It's Class War!

General Electric, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010. General Electric actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion from American taxpayers.

At the same time that General Electric was not paying taxes, many undocumented immigrants, who are typically accused of taking advantage of the system while not contributing to it by many on the right, paid $11.2 billion in taxes.

He belonged in the class with Folk and LaFollette, Roosevelt, Seth Low, and Walter Fisher. He was on “our side,” the people’s; that was why the other side, the plutogogues, called him a demagogue. But I heard some of Tom Johnson’s campaign speeches in the infamous tent he moved about for meetings in parts of the town where there were no halls or where opponents closed halls against him. His “circus” speeches were indeed entertaining; he encouraged questions from the floor, and he answered them with quick wit and barbed facts; but those political meetings were more like classes in economics and current (local) history than harangues.

The only just complaint of his enemies was that he “had gone back on his class.” This was said by men who almost in the same breath would declare that reform was not a class struggle, that there was no such thing as class consciousness, no classes, in America; and they meant it, too. The charge against Tom Johnson, Folk, LaFollette and, later, Rudolph Spreckels, of treason to their class, is an expression of our unconscious class consciousness, and an example of our appalling sincerity, miscalled hypocrisy.

The requested 9.6% tuition increase is intended to make up for the $150-million funding reduction outlined in a state budget passed last week. The previous 8% tuition increase, along with a package of other spending cuts and austerity measures, was aimed at addressing a previously announced $500-million cut in state support for the UC system, according to Patrick Lenz, UC’s vice president for budget and capital resources.

The Times reported last week that a tuition hike of this size was imminent, and that the Cal State system was also likely to approve a tuition increase of between 10% and 15%.

Times being what they are, when a Teamsters committee came to the plant in early June to open negotiations over a new contract to start Sept. 1, they thought they might be asked to accept minuscule wage increases and maybe some givebacks on health coverage.

They were stunned by what they heard instead: As of Aug. 31, the plant would be outsourced to an unidentified third-party logistics company and all but three of its 71 employees laid off.