Dem Rep. Jeffries: ‘No Empirical Evidence’ $600 Unemployment Insurance ‘Incentivizing People to Stay at Home’
1:30 As Congress weighs another coronavirus stimulus package, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) on Wednesday’s “MSNBC Live” said the notion that the unemployment insurance of $600 a week is incentivizing people to not seek employment “has no basis in reality.”
Jeffries argued “there’s no empirical evidence” to prove the unemployment insurance is keeping people home rather than working. According to Jeffries, such a belief is “insulting” to Americans who want to work.
“You know, we have lost over 50 million jobs,” Jeffries emphasized. “There are no jobs to return home to … or return back to work to. And America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We should be able to provide some measure of modest assistance to people in the midst of a deadly pandemic where the economy is in recession, possibly heading toward Depression-like conditions.”
“There’s no empirical evidence that the $600 emergency unemployment insurance enhancement is incentivizing people to stay at home,” he added. “In many ways, that argument is insulting to everyday Americans who want to work, who view employment with the dignity that it traditionally has here in America. But they just want to be able to provide a comfortable living for themselves.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
As Congress weighs another coronavirus stimulus package, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) on Wednesday’s “MSNBC Live” said the notion that the unemployment insurance of $600 a week is incentivizing people to not seek employment “has no basis in reality.”
Jeffries argued “there’s no empirical evidence” to prove the unemployment insurance is keeping people home rather than working. According to Jeffries, such a belief is “insulting” to Americans who want to work.
“You know, we have lost over 50 million jobs,” Jeffries emphasized. “There are no jobs to return home to … or return back to work to. And America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We should be able to provide some measure of modest assistance to people in the midst of a deadly pandemic where the economy is in recession, possibly heading toward Depression-like conditions.”
“There’s no empirical evidence that the $600 emergency unemployment insurance enhancement is incentivizing people to stay at home,” he added. “In many ways, that argument is insulting to everyday Americans who want to work, who view employment with the dignity that it traditionally has here in America. But they just want to be able to provide a comfortable living for themselves.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
House Speaker Pelosi signals readiness to cut unemployment benefits
5 August 2020
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in an interview on PBS’ “NewsHour” program Tuesday signaled the Democratic Party’s willingness to reduce benefits for the nearly 30 million US jobless workers who had been receiving $600 a week in enhanced federal unemployment pay. The jobless benefit, part of the CARES Act, which allocated trillions for the corporations and banks, expired this past week.
The federal benefit, along with a moratorium on rental evictions from properties with federally backed mortgages, was allowed to lapse at the end of July, leaving millions in the lurch.
Shortly before the expiration of the federal unemployment benefit, the House of Representatives, in a near party-line vote, passed a $694.6 billion defense appropriations bill for 2021. The bill, overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party, included funding for 91 F-35 fighter jets ($9.3 billion) and nine new Navy ships ($22.3 billion). Added together, the cost of these 100 pieces of military hardware could provide supplemental jobless benefits for 30 million people for nearly two weeks.
While both parties worked around-the-clock for the financial oligarchy and their cratering stock portfolios by passing the CARES Act in late March, now that Wall Street has been rescued, the two big business parties are taking their time in working out the terms for imposing the full brunt on the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic on the backs of the working class.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows have been meeting daily behind closed doors with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and Pelosi. While the Democratic negotiators have claimed “progress” in the talks, the White House representatives, who had proposed cutting the unemployment supplement to $200, have said the two sides remain far apart.Throughout the PBS interview, Pelosi, with an estimated net worth of $120 million, portrayed herself and the Democratic Party as champions of working people. However, when gently pressed by the news anchor, Judy Woodruff, the House speaker signaled the corporate-financial elite that the Democrats were prepared to cut the already inadequate $600-a-week benefit, saying, “Let’s find out what we can afford.” She added, “We will find our common ground.”
All parties are seeking to pass a new bill that would provide reduced benefits, using the prospect of hunger and homelessness to blackmail workers into returning to virus-infected work sites or take other work at lower pay when their previous jobs have been eliminated.
At the end of the interview, Pelosi made clear that the goal of the Democrats was the same as the Republicans: “reopening” the economy (i.e., resuming at full blast the flow of corporate profit) by forcing teachers and students back to school so as to allow “our parents to go to work.”
For his part, President Donald Trump in a Tuesday press conference threatened to issue an executive order to suspend the payroll tax, the primary source of funding for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He also took the opportunity to lash out against China, claiming that the looming wave of evictions in the US was “China’s fault.”
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to unemployed workers about the consequences of a cutoff or reduction in the federal unemployment supplement.
April, a cook from rural northern Illinois, said: “The $600 dollar added bonus really did help. We could not have survived without it. It made me realize that everyone needs to be making a basic amount to live and thrive.
“I was actually getting slightly more with the added money than I was with my paycheck before being unemployed, only because my pay was so low. Now that the benefit is gone, I am still unemployed and my partner now makes way less than he did previously.
“I went from working one job. Now I can’t find full-time work. I’ll have to work two or three jobs just to get by. And then my partner started a new job and was denied Medicaid because he makes $3 too much. He makes $11 an hour.
“We have a little saved up. I hope to stay in my apartment and be able to take care of the necessities, but if I don’t find work before then, I am not sure what we will do once September arrives. I am constantly oscillating between being angry and scared. Everything is so unequal. You have millionaires and billionaires and then you have the rest of us just trying to get by.”
A cashier from Virginia who was forced to return to work after the state failed to process her unemployment claim told the WSWS: “I was a cashier, now I am a personal shopper. I applied for unemployment benefits back in April. The benefits never were approved.
“I had panic attacks fearing for my safety. Luckily for me, my family and girlfriend, who was able to get the expanded benefits, were able to help me with rent throughout the last few months. If it wasn’t for them, I’d have been working throughout this entire pandemic.
“Two weeks ago, the last bit of money I received from the $1,200 check Trump sent ran out and I was forced to return to work. I’m not sure if I have a compromised immune system, but I had open heart surgery, so I’m worried if I catch this disease. My parents are elderly. I see people in my state socializing and not wearing masks. I’m definitely scared.
“The fact that I didn’t get any benefits throughout the entire pandemic has really hurt me
financially. My girlfriend and I had plans to move into a house together, but that isn’t going to happen now for a long time.
“This order to get back to work is really tough on people. We’re being forced to take high risks with our health in the middle of a health care crisis. If someone in the US government had actually done something to help people before this pandemic happened, we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”
As for Pelosi, her district is so damaged, so depressed, they will likely re-elect her and keep her in office until she is 100% wax-ready for Madame Tussaud’s.
Nancy Pelosi Stands with Anti-Semites
Last Wednesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi endorsed Rep. Rashida Tlaib in her August 4 Michigan Democratic primary rematch with Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, whom Tlaib narrowly defeated in 2018.
Similarly, for the August 11 Minnesota primary, Pelosi endorsed another of Congress' three Israel-boycotters, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has been enthusiastically praised by David Duke, and was voted 2019 Antisemite of the Year in a poll by stopantisemitism.org.
What is Pelosi's motivation in supporting them? Is it identity politics? In Omar's race, Pelosi had the option of endorsing her progressive African-American opponent, who opposes the Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) campaign to isolate and destroy Israel. In Tlaib's race, where opponent Brenda Jones is a staunch ally of Rev. Louis Farrakhan, Pelosi had the option of staying neutral.
Even Brenda Jones said she's had enough of Tlaib's flamboyant divisiveness and emphasized the need for working with President Trump and the Republicans. “I am interested in opening a dialogue with people that I do not always agree with for the good of the district,” Jones said. She has criticized Tlaib for vowing, within hours of taking office, to “impeach the m-----f-----.”
Perhaps Pelosi, who seems increasingly consumed with hatred of Trump to the point of fulfilling Tlaib's vow of impeaching him for no good reason, prefers the Squad over conciliatory Democrats because she has reached the point where she shares their militancy. Whatever Trump does, she predictably does the opposite.
But by endorsing Tlaib and Omar, the nation's most powerful Democrat is giving the party's seal of approval to their boycott of Israel and their support for its openly genocidal terrorist enemies -- a historic step towards turning the Democrats into a twin of the recently defeated terrorist-allied Corbynite Labor Party.
Tlaib, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an anti-Semitic hate group that promotes “Palestine from the River to the Sea” -- a euphemism for replacing the world's one tiny Jewish state with another Islamic state, of which there are already dozens. The DSA promotes the BDS campaign, and was quick to blame the Jews for Minneapolis police violence towards African-Americans.
Tlaib, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez’s BDS advocacy places them in intersectional solidarity with David Duke and neo-Nazi parties in Germany. German officials recently declared that this economic warfare against the Jewish state “roughly recalls similar measures against German Jews by the National Socialists” in 1933. The hate-monitor organization Canary Mission has noted the identical bigoted talking points voiced by neo-Nazis and the progressive-Islamist alliance that Pelosi is helping to take over the Democratic Party.
Tlaib sent a chilling message at her swearing-in ceremony, where she was joined by Abbas Hamideh, an outspoken admirer of genocidal Hezb’allah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Palestinian-terrorist child-killer Samir Kuntar. Of the countless Palestinian murders of Jews over the decades, Kuntar's are remembered as among the most horrific. As the Algemeiner reported:
Hamideh, executive director of the US-based Palestine Right to Return Coalition, has equated Zionists to Nazis, said Israel has a “delusional ISIS-like ideology” and labeled the nation’s founding a “crime.”
According to a screenshot captured by advocacy group StandWithUs, he also lamented the death of “the legendary Hezbollah martyr” Samir Kuntar in 2015, who years earlier led an attack that killed four Israelis. Among the fatalities was 31-year-old father Danny Haran, who Kuntar shot to death in front of his four-year-old daughter Einat, before killing the girl by smashing her skull against a rock with his rifle. Haran’s wife managed to hide with her two-year-old daughter Yael, but accidentally suffocated the child while trying to quiet her whimpering...
Unfortunately, there's more. Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism reported in 2019 that “...Tlaib posed with Nader Jalajel, a Palestinian activist who last year mourned the death of a terrorist who led a shooting attack that murdered a rabbi...”
And according to the Zionist Organization of America, Tlaib posted a photo of herself with Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian terrorist convicted of the murder of Hebrew University students Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner in a 1969 bombing.
Last year, Tlaib and Omar's planned trip to Israel (identified as “Palestine” on the itinerary) was sponsored by a a terrorism-promoting organization that disseminates bizarre, vicious, anti-Semitic libels. Clifford D. May wrote:
They were planning to meet with individuals and groups directly tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism. Among them: Shawan Jabarin, identified by Israel’s Supreme Court as a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist organization responsible for airplane hijackings and suicide-bombings...
Organizing their visit was Miftah, an organization that in 2013 published an article alleging that Jews use Christian blood for their Passover matzos -- a very old and very sick libel.
Miftah also published “an American neo-Nazi treatise” called “Who Rules America: The Alien Grip on Our News and Entertainment Media Must Be Broken.” Apparently, to Tlaib and Omar, white supremacy in defense of Jew-hatred is no vice.
Miftah has praised the murder of Jews including Gail Rubin, niece of the late Sen. Abraham Ribicoff. The organization also accused Israel of harvesting organs from Ukrainian children and Haitian earthquake victims.
If Tlaib's trip sponsor sounds like a medieval European lynch mob that came to us through a time portal, unfortunately their kind of ignorance, superstition, and obsessive hatred increasingly has a voice in universities and in media -- and in Congress. Consider who Pelosi chose to deliver the opening prayer for a session of the U.S. House last year -- Imam Omar Suleiman, who has equated Israel with Nazi Germany, called for Jews to be massacred in a third intifada, and blamed Jews for the fact that food decays.
Perhaps inviting him was carelessness on Pelosi's part, but in retrospect, it looks like another example of “do the opposite of what Trump would do” and a warning sign that more capitulation to her party's far-left bigot wing was in store.
She knelt with Sen. Charles Schumer in memory of George Floyd, but when the innocent victims are another historically oppressed minority whom the progressive-Islamist mob regards as deserving of slaughter, she stands with Tlaib and her fellow terror enthusiasts on the side of the murderers.
The cultural divide between western civilization and those indoctrinated into a genocidal jihadist mindset will probably not be bridged during our lifetimes. But what Pelosi has done is to legitimize and empower the toxic culture Tlaib brings with her; to side with it, and to assist it in hijacking the Democratic Party.
The left’s two big albatrosses – Biden and Pelosi
One has to wonder, do those on the left, including the media, actually think that Joe Biden is a viable candidate for president? Do they not realize that Nancy Pelosi is as senile as Joe? Like Joe, she often slurs her words, suffers brain freezes mid-sentence and spews gibberish. Biden is life-long corruptocrat, a known plagiarist, a pathological liar and a truly mean and evil man. You can catch a glimpse of just how mean in the film about Clarence Thomas; it was Biden who grilled him mercilessly during the hearings over Anita Hill’s phony allegations. Biden is a racist as well. Pelosi is a life-long power-mad lunatic. She has allowed her own district to dissolve into a homeless camp with all the attendant problems – discarded needles, feces on the streets and sidewalks, and an ever-escalating crime wave. Smash and grab car burglaries occur by the minute in San Feancisco and there are no consequences for the perpetrators if caught. Like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Pelosi and her husband are millionaires several times over; they’ve become rich because both have been in Congress for so many years. They all get rich on insider information. Joe Biden goes further; we all know he used a billion dollars in U.S. aid as leverage to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired because he was investigating his son. John Kerry was in on that bit of bribery. He is as low a form of life as Biden.
And yet, at the moment, Biden is their candidate and Pelosi is their Speaker who embarrasses herself every time she opens her mouth, as does Biden. Both of them belong in a long-term care facility for the aged. That the Democrats consider either of these pols a credit to their party is proof of their willful blindness. Why do they not see what everyone outside of their party can see? That these two people are way past their sell-by date. How is Joe going to debate President Trump? He is unable to utter a coherent sentence or answer a simple question. Pelosi submitted a $3 trillion spending bill that is simply a joke. Biden has vowed to pick a “woman of color” as his running mate. Woe be unto him if he doesn’t.
As for the left’s “believe all women” mantra, that went out the window the moment Tara Reade accused Biden of sexual assault. Reade’s allegations are infinitely more credible than Christine Blasey-Ford’s fabricated accusations against a high school-aged Brett Kavanaugh, but Democrats are so self-unaware, they don’t recognize their own gross hypocrisy. This time Reade is “making it up.” See Ami Horowitz’ recent video. Blasey-Ford most likely never met Justice Kavanaugh. Reade did work in Biden’s office, did report his behavior and tell others at the time. But the Dems believed Blasey-Ford and don’t believe Reade. Go figure. Denial is a dangerous and mystifying psychological defense mechanism and the Democrat party is in denial about the mental capacity of its two most prominent “leaders.”
Donald Trump has warned our federal government about the dangers China represents to the US since the 1980s. He was right and since he took office he has tried to rectify the horrific trade imbalance. No one can refute the fact that China purposely unleashed the covid virus upon the world but Nancy Pelosi calls Trump’s focus on China “a diversion.” Is she really that clueless? Probably not, but destroying Trump is far more important to her than protecting America. Her comments about Trump’s use of hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic are outrageous. It is the most effective drug at the moment, used all over the world. And Trump is not “morbidly obese” She however is morbidly botoxed and has undergone so much plastic surgery she resembles a character from the film Death Becomes Her. She is a ghoul in every sense of the word but the left seems not to realize it. They celebrate how she wields her power. That is what they admire; it’s the only thing they admire in anyone. They just cannot abide it in a republican, especially when they were so certain Hillary was going to win the 2016 election and they would all be in fat city. They would have been all-powerful. They would have had control of all the levers of power in this country. And being the spoiled children they are, to this day they cannot accept that defeat, especially to an outsider like Trump. They love to mock him, to call him stupid but he has them all by the short hairs and runs rings around their collective body of never-Trumpers.
To be sure, Biden and Pelosi have their devoted fans who are so blinded by their hatred of Trump and their thoroughly unwarranted hero worship of Biden and Pelosi that they mistakenly think they are normal and healthy but both are seriously in need of an intervention. Why Jill Biden allows Joe’s candidacy to continue is a cruelty, a form of elder abuse. As for Pelosi, where are her five kids telling her it is time to retire? Of course the lady of iron will would refuse but how much longer can her infirmities be on public display? Only time will tell but it seems pretty likely Trump has the election in the bag. Biden is the weakest candidate the democrat party has run since George McGovern and McGovern was a decent man; Biden is not. As for Pelosi, her district is so damaged, so depressed, they will likely re-elect her and keep her in office until she is 100% wax-ready for Madame Tussaud’s.
Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of images by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0, and USFWS // public domain
Insights to Consider Before November
Read this like your future depends upon it.
Here are some interesting points to think about prior to the November election, especially for my friends on the fence, like moderate Democrats, Libertarians and Independents, Never-Trump Republicans, and those thinking of "walking away" from the Democrat party.
Women are upset at Trump’s naughty words. They also bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Gray.
Not one feminist has defended Sarah Sanders. It seems women’s rights only matter if those women are liberal.
No border wall. No voter ID laws. Did you figure it out yet? But wait... there's more.
Chelsea Clinton got out of college and got a job at NBC that paid $900,000 per year. Her mom flies around the country speaking out about white privilege.
And just like that, they went from being against foreign interference in our elections to allowing non-citizens to vote in our elections.
President Trump’s wall costs less than the Obamacare website. Let that sink in, America.
We are one election away from open borders, socialism, gun confiscation, and full-term abortion nationally. We are fighting evil.
They sent more troops and armament to arrest Roger Stone than they sent to defend Benghazi.
Sixty years ago, Venezuela was 4th on the world economic freedom index. Today, they are 179th and their citizens are dying of starvation. In only 10 years, Venezuela was destroyed by "democratic socialism".
Russia donated $0.00 to the Trump campaign. Russia donated $145,600,000 to the Clinton Foundation. But Trump was the one investigated.
Nancy Pelosi invited illegal aliens to the State of the Union. President Trump invited victims of illegal aliens to the State of the Union. Let that sink in.
A socialist is basically a communist who doesn’t have the power to take everything from their citizens at gunpoint... yet.
How do you walk 3000 miles across Mexico without food or support and show up at our border 100 pounds overweight and with a cellphone?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to ban cars, ban planes, give out universal income and she thinks socialism works. She calls Donald Trump crazy.
Bill Clinton paid $850,000 to Paula Jones to get her to go away. I don’t remember the FBI raiding his lawyer’s office.
I wake up every day and I am grateful that Hillary Clinton is not the president of the United States of America.
The same media that told me Hillary Clinton had a 95% chance of winning now tells me Trump’s approval ratings are low.
“The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”— Margaret Thatcher
Maxine Waters opposes voter ID laws; she thinks that they are racist. You need to have a photo ID to attend her town hall meetings.
President Trump said, "They’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just in their way."
Now, go back and read this again like your future depends upon it. Because it does
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