Reagan's scapegoats

Scan page 10

In to this... The Presiden vors the prime rede shoul ang date. SIS & LOAN ASSOCIATION "AT THE price-Pfister Brass Manufacturing Corporation in Pacoima, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, dozens of unemployed men clawed their way up wire fences to watch 82 suspected illegal workers being loaded into buses...

•The next morning, over 1000 inhapekers mact af TALINE INDUSTRY them young blacks or -ironically - people of Latin American origin, besieged Price-Pfister and two other firms that had been raided the previous day" (Sunday Times, May 2).

With unemployment at 9 per cent overall, 35 per cent for black teenagers in Los Angeles, and even higher for Hispanics there, the workers. Daily sweeps in ten major cities have pulled in thousands of illegal immigrants for deportation. Most of them are from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Hispanics, alongside blacks, are also bearing the brunt of Reagan's cuts. The 1980 census figures, just published, showed 12½ per cent of Americans living below the official poverty line. (The figure is now 15 per cent). But among Hispanics the figure was 24% below the poverty line; among blacks, 30%.

60 per cent of Reagan's $11.3 billion cuts last year in Federal programmes came from spending aimed to help people below the poverty line. Reagan's proposed 1983 budget would leave households.on $10,000 a year or less $240 worse off, and rich households ($80,000-plus a year), $15,000 better off.

Talks between the White House and the Democratic Congress majority on these budget proposals have now broken down. The reason is not so much the penalties against the poor as the big budget deficit implied in the Reagan plans. But the breakdown reflects increasing disillusion with 'Reaganomics', both in the working class and in the ruling class.

Declining

Only months ago Reagan's team was predicting a 'roaring recovery' by spring 1982. Yet the last three months' figures show industrial production declining at a rate of 14½ % per year. Profits fell sharply in the last quarter of 1981, manufacturing corporations suffering a decline of $17.1 billion. General Motors has just announced its figures for the first quarte of 1982 - it was saved from a loss only by gains on foreign exchange transactions.

Business failures are running at the highest rate since 1933.

So long as it... rest rates remain at their present skyhigh levels - about 7½% per year in real terms, whereas until recent years interest rates in the big capitalist economies were almost always negative in real terms - any major revival is unlikely. Investment will remain depressed because the cost of borrowing money is so high.

Yet the Reagan administration dare not do anything to 'reflate' the econory, for fear of setting off new spirals of inflation and forfeiting all the bosses' confidence.

So they end up lashing out at scapegoats. But the day is coming closer when the US labour movement will link up with those "scapegoats' to lash back at Reagan.

Scan page 11

Sucialist Organiser no.83

----- pull-quotes -----

SMALL BANKRUPTCY BUSINES JUNK YARD ALTO LADI ŞIK