Worldwide, workers’ rights are taking a battering – Weekly Roundup    By Ian McAuley 

The Public service grapples with Commissioner Holmes’ Robodebt report; Capitalism is at war with democracy; and why are our hospitals overstressed? Read on for the Weekly Roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy.

 

Politics and administration

Robodebt: mainstream media covers the politics but there is much more in Commissioner Holmes’ report – about the public service, social security policy and government secrecy. Labor’s honeymoon is over, but that doesn’t mean we have turned to the Coalition. Why are the French revolting? – maybe it’s because politics is failing France and other democracies.

 

Economics

Australians would like the government to be more bolshie in dealing with the cost of living. There has to be a better solution than competition to keep a lid on child care costs. Worldwide, workers’ rights are taking a battering. Capitalism is at war with democracy.

 

Health policy

We have plenty of hospital beds, and plenty of doctors: so why are our hospitals overstressed? After 50 years surely it’s time to include dentistry in Medicare. Covid-19 is still hanging around, but let’s not forget other respiratory pestilences. A growing opioid problem. Stephen Duckett on the ethics of health policy.

Public ideas

The university in a distant land where prime ministers are made. How conspiracy theories infect politics. The young don’t have a monopoly on demonstrations.

Albo in Berlin

Links to sources of webinars, podcasts and readings

 

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https://johnmenadue.com/weekly-roundup-saturday-july-15/

 

 

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Why Hollywood Elites Don’t Want You To Watch Sound Of Freedom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd1WsIpPy0g

 

In this short clip PBD, Lauren Chen, Adam, and Vinny discuss why Hollywood Elites Don’t Want You To Watch Sound of Freedom.

 

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 BY Daniel Lacalle

 

Keynesian policies are damaging what they were intended to support. No example is more evident than the United States. A few years ago, in 2021, I had a conversation with Judy Shelton where she said that the recovery would be much stronger without the stimulus package, and she was right. Massive government spending and currency printing have left a much weaker labor market and poorer citizens.

In June, nonfarm payrolls increased by 209,000, the smallest advance since the end of 2020, after two consecutive downward revisions in the prior months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). If we look at employment statistics beyond the headline unemployment rate, we can see that the labor force participation rate was 62.6 percent for the fourth consecutive month, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.3 percent, was unchanged over the month, according to the BLS. Both measures remain below pre-pandemic levels (63.3% and 61.1%, respectively) after years of enormous entitlement and spending programs.

Workers are not satisfied, and there is a reason for it. All the money printing has created elevated inflation and a recovery where the United States has seen 26 consecutive months of negative real wage growth. We have not seen such a negative recovery for American workers in decades.

U.S. citizens are surviving on record levels of debt. Credit card debt, according to the Federal Reserve, reached a record high in the first quarter of 2023, while personal savings as a percentage of disposable income remain well below pre-pandemic levels at 4.6%, a massive 44.7% decline from the figure at the end of 2019. Real retail and food service sales bounced after the re-opening of the economy but remain below the April 2022 peak and are down in six of the last seven months.

It is no surprise that the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is still 40% below the level prior to the COVID crisis slump.

We have to put these poor figures in the context of a so-called “stimulus” that built a federal deficit that surpassed the $7 trillion mark between 2020 and the first quarter of 2023. We often read the MMT nonsense that deficits are reserves for the private sector and a tool for growth and prosperity.

The reality is that American workers are much worse off and need to work harder to make ends meet as the inflationary tax eats away at their savings and wages.

Of course, the excuse is to say that without the massive U.S. government spending plan, things would be much worse, but that is typical counterfactual nonsense. These large government spending plans were not created to mitigate a weak recovery, but as a tool to strengthen and accelerate it. And the reality is that the recovery is weaker than the historical trend, real wage growth is negative, and debt is much higher. Thus, in terms of return on invested capital, the stimulus plan has detracted from a recovery that was already evident simply because of the re-opening of the economy.

We can also argue that the stimulus plan financed with newly created currency in the middle of a lockdown has been the main cause of inflation, as the studies of Claudio Borio and others have demonstrated (“an upsurge in money growth preceded the inflation flare-up, and countries with stronger money growth saw markedly higher inflation,” BIS Bulletin, No. 67, January 26, 2023).

Why am I discussing these figures? Because the backlash from these stimulus plans will likely lead to a recession, the government will present itself again as the solution with yet another multi-trillion-dollar misguided measure. However, this time the ability to increase the deficit is simply not there, as even the most optimistic estimates see a $14 trillion accumulated deficit through 2032 with the current budget proposals.

The next stimulus plan may lead to a huge debt-deflation spiral Japan-style if population aging and de-industrialization continue, or even worse, stagflation if the government decides again to use the misguided stimulus checks. You got $1,000 from the government, and the inflationary tax took $3,000 from you.

It is evident that we have reached the point of debt saturation, where new stimulus packages simply generate no multiplier effect but make citizens poorer until the next one makes things even worse. Someday, policymakers may start to realize that progress comes from saving and prudent investment, not spending and debt.

 

https://mises.org/wire/us-consumers-are-suffering-less-robust-economy

 

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Film and television strikers in Los Angeles call for mass action: “I think we need a general strike in this country”

 

   BY Jacob Crosse, Marc Wells

 

A powerful and militant mood has taken hold among the over 10,000 writers in the Writers Guild of America (WGA), who have been on strike since May 2, and 65,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), who joined their class brothers and sisters on strike last week.

The attempt by the major networks and studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), in coordination with the leadership of the various unions, to isolate the striking writers has backfired in the face of strong opposition from workers in both unions unwilling to be abandoned and defeated.

Frightened by the prospect of the “double strike” continuing and expanding to include other sections of the working class, such as the 340,000 UPS workers, whose contract expires at the end of the month, and the over 160,000 autoworkers in the UAW, whose contract expires this fall, the Biden administration, as it did with the railroad struggle last year, is working “in the shadows” to suffocate the strike and enforce a corporate-friendly agreement.

On Tuesday, the Hollywood Reporter published an article headlined “The Behind-the-Scenes Players Seeking a Path to Hollywood Peace.” The authors wrote that “growing fear of a lengthy standoff between talent unions and studios” had prompted “a handful of seasoned negotiators” to begin “working in the shadows to find a way forward.”

The report disclosed that “Javier Ramirez —President Biden’s choice to be director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) —and Jimmy Valentine, an FMCS commissioner based in Glendale, have had meetings with the parties [AMPTP and SAG-AFTRA] for weeks.”

The FMCS was created as an “independent agency” as part of the passage of the anti-worker Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, more commonly known as the Taft-Hartley Act. According to the US government, “the mission” of the FMCS is to “prevent or minimize the impact of labor-management disputes on the free flow of commerce by providing mediation, conciliation and voluntary arbitration.”

While the FMCS cannot force a deal on either of the parties, a federal mediator, speaking on behalf of the Biden administration, can provide a pro-company framework as the basis of any future deal.

While federal mediators, working hand in hand with Hollywood executives, operate “behind the scenes” to force a deal on workers, the union bureaucracies, in conjunction with the pseudo-left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), are seeking to stab not only striking writers and actors in the back but UPS workers as well.

On Wednesday, the DSA-LA Labor committee will be sponsoring a rally with the chief Teamsters bureaucrat Sean O’ Brien. This past Saturday, O’Brien held a similar event in New York City with DSA member and strikebreaker Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez, was one of three DSA members–the others being Cori Bush (Missouri) and Jamaal Bowman (New York)–to vote in favor of House Joint Resolution 100 last November that blocked some 110,000 railroaders from exercising their democratic right to strike.

The fact that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA leadership is promoting a rally with the same forces, O’Brien included, who worked “behind the scenes” last year to block the railroad strike, is a warning to workers that the struggle is in danger. In order to countermand the plans of the studios, working in conjunction with their Democratic Party apparatchiks in the trade union bureaucracies, it is imperative that striking workers form independent rank-and-file committees, controlled by workers themselves, aimed at not only winning the contract, but formulating a strategy aimed at the fundamental reorganization of society to meet human need, not private profit.

The combined presence of federal mediators sent by Biden, the DSA, the Teamsters’ O’Brien and Ocasio-Cortez is a sure recipe for sabotage and betrayal. Writers and actors, beware!

In contrast to the heads of the various unions, rank-and-file actresses and actors continue to speak powerfully against not only the corporations and their greedy CEOs but the capitalist system as a whole.

Leila, an actress and member of SAG-AFTRA (and SAG before the unions’ merger) for 30 years, spoke eloquently on the current and previous struggles of film and television workers and how she saw the way forward.

“The studios have increased their revenue by quite a bit, and they also decreased the actual pay that actors and writers are getting. So there was no choice. We’re seeing it all across the country, whether it’s UPS, whether it’s the railway workers. It’s really nice to see a militancy in my own group, that I’ve been sort of longing for ... I’m glad we’re joining what other workers are going through right now.

“Hotel workers, nurses ... I think we need a general strike in this country. We absolutely need to withhold our labor,” she went on.

 

“We should all have healthcare, not through your union, just through our government. We should all have a living wage, no matter what. You should be paid for your physical likeness. With AI, they can do body scans and continuously use you. Everybody deserves a fair share for their work. Instead we’ve got [Disney CEO] Bob Iger talking about how it’s ‘unreasonable’ that people want to be paid for the fruits of their labor, while he hoards all of the fruits of our labor.”

Commenting on the letter issued by SAG-AFTRA members warning union President Fran Drescher and the rest of the negotiating committee not to betray the struggle, Leila said she was “very pleased to see all the big-name actors who signed that letter because they actually don’t have to. It would have been disgusting if they hadn’t, but they don’t have to. So they really are doing it for the rest of us and using their enormous platforms to stick up for us because most of us are barely scraping by as working actors as it is.

 

“I do think this is a different moment from the 2007-2008 strike and even a year ago. If you talked about militancy, even a year ago, some people bristled. There’s been a really big shift.”

Reflecting on the 2007-2008 WGA strike, Leila revealed that “we lost our house in that strike. We’ll never be able to own a house again in Los Angeles. My husband’s a writer, so that was it. That was eight months. And what happens is, you don’t pick up the day the strike ends. It’s not like everybody’s handing you checks.

“Capitalism is broken. It’s a cancer. It destroys itself in the end, right? But along the way it’s going to destroy the whole working class.

 

“If the dockworkers had absolutely turned everybody away, if Biden and everybody hadn’t interfered with the railways, if we all joined a general strike and shut it down, we would bring this country to its knees.

“It’s why we don’t see the French burning down Paris on cable TV. They don’t want us to know this is what we could be doing if we don’t want them to raise the retirement age or decrease our pensions. It’s why Biden’s given more money to cops than even Trump did, because they know that the pitchforks are coming for them.

“My Twitter—I mean, who cares—but my account was banned permanently because I said it’s time to bring back guillotines. The billionaires know what’s coming, and they’re very explicit about the social murder they intend on committing. It was leaked to Deadline that this was part of their strategy. Some executive said: Our mission is to bleed them dry, when they start losing their homes and housing, then they’ll have no choice but to come back to us. That’s a form of violence, you kick somebody out of their house, you deny them health care. We lose 68,000 people every year in the US because we don’t have healthcare for everybody. A third of the people who died of COVID, they say it’s because we don’t have healthcare.

“Liberals love to focus on the National Rifle Association. I don’t like gun violence either. But why are they silent about the fact that our government just allows health insurance companies to deny coverage, which leads to people dying every year?”

Leila continued, “Even now, no one’s talking about COVID. A thousand people a week are still dying of COVID. We just stopped reporting it. When Trump stopped reporting it, when he said the numbers will go down if we stop testing, people were outraged. Biden comes in, and that’s fine. People are developing Long COVID. We have a mass disabling event, and nobody’s talking about it. Even people who are nominally on the left aren’t talking about it.

“I love the idea of forming rank-and-file committees,” Leila said. “Yes, if we could do that, if the rank and file from all the different unions banded together in a general strike ... So many of us have been talking about that in this country.

“More and more people are affected by the greed of these ghouls, who are committing social murder. The rank and file from all the unions across the world should get together, worldwide socialism, that is the answer. It needs to be an international workers’ movement. A worldwide socialist movement, absolutely.”

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/19/ckpc-j19.html

 

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