TYSON HAS LONG BEEN IDENTIFED WITH THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR OBVIOUS REASONS.
Tyson Foods Faces Boycott After Firing 1,200 Americans, ‘Would Like to Employ’ 42,000 Migrants - AND BIDEN - MAYORKAS - SCHUMER HAVE USHERED OVER THE BORDER 15 MILLION TO PICK FROM.
Muslim extremists have carried out a door-to-door anti-Christian murder campaign this summer, killing over 500 Christians since June, Christianpersecution.com reported.
The Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church has called on the government of Ethiopia to act decisively to stop the ongoing slaughter of Christians and the destruction of churches, the September 9 report states.
Since late June, the attacks by Oromo Islamist radicals have entailed the murder of upwards of 500 Christians, including pregnant women, children, and entire families in the Oromia regional state, which includes the nation’s capital of Addis Ababa.
The assailants are members of a Muslim Oromo male youth movement called Qeerroo, meaning “bachelors.”
Throughout the summer, the Qeerroo radicals traveled about in cars, armed with guns, machetes, swords, and spears, seeking out and slaughtering Christians door to door, the Barnabas Fund reported earlier this month in a chilling story ignored by mainstream media.
The targeted killings of Christians followed on the alleged assassination of a popular Oromo singer, Hachallu Hundessa, who was reportedly shot dead on 29 June while driving in the outskirts of Addis Ababa.
A field report released in July stated: “These were the most horrific days for Christians in the Oromo region. There are different factions in the region. Some are ethno-nationalist and others are religious. The majority of those who got killed in a brutal way (beheaded and mutilated) are Orthodox Christian of Amhara Ethnicity.”
The report declared that no governmental security forces were present at the scene of the murders and no one stopped or interfered with the killings.
At that time, Archbishop Abune Henok, Primate of the diocese of West Arsi in the Oromo region, stated that Orthodox Christians were purposefully being targeted and killed, noting that more than 239 Orthodox Christians had already been slaughtered.
Attacks on Christians were confirmed in numerous towns and villages including Arsi Negele, Ziway, Shashemane, Gedeb Asasa, Kofele, Dodola, Adaba, Robe, Goba, Bale Agarfa, Chiro, Harar, Dire Dawa, Adama, Dera, Asela and Kembolcha, reaching to the far south-east and east of the country.
Some of the Islamists carried lists of the names of Christians, particularly prominent Church members, and hunted them down, often with the assistance of local officials in the Oromia region, Barnabas reported.
Attackers captured one local Christian and told him to remove the thread around his neck worn by many Ethiopian Christians as a sign of their baptism. When the man refused, his captors cut off his head.
“The attackers said that it is only he/she who prostrates with us before Allah for prayer who is considered an Oromo,” the man’s widow declared.
Local eyewitnesses also recounted that the killers desecrated corpses by “dancing and singing, carrying the chopped or hacked body parts of those they slaughtered.” Raiders also dragged the hacked bodies of an elderly Christian couple through the streets of Gedeb Asasa.
Along with the killings, extremists also burned down numerous Christians’ businesses and houses, vandalizing or destroying others, reportedly causing billions of dollars’ worth of property damage.
The ongoing murders have been compared to the surge of killings that led to the Rwandan genocide. Initially slow to intervene, government security forces have since carried out thousands of arrests, including of local officials complicit in the attacks.
So, in the present moment of booming stock markets and child
hunger, you might be feeling too inured to America’s grotesque
levels of inequality to summon much interest in yet another report testifying
to the one percent’s total victory in the
50 Years Class War.
Study: Inequality Robs $2.5 Trillion From U.S. Workers Each Year
A better world was possible. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Every few months, some group of socially conscious number crunchers will remind Americans that a tiny elite is binge-eating the nation’s economic pie while the rest of us plebeians fight over table scraps. Journalists will then aggregate eye-popping statistics and edifying charts, progressives will share these over social media, adorned with red-faced (and/or guillotine) emoji — and the moral arc of history will carry on bending toward neofeudalism.
So, in the present moment of booming stock markets and child hunger, you might be feeling too inured to America’s grotesque levels of inequality to summon much interest in yet another report testifying to the one percent’s total victory in the 50 Years Class War.
But a new study from the Rand Corporation, in partnership with the Fair Work Center, illustrates the impact of a half-century of upward redistribution in bracingly concrete terms: If income had been distributed as evenly over the past five decades as it was in 1975, the median full-time worker in the U.S. would enjoy annual earnings of roughly $92,000 a year. As is, that worker makes just $50,000.
It’s no secret that wage and productivity growth began decoupling in the 1970s. Charts like this one from the Economic Policy Institute have been ubiquitous in progressive economic policy debates since the Great Recession:
But RAND’s innovative methodology — which involved constructing a new metric for inequality that compares income growth to GDP, and then using that metric to gauge changes in the income distribution across every U.S. business cycle since 1975 — allowed it to translate the abstractions of macro-level income shares into something much more tangible. Between the mid-1970s and 2018, per capita GDP growth in the U.S. increased by 118 percent. Had income growth on every rung of America’s class ladder kept pace with those gains, annual earnings at the bottom would be nearly twice as high as they are now. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent of U.S. earners would collectively take home $2.5 trillion more in income each year.
Graphic: RAND Education and Labor
The 1970s were a pivotal decade. Graphic: RAND Education and Labor
There are a few significant limitations to RAND’s data. Chief among these is that the study only measures taxable income, which does not capture any potential increase in non-monetary forms of compensation, such as health-care benefits. There is no question that such perks make up a larger share of labor’s compensation today than they did in 1975. That may say more about runaway rent-seeking in America’s health-care system than it does about worker’s true income gains. But a perfect apples-to-apples comparison would take note of the value of benefits.
Separately, it seems likely that had America’s income distribution held constant since 1975, inflation would have been much higher in recent decades — and thus, “2018 dollars” in the counterfactual universe would be worth less than they are in our own. The reason for this is simple: Rich people have a lower propensity to consume each additional dollar of income than working people do. Thus, if you concentrate income gains among the rich, the bulk of those dollars will be invested; which is to say, they will be used to bid up the prices of stocks and real-estate. If you concentrate income gains among workers, meanwhile, the bulk of those gains will be spent on goods and services, thereby bidding up consumer prices.
This is a crucial part of the inequality story in the United States. Under Paul Volcker’s leadership, the Federal Reserve consciously sought to overcome the high inflation of the late 1970s by breaking the bargaining power of U.S. workers, and reducing labor’s share of income. Thanks to the Reagan revolution, among other things, the central bank accomplished this objective too well. Now, instead of contending with inflationary pressures, the Fed must make increasingly audacious interventions in capital markets to ward off the perennial threat of consumer price deflation — even as asset prices rise to evermore spectacular highs.
Nevertheless, RAND’s projections remain a useful approximation. Although the income distribution it posits would probably be one more vulnerable to inflation, it would also probably be more conducive to economic growth. In 2014, OECD economists estimated that increases in income inequality had reduced U.S. GDP growth by as much as 8 percentage points over the preceding two decades.
Further, if we acknowledge that economic power is easily translated into the political variety, it seems likely that in RAND’s counterfactual universe, ordinary Americans would enjoy more generous social benefits and workplace protections than they do in our dimension. Thus, even if we stipulate that a more equitable income distribution would mean a weaker dollar in 2018, it’s possible that RAND’s counterfactual underestimates what the real value of the median workers’ annual income would have been under such a distribution.
Regardless, the paper makes the radical regressivism of the contemporary U.S. political economy plain to see. Progressives often mock nostalgic invocations of some bygone golden era in American life, noting that the postwar period was less than “great” for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, or women trying to make a place for themselves in the professions. And this allergy to white male-centric nostalgia has much to recommend it. But it is also the case that the first three decades after the Second World War witnessed a degree of shared prosperity that was never seen before or since. And if the income distribution of 1975 had been maintained over the ensuing decades, according to RAND’s methodology, wages for most Black workers would be nearly twice as high as they are now.
Actually-existing America has a lot of problems, many of which cannot be reduced to questions of economics or class power. But it is hard not to suspect that most of our nation’s troubles would be less severe, if America’s working-class had an extra $2.5 trillion to spend each year.