12 November 2016 — The Wolf Report: Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor

1. See this article in the NYT.   It is an important article

2.  It is important to note that the article confirms Insurgent Notes‘ argument that the turn to Trump was a measure of desperation by workers, and that neither racism, nor anti-immigration were the selling points to the Carrier workers.

 3.  It is important that none of the African-American workers interviewed could bring themselves to vote for Trump.

4.  It is important to note that “holding Trump to his promises”  is where you get the full measure of the desperation– that despite the actual record of Trump as a businessman, where breaking agreements, contractual obligations, promises of payment to suppliers, vendors, and workers was his default procedure– there is the “wish to believe.”

5. It’s important to grasp that the reduction in manufacturing jobs with a higher wage rate, the increase in service jobs with a lower wage rate; the increase in part-time and temporary employment; the destruction of benefits, is not the result of globalization or “open borders” or NAFTA, or the WTO or free trade agreements, but is inherent in the “productivity of labor”– the substitution of machinery for living labor that capitalism demands of, by, and for the capitalists.  The incessant substitution drives down the profitability of production, leads to overproduction, precipitates the attacks on wages and benefits, is the source of the demands for “give backs” and further “productivity gains” leading to successive drops in profitability and attacks on wages.

6.  It’s important to note that this death spiral is not intrinsic to technological advance.  It is intrinsic to the advance of capitalism.  It is intrinsic to technology deployed and constrained in and only in the service of profit.  We are not Luddites.  Not even the Luddites were Luddites. Technology, when attacked, is attacked as the embodiment of capital, as the property of oppression and oppressors.

7. It’s really important to note that the African-American workers smelled a rat in the  “program” of Trump. The rat is that big capital uses attacks on the the poor, on the marginalized, on the undocumented,  by both the “centrists” and  the “alt-right” not as a “social medium” but as a street force in a mobilization exercise, an organizing principle to be used against  all workers regardless of what promises are made, what promises are broken.  The Clinton attacks on black youth as “super-predators” and the Trump full page-ads calling for execution of the Central Park Five were siblings in the same litter.

8. It’s important to note that in the 2Q 2016, profits for the S&P 500 declined approximately 3 percent on a year-over-year basis.  This is the fifth consecutive quarterly decline. The last time the S&P 500 experienced five straight quarters of decline was 2008-2009.  Carrier intends to begin layoffs at the Indiana plant this summer.  The workers don’t have that long. The layoffs will begin before that whether or not production is transferred to Mexico.

9. Against all promises.  Against all layoffs.

S.Artesian

November 12, 2016

address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net