Tom Cotton: Joe Biden Avoids Wage-Raise Policy
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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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