Confessions Of A Union Busting Hitman

For almost twenty years, Martin Jay Levitt spent 19 years managed 250 union-busting campaigns for corporations around the country. How talented was he? His record was 245 wins and 5 losses.

“In the below video, “Confessions of a Union Buster,” Levitt shares his experience and trade secrets with 27,000 flight attendants at Delta Airlines who will begin voting Sept. 29 on forming a union with the Flight Attendants/CWA (AFA/CWA).

Two of the main pillars of an anti-union campaign says Levitt, are misinformation and fear. Charter school teachers, from New York to Illinois to California, will find much of this playbook familiar.”

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Rich People and Corporations and the Destruction of the American Dream

Rich people and Corporations and the Destruction of the American Dream

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The US Trade Deficit: A Measurement of Income in the US Being Redistribributed from the 99 to the 1 Percent

Free trade treaties are gifts given to Wall Street and billionaires by US government officials, such as President George W. Bush, President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama and “Senator Wall Street fetch boy Ron Wyden.” The treaties allow US businesses to ship the jobs of US citizens overseas, and also allows them to create jobs overseas, which wouldn’t be possible without the treaties. When this occurs, the difference between the old and higher wages in the US and the new lower wages goes into the pockets of the billionaires that fund political campaigns and propaganda advertisements directed at the 99 percent. In other words, free trade treaties are an income redistribution scam from the 99 to the 1 percent. The 99 percent are the people that need jobs to support themselves.

When their jobs are shipped overseas so that their income can be redistributed to billionaires, they not only lose their livelihoods, which they would perform year are year, but the billionaires get the income of the 99 percent year after year. The result is the destruction of local and state tax bases that support state and local government services, such as fire, road repair, police and schools.

We hear from the corporate news media that “the United States has a trade deficit with China. China had a record trade surplus with the US in October of this year.” Of course that’s a half-truth, although it’s more likely an out and out lie. US corporations have shipped production to China during the last several years. The products shipped from China to the USA come with names such as Microsoft, Apple, Nike and many others. The US trade deficit is with US corporations, which are owned by billionaire investors. Therefore, the trade deficit is not between China and the US, but between the billionaire investors and the rest of the USA. In other words, the US trade deficit gives us a rough idea how massive the yearly redistribution of income and wealth is occuring every month between the billionaires and the 99 percent.

The 1 percent now steal about 29-31 percent of all US income, up from 23.5 percent in 2008, and about 8 percent thirty-two years ago. According to the US Census Bureau, the US had a trade deficit with all nations of less than $20 billion in 1980. In 2011, that deficit was nearly $560 billion. The growth of the US trade deficit and income redistribution has mirrowed each other. Think about it.

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Trade Deficit Dots Connect to Billionaires–truthout.org

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The Right to Work means Redistributing Income Upward

The Right to Work means the Right to Work for Less

If wages drift down in Michigan because of the new Right-to-Work-for-Less law, the difference between the old higher wages and the new lower wages will be redistributed into the already fat wallets of the super-rich via higher corporate profits, share prices and dividends. Some of that income will be redistributed to Wall Street CEO’s via higher bonuses and greater fees for stocks and bonds traded. Some of the income will be redistributed into the already fat wallets of other corporate CEOs via pay hikes and bonuses. In other words, right to work for less laws redistribute income upward by pushing wages down.

That redistribution of income means higher poverty rates for the 99 percent.

There is also a redistribution of political power going on here. A labor union is a union of labor. A publicly traded limited liability corporation is a collective of rich person’s money. The owners of that money usually don’t have a clue as to what is being produced by their corporation, but whoever controls that money wields much more political power than any one labor union. Essentially, our democracy is being purchased by a series of communist collectives for rich people, otherwise known as corporations.

The Reagan and Bush tax opened the floodgates of rich people’s money into politics, something that could not be matched by the 99 percent. The ability of the 1 percent to form collectives is at the heart of this matter. The floodgates had been carefully built by FDR, Truman and Eisenhower. Now rich people are using their tax breaks and collectives to break what little political power remains with the 99 percent.

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Corporate Profits are at an all-time high as worker pay plunges

According to a report by CNN, in 2012, third quarter corporate earnings were $1.75 trillion, up 18.6% from a year ago. Corporations are currently making more as a percentage of the economy than they ever have since such records were kept. That money goes to shareholders and CEO’s, charter members of the 1 percent. But at the same time, wages as a percentage of the economy are at an all-time low, as this chart shows. (The red line is corporate profits; the blue line is private sector wages.)

As CNN Money explained, “a separate government reading shows that total wages have now fallen to a record low of 43.5% of GDP. Until 1975, wages almost always accounted for at least half of GDP, and had been as high as 49% as recently as early 2001.”

As CNN also explained, “businesses with high labor costs have either gone under or moved offshore.” And that’s the real problem. Free trade treaties are really income redistribution treaties. The difference between the old higher pay of US jobs and the new lower pay in other nations goes into the already fat wallets of CEO’s and rich shareholders.

So when somebody loses his or her job on account of an income redistribution trade treaty, that person loses the money year after year. However, the money isn’t really lost. It goes into the fat wallets of the rich year after year. That’s what’s going on right now.

And President Obama plans on redistributing more cash from the middle class to the 1 percent via the Trans Pacific Partnership, the largest free income redistribution trade treaty ever. In other words, Obama is rigging the game even more against the middle class, while simultaneously destroying the economy’s ability to increase the demand for goods and services.

Corporate profits are at an all-time high. Worker pay continues to go down, down, down. The result is an economy that is tilting toward the abyss. This is a no-brainer.

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Corporate profits at an all-time high–Thinkprogress.org

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Mitt Romney’s Plan to Destroy the American Economy — Part 1

Part 1 of Mitt’s plan is to destroy organized labor, what little is left.

Labor leaders have painted a stark picture of what might lie ahead should Romney win.

“’A worker voting for Mitt Romney is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders,’” Richard Trumka told the magazine, “In These Times during an AFL-CIO rally in August. Romney wants to “’annihilate organized labor as we know it,’” Teamsters President James Hoffa said in September.”

Mitt's Plan to Destroy the Labor Unions — In These Times

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Obama’s Betrayal of the 99 Percent; The Pacific free trade deal that’s anything but free

The Guardian UK reports, In reality, the Trans Pacific Free Trade Treaty… “has almost nothing to do with trade: actual trade barriers between these countries are already very low. The TPP is an effort to use the holy grail of free trade to impose conditions and override domestic laws in a way that would be almost impossible if the proposed measures had to go through the normal legislative process. The expectation is that by lining up powerful corporate interests, the governments will be able to ram this new “free trade” pact through legislatures on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.”

Free trade scams, which are labeled “agreements” to avoid the constitutional requirement that all treaties require a 66 percent yes vote in the senate, are treaties aimed to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. It’s also a way to redistribute what little political power the 99 percent has to the 1 percent, as the Guardian noted above. President Obama represents one faction of the 1 percent; Wall Street Mitt the Twit Romney represents the other faction.

When jobs are shipped or created overseas because of these treaties, the difference between the old, higher US wages and compensation and the new, lower foreign wages and other compensation goes into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate profits, higher dividends and surging stock prices.

The rich also receive the difference between the cost of the old higher standard environmental US regulations and the more lax environmental regulations (if any) in the foreign nations.

But now the TPP has new things in store to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent by bypassing the normal political process, which is why the Obama regime is negotiating the treaty in the first place.

These treaties are the biggest reason the 1 percent now receive nearly 30 percent of the total income in the US compared to around 7 or 8 percent thirty-two years ago.

The Trans Pacific Free Trade Agreement is more of the same, only worse. The Guardian UK has called the treaty NAFTA on Steroids. Click on the link below for more of the story.

Obama's Betrayal: The Pacific Free Trade Income Redistribution Deal–Guardian UK

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Romney dosen’t refute that He Shipped Jobs Overseas, Tells Press To Call It ‘Offshoring’ Not ‘Outsourcing’

Today, the Washington Post reported that Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mitt Romney headed for fifteen years, invested extensively in corporations that shipped jobs overseas to low-wage countries like China. The practice contradicts the rhetoric of candidate Romney, who since announcing his presidential ambitions, has criticized government policies that have led to jobs, particularly those in manufacturing, moving offshore.

The difference between the old higher wages here and the newer lower wages over there filled the pockets of Bain’s rich investors, as well as Romney’s wallet. In other words, Wall Street Mitt made his money redistributing income from working Americans to the idle rich. That’s what so-called free trade is all about. Romney knows this. So does the Washington Post, but the corporate media giant isn’t going to tell you that.

You know all those big fat houses Romney owns? He got them by shipping the jobs of workers overseas and pocketing the difference between the old wages and the new.

Rather than dispute the substance of the article, the Romney campaign has responded to the Post piece by parsing words, claiming that the story is “fundamentally flawed” for not differentiating between the technical definitions of “outsourcing” and “offshoring”:

“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports. Mitt Romney spent 25 years in the real world economy so he understands why jobs come and they go,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. What Saul didn’t say in interesting; jobs went away so that the wages of working people could be redistributed to the 1 percent. Saul continued, “As president, he will implement policies that make it easier and more attractive for companies to create jobs here at home. President Obama’s attacks on profit and job creators make it less attractive to create jobs in the U.S.”

Technically, the campaign is correct. The official definition of outsourcing is pushing activities outside of the company that could have been performed in-house. A company can outsource, while keeping the activity domestic. Offshoring is the practice of sending jobs overseas.

However, outsourcing is commonly used to describe the practice of moving jobs to foreign countries. But just to be clear, ThinkProgress has changed the text of the Post article so that the proper technical terms are used:

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Apple Inc and other manufacturers: Why those jobs aren’t coming back

The cost of labor is only one factor in why a US corporation chooses to relocate or create jobs overseas. The labor cost in the US to produce a $1500 computer is about $25 per computer compared with about $9 in China. The difference appears miniscule, but it’s a serious factor. But there are more sinister reasons that help shape the decisions of CEOs to ship or create jobs overseas. Apple executives gave us one of those reasons.

“Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.”

In other words, slave labor is paramount in deciding when and if to move jobs overseas. Click the link below for the complete story.

Apple, America, China and the big squeeze

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It Stinks in Wisconsin. Did Scott Walker Win the Recall Election via Election Fraud?

Okay, exit polls aren’t perfect, but they were 100 percent accurate until the presidential election of 2000 pushed George Bush into the oval office. Now why all of a sudden have exit polls become more inaccurate?

Yesterday, the exit polls showed a dead even race between Tom Barrett and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The election was anyone’s to win. But Walker won by six points. The Republicans have a long history of election fraud over the last twelve years. The Wisconsin recall election was probably no different.

For example, in 2004 an electronic voting machine was found to have credited President Bush with 3,893 extra votes in a suburb of Columbus where only 638 people voted. During that presidential election, 150,000 Democrats were taken off the voter rolls between the primary and the general election. Nobody told them, so they had no chance to appeal. When those people voted, they didn’t know they’d been whacked off the rolls. So the exit polls showed John Kerry defeating President Bush in Ohio, but when the votes of the legal voters were counted, Bush won by less than 130,000 votes. In other words, Kerry really defeated Bush in Ohio and won the presidential election, but election fraud stopped what should’ve been.

Below is the story from Reuters about the exist polls in Wisconsin, and below that are the stories of fraud in Ohio in 2004. However, election fraud has been discovered in several different states that Bush really lost. Now how could those exit polls be wrong? Let me count the way.

(Reuters) – Exit polls show the Wisconsin recall election on Tuesday is essentially tied between

Governor Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Tom Barrett, CNN said.

The CNN data is based on interviews with voters after they cast ballots and not on actual results.

Most polling stations closed at 8 p.m. CT (9 p.m. EDT), although voters in line to were allowed to cast ballots after the official deadline. First results were expected to begin trickling in from around the state soon after the polls closed, although the winner might not be known for hours.

Walker is only the third governor in U.S. history to face a recall from office. He angered Democrats and unions when he championed a law to severely restrict the collective bargaining of unionized state and local government workers. Walker said the changes were necessary to close a large state budget deficit.

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How Ohio Was Delivered to Bush in 2004

What Really Happened in Ohio in 2004

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