GM wields the big stick

Nick Reilly, head of General Motor's international operations, is touring Europe on a mission. He's been to Poland and Belgium. Yesterday in England he met New Labour's august Lord Mandelson, the UK's First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, and Tony Woodley, deputy leader of trade union Unite. Today Reilly is in Spain.

Reilly is using the big stick of closure to threaten governments and unions. With massive overcapacity globally and car scrappage schemes ending, production cannot continue without huge additional bail-outs, reduction of capacity equivalent to three of the eight plants in Europe, and up to 10,000 job losses.

Reilly's mission is to extract the best deal he can as part of the restructuring of one of the now bankrupt behemoths of capitalist system of production and finance. GM was one of the biggest and most powerful of the global corporations that grew to dominate the world economy during the credit-induced boom of the second half of the 20^th century.

Together their power grew to the extent that it changed the role of government. To keep itself afloat, the sales of GM the vehicle producer, became increasingly dependent on the success of its own finance company GMAC – a hugely complicated operation providing insurance and mortgage services in around 40 countries as well as loans for vehicles purchased via its network of dealers.

As the 2008 financial crisis swept the world, sending banks into a spiral of decline, GMAC was given permission to join their ranks as a bank holding company so that it could access funds from the US government's Troubled Assets Relief Programme, which it promptly did. In May this year GMAC was rebranded as the Ally Bank, because according to Sanjay Gupta, GMAC's chief marketing officer “it gives the sense of a trusted partner, the attributes we are trying to convey".

Really? Operating in Britain as mortgage lender GMAC-RFC, the company was fined £2.8m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) last month for mistreating customers who fell into arrears. It has also been told to repay £7.7m, plus interest, to 46,000 of its borrowers.

After setting up as a mortgage business in the UK in 1998, GMAC-RFC grew rapidly to become one of the UK's largest mortgage lenders, but it stopped making new loans last year. The FSA's investigation of the company's lending practices between October 2004 and October 2008 found that charges for dealing with people in arrears were "excessive and unfair"; repossession proceedings were started before all other alternatives had been considered; GMAC staff were not properly trained in dealing with arrears cases and repossessions.

Workers in plants throughout Europe and the rest of the world should not be reassured by the failure of the deal to sell Opel and Vauxhall to the consortium of Canadian parts dealer Magna and Russian finance interests. Neither should they place any faith in the ability of union leaders like Woodley to secure their future.

The logic of capital is ruthless. The downward spiral into recession and slump cannot be reversed by low interest rates or injections of invented cash. GM's 25% production cuts will soon look small. GM workers should be preparing their own plans. They should discuss how to take over their industry, and convert their workplaces to production of zero-carbon vehicles as part of a massive expansion of public transport.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Car workers abandoned by union leaders

Toyota car workers at plants around the country yesterday voted by more than two to one to accept a 10% cut in pay and hours, which was recommended to them by UNITE and GMB unions on the spurious grounds that the negotiated “deal” was better than redundancy.

Peter Tsouvallaris, the UNITE representative at Toyota, argued that the deal would mean that workers would not suffer the fate of the 1,000 workers at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), 850 at Mini and 1,200 at Nissan who have their jobs cut recently. But taking a pay cut won’t save Toyota. Predictions are that the company will face an operating loss of £3.4 billion by the end of March due to sharp falls in global sales. Sales of new cars in February in Britain were 22% lower than a year earlier.

And while the unions betray their members by peddling hours and pay cuts as the lesser of two evils, 1,000 jobs are disappearing each week in the Birmingham area alone in companies supplying the major manufacturers. And union leaders are doing nothing about it.

Other car manufacturers are in the same position as Toyota. General Motors introduced a three-year wage freeze for Canadian workers earlier this month. GM Europe, Vauxhall’s parent company last week warned that it was about to go bankrupt. GM spokesman said that "everything will fall over" if support for the company was not forthcoming. This includes plants at Ellesmere Port and Luton, which employ 4,000 people. GM is seeking huge bail-outs from European governments as a price for keeping plants open.

Is there any help forthcoming from the Trades Union Congress about how to cope with the threat of the sack? Well, actually no. In two booklets, called Coping with the Downturn and Facing Redundancy, pains are taken to explain the difference between the “sack” and “redundancy”, claiming that “redundancy is a fair reason for dismissal”.

Clearly the TUC believes that unemployment is inevitable and that people must accept the “fate” that capitalism is dishing out to them. It sees its role as mediating between workers, their employers and the government to convince workers that there is no alternative and that they must accept the pain and find ways to live in poverty.

The stark fact is that no amount of pay freezing and shorter hours will resolve the  massive over-capacity that has built up in the industry over past decades, not to speak of the ongoing collapse of the global capitalist economy. As to the claim by union bureaucrats that their “solution” is the lesser of two evils, well, as someone once said, the lesser of two evils is still an evil.

Instead of accepting the demands of the global corporations, there has to be an organised resistance to the economic slump. It’s not going to come from UNITE and GMB leaders, who have run up the white flag, nor TUC bureaucrats. If Toyota and other corporations are going bust, it is because the economic system they are part of has fallen off a cliff.

The real way forward is for global car business to be run on an entirely different, not-for-profit way in a re-shaped transport industry. In any case, what is the point of the vast over-capacity in the motor industry, which churns out unneeded metal boxes while carbon-induced climate change takes the planet to hell on wheels?

It’s time for the biggest industrial and social change ever. Toyota and GM workers could be making really useful, ecologically-sound forms of transport. The first step towards that goal is an occupation of threatened plants and an ousting of the executives whose failed policies have brought the company to its knees and the removal of union officials who have absolutely no intention of leading a fight back.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

A tipping point is reached

It’s difficult to know which of two momentous pronouncements yesterday has the most profound significance for the future of the global capitalist economy.

Is it the Bank of England’s expected decision to reduce the base interest rate to 0.5%, and start to print money – an initial £75 billion – with which it will bypass the commercial banks and lend direct to businesses, if it can find any that want to borrow?

This means that “monetary policy in its conventional form has ceased to operate”, according to the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf. A better example of what is meant by “a tipping point” would be hard to find.

Or is it the also expected admission from global giant car-maker (and financial services company) General Motors that there are now serious doubts about its ability to continue as “a going concern”? Continued deterioration in the availability of credit together with slumping demand for vehicles of all kinds has driven it to the brink of collapse.

The fact is that the complete breakdown of the credit system and the implosion of production are tightly intertwined.

Interest rates were last reduced to historic lows to deal with the dot.com crash of 2001/2, ushering in a period of frenzied speculation, which intersected at its pinnacle with the beginning of the downturn in consumption in 2004.

The global credit system closed for business in mid-2007 when it became clear that the effects of the deepening recession were irreversible. Financial institutions and investors recognised, however dimly, that the possibility of tempting consumers back into the shops to restart growth was gone. It was called a “collapse of confidence”. Share prices continue to tumble.

Despite trillions of dollars, pounds, yen and roubles being poured into the banks and the auto giants, and virtually unlimited guarantees to underpin new lending these attempts at resuscitating the system have failed. There's just too much over-capacity already to tempt new production. Too many unsold cars.

Neither can the crash be reversed by “quantitative easing” - increasing the money supply to induce spending, touted as the last throw of the dice. Governments have embarked on this desperate measure because interest rates are close to zero, property and commodity prices are dropping as demand has evaporated, and nothing else is working.

There will be attempts to bypass the banks and shovel cash into consumers' pockets directly - the “helicopter drop” approach favoured by the current chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.

This can only make an unprecedentedly bad situation a whole lot worse. There’s talk already in the US and the UK about “fiscal collapse” – tantamount to state bankruptcy.

Obama’s team is reported to be working around the clock, not on a solution, but “to form an approach” to the disintegration of the auto industry. They must be getting very tired.

Obama, Brown, Darling, Mandelson, Wolf, and Mervyn King, the Bank of England’s governor and every one of the fantasists of the capitalist world are pinning their hopes on a recovery, sometime, not this year, maybe later. Maybe never.

As the conference called by the Left Economics Advisory Panel for 25 April puts it, “Capitalism Isn’t Working”. The conference is scheduled to discuss policy solutions for the crisis. They will have to be founded upon collectively-owned, co-operatively managed, not-for-profit ecologically-sound production, distribution and exchange. And that includes the banks. Nothing less will do.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Shocks to the system

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of even one of the economic events of the last 24 hours. Fears of a severe recession sent financial markets into freefall once more while retailers launched their January sales two months early in an attempt to tempt now wary consumers into deeper debt.

The price of oil slipped below $50 to a third of the $147 reached earlier this year, a measure of the speed and depth of the slump. Only hours earlier, Robert Shapiro, an advisor to Barack Obama, gave a chilling warning of more financial shocks to come that would shake the system to its roots. Perhaps he had the impending crash of Citigroup in mind, whose planned sacking of 75,000 staff has done nothing to stop its share price from imploding.

Even before Democrats in the US House of Representatives failed to come up with a bail-out plan for the near-bankrupt car producers GM, Ford and Chrysler, another 542,000 workers filed new claims for jobless benefits last week alone, the highest number since the early 1990s recession. More than 10 million American workers are now unemployed.

The big three car makers employ 240,000 in the United States directly and indirectly support more than 4.5 million other workers, including thousands of dealerships and parts suppliers. Up to 3 million jobs could be at stake in a bankruptcy as well as retirement benefits for millions more. The impact of their collapse would be felt everywhere as these are among the giants of the global corporations with manufacturing, distributing and selling operations throughout the world. The crisis has spread to Honda too, which has just announced the closure of its Swindon plant for two months next year.

In Britain, as the Royal Bank of Scotland’s shareholders voted to accept a state hand-out, chairman, Sir Tom McKillop, said he was "profoundly sorry" for the bank's financial difficulties and "sorry" about the human cost that RBS’s troubles have caused. Its demise is a significant point in the history of British capitalism. RBS’s 300 years of operation closely follows the history of capitalist production. The bank’s forerunner, the Equivalent Society, was set up following the 1707 Acts of Union that created the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Now, the once great banking empire is reduced to receiving a £20bn hand-out from New Labour, and, as a consequence it seems, its shareholders will receive no dividends.

Gordon Brown’s dream of getting New Labour to act as a private equity fund by asset-stripping Northern Rock and returning it to private hands has turned into a nightmare as defaults on mortgages held by its previously highly profitable subsidiary Granite have soared, forcing it to stop making payments to the parent company. Repayments of mortgage debt which have fallen 90 days or more behind have risen four-fold since mid-2007. Figures out today have revealed a massive increase in repossessions by the major lenders. They were up by 12% in the third quarter, as another 11,300 were made homeless by the same banks who are guaranteed by the government.

In the midst of all this, the British state’s finances are themselves in dire straits. Borrowing is at unprecedented levels, while tax revenue is plummeting. Tax rises are on the way and the room for manoeuvre is extremely limited. Whichever way you look, the crisis can neither be contained nor solved within the existing political and economic frameworks. This raises the possibility and necessity of a reconstructed system based on not-for-profit finance, servicing sustainable production for need, carried into practice by a new democratic politics as outlined in our book, Unmasking the State.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Can we do it? Yes we must!

As the political leaders of 20 of the biggest economies gather in Washington to work out how to fix the global capitalist economy as, like a runaway train, it heads straight for the buffers, the range of “solutions” is piling up. None of them have a hope of taking off.

For outgoing US President George Bush, the oh-so-obvious answer is “sustained economic growth”. He told a New York audience that "the answer is not to try to reinvent that system” but to “make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free-market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people around the world".

Others are into reinvention. Gordon Brown, who until recently thought globalised capitalism could not possibly be improved upon, is now for “creating a new global financial architecture” to replace the Bretton Woods monetary system (which actually collapsed 40 years ago!). The Germans want a “new balance between market and state” while the Canadian suggestion is that "dynamic new economic players ... must be full participants at the global table".

There’s another proposal aired by Bob Geldof. He is back banging the drum for Africa, which has been left out of the discussions. Bob wants to ensure that “900 million potential producers and consumers” are drawn into “the next round of globalisation”. With the whole world diving into slump, Bob sees salvation for capitalism in Africa.

And on that he’s at one with Bush, who just yesterday received a major humanitarian award from Africare for his work in Africa. No really, it’s true. According to Voice of America White House correspondent Paula Wolfson, Bush was honoured for his efforts throughout his administration to combat disease across the continent. Bush says America has an obligation to help the people of Africa. "It is in our national security interest that we defeat hopelessness. It is in our economic interest that we help economies grow.”

The brutal truth is all these plans, pleas and proposals are non-starters. Why? Because they all look beyond the current disastrous disintegration of the global economy to a bright, newly refurbished, much more regulated, fairer, capitalist world. This is not how capitalist slumps work themselves out.

Fixing the real problem - an overhang of capacity as global production turns from recession to depression and slump - has only one solution as far as capitalism is concerned. In 1942 in the midst of the Second World War, economist Joseph Schumpeter, a critic of Keynes, but a big fan of credit-led investment, published his most famous work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. It was then, with the world at war, that he chose to develop his version of the concept of “creative destruction”. That is already under way, with 10 million Americans already out of work and General Motors on the edge of bankruptcy.

Bush bemoaned the fact that critics were "equating the free enterprise system with greed, exploitation and failure" and objected to it. He is right to warn against the coming assault on the citadels of capitalism. There’ll be many demonstrations and protests against the G20 over the weekend and the election of Obama last week was itself a product of the anger millions of Americans who want action against bankers and corporations.

What is urgently needed is a concept of a society beyond the private ownership and control of capital, together with the leadership and organisation to make it a reality. Can we do it? Yes we must!

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

From fantasy finance to economic crash

When corporations at the heart of American capitalism, Ford and General Motors, find themselves close to bankruptcy, there is no surer sign that financial mayhem is turning into economic disaster for the masses who actually work for a living rather than speculate with other people’s money and lives.

As Wall Street crashed (again) yesterday, the car giants found themselves in the eye of the storm, their shares valued at next to nothing. Sales have slumped as lending to consumers dries up. Both Detroit corporations had their credit ratings reduced to “junk”, making it impossible for them to borrow. Bankruptcy looms as the unthinkable becomes reality.
In Britain, the trade deficit between imports and exports is the biggest since the end of the 17th century. Paul Dales, UK economist at Capital Economics, said the data supported other evidence suggesting that Britain entered a recession in the past three months. Exports orders have fallen rapidly as the global economy goes into reverse.

So as finance ministers from the major economies began to gather for an emergency session in Washington, we had this admission from Alistair Darling yesterday: “The world economy is changing. Sticking with the solutions of the past is not an option. Now, more than ever, we need new ideas.” But this is the man who has been a willing, even fervent promoter of the no-alternative school which holds that global capitalism is the only game in town.

So all of their energy, as well as our savings, taxes, pensions, livelihoods, and council services, are devoted to the task of ensuring that the system survives. The “new idea” is that politicians pledge to work together to do “whatever it takes” to restore “stability”. The plan is that the bankers cash in and the rest of us take the pain. In that, all the major bourgeois parties are agreed in an outbreak of “bipartisanship”, which meant the House of Commons devoted an entire 19 minutes to the crisis yesterday. Democracy? It's a luxury at a time of national crisis.

Certainly there can be no effective action to prevent the descent into an unprecedented slump. And the market speculators know it, selling shares not just in banks but in retailers and manufacturers. The souring of relations between Britain and Iceland, with the government using anti-terror laws to freeze accounts, shows how the breakdown of the global financial system turns friends into enemies overnight.

We’re not alone in pointing out that following the 1929 Crash, it took a decade and a half of the Great Depression and the destruction of surplus productive capacity and tens of millions of human beings in a world war. Only then, could the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement establish the basis for restarting the process of profit making and capital accumulation.

The post-war period of growth induced by a controlled expansion of the money supply began to suffer a series of worsening setbacks and shocks from the end of the 1960s. Control had given way to uncontrolled inflation and the Bretton Woods arrangements broke down in 1971. This left the world prey to three and a half decades of naked credit-led growth. This produced global corporations and subservient governments which encouraged gross over-consumption.

It had to end. More and worse financial shocks reverberated around the world throughout the 1990s. The bursting of dot com bubble in 2000 was the writing on the wall. When the outpouring of commodities bought on credit overwhelmed the consumers’ ability to service their debts by 2004, the game was already up. (NB Chancellor Darling).

Darling says that “All forecasters, including the International Monetary Fund, have been surprised by the profound impact of this shock.” Not us, chum. We wrote about it in 2004 in our book A World to Win. And we continued to study it until, at the end of 2007, we published A House of Cards, with its prophetic sub-title, from fantasy finance to global crash.

But Darling is right about one thing, sticking to “solutions of the past” won’t do the trick. A revolutionary break with the past is needed in opposition to international plans for bailing out bankers while ordinary people suffer. We’ll be discussing our solutions on Saturday week, October 18, at the Stand Up for Your Rights festival. And, we can promise you, we won’t be talking about how to save the present financial and economic system.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

A global car crash

Any lingering doubts about the trend towards recession were swept away last night as the world’s vehicle makers announced their April results. Falling off a cliff would sum it up. General Motors sales fell 23%, Ford 19%, and Chrysler nearly 30%. And to make matters worse for the manufacturers, the effect of spiralling fuel prices has shifted sales from high-profit trucks and gas-guzzling SUVs to more fuel-efficient but less profitable models. The idea that a US recession wouldn’t affect the rest of the world also took a beating as Toyota dropped 5% and Nissan 2%.

The latest figures on US manufacturing confirm that the American economy overall is contracting, with employment dropping sharply to its lowest level since May 2003. Despite the distribution of $110 billion in tax rebates intended as a stimulation package, these figures are certain to deepen and accelerate the impact on US consumers, already hit by house repossessions. These jumped by 23% in the first quarter and are more than double the level of the year before. One in every 194 households received a notice of default, auction sale or bank repossession in January, February and March. Rising fuel and food prices are also taking their toll on household spending.

To say that these are unprecedented times is an understatement. Last year GM was the 5th largest of the global corporations ranked by revenue. It made a loss of nearly $2 billion on sales of $207.3 billion. Toyota was the 6th and DaimlerChrysler the 8th largest. Ford was 12th in the list. It made a massive loss of $12.6 billion on sales of $160.1 billion. So the impact on of a slump in their sales will be felt throughout the global economy.

For the UK, latest projections from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research show consumer spending growth falling from 3.1% last year to just 1.2% - the slowest rate since 1992 when Britain was emerging from recession. "The UK economy has perhaps reached its most precarious position in over a decade because of global financial market developments," NIESR says. "Private consumption will slow to a crawl this year and next."

Before the car makers’ shock results, commentators had been playing alphabet soup with the economy trying to guess whether the recession will be brief, giving a V-shaped curve to growth, a double-dip W, a longer U-shape, or (though the BBC ignored it on Newsnight) a long L. All of these options assume that there’s a bottom. In reality, the global capitalist economy is headed for the biggest wave of destruction of productive capacity in history.

This prospect has reinforced the loss of confidence in governments to deal with basic questions, let alone the economic crisis, as seen in New Labour’s disastrous local election results. Avoiding the horrific consequences of a prolonged recession leading to slump requires bold political action well beyond the capacity of parties like New Labour. The objective has to be to end the anarchy of the market and capitalist production for profit in favour of a sustainable, co-operative system that is motivated by meeting people's needs.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor