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      Rowing Together to Tackle Inequality

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      Beyond the health consequences of the pandemic, evidence shows that the COVID-19 crisis may result in increasing the levels of poverty and inequality for years, if not generations. This outcome is not inevitable. However, insufficient responses to the crisis have deepened inequalities both between and within countries and intensified public discontent, paving the way to “social turmoil and unrest,” says research Bruno Valerio.

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      The costs of the pandemic are being borne disproportionately by poorer categories of society since low-income households are more exposed to health risks and more likely to experience job losses and sharp declines in wellbeing. At the same time, the pandemic has been a boon for the wealthy. In response to the economic collapse in March and April 2020, central banks injected enormous amounts of liquidity into financial markets, keeping asset prices high while economic activity slowed down. Some of the biggest winners were those with high stakes in the technology sector.

      Against this background, Kara Tan Bhala, the founder of the Seven Pillars Institute for Global Finance and Ethics, suggests using the Gini coefficient as a measure of how close a country or the world is to economic upheaval. “The Gini coefficient gauges the income inequality of a region, where 0 corresponds with perfect equality and 1 corresponds with perfect inequality,” she says. “Perhaps nations begin seriously reforming economic policies when their Gini coefficients are above 0.4 (United States) and red lights start flashing trouble when a country scores above 0.5 (South Africa, Brazil).”

      But how do we tackle inequality? According to economist Etienne Perrot, “the adequate responses must … address both property [ownership] rights through anti-trust regulations to counter the abuse of a dominant position, policies through redistributive taxes and education so as not to confuse emulation and competition.” Other policy responses may include “reforms of the transparency and other features of firm governance, broader acceptance of countries’ right to control cross-border capital movements,” as Andrew Cornford points out.

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      To implement these policies, the first condition is that inequalities should be on the political agenda, which is not the case everywhere, as professor Yuriy Temirov illustrates with the case of Ukraine. But policy measures alone are not sufficient to reduce inequalities. They have to be complemented by a cultural, transformative process for learning to “row together” (Fratelli tutti), as Domingo Sugranyes of the Pablo VI Foundation says, to increase our socioeconomic resilience.

      By Virgile Perret and Paul Dembinski

      Note: From Virus to Vitamin invites experts to comment on issues relevant to finance and the economy in relation to society, ethics and the environment. Below, you will find views from a variety of perspectives, practical experiences and academic disciplines. The topic of this discussion is: Inequalities seem to accelerate in every part of the world due to COVID-19 and other issues. Unlike the climate debate, in social issues, we do not have a proper threshold for catastrophe. This leads to a possible overestimation of social resilience and leaves the issue as such largely untackled. Drawing on the particularities of your region or on your area of expertise, what should/can be done?

      “… perfectly predictable socioeconomic inequalities … ”

      “The pandemic only reveals perfectly predictable socioeconomic inequalities. Pope Francis had alerted the international community as soon as the first vaccines appeared. The causes of these glaring social inequalities mix the institutional side through the right of property, the politics increasingly tempted by nationalism, and the spiritual bathed in the materialistic individualism of modernity. The adequate responses must therefore address both property right through anti-trust regulations to counter the abuse of a dominant position, policies through redistributive taxes and education so as not to confuse emulation and competition, distinguishing between the elite and the financial success.”

      Etienne Perrot — Jesuit, economist and editorial board member of the Choisir magazine (Geneva) and adviser to the journal Etudes (Paris)

      “… the Gini coefficient as a measure of how close a country is to economic upheaval… ”

      “In the global climate crisis, anything over 2°C above the average pre-industrial temperature leads to unmitigated disaster. In a similar vein, I suggest we use the Gini coefficient as a measure of how close a country or the world is to economic upheaval. The Gini coefficient gauges the income inequality of a region, where 0 corresponds with perfect equality and 1 corresponds with perfect inequality. Perhaps nations begin seriously reforming economic policies when their Gini coefficients are above 0.4 (United States) and red lights start flashing trouble when a country scores above 0.5 (South Africa, Brazil). Of course, these watershed levels need further research, but it would be enlightening to have an idea of the income inequality thresholds of social disaster.”

      Kara Tan Bhala —president and founder of the Seven Pillars Institute for Global Finance and Ethics

      “… public support will be essential to act to avert a total catastrophe … ”

      “Despite its importance, GDP as an indicator should no longer be the only way we measure economic success. Fairer economy would mean tackling health inequalities and getting to grips with issues that prevent individuals from certain ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds meeting their full potential. We need to embrace means of improving wellbeing and advancing social mobility, build on promoting social inclusion as well as addressing poverty. New plans must be put in place to achieve a more sustainable economy in a more equal and socially just society, and this cannot just be an aspiration — it must be seen as critical to our survival. In recognizing the profound challenges, public support will be essential to act to avert a total catastrophe. The coronavirus is still alive, and risk lies in whether this will be possible.”

      Archana Sinha — head of the Department of Women’s Studies at the Indian Social Institute in New Delhi, India

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      “… rowing together (Fratelli tutti) …”

      “I don’t see a theoretical answer to this extremely vast question. My reaction can only be in terms of (modest) action-oriented commitment: ‘rowing together’ (Fratelli tutti), i.e., trying to identify social projects of high solidarity value, which help people to emerge from poverty on their own capabilities, and look for means — money, goods, time — in order to increase the scope and impact of such communities. We need business and people in business to get much more decidedly involved in these kinds of projects. This is, among many other organizations, what we try to do with The Voluntary Solidarity Fund (VSF International) and VSF Spain. Everybody is welcome to join.”

      Domingo Sugranyes — director of a seminar on ethics and technology at Pablo VI Foundation, former executive vice-chairman of MAPFRE international insurance group

      “… an effective wealth tax and a global minimum corporate tax … ”

      “With the COVID-19 pandemic, the gap between the rich and the poor, in particular the income gap, has increased as Pope Francis, among others, has stated on several occasions. It is undeniable that the trend had already started several decades ago. However, with COVID-19, inequalities have reached record levels that do necessitate strong internal reforms. If no actions will be taken, such as an effective wealth tax and a global minimum corporate tax, the possibility of social turmoil and unrest will be inevitable. In Italy, political parties are literally unable to agree and set the slightest kind of agenda for a proper patrimoniale (wealth tax or asset tax), preferring to keep the country in an extremely dangerous status quo.”

      Valerio Bruno —researcher in politics

      “… fiscal measures, transparency, control of cross-border capital movements … ”

      “Much attention has been given to the wealth as well as the income dimension of the inequalities — the associated rents of the minority at one end, and the much lower and often stagnating incomes of the remainder. The latter comprises not only the working class, but also parts of the middle class. Much commentary has also concerned the opportunities to hide wealth — and thus reduce tax exposure — provided by cross-border financial liberalization and offshore financial centers. Policy responses to the inequalities should include fiscal measures, including improved taxation of the wealth of individuals and firms, reforms of the transparency and other features of firm governance, broader acceptance of countries’ right to control cross-border capital movements, and changes in legal definitions designed to facilitate controls over firms’ domestic and cross-border access to different economic activities and industries and thus to restrict regulatory arbitrage and opaqueness in firms’ operations.”

      Andrew Cornford — counselor at Observatoire de la Finance, former staff member of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), with special responsibility for financial regulation and international trade in financial services

      “… imaginative countermeasures of income … ”

      “The fundamental dynamic of any economy is summed up in the dictum, ‘To those who have shall be given and they shall have more than they can use, and from those who have not shall be taken even what they have.’ COVID also has set it in motion. Where the effects are beneficial — e.g., the reduction in travel by air — it should be encouraged. Further good news is that the deprivation inflicted by COVID on the deprived has been met — at least in places like Geneva — not by the usual blame, scorn and exclusion, but by imaginative countermeasures of income support and new forms of communication like Zoom.”

      Edouard Dommen — specialist in economic ethics, former university professor and researcher at the UNCTAD and president of Geneva’s Ecumenical Workshop in Theology.

      Embed from Getty Images

      “… first we have to think about youth … ”

      “The social deprivation problems are persistent, and this fact routinizes somehow their existence and hinders the definition of a social resilience threshold. Differentiated priorities emerged in South/Eastern Europe after the successive waves of crisis, but first we have to think about youth since no country can sustain without giving hope to its members through a micro/macro strategy that includes: i) an immediate recovery plan with emergency income support for the vulnerable groups; ii) long-lasting work-related policies and investments on youth employment (work-based training, tax reliefs for innovative enterprises); iii) strategies of sharing the risks with interregional cooperation and job retention schemes; and iv) protection and support of childhood integrity (tackling invisible work and poverty with financial benefits for low-income families and proper child/health-care, along with future-centered support, such as home learning environment and early schooling interventions).”

      Christos Tsironis —associate professor of social theory at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

      “… in Ukraine, social inequality will not become a priority soon … ”

      “In Ukraine, social inequality has two primary sources: the legacy of the ‘socialist’ totalitarian past and deformed oligarchic capitalism. At the same time, the initial period of transformation with the exacerbation of the problems of social inequality has dragged on dangerously. From 1991 to 2014, the domination of the interests of oligarchic groups over national interests acted as a brake on reforms. After the Revolution of Dignity, there was a political will to implement unpopular reforms, but they had to be carried out in conditions of the population’s fatigue from reforms, in the realities of Russian aggression. The promotion of reforms by servants of the people is complicated by populism. In Ukraine, social inequality will not become a priority soon. At this stage of transformation, this issue cannot be a priority; the authorities do not have a correct understanding of the hierarchy of priorities, and society’s perceptions of equality/inequality are distorted by collectivism and paternalism.

      Yuriy Temirov —associate professor, dean of the Faculty of History and International Relations at Vasyl Stus Donetsk National University

      *[An earlier version of this article was published by From Virus to Vitamin before the Ukraine War began.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      American CEOs make 351 times more than workers. In 1965 it was 15 to one | Indigo Olivier

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      OpinionInequalityAmerican CEOs make 351 times more than workers. In 1965 it was 15 to oneIndigo OlivierRather than address stagnant wages for hourly workers and yawning inequality, corporations are blaming a ‘labor shortage’ Tue 17 Aug 2021 06.24 EDTLast modified on Tue 17 Aug 2021 06.25 EDTLast week, the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan thinktank, released a report on the increasing pay gap between chief executives and workers. This research tells a familiar story with updated figures. When taking into account stocks, which now make up more than 80% of the average CEO’s compensation package, the report found that chief-executive pay has risen by an astounding 1,322% since 1978. That’s more than six times more than the top 0.1% of wage earners and more than 73 times higher than the growth of the typical worker’s pay, which grew by only 18% in the same time period. Most remarkable, however, is the 18.9% increase in CEO compensation between 2019 and 2020 alone.Bob Woodward’s third book in Trump trilogy to cover handling of pandemicRead moreCEO compensation outpacing that of the 0.1% is a clear indication that this growth is not the product of a competitive race for skills or increased productivity, the EPI report explains, so much as the “power of CEOs to extract concessions. Consequently, if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on the economy’s output or on employment,” the report concludes.This report joins a slew of data sounding an alarm on a massive upward transfer of wealth to the top 1% over the course of the pandemic. One estimate by the Institute for Policy Studies puts this figure as high as $4tn, or a 54% increase in fortunes for the world’s 2,365 billionaires.Today in the US, the CEO-to-worker pay gap stands at a staggering 351 to one, an unacceptable increase from 15 to one in 1965. In other words, the average CEO makes nearly nine times what the average person will earn over a lifetime in just one year.It’s worth remembering that the federal minimum wage would be $24 an hour today had it kept pace with worker productivity, rather than $7.25, where it’s been stuck since 2009. Additionally, inflation has resulted in a nearly 2% pay cut over the past year despite modest gains in hourly wages, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.This reality is unfolding against a narrative of a “labor shortage,” with small businesses, retail giants and fast-food chains expressing difficulty in filling poorly paid positions – even though there are one million more unemployed workers than there are open jobs. Clearly, something else is going on here.The grim reality is that a huge section of the American labor force – between 25% and 40% – made more on unemployment than they ever have working full-time at a minimum wage job. $7.25 an hour is $290 a week before taxes, compared with the $300 in weekly federal benefits that pandemic unemployment assistance provided. Nor does this account for the additional weekly state benefits that those on unemployment received.In our current milieu, “labor shortage” has become doublespeak for a stubborn reluctance on the part of politicians and businesses to address poverty wages, the remedy for which has been to let pandemic unemployment assistance expire so that workers are desperate enough to go back to the exploitative conditions that billion-dollar companies insist are necessary to keep the economy running.Rather than succumb to mainstream accounts that our “labor shortage” is the consequence of welfare-induced idleness, we should have an honest discussion about how we’ve allowed the essential workers who uphold our standard of living to be abused for so long while the mega-wealthy billionaires whom they work for realize their infantile fantasies of starting colonies in space.The EPI is correct. A wealth tax on the 1% would not hinder the economy nor employment, so much as rein in the excesses of the billionaire space race and luxury doomsday bunkers that stand in stark relief to the floods, fires, famine and pestilence that have currently taken hold.Among the report’s policy recommendations for reversing skyrocketing pay for CEOs are raising the marginal tax rate on the ultra rich to “limit rent-seeking behavior” and penalizing companies with unacceptable CEO-to-worker pay ratios with higher corporate taxes. Let’s examine the feasibility of both under Joe Biden’s administration.When Biden came into office, Trump had cut corporate tax rates from 35% to 21% and lowered rates on the ultra-wealthy to such an extent that the richest 400 people in the US paid a lower tax rate than any other group in the country – including the minimum wage workers who are rightly refusing to return to the same conditions they withstood before the pandemic. Investopedia called Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act the “largest overhaul of the tax code in three decades”.Biden, seeking to undo some of this pillaging of the public sphere, has proposed raising corporate taxes to 28% – 7% lower than what they had been when Barack Obama left office – and raising the top rates for individuals back to 39.6% from Trump’s 37% as part of the Democrats’ $3.5tn budget proposal (though there was some suggestion that Biden would concede to a 25% corporate tax rate if it would please congressional Republicans). Biden has also stated that he will not increase taxes on those making less than $400,000 – meaning less than the top 2% of wage earners.In other words, popular slogans taking aim at the top 1% have resulted in an administration of corporate Democrats that will attempt to take aim at the 1%, but make clear to their base that the 1% is as far as they’re willing to go.This is a far cry from the popular policies Bernie Sanders proposed during the presidential primaries, such as giving workers an ownership stake in the companies they’re employed by, democratizing corporate boards through employee elections, passing a wealth tax, banning stock buybacks and more. And it falls short of what is by far the cheapest and easiest solution to stimulating the economy and vastly reducing income inequality while steering clear of Republican interference: full student debt cancellation through executive order.With the stroke of a pen, Biden could provide life-changing financial relief for one in eight people living in the US. Each day he chooses not to is further proof that Biden is keeping to his original promise to rich donors on the campaign trail: “… nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”
      Indigo Olivier is an investigative reporting fellow at In These Times magazine
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      Biden’s 100 days: bold action and broad vision amid grief and turmoil

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      On the 50th day of his presidency, Joe Biden marched into the Oval Office and took a seat behind the Resolute desk, where the massive, 628-page American Rescue Plan awaited his signature. Across the room hung a portrait of Franklin D Roosevelt, a nod to the transformative presidency Biden envisions for a nation tormented by disease, strife and division.The $1.9tn package was designed to tame the worst public health crisis in a century and to pave the way for an overhaul of the American economy. It overcame unanimous Republican opposition in Congress, where Democrats hold the barest majority.“This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation, working people, middle-class folks, people who built the country, a fighting chance,” Biden said. And with the flick of a pen, he signed into law one of the most expensive economic relief bills in American history.Biden took office at a moment of profound grief and turmoil, inheriting from Donald Trump a virus that has killed more than 550,000 and exposed glaring inequalities in healthcare, education and the economy. Fear and anxiety still gripped the nation in the aftermath of the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol, when Trump loyalists stormed the building in a bloody attempt to stop lawmakers certifying Biden’s electoral victory. All of this amid a generational reckoning on race and the ever-accelerating threat of climate change.One hundred days into his term, Biden’s solution to the myriad crises is an ambitious economic agenda that promises to “own the future” by dramatically expanding the role of government in American life.The White House is guided by the belief that if it can lift the nation from the Covid-19 crisis and the economic havoc it wrought, it can begin to restore Americans’ faith in government and pave the way for the next phase of the Biden presidency.“We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital,” Biden said in his first primetime address, hours after signing the American Rescue Plan. “It’s us. All of us.”The pandemic remains an inescapable challenge. But the picture is inarguably brighter than it was when Biden delivered his inaugural address in January to a sea of American flags marking the crowds absent from the Mall. Now, Biden is dangling the prospect of backyard barbecues by the Fourth of July.Marshaling a “full-scale, wartime effort”, his administration has built one of the largest and most effective mass immunization campaigns in the world.At its peak the US was administering more than 3m shots a day. In a nation of nearly 330 million, more than 50% of adults including 80% over 65 are at least partially vaccinated. Last week, Biden surpassed his goal of administering 200m shots by his 100th day. The problem is rapidly becoming too much vaccine and not enough people willing to be vaccinated.“That was arguably one of his main jobs as president – to start getting this pandemic under control,” said Dr Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, “It’s not fully under control yet, but it is clearly in much better shape than it would have been had this incredible vaccination effort not happened.”Jha credits the campaign’s success to several factors, from improving coordination between the federal government and states to tweaking the way doses are extracted from vials. He added that such success is due in part to the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, which dramatically accelerated vaccine development.Deaths from the coronavirus have declined sharply since a peak in January, as many of the most vulnerable Americans are vaccinated. Yet infections are rising again in many parts of the country. The more contagious B117 variant of the coronavirus that was first discovered in the UK has emerged as the dominant strain in the US, and young people are at particular risk. Even so, a number of Republican states have ignored Biden’s pleas to keep mask mandates and other restrictions in place.Reaching the roughly 130 million Americans who have yet to be inoculated remains a challenge, as demand softens and vaccine hesitancy persists. As of 19 April, all adult Americans became eligible to receive a vaccine, marking what Biden called a “new phase” of the immunization effort.Public health experts are working to confront misinformation and conspiracy theories. The decision by federal health officials to temporarily halt the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after rare instances of blood clots among millions who have received the shot further fueled mistrust in some corners.“The biggest challenge that the administration faces over the next 100 days is in building confidence in people who are not sure they want the vaccine,” Jha said. “That is going to take an enormous amount of effort and, in some ways, it’s much harder than simply building vaccination sites because it’s sociological.”As the vaccine campaigns help Americans push past the pandemic, and the economy begins to show signs of recovery after a year of hardship, Biden is turning to the potentially legacy defining pieces of his agenda. He plans to spend trillions more on an infrastructure package.“It is not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” Biden said, introducing the first half of a multi-trillion dollar agenda in a speech outside Pittsburgh. “It is a once-in-a-generation investment in America.”The president’s “Build Back Better” agenda widens the definition of infrastructure to include investments in home care, an expansion of broadband and a restructuring of the tax system in addition to more traditional public works projects like roads, bridges and railways. It also represents the cornerstone of Biden’s fight against climate change, which he has called the “the existential crisis of our time”. Embedded throughout the plan are proposals to reduce carbon emissions by investing in green infrastructure and technologies, electric vehicles and clean energy, as well as a clean electricity standard that aims to ​decarbonize the nation’s power sector by 2035 – and the whole economy by mid-century.At a White House virtual climate summit with world leaders, Biden unveiled an ambitious ​new pledge ​to cut US carbon emissions by at least half by 2030.A forthcoming piece of his infrastructure agenda is expected to center on expanding childcare services and making education more affordable and accessible. It too envisions hundreds of billions of dollars of spending.It is perhaps a surprising approach for a man who has spent nearly four decades in public life building a reputation as a consensus-minded moderate eager to negotiate with his “friends across the aisle”. In the Democratic primary, he was cast as the establishment alternative in a field of rising stars and progressive challengers.But since emerging as the party’s standard bearer, Biden has steadily embraced a more expansive vision, arguing that the social and economic moment demands bold action.During his first press conference last month, Biden said repeatedly he wanted to “change the paradigm” – a stark shift in tone from the early days of his presidential campaign, when he promised donors that under his leadership “nothing would fundamentally change”.Congressman Jim Clyburn, the Democratic majority whip and a close ally and friend of the president, said Biden’s tenure has so far “exceeded my expectations – not my hopes are my dreams – but my expectations.”Clyburn, who is widely credited with saving Biden’s campaign by endorsing him weeks before the South Carolina primary, said he was pleasantly surprised by Biden’s infrastructure proposal, which he “didn’t expect to be as bold as it is”.“A lot of people, I among them, felt that because of this 50-50 split in the Senate, he would go less bold,” Clyburn said. “But I think that he has calculated, the way that I would, that in the legislative process, you never get all that you ask for … so it’s much better to get some of a big bill, then some of a little bill.”Republicans are balking at the scale and cost of Biden’s plans, as well as his proposal to pay for it by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to fight Democrats “every step of the way” on Biden’s infrastructure plan, which he has panned as a “Trojan Horse” for liberal priorities.“It won’t build back better,” he said last week. “It’ll build back never.”Democratic leaders have yet to choose a legislative path forward for Biden’s infrastructure plan, but, thanks to a recent ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, they now have multiple avenues to circumvent Republican opposition.Biden’s infrastructure plan has not sat well with moderate Republicans, who say they were expecting a governing partner in the White House.“A Senate evenly split between both parties and a bare Democratic House majority are hardly a mandate to ‘go it alone’,” Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah who is part of a working group that hopes to find a bipartisan solution on infrastructure, wrote recently on Twitter.The group unveiled a counterproposal hat is a fraction of the size of Biden’s public works plan, touting it as a “very generous offer”. The White House welcomed the effort but the vast spending gap suggested the differences between the parties may be too wide to overcome.The president is keenly aware of the difficult math in the Senate, having spent more than 30 years in the chamber. Even if bipartisan discussions collapse and Democrats go it alone, Biden will still face challenges keeping his ungainly coalition together.But in choosing bold action over incrementalism, Biden is gambling that voters will forgive the price tag if Democrats can deliver tangible results like universal broadband and affordable childcare while seeking to put Republicans on the defensive over their opposition to a plan that polling suggests is broadly popular.A recent New York Times survey found that two in three Americans, including seven in 10 independents, approve of Biden’s infrastructure spending.Progressives are pressing the 78-year-old president to act urgently, knowing Democrats’ precarious hold on Congress is only guaranteed through January 2022. Declaring the “era of small government” over, they argue that there is a political risk to being too cautious. Pursuing an expansive economic agenda, they say, is not only good policy but good politics.Biden, for the most part, appears to agree. He has argued that spending too little confronting the nation’s crises is riskier than spending too much. He told Republicans at a meeting last week that he was open to compromise, but vowed that “inaction is not an option”.In a recent speech, Biden said it was time to retire the theory of “trickle down” economics, saying now was the time for building an economy that “grows from the bottom up and the middle out”.“This is the first time we’ve been able, since the Johnson administration and maybe even before that, to begin to change the paradigm,” the president said.Shortly after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd last week, Biden placed an emotional call. Huddled in the courthouse, Floyd’s family put the president on speakerphone.“At least, God, now there is some justice,” Biden told them. “We’re all so relieved.”Their attorney, Ben Crump, urged the president to pressure Congress to pass policing reform and to use this moment to confront America’s violent legacy of racism.“You got it, pal,” Biden said. “This gives us a shot to deal with genuine, systemic racism.”The murder of Floyd, who was Black, at the hands of a white police officer touched off global protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Biden said then that the long overdue racial reckoning created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to directly historic racial injustices.As president, Biden has placed emphasis on racial equity, drawing support from civil rights activists and criticism from conservatives.He assembled a cabinet that is the most diverse in history, including the first female, first African American and first Asian American vice-president, as well as the first Native American and first openly gay cabinet secretaries, the first female treasury secretary, the first African American defense secretary and the first immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.Confronting systemic racism is the “responsibility of the whole of our government”, the White House declared, laying out steps the new administration would take to address inequality in housing, education, criminal justice, healthcare and the economy.He has emphasized equity in vaccine distribution and targeted underserved communities with his $1.9tn relief plan. His infrastructure plan dedicates funding to neighborhoods harmed by pollution and environmental hazards as well as to homecare aids, predominantly women of color. He endorsed statehood for the District of Columbia, a heavily Black city that does not have voting representation in Congress. He warned that some states were “backsliding into the days of Jim Crow” by imposing new voting restrictions.Yet a major voting rights bill remains stalled along with a long-promised policing overhaul. Biden’s sweeping immigration reform has yet to gain traction as Republicans hammer the administration over an influx of migrant children at the Mexico border. Spasms of gun violence have renewed calls for gun control.Biden’s first in-person meeting with a foreign leader began with the Japanese prime pinister, Yoshihide Suga, extending his condolences for a mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis, which left eight people dead. Suga also condemned a rising tide of violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since the start of coronavirus lockdowns.The summit underscored Biden’s belief that the nation’s crises are not only an inflection point for America – but for the world. Biden has framed his domestic revitalization effort as part of a global conflict between authoritarianism and democracy.“That’s what competition between America and China and the rest of the world is all about,” Biden said in his infrastructure speech. “It’s a basic question: Can democracies still deliver for their people?”Jonathan Alter, author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, said Biden, like the 32nd president, has a rare opportunity to transform the political landscape for generations.“Roosevelt and his New Deal represented a new social contract between the government and the people in terms of what the government owed Americans,” he said. That lasted for nearly five decades, he said, until Ronald Reagan gave rise to a new era of small-government and free-market competition.Whether Biden can forge a new social contract to meet the most urgent challenges of the 21st century – yawning inequality, a warming climate and rising authoritarianism – is a question unlikely to be answered by his 100th day in office, Alter cautioned. But he expects the next 100 to be revealing.“It’s hard to imagine but Biden has already spent several times as much in 1933-dollars as Roosevelt did in his first 100 days,” Alter said. “And the odds that a Rooseveltian achievement in American political life will take place this year are highly likely.” More

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      ‘It’s a scandal, quite frankly’: US Equal Rights Amendment still faces uphill battle

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      With renewed attention on anti-discrimination policies following the #MeToo movement and a record number of women serving in Congress, a nearly century-long effort to explicitly enshrine gender equality in the United States constitution may finally be coming to a head.If the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) were incorporated into America’s founding document, it would represent a huge victory for women and people across the gender spectrum, whose fundamental rights are too often tied to partisan disagreements.But amid legal controversies, disingenuous talking points and a chronic lack of urgency, the landmark amendment still faces an uphill battle.“It’s outrageous – a scandal, quite frankly – that women still have to be in the begging position for their rights,” said Carol Jenkins, president and chief executive of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality.First drafted in 1923 and revised over the years, the proposed article is a constitutional guarantee that the “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”. It would also give Congress the power to enforce gender equality through legislation, and would take effect two years after ratification.Proponents argue the ERA would send a powerful signal and be used as a tool to effectively challenge restrictions and loopholes currently undermining people’s hard-won protections.As chronicled in last year’s hit television series Mrs America, the fight for the ERA ramped up in the 1970s, bolstered by a strong feminist movement. But it quickly garnered enemies in the form of conservatives with traditional values, who would eventually ensure its demise.It’s outrageous – a scandal, quite frankly – that women still have to be in the begging position for their rightsWhen Congress passed the ERA in 1972, lawmakers imposed a seven-year deadline for ratification by at least 38 states. That time limit eventually got extended to 1982, but in the meantime, anti-feminist attacks haunted messaging around the amendment, stifling progress.By the early 1980s, proponents were only able to drum up support from 35 states – three short of the required threshold – even as Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota tried to invalidate their previous decisions to ratify.“We will not again seriously pursue the ERA until we’ve made a major dent in changing the composition of Congress as well as the state legislatures,” said Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women.The ERA languished for decades, nominally re-introduced in Congress year after year but largely sidelined and ignored. Then, during Donald Trump’s incendiary tenure that brought the plight of American women into stark relief, three holdout states, Nevada, Illinois and Virginia, ratified back to back.Suddenly, nearly 100 years of advocacy had reached its apex: the endorsement of 38 states. But the former president’s justice department claimed the new ratifications didn’t pass muster, setting up a showdown over whether Congress’ arbitrary deadline rendered them moot.Last month, a federal judge weighed in, dismissing arguments made by several state attorneys general who were trying to get the ERA certified as the 28th amendment. The deadline “expired long ago”, the judge wrote, and recent ratifications “came too late to count”.Similarly, debate persists over whether the five states that tried to rescind, withdraw or sunset their approvals can actually do so, although precedent around past amendments suggests they probably can’t. In March, North Dakota lawmakers nevertheless voted to rescind their support as well.Despite so many roadblocks, the ERA’s proponents are still looking for ways to finish the work their predecessors started soon after successfully advocating for the right to vote.“Really, at this point, I think we’re just trying to get it done. We’re just trying to get this on the books,” said Robin Bleiweis, a research associate with the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress.Last year, and again several weeks ago, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted largely along partisan lines to remove the ERA’s congressional deadline, shirking the justice department’s guidance under Trump.The amendment now faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, where only two Republicans – Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins – have jumped onboard. While anti-abortion lawmakers lean hard on the lightning rod as their reason to oppose the ERA, advocates are trying to convince a larger cohort of right-leaning senators such as Shelley Moore Capito and Mitt Romney to cross party lines.“We’ve lived this way, unequally, for as long as we’ve been in existence, and to some extent we can’t quite grasp that we actually can change this,” Jenkins said. “But it requires now, at this moment, 60 votes in the Senate.”If all other options flounder, Congress can always propose the amendment anew, restarting the ratification process.“We’re never gonna give up – never, ever, ever,” the New York representative Carolyn Maloney, an outspoken champion of the amendment, told the Guardian. “Failure’s impossible.”Without the ERA, Americans are left at the whims of three mercurial government branches, which can bolster rights but also take them away.Attorneys have been able to secure major triumphs for women by arguing that the 14th amendment, which mandates “the equal protection of the laws”, applies to gender equality. But not everyone on the bench agrees.“Certainly the constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t,” the late supreme court justice Antonin Scalia said.If the ERA were to succeed, individuals would finally be armed with irrefutable proof of their right to gender equality under the constitution. That, in turn, could help them defend themselves from discrimination and prevent their lives and livelihoods from becoming political footballs.“I don’t think that our rights should be dependent on who has the majority in Congress, or who’s the speaker, or who’s the majority leader in the Senate, or who’s the president, or who’s on the supreme court,” Maloney said.“If you are bedrock protected in the constitution, then they can’t roll back your rights. They have to work off that document.”The ERA enjoys overwhelming support, with backing from anywhere between 78% and 94% of Americans, according to two surveys.Life under Trump made clear to many citizens that misogyny still underpins American society and government. The single-term commander-in-chief was elected to the nation’s highest office in 2016 despite his comments about grabbing women by the genitals, on tape. He has faced few repercussions for more than 20 sexual misconduct allegations lodged against him.Just after Trump’s inauguration, millions took to the streets for the Women’s March, the largest single-day protest in US history. Soon, pink “pussyhats” – a reference to his degrading and predatory comments about women – became a symbol of resistance.But as critics decried Trump’s alleged misconduct and vitriol, he spent four years elevating policies and people on the wrong side of women’s rights – perhaps most famously Brett Kavanaugh, another alleged perpetrator.After televised, high-profile hearings watched by millions, where Christine Blasey Ford carefully recounted how Kavanaugh violated her, he nevertheless slid onto the Supreme Court for a lifetime appointment. Two years later, so did Amy Coney Barrett, a judge who’s notoriously ambivalent on reproductive rights.Their confirmations – alongside the appointments of more than 200 federal judges, many of them ideological and rightwing – underscored the serious risks that exist in a world without the ERA.“A lot of what has been gained is judge-made law, and you can rest on your laurels and think it’s all secure. But in fact, there’s a long history of the courts eroding and diminishing rights previously recognized by the courts,” said John Kowal, vice-president of programs at the Brennan Center for Justice.Meanwhile, the safeguards that currently exist have failed to shield American women from an endless cycle of hardship and victimization. In a country that has never elected a female president, where women still make 82 cents to a man’s dollar, a whopping 42% of working women say they have suffered gender discrimination while on the job.Almost one in five women experience completed or attempted rape, while nearly one in four are subjected to severe physical violence by an intimate partner.Even though the supreme court established the right to an abortion back in the 1970s, state legislatures are still waging a war against comprehensive reproductive care, introducing more than 500 abortion restrictions this year alone.And, faced with the US’s segregated labor market amid a recession connected to the coronavirus pandemic, women have shed a net 5.4m jobs – a million more than their male counterparts.“Gender inequality is rarely talked about like a crisis,” Bleiweis said.“Long-term, disparate treatment that, you know, pushes people into poverty, into violence – that is absolutely a crisis, and should be treated as such.” More

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      The rich-poor gap in America is obscene. So let's fix it – here's how | Bernie Sanders

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      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.A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in itWe 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. More

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      ‘I knew they were hungry’: the stimulus feature that lifts millions of US kids out of poverty

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      A few months into the pandemic the tooth fairy didn’t show up. Mary Beth Cochran was caring for her six-year-old grandson, Howie, in the small town of Canton, North Carolina, and having lost her Kmart job and with it more than half her income, she couldn’t afford food let alone a dollar under the pillow.Howie woke that morning and shouted out to his grandmother: “Memaw, my tooth’s still here, what happened?” He frantically scoured the bedding for a note or coins, then slumped to the floor and cried.Cochran was tempted to say to the boy: “Tooth fairy couldn’t come because she’s run out of money.” But she didn’t. “You know, sometimes tooth fairy can’t get to all the children,” she said.Cochran, 52, is no stranger to the hardships that living in poverty in the United States can bring. She has had to put her marriage on hold because she can’t afford it – living together with her husband would cost them hundreds of dollars in lost benefits.But the Covid-19 crisis has pushed her to new extremes that have tested her ability to provide for Howie and his sister Annie, 11. Cochran has cared for the children over the past five years after her eldest daughter, their mother, fell into drug addiction and homelessness. Howie and Annie’s two other siblings are looked after by another of Cochran’s daughters who lives nearby.With $814 a month in disability pay and $236 in child support, from which she must subtract $600 in rent, Cochran has $450 a month and food stamps to feed and clothe the two children in her care.As weeks of the pandemic passed by and resources tightened, necessities started to peel away. Clothes and shoes that Cochran used to buy for the kids from thrift stores and bargain basements now became strictly second-hand.When even cast-off shoes for the rapidly growing Howie became beyond her reach, Cochran skipped buying the medicines she takes for her own chronic back problem and bipolar disorder.The toughest part has been the knowledge that there have been nights when the children have gone to bed hungry. “It breaks my heart,” she said. “I know it’s not my fault, but I wish things could be different. I wish I could give them everything they need.”Now Cochran has a chance to give her young charges everything they need. Joe Biden’s $1.9tn pandemic relief package, the American Rescue Plan, signed into law by the president earlier this month, contains a relatively unheeded feature that could radically improve the lives of Annie and Howie and millions of other American children like them trapped in poverty.The provision, known as the child tax credit, is so much more than the cold, bureaucratic transaction suggested by its title. It will transform the way that welfare is addressed in the US, bringing it into line with European and other wealthier countries by discarding the old shibboleth of deserving and undeserving poor that has dogged America’s approach for a quarter of a century.Most significantly, it will have the potential to cut child poverty in the country in half by lifting more than 5 million American kids out of its iron grip.“Millions of children will benefit,” said Kathryn Edin, professor of sociology at Princeton. “It’s amazing. It’s dignifying, it doesn’t stigmatize, it no longer segregates poor children but tells them they are important and allows them to live as part of society.”It no longer segregates poor children but tells them they are important and allows them to live as part of societyUnder the new provision, families will receive $3,600 a year for each child under six, and $3,000 a year for each older child. The money will be paid monthly, rather than the current annual lump sum, easing the burden throughout the year, and it will no longer be tied to any work requirements.Its impact will spread far and wide. A family like Cochran’s will benefit with $500 a month, no strings attached, doubling her available cash for her grandkids.Almost 70 million children will be included in the scheme – that’s more than 90% of all American kids. And the impact, social scientists believe, will be transformative.The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University has calculated that about 5.5 million children will be lifted out of poverty – more than half those currently plagued by it. The injection of cash support will have a stunning effect especially in communities of color.One in five Black children are currently locked into poverty in America; they are projected to see a 55% drop in poverty rates. Hispanic children too are expected to see a boost, with 53% lifted out of poverty.“This would be the biggest poverty reduction legislation since the introduction of social security in the 1960s,” said Zachary Parolin, one of the Columbia authors. “We could look back on this moment, and this legislation, as an historic turning point in the development of the US welfare state.”So what does all this mean to the actual kids – to the Howies and Annies of America?Edin has a strong take on that question, having helped focus public attention on the crisis of child poverty in America with her 2015 book, $2 a Day. It delivered the gut-wrenching news that there were 1.5 million families in the US – including 3 million children – eking out a virtually cashless existence on no more than $2 a person a day.Edin began studying poverty in the early 1990s, and had a front-row seat on the 1996 welfare reforms that dramatically changed the way the US interacted with its poor. The move scrapped cash aid for low-income families with children and replaced it with a work requirement that meant that those without a job were disconnected from state help.The sociologist watched aghast as more and more families – especially those which were African American, Hispanic or headed by a single mother – were forced into direst need by a diabolical catch-22. Many of them were too poor to work, and because they weren’t in work they were deemed undeserving of benefits.“In $2 a Day we told the story of the woman who couldn’t work because she couldn’t put gas in her car. Once you end up in that kind of spiral it’s very hard to get out of, and it puts your kids at risk.”As a result of what Edin calls the “toxic alchemy” of the 1996 welfare reforms, by the mid-2000s one in five single mothers were neither working nor receiving any welfare benefits. They were dependent on food stamps and living essentially cashless in the richest nation on Earth.The terrible hardship that Edin watched unfolding is prevalent today. A separate 2019 Columbia University study found that more than one in three children in the US are penalized because their families earn too little to be fully eligible for benefits.That includes 23 million children who are too poor to receive state aid.This hard-edged approach has separated the US from many other high-income nations such as Canada, the UK and Australia, which offer large swaths of their populations a guaranteed income to rear their children. The work-related path taken by the US essentially abandoned its most vulnerable children to the vagaries of food insecurity, eviction and all the mental and physical health problems that flow from being poor.You can see what those harsh winds can do through the experiences of the Cochrans during the pandemic. Every month when Mary Beth received her disability money, Annie, a nervous child racked by anxiety instilled by her unstable early childhood, would approach her.“Memaw, are you OK?” she would say. “Do we have enough food to last this month?”The honest answer was, no. By the third week in the month the cash was gone, the food stamps dried up. Cochran stopped buying fresh salad – Annie’s favorite – because it was too expensive, turning to less healthy packaged foods such as hotdogs and burgers.Even then, there was not enough to feed the children. By the end of the month there was no way out of it. Cochran, who doesn’t own a car, would have to beg a lift to the soup kitchen.“It hurts so much,” she said. “I feel like I’m letting them down. I knew they were hungry, and there was nothing I could do to change it.”The devastating shift in 1996 away from cash aid to work-related tax credits was founded upon the view that poverty is a moral deficiency, a form of victim blaming that stems back generations in America. It was signed into law by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and received strong backing from Biden, then a US senator from Delaware.Biden tried to justify the reform’s tough work requirements by arguing at the time that “too many welfare recipients spend far too long on welfare and do far too little in exchange for their benefits”.Today, Biden finds himself at the forefront of a movement that is beginning to undo some of the damage wrought by that legislation he supported 25 years ago. But his about-turn hasn’t come without a shove.Until relatively recently, Biden remained agnostic about the idea of addressing child poverty amid the destruction of the pandemic. It took the energetic intervention of a Democratic congresswoman to force the child allowance on to his coronavirus relief package.That congresswoman was Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who has been striving to get subsidies for children on to the statute books for almost two decades. In 2003 she introduced her first “advancement of the child” bill, re-entering it every two years only to see it die repeatedly for lack of political support.These were the lonely years in the wilderness when child poverty was considered insignificant. “It wasn’t a question of opposition, it was a question of indifference,” she told the Guardian. “So for a while, yes, I was a lone voice.”But she kept her eyes doggedly on the prize, driven by her deep understanding of children in need based on her own personal experiences. When she was nine, her family in New Haven fell on hard times and were evicted from their home.She went to live, like Annie and Howie, with her grandmother. “My family struggled financially for most of my parents’ lives. My own background inspires me to keep pushing,” she said.Now all those years of effort have paid dividends. “For the US this is historic,” she said of the new child allowance. “It’s akin to what Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal through social security which lifted 90% of seniors out of poverty – President Biden is lifting millions of children out of poverty.”So what changed? What led the US to pull back from 25 years of a policy that, at best, could be described as tough love, at worst looks like cruelty towards its most defenseless children?DeLauro ascribes the shifting mood to the pandemic, which she says has “shone a bright light on the health and economic inequities and the racial disparities in our system”.Edin agrees that if it hadn’t been for the pandemic we might not be here. Such glaring hardship for so many Americans has made it impossible to continue to victim-blame the “undeserving” poor.“The undeserving-deserving divide breaks down when people who do deserving things don’t get what society has promised them. The labor market is so fragile, and so many people feel on the edge, you really don’t have two groups any more.”The other great driving force behind the new provisions has been race. The eruption of racial justice protests last summer following the death in police custody of George Floyd has led to a renewed focus on police brutality and the treatment of Black communities within the criminal justice system.But it has also put new vigor in movements to challenge the growing inequality between racial groups in the US and push back against the white supremacist narrative unleashed by Donald Trump. One of the beneficiaries of this new energy has been the cause of child poverty.The Rev Dr Starsky Wilson is himself an example of the links between the struggle for racial justice and the battle to lift children out of poverty. He was co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, an independent review of the impediments to racial equality convened in the wake of the 2014 police killing in Ferguson, Missouri, of the unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown.Today Wilson is president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a leading US advocacy group whose mission is to make sure every child in America has what they need to thrive. He views the new child allowances as a corrective to generations of public policy skewed against communities of color, which resulted in the vast 90% wealth gap between African American families and their white counterparts.“The movement for racial justice, starting in Ferguson and culminating in the largest racial justice mobilization in history in 2020, has absolutely changed our ability to talk about public responsibility to respond to racial inequality,” he said.It’s going to mean food on the table in July when they are out of school and there is no summer feeding programsWilson evoked a young child living in Lower St Louis where he used to pastor, and pondered what the new $300-a-month allowance for their family would mean for them. “It’s going to mean food on the table in July when they are out of school and there is no summer feeding programs. It is going to mean the child feeling settled and safe, each and every day.”The challenge now for Wilson and all the others who have campaigned for so long for a better deal for America’s children is to make this victory last. Under the pandemic relief package, the new allowances will be in place for one year only, but the hope is that they will prove so popular that Congress will be obliged to make them permanent.Mary Beth Cochran would certainly welcome that. Once she starts receiving the $500-a-month checks this summer she plans to pay off her bills and then maybe buy a used car. She won’t have to skip her meds any more or go to the soup kitchen, and when the pandemic lifts she plans to drive to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee so Annie and Howie can play in the rivers.And the tooth fairy will be back. More