Today's Teamster News 04.15.13

Foreclosure Settlement Shows 4.2 Million Borrowers Shafted in 2009-2010  Economic Populist   ...Close to 1.2 million borrowers, or about 30 percent of the more than 3.9 million households whose properties were foreclosed on by 11 leading financial institutions in 2009 and 2010, had to battle potentially wrongful efforts to seize their homes despite not having defaulted on their loans, being protected under a host of federal laws, or having been in good standing under bank-approved plans to either restructure their mortgages or temporarily delay required payments...
Is the Fed Handing Out Valuable Tips to Insiders?  Washington Blog   ...Congressman Grayson Asks for an Investigation into Federal Reserve’s FOMC leak...
The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment  The Atlantic   ...It's an awful catch-22: employers won't hire you if you've been out of work for more than six months...
U.S., Guatemala reach deal to resolve labor dispute  Reuters   ...The new 18-point labor enforcement plan "reflects Guatemala's commitment to constructive engagement to meet its labor obligations under our trade agreement," Acting U.S. Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis said in a statement...
Margaret Thatcher the tax snatcher? Mystery of her £6m house with links to THREE tax havens  Mirror   ...“How can a former prime minister spend more than two decades living in a house in London that has been owned for many years by a company based in the British Virgin Islands? ... We all have a duty to pay our taxes, and that includes former politicians...
Portugal's fed-up youth pack and go as their nation slides into reverse  The Guardian   ...Job prospects are grim, health and education are in crisis and, with more austerity to come, emigration is increasingly the only solution...
U.S. grants Michigan permit to build 2nd Detroit-Canada bridge  Detroit Free Press   ...The U.S. State Department announced its issuance of a presidential permit to the state of Michigan for the New International Trade Crossing between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, moving the project an important step closer to completion...
After Courts Block GOP Laws, Wisconsin GOP Pushes Bill To Strip Most State Courts’ Power To Block Laws  ThinkProgress   ...Last November, Wisconsin was able to run a fair election unmarred by one of the Republican Party’s favorite voter suppression tactics because two lower courts struck down the state’s unconstitutional voter ID law, and the conservative state supreme court repeatedly refused requests to take up the case before it winds its way through the normal appeals process. Now, a group of Wisconsin Republicans are pushing legislation to ensure that something like this never happens again:...
Flaws Seen in Protection of Animals on the Set  New York Times   ...Trainers, who are already heavily regulated by state and federal officials, are particularly incensed by the idea that the (American Humane) association might seek to extend its authority beyond film sets, to include certification of those who house and supply animals — something they see as an attempt to bolster funds by tapping them for fees...

Margaret Thatcher, Pawn of the Banksters, Scott Walker's role model

It figures that Wisconsin Job-killer Gov. Scott Walker would lament the death of Margaret Thatcher. She was a job-killing, privatizing, union-busting machine and she made most Britons poorer and politically weaker. In the end, only the banksters and bililonaires benefited from her leadership.

That appears to be Scott Walker's dream.

The Cap Times reports:

After expressing sadness Monday on Facebook over Thatcher’s passing, Walker added a quote from the Iron Lady that fits with the image he has sought to establish throughout his divisive governorship: 

"I am not a consensus politician. I'm a conviction politician."

What crap. Walker is as much a hapless pawn of Wall Street and the Koch brothers as Thatcher was of the UK's own banksters.

Michael Hudson, an economics professor, explains that London banksters viewed her as a puppet doing their bidding:

Privatization’s ultimate beneficiary was the City of London, the square mile of financial institutions that obtained the quickest benefits and turned the program into something rather unanticipated by Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. (Nigel) Lawson (chancellor of the Exchequer). The rentiers for their part seem to have perceived the Thatchers and (Milton) Friedmans as pawns, an advance infantry of promoters wrapping austerity economics in populist garb – policies that otherwise would have been difficult (if not impossible) to sell to voters.

Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers describe Thatcher's impact on the U.K.'s 99 percent in Counterpunch:

When Mrs. Thatcher took power, 1 in 7 of the England’s children lived in poverty. By the end of her reforms that number had risen to 1 in 3. She polarized the country in a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that foreshadowed that of Ronald Reagan and more recent American politicians such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The effect of her policy was to foreclose on the economic mobility into the middle class.

They call her The Queen Mother of Financial Austerity and Financialization.

Hudson recounted how she privatized and carved up  Britain's infrastructure into a series of monopolies in naked capitalism, which we will summarize here.

...Many services were cut back, especially on the least utilized transport routes. The largest privatized bus company was charged with cut-throat monopoly practices. The water system broke down, while consumer charges leapt. Electricity prices were shifted against residential consumers in favor of large industrial users. Economic inequality widened as the industrial labor force shrunk by two million from 1979 to 1997, while wages stagnated in the face of soaring profits for the privatized companies. The tax cuts financed by their selloff turned out to benefit mainly the rich.

Thatcher transformed social organizations so they were managed for shareholders' gains, not for broader public purposes. And what a shock. All it did was make shareholders' rich. But that wasn't the way privatization was sold:

It was taken as a matter of faith that financial gains would be invested in upgrading the enterprises once they were privatized, installing new machinery and hiring more labor to provide better service while increasing output at falling prices. Workers were invited to think of themselves as finance-capitalists-in-miniature, earning dividends and capital gains by investing their savings in the shares in these companies.

That's how Thatcher managed to persuade people to support policies against their own self-interest. It sounds a lot like George W. Bush's "ownership society," doesn't it?

The idea of getting workers to think of themselves as property owners had long been voiced by Conservative politicians. It began with the idea of them owning their own homes, bought on mortgage. Mrs. Thatcher started the process with Council house sales. No less than £24 billion were sold off, larger than any single other public industry. But the privatization that really inaugurated “popular capitalism” was the sale of British Telephone in November 1984. The idea was nothing less than to win workers over to the cause of capitalism as an ideal, by turning them into stockholders in the economy’s commanding heights. This, she hoped, would shift their faith away from socialism in the future to capitalism in the present. “Privatization not only widens share ownership (desirable in itself),” claimed Lawson, “but increases employee share ownership, which previous privatizations show leads to further improved performance.” More politically to the point, giving property to citizens would create “a society with an inbuilt resistance to revolutionary change.”

Then there was the union busting. In 1990, Thatcher passed the U.K.'s equivalent of No Rights at Work. Two years earlier she passed an act that let union members opt out of strikes called without a ballot. Minimum wage laws were abolished for children and young adults under 21.

Hudson concluded that Thatcher had set in motion a vicious downward cycle:

The decline in union power enabled the privatized companies and others to downsize their labor force. Between 1979 and 1986, union membership fell by three million persons. Two million industrial workers were put out of work, including over a million miners.

So what's an appropriate way to honor her legacy? Politicususa tells us of a British film director who wants to privatize her funeral.

...film director Ken Loach thinks former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday following a stroke, would have wanted it this way. “How should we honour her? Let’s privatise her funeral,” Loach said. “Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It’s what she would have wanted.” 

Indeed.