28 April 2020
On
Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive
Democratic Party candidate in the 2020 presidential election. In an
eleven-minute video, Pelosi lavished praise on the pro-war, pro-corporate
long-time senator and vice president under Barack Obama, the most right-wing of
the major contestants for the nomination.
Pelosi
called the 77-year-old, semi-senile political hack a “voice of reason” in the
coronavirus crisis and absurdly described him as “a leader who is the
personification of hope and courage, values and integrity.” In the midst of
the greatest corporate bailout in world history, she specifically praised Biden
for his role in the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street during the
2008–2009 financial crisis.
Pelosi’s
endorsement followed endorsements earlier this month by Bernie Sanders,
Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, marking the line-up of the
so-called “progressive” wing of the party behind the candidate of the party
apparatus, whose official imprimatur was signaled by the endorsement the same
week by Barack Obama.
But the
unity at the top has not resolved the party’s deep crisis. Biden is despised
by broad sections of the working class and especially youth and younger
workers, and there are many indications that large sections of those,
especially young people, who supported the Sanders campaign may not accede to
Sanders’ post-capitulation demand that they vote for Biden.
Their
disquiet has been increased by the news last week that Biden’s chief economic
adviser is Larry Summers, a key architect from the 1990s to the present of the
policies of deregulation and economic parasitism that have enabled the
financial aristocracy to monopolize ever greater portions of society’s wealth.
This has
been compounded by a simmering scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse
against Biden by Tara Reade, a one-time staffer in Biden’s Senate office, who
filed a complaint with Washington DC police in March accusing the then-senator
from Delaware of having assaulted her in 1993.
The alleged
incident occurred 26 years ago, there were no other witnesses, Reade did not
file a complaint with the police at the time, and the statute of limitations
has long since expired. Biden himself has said nothing, but his campaign has denied
the charges.
has no way of knowing whether Reade’s
allegations are true. One thing is clear, however. The response of the
Democratic Party and media organizations aligned with it, such as the New
York Times and the Washington Post, which have
spearheaded the #MeToo witch hunt and reveled in the “take down” of dozens of
prominent men on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct,
has exposed their rank hypocrisy.
The Times and the Post failed
to report Reade’s allegations for weeks after the story was broken by Sanders
supporter Katie Halper on her podcast in March. In mid-April they posted
articles emphasizing inconsistencies in Reade’s story and insisting that it had
to be carefully examined and Biden given the presumption of innocence before
reaching any conclusion as to his guilt.
The
Democratic National Committee has said nothing, nor has Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer, Sanders, Warren or most of the dozen or so women on Biden’s
short list for his vice presidential running mate. Pelosi has spoken publicly
only once on the matter, telling MSNBC on April 17 that she was “satisfied”
with Biden’s denial. She appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program
and was not asked by moderator Jake Tapper about the issue.
The contrast
between the treatment of Biden by the Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic
media and the treatment of a host of targets of #MeToo sex charges could not be
more blatant. The mantra “believe women” that was proclaimed repeatedly,
including by Biden himself during the September 2018 Senate confirmation
hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been supplanted by a
sudden (dishonest) affirmation of the democratic principles of due process and
the presumption of innocence.
What has
been exposed is the role of the #MeToo campaign as an adjunct of the Democratic
Party. Its proponents have changed their tune because the McCarthyite methods
of #MeToo in this particular case cut across the interests of the Democratic Party
and substantial sections of the ruling class that are backing Biden in the
contest with Trump.
There are, however, forces aligned with the
Democratic Party that are pushing Reade’s allegations and calling out the party
apparatus for seeking to quash them. The Intercept has
published a number of articles as have some pseudo-left Sanders promoters,
including Jacobin magazine.
This
opposition has increased since the posting Friday by Newsbusters of a video
clip from an August 1993 CNN “Larry King Live” program in which a woman,
identified by Reade as her mother, calls in and cites the case of her daughter,
who was “working for a prominent senator and could not get through with her
problems at all.” The caller does not identify the senator and does not mention
sexual harassment, but the clip seems to confirm Reade’s claim that she told
her mother of the incident with Biden at the time.
The video
has been widely reported by Fox News and other right-wing media, but largely
suppressed by the rest of the corporate media.
Fox News
reported Monday that the hashtag #dropoutbiden was trending on Twitter on
Sunday, until it was allegedly removed. Nick Brana, Sanders’ former national
outreach coordinator, tweeted over the weekend that the Democratic National
Committee should either force Biden to drop out or “admit that suppressing
progressives is the true purpose of your party.”
Another
former Sanders senior adviser, Winnie Wong, tweeted: “The video of Tara Reade’s
late mother calling into Larry King to blow the whistle about Tara’s sexual
assault is being met with relative silence from a cadre of progressives right
now and I want you all to know that I see you. We all do.”
Within this
context, Pelosi’s abrupt endorsement of Biden appears to be an effort to
contain and silence the voices calling for him to step aside and make explicit
the party’s demand that the matter be dropped. Pelosi’s video appears to be
part of a circling of the wagons around Biden.
On Monday,
the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila
Jayapal (Democrat from Washington state), endorsed Biden, after having served
as the Sanders campaign’s national chair for health policy. Biden was the
most strident opponent of Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” during the
primary contest, repeatedly denouncing it on the grounds that it would cost
several trillion dollars. Of course, both he and Sanders are now supporting a
bailout of the corporate-financial elite that has already reached some $10
trillion.
“I am ready
to work with him [Biden] to craft and then implement the most progressive
agenda of any candidate in history,” Jayapal said in a statement.
Her endorsement
followed that of two other former Sanders campaign officials. The Progressive
Congressional Caucus’s other co-chair, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, endorsed Biden
last week, as did Representative Ro Khanna of California. Pocan and Khanna
served as co-chairmen for Sanders.
There is
nothing progressive in the efforts of disaffected Democrats and their
pseudo-left allies to dislodge Biden on the basis of unsubstantiated sex
allegations. Even assuming that Reade is telling the truth, in which case Biden
should be held to account, the fact is that Biden and his party are guilty of
far greater crimes.
The wars
Biden supported in Afghanistan and Iraq alone killed hundreds of thousands of
people, including women and children. The Obama administration, in which Biden
served as second-in-command, made drone assassination a major instrument of US
foreign policy, asserting the right to murder US citizens and carrying out the
assassination of at least three Americans. In 2010, Biden himself declared
persecuted journalist Julian Assange to be a “hi-tech terrorist.”
It is not a
question of replacing Biden with some other servant of American imperialism and
Wall Street and promoting the middle class politics of racial and gender
identity. The crisis requires the mobilization of the mass of workers, who are
increasingly fighting back against the return-to-work campaign of both big
business parties, and behind them all genuinely progressive elements in the
middle class, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program in opposition
to the entire two-party system and the ruling class it defends.
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama
administrations orchestrated the bailout of
Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed securities,
that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of
speculation. As a result, social inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate cash
hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion
was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences
of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply
been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale.
Once
again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity
to
restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
The Great Wall Street Heist of 2020
28 April
2020
The economic fallout
from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have devastating consequences for the
vast majority of the population in the United States. The new month begins on
Friday, which means that rents and mortgages will come due for tens of millions
of workers who have no income to pay for them.
More than 20 million
people have filed for unemployment benefits over the past five weeks. In March,
less than 30 percent of those who filed received any benefits. Millions more
are ineligible for any assistance.
Millions of people have
yet to receive anything, including the $1,200 federal cash stimulus, and are
desperately attempting to stave off destitution. Food banks are overwhelmed by
demand and are running out of staple goods. According to the Economic Policy
Institute, more than nine million people who lost their jobs have also lost
their health insurance through April 11, with millions more in the weeks that
have followed.
There are, however, two
realities, two
Americas. While the
economic destitution of
workers is being used
in an effort to drive
them back to work over
widespread
opposition, the
corporate and financial
oligarchy has seen its
fortunes increase.
Gigantic corporations,
many of which have massive cash hoards, are laying off employees while
continuing to pay executives. Entertainment giant Disney recently came under
public scrutiny over the fact that it has furloughed more than 100,000 workers
while maintaining its executive compensation program. But this is the general
rule.
US billionaires, since
mid-March, have
increased their wealth
by $282 billion. The
collective fortune of
these 614 individuals,
which totals $3.2
trillion, has been buoyed by
the continued rise of
share values on Wall
Street, which increased
sharply again on
Monday.
A headline in the German
newsweekly Der
Spiegel yesterday captured the economic situation: “The death toll in
the US is rising—so are the markets.” Noting that while businesses remain shut
down and joblessness exceeds by far anything seen in American history, Der Spiegel writes:
“So if the fundamental economic data actually offer so little incentive to buy,
what is behind the rally? The solution to the riddle has three letters: Fed.”
The Fed—that is, the US
Federal Reserve—has made clear that it will do everything in its power to
support Wall Street. As a consequence, the markets keep going up. “If you
wanted to bet on price losses,” Der Spiegel remarks,
“you would have to bet against an institution whose funds are practically
infinite.”
Beginning in March, as
the Trump administration and the media were downplaying the danger posed by the
coronavirus pandemic, the Federal Reserve began funneling money into the
markets—first by reducing interest rates to zero, then by initiating a raft of
programs to buy up assets from banks and corporations, providing them with cash
to purchase stocks.
The activity of the
Federal Reserve was endorsed unanimously by the US Congress in late March, when
it passed the “CARES Act,” which allocated $454 billion to finance up to $4
trillion in asset purchases. Every single senator voted for the CARES Act,
including the erstwhile “democratic socialist” from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
The Fed is spending
something on the order of $80 billion every day.
The central bank’s balance sheet is expected to increase to as much as $11
trillion, from less than $4 trillion last year and less than $1 trillion before
2008. This would bring the overall value of assets held by the Fed to nearly
half the entire annual economic output of the United States.
One should call things
by their right names. Terms such as “asset purchases” and “quantitative easing”
tend to obscure what is happening. This is plunder, thievery, robbery on an
unprecedented scale. Since stock ownership is overwhelmingly concentrated among
the rich, it is the rich who are benefiting.
The Great Wall Street
Heist of 2020 has been aided and abetted at every stage by the Democratic and
Republican parties. The various institutions of the state, including the
mainstream media, have exposed themselves as nothing more than the paid
hirelings of Wall Street, to put the matter delicately. Others might have more
expressive terms.
After the 2008 crisis,
the Bush and Obama administrations orchestrated the bailout of Wall Street,
buying up all the bad debts, particularly in mortgage-backed securities, that
had been used as vehicles for an orgy of speculation. As a result, social
inequality increased to record levels. Corporate cash hoards rose to $2
trillion. Some $4 trillion was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced
to pay for the economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and
corporations have simply been bailed out again, this time on a far larger
scale. Once again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to
restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
Everything turned over
to Wall Street will be paid, in one form or another, by the working
class--through austerity, the further destruction of social programs and
intensified exploitation. Hence the relentless campaign to return everyone back
to work, risking a new wave of the pandemic and the deaths of countless
thousands of people.
Such measures, we are
told, are necessary to “save the
economy.” But “the economy,” like the “American people,” is an abstraction. “The economy” that has been “saved” is the economy of the rich, capitalism. Every measure taken has
economy.” But “the economy,” like the “American people,” is an abstraction. “The economy” that has been “saved” is the economy of the rich, capitalism. Every measure taken has
been based on
protecting the interests of the oligarchy at the expense of
society.
Every policy has been guided by class interests.
Every policy has been guided by class interests.
A socialist response,
that is, one based on the interests of the working class, is of an entirely
different character. Trillions must be allocated, not to bail out Wall Street,
but to implement an emergency program to build up health care infrastructure
and provide protective equipment to all essential workers.
The loans and other
mechanisms through which the income of workers is earmarked for payments to the
banks must be immediately forgiven. Student debt ($1.5 trillion), car loans
($1.3 trillion) and credit card debt ($1.08 trillion) could all be wiped out
with the money that has been turned over to Wall Street, with trillions still
left over.
All workers must
continue to receive their full income for the duration of the pandemic. The
highest quality health care must be available to all, free of charge and on a
completely equal basis.
There must, moreover,
be real assistance to small businesses. The so-called Paycheck Protection
Program passed by Congress, ostensibly to aid small businesses, has turned out
to be another massive swindle for large corporations, including restaurant
chains, hotel conglomerates and hedge funds.
Such actions and other
emergency measures to secure the interests of the working class, in the United
States and internationally, could not and cannot be secured within the
framework of the existing state institutions.
The entire response to
the pandemic—from the initial downplaying of the threat to the failure to
organize any significant response, the massive handout to Wall Street and the
present campaign to force workers back to work even as the pandemic rages—is
proof of the Marxist theory of the state. The state is not a neutral body. The
financial oligarchy rules. It is their state.
The politicians are their politicians.
The media is their media.
The logistics, food
production, health care, energy, manufacturing and other basic industries must
be restructured to meet social needs, under the democratic control of the
working class. The massive bailouts of Wall Street must be reversed, with the
social resources redirected to securing the financial well-being and health of
the working class.
Such policies cannot be
realized within the existing political system. They raise the necessity for the
revolutionary mobilization of the working class to take political power in its
own hands through the establishment of a workers’ government—that is, a
government of the workers, by the workers and for the workers—that will
implement the socialist policies required to save mankind from disaster.
Questions
Swirl as Fed Meets Amid Deepening Economic Crisis
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve has largely calmed
turbulent financial markets. Yet a far tougher task remains: Helping rescue an
economy and job market that appear to be free-falling into the worst
catastrophe since the Great Depression.
Fed policymakers will meet Tuesday and Wednesday
against a backdrop of dismal data: More than 26 million Americans have applied
for unemployment benefits since the coronavirus forced widespread business
closures. Retail sales have dropped by a record pace. Home sales have plunged.
In the meantime, inflation has started to fall amid
the collapse in economic activity and is sure to sink further below the Fed’s
2% target level. With beleaguered hotels, airlines and retailers slashing
prices, inflation could fall to 1% or less by year’s end. That poses another
problem for the Fed: Declining prices can eventually lead consumers to delay
spending, thereby slowing the economy further.
In response, the Fed has slashed its benchmark
interest rate to near zero in two emergency moves and launched an alphabet soup
of lending programs — nine in total — to pump cash into financial markets. The
central bank has also bought about $1.4 trillion in Treasury securities to
ensure that banks can swap Treasurys for cash and keep rates low.
AS THE MASSIVE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE EXPANDS TO ALL STATES,
PENSIONS FOR LEGALS MUST BE DESTROYED TO MAKE THE NUMBERS WORK. IN CALIFORNIA,
THE FIRST PRIORITY ARE ILLEGALS SO THEY
KEEP VOTING DEMOCRAT.
Neither McConnell nor the Democrats have any problem giving free
money—in unlimited amounts—to Wall Street.
On Wednesday, Forbes published
a commentary titled “Kiss Your State Pension Goodbye.” It noted: “This is
hardly the first time letting states file for bankruptcy to escape trillions of
dollars in promised retirement benefits has been proposed.”
Senate
Majority Leader McConnell calls for states to declare bankruptcy and gut
pensions
25 April 2020
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday called for
state governments facing mounting deficits linked to the coronavirus crisis to
file for bankruptcy instead of receiving financial aid from the federal
government.
Specifically targeting public sector workers’ pensions, the
Kentucky Republican told right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt: “I think this whole
business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be
thoroughly evaluated. There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side
to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”
States currently have no legal right to declare bankruptcy, but
McConnell suggested a law to permit it, saying, “I would certainly be in favor
of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route.” He added, “We have governors
regardless of party who would love to have free money.”
McConnell’s office on Wednesday released a statement titled
“Stopping [Democratic-led] Blue State Bailouts.”
Declaring
bankruptcy would allow state governments to override laws and even state
constitutional provisions that guarantee the pension benefits of retired public
workers. On Wednesday, Forbes published
a commentary titled “Kiss Your State Pension Goodbye.” It noted: “This is
hardly the first time letting states file for bankruptcy to escape trillions of
dollars in promised retirement benefits has been proposed.”
The author cited
a 2011 column by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich in the Los
Angeles Times calling for change in federal bankruptcy laws to
allow states to “reorganize their finances.”
Neither McConnell nor the Democrats have any problem giving free
money—in unlimited amounts—to Wall Street. The
Senate majority leader’s statement came one day after the Senate voted by
unanimous consent for a new $484 billion bill that will funnel money
disproportionately to large businesses, in the guise of aiding small businesses
and their employees. The bipartisan bill was approved by the House of
Representatives on Thursday, with only one dissenting Democratic vote, and
signed into law Friday by President Donald Trump.
The new legislation includes an additional $310 billion for the
so-called “Paycheck Protection Program” (PPP) enacted last month as part of the
$2.2 trillion CARES Act corporate bailout. The Democrats dropped their
demands that the new legislation include money to aid state and local
governments and additional funding for food stamps. They claimed that aid
to the states and localities facing collapsing tax revenues would be
forthcoming in a new bailout bill to be negotiated with the White House and
congressional Republicans.
Trump reiterated at his Thursday White House briefing that he
was open to discussing aid to the states as part of the next bailout bill, but
he added that “a lot of people” were sympathetic to McConnell’s position, and
he singled out for attack “blue” states, naming Illinois. The White House is
seeking to use the fiscal crisis of state and local governments and the
possibility of federal aid as leverage to force them to reopen their economies
more rapidly.
The Democrats voted to top up the PPP, which exhausted its $349
billion funding in less than two weeks, even though multiple reports had
emerged that the vast majority of family-owned businesses had been shut out of
the loan program while scores of large publicly traded companies had received
millions of dollars in forgivable loans, and the Wall Street banks assigned to
handle the Small Business Administration financing had made $10 billion in
fees.
In saying it would be preferable to allow states and cities to
go bankrupt rather than provide them with a small fraction of the trillions
doled out by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to corporations and banks,
McConnell was expressing the outlook of the corporate-financial oligarchy that
runs America. Working through both of its
political parties, it has responded to the deadly pandemic by opposing any
diversion of resources from its private wealth to save lives and contain the
virus, and instead orchestrated the unlimited transfer of taxpayer money to
prop up the stock market and make itself even richer.
Now it is moving to use the crisis to lay waste to what remains
of social services and benefits on which hundreds of millions of working class
people depend. This too is, in all essentials, a bipartisan policy.
The
Democratic-aligned Washington
Post, owned by Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, published an
editorial Friday that chastised McConnell and called for aid to states and
cities. At the same time, it lined up behind McConnell’s attack on pensions,
denouncing the call by the Illinois Senate president, a Democrat, for $10
billion in federal aid to stave off the collapse of the state’s pension system.
It declared that the federal government should not aid pension systems whose
problems are “self-inflicted.”
The National Governors Association has requested $500 billion in
federal aid, a fraction of the trillions injected into the financial markets,
to avert a collapse of basic social services, from education and health care to
sanitation and firefighting, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of
public-sector jobs, as well as the wages and pensions of state and municipal
workers.
State and local officials of both parties fear a social
explosion as the ruling class demands that workers return to work without any
protection from infection, unemployment reaches Depression-era levels, millions
of laid off workers are blocked from applying for benefits as a result of
antiquated and overwhelmed state benefit systems, and outrage grows over the
callous indifference of the political establishment to massive human suffering
and death.
McConnell’s statement has intensified tensions between the
states and the federal government. Trump has rejected calls by governors for
federal money and coordination to ramp up coronavirus testing. Last month he
suggested that New York state be quarantined, provoking Democratic Governor
Andrew Cuomo to call it a “civil war measure.” Earlier this month Trump
declared that he had “absolute authority” to force the states to reopen their
economies on his timeline.
Democratic governors, in particular, have denounced McConnell’s
proposal. On Thursday, Cuomo called the bankruptcy suggestion “one of the
saddest, really dumb comments of all time.” On Friday he denounced it as
“un-American.”
Some Republicans have joined in. New York Congressman Peter King
called McConnell’s remarks “shameful and indefensible,” and dubbed him the
“Marie Antoinette of the Senate.”
However, none of them have pointed to the contrast between the
senator’s attitude to providing money to maintain social services and pensions
and his avid support for bailing out Wall Street. That is because the
Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans, supports the
multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the oligarchy.
Even as Democratic governors and mayors criticize Trump and the
Republicans for withholding federal aid, they are preparing massive budget
cuts. Not one has even proposed raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy
to avoid the destruction of vital services and the impoverishment of working
class families.
Moody’s Analytics has warned that states may face combined
deficits of $158 billion to $203 billion through the 2021 fiscal year. More
than 2,100 cities across the country expect budget deficits this year.
New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, has frozen more
than $1 billion in spending and cut property tax rebates for homeowners.
Responding to McConnell’s bankruptcy proposal, Murphy said Wednesday that
without federal support his state would not go bankrupt. Instead, he declared,
“We will just cut, cut, cut and cut.”
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, is seeking to
freeze $2.3 billion in new spending, scuttling a program for free tuition at
community colleges and canceling an increase in the state minimum wage.
Washington state Governor Jay Inslee, also a Democrat, this
month vetoed budget items projected to cost $445 million over three years,
including a plan to hire 370 school guidance counselors.
New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced last week
that he would slash over $2 billion in city services over the next year. He
plans to close public pools, reduce sanitation pickups, suspend the summer
youth employment program and impose a hiring freeze.
Michigan may have a deficit as high as $7 billion over the next
18 months. Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan, has threatened to throw the
city back into bankruptcy and bring in an emergency financial manager to impose
new cuts in social services, pensions and jobs.
Whatever their policy differences, the two parties are united in
ruling out any challenge to the capitalist profit system and the entrenched
wealth of a parasitic ruling elite. They all agree that the full burden of the
pandemic crisis must be borne by working people.
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