“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat
and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by
its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan
OBAMA’S CRIMINAL MONEY LAUNDERING PARASITE
BANKSTER JAMIE DIMON IS DOING WELL. BUT THEN HE OWNS ENOUGH POLS THERE’S NO
REASON FOR HIM TO CONTEMPLATE JAIL TIME.
Among bankers, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase
topped the list with $31 million, while Brian Moynihan of Bank of America
received $23 million. Along with Goldman Sachs, these banks played central
roles in precipitating the 2008 Wall Street crash.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/01/fifty-years-since-johnsons-declaration.html
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the
Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in
pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules
America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
---- Karen McQuillan
Median CEO pay in US tops $1 million a month The median income for 132 CEOs of major US
corporations jumped to $12.4 million in 2018, more than $1 million a month,
according to an analysis published Sunday by the Wall Street Journal
The CEO gains were driven by rising stock
prices for the year, despite a sharp drop in December 2018, the worst December
for the financial markets since the Great Depression. Assuming the pay rises
for the remaining CEOs in the S&P 500 match those of the first group, 2018
would mark the third consecutive year of record CEO pay in the United States.
Among the biggest payouts were $66 million for
Robert Iger, longtime CEO of Walt Disney Co., $44.7 million for Richard
Handler, CEO of Jefferies Financial Group, and $42 million for Stephen
MacMillan, CEO of medical equipment maker Hologic Inc. Patrick McHale of
Minneapolis-based manufacturer Graco Corp. made $34.9 million in 2018.
Some CEOs outside the S&P 500 received even
bigger windfalls, topped by the $125 million for Nikesh Arora, a former Google
executive who became CEO of Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity company, only
in June 2018.
Corporate criminals like the CEO of Boeing and
the heads of the major banks suffered no consequences from the devastation that
their actions have caused for their own workers and the population as a whole.
Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg received $23.4
million after a year that ended with the crash of a 737 Max jetliner operated
by Lion Air of Indonesia, killing 189 people. Two weeks ago, a second crash of
a 737 Max, this time in Ethiopia, killed 157 people and led to the worldwide
grounding of all the 737 Max 8 and Max 9 jets made by the company. Boeing stock
plunged 10 percent, wiping out $25 billion in stock market value.
Among bankers, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase
topped the list with $31 million, while Brian Moynihan of Bank of America
received $23 million. Along with Goldman Sachs, these banks played central
roles in precipitating the 2008 Wall Street crash.
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan saw a pay rise to
$16.4 million, including his first-ever bonus, despite the company’s stock
plunging 24 percent due to the scandal involving the creation of millions of
false accounts for customers, leading to fines and regulatory penalties.
Ford President and CEO Jim Hackett received a
10 percent raise in 2018, raking in $17.75 million, while the company continues
to slash jobs both in the United States and internationally. According to press
reports, the Ford CEO received 276 times the median pay for all Ford employees.
General Motors has yet to report the 2018 compensation for CEO Mary Barra, who
made $21.9 million in 2017.
A study reported last month in the
magazine Institutional
Investor
Following a drop after the 2008 Wall Street
crash, when CEO compensation was driven down by falling share prices, the
combined compensation from pay, stock options and bonuses for corporate bosses
has returned to the level that prevailed before the financial crisis. In
contrast, most workers have seen no significant recovery.
CEO pay has risen nearly 72 percent since the
low point in 2009 and is now just 3.3 percent below the record levels set in
2007, on the eve of the financial collapse. According to the study reported
in Institutional Investor
The ratio of CEO pay to the pay of the average
worker has risen from 20-1 in 1965 to 30-1 in 1978, 58-1 in 1989, 112-1 in 1995
and a record 344-1 in 2000. After the dip following the 2008 crash, the
CEO-to-worker pay ratio rose back to 312-1 in 2017.
One corporate CEO’s record pay package deserves
particular attention: Daniel Loepp, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan,
the largest insurer in the state, covering the majority of autoworkers and
other industrial workers, as well as auto retirees. Loepp has seen his annual
compensation rocket from $1 million in 2006, when he became CEO, to $9 million
in 2015, $13.4 million in 2017 and $19.2 million in 2018, including a
staggering bonus of $16.2 million.
Loepp’s bonus was “only” $10.4 million in 2017,
and the $5.8 million raise in his bonus was due to meeting “performance
targets” set by the corporate board. These targets included slashing corporate
expenses by $360 million over the past three years, through cuts in jobs and
employee compensation. Loepp also pushed through a cut in the health care
coverage for Blue Cross retirees, who had expected, having worked for a health
care company, that their benefits would be secure.
Loepp is by far the best-paid chief executive
officer of a company that is still nominally not-for-profit—but posted an
“operating margin” last year of $605 million—and which, because of its
longstanding relationship with the auto industry, the UAW and the AFL-CIO, has
eight union executives on its board of directors.
These union officials approved the bonus and
other compensation for Loepp and set the “targets” that Loepp had to meet,
which were achieved by cutting the jobs and benefits of Blue Cross Blue Shield
workers, many of them members of the UAW, as well as benefits for workers
insured by the company, which is the principal health insurer for unionized
workers across the state.
The Detroit
Free Press
William Black, executive director of Michigan
Teamsters Joint Council 43, said in an email to the newspaper: “We at the board
are sensitive to compensation issues, and we have emphasized that pay be tied
to performance... His compensation is heavily weighted against company
performance, as it should be. That performance has been very strong in recent
years.”
This statement underscores the scurrilous and
thoroughly corrupt role of the unions in supporting the profit system and the
gouging of union members to enrich the capitalists and the corporate bosses.
The union executives have far more in common with Loepp than with the workers
they claim to represent. In institutions like the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits
Trust, the union officials preside over multibillion-dollar corporate entities
with salaries and bonuses that are modeled on those of the Loepps, Hacketts and
Jamie Dimons.
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
Opposition to refugees is bigotry, sneers
WashPo columnist. @crampell stepped outside the country club,
she'd see cheap labor hurts Americans' income, society, productivity &
competitiveness. 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 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.
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 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