A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0
Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream⎜WHY POVERTY?⎜(Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6niWzomA_So&list=WL&index=19
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock (JOE BIDN’S BIGGEST BRIBSTER) in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
The Economy is like a Bad Magic Trick - Full of Smoke and Mirrors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTUKpeXiB2U
What Happened To The American Middle Class? | Financial Crash Documentary | Business Stories
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbTlq7A-wVs&list=WL&index=1
As the economic outlook gets uglier, Biden blames everyone but himself
Earlier this week, the Biden administration was presented with some grim news. Inflation increased to a staggering 9.7% for the year ending January, much higher than forecasted. Consumer prices also increased by 7.5%, the highest annual rate in four decades. Despite promises by Biden to reduce inflation, it has continued to increase, putting more pressure on Americans to pay for everyday goods. In addition, Biden piled on more bad news for Americans, indicating that Russia's suspected invasion of Ukraine will further increase gas prices, which are already at an eight-year high.
Government numbers aside, real-world inflation is already in double-digits because the government under-reports little things, like gas and groceries, the very things we need and buy in real life. These cascading effects will substantially curtail home-buying for Americans. Instead of bringing the bacon home, literal bacon costs you an extra 18.6%. It will continue to add to the struggles of American families, who will find it more costly to put food on their tables. This is a road that can lead to hyperinflation.
Instead of offering a plan to combat these economic challenges, Biden has turned to blame anyone but himself for his policies. Inflation, Biden claims, is the Republicans' fault because they did not support his two-trillion-dollar Build Back Better spending bill. Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress. Shortly after, he blamed Russia and Putin's provocations with Ukraine for increased gas costs to American consumers. However, Biden canceled the Keystone pipeline in the U.S. and approved the NordStream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany. Biden need only look in a mirror to discover the person to blame.
The financial impact of Biden's policies on Americans, left unchecked, will likely lead to a sea change in the midterm elections.
Four critical economic and political questions remain:
- What must happen before inflation starts to decrease? The Federal Reserve signaled it would raise interest rates multiple times in 2022. This might help reduce inflation but will have a devastating impact on Americans.
- What will happen if the Fed "succeeds" in lowering inflation? A decrease in inflation may reduce the prices of goods such as milk, gas, and bread. However, it also has a reciprocal impact on the buying power of Americans. When interest rates increase, it will make it harder to buy homes due to unaffordable mortgages. Businesses will see their costs increase, which will impact the American workforce.
- Why is Biden blaming everyone else for his failed economic policies? It is no secret that Biden's domestic agenda has utterly failed at every turn. With the 2022 midterm elections coming up, he has to find a villain to blame for the depleting economy. The Democrats are projected to sustain heavy losses in the House and Senate this year, and he has to stop the bleeding as quickly as possible.
- What could Biden do next to save the economy and help Democrats in the upcoming election? The economic distress in the U.S. will take months to fix. Biden is running out of time, and his influence in his party is meager. His poll numbers say it all. He is at the lowest approval rating of his presidency. He has to change course quickly and present an economic solution that the American people will believe. Up to now, Biden's shown that he has been incapable of overseeing a strong economy, and most Americans do not believe he has what it takes to produce a strong economy in the future.
Blake Harbin is the CEO of Houzzle Financial, a mortgage lending company in the Southeast. He has been a small business owner for more than two decades and is an expert in the real estate industry. Blake is running as a candidate for Georgia's 6th Congressional District in 2022.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
A president so bad that even his base is disgusted with him
Drew Magary is a San Francisco columnist who comes at politics from a place far, far along the leftist spectrum. He is the radical base that drives the modern Democrat party. On the Venn diagram mapping out my political views and Magary's, however, there is one point of intersection: we both think of Biden as a failed president. That's good for my side of the aisle and very, very bad for Magary's.
Margary's essay is entitled "Joe Biden is a lousy president." In it, you'll find phrases such as this: "Joe Biden is out of excuses." "In many ways, it feels as if Biden's presidency is already over." "All this begs the question: Does Joe Biden even know he's president ? Does he give a s---?" "He's uninterested..." "He's shown no ambition..." "I am sick to death of this..." "It's not merely that Biden has been a lousy president; it's that I've seen nothing to suggest that he'll STOP being lousy." "I briefly had high hopes for Joe Biden, and that's on me."
I think we conservatives can agree with every one of those statements. Where the opinion piece starts having that funhouse mirror feel is learning that, aside from being as disgusted as conservatives about Biden's Afghanistan pullout fiasco, every one of Magary's complaints comes about because he feels that Biden has failed as a leftist. Thus, stripped to its essentials, Margary's article complains that Biden:
- Wasn't sufficiently proactive about distributing "free" COVID tests. (Of course, they're not "free" at all. You and I paid for them.)
- Failed to increase the federal minimum wage.
- Failed to override Manchin, who then dealt the death blow to Build Back Better.
- Failed to override Sinema, who killed the effort to federalize elections.
- Failed to continue COVID unemployment benefits.
- Failed to come down hard on the side of quarantining and mask-wearing.
- Failed to campaign vigorously to the Supreme Court to force it to preserve Roe v. Wade.
- Failed to use his bully pulpit to get foreign oil producers to keep prices down.
- Failed to use vaccine mandates to socialize America's health care system. (So, you were right all along about the larger plan the left had for COVID.)
- Failed to pack the Supreme Court.
As far as Magary is concerned, Biden is a weak leader who blew every important item on the leftist wish list.
Image: Joe Biden. YouTube screen grab.
Indeed, when Magary looks back on Biden's presidency, the best Magary can say about him is that "he wasn't Donald Trump." Additionally, Magary remains thrilled that Biden did sign off on that first "nearly $2 trillion stimulus fund," even while he complains that Biden didn't do anything to stop inflation. Apparently being a columnist at SF Gate does not require even the vaguest understanding of basic economics.
The reason I was caught by Magary's attack on Biden is that it showed something interesting about the man in the Oval Office: he is so extraordinarily bad that even his base hates him. He's managed to repulse most Americans. What this means is that Democrat turnout in November 2022 will almost certainly be lackluster. More than that, it may mean that Biden is driving a stake through the heart of the Democrat party.
Wealth-X report: Billionaire wealth surged during pandemic
A new report from research firm Wealth-X found that the global COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the growth of social inequality and witnessed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth among the most privileged layers in society. For the first time in human history, the world had more than 3,000 billionaires in 2020.
This amounts to a 13.4 percent increase in billionaires since 2019, currently totaling 3,204 individuals, with a median wealth of $1.9 billion. Billionaires’ collective wealth swelled to $10 trillion, a 5.7 percent increase from 2019.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (AP Photo/John Locher, File)
“Viewed in aggregate, the global pandemic delivered a windfall to billionaire wealth, boosted by the flood of monetary stimulus and swelling profits in key sectors that coined a new wave of younger, self-made billionaires,” the report said.
Billionaire wealth has increased steadily since 1990, but one-third of these wealth gains have occurred during the pandemic. US billionaire wealth increased nineteen-fold over the last 31 years, from an inflation adjusted $240 billion in 1990 to $4.7 trillion in 2021.
The parasitic growth in wealth was most pronounced in the United States, the center of world capitalism. The ranks of billionaires in all of North America grew by 17.5 percent from last year. In fact, North America’s 980 billionaires account for 30.6% of the world’s billionaires.
The US was the top billionaire country in 2020. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS), American billionaires have seen their collective wealth surge by 62 percent, approximately $1.8 billion, since March 18, 2020. Following North America, Asia saw its number of growing by 16.5%, for a grand total of 883. Asia’s billionaires saw their collective net worth grow to $2.6 trillion, a 7.5% increase.
The good fortune of this tiny layer of the world’s population over the past 18 months is all the more appalling when contrasted to the growing immiseration and impoverishment of billions of workers around the globe. As a few thousand billionaires amassed enormous sums of wealth, workers around the world lost $3.7 trillion in earnings during the pandemic, according to a report from the International Labor Organization (ILO).
The report estimated an 8.8 percent year-by-year decline in global working hours from 2019 to 2020, equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. This is approximately four times greater than the recorded loss during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.
The lost working hours were due to massive cuts in working hours and unprecedented levels of job loss, impacting some 114 million people and their families. Significantly, 71 percent of these job losses came from “inactivity,” meaning at least 81 million people around the world left the labor market because they could not find work.
Women have been more adversely affected by the pandemic than men. Globally, employment losses for women stand at 5 percent, versus 3.9 percent for men. Women were much more likely than men to drop out of the labor market, most commonly due to childcare concerns. Younger workers have also been devastated. Employment fell by 8.7 percent among workers aged 15-24 years old, compared to 3.7 percent for adults. Generation Z, the oldest of whom is 23, has become the most unemployed generation and is on track to experience the same financial struggles as millennials.
In the US alone, the official poverty rate rose by 1.0 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the US Census Bureau. The poverty rate grew to 11.4 percent, marking the first increase in the official poverty rate after five years of consecutive decline. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.
At the same time, median household income in 2020 dropped by 2.9 percent from the previous year. This is the first statistically significant decline in median household income since 2011.
Over 86 million Americans have lost jobs, almost 38 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 675,000 have died from it. Between 2019 and 2020, the real median earnings of all workers fell by 1.2 percent. The total number of people reporting earnings decreased by about 3 million, while the number of full-time, year-round workers decreased by approximately 13.7 million.
The chief obstacle to solving the world’s burning social questions—whether the devastating impact of COVID-19 or the widespread growth of poverty—is the private profit interests of the capitalist ruling class. Every action these vultures have taken in response to the pandemic has been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of a few. To save lives and avert even further disaster, workers must fight for a policy based on the interests of the working class, the vast majority of society.
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