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.
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 tax. And
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.
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.
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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