Wednesday, May 6, 2020

LAWSUIT AGAINST DEPT. OF EDUCATION CLAIMS WAGES BEING GARNISHED TO PAY OFF STUDENT LOAN DEBT EVEN AS TRUMP AND WALL STREET FLOOD AMERICA WITH FOREIGN "CHEAP' LABOR

Lawsuit against US Department of Education claims wages being garnished to pay off student loan debt

6 May 2020
Last week, upstate New York resident Elizabeth Barber filed a lawsuit against the United States Department of Education, alleging that employers continue to garnish the wages of 285,000 people over unpaid student loans, in violation of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act signed into law by President Trump on March 27. The continued collection practices are entirely in line with the priorities of the Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in the continued privatization and financialization of higher education.
Barber, a 59-year-old home health aide who makes under $13 per hour, is seeking class-action status for the lawsuit on behalf of all the others who have been similarly affected.
Aside from ostensibly stopping wage garnishment for student loan debt, the CARES Act implemented a number of other temporary measures to alleviate pressure on the nearly one in seven Americans who owe money on student loans, many of whom have no doubt lost their jobs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of those owing money on federally administered student loans were placed into “administrative forbearance,” essentially suspending their loan payments through September 30. Interest capitalization, that is, adding unpaid interest to the balance owed, was also temporarily stopped.
One of the apparent reasons for the continued garnishments is that many of these deductions are applied automatically by employers, who receive instructions from the Education Department to seize wages on behalf of the federal government, which holds or administers much of this student loan debt. As a result, even though the garnishment has been formally suspended as a legal matter, the Education Department has not told all employers to stop the practice.
As Seth Frotman, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, told the Washington Post, “We have built a student loan debt collection monster that we cannot physically stop, even in violation of the law.”
Additionally, because the CARES Act was passed March 27, but provided relief for the period of March 13 to March 26, student loan borrowers who had wages garnished during that time are eligible for refunds. Those eligible for refunds include those who made payments that were due before the law passed. In many cases, these refund requests have been met by complete silence or interminable waits to speak to a representative from the loan servicing companies contracted by the government to act as go-betweens.
Huge numbers of student loan borrowers are receiving no relief under the CARES Act because they either hold ineligible federally administered loans, or because they have entirely privately issued student loans. The number of these borrowers is estimated at around seven million. Most of these students had little or no choice in the matter, because which type of student loans they were even offered is often a decision made by colleges and universities.
Even before the wave of coronavirus-related layoffs, which have already hit over 30 million Americans and are expected to exceed the worst levels seen in the Great Depression, many student loan borrowers were struggling under the weight of their loans. More than 9 million student loan borrowers have not made payments on their student loans in over a year, making them eligible to have their wages garnished.
Before the start of the pandemic, household debt had already topped existing records. According to a Tuesday report from the New York Federal Reserve, US household debt rose 1.1 percent to $14.3 trillion. By way of comparison, this is $1.6 trillion more than the level of household debt total recorded in 2008. Outstanding student debt alone amounts to $1.54 trillion, $27 billion more than in the previous quarter.
A group of Democratic Senators and House members, most prominent among them Dick Durbin and Elizabeth Warren, have attempted to position themselves as being on the side of students. They proposed immediately discharging student loans for students who attended for-profit schools ITT and Corinthian, among others, measures that target only the most egregious abusers of the student loan system. DeVos has repeatedly opposed discharging loans for for-profit schools, an industry to which she has close ties.
Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden has called for a paltry $10,000 in student loan forgiveness. Aside from providing little relief to many borrowers, there is no reason to believe the Democrats are even committed to making it happen. The same proposal to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for all borrowers was proposed by Democratic Party leaders during the passage of the CARES Act, only to be negotiated away.


Fortune 500 to Agencies: Help Keep U.S. Jobs Filled with 200,000-plus Visa Workers

H1-B Visa Workers
MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty Images
NEIL MUNRO
64
2:24
The government will open “hundreds and thousands” of jobs to Americans if it won’t extend work permits for foreign visa workers, says a plea from advocacy groups funded by Mike Bloomberg, the Koch networks, and many Fortune 500 companies.
“For a politician, this should be a no-brainer,” responded Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers. “This is no brainer … if you’re a citizen who is going hungry while foreigners are being preferred for hiring, you’re going to vote that politician out office.”
Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies said the companies:
…are obviously not planning to hire the unemployed 26 million Americans. They are trying to stave off [agency] action that they fear will result in some of the visa workers that they have used to replace American [graduates] having to leave the country. They are in a panic that their business model of driving down wages and replacing Americans with visa workers will be upended.
Congress and the White House have allowed companies to keep a population of roughly 1.5 million foreign graduates in a very wide variety of U.S. jobs, both elite jobs and the starter jobs needed by new U.S. graduates. The foreign graduates include more than 270,000 Chinese graduates and roughly one million Indian graduates.
The federal government also helps companies import at least 400,000 foreign workers for seasonal work each year, including roughly 100,000 J-1 workers for summertime jobs at Disney and various beach resorts.
This government-delivered labor supply sidelines many Americans, cuts wages and salaries, subsidizes employers and investors, and also transfers wealth from the interior states to the coasts.
Recent polls show that the public wants a near-total shutdown of immigration, partly to ensure that Americans can recover their jobs lost to the coronavirus crash:
“Trump is really going to suspend immigration? Including H1B?” one technology professional asked Breitbart News. “I know people who are literally crying in joy from this news and the chance to have a job in tech again.”
Americans graduating from college in 2020 are “walking into a hurricane,” said Patrick Beharelle, CEO of TrueBlue, told the Wall Street Journal.
While facing pressure from many pro-American advocacy groups and the impending election, Trump and his deputies are showing an increased willingness to trim the many visa workers programs. But the grassroots advocacy groups are pushing for deeper reforms to help open many jobs for Americans. 
The signers of the plea include several groups that have been funded by corporations, the Koch brothers, or investor George Soros: Americans for Prosperity, the Libre Initiative,  the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Immigration Forum, and the Hispanic Leadership Fund. 
The signers also included many labor-brokers for the employers of blue-collar and white-collar workers: AmericanHort, the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, the American Immigration Council, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association
Fortune 500 companies are represented by TechNet and the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Indian labor brokers. The two groups include nearly all of the major technology firms who use the H-1B program to sideline at least 900,000 American professionals. The ITIC group also includes at least two members of the India-based NASSCOM outsourcing coalition, Cognizant and Tata. 
Bloomberg’s advocacy group, New American Economy, signed the letter.
Mark Zuckerberg and fellow West Coast investors at FWD.us did not sign the letter, but FWW.us is a member of the Technet coalition and works with another signer, a university coalition titled The President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
The April 17 plea was sent to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State. Curiously, it was not sent to the labor department where the relevant offices are run by a former counselor for former President George W. Bush.
The plea says:
USCIS office closures and visa processing limitations mean that without action, nonimmigrant workers risk falling out of status or violating the terms of their visa through no fault of their own. American hospitals and farms will lack the critical immigrant labor force needed to get us through these trying times. We applaud recent actions taken by the State Department, USCIS and DHS to address some of the issues associated with visa processing, but more needs to be done. We ask that DHS, the Department of State, and USCIS provide relief to these important workers and their employers.
…
Without action, these issues will lead to hundreds and thousands of unfilled jobs and have profound negative economic effects.
…
We the undersigned ask that U.S. federal agencies take immediate action to support foreign- born workers and their employers during the COVID-19 pandemic. 
The phrase “hundreds and thousands” means “an indefinite but emphatically large number,” according to Wikipedia.
The companies requested:
Delay all work authorization expiration dates and extend deadlines to renew or adjust status until at least September 10 …
Forgive accrual of unlawful presence for furloughed workers and student visa holders and forgive extended absence for green card holders …
Add flexibility to continue processing essential worker visas, including for health care workers and temporary farmworkers.
The request was signed by the Niskanen Center, a pro-migration group which recently posted a document saying that “the total number of would-be legal immigrants working here who may lose status and have to depart [because of the coronavirus crash] would likely more than double to over a quarter of a million.”
In 2019, the center produced a list of priorities for immigration policy — and excluded any ideas for protecting Americans’ careers, pay, housing, or children.
The Fortune 500 plea was favorably covered two foreign-born reporters at Mike Bloomberg’s Bloomberg.com:
The tech industry is crucial to supporting offices working remotely, helping doctors provide telehealth services and keeping students learning at home, said Alex Burgos, senior vice president of federal policy and government relations at TechNet. “We’ve seen the administration extend tax filing deadlines,” he said, and similar flexibility in visa programs makes sense “because no one here is at fault in any way.”
Technet did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
The plea by Burgos at Technet for “flexibility … because no one here is at fault in any way” spotlights a key argument by business groups, that no-fault rules in visa worker laws allow the wholesale suspension of the rules to help employers.
But those no-fault rules were designed for fixing small-scale problems — not for bailing out the companies’ decades-old and economy-wide policy of replacing Americans with cheaper, compliant, and disposable foreign workers, said Lynn.
“We’ve got 26 million unemployed Americans: Why would we be concerned with foreign returning home when their visas or contracts have expired?” said Lynn.
“The companies’ [contractual] promise was kept, and now an American will have an opportunity to fill that position,” he said, adding “these are just the forces that want cheap labor, who don’t want there to be an opportunity for Americans to fill  those positions.”

Millions of US workers blocked from applying for jobless benefits


29 April 2020
While the US government has proceeded expeditiously to hand over trillions of dollars to the Wall Street banks and corporations, millions of workers who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic have been blocked from applying for unemployment benefits.
A survey published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that the widely reported figure of 26.5 million workers who applied for jobless benefits over the past five weeks significantly underestimates the actual number of people who have lost their jobs since March 15.
The EPI survey reveals that for every 10 people who have successfully applied for unemployment benefits during the pandemic, three or four more tried to apply but could not get through to make a claim. An additional two people did not try to apply at all because the process was so onerous.
EPI summarizes the survey results in the following way: “When we extrapolate our survey findings to the full five weeks of UI [unemployment insurance] claims since March 15, we estimate that an additional 8.9–13.9 million people could have filed for benefits had the process been easier.”
The EPI further states: “These findings imply the official count of unemployment insurance claims likely drastically understates the extent of employment reductions and the need for economic relief during the coronavirus crisis.”
The inability of millions of workers across the country to even apply for unemployment benefits stands in stark contrast to the trillions of dollars that have been transferred from the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve to corporations, banks and the super-rich.
At present, the amount of “emergency assistance” provided to the corporations and banks by the US government—since President Trump signed the initial $2.2 trillion CARES Act on March 27—stands at between $4.2 and $6 trillion.
The denial of resources to unemployed workers while unlimited funds are made available to the ruling elite demonstrates that the officially stated purpose of the CARES Act—voted for unanimously by both Democrats and Republicans—as “fast and direct economic assistance for American workers, families and small businesses” is an utter fraud.
The unemployment benefits program included in the CARES Act has been, to a large extent, an elaborate exercise in deliberate mass deception. When Congress and the White House presented the additional 13 weeks of state-based unemployment insurance beyond the typical 26 weeks, plus an additional $600 weekly federal supplement through July 31, 2020, as a social safety net during the COVID-19 crisis, they knew very well that millions of unemployed workers would be unable to take advantage of it.
The Democrats and Republicans knew that many workers would not be able to get through to the antiquated systems in the state capitals across the country, which would be completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the number of people seeking to apply for benefits. They were counting on these systems being so backed up with delays and confusion that workers would give up and end up receiving little or nothing of the government money.
The banks, corporations and wealthiest 

individuals, on the other hand, were to get 

vast sums of money without delay.
In an example of the ease with which government money is flowing into the accounts of the largest corporations in America, the Washington Post reported on Monday that nearly half of the “payroll support fund” allocated to the airline and cargo industries had been disbursed. The Post report said: “As of this week, $12.4 billion of the $29 billion in grants has been paid out to 93 carriers to keep front-line workers on the job, Treasury officials said. In all, airlines and air cargo carriers are eligible for more than $50 billion in grants and loans.”
Additionally, the Federal Reserve will shortly begin buying $500 billion in bonds issued by large US corporations. Although this cash is being provided officially as a “financial lifeline” that is to be paid back, there are no provisions in the Fed’s credit program requiring companies to maintain jobs or restrict the funds from being used for executive compensation, stock buybacks or shareholder dividends.
The EPI survey, starting with 24.4 million people who applied for unemployment benefits between March 15 and April 18, shows that the actual number of unemployed workers in the US is somewhere between 33.3 and 38.3 million people. This means that between one-quarter and one-third of the workers who have lost their jobs during the pandemic (8.9 to 13.9 million workers) have been blocked from applying for benefits.
EPI explained the methodology behind its study: “To gauge how well the UI [unemployment insurance] system is handling the new caseloads, we used Google Surveys to ask 25,000 people, ‘Did you apply for unemployment benefits in the last 4 weeks?’”
EPI asked those who responded to this question which one of six different scenarios corresponded to their experience, such as, “I applied successfully,” “I tried but could not get through,” “I did not apply because it was too difficult.”
When added to the number of people who were officially without a job prior to the pandemic—7.1 million workers—the EPI survey results would put the jobless rate in the US at somewhere between 24 and 27 percent, eclipsing the highest rates of unemployment during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In addition to jobless workers who have been prevented from applying for government assistance, a number of surveys have shown that substantial numbers of those who have successfully applied have not received any benefits.
A study by the Washington Post published on April 23 says that there is a backlog of three million unpaid jobless claims across the US, although “the true backlog is probably far greater.” A Pew Research Study showed that only 29 percent of the 7.37 million who filed for jobless assistance in March, or 2.1 million people, actually received the benefits.
Many states across the country are continuing to report “glitches” and “backlogs” in processing unemployment applications that have been successfully submitted. Among the states reporting delays in processing applications are:
• California: A report on Monday in the Los Angeles Times said that for Californians applying for unemployment assistance, “the last month has been a perfect storm of failures for a state government with a long history of technology problems.” Of the 3.2 million new unemployment claims filed in the last month, 76 percent of those applying have received benefits. This means that 768,000 applicants have not yet received an unemployment check.
• Florida: The state of Florida has published an online dashboard showing a total of 1.9 million applications for “reemployment insurance” since March 15. Because of confusion created by the state instructing applicants who had applied before April 5 to apply a second time, there are multiple applications in this total. Florida then reports 824,412 “Confirmed Unique Claims Submitted,” and of these, just 392,051 (47.6 percent) that have been paid any benefits.
• Oregon: A large percentage of the 300,000 unemployed in Oregon who have filed for government assistance have not received a check and cannot find out the status of their claim. The state’s antiquated systems have been overwhelmed by the volume of applications, and, according to a report in the Oregonian, thousands of workers have been given faulty information about their applications. “The department’s phone lines are overwhelmed, preventing callers from getting through,” the newspaper reports.
Amidst the dysfunction, chaos, incompetence and bureaucratic mismanagement of state unemployment programs in the US, there is a definite policy at work. The ruling class and both of its parties are intentionally withholding financial assistance from broad sections of the working class who are being devastated by the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, while offering up unlimited funds in the trillions of dollars to the corporate-financial oligarchy.
There is a deliberate policy of using mass unemployment and the prospect of destitution, homelessness and hunger to blackmail a section of workers into going back to work under unsafe conditions. This policy is, moreover, aimed at the imposition among all workers of a permanent restructuring of economic and class relations, such that full-time jobs, wages, health care, pensions and social services such as education are gutted.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the financial collapse of 2008 was a foretaste of the social and political assault on the working class that is now unfolding. At the same time, millions of workers all over the world are seeing the true reality of capitalism—the subordination of everything, including human life itself, to the ruthless drive of the parasitic elite to increase its wealth. The conditions are being created for revolutionary upheavals. The conclusion that must be drawn is the necessity for a unified international struggle of the working class to put an end to the capitalist system and establish socialism.


Pelosi is a ghastly creature. She and her ilk – Feinstein, Boxer, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom – have effectively destroyed California and they did it on purpose. They strive to import as many illegal migrants as possible; they've created and fostered the homelessness and let it fester. California is now a socialist disaster and the further destruction of the economy is just what they've wanted. They see it as their chance to transform the state into Venezuela. PATRICIA McCARTHY



GLOBALIST BARACK OBAMA AND NANCY PELOSI’S CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY AND KEEP AMERICA FLOODED WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS






"Along with Obama, Pelosi and Schumer are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY (BIDEN IS NOT NOTED AS HE SPENT 8 YEARS DURING THE OBOMB FOR BANKSTERS REGIME SUCKING OFF BRIBES AND NO ONE REALLY SAW HIM)


San Francisco is a disaster about which Nancy Pelosi she cares nothing.  It is a city ravaged by drug abuse, homelessness, rampant crime and all the other scourges of leftism.  She lives extravagantly in her gated mansion.  She lives a life of wealth and privilege in city suffering a civilizational collapse created and orchestrated by 
her own party.  She revels in it.  She has become a near-billionairess by way of politics of the most corrupt variety.  She is indeed a cancer on the body politic. PATRICIA McCARTHY

 


Nancy Pelosi, a ghastly creature, quite beyond the pale

By Patricia McCarthy
On Monday, Speaker Pelosi finally got around to endorsing Joe Biden for president.
Today, I am proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States because he will be an extraordinary president. He knows how to get the job done. When our nation faced the Great Recession, it was Joe Biden who led the implementation and the accountability of the Recovery Act, helping create and save millions of jobs. Now more than ever, we need a forward-looking, battle-tested leaders who will fight for the people, a president with the values, experience and the strategic-thinking to bring our nation together and build a better, fairer world for our children. For these and other reasons, I am proud to endorse Joe Biden for president, a leader who is the personification of hope and courage, values, authenticity and integrity.

YouTube screen grab.
Has anyone ever heard a bigger load of sheer nonsense?
Any remotely sentient person knows by now that Joe Biden is an intellectual lightweight, a plagiarist, corrupt to his core (he has seen to it that every member of his family has become fabulously wealthy thanks to his nefarious shenanigans), and that he is suffering from rapidly advancing dementia.  His wife Jill seems to want to be first lady so badly she is willing to sacrifice her husband's well-being to her own hunger for power.  Maybe she thinks she can be Edith Wilson, Woodrow Wilson's second wife, who ostensibly ran the country after Wilson's massive stroke in 1919.  He had suffered three previous strokes: 1896, 1906, and 1913.  Wilson was an avowed racist and the first "progressive" president to attempt the transformation of America.  He was a nasty piece of work.  Obama was his direct descendent politically. 
Joe Biden suffered two aneurysms for which he underwent brain surgery.  He survived those operations and remained a senator without distinction.  As Robert Gates wrote in his book, Joe Biden has been wrong on every foreign policy issue for forty years.  He has always been a mediocre senator and everyone — the media and the DNC — knows it.
Pelosi now seems to be almost as senile as Joe.  She stumbles and mumbles when speaking, forgets names, and is often as completely nonsensical as Biden.  She is so out of touch with the American people that she can show off her fancy refrigerator and $13-a-pint ice cream as a prescription for enduring the stay-at-home edicts.  And now she is endorsing a man the whole world knows is mentally deficient.  The woman is a menace to society.  And like the rest of the left, she assumes the American people, at least her Democrats, are mind-numbed idiots, that despite Biden's obvious mental problems, he can be elected president. 
Then came COVID-19.  The left could not believe its good fortune.  All previous attempts to destroy Donald Trump had failed because they were all fabricated hoaxes; Russia collusion, the thoroughly discredited Mueller report, Ukraine quid-pro-quo, impeachment.  Pelosi was happily onboard with Adam Schiff's phony impeachment scam; Schiff is the biggest fool in the House, and thankfully, his unscrupulousness is gradually coming to light.
Pelosi dragged the impeachment process out as long as possible.  "Procrastination is also a subtle act of corruption — it corrupts valuable time" (Amit Abraham).  She was playing power politics and paying absolutely no attention to COVID-19.  As late as the end of February, she was encouraging San Franciscans to party in the streets for the Chinese New Year.  She opposed Trump's travel ban.  Now she blames him for the virus itself.  The woman is a harpy.  Nothing proves her lack of concern for the country more than her predictable and prescribed endorsement of Biden.  The left and its governors intend to drag out the destruction of the American economy for as long as possible in the mistaken belief that it will ensure the defeat of President Trump.
Biden's mental decline is so apparent that it is likely that the DNC will be forced to somehow select another candidate before November.  It had better not be Saint Andrew of Albany.  He has managed his state's virus crisis horribly.  He is an arrogant, incompetent jerk.  Ordering COVID-19 patients into nursing homes and not to the hospital ship or the field hospitals that Trump has speedily provided cost thousands of lives.
Pelosi is the presumptive leader of her party but has been part and parcel of the Russia hoax, the Kavanaugh spectacle, impeachment and her party's failure to grasp the seriousness of this virus when Trump did, when only one person in the US had died from it. The Democrat party as a whole has devolved into a Tammany Hall machine. Nancy Pelosi has long been their Boss Tweed. 
Pelosi is a ghastly creature. She and her ilk – Feinstein, Boxer, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom – have effectively destroyed California and they did it on purpose. They strive to import as many illegal migrants as possible; they've created and fostered the homelessness and let it fester. California is now a socialist disaster and the further destruction of the economy is just what they've wanted. They see it as their chance to transform the state into Venezuela.
Nothing proves their contempt for hardworking Americans more than their embrace of this lockdown. Pelosi pretends to revere democracy, but she means to foment and protect the plutocracy she believes she has successfully brought into being.
The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition." (Vauvenargues)
Pelosi, Schiff, Schumer, et.al. are all small talents with great ambition who have inflicted evil upon our nation.

Amid simmering crisis over sexual assault charges Nancy Pelosi endorses Biden

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.



BLOG: DURING THE EIGHT YEARS OF THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME WE NEVER HEARD GROPER JOE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE LOOT HANDED OVER TO THEIR BANKSTER DONORS OR A COMMENT ON SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (ENDORSED BIDEN) AND HER CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO!

 

Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small businesses.

 

Biden wants a new stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion


By Michael Grunwald
Joe Biden wants a more progressive approach to economic stimulus legislation than Washington has taken so far, including much stricter oversight of the Trump Administration, much tougher conditions on business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and climate that have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.
In a fiery half-hour interview with POLITICO, the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded a bit like his angrier and less moderate primary rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, though in unexpurgated Biden style. The former vice president said that the next round of coronavirus stimulus needs to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than last month’s $2 trillion CARES Act, that it needs to include massive aid to states and cities to prevent them from “laying off a hell of a lot of teachers and cops and firefighters,” and that the administration is already “wasting a hell of a lot of money.”
Biden has been running a low-profile campaign during the pandemic, tweeting, filming videos and appearing on Sunday shows from his Delaware home while President Donald Trump has briefed the nation daily from the White House. Biden has let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speak for the Democratic Party during the debates over economic relief, offering supportive public statements that have faded into the background.
But stimulus is a subject close to his heart, and he passionately contrasted his own management of President Barack Obama’s $800 billion Recovery Act in 2009 with President Donald Trump’s approach to the trillions of dollars flowing out of Capitol Hill.
The Obama stimulus was wildly controversial, but it won bipartisan praise for its strict oversight and unusually low levels of fraud. In the interview, Biden was at his most indignant when he recounted how he recruited a gruff law enforcement veteran and government watchdog named Earl Devaney to oversee the Recovery Act in 2009, and how President Donald Trump fired the Pentagon inspector general who had been selected to oversee the CARES Act almost immediately after he signed it.
“I wanted to bring in the toughest son-of-a-b***h in the country—I really mean it, I’m not joking—because we wanted to make sure we did it by the numbers with genuine oversight,” Biden said. “Right now, there’s no oversight. [Trump] made it real clear he doesn’t have any damn interest in being checked. The last thing he wants is anyone watching that $500 billion going to corporate America, for God’s sake.”
The Trump campaign said it would not comment on the firing of Pentagon inspector general Michael Atkinson beyond the president’s public comments on April 4, when he attacked Atkinson for giving Congress the original whistleblower report about his call with the Ukrainian president that eventually led to his impeachment. “I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible,” the president said at the time. “He took a fake report and brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump fan—that, I can tell you.”
Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small businesses. Over the last month, 26 million Americans have lost their jobs, and Biden said many of those jobs could be gone for good if mom-and-pop operations get left behind.
“We knew from the beginning that the big banks don’t like lending to small businesses,” Biden said. “I’m telling you, though, if Main Street businesses don’t get help, they’re gone.”
The CARES Act and three smaller coronavirus relief bills have all passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Biden was careful to avoid criticizing Pelosi and Schumer even as he criticized the results of the compromises they negotiated. He said he’s “in constant conservation” with both Democratic leaders, letting them know his priorities without interfering with their negotiations; he credited them with securing major increases in unemployment benefits and other improvements to Republican proposals that were initially skewed even further towards big business.
He was clearly disappointed that Pelosi and Schumer failed to secure any new aid to states in this week’s $484 billion package, but he suggested that could work out politically, because in the next round they’ll be able to blame Trump and other Republicans for looming state budget cuts and layoffs of first responders.
“They got what they could get,” Biden said. “I’ve been in too many negotiations to second-guess anybody else’s.”
Still, Biden suggested that after four rounds of legislation designed primarily to stanch the economic bleeding, the next round should include more forward-looking investments that could help the economy start to recover and grow once the virus is contained. He suggested a “trillion-dollar infrastructure program that can be implemented really rapidly,” as well as “dealing with environmental things that create good-paying jobs.”
Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have suggested that “green stimulus” would be a non-starter with Republicans, but Biden said investments in light rail, clean drinking water, and half a million electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s highways could help retool the economy for the future.
Biden also argued that long-term growth initiatives are America’s only hope to rein in a budget deficit that has suddenly ballooned to an unprecedented $4 trillion, and is sure to continue to expand as Washington continues to spend. He said that repealing the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut would help limit the red ink—“It wasn’t worth the powder it will take to blow it to hell”—but ultimately, restoring jobs and investing in the future is “the only thing that grows the economy back so the deficit doesn’t eat you alive.”
Biden has loved talking about stimulus ever since he ran the Recovery Act, and he sounded comfortable returning to the topic from his Delaware home, although there were a couple of typically hard-to-follow tangents, and one brief coughing interruption that he attributed to swallowing a peanut the wrong way.
His main theme was the contrast between his legendary harassment of the Cabinet secretaries, governors and mayors in charge of spending Recovery Act dollars—he reminded me that he spoke with every governor except Alaska’s Sarah Palin, most of them repeatedly—and “the malpractice of this administration.”
“There’s no coordination. There’s no accountability. Come on, the guy waits to hold up money because he wants to make sure his name is on the checks!” Biden said.
Biden has been firing off a steady stream of tweets attacking Trump for failing to make sure America has enough tests and protective equipment, for complaining about his media coverage, and most recently for suggesting that drinking bleach might help cure the virus. But while Biden clearly hopes to persuade some 2016 Trump voters to back him in November, he also needs to make sure that progressive Sanders and Warren supporters don’t stay home.
BLOG: HERE’S GROPER JOE’S NEW PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEK. THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY IS NOW A ‘POPULIST’
This week, Biden has taken flak from the left for including the corporate-friendly Democratic economist Lawrence Summers on internal calls. But on Friday night, he denounced corporate America as “greedy as hell,” echoing the structural critiques of the modern economy that fueled the Sanders and Warren campaigns.
He called for stronger assurances that small-business loans will go to small businesses, and that aid to larger corporations will come with strings prohibiting stock buybacks, executive bonuses or worker layoffs. But he also went beyond policy prescriptions, saying the pandemic might convince Americans that grocery clerks “and all the other folks out there saving our rear ends and risking their lives for eight bucks an hour” deserve a better deal. He thinks there could be a backlash against big corporations who have poured their profits into buybacks and dividends rather than worker training and research and development. He thinks the virus could deal a blow to short-term economic thinking and anti-government political thinking.

“I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time,” Biden said. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”

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 
been based on protecting the interests of  the oligarchy at the expense of society. 
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.


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