|
Who Exactly Is Doing the Looting, and Who's Being Looted? |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54307"><span class="small">David Sirota, Jacobin</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 31 May 2020 09:03 |
|
Sirota writes: "We live in an Orwellian era, in which working-class people pilfering convenience store goods is called 'looting.' Rich people stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, on the other hand, is just well-functioning 'public policy.'"
The view on Wall Street on May 26. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Who Exactly Is Doing the Looting, and Who's Being Looted?
By David Sirota, Jacobin
31 May 20
 eadlines this morning are all about looting — specifically, looting in Minneapolis, after the police killing of an unarmed African-American man was caught on video. In the modern vernacular, that word “looting” is loaded — it comes with all sorts of race and class connotations. And we have to understand that terms like “looting” are an example of the way our media often imperceptibly trains us to think about economics, crime, and punishment in specific and skewed ways.
Working-class people pilfering convenience-store goods is deemed “looting.” By contrast, rich folk and corporations stealing billions of dollars during their class war is considered good and necessary “public policy” — aided and abetted by arsonist politicians in Washington lighting the crime scene on fire to try to cover everything up.
To really understand the deep programming at work here, consider how the word “looting” is almost never used to describe the plundering that has become the routine policy of our government at a grand scale that is far larger than a vandalized Target store.
Indeed, if looting is defined in the dictionary as “to rob especially on a large scale” using corruption, then these are ten examples of looting that we rarely ever call “looting”:
- “The Fed Bailed Out the Investor Class“: “Thanks to this massive government subsidy, large companies like Boeing and Carnival Cruises were able to avoid taking money directly — and sidestep requirements to keep employees on.”
- “Millionaires To Reap 80% of Benefit From Tax Change In Coronavirus Stimulus“: “The change — which alters what certain business owners are allowed to deduct from their taxes — will allow some of the nation’s wealthiest to avoid nearly $82 billion of tax liability in 2020.”
- “Stealth Bailout’ Shovels Millions of Dollars to Oil Companies“: “A provision of the $2.2 trillion stimulus law gives [companies] more latitude to deduct recent losses.?.?.?. The change wasn’t aimed only at the oil industry. However, its structure uniquely benefits energy companies that were raking in record profits.”
- “The Tax-Break Bonanza Inside the Economic Rescue Package“: “As part of the economic rescue package that became law last month, the federal government is giving away $174 billion in temporary tax breaks overwhelmingly to rich individuals and large companies.”
- “Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Bailout for Struggling Health Providers“: “Twenty large chains received more than $5 billion in federal grants even while sitting on more than $100 billion in cash.”
- “Airlines Got the Sweetest Coronavirus Bailout Around“: “The $50 billion the government is using to prop up the industry is a huge taxpayer gift to shareholders.”
- “Large, Troubled Companies Got Bailout Money in Small-Business Loan Program“: “The so-called Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to help prevent small companies from capsizing as the economy sinks into what looks like a severe recession.?.?.?. But dozens of large but lower-profile companies with financial or legal problems have also received large payouts under the program.”
- “Public Companies Received $1 Billion Meant For Small Businesses“: “Recipients include 43 companies with more than 500 workers, the maximum typically allowed by the program. Several other recipients were prosperous enough to pay executives $2 million or more.”
- “Firms That Left U.S. to Cut Taxes Could Qualify for Fed Aid“: “Companies that engaged in so-called corporate inversion transactions while maintaining meaningful U.S. operations appear to be eligible for two new programs.”
- “The K Street Bailout“: “Lobbyists already got bailed out, in effect, when corporations got bailed out. This is kind of the ultimate in double dipping; corporations are nursed back to health by the sheer force of Federal Reserve commitments, this allows them to keep their lobbying expenses up, and then lobbyists lobby for free money for themselves.”
This looting is having a real-world effect: as half a billion people across the globe could be thrown into poverty and as 43 million Americans are projected to lose their health care coverage, CNBC reports that “America’s billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the U.S. lockdown between mid-March and mid-May.”
Apparently, though, all of that pillaging is not enough. The looting is now getting even more brazen: President Trump is floating a new capital gains tax cut for the investor class, while the New York Times notes that House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new proposal “to retroactively lift a limit on state and local tax deductions would largely funnel money to relatively high earners.”
We don’t call this “looting” because it is being done quietly in nice marbled office buildings in Washington and New York.
We don’t call this “looting” because the looters wear designer suits and are very polite as they eagerly steal everything not nailed down to the floor.
We don’t call this “looting,” but we should — because it is tearing apart our nation’s social fabric, laying waste to our economy, and throwing our entire society into chaos.
 |
|
The Trump Presidency Is the Worst Ever for Public Lands |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54530"><span class="small">Wes Siler, Outside</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 31 May 2020 08:17 |
|
Siler writes: "An analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress (CAP) published on May 21 calculates that the total area of public lands that have already lost protections during Donald Trump's presidency, or which his administration is working to reduce protections for, amounts to almost 35 million acres. That's nearly the size of the entire state of Florida."
A bald eagle. (photo: Sonya/Creative Commons)
The Trump Presidency Is the Worst Ever for Public Lands
By Wes Siler, Outside
31 May 20
 n analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress (CAP) published on May 21 calculates that the total area of public lands that have already lost protections during Donald Trump’s presidency, or which his administration is working to reduce protections for, amounts to almost 35 million acres. That’s nearly the size of the entire state of Florida.
“President Trump is the only president in U.S. history to have removed more public lands than he protected,” reads the analysis.
Our nation’s unique system of public lands are not traditionally a partisan issue: 12.5 million acres of public land were protected during the Reagan administration. George H.W. Bush protected 17.8 million acres. His son protected 3.8 million acres. And, of course, President Obama protected 548 million acres both on land and at sea, by far the most of any president in history.
Six hundred and forty million acres of land in the United States—about 28 percent of our nation’s total land area—are owned by the American people and managed on our behalf by the federal government. The foundational principle of that management is called multiple use. Public lands are used for resource extraction, but that extraction must be balanced with ecosystem conservation, recreation, and the need to maintain these lands so that future generations of Americans can continue to make the most of them. Public lands contribute to the federal government’s bottom line, reducing the amount of taxes all of us must pay to fund our government’s operation. They support industries like oil, gas, and outdoor recreation, and provide plant and animal biodiversity, helping to protect the environment we live in. In short, these wild places, where we camp, run, hunt, climb, and ride, contribute to our quality of life.
Our system is utterly unique. No other country has the same amount of public land that we do, nor anything that approaches our equality of access. This is why it’s so galling that, according to the CAP analysis, “Trump has led the most anti-nature presidency in U.S. history.”
While reducing protections to areas of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah have garnered the most headlines, CAP finds that the Trump administration’s actions in Alaska have covered a much larger area. In that state, 9.2 million acres of old growth forest, 1.5 million acres of polar bear denning habitat, and 6.5 million acres of migratory bird nesting grounds—together our country’s largest areas of unspoiled wilderness—are being threatened by resource extraction.
In total, CAP details 19 projects in various states of completion that spread across 12 states. Only current projects (not simply proposed ones) are included. The administration is also threatening an additional 50 million acres in Alaska. Those active projects include Trump’s border wall, which has destroyed 150 miles of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, drilling and mining efforts that impact Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and mineral extraction in the California Desert Conservation Area, among others.
CAP’s assessment does not take into account proposed offshore projects, like the draft-form National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program, which proposes removing protections against oil and gas drilling from a whopping 1.5 billion acres of ocean.
That this scale of degradation to our nation’s natural heritage has taken place in less than a single presidential term is incredibly concerning. Our public lands are a finite resource that, once destroyed, are gone forever. So, here’s another comparison that hopefully puts the scale of this attack in context: Trump has already removed protections from 16.6 times the amount of land that Theodore Roosevelt managed to protect in the form of parks and monuments. Roosevelt’s legacy has survived for more than a century. How long will Trump’s last? |
|
|
RSN: Is Stacey Abrams Progressive? |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54528"><span class="small">Deborah Toler, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 30 May 2020 12:52 |
|
Toler writes: "Stacey Abrams is being widely touted as Joe Biden's best pick for the vice-presidential nomination. She has been a rising star in the Democratic Party ever since her historic and groundbreaking run in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race."
Stacey Abrams. (photo: Kevin D. Liles/Getty Images)
Is Stacey Abrams Progressive?
By Deborah Toler, Reader Supported News
30 May 20
 tacey Abrams is being widely touted as Joe Biden’s best pick for the vice-presidential nomination. She has been a rising star in the Democratic Party ever since her historic and groundbreaking run in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. But — while having a black woman on the ticket would be welcome — progressives need to understand that Abrams is firmly entrenched in the centrist establishment wing of the party.
Because Abrams ran an excellent race for governor in the Georgia context — fully deserving the widespread support she received from progressive organizations and individuals — it is easy to misunderstand her political approach as being more progressive than it is. In December 2018, weeks after losing (or, more accurately, having the gubernatorial race stolen from her), Abrams stepped onto the national stage while signaling her embrace of the Democratic Party’s corporate wing. She joined the board of directors at the Center for American Progress (CAP), which is second to none as a powerful political operation for the party’s Clinton-aligned forces, fiercely hostile to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.
For many years, no “think tank” in Washington has done more to wage political war on Sanders than CAP under the leadership of fervent Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden. So, Abrams’s public statement when she joined the CAP board is notable: “I am honored to be joining the board of the Center for American Progress. Led by the extraordinary Neera Tanden, CAP has been at the forefront of progressive policy development and activism for years. Together we will find and support bold solutions on health care, voting rights, the economy, and other critical issues our nation faces.”
A little more than a year later, in early 2020, Abrams doubled down on throwing her lot in with the corporate wing of the party when she joined the board of a major big-money organization, Priorities USA.
The first African-American woman to be the gubernatorial nominee of a major party, Abrams came to national prominence as a result of her grassroots campaign against Georgia’s Republican then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. He refused to recuse himself from running his own election and worked assiduously to purge more than 1.4 million voters from the rolls between 2012 and 2018. Abrams, leading the New Georgia Project, drew 800,000 more Democratic voters to cast ballots in 2018 than in the 2014 midterms. Despite poll site closings, nonfunctional voting machines, and other voter suppression factors, Abrams “lost” the election by only 55,000 votes.
Abrams ran on a platform that was progressive for Georgia. She supported Medicaid expansion, universal background checks, universal pre-K, criminal justice reform, and the introduction of automatic voter registration. She also supported pay equity and expanded sick leave. She won union support with her backing of the right to form a union and to collectively bargain for fair wages and safe workplace conditions. Those positions, coupled with her massive grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign, excited everyone from Oprah (who went door-to-door for her) to progressive activists like the Bernie Sanders-inspired group Our Revolution. Indeed, Bernie himself formally endorsed Abrams.
From a national perspective, however, those were mainstream Democratic Party positions, with limits on how progressive her platform was. She supported a $15-per-hour minimum wage for cities such as Atlanta but not for the state as a whole, arguing that such an increase would destabilize many of the state’s local economies. She did not advocate for single-payer health care.
Overall, Abrams argues for the supremacy of identity over class politics. “I’m not going to do class warfare; I want to be wealthy,” she has said. A longtime member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, she laid out her views on identity versus class politics in a 2018 article in the Council’s Foreign Affairs magazine. In that article, she argued that minorities and the marginalized have little choice but to fight against the particular methods of discrimination employed against them. And she rejected politics based on “the catchall category known as ‘the working class,’” citing the long history of conflict between black and white laborers in the U.S.
During a presentation titled “A Conversation with Stacey Abrams” at a May 2019 Conference on Diversity in International Affairs sponsored by CFR, Abrams said that “income inequality is a danger because of what it signals to our economy,” and the solution is to take aggressive steps to “ensure that more people can make more money …” But, she added: “I disagree sometimes with the notion that if we just reduce the top then that’s enough, because if we reduce the top but we don’t increase the bottom and we don’t strengthen the middle, then we’re going to be in the same place again.”
“And so,” Abrams said, “I do believe that we have a framework for addressing income inequality. Now let’s be clear, I’m less concerned about what the richest person than I am about making sure other people have the opportunity to have that too. And as long as we’re focusing on pulling down as opposed to pulling up, then we’re having the wrong conversation because when you’re only focused on the pulling down, people can argue that that’s just classism.” (This resonates with Joe Biden’s comments to the Brookings Institution in 2018 — “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” — and his assurance to donors last year that “nothing would fundamentally change” under his presidency.)
Abrams typically hedges her ideological position. “I was a Hillary surrogate who has hired Obama folks and Bernie folks and Clinton folks,” she told Time magazine in 2018. “I am absolutely a progressive,” she continued, “but I would not say that I represent any wing of the Democratic Party except for the Democratic Wing.” But her decisions to join the boards of both the Center for American Progress and Priorities USA signal her decision to join the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment.
The Center for American Progress is a behemoth in Democratic Party circles, along with its sister organization the CAP Action Fund that shares its staff. (The 501(c)4 Action Fund does more explicit lobbying and electoral work.) CAP’s $60 million budget comes primarily from philanthropic sources such as the Foundation to Promote Open Society, the Sandler Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Walton Family Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. CAP claims that less than 3 percent of its budget comes from corporations. These have included Amazon.com, Facebook Inc., Google, Microsoft, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Comcast NBC Universal, CVS Health, Lyft, Uber Technologies, Verizon and Walmart.
Although CAP bills itself as an “independent nonpartisan policy institute dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans,” in reality it is a hotbed of Democratic operations for the party’s corporate wing. CAP research has shaped the Democratic Party’s centrist policy positions for more than a decade, with fierce allegiance to the Clinton wing. As such it has actively opposed the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns.
CAP’s founder in 2003 was John Podesta, who had served as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff; he went on to be a senior counselor to Barack Obama and campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primary. CAP’s president since 2011, Neera Tanden, advised Obama and both Clintons. She was a policy adviser to Bill Clinton and later worked as Hillary’s policy director during the 2008 primary battle with Obama. Describing herself as a Hillary Clinton “loyal soldier,” Tanden acknowledged that she was an informal adviser to the 2016 Clinton campaign and that she privately gave the campaign political advice.
One of the key differences between the establishment and progressive wings of the Democratic Party is disagreement over the role big money should play in electoral politics. That Abrams is comfortable with big money playing an outsized role in electoral politics was evident in her support of Michael Bloomberg’s entry into the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. While failing to publicly note Bloomberg’s record of imposing anti-Muslim, anti-black, unconstitutional policing tactics on New York City during his time as mayor, Abrams defended what amounted to Bloomberg’s attempt to buy the Democratic presidential nomination.
Appearing on ABC’s “The View” in mid-February, Abrams said of Bloomberg: “Every person is allowed to run and should run the race that they think they should run, and Mike Bloomberg has chosen to use his finances. Other people are using their dog, their charisma, their whatever.” She added: “I think it is an appropriate question to raise. But I don’t think it is disqualifying for anyone to invest in fixing America.” When asked if Bloomberg’s $5-million contribution to her political action committee Fair Fight Action had any influence on her position, Abrams responded: “I am grateful to any person who contributes to Fair Fight. We have more than one hundred thousand contributors, his check just had a few more zeroes on it.”
When commenting on Bloomberg’s entry into the Democratic primaries, Abrams quipped “for once we know where the money is coming from.” Priorities USA is affiliated with the Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA Action. Priorities USA is a lavishly funded nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization and is an embodiment of not knowing where the money is coming from, since it relies on unlimited anonymous contributions. Joining this group’s board puts Abrams in touch with some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors and, when coupled with her board membership at CAP, gives her major access to the party’s establishment power structure.
This is in keeping with Abrams’s political ambitions. She has made no secret of her interest in becoming the nominee for vice president this year. She recently told Elle magazine: “I would be an excellent running mate. I have the capacity to attract voters by motivating typically ignored communities. I have a strong history of executive and management experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. I’ve spent 25 years in independent study of foreign policy. I am ready to help advance an agenda of restoring America’s place in the world. If I am selected, I am prepared and excited to serve.”
Abrams has also made clear that she plans to run for president down the political road. When the time comes, given her approach to political positioning and campaign fundraising, there are scant reasons to believe she would opt for the kind of progressive, small-donor models embodied in the 2020 campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. While she likes to describe herself as a progressive and as a pragmatist, Stacey Abrams is now on a national path that looks far more “pragmatic” than progressive.
Deborah Toler is a researcher at RootsAction.org. She was previously a Program Director at Oxfam America and a Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First).
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
America's Prison System Is a Danger to Public Health. These Numbers Are Proof. |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50468"><span class="small">Luke Savage, Jacobin</span></a>
|
|
Saturday, 30 May 2020 12:52 |
|
Savage writes: "Public health experts have been sounding the alarm about the spread of coronavirus in American prisons. Yet despite repeated warnings, newly released data show that America's addiction to incarceration continues unabated - endangering all of us, both inside and outside prison walls."
A prisoner. (photo: Getty Images)
America's Prison System Is a Danger to Public Health. These Numbers Are Proof.
By Luke Savage, Jacobin
30 May 20
Public health experts have been sounding the alarm about the spread of coronavirus in American prisons. Yet despite repeated warnings, newly released data show that America’s addiction to incarceration continues unabated — endangering all of us, both inside and outside prison walls.
 t should come as little surprise that America’s prisons and jails are particularly vulnerable to outbreaks of disease. As a former New York City corrections commissioner recently put it to ABC News: “People refer to cruise ships as petri dishes, but nobody has invented a more effective vector for transmitting disease than a city jail.”
Predictably enough, local, state, and federal jails were quick to report cases of COVID-19, and inaction has produced a terrifying rate of infection. It took less than two weeks, for example, for cases at New York’s Riker’s Island facility to multiply from one to nearly two hundred.
While every country’s carceral system is probably especially prone to seeing a rapid spread of infectious diseases, America’s uniquely punitive approach to criminal justice puts the emerging health crisis in its prisons on another level. In 2018, for example, there were more than 2.1 million prisoners in the United States, compared to 1.65 million in China, 690,000 in Brazil, and 583,000 in Russia — the United States topping all other countries with an incarceration rate of 655 per 100,000 people, according to numbers released that year by the World Prison Brief database.
As Heather Ann Thompson, a historian of American prison rebellions and urban social unrest, recently explained to Jacobin: “The COVID-19 outbreak is essentially a reaping of what we’ve sown with mass incarceration, from a public health perspective.” Thompson noted that the risk posed by prison outbreaks extends far outside the walls and fences of America’s carceral facilities, ultimately endangering prisoners and members of the general public alike:
Prisons don’t just pose a health risk to those locked inside of them, but also to the general public. This is because most people do, in fact, come home from prison, and they often bring with them highly infectious diseases — whether we’re talking about HIV or tuberculosis or COVID-19.
Health experts and officials alike have issued many warnings about the risk of serious outbreaks in prisons and jails. Yet a newly released report from the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy organization that studies issues surrounding law enforcement and criminal justice, suggests that America’s prison system has been dangerously slow to react amid the spread of COVID-19.
Using data gathered from state corrections departments and the federal Bureau of Prisons, the report’s authors observed a decline in the incarceration rate since its peak in 2007 — a trend they attribute to, among other things, a decrease in the number of people in federal prisons. But, as they hasten to add, information collected for March and April 2020 clearly shows that no American jurisdiction has “moved with the urgency required to meet the recommendations of public health officials to reduce incarceration” in the wake of COVID-19 — the overall prison population having decreased by a mere 1.6 percent.
Five states, in fact (Idaho, Iowa, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming), actually had more people in prison at the end of March than they did during the final week of 2019 — as measured by the total number of people under the jurisdiction of correctional authorities (which includes private facilities and other carceral institutions, like halfway houses). In total, Vera’s numbers for March 31, 2020 show a total of 1,287,416 people in state and federal prisons, compared with 1,308,009 on December 31, 2019 — a decrease of just over 20,000.
Mass incarceration has always been immoral. But, like other hallmarks of a needlessly unequal and unjust society, the coronavirus pandemic has thrown its visceral cruelty into even sharper relief. As Matt Hartman argued last month, the outbreak therefore represents an important opportunity for advocates to push decarceration measures with renewed urgency.
Though proponents of mass incarceration see it as integral to the maintenance of public safety, the spread of COVID-19 is a clear and present example of precisely the opposite: prisons are risking not only the lives of inmates — many of them imprisoned for minor or nonviolent offences — but also the quality of public health at large and the effectiveness of efforts to contain the virus.
The dismantling of America’s uniquely brutal incarceration system is long overdue. Why not start now?
|
|
