Today's Stories

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

February 12, 2009

P. Sainath
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

Jean Bricmont
French Echoes of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Michael Hudson
Trying to Revive the Bubble Economy: Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan

Peter Lee
Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, is the Main Event

Dave Lindorff
Judges Nabbed, Jailing Kids for Kickbacks

February 11, 2009

Neve Gordon
Few Peacemakers in the New Israeli Knesset

Peter Morici
Anatomy of a Hemorrhage

Andy Worthington
Who's Running Guantánamo?

Marjorie Cohn
A Call to End All Renditions

Fred Gardner
Change We Can Smoke?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The G & O (Geithner and Obama) Bank

Zoe Blunt
Vancouver Island Hippies: Top Security Threat for 2010?

Belén Fernández
Politics on the Panamericana

Martha Rosenberg
Don't Breathe the Meat

Website of the Day
George Dyson on Project Orion

Blues of the Day
David Vest on the CBC

February 10, 2009

Kathy Kelly
How Do People Keep Going?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Stimulus Imbroglio

Uri Avnery
Dirty Socks

Michael J. Berg
Will South Carolina be the Center of the Nuclear Revival?

Russell Mokhiber
Et Tu, Atul?

Joe Bageant
A Commodity Called Misery

Gareth Porter
Petraeus' Subterfuge

Dave Lindorff
Seek Truth, But Prosecute Liars

Rannie Amiri
The Implications of Recognizing Israel's "Right to Exist"

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes and the Stimulus

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What We Didn't Learn at Obama's Press Conference

Website of the Day
RIAA Takes Over DoJ Under Obama

February 9, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Why Sanjay Gupta is the Wrong Man for Top US Health Job

Paul Craig Roberts
Driving Over the Cliff

Julio Sanchez /
Feliz de Bedout
The Threat of Peace in Colombia: an Interview with Hollman Morris

National Lawyers Guild
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

Jonathan Cook
Israeli University Welcomes "War Crimes" Colonel

Alana Smith
The Nightmarish Case of Fahad Hashmi

Binoy Kampmark
Taking the Bong

Sam Bahour
End the Occupation First

Nicole Colson
Can You Afford College?

Ron Jacobs
Remembering the Second Intifada

Website of the Day
The Legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

Weekend Edition
February 27 - March 1, 2009

Concessions Upon Concessions

Blaming the Autoworkers

By LEE SUSTAR

Autoworkers will take sweeping cuts in their paychecks and the elimination of key union work rules if they vote to accept the terms of concessions negotiated as part of $17.4 billion in government loans to the Detroit Three automakers.

The negotiations were conducted under duress. Under the terms of the government loan granted by the outgoing Bush administration the United Auto Workers (UAW) was prohibited from striking against concessions, which were mandated under terms of the deal.

What's more, retiree health care and pensions would be severely underfunded if General Motors (GM), Chrysler and Ford bosses get their way. According to the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., pensions at the Detroit Three are $41 billion short of the companies' obligations to workers and retirees.

Now, the companies are trumpeting the UAW's concessions as well as sweeping job cuts in their bid to get further government loans. GM, which plans to close 14 plants in the U.S. over the next three years, wants an additional $16 billion from the government, on top of the $13.4 billion it received in the waning days of the Bush administration.

Chrysler, which took a $4 billion loan in December, wants another $5 billion by the end of March. It plans to cut another 3,000 jobs and further cut production.

The other member of the Detroit Three, Ford, didn't take a government loan, but says it may have to tap a line of credit with the government if its business continues to deteriorate--so Ford is seeking union concessions as well.

The UAW already granted huge concessions in the 2007 contract, which is still in force. Under that deal, the union agreed to allow new hires who work off the assembly lines to be paid just $14 per hour, about half the current rate.

But when the auto crisis worsened dramatically following last fall's financial crash, Detroit Three managers and union-hating congressional Republicans piled on to demand further cuts--making workers pay for decades of bad management by U.S. auto executives.

* * *

THE UAW has so far refused to comment officially on the latest concessions to the Detroit Three. But the Automotive News reported February 18 that the union agreed to concessions so steep that they all but eliminate the differences between pay and working conditions at union and non-union auto plants in the U.S. owned by foreign companies.

According to those reports, the UAW has surrendered overtime pay that kicks in whenever a worker's eight-hour shift is complete. Instead, overtime pay will only be paid when a UAW member works more than 40 hours in a given week.

This will have a major impact on take-home pay. Because hourly wages for UAW members have essentially been flat since 1980, most workers have boosted their income by working overtime. Management has encouraged this, since it was cheaper to pay existing workers the higher overtime rate than hire new workers.

Also, the UAW reportedly agreed to eliminate lump-sum bonuses over the next two years, and to allow Chrysler to cancel the $600 Christmas bonus.

A further major giveback was a limitation of supplemental unemployment benefits (SUB). Workers with 20 or more years of seniority can collect pay equivalent of 72 percent of gross pay for 52 weeks, and receive half pay for an additional 52 weeks. But workers with less than 20 years on the job will get 72 percent pay for just 39 weeks and half pay for another 39 weeks.

What's more, the automakers--and the union-busters in Congress, like Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)--succeeded in getting the UAW leadership to abandon work rules built up over decades.

Management has long hated these work rules because they give workers power and dignity on the job, enabling them to resist unsafe work practices, bullying supervisors and relentless speedups of production. At Toyota's Georgetown, Ken., plant, for example, some 2,000 workers were forced off the job by injuries between 2002 and 2007, according to pro-UAW activists in the plant.

The concessions don't end there, however. The companies are trying to force the UAW to accept drastic cuts in funding for retiree health care, which is set to shift to a union-controlled funds known as the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Associations (VEBAs) in 2010.

The health plans were already badly underfunded in the original agreement to create the VEBA in the 2007 contract. Then, GM agreed to hand over to the UAW some $35 billion in cash and securities to cover $55 billion in retiree health obligations. The UAW's VEBA fund managers, it was claimed, would make up the shortfall through wise investments.

The picture was similar at Chrysler, which agreed to pay the UAW $8.8 billion to cover health care obligations of $18 billion. For its part, Ford got the UAW to accept just $13 billion to cover retiree health care liabilities of $23 billion.

Now the Detroit Three want the UAW to accept less cash and more stock to fund the VEBA--even though GM's stock, which traded for $40 per share in 2007, is now worth only about $3. "The government also wants the automakers to pay half of what they owe a UAW health care trust in company stock rather than cash, a move that could save them billions of dollars," the Detroit News reported.

If the UAW agrees to accept that much stock, it ties itself even more closely to management. If GM or Chrysler were to go bankrupt, the stock would become worthless and retiree health care would be eliminated.

In any case, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger has sought to do whatever it takes to keep the automakers profitable--on their terms. The UAW has barely challenged the media propaganda that workers make $72 per hour--a figure that includes health care costs. And the union hasn't challenged job cuts that have seen the number of UAW workers at GM fall from 265,000 in 1992 to just 73,000 in 2007--even though the number of vehicles produced each year actually increased from 4.4 million to 4.5 million.

As retired autoworker Gregg Shotwell put it in his Live Bait & Ammo newsletter:

All this speculation about what the UAW is going to give up next neglects one well documented fact: the contract. The deal went down in 2007. It's over. Gettelfinger & Co. are sweeping the debris from the halls of infamy and locking the door on their way out. One doesn't need a bloodhound to follow the trail, it's documented...

What's the point in playing dumb? The train left the station. While UAW members were busy splurging their "signing bonus," the carnies were pulling stakes from the tent. The deal went down. The prize is a union with less ferocity than a stuffed animal.

New hires were sold out so the Con [Concessions] Caucus could throw old hires a rabbit foot. The thirty-and-out incentive for retirees set new workers back thirty years. Turnabout is not only fair, it's inevitable. When the VEBA goes bust retirees will be rubbing the rabbit foot and looking for work.

Lee Sustar writes for the Socialist Worker.

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