Robert B. Reich's Blog, page 33
July 16, 2020
Trump Rush to Reopen America is Causing a Covid Resurgence
July 14, 2020
When Bosses Shared the Profits
Corporate Hypocrisy on RacismWall Street banks and corporate...
Corporate Hypocrisy on RacismWall Street banks and corporate executives have wasted no time trying to establish themselves as allies of the Black Lives Matter movement, professing support for the historic protests against police killings of Black people.
But when you peel back their PR stunts and press releases, the truth comes into focus: far from being the solution to systemic racism in America, these billionaires and their corporations are actively perpetuating it.
Consider Jamie Dimon, billionaire CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who recently took a knee before a lineup of cameras at a branch of his bank. In a statement, Dimon urged his employees to “be inclusive in our work and in the neighborhoods where we operate."
Let’s take a look at that inclusivity, shall we? In 2017, the bank paid $55 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against Black and Latino mortgage borrowers — causing some 53,000 borrowers tens of millions of dollars in damages. According to the lawsuit, even when the bank knew about the discrimination, they did nothing to stop it.
When it’s not discriminating against its customers, JPMorgan Chase is excluding Black people from its upper echelons of management. Just 4 percent of the bank’s top executives are Black, despite years of bragging about increasing diversity. Under Dimon, the bank also agreed to pay $19.5 million in a settlement for racial discrimination against Black employees in 2018.
It’s not just Chase. Larry Fink, CEO of the giant investment firm BlackRock, recently wrote a letter to colleagues opining that “These [racist] events are symptoms of a deep and longstanding problem in our society and must be addressed on both a personal and systemic level.”
That’s rich, considering BlackRock is one of the largest investors in the notorious private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. If Larry Fink was serious about addressing structural racism, he would stop BlackRock’s investment in an industry that disproportionately incarcerates and terrorizes Black and brown men.
It doesn’t end there. Wall Street even manages to profit off police brutality. Cities often issue municipal bonds to cover the costs of settlements related to wrongful police shootings, beatings, and imprisonments. These so-called “police brutality bonds” have earned banks and investors more than a billion dollars in profits in recent years. As if this weren’t egregious enough, banks – including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America – collect heavy fees on these bonds. Of course, this hasn’t stopped them from rolling out empty statements declaring “Black Lives Matter”.
Hypocrisy isn’t limited to Wall Street. Amazon has pledged to fight systemic racism but refuses to provide paid sick-leave to all warehouse and delivery workers, the majority of whom are people of color.
Walmart, the nation’s largest corporate employer of Black Americans, recently announced that it would create a center on racial equality, but has overworked and mistreated its Black employees for decades. The company also donates to Republican politicians, including Senator Tom Cotton who openly called for the military to crack down on predominantly Black protestors.
Similarly, AT&T, whose CEO called on companies to speak out against racism, has donated to Senator Rand Paul, who stalled legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime.
Many CEOs also fight against instituting a living wage and universal basic income, two policies that would lift more Black Americans out of economic oppression.
And the very banks plastering Black Lives Matter banners on their websites not only oppose tighter regulations against red-lining, they also have provided $5.5 billion in credit to the payday lending industry. Of course, both redlining and payday lending disproportionately hurt Black and brown communities.
Don’t be fooled by glitzy press releases and flashy PR stunts. Wall Street and corporations profit from and reinforce systemic racism in America.
We have the power — as their consumers, clients, and employees — to demand these companies and their CEOs stop their racist practices. It’s time they back up their lofty rhetoric with fundamental change.
Raise your voices, and stay vigilant.
July 7, 2020
Monopoly Mayhem: Corporations Win, Workers LoseWhy do big...
Monopoly Mayhem: Corporations Win, Workers LoseWhy do big corporations continue to win while workers get shafted? It all comes down to power: who has it, and who doesn’t.
Big corporations have become so dominant that workers and consumers have fewer options and have to accept the wages and prices these giant corporations offer. This has become even worse now that thousands of small businesses have had to close as a result of the pandemic, while mammoth corporations are being bailed out.
At the same time, worker bargaining power has declined as fewer workers are unionized and technologies have made outsourcing easy, allowing corporations to get the labor they need for cheap.
These two changes in bargaining power didn’t happen by accident. As corporations have gained power, they’ve been able to gut anti-monopoly laws, allowing them to grow even more dominant. At the same time, fewer workers have joined unions because corporations have undermined the nation’s labor laws, and many state legislatures – under intense corporate lobbying – have enacted laws making it harder to form unions.
Because of these deliberate power shifts, even before the pandemic, a steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits, and a shrinking portion allocated to wages.
Once the economy tanked, the stock market retained much of its value while millions of workers lost jobs and the unemployment rate soared to Great Depression-era levels.
To understand the current concentration of corporate power we need to go back in time.
In the late nineteenth century, corporate power was a central concern. “Robber barons,” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed unprecedented wealth for themselves by crushing labor unions, driving competitors out of business, and making their employees work long hours in dangerous conditions for low wages.
As wealth accumulated at the top, so too did power: Politicians of the era put corporate interests ahead of workers, even sending state militias to violently suppress striking workers. By 1890, public anger at the unchecked greed of the robber barons culminated in the creation of America’s first anti-monopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act.
In the following years, antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office; but after 1980, it virtually disappeared. The new view was that large corporations produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Power, the argument went, was no longer at issue. America’s emerging corporate oligarchy used this faulty academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust.
As the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, American industry grew more and more concentrated. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks. It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to just four today. Three giant cable companies came to dominate broadband. A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry.
Today, just five giant corporations preside over key, high-tech platforms, together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.
The monopolies of yesteryear are back with a vengeance.
Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation.
Meanwhile, big investors have made bundles of money off the growing concentration of American industry. Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest men, has been considered the conscience of American capitalism because he wants the rich to pay higher taxes. But Buffett has made his fortune by investing in monopolies that keep out competitors.
– The sky-high profits at Wall Street banks have come from their being too big to fail and their political power to keep regulators at bay.
– The high profits the four remaining airlines enjoyed before the pandemic came from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions.
– High profits of Big Tech have come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and disproportionate power that prevents innovative startups from entering the market.
If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he’d be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power and creating incentives for startups to enter the marketplace and increase competition.
This mega-concentration of American industry has also made the entire economy more fragile – and susceptible to deep downturns. Even before the coronavirus, it was harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses formed had already been halved from the pace in 1980. And the coronavirus has exacerbated this trend even more, bringing new business formations to a standstill with no rescue plan in sight.
And it’s brought workers to their knees. There’s no way an economy can fully recover unless working people have enough money in their pockets to spend. Consumer spending is two-thirds of this economy.
Perhaps the worst consequence of monopolization is that as wealth accumulates at the top, so too does political power.
These massive corporations provide significant campaign contributions; they have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers and directly employ many voters. So items they want included in legislation are inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped.
They get tax cuts, tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory exemptions. When the government is handing out money to stimulate the economy, these giant corporations are first in line. When they’ve gone so deep into debt to buy back their shares of stock that they might not be able to repay their creditors, what happens? They get bailed out. It’s the same old story.
The financial returns on their political investments are sky-high.
Take Amazon – the richest corporation in America. It paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018. Meanwhile, it held a national auction to extort billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies from cities eager to house its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, its home headquarters, to back away from a tax on big corporations, like Amazon, to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the city’s sky-high rents, caused in part by Amazon!
And throughout this pandemic, Amazon has raked in record profits thanks to its monopoly of online marketplaces, even as it refuses to provide its essential workers with robust paid sick leave and has fired multiple workers for speaking out against the company’s safety issues.
While corporations are monopolizing, power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers.
In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.2 percent of them are.
Since the 1980s, corporations have fought to bust unions and keep workers’ wages low. They’ve campaigned against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. They fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so is minor compared to the profits that come from discouraging unionization.
Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Under shareholder capitalism, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. You can guess the kind of chilling effect that has on workers’ incentives to take a stand against poor conditions.
As a result of this power shift, workers have less choice of whom to work for. This also keeps their wages low. Corporations have imposed non-compete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements, further narrowing workers’ alternatives.
Corporations have used their increased power to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. In 1988, General Electric threatened to close a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana that made electrical motors and to relocate it abroad unless workers agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. The Fort Wayne workers eventually agreed to the cut. One of the factory’s union leaders remarked, “It used to be that companies had an allegiance to the worker and the country. Today, companies have an allegiance to the corporate shareholder. Period.”
Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so too has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have made it easier for workplaces to unionize.
All the while, corporations have been getting states to enact so-called “right-to-work” laws barring unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. Since worker representation costs money, these laws effectively gut the unions by not requiring workers to pay dues. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, extended “right-to-work” to public employees.
This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. Trump took full advantage.
All of this has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II.
That’s true even during a severe downturn. For the last decade, most profits have been going into stock buybacks and higher executive pay rather than new investment.
The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with the decline in unionization. Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Shareholders have gained because workers stopped sharing the gains.
So, what can be done to restore bargaining power to workers and narrow the widening gap between corporate profits and wages?
For one, make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before the SEC legalized them under Ronald Reagan. This would prevent corporate juggernauts from siphoning profits into buybacks, and instead direct profits towards economic investment.
Another solution: Enact a national ban on “right-to-work” laws, thereby restoring power to unions and the workers they represent.
Require greater worker representation on corporate boards, as Germany has done through its “employee co-determination” system.
Break up monopolies. Break up any bank that’s “too big to fail”, and expand the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to find monopolies and review and halt anti-competitive mergers. Designate large technology platforms as “utilities” whose prices are regulated in the public interest and require that services like Amazon Marketplace and Google Search be spun off from their respective companies.
Above all, antitrust laws must stop mergers that harm workers, stifle competition, or result in unfair pricing.
This is all about power. The good news is that rebalancing the power of workers and corporations can create an economy and a democracy that works for all, not just a privileged few.
July 6, 2020
Brace Yourself for Trump’s Great Recession Trump and businesses...
Brace Yourself for Trump’s Great Recession
Trump and businesses demanded America “reopen” to revive the economy. But we’ve reopened too soon, before Covid-19 is under control. So we’re needing to close or partly close again, which will prolong the economic downturn and wreak even more havoc on millions of Americans’ livelihoods.
It never should have been a contest between public health and the economy, anyway. The economy has always depended on getting public health right. And we still haven’t.
Trump has downplayed the risks. He got in the way of governors trying to keep people safe. And now all of us are paying the price.
Brace yourself. The wave of evictions and foreclosures in the next 2 months will be unlike anything America has experienced since the Great Depression. And unless Congress extends extra unemployment benefits beyond July 31, we’re also going to have unparalleled hunger.
Eviction protections for federally subsidized properties run out at the end of July. In some states that enacted their own moratoria on evictions, renter protections are already running out. One study estimates that 19 to 23 million renters, or 1 in 5 people who live in renter households, are at risk of eviction by September 30th.
The people most likely to be evicted are Black and Latinx people, single mothers, people with disabilities, formerly incarcerated people, and undocumented people. This is systemic racism playing out in real time.
Meanwhile, delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March.
Unemployment itself is different than what we saw back in March and April. Today’s layoffs are permanent, the result of businesses throwing in the towel or permanently slimming down.
In the public sector, loss of state tax revenue is running up against state constitutions that bar deficits. This is putting vital public services on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – at a time when the public needs them more than ever.
In April and May alone, states and localities furloughed or laid off some 1.5 million workers, about twice as many as in the entire aftermath of the Great Recession a decade ago. These cuts will be just the tip of the iceberg if the federal government doesn’t provide more fiscal aid for states and localities.
Let me remind you: Expanded unemployment benefits are set to expire by July 31, leaving at least 21 million unemployed Americans with a 60% income reduction and no stimulus check to fall back on.
To make matters worse, over 16.2 million households have lost employer-provided health insurance. The Census Household Pulse Survey shows large losses in income in coming months, along with high food and housing insecurity.
So what’s Trump’s and Mitch McConnell’s response to this looming catastrophe?
Do nothing.
Don’t extend supplemental unemployment benefits beyond July 31, when they’re due to expire.
Don’t help states and cities.
Reject the HEROES Act, passed by the House of Representatives to keep struggling families afloat and the economy from going into a tailspin.
Trump has even asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. If the Court agrees, 23 million Americans will lose their health insurance, and the richest 0.1 percent of households with annual incomes of over $3 million will receive tax cuts averaging about $198,000 per year.
This is lunacy. The priority must be getting control over this pandemic and helping Americans survive it physically and financially. Extra unemployment benefits must be extended.
The HEROES Act must be signed into law. Moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures must be extended. If it’s necessary to go back to sheltering in place to contain this pandemic, we must be willing to do so.
This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s the bare minimum of what our government must do to prevent an even worse economic and human catastrophe.
Anything less is indefensible.
July 5, 2020
Trump Rushed to Reopen America. Now Covid is Closing in on Him
June 30, 2020
Trump’s 2020 Election Strategy in 25 StepsTrump will do anything...
Trump’s 2020 Election Strategy in 25 Steps
Here’s Trump’s re-election playbook, in 25 simple steps:
1. Declare yourself above the law.
2. Use racist fearmongering. Demand “law and order” and describe protesters as “thugs”, “lowlife” and “rioters and looters”. Describe Covid-19 as “Kung-Flu”. Retweet posts from white supremacists. In your campaign ads, use a symbol associated with Nazis.
3. Appoint an attorney general more loyal to you than to America, and politicize the Department of Justice so it’s lenient on your loyalists and comes down hard on your enemies. Have it lighten the sentence of a crony convicted of lying under oath. Order investigations of industries you dislike.
4. Fire US attorneys who are investigating you.
5. Fire independent inspectors general who are looking into what you’ve done. Crush any whistleblowers you find.
6. Demean and ignore the intelligence community. Appoint a director of national intelligence more loyal to you than to America. Demand that the head of the FBI pledge loyalty to you.
7. Pack the federal courts with judges and justices more loyal to you than to the constitution.
8. Politicize the Department of Defense so generals will back whatever you order. Refer to them as “my generals”. Have them help clear out protesters. Order the military to surveil protesters. Tell governors you’ll bring in the military to stop protesters.
9. Purge your party of anyone disloyal to you and turn it into a mindless, brainless, spineless cult.
10. Get rid of accumulated experience and expertise in government. Demean career public servants. Hollow out the state department, the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, and public health.
11. Reward donors and cronies with bailouts, tax breaks, subsidies, government contracts, regulatory rollbacks and plum jobs. Put their lobbyists in charge of your agencies. Distribute $500bn in pandemic assistance to corporations in secret, without any oversight.
12. Coddle dictators. Don’t criticize their human rights abuses. Refuse to work with the leaders of other democracies. Withdraw from international treaties.
13. Create scapegoats. Demonize migrants and lock up asylum-seekers at the border even if they’re children. Put a white nationalist in charge of immigration policy. Blame Muslims, Mexicans and Chinese.
14. Denigrate and ridicule all critics. Describe opponents as “human scum”. Attack the mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and “enemies of the people”.
15. Conjure up conspiracies against yourself supposedly led by your predecessor and your opponent in the last election. Without any evidence, accuse your predecessor of “treason”. Fabricate a “Deep State” out to get you.
16. Downplay real threats to the nation, such as a rapidly spreading pandemic. Lie about your utter failure to contain it. Muzzle public health experts. Urge people to go back to work even as the pandemic worsens in parts of the country.
17. Encourage armed supporters to “liberate” states from elected officials who disagree with you.
18. Bribe other nations to investigate your electoral opponent and flood social media with lies about him.
19. Use rightwing propaganda machines like Fox News and conspiracy theory peddling One America News to inundate the country with your lies. Ensure that the morally bankrupt chief executive of Facebook allows you to spread your lies on the biggest media machine in the world.
20. Suppress the votes of people likely to vote against you. Intimidate voters of color. Encourage Republican governors to purge voter rolls, demand voter ID and close polling places.
21. Seek to prevent mail-in ballots during the pandemic. Claim they will cause voter fraud, without evidence. Threaten to close the US postal service.
22. Get Vladimir Putin to hack into US election machines, as he did in 2016 but can now do with more experience and deftness. Promise him that in return you’ll further destabilize America as well as Nato. Allow him to put a bounty on killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
23. If it still looks like you’ll be voted out, try to postpone the election.
24. If you’re voted out of office notwithstanding all this, refuse to leave. Contest the election, claim massive fraud, say it’s a conspiracy, get your cult of a political party to support your lies, get your propaganda machine to repeat them, get your justice department to back you, get your judges and justices to affirm you, get your generals to suppress any subsequent rebellion.
25. Declare victory.
Memo to America: Beware Trump’s playbook. Spread the truth. Stay vigilant. Fight for our democracy.
June 23, 2020
America is Exceptional in All the Wrong WaysAs our incompetent...
America is Exceptional in All the Wrong Ways
As our incompetent president flounders in the face of crises – leading the worst coronavirus response in the industrialized world, and seeking to crush nationwide protests for black lives – the hard truth about this country comes into focus: America is not exceptional, but it is the exception.
No other industrialized nation was as woefully unprepared for the pandemic as was the United States. With 4.25% of the world population, America has the tragic distinction of accounting for about 30% of pandemic deaths so far.
Why are we so different from other nations facing the same coronavirus threat? Why has everything gone so tragically wrong in America?
Part of it is Donald Trump.
He and his corrupt administration repeatedly ignored warnings from public health experts and national security officials throughout January and February, only acting on March 16th after the stock market tanked. Researchers estimate that nearly 36,000 deaths could have been prevented if the United States had implemented social distancing policies just one week earlier.
No other industrialized nation has so drastically skirted responsibility by leaving it to subordinate units of government – states and cities – to buy ventilators and personal protective equipment.
In no other industrialized nation have experts in public health and emergency preparedness been muzzled and replaced by political cronies like Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in turn has been advised by campaign donors and Fox News.
In no other industrialized nation has Covid-19 so swiftly eviscerated the incomes of the working class. Around the world, governments are providing generous income support to keep their unemployment rates low. Not in the U.S. Nearly 40 million Americans have lost their jobs so far, and more than 30% of American adults have been forced to cut back on buying food and risk going hungry.
At best, Americans have received one-time checks for $1,200, about a week’s worth of rent, groceries and utilities. After a massive backlog, people finally started collecting their expanded unemployment benefits – just in time for the expansion to expire with little to no chance of being renewed.
In no other nation is there such chaos about reopening. While Europe is opening slowly and carefully, the U.S. is opening chaotically, each state on its own. Some are lifting restrictions overnight.
And not even a global pandemic can overshadow the racism embedded in this country’s DNA. Even as black Americans are disproportionately dying from coronavirus, they have nonetheless been forced into the streets in an outpouring of grief and anger over decades of harsh policing and unjust killings.
As protests erupted across the country in response to more police killings of unarmed black Americans, the protesters have been met with even more police violence. Firing tear gas into crowds of predominantly black protesters, in the middle of a pandemic caused by a respiratory virus that is already disproportionately hurting black communities, is unconscionably cruel.
Indeed, a lot of the responsibility rests with Trump and his hapless and corrupt collection of grifters, buffoons, sycophants, lobbyists and relatives.
But the problems at the core of our broken system, laid bare by this pandemic, have been plaguing this country long before Trump came along.
America is the only industrialized nation without guaranteed, universal healthcare.
No other industrialized nation insists on tying health care to employment, resulting in tens of millions of U.S. citizens losing their health insurance at the very moment they need it most.
We’re the only one out of 22 advanced nations that doesn’t give all workers some form of paid sick leave.
Average wage growth in the United States has long lagged behind average wage growth in most other industrialized countries, even before the pandemic robbed Americans of their jobs and incomes. Since 1980, American workers’ share of total national income has dropped more than in any other rich nation.
And America also has the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap on the planet. In 1965, American CEOs were paid 20 times the typical worker. Today, American CEOs are paid 278 times the typical worker.
Not surprisingly, American workers are far less unionized than workers in other industrialized economies. Only 10.2 percent of all workers in America belong to a union, compared with more than 26% in Canada, 65% in Sweden, and 23% in Britain. With less unionization, American workers are easily overpowered by corporations, and can’t bargain for higher wages or better benefits.
So who and what’s to blame for the largest preventable loss of life in American history?
It’s not just Trump’s malicious incompetence.
It’s decades of America’s failure to provide its people the basic support they need, decades of putting corporations’ bottom lines ahead of workers’ paychecks, decades of letting the rich and powerful pull the strings as the rest of us barely get by.
This pandemic has exposed what has long been true: On the global stage, America is the exception, but not in the way we would like to believe.
June 17, 2020
Who’s Really Looting America?As hundreds of thousands take to...
Who’s Really Looting America?As hundreds of thousands take to the streets to protest ruthless police killings of Black Americans and centuries of systemic racism, Donald Trump and his enablers have been quick to cast the protesters as violent “looters” – and distract from the real looters of America.
So far, over 10,000 Americans have been arrested during the wave of protests. Yet a decade ago, after Wall Street bankers looted America through predatory lending and securities fraud – often preying upon people of color and causing American households to lose roughly $19 trillion in total wealth – not a single top Wall Street executive went to prison. Instead, they received billions in taxpayer bailouts, and executives took home massive bonuses.
Now, during the coronavirus pandemic and an unprecedented economic crisis, America’s billionaires have seen their wealth soar by $434 billion. How? Their corporations lobbied for and got $500 billion in bailouts and they got $135 billion in tax breaks. And the Treasury Department and the Fed are erasing the corporate debt they amassed over the last few years so their corporations could buy back their shares of stock. Meanwhile, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Walmart, and other corporate giants are using their vast market power to rack up record profits.
The corporate looting doesn’t stop there. Just look at the epidemic of wage theft through misclassifying employees as independent contractors and denying workers the overtime pay they are due. Every year, American employers steal a combined $15 billion in income from their workers, whether white, black or brown.
The most profitable corporations in America are also looting America of billions in taxes through loopholes, write-offs, and special exemptions they’ve successfully lobbied for. Amazon paid just a 1.2 percent tax rate on $13 billion in profit in 2019. Other companies, including Chevron, Halliburton, and Netflix, haven’t paid a dime in federal taxes in recent years. The United States loses nearly $70 billion a year in tax revenue because corporations loot America by shifting their profits to tax havens overseas.
Meanwhile, entire industries loot Black and brown communities. Predatory payday lenders, focusing on communities of color, offer loans with sky-high interest rates and hidden fees that trap borrowers in a never-ending cycle of poverty. The bail bond industry profits from mass incarceration and the failed war on drugs, as does America’s prison-industrial complex – keeping over 2 million Americans behind bars, disproportionately black and brown. All these corporations have platoons of lobbyists that keep their looting going.
Here’s what Donald Trump and his corporate cronies will never admit: The worst looting in America isn’t breaking windows at Target or Wells Fargo. It’s billions of dollars in wage theft, unjustifiable tax breaks for the top 1 percent, corporate tax havens, predatory loans, bail bonds, mass incarceration, and crooked Wall Street bankers who have never been accountable to anything but their bottom line.
By pitting us against each other – blaming immigrants, blaming liberals, and especially blaming people of color, and Black people in particular – they’ve divided us, and gotten away with it.
This needs to end. Stand together, and know the truth about the real looters in America.
7 Ways 2020 Has Exposed AmericaIf we learn nothing else from...
7 Ways 2020 Has Exposed America
If we learn nothing else from these dark times, here are 7 lessons we should take away from 2020:
1. Workers keep America going, not billionaires. American workers are forced to put their lives on the line to provide essential services, even as their employers fail to provide them with adequate protective gear. Meanwhile, America’s billionaires have retreated to their mansions, yachts and estates.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos returned to his 165,000-acre West Texas ranch while Amazon’s warehouse workers toil in close proximity to each other, often without masks, gloves, or sanitizer. The company has already scrapped the measly $2 an hour hazard pay increase it gave warehouse workers, even as Bezos’ wealth has jumped by a staggering $23.6 billion since the start of the pandemic.
2. Systemic racism is literally killing black and brown Americans. African Americans account for 42 percent of coronavirus deaths so far, despite representing only 21 percent of the population. As they bear the brunt of this pandemic, African Americans are forced to fight for their humanity in another regard — taking to the streets across the country to protest decades of unjust police killings of their community members, only to be met with more police violence.
And among Native American communities, the coronavirus figures are even more horrifying. The Navajo Nation has a higher per-capita infection rate than any state but can’t adequately care for the sick, thanks to years of federal underfunding and neglect of its healthcare system.
Decades of segregated housing, pollution, lack of access to medical care, and poverty have left communities of color vulnerable to the worst of this virus, and the worst of America.
3. If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to invest in the American people. I’m sick and tired of hearing we can’t afford Medicare for All, or a Green New Deal or eliminating student debt – in the same breath that Congress hands out billions to big banks, corporations, and the wealthy.
At the insistence of Senate Republicans and the Trump administration, coronavirus relief legislation has doled out at least $243 million to big corporations, including $72 million to oil and gas companies and $25 million to the airline industry. Millionaires have received $82 billion in tax cuts. The GOP couldn’t care less about “fiscal responsibility” even during a national crisis. It’s a question of priorities, not what we can afford.
4. Governors and mayors are running the country, not Trump. While Trump spews lies and attacks the media, local and state leaders have had no choice but to step up and tackle the pandemic on their own. They have struck deals with foreign nations to obtain tests and medical equipment, and developed inter-state pacts to coordinate purchases and regional guidelines for when and how to reopen.
The Trump administration hasn’t just sat on the sidelines and left it up to the states — it’s actively thrown obstacles in their way. Trump and his lackeys have refused to help states secure ventilators, ordered FEMA to seize states’ shipments of personal protective equipment, threatened to sue states that maintain lockdown orders, and even suggested holding states hostage to federal aid until they end sanctuary cities. Meanwhile, Trump says he plans to send our precious supply of ventilators to his dear friend, Vladimir Putin. Funny how that works.
5. Health care must be made a right in America. In the wealthiest country on earth, it is a moral outrage that Americans can’t even receive the care they need during a pandemic.
Even before this crisis struck, an estimated 27 million Americans didn’t have health insurance. And according to a recent report, an additional 43 million could soon lose employer-provided coverage because they’ve lost their job. Without insurance, a hospital stay to treat COVID-19 could cost as much as $73,000. Remember this the next time you hear pundits saying Medicare for All is too radical.
6. Our social safety nets are woefully broken. No other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the United States. We don’t provide universal health care. We’re one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide all workers some form of paid sick leave.
Other industrialized nations kept their unemployment rates low by guaranteeing paychecks during the pandemic. Here, as of mid-May, 36.5 million Americans have filed for unemployment and received just a one-time $1,200 check to hold them over. And this number is probably underestimated – unemployment offices have been so overwhelmed that many claims can’t even be filed.
7. Government matters. For decades, conservatives have told us that government is the problem and that we should let the free market run its course. Rubbish. The coronavirus pandemic has shown, yet again, that the unfettered free market won’t save us. After 40 years of Reaganism, it’s never been clearer: Government is in fact necessary to protect the public.
It’s tragic that it took record unemployment, graphic videos of Black Americans being murdered, and millions of people taking to the streets for many of us to grasp how broken, backwards, and racist our system really is.
We cannot cling to the idea of “going back to normal” because “normal” is what got us here. We can no longer accept piecemeal reforms of our broken systems. We need to reimagine a political and economic system that values humanity and builds prosperity for every American. Let’s get to work.
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