meatpacking workers live in order to police social distancing. Making clear just how little Republicans in particular care about workers, Trump has opposed extending unemployment insurance for laid-off workers. His Labor Department has encouraged companies to snitch on workers so that their unemployment benefits are cut off if they are too fearful of returning to work. And, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to protect corporations from liability in coronavirus-related lawsuits by workers. Republicans have also refused to take up any more stimulus bills even as more than 38-million Americans have lost jobs in just nine weeks. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, showing just how blind he is to the pain of workers, said, “I don’t see the need right now”. Senator McConnell echoed this, saying, “I don’t think we have yet felt the urgency of acting immediately. That time could… [come], but I don’t think it has yet”. Time and again conservative politicians, in shilling for the rich, have indicated that American workers, rather than being essential, are simply expendable. This is their version of a class war. The White House’s latest idea for helping workers is to cut corporate taxes in half as a way to incentivsze overseas jobs to return to the US. Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic adviser, touted a payroll tax cut as a way to put more money into Americans’ pockets. He failed to mention that cutting payroll taxes meant a cut in
payroll-tax-funded programmes such as Medicare and Social Security – programmes many Americans rely on that the class warriors have wanted to cut for years. Amazingly, the stock market appears to not care that there is record unemployment as week after week even with skyrocketing unemployment, the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indices remain buoyed. Indeed, the indicators that are announced with much fanfare every day on the popular radio programme Marketplace have never had a real bearing on the well-being of American workers, no matter how much enthusiasm host Kai Ryssdal musters during his announcements. To his credit, he has admitted as much, explaining that the “wealthiest 10 percent of American households own 84 percent of all stocks”. Before the pandemic, Trump bet his reelection on a low unemployment rate and the buoyancy of the stock market. Now, with official unemployment figures so incongruent with the stock market’s growth, he has a harder time making a claim of widespread economic prosperity. In fact, there was no prosperity even before the pandemic. The official unemployment rate was low, but that did not indicate how many people had quit looking for work or how poor quality those jobs were. The pandemic has exposed the fact that Trump’s claims of financial triumph were always more of a mirage than a miracle.
A
s the anguish of millions of American workers remains irrelevant to the corporate profiteers
and their political benefactors, we are expected to rejoice in the fact that Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, could become the world’s first trillionaire in a few years. It would be convenient for Michael Strain and the American Enterprise Institute if we are convinced to ignore such obscenity and focus instead on workers remaining “resilient” as the rich wage their class war. The only rational response to the absurd state of the US economy is to insist that billionaires (and especially trillionaires) are simply not allowed to exist. After the first $100-million, there is no need to continue to amass any more wealth. Congress could easily enact laws to tax billionaires heavily enough that they remained more than comfortable for the rest of their lives while funding necessary services that huge numbers of Americans could benefit from: paid sick leave, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and so much more. There is no justification for individuals to hoard so much wealth compared to the rest of us. But they will never give up that wealth voluntarily. They will instead fight tooth and nail, lie and cheat, to preserve and expand their inconceivable riches. Against such a class war there is only one option. CT Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
ColdType | Mid-June 2020 | www.coldtype.net
43
