Saturday, April 18, 2020

TRUMPERNOMICS - 'I will lose my life savings and business in 30 days!'

FIRST BAILOUT OUT WALL STREET. THEN TALK ABOUT THE VIRUS LIKE IT IS A REALITY TV SHOW HOAX  -  Donald Trump, Moron of America



Minnesota Resort Owner: I Will Lose My Life Savings, Business in 30 Days

Ali-Jae Nicolai
Volume 90%
2:59

Bob Barton, a Minnesota resort owner, told Breitbart News that his business will be destroyed within a month if Gov. Tim Walz’s (D-MN) “stay home order,” ostensibly issued to “slow the spread of Covid-19 across the state,” remains in effect. He offered his remarks during Friday’s “Liberate Minnesota” protest outside of Walz’s residence in Saint Paul, MN.
Via executive order on March 25, Walz decreed closures of bars, restaurants, and “other places of public accommodation.”
Transcript below:
I’m here because unless the governor lifts to stay-at-home order, in another 30 days, I’m out of business. And when you own a resort, typically, a resort owner lives on the resort. I don’t lose just my business. I lose my home because we have a three-month season in which we make our living, and [Walz is] already talking about truncating it by a month now. Me and hundreds of other resorts will go out of business this year.
In this state, over 30 years ago, there were over 2,500 resorts. We’re down to a hair over 800. I would think that we’re going to lose half of those this year, and northern Minnesota is all tourism-based. We’re all interrelated, whether it’s a resort, or a bait store, or a hardware store, or a grocery store, or gas station, you name it — when one sector goes down, we all go down.
If he does not lift this stay-at-home order, there will not be an economy to recover in northern Minnesota. Primarily resorts, once they’re gone, they never come back. We’re going to lose an entire third of the state.
He is being incredibly short-sighted, and like John said, when we come down here for our legislative days for our association, everybody comes in, [Paul] Gazelka comes in and says, “Oh, we love you resorts. You’re the greatest thing in the world.”
We met with [Tim] Walz: “Oh yeah, we love what you do. Keep doing what you’re doing.” And then they turn around and either don’t try to help us or actually, in Walz’s case, try to put us out of business. It makes no sense.
What am I gonna do, Gov. Walz? Come July or August, when the bank comes and takes my property and my life savings — everything I’ve ever earned in my life went into the purchase of that property — what am I going to do? What do I do for my family, for a job, for a place to live? You’re giving me no options.
“What this governor is doing [is] out of control and unconstitutional,” said John Casper, a Minnesota resident, to Breitbart News. He described Walz as a “communist” governor.
WATCH:
Ali-Jae Nicolai
Volume 90%
Describing Barton as his friend, Casper warned that Walz’s “stay home order” will destroy Minnesota’s resort industry.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.








The booming economy since the Great Recession 
of 2008, amplified by Republican tax cuts that 
gave corporations huge benefits, has begun to 
raise hourly wages, but not significantly.



"The financial oligarchy go into the New Year 
celebrating their massive accumulation of 
wealth and the so-called mainstream media 
will continue to maintain the fiction that the 
US and, by extension, the global economy, 
remain sound. But the reality is that the seeds
of another financial catastrophe have not 
only been planted but are rapidly germinating."



What Makes a “Healthy” Economy?

The coronavirus pandemic shows that we don’t have one.

Last week, Janet Yellin, former chair of the Federal Reserve, gave an upbeat assessment of the pre-pandemic U.S. economy. “Very fortunately we started with an economy that was healthy before this hit,” she told the PBS NewsHour. “The banks were in good shape, the financial system was sound, Americans at least overall on average had relatively low debt burdens.”
But how “healthy” was that economy, really? How healthy is an economy whose workers have so little savings that they can’t make the rent after missing just a couple of paychecks? How healthy is an economy whose small businesses have so little cushion that they face almost instant obliteration when their cash flow is disrupted? How healthy is an economy where hourly employees performing many essential services earn so little that they have to go to work sick to keep their jobs? And how healthy is an economy whose housing costs force millions to cram into overcrowded homes in polluted slums replete with high stress, malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, heart problems, and other chronic disease?
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” said Fed chairman Jerome Powell in March. It was “resilient,” he said in February. Yellin concurred, citing the old good news in her hope that the “economy will recover much more speedily than it did from any past downturn.”
Recover for whom? The experts look at conventional measurements, which painted a picture of prosperity before COVID-19. The unemployment rate last September hit a fifty-year low, at 3.5 percent, and the rate for people without a high school diploma dropped to a new low of 4.8 percent. The GDP had been growing within the range considered ideal—two to three percent—and Powell reported a rising willingness of employers to hire low-skilled workers and train them.
But alongside the bright figures on unemployment and job creation, consider a competing set of numbers from before the pandemic: The poverty-level wages for those who harvest our vegetables, cut our Christmas trees, wash our cars, cook and serve our food in restaurants, deliver groceries to our doors, clean our offices, and even drive our ambulances. The 14.3 million households (11.1 percent) uncertain that they could afford enough food, and the 5.6 million families (4.3 percent) where at least one person has had to cut back on eating during the year. The 14.3 percent of black children with asthma, double the rate in the population overall. The 20 percent of children living in crowded homes shared with other families or three generations of their own, and the 50 percent of urban children who have lived in those conditions by age nine.
A pernicious dynamic of financial stress is the unexpected link between housing costs and malnutrition. For many low-wage families without access to such government subsidies as Section 8 vouchers or affordable housing, rent can soak up 40 to 60 percent of income, which can leave too little for other necessities. You have to pay the rent. You have to pay the electricity, phone, and fuel bills. If you need a car to get to work, which the vast majority of employees do, you have to make the car payments. Those are not optional. The category that can be squeezed is for food, and that’s what many poor families have to do.
A result is childhood malnutrition. It sometimes manifests itself in obesity resulting from cheap, bad food, which in turn can promote diabetes. It compromises the immune system. Even more seriously, deprivation of nutrients such as iron during key periods of brain development, both before and after birth, can lead to lifelong cognitive impairment. Studies show that children who suffered iron deficiency as infants, even if they’re fed properly later, still suffer as adolescents, scoring lower in math, written expression, and selective recall. Their teachers see them displaying “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems,” according to a National Academy of Sciences report.
So when federal and state governments are stingy with housing subsidies, as they always are, they are effectively, perhaps unwittingly, damaging children’s brain development and life opportunities.
The booming economy since the Great Recession 
of 2008, amplified by Republican tax cuts that 
gave corporations huge benefits, has begun to 
raise hourly wages, but not significantly.
If median hourly wages in certain jobs are put next to the official poverty line—currently $25,750 a year for a family of four—it’s clear why so many people are in desperate trouble so soon after the economy’s lockdown. Most poor families have only one wage earner, so assuming a full-time, 40-hour week, that person would have to be paid $12.38 an hour just to reach the poverty line. As of May 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly wage for ambulance drivers and assistants was just $12.45; for workers in retail sails, $11.37 to $12.14; for building cleaners, $12.68; for parking attendants, $12.11; and for fast-food and restaurant cooks and servers (some of whom also get tips), $11.00 to $12.45.
The lesson is to look beyond the unemployment rate and number of new jobs and examine how well those jobs pay. The “healthy” economy did little to narrow the wealth gap. The most recent Federal Reserve figures, from before the pandemic, showed the top 10 percent of households with a median net worth of $2,387,500 and the bottom 10 percent with minus $962—that is, they owed more than they owned.
Adding assets and subtracting liabilities as of the fourth quarter of 2019, the wealthiest 10 percent had 70 percent ($78.5 trillion) of the country’s total household net worth, and the bottom 50 percent had just 1.5 percent ($1.7 trillion). The top had miniscule debt, and the bottom half had miniscule financial assets alongside huge mortgage and consumer debt.
So, Janet Yellin was only partially right when she said that Americans had low debt burdens. Consumer debt reached a record high in 2019 of more than $14 trillion, according to Experian, the credit agency. But it was lower as a portion of income. And defaults and late payments were low enough to drive the average FICO score—a person’s credit rating—to a high of 703, up from 689 in 2010 at the end of the Great Recession. (A perfect score is 850.) Given the high credit card and other debt among the unwealthy, however, delinquency rates can now be expected to soar, pushing credit ratings down.
In that prospering economy, then, the glass was either half full or half empty, depending on whether you were looking from the top or from the bottom. There was no need to exaggerate the hardships at the bottom, as some Democratic candidates did with one misstated statistic.
BLOG: INTERESTINGLY HARRIS, WARREN AND SANDERS ALL WANT AMNESTY SO 40 MILLION ILLEGALS CAN BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO. NOW DO THE MATH ON JOBS, HOUSING AND THE HOMELESS CRISIS
Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all said last year that 40 percent of Americans could not come up with the money to pay a $400 emergency expense. In fact, the contrary was the case, according to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.”
Asked to check all the ways they could pay for a $400 emergency, only 12 percent said they could not pay right now, 45 percent checked “with the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash,” and 33 percent said they’d use a credit card and pay it off entirely at the next statement. To a follow-up question, 85 percent said that making the unexpected payment would not prevent their paying other bills.
On the other hand, 25 percent told the Federal Reserve that they were just getting by or finding it difficult to get by. That number is troubling enough, one bound to spike as stay-at-home orders continue. The economy was not “healthy” for those folks in the first place, and will not be so for many more.
Improvements will come not from the stalemate of left and right, or from their manipulating statistics, but from a new ideology of practical realism that honors the complex facts, without distortion. The free-market system is the one we have, and it can work for virtually everyone if everyone in government and business works for everyone. Too idealistic? Naïve? Probably.

THE REASON TRUMP IS NOT PROSECUTING EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!

 

More Americans Are Going on Strike

For decades, the decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity “surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked “the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway, and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to 
underperform. People can find jobs, in other 
words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As 
the costs of private health insurance rise, 
adding another strain on household budgets, 
Americans are finding that employment and 
prosperity are two separate concepts.
Without a union, exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job, and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens, but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill intent.
The new BLS data reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.
 “The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

 

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ 

about the economy, says Nobel 

Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.” 
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi

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.
The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders, the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!”

Bloomberg: 2019 a Good Year for Wealthy; Jeff Bezos Remains on Top Despite $9 Billion Loss in Divorce

For the already wealthy and those who struck gold for the first time, 2019 was a good year for the rich.

Bloomberg News’ billionaire index is reporting on the money made this past year, including Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos remaining on the top of the heap despite a divorce settlement with his ex-wife that led to a $9 billion decrease in his portfolio:
The leveraging of a giant social-media presence, a catchy tune about a family of sharks and a burgeoning collection of junkyards are just a few of the curious ways that helped make 2019 a fertile year for fortunes to blossom around the world.
Kylie Jenner became the youngest self-made billionaire this year after her company, Kylie Cosmetics, signed an exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty Inc. She then sold a 51% stake for $600 million.
It has been almost two months since the Washington Nationals captured their first World Series championship, but people around the world are still singing along to the baseball team’s adopted rallying cry: “Baby Shark, doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo.” The Korean family that helped popularize the viral earworm are now worth about $125 million.
The new wealthy includes Willis Johnson of Oklahoma who has amassed a $1.9 billion fortune from building a network of junkyards that sell damaged automobiles, according to Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg reported that the 500 wealthiest people around the world added $1.2 trillion to their wealth, “boosting their collective net worth 25 percent to $5.9 trillion.”
“Leading the 2019 gains was France’s Bernard Arnault, who added $36.5 billion as he rose on the Bloomberg index to become the world’s third-richest person and one of three centibillionaires — those with a net worth of at least $100 billion,” Bloomberg reported.
Ironically, Bezos was one of 52 people who had a decline in their fortune, in his case because of a divorce settlement with MacKenzie Bezos who is now on the billionaires list ranking No. 25 with a net worth of $27.5 billion.
Bloomberg reported on the winners:
  • The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg ranking added $500 billion, with Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg up $27.3 billion and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates up $22.7 billion.
  • Representation from China continued to grow, with the nation’s contingent rising to 54, second only to the U.S. He Xiangjian, founder of China’s biggest air-conditioner exporter, was the standout performer as his wealth surged 79 percent to $23.3 billion.
  • Russia’s richest added $51 billion, a collective increase of 21 percent, as emerging-market assets from currencies to stocks and bonds rebounded in 2019 after posting big losses a year earlier.
And “losers”:
  • Rupert Murdoch’s personal fortune dropped by about $10 billion after proceeds from Walt Disney Co.’s purchase of Fox assets were distributed to his six children, making them billionaires in their own right.
  • Interactive Brokers Group Inc.’s Thomas Peterffy saw his wealth slump by $2.1 billion as investors weighed a reshaped competitive landscape for brokerage businesses after rival Charles Schwab Corp. eliminated commissions and agreed to buy TD Ameritrade Holding Corp.
  • WeWork’s Adam Neumann saw his fortune implode — at least on paper — as the struggling office-sharing company’s valuation dropped to $8 billion in October from an estimated $47 billion at the start of the year. Still, SoftBank Group Corp.’s rescue package left Neumann’s status as a billionaire intact.
And the new billionaires:
  • White Claw, the “hard seltzer” that was the hit of the summer among U.S. millennials, helped boost Anthony von Mandl’s net worth to $3.6 billion.
  • Mastering the art of fast-food deliveries proved rewarding for Jitse Groen, whose soaring Takeaway.com NV lifted his wealth to $1.5 billion.
  • The popularity of soy milk gave eight members of Hong Kong’s Lo family a combined $1.5 billion.


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.

The Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt

To get out of our Second Gilded Age, look no further than how we got out of the first one.
We’ve been rocked by scandals over the past year involving the nation’s most wealthy and powerful. We’ve learned that a twisted multimillionaire allegedly procured and raped girls in his Manhattan mansion and on his private Caribbean Island; entitled celebrities and corporate plutocrats paid millions of dollars in bribes to get their kids into elite universities; pillars of the Hollywood and media establishments have used their stature to sexually prey upon underlings; and, yes, our president was caught lying about possibly violating campaign finance laws with hush money payoffs to a porn star and Playboy bunny.
This moral corruption is accompanied by the regressive government policies of a scandal-stained administration. President Donald Trump is rolling back programs that protect consumers, voting rights, the environment, and competitive commerce faster than Congress can issue subpoenas. His cabinet includes 17 millionaires, two centimillionaires, and one billionaire with a combined worth of $3.2 billion, according to Forbes. He presides over the most corrupt administration in American history, one marked by nepotism and self-dealing. His so-called “A Team” of senior officials has undergone a record 75 percent turnover since he took office—most of whom resigned under pressure, often caught up in scandal.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose net worth is estimated at $600 million, reflected the arrogance and empathy deficit that typifies the Trump White House during last winter’s record-long government shutdown. He suggested that federal workers just take out loans until they got paid.
But nobody tops the swamp king, Trump himself. Forget the sleaze, forget the obstruction of justice, forget the constant dissing of Congress. His defying the Constitution’s emoluments clause alone would, in a normally functioning American democracy, make him the subject of impeachment. Instead, he flouts the rules as if they don’t apply to him. If he gets his way and hosts next year’s G-7 summit at Mar-a-Lago, we may as well send the Constitution to the shredder. And yet, as more recent controversies have shown us, including the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking racket, this kind of indifference to moral values is not confined to government grandees.
So, what gives? Is America drowning in a marsh of unchecked corruption and entitlement brought on by latter-day Louis XVI’s and Marie Antoinettes? Are the uber-wealthy out of control? There’s something rotten in America and, if we don’t fix it soon, we invite a new wave of national decline and social disintegration.
The good news is that we have faced similar challenges before. Some prescriptions from a previous era may provide a lodestar for a future Democratic president to steer the country in the right direction. As Mark Twain, who coined the term “the Gilded Age,” once said, “The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor.” He was talking about the original Gilded Age, but that diagnosis could just as easily apply to our current American condition.
The first Gilded Age was marked by rapid economic growth, massive immigration, political corruption, and a high concentration of wealth in which the richest one percent owned 51 percent of property, while the bottom 44 percent had a mere one percent. The oligarchs at the top were popularly known as “robber barons.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who was president at the time, understood that economic inequality itself becomes a driver of a dysfunctional political system that benefits the wealthy but few others. As he once famously warned, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”
His response to the inequities of his times, which came to define the Progressive Era, have much to teach us now about how to sensibly tackle economic inequality. It’s worthwhile to closely examine the Rooseveltian playbook. For instance, his “Square Deal” made bold changes in the American workplace, government regulation of industry, and consumer protection. These reforms included mandating safer conditions for miners and eliminating the spoils system in federal hiring; bringing forty-four antitrust suits against big business, resulting in the breakup of the largest railroad monopoly, and regulation of the nation’s largest oil company; and passing the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the FDA. He prosecuted more than twice as many antitrust suits against monopolistic businesses than his three predecessors combined, curbing the robber barons’ power. And he relentlessly cleaned up corruption in the federal government. One-hundred-forty-six indictments were brought against a bribery ring involving public timberlands, culminating in the conviction and imprisonment of a U.S. senator, and forty-four Postal Department employees were charged with fraud and bribery.
Now, we are in a Second Gilded Age, facing many of the same problems, and, in some ways, to an even greater degree. The gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than it was during the late 19th Century, when the richest two percent of Americans owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Today, the top one percent owns almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent combined, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The first Gilded Age saw the rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. And three families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have enjoyed a nearly 6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president, while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent.
The consequences of this wealth gap are dire. Steve Brill explains in his book Tailspin that, by manipulating the tax and legal systems to their benefit, America’s most educated elite, the so-called meritocracy, have built a moat that excludes the working poor, limiting their upward mobility and increasing their sense of alienation, which then gives rise to the populist streak that allowed politicians like Trump to captivate enough of the American electorate.
Similarly, psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research shows that power in and of itself is a corrupting force. As he documents in The Power Paradox, powerful people lie more, drive more aggressively, are more likely to cheat on their spouses, act abusively toward subordinates, and even take candy from children. Too often, they simply do not respect the rules.
For example, in monitoring an urban traffic intersection, Keltner found that drivers of the least expensive vehicles virtually always yielded to pedestrians, whereas drivers of luxury cars yielded only about half of the time. He cites surveys covering 27 countries that show that rich people are more likely to admit that it’s acceptable to engage in unethical behavior, such as accepting bribes or cheating on taxes.“The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior,” says Keltner.
That’s why we need to reform our political system if we are to survive the rampant amorality and lawlessness of the Second Gilded Age. Simply put, so very few should not wield so much sway over so many.
One of the first priorities of an incoming administration should be to narrow the wealth and income gap. French economist Thomas Picketty favors a progressive annual wealth tax of up to two percent, along with a progressive income tax as high as 80 percent on the biggest earners to reduce inequality and avoid reverting to “patrimonial capitalism” in which inherited wealth controls much of the economy and could lead essentially to oligarchy.
The leading 2020 Democratic candidates favor raising taxes, as well. Elizabeth Warren has proposed something commensurate to Picketty’s two percent wealth tax for those worth more than $50 million, and a three percent annual tax on individuals with a net worth higher than $1 billion. She has also proposed closing corporate tax loopholes. Joe Biden wants to restore the top individual income tax rate to a pre-Trump 39.6 percent and raise capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders has proposed an estate tax on the wealth of the top 0.2 percent of Americans.
Following Theodore Roosevelt’s example, we need to aggressively root out the tangle of corruption brought on by Trump and his minions. This has already begun with multiple and expanding investigations led by House Democrats into the metastasizing malfeasance within the Trump administration. Trump’s successor, however, should work with Congress to appoint a bipartisan anti-corruption task force to oversee prosecutions and draw up reform legislation to prevent future abuses.
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Roosevelt once warned. The free market has made America the great success it is today. But history has shown that unconstrained capitalism and a growing wealth gap leads to an unhealthy concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. When the gap between the haves and the have-nots goes unchecked, populism takes hold, leading to the election of dangerous demagogues like Trump, and the disastrous politics they bring with them. It is not too late to reverse course. But first, we need to re-learn the lessons from our first Gilded Age if we are going to get out of the current one.

 

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.



Minnesota Small Business Owner: This Shutdown ‘Will Be the End of Us’

Ali-Jae Nicolai
Volume 90%
2:26

Small businesses will die if Minnesota’s shutdown does not end soon, a protester outside Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) residence in St. Paul said Friday.
“I’m here because my business is dying and Walz holds the key to get it all going again. I’m a chiropractor,” the woman told Breitbart News.
“All of my small business friends are affected. We’re either shut down or we’re down to 20 percent and we can’t go on the way it is right now. This will be the end of us,” she commented while holding a sign that read, “Small Business Is Dying You’re Holding the Noose.”
The chiropractor was just one of a group of Minnesotans who showed up outside the governor’s mansion to demand an end to the state’s stay-at-home order that was recently extended to May 4, according to Breitbart News.
When asked what she would tell the Democrat governor if given the chance, the woman said she would advise him to reopen the state for business.
“The state was built on the ability of small business to do what we do and support our nonprofits, support our friends, and to keep our communities strong. We don’t have the ability to do that right now,” she commented.
“We have no idea what the financial implications are of how this is going to affect us in the next weeks, months, or years,” the woman said, adding, “Many small businesses, many small businesses, will close.”
Monday, Walz said there was no debate about whether or not residents wanted to get the economy up and running again, according to the Associated Press (AP).
“We all want to open up tomorrow, but people will die if we do that without having things in place,” he commented.
However, the group that organized Friday’s “Liberate Minnesota” protest alleged that Walz was using the pandemic “to launch a full blown attack on the citizens of Minnesota, not to save lives, but to strip away and annihilate [our] freedoms.”
In a tweet Friday morning, President Trump appeared to urge the state to begin reopening its economy.


Thursday, the president announced new guidelines for reopening the nation following the peak of the health crisis, Breitbart News reported.
“We’re not opening all at once, but one careful step at a time,” he said, adding, “We’re starting our life again. We’re starting rejuvenation of our economy again in a safe and structured and a very responsible fashion.”



Trump administration’s “back to work” drive will fuel pandemic

17 April 2020
US President Donald Trump announced Thursday a set of “guidelines” for states to end social distancing measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, setting the stage for businesses to reopen throughout the country.
The new guidelines will fuel the coronavirus pandemic and lead to a sharp increase in deaths. In an indication of the mad rush to resume production, Boeing announced that it will begin aircraft production and send 27,000 workers back as early as Monday.
These moves come as the US continues to post record deaths, and the United States still does not have enough tests to contain the disease. More than 2,000 deaths were reported yesterday, and more than 8,000 over the past three days.
President Donald Trump points to a reporter to ask a question as he speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Thursday, April 16, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
There is still widespread community transmission, meaning that once social distancing measures are ended a second wave of cases and deaths will follow. The real fatality rate, moreover, far exceeds official statistics. Yesterday, reports began to emerge of mass casualties, of at least 29 and possibly as many as 60, at one nursing home facility in Queens, New York.
Workplaces have been a major center of transmission for the pandemic, with dozens of cases and multiple deaths linked to individual workplaces. More than 540 cases of coronavirus have been recorded at one meatpacking plant in South Dakota.
Trump’s plan is not grounded in any real scientific analysis of the pandemic. It is not conceived from the standpoint of public health, but to ensure that major corporations are allowed to get back to the business of squeezing profits out of workers as quickly as possible.
Now that Wall Street and major corporations have exploited the COVID-19 crisis to receive a massive bailout from the Treasury and Federal Reserve even larger than that following the 2008 financial crisis, the ruling class is determined to send workers back into America’s factories, no matter the death toll.
Trump’s back-to-work campaign aims to normalize death on a massive scale, in which outbreaks of COVID-19 are seen as the cost of doing business. With government restrictions ended, employees who refuse to work under unsafe conditions will face the threat of being fired and becoming ineligible for unemployment insurance. As far as the ruling class is concerned, if workers die, they will simply be replaced.
The plan urges states to reopen businesses if they can demonstrate a “downward trajectory” of cases over a fourteen-day period. This proposal has no relation to the statements and assessments of epidemiologists and health experts, and it contradicts the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Public health experts have repeatedly warned that reopening businesses too soon could cause major new outbreaks. Lifting “physical distancing measures” too early “can result in the disease returning if you don’t have the public health measures to deal with the virus,” warned WHO epidemiologist Maria D. Van Kerkhove.
Wall Street, recognizing the significance of the proposal for boosting corporate profits, surged in response to the news, with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures up by 820 points late on Thursday.
The plan is the result of a campaign by the Trump administration and the media to downplay the severity of the disease. To this end, the media has simply ignored the fact that the United States posted a record 2,600 deaths on Wednesday, and that the number of deaths has soared from 4,000 at the beginning of this month to over 34,000.
Over the past two days, the media has highlighted a handful of protests, organized by extreme right-wing forces, demanding a return to work. The ruling class is attempting to manufacture a narrative that the population is demanding an end to social distancing measures in order to justify a return to work.
“There is no plan for re-opening. Just re-opening,” said Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves. “No national scale-up of testing capacity, contact tracing, isolation, PPE, economic support for ordinary Americans. It flies in the face of public health and economic advice. It’s destructive, deadly.”
“There are no metrics of any kind in the guidelines,” said science journalist Laurie Garrett. “The plan does have ‘recommendations’ for testing and tracing, but no measurable benchmarks for it, just left up to the discretion/perception of individual governors.”
The United States now has three times more cases than any other country in the world. In New York, an epicenter of the crisis, 1.1 percent of the population has tested positive for the virus. Nationally, the COVID-19 test positivity rate is 20 percent, indicating that tests have been conducted mainly among those already showing symptoms, and that far more people need tests than are able to get tested.
By contrast, South Korea has only 2 percent of tests reporting positive, an order of magnitude less than the United States. Canada, Germany and Denmark have rates between 6 and 8 percent.
Hospitals in the United States are filled to capacity, and funeral homes and morgues have no room to put the bodies.
During his press conference Thursday, Trump praised his government’s response to the disease because, just a few months into the outbreak, the United States has had fewer deaths than scenarios predicted by epidemiologists over the course of several years.
“Our strategy to slow the spread has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Models predicted between 1.5 million and 2.2 million US deaths,” he said. “And between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths with mitigation. It’s looking like we will come far under even these lowest numbers.”
Because aggressive social distancing measures carried out throughout the country have led to a stabilization of the rate of new cases, Trump falsely argues that it is now appropriate to reopen businesses. In fact, social distancing measures like business and school closures are effective only to the extent that they create the conditions for sufficient testing, quarantine, and contact tracing.
Trump is cynically exploiting the widespread social dislocation caused by the pandemic to pressure workers to return to work. Under conditions in which millions of workers have received neither unemployment payments nor emergency stimulus measures, workers are left to choose between returning to work under unsafe conditions or being unable to feed their families.
But the claim that humanity must choose between letting workers die and subjecting them to economic destitution is false. This dichotomy assumes the prerogatives of the capitalist system, in which the state gives trillions to the corporations but won’t ensure a livable income for workers.
The first priority in this pandemic must be saving human lives. This is only possible through a massive expansion of public health care spending to fund an enormous ramp-up of testing, quarantine, and contact tracing. Social distancing measures must remain in place until this capacity is created.
The demand by corporations and the White House for a premature return to work will spark widespread opposition within the working class. Workers must demand safe working conditions and the continued closure of non-essential businesses.

Coronavirus-driven slump has wiped out 22 million jobs in the US



The US Labor Department reported Thursday that 5.2 million more workers had filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total number of claims in the last four weeks to an unprecedented 22 million. This marks the sharpest rise in unemployment ever recorded in the country and equivalent to all jobs created since mid-2009, the beginning of the official recovery from the Great Recession.
The unprecedented job losses come amid a wave of economic figures showing the shattering impact of the coronavirus epidemic on the American and world economy. On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported the biggest monthly decline in retail sales since the figures were first compiled 30 years ago, 8.7 percent, more than double the previous monthly record, set during the 2008 Wall Street crash. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve reported the biggest decline in industrial production since the shutdown that followed the end of the Second World War in 1946.
Industries hit with full force by the coronavirus lockdowns suffered the worst. The US airline industry has collapsed, with just 4 percent of the typical number of daily passengers when compared to last year, as interstate and international travel has largely come to a halt. Big retailers are going out of business. Best Buy said it would lay off 51,000 store workers, 40 percent of the total, beginning Sunday. J. C. Penney failed to make a $12 million interest payment on debts Wednesday, putting it 30 days from outright default.
People wait in line at The Campaign Against Hunger food pantry, Thursday, April 16, 2020, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
The mass layoffs come as factories, restaurants, theaters, and most small businesses have been ordered closed by state governors to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus, which has already infected over 670,000 in the US and killed more than 34,000.
While the states that remain epicenters of the disease—New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Louisiana—are beginning to see some signs that social distancing has eased the growth in the number of cases, there are reports that COVID-19 is now beginning to hit other states as well as small cities and rural areas of the country, resulting in the closure of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
One month into criminally belated government initiatives to contain COVID-19, millions of people are desperate for money, missing payments on their rent, mortgages, and auto loans as well as credit card and student loan debt. Thousands have been lining up for hours in every city and community to receive much needed food aid, including members of the middle class who have never before had to rely on such support.
Economists project that the US and the world economy will suffer the worst contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Retail sales and industrial output in the US have already collapsed by record amounts and are expected to fall further even if social distancing measures are lifted.
Even though the unemployment figures reported so far are unprecedented, suggesting a current unemployment rate of 17 percent, they still do not capture the scope of the crisis facing the working class and small business owners. The weekly filings were limited by the Easter holiday weekend and many workers still report that they are unable to file a claim due to overloaded call centers, crashing websites and archaic application systems. Contractors and workers in the “gig economy” face long delays in gaining access to unemployment payments, while millions of undocumented workers have no hope of any sort of government assistance.
People who are fired from their jobs are ineligible for any unemployment and those who have recently moved from one state to another are having great difficulty filing. Every hurdle is placed in the way of workers to jump over in order to receive a few hundred dollars every week. It is estimated that as many as 35 million people could lose employer-paid health insurance due to the mounting layoffs. Nothing is being done for anyone who is not already rich.
The $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which was ostensibly aimed at helping small business owners keep their employees on the payroll, has already been exhausted, leaving tens of thousands of business owners and their employees in the lurch. Meanwhile among the “small businesses” which have received multimillion-dollar loans through the program are giant conglomerates including Potbelly Corporation, which employs 6,000 people and operates 474 sandwich shops in the US and internationally, and Ruth’s Hospitality Group, which operates a chain of more than 100 steakhouses across North America and Asia.
Under these conditions millions are being given the option of staying home and starving or going to work and risking illness and death.
President Donald Trump, who yesterday released his plan for reopening the American economy, is seeking to use the desperation of workers and the middle class to his advantage to force open the economy after funneling trillions of dollars to the big banks and corporations, a move that will lead to tens of thousands more deaths from COVID-19. Protests organized by Trump supporters against Democratic governors in Michigan, Kentucky and North Carolina and other states demanding an end to the lockdowns are a particularly backward expression of the very real desperation millions now confront.
Workers should reject with contempt this framework and fight for the democratic distribution of trillions of dollars in social aid to every section of society which is being devastated by the pandemic.
What is required to meet the interests of workers without sacrificing their lives and the lives of their families to the profits of Wall Street?
1. Nationalize the banks and large corporations, redirecting the trillions which are being funneled to the rich to fully support workers and small businesses for the duration of the pandemic.
The $6 trillion bailout authorized by the misnamed CARES Act, most of which has been funneled immediately to Wall Street, would be enough to provide every man, woman and child in America with a check of roughly $18,000. Instead, workers have had to wait weeks for a mere $1,200 stimulus, with many more left to wait months for any sort of cash aid. Thanks to a tax provision of the act, the average multimillionaire who owns a pass-through company will receive $1.6 million in stimulus. Billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has cashed in on the pandemic, increasing his net worth by $23.6 billion, enough to give every Amazon worker a bonus of $31,000. The claim that there is no money for the needs of the working class has never been more of a lie.
2. No return to work for nonessential businesses, and safe working conditions guaranteed for all those who work in essential jobs until the pandemic is over.
If the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world are to be saved the coronavirus must be contained, until a vaccine is developed people have to maintain social distancing measures, which means keeping most businesses closed. Workers in hospitals, grocery stores, food processing, transportation and logistics must be given every possible protection from the coronavirus and provided full pay and have all health care costs covered if they get sick.
3. Full funding for testing, tracing and quarantine.
Testing for COVID-19 and efforts to control its spread are still criminally lacking in the United States. Hundreds of billions must be spent on developing, distributing and carrying out tests and subsequently tracing contacts of those who test positive and provide them with safe quarantine conditions. The answer to the historic economic crisis sweeping across the globe is not an immediate return to “normalcy” but a mass independent movement of the working class, leading behind it the best elements of the middle class, fighting for a reorganization of society to meet human need, not the rapacious and murderous needs of the profit system.

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