Re: [Pen-l] CounterPunch, the most widely read radical website in the English...

[Patrick Bond <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine wrote:
> The New York Times / December 10, 2008
> By DAVID LEONHARDT
> ...It's a reflection of how many
> retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees
> long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You'd
> never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN
> last week, contrasting the "$73/hour" pay of Detroit's workers with
> the "up to $48/hour" pay of workers at the Japanese companies.
> These retirees make up arguably Detroit's best case for a bailout. The
> Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the
> middle class in a country where individual companies — as opposed to
> all of society — must shoulder much of the burden of paying for
> retirement...
>   

Actually, the 'bad luck' was part of a top-down business-government 
class-war strategy, was it not, to avoid a social welfare state and 
increase the bargaining power of capital versus labor in the 1940s? 
That's the way Vicente Navarro explains the hostility to national health 
insurance, and I assume the same goes for pensions.
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