The betrayals of the UAW and the rise of right-wing militias in Michigan
Less than a week after the arrest of 13 men for plotting to kidnap and kill the Michigan governor and incite civil war on the eve of the US presidential elections, the matter has largely been swept under the rug by the news media and the Democratic Party.
The Democrats, terrified of anything that will provoke a social movement from below, are covering up the broader significance of the plot and its connection to the political strategy of the Trump administration to stoke fascistic violence in the runup to the elections. In this they are assisted by the AFL-CIO labor federation and various trade unions, which are doing nothing to alert, let alone mobilize, workers who would be the main targets of Trump’s efforts to overthrow the US Constitution and impose a presidential dictatorship.
The Teamsters, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the majority of unions have remained silent on the Michigan coup plot. The AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers (UAW) have issued perfunctory press releases. Echoing the line of the Democrats, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka declared that the threat of the far right could be countered by “voting for hope and unity” and electing “Biden to the White House and the haters back to irrelevance.”
UAW President Rory Gamble issued a short statement noting that what was uncovered was a “very real plot to destabilize the government in Michigan and to stoke extremist civil war in our country.” He did not propose that workers do anything about it, however, and focused his comment largely on thanking the FBI and “our men and women in blue” for having “saved our democracy.”
Historically, the fight against the influence of the far right has always been centered on the struggle of the labor movement to unite workers as a class against the fascist demagogues and their big business financiers, who try to weaken and divide workers with their anti-Semitic, racist and nationalist agitation. The UAW and other industrial unions were established in the 1930s through the struggle of socialist-minded workers to develop class consciousness and politically inoculate workers against the fascist poison peddled by the likes of Father Coughlin in Michigan and the Nazi-supporter Henry Ford.
But what was left of the “labor movement” in the United States died long ago. The UAW, in particular, is nothing more than a corporatist syndicate, many of whose executives have been indicted for accepting bribes from the companies and stealing workers’ dues money. The beginning of the end was the political subordination of the unions to the Democratic Party and through the Democrats to the capitalist system. This included the anticommunist purges of the late 1940s and 1950s, led by UAW President Walter Reuther, and the embrace of American imperialism, which was at the heart of the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955.
By the 1980s, with the American ruling class shifting to a policy of class war in response to the loss of its dominant world position, the UAW and other unions adopted the corporatist outlook of labor-management partnership and collaborated in the defeat of strikes, wage-cutting, and the shutdown of factories and massive job losses. This went hand in hand with the promotion of “Buy American” chauvinism and the racist scapegoating of workers in Japan and other countries for “stealing American jobs.”
It is not an apology for the fascistic elements involved in the Michigan coup plot to note that the economic devastation in that state and other industrial centers in the United States, overseen by the unions, has created the conditions for the extreme right to recruit and find support.
The profiles of the 13 coup plotters reveal that several were small businessmen, ex-soldiers or lower-paid employees living in small towns and suburban areas outside economically ravaged cities. Most faced significant economic and social distress, including the loss of employment and income and pressure to pay unpaid taxes.
The militia movement in Michigan got started in the 1990s as deindustrialization, carried out with the collusion of the UAW, led to the shutdown of hundreds of factories in cities like Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, Grand Rapids and other areas. Between 1999 and 2009, another 460,000 manufacturing jobs were wiped out in Michigan, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median wage for a Michigan factory worker today is $16.03 an hour, a third less than the $24.00 an hour in inflation-adjusted dollars such a worker earned in 1972.
Last year, Michigan incomes finally topped their pre-Great Recession levels after nearly 12 years, before the pandemic hit, driving them down again. Nearly 26 percent of the state’s residents reported that eviction or foreclosure in the next two months is either very likely or somewhat likely, according to a weekly US Census Bureau survey in late August.
The activities of militia groups in Michigan, Pennsylvania and other hard-hit industrial states tapered off after the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which killed 168 people, including 19 children. Before the bombing, Timothy McVeigh, who was the son of a longtime UAW member in economically depressed western New York, attended early meetings of the Michigan Militia, one of the predecessors of the Wolverine Watchmen, which planned to kill Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
The militias, however, were given new life by the economic devastation wrought under the eight years of the Obama administration, which oversaw the continued destruction of workers’ jobs and living standards, while engineering the 2008-09 Wall Street bailout.
Trump's victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016 was not the product of “racism” of white workers, as the Hillary Clinton campaign and other apologists of the Democratic Party claimed. Instead, it was a shift by a section of working-class voters, including many who had voted for Obama, to Trump or third parties, leading to the defeat of Clinton, who made no secret of her contempt for the working class.
AFL-CIO President Trumka’s claims that the danger of fascist violence will miraculously disappear if Biden manages to get into the White House are patently false. On the contrary, if Biden wins the election and is helped into office by sections of the military, as the Democrats hope, he will be committed to a program of ruthless austerity to pay for the $4 trillion CARES Act bailout and more aggressive militarism. This will only create conditions for the growth of the far right.
Having created the conditions for the rise of the far right through their corporatist and nationalist policies and their subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party, the unions are doing nothing to mobilize workers against the homicidal policy of the ruling elite in response to the pandemic. The struggles by workers that have erupted—including the walkouts by autoworkers in March during the first peak of the pandemic—were organized independently of and in opposition to these anti-working class organizations.
The fascistic groups behind the Michigan plot do not yet have a mass following. However, the economic havoc caused by the pandemic—mass unemployment, evictions, the bankruptcy and closure of small business and the wiping out of savings—can fuel the growth of the far right if it is not countered with a movement of the working class, mobilizing behind it broader sections of the middle class.
This requires the formation of independent rank-and-file factory, workplace and neighborhood committees to unify workers of all races and ethnic backgrounds in defense of jobs, health care, safety and social and democratic rights.
Measures to combat the pandemic must be combined with policies to secure the livelihoods and interests of all those affected by it. This can only be done through a struggle against capitalism and a radical redistribution of wealth from the billionaires who hoard it to workers who produce it.
What has taken place in Michigan is a warning. Whatever happens in the election, the ruling class is moving toward authoritarian and dictatorial forms of rule. The struggle against the danger of fascism must be waged through the organization of the working class in a political movement against capitalism and for socialism.
HOW MANY MORE ILLEGALS BEFORE THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS
DESTROYED MIDDLE AMERICA ALL TOGETHER???
Study finds 90
percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four decades of
increasing income inequality
HAVE YOU EVER WITNESSED A BANKSTER-OWNED
DEMOCRAT POL DOING SOMETHING FOR MIDDLE AMERICA???
Joe
Biden Promises Welcome for Venezuelan, Cuban Migrants
ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
Democratic candidate Joe Biden is offering a green light to
migrants who want to flee from Cuba and Venezuela.
“The Venezuelan people need our support to recover their
democracy and rebuild their country,” Biden told a political event in Florida
on October 7. “That’s why I would immediately grant Temporary Protected
Status (TPS) to Venezuelans” in the United States, he said.
The TPS status allows foreigners to live and work in the United
States, and to get welfare and access to K-12 schools. Since 2017, President
Donald Trump has blocked TPS for Venezuelans, amid campaigns by Florida business groups and D.C.-based
progressives. Trump has also worked to shrink TPS populations created by prior
presidents.
Biden continued:
There are almost 10,000 Cubans languishing in tent camps along
the Mexican border because of the administration’s anti-immigration agenda.
That’s the administration actively separating Cuban families by not processing
visas [and] through restrictions on family visits and remittances. I think we
have to reverse that.
If implemented, Biden’s welcome policy “will set off a new
exodus from those countries as people try to take advantage of the opportunity
to stay in the United States,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the
Center for Immigration Studies.
Biden’s plan would hurt Americans, she said. “What scholars
found specifically when they looked at the [1980] impact of Cubans in South
Florida is that the wages of American workers who were competing for unskilled
or less skilled jobs went down significantly … The usual suspects will benefit
— the employers who will have a labor surplus and will get away with paying low wages, [and]
the slumlords who can fill
up their substandard affordable housing.”
The impact of low wages and surplus labor on Floridians was
sketched in a June 2020 article in the Washington Post:
KISSIMMEE, FLA. — The pandemic had forced them from their home.
Then they had run out of money for a motel. That left the car, which is where
Sergine Lucien, Dave Marecheau and their two children were one recent night,
parked in a lot that was tucked behind a row of empty storefronts.
Even when the economy was booming, Dave and Sergine had lived in
a state of near homelessness, shuttling between seedy motels that had become a
shelter of last resort for thousands in the Orlando area. Last year, after six
years of the motel life, they had saved enough to finally make it out. They
bought an RV and rented a spot in a quiet and clean mobile home community.
Sergine promised the kids they would never go back.
Now all that was gone. In theory, they qualified for a $3,400
federal stimulus check, but they had no bank account or address to collect it.
In theory, Dave was entitled to unemployment, but as of May only about 43
percent of the state’s 1.1 million claims had been paid.
“I would immediately grant temporary
protected status to Venezuelans as President." 🇻
— @JoeBiden🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/4vGTctYTLX
— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) October 7, 2020
“We have to be extremely prudent in offering any kind of
temporary humanitarian protection,” Vaughan told Breitbart News.
Politicians ignore the emotional incentive for migrants to get
into the United States, Vaughan said. “For the privileged, it might be a
dollars-and-cents calculation. But for others, it’s more than that — it’s an
opportunity to live freely with the opportunity to have a decent quality of
life [and] to put their children on a trajectory towards prosperity.”
TPS migrants are rewarded for being in the United States, she
said. “They are allowed to immediately access welfare programs, as happened
with the Cubans [in 1980 and 1994] and Haitians [in 2010] — unlike other asylum
seekers or green card admission – at an enormous cost.”
Even apparently small changes in border rules can precipitate
floods of migrants, she said. The Central American migration began as “a
trickle at first [in 2010], and quickly turned into a flood because the
smuggler started to take advantage and fed this idea of coming here with kids,
or sending your kids.”
The Central American migration was largely stopped in 2020 — but
only because President Donald Trump and his deputies fought numerous
high-profile battles with the agencies, various pro-migration groups, the
establishment media, and many judges to impose a set of migration curbs.
Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular restrictions
on immigration and visa workers.
But Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let
companies import more visa
workers, to let mayors import temporary
workers, to accelerate the inflow of
chain-migration migrants, to suspend immigration enforcement against illegal
aliens, and to dramatically increase the inflow of poor refugees.
“The number of [foreign] people who could potentially benefit
[from Biden’s welcome] is limited only by the tolerance of our government,”
Vaughan said. But Biden had his progressive supporters “live insulated
from the effects of it, whether it is their schools, their job markets, or
their neighborhoods … they live in a bubble.”
Biden’s allies “disregard the effects of their actions on
regular Americans, which means it’s selfish elitism.” Like the characters in
the 1925 novel, The Great
Gatsby, she said, “they use working people for their own sexual and
emotional gratification and cast them aside, caring nothing for the effects on
people’s lives.”
Opposition to refugees is bigotry, sneers
WashPo columnist.
If @crampell stepped outside the country club,
she'd see cheap labor hurts Americans' income, society, productivity &
competitiveness.
But snobs praise diversity to reject solidarity w/ citizens.https://t.co/WdcYgwNU0R
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) October 7, 2
Study finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more
without last four decades of increasing income inequality
25 September
2020
A new study from the RAND Corporation, “Trends in Income From
1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards, provides new
documentation of the profound restructuring of class relations in America over
the last 40 years.
The study, which looks at changes in
pre-tax family income from 1947 to 2018, divided into quintiles of the American
population, concludes that the bottom 90 percent of the population would, on
average, make 67 percent more in income—every year (!)—had shifts in income
inequality not occurred the last four decades.
In other words, any family that made less than $184,292 (the
90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would be, on average, making 67 percent
more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5 trillion of collective lost income
for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.
Furthermore, the study concludes, that had more equitable growth
continued after 1975 (a date they use as a shifting point), the bottom 90
percent of American households would have earned a total of $47 trillion more
in income.
Given that there were about 115 million households in the bottom
90 percent of the US in 2018 population (out of a total of 127.59 million in
2018), that would mean that each of these households would, on average, be
$408,696 richer today with this lost income.
To reach these conclusions, the authors break down historical
real, pre-tax, income into different quintiles of the population (bottom fifth,
second fifth, third fifth, fourth fifth, highest fifth). Looking at the period
between 1947 and 2018, they divide the years based on business cycles (booms
and busts of the economy).
Growth in Annualized Real Family Pre-tax, Pre-Transfer Income by
Quantile from RAND, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018,” by C. Price and K.
Edwards.
Their data quantitatively expresses the restructuring of class
relations that began at the end of the post-WWII boom. Facing intensified
economic crisis, automation, and global competition, the US ruling class
undertook an aggressive campaign of deindustrialization, slashing wages and
clawing back benefits won in the previous period by explosive struggles of the
working class, while simultaneously funneling money to financial markets,
expanding the wealth and income of both the upper and upper-middle class.
As the data shows, while the bottom 40 percent of American
households made significant percentile increases to their income, relative to
the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947 and 1968, in the 40 years from
1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In 1980-2000, the bottom 40
percent of the population experienced a net income gain significantly below
that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because these are percentile
increases, the absolute differences between the gains of the rich versus the
poor is far larger.
Furthermore, not included in this data is wealth. In the last 40
years, and especially the last 10 to 20 years, the stock market has become the
principal means through which the top 10 percent of the population has piled up
historic levels of wealth.
Significantly, the data from 2001 to 2018 shows a sharp slowdown
in income gains for all sections of American society as per capita GDP growth slowed
and US capitalism experienced a historic decline. However, while the income of the top 5
percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent between 2008
and 2018, the wealth of
the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data
from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the
population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008,
just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the
beginning of 2018.
By using the data, the authors come up with a set of
counterfactual incomes based on what would be the different income brackets in
2018 without a shift in income distribution. The top 1 percent, instead of
making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The 25th percentile, instead
of making $33,000 would make $61,000.
Data source: RAND; Graphics by Marry Traverse for Civic
Ventures; as published in TIME Magazine
The authors of the study also make several other important
observations by breaking down their data on the basis of location, education,
and race.
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.
However, the Democratic Party proposal to increase food stamp
benefits by 15 percent is being considered as a temporary measure “for the duration
of the economic crisis,” according to the New York Times. In any case, the increase is still
insufficient to provide the poor what they need to adequately feed their
families, with the average monthly benefit of $239 going up by $36 to $274
under the Democrats’ proposal.
Meanwhile, with tens of millions who have lost their jobs during
the pandemic unable to collect unemployment benefits due to delays and backlogs
in government systems that are ill-equipped to handle the increase in applications,
the same kind of bureaucratic mismanagement is certainly to be expected in the
present wave of SNAP assistance applications.
Along with every social program over the past four decades,
federal food stamp assistance has been attacked by Democratic and Republican
administrations alike as “welfare” that is undeserved by those receiving it.
Before the pandemic, President Trump boasted that he forced 7 million people
off of food stamps since taking office and the Congressional Republicans were
working on a plan to further reduce eligibility and expand work requirements to
qualify for the benefit.
The return of mass hunger in America is an inevitable product of
the response of the US government and ruling establishment to the pandemic,
which has been a mixture of utter indifference to the suffering caused by the
health crisis and outright cruelty toward the working class, poor and elderly
who have been attacked by COVID-19 infection and death as well as the
deprivation associated with the economic crisis.
Clearly, the staggering magnitude of the impact of the pandemic
on families has been revealed by the findings of The Hamilton Project food
insecurity study. As dire circumstances confronting millions of people persist
and deepen, the crisis is pointing directly to social convulsions that have not
been seen in the US since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/25/ineq-s25.html
Study
finds 90 percent of Americans would make 67 percent more without last four
decades of increasing income inequality
Gabriel
Black
25 September 2020
·
·
·
·
·
A new study from the RAND Corporation, “Trends
in Income From 1975 to 2018,” written by Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards,
provides new documentation of the profound restructuring of class relations in
America over the last 40 years.
The study, which looks at changes in pre-tax family
income from 1947 to 2018, divided into quintiles of the American population,
concludes that the bottom 90 percent of the population would, on average, make
67 percent more in income—every year (!)—had shifts in income inequality not
occurred the last four decades.
In other words, any family that made less than
$184,292 (the 90th percentile income bracket) in 2018 would be, on average,
making 67 percent more. This amounts to a total sum of $2.5 trillion of
collective lost income for the bottom 90 percent, just in 2018.
Furthermore, the study concludes, that had more
equitable growth continued after 1975 (a date they use as a shifting point),
the bottom 90 percent of American households would have earned a total of $47
trillion more in income.
Given that there were about 115 million
households in the bottom 90 percent of the US in 2018 population (out of a
total of 127.59 million in 2018), that would mean that each of these households
would, on average, be $408,696 richer today with this lost income.
To reach these conclusions, the authors break
down historical real, pre-tax, income into different quintiles of the
population (bottom fifth, second fifth, third fifth, fourth fifth, highest
fifth). Looking at the period between 1947 and 2018, they divide the years
based on business cycles (booms and busts of the economy).
Growth in Annualized Real
Family Pre-tax, Pre-Transfer Income by Quantile from RAND, “Trends in Income
From 1975 to 2018,” by C. Price and K. Edwards.
Their data quantitatively expresses the
restructuring of class relations that began at the end of the post-WWII boom.
Facing intensified economic crisis, automation, and global competition, the US
ruling class undertook an aggressive campaign of deindustrialization, slashing
wages and clawing back benefits won in the previous period by explosive
struggles of the working class, while simultaneously funneling money to
financial markets, expanding the wealth and income of both the upper and
upper-middle class.
As the data shows, while the bottom 40 percent
of American households made significant percentile increases to their income,
relative to the top 5 percent, for the 20 years between 1947 and 1968, in the
40 years from 1980 to the present, this trend was reversed. In 1980-2000, the
bottom 40 percent of the population experienced a net income gain significantly
below that of the top 5 percent. It must be noted that because these are
percentile increases, the absolute differences between the gains of the rich
versus the poor is far larger.
Furthermore, not included in this data is
wealth. In the last 40 years, and especially the last 10 to 20 years, the stock
market has become the principal means through which the top 10 percent of the
population has piled up historic levels of wealth.
Significantly, the data from 2001 to 2018 shows
a sharp slowdown in income gains for all sections of American society as per
capita GDP growth slowed and US capitalism experienced a historic decline.
However, while the income of
the top 5 percent of the population may have only grown by about 2 percent
between 2008 and 2018, the wealth of
the top percentiles of the population exploded. For example, according to data
from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the wealth of the top 1 percent of the
population increased from almost $20 trillion in the first quarter of 2008,
just before the worst of the financial crisis, to almost $33 trillion at the
beginning of 2018.
By using the data, the authors come up with a
set of counterfactual incomes based on what would be the different income
brackets in 2018 without a shift in income distribution. The top 1 percent,
instead of making on average $1,384,000 would make $630,000. The 25th percentile,
instead of making $33,000 would make $61,000.
Data source: RAND; Graphics by
Marry Traverse for Civic Ventures; as published in TIME Magazine
The authors of the study also make several
other important observations by breaking down their data on the basis of
location, education, and race.
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.
However, the Democratic Party proposal to
increase food stamp benefits by 15 percent is being considered as a temporary
measure “for the duration of the economic crisis,” according to the New York Times. In any case,
the increase is still insufficient to provide the poor what they need to
adequately feed their families, with the average monthly benefit of $239 going
up by $36 to $274 under the Democrats’ proposal.
Meanwhile, with tens of millions who have lost
their jobs during the pandemic unable to collect unemployment benefits due to
delays and backlogs in government systems that are ill-equipped to handle the
increase in applications, the same kind of bureaucratic mismanagement is
certainly to be expected in the present wave of SNAP assistance applications.
Along with every social program over the past
four decades, federal food stamp assistance has been attacked by Democratic and
Republican administrations alike as “welfare” that is undeserved by those
receiving it. Before the pandemic, President Trump boasted that he forced 7
million people off of food stamps since taking office and the Congressional
Republicans were working on a plan to further reduce eligibility and expand
work requirements to qualify for the benefit.
The return of mass hunger in America is an
inevitable product of the response of the US government and ruling
establishment to the pandemic, which has been a mixture of utter indifference
to the suffering caused by the health crisis and outright cruelty toward the
working class, poor and elderly who have been attacked by COVID-19 infection
and death as well as the deprivation associated with the economic crisis.
Clearly, the staggering magnitude of the impact
of the pandemic on families has been revealed by the findings of The Hamilton
Project food insecurity study. As dire circumstances confronting millions of
people persist and deepen, the crisis is pointing directly to social
convulsions that have not been seen in the US since the Great Depression of the
1930s.
No comments:
Post a Comment