Tag: bailout

Politicians, Wobblies pile on to support Chicago workers; BoA caves

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

The Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation turned out to be the right action at the right time. It attracted solidarity from Jobs with Justice, congresspeople, President Elect Obama, and from the New York City IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, a longstanding union built on anarchist principles). The NYC solidarity action visited 3 Bank of America offices:

The net result…

The 240 workers who had occupied the factory since its abrupt closing Dec. 5 voted unanimously Wednesday night to accept a deal to pay them severance, vacation time, and temporary health care benefits. The $1.75 million agreement was negotiated over three days with the workers’ union, Republic owners and lender Bank of America.

Union negotiators were unable to obtain a commitment from the parties to reopen the Goose Island plant, said United Electrical Workers organizer Mark Meinster. So the union has decided to forge ahead to find someone new to run the plant, he said, using some of the money donated from around the world during the sit-in. (Chicago Tribune)

The settlement, happily coming on my birthday, includes the following:

The settlement totals $1.75million. It will provide the workers with:

– Eight weeks of pay [workers] are owed under the federal WARN Act;
– Two months of continued health coverage, and;
– Pay for all accrued and unused vacation.

JPMorgan Chase will provide $400,000 of the settlement, with the balance coming from Bank of America. Although the money will be provided as a loan to Republic Windows and Doors, it will go directly into a third-party fund whose sole purpose is to pay the workers what is owed them. In addition, the UE has started the “Window of Opportunity Fund” dedicated to re-opening the plant. (Jobs with Justice)

Of course, larger success will come (or not come) as these tactics are taken up across the country, as they change agenda and form of contest, and if they make workers (and, yes, that’s us) think of themselves as owning the economy instead of just working for it.

For now the threat alone may have an impact as well, as U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) put it, “This Republic Windows saga, I’m sure, is reverberating throughout boardrooms in America.”

Bitch, Ph.D. notes insightfully:

The last time American workers resisted mass layoffs this way, we ended up with a middle class.
And that’s change you can believe in.

Laidoff Green Economy Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago

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[Yes, more of an overview update is coming soon; there’s been big news in the past two months. The bailout has morphed into something bigger, with both interesting and scandalous implications (some times at the same time); we have a new president; anti-authoritarians have some interesting things to think through around grassroots political campaigning, public works projects and an economic crisis, etc. Plus, Thai mass direct action just brought down a government. But everything starts somewhere, so let’s start with a new kind of protest..]

In Chicago, the economic crisis hit the road in the form of worker suddenly cut off from their jobs at Republic Windows and Doors (company website here). Republic’s (apparently one and only) factory closed Friday, three days after its 260 workers were notified. Standard notice is sixty days. Severance and unused vacation for the workers have not been paid. In response:

Members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, which represents 260 workers at the company’s Goose Island plant, have taken shifts at a sit-in at the plant, 1333 N. Hickory Ave., since Friday. (Chicago Tribune)

Scores of workers laid off from a factory here that makes windows and doors have refused to leave, deciding to stage a “peaceful occupation” of the plant around the clock this weekend as they demand pay they say is owed them.

[…]

The workers, many of whom were sitting on fold-up chairs on the factory floor Saturday afternoon, said they would not leave.

“They’re staying because the fact is that these workers feel they have nothing to lose at this point,” said Leah Fried, an organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 1110, who said groups of 30 were occupying the plant in shifts. “Telling them they have three days before they are out on the street, penniless, is outrageous.” (NYT)

Clearly, this is the face of the overall downturn: we saw 533,000 lost jobs in November, bringing the total ot 1.9 million in the current recession. It’s also the front end of the bailout: Bank of America, backed up by our bailout, is Republic Windows and Doors’ creditor, and is accused by workers of not releasing the funds for the company to meet its obligations. Bank of America, by the way now includes ABN AMRO North America, FleetBoston, LaSalle Bank, NationsBank, predatory lender Countrywide Financial, Merrill Lynch, credit card giant MBNA. As of July, after taking on Countrywide, the company controlled between 20 to 25 percent of the home loan market. As Jobs with Justice reminds us, “Bank of America has received $25 billion in bailout funds, ostensibly in order to extend credit to companies that need it.”

You can back up their protest with letters to Bank of America here.

Bailout fails in Congress; Dow falls; Wall Street eerily silent. Now what?

Carwil Bjork-James1 Comment

I paid a second, shorter visit to Wall Street today, in the midst of the sharp crash that followed the House of Representative’s surprise rejection of the financial bailout bill. It was just plain quiet. Only two, fairly sectarian-looking representatives of public protest stood at Wall and Broadway, amid a tableau of tourists and television cameras, slack-jawed business people and an unearthly calm.

It’s hard to believe that the alarms of emergency sounded by both parties and much of the media didn’t push the package through, but they didn’t. The House roll call shows that this wasn’t a resistance of the left, but of the bottom, of people across the country and the political spectrum who didn’t want to be pushed into a massive government buyout of junk debt. Oponents included people I respect like antiwar maverick Barbara Lee and former Black Panther Bobby Rush and people I disdain like Cuba hawk Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and anti-immigrant zealot James Sensenbrenner.

Meanwhile some people on the supporting side, including Nancy “Does she really represent San Francisco” Pelosi, have been inspired by the crisis to speak of principles if not act on them, saying this before the vote:

They claim to be free market advocates when it’s really an anything-goes mentality: No regulation, no supervision, no discipline. And if you fail, you will have a golden parachute and the taxpayer will bail you out. Those days are over. The party is over.

With the express train to a quick bailout now derailed, we may have time to do some collective thinking about the future of our economy. A list of big ideas begins here:

  • Economist Dean Baker (who among other things, called the housing bubble back in 2004) argues things aren’t so urgent after all: “the worst case scenario is that we have an extremely scary day in which the markets freeze for a few hours. Then the Fed steps in and takes over the major banks. The system of payments continues to operate exactly as before, but the bank executives are out of their jobs and the bank shareholders have likely lost most of their money.” (“Why Bail?,” Huffington Post)
  • Bailout Main Street is compiling a list of counter-proposals.
  • Former CIA analyst turned critic of empire Chalmers Johnson notes the government’s long term financial crisis (read potential bankruptcy) boils down to war. (“We Have the Bailout Money–We’re Spending It on War” The Nation)
  • Katrina vanden Heuvel & Eric Schlosser echo protesters’ call for a “New Deal for Main Street” (America Needs a New New Deal, The Nation, op-ed in Wall Street Journal)
  • Jeremy Jacquot asks “What About the Climate Crisis?“

Bailout Protest on Wall Street

Carwil Bjork-James1 Comment

Responding to an open call circulating in the city, some 300 protesters against the bailout plan gathered in New York’s financial district and marched to the New York Stock Exchange at Wall St. and Broad yesterday afternoon. The crowd was loud, diverse and fed up. Video coverage of the rally is part of today’s Democracy Now! The Indypendent has a live blog archive of the protest. Click on the picture below for more Indymedia photos.

Facing the New York Stock Exchange, protesters filled the intersection and the steps of Federal Hall
Facing the New York Stock Exchange, protesters filled the intersection and the steps of Federal Hall

Apparently, we weren’t the only people pissed off, either. TrueMajority.com is hosting a bulletin board for coordinating protests, with over 250 planned or carried out already, as covered her by CNN.

Being on the streets, there was a happy thrill to be back in force, in a protest taking over Wall Street for my first time since the J18 protest against the G8,* when a Reclaim the Streets protest flooded that intersection for nearly an hour. Of course, this time, our connection to most Americans was much more organic, as everyone from New York anarchists to Montana’s governor are raising big questions about this handover of government loans for junk securities.

What was strange, though, was to look so many Wall Street traders in the eyes. While many waded into the crowd to snap photos with their IPhones, others were visibly unnerved at the display of public opposition. And is the unfortunate nature of public protests we weren’t being the most articulate in our chants (see Tom Tomorrow from 1992 below), even if we were some times hillarious saying things like: “You break it, you bought it” and “You fucked up. Suck it up.” Above all, we needed to be loud and unequivocal in just the right physical space. Thankfully the media was the outlet for my desire to be articulate, and apparently for others desire if you listen to Democracy Now!

How we have to protest when the media and the two parties speak in unison
How we have to protest when the media and the two parties speak in unison

*Some of you may remember I worked on another more recent protest there, but I spent the morning working phones off-site.

The dangers of financial shock therapy…

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A week ago Saturday, when the preparation of Sarah Palin to be vice president seemed like the central political issue, I heard Naomi Klein, among others talk about the presidential campaign. Like any good writer with a recent book, she offered a capsule summary of the shock doctrine. Instead of getting into the detail, I let the amazing director Alfonso Cuarón do it for you.

Whether or not you’ve caught up with the details of the crisis in the financial markets or the Wall Street bailout, keep one eye on the political game being played here. After a week of downtown Manhattan traders whipsawing the market (with a net loss of less than 1%), an emergency measure is proposed, on a scale larger than anything we’ve ever seen in our lifetime (think the full price of the Iraq war being proposed up front). This is classic shock politics. And it doesn’t end today, it transfers the risk and the loss from Wall Street banks to the US Treasury in the form of new debt. Klein argues on Real Time with Bill Maher:

The disaster is far from over. They’ve actually just relocated the disaster. The disaster was on Wall Street and they have moved the disaster to Main Street by accepting those debts. … The bomb has yet to detonate, the bomb is the debt that has now been transferred to the taxpayers. So it detonates when — if John McCain becomes president, in the midst of an economic crisis, and says, “Look, we’re in trouble, We’ve got a disaster on our hands. We have to privatize social security; we can’t afford healthcare; we can’t afford food stamps. We need more deregulation, more privatization. You know the thesis of the Shock Doctrine is that you need a disaster to rationalize putting through these policies.”

And it’s not just McCain who might try some kind of emergency pullback around the debt. Those of us who were hopefully watching the president from Hope, Arkansas, saw this whole story in 1992:

It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, “President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy.”

The narrative is from Klein again, who warns that Barack Obama has his own Chicago Boys advising his economic policies. And right on cue, Mr. Hope is announcing the bailout “will likely postpone his sweeping proposals on healthcare, education, alternative energy, and other priorities.”

Primer on the financial mess…

Carwil Bjork-James2 Comments

Okay. No one can claim that the vortex of disappearing money is not confusing. Those of us who spend our days buying mere things with services thrown in for a bonus, are bound to be confused by the array of ways in which money, currencies, debt are bought, repackaged and sold. Not to mention the ways in which the possibility of any of those “things” fluctuating in value is then remade into a commodity in and of itself.

So, I’m assembling here (stay tuned to this post) as much background as I can on how this happened…

First up, is This American Life‘s collaboration with NPR on The Giant Pool of Money, an hour-long radio documentary on how excess cash begat a housing boom, a mortgage collapse, and the credit crunch. Ignore the bit from early this summer when they speculate that everything will only get as bad as the 1970s. As Lehman Brother’s understated last dispatch declares:

This episode of financial crisis appears to be much deeper and more serious than we and most observers thought it likely to be. And it is by no means clear that it is over.

Smart and graph-heavy expert Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer gives his take in two parts (1|2) as the crisis evolves.

The New York Times, which has had to start a blog called Freakonomics (after a book, but imagine the great grey paper running that title in stabler times), offers summaries of the crisis by David Leonhardt, “Bubblenomics,” and John Steele Gordon, “Greed, Stupidity, Delusion — and Some More Greed.”

$700B! WTF? New York to talk back to Wall Street THURSDAY

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

A do-it-yourself protest is gathering to counter the rush “do something” by bailing out Wall Street. More thoughts from me soon on how “we” got into this mess, and what options there are, but here’s one place to pull the emergency brake on the train to spending $700 billion of our money to buy bad debt. Seems to me all the times we’ve asked for our money for something useful, we’re told there isn’t any…

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout
Everyone,

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.

This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the “therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!

Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children, perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below). We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.

With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.

This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.

Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,” and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want, whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”

It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us. Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park, which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the northern tip.

By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can still join us downtown as soon as they are able.

There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!

On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media
activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the event, etc.

Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?

We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start!

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout
Who: Everyone!