PHOTO/STEVE RHODES
OAKLAND, CA — The corporate agenda that has captured both major political parties and deprived working people of their basic rights is most fully developed in the state of Michigan. But it is taking shape in different ways in California and elsewhere. That agenda’s goal is maximizing profits by transferring public worth into private hands and ravaging the rights of workers. The excuse used is austerity: workers must sacrifice to help corporations make more money.
The corporate agenda has stripped basic democratic rights from large numbers of Michigan residents, including more than half the state’s African Americans. In the name of austerity, Governor-appointed Emergency Managers take all financial and operational decisions away from the elected officials that citizens voted for. And a growing number of Detroit residents are losing the human right to running water because they can’t afford their water bills.
In California, the global corporate agenda is using other tactics to achieve the same goals, making sure corporations get the highest profits possible at the expense of the rest of us. Businesses are trying to use the state to shift millions of dollars away from pensions and wages and into paying off corporate debt.
Stockton, California was the largest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy until Detroit filed in mid-2013, and San Bernardino was the second largest. Both of these California cities first tried to protect retiree pensions. But as business interests ramped up the pressure, and Detroit retirees twisted in the wind, those initial protections were whittled away.
Stockton now proposes converting $544 million in lifetime retiree health benefits into a $5.1 million one-time payment. That gives workers just under a penny for every dollar promised them. And a judge’s ruling due any time now could declare Stockton’s pensioners no more worthy of protection than any of its other debtors. Such a ruling could encourage other California cities to file for bankruptcy to cut worker pension costs.
San Bernardino stopped paying into California’s public worker pension fund for about a year. While it is once again making payments, it has refused to make up $13.5 million worth of back payments. A court-imposed gag order prevents a proposed settlement from being publicly disclosed.
The equivalent of Michigan’s Emergency Manager system runs San Francisco City College, once the state’s largest community college. Its original 85,000 enrollment has shrunk in the 15 months since a commission threatened to yank its accreditation. The threat had nothing to do with its quality of education and everything to do with its budget, including pension and health care costs.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, home of Silicon Valley millionaires, corporations are fighting against a livable minimum wage. Business lobby pressure watered down minimum wage proposals in Berkeley and Richmond, and killed a state legislature proposal to raise the state minimum wage.
These are just a few examples of a push toward a national corporate dictatorship. Corporate leaders have a plan to secure their profits by using the power of the government to enforce austerity on the working class. Workers need a counterplan to put the tremendous abundance from the microchip into the service of all society.
