Season for Job Cuts...

Recession is hitting big time and very bad. Cost cutting makes way for job cuts/filing for bankruptcy in corporate houses all over the world and how? Just today I read about so many that it really put me into spin. Our local papers did not even mention them. Here are a few prominent ones...

US Tribune the publisher of Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune has filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday as it struggles to renegotiate its estimated $13 billion (£8.7 billion) debt mountain, while the New York Times Company looked for a multibillion-dollar loan against its headquarters.

Sony axes 16,000 jobs and shuts down its plants and Dow Chemical cuts 5000 jobs and is planning to shut down 20 plants.

Ford's Volvo cuts 4616 jobs, while Deutsch bank to cut 900 jobs.

Rio Tinto, the giant miner, the Anglo-Australian company cited the "unprecedented rapidity and severity of the global economic downturn," and said it was shedding 14,000 jobs, of which 8,500 are contract positions. It is struggling to reduce a debt burden of nearly $40 billion.

SKF of Sweden, the world's largest maker of ball bearings, said Wednesday that it would cut 2,500 jobs as its customers struggle.

Despite joblessness and foreclosures uncontrollably soaring, we still think capitalism has a future. The Big Three auto makers are about to go bust, banks and investment biggies are filing for bankruptcy and leading retailers are shuttering their doors. Great Depression II looms. Yet still, we think there can be a “turnaround.”

As history would recall, the great depression of early 20th century saw a big band-aid in the form of the manufacturing boom that followed all the wars. Are all the occupations and wars happening around the world future band-aids for such scenarios?

Other questions: What if war once again emerges as the only real way to fire up any nation’s manufacturing sector? Who would we fight, and at what horrendous cost across the globe? What fraudulent, immoral excuse would “justify” our action? Is India's present war alert, one of such excuses?

The many decades of capitalist media have carefully cultivated a false consciousness that greed is good, that private ownership of economic (and socially produced) property as well as natural resources is sacrosanct. One turns around and wonders how many more company's need go bankrupt and how many need to lay off people, for the population at large to understand that capitalism really stinks!!