half making $28 an hour and the other $14. No bonuses for GM workers, instead pay is cut by half. The story reveals DC doing New York’s dirty work:
The administration proposal also called for all new production employees to be paid the $14 rate, expanding a 2007 labor agreement that set up the lower rate, though only for some “non-core” jobs. In doing so, the administration went well beyond the pay cuts the automakers had envisioned, sources said…. The government didn’t say $28 an hour was overpaying people,” the source said. “But they saw the $14 rate as a way to lower overall labor costs to be competitive.”
In the middle of the collapse of corporate global finance and all it represented, the Democratic administration, the so-called socialists, argued the same tripe used for the last three decades to decimate the American middle class. Most unpalatable is agreement of the UAW to whole mess, though at the very least there was some dissent,
The two-tier agreement “effectively ends many of the principles established 70 years ago in the UAW’s birth,” Bill Parker, a negotiating committee leader, wrote in an unusual dissent. “For years, the UAW embodied industrial unionism and the gains of the New Deal. So goes the UAW, so goes the American middle class.”
This pretty much states it all. The UAW just another crumbling component of the New Deal, and understand, one of the most important elements of the New Deal, and its greatest small “d” democratic element, was the establishment of a strong labor movement. But that as they say is history, organized labor is a dead force in economic matters in this country, and with its decline the American middle class has become subjugated to the looting of New York and DC. This story has been running for over three decades now, and it will continue until the American people say enough. “Which side are you on?” was a rallying cry for working people in the 1930s, it would do us well to re-ask the question. You can start in November. Dylan Ratigan has done a service by giving us a voters guide, reminding us of all the people who voted for the bank bailouts, begin rewriting the story, vote them out.
Cross-posted from A Tale of Three Cities
Archein