Sunday, January 26, 2020

BUILDING POVERTY IN AMERICA WHILE IMPORTING IT AT THE SAME TIME


WHY EDUCATE AMERICANS WHEN CONGRESS, ON BEHALF OF THEIR BILLIONAIRE BRIBSTERS, ARE HELL BENT ON IMPORTING MILIONS OF “CHEAP” LABOR FOREIGNERS WHO GOT THEIR EDUCATION IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY ! FREE !?

RURAL EDUCATION DESERTS
60 miles from college: Lack of education, a way out of poverty, could 'kill rural America'
More than 5 million Americans live in education 

deserts, lacking any college within a 30-minute 

drive. Few students go away to college, and 

poverty persists.

David Jesse, Detroit Free Pres
Editor's note: The promise of public education in America has lifted up millions of children and helped to create the middle class. But education opportunities in cities far outpace those in rural areas. In 2020, with the divisions in America starker than perhaps ever before, the USA TODAY NETWORK will examine issues in rural education. Reporters in our Network are uniquely positioned to write these stories: Many of them call small-town and mid-America home. This month, the series launches with an exploration of the widest educational divide between rural and urban America: the percentage of adults with college degrees.

BALDWIN, Mich. – The squeals of elementary students at recess and the occasional hiss of a tractor-trailer's tires on the main drag serve as the only soundtrack as a quartet of high school students saunter down a Baldwin street, heading for some fun away from school.

Traffic stops briefly as it leaves town, next to the county courthouse and a gas station at the town's only traffic signal — a flashing red light.
It’s a stereotypical rural small-town scene.

The skills gap is going to kill rural America. If there's nowhere for students to get the training they need, they aren't going to be able to get the jobs they need.

Two hundred miles southeast, on the edge of the University of Michigan campus, it’s louder — a jackhammer pounds away, a steady stream of cars rolls along a nearby street and students crowd sidewalks. A homeless man pleads for help. Inside a coffee shop, one of several within a couple blocks, tables are full of students studying, professors working on plans and townies just sipping a latte.

It’s a stereotypical college town scene.

The towns show little similarity. Ann Arbor is in Washtenaw County, Michigan’s richest county in terms of median household income. Baldwin is in Lake County, Michigan’s poorest.

Washtenaw is Michigan’s most educated county, with the highest percentage of adults with some sort of college degree. Lake County is among Michigan’s least educated, with the second-lowest percentage of college-educated adults.

With a 40-minute drive west to the nearest community college or a 40-minute drive south to a four-year college, Lake County is smack dab in the middle of a higher education desert, one of a handful of such spots in Michigan, most located north of Grand Rapids. In that same 40-minute drive, an Ann Arbor resident can reach four community colleges and two public, four-year colleges.

The deserts are home to Michigan’s poorest counties, the kind that need a boost from employers bringing jobs. But there’s a vicious circle at work — no easy access to education past high school, which means no highly trained workforce, which means no reason for a small manufacturing company or a software firm to come to town, which means not many jobs that pay well, which means more poverty, which means it’s harder for people to have money for college, which means … well, the circle just continues.

It's a circle that's repeated all across America. In 2016, across U.S. states and territories, 5.4 million individuals lived in education deserts, lacking access to any type of higher education institution within a 30-minute drive, according to a recent study by the Jain Family Institute. Looking at public colleges alone, 10.1 million individuals live in education deserts and 30.7 million individuals have access to only one public school.

"The skills gap is going to kill rural America," said Randy Smith, president of the Rural Community College Alliance. "If there's nowhere for students to get the training they need, they aren't going to be able to get the jobs they need."

Poverty in rural Michigan: Relentless aging and few opportunities for those of working age

Deserts across America

Along the Rocky Mountains, in the Great Plains, across the top of Midwest and in the Deep South, hundreds of American counties are education deserts, places that lack easy access to higher education in their county or commuting zone, within a half-hour drive.

America's education desert zones are generally less populated than those with easy access to a college, with the average population of a commuting zone desert approximately 72,100, according to a study done by Nicholas Hillman and Taylor Weichman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But not all are — 15 commuting zone deserts across the nation have populations of more than 250,000.

Most are rural areas, which makes it hard for a community college to be located there, said Smith, the head of the Rural Community College Alliance.

"Population matters in where community colleges are located. Geography matters and transportation matters," he said.

A community's wealth also matters.

"It's a stark reality: The richer zip codes" have more options, said Laura Beamer, one of the researchers on the Jain Family Institute study.
Money matters as well in terms of starting a school and running it. It takes millions of dollars to start one, and then the college must attract enough students to pay the operating costs. It can also be a challenge to recruit faculty to a rural area because of low pay and lack of job options for spouses.

It's hard to recruit schoolteachers, too: Inside the struggle to keep teachers at rural schools

All that means it can be tough for students living in these areas to find a way to college or post-high school training.
The pursuit of education

Every day for her last two years of high school, Nicole Mooney got to leave her midmorning class at Baldwin High School 15 minutes early.

She grabbed her lunch and headed to a school bus, where she would eat while it bounced down the road, heading west from Baldwin, through the Huron-Manistee National Forest on a ride of between a half-hour and 45 minutes to West Shore Community College.

After an hour and a half at most in class — over the two years, she took English Composition I&II, Intro to Psychology, Interpersonal Communications, College Algebra, Western Civilization to 1600, and U.S. History to 1865 through dual enrollment — it was back on the bus for a trip back across parts of two counties.

Lake County, where Mooney grew up, doesn't register on a map of Michigan counties that are home to some sort of college. Neither does a huge chunk of the northern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, the entirety of the "Thumb" or some of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Michigan's 15 public universities, 28 public community colleges and dozens of private colleges and universities are largely clustered around each other, creating large higher education deserts elsewhere in the state. Most are located within 80 miles of the Indiana or Ohio border.

That's hurting students all across the state, from high schoolers to those seeking career training. It's also a barrier to economic mobility, trapping rural residents in poverty.

Like many high school students across Michigan, Mooney had a limited number of classes available to her. Dual enrollment in college classes offered a chance both to take advanced classes Baldwin High couldn't offer and to stockpile college credits for free.

"We're a small rural community, fairly isolated," said Baldwin school Superintendent Rick Heitmeyer. "We're extremely rural. Have to go at least a half-hour to get to a Meijer," a Michigan-based superstore grocery chain. "We're trying to create a culture where (students) expect to go to college."
Baldwin is making a push to help students understand if they want to improve their financial well-being — more than 90% of the district's students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a key measure of poverty — they need some sort of post-high school training.
But that's hard to do in education deserts, Heitmeyer said.

"When you don't have somewhere close by," it's harder for students to get that training, he said, often for a simple reason — it's just not easy to get to a college.

Lisa McIntyre, 28, lives just outside of Rogers City in the northeast corner of the Lower Peninsula. Neither she nor her husband, both graduates of Rogers City High School, have college degrees. They live in another of Michigan's education deserts.

McIntyre works at a gas station. She's worked other minimum-wage jobs for the last decade or so. Her husband works a combination of construction and landscape jobs. Combined, they earn about $32,000 a year.

"I really wanted to be a nurse," McIntyre said, adding she loved helping people and thought nursing would be a stable career. "But I couldn't really get anywhere for training after high school. I didn't really have a car that was good for a lot of driving, so driving anywhere not right around here just wasn't an option."

The nearest community college, in Alpena, is about 30 miles from Rogers City. The nearest four-year school is Lake Superior State University, about 85 miles away. Central Michigan University and Saginaw Valley State University are each about 130 miles south.

"We're making it (financially), but I wonder sometimes if it would have been different if we went to college," she said.

The 30-mile commute to Alpena is about average for a rural community college student, said Smith, the alliance president. And that's sometimes in areas with heavy snow or no freeways. "Depending on where the college is and what the season (of the year) is, that can be tough," he said.
Online classes are an option, but that's hard as well. Lots of rural America lacks reliable broadband internet needed for video classes. And some subjects simply need hands-on teaching — it can be hard to teach welding online, for example.
"For prospective students who live in communities with few educational options, their educational destinations are bound by whatever institution is nearby. Not all students have the luxury of shopping around, and in many cases there are no alternatives from which to choose," Hillman and Weichman wrote in their paper.

With federal debate swirling over free college and the cost hurdles to higher education, it's important to work on other barriers, Beamer said.

"It's just as important that (students) be able to attend a school close by."
Free college: Plans such as Elizabeth Warren's are pricey. Some say they'd benefit the rich the most.
Big Bad Axe
Bad Axe is big, at least compared with what else is around. It has an active downtown. There’s a KFC, McDonald's and the normal slate of other fast-food restaurants common to Everywhere U.S.A. The Walmart is bigger than most city blocks. A few payday loan outfits appear on the outskirts of town, like just about every other city or village in rural Michigan.

Rural life in Bad Axe

To get there, you'll travel roads uncluttered by cars but with the occasional beet truck slowing your drive. Farmhouses mix with old barns, cornfields and streams wandering through woods and under the road. Down the way, an older man stops into a gas station to buy a freshly made sandwich and doughnut, while a lady on the other side of the gas station looks at guns and stacks of ammo boxes at a counter to rival one in Cabela's. She buys a handgun, milk and a couple of lottery tickets.

But missing from Bad Axe — and any other city in Michigan's Thumb — is a community college. The community college nearest to Bad Axe is in either Flint or Port Huron, both about 60 miles away on country roads.
So a beige sign advertising Mid-Michigan College outside a one-story building on the outskirts of Bad Axe is a bit jarring, if for nothing else than the fact that Mid-Michigan College is located 115 miles to the west.
But on a Thursday last semester, 17 students were scattered across a classroom in small groups, listening to Julie Carr, an adjunct professor at Mid-Michigan, teach them about introductions in her college-level speech class.
  
Julie Carr, an adjunct professor of speech from Mid-Michigan Community College, addresses her class at Huron Area Technical Center Thursday, Sept. 19, 2019. Next, Joshua Swathwood, 18, a senior from Sebewaing who attends Elkton-Pigeon Bay Port Schools, talks about classes that he takes offered by Mid-Michigan Community College. Finally, student names are seen near colleges on a bulletin board in the hallway.MANDI WRIGHT, DETROIT FREE PRESS

The students are part of a dual-enrollment program with the Huron Intermediate School District and Mid-Michigan. In addition to the dual-enrollment program, for-credit and noncredit classes are offered, including some in the evening.

It's an attractive partnership for all involved. Huron County gets job training, college prep classes and workforce development it might not have otherwise had. Mid-Michigan gets students and tuition payments, along with a chance to fulfill its mission to "empower learners and transform communities," said Scott Mertes, vice president of community outreach and advancement, even if the communities it is working with are a hundred miles from its main campus.

One classroom over, past a hallway logo of Mid-Michigan, Erin Wylie was teaching a psychology class — 22 students, the majority with laptops open, earnestly taking notes.

Most of the dual-enrollment classes are taught in one of three classrooms in a row, located behind a closed door at the end of a hallway. It's a separate world from the other classes going on for high school students in the rest of the Huron Tech Center building.

The one exception? Because it needed access to an emergency chemical rinse-off shower, the biology lab is carved out in the back of a machine shop. But there's no skimping there — expensive microscopes dot the tables, while a camera hookup to the instructor's microscope shows what he is seeing on a large flat-screen television on a stand at the front of the area.
Chloe Guest, 17, a senior at Laker High School in nearby Pigeon, is taking dual-enrollment classes because, like Mooney in Baldwin, she has already taken all the classes her smaller district can offer.

Now she's looking for a jump-start on college.

"You don't have a teacher talking to you all the time here, checking in on whether you did everything," she said. "You have to do it. We're constantly studying."

In addition to getting students used to college-level classes, dual enrollment means they can graduate with dozens of college credits already taken for free. That's a big deal for holding down costs for students from rural families without a lot of money.

It's an opportunity being missed in all those education deserts across Michigan.

Those areas "can't afford to start a new community college," Mertes said. But Mid-Michigan is already in a rural area. "We want to help as many communities as we can. Partnerships are the best way."

"We want to provide services they lack," Mertes explained. "Online is certainly available, but our commitment is to look for face-to-face instruction first."

There is no statewide push in Michigan to form more of those partnerships. And there's not likely to be, said Michael Hansen, president of the Michigan Community College Association. That's because in Michigan, each community college is run by a board elected by voters in the community college's district. The board and college president don't report to a statewide authority.

"We are so decentralized that any time you mention state coordination," Hansen said, "people break out in hives."

Follow David Jesse on Twitter: @reporterdavidj



A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

 

Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires


The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder




Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans

The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.

For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate taxAnd they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018

 

(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.

 

TRUMPERNOMICS:

Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019

As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, its most salient feature—the plundering of humanity by a global financial oligarchy—continues unabated.
Amidst trade war and the growth of militarism and authoritarianism on the one side, and an eruption of international strikes and protests by the working class against social inequality on the other, the stock market is hitting record highs and the fortunes of the world’s billionaires are continuing to surge.
On Friday, one day after all three major US stock indexes set new records, Bloomberg issued its end-of-year survey of the world’s 500 richest people. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that the oligarchs’ fortunes increased by a combined total of $1.2 trillion, a 25 percent rise over 2018. Their collective net worth now comes to $5.9 trillion.
To place this figure in some perspective, these 500 individuals control more wealth than the gross domestic product of the United States at the end of the third quarter of 2019, which was $5.4 trillion.
The year’s biggest gains went to France’s Bernard Arnault, who added $36.5 billion to his fortune, bringing it above the rarified $100 billion level to $105 billion. He knocked speculator Warren Buffett, at $89.3 billion, down to fourth place. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion due to a divorce settlement, but maintained the top position, with a net worth of $116 billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates gained $22.7 billion for the year and held on to second place at $113 billion.
The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg list added $500 billion, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recording the year’s biggest US gain at $27.3 billion, placing him in fifth place worldwide with a net worth of $79.3 billion.
It is difficult to comprehend the true significance of such stratospheric sums. In his 2016 book Global Inequality, economist Branko Milanovic wrote:
"A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everyone on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood… Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case."
The vast redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of society is the outcome of a decades-long process, which was accelerated following the 2008 Wall Street crash. It is not the result of impersonal and simply self-activating processes. Rather, the policies of capitalist governments and parties around the world, nominally “left” as well as right, have been dedicated to the ever greater impoverishment of the working class and enrichment of the ruling elite.
In the US, the top one percent has captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
The main mechanism for this transfer of wealth has been the stock market, and the policies of the US Federal Reserve and central banks internationally have been geared to providing cheap money to drive up stock prices. The cost of this massive subsidy to the financial markets and the oligarchs has been paid by the working class, in the form of social cuts, mass layoffs, the destruction of pensions and health benefits, and the replacement of relatively secure and decent-paying jobs with part-time, temporary and contingent “gig” positions.
Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, pledging to slash corporate taxes, lift regulations on big business and dramatically increase the military budget, the Dow has surged by 9,000 points. This year, Trump and the financial markets applied massive pressure on the Fed to reverse its efforts to “normalize” interest rates. The Fed complied, carrying out three rate cuts and repeatedly assuring the markets it had no plans to raise rates in 2020.
This windfall for the banks and hedge funds was supported by the Democrats no less than the Republicans. In fact, Trump’s economic policy has been given de facto support by the Democratic Party all down the line—from his tax cuts for corporations and the rich to his attack on virtually all regulations on business. Even in the midst of impeachment—carried out entirely on the grounds of “national security” and Trump’s supposed “softness” toward Russia—the Democrats have voted by wide margins for Trump’s budget, his anti-Chinese US-Mexico-Canada trade pact and his record $738 billion Pentagon war budget.
This has included giving Trump all the money he wants to build his border wall and carry out the mass incarceration and persecution of immigrants.
Trump’s pro-corporate policies are an extension and expansion of those pursued by the Obama administration. It allocated trillions in taxpayer money to bail out the banks and flooded the financial markets with cheap credit, driving up stock prices, while imposing a 50 percent across-the-board cut in pay for newly hired autoworkers in its bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. Obama oversaw the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of hundreds of thousands of teachers, and enacted austerity budgets that slashed social programs.
Two of those running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are billionaires—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. The latter, with a net worth of $56 billion, is the ninth richest person in the US. He entered the race as the spokesman for oligarchs outraged over talk from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren of token tax increases on the super-rich.
The oligarchs are not frightened by Sanders and Warren—two longstanding defenders of the American ruling class, who seek to mask their subservience to capital with talk of making the oligarchs pay “their fair share,” a euphemism for defending their right to pillage the population. The billionaires are frightened by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism that finds a distorted expression in support for the phony “progressives” in the Democratic fold.
Between them, Bloomberg and Steyer have already spent $200 million of their own money in an effort to buy the election outright.
The impact of the policy of social plunder is seen in the deepening of a malignant social crisis in country after country. In the US, society is marching backwards, as the crying need for schools, hospitals, affordable housing, pensions, the rebuilding of decrepit roads, bridges, transportation, flood control, water and sewage, fire control and electricity grids is met with the official response: “There is no money.”
The result? Three straight years of declining life expectancy, record addiction and suicide rates, devastating wildfires and floods, electricity cut-offs by profiteering utility companies. And a climate crisis that cannot be addressed within the framework of a system dominated by a money-mad plutocracy.
Not a single serious social problem can be addressed under conditions where the ruling elite—through its bribed parties and politicians, aided by its pro-capitalist trade unions and backed up by its courts, police and troops—diverts resources from society to the accumulation of ever more luxurious yachts, mansions, private islands and personal jets.
Where social reform is impossible, social revolution is inevitable. The solution to the impasse is to be found in the growth of the class struggle. The movement of workers and youth all over the world—from mass strikes in France to strikes by autoworkers and teachers in the US, protests in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, strikes and mass demonstrations in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and India—reveals the social force that can and will put an end to capitalism.
The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders, the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!”


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