Repost (May 7): Various Items

(1) About today’s BLS unemployment report: As you have probably heard, the U.S. economy added 290,000 jobs, but the unemployment rate still went up, to 9.9%. This is because of discouraged workers returning to the job market. This is the official (“U-3”) rate; I wasn’t able to quickly find the expanded (“U-6”) rate, which includes discouraged and involuntarily-part-time workers (see this article for an explanation), but you can look for it yourself at the BLS’s Employment Situation Summary.

Frequent D&S blog contributor Bob Feldman sent this report based on the new BLS data:

Black Female Worker Jobless Rate Jumps To 13.7 Percent

The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Black female workers over 20-years-of-age in the United States jumped from 12.4 to 13.7 percent between March and April 2010; while the “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all U.S. female workers over 20-years-of-age increased from 8 to 8.2 percent, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for white male workers over 20 years-of-age increased from 8.9 to 9.2 percent between March and April 2010; while the “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Black male workers over 20 years-of-age was still 18 percent April 2010.

The official “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for all Hispanic or Latino workers was still 12.5 percent in April 2010; while the official “not seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for Asian-American workers decreased from 7.5 to 6.8 percent.

The “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Black youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 37.3 percent in April 2010; while the “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for white youths between 16 and 19 years-of-age was 23.5 percent in April 2010. The “not seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for Hispanic or Latino youth between 16 and 19 years-of-age was still 29.2 percent in April 2010.

The official “seasonally adjusted” unemployment rate for all male workers over 16 years of age in the United States increased from 10.7 to 10.8 percent between March and April 2010; while the “seasonally adjusted” jobless rate for all female workers over 16 years of age increased from 8.6 to 8.8 percent.

The official “seasonally adjusted” national unemployment rate in the United States for all workers increased from 9.7 to 9.9 percent between March and April 2010. The total number of unemployed workers in the United States also increased from 15,005,000 to 15,260,000 workers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May 7, 2010 press release:

“…In April, the number of unemployed persons was 15.3 million, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.9 percent. The rate had been 9.7 percent for the first 3 months of this year…

“Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for whites (9.0 percent) edged up in April…

“The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) continued to trend up over the month, reaching 6.7 million. In April, 45.9 percent of unemployed persons had been jobless for 27 weeks or more…

“The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was about unchanged at 9.2 million in April. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

“About 2.4 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in April…These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey…

“Among the marginally attached, there were 1.2 million discouraged workers in April…Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them…

“Over the month, employment changed little in wholesale trade, retail trade, information, and financial activities.

“Employment in transportation and warehousing fell by 20,000 in April, reflecting a large decline in courier and messenger services…”

–b.f.

(2) About those three people who died in the bank during the street protests in Athens–the report was that anarchists threw a firebomb into the Marfin Bank, Mitchel Cohen posted something quite informative to lbo-talk, the list-serve of Left Business Observer, a couple of days ago: it seems it is not so clear who is responsible for the deaths:

I received this communique this morning
concerning the burning of the Marfin Bank branch
in Athens during yesterday’s uprising and general
strike, in which 3 workers lost their lives.

The Greek government, run by phony Socialists, is
trying to blame the deaths on “anarchists” as a
means of trying to derail the strikes against the
government’s collaboration with the International
Monetary Fund and European Union’s structural adjustment policies.

The two letters below put a great deal of context
to what really went on, including the bank’s
ordering of all workers to come to work that day
or be fired. (Note: The 2 undercover cops at the
bank mysteriously avoided coming to work the day of the fire.)

– Mitchel Cohen

————————

An employee of the burnt bank speaks out on
tonight’s tragic deaths in Athens–please spread

Tonight’s tragic deaths in Athens leave little
space for comments–we are all very shocked and
deeply saddened by the events. To those (on the
“Occupied London” blog even) who speculate that
the deaths might have been caused purposefully by
anarchists, we can only reply the following: we
do not take to the streets, we do not risk our
freedom and our lives confronting the greek
police in order to kill other people. Anarchists
are not murderers, and no brainwashing attempted
by Greek PM Papandreou, the national or the
international media should convince anyone otherwise.

That being said, and with developments still
running frantically, we want to publish a rough
translation of a statement by an employee of
Marfin Bank–the bank whose branch was set
alight in Athens today, where the three employees found a tragic death.

Read the letter, translate it, spread it around
to your networks; grassroots counter-information
has a crucial role to play at a moment when the
greek state and corporate media are leashing out
on the anarchist (and not only) movement over here in Greece.

——————————

I feel an obligation toward my co-workers who
have so unjustly died today to speak out and to
say some objective truths. I am sending this
message to all media outlets. Anyone who still
bares some consciousness should publish it. The
rest can continue to play the government’s game.

The fire brigade had never issued an operating
license to the building in question. The
agreement for it to operate was under the table,
as it practically happens with all businesses and companies in Greece.

The building in question has no fire safety
mechanisms in place, neither planned nor
installed ones–that is, it has no ceiling
sprinklers, fire exits or fire hoses. There are
only some portable fire extinguishers which, of
course, cannot help in dealing with extensive
fire in a building that is built with long-outdated security standards.

No branch of Marfin bank has had any member of
staff trained in dealing with fire, not even in
the use of the few fire extinguishers. The
management also uses the high costs of such
training as a pretext and will not take even the
most basic measures to protect its staff.

There has never been a single evacuation exercise
in any building by staff members, nor have there
been any training sessions by the fire-brigade,
to give instructions for situations like this.
The only training sessions that have taken place
at Marfin Bank concern terrorist action scenarios
and specifically planning the escape of the
banks’ “big heads” from their offices in such a situation.

The building in question had no special
accommodation for the case of fire, even though
its construction is very sensitive under such
circumstances and even though it was filled with
materials from floor to ceiling. Materials which
are very inflammable, such as paper, plastics,
wires, furniture. The building is objectively
unsuitable for use as a bank due to its construction.

No member of security has any knowledge of first
aid or fire extinguishing, even though they are
every time practically charged with securing the
building. The bank employees have to turn into
firemen or security staff according to the
appetite of Mr Vgenopoulos [owner of Marfin Bank].

The management of the bank strictly barred the
employees from leaving today, even though they
had persistently asked so themselves from very
early this morning–while they also forced the
employees to lock up the doors and repeatedly
confirmed that the building remained locked up
throughout the day, over the phone. They even
blocked off their internet access so as to
prevent the employees from communicating with the outside world.

For many days now there has been some complete
terrorisation of the bank’s employees in regard
to the mobilisations of these days, with the
verbal “offer”: you either work, or you get fired.

The two undercover police who are dispatched at
the branch in question for robbery prevention did
not show up today, even though the bank’s
management had verbally promised to the employees that they would be there.

At last, gentlemen, make your self-criticism and
stop wandering around pretending to be shocked.
You are responsible for what happened today and
in any rightful state (like the ones you like to
use from time to time as leading examples on your
TV shows) you would have already been arrested
for the above actions. My co-workers lost their
lives today by malice: the malice of Marfin Bank
and Mr. Vgenopoulos personally who explicitly
stated that whoever didn’t come to work today
[May 5th, a day of a general strike!] should not
bother showing up for work tomorrow [as they would get fired].

– An employee of Marfin Bank

Find the Greek original here, on Indymedia Athens, where we found the incredible poster for the Athens May Day week of “struggle, self-development, and memory” (rough translation), that ran with Mike Epitropoulos’s article from our current issue.

(3) Also related to the Greek debt crisis, and debt crises more generally (and also originally posted at lbo-talk), an analaysis from Julio Huato that I found quite useful:

Media pundits, economists, and politicians claim that the current
level of public indebtedness in the U.S. and its further expansion are
“unsustainable.”

Seemingly, “our” profligacy is catching up with us. The day of
reckoning approaches. We should either prepare for a drastic decline
in social welfare tomorrow or accept a worsening of the economic
situation today — e.g. the government should limit its meager
“stimulus” spending and allow the economy to slip into greater
joblessness to prevent the looming catastrophe. The crisis in Greece,
that many commentators attribute to a borrowing binge by the Greek
government, is now being alluded as exhibit 1. (Let alone the fact
that the sudden increase in Greek public debt may have resulted from
the financial crisis and the attempt of the Greek government to
salvage banks that are now downgrading its debt, as Costas Lapavitsas
claims here: http://bit.ly/cMQeMn.) One of the latest additions to
this parade of nonsense is Arianna Huffington’s “Life in the Age of
“Much Worse Than We Thought It Would Be”” (http://huff.to/bu0txF).

Economists, of course, will pretend that fundamental scarcity — i.e.
the fact that society’s total labor time and its productive force are
never infinite — is at the root of the dilemma. Society’s cake is
finite, and one cannot eat it and have it at once. Except that this
is a false premise. The public debt (or the private debt, for that
matter) has absolutely nothing to do with the finiteness of society’s
resources and productive possibilities. It’s not nature but social
convention or, more precisely put, social structure.

Public debt is not about the limited production possibilities of our
society. Public debt is about how the wealth that exists (or will be
produced) is (or will be) held — by whom and at whose exclusion. In
other words, it is about how the ownership over existing wealth is
distributed. It’s about who owns today’s wealth and, hence, holds the
enforceable claims over future production flows. It is not about how
large these flows can be with existing resources and productivity.
Wealth distribution is a social condition, not a fact of nature. It
is entirely within the reach of human capabilities to alter the form
in which wealth ownership is distributed.

Of course, the smuggled pretension here is that the only conceivable
or legitimate way in which wealth ownership can be reshuffled in our
society is via the market mechanism: that private ownership is sacred.
But, any thought about it shows that the pretension is exactly
contrary to the very (contradictory) institutional framework and modus
operandi of modern capitalist societies. No modern capitalist society
would last long without a massive state — tasked with enforcing and
protecting ownership rights, disciplining labor, undertaking social
programs to preempt unrest, waging wars, regulating commerce, and
plain taking from the poor (and the out-of-favor rich) to give to the
rich (and better connected). A massive state requires taxation and
the allocation of expenditures outside of the market mechanism.

Furthermore, historically, under capitalism, high levels of public (or
private) indebtedness have always been resolved, partially or
entirely, through politically-sanctioned or politically-induced
processes of wealth redistribution — from land reforms and outright
expropriation to price management to relatively benign inflationary
processes.

The McKinsey Global Institute (http://bit.ly/8bQV8z) estimates that
adjusting the imbalances that led to the ongoing crisis will require a
(on average) 6-7 year long process of “deleveraging,” which should
wind up reducing the ratio of debt to GDP by 25%! How can such a
massive transfer of wealth ownership ever happen anywhere without a
politically sanctioned process or carnage? Can any society today
accomplish this feat by heeding Andrew Mellon’s dictum alone —
liquidate, liquidate, liquidate? At what human cost. (Isn’t the
point of an economy supposed to be “human welfare”?)

Again, unless they are willing to see themselves reduced to chop
liver, working people are going to have to take matters on their own
hand. The Greek people are showing the way. And this is not an
endorsement of the methods of small groups of anarchists or
professional provocateurs. It’s simply the notion that working people
will need to take action, rather than wait for the powers to decide
how to allocate the cost of the “adjustment.”

Just like the spike in public indebtedness in Greece followed the
financial panic and the government’s effort to prop up its banks,
public indebtedness in the U.S. has next-to-zero to do with welfare
queens on Cadillacs or poor people getting over their heads with
subprime mortgage borrowing. It has mostly to do with war making, tax
cuts for the rich, the secular decline in the real income and economic
security of working people since the 1970s, the financial blowout, all
rooted in traits inherent to capitalism.

There’s nothing inevitable here, but the struggle. It is a class struggle.

[Note to economic theorists: I am not claiming that distribution and
efficiency are independent variables under an abstract, pure, and
functional capitalist economy. Those theoretical constructs assume
that capitalism functions smoothly. In other words, they assume that
working people are reduced to perpetual political submission. I’m
referring to the fact that things do not have to be that way.]

That’s all I have for now–I hope the blog is fixed by next week so I can post more regularly.
—CS