Sunday 31 May 2020

Who are the “Wrong Hands” in Yemen?


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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Some of them want to kill us.
Take Abu Abbas (as Henny Youngman used to say: “Please.”). Abu Abbas (a nom de guerre for one Adil Abduh Fari al-Dabhani) is the founder and leader of the Abu Abbas brigade, a militia fighting on the government side in Yemen.
Abbas and his eponymous militia are unintended beneficiaries of Pentagon largesse. According to CNN, the Abu Abbas brigade possesses armored tactical military vehicles manufactured by US company Oshkosh Defense. We know this because the Abu Abbas brigade openly paraded the American-made vehicles through the streets of the Yemeni city of Taiz in 2015. Apparently, President Donald Trump isn’t the only one who loves a military parade.
There are two things you should know about Abu Abbas. First, the Abu Abbas brigade isn’t supposed to have the vehicles. The US sold the vehicles to the UAE which violated the sales agreement by transferring them to a third party, the Abu Abbas brigade, without the authorization of the US.
Second, Abu Abbas is affiliated with Al-Qaeda. The Trump Administration placed sanctions on Abu Abbas in 2017, calling him a fundraiser for Al-Qaeda who, in addition, “served with” ISIS. The Washington Post calls Abbas “a powerful Yemeni warlord.”
To recap, the UAE, a nominal US ally, illegally transferred military hardware to a militia affiliated with a major US enemy. Al-Qaeda, you’ll recall, kills Americans. And still does. Ahmed Mohammed Alshamrani, the Saudi pilot trainee who murdered three US sailors at a US naval base in Florida in December 2019, was in contact with Al-Qaeda’s Yemeni franchise, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The FBI learned this from examining Alshamrani’s phone records. AQAP has taken credit for the Florida attack.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have been making war on Yemen since 2015, routinely transfer US arms to extremist militias involved in the fighting. To its shame, the US has been supporting the Saudi-led coalition with arms sales, intelligence sharing, and targeting assistance since 2015. Nobel Peace Prize (Sorry, Mr. Trump. I mean Noble Peace Prize) laureate Barack Obama took the US into the war in 2015. The war in Yemen is now the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in which at least 100,000 people have died.
CNN told the Department of Defense that US weapons were winding up in the hands of extremist militias. DoD said the matter was already being looked into. Great news! The DoD has cleared the UAE of wrongdoing, according to sources in the executive branch and on both sides of the aisle in Congress. So I guess we have nothing to worry about.
Either that, or the US doesn’t care that American weapons are winding up in the hands of US enemies just so long as the US gets to sell more and more arms. The Trump Administration doesn’t care how. If selling arms requires circumventing Congress, Trump is cool with that. So is Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
In May 2019, Secretary Pompeo concocted a phony emergency with Iran in order to push through $8 billion in arms sales without having to consult Congress. State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was investigating the legality of the sale when President Trump fired him at Secretary Pompeo’s behest on May 15 of this year.
CNN learned from four sources that Pompeo had apparently already decided to push the sale through when he asked subordinates to dream up reasons to justify the sale’s legality. According to Politico, “high-level officials of the State Department, Pentagon and within the intelligence community” advised Pompeo against invoking an emergency in order to make the arms sale.[1]
Going further back, on September 12, 2018, Secretary Pompeo falsely certified that the Saudis and the UAE were “undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure” in Yemen. Hogwash. The month before, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that “There is little evidence of any attempt by parties to the conflict to minimize civilian casualties.” Had Pompeo told the truth, the US would have been required under the National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 to terminate military assistance to the Saudis and the UAE. That would have jeopardized arms sales.
Even if US arms were not being transferred to extremist militias, arming the Saudis and UAE is bad enough. The Saudi-led coalition uses US arms in indiscriminate attacks on civilians, in contravention of international law. Fragments of a bomb manufactured by US defense contractor Lockheed Martin were found at the scene of a 2019 bombing which killed 40 Yemeni children aboard a school bus. CNN and other media outlets engage in much hand-wringing about US weapons winding up in the “wrong hands,” by which they mean militias. Why aren’t the Saudis and UAE considered the “wrong hands,” too? Oh, I know. Because they buy US arms.
Notes.
1) On June 24, 2019, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced a bill, the Saudi Arabia False Emergencies (“SAFE”) Act. The bill restricts the president’s ability to invoke an emergency in order to evade Congressional review of arms sales to a handful of countries: members of NATO, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Israel. The list conspicuously omits Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. ↑

Charles Pierson is a lawyer and a member of the Pittsburgh Anti-Drone Warfare Coalition. E-mail him at Chapierson@yahoo.com.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/29/who-are-the-wrong-hands-in-yemen/

posted by Satish Sharma at 21:07 0 Comments

The coronavirus pandemic is boosting the big tech transformation to warp speed

Information economics

Beginning in the 1940s, the work of information theory pioneer Claude Shannon had a deep effect on economists, who saw analogies between signals in electrical circuits and many systems in society. Chief among these new information economists was Leonid Hurwicz, winner of a 2007 Nobel Prize for his work on “mechanism design theory”.
Information theorist Claude Shannon also conducted early experiments in artificial intelligence, including the creation of a maze-solving mechanical mouse. Bell Labs
Economists have pursued analogies between human and mechanical systems ever since, in part because they lend themselves to modelling, calculation and prediction.
These analogies helped usher in a new economic orthodoxy formed around the ideas of F.A. Hayek, who believed the problem of allocating resources in society was best understood in terms of information processing.
By the 1960s, Hayek had come to view thinking individuals as almost superfluous to the operation of the economy. A better way to allocate resources was to leave decisions to “the market”, which he saw as an omniscient information processor.
Putting information-processing first turned economics on its head. The economic historians Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah argue economists moved from “ensuring markets give people what they want” to insisting they can make markets produce “any desired outcome regardless of what people want”.
By the 1990s this orthodoxy was triumphant across much of the world. By the late 2000s it was so deeply enmeshed that even the global financial crisis – a market failure of catastrophic proportions – could not dislodge it.
 Market society
This orthodoxy holds that if information markets make for efficient resource allocation, it makes sense to put them in charge. We’ve seen many kinds of decisions turned over to automated data-driven markets, designed as auctions.
Online advertising illustrates how this works. First, the data generated by each visitor to a page is gathered, analysed and categorised, with each category acquiring a predictive probability of a given behaviour: buying a given product or service.
Then an automated auction occurs at speed as a web page is loading, matching these behavioural probabilities with clients’ products and services. The goal is to “nudge” the user’s behaviour. As Douglas Rushkoff explains, someone in a category that is 80% likely to do a certain thing might be manipulated up to 85% or 90% if they are shown the right ad.
This model is being scaled up to treat society as a whole as a vast signalling device. All human behaviour can be taken as a bid in an invisible auction that aims to optimise resource allocation.
To gather the bids, however, the market needs ever greater awareness of human behaviour. That means total surveillance is here to stay, and will get more intense and pervasive.
Growing surveillance combined with algorithmic interventions in human behaviour constrain our choices to an ever greater extent. Being nudged from an 80% to an 85% chance of doing something might seem innocuous, but that diminishing 20% of unpredictability is the site of human creativity, learning, discovery and choice. Becoming more predictable also means becoming more fragile.
Videoconferencing has boomed in schools and workplaces, with software like Zoom and Microsoft teams reporting enormous increases in usership. Lukas Koch / AAP

In praise of obscurity

The pandemic has pushed many of us into doing even more by digital means, hitting fast-forward on the growth of surveillance and algorithmic influence, bringing more and more human behaviour into the realm of statistical probability and manipulation.
Concerns about total surveillance are often couched as discussions of privacy, but now is the time to think about the importance of obscurity. Obscurity moves beyond questions of privacy and anonymity to the issue, as Matthew Crawford identifies, of our “qualitative experience of institutional authority”. Obscurity is a buffer zone – a space to be an unobserved, uncategorised, unoptimised human – from which a citizen can enact her democratic rights.
The onrush of digitisation caused by the pandemic may have a positive effect, if the body politic senses the urgency of coming to terms with the widening gap between fast-moving technology and its institutions.
The algorithmic market, left to its optimisation function, may well eventually come to see obscurity an act of economic terrorism. Such an approach cannot form the basis of institutional authority in a democracy. It’s time to address the real implications of digital technology.

posted by Satish Sharma at 20:23 0 Comments

Surveillance is getting under our skin - and that should alarm us

We are at a watershed moment where surveillance is no longer limited to what we do, but how we feel.

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The coronavirus is a kind of watershed event for surveillance.

Firstly, it is spreading everywhere with the disease. And secondly, we are seeing a change in the nature of surveillance from over the skin surveillance to under the skin surveillance.
Over the skin surveillance is the things that we do, where we go, who we meet, what we watch on television. We know that, for years, corporations and governments have been developing the abilities, the technological tools, to monitor what we do. And this gives them a lot of insight into our political views, our preferences, even our personalities.
But what is happening now is that surveillance is beginning to go under the skin - revealing not just what we do, but how we feel.

Of course, it is, at the moment, focused on the disease itself. In order to know whether we are sick, the surveillance systems need data about what is happening inside our bodies - our body temperature, maybe our blood pressure, perhaps our heart rate. All of these things can be used to establish our medical condition.

But once surveillance goes under the skin, it can be used for many other purposes. For example, if you read this article or watch the accompanying video, it might offer some clue about your political views or personality.
But what if surveillance systems can actually go under your skin as you are reading or watching it? Perhaps your TV is watching you and a biometric bracelet on your wrist is measuring your body temperature, your blood pressure, your heart rate. They can know not only what you are reading or watching but how it makes you feel - what makes you angry, what makes you laugh, whether you agree with me or if you think - "I am crazy".
The implications of this are extreme. They can go all the way to the establishment of new totalitarian regimes - worse than anything we have seen before. They can also result in huge revolutions in the job market, in the economy, in personal relations.
I am not against surveillance itself. I think in this pandemic we need to make use of whatever technologies are available to us to fight it and to ease the accompanying economic crisis. Surveillance can help us do that. It can, for example, ease the lockdowns and allow people to go back to work, school or university much earlier than if we did not have this technology.
But it should be done carefully. And there are two main guidelines we should follow.

Firstly, we should monitor people if they are sick, but this should not be done by the police or the security services, which could potentially use the data for other purposes. Independent healthcare authorities or agencies should be established and tasked solely with stopping the pandemic. The data they collect should not be shared with anybody else - not the police, not our bosses, not our insurance companies.
A lot of people, including politicians, are describing the fight against the pandemic as a war. And in a war, we need to involve the security services. But this is not a war. This is a healthcare crisis. It is not about soldiers running around with guns. It is about nurses in hospitals changing dirty bedsheets. 
We do not need experts in killing people. We need experts in taking care of people. So if you want to put somebody in charge, put a nurse in charge, not a soldier or a general. 
But better yet, there are ways to not put anybody in charge, ways that information can be shared peer to peer without a central authority that collects it all. So, for example, there are technologies that allow your smartphone to talk directly to the smartphones around it. So, let us say you were with someone who later tested positive for COVID-19, that person's smartphone will alert your smartphone and the smartphones of the other people who were around them. 
Secondly, if we increase the surveillance of citizens we must always balance it by increasing the surveillance of governments and corporations. 
Governments are now making extremely important decisions. They are handing out money like water - hundreds of billions of dollars or, in the case of the United States, trillions of dollars. This should be monitored. Who is making the decisions about where this money goes? Does it go to help big corporations whose directors are friends with government ministers, or does it go to help small businesses?
Governments may try to say that it is too complicated to track all of these decisions and payments, but it is the same technology. So if it is not too complicated to monitor us, then it is not too complicated to monitor them. 
So citizens need to demand two things - firstly that their privacy be protected as far as possible, and secondly that any increase in the monitoring of them be accompanied by an increase in the monitoring of governments.
People may think, "OK, we'll adopt this emergency measure now and when this emergency is over, when there is no more coronavirus, we can dismantle this surveillance system." But measures taken in an emergency have a nasty tendency of outlasting the emergency. It is easy to build a system of surveillance but very difficult to dismantle afterwards.
There is always a new emergency on the horizon. Even if the number of COVID-19 patients is down to zero, governments will say "but there might be another wave or there might be an Ebola outbreak, so we need to keep this in place".
So whatever systems are established now, whatever measures are adopted, think of them as long term. And do not just think about your present government. Maybe you trust your present government with this surveillance system, but think about the politician in your country you are most afraid of. Now ask yourself, "What happens if this politician is prime minister or president in four or eight years from now?" What kind of surveillance system do you feel comfortable with them being in charge of?
But the most important thing to realise about all these technological inventions is that technology is never deterministic. It always depends to some extent on politics and on our decisions. We can decide to use the same technology to build very different kinds of societies. We saw this in the 20th century when the same technology was used to build communist dictatorships, fascist regimes and liberal democracies. If you look at North Korea and South Korea today, they have access to the same technology, they just choose to use it differently.
It will be the same with new technologies like surveillance systems. So we have to question the political decisions we take now about how to use them. Because with this pandemic, there is not only a motivation to increase monitoring, there is also agreement from the public. "OK, go under my skin, I allow it." It is a small step because right now, that information will be gathered to know whether or not you have the disease. But it is, nevertheless, a step in a dangerous direction on a momentous road so we must be careful as we take it.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and best-selling author.

posted by Satish Sharma at 20:13 0 Comments

Does Neo-Feudalism Define Our Current Epoch?

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 When I learned that we were entering a new period called neo-feudalism, my first reaction was to wonder if that was any worse than what we have now. After all, the serf might have suffered from a lack of freedom but at least had lots of time off as Michael Perelman pointed out in “The Invention of Capitalism“:
Although their standard of living may not have been particularly lavish, the people of precapitalistic northern Europe, like most traditional people, enjoyed a great deal of free time. The common people maintained innumerable religious holidays that punctuated the tempo of work. Joan Thirsk estimated that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, about one-third of the working days, including Sundays, were spent in leisure. Karl Kautsky offered a much more extravagant estimate that 204 annual holidays were celebrated in medieval Lower Bavaria.
Then again, I wondered if they were using the term feudalism in the same way I do. When I first began to hear about Trump as a “neo-fascist,” I stubbornly insisted on using the term fascism in a strict sense. I didn’t find him that different from past American presidents, including F.D.R. who threw Japanese-Americans into concentration camps in defiance of constitutional guarantees to citizens.
I decided to look more closely at the term after Jodi Dean’s article appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books on May 12th. Comrade Dean, after all, is an accurate barometer of trends in the left academy. Before his shelf-life had expired, Dean was quite the apostle of Slavoj Zizek. Titled “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?”,  her article identified Joel Kotkin as “a conservative geographer” who envisions the U.S. future as mass serfdom. Well, if that means having one-third of your working days off, that might not be so bad. Although Dean’s article doesn’t mention him, Robert Kuttner has also weighed in the March/April 2020 issue of The American Prospect. Since these three constitute the broad political spectrum from Kuttner’s liberalism to Dean’s Marxism, I thought that writing about them might help me clarify my own thinking and that of my readers. With the cataclysmic changes capitalism is now undergoing, one can understand why some would go in search of new theories.
Let me start with Joel Kotkin, an urban studies professor who traffics in futuristic projections. His 2010 “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050” was just such an exercise. The book called for nurturing the middle class, a goal shared by just about every politician on the planet, at least verbally. He has a new book out titled “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class” that seems consistent with the earlier one. You’d think that anybody warning about neo-feudalism would be an arch-enemy of Donald Trump, but it turns out that Kotkin was a fan. In a 2017 Daily Beast article titled “Here’s How Donald Trump Could End America’s New Feudalism,” California liberals, especially in Silicon Valley, are the dragon and Donald Trump is St. George:
Neo-feudalism diminishes the property owning middle-class. In the Bay Area, regional governments are now seeking to limit all new development to a mere fraction of the area’s land mass, all but guaranteeing the future generations will face almost impossibly high housing prices. And a new set of state regulations, including a requirement that new houses have “zero” net energy use all but guarantees that houses, over time, will continue becoming ever more expensive.
The article hails Trump’s nativism, economic nationalism and all the other nostrums associated with the far-right. He writes, “For all the awfulness associated with Trump, his election stemmed from a disinclination among Americans to accept their place in the new technocratic order.” There’s not much else to say about Kotkin except to paraphrase what Jeeves told Bertie Wooster: “You would not enjoy Kotkin, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”
Let us turn now to Robert Kuttner, a stalwart and long-time Democratic Party supporter. His prolix article titled “The Rise of Neo-Feudalism” does not target Donald Trump per se. Thankfully, Kuttner sees neo-feudalism as a product of both Democratic and Republican administrations. It is a system that promotes deregulation, allows Facebook and other tech firms to enjoy a monopoly, and empowers Monsanto to screw small farmers through its intellectual property control over seeds. Since these abuses grew under both Obama and Trump, we can at least give Kuttner credit for not making Trump the embodiment of neo-feudalism.
Although he does not pinpoint exactly when such practices began, he does identify most of the 20th century as the halcyon days of democratic rather than feudal rule. The first inkling you get that Kuttner is rather hazy on feudalism as a system is when he refers to the Enclosure acts:
In the new tragedy, public regulation is precluded because law has been sundered from the democratic commons, in a manner that evokes the original tragedy of the commons—the English enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries—in which lands that had been cultivated by the peasantry since time immemorial were carved up into commercial properties by local lords, with the blessing and legal protection of the Crown.
If you’ve read Marx, you’d understand that there was nothing feudal about the enclosure movement. Instead, it was the sine qua non for capitalist farming. Those “local lords” were not disposed to giving farmhands the kind of days off they enjoyed in the 12th century. They worked them to the bone, all in pursuit of profit. In the same way that there was nothing pre-capitalist about slavery in the New World, there was nothing feudal about English agriculture once the Enclosure acts began.
Kuttner makes the same error in discussing American industrialists of the 19th century. They retained “quasi-feudal rights” through the entire contract doctrine, which provided that “workers who left an employer mid-contract had no right to be paid for any work they had performed, and the tort of enticement, which enabled employers to prevent their workers from departing their establishment to work for someone else.” Once again, there is nothing feudal about that. It was simply the capitalist class using the law against workers who lacked the political power to defend themselves. During apartheid in South Africa, there were pass laws that robbed the black miner from enjoying the same freedoms as white wage workers. Pass laws were not feudal. Instead, they were part of apartheid’s racial capitalism.
As another example, you can look at how the Spaniards exploited native peoples in Peru in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Incas used the Mit’a to force conquered tribes to build roads. When the Spanish took power, they used the Mita (a different spelling and different meaning) to mine for gold. That gold was a critical link in the birth of capitalism and had nothing to do with the unhurried life under the Incan empire. It was human sacrifice rather than being worked to death in a gold mine that made you worry.
The one thing that Kotkin and Kuttner have in common is the belief that Silicon Valley is the embodiment of neo-feudalism. After reading a section of his article titled “Silicon Valley as a Giant Fiefdom”, you’d conclude that Mark Zuckerberg has something in common with King Louis XIV. He is outraged that companies like companies Google, Apple, and Amazon have invented their own jurisprudence within the terms of service that nobody reads to allow them to make money off our personal data. Is this feudal? I don’t see how. It just strikes me as the unlimited power of monopolies, the same sort of injustice that led Lenin to write “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Turning now to Jodi Dean, she at least acknowledges that today’s neo-feudalism does not reproduce all the features of traditional feudalism. To help her readers understand how the earlier feudalism works, she cites Perry Anderson and the late Ellen Meiksins Wood. From them, she draws the central lesson that political authority and economic power overlapped. Feudal lords extracted a surplus from peasants through legal coercion.
Under neo-feudalism political authority reasserts itself:
Political power is exercised with and as economic power, not only taxes but fines, liens, asset seizures, licenses, patents, jurisdictions, and borders. At the same time, economic power shields those who wield it from the reach of state law. Ten percent of global wealth is hoarded in off-shore accounts to avoid taxation. Cities and states relate to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google/Alphabet as if these corporations were themselves sovereign states — negotiating with, trying to attract, and cooperating with them on their terms.
Like Kuttner, she mistakes the power exercised by such monopolies with feudalism. Google operating like a “sovereign state” is hardly feudal. Maybe she needs refresher course in “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Before WWI, the lines between the state and monopolies were highly porous. Like Google, General Electric straddled the world and forced sovereign states to bow before it. Lenin wrote:
The famous A.E.G. (General Electric Company), which grew up in this way, controls175 to 200 companies (through the “holding” system), and a total capital of approximately 1,500 million marks. Of direct agencies abroad alone, it has thirty-four, of which twelve are joint-stock companies, in more than ten countries. As early as 1904 the amount of capital invested abroad by the German electrical industry was estimated at 233 million marks. Of this sum, 62 million were invested in Russia. Needless to say, the A.E.G. is a huge “combine”—its manufacturing companies alone number no less than sixteen—producing the most diverse articles, from cables and insulators to motorcars and flying machines.
Perhaps, the ability of high-tech companies to achieve the dominance that Standard Oil and G.E. once enjoyed sends people like Kuttner and Dean in search of new terminology to capture the current period. It would be far better for them to identify the underlying class relations in 1914 and that still exist in 2020. People handling packages for Amazon are wage earners. The wage form disguises the ability of the boss to extract surplus value. Under feudalism, that was more obvious. The serf produced a hundred bushels of wheat and the lord took ten. He needed them to exchange for the armor his soldiers wore to defend the estate against rivals. The main difference? Under capitalism, the wage worker has no ties to the soil. If a factory is unprofitable, he or she loses her job. Under the sluggish feudal system, you are tied to the soil replicating age-old practices like leading an ox across a field.
Toward the end of the article, Dean tries to justify this new way of analyzing class relations. She writes:
For those on the left, neofeudalism lets us understand the primary political conflict as arising out of neoliberalism. The big confrontation today is not between democracy and fascism. Although popular with liberals, this formulation makes little sense given the power of oligarchs — financiers, media and real estate moguls, carbon and tech billionaires.
Once you get past the buzzwords about feudalism, all Jodi Dean seems to be saying is that big corporations are our enemy. Is that such a political or intellectual breakthrough?
With all due respect to the American Zizek, those on the left who have mastered their Marxism do not see the big confrontation as between democracy and fascism. That is how Noam Chomsky, Todd Gitlin, and Eric Alterman might see it. For us, it has always been a battle between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labor power to survive. Today, when the means of production lie prostrate on the ground like a dying ox, it is probably a good idea to stick to the Marxist basics rather than trendy but empty terms. If people want to call the capitalist system “neo-feudal,” I have no objection. For many people making a career out of Marxist punditry, there is always a need to keep your brand fresh and marketable. Once they called Zizek a superstar of Marxism and the Elvis of cultural studies. Now, like some superannuated movie star, it is hard for him to gain attention except through absurd books like “Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes The World.” Let’s hope Comrade Dean stays on top of her game. The competition is tough out there.
Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/29/does-neo-feudalism-define-our-current-epoch/

posted by Satish Sharma at 19:58 0 Comments

Pandemic Crisis and Recession Can Spark a Fight for Real Change in the US

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 American workers have a huge opportunity as a result of this coronavirus pandemic — an opportunity to massively expand union membership in the workplace, and a chance, after decades of being ignored by Congress, to finally win a desperately needed increase in the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 per hour to at least $15 per hour.
Republicans in Congress, notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are unhappy with the supplemental $600 per week that laid-off workers are getting with their unemployment checks. They’re afraid workers won’t try to get a new job until their unemployment checks end, so they are saying they will refuse any effort by Democrats to push for an extension of the program, which only lasts for 13-20 weeks, depending upon the state. (States with the lowest pay rates and minimum wage tend to also be the states that limit the bonus to 13 weeks.)
Never mind that there are now more people unemployed — 40 million have applied for unemploment benefits and well over 27 percent of the workforce at this point are jobless. And that number rises to nearly half of all workers when gig workers and small owners of independent businesses are added in. That’s a significantly higher unemployment rate than at the depth of the Great Depression when joblessness hit 24.9 percent in 1933, and virtually no serious economist thinks that the economy is going to bounce back any time soon — meaning that unemployment will be at record levels for considerable time, and that jobs will be hard to find.
Indeed some are warning that as many as 40 percent of the people laid off will not be getting rehired, either because their employers — restaurants, theaters, small businesses, and even significant companies like Hertz or JC Penny’s — are going bust.
The truth is, McConnell is right about workers not wanting to lose their unemployment status by going back to some crappy job paying minimum wage or maybe a buck or two more an hour.
That $600 weekly check from Uncle Sam is an interesting number. It’s what you’d earn for a 40-hour week if you were getting paid $15 an hour by the boss. It’s more than double the paltry $290 a week that workers get if they’re paid the federal minimum wage that is in effect in 18 states.
There’s an old saying: “How’re you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen (fill in the blank).” And it’s true. According to researchers, a third to two-thirds of all American workers — that would be between 50-100 million of us — work for poverty wages. According to a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute, fully 11.5 percent of US workers or one in nine of all workers, were earning less than a poverty-level income before the current wave of layoffs and shutdowns. And it should also be pointed out that the minimum wage of $7.25 that is what so many US workers earn (that’s gross pay before deductions for income tax, state and local taxes and Social Security, not take-home pay) is the same as it was in 2009, while inflation has reduced its buying power by 19 percent. That is to say, workers today earning the same minimum wage that a worker was earning 11 years ago, would have to be making $8.63 just to be in the same economic situation the worker in 2009 was.
America’s low-income workers have been going backwards for decades!
Given all this, how can anyone expect US workers, after having briefly experienced while on unemployment benefits what it’s like living on $15 an hour, to willingly go back later and take $7.25 again?
Of course, one worker or a couple of working parents, confronted with that situation — of losing unemployment benefits, and having a family of kids to support — will probably take whatever he or she can get out of desperation. But if the army of tens of millions of low-paid workers stand together (and remember this is an election year), and demand that their wages be raised to at least that $600/week rate, or $15 per hour, they can — we can — win it.
This is a historic moment for change.
People who still have their jobs are also learning that there’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to work from home.
And they’re learning too that their so-called “beloved” employer sponsored health insurance is good for nothing if they get laid off, or if, like the United Autoworkers who struck GM last fall learned, if they go on strike. They know now that what they need is what subverted and crushed presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders was calling “Medicare for All” but what is often known more properly as single-payer health care, where the US government insures every American.
They’re learning that the Republicans have no interest in helping them, caring only about helping business and the rich, and that establishment Democrats cannot be trusted to help them either, preferring to cut deals with Republicans, to offer support for lobbying firms, arms industry companies and the banking industry with a few sops for the people.
So let’s use this moment to demand real change. We need to take to the streets in numbers not seen in a century to let Washington politicians of both parties know we’re not going back to the “old normal” that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden was promising during the debates.
We need to demand that any politician running for office have the interests of working people as a priority. Whether that politician is running for president, senator, representative, governor or state legislator, we need to know that he or she supports a living minimum wage, a right to join a union and to strike for better working conditions, laws requiring a supportive workplace that is safe — including from infectious diseases — and that provides all workers with paid sick leave, parental leave and vacation time. We need to demand the establishment of a single-payer health system that covers all the medical costs of all Americans.
Crises like this Pandemic and this unprecedented recession are a time of suffering and fear, but they can also be a time of people coming together to help each other, and to make radical change.
It’s up to use to use this crisis to remake this country from one based upon exploitation and greed to one based upon community, generosity and mutual support.

posted by Satish Sharma at 19:41 0 Comments