FIRST, WE STEAL THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THEN
HAND IT TO MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS WITH NO STRINGS. THEN WE GIVE THE SAME ILLEGALS
YOUR JOBS BECAUSE THEY WILL VOTE DEMOCRAT FOR MORE AND PROVIDE GENERATIONS OF “CHEAP”
LABOR.
But there’s not much evidence that the ship
of American democracy can be turned in time to save working-class people, in
large part because they themselves don’t think it’s possible.
What’s Killing the White Working Class?
Their updated data points are stark: Deaths
from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related disease among middle-aged
white men and women skyrocketed from 30 per 100,000 in 1990 to 92 per 100,000
in 2017.
The GOP continues to
supply more of the policies that are destroying its base.
In early January last year, the Fox News host
Tucker Carlson took to the airwaves with a 15-minute rant about the way that
American capitalism was crushing families and decimating white working-class
communities. He blamed small government conservatives and liberal elites alike
for ignoring the economic cause of the collapse of the working class.
Conservatives, he complained, blame the problem solely on the breakdown of the
traditional family. “Like the libertarians they claim to oppose, many social
conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct,” Carlson said. “The idea that
families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They
refuse to consider it.”
Deaths of Despair and
the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Princeton University Press, 312 pp.
the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Princeton University Press, 312 pp.
His indictment of American capitalism went
viral and set off a familiar, if heated, debate, mostly on the right, where
conservatives weren’t used to hearing such an assault on free market economics
from one of their own. Yet Carlson’s assessment was rooted in solid academic
research. In fact, his monologue could have served as the prologue for Deaths of Despair, a new book written
by the married Princeton economics duo Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus
Deaton. They’re the academics who first shocked the country in 2015 with a new
study finding that the mortality rates of white people, particularly those
without college degrees, had spiked, after nearly a century of sustained
decline.
At the time, they were hard pressed to explain
exactly why white people were suddenly dying in such large numbers when
everyone else—African Americans, Hispanics, and white working-class people in
other countries—seemed to be doing better. Five years later, with Deaths of Despair, they’ve returned with a
book-length investigation of the trends they first identified in 2015. Their
updated data points are stark: Deaths from suicide, drug overdoses, and
alcohol-related disease among middle-aged white men and women skyrocketed from
30 per 100,000 in 1990 to 92 per 100,000 in 2017. The spike in these deaths
is almost exclusively confined to white Americans, both men and women, without
a college degree. Mortality rates among college-educated Americans have
continued to fall. Mortality rates for white-working class people in other
wealthy countries are similarly in decline.
Case and Deaton note that these premature
deaths are the reason that American life expectancy at birth has fallen for
three straight years. Such a drop is unparalleled in modern U.S. history. The
only comparable disaster came during the First World War and the flu epidemic
that followed. The authors compare what’s happening with the American white
working class to what happened after the collapse of the former Soviet Union,
where the resulting countries saw radical change and dire economic straits. “It
is no exaggeration to compare the long-standing misery of these Eastern
Europeans with the wave of despair that is driving suicides, alcohol, and drug
abuse among less educated white Americans,” they write.
Deaths of Despair is an academic
book, laden with charts and facts and figures, and the authors devote a
significant amount of ink to shooting down things they think are not causing
the crisis—problems like obesity, for instance. But after dismissing a variety
of possible causes for increasing mortality rates, they essentially come to the
same conclusion Carlson did: that rapacious capitalism and predatory
corporations, protected by politicians indebted to them, have destroyed the
white working class. American capitalism, they write, is uniquely toxic and
often looks “more like a racket for redistributing upward than an engine of
general prosperity.” They believe that the way capitalism has run amok in the
U.S., without much regulation or a safety net for those caught up in its
creative destruction, is literally killing people.
Deaths of Despair features a
battery of distressing statistics about the state of the white working class.
For white men without a college degree, the average growth in median wages
between 1979 and 2017 was a negative number (−0.2 percent a year), even as
median hourly earnings for all white workers grew by 11 percent in the same
period. This wage deflation has had well-documented cultural ripple effects,
depressing marriage rates as men’s appeal as partners fell along with their
earnings. Without a stable family life, these men are more isolated, with fewer
of the sorts of social buffers that might inoculate them against suicide or
drug abuse. As a result, the rates for both have gone up.
Women without college degrees are also
suffering. Both men and women are now experiencing record levels of disability
and stalled progress against heart disease. Women have always had lower rates
of suicide, alcoholic liver disease, and drug overdoses, whether or not they
have a four-year degree. But that has changed since the late 1990s.
Working-class women without college degrees are dying from despair in about
equal numbers as men. Case and Deaton don’t tease this out, but recent data
suggests that white middle-aged women are now drinking themselves to death at a
shocking rate. Between 1999 and 2015, alcohol-related deaths in this group
soared by 130 percent.
But Case and Deaton argue that the deaths are
far more than a product of stagnant wages or economic distress. If that were
the case, African Americans would surely be leading the uptick, but they
aren’t. White working-class people are much less likely to be poor than black
Americans are, and while African Americans still have higher overall mortality
rates, those rates have been falling for the past 20 years even as they’ve
risen for white people without college degrees.
Instead, Case and Deaton point to something
much broader at work in these numbers: the collapse of communities and the end
of a way of life. Black communities experienced the ravages of
deindustrialization decades before white communities did, along with an
increase in mortality. These groups have since stabilized. But now, as rapid
technological change and globalization have more thoroughly destroyed U.S.
manufacturing, the community networks that kept the white working class
together are collapsing.
That means that, just as 1980s Detroit or
Baltimore was a ripe environment for the crack epidemic, white working-class
areas of Kentucky or Ohio were uniquely primed for the opioid epidemic. Of the
drug overdose deaths since the introduction of OxyContin, 90 percent have been
among those without college degrees. “The people who used the opioids, the many
millions who became opioid abusers or became addicted, who became zombies
walking the streets of once-prosperous towns, were those whose lives had
already come apart, whose economic and social lives were no longer supporting
them,” the authors write.
But Case and Deaton also offer a harsh
indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, which made obscene profits from
getting vulnerable people hooked on deadly drugs. Indeed, they offer a harsh
indictment of the health care system in general. American health care is
stripping away fully 18 percent of the gross domestic product—nearly $11,000
per person in 2017. They describe the system as “a cancer at the heart of
the economy, one that has widely metastasized, bringing down wages, destroying
good jobs, and making it harder and harder for state and federal governments to
afford what their constituents need.”
Out-of-control health care costs have helped
turn good jobs into bad ones as companies outsource work to shift the cost of
care elsewhere, keep wages down to compensate for rising health care costs, or
eliminate many jobs entirely. Once, it was possible for janitors to work their
way up into C-suite positions at major companies. That’s no longer true,
because janitors now rarely work for the same company as the people in the
offices they clean. Corporate managers have shunted these workers off to
contractors that offer low wages, few benefits, and little opportunities for
advancement. Meanwhile, all that health care spending is draining public
investment on other important things, like education and infrastructure. It
shows. U.S. roads are so dilapidated that FedEx trucks need new tires twice as
often as they did 20 years ago, Case and Deaton write.
One key policy question that the authors don’t
address is whether or not the Affordable Care Act has impacted mortality rates,
which seems like a glaring oversight for a book like this. It would stand to
reason that a law that extended decent health insurance to millions of people,
many of them white working class, might have staunched the bleeding. But from
the national numbers they present, Obamacare doesn’t seem to have been much of
a salve. In fact, the death rate has accelerated since Obamacare passed in
2010. The problem with American health care, Case and Deaton say, is less
insurance coverage than the enormous cost of the system that’s dragging the
economy down with it. “The industry is not very good at promoting health, but
it excels at promoting wealth among healthcare providers,” they write.
But while Obamacare may not have helped prevent
deaths of despair, Case and Deaton’s research suggests that attacks on social
safety programs have made the problem worse. The authors steer clear of
partisan politics, but the death trends they’ve identified dovetail almost
perfectly with conservatives’ decades-long assault on the nation’s social
programs. Starting with the 1994 Republican revolution in Congress, both the
federal government and many GOP-dominated states have made it much harder for
people suffering a job loss or other calamity to access everything from
Medicaid to food stamps, a trend that has likely exacerbated the current misery
of white working-class people today. Thirty percent of people living on an
income that’s half the poverty line—about $12,000 a year for a family of four
with two kids—get no help from the government of any sort.
The lack of a safety net is one reason why Case
and Deaton suggest that the working class in the U.S. is suffering in a way
that those in other wealthy countries are not, even though the same forces of
globalization and inequality are buffeting their citizens as well. Without a
cushion for their fall in the midst of massive change, America’s white
working-class communities are coming apart.
While Deaths
of Despair does an admirable job of describing the scope of this
epidemic and some of its causes, apparently not even a Nobel Prize–winning
economist can figure out what to do about it. Case and Deaton throw up one or
the other idea kicking around in politics in recent years—a universal basic
income or higher marginal tax rates on the rich—only to dismiss the proposed
solutions as ineffective, too expensive, or politically unpalatable.
Take the safety net—the same thing they
identified as being helpful in protecting European people during the Great Recession
and through 40 years of globalization. They argue that a bigger welfare state
might have helped Americans when globalization first exploded, but that it
would now be too little, too late. That’s especially true so long as the
well-being of Americans is dependent on whether or not they have a college
degree. “The safety net is something of a Band-Aid,” they write, “useful but
incapable of addressing the fundamental problem”—the loss of good jobs for
people without college degrees.
So if a college degree protects against much
that ails the working class, maybe the government should embrace Bernie
Sanders’s idea of free college for everyone? Eh, sorry, they declare. That
would be too expensive, and most of the benefits would go to people who don’t
need them. Besides, unless the American form of capitalism is reformed in a
meaningful way, Case and Deaton warn, a bachelor’s degree is “not a suit of
armor that protects you against change.” Just as African Americans suffered
mass casualties 50 years ago with the decline in manufacturing jobs, and the
white working class is suffering now, the authors conclude that it is entirely
possible that “many of those with a college degree will be next in line.”
They see universal health care as critical, but
only if it’s accompanied by significant cost controls, something likely to be
stiffly opposed by big monied interests in the health care system, like doctors
and pharmaceutical companies. To get around that problem, they advise giving
some of the richest people in America the sort of soft landing that has never
been available to the subjects of their book. “The healthcare lobby is the most
powerful in Washington, and it is almost certainly impossible to have reform
without paying them off at the time of the reform,” they note. “The alternative
is to keep paying them off forever, and a well-designed reform, with cost
control, will slowly reduce the tribute we have to pay them.”
Case and Deaton do suggest some simpler, more
palatable solutions, such as increasing the minimum wage and expanding
apprenticeship programs like those in Germany to help train workers who don’t
go to college. And they champion better antitrust enforcement to increase
competition and level the business playing field. But they lament that such
efforts would require a functioning democracy, which the U.S. currently does
not have, strangled as it is by “lobbying and by legislators’ need for
deep-pocketed backers.”
In a rare moment of optimism, the authors argue
that these political problems are solvable. “Democracy can rise to the
challenge,” they write. “Democracy in America is not working well, but it is
far from dead and it can work again if people push hard enough, just as it was
made to work better in the Progressive Era a century ago and in the New Deal of
the 1930s.”
But there’s not much evidence that the ship of
American democracy can be turned in time to save working-class people, in large
part because they themselves don’t think it’s possible. In 2016, the
enterprising Washington Post reporter
Jeff Guo discovered that in counties where white people were dying the fastest,
Trump performed best in the GOP primary. Since assuming office, President Trump
and the GOP-controlled Senate have single-mindedly pursued policies that will
harm white working-class voters, through cuts in social welfare programs like
food stamps and Medicaid and by allowing huge corporate mergers. Yet these same
sick and dying white working-class voters want nothing to do with the
Democratic Party, whose platform at least offers some meaningful assistance.
“It is easy to be pessimistic,” Case and Deaton
concede. “The election of Donald Trump is understandable in the circumstances,
but it is a gesture of frustration and rage that will make things worse, not
better. Working-class whites do not believe that democracy can help them; in
2016, more than two-thirds of white working-class Americans believed that
elections are controlled by the rich and by big corporations, so that it does
not matter if they vote.”
They’re probably right. Even Tucker Carlson
sees that the problem goes far beyond Trump. In his viral monologue last year,
he said, “At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be
gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will it be then? How
do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that
matter.”
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
TRUMPERNOMICS:
Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019
28
December 2019
A new Gilded Age
has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The
wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both
the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia,
where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle
class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you
can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can
start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to
succeed in this country. Most people don’t
want to start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate
concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector,
for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance
between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem
and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported,
Hawley detailed in the
interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World
Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01
percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The
report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich
and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That increasing
worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic
research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.
TRUMPERNOMICS:
Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019
28
December 2019
As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, its
most salient feature—the plundering of humanity by a global financial
oligarchy—continues unabated.
Amidst trade war and the growth of militarism and authoritarianism
on the one side, and an eruption of international strikes and protests by the
working class against social inequality on the other, the stock market is
hitting record highs and the fortunes of the world’s billionaires are
continuing to surge.
On Friday, one day after all three major US stock indexes set
new records, Bloomberg issued its end-of-year survey of the world’s 500 richest
people. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that the oligarchs’ fortunes
increased by a combined total of $1.2 trillion, a 25 percent rise over 2018.
Their collective net worth now comes to $5.9 trillion.
To place this figure in some perspective, these 500 individuals
control more wealth than the gross domestic product of the United States at the
end of the third quarter of 2019, which was $5.4 trillion.
The year’s biggest gains went to France’s Bernard Arnault, who
added $36.5 billion to his fortune, bringing it above the rarified $100 billion
level to $105 billion. He knocked speculator Warren Buffett, at $89.3 billion,
down to fourth place. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion due to a
divorce settlement, but maintained the top position, with a net worth of $116
billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates gained $22.7 billion for the year and
held on to second place at $113 billion.
The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg list added $500
billion, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recording the year’s biggest US gain
at $27.3 billion, placing him in fifth place worldwide with a net worth of
$79.3 billion.
It is difficult to comprehend the true significance of such
stratospheric sums. In his 2016 book Global Inequality, economist
Branko Milanovic wrote:
"A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience
of practically everyone on earth that the very quantity it implies is not
easily understood… Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1
billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three
years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700
years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to
blow your inheritance in the second case."
The vast redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of
society is the outcome of a decades-long process, which was accelerated following
the 2008 Wall Street crash. It is not the result of impersonal and simply
self-activating processes. Rather, the policies of capitalist governments and
parties around the world, nominally “left” as well as right, have been
dedicated to the ever greater impoverishment of the working class and
enrichment of the ruling elite.
In the US, the top one percent has captured all of the increase
in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in
national wealth since the 2008 crash.
The main mechanism for this transfer of wealth has been the
stock market, and the policies of the US Federal Reserve and central banks
internationally have been geared to providing cheap money to drive up stock
prices. The cost of this massive subsidy to the financial markets and the
oligarchs has been paid by the working class, in the form of social cuts, mass
layoffs, the destruction of pensions and health benefits, and the replacement
of relatively secure and decent-paying jobs with part-time, temporary and contingent
“gig” positions.
Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, pledging to
slash corporate taxes, lift regulations on big business and dramatically
increase the military budget, the Dow has surged by 9,000 points. This year,
Trump and the financial markets applied massive pressure on the Fed to reverse
its efforts to “normalize” interest rates. The Fed complied, carrying out three
rate cuts and repeatedly assuring the markets it had no plans to raise rates in
2020.
This windfall for the banks and hedge funds was supported by the
Democrats no less than the Republicans. In fact, Trump’s economic policy has
been given de facto support by the Democratic Party all down the line—from his
tax cuts for corporations and the rich to his attack on virtually all
regulations on business. Even in the midst of impeachment—carried out entirely
on the grounds of “national security” and Trump’s supposed “softness” toward
Russia—the Democrats have voted by wide margins for Trump’s budget, his
anti-Chinese US-Mexico-Canada trade pact and his record $738 billion Pentagon
war budget.
This has included giving Trump all the money he wants to build
his border wall and carry out the mass incarceration and persecution of
immigrants.
Trump’s pro-corporate policies are an extension and expansion of
those pursued by the Obama administration. It allocated trillions in taxpayer
money to bail out the banks and flooded the financial markets with cheap
credit, driving up stock prices, while imposing a 50 percent across-the-board
cut in pay for newly hired autoworkers in its bailout of General Motors and
Chrysler. Obama oversaw the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of
hundreds of thousands of teachers, and enacted austerity budgets that slashed
social programs.
Two of those running for the 2020 Democratic presidential
nomination are billionaires—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. The latter, with
a net worth of $56 billion, is the ninth richest person in the US. He entered
the race as the spokesman for oligarchs outraged over talk from Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren of token tax increases on the super-rich.
The oligarchs are not frightened by Sanders and Warren—two
longstanding defenders of the American ruling class, who seek to mask their
subservience to capital with talk of making the oligarchs pay “their fair
share,” a euphemism for defending their right to pillage the population. The
billionaires are frightened by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism that
finds a distorted expression in support for the phony “progressives” in the
Democratic fold.
Between them, Bloomberg and Steyer have already spent $200
million of their own money in an effort to buy the election outright.
The impact of the policy of social plunder is seen in the
deepening of a malignant social crisis in country after country. In the US,
society is marching backwards, as the crying need for schools, hospitals,
affordable housing, pensions, the rebuilding of decrepit roads, bridges,
transportation, flood control, water and sewage, fire control and electricity
grids is met with the official response: “There is no money.”
The result? Three straight years of declining life expectancy,
record addiction and suicide rates, devastating wildfires and floods,
electricity cut-offs by profiteering utility companies. And a climate crisis
that cannot be addressed within the framework of a system dominated by a
money-mad plutocracy.
Not a single serious social problem can be addressed under
conditions where the ruling elite—through its bribed parties and politicians,
aided by its pro-capitalist trade unions and backed up by its courts, police
and troops—diverts resources from society to the accumulation of ever more
luxurious yachts, mansions, private islands and personal jets.
Where social reform is impossible, social revolution is
inevitable. The solution to the impasse is to be found in the growth of the
class struggle. The movement of workers and youth all over the world—from mass
strikes in France to strikes by autoworkers and teachers in the US, protests in
Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, strikes and mass demonstrations in Lebanon,
Iran, Iraq and India—reveals the social force that can and will put an end to
capitalism.
The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders,
the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!”
ONE-THIRD OF ALL
ILLEGAL "cheap" LABOR
FARM WORKERS END UP
ON WELFARE AS SOON AS
THEY START PUTTING OUT
ANCHOR BABIES. ALL VOTE
DEMOCRAT FOR MORE!
Study: More than 7-in-10 California Immigrant
Welfare
More than 7-in-10 households headed by immigrants in the state of California are on taxpayer-funded welfare, a new study reveals.
The latest Census Bureau data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that about 72 percent of households headed by noncitizens and immigrants use one or more forms of taxpayer-funded welfare programs in California — the number one immigrant-receiving state in the U.S.
Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of households headed by native-born Americans use welfare in California.
All four states with the largest foreign-born populations, including California, have extremely high use of welfare by immigrant households. In Texas, for example, nearly 70 percent of households headed by immigrants use taxpayer-funded welfare. Meanwhile, only about 35 percent of native-born households in Texas are on welfare.
In New York and Florida, a majority of households headed by immigrants and noncitizens are on welfare. Overall, about 63 percent of immigrant households use welfare while only 35 percent of native-born households use welfare.
President Trump’s administration is looking to soon implement a policy that protects American taxpayers’ dollars from funding the mass importation of welfare-dependent foreign nationals by enforcing a “public charge” rule whereby legal immigrants would be less likely to secure a permanent residency in the U.S. if they have used any forms of welfare in the past, including using Obamacare, food stamps, and public housing.
The immigration controls would be a boon for American taxpayers in the form of an annual $57.4 billion tax cut — the amount taxpayers spend every year on paying for the welfare, crime, and schooling costs of the country’s mass importation of 1.5 million new, mostly low-skilled legal immigrants.
As Breitbart News reported, the majority of the more than 1.5 million foreign nationals entering the country every year use about 57 percent more food stamps than the average native-born American household. Overall, immigrant households consume 33 percent more cash welfare than American citizen households and 44 percent more in Medicaid dollars. This straining of public services by a booming 44 million foreign-born population translates to the average immigrant household costing American taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare.
Report: Crammed Working Conditions for H-2A Foreign Workers Pose Public Health Risk
4:23
The often crammed working and living conditions that imported foreign farmworkers are exposed to pose a particular public health risk during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, experts say.
While jobless claims for Americans have spiked beyond 6.6 million in just a week, the State Department announced new visa waivers for H-2A and H-2B foreign agricultural and nonagricultural workers, making it all the easier for businesses to import cheap foreign labor.
For H-2A foreign visa workers — the program by which big agriculture imports hundreds of thousands of farmworkers every year — working and living conditions are tight, an issue amid mandatory social distancing standards issued by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Labor laws demand that employers of H-2A foreign visa workers provide their imported workforce with housing, which often means nationals from across Central America live in close living quarters together.
Experts with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) note in new research that H-2A foreign farmworkers will be at risk of contracting and spreading the coronavirus due to these close working and living conditions should employers not change their practices.
“The most important thing farm employers should do now is devise safety plans and procedures and procure additional safety and sanitation equipment,” EPI researchers Daniel Costa and Philip Martin write. “In order to keep healthy, farmworkers need access to masks, gloves, and other safety equipment, as well as ways to disinfect their hands, tools, clothing, and machinery.”
EPI researchers continue:
Employers may need to implement “social distancing” measures in fields and packing facilities to minimize the risk of farmworkers infecting one another. This will require changes in workplace habits that may be uncomfortable for workers and may reduce productivity if, for example, crews that work conveyor belts in vegetable fields are shrunk to avoid close contact. [Emphasis added]Employers should encourage farmworkers to report when they feel ill and to stay home if they are sick, and not punish them for it. If workers think they will be disciplined, have their hours cut, or be fired, they may work sick, endangering their colleagues. Some Mexican exporters are reportedly checking the temperatures of their workers and barring visitors, fearing that a COVID-19 case could prevent them from exporting produce to the United States. [Emphasis added]
Left-wing organizations representing foreign farmworkers have told the media that they have serious reservations about the working and living conditions in the midst of much-needed social distancing measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
These spokespersons also said big agriculture’s push to pack farms with as many H-2A foreign visa workers this year amid the crisis could mean more working and living condition violations.
“We’re really concerned, especially given that a lot of them live in bunker-style housing,” a spokesperson with the left-wing Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy group told the Santa Maria Sun.
“We are really concerned that in this emergency situation we’re going to … see an increase in housing violations by overcrowding,” another spokesperson with a left-wing advocacy group said. “There are not going to be adequate measures taken to ensure that workers can social distance, either at the housing or in the surrounding areas.”
While H-2A foreign visa workers earn well above the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage, farmers routinely use the program to reduce wages in the agricultural industry, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data has shown.
In 2017, H-2A foreign visa workers picking crops were paid about two percent less than their American counterparts, while visa workers operating agricultural equipment were paid 23 percent less than the national average wage for that job. The largest wage discrepancy comes with H-2A foreign visa workers who take jobs as first-line supervisors for farming and fishing. They are paid about 95 percent less than their American counterparts.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinde
Unemployment Rate Jumps to 4.4%, 701,000 Jobs Lost
4:29
The unemployment rate jumped to 4.4 percent in March and the economy shed 701,000 jobs.
The new numbers from the Department of Labor’s employment situation report end the record 113 straight months run of hiring.
Employment in leisure and hospitality businesses fell by 459,000, with a loss of 417,000 of jobs in bars and restaurants. That’s enough to erase two years of gains.
Economists had forecast that the government would say employers shed about 150,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate rose from a half-century low of 3.5 percent to 3.9 percent, according to FactSet.
Health care employment declined by 43,000, as people put off elective medical procedures and even regular check-ups. Dentist offices lost 17,000 jobs, physician office lost 12,000 jobs, and other health care practitioners lost 7,000 jobs.
In March, social assistance saw an employment decline of 19,000, reflecting a 19,000 job loss in child daycare services.
Employment in professional and business services decreased by 52,000 in March, with temporary help services falling by 50,000. Employment also decreased in travel arrangement and reservation services by 7,000.
Retail trade declined by 46,000 jobs. Clothing and clothing accessories stores jobs shrank by 16,000, furniture store jobs fell by 10,000, and jobs in sporting goods, hobby, book, and music stories fell by 9,000.
In a demonstration of just how widespread the jobs losses have been, employment fell by 30,000 in construction, including an 11,000 job loss in heavy construction and civil engineering.
In March, manufacturing employment slipped by 18,000. Growth in manufacturing employment stagnated last year and is more or less unchanged from a year ago. Personal and laundry services dropped by 13,000.
But the jobs figures vastly understate the magnitude of last month’s losses because the government surveyed employers before the heaviest layoffs struck in the past two weeks. Nearly 10 million Americans have since applied for unemployment benefits, far more than for any corresponding period on record.
The higher than expected jobs loss and unemployment figures for March indicate that, some job cuts happened earlier in the month, when most economists think businesses began clamping down on hiring. The job loss for March underscore the head-snapping speed with which the economy has unraveled after nearly a decade in which employers added nearly 23 million jobs. As recently as February, employers added 273,000 jobs.
Economists had welcomed February’s job gain, though they wondered why hourly paychecks weren’t rising more quickly. But any concerns over sluggish wage growth have now been put well off to the side.
“Four years of job gains have evaporated in the span of two weeks,” said Daniel Zhao, an economist at the jobs website Glassdoor.
The layoffs will continue to mount. Some economists have forecast that 20 million jobs will be lost by the end of April, swelling the unemployment rate as high as 15% and wiping out the bulk of the past decade’s gains. That unemployment rate would be the worst since the 1930s.
Roughly 90 percent of the U.S. population is living under some version of a shutdown order, which has forced the closure of bars, restaurants, movie theaters, factories, gyms and most other businesses. Some hotels are closed; others are largely empty. Fast-food chains are either closed or providing only drive-through service, costing thousands of jobs.
With business activity tightly restricted, analysts expect a stomach-churning recession. Economists at Goldman Sachs have forecast that the economy will shrink at an annual rate of 34 percent in the April-June quarter — the worse fall on records dating to World War II. Goldman expects the economy to rebound with 19 percent growth in the third quarter. But even by the end of next year, the economy will not have fully recovered from the damage, Goldman projects.
–The Associated Press contributed to this report
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