Meanwhile, the Biden campaign’s Spanish-language advertising in Florida struck an openly anti-communist note, portraying Trump as “soft” on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and Nicolas Maduro of Venzeuela.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
Historic US job losses continue with another 860,000 unemployment claims
By Jacob Crosse
18 September 2020
For the 26th straight week, US unemployment claims remain at levels unseen since the Great Depression as an estimated 860,000 people filed first-time jobless claims for the week ending September 12, according to the latest US Department of Labor report. An additional 658,737 Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims were also recorded bringing the weekly total to over 1.5 million new claims.
In total, over 61,000,000 jobless claims have been filed in the last six months since COVID-19 lockdown measures and business closures were first mandated to slow the spread of the virus. Over 202,000 people in the US have died due to COVID-19 as of this writing after most of those measures were quickly abandoned at the insistence of the financial oligarchy. Of the over 22 million jobs lost since mid-March, less than half, approximately 10.5 million have “returned,” albeit for many workers at reduced hours and wages.
A July study published by the University of Chicago in conjunction with the nation’s largest payroll processor, ADP, found that from March through June, employers froze the wages of 58 percent of their workers, compared to 36 percent during the same period last year. An estimated 40 percent of the 18 million workers who reported that they were furloughed in April have returned to work, according to Gusto, another payroll processing company that services more than 100,000 small businesses in the US.
Of the roughly 7.2 million workers who have returned, Gusto reported that 29 percent have been brought back at a lower wage or with fewer hours. Speaking to USA Today on the figures, Sarah Gustafson, Gusto’s lead data scientist, remarked, “When they come back, it doesn’t mean they’re coming back to a rosy picture, they’re kind of getting a double whammy.” Even among workers who were not laid off or furloughed, Gusto data found 8.8 percent of all workers saw their hours reduced in August, up nearly 3 percent compared to last year.
The Department of Labor reported that the national seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was an estimated 8.6 percent for the week ending September 5. However, several states and territories have double-digit unemployment rates, with Hawaii leading the country at 20.3 percent. This was followed by California, 17.3; Nevada, 15.6; New York, 15.0; Puerto Rico, 14.1; Louisiana, 13.6; Connecticut and Georgia at 11.9; District of Columbia, 11.3; and finally, Massachusetts at 11.0 percent.
The number of people receiving some form of unemployment assistance actually increased by nearly 100,000 last week, to 29,768,326. For comparison's sake, during the same week last year, only 1,498,917 people were receiving government assistance. Overall, the weekly unemployment claims report largely mirrored those of the last three weeks, since the department changed its formula for calculating claims, bringing the four-week average claim amount to just under one million a week at 912,000.
With job losses continuing, the $600 federal unemployment aid long expired and no relief in sight, food lines are growing as hunger grips millions. In New York City, an estimated 2 million people are food insecure. Rosanna Robbins, director of food access and capacity at City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, reflected on the ongoing crisis.
“It’s never been this tragic for such a sustained period of time. Since COVID hit, the numbers of people in line at food pantries and soup kitchens skyrocketed, and it’s not going down,” she told the Associated Press. “And so, I think for us it’s just adjusting to the fact that we expect there to be a real need for free food for a very long time to come.”
While millions of unemployed workers and their families are queuing in food lines, a report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that from March 18 through September 4, the wealth of US billionaires increased by a whopping $970 billion, “an increase of 32.9 percent over 24 weeks.” Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has seen his wealth increase from $118 billion to over $206.4 billion, while Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s wealth nearly quadrupled in the same time from $24.6 billion to $93.3 billion.
This is part of an international phenomena; according to data from Forbes, Canada’s richest 20 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $37 billion since March, with the average gaining nearly $2 billion in the last six months. The Thomson family, which owns media outlets Thomson Reuters and the Globe and Mail, saw their wealth increase by an estimated $8.8 billion. During that same time, 1.1 million workers in Canada lost their jobs while another 713,000 reported losing at least half, if not more, of their work hours due to the pandemic.
As the financial oligarchy gorges itself on trillions of dollars through the artificial inflation of the stock market by the influx of unlimited funds furnished via the Federal Reserve, millions of jobless and destitute workers are left with nothing while the Democrats and Republicans in Congress feign interest in “getting something done” in between extended recesses and half-hearted negotiations that have produced nothing in the last eight weeks.
While a few jobless workers have seen modest relief after President Donald Trump signed an executive memorandum on August 8 that created the Lost Wages Assistance (LWA) program, millions have yet to see anything.
The LWA directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to oversee distributing $44 billion to jobless workers in the form of $300 weekly payments, less than half what workers were receiving before. Only workers who had been receiving at least $100 a week in unemployment benefits are eligible to receive the benefit.
Every single US state except for South Dakota applied for LWA payments with over $30 billion already earmarked for distribution. For many states such as Alaska, which was approved by FEMA to begin sending payments on August 24, entirely new delivery systems needed to be developed, delaying payments for an estimated eight weeks. Meanwhile the unemployed in other states such as New Mexico, which has already distributed five weeks of payments, have already been cut off from the program.
While millions of workers have been left in the lurch as the US Congress, American Airlines CEO Doug Parker, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby and Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly met with White House chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Thursday to demand another $25 billion in federal aid before the end of the month. The airline companies have warned that without government aid, up to 36,000 workers could be furloughed, including 19,000 at American Airlines and 16,370 at United.
Despite unprecedented joblessness, and the threats of more layoffs coming, no relief package appears to be on the agenda for either party.
Instead, on Thursday the Democratic-controlled House passed a nonbinding resolution condemning “all forms of anti-Asian sentiment as related to COVID-19” in a 243-164 vote. This gave both parties an opportunity to blame the other party for not being sufficiently bellicose against China and Russia as each side took turns sabre rattling over foreign policy.
Jim Jordan (Republican-Ohio) voted against the resolution while falsely claiming that China and the World Health Organization lied to the United States about the severity of the coronavirus. Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy chastised Pelosi for being too focused on “impeaching the President” back in January, instead of “focusing on China.”
Pelosi responded: “In terms of China I take second place to no one in this body in my opposition to China for three decades. Sometimes I take pride in being called the most disliked American in China for my opposition to China...trying to stop their proliferation of weapons technology, of mass destruction, to rogue countries and those delivery systems.”
Pelosi continued, “I have been on it [China] every single day for over 30 years.” She then accused House Leader Kevin McCarthy of having “newly arrived at this issue, in order to deflect attention from the fact that the Russian’s trying to once again infiltrate and [unintelligible] the security of our elections. Whoever interferes with our elections must be dealt with. But all of the sudden it’s about China, instead of Russia. I think the American people should decide who the next president of the United States is, not Vladimir Putin.”
Biden in Minnesota: A phony “pro-worker” spin on a right-wing campaign
19 September 2020
In a televised town hall on CNN Thursday night and a speech Friday in Minnesota, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden sought to put a “pro-worker” spin on his right-wing election campaign.
Many polls are showing Biden’s lead in Midwestern battleground states slipping and there are mounting statements of concern from within the Democratic Party over the lack of enthusiasm among workers and young people for the decades-long senator and former vice president. Under these conditions, Biden is doubling down on his ludicrous self-promotion as a “working stiff” from “hard-scrabble” Scranton, Pennsylvania, in contrast to the billionaire Donald Trump.
Biden is proposing no significant social reforms to go along with his pseudo-populist demagogy, refraining even from demanding the restoration of the $600 per week federal unemployment benefit in the midst of the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. The Democrats and Republicans in Congress allowed the benefit to expire at the end of July, threatening millions of workers with destitution, hunger and homelessness. Nor does Biden oppose the deadly back-to-work and back-to-school campaign in the midst of a rampaging pandemic being led by Trump at the behest of Wall Street.
The actual content of Biden’s supposed defense of working people is economic nationalism, promotion of the pro-corporate trade unions, anti-Chinese and anti-Russian agitation and the glorification of the US military. All of these themes were on display in his campaign events this week.
On Thursday night, Biden took questions from both Democrats and Republicans at a televised town hall event held near Scranton and hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper. In an effort to underline his plebian roots, he criticized an unnamed reporter who remarked that if elected, Biden would become the first president in many years not to have an Ivy League college degree.
“Who the hell makes you think I have to have an Ivy League degree to become president?” demanded Biden, who graduated from the University of Delaware and received his law degree from Syracuse University. (Biden failed to mention that he attended Archmere Academy, an elite private prep school in Claymont, Delaware).
He then raised a theme upon which he expanded in his speech Friday in the Minnesota iron range town of Hermantown. “I really do view this campaign as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue,” he said. “All [Trump] thinks about is the stock market.”
In the course of the town hall he repeated what has become part of his standard stump speech—a denunciation of Trump for his alleged slur on US soldiers killed in battle as “suckers” and “losers.”
He evaded a direct answer to a direct question as to whether he supported the so-called Green New Deal, which is promoted by the “progressive” Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. But he made clear his subservience to corporate oil and energy interests when he said he would not ban fracking.
He made much of his support for an expanded child tax credit, offering $3,000 per child a year for all but the wealthiest families. This paltry measure would do little to reverse the decline in working class living standards and the ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the very top of the income ladder. In any event, as Biden well knows, it would stand virtually no chance of being adopted in a Biden administration.
Biden repeated these themes in his Friday speech in northern Minnesota. They were, however, joined by a heavy dose of “Made in America” economic nationalism intended to outdo Trump’s “America First” protectionism. As in his speech last week to assembled bureaucrats at a United Auto Workers union hall in Warren, Michigan, Biden spoke after touring an apprentice training program at a facility of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners.
Hermantown is located in a region that voted for Trump in 2016, largely because of massive job losses on the iron range during the Obama-Biden administration. Whenever the Democratic Party seeks to make an appeal to workers, it inevitably takes the form of economic nationalism, national chauvinism and implied or open anti-communism. All of this was in evidence on Friday.
Introducing Biden, Minnesota Senator Any Klobuchar declared, “We need ‘Buy American.’” She boasted that the Obama-Biden administration “did something about Chinese steel dumping.”
Playing the populist card, Biden contrasted the plight of laid-off workers struggling to meet their mortgage or rent payment with the “people at the top.” He said, “Billionaires in America during the pandemic made another $300 billion. Hear what I just said? In the middle of the pandemic. You’re left to wonder who is looking out for ordinary folks.”
What he left out is the fact that congressional Democrats voted nearly unanimously for the Trump administration’s CARES Act, which provided trillions of dollars to the corporations and banks in the biggest bailout in world history, making possible the stock market explosion that funneled hundreds of billions into the pockets of the billionaires. This looting of society continues in the form of ongoing Federal Reserve money-printing, while the already inadequate relief measures for workers and small businesses have ended.
Biden then recycled his Scranton vs. Wall Street trope, amending it to say, “I view this campaign as between Scranton and Park Avenue. All Trump sees from Park Avenue is Wall Street. That’s why the only metric of American prosperity for him is the value of the Dow Jones.”
This was followed by his attack on Trump for denigrating soldiers, to which he added Trump’s badmouthing of John McCain, the deceased Vietnam War pilot and prisoner of war-turned Senate warmonger. Boasting of his friendship with McCain, Biden said, “John McCain was no ‘sucker’ or ‘loser,’ he was a war hero.”
Touting his “Buy American, Build American” plan, he said, “When the government spends taxpayers’ money, we should use that money to buy American products, made by American workers, in American supply chains to generate American growth. My plan would tighten the rule to make ‘Buy American’ a reality.”
This would be the core, Biden explained, of his policy to “reward work, not wealth.” To which he hastened to add, “I’m not looking to punish anybody… not to penalize wealth, but to make sure the wealthy and big corporations finally begin to pay their fair share.”
In other words, Biden will do nothing that challenges the basic profit interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy, whose real “fair share” to pay would be 100 percent, since it is the working class, not the capitalist exploiters, who produce all of the wealth of society.
Biden’s only substantive reform proposal was a $400 billion infrastructure program, itself entirely inadequate to reverse the decay of America’s social infrastructure and address the lack of decent-paying and secure jobs. Only a small fraction of the trillions handed over to big business, it would, in any event, never be implemented.
Despite the pseudo-populist rhetoric, the Biden campaign has continued to move to the right since the party conventions in August and the official start of the fall campaign on Labor Day.
Earlier this month, Biden told Stars and Stripes that he would keep US troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria indefinitely and would likely increase the military budget; he used an interview on CNN to attack Trump for failing to uphold US “national security” and disrespecting the military; and he gave a speech in Pittsburgh followed by a campaign ad in which he denounced “violent” protesters and demanded that they be criminally prosecuted.
At both events this week Biden continued his policy of saying virtually nothing about Trump’s threats to hold onto power regardless the outcome of the November 3 vote and to declare martial law and mobilize troops to put down protests after Election Day.
Nor did he mention Trump’s defense of police and fascist murders of anti-police violence protesters in Washington state and Kenosha, Wisconsin; Attorney General Williams Barr’s call for protesters to be charged with sedition, as well as the Democratic mayor of Seattle; and the call by Trump’s assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human services, Michael Caputo, for Trump supporters to arm themselves in preparation for the election.
Biden did refer to Trump's dictatorial moves during a campaign stop in Florida on Tuesday, primarily to highlight his anti-communist credentials. He compared Trump to Fidel Castro as a would-be authoritarian ruler in an effort to appeal to far-right anti-Castro sentiment in south Florida.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign’s Spanish-language advertising in Florida struck an openly anti-communist note, portraying Trump as “soft” on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and Nicolas Maduro of Venzeuela.
Biden on His Plan to Get Americans Back to Work: 'I Won't Bore You With the Details'
(CNSNews.com) - A nurse told Democrat Joe Biden Thursday night she knows people who refuse to look for jobs because they're making more money by collecting enhanced unemployment benefits. "What is your plan to get Americans back to work and off the government payroll?" she asked Biden at a CNN-hosted town hall:
Biden told her he wouldn't "bore" her with "the details" of his plan, but he said he'd send her "the material." Then he talked about people in financial distress and COVID, which had nothing to do the nurse's question.
Here is his full response to the question about getting Americans back to work:
First of all, I have a plan to deal with the need for additional health care workers and pay them a wage that is a living wage that's real. So they don’t have to live hand to mouth. For real.
I won't bore you with the details, but I’ll -- if I get your name, we'll send you the material, number one.
Number two, the fact is, there are 20 million people right now, many of them in Scranton and Wilkes Barre and around the region, who in fact are worried whether they’ll be able pay their mortgage payment next month. Whether they’re going to lose their house. There are tens of thousands of people who are going to lose their apartments and be out in the streets.
The president has postponed the ability -- the requirement they have to pay, but guess what? Next quarter, they have to make up for whatever they got this quarter in terms of free rent, quote unquote, not having to pay. And so it makes no sense to do what the president is doing. People can't make that up.
We should -- as long as the COVID is going on at the rampant rate it is, and by the way, you know better than I do, we're talking about roughly 36,000 new cases a day and close to a thousand cases a day, average.
You know, and here we are on -- yesterday 1,200 deaths in the United States. All of Canada had nine. Last Friday, we had a thousand deaths. All of Canada had zero deaths. This president is doing it all wrong. We need to make a fundamental change in the way we're moving.
And by the way, if you're a nurse, you're taking a shot, you're taking a chance. You really are. And your husband -- you know, growing up in Scranton and Claymont, Delaware, I grew up and there were three things all my friends became -- a cop, a firefighter or a priest. I wasn't qualified for any of them.
But all kidding aside, they deserve, when they pin on that shield in the morning, they deserve to be able to go home at night, safely, period. There's no exceptions.
Notably, host Anderson Cooper did not steer Biden back to the nurse's question. Instead, he called on another member of the audience.
Biden did something similar with the next questioner, who asked Biden about his plan to "stand up for us health care workers."
Biden talked about raising the minimum wage, explained why he views the race as "a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue," then told the man also named Joe: " So, again, I won't take the time now, but Joe, if you -- if I can get your address, let me get to you. Go to JoeBiden.com and you'll see what I talk about needing to be done with regard to health care workers."
“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE
Biden: My Immigration Policy Will Protect Foreign Families
The U.S. government will change its deportation policy to help keep foreign families together, Democratic candidate Joe Biden promised the Spanish-language Telemundo TV network.
“There are still thousands of people who are being separated from their families,” Biden told Telemundo viewers September 15:
There are going to be no deportations in the first hundred days of my [presidency]. Freeze deportations for the first hundred days and the only people [who] will be deported are people who committed a felony while here [in the United States].
Biden repeatedly emphasized that his presidency would focus on the needs of foreign families, saying:
I can only imagine what it’s like to see someone in your family deported. I can only imagine it. To me, it’s all about family — beginning, middle, and end. It’s about family.
It’s not going to happen in my administration, simply not going to happen. We’re gonna abide by the law, we’re going to abide by the law. We’re not going to continue this, this relentless assault on ‘They’re coming up across the border! They’re going to invade us! These are all people bad people!’ I mean, it’s just terrible what’s happening. The idea you can’t even seek asylum on American soil? Can’t even seek asylum in American soil? When did that happen? Trump. It’s wrong,
But “a good immigration system would be good for American families,” not just for migrants’ families, countered Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers.
When you have a husband and a wife, working to pay a mortgage and to keep their kids in a good school district, in a good immigration policy, it would get easier and easier to do that.
But in the current state, what’s happening is that one of the spouse’s jobs is about to be outsourced and offshored to India. They’re going to lose their home. Their kids will need to change school. And they will need to seriously downsize, downscale their lives, going from the middle-class to lower middle class, with ever-decreasing opportunities available to them.
Biden’s comments were apparently anchored to his view of the United States primarily as a new home for foreign migrants, not as a home for Americans and their children.
“We’re a nation of immigrants,” Biden said. “We built this country because of the courage it took for people to get up on a boat … leave everything they know for a better opportunity. ”
Biden is pushing the “Nation of Immigrants” claim because he and other neoliberals “believe in the free movement of people and capital for the sole purpose of maximizing profits,” responded Lynn, adding:
They know nothing else. His family has not witnessed the carnage created by these policies, and they never will. They’ve been able to secure enough wealth from this system — the system that threw working men and women overboard 30 years ago. They have no idea what the average American goes through. They have no idea of the insecurity that the average Americans face when they look at the job market.
Biden’s 2020 plan includes several proposals to expand the inflow of foreign workers and consumers into the United States. He promises to let mayors import foreign workers for local jobs, let companies import more visa workers for college jobs, expand the inflow of chain-migration migrants, suspend immigration enforcement against illegals, dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees, and also provide more healthcare and other aid to arriving migrants.
The huge inflow of migrants will lower Americans’ wages, transfer more wages to investors, shift jobs from the interior states to the coasts, reduce investment in wealth-generating technology, and exacerbate the chaotic diversity that has damaged U.S. society and politics.
In contrast, President Donald Trump says he is pushing a “Pro-American Immigration” policy.
2019 was such a good year for wage earners that per-household income rose by almost 7%, even as wages rose by just a little over 2%.
That won't happen again if businesses and progressives get to import even more workers. https://t.co/gHlh42iUcd— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) September 16, 2020
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