LIKE WHO THE HELL DOES THIS IDIOT REICH THINK RUNS THIS COUNTRY ALREADY???
Clinton’s Labor Secretary Pleads for Wall Street Control of the White House
David McNew/Getty Images
The One Percent on Wall Street must save the nation by taking political control from President Donald Trump, says former President Bill Clinton’s far-left labor secretary.
“If the leaders of American business remain silent about what Trump is doing to American democracy, they will be complicit in its demise,” Robert Reich begged Wall Street CEOs in the April 26 San Francisco Chronicle.
Reich, who was a progressive Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997, justifies calls for a virtual occupation by Wall Street of the White House, saying:
As the Republican Party moves toward Trump’s looniness — his xenophobia, isolationism, attacks on the media and on truth, conflicts of interest, anti-Muslim and racist provocations, climate-change denials, proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, and the evisceration of the constitutional divide between church and state — Dimon and his ilk could come out big losers.Let them try to sustain corporate profits as America slides toward authoritarianism. Let them try to maintain comfortable lifestyles as America descends into angry populist tribalism.Don’t [Jamie] Dimon [chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co. bank] and other CEOs have a moral responsibility to sound the alarm?
This Reich is very different from the 2011 Reich, where he passionately supported the short-lived Occupy movement against Wall Street. In November 2011, Reich wrote:
… break up the big banks. In the wake of the bailout, they’re bigger than ever. Twenty years ago, the 10 largest banks on the Street held 10 percent of America’s total bank assets. Now they hold over 70 percent.…You don’t have to be an occupier of Wall Street to conclude the Street is still out of control. And that’s dangerous for all of us.
When he was working for Clinton — who was a moderate compared to former President Barack Obama — Reich was also credited with popularizing the “corporate welfare” term. Populists share Reich’s criticisms of corporate welfare but often highlight different examples.
But even though he often complains about economic inequality, Reich urged a dramatic increase in the government-delivered supply of foreign workers to U.S. employers via extra immigration and more amnesties.
In practice, the foreign labor supply just forces down Americans’ wages and salaries while aiding Wall Street investors, including Dimon. This month, for example, Dimon called for an unlimited supply of foreign college-grads to take white-collar jobs from Americans in the United States.
“Those [foreign students] who get an advanced degree in the United States should receive a green card along with their diploma,” Dimon said in his annual letter to investors. “We need these skilled individuals in America.”
White-collar liberals & reporters want to think immigration is a 'diversity' issue. But Jamie Dimon & Wall Street know it is about moving money from paychecks to portfolios. Media will pay attention once it impacts their salaries & their golden children. bit.ly/2qewqd7
That cheap-labor agenda is common on Wall Street, which would gain greatly if white-collar immigration slashed white-collar salaries, as it has in the computer sector with the aid of roughly 600,000 resident H-1B outsourcing workers.
For example, Bruce E. Aust, the vice chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange, called April 13 for the federal government to import more engineers, scientists, and programmers. Aust made clear that companies do not want raise salaries to encourage Americans to train and take those jobs, but instead want a government bailout in the form of taxpayer-funded training and looser immigration rules. He wrote:
Employers also have the responsibility to lead in this area by partnering with schools and non-profits to get more young people interested in STEM and mentoring people within their organizations to take on new challenges and leadership roles.Still, we currently face persistent high-skilled labor shortages, and startups also need access to the best talent from across the world to fill those jobs and continue innovating.…we also need high-skilled immigration reform that helps fill critical high-skilled labor shortages and increases our global competitiveness.
Trump’s deputies are trying to curb the H-1B outsourcing program and to raise American graduate’s salaries.
But amid Trump’s triumph over progressive hopes, Robert Reich is pleading with Wall Street to take the wheel, saying:
I’m old enough to recall a time when CEOs were thought of as “corporate statesman” with duties to the nation. As one prominent executive told Time magazine in the 1950s, Americans “regard business management as a stewardship,” acting “for the benefit of all the people.”
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting roughly 1.1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
As CEO pay, corporate profits and
corporate cash hit new highs
US
housing secretary proposes tripling of rent for the poor
30
April 2018
As CEO pay, corporate profits and
corporate cash hit new highs
US
housing secretary proposes tripling of rent for the poor
30
April 2018
US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben
Carson’s “Making Affordable Housing Work Act of 2018,” unveiled last week,
would spell destitution for the poorest households receiving federal rental
assistance, virtually all of which have annual incomes of less than $7,000.
Roughly 1.7 million people, including 1 million children, would face eviction
and homelessness.
The typical household affected would be a single mother with two
children, with an annual income of $2,400—or just $200 a month. After paying
rent, under this proposal, the family would have only $48 left to pay for
necessities like clothing, diapers, school supplies and food or medical needs
not covered by other assistance.
The housing proposal would impose a mandatory tripling of the
minimum rent for households with an adult younger than 65, to at least $152;
raise rents from the current 30 percent to 35 percent of gross income; and
allow local public housing authorities to impose work requirements on those
receiving benefits.
Carson’s sadistic plan is only the latest in a series of attacks
on the most vulnerable and impoverished Americans that are being proposed or
carried out at the federal and state level. It follows an executive order by
President Trump instructing the secretaries of six federal departments to seek
out new ways to gut existing programs and impose work requirements for
Medicaid, food stamps, home heating assistance, housing assistance and welfare
benefits.
In addition to housing assistance cuts, other major programs
targeted include:
* Medicaid: Trump’s Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services (CMS) has given wide latitude for states to impose work
requirements in Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor jointly
administered by the federal government and the states. About 1.7 million out of
the 67 million people currently covered by the program could be affected by
work requirements now imposed or being proposed in 10 states.
* Food stamps: Republicans have proposed work
requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly
known as food stamps, in the farm bill now going through Congress. If enacted,
benefits for about 2 million people will be reduced or eliminated altogether.
Those current SNAP recipients most likely to face cutbacks are working
households—those with working members whose wages are so low, or hours of work
so few, that they qualify for food assistance.
The ruling class drive to plunge workers and the poor more deeply
into poverty and despair is seen most clearly in the state of Wisconsin, which
has been at the forefront of the attack on food stamp benefits. In February,
legislation was passed prohibiting SNAP recipients from owning a car valued at
more than $20,000.
Republican Governor Scott Walker preposterously claimed that the
law was to ensure that “people with giant mansions and fancy cars don’t get
welfare checks while hardworking taxpayers have to pay the bill.” The state has
also imposed work requirements for food stamps benefits. These moves yielded a
28 percent reduction in SNAP benefits from 2013 to 2017.
In Kentucky, the first state imposing work requirements for
Medicaid, advocates estimate that one in four Medicaid recipients who work
sufficient hours to qualify during the year will have at least one month in
which they fall below the state’s requirement, putting them at risk of losing
medical coverage. Those most at risk will be low-paid workers in food services,
retail and construction.
These punitive cuts come as corporate boardrooms across the
country toast the “booming” economy and rising stockpiles of cash, now at an
estimated record of some $2 trillion. Recent reports have shown median CEO pay
at the nation’s 100 largest corporations rising to an 11-year high of $15.7
million, 235 times the pay of workers. Earlier this month the major Wall Street
banks reported record profits for the first quarter of 2018.
The claim that there is no money to pay for a living wage for
teachers and decent schools, housing, health care and nutrition is a lie. The
problem is that the wealth produced by the working class is being stolen and
hoarded by the financial oligarchy that controls both parties and runs the
country.
These attacks on what remains of the social safety net are being
implemented with barely a whimper of opposition from the Democratic Party,
which remains single-mindedly focused on its anti-Russia campaign and the push
for military escalation in Syria. Its opposition to Trump has nothing in common
with the anger of millions of working people who oppose the administration’s
reckless militarism, its assault on immigrants and democratic rights, and its
efforts to further enrich the oligarchs by gutting what remains of social
programs for workers and poor people.
The Democrats speak for sections of the corporate elite and the
military/intelligence establishment that consider Trump too “soft” on Russia
and doubt his ability to handle the global affairs of US imperialism and crush
growing opposition from the working class at home.
Last year, the Democrats put up no serious opposition to the Trump
administration’s gargantuan tax cut for the wealthy, which they support. Making
the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday, none of the Democrats
who appeared had anything to say about the growing assault on social programs.
In this attack, the Trump administration is extending the social
counterrevolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The war on the
working class was carried forward by the Democratic Bill Clinton administration
in 1996, who ended “welfare as we know it” by terminating it as an open-ended
federal program, resulting in millions being cut off of any cash income.
The Obama administration deepened the war on workers and the poor,
overseeing the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of hundreds of
thousands of teachers and other public employees. His bailout of the banks and
restructuring of the auto industry were accompanied by a reduction in workers’
wages, including a 50 percent cut in newly hired autoworkers’ pay. He boasted
that under his tenure, nondefense discretionary spending fell to the smallest
share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.
The latest assault on social programs, while directed initially
against the poorest segments of the population, is aimed at the working class
as a whole, which is entering into a new stage of struggle. The continuing
rebellion of teachers in states across the US is a sign that the decades-long
period in which the unions could suppress the class struggle is coming to and.
The ruling class is expanding the pool of cheap labor by forcing
Medicaid, food stamp and housing assistance recipients to work for poverty
wages. These desperate and super-exploited workers are seen by the corporate
elite as a battering ram to undercut the struggle of workers to reverse decades
of wage and benefit cuts and attacks on working conditions.
The Democrats and Republicans speak for different factions of the
capitalist ruling oligarchy. Not a single social problem confronting workers in
the United States and around the world, however, can be solved without a
frontal assault on the wealth and political domination of this ruling class.
The oligarchs’ stranglehold on society must be broken and the
massive resources monopolized by the rich seized to ensure the basic right of
everyone to quality housing, a good-paying job, health care, education and a
secure retirement. Expropriating the corporate cash hoard, for example, would
provide 61 times the current budget of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development ($32.6 billion).
To implement this policy, the working class must organize itself
as an independent political force. As the strike wave of teachers demonstrates,
the working class is entering into struggle. The task of the Socialist Equality
Party is to build a revolutionary, socialist leadership in every section of the
working class, to develop a conscious political movement to overthrow the
capitalist system, establish workers power and reorganize society to meet
social need, not private profit.
Kate Randall
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