EEOC Reaches Settlement in Yet Another 'No Americans Need Apply' Case
By Jason RichwineThe lawsuit against Helados La Tapatia is the latest in a long string of immigrant- or Hispanic-preference EEOC cases that I documented in a 2019 CIS report, entitled “EEOC Lawsuits: Employers Eager to Replace Low-Skill Native Workers with Immigrants: No Americans Need Apply”.
Report
Estimating Illegal Immigrant Receipt of Cash Payments from the EITC and ACTCBy Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler, May 13, 2021
Excerpt: Millions of illegal immigrants have Social Security numbers, potentially allowing them to receive cash payments from the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit. We estimate that illegal immigrants may receive between $3.8 and $4.5 billion from the two programs. This is in addition to the $4.4 billion we have previously estimated illegals likely received in stimulus checks this year.
By Rob Law
When asked, “Do you think the Biden administration’s executive actions on immigration encourage or discourage illegal immigration?”, by a 65-35 breakdown respondents said Biden’s actions encourage illegal immigration.
Biden Steals $850 Mil from COVID Strategic Medical Stockpile for Illegal Aliens
6 comments
Remember during the pandemic when we occasionally wondered where the supplies that the federal and state government was supposed to have stockpiled for emergencies like this were, and it turned out Obama and Democrat governors had emptied them out?
Even lackluster RINOs like Schwarzenegger had responsibly built up stockpiles of supplies for an emergency that Democrats trashed.
Once this became an issue, the media rushed into action, spinning frantically and tossing out denials. Except that we're now seeing the same process repeating itself in real time.
The Department of Health and Human Services has diverted more than $2 billion meant for other health initiatives toward covering the cost of caring for unaccompanied immigrant children (ed: illegal alien migrants of uncertain age), as the Biden administration grapples with a record influx of migrants on the southern border.
The redirected funds include $850 million that Congress originally allocated to rebuild the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile, the emergency medical reserve strained by the Covid-19 response. Another $850 million is being taken from a pot intended to help expand coronavirus testing, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Hey, we're past the pandemic. Let's start redirecting the stockpiles and supplies to fund illegal aliens instead.
And then next time this happens we can redirect more infected patients to nursing homes killing tens of thousands of seniors who are statistically more likely to vote Republican while promoting the illegal aliens who are more likely to vote Democrat.
But by then the media will ghost edit its old articles mentioning this and insist that it never happened.
But these transfers come as HHS has publicly sought to pump new funds into the Strategic National Stockpile and Covid-19 testing efforts by emphasizing the critical role that both play in the pandemic response and future preparedness efforts.
They don't care about prepping for a pandemic. They do care about illegal aliens.
“The fight against Covid-19 is not yet over,” Becerra testified to a House panel on Wednesday in defense of a budget request that would allocate $905 million for the stockpile. “Even as HHS works to beat this pandemic, we are also preparing for the next public health crisis.”
This is politics as usual.
Clamor for money to fund something that people want and need, and then shift it over to your priorities like filling the country with illegal aliens.
Becerra later stressed the need to “make sure we’ve got the resources” to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile
It's Becerra, by "national stockpile", he meant the stockpile of illegal aliens that Democrats used to turn California blue and that they intend to use to take over Texas.
Joe Biden Diverts Healthcare Cash to Help Illegal Migrants
President Joe Biden has taken
$2 billion from Americans’ healthcare
programs to help deliver migrant
youths and children to their illegal-
migrant parents throughout the
United States, press reports say.
“The Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] has diverted more than $2 billion meant for other health initiatives toward covering the cost of caring for unaccompanied immigrant children,” Politico reported May 15. The article continued:
The redirected funds include $850 million that Congress originally allocated to rebuild the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile, the emergency medical reserve strained by the Covid-19 response. Another $850 million is being taken from a pot intended to help expand coronavirus testing, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
…
In addition to transferring money from the Strategic National Stockpile and Covid-19 testing, HHS also has pulled roughly $436 million from a range of existing health initiatives across the department.
The program costs are expected to reach almost $9 billion by October according to a leaked report in the New York Times.
The transfer of funding to the growing population of more than 50,000 foreign children and youths means fewer resources for lower-profile American kids, as their diverse American parents are damaged by the Chinese virus, cheap labor migration, job losses, housing costs, drugs, or homelessness.
The Politico report follows the leak of a government report to the May 10 New York Times. The leaked report showed how the HHS agency expects to spend almost $9 billion by October to implement Biden’s decision to import the youths and children of U.S.-based illegal migrants.
“Current projections show [a] preliminary budget estimate of $8.6b for FY21,” said the briefing for officials in HHS. It continued:
With existing resources, a shortfall (of 366m) occurs in May and grows quickly through July with an overall project shortfall in excess of $4 billion
…
OMB approved an additional transfer from HHS resources to the UC [UAC] programing the amount of $850 million this week. This funding is not reflecting in this morning balance — will be added once [the] execution process is complete. There may be [an] additional $846.5 million available in future weeks. This will mitigate but not fully resolve the project budget shortfall.
The HHS spending does not including spending — or diverted resources — at other agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) and Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) are the top Republicans on the panels overseeing federal spending at HHS and the DHS. Their offices did not respond to emails from Breitbart News.
Since January, roughly 50,000 youths and children have been accepted at the border by the government-run program, which replaced President Donald Trump’s policy of flying the youths and children back to their homes in Central America.
Biden declined to use the judge-approved option of flying the arriving youths and children back to their distant homes. Strong majorities of swing voters blame Biden, not Trump, for the unpopular migration crisis.
“The $2.13 billion in diverted money exceeds the government’s annual budget for the unaccompanied children program in each of the last two fiscal years,” Politico reported.
But the overall migration is an economic stimulus for Biden’s business donors because the migrants inflate rents and stimulate federal, state, and local spending.
Most of the 50,000 “children” are actually older teenage boys, many of whom will take jobs at low wages to repay their smuggling debts and support relatives in Central American countries.
But even children are an economic stimulus for Biden’s business donors because they inflate rents and because they stimulate federal, state, and local spending, for example, on K-12 education programs.
Biden’s delivery of the incoming youths and children also helps to keep their illegal migrant parents in the United States amid pressure from their distant families to return home. For example, a New York Times May 6 report noted 51 percent of the UACs released in the prior week were handed over to parents or step-parents. Another 38 percent were handed over to immediate relatives, some of whom may have been fronting for nearby illegal migrant parents who declined to come forward.
A May 13 tweet by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) cited federal data for 1029 that said 79 percent of sponsors were “without [legal] status.”
The migration also creates a new generation of illegal migrants for business groups and progressive Democrats to champion instead of poor or disadvantaged Americans, just as Democrats now cheerlead for the “DACA” illegals.
Biden’s policy is being implemented by Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban-born child refugee who runs the Department of Homeland Security. Mayorkas frequently claims the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants,” not of Americans. He frequently argues the nation’s values require Americans to accept many migrants, poor or rich, old or young, as if there is no economic or civic cost to Americans from the inflow of foreign migrants.
The federal delivery of children to their illegal migrant parents, after their handoff at the border by cartel-controlled coyotes, has been an open secret in Washington, DC, for at least six years.
The secret federal cooperation with the coyotes and the cartels stopped when President Donald Trump used his emergency authority in 2020 to send the migrants home when they arrived at the border. The cooperation has been accelerated by President Biden as his deputies seek to extract more wage-cutting workers, taxpayer-supported consumers, and high-occupancy renters from Central American into the United States.
“We’re complicit as a nation in human trafficking,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said at a March 26 press conference in Texas with 17 other GOP senators.
Report shows CEOs in US cashed in during the pandemic as workers lost jobs, wages and lives
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) published a significant report on May 11 that details the rigging of executive compensation plans by corporate boards during the pandemic, so that vast sums could be funneled into the pockets of millionaire executives while workers suffered unemployment, reduced wages, exposure to COVID-19 and death.
Under the title “Pandemic Pay Plunder,” the top finding of the IPS’ 27th Annual Executive Excess report is that among the top US corporations with the lowest paid workforces, CEOs received a 29 percent increase in compensation, while workers’ wages fell by 2 percent on average last year.
The IPS research shows that 51 out of the 100 corporations on the S&P 500 list with the lowest median worker wages bent corporate rules during the pandemic to ensure that their CEOs increased their compensation by an average of $4 million, to a total of $15.3 million, while workers’ wages fell by more than $550 to $28,187. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio for these corporations reached 830 to 1.
In introducing the report, IPS authors Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project and co-editor of Inequality.org, and Sam Pizzigati, IPS associate fellow and co-editor of Inequality.org, write: “American families have been simply unable, on their own, to bear the COVID crisis. Meanwhile, corporate chief executives in the United States have continued to score the sorts of windfalls that have ballooned billionaire wealth.”
In explaining how corporate boards modified compensation rules to ensure a windfall for executives, the report says that the companies engaged “in various rigging maneuvers” such as (1) lowering the performance numbers so executives could meet their bonus targets, (2) awarding special “retention” bonuses, (3) excluding poor second-quarter (March-May 2020) results from performance evaluations and (4) replacing performance-based awards with time-based awards.
The IPS report says that “an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants” was retained by the corporate boards in order to “give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.” For example, Carnival—the largest international cruise line company—paid Frederick W. Cook & Co. $423,274 to give its CEO bonus “a stamp of fiscal probity as the company’s profits cratered and workers suffered.”
In relation to the Carnival compensation scam, the report notes that the company stranded employees at sea for months while it scrambled to get customers back home. But after securing $6 billion in low-cost financing from the US Federal Reserve, it gave CEO Arnold Donald special pandemic “retention and incentive” stock grants valued at more than $5 million. “Arnold’s total 2020 compensation came to $13.3 million, 490 times the company’s $27,151 median worker pay” the report states.
The IPS study does not mention reports that nearly a dozen cruise line workers died in suicides committed during the lengthy period of forced isolation without pay on ships, or as a result of mental health problems after they came ashore.
Other specific examples given by IPS of corporate manipulation of executive compensation in the midst of the pandemic include the meatpacking, poultry and automotive industries. In the case of $30 billion Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the report says that “executives didn’t meet their cash bonus targets last year,” but the board “gave them stock awards to make up the difference.”
Tyson CEO Noel White earned $11 million, which is 294 times Tyson’s $37,444 median worker pay. The report states, “Another recipient of those special stock awards was company chair John Tyson, a billionaire hardly in dire need of special support. The heir and grandson of the company founder, Tyson has watched his personal wealth increase 72 percent during the pandemic—to $2.6 billion.”
Tyson workers, like all poultry and meatpacking employees, were declared essential workers during the pandemic and forced to stay on the job. The report says the Tyson workers suffered the most COVID-19 infections and deaths in the industry, noting: “As of February 2021, more than 12,000 Tyson workers had been infected by the virus and at least 38 had lost their lives to it.”
The automotive supplier Aptiv—one of the spin-offs from Delphi Automotive, itself a spin-off from GM—has the widest pay gap (5,294 to 1) on the IPS list of 51 low wage corporations. Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark was paid $31.3 million while the median wage earner made $5,906 in 2020. The report says, “The Aptiv board inflated Clark’s paycheck by moving bonus goalposts and excluding 2020 results from the 2018-2020 performance period for long-term executive incentive awards.”
The report also explains that the company justified the massive payout to Clark—totaling an additional $18 million—“as nothing more than the product of ‘accounting adjustments’ related to 2019 and 2020 stock awards.”
Aptiv operates in 44 countries and did not disclose to IPS where the workers earning a median wage of a little less than $6,000 are employed. The global corporation—which specializes in automotive cooling systems—was the product of the multi-billion-dollar July 2015 merger of Delphi Thermal with the German-based Mahle-Behr GmbH and British-based HellermannTyton.
Some of the other companies highlighted in the IPS report for extreme CEO-worker pay ratios in 2020 are:
*Apparel corporation Under Armour, where half the workforce earns less than $6,669 per year. There, the company board “altered bonus metrics and replaced performance-based with time-based stock awards” for CEO Patrik Frisk, so as to pay him $7.4 million.
* Chipotle Mexican Grill, where CEO Brian Niccol “received $38 million in 2020 compensation, 2,898 times the restaurant chain’s median worker pay.” The firm’s board of directors inflated his bonus by tossing out the company’s poor financial results from the peak shutdown period and excluding COVID-related costs.
While the political conclusions of the IPS editors are for tax reform that will force companies to pay increased taxes for CEO-worker wage gaps of more than 50-1—which is itself a defense of social inequality—the facts and figures presented in the report are a devastating exposure of the criminality of the ruling class under conditions of the worst public health crisis in a century.
The IPS report was published just as the US political establishment was launching a campaign to eliminate weekly supplemental unemployment benefits for millions of workers who remain unemployed as a result of the economic crisis and deadly health conditions caused by the response of the corporate and financial elite to the pandemic.
Already more than half of US states have revived their work search requirements in an effort to force workers back to work at low-paying jobs. As reported by the New York Times on Sunday, Arkansas and Louisiana brought back these requirements months ago and others such as Vermont and Kentucky have done so in the last few weeks.
Laying bare the economic interests that lie behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decision to lift the mask requirement for “anyone who is fully vaccinated” last Thursday, President Biden ordered the Labor Department four days before to pressure state governments to put the job search requirements back into place.
The IPS report is a further confirmation of the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site that the capitalist ruling class lives by the motto, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and has used the pandemic to intensify the exploitation of the working class, further enrich itself and expand social inequality to unprecedented levels.
Soaring prices push US households to the edge
Surging prices for necessities like used cars, phones, and housing have caused the biggest jump in “core” consumer prices in nearly four decades, according to new figures released Wednesday by the US Department of Labor (DOL).
Rising prices for food, heating oil, gas, and other necessities are eating into workers’ incomes both in the United States and internationally.
Workers are finding it increasingly impossible to make ends meet, even if they are employed full-time. The minimum wage in the United States remains at $7.25 per hour, and US President Joe Biden has reneged on his campaign promise to raise it.
Workers’ real average hourly earnings have plunged, falling 3.4 percent over the past year, according to the latest jobs report from the DOL, as companies used the pandemic as a pretext to slash wages over the past year.
Overall consumer prices increased 4.2 percent from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2008, and significantly above economists’ expectations.
But “core” consumer prices, which exclude food and energy prices, rose 0.9 percent between April and March in the largest monthly increase since 1982.
The surge was extremely broad-based, driven by prices for used cars, air travel, housing, furniture and other consumer goods.
The biggest driver of rising overall consumer prices was rising costs for used cars, which increased by 10 percent over the past month and are up 18 percent for the year. The surge—the highest on record—is driven by the shutdown of auto assembly plants due to a shortage of raw materials, primarily microchips.
In April, the average price for a used car exceeded $25,000 for the first time in history, according to J.D. Power.
The CPI figures significantly underestimate the real price of housing, since they only take into account rent, not the price of owning or renovating a home. Over the past year, home values have shot up more than 10 percent nationwide, and in many of the zip codes, the increases are far higher.
The Wall Street Journal noted that “The median sales price for existing single-family homes was higher in the quarter compared with a year earlier for 182 of the 183 metro areas tracked by the National Association of Realtors, the group said Tuesday. In 89% of those metro areas, median prices rose by more than 10% from a year earlier.”
The increase in home values is affecting those least able to afford them. The value of homes priced under $100,000 have grown the most out of any price point over the past three years, according to an analysis by the Journal .
Lumber prices have more than doubled since the start of the year, making it impossible for many households to carry out much-needed repairs on their homes, and vastly increasing prices for new construction.
Prices are surging for nearly every commodity. The price of tin, essential to manufacturing electronics, shot up by 46 percent this year. Other raw materials, such as copper and steel used in electronics and appliances, are surging amid a mass speculation by large investors.
The run-up in food prices is driven by surging prices for staples like soybeans and corn, which have increased by more than 50 percent over the past year.
The Los Angeles Times noted that “last month, about 36% of small businesses surveyed by the National Federation of Independent Business indicated that they had raised selling prices, the highest share in 40 years.”
“Any animal that you eat is eating grains, and it’s eating corn, soybeans, or soybean meal, and perhaps even some wheat,” Sal Gilbertie, the CEO and president of Teucrium Funds, told Yahoo Finance Live. “We see the prices of these grains go as high as they’ve been literally since 2012, 2013,” he said.
Dana Peterson, the Conference Board chief economist, told Yahoo Finance Live, “While some of these price increases may fade with the pandemic, some may not.” He said the high grain prices will remain “at least a year, maybe two years.”
Periods of high inflation have previously corresponded with an intensification of the class struggle, with workers demanding higher pay to keep up with rising prices. The sensitivity of the US political establishment to these wage demands was expressed by the decision of the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, to call up the National Guard to help suppress a strike by 3,400 nursing home workers set to begin Friday morning.
One in three college students is food insecure in the United States
Since the onset of the pandemic, food insecurity has skyrocketed throughout the United States. One of the hardest hit segments of the population has been students in higher education. Food insecurity now affects one-in-three college students.
According to a survey conducted during the fall 2020 semester from Chegg.org, the research and advocacy arm of the course materials and services company Chegg, nearly one third (29 percent) of students have missed a meal at least once a week since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition, more than half of all students (52 percent) sometimes use off-campus food banks, and 30 percent use them once a month or more.
According to the survey, nearly one third of students reported they had been laid off due to the pandemic, and 40 percent of those who skipped meals said they did so to pay for debt or study materials.
For working class youth, making the decision to go to college means sacrificing basic necessities such as health care, adequate housing, and food security. Under the dire conditions created by the ruling class response to the pandemic, seeking higher education comes at a staggering price for a whole generation of youth.
The cost of college alone is enough to keep working class youth chained to the banks well into old age. The average public university student now borrows $30,030 to attain a bachelor’s degree. The total student debt outstanding in the Federal Loan Portfolio is over $1.56 trillion.
Many working class youth qualify for food assistance programs throughout their tenure at K-12 schools. The USDA National School Lunch Program provides low-cost or free meals to 29.4 million K-12 students of low-income families. The fact that so many children rely on these programs in order to eat each day is a staggering indictment of the difficult conditions facing working class families in the most “advanced” capitalist country in the world.
When these students graduate high school, this meager safety net is no longer available. College students face strict eligibility requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
In a report from the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness (NSCAHH) from 2016, 46 percent of US college students reported experiencing food insecurity in the past 30 days, yet only 18 percent of college students qualified for SNAP and just 3 percent received benefits. While there is limited data out on the situation over the last year, one can assume these figures are now much starker than in 2016.
In December 2019, rule changes to the SNAP program specifically targeted “able-bodied adults without dependents.” These changes made it even more challenging for states to waive requirements that someone work at least 20 hours per week, excluding otherwise eligible students from the program.
What this means in practical terms is that many college age students are forced to work 20 hours a week on top of a full class load just to be able to afford food.
Sal, a community college student from Silicon Valley, California, spoke with the WSWS about how food insecurity has affected him.
As a full-time college student, it’s not realistic for me to work a full-time job, meaning that I have limited income. Because of this I rely on CalFresh (food stamps) benefits, which offer just over $200 a month, in order to help with grocery expenses. However, this usually does not suffice. During most months, my benefits are exhausted by around the 3rd week, forcing me to dip into my checking account in order to buy food.
This puts additional strain on my already-shoestring budget and causes needless stress over whether I’ll be able to pay important bills including those for rent and car insurance. While I’m still able to do well in my classes, this stress does have a noticeable effect on my ability to focus on my studies and is particularly bothersome during exams, writeups, and other high-pressure assignments.
Social support systems such as SNAP have been under assault for decades, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Many students are forced to rely on school food pantries to make it through the month.
Arik, a student at South Florida University told the WSWS that being food insecure has affected his academics: “Most of the time it made it harder for me to study. I’d be stressed out and focused more on how I’ll satisfy my hunger rather than passing my classes.”
Arik continued, “It’s made me less energized and lethargic. I feel really weak throughout the day at some time.”
This epidemic of food insecurity affects students from all across the country. A 2019 study published in the journal Advances in Nutrition reviewed 51 studies on food insecurity on college campuses. The review, titled Food Insecurity among College Students in the United States: A Scoping Review, estimated that food insecurity prevalence at universities was as high as 47 percent on community college campuses and 37 percent at 4-year degree universities.
The studies ranged from a low of 14 percent (University of Alabama) to a high of 75 percent (University of California - Davis), and included rural schools such as Appalachian State University (46 percent) and large urban universities like Kent State (37 percent).
The Healthy CUNY 2018 survey found that 15 percent of students at the City University of New York reported they were often or sometimes hungry in the last year—affecting about 34,000 students. Forty-eight percent reported being hungry in the last 30 days.
The rest of New York state is facing similar issues. The State University of New York (SUNY) is offering $1,000 grants for the purchase of refrigerators for on-campus food pantries.
The Hope Center for College, Community and Justice conducted a study of Denver College students in Colorado and found that 40 percent of the roughly 65,000 college students in the city suffer from food insecurity.
At the University of Colorado Denver, the university has created a food bank program for students. All students at UC Denver are provided with 10 points each week to choose non-perishable and personal hygiene items at the food pantry.
Food pantry systems are in dire need of additional funding, but in December 2020 the University of Colorado system provided just an additional $50,000 towards student hunger in Denver, just a few dollars per food insecure student.
Such conditions are a glowing indictment of the crisis facing students across the country. Research by Feeding America has found that upwards of three-quarters of university students are financially independent. That is, they do not have family members to support them financially through their education and must provide almost entirely for themselves.
Students are finding themselves in an increasingly precarious situation as wages continue to stagnate, and as the cost of living and tuition skyrocket. From 1987 to 2017, the cost of tuition at public four-year institutions rose 213 percent (seven percent per year), more than three times the average annual rate of inflation and nominal wage growth since 2007.
The pandemic has greatly exacerbated this crisis. Workers aged 18-24 were the most likely to be unemployed during the pandemic, and disruptions to campus services reduced student access to food pantries and nutritional food. The true impact of the pandemic on student hunger is still to be determined.
Students all over the country are drawing far reaching conclusions from the conditions they face.
Sal explained what he thinks student hunger says about the state of society:
It highlights the stark inequality and unfairness of the status quo. .. expressed by the aphorism ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ Basically, our society deems it acceptable that certain people born to unfortunate circumstances must struggle throughout their entire youth just to acquire a reasonable chance at economic security, whereas those raised by more well-to-do parents and who’ve enjoyed a relatively painless life exert much less effort not only to secure basic economic needs, but also to excel and pursue their dreams. Society turns a blind eye and has a dismissive, cavalier, almost nihilistic attitude to what, upon a close and objective assessment, is evidently a harsh injustice.
When Arik was asked what he thought the conditions facing students showed about society he replied that it means “we live in a failed state.”
Soaring prices push US households to the edge
Surging prices for necessities like used cars, phones, and housing have caused the biggest jump in “core” consumer prices in nearly four decades, according to new figures released Wednesday by the US Department of Labor (DOL).
Rising prices for food, heating oil, gas, and other necessities are eating into workers’ incomes both in the United States and internationally.
Workers are finding it increasingly impossible to make ends meet, even if they are employed full-time. The minimum wage in the United States remains at $7.25 per hour, and US President Joe Biden has reneged on his campaign promise to raise it.
Workers’ real average hourly earnings have plunged, falling 3.4 percent over the past year, according to the latest jobs report from the DOL, as companies used the pandemic as a pretext to slash wages over the past year.
Overall consumer prices increased 4.2 percent from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2008, and significantly above economists’ expectations.
But “core” consumer prices, which exclude food and energy prices, rose 0.9 percent between April and March in the largest monthly increase since 1982.
The surge was extremely broad-based, driven by prices for used cars, air travel, housing, furniture and other consumer goods.
The biggest driver of rising overall consumer prices was rising costs for used cars, which increased by 10 percent over the past month and are up 18 percent for the year. The surge—the highest on record—is driven by the shutdown of auto assembly plants due to a shortage of raw materials, primarily microchips.
In April, the average price for a used car exceeded $25,000 for the first time in history, according to J.D. Power.
The CPI figures significantly underestimate the real price of housing, since they only take into account rent, not the price of owning or renovating a home. Over the past year, home values have shot up more than 10 percent nationwide, and in many of the zip codes, the increases are far higher.
The Wall Street Journal noted that “The median sales price for existing single-family homes was higher in the quarter compared with a year earlier for 182 of the 183 metro areas tracked by the National Association of Realtors, the group said Tuesday. In 89% of those metro areas, median prices rose by more than 10% from a year earlier.”
The increase in home values is affecting those least able to afford them. The value of homes priced under $100,000 have grown the most out of any price point over the past three years, according to an analysis by the Journal .
Lumber prices have more than doubled since the start of the year, making it impossible for many households to carry out much-needed repairs on their homes, and vastly increasing prices for new construction.
Prices are surging for nearly every commodity. The price of tin, essential to manufacturing electronics, shot up by 46 percent this year. Other raw materials, such as copper and steel used in electronics and appliances, are surging amid a mass speculation by large investors.
The run-up in food prices is driven by surging prices for staples like soybeans and corn, which have increased by more than 50 percent over the past year.
The Los Angeles Times noted that “last month, about 36% of small businesses surveyed by the National Federation of Independent Business indicated that they had raised selling prices, the highest share in 40 years.”
“Any animal that you eat is eating grains, and it’s eating corn, soybeans, or soybean meal, and perhaps even some wheat,” Sal Gilbertie, the CEO and president of Teucrium Funds, told Yahoo Finance Live. “We see the prices of these grains go as high as they’ve been literally since 2012, 2013,” he said.
Dana Peterson, the Conference Board chief economist, told Yahoo Finance Live, “While some of these price increases may fade with the pandemic, some may not.” He said the high grain prices will remain “at least a year, maybe two years.”
Periods of high inflation have previously corresponded with an intensification of the class struggle, with workers demanding higher pay to keep up with rising prices. The sensitivity of the US political establishment to these wage demands was expressed by the decision of the Democratic governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, to call up the National Guard to help suppress a strike by 3,400 nursing home workers set to begin Friday morning.
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