All of this is, if we can be permitted to use Biden’s catchphrase, “malarkey.” Harris has already proven herself as a trusted servant of the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class.
The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that Wall Street financers had breathed a “sigh of relief” at Biden’s pick of Harris. Industry publication American Banker noted that her steadiest stream of campaign funding has come from financial industry professionals and their most trusted law firms.
Joe Biden, the corrupt, unaccomplished 47-year career politician, with a
reputation of having been a proud segregationist, an unabashed plagiarist and
liar, a resolute tale-teller, and a serial flip-flopper, is pretending to head up a
radical social-democratic ticket for President of the United States that includes
as his running mate the ambitious, disagreeable junior senator from California:
Kamala Harris
Biden Suggests Millions of Americans Are 'Jim Crow' Throwbacks for Supporting Voting Safeguards
(CNSNews.com) - "There's an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote and fair and free elections," President Joe Biden claimed on Tuesday. "An assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are, who we are as Americans."
Biden, who ran for president on a "unity" platform, attributed racial motives to the "onslaught of state laws" that he said are "undermining voting rights in old and new ways."
Speaking in support of the Democrat plan to federalize elections -- and relax the rules that prevent cheating -- Biden told a group in Philadephia he's doubling the size of his voting rights division to dismantle "racially discriminatory laws," such as "Georgia's vicious anti-voting law."
He also blasted Texas legislation, now pending in a special session of the state legislature, which would actually expand the number of voting hours:
"Civil rights groups and other organizations have announced their plans to stay vigilant and challenge these odious laws in the courts," Biden said:
In Texas, for example, Republican-led state legislatures wants to allow partisan poll watchers to intimidate voters and imperil--and impartial poll workers. They want voters to drive further and be able to be in a position where they wonder who's watching them and intimidating them, to wait longer to vote, to drive a hell of a lot--excuse me, a long way to get to vote.
They want to make it so hard and inconvenient that they help people don't vote at all. That's what this is about. This year alone, 17 states have enacted, not just proposed but enacted, 28 new laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, not to mention, and catch this, nearly 400 additional bills Republican members of the state legislatures are trying to pass.
The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real. It's unrelenting. And we're going to challenge it vigorously.
According to the "Texas Tribune," the pending bills in Texas would do the following:
-- Retain 12 days of early voting; ban 24-hour voting, but set a new, expanded in-person voting window of 6 a.m.-10 p.m. (or 9 p.m.);
-- Ban the universal distribution of unsolicited mail-in ballot applications;
-- Set new ID requirements for absentee ballots so voters must provide their driver’s license number, or if they don’t have one, the last four digits of their Social Security number on applications for those ballots. For their votes to be counted, voters will be required to include matching information on the envelopes used to return their ballots.
-- Create a new correction process for mail-in ballots that are ordinarily rejected because of a missing signature;
-- Set up a monthly review of the state’s voter rolls to identify noncitizens;
-- Enhance poll watcher protections by granting them “free movement” within a polling place, except for being present at a voting station when a voter is filling out their ballot. Both chambers also want to make it a criminal offense to obstruct their view or distance the watcher “in a manner that would make observation not reasonably effective.”
Biden on Tuesday called the Texas law a "broad assault against voting rights."
He said the "target" of state voting integrity laws is "the people who did not vote for them (Republicans)".
"We must ask those who represent us at the federal, state, and local levels, will you deny the will of the people? Will you ignore their voices? We have to ask, are you on the side of truth or lies, fact or fiction, justice or injustice, democracy or autocracy? That's what it's coming down to, which brings me to perhaps the most important thing we have to do.
"We have to form--forge a coalition of Americans of every background and political party, the advocates, the students, the faith leaders, the labor leaders, the business executives to raise the urgency of this moment, because as much as people know they are screwing around with the election process, I don't think that most people think this is about who gets to count what vote counts literally, not figuratively."
Biden said the next test will be the midterm elections in 2022, when "a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression and raw and sustained election subversion.
"We have to prepare now. As I've said time and again, no matter what, you can never stop the American people from voting." (Yet his entire speech was about stopping people from voting.)
"They will decide, and the power must always be with the people.
"That's why just like we did in 2020, we have to prepare for 2022. We'll engage in an all-out effort to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote, and then get the vote out. We'll encourage people to run for office themselves at every level.
"We'll be asking my Republican friends in Congress, in states and cities and counties to stand up, for God's sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote."
Inflation is Surging as Wages are Falling - People are Unprepared
Biden's American Jobs Plan Is Devoid of Moral Values and Economic Realities
The American Jobs Plan is premised chiefly upon investing $621 billion in America's crumbling transportation infrastructure. The Biden administration claims, "Decades of declining public investment has left our roads, bridges, rail, and transit systems in poor condition, with a trillion-dollar backlog of needed repairs. More than 35,000 people die in traffic crashes on U.S. roads each year, and millions more are seriously and often permanently injured." These statistics related to infrastructure are misleading. While traffic deaths have risen appreciably from 2020 despite fewer people driving, the preponderance were caused by aberrant behavior, not infrastructure. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics show that deaths resulting from impaired driving rose more than 9% since 2019, and failure to wear safety belts increased 15%. There can be little doubt that the White House's distortion of the causes of death is based on ulterior motives.
It is more likely that the vast investment in infrastructure is driven by the desire of progressives to consolidate economic and political power. It can scarcely be called legitimate. The most damning evidence for this view is that specific places and people that such projects are intended to help are strikingly absent. Similarly, the costs for each of the (unnamed) projects are not supplied, nor are safeguards to control cost overruns included. In fact, the Plan is alarming for anyone who typically asks, Why? What? Where? When?
Another commentator has already noted a similar lack of specificity in Biden's so-called Fact Sheet on Domestic Terrorism. The so-called jobs "Plan" provides a lot of vacuous generalities that serve the purpose of dramatically expanding the federal government but vacuously ignore specifics.
Economically, there is no long-term financial plan to pay for improvements without both raising taxes across the board and further increasing already burgeoning national debt. Think of the fabulous expansion of railroads in the 19th century. The government did not pay for the expansion of the railroads, but incentivized the railroads to invest in the project by providing land grants to the railroads for every mile of new track laid. They found a way for the government to support the private sector to accomplish infrastructure goals.
So many economic issues affecting the USA are ignored by this document. Honest hardworking people are becoming increasingly alarmed about the loss of our energy independence, acerbated by the shutdown of the Keystone XL pipeline, resulting in higher fuel prices and transportation costs of goods to market. More importantly, the shutdown led to the loss of thousands of jobs. The shift away from natural gas– and oil-generated power in favor of electric power for cars, and solar power and windmills for homes, will lead to tremendous employment dislocation. Yet these likely dislocations are not addressed in a meaningful way by the so-called Plan. As a Plan, it is therefore strangely disconnected from the stated goals of the administration.
The issue of job development cannot be properly addressed without seriously addressing inflation. Despite the attempts of Janet Yellen to downplay the threat of inflation even as our national debt surges to unprecedented levels under the Democrat give-away-the-store public spending, this elephant in the room is not addressed in the Jobs Plan even in passing. The consumer price index has already risen 1.4% in the past year. Earnings have begun to stagnate while taxes reflexively will escalate to meet the rising demand for increased social services, which the administration is ready to offer to non-citizens as well as citizens. These are portents of trouble.
When the many key issues of economics are not properly addressed by a document that is more propaganda and posturing than truly analytical and issue-oriented, many bad consequences are sure to follow. Why? The answer is simple: the fiscal and philosophical fundamentals have not changed. The virulent evil of China's communist dictatorship and its footprint in our national economy must be reckoned with. We must avoid becoming a command economy like China, but compete under free market strategies, meanwhile shrinking our reliance on government. If we are to survive, we must shrink, not increase, our dependence on a government-driven and controlled economy. If America is still to be the dominant economic powerhouse, our strategy must change. So must our priorities.
The moral dimension of jobs and work requires that we determine our own future through the classical dignities of work and self-reliance. How ironic that we citizens are offered an American Jobs Plan while thousands of illegal so-called refugees are being admitted who will undermine our economy. They will take jobs away from actual citizens, and they will depend upon social services that will drain and undermine the economic life of citizens through excessive taxation and a skyrocketing national debt. The American Jobs Plan is for Americans, yet without borders, there is no country. We control who comes here and how. This does not make us racist, narrow-minded or xenophobic. It is the rule of law, what makes us American.
We cannot endure as a country by leveraging large amounts of long-term debt and cultivating an inflationary economy. American life is and should always be a renewal movement built upon the dignity of being an American — a living hope directed by discipline, virtue, and above all order. It therefore takes time, energy, and courage. Most of all, it requires character and a manifestation of moral truth to set the example. We do not need the stream of ideological pap and "green" thinking that has been emanating from the Democrats. We do not need a jobs plan that has no plans. Moral realities combined with non-green economic realities must be embraced and put forward as an alternative to the bogus jobs plan of this administration.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
WSJ: Elite Schools Leave Grad Students Buried Under Mountains of Debt
Elite universities continue to push master’s programs that don’t pay off, as the jobs that graduates get with their degree from top institutions fail to generate enough income to pay down their six-figure federal loans, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Master’s students lured in by the idea of acquiring a degree from prestigious institutions have taken on debt beyond what their salary after graduation can support, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000, and two years after obtaining their degrees, half of the borrowers are earning less than $30,000 a year, the report added.
Columbia’s program is reportedly the most extreme example of how top universities have recently been awarding thousands of master’s degrees that don’t result in enough early career earnings for graduates to start paying down their massive student loans.
Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master’s program in the United States, the Journal reports.
Meanwhile, at New York University, graduates with a master’s degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000, and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after graduating, the report added.
At Northwestern University, half of the students who earned degrees in speech-language pathology reportedly borrowed $148,000 or more, and are earning a median income of $60,000 two years later.
As for University of Southern California’s marriage and family counseling program, graduates borrowed a median $124,000, and half earned $50,000 or less two years later.
While undergraduate students have been facing inflating loan balances for years, now it’s graduate students who are accumulating the most burdensome debts, reports the Journal.
And unlike undergraduate loans, the federal Grad Plus loan program has no fixed limit on how much graduate students can borrow. The limitless loans make master’s degrees a goldmine for universities, which have gone on to expand their graduate school offerings since the creation of the Grad Plus in 2005.
And now, for the first time ever, graduate students are on track to have borrowed as much as undergraduates in the 2020-2021 academic year, the report adds.
Zack Morrison, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia in 2018, told the Journal that his graduate school loan balance now stands at nearly $300,000, including accrued interest.
Morrison added that he has been making between $30,000 and $50,000 a year as a Hollywood assistant, and from side gigs working in commercial video production and photography.
“There’s always those 2 a.m. panic attacks where you’re thinking, ‘How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?'” he said.
It’s the taxpayers, however, who will end up being responsible for whatever is left unpaid by graduates who took out the staggering loans.
Combined US federal and state unemployment claims rose to 470,000 last week
The release Thursday of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) latest weekly unemployment claims report gives an indication of the economic and social crisis facing workers and their families more than 16 months into the coronavirus pandemic. According to the report, 373,000 jobless workers applied for state unemployment benefits, a slight increase over the previous week, and an additional 99,000 filed for assistance under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program.
The report was received with consternation within corporate boardrooms and both big business parties. They had hoped that the early termination of supplementary unemployment benefits by over half of the states would have forced more workers to accept dangerous and low-paying jobs, despite the new surge in COVID-19 infections fueled by the reopening of businesses and schools and the lifting of virtually all remaining social distancing and safety measures, carried out in the face of the spread of the virulent Delta variant.
The DOL report also found that more than 14.2 million Americans were still receiving some form of unemployment payment through June 19. Meanwhile, economists estimate that there are some nine million job openings across the US, the majority centered in the low-paying service, retail and seasonal tourist industries.
The 472,000 combined state and federal claims filed for the week ending July 3, which is double the pre-pandemic average, came despite the fact that 26 states have announced plans or have already begun to eliminate the meager $300-a-week federal supplement included in the Biden administration’s “American Rescue Plan,” which was signed into law this past March.
Biden has already announced that he will not seek to extend the federal benefit when it expires on September 6, and the White House has explicitly endorsed the “right” of Republican-led state governments to turn down the federal funding and terminate the program prematurely, on the grounds that the extra $300 a week is a “disincentive” to work.
In plain English, this translates into: Either work for poverty wages and risk infection and possible death from COVID, or starve!
Economists estimate that cutting unemployment pay prematurely in the 26 states will force some four million jobless workers and their families to participate in what NBC News described last month as a “bold experiment” in compelling workers to fully resume pumping out corporate profits.
However, the “bold experiment” has to date fallen short of expectations. Economists with Morgan Stanley in a recent analysis reported by Forbes found that: “... generous [sic] unemployment benefits are likely no more of a factor than other impediments, including childcare, transportation and health concerns, to workplace re-entry.”
The same report found that states that eliminated benefits on June 19, including Alabama, Idaho, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming, had only slightly larger declines in continued unemployment claims through May compared to states that are eliminating benefits but have not yet done so—12 percent compared to 8.7 percent. States that have not announced plans to terminate benefits early saw a 4 percent decline in continued unemployment claims through May.
The group of economists, led by Sarah Wolfe and Ellen Zentner, wrote that they could find “only mixed evidence” that ending benefits early had an effect on workers seeking employment, adding: “Stripping out the disincentive effect of unemployment benefits on the labor market recovery is not simple.”
As the ruling class and the entire political establishment rush to fully “reopen” the economy, they are centrally concerned by the development of a tight labor market, which gives workers, particularly lower paid workers, a degree of leverage in seeking better-paying positions and, in general, pushing for wage increases after decades of stagnating or declining wages. This hinders the drive to utilize the pandemic to further cut wages and increase the exploitation of the working class.
The Biden administration’s response is three-pronged: Allow the pandemic-triggered relief to expire, support the corporatist trade unions in their efforts to suppress mounting working class militancy, and promote identity, and particularly racial, politics to divide and disorient the working class.
Even with the temporary $300-a-week federal supplement, the combined total of state and federal benefits falls far short of meeting the basic needs of working class families. In many states, the amount does not replace even half of a worker’s normal earnings.
Despite having control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, the Democratic Party has not lifted a finger to preserve the $300-a-week stipend, which is already a 50 percent cut from the $600-a-week supplement passed as part of last year’s CARES Act.
The coming expiration of federal unemployment benefits, coupled with the ending of the Centers for Disease Control eviction moratorium at the end of July, has pushed thousands of families into homeless shelters, tents or cramped living situations with friends or relatives.
This past week, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University made public data collected in conjunction with the Las Vegas Review-Journal over the past year showing that despite the moratorium, thousands of evictions have been processed in metro-Las Vegas, including 4,559 in November 2020 alone.
“The fact that in November filings were 50 percent above what they are normally—that’s not the case in really any of the other cities we track,” Jacob Hass, a research specialist at the Eviction Lab, told the newspaper. Haas noted that the November spike occurred after Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak allowed the state-wide moratorium to expire on October 15, before renewing it on December 14.
Overall, between March 15, 2020 and May 27, 2021 Clark County (Las Vegas) had an estimated 22,400 eviction filings, which is more than any other similarly sized area studied by the researchers. For comparison’s sake, Dallas County, Texas, which has a larger population than Clark County, had nearly 4,000 fewer evictions, 18,600, over the same time period. Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania recorded 5,200 evictions total.
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