The Class War Continues on Sam's Plantation

A rundown of the stock-jobber press today offers plenty of evidence that the class war Marx described between those who produce and those who feed off their production continues to the present. The stories below paint a picture of an economy slowly sinking into crisis and a ruling order using whatever means it has at its disposal - the courts, the government, and outright duplicity against the very people who have helped to enrich them for decades - to save itself.

• GM parts-maker Delphi petitioned before a New York City court "for permission to dismantle its union contracts" as a means of pressuring GM into paying benefits to workers that Delphi does not want to pay. The UAW correctly said they were being treated as pawns, suggesting that Delphi's real aim was to "exit its U.S. operations and transfer its production to low-wage foreign facilities, and to convert the remaining few Delphi workers from the middle class to the margins somewhere between just getting by and the poverty level."
  
• The Washington Post reported that "Fannie Mae, the nation's largest financier of home mortgages, disclosed two more accounting problems as it cleans up its books after a $10.8 billion accounting scandal." Fannie Mae's scandelous accounting practices stem directly from their part in the effort engineered by the Federal Reserve to help "the economy to recover from the 2000 stock market meltdown and the recession in the following year," according to John Bellamy Foster. The accounting scams at Fannie Mae reflect the slowing of the housing market and the resulting inability of those debt-saddled people living on Sam's Plantation to sustain consumption.
• AP reports, " The Ford Motor Company... said on Tuesday that it would close seven North American plants from 2010 to 2012 as part of its previously announced revamping."

Add to this news another report in the Financial Times announcing that, "the dollar slid to one-year lows against the euro, sterling and the Swiss franc on Wednesday," and one emerges with a somewhat frightening picture of the direction Uncle Sam's economy seems to be heading.

While the currency crisis may not impact the working class directly, its close correlation to already sky-high oil & gas prices adds additional cause for alarm to the unceasing barrage of stories such as those described.

They point to an economy in which the working class is being strangled by a ruling order that continues to spend on war while robbing those who have worked for a living on Sam's Plantation of their health care and pensions or cleansing them from their homes through gentrification and land theft.