Friday, April 17, 2020

TRUMP DECLARES WALL STREET PROFITS FIRST! - THE BACK TO WORK DRIVE WILL FUEL PANDEMIC

Trump administration’s “back to work” drive will fuel pandemic

17 April 2020
US President Donald Trump announced Thursday a set of “guidelines” for states to end social distancing measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, setting the stage for businesses to reopen throughout the country.
The new guidelines will fuel the coronavirus pandemic and lead to a sharp increase in deaths. In an indication of the mad rush to resume production, Boeing announced that it will begin aircraft production and send 27,000 workers back as early as Monday.
These moves come as the US continues to post record deaths, and the United States still does not have enough tests to contain the disease. More than 2,000 deaths were reported yesterday, and more than 8,000 over the past three days.
President Donald Trump points to a reporter to ask a question as he speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Thursday, April 16, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
There is still widespread community transmission, meaning that once social distancing measures are ended a second wave of cases and deaths will follow. The real fatality rate, moreover, far exceeds official statistics. Yesterday, reports began to emerge of mass casualties, of at least 29 and possibly as many as 60, at one nursing home facility in Queens, New York.
Workplaces have been a major center of transmission for the pandemic, with dozens of cases and multiple deaths linked to individual workplaces. More than 540 cases of coronavirus have been recorded at one meatpacking plant in South Dakota.
Trump’s plan is not grounded in any real scientific analysis of the pandemic. It is not conceived from the standpoint of public health, but to ensure that major corporations are allowed to get back to the business of squeezing profits out of workers as quickly as possible.
Now that Wall Street and major corporations have exploited the COVID-19 crisis to receive a massive bailout from the Treasury and Federal Reserve even larger than that following the 2008 financial crisis, the ruling class is determined to send workers back into America’s factories, no matter the death toll.
Trump’s back-to-work campaign aims to normalize death on a massive scale, in which outbreaks of COVID-19 are seen as the cost of doing business. With government restrictions ended, employees who refuse to work under unsafe conditions will face the threat of being fired and becoming ineligible for unemployment insurance. As far as the ruling class is concerned, if workers die, they will simply be replaced.
The plan urges states to reopen businesses if they can demonstrate a “downward trajectory” of cases over a fourteen-day period. This proposal has no relation to the statements and assessments of epidemiologists and health experts, and it contradicts the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Public health experts have repeatedly warned that reopening businesses too soon could cause major new outbreaks. Lifting “physical distancing measures” too early “can result in the disease returning if you don’t have the public health measures to deal with the virus,” warned WHO epidemiologist Maria D. Van Kerkhove.
Wall Street, recognizing the significance of the proposal for boosting corporate profits, surged in response to the news, with Dow Jones Industrial Average futures up by 820 points late on Thursday.
The plan is the result of a campaign by the Trump administration and the media to downplay the severity of the disease. To this end, the media has simply ignored the fact that the United States posted a record 2,600 deaths on Wednesday, and that the number of deaths has soared from 4,000 at the beginning of this month to over 34,000.
Over the past two days, the media has highlighted a handful of protests, organized by extreme right-wing forces, demanding a return to work. The ruling class is attempting to manufacture a narrative that the population is demanding an end to social distancing measures in order to justify a return to work.
“There is no plan for re-opening. Just re-opening,” said Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves. “No national scale-up of testing capacity, contact tracing, isolation, PPE, economic support for ordinary Americans. It flies in the face of public health and economic advice. It’s destructive, deadly.”
“There are no metrics of any kind in the guidelines,” said science journalist Laurie Garrett. “The plan does have ‘recommendations’ for testing and tracing, but no measurable benchmarks for it, just left up to the discretion/perception of individual governors.”
The United States now has three times more cases than any other country in the world. In New York, an epicenter of the crisis, 1.1 percent of the population has tested positive for the virus. Nationally, the COVID-19 test positivity rate is 20 percent, indicating that tests have been conducted mainly among those already showing symptoms, and that far more people need tests than are able to get tested.
By contrast, South Korea has only 2 percent of tests reporting positive, an order of magnitude less than the United States. Canada, Germany and Denmark have rates between 6 and 8 percent.
Hospitals in the United States are filled to capacity, and funeral homes and morgues have no room to put the bodies.
During his press conference Thursday, Trump praised his government’s response to the disease because, just a few months into the outbreak, the United States has had fewer deaths than scenarios predicted by epidemiologists over the course of several years.
“Our strategy to slow the spread has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Models predicted between 1.5 million and 2.2 million US deaths,” he said. “And between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths with mitigation. It’s looking like we will come far under even these lowest numbers.”
Because aggressive social distancing measures carried out throughout the country have led to a stabilization of the rate of new cases, Trump falsely argues that it is now appropriate to reopen businesses. In fact, social distancing measures like business and school closures are effective only to the extent that they create the conditions for sufficient testing, quarantine, and contact tracing.
Trump is cynically exploiting the widespread social dislocation caused by the pandemic to pressure workers to return to work. Under conditions in which millions of workers have received neither unemployment payments nor emergency stimulus measures, workers are left to choose between returning to work under unsafe conditions or being unable to feed their families.
But the claim that humanity must choose between letting workers die and subjecting them to economic destitution is false. This dichotomy assumes the prerogatives of the capitalist system, in which the state gives trillions to the corporations but won’t ensure a livable income for workers.
The first priority in this pandemic must be saving human lives. This is only possible through a massive expansion of public health care spending to fund an enormous ramp-up of testing, quarantine, and contact tracing. Social distancing measures must remain in place until this capacity is created.
The demand by corporations and the White House for a premature return to work will spark widespread opposition within the working class. Workers must demand safe working conditions and the continued closure of non-essential businesses.

Coronavirus-driven slump has wiped out 22 million jobs in the US



The US Labor Department reported Thursday that 5.2 million more workers had filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total number of claims in the last four weeks to an unprecedented 22 million. This marks the sharpest rise in unemployment ever recorded in the country and equivalent to all jobs created since mid-2009, the beginning of the official recovery from the Great Recession.
The unprecedented job losses come amid a wave of economic figures showing the shattering impact of the coronavirus epidemic on the American and world economy. On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported the biggest monthly decline in retail sales since the figures were first compiled 30 years ago, 8.7 percent, more than double the previous monthly record, set during the 2008 Wall Street crash. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve reported the biggest decline in industrial production since the shutdown that followed the end of the Second World War in 1946.
Industries hit with full force by the coronavirus lockdowns suffered the worst. The US airline industry has collapsed, with just 4 percent of the typical number of daily passengers when compared to last year, as interstate and international travel has largely come to a halt. Big retailers are going out of business. Best Buy said it would lay off 51,000 store workers, 40 percent of the total, beginning Sunday. J. C. Penney failed to make a $12 million interest payment on debts Wednesday, putting it 30 days from outright default.
People wait in line at The Campaign Against Hunger food pantry, Thursday, April 16, 2020, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
The mass layoffs come as factories, restaurants, theaters, and most small businesses have been ordered closed by state governors to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus, which has already infected over 670,000 in the US and killed more than 34,000.
While the states that remain epicenters of the disease—New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Louisiana—are beginning to see some signs that social distancing has eased the growth in the number of cases, there are reports that COVID-19 is now beginning to hit other states as well as small cities and rural areas of the country, resulting in the closure of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
One month into criminally belated government initiatives to contain COVID-19, millions of people are desperate for money, missing payments on their rent, mortgages, and auto loans as well as credit card and student loan debt. Thousands have been lining up for hours in every city and community to receive much needed food aid, including members of the middle class who have never before had to rely on such support.
Economists project that the US and the world economy will suffer the worst contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Retail sales and industrial output in the US have already collapsed by record amounts and are expected to fall further even if social distancing measures are lifted.
Even though the unemployment figures reported so far are unprecedented, suggesting a current unemployment rate of 17 percent, they still do not capture the scope of the crisis facing the working class and small business owners. The weekly filings were limited by the Easter holiday weekend and many workers still report that they are unable to file a claim due to overloaded call centers, crashing websites and archaic application systems. Contractors and workers in the “gig economy” face long delays in gaining access to unemployment payments, while millions of undocumented workers have no hope of any sort of government assistance.
People who are fired from their jobs are ineligible for any unemployment and those who have recently moved from one state to another are having great difficulty filing. Every hurdle is placed in the way of workers to jump over in order to receive a few hundred dollars every week. It is estimated that as many as 35 million people could lose employer-paid health insurance due to the mounting layoffs. Nothing is being done for anyone who is not already rich.
The $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which was ostensibly aimed at helping small business owners keep their employees on the payroll, has already been exhausted, leaving tens of thousands of business owners and their employees in the lurch. Meanwhile among the “small businesses” which have received multimillion-dollar loans through the program are giant conglomerates including Potbelly Corporation, which employs 6,000 people and operates 474 sandwich shops in the US and internationally, and Ruth’s Hospitality Group, which operates a chain of more than 100 steakhouses across North America and Asia.
Under these conditions millions are being given the option of staying home and starving or going to work and risking illness and death.
President Donald Trump, who yesterday released his plan for reopening the American economy, is seeking to use the desperation of workers and the middle class to his advantage to force open the economy after funneling trillions of dollars to the big banks and corporations, a move that will lead to tens of thousands more deaths from COVID-19. Protests organized by Trump supporters against Democratic governors in Michigan, Kentucky and North Carolina and other states demanding an end to the lockdowns are a particularly backward expression of the very real desperation millions now confront.
Workers should reject with contempt this framework and fight for the democratic distribution of trillions of dollars in social aid to every section of society which is being devastated by the pandemic.
What is required to meet the interests of workers without sacrificing their lives and the lives of their families to the profits of Wall Street?
1. Nationalize the banks and large corporations, redirecting the trillions which are being funneled to the rich to fully support workers and small businesses for the duration of the pandemic.
The $6 trillion bailout authorized by the misnamed CARES Act, most of which has been funneled immediately to Wall Street, would be enough to provide every man, woman and child in America with a check of roughly $18,000. Instead, workers have had to wait weeks for a mere $1,200 stimulus, with many more left to wait months for any sort of cash aid. Thanks to a tax provision of the act, the average multimillionaire who owns a pass-through company will receive $1.6 million in stimulus. Billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has cashed in on the pandemic, increasing his net worth by $23.6 billion, enough to give every Amazon worker a bonus of $31,000. The claim that there is no money for the needs of the working class has never been more of a lie.
2. No return to work for nonessential businesses, and safe working conditions guaranteed for all those who work in essential jobs until the pandemic is over.
If the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world are to be saved the coronavirus must be contained, until a vaccine is developed people have to maintain social distancing measures, which means keeping most businesses closed. Workers in hospitals, grocery stores, food processing, transportation and logistics must be given every possible protection from the coronavirus and provided full pay and have all health care costs covered if they get sick.
3. Full funding for testing, tracing and quarantine.
Testing for COVID-19 and efforts to control its spread are still criminally lacking in the United States. Hundreds of billions must be spent on developing, distributing and carrying out tests and subsequently tracing contacts of those who test positive and provide them with safe quarantine conditions. The answer to the historic economic crisis sweeping across the globe is not an immediate return to “normalcy” but a mass independent movement of the working class, leading behind it the best elements of the middle class, fighting for a reorganization of society to meet human need, not the rapacious and murderous needs of the profit system.

FINISHING AMERICA OFF: THE FOREIGN INVASION FOR “CHEAP” LABOR

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-fall-of-america-by-invitation-tens.html

Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone. JOHN BINDER

But many less-skilled migrants play their largest role by simply shifting small slices of wealth from person to person, for example, by competing up rents in their neighborhood or by competing down wages in their workplace. The crudest examples can be seen in agriculture.

Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.

CALIFORNIA UNDER THE DEMOCRATS: Worst Lower Education System in the Nation!
"The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats."

"California’s public education system, once the envy of the world, now ranks 49th in the nation." ROBERT J. CRISTANO, Ph.D

Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.

"The public schools indoctrinate their young charges to hate this country and the rule of law. Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety for all citizens."

IMMIGRATION AS ECONOMIC WAR ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS.



However, the dominant force in American politics for the last two decades has been economic warfare against American citizens.

This economic warfare has two primary 

components; the use of government to 

economically favor one group over another; 

and the collusion of immigrant groups to 

economically inhibit Americans who oppose 

replacement migration. JOSHUA FOXWORTH 








Jeff Sessions: Let Americans Work and Earn — Halt Foreign Worker Visas Now

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks on immigration at the Justice Department September 5, 2017 in Washington, DC. Sessions announced that the Trump Administration is ending the Obama era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protect those who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, with a …
Alex Wong/Getty Images
3:48

When the worst of the pandemic ends, tens of millions of Americans will be out of work. While the fundamentals of the Trump economy are strong, the rebound will take some time. As the economy comes back to life, we must put Americans, not foreign workers, first.
Americans deserve every opportunity to find good-paying jobs, especially in tough times. I am proposing that the federal government end all employment-based immigration until we recover. We must pause new work-based immigration visas until the economy reaches its pre-pandemic unemployment rate of 3.5 percent.
Our guest worker programs can make sense when there is a real shortage of workers to do temporary work. But the government’s primary duty is to our citizens, not foreign nationals. This crisis is not the time to import more foreigners when millions of Americans are itching to get back to work. Indeed, in a very real sense, there are no available jobs in America. More than 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past few weeks.
Work means dignity. Americans find purpose in their jobs, and the value they help create. That purpose drives our communities. That honest income gives them the means to provide for their families and support local businesses, charities, and churches.
Conversely, making it harder for Americans to reenter gainful employment after this pandemic may reduce the likelihood of their ever reentering the workforce, causing them to rely on government assistance. Government assistance is no substitute for the benefits of honest, hard work.

When we bring in foreigners to work, we are really offering them the right to take one of a limited number of jobs in a recovering economy, taking jobs that would otherwise go to unemployed Americans.

As Harvard economics professor George Borjas explains, this hits the working class the hardest: “When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down… immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.”
And this affects high-skilled and middle-income workers too. In recent years, big companies like Disney, AT&T, and Bank of America have abused these employment visa programs to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. Some of these companies even made their American workers train their foreign replacements as a condition of receiving severance.
Now, while joblessness and pay cuts impact more than 4 in 10 American workers, the special interests haven’t stopped clamoring for more foreign labor. It is morally outrageous and economic insanity.
Every year, the United States gives more than 1.4 million “temporary” visas to foreign workers, and that doesn’t even include the millions of illegal aliens who work off the books. President Trump has done great work to strenuously enforce our laws against illegal immigration, but he needs more support to continue his progress protecting the American worker.
Our small business assistance program has a strong focus on protecting the jobs of Americans. Importing workers from abroad to take the few jobs being created makes no sense whatsoever. We need an immediate end to the importation of more foreign workers. This pandemic may have knocked America on its back, but we will get back up and be stronger than ever. In the meantime, we need to give struggling Americans a fighting chance.
Jeff Sessions was the 84th Attorney General of the United States and previously served as the United States Senator for Alabama.


THERE WILL NOT BE A 'DEPRESSION' FOR TRUMP'S WALL STREET CRONIES!




Rush Limbaugh: ‘We Are Headed to Great Depression’ with ‘Democrats Fully on Board’

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 04: Radio personality Rush Limbaugh reacts after First Lady Melania Trump gives him the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 04, 2020 in Washington, DC. President Trump delivers his third …
Mario Tama/Getty Images
2:38
A clearly astonished Rush Limbaugh warned his listeners Thursday that America is headed for another Great Depression if the economy contracts any further due to shutdowns in response to the coronavirus crisis.
“All we need is a 30 to 40% contraction in this economy,” the conservative radio host asserted. “We’ll hit Great Recession territory first and then depression, if this doesn’t stop — and the idea that there are people advocating for this!”
Limbaugh stressed Americans need to know this path to depression could begin a reversal immediately, but that “there are forces arrayed against doing that”:
We know who they are. We know exactly. We know they’re all Democrats. We know they are some in the health and medical community.
The Drive-By Media, the media, and the Democrats are fully on board with the Democrat agenda here … They are hoping that coronavirus accomplishes what Robert Mueller and impeachment, Adam Schiff failed to do.
Limbaugh, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump during the State of the Union address in February, told his audience Americans are “doing this to ourselves – and it’s amazing how quickly!”
He said:
Three years to revive an economy, create roaring circumstances. It took less than two months to wipe it all out. Twenty-two million people filing for unemployment compensation — 22 million — and the idea that there is not an angry outcry from all over the world that this must stop?
That outcry had better happen, because this… We’re beyond now saying this is unsustainable. This is untenable! This is cataclysmic! We’re in the midst of a self-created disaster that we could fix (snap, snap, snap) at the snap of our fingers.
“How in the world can anybody sane want to keep this economy shut down?” the radio host asked, repeatedly pointing out how the entire concept of what has occurred in America over the past two months is nothing less than astonishing:
How can anybody sane be anything less than scared and outraged and mortified that 22 million people have been thrown out of work over something that may end up killing fewer than 50,000 people? It is unprecedented! And yet there are people who want to maintain the circumstances we are in. And it boggles the mind.
“It is so counterintuitive to Americanism,” Limbaugh continued. “We cannot go on! … I can’t believe it has gone on this long! I can’t believe… In one way, I can’t believe the American people haven’t arisen in outrage over this yet.”


Coronavirus unemployment: Bay Area loses 27,000 jobs in March, ending economic boom

 

California loses nearly 100,000 jobs, first monthly job losses in 10 years

 

 An empty San Jose International Airport, April 2020. The coronavirus economic woes bludgeoned the Bay Area’s suddenly feeble economy during March and unleashed a loss of 27,000 jobs — the worst month for the region’s employment market since the Great Recession.
By GEORGE AVALOS | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED:  | UPDATED: 
The coronavirus economic woes bludgeoned the Bay Area’s suddenly feeble economy in March, unleashing a loss of 27,000 jobs — the worst month for the region’s employment market since the Great Recession, a grim new government report released Friday showed.
California staggered to a loss of 99,500 jobs last month, a setback that abruptly terminated the state’s record-setting economic expansion, the Employment Development Department reported Friday.
The statewide unemployment rate jumped to 5.3 percent, a huge one-month increase from February’s all-time record-low jobless rate of 3.9 percent.
The Bay Area lost 27,200 jobs during March, the region’s worst one-month job loss in nearly 11 years, this news organization’s analysis of the EDD figures shows. The EDD report was the first to sketch out a comprehensive picture of the coronavirus impact on the Bay Area economy.
The San Francisco-San Mateo region accounted for more than half of all positions shed in the Bay Area with a devastating loss of 13,700 jobs. Tech-heavy Santa Clara County lost 8,400 jobs in March. The East Bay fared the best of the Bay Area’s three major urban centers, losing just 3,300 positions.
“The decline of 99,500 jobs in California does not capture all the pain the state is going through,” Sung Won Sohn, a veteran economist, wrote in a research note on Friday. “California employment is in free fall and no bottom is yet in sight.”
By the time the unemployment reports for the Bay

Area roll in over the next couple of months, the 

Bay Area could suffer a loss of 835,000 jobs, 

according to an April 8 forecast issued by the 


Research that’s headed up by economist Jeffrey 

Michael.
Mandatory lockdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus have forced countless businesses to shut their doors, dismiss or furlough employees, and retail shoppers remain in their homes amid an array of shelter-in-place orders. Friday’s report was the first to reflect the first job losses since the regional and statewide stay at home orders were issued.

Wall Street feasts on death

15 April 2020
Yesterday, April 14, the total worldwide deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic passed 126,000. In the United States, more than 2,400 people died on Tuesday, bringing the total nationwide number of victims to 26,000. These official numbers are undoubtedly substantially lower than the actual number of people who have died as a result of being infected by the coronavirus.
Not since the 1930s has the United States experienced a crisis on its soil that has had such a devastating impact on the social well-being of the American people. Images showing mass graves being dug in New York City, body bags piling up in Detroit hospitals, and endless lines of cars with drivers waiting to collect food to feed their families will be remembered like the Depression-era photos of Dorothea Lange. Tens of millions of Americans are without an income and lack sufficient savings to cover their mortgages and rent, insurance premiums, interest on outstanding loans, and other inescapable daily, weekly and monthly expenses. More than 16 million people have filed unemployment claims. It will take weeks, if not months, before their jobless checks arrive. The promised payment of $1,200 that was supposedly part of the CARES bill passed last month by Congress has shown up in very few bank accounts.
A social disaster is unfolding, and the media’s joyful invocation of “glimmers of hope” bears no relation to reality as it is being experienced by the vast majority of the population. The references to “peaks” and “plateaus” are of a largely hypothetical character. The pandemic is raging throughout the country. For millions who are still on the job, showing up for work means running the serious risk of being exposed to the coronavirus.
And yet, in the midst of this immense crisis, there is one small segment of society that has richly prospered during this time of troubles.
Just over three weeks ago, on March 23, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 18,591. During the previous five weeks, as the seriousness of the pandemic was being gradually and reluctantly acknowledged, the Dow had fallen nearly 35 percent from its February 13 high of 29,551.
Since March 23, two numbers have risen in tandem: COVID-19 deaths and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (along with other major markets' averages such as the S&P and NASDAQ).
On March 23, the number of pandemic victims in the US had reached 556. Over the next four days, Congress hastily enacted its multi-trillion-dollar bailout of financial and corporate institutions and investors. The “CARES Act” was signed into law on March 27. On that day, the DJIA closed at 21,636. Expectation of the imminent passage of the bailout had lifted the market nearly 3,000 points in just four days. But between March 23 and March 27, the number of pandemic deaths in the United States nearly tripled, rising to 1,697.
During the week of March 30, there was a further explosive rise in pandemic victims. By Friday, April 3, the number of victims reached 7,139. Throughout the weekend, the media sought to prepare the public for a further rapid rise in the death toll. But there was also a distinct change in the tone of the media narrative. Phrases such as “hopeful signs,” “turning the corner,” and, inevitably, “glimmers of hope” became part of the media’s propaganda repertoire. This was combined with an increasingly aggressive campaign for a more or less rapid return to work.
Throughout the week, the rapid rise in the death toll revealed the expanding dimensions of the social tragedy. The rise in the stock market averages reflected the financial elite’s expectation, having been gifted trillions of dollars by the government, that it will profit from this crisis and emerge wealthier and more powerful than ever.
By Monday, April 6, the number of COVID-19 deaths reached 10,895. The Dow closed at 22,679. By April 9, the death toll had climbed to 16,712. The Dow closed at 23,319. And yesterday, as the number of dead went beyond the staggering 26,000 mark, the investors and speculators joyfully watched the Dow gain another 569 points and close at 23,935.
Let the reader pause over these numbers. Since March 23, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed, according to official statistics, more than 25,000 lives in the United States. During the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen more than 30 percent.
On the surface, there is nothing in the economic news that justifies the extraordinarily rapid rise in the markets. In fact, all available information indicates that the global impact of the pandemic may prove to be as serious and long-lasting as the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Yesterday morning, the International Monetary Fund issued a report titled, “The Great Lockdown: Worst Economic Depression Since the Great Depression.” Written by chief IMF economist Gita Gopinath, the report describes the prevailing situation as “a crisis like no other,” and forecasts a prolonged decline in global economic growth. “This makes the Great Lockdown the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis [of 2008–2009].” The report continues:
The cumulative loss to global GDP over 2020 and 2021 from the pandemic crisis could be around 9 trillion dollars, greater than the economies of Japan and Germany, combined.
Clearly, it is not current economic projections that have fueled the euphoria on Wall Street; and it is highly unlikely, as the global contraction grows ever more severe, that the current rally can be sustained. But for the time being, the euphoria is being driven by the trillions of dollars of free and unsupervised money that is being provided by the Federal Reserve; and by the expectation that the crisis will provide the corporate-financial oligarchy within the United States as well as in Europe with an opportunity to restructure the capitalist economy and class relationships in a manner that facilitates the accelerated transfer of wealth into the coffers of the capitalist class.
But there is another factor that will counteract the euphoria; and that is the growing social resistance of the working class, which is developing its own ideas about how the American and global economy should be restructured and wealth redistributed.

22 MILLION AMERICAN JOBS GONE - TRUMP MOVES QUICKLY TO PROTECT THE PROFITS OF CRONIES AND WALL STREET


Coronavirus-driven slump has wiped out 22 million jobs in the US



The US Labor Department reported Thursday that 5.2 million more workers had filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total number of claims in the last four weeks to an unprecedented 22 million. This marks the sharpest rise in unemployment ever recorded in the country and equivalent to all jobs created since mid-2009, the beginning of the official recovery from the Great Recession.
The unprecedented job losses come amid a wave of economic figures showing the shattering impact of the coronavirus epidemic on the American and world economy. On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported the biggest monthly decline in retail sales since the figures were first compiled 30 years ago, 8.7 percent, more than double the previous monthly record, set during the 2008 Wall Street crash. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve reported the biggest decline in industrial production since the shutdown that followed the end of the Second World War in 1946.
Industries hit with full force by the coronavirus lockdowns suffered the worst. The US airline industry has collapsed, with just 4 percent of the typical number of daily passengers when compared to last year, as interstate and international travel has largely come to a halt. Big retailers are going out of business. Best Buy said it would lay off 51,000 store workers, 40 percent of the total, beginning Sunday. J. C. Penney failed to make a $12 million interest payment on debts Wednesday, putting it 30 days from outright default.
People wait in line at The Campaign Against Hunger food pantry, Thursday, April 16, 2020, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
The mass layoffs come as factories, restaurants, theaters, and most small businesses have been ordered closed by state governors to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus, which has already infected over 670,000 in the US and killed more than 34,000.
While the states that remain epicenters of the disease—New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Louisiana—are beginning to see some signs that social distancing has eased the growth in the number of cases, there are reports that COVID-19 is now beginning to hit other states as well as small cities and rural areas of the country, resulting in the closure of slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
One month into criminally belated government initiatives to contain COVID-19, millions of people are desperate for money, missing payments on their rent, mortgages, and auto loans as well as credit card and student loan debt. Thousands have been lining up for hours in every city and community to receive much needed food aid, including members of the middle class who have never before had to rely on such support.
Economists project that the US and the world economy will suffer the worst contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Retail sales and industrial output in the US have already collapsed by record amounts and are expected to fall further even if social distancing measures are lifted.
Even though the unemployment figures reported so far are unprecedented, suggesting a current unemployment rate of 17 percent, they still do not capture the scope of the crisis facing the working class and small business owners. The weekly filings were limited by the Easter holiday weekend and many workers still report that they are unable to file a claim due to overloaded call centers, crashing websites and archaic application systems. Contractors and workers in the “gig economy” face long delays in gaining access to unemployment payments, while millions of undocumented workers have no hope of any sort of government assistance.
People who are fired from their jobs are ineligible for any unemployment and those who have recently moved from one state to another are having great difficulty filing. Every hurdle is placed in the way of workers to jump over in order to receive a few hundred dollars every week. It is estimated that as many as 35 million people could lose employer-paid health insurance due to the mounting layoffs. Nothing is being done for anyone who is not already rich.
The $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which was ostensibly aimed at helping small business owners keep their employees on the payroll, has already been exhausted, leaving tens of thousands of business owners and their employees in the lurch. Meanwhile among the “small businesses” which have received multimillion-dollar loans through the program are giant conglomerates including Potbelly Corporation, which employs 6,000 people and operates 474 sandwich shops in the US and internationally, and Ruth’s Hospitality Group, which operates a chain of more than 100 steakhouses across North America and Asia.
Under these conditions millions are being given the option of staying home and starving or going to work and risking illness and death.
President Donald Trump, who yesterday released his plan for reopening the American economy, is seeking to use the desperation of workers and the middle class to his advantage to force open the economy after funneling trillions of dollars to the big banks and corporations, a move that will lead to tens of thousands more deaths from COVID-19. Protests organized by Trump supporters against Democratic governors in Michigan, Kentucky and North Carolina and other states demanding an end to the lockdowns are a particularly backward expression of the very real desperation millions now confront.
Workers should reject with contempt this framework and fight for the democratic distribution of trillions of dollars in social aid to every section of society which is being devastated by the pandemic.
What is required to meet the interests of workers without sacrificing their lives and the lives of their families to the profits of Wall Street?
1. Nationalize the banks and large corporations, redirecting the trillions which are being funneled to the rich to fully support workers and small businesses for the duration of the pandemic.
The $6 trillion bailout authorized by the misnamed CARES Act, most of which has been funneled immediately to Wall Street, would be enough to provide every man, woman and child in America with a check of roughly $18,000. Instead, workers have had to wait weeks for a mere $1,200 stimulus, with many more left to wait months for any sort of cash aid. Thanks to a tax provision of the act, the average multimillionaire who owns a pass-through company will receive $1.6 million in stimulus. Billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has cashed in on the pandemic, increasing his net worth by $23.6 billion, enough to give every Amazon worker a bonus of $31,000. The claim that there is no money for the needs of the working class has never been more of a lie.
2. No return to work for nonessential businesses, and safe working conditions guaranteed for all those who work in essential jobs until the pandemic is over.
If the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world are to be saved the coronavirus must be contained, until a vaccine is developed people have to maintain social distancing measures, which means keeping most businesses closed. Workers in hospitals, grocery stores, food processing, transportation and logistics must be given every possible protection from the coronavirus and provided full pay and have all health care costs covered if they get sick.
3. Full funding for testing, tracing and quarantine.
Testing for COVID-19 and efforts to control its spread are still criminally lacking in the United States. Hundreds of billions must be spent on developing, distributing and carrying out tests and subsequently tracing contacts of those who test positive and provide them with safe quarantine conditions. The answer to the historic economic crisis sweeping across the globe is not an immediate return to “normalcy” but a mass independent movement of the working class, leading behind it the best elements of the middle class, fighting for a reorganization of society to meet human need, not the rapacious and murderous needs of the profit system.

FINISHING AMERICA OFF: THE FOREIGN INVASION FOR “CHEAP” LABOR

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-fall-of-america-by-invitation-tens.html

Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone. JOHN BINDER

But many less-skilled migrants play their largest role by simply shifting small slices of wealth from person to person, for example, by competing up rents in their neighborhood or by competing down wages in their workplace. The crudest examples can be seen in agriculture.

Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.

CALIFORNIA UNDER THE DEMOCRATS: Worst Lower Education System in the Nation!
"The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats."

"California’s public education system, once the envy of the world, now ranks 49th in the nation." ROBERT J. CRISTANO, Ph.D

Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.

"The public schools indoctrinate their young charges to hate this country and the rule of law. Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety for all citizens."

IMMIGRATION AS ECONOMIC WAR ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS.



However, the dominant force in American politics for the last two decades has been economic warfare against American citizens.

This economic warfare has two primary 

components; the use of government to 

economically favor one group over another; 

and the collusion of immigrant groups to 

economically inhibit Americans who oppose 

replacement migration. JOSHUA FOXWORTH 






Jeff Sessions: Let Americans Work and Earn — Halt Foreign Worker Visas Now

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks on immigration at the Justice Department September 5, 2017 in Washington, DC. Sessions announced that the Trump Administration is ending the Obama era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protect those who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, with a …
Alex Wong/Getty Images
3:48

When the worst of the pandemic ends, tens of millions of Americans will be out of work. While the fundamentals of the Trump economy are strong, the rebound will take some time. As the economy comes back to life, we must put Americans, not foreign workers, first.
Americans deserve every opportunity to find good-paying jobs, especially in tough times. I am proposing that the federal government end all employment-based immigration until we recover. We must pause new work-based immigration visas until the economy reaches its pre-pandemic unemployment rate of 3.5 percent.
Our guest worker programs can make sense when there is a real shortage of workers to do temporary work. But the government’s primary duty is to our citizens, not foreign nationals. This crisis is not the time to import more foreigners when millions of Americans are itching to get back to work. Indeed, in a very real sense, there are no available jobs in America. More than 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past few weeks.
Work means dignity. Americans find purpose in their jobs, and the value they help create. That purpose drives our communities. That honest income gives them the means to provide for their families and support local businesses, charities, and churches.
Conversely, making it harder for Americans to reenter gainful employment after this pandemic may reduce the likelihood of their ever reentering the workforce, causing them to rely on government assistance. Government assistance is no substitute for the benefits of honest, hard work.

When we bring in foreigners to work, we are really offering them the right to take one of a limited number of jobs in a recovering economy, taking jobs that would otherwise go to unemployed Americans.

As Harvard economics professor George Borjas explains, this hits the working class the hardest: “When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down… immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.”
And this affects high-skilled and middle-income workers too. In recent years, big companies like Disney, AT&T, and Bank of America have abused these employment visa programs to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. Some of these companies even made their American workers train their foreign replacements as a condition of receiving severance.
Now, while joblessness and pay cuts impact more than 4 in 10 American workers, the special interests haven’t stopped clamoring for more foreign labor. It is morally outrageous and economic insanity.
Every year, the United States gives more than 1.4 million “temporary” visas to foreign workers, and that doesn’t even include the millions of illegal aliens who work off the books. President Trump has done great work to strenuously enforce our laws against illegal immigration, but he needs more support to continue his progress protecting the American worker.
Our small business assistance program has a strong focus on protecting the jobs of Americans. Importing workers from abroad to take the few jobs being created makes no sense whatsoever. We need an immediate end to the importation of more foreign workers. This pandemic may have knocked America on its back, but we will get back up and be stronger than ever. In the meantime, we need to give struggling Americans a fighting chance.
Jeff Sessions was the 84th Attorney General of the United States and previously served as the United States Senator for Alabama.


THERE WILL NOT BE A 'DEPRESSION' FOR TRUMP'S WALL STREET CRONIES!


Rush Limbaugh: ‘We Are Headed to Great Depression’ with ‘Democrats Fully on Board’

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 04: Radio personality Rush Limbaugh reacts after First Lady Melania Trump gives him the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 04, 2020 in Washington, DC. President Trump delivers his third …
Mario Tama/Getty Images
2:38
A clearly astonished Rush Limbaugh warned his listeners Thursday that America is headed for another Great Depression if the economy contracts any further due to shutdowns in response to the coronavirus crisis.
“All we need is a 30 to 40% contraction in this economy,” the conservative radio host asserted. “We’ll hit Great Recession territory first and then depression, if this doesn’t stop — and the idea that there are people advocating for this!”
Limbaugh stressed Americans need to know this path to depression could begin a reversal immediately, but that “there are forces arrayed against doing that”:
We know who they are. We know exactly. We know they’re all Democrats. We know they are some in the health and medical community.
The Drive-By Media, the media, and the Democrats are fully on board with the Democrat agenda here … They are hoping that coronavirus accomplishes what Robert Mueller and impeachment, Adam Schiff failed to do.
Limbaugh, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump during the State of the Union address in February, told his audience Americans are “doing this to ourselves – and it’s amazing how quickly!”
He said:
Three years to revive an economy, create roaring circumstances. It took less than two months to wipe it all out. Twenty-two million people filing for unemployment compensation — 22 million — and the idea that there is not an angry outcry from all over the world that this must stop?
That outcry had better happen, because this… We’re beyond now saying this is unsustainable. This is untenable! This is cataclysmic! We’re in the midst of a self-created disaster that we could fix (snap, snap, snap) at the snap of our fingers.
“How in the world can anybody sane want to keep this economy shut down?” the radio host asked, repeatedly pointing out how the entire concept of what has occurred in America over the past two months is nothing less than astonishing:
How can anybody sane be anything less than scared and outraged and mortified that 22 million people have been thrown out of work over something that may end up killing fewer than 50,000 people? It is unprecedented! And yet there are people who want to maintain the circumstances we are in. And it boggles the mind.
“It is so counterintuitive to Americanism,” Limbaugh continued. “We cannot go on! … I can’t believe it has gone on this long! I can’t believe… In one way, I can’t believe the American people haven’t arisen in outrage over this yet.”


Coronavirus unemployment: Bay Area loses 27,000 jobs in March, ending economic boom

 

California loses nearly 100,000 jobs, first monthly job losses in 10 years

 

 An empty San Jose International Airport, April 2020. The coronavirus economic woes bludgeoned the Bay Area’s suddenly feeble economy during March and unleashed a loss of 27,000 jobs — the worst month for the region’s employment market since the Great Recession.
By GEORGE AVALOS | gavalos@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED:  | UPDATED: 
The coronavirus economic woes bludgeoned the Bay Area’s suddenly feeble economy in March, unleashing a loss of 27,000 jobs — the worst month for the region’s employment market since the Great Recession, a grim new government report released Friday showed.
California staggered to a loss of 99,500 jobs last month, a setback that abruptly terminated the state’s record-setting economic expansion, the Employment Development Department reported Friday.
The statewide unemployment rate jumped to 5.3 percent, a huge one-month increase from February’s all-time record-low jobless rate of 3.9 percent.
The Bay Area lost 27,200 jobs during March, the region’s worst one-month job loss in nearly 11 years, this news organization’s analysis of the EDD figures shows. The EDD report was the first to sketch out a comprehensive picture of the coronavirus impact on the Bay Area economy.
The San Francisco-San Mateo region accounted for more than half of all positions shed in the Bay Area with a devastating loss of 13,700 jobs. Tech-heavy Santa Clara County lost 8,400 jobs in March. The East Bay fared the best of the Bay Area’s three major urban centers, losing just 3,300 positions.
“The decline of 99,500 jobs in California does not capture all the pain the state is going through,” Sung Won Sohn, a veteran economist, wrote in a research note on Friday. “California employment is in free fall and no bottom is yet in sight.”
By the time the unemployment reports for the Bay

Area roll in over the next couple of months, the 

Bay Area could suffer a loss of 835,000 jobs, 

according to an April 8 forecast issued by the 


Research that’s headed up by economist Jeffrey 

Michael.
Mandatory lockdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus have forced countless businesses to shut their doors, dismiss or furlough employees, and retail shoppers remain in their homes amid an array of shelter-in-place orders. Friday’s report was the first to reflect the first job losses since the regional and statewide stay at home orders were issued.