After White House, Congress cut aid to unemployed, evictions and food lines spread across the US
12 August 2020
Less than two weeks after the White House and congressional Democrats allowed the $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement to expire, slashing the income of some 30 million unemployed workers by 60-80 percent, evictions are already on the rise and food lines are growing by leaps and bounds across the United States.
In signing four executive actions on Saturday, President Donald Trump claimed that he had intervened to temporarily resume the unemployment benefit, although at a sharply reduced rate of $300-$400. He also said his unilateral action, bypassing Congress, would prevent a wave of evictions following the expiration of a partial moratorium at the end of July.
But it will be weeks or even months before jobless workers receive any of the promised money. Moreover, Trump’s executive memorandum on rent failed to extend the expired ban on evictions or provide any rental assistance, setting the stage for a rapid growth in the ranks of the homeless.
A senior White House official confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that there are currently no plans for congressional Democratic leaders, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and White House negotiators, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and White Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to meet this week to discuss a fifth coronavirus relief bill. In fact, Meadows has already left Washington DC “for an unspecified amount of time,” according to a Washington Post report Tuesday.
People wait to speak with representatives from the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission about unemployment claims Thursday, July 9, 2020. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)Under Trump’s legally dubious executive orders, US states already slashing budgets and furloughing workers in an attempt to make up for massive deficits incurred as a result of the pandemic are being asked to contribute an additional $100 a week on top of whatever meager state unemployment benefit is being paid out. The federal government would then add a further $300 a week.
In a letter released Monday in response to Trump’s executive actions, the National Governors Association registered its “concern” over “the significant administrative burdens and costs this latest action would place on the states.” The letter requests that Congress and the administration “get back to the negotiating table and come up with a workable solution.”
Meanwhile, early data from across the country indicate that evictions have already begun en masse. In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis postured as a protector of renters when he announced he was extending the state moratorium on evictions for a month. However, the text of the order bars only “final actions” in eviction proceedings, and only if the tenant can prove that nonpayment of rent is due to the coronavirus.
In Duval County, Florida, court records for the first week of August show 219 eviction filings, the first full week since the federal moratorium expired.
In California, data collated by CalMatters show that more than 1,600 households have been evicted since March 4, when Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom first declared a state of emergency. The report notes that this figure is likely a drastic undercount due to the fact that sheriffs’ departments in “14 counties did not respond to data requests,” including Los Angeles County, which includes more than 10 million residents.
A recent report by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy estimated that up to 365,000 Los Angeles County renters could be facing eviction in the next month. This coincides with a separate study conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which found that as many as 120,000 households in Los Angeles County, including up to 184,000 children, will become homeless as evictions resume.
Food lines continue to stretch for miles in major cities across the country. On Tuesday, there were reports of 2,000 people lining up at a food bank in Queens, New York.
In Dallas, nearly 8,000 people lined up at dawn to collect donated food. The first people in line arrived three hours before the distribution began. Speaking to local NBC television affiliate WMBF, Pauletta Johnson said she wanted to get there early because “It helps feed the grandkids.” Johnson continued, “I don’t really have the money. I’m on a fixed income and I don’t have the money to buy some of the things that I need to get. So that’s why I’m here this morning.”
According to Feeding America, a national nonprofit food bank network, food banks distributed over 1.9 million meals from the beginning of March through the end of June. In March, food banks gave out 20 percent more food than average.
In addition to mass homelessness and growing hunger, the double-digit unemployment rate means that millions are now without health insurance. A new study by Zippia found that in the state of Michigan nearly 222,000 workers have lost their insurance since the start of the pandemic.
Nearly 100,000 people, or 11 percent of New Hampshire’s adult population, are now uninsured, according to a recent report from the National Center for Coverage Innovation. The same report found that the increase in uninsured Americans nationally surpassed any previously recorded annual increase.
The two big-business parties and the social class they represent are more than willing to sit back and let the working class bear the full brunt of the pandemic, as long as the stock market remains at near-record levels. Even after a dip at closing on Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up at 27,791.44, only 1,300 points down from its mid-February high. Since the passage in late March of the CARES Act multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, the Dow has risen by more than 30 percent.
The supposed “partisan gridlock” that has prevented the passage of a new stimulus bill and extension of the federal unemployment supplement is a fraud. The slashing or elimination of the financial lifeline for millions of working-class families, along with the reckless rush to reopen the schools, is part of the strategy of the ruling class to force workers back to work even as the pandemic rages out of control. It is a bipartisan strategy.
When it came to passing legislation to hand over trillions to the financial oligarchy, both parties joined hands and passed the CARES Act in record time, and by a near-unanimous vote. When Trump then launched the back-to-work campaign, Democratic governors and mayors complied and announced plans to reopen businesses and public venues, despite the failure to contain the pandemic and the absence of adequate testing and contact tracing. Now Democratic officials in states and cities across the country are working to reopen the schools despite the rise in infections and deaths that will inevitably follow.
But when it comes to a measly $600 to enable laid-off workers to pay rent and put food on the table, the entire political system comes to a grinding halt. There is no mystery here: both parties are beholden to the oligarchy that rules America and do its bidding.
WHY BIDEN PICKED HARRIS, AS EVERYONE KNEW HE WOULD:
1.) Like Biden, she is totally amoral.
2.) Like Biden she is a servant of big banksters and demonstrated that no bankster criminal should ever be prosecuted.
3.) Like sociopath Barack Obama, Harris knows how to perform like a populist while still serving the rich, Wall Street and big banksters.
4.) Like Obama-Biden, Harris advocates amnesty and open borders to keep wages depressed, build the massive LA RAZA Mexican welfare state to assure Wall Street of never ending generations of ‘cheap’ labor.
5.) Harris is nothing more than a clone of Barack Obama; a sociopath lawyer.
“She proved her political worth to big business in her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney. Harris ran as a law-and-order candidate, backed by the police unions and big business.”
“Establishing close ties to the older, established wealth of San Francisco, anchored in banking, oil and real estate, Harris followed in the footsteps of two other prominent and wealthy San Francisco Democrats—Dianne Feinstein, first mayor, then US senator, and Nancy Pelosi, congresswoman and now speaker of the House.”
“If anything, the opposite has been the case. Harris has frequently traded on her status as the first black woman to be district attorney, the first black woman to be state attorney general, the second black woman to hold a US Senate seat, etc., as a political screen to cover the right-wing policies she advocates and the social class that she defends: the corporate elite of multi-millionaires and billionaires.”
Biden picks former law-and-order prosecutor Kamala Harris to be his Democratic running mate
12 August 2020
Former Vice President Joe Biden announced Tuesday afternoon that he had selected Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate in the 2020 presidential election. The decision, entirely predictable and widely expected, confirms the right-wing political orientation of the Democratic presidential ticket.
Biden has a 48-year political career in which he has been identified primarily with intensified police repression at home and the ferocious defense of the interests of American imperialism abroad. The 77-year-old candidate will now have a 55-year-old running mate with her own right-wing credentials: as a law-and-order prosecutor and attorney general in California, and, since coming to Washington in 2016, an advocate and defender of the military-intelligence apparatus.
Biden’s statement came on social media less than a week before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, which will nominate the Biden-Harris ticket to face Trump and the Republicans in the November election. He tweeted that Harris was “a fearless fighter for the little guy.”
The truth is that during her 26 years as a prosecutor—first in Alameda County (Oakland), then San Francisco, then for California as a whole—Harris was putting “the little guy” in jail, while she cultivated relationships with the wealthy San Francisco elite (including the Getty oil billionaires), who became her principal political backers.
Neither Harris nor Biden is associated with any popular social movement or linked to the advocacy of any significant social or political reform. They have carried out their entire political careers under conditions where the Democratic Party has been moving steadily, and ever more rapidly, to the right.
For 36 years Biden was a senator from Delaware, the state where American corporations go to escape regulations, taxes and government oversight. The tiny state has fewer than one million people, but more than one million corporations are headquartered there, thanks to a political environment that guarantees low taxes and look-the-other-way enforcement.
Biden entered the Senate in 1972 and was always associated with right-wing, pro-corporate politics, rising to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee, then chairman or ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He was chosen by Barack Obama to be his running mate in 2008 for precisely that reason: to reassure Wall Street and the Democratic establishment, in the midst of a global financial crisis, that there would be nothing radical about an Obama presidency.
Harris, a generation younger, made her career in the Bay Area, dominated by the Democratic Party politically, during the time when vast fortunes were being made in Silicon Valley. She proved her political worth to big business in her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney. Harris ran as a law-and-order candidate, backed by the police unions and big business, and defeated the “left” incumbent, Terence Hallinan, who had close ties to the Stalinist-led trade unions and the sizeable radical milieu.
Establishing close ties to the older, established wealth of San Francisco, anchored in banking, oil and real estate, Harris followed in the footsteps of two other prominent and wealthy San Francisco Democrats—Dianne Feinstein, first mayor, then US senator, and Nancy Pelosi, congresswoman and now speaker of the House. After six years as San Francisco DA, Harris was the consensus choice of the Democratic Party establishment to succeed Jerry Brown as state attorney general in 2010, and then to take the open US Senate seat in 2016.
Democratic Party officials and their media acolytes have hailed the “historic” character of the selection of Harris, the first African-American woman on a major party ticket. This chorus of praise includes Bernie Sanders, who declared that Harris “will make history.” But despite the hosannas from the advocates of identity politics, her ethnicity and gender provide no assurance about the “progressive” character of her politics.
If anything, the opposite has been the case. Harris has frequently traded on her status as the first black woman to be district attorney, the first black woman to be state attorney general, the second black woman to hold a US Senate seat, etc., as a political screen to cover the right-wing policies she advocates and the social class that she defends: the corporate elite of multi-millionaires and billionaires.
She has now joined this class herself, thanks in part to her marriage to millionaire entertainment industry lawyer Douglas Emhoff. The couple had an adjusted gross income of $1.88 million in 2018, putting them in the top 0.1 percent of American society.
Objectively speaking, there is little to distinguish Harris, with only four years in the US Senate, from other potential alternatives for the vice presidency. She is not notably more qualified than dozens of other senators, governors or representatives. But in the eyes of the advocates of identity politics, in and out of the corporate media, Harris’s mediocrity and right-wing politics count for nothing compared to her skin color and gender.
BLOG EDITOR: THE GIG IS DEM POLS STAGE THEMSELVES AND PERFORM ACTS OF ‘POPULISM’ WHILE SERVING THE BANKSTERS AND RICH!
In her unbounded opportunism and ruthless pursuit of her own career and economic interests, Harris personifies both the social psychology and class basis of identity politics. It is the politics of privileged layers of the upper-middle class, including but not limited to minorities, that use race, gender and sexual orientation to conceal the fundamental class divisions in capitalist society, channel social opposition behind the Democratic Party, and carve out a greater share of the wealth of the top one percent for themselves. It is organically hostile to the interests of the working class.
Identity politics was the key to Biden’s own campaign for the presidential nomination, which he based on the mobilization of support from the Congressional Black Caucus and African-American businessmen and Democratic Party operatives, trading on his role as Obama’s vice president. Prior to the Obama administration, he had no significant connection to civil rights struggles and won no significant black support in either of his own presidential campaigns, in 1988 and 2008.
With the emergence of Bernie Sanders as the leading candidate for the nomination, with victories in New Hampshire and Nevada and a tie in Iowa, the Democratic Party establishment launched an all-out drive to block the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” and deliver the nomination to its choice, the former vice president.
The critical turning point in February 2020 came with the fulsome support of Representative James Clyburn, the political boss of the Democratic Party in South Carolina and the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, as majority whip. Biden had been badly beaten in the first three primaries, but won by a landslide in South Carolina, thanks to a large African-American turnout.
Besides Clyburn’s support, Biden was assisted by the withdrawal of Kamala Harris, who folded up her own presidential campaign in December 2019, and Cory Booker, who dropped out a month later, insuring that there would be no African-American candidate to draw away votes from Biden in South Carolina.
Within days, two more Democratic rivals, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, threw their support to Biden, allowing him to sweep the Super Tuesday primaries and become the virtually unchallenged frontrunner. Soon afterwards, Harris endorsed Biden and began campaigning aggressively for him in states like Michigan.
BLOG EDITOR: THE GIG IS DEM POLS STAGE THEMSELVES AND PERFORM ACTS OF ‘POPULISM’ WHILE SERVING THE BANKSTERS AND RICH!
Those celebrating the elevation of a black woman to the presidential ticket seem to forget that only 12 years ago an African-American man, Barack Obama, was elected to the presidency. Despite the claims that the first black president would be a transformational figure, Obama proved to be a thoroughly reactionary defender of Wall Street and the CIA. He bailed out the banks and the stock exchange, forced auto workers to take wage cuts, continued the wars of George W. Bush and added new ones, including Libya, Syria and Yemen.
The disappointment and disillusionment in Obama’s empty promises of “hope” and “change” found expression in the shift of significant sections of the working class, white and black, away from the Democratic Party, leading first to the Republican takeover of Congress—the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014—and then the election of Trump in 2016.
One element in Biden’s decision to choose Harris as his running mate is the need to provide some stimulus, even as poor as this, to black voter turnout in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where the 2020 election could well be won or lost.
Biden is also seeking to demonstrate to his real constituency, the American ruling elite, that he will represent a steadier hand than the erratic and impulsive Trump. If the selection of Kamala Harris is the conventional, safe and predictable choice, that only underscores his pledge to be a conventional, safe and predictable defender of the interests of corporate America, in contrast to Trump, who is increasingly regarded in the ruling class as a destabilizing factor who provokes mass opposition through his incendiary, authoritarian and racist tirades.
It is significant that on the eve of the selection of Harris, and the week before the Democratic National Convention, the New York Times ran a major report on the growing support for Biden on the stock exchange, while Politico followed with an account of how Biden has won the lion’s share of campaign contributions from Wall Street bankers.
The ignominious fall of Kamala Harris
5 December 2019
On Tuesday, US Senator Kamala Harris terminated her 2020 presidential campaign, becoming the highest-profile candidate to withdraw from the race so far. Harris’ ignominious end—less than 11 months after launching her campaign with great fanfare, and before the primaries have even begun—demonstrates the mounting inability of identity politics to mask a right-wing political record and program.
While attempting to strike a middle ground between the conservative Biden and the “progressive” Sanders and Warren, Harris ended up vacillating repeatedly and never successfully convinced working-class voters that she had anything to offer. In particular, her backpedaling after claiming to oppose private health care exposed her thoroughly corporatist outlook. Having ascended the political ladder and married a millionaire lawyer, Harris’s income placed her in the top 0.1 percent of society, rendering her occasional “left” populism a transparent fraud.
First announcing her campaign on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Harris repeatedly invoked her identity as an African-American woman to try to cover over her reactionary political history, first as city prosecutor in Oakland and San Francisco, then attorney general of California, and finally as US senator since 2016.
While in California, Harris was a strict “law and order” advocate. She sent countless working-class residents to lengthy prison terms, sponsored a law to send parents to jail when their kids were truant, and defended the rampant overcrowding of the state’s prisons even after the US Supreme Court declared this a form of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Upon her election as US senator, Harris was quickly elevated into the leadership of the Democratic Party. Appointed to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017, she became one of the most fervent promoters of the anti-Russia campaign, spearheaded by sections of the Democratic Party and intelligence agencies as part of an effort to reorient foreign policy back towards confrontation with Russia. Harris was an early advocate for Trump’s impeachment, not due to any of his real crimes against immigrants and the working class, but due to bogus allegations of ties to the Russian state.
BLOG EDITOR: IT WAS SEC. OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON WHO SUCKED OFF $165 MILLION IN RUSSIAN BRIBES ALL OF WHICH ENDED UP IN THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND.
Harris was expected to run for president well ahead of her announcement and had been among the top five prospective candidates since at least December 2018. After announcing, she gradually rose in the polls, reaching her peak after the first Democratic debate on June 27 at which she verbally sparred with former Vice President Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Following that debate, she reached 15.2 percent in national polls, briefly placing her in second overall.
While Harris’s standing in the polls gradually began declining, a key turning point came at the second Democratic debate, when Harris’s reactionary record as attorney general was attacked by Tulsi Gabbard. After that debate, Harris sank below 10 percent in the polls and continued to fall, ultimately slipping to barely 3 percent.
Beyond her fall in the polls, the immediate reasons for Harris ending her campaign appear to be a collapse in her campaign finances and fundraising, and a desire to best position herself to be selected as a vice presidential running mate. In a public statement, Harris stated bluntly, “My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”
Since the latest release of campaign finance data on September 30, multiple reports have surfaced indicating that the Harris campaign became increasingly cash-strapped, prompting the layoff of dozens of staffers in late October at her Baltimore headquarters. An aide to Harris confirmed with the New York Times Wednesday that the campaign would have had to go into debt in order to continue functioning.
While Sanders and Warren have been able to secure over $40 million and $30 million respectively in small donations of less than $200, Harris only raised roughly $14 million in small donations by September 30. Further, wealthy donors were more inclined to donate to Biden and Buttigieg, with the former publicly launching a super PAC at the end of October after stating he was opposed to super PACs. While Harris could have gone this route and openly appealed to the financial aristocracy, she evidently felt this was politically unviable.
BLOG EDITOR: AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CA, HARRIS PROTECTED OBAMA-BIDEN’S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND MADE SURE NOT ONE WAS CRIMINALLY PROSECUTED. WELLS FARGO, PROBABLY THE BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANK IN U.S. HISTORY THANKED HARRIS WITH BIG BACKEND BRIBES AS THANKS. GOOGLE IT!
By then, according to one estimation, she was spending $1.41 for every dollar she raised.
In her resignation letter, Harris also wrote, “I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign. And as the campaign has gone on, it’s become harder and harder to raise the money we need to compete.” The reference to a “billionaire” candidate includes Trump, who has publicly raised over $165 million since the 2016 election, as well as Democratic candidates Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg entered the race on November 24 after purchasing $37 million in a television ad blitz, a greater sum than Harris had raised in her entire campaign. In the days prior to her campaign termination, Bloomberg surpassed Harris in polling, placing her in sixth place overall for the first time.
Concurrent with Harris, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak and Wayne Messam have recently withdrawn from the Democratic race. There have already been complaints that the next Democratic debate, set for December 19 in Los Angeles, will have no candidates “of color,” given Harris’s withdrawal and the likelihood that Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard have not yet qualified.
The leadership of the Democratic Party will undoubtedly work to ensure that either Harris, Booker, Castro or another minority candidate is selected as the running mate to add diversity to the ticket.
However, despite the efforts to entrench race and gender in American politics, the demise of Harris’s presidential bid highlights the inability of identity politics to gain a significant foothold within the working class. For the vast majority of the population, Harris’s constant invocations of her identity did little to convince them that she was in any way a progressive candidate. Rather, she was recognized as a pro-corporate Democrat, the stock-in-trade of the party as a whole.
The decades-long shift to the right of the Democratic Party culminated in the Obama administration, which oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in US history, deported more immigrants than any previous administration, and became the first to remain perpetually at war. Harris, along with all the other Democratic Party candidates, defends this record of war, austerity and xenophobia that paved the way for the election of Trump in 2016.
Why Did Biden Pick Kamala? Follow the Money
How much did it cost to buy Biden's VP Spot? $3.5 million.
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