Lame and predictable

Looks like the union-backed drive to recall Republican politicians in Wisconsin and replace them with Democrats has failed. It was a predictable result, but even success for the Dems wouldn't have changed the fundamental issues at stake.

As soon as the energy and activism of the Wisconsin protests was diverted into harmless electoral channels, this movement stopped being about anything but the Democrats' political interests. When the workers of Wisconsin were leading the protests, there was a genuine Egypt-like quality to it, of the people getting pissed off enough to take their destiny into their own hands. The logical next step should have been a general strike.

Unfortunately, no matter how many times the Democrats piss on the interests of the rank-and-file union members (and the working class in general), the corrupt union leadership is only too willing to make recalling Republicans and electing Democrats the entire focus of the movement - as if that would make any difference whatsoever to the push for austerity and the attack on collective bargaining rights.

I've said that the American political system won't really change until progressives, the left and the working class unshackle themselves from the anchor of a corrupt, corporatized Democratic Party. But one of the biggest problems is that the leaders of the union are still perfectly cozy with the current arrangement. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter to the union bureaucrats if the Dems break all their promises and spit on unions by neglecting things like the Employee Free Choice Act; all that matters is that THEY get to retain their privileges and hefty salaries. It's the predictable outcome of bureaucracy in all its forms - bureaucrats that raise themselves above the rank-and-file forget who they represent and become consumed only with preserving their own interests and perks.

The working class needs to fight against the Democratic Party as much as against the Republican Party, but there's one massive obstacle that unions (the most organized workers) need to get past - the corrupt leadership that continues to tie them to the Democrats.

Hamilton Steelworkers Fight U.S. Steel Lockout

Originally posted at Fightback.

On November 7, US Steel locked out over 900 employees at its Hamilton plant. This followed failed attempts to bypass the union and directly force workers to vote on pension cuts dictated by corporate headquarters. United Steelworkers Local 1005 argued that the company was negotiating in bad faith, noting that it had activated two blast furnaces in US plants while shutting down production at the Hamilton mill, and refused to hold a vote.

Citing “the current economic landscape and Hamilton’s status as one of the most challenging steelmaking facilities in all of North America,” the company ordered workers to vote on its final offer, which included two key demands: an end to the indexing of pension payments for its 9,000 retired workers, and refusing new hires the existing pension plan by replacing it with a defined contribution retirement savings plan.

Pension indexing was negotiated as part of the 1990 contract between the former Stelco (bought out by US Steel in 2007) and the United Steelworkers. It makes payments ranging from between zero and three per cent based on an equation that balances the performance of Stelco pension plans against cost-of-living increases—in essence, increasing pension payments to adjust for inflation. That slight increase is crucial, since inflation can quickly erode the value of workers’ pensions.

As noted by the Hamilton Spectator, while direct benefit plans pay retired workers a set pension per month, direct contribution plans pay according to how much money has been saved and how much has been earned in investments. “Direct contribution plans also don’t require the employer to ensure there’s enough money in the pension plan to meet all former obligations if the company goes out of business. That’s important for US Steel because the former Stelco plans are underfunded by about $1.2-billion.”

Employees at the US Steel plant in Hamilton are almost evenly divided by age, with approximately half of workers under 50 and half over 50—the result of skewed hiring practices in past decades. The US-based steel conglomerate is exploiting those divisions by attempting to pit young workers against old. As union representatives commented, allowing 900 active workers to decide the fate of 9,000 retired employees' pensions would be a cruel mockery of democratic norms.

Pensions are less of a concern for younger employees, who are more likely to bow to company demands rather than face an indefinite lockout and attempt to feed their families on strike pay of $200 per week. In addition, Local 1005 received a letter confirming that health benefits (prescription drugs, medical, dental, and vision), life and disability benefits had been temporarily suspended for all active Bargaining Unit members as of November 8. Management may be banking on a similar outcome as occurred in its Lake Erie plant in Nanticoke, where workers eventually acquiesced to identical pension cuts after an eight-month lockout.

Adding insult to injury, US Steel only three years ago made extravagant promises to workers that its acquisition of Stelco would not affect their livelihoods. The irony is too much to bear reading the letter today, dated 28th September 2007 and headlined “Stelco’s Pensions Safe with U.S. Steel”:

We would like to clear up any confusion and relieve any concerns Stelco’s employees and pensioners may have about the security of their pensions on the closing of our transaction to buy Stelco. U.S. Steel has agreed to significantly improve the security of the Stelco pension plans. We did so in two ways. First, we agreed to unconditionally guarantee pension funding obligations at the corporate (as opposed to Canadian subsidiary) level. Thus, instead of having to rely solely upon Stelco's ability as a stand-alone enterprise to generate the cash necessary to meet pension funding obligations, Stelco's employees and pensioners can now look to the strength of our entire company to do so. Second, we agreed to make an extraordinary payment of $32.5-million into the plans up front at closing. This is in addition to the pension payment schedule agreed upon by the Ontario pension regulator and Stelco.

[...]

Of course, all laws that presently apply to Stelco will continue to apply, as will all other provisions of the Stelco pension agreement, including those provisions requiring pension contributions to fully fund Stelco’s pension plans by 2015. We want Stelco’s employees and retirees to know that we understand the fundamental importance of sound pension funding. We have a large defined benefit pension plan for decades. We take our obligations very seriously and are proud of the fact that today that plan is fully funded. In fact, over the last four years, we have made over $700 million in voluntary contributions to that plan. We will honour our commitment to the Stelco pension plans. That is our history and track record.

Some track record!

In an article for the Hamilton Spectator, retired Stelco treasurer Robert H. Thompson argued that three critical macroeconomic factors outside the labour dispute contributed to the lockout decision.

First, the rising value of the Canadian dollar against a declining American dollar, helped in part by large Canadian energy exports, has wiped out any competitive advantages formerly held by Canadian industry. Second, the decimation of Ontario’s manufacturing base in recent years has severely decreased the amount of potential customers for Hamilton steel products; for example, fewer Ontario automobile plants means less demand for steel. Finally, Hamilton Works is less technologically-advanced than the company’s other plants. As a result of mill closures over the past decade (plate mill, strip mill), there is nowhere to process fresh slabs of steel, which must be shipped to other US Steel plants for processing.

However long the lockout lasts, its economic impact on Hamilton and surrounding areas promises to be devastating. 900 employees currently work at Hamilton Works, down from a peak of 13,000 in previous decades, but the lockout will also affect supporting industries and drastically lower the amount of raw materials flowing through Hamilton’s port. Aside from the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs, Thompson estimates the city faces up to $1-billion in lost revenue.

Nor can the symbolic impact on Canadian workers be underestimated. Having tasted blood with their successful effort to overturn pension agreements at the Lake Erie plant, the bosses are now determined to set a precedent in Hamilton and break the union. Members of Local 1005 USW harbour no illusions about the company’s intentions.

“A foreign monopoly called US Steel has come into our corner of the earth and with utmost arrogance is dictating to Canadians that we should ‘be realistic,’” reads a recent Local 1005 information update. “To prove the union is not ‘completely unrealistic’ it is supposed to serve ‘American manufacturing and trading interests and policies.’ It is supposed to follow U.S. ways of ‘fend for yourself’ and agree to an endless downward slide in living and working conditions.”

The nationalistic undertones of the workers’ protest, epitomized by slogans such as “Yankee Go Home,” are understandable but misplaced. US Steel is a US-based multinational with significant reserves to ride out a lengthy lock-out. They want to make an example of the Hamilton workers not just to push down conditions in Canada, but also internationally. Here we see that the interests of workers in Canada are united with the interests of workers internationally, including in the United States. We may also note that the interests of the bosses are also united in the US and Canada. Therefore, rather than utilizing nationalist slogans that divide Canadian and American workers, wouldn’t it be better instead to strengthen those bonds of workers’ solidarity?

To replace the lost production in Hamilton, two new furnaces have been fired up in the USA. It is possible that these plants are unionized, perhaps even with the USWA. Hamilton steelworkers should send delegations down to these mills to explain that whatever concessions are squeezed out of Canadian workers will in turn be demanded of American workers. This brings to mind the fantastic solidarity movement around the Liverpool dock-workers in the 1990s. Every scab ship that loaded in Liverpool, England, was followed around the world by workers who set up picket lines on the East Coast, West Coast, and other international ports. The longshoremen refused to cross what Billy Bragg called “The World’s Longest Picket Line” in a song celebrating the struggle. With an internationalist appeal those two extra furnaces could be shut down and real pressure can be put on the multinational corporation.

Workers have appealed for help from Canadian politicians but have received little in return. Nothing illustrates this claim better than the pathetic performance of federal Minister of Industry Tony Clement, who was quoted by the Hamilton press as saying, “There’s nothing the federal government can do...The Pittsburgh-based steelmaker is free to do whatever it wants...They can make decisions, good, bad, or indifferent, according to their own timetable and their own sensibilities.”

Conservative cries of federal impotence were matched provincially by the odious Dalton McGuinty. When the Ontario premier visited Hamilton last week to announce 300 new green jobs courtesy of Liberal donors JNE Consulting Inc., locked-out steelworkers waited outside the building to confront McGuinty and demand that he guarantee pensions of the 9000 retired Stelco employees by forcing US Steel to the bargaining table. In a cowardly, but entirely typical display, the premier avoided the workers by using an alternative entrance, later blaming that gutless decision on his security detail.

Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, alone among provincial and federal party leaders, visited the picket line on November 10 to support the steelworkers. She noted that since the provincial government lent Stelco $150-million to deal with its pension solvency issues, gutting the pension funds of former, current, and future Hamilton steelworkers was “unacceptable.” Horwath urged McGuinty to take action by supporting workers’ rights to pensions against the dictates of powerful multinationals. The Liberal premier responded with a characteristically weak and non-committal response, arguing that both sides have a responsibility to settle the issue through mediation. With this effective capitulation, he chose to ignore the vast differences in resources between a multinational conglomerate worth billions of dollars and a determined band of 900 steelworkers.

This struggle is important for a number of reasons, not least of which is the historical militancy of USW Local 1005. The local has been at the forefront of the fight for decent pensions, against manufacturing job losses, and in solidarity with the oppressed. A number of the local’s executive members consider themselves Marxists, including Local President Rolf Gerstenberger, who is also a prominent member and vice-president of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). When Stelco was under bankruptcy protection before the US Steel takeover, Gerstenberger called for the nationalization of the company and the development of some form of economic planning.

While we at Fightback are wary of any appeal to Canadian nationalism rather than the international solidarity of the workers’ movement, Gerstenberger’s proposal is nevertheless more inspiring than the impotent declarations of Big Business and the politicians they own, who claim that “market forces” are to blame and that nothing can be done but to brutally decimate the labour force and wait for these abstract conditions to improve.

If the subservience of bourgeois politicians like Tony Clement to the whims of U.S. Steel is an indication of the global solidarity of the capitalist class, it also reminds us of the common plight shared by the international working class. Just as all Canadian workers must see their own struggle in the fight of the Hamilton steelworkers, all workers of the world must view their seemingly isolated battles in a larger context. In this epoch of capitalist austerity, all of the gains made by workers in the post-war period are in danger. With militancy and international solidarity we can hold these cuts at bay—but only by fighting for socialism and nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy under democratic workers’ control and management can we end these attacks forever.

The Relevance of Labour Unions Today

Originally published at Kingstonist.

In spite of national peculiarities the labor movement has overleaped national boundaries. Economic conditions are swiftly becoming the same the world over…As trade becomes international and the market a world market, the labor leaders in the several countries tend to draw together to exchange ideas, work out programs for common action, and protect the workers of each country against the competition of other countries.

- Mary Beard, A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1921)

The Mayworks Festival of Labour and the Arts, a weeklong event designed to encourage social change by bridging the gap between artists and workers, hit Kingston last week. In addition to the Mayday Festival in Skeleton Park, tours of the working class Swamp Ward, screenings of labour-oriented films such as coalmining epic Matewan, and art exhibitions at the Artel and Modern Fuel, the celebration also featured lectures on issues like sexual harassment in the workplace and the social stigma faced by sex workers.

Of these lectures, perhaps the most pertinent to the broader future of the labour movement was last Tuesday’s discussion panel on “The Relevance of Labour Unions Today” at the downtown public library. Upstairs in the Wilson Room, an audience of around 20 people gathered to hear a trio of speakers talk about the role of unions locally and internationally. If there were broad themes to be found, they were the importance of organizing, tying labour to local communities through social justice, and creating an international movement of workers to combat the influence of transnational capital.

Each of the speakers was either active in the labour movement or had researched it extensively. The panel included Debi Wells, president of the Kingston and District Labour Council; Shell Sweeney, regional organizer for the Public Service Alliance of Canada; and Andrew Stevens, a PhD candidate in sociology at Queen’s University.

Wells spoke first. Besides her work with the KDLC, which represents 40 local unions in the Kingston region with a membership of over 10,000 workers, Wells is first vice president of elementary teachers at the Limestone District School Board and sits on the Board of Directors as treasurer for the Kingston Economic Development Corporation. She began by relating the experience of Hamilton during the “economic heyday” of the 1950s through to the 1970s. During this time, non-union workers at the Dofasco steel plant received relatively high wages and benefits – mainly due to the fact that unionized workers at rival Stelco had raised the bar by exerting pressure on their employers.

Kingston, said Wells, had a similar experience.

DuPont [chemical company] never had an independent union, and they always got paid a little more than Alcan [aluminium company]. I’m talking pennies an hour more than Alcan, which was always well-organized, and they too benefitted from having unions.

Wells explained how unions began as a form of workers’ protection in the early industrial era, when workers were seen as expendable resources (a trend she warned was making a disturbing comeback via the term “human resources”). Labourers pooled their money together to ensure compensation in the case of death or injury: thus, she said, “if you lost an arm in Ottawa at the lumber mills, your family would get some money.” Wells went on to say:

I think that what sometimes we forget to appreciate is that the standards that many of us enjoy for wages and safety and benefits in our workplaces comes from unions and comes from people who’ve fought for them and negotiated them. Not just wages, but benefits and also rights – the right to not be fired for no reason at all, the right to not be discriminated against for an ever-lengthening list of things, the right to have seniority respected, the rights to return to a job after maternity leave.

Today, globalization has led to dangerous backslides in workers’ rights, as transnational corporations have embraced outsourcing as a means of shifting production to countries that employ dirt-cheap labour at slave wages. With domestic workers increasingly facing part-time, temporary employment, Wells admitted that the past decade had not been a progressive one from labour’s perspective.

Outsourcing is a way to lower wages. It’s a way to save money, and to sidestep the need for safety standards, to not have to deal with benefits. It’s really quite lovely – just send the work elsewhere. There are many instances in industrialized countries now of unions working with the employers trying to get around that, because the employers find that they can’t do all of the work in other countries.

One of the questions about the relevancy of the union movement is that they’re not keeping up with the whole globalization movement – they’ve not being globalized. I disagree. I think the union movement is trying, and I think that we’re going to get there. I know that in Canada and in the States and in Europe, the union movement…[is] fighting, for example, in Colombia, where union organizers are being killed. We’re fighting for fair trade agreements, we’re fighting for fair trade goods. We’re fighting against child labour in other countries, and I think that’s the direction we have to go.

People have to be organized for their own protection. And not just in third world countries – here. People have to be organized, for their own protection, whether you’re migrant workers or whether you’re in an industry or a sector that’s not well-regulated. We have to fight for that. The robber barons in the 19^th century – they didn’t just decide to be nice and share. We took it from them. And there were some big fights about that. But now they seem to want it back, and I think that we have seen a lot of very smart attacks against unions.

She pointed to recent attacks on pensions. Governments around the world (including Ontario’s) are currently pushing austerity measures to make workers pay for the global economic crisis, which has helped fuel the ongoing riots in Greece.

The idea that you could have an economic crisis caused basically by banks blamed on the union movement, because people make too much money and they’ve put too much aside in their pensions, is actually sort of stunning. Unions in good faith negotiated those pensions…[management is] reneging on deals here.

I think that the right to grow old in dignity is not too much to ask for. I think that safe working conditions are not too much to ask for. I think that unions will be relevant as long as business interests put profit ahead of human interests.

Next up was Sweeney, representative of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. The PSAC is one of the country’s largest unions, with more than 172,000 members from coast to coast working in the federal government, its agencies, and the broader public sector (including universities and women’s shelters). Sweeney explained her union philosophy thusly: “it really is no more complicated than having fairness and respect in the workplace, and then connecting to the community.”

She detailed how she got her start as a union organizer while a grad student at the University of Western Ontario. Involved in student politics, Sweeney volunteered to be union steward and attended a local labour council, where she talked about homelessness and international solidarity to a stony response from the local – essentially, “what does that have to do with us?”

Those who wish to affect large-scale social change, she argued, need to prevent lines from being drawn between labour and community organizing. Having previously worked with Burmese human rights organizations, Sweeney knows that unions must fight a perpetual battle against corporate media and big business, which tend to characterize strikes as money-grabs by greedy workers.

It’s nothing new. Now the rhetoric has shifted to ‘in these economic times…’, that there’s no longer a role for unions and we all have to get along and everybody has to give up their bit. We all know it’s bullshit…I don’t pretend to be the expert. All I know is why workers are choosing to organize, and it’s because of the fear of contracting out, the fear of privatization.

She criticized the prevalence of so-called “public-private partnerships” (PPPs), more often than not a euphemism for contracting out government functions to the private sector. Yet Sweeney was not completely opposed to the idea in principle.

I think we need to keep working really hard to build bridges between the public and private sectors as well, and we’ve seen some nice examples of that with respect to the Vale-Inco strike up north…in Sudbury. Again, big business, big company overseas…comes in, total disrespect for Canadian labour laws, and they know that it’s a challenge for us to stick together and figure it out. Hence the importance for international solidarity, which is why, again, it always comes down to building community.

Rounding out the speakers was Andrew Stevens, who drew on his research into outsourcing to offer a more international scope on the state of unions. That research began in 2003 when the campaign to unionize teaching assistants at Queen’s got off the ground. Stevens quickly found that attempts to unionize TAs here encountered similar problems as efforts to unionize call centre workers in India – namely, a widespread perception that self-declared “professionals” did not require unions.

The usual question that comes up is, ‘what is the relevance of unions?’. They don’t see it. ‘We don’t need unions, we’ve got laws, we’ve got an apparatus that protects workers’ rights.’ And I said, ‘well, who do you turn to in the event of unjust dismissals and grievances without a union?’ Call a labour board and they’ll tell you that there are really few recourses for action unless you have the capital to actually hire a lawyer and take on the case yourself. And so, what I think has actually happened is there’s this removal of the culture or tradition of unionism in certain sectors.

In describing the need for an international workers’ movement, Stevens dug up the quote from American historian and campaigner for women’s suffrage Mary Beard shown at the top of this article. Internationalism, he said, did not mean the abandonment of national orientations, but rather recognized a working class solidarity that transcended those borders. He urged the creation of global union federations (GUFs) as a means of combating transnational corporations, enforcing an international law for the implementation of labour codes, and creating a commonwealth for labour initiatives.

"I guess the best analogy I would use is thinking about the global union movements as the body," said Stevens. "The local or the regional campaigning and the organizing is certainly the backbone, and the international federations I think operate in many respects like the nerve centre, coordinating different parts of the body and communicating limbs with the brain, etc. So this isn’t yet a structure in which we can say there’s a massive international union, but it’s slowly coalescing into something more concrete compared to what has existed in the past."

He emphasized that workers must be seen as a united force in order to build a movement from the ground up with GUFs. The ongoing strike of Vale-Inco workers in Sudbury could be seen as a model; workers might also build support across different demographics by addressing social issues. Finally, the labour movement must recognize the transitory, often temporary nature of modern employment and adjust its perspective accordingly.

For union network internationals, it has actually been about looking for ways of regulating markets and regulating labour markets, providing a union that goes with you from workplace to workplace given the very flexible and very footloose nature of employment in certain sectors, from graphic designers to engineers. This whole idea of lifelong employment is really receding in certain sectors…what the union movement has said is that we need to create flexible unions that actually carry services and benefits and the capacity to resist throughout certain regions.

Following these three presentations, an hour-long question and answer period rounded out the evening.

General Motors and the Crisis of Capitalism

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's take on the government-subsidized "restructuring" of General Motors was good for a laugh:

The governments of Canada and Ontario are co-operating to provide financing to General Motors of Canada Limited (GMCL) and General Motors (GM) Corporation to support the companies’ efforts to restructure while maintaining Canada’s production share in the Canada-U.S. market and making a significant investment in research and development.

“The management, unions and financial institutions behind General Motors have each made major sacrifices to help ensure a sustainable, competitive company going forward,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was joined by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Federal Minister of Industry Tony Clement in making the announcement.

Since the onset of the global financial crisis, a constant thread has been the assault on the working class by a financial oligarchy intent on making them pay for the financial crisis. The old quote, "As goes General Motors, so goes the nation" has never been more relevant. Contrary to Harper's bullshit, the unions have borne the lion's share of "sacrifice". From SocialistWorker:

The Wall Street Journal editorial page sounded a similar theme. "The new agreement simplifies some work rules and job descriptions but makes no reductions in hourly pay, pensions or health care for active workers," the Journal complained. It was forgetting that the United Auto Workers (UAW) agreed to forgive a $20 billion debt that GM owes the union for a retiree health care fund. Instead, the UAW health care trust fund will get 17.5 percent of company stock--which is highly unlikely to ever be worth enough to pay for retirees' health care.

At Chrysler, the UAW health care trust fund will get 55 percent of company stock under the takeover by Fiat--but that's even more likely to force cuts in retiree health care. And at both Chrysler and GM, the UAW gave up the right to strike until 2015--and contract negations will apparently be replaced by arbitration.

So despite the complaints of right-wing blowhards, it's autoworkers, their families and communities who are getting screwed. With 14 GM plants set to close, the company's UAW workforce will be downsized from 64,000 today to just 40,000--compared to 450,000 in the late 1970s.

And as better-paid autoworkers retire, most will be replaced with new hires earning just about half the current top wage of about $28 per hour, thanks to a contract concession made several years ago.

The sacrifices of the UAW mirror the experiences of millions of working people in Canada and the United States, who are being squeezed mercilessly by governments in the pockets of our respective financial aristocracies. As Linda McQuaig notes, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has made no secret of his contempt for workers and the unemployed, whom he blames for the crisis. The stinginess of the Conservative government in its treatment of Employment Insurance is truly remarkable, given how many Canadians have paid premiums into the program without receiving any benefits. But then, this isn't strictly a Conservative thing. After all, it was the Liberals who used built-up money from EI premiums to balance the budget. It left us ill-prepared for an economic rainy day, let alone the tsunami of a global financial meltdown.

Conspicuously absent from political discussions in Canada and the United States has been any discussion of a progressive income tax - i.e., of raising taxes on the rich. In the recent provincial election in British Columbia, even NDP leader Carole James pledged not to touch Liberal premier Gordon Campbell's corporate tax cuts. Since government budgets everywhere are swimming in red ink - deficit spending being necessary to stimulate the economy - you'd think this obsession with balanced budgets might point pundits towards the most obvious solution - raising taxes on the rich. After all, in times of economic crisis, it's the working classes that make or break a recovery. By giving people more disposable income through EI or social programs, they can afford to purchase more and help the economy recover (especially since they are far more likely to spend money quickly than the wealthy).

Unfortunately, that's the not the way our elites think. For them, any kind of limitation on their own luxurious lifestyles - no matter how small - is inconceivable. No, better to make the working masses pay for it, despite the fact that it was this parasitical financial oligarchy, with their reckless gambling on Wall Street and incessant demand for tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cut, that left us in such a precarious position today. As the always-brilliant Bill Maher pointed out, America is never short of people willing to fuck each other over for a buck - although it can easily be argued that the trait of greed is universal. But episodes like the developing plan to turn California into a Third World state are always staggering to hear about. As a kid, I admired Arnold Schwarzenegger as a larger-than-life action hero, but it turns out that he is a very small man indeed. Granted, this is institutional inertia as much as anything else, and was likely forced on him by the usual combination of corrupt politicians in Sacramento and Washington, and the wealthy donors that legally bribe them. States are unable to run a budget deficit, and so in that sense he had no choice - Schwarzenegger had to find some way to fill that $21 billion hole in the budget. Yet with raising taxes on the rich politically impossible, he took an axe to social programs with a vengeance. Many Californians will die because of these policies. But hey, you can't deny the rich their fair supply of yachts.

Of course, it all could have been prevented if President Obama had any balls. The federal government could easily have supplied $21 billion to California, but refused to. Apparently, it's no problem to give $185 billion to AIG, $45 billion to Citigroup (with $300 billion more in guarantees for that company's toxic paper), but politically insurmountable to try and save the actual people of California, one of the world's largest economies. As if it wasn't clear before, just more proof that the American government was bought and paid for a long time ago.

Blame Reagan.