Biden “recovery” plan will fail to relieve social misery or stop pandemic death
On January 14 President-elect Joe Biden unveiled his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, dubbed the American Rescue Act, which he has urged Congress to pass within days of his January 20 inauguration. This was followed the next day with a speech in which Biden outlined his vaccination plan, purporting to administer 100 million coronavirus vaccines within the first 100 days of his administration, although the current rate is far below that.
The second announcement was mainly significant for what was not in it. Biden focused on the vaccine entirely to the exclusion of efforts to prevent the spread of the infection, which will kill hundreds of thousands more before they can be vaccinated. Above all, there is not the slightest suggestion of the only serious measure to contain the pandemic: a full-scale lockdown of the economy, including closing non-essential businesses and schools, and providing income for working people and fully-resourced remote education for children until it is safe for everyone to resume normal life.
In announcing the plan, Biden paid lip service to widening income inequality, making note of “those few people at the very top who are doing quite well in this economy.” He correctly pointed out that the wealth of the top 1 percent has grown “roughly $1.5 trillion since the end of last year, four times the amount for the entire bottom 50 percent of American wage earners.”
The American Rescue Act does not aim to reverse this trend through aggressive taxes on “pandemic profiteers” such Jeff Bezos or ElonMusk, who recently became the world’s richest man after “earning” some $165 billion last year based almost entirely on the meteoric rise of Tesla’s stock. In fact, there are no tax increases for the wealthy at all, with Biden allowing the wealthy to keep their ill-gotten gains while the federal government borrows the money—from these same billionaires, at a hefty price in terms of interest payments—to foot the bill.
Despite a majority of House Republicans and senators such as Ted Cruz (Texas) and Josh Hawley (Missouri) seeking to overturn his election victory last week even after the failure of President Donald Trump’s fascistic coup attempt, Biden pleaded for “unity” with his “Republican colleagues.” He also welcomed their input in modifying the legislation. This process has already begun as the $1.9 trillion cost of the package is $1.1 trillion less than the Heroes Act which passed the Democratic controlled House last May, largely along party lines.
In fact the total cost of both the $900 billion relief bill and this latest $1.9 trillion proposal is still less than the Heroes Act. The effect the Democratic Party taking control of both houses of Congress and the White House is thus a smaller “relief” package than Pelosi proposed last year, when the Republicans still controlled the Senate and Trump was in the White House—this under conditions where the need for millions of people is far greater than it was roughly 10 months ago.
The package includes roughly $415 billion in public health measures, of which $170 billion is slated for schools in order to reopen them and get parents back at work producing surplus value for the ruling class. In order to facilitate this, Biden promised “more testing and transportation, additional cleaning and sanitizing services in those schools” along with “protective equipment and ventilation systems.”
Some $50 billion is allocated toward COVID-19 testing with another $20 billion toward a national vaccine program. In Friday’s speech detailing the five steps a Biden administration plans to implement in order to vaccinate the population, Biden lumped teachers in with health care and grocery store workers as “essential workers” and therefore prioritized for receiving the vaccine.
Notably, Biden didn’t say that every teacher would have to be vaccinated in order to go back to school, and unlike groceries and hospitals, which are essential for the preservation and continuation of human life, schools are not. They can be closed temporarily or operated remotely. This underscores the fact that the billions being allocated to “reopen schools safely” is not an example of the Biden administration “following the science,” but instead following the dictates of the financial oligarchy, who are well represented in his administration.
In another step down from the Heroes Act, only $350 billion is allocated for state, local and tribal government aid, roughly a third of the $1 trillion in the Heroes Act.
The bill also includes $15 billion in grants to small businesses and $35 billion for state and local governments to administer low-interest loans. These small sums are an invitation for the Republicans to make a counteroffer that would boost the subsidies and include large corporations and banks, like the CARES Act.
Other proposals, which have little chance of being included in a bipartisan bill, include:
- Increasing the federal, per-week unemployment benefit by $100 to $400 and extending it through September 2021. The $400 a week is still $200 less per week than what was included in the CARES Act.
- Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to a still starvation wage of $15. The proposal didn’t lay out a specific timetable, meaning it could be years before it is actually put into effect, if it even passes muster with enough Republicans.
- Increasing the Child Tax Credit to $3,000 per child and $3,600 for those under age 6.
- A 15% increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) through September and an additional $3 billion towards the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.
Drawing the ire of millions, Biden’s plan for direct cash payments would be set at $1,400, instead of the $2,000 that many thought was coming after Biden touted “$2,000 checks” while stumping for Democratic challengers in Georgia’s special election runoff.
“If you send Jon [Ossoff] and the Reverend [Raphael Warnock] to Washington, those $2,000 checks will go out the door,” Biden said during a rally. This was a deliberate lie at the time, since the proposal from December, which Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to, was to increase the $600 payment to $2,000, an increase of $1,400.
The fact is neither $1,400 nor $2,000 is enough for the millions out of work and the millions more that have fallen further into debt. A recent study on American household credit card debt conducted by the website Nerdwallet found the average credit card debt for a US household was $7,027. Overall, 42 percent of those surveyed said their household financial situation worsened since the onset of the pandemic, with 51 percent of those claiming a decrease in income while 22 percent had a job loss.
Nearly 11 million jobs have yet to return since March 2020 and roughly 1 million more unemployment claims were filed last week. Last week’s Labor Department monthly jobs report revealed for the first time since March negative job growth, with 140,000 jobs lost in December. Figures from the Commerce Department released on Friday showed that US retail sales, the backbone of US economic activity, decreased by 0.7 percent in December, after falling by 1.4 percent in November. At the same time, with teachers and workers being blackmailed back into schools and workplaces, the coronavirus, and its new variants, have embedded themselves across the country resulting in a world-leading death toll of some 400,000 in the US.
It is under these conditions that Biden’s proposal, as he acknowledges, will do little to prevent this ongoing, preventable catastrophe, with the President-elect once again gravely intoning that a “very dark winter” is still on the horizon. As the WSWS has previously noted, mass death is not preordained nor inevitable, but the deliberate policy of the ruling class which subordinates all aspects of society to the further enrichment of themselves.
The resources and material means exist to provide everyone with shelter and sustenance until vaccines can be administered to essential workers. The urgent task remains organizing workers on an internationalist socialist program and perspective in order to expropriate the ill-gotten wealth of the “pandemic profiteers” and use it for the preservation of life.
Joe Biden Weighs Amnesty Plan for Illegal Aliens in Meeting with Open Borders Lobby
President-elect Joe Biden is laying the groundwork for an amnesty for 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States, meeting with open borders lobbying groups and sanctuary city politicians to discuss a legislative strategy.
On Thursday, Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris met with a handful of cabinet nominees, executives with open borders lobbying groups, and sanctuary city politicians about “his day one plans to introduce immigration reform legislation and protect DACA recipients,” according to a readout of the meeting.
Biden’s meeting included Xavier Becerra, his nominee to lead Health and Human Services (HHS), who as California attorney general has implemented one of the strictest sanctuary state policies in the nation — even going as far as to say the state would prosecute employers who cooperate with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
The meeting also included Los Angeles, California Mayor Eric Garcetti, who oversees a sanctuary city policy that frees back into the community hundreds of criminal illegal aliens every week from local jails.
Alida Garcia with Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us attended the meeting. As Breitbart News has chronicled, FWD.us is one of the leading pressure groups to expand the number of foreign visa workers that corporations are allowed to import to take high-paying, white-collar U.S. jobs.
Other executives with the open borders lobbying groups in attendance included:
- Sindy Benavides, President of LULAC
- Alida Garcia, Vice President of Advocacy of FWD.us
- Domingo Garcia, Board Chair, LULAC
- Maria Teresa Kumar, President & CEO of Voto Latino
- Henry R. Munoz III, co-Founder of Latino Victory
- BLOG EDITOR:UNIDOSUS IS FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE RACIST LA RAZA SUPREMACIST PARTY
- Janet Murguia, President of UnidosUS
- Nathalie Rayes, President & CEO of Latino Victory Fund
- Tom Saenz, President of MALDEF
- Hector Sanchez, President of Mi Familia Vota
The business lobby, which regularly seeks an expansion of legal immigration levels to widen profit margins by cutting U.S. wages, was represented by an executive with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Biden’s advisers have already begun meeting with House Democrats to talk about a legislative pathway for an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. Aside from an amnesty that would burden 18 million jobless Americans with increased foreign competition in the U.S. labor market, Biden is eyeing an end to President Trump’s reforms at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The plans include ending the Centers for Disease Control’s Title 42 order and Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which ensures that federal immigration officials can return border crossers to their native countries within hours and forces Mexico to house asylum applicants so they are not released into the interior of the U.S.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Bush, Obama DHS Chiefs Praise Joe Biden’s DHS Nominee
Four former homeland security chiefs have endorsed President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for homeland security because he helped deliver work permits to roughly 800,000 illegal migrants.
“We each know [nominee Alejandro] Mayorkas as a man of character, integrity, experience and compassion … he helped create and administer the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] program,” said the January 12 Washington Post op-ed by former DHS secretaries Tom Ridge, ,
“The president-elect could not have found a more qualified person to be the next homeland security secretary,” said the four former secretaries, all of whom worked for Presidents George W. Bush or President Barack Obama — despite evidence of multiple scandals in Mayorkas’ record.
“The swampiest of the swamp,” responded John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Reform Institute, who is suing to block some of Mayorkas’ pre-2017 policies. “Bush, Obama, Biden, it’s all the same cast of characters, destroying working Americans from the beginning, and they’re now getting back into power,” he said.
Mayorkas faces a fast-track confirmation hearing on January 19 before several GOP members, including Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Rick Scott of Florida.
When Mayorkas worked for Obama, “everything that came out of his office was to screw working Americans,” said Miano, whose lawsuits against Mayorkas’ cheap labor policies are still being passed back and forth among judges who do not want to rule against the visa worker programs. “That’s what we expect we’re going to be seeing from the Biden administration.”
The four secretaries will likely portray their op-ed as a favor to Mayorkas that can be repaid to clients by Mayorkas if he is confirmed, Miano added.
I happen to believe there is a place for legal migration, and for people to be coming in temporarily with a visa to do work that Americans need to have done and that will not be done by American citizens,” he told Axios on December 18.
Until August 1, Napolitano was the chancellor of the huge Univerity of California system that opposed curbs on the award of visas and work permits to the foreign customers of the universities via the huge Optional Practical Training program that Chertoff helped to create.
Their op-ed denounced Trump’s DHS political priorities — which include the protection of Americans’ labor markets — saying, “DHS should not be beholden to a president’s political agenda; it exists for the protection of the American people on land, at sea, in the air and in cyberspace.”
The pro-migration agenda shared by the four authors and Mayorkas is being applauded by many establishment figures, including the multi-billion dollar widow of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Inc.
We will have a DHS that builds bridges, not walls. Ali Mayorkas’s historic nomination – 1st Latino and 1st immigrant to head the department – is the leadership America needs. https://t.co/jOX6wbMDoG
— Laurene Powell Jobs (@laurenepowell) November 23, 2020
Migration is a boon for wealthy Americans because it moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, 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, shortchange labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals.
Migration also helps corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.
“The fact we have all these swamp creatures supporting him,” said Miano, “should tell us that he is an agent of the establishment who will screw the average working American.”
Joe Biden's pick to run the DHS immigration agency – Alejandro Mayorkas – is a political gift for the GOP, says Jessica Vaughan at CIS: "Cronyism, corruption, swampiness, and the immigration issue."https://t.co/859b16NhN4
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) November 23, 2020
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