Tom Cotton: Joe Biden
Avoids Wage-Raise Policy
23 Oct 2020154
3:42
Joe Biden’s open-borders migration policy ignores the obvious
way for the government to help Americans get wage raises, Sen. Tom Cotton,
R-Ark., told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with
host Alex Marlow.
“The simple way to help workers to get pay raises is to mandate
the use of the E-Verify system,” Cotton said in the October 23 interview,
adding:
You’re not going to impose a wage
mandate on anyone. You just have to tell every company in this nation that they
will use the E-Verify system to verify the legal eligibility for applicant
employees to work. That will automatically help raise wages for American
workers, not for illegal aliens.
The E-Verify system allows hiring
companies to quickly and easily verify job applicants’ legality, at no cost to
the employer.
But instead of raising wages by the
use of E-verify, Biden is promising to flood Americans’ labor market by
legalizing the nation’s semi-hidden population of illegal immigrant workers,
Cotton said.:
Joe Biden is saying, “I’m gonna send
an amnesty bill to the Congress in my first hundred days without asking
anything in return, without trying to secure our border, without enforcing
immigration rules at workplaces against unscrupulous employers, without
cracking down on visa fraud.”
Biden is also threatening to import
additional white-collar and blue-collar workers, Cotton said:
He’s also talking about importing
millions and millions of new workers, over and above the 15 million illegal
aliens here who are going to get amnesty, and therefore the right to work. He
is going to import millions of workers at a time when we have more than 10
million Americans who are still out of work because of the Wuhan coronavirus.
So Joe Biden is going to bring in millions of new foreigners to compete with
those Americans who are out of work at a time when we should be putting
American workers first in line for American jobs. It just goes to show how
radicalized the Democrats have become on immigration.
Trump’s 2020
plan offers broadly popular —
but quite
limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers.
In many speeches, for example, Trump ignores the
economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration
on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare,
even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to
Americans.
Joe 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 end
migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless
they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor
refugees to at least
125,000 per year.
Open-ended
legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because
migrants’ arrival helps to transfer
wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration
moves money from employees to employers, from
families to investors, from young
to old, from homebuyers to
real estate investors, and from
the central states to the coastal states.
Migration
also allows investors and
CEOs to skimp on labor-saving
technology, sideline U.S.
minorities, ignore disabled
people, exploit stoop
labor in the fields, short-change
labor in the cities, impose tight
control on American professionals, centralize technological
innovation, undermine labor rights, and get
many left-wing
reporters to cheerlead for Wall
Street’s priorities.
So Trump's economy grew and wages rose amid a decline in migration.
Inconceivable! … responds the chorus from the Chamber, Cato, the Koch's
network, Brookings, Silicon Valley, Wall St. WashPo, NYT, etc. https://t.co/I0I1Lhs0v0
— Neil Munro
(@NeilMunroDC) October 23,
2020
Tom Cotton: Joe Biden
Avoids Wage-Raise Policy
23 Oct 2020154
3:42
Joe Biden’s open-borders migration policy ignores the obvious
way for the government to help Americans get wage raises, Sen. Tom Cotton,
R-Ark., told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with
host Alex Marlow.
“The simple way to help workers to get pay raises is to mandate
the use of the E-Verify system,” Cotton said in the October 23 interview,
adding:
You’re not going to impose a wage mandate on anyone. You just
have to tell every company in this nation that they will use the E-Verify
system to verify the legal eligibility for applicant employees to work. That
will automatically help raise wages for American workers, not for illegal aliens.
The E-Verify system allows hiring companies to quickly and
easily verify job applicants’ legality, at no cost to the employer.
But instead of raising wages by the use of E-verify, Biden is
promising to flood Americans’ labor market by legalizing the nation’s
semi-hidden population of illegal immigrant workers, Cotton said.:
Joe Biden is saying, “I’m gonna send an amnesty bill to the
Congress in my first hundred days without asking anything in return, without
trying to secure our border, without enforcing immigration rules at workplaces
against unscrupulous employers, without cracking down on visa fraud.”
Biden is also threatening to import additional white-collar and
blue-collar workers, Cotton said:
He’s also talking about importing millions and millions of new
workers, over and above the 15 million illegal aliens here who are going to get
amnesty, and therefore the right to work. He is going to import millions of
workers at a time when we have more than 10 million Americans who are still out
of work because of the Wuhan coronavirus. So Joe Biden is going to bring in
millions of new foreigners to compete with those Americans who are out of work
at a time when we should be putting American workers first in line for American
jobs. It just goes to show how radicalized the Democrats have become on
immigration.
Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite
limited —
pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. In many speeches, for
example, Trump ignores
the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans
while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though
his low-immigration policies have been a popular
boon to
Americans.
Joe 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 end
migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to
dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at
least 125,000 per year.
Open-ended legal migration is
praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps
to transfer
wealth from
wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from
employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states
to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp
on labor-saving
technology, sideline U.S. minorities,
ignore disabled
people, exploit stoop labor in the
fields, short-change
labor in
the cities, impose tight
control on
American professionals, centralize technological
innovation, undermine labor rights, and get many left-wing
reporters to
cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.
So
Trump's economy grew and wages rose amid a decline in migration.
Inconceivable! … responds the chorus from the Chamber, Cato, the Koch's
network, Brookings, Silicon Valley, Wall St. WashPo, NYT, etc. https://t.co/I0I1Lhs0v0
— Neil Munro
(@NeilMunroDC) October
23, 2020
TO BUY THE INVADERS' ILLEGAL
VOTES, THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY MUST PROMISE THEM OUR JOBS, MORE WELFARE
AND AMNESTY SO THEY MAY LEGALLY BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO AND VOTED DEM FOR
MORE
Democratic nominee Joe Biden and
Republican President Donald Trump barely mention the hardship facing millions,
while both promise Wall Street that they’ll continue to pursue the deadly
reopening of schools and businesses as part of the ruling class’s genocidal “herd
immunity” policy, which has been embraced from Trump and Biden to the
Democratic Socialists of America, demonstrating their shared class interests.
Catastrophic job losses continue in the US as nearly
800,000 new unemployment claims reported
a day ago
·
·
·
·
·
Over the last 31 weeks, 65.2
million initial unemployment claims have been filed, including 787,000 for the
week ending Oct. 17, a slight decrease from the 842,000 filed the previous
week, but still over 85,000 more than the previous high set in 1982.
The astronomical total is
nearly 30 million higher than what was filed throughout the entire 2008–09
Great Recession. The economic crisis which has ravaged the working class and
small businesses since March is the worst since the Great Depression of the
1930s.
People wait for
a distribution of food in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, April 18, 2020
(AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
Nearly 11 million jobs have yet
to be restored over seven months into the pandemic as “temporary cut-backs” become
permanent, especially among restaurants, salons, nightclubs and bars that have
depleted Paycheck Protection Program loans, yet have not seen a recovery in
revenue as the coronavirus continues to spread unchecked throughout the US.
According to an ongoing study
by Opportunity Insights, which compiles public and private
data, nearly a quarter of small businesses, 24.1 percent, have closed since
January, while overall small business revenue is down 23.2 percent in the last
nine months.
Illustrating persistent
economic stagnation, the October federal jobs report, which is based on
September statistics, showed that 2.4 million workers have been unemployed for
27 weeks or more, up 800,000 from 1.6 million in the month of August.
The top five states with the
most new claims were California, with 158,877; followed by New York with
56,483; Texas, 50,819; Illinois, 47,018; and finally, Massachusetts with 44,518
jobless claims. California had not reported numbers the last two weeks in order
to implement a new “anti-fraud” program to catch alleged scammers.
In addition to the nearly
800,000 initial claims, another 345,440 people applied for Pandemic
Unemployment Assistance, which was passed as part of the CARES Act in March,
bringing the total number of claims for unemployment support above 1.1 million.
There has yet to be a single week since March 14 in which combined state and
PUA claims have not exceeded 1 million.
Part of the reason for the
decline in the number of continuing claims for unemployment benefit, which are
administered through the individual states as opposed to the federal
government, is that a majority of states have capped at 26 weeks the length of
time jobless workers can collect benefits, while some, such as Florida and
North Carolina, set the maximum at only 13 weeks. Just under 9 million people
are currently collecting state benefits.
As those benefits begin to
expire, workers who were laid off at the start of the pandemic have begun to
shift to the federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC)
program. The PEUC program, which provides an additional 13 weeks of benefits
and expires on Dec. 31, added 509,823 people for the week ending Oct. 3,
bringing that total to 3.3 million.
While this has led to a
reduction in the actual number of people collecting government assistance, this
does not mean the need has evaporated. All together some 23.2 million people
are on some form of unemployment insurance. The four-week average for new
claims, after revisions, is at 811,000, roughly four times the pre-pandemic
average.
For thousands of workers the
daily ritual of navigating phone trees, filing claims and waiting on hold in
order to maybe speak to a human and file the necessary paperwork in order to
collect some form of assistance has yet to bear fruit. In Nevada, which only
began paying out the $300-a-week Lost Wage Assistance (LWA) benefit last week,
nearly 18,000 jobless workers have organized in a private Facebook Group to
assist others in navigating the labyrinthine process.
“I haven’t gotten thru in
WEEKS… I’m losing my patience you guys. This is soo illegal and unfair,” reads
a recent comment, typical of the experience for thousands of workers. Others
state that they have been calling for 27 weeks, or more, only to be hung up on
as they try to negotiate archaic unemployment systems which in many cases, have
been specifically designed to
frustrate and impede.
Another wrote, “So I called the
[unemployment] number 3 times today. One call said ‘thanks for calling
behavioral health.’ The second call said ‘you’ve reached the United registry,’
and the 3rd call said ‘please enter your social security number.’”
While thousands continue to try
and process their claims, for millions of other workers in states across the
country the LWA funds have already dried up. As of this week only New Jersey,
Nevada, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Virginia, Alaska, Kansas and Arkansas are still
paying out LWA.
The dire situation facing
millions of workers has yet to compel both capitalist parties into coming to
terms on another relief bill. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, once again, held limited talks that didn’t
yield any legislation, much less an agreement.
“It is not just a question of
us agreeing in a room… it takes time,” Pelosi said.
While Pelosi, married to a real
estate investor worth an estimated $114 million, and Mnuchin, a former Goldman
Sachs banker worth an estimated $300 million, take their time, US census data
indicates that nearly 51 million households are unable to budget for basic
monthly expenses, while 1 in 4 households have experienced food insecurity this
year.
The need has gotten so extreme
for millions of people in the richest country in the world that popular
internet crowd-funding website GoFundMe.com debuted a “Basic Necessities Cause
Fund,” which will “offer financial relief for basic needs such as rent and
food.” The website notes that since March 2020, donor support on GoFundMe has
increased, “300% for fundraisers related to rent, food, and bills.”
Meanwhile, the Pentagon
announced on Wednesday that the classified military intelligence budget was
approved by Congress at the level of $23.1 billion for the fiscal year. In a
brief statement, the Department of Defense stated that it wouldn’t release any
“budget figures or program details … as they remain classified for national
security reasons.”
It is the highest amount the
military intelligence budget has received since Congress approved $27 billion
in 2010. The Pentagon has requested another $23 billion for 2021.
At every step of the way the
needs of the broad mass of the population, for food, housing and safety from
the deadliest pandemic in a century are constantly thwarted by a parasitic
ruling class, whose primary concern is increasing and preserving their
ill-gotten wealth.
Democratic
nominee Joe Biden and Republican President Donald Trump barely mention the
hardship facing millions, while both promise Wall Street that they’ll continue
to pursue the deadly reopening of schools and businesses as part of the ruling
class’s genocidal “herd immunity” policy, which has been embraced from Trump
and Biden to the Democratic Socialists of America, demonstrating their shared
class interests.
The fight to stop the spread of
the pandemic and redistribute the wealth controlled by pandemic profiteers, major corporations and Wall Street will be led by workers and youth
organized on an international class basis in rank-and-file, work, school and
neighborhood committees. Those interested in joining a committee near you or
starting one are encouraged to contact us and make a class conscious
decision to fight 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.
Ranks of
long-term jobless soar as US
unemployment
aid dries up
5 October 2020
·
·
·
·
·
The number of long-term jobless
workers in the United States continues to rise with millions of workers being
forced to fend for themselves as the US Congress refuses to provide any aid to
protect them against hunger, poverty and homelessness.
Last week’s job report from the
US Department of Labor showed that a staggering 695,000 workers dropped out of
the workforce.
The number of long-term
unemployed out of work for 27 weeks or more increased by 781,000 to 2.4
million. These workers have exhausted their 26-week limit on state unemployment
benefits, and another five million laid-off workers will reach this limit over
the next two months.
Pedestrians
wait in line to collect fresh produce and shelf-stable pantry items outside
Barclays Center as Food Bank For New York City provides assistance to those in
need due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020, in New York. (AP
Photo/John Minchillo)
At the end of July, Congress
allowed the $600-a-week federal supplement to state benefits to expire, reducing
weekly income in many cases by two-thirds or more over the last two months.
While Trump promised a
$300-a-week Lost Wages Assistance benefit for six weeks, the funds allocated
for this totally inadequate program have quickly dried up, with at least nine
states announcing they have ended paying the additional benefit.
Congress has shown no interest
in restoring any jobless benefits and the issue has hardly rated a mention in
the corporate media, let alone by Democratic candidate Joe Biden. The issue of
extending jobless benefits was not raised a single time during the debate last
week.
Under these conditions, hunger
is rising. In August, the Feeding America network food banks distributed an
estimated 593 million meals, an increase of 64 percent from a typical
pre-pandemic month. Meals on Wheels America, another charity, reported that
their food programs were serving an average of 77 percent more meals and 47
percent more high-risk seniors in August than they were on March 1.
An analysis released last week
by Feeding America projects a 6 billion to 8 billion meal shortfall over the
next 12 months. The total need for charitable food over the next year, Feeding
America estimates, will reach 17 billion pounds, more than three times last
year’s distribution.
A recent survey taken by the US
Census Bureau in August found that 10.5 percent or 22.3 million adults say they
cannot afford to adequately feed their families, up from 18 million in March.
This situation is being
worsened by a new round of mass layoffs, including from airlines, entertainment
companies and aircraft manufacturers, which received billions in CARES Act
money and tax cuts. Over the last few days alone, corporations have announced
almost 100,000 new layoffs.
Last Thursday, United, American
and other major US airlines began laying off 32,000 flight attendants, pilots
and other airline workers after the expiration of the temporary prohibition on
permanent job cuts which was contained in the CARES Act’s $24 billion bailout
of the airlines. On Monday, Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly said all
employees would have to take a 10 percent pay cut by Jan. 1, 2021, to avoid
permanent job cuts.
This week Cineworld, the
world’s second-biggest cinema chain, is closing its US and United Kingdom
theaters, laying off 45,000 workers, including nearly 40,000 at 536 Regal
theaters in the US. This follows the announcement by Disney last week that it
is laying off 28,000 of its 100,000 employees at its US parks and resorts.
Department store chain JCPenney
will close 149 stores and cut 15,000 jobs ahead of the holiday shopping season
as part of its plan to emerge from bankruptcy.
Another 280,000 workers lost
jobs last month in local and state education, as new austerity measures were
imposed even as teachers and students were forced back into unsafe schools.
The American ruling class is
seeking to use mass unemployment and the threat of poverty as bludgeons in its
drive to herd workers back into unsafe factories and workplaces in order to
further enrich the financial oligarchy. This is the policy not only of Trump
and the Republicans but the Democrats on the federal, state and local levels.
That is why the cutoff of jobless benefits has received bipartisan support.
But workers are fighting back
in their own defense. This week, nurses and other health care workers are set
to strike in Minneapolis and northern California. Protests by teachers, parents
and students against the unsafe return to schools, which has already led to the
deaths of 30 educators and the infection of thousands of students, are
spreading across New York, Wisconsin and other states.
In opposition to the treachery
of the unions, which have collaborated in the deadly back-to-school and
back-to-work campaign, educators, autoworkers and other workers have set up
rank-and-file safety committees in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Florida
and other states.
In a report yesterday, World
Bank Group President David Malpass warned of an “inequality pandemic,” a term
first coined by the World Socialist Web Site,
and warned the ruling elites of the potentially revolutionary consequences of
international working-class resistance. “In an interconnected world, where
people are more informed than ever before,” Malpass warned, “this pandemic of
inequality—with rising poverty and declining median incomes—will increasingly
be a threat to the maintenance of social order and political stability.”
The ruling class’s fear of
mounting popular resistance to the Trump administration’s homicidal “herd
immunity” policy is what lies behind the increasing moves towards authoritarian
measures, including Trump’s threats of a presidential coup if he loses the
elections. A report in the Wall
Street Journal Monday noted that New York City Police
Department was training its 35,000 cops “to prepare for the possibility of
widespread unrest after the US presidential election and the vote on the
nomination of a new Supreme Court justice.”
As for Biden and the Democrats,
there is nothing they fear more than a movement from below against Trump
because of the danger this would pose to the corporate and financial oligarchy,
which the Democrats defend just as ruthlessly as the Republicans.
But that is exactly what needs
to be done. The growing opposition of workers and young people over the
pandemic, social inequality, police killings, the danger of fascism and war
must be united. In every workplace and community, new organizations of
struggle, rank-and-file committees, must be formed, independent of the corrupt
unions and both capitalist parties, to prepare a political general strike.
The
American ruling class, which has produced only mass death and social misery,
has no legitimate claim to hold onto political power. It is up to the working
class to take the reins of power into its own hands, expropriate the private
fortunes of the billionaires and carry out a socialist restructuring of
economic and social life, to meet the needs of society, not the wealthy few.
Amid record long-term unemployment, US government denies
aid to workers
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With the number of workers
unemployed for more than six months hitting an all-time high and millions
running out of federal and state jobless benefits, the US government has made
it clear that providing unemployment benefits for workers is not a priority.
After the $600-a-week federal
supplement to state unemployment benefits expired on July 31, Trump approved a
stopgap measure called the Lost Wage Assistance program, which cut federal
assistance in half, providing six weekly payments of $300, starting
retroactively on August 1. But even this meager money is now running out.
More than two million
Californians are getting their last $300 check this week. Another 2.4 million
New Yorkers will lose their benefits in the next two weeks, and the program has
already ended in Texas, Utah, Iowa, Florida, Arizona, Alabama, Georgia,
Montana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Idaho,
New Hampshire and Missouri.
Pedestrians
wait in line to collect fresh produce and shelf-stable pantry items outside
Barclays Center as Food Bank For New York City provides assistance to those in
need due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020, in New York. (AP
Photo/John Minchillo)
Negotiations on a new stimulus
bill were taking place when US President Trump tweeted last week that he was
ending any further talks until after the election. Shortly afterwards, however,
he called for the passage of a relief package.
Amid demands by California
Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, the former co-chair of the Sanders
campaign, to “Make a deal, put the ball in McConnell’s court,” Democratic House
speaker Nancy Pelosi flatly refused to make any progress on a new stimulus
bill.
Asked by CNN anchor Wolf
Blitzer why she was not doing more to help “millions of Americans who can’t put
food on the table, who can’t pay the rent,” Pelosi replied, in a shocking
expression of indifference, “Have you fed them? We feed them.”
Whatever the jostling for
electoral advantage, the fact is that the last thing on the minds of any of the
millionaire Congressmen in Washington is the well-being of tens of millions of
desperate workers and their families.
While the federal and state
governments initially expanded unemployment benefits, suspended foreclosures
and stopped utility shutoffs to try to prevent a social explosion as tens of
millions lost their jobs due to the pandemic, all of these measures are now
being eliminated.
Landlords nationwide can start
eviction processes while a federal moratorium remains in place through
December, according to an updated guidance released Friday by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and the Justice Department. At the same time,
landlords will not be required to tell renters about the protections to which
they are entitled.
With the pandemic worsening and
the cold weather setting in, as many as 180 million people face the danger of
having their light, water and other utilities shut off as state protections
end. Nationwide, electric and gas debts alone threaten to reach or exceed $24.3
billion by the end of the year, according to an analysis from the National
Energy Assistance Directors’ Association released earlier this month.
Thousands of Louisville,
Kentucky-area electric and gas customers behind on their bills face shutoffs
after the Kentucky Public Service Commission voted to allow utilities to resume
disconnections as soon as October 20.
Hundreds of thousands of New
Jersey residents also face shutoff as the state moratorium ends this week. “I
saw the dollar amount first, and it was like I almost passed out,” Racquel
Kooper told a CBS News affiliate after the single mother of three received a
past due amount of over $2,300 and cutoff warning.
About 22 million adults in the
US, or 10.1 percent of the total, reported that their households could not
afford to buy enough food, according to Household Pulse Survey data by the US
Census Bureau. This was nearly triple the rate before the pandemic.
Some 13 million Americans were
officially unemployed in September, about seven million more than pre-pandemic
levels. This included 2.4 million workers laid off for more than 27 weeks.
Another 4.9 million will join the rolls of the long-term unemployed over the
next few weeks.
At the same time, the number of
permanent job losses grew by 345,000 to 3.8 million as temporary furloughs
became permanent. Allstate, American Airlines, Chevron, Disney, Royal Dutch
Shell and United Airlines all announced permanent job cuts in recent days.
According to a new study
by Axios, the
real unemployment rate in America—if calculated on the basis of the number of
people looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage but unable to find
one—is 26.1 percent, or three times higher than the official jobless rate of
7.9 percent in September. If you count anybody over 16 years old who is not
earning a living wage, the unemployment rate rises to a staggering 54.6 percent
overall and 59.2 for African Americans.
While tens of millions of
people are confronting the worst economic and social crisis since the Great
Depression, the multitrillion-dollar CARES Act bailout for Wall Street has led
to booming bank profits. Goldman Sachs on Wednesday announced that its
third-quarter profit nearly doubled to $3.62 billion.
The desperate situation facing
the population is hardly mentioned by either Trump or his presidential
challenger Joe Biden. While Trump incites right-wing violence to enforce his
“herd immunity” policy, both corporate-controlled parties are using the threat
of homelessness and hunger to force workers back on the job so they can produce
the profits to pay for the giant corporate bailout.
Regardless of the outcome of
the election, working class opposition will continue to mount against the
ruling class’s murderous back-to-work and back-to-school policies and efforts
to loot society’s resources.
Throughout the US and
internationally, strikes and protests are continuing to grow, including the
walkouts by Polish students against the spread of the deadly contagion in
schools and the formation of rank-and-file safety committees at worksites and
schools in the US, UK, Germany and other countries.
In every workplace and
neighborhood, workers and young people should build rank-and-file committees,
independent of the corrupt unions and the corporate-controlled parties, to
fight the spread of the disease and to ensure the health and safety of workers.
At the same time, trillions of
dollars must be diverted from the bailout of Wall Street and used instead to
marshal the international scientific resources to battle the pandemic and
address the massive economic and social crisis. This must include the provision
of free, high-quality health care for all, full income for all those affected
by the crisis, the closure of nonessential production, the ending of in-person
learning until the pandemic is contained, and the provision of protective
equipment for essential workers.
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