https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/29/rich-poor-gap-wealth-inequality-bernie-sanders

The United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political crises that we face – and it must be dealt with.

The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires have enormous wealth and power while working families have been struggling in a way we have not seen since the Great Depression. This situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence.

Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs and incomes during the pandemic, over the past year 650 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3tn.

The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new.

Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America.

In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation’s wealth. In 2019, the latest year of data available, they own nearly 20%.

Unbelievably, the two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined.

If income inequality had not skyrocketed over the past four decades and had simply stayed static, the average worker in America would be earning $42,000 more in income each year. Instead, as corporate chief executives now make over 300 times more than their average employees, the average American worker now earns $32 a week less than he or she did 48 years ago – after adjusting for inflation. In other words, despite huge increases in technology and productivity, ordinary workers are actually losing ground.

Addressing income and wealth and inequality will not be easy, because we will be taking on some of the most powerful and well-financed entities in the country, including Wall Street, the health insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial-complex. But it must be done. Here is some of what Congress and the president can do in the very near future.

We must raise the minimum wage from the current starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $15 an hour. A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.

We need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be directly linked to the decline in union membership in America.

We need to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, bridges, wastewater plants, sewers, culverts, dams, schools and affordable housing.

We need to combat climate change by fundamentally transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels towards energy efficiency and renewable energy which will also create millions of good paying jobs.

We need to do what virtually every other major country does by guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right. Passing a Medicare for All program would end the absurdity of us paying twice as much per capita for healthcare as do the people of other countries, while tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or under-insured.

We need to make certain that all of our young people, regardless of income, have the right to high quality education – including college. And that means making public colleges and universities tuition free and substantially reducing student debt for working families.

And yes. We need to make the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America start paying their fair share of taxes.

Growing income and wealth inequality is not just an economic issue. It touches the very foundation of American democracy. If the very rich become much richer while millions of working people see their standard of living continue to decline, faith in government and our democratic institutions will wither and support for authoritarianism will increase. We cannot let that happen.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/28/22354604/amazon-twitter-bernie-sanders-jeff-bezos-union-alabama-elizabeth-warren

Amazon has long been at odds with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) over their criticisms of the company’s labor and business practices. But the discord reached new heights last week when Amazon aggressively went after both senators on Twitter in an unusual attack for a large corporation. With each new snarky tweet from an Amazon executive or the company’s official Twitter account, insiders and observers alike asked a version of the same question: “What the hell is going on?”

It turns out that Amazon leaders were following a broad mandate from the very top of the company: Fight back.

Recode has learned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed dissatisfaction in recent weeks that company officials weren’t more aggressive in how they pushed back against criticisms of the company that he and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading. What followed was a series of snarky and aggressive tweets that ended up fueling their own media cycles.

The timing was likely not coincidental. Bezos and other Amazon leaders are on edge as the company is facing the largest union election in its history at its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse. Election results will be tallied early this week, and Amazon officials understand that if a majority of the employees vote to unionize, it could set off a chain reaction at other facilities — potentially forcing the e-commerce giant to overhaul how it manages its hundreds of thousands of frontline US workers.

There was terror inside the executive ranks of Amazon the last time a union election was held at a US Amazon facility — and that was only a small subset of a warehouse’s workforce, the majority of whom voted against unionization. That vote happened in early 2014 and consisted of just 27 technicians and mechanics at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware. In Alabama, though, the stakes are much higher with nearly 6,000 workers eligible to vote. Bezos knows all of this well.

I explain more here, but our epidemic of mass shootings and Right Wing refusal to even consider reform is rooted in our white supremacist, slave-owning past, and the fact that white men violently refuse to loosen their stranglehold on power.https://t.co/2cJ65u88tM

— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) March 28, 2021

Oy vey ye mateys

https://www.businessinsider.com/banking-industry-union-unionize-pro-act-fair-wages-congress-2021-3?utm_source=reddit.com

Just weeks before COVID-19 reached my city of Eugene, Oregon, I was fired from my job without any prior disciplinary record or even a warning from my manager.

Back then, we didn’t know as much as we do now about the pandemic, but I had read and seen enough to know that we needed to be prepared. So I put up a flyer in the break room to see if my coworkers at Pentagon Federal Credit Union would be interested in organizing for better healthcare. At the time, for a healthcare plan with a reasonable deductible, PenFed employees could expect to pay a premium over $400 a month to cover their family. This led many to opt for the high deductible plan, a risky gamble even without a pandemic.

PenFed’s reaction to my organizing is all too common. Employers often use firings or unfair discipline as a tactic to show their workforce that they will target anyone who speaks up for better conditions. It is an attempt by an employer to make an example of a few employees and send a message to their colleagues: speak up, and you’ll lose your livelihood, too.

If there’s one thing the pandemic has shown us, it’s that no matter what industry you work in — whether it’s banking or fast food or healthcare — workers have very few ways to improve their economic security. Part of why we remain stuck is because we are stopped at every turn from having a voice on the job. It’s also why we’ve been hammered with job losses and preventable cases of COVID-19.

That’s why I support the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a crucial bill that would overhaul labor law to strengthen workers’ rights on the job, and make it easier for workers to join unions and collectively bargain with their employers. It would ban coercive activities that companies use to deter workers from joining unions, and companies who retaliate against their employees would face financial penalties for their actions.

When I was fired, I filed an Unfair Labor Practice, or ULP, against PenFed. An employer commits a ULP for violating the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guarantees the right of employees to organize unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action. Just as this landmark piece of legislation was passed in a time of crisis in this country, the PRO Act would today provide us bold labor protections against employers that continue to strong arm us. Unfortunately, corporate special interests have spent decades gutting and weakening the NLRA.

With the PRO Act, instead of losing my job and income when I was fired, I would have been able to continue to work and be paid throughout the entire ULP process. PenFed wouldn’t have been incentivized to drag out the proceedings, which ultimately forced me to accept a financial settlement rather than getting my job back, which was my intention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregion/new-jersey-voting-rights.html

Months after a divisive presidential election pushed voting rights to the fore, the issue has become a key political battlefield.

Bills restricting ballot access are moving quickly in Republican-led states even as President Biden and his fellow Democrats in Washington press for passage of the most ambitious voting rights legislation in decades to help blunt their effect.

In New Jersey, the Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, is about to sign a bill authorizing early in-person voting, sending a clear signal that making it easier to vote is crucial for a healthy democracy.

It will be done in a ceremony laden with symbolism: Mr. Murphy will be joined on Tuesday in a videoconference by Stacey Abrams, whose decade-long effort to enroll voters in Georgia helped Mr. Biden win the state and cemented the Democrats’ slim majority in the United States Senate.

New Jersey lawmakers’ final approval of two bills that expand voter access were not surprising in a state where Democrats control the State House and Democratic voters outnumber Republican voters by more than one million. And the practice of early in-person voting is hardly novel: New Jersey will become the 25th state to allow voters to cast ballots in person before elections for a period that includes a weekend day.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/29/cdc-will-extend-national-ban-on-evictions-ban-through-end-of-june-.html

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has extended the national ban on evictions through the end of June.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a historic threat to the nation’s public health,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement. “Keeping people in their homes and out of crowded or congregate settings — like homeless shelters — by preventing evictions is a key step in helping to stop the spread of COVID-19.”

The eviction ban was scheduled to expire in two days, and advocates warned of a spike in evictions if it was not kept in effect.

Around 20% of adult renters said they didn’t pay last month’s rent, according to a survey published in March by the Census Bureau. Closer to 33% of Black renters reported the same.

https://www.axios.com/biden-infrastructure-plan-economists-e2d937d5-d83b-4552-92e2-f85a4794bc2b.html

Economists are becoming positively giddy about the potential for economic growth this year as President Biden and Congressional Democrats look set to push forward a $3 trillion infrastructure bill.

What we’re hearing: “Stimulus helps build the bridge for the recovery to reach the other side, but an investment in infrastructure is the fuel to jump start the economic engine,” Beth Ann Bovino, U.S. chief economist at S&P Global, says in an email.

S&P predicts Biden’s infrastructure plan will create 2.3 million jobs by 2024, inject $5.7 trillion into the economy — which would be 10 times what was lost during the recession — and raise per-capita income by $2,400.

The big picture: “We have to have a big public works program,” Lawrence Baxter, director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke, tells Axios.

Baxter compares Biden’s proposed new programs to New Deal initiatives like the Blue Ridge Parkway that were created to battle unemployment following the Great Depression.

“They’re not daring to call it that because that would be a lightning rod,” he adds.

Beneath the surface: A historically high number of Americans are struggling despite what appears to be a recovering economy.

According to the Census Bureau’s latest Household Pulse Survey, more than 9 million renters are behind on their rent payments and at risk of being evicted, while around 11% of renters say they have no confidence they’ll be able to pay next month’s rent. (That number jumps to 25% for Americans with a high school diploma or less.)

The Census Bureau also found that 19.2% of U.S. adults are expecting a loss of employment income in the next four weeks, while 10.7% said they don’t have enough to eat.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/books/review/the-aoc-generation-david-freedlander.html

THE AOC GENERATION
How Millennials Are Seizing Power and Rewriting the Rules of American Politics
By David Freedlander

Perhaps the most striking political change that occurred during the stormy reign of Donald J. Trump is one his devotees utterly abhorred: the growth of a sizable left outside and inside the Democratic Party. Young radicals and middle-aged white suburban dwellers both flocked to “the Resistance,” under whose militant rubric one could do anything from marching in a demonstration to starting a Facebook page to canvassing for a favored candidate. During his second run for the White House even more than during his first, Bernie Sanders inspired millions of young people of all races to imagine living in a nation with strong unions and a robust welfare state instead of the “neoliberal” order long favored by leaders of both major parties. And, for many Berniecrats, socialism became the name of their desire instead of a synonym for state tyranny.

The journalist David Freedlander’s slim new book, “The AOC Generation,” is a keenly observant narrative, albeit an entirely sympathetic one, about the young women and men most responsible for the upsurge on the left that infused the Democrats with their abundant energy, cleverness and grievances. At the center of his story is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who may need no introduction but still might blush to read this glowing portrayal by a reporter who lives in her New York City district and appears to have interviewed only people who share his sentiments.

Freedlander calls the congresswoman, who is a wizard of social media, the “avatar of this new generation.” He describes his heroine as an “electric” orator and quotes one of her college friends, who recalls, “Everybody I knew was in love with her.” He interviews a Democrat who, after returning home from a gathering he attended with A.O.C., told his wife, “I think I met the future president of the United States.” On occasion, Freedlander’s terms of acclaim are reminiscent of how film magazines used to gush over Hollywood stars. A.O.C., he beams, “is an atmosphere all to herself, and it has become impossible to look away.” Dazzled by her radiance, he neglects the fact that, as a congresswoman in just her second term, she wields no institutional clout.

Fortunately, Freedlander looks away long enough to offer a vivid report on the growing leftist infrastructure for which A.O.C.’s election in 2018 was merely one step on the anticipated road to a party and, perhaps, a nation transformed. He moves briskly from describing the people who initiated such electoral vehicles as Brand New Congress, Indivisible and Justice Democrats in the wake of Trump’s victory to upstart media outlets like The Intercept and Jacobin and the Young Turks podcast and on to the think tank Data for Progress. He explains how Sanders’s two presidential campaigns turned Democratic Socialists of America from a remnant of aging veterans of the 1960s New Left into a dynamo of close to 100,000 members. Inevitably, growth so rapid has also generated ideological skirmishes between more practical and more utopian comrades.

What binds together most activist members of this generation is a mixture of populist anger and political savoir-faire. On the one hand, they rage at the “big-money donors” and “establishment players” in the Democratic Party, who allegedly have stood in the way of measures to decrease economic inequality and reverse climate change. Yet they also reject the dogmatic, sectarian thinking that often plagued past leftists who, in Daniel Bell’s words, “could only act, and then inadequately, as the moral, but not political” force “in immoral society.”

In working to embed a growing social-democratic faction within one of America’s major parties, these activists have demonstrated a strategic realism that their progenitors in the old Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas never possessed. After Sanders came close to winning the 2016 Democratic nomination, Freedlander writes, “leftists realized that if they wanted power, and if they wanted to enact the policies they purported to believe, they would need to engage in political fights, and more importantly, they would need to start winning them.”

Freedlander’s book is informative as an in-house account, yet it fails to take on the difficult but inescapable question of how the “A.O.C. generation” might actually “seize” power and “rewrite the rules.” Left-wing Democrats have built a solid constituency in deep blue districts and cosmopolitan cities. Most of their prominent figures are college-educated and take the virtues of cultural tolerance and racial justice for granted. Although Ocasio-Cortez was serving up drinks in a Manhattan bar when she decided to run for Congress, she grew up in a prosperous suburb, attended a good private university, writes poetry and spent her junior year in Niger, where she counseled expectant mothers and also learned how to sand surf. How will she and her allies persuade Americans who are wary of their background, their image or their ideas to warm up to their programs?

Michael Harrington, the influential socialist thinker and organizer who died in 1989, famously worked to create “the left wing of the possible.” Under President Biden, insurgent Democrats will have to decide what is and is not possible in a party they have nudged left on issues like union rights and climate change but that still must rise or fall with a coalition that includes both voters who admire Ocasio-Cortez and those who are willing to keep a coal-state centrist like Joe Manchin in the Senate.

Pragmatic leftists do have one advantage over their intraparty rivals: the confidence that the future belongs to them. “Those of us in our 20s or younger, just coming into the electorate now, I don’t think people are ready for us,” Sean McElwee, a founder of Data for Progress, told Freedlander. “We could grow much more conservative over time and we would still be the most liberal generation ever polled.”

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/545186-democrats-gear-up-for-major-push-to-lower-drug-prices

Democrats are planning a major push to lower drug prices as part of a coming infrastructure package, seeing an avenue to move forward on a long-held goal for the party.

House Democratic leaders are intent on including a measure that would allow the secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, sources say.

That bill, first passed by the House in 2019, would provide about $450 billion in savings that in turn could help fund a spending package with a price tag as high as $3 trillion.

The drug pricing measure, H.R. 3, is a Democratic priority in its own right, with the party lamenting for years how Medicare is prohibited from negotiating lower prices.

But the bill is fiercely opposed by Republicans and the powerful pharmaceutical industry, with executives warning it would harm innovation that leads to new drug development. The 50-50 split in the Senate is also raising questions about whether it could get through that chamber without losing any moderate Democrats.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave a vote of confidence to the idea of including the drug pricing measure in the infrastructure package last week.

“If we were able to do that, we could save almost a half a trillion dollars,” Pelosi said. “We would be missing an opportunity if we did not include lowering the cost of prescription drugs.”

Still, questions loom in the Senate. Spokespeople for moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) did not respond when asked if their bosses supported including the measure in an infrastructure package.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who represents a state that is home to many big-name pharmaceutical companies, voted against a measure to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices in the Senate Finance Committee in 2019.

His office was noncommittal when asked about including H.R. 3 in an infrastructure package.

“While we haven’t seen any final language, I can tell you that the senator supports efforts that will create actual savings for consumers and not just for the health care system or government,” said Robert Julien, a Menendez spokesman.

He declined to comment when asked if Menendez views H.R. 3 as a bill that meets that standard.

“We have a fight on our hands to get this passed,” said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), one of the House’s main proponents of drug pricing legislation. “We’ve got a Senate with a razor-thin margin that we hope will pass it.”

Total amount up and amount of new taxes (which will be on the wealthy and corporations) way up. Of course, they will do the kabuki of attempting to get Republicans to sign on, but everyone knows no Republican will ever vote for anything like this.

The Biden Administration has turned out better than I thought they would domestically. Not that they are going to do everything we want (e.g., debt relief and $15 minimum), but Bernie and other progressives certainly are not being shut out. They can also read polls. This stuff is an about face from Dem conventional wisdom under Clinton/Obama.

On foreign policy, they are about what I thought they would be. Not great but a slight improvement over Trump.

NEW: Latest on some big parts of first part of 2-part plan, coming Wednesday:

— Physical infrastructure $ (roads; bridges; etc)
— Clean energy & R&D investment
— Domestic manufacturing push
— $ for childcare & school facilities
— "Home-based" care for disabled & elderly

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 29, 2021

Part 2 of the plan, which Psaki says would be introduced weeks later, expected to have major pieces including:

— Significant child care $
— Paid family and medical leave
— Expansion of health care/ACA
— Extension of larger child benefit in stimulushttps://t.co/eSUt55MX8B

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 29, 2021