AMERICA GOES HUNGRY - WALL STREET LOOTS AND THE RICH GET MUCH, MUCH RICHER!

 The release of the Forbes 400 billionaire report

gives a sense of this reality. The richest 400 

individuals (0.00012 percent of the population) 

now possess more than $3 trillion.

VIDEO: Protesters March to Jeff Bezos’ Mansion to Demand Higher Wages, Coronavirus Protections

AMY FURR

5 Oct 202058

2:28

Activists marched to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ California mansion Sunday to protest the company’s working conditions during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Protesters rallied at Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills, then marched to the gates of Bezos’ home, carrying signs and chanting ‘Tax Bezos,'” according to the Los Angeles Times.

A group called the Congress of Essential Workers (T.C.O.E.W.) sponsored the event that was led by its founder, Chris Smalls, a former Amazon warehouse manager.

The organizer’s list of demands included that the company provide employees with adequate protective equipment, cleaning supplies, and increase wages by $2 an hour for hazard pay, the Times article read.

Smalls was fired from Amazon in March “shortly after he helped organize a work stoppage at the company’s warehouse to protest what he called a lack of protective gear and hazard pay for employees,” according to Patch.com.

Amazon said it fired him for “violating social distancing guidelines and putting the safety of others at risk,” the outlet stated.

T.C.O.E.W. dubbed Sunday’s protest The Wrong Amazon Is Burning! and described it as a “solidarity march to demand labor + climate justice,” according to its Twitter page.

The group called itself, “A secure, collaborative network of essential workers and allies fighting for the elimination of billionaires, wealth redistribution, and protecting the working class from exploitative CEOs like Jeff Bezos.”

Nearly 20,000 Amazon workers in the United States have contracted the coronavirus since March, Breitbart News reported October 2:

Amazon has faced pressure from lawmakers and labor groups to release data on coronavirus infections among its workforce following several reports of unsafe working conditions. The company implemented regular temperature checks and began offering workers basic PPE following pressure from both the Senate and House of Representatives.

Andrew Lewis of the North Westwood Neighborhood Council was one of about 100 people who attended the protest on Sunday.

“Amazon is far and beyond the wealthiest corporation on the planet,” he told the Times, adding, “They have the resources to keep their employees safe and healthy, and actively choose not to.”

Over 40 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under are now food insecure in the US

Kevin Reed

7 May 2020

A blog post on the website of The Hamilton Project has revealed that hunger in the US has expanded to historically unprecedented proportions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among households with young children.

Reporting on evidence from two surveys, The Hamilton Project shows that by the end of April 2020, more than 20 percent of all US households and over 40 percent of mothers with children under the age of 13 were experiencing food insecurity. These figures are between two and five times greater than they were in 2018, when food insecurity data was last collected.

Households and children in the surveys are considered food insecure if a respondent “indicates the following statements were often or sometime true”:

• The food we bought just didn’t last and we didn’t have enough money to get more.
  
  
• The children in my household were not eating enough because we just couldn’t afford enough food.

Lauren Bauer, a fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution who specializes in social and safety net policies, wrote in her blog post on Wednesday, “Rates of food insecurity observed in April 2020 are also meaningfully higher than at any point for which there is comparable data” from 2001 to 2018.

A woman clutches a child while waiting with hundreds of people line up for food donations, given to those impacted by the COVID-19 virus outbreak, in Chelsea, Mass., Tuesday, April 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Further placing the present ability of families to put food on the table in historical context, Bauer writes, “Looking over time, particularly to the relatively small increase in child food insecurity during the Great Recession, it is clear that young children are experiencing food insecurity to an extent unprecedented in modern times.”

Bauer explains that the surveys conducted their own national sampling of mothers in late April by asking the same questions used by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in previous food insecurity studies.

Significantly, Bauer also explains that the USDA aggregates a battery of questions on access to food from the Current Population Survey in 2018. If the nearly two-to-one ratio between the percent of mothers with children under the age of 12 who had food insecure children in their household and the percent of families with children who were not eating enough because they couldn’t afford enough food were maintained today, the “17.4 percent [of] children not eating enough would translate into more than a third of children experiencing food insecurity.”

The Hamilton Project (THP) is a Democratic Party economic policy think-tank associated with the Brookings Institution. Launched in 2006, the THP featured then-Senator Barack Obama as a speaker at its founding event, who called the organization “the sort of breath of fresh air that I think this town needs.”

The publication of the US hunger data is part of an initiative by THP to push for increases in government spending on national food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

As pandemic death toll approaches 200,000, American oligarchs celebrate their wealth

 

12 September 2020

The United States is passing through a historic social, economic and political crisis. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic is nearing 200,000 and could double by the end of the year. Democratic forms of rule are breaking down, with the Trump administration intensifying its open incitement of fascistic violence. Tens of millions are unemployed and face impoverishment and homelessness. Wildfires are burning out of control on the US West Coast.

It is impossible to understand any of these processes outside of the massive levels of social inequality. The United States is an oligarchy, with a concentration of wealth that is historically unprecedented.

The release of the Forbes 400 billionaire report

gives a sense of this reality. The richest 400 

individuals (0.00012 percent of the population) 

now possess more than $3 trillion.

The report declares: “Pandemic be damned: America’s 400 richest are worth a record $3.2 trillion, up $240 billion from a year ago, aided by a stock market that has defied the virus.” The surge in the stock market, underwritten by the multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act passed in March, has filled the already overflowing coffers of the super-rich, who now hold claim to the equivalent of 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Even the numbers provided by Forbes, based 

on figures from July 24, are a major 

underestimation of the current reality. Since 

that time, the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff 

Bezos, the world’s richest person, has shot up 

to more than $200 billion, while the wealth of 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has grown to over $100 

billion. Bezos’s holdings are three million 

times greater than the annual income of the 

typical American household.

The staggering level of inequality reflected in the Forbes list is the central feature of American society, which is defined by the transfer of obscene and ever larger amounts of wealth from the working class into the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy through tax cuts, bailouts, the slashing of wages and the clawing back of pensions and other benefits won by workers in the struggles of the 20th century.

The latest rise in the billionaires’ wealth is not based on any exertion of labor but on the inflation of the stock market, with trillions of dollars in debt from the Federal Reserve and Congress which will be paid off the backs of the working class. Everything has been subordinated to ensuring that the Dow Jones and S&P 500 rise to new heights.

It would take the median American, who earns $33,000 per year, 97 million years to earn as much as is controlled by the wealthiest Americans. Consider what $3.2 trillion could pay for in a year:

·         In the 2016-17 school year, $739 billion was spent on public elementary and secondary schools, providing education for 50.8 million students and employing 3.2 million teachers and another 3.2 million school employees.

·         The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal government will spend $1.3 trillion on health care programs this year.

·         Diabetes cost the US economy $327 billion in 2017, with insulin accounting for $40 billion of this total. The average cost of insulin, critical for the survival of diabetes patients, is up to $6,000 per year and continues to rise.

·         According to the US Department of Agriculture, $800 billion was spent by Americans on food and beverages for consumption at home in 2019. The federal government provided $60 billion of this in food stamps for the poorest and most vulnerable to gain access to essential nutrition.

·         The 2018 fire season cost $24 billion, driven by record devastation including the destruction of the city of Paradise, California. All told, extreme weather and climate disasters that year cost $91 billion.

Added up, the wealth of just 400 people could pay for an entire year of public education, health care, nutrition and disaster relief for millions of Americans. The UN recently reported that 132 million more people will go hungry worldwide this year due to the pandemic, driving the number of undernourished close to 1 billion.

Despite the burning need to save millions from malnourishment and starvation, the World Food Program faces a shortage of $5 billion in its effort to deliver food to those in need. The wealth of the 400 richest people in the US is more than 600 times this amount.

Every element of politics is subordinated to the interests of this social layer. It is for this reason that the danger of the pandemic was initially covered up, the bailout of Wall Street was organized and the back-to-work and back-to-school campaigns were implemented.

The systematic looting of society left the country vulnerable to such an outbreak. The subordination of health care to the predatory interests of for-profit health care companies and insurance giants turned nursing homes for the elderly into death chambers and left nurses and doctors without the necessary personal protective equipment and other medical equipment—such as ventilators—needed to treat patients.

The drive of the Trump administration to fascism and the cultivation of extreme right cannot be understood except in relation to the class interests of the oligarchy, representing that faction of the ruling class which seeks to smash outright any sign of opposition from the working class. On the other side of the coin, the Democrats represent that faction that has sought to use the politics of race and identity to smother the class struggle while fighting for access to positions and greater wealth.

As only the latest example, the racially fixated New York Times published its “Faces of Power” list this week, noting that too many people in “influential positions” are white. What difference would it make if everyone one of them was black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American? In fact, the report found that a majority of police chiefs in the largest cities are black or Hispanic. Cold comfort for the young black men who are disproportionately killed by police.

The obsession by upper-middle class academics and journalists on race and gender is a distraction from the grotesque levels of wealth that define social relations in American society. This form of politics has nothing to do with the interests of the working class. Instead, it seeks to harness anger over racism and social inequality to advance the interests of a small layer of minorities in the next 9 percent who want a larger piece of the pie hoarded by the top 1 percent.

At every point, science, reason and human solidarity collide with the economic interests of the current rulers of society—the oligarchs, the parasitic masters of finance capital. It is impossible to defend democratic rights or save lives without confronting this issue.

Mass problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly deadly fires fueled by climate change, and global hunger require mass solutions. The problems of mankind cannot be resolved without breaking the stranglehold of the capitalist oligarchy in every country. The wealth must be expropriated and directed toward meeting social needs. The large corporations and banks transformed by the working class into democratically controlled institutions oriented to meeting human need and not private profit.

The social inequality that characterizes capitalist society—and all the policies that flow from it—is fueling an immense growth of social anger and working class struggle. These struggles must be organized and united on the basis of a conscious, revolutionary and socialist program.