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May 21, 2020 09:32:53   #
Airforceone
 
As Trump opens the country unemployment rises by 2.4 million. At what point do the Trump supporters say to themselves I am backing the wrong guy.

Trump was very excited about getting a $500 billion slush fund to bail out the corporate elite and some of those corporations haven’t paid any corporate taxes in years and have received government subsidy checks. But Trump and the republicans are against extending unemployment to the 39 million unemployed. This is how the Republican Party operates take care of the corporate elite and screw the middle class.

Trump finally got all his cronies out of jail. I wonder if it was Proud Republican thrown in jail for lying would they let her out of jail.

Reply
May 21, 2020 09:39:28   #
Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall
 
Airforceone wrote:
As Trump opens the country unemployment rises by 2.4 million. At what point do the Trump supporters say to themselves I am backing the wrong guy.

Trump was very excited about getting a $500 billion slush fund to bail out the corporate elite and some of those corporations haven’t paid any corporate taxes in years and have received government subsidy checks. But Trump and the republicans are against extending unemployment to the 39 million unemployed. This is how the Republican Party operates take care of the corporate elite and screw the middle class.

Trump finally got all his cronies out of jail. I wonder if it was Proud Republican thrown in jail for lying would they let her out of jail.
As Trump opens the country unemployment rises by 2... (show quote)


Don't be absurd...

If Proud Republican were in prison it would be because of due process, and those of us on the right would support the sentence...

Sure she took out a few lefty trolls with here bare hands, but laws are laws😂😂😂

I'd visit her The

(and act as a character witness..Depending on the troll)

Reply
May 21, 2020 13:32:48   #
Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio
 
Wolff in CounterPunch: "Mass Unemployment Is a Failure of Capitalism"
Richard Wolff
posted by RICHARD WOLFF | 9154pt
May 14, 2020
Professor Richard Wolff contributes an op-ed to Counterpunch explaining that historical unemployment numbers during the COVID19 pandemic are a result of capitalism: "It’s nothing personal; it’s just business."

This article originally appeared on counterpunch.org

The difficulties caused to workers by record unemployment during the pandemic are a product of capitalism. Most of the time, employers decide to hire or fire workers depending on which choice maximizes employers’ profits. Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is “the bottom line” of capitalism and thus of capitalists. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their profits are high and punished when they are not. It’s nothing personal; it’s just business.

Unemployment is a choice mostly made by employers. In many cases of unemployment, employers had the option not to fire employees. They could have kept all employed but reduced their hours or days or else rotated off-work times among employees. Employers can choose to retain idled employees on payrolls and suffer losses they hope will be temporary.

However, unemployment is received almost everywhere and by almost all as a negative, unwanted experience. Workers want jobs. Employers want employees producing profitable output. Governments want the tax revenues that flow from employees and employers actively collaborating.

So why has the capitalist system periodically produced economic downturns wherever it has settled across the last three centuries? They have happened, on average, every four to seven years. The United States has had three crashes so far this century: “dot-com” in 2000; “sub-prime mortgage” in 2008; and now “coronavirus” in 2020. Thus the United States conforms to capitalism’s “norm.” Capitalists do not want unemployment, but they regularly generate it. It is a basic contradiction of their system.

There are good reasons why capitalism produces and reproduces unemployment over time. It draws benefits (as well as suffers losses) from doing so. Reproducing a “reserve army of the unemployed” enables periodic upsurges in capital investment to draw more employees without driving up wages. Rising wages—and thus falling profits—would accompany investment surges if all workers were already fully employed before such surges. Unemployment also disciplines the working class. The unemployed, often desperate to get jobs, give employers the opportunity to replace existing employees with unemployed candidates willing to work for less. Unemployment thus operates as a downward pressure on wages and salaries and thereby a boost for profits. In short, capitalism both wants and does not want unemployment; it expresses this tension by periodically adding to and drawing down a reserve army of the unemployed that it continually maintains.

That reserve army exposes a stark reality that no ideological gloss ever fully erases. While unemployment serves capitalism, it does not well serve society. That key difference is most glaringly in evidence when unemployment is very high, as it is today. Consider that today’s many unemployed millions continue much of their consumption while ceasing much of their production. While they continue to take their means of consumption from socially produced wealth, they no longer produce nor thereby add to social wealth as they did when employed.

Unemployment thus entails wealth redistribution. Part of the wealth produced by those who are still employed must be redistributed away from them and to the unemployed. Taxes accomplish that redistribution publicly. Employees and employers, labor and capital struggle over whose taxes will fund the consumption of the unemployed. Such redistribution struggles can be and often are bitter and socially divisive. In the private sphere of households, portions of the incomes and wealth of the employed likewise get redistributed to enable consumption by the unemployed: spouses share, as do parents and children, relatives, friends, and neighbors. Working classes always redistribute their incomes and wealth to cope with the unemployment capitalism so regularly imposes on them. Such redistributions typically cause or aggravate many tensions and conflicts within the working class.

Many public and private redistribution struggles could be avoided if, for example, public re-employment replaced private unemployment. If the state became the employer of last resort, those fired by private employers could immediately be rehired by the state to do socially useful work. Governments would stop paying unemployment benefits and instead pay wages to the re-employed, obtain in return real goods and services, and distribute them to the public. The 1930s New Deal did exactly that for millions fired by private employers. A similar alternative to private capitalist employment and unemployment (but not part of the New Deal) would be to organize the unemployed into worker co-op enterprises performing socially useful work on contract with the government.

This last alternative is the best because it could develop a new worker-co-op sector of the U.S. economy. That would provide the U.S. public with direct experience in comparing the capitalist with the worker-co-op sector in terms of working conditions, product quality and price, civic responsibility, etc. On that concrete, empirical basis, societies could offer people a real, democratic choice as to what mix of capitalist and worker-co-op sectors of the economy they prefer.

Reply
 
 
May 21, 2020 15:00:28   #
dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA
 
Milosia2 wrote:
Wolff in CounterPunch: "Mass Unemployment Is a Failure of Capitalism"
Richard Wolff
posted by RICHARD WOLFF | 9154pt
May 14, 2020
Professor Richard Wolff contributes an op-ed to Counterpunch explaining that historical unemployment numbers during the COVID19 pandemic are a result of capitalism: "It’s nothing personal; it’s just business."

This article originally appeared on counterpunch.org

The difficulties caused to workers by record unemployment during the pandemic are a product of capitalism. Most of the time, employers decide to hire or fire workers depending on which choice maximizes employers’ profits. Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is “the bottom line” of capitalism and thus of capitalists. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their profits are high and punished when they are not. It’s nothing personal; it’s just business.

Unemployment is a choice mostly made by employers. In many cases of unemployment, employers had the option not to fire employees. They could have kept all employed but reduced their hours or days or else rotated off-work times among employees. Employers can choose to retain idled employees on payrolls and suffer losses they hope will be temporary.

However, unemployment is received almost everywhere and by almost all as a negative, unwanted experience. Workers want jobs. Employers want employees producing profitable output. Governments want the tax revenues that flow from employees and employers actively collaborating.

So why has the capitalist system periodically produced economic downturns wherever it has settled across the last three centuries? They have happened, on average, every four to seven years. The United States has had three crashes so far this century: “dot-com” in 2000; “sub-prime mortgage” in 2008; and now “coronavirus” in 2020. Thus the United States conforms to capitalism’s “norm.” Capitalists do not want unemployment, but they regularly generate it. It is a basic contradiction of their system.

There are good reasons why capitalism produces and reproduces unemployment over time. It draws benefits (as well as suffers losses) from doing so. Reproducing a “reserve army of the unemployed” enables periodic upsurges in capital investment to draw more employees without driving up wages. Rising wages—and thus falling profits—would accompany investment surges if all workers were already fully employed before such surges. Unemployment also disciplines the working class. The unemployed, often desperate to get jobs, give employers the opportunity to replace existing employees with unemployed candidates willing to work for less. Unemployment thus operates as a downward pressure on wages and salaries and thereby a boost for profits. In short, capitalism both wants and does not want unemployment; it expresses this tension by periodically adding to and drawing down a reserve army of the unemployed that it continually maintains.

That reserve army exposes a stark reality that no ideological gloss ever fully erases. While unemployment serves capitalism, it does not well serve society. That key difference is most glaringly in evidence when unemployment is very high, as it is today. Consider that today’s many unemployed millions continue much of their consumption while ceasing much of their production. While they continue to take their means of consumption from socially produced wealth, they no longer produce nor thereby add to social wealth as they did when employed.

Unemployment thus entails wealth redistribution. Part of the wealth produced by those who are still employed must be redistributed away from them and to the unemployed. Taxes accomplish that redistribution publicly. Employees and employers, labor and capital struggle over whose taxes will fund the consumption of the unemployed. Such redistribution struggles can be and often are bitter and socially divisive. In the private sphere of households, portions of the incomes and wealth of the employed likewise get redistributed to enable consumption by the unemployed: spouses share, as do parents and children, relatives, friends, and neighbors. Working classes always redistribute their incomes and wealth to cope with the unemployment capitalism so regularly imposes on them. Such redistributions typically cause or aggravate many tensions and conflicts within the working class.

Many public and private redistribution struggles could be avoided if, for example, public re-employment replaced private unemployment. If the state became the employer of last resort, those fired by private employers could immediately be rehired by the state to do socially useful work. Governments would stop paying unemployment benefits and instead pay wages to the re-employed, obtain in return real goods and services, and distribute them to the public. The 1930s New Deal did exactly that for millions fired by private employers. A similar alternative to private capitalist employment and unemployment (but not part of the New Deal) would be to organize the unemployed into worker co-op enterprises performing socially useful work on contract with the government.

This last alternative is the best because it could develop a new worker-co-op sector of the U.S. economy. That would provide the U.S. public with direct experience in comparing the capitalist with the worker-co-op sector in terms of working conditions, product quality and price, civic responsibility, etc. On that concrete, empirical basis, societies could offer people a real, democratic choice as to what mix of capitalist and worker-co-op sectors of the economy they prefer.
Wolff in CounterPunch: "Mass Unemployment Is ... (show quote)


Richard Wolff is a communist. He has been promoting his special brand of socialism to the unthinking masses with the help of PBS for all the leftists to see and embrace. It is not the fault of capitalism. It is the fault of the progressive, over-regulatory, big-government bureaucratic policies that have pushed our free-market toward socialism these past 50 plus years. Actually going back to FDR and Woodrow Wilson where it started incrementally and gained full speed with Johnson's Great Society. Now we have an entire generation of useful idiots indoctrinated by the leftist media and universities. Wolff doesn't offer up any reasonable alternative or solution to the problems and what he advocates for would do more to destroy through unintended consequences. But he talks a good game, I'll give him that.

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May 21, 2020 21:40:02   #
Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio
 
It sounds like you have a better idea for yourself.
What is it?

Reply
May 21, 2020 21:47:21   #
Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio
 
dtucker300 wrote:
Richard Wolff is a communist. He has been promoting his special brand of socialism to the unthinking masses with the help of PBS for all the leftists to sat.

*
*It is not the fault of capitalism. It is the fault of the progressive, over-regulatory,-government bureaucratic policies that have pushed our free-market toward socialism these past 50 plus years.*

If this were true wouldn’t the progressives have all the money?
Your free market was gone a long time ago. The capitalists you refer to killed the free market in favor of profit or greed. They don’t want a free market.
They want short term gains period.
More like Profit at any cost!

Reply
May 21, 2020 23:18:29   #
dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA
 
Milosia2 wrote:
*
*It is not the fault of capitalism. It is the fault of the progressive, over-regulatory,-government bureaucratic policies that have pushed our free-market toward socialism these past 50 plus years.*

If this were true wouldn’t the progressives have all the money?
Your free market was gone a long time ago. The capitalists you refer to killed the free market in favor of profit or greed. They don’t want a free market.
They want short term gains period.
More like Profit at any cost!
* br *It is not the fault of capitalism. It is the... (show quote)


That's the globalists

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May 22, 2020 08:01:05   #
Kickaha Loc: Nebraska
 
Milosia2 wrote:
It sounds like you have a better idea for yourself.
What is it?


Let's reopen the country. The jobs won't come back overnight, but they will come back and unemployment will drop. The company I work for had put a hold on hiring through this pandemic, but we're now trying to fill vacancies. I like that Trump has ordered agencies to reevaluate their regulations and get rid of the ones that place an undue burden on America and its economy.

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May 22, 2020 08:21:48   #
Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio
 
Right. Less regulations should help.
Workers rights should go first.
Eliminate the minimum wage.
Abolish 40hr week.
End all environmental regulations.
Give the corporations all the money they want.
I should stop here. Their actions are always hidden in something else like kittens once looked into you find it means something else.
Would they ever try to take advantage of the pandemic to work in their favor only?

Reply
May 22, 2020 08:25:08   #
Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio
 
Kickaha wrote:
Let's reopen the country. The jobs won't come back overnight, but they will come back and unemployment will drop. The company I work for had put a hold on hiring through this pandemic, but we're now trying to fill vacancies. I like that Trump has ordered agencies to reevaluate their regulations and get rid of the ones that place an undue burden on America and its economy.



2020 Posts: 718 Loc: Cleveland Ohio

Right. Less regulations should help.
Workers rights should go first.
Eliminate the minimum wage.
Abolish 40hr week.
End all environmental regulations.
Give the corporations all the money they want.
I should stop here. Their actions are always hidden in something else like kittens once looked into you find it means something else.
Would they ever try to take advantage of the pandemic to work in their favor only?
As government expands liberty gets better for everyone!

Reply
May 22, 2020 08:25:21   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
Airforceone wrote:
As Trump opens the country unemployment rises by 2.4 million. At what point do the Trump supporters say to themselves I am backing the wrong guy.

Trump was very excited about getting a $500 billion slush fund to bail out the corporate elite and some of those corporations haven’t paid any corporate taxes in years and have received government subsidy checks. But Trump and the republicans are against extending unemployment to the 39 million unemployed. This is how the Republican Party operates take care of the corporate elite and screw the middle class.

Trump finally got all his cronies out of jail. I wonder if it was Proud Republican thrown in jail for lying would they let her out of jail.
As Trump opens the country unemployment rises by 2... (show quote)


Obsession to hysteria you’re on a roll. Getting closer to the election got you a little worried does it?

Reply
 
 
May 22, 2020 08:38:09   #
Kickaha Loc: Nebraska
 
Milosia2 wrote:
2020 Posts: 718 Loc: Cleveland Ohio

Right. Less regulations should help.
Workers rights should go first.
Eliminate the minimum wage.
Abolish 40hr week.
End all environmental regulations.
Give the corporations all the money they want.
I should stop here. Their actions are always hidden in something else like kittens once looked into you find it means something else.
Would they ever try to take advantage of the pandemic to work in their favor only?
As government expands liberty gets better for everyone!
2020 Posts: 718 Loc: Cleveland Ohio br br Right.... (show quote)

There is a difference between laws and regulations. Some regulations get written because someone got upset about something and decided they were going to show them who was boss. Too many regulations are written by agencies trying to prove their worth and increase their budgets. Many of the existing regulations seem to be contradictory. What Trump has proposed is that the agencies review their regulations and get rid of those that are outdated, impractical, obtuse, or unnecessary. Things like the 40 hour week and minimum wage are laws and as such it would take Congress to pass a new law changing these. Workers rights are also written laws, not regulations. Things like EPA rules are now required to have scientific evidence supporting proposed rule changes.

Reply
May 22, 2020 09:19:35   #
Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio
 
lindajoy wrote:
Obsession to hysteria you’re on a roll. Getting closer to the election got you a little worried does it?


Trump Moves Openly to Steal the Election: Democrats Should Impeach Him Again
2020 Elections | Donald Trump
by Amanda Marcotte | May 22, 2020 - 7:31am
— from Salon

Despite his off-the-charts narcissism, Donald Trump knows on some level that the majority of Americans don't want him to be president and he cannot win in a fair election. He didn't beat Hillary Clinton in the popular vote in 2016 — she got nearly 3 million more votes — and only won because of the outsize influence of smaller, rural states in the Electoral College. He has only grown less popular since then and is now well behind former Vice President Joe Biden in most national polls, usually by a margin of 5 to 8 points.

But Trump has had a plan to win in 2020, ever since his re-election campaign kicked off the second he was inaugurated: Cheat like crazy.

Trying to cheat in the presidential election is, of course, what Trump was impeached for in December, which no doubt feels like ancient history, due to the rising death tolls and exploding unemployment rate over which our "very stable genius" of a president has presided since then. So here's a refresher: Trump, anticipating (apparently correctly) that Biden would be his Democratic opponent, leveraged the power of the State Department in an effort to blackmail the Ukrainian president into publicly backing right-wing conspiracy theories about Biden, threatening to withhold military aid unless Ukrainian officials announced "investigations" into Biden. The idea was to create the 2020 version of "Clinton's emails" by using phony investigations and innuendo to paint Biden as corrupt, even though there's no evidence Biden did anything corrupt in his dealings with Ukraine.

Impeachment did a lot to shut down that scheme (though I have no doubt they'll keep trying), but that doesn't mean Trump has given up the hope that he can rig some kind of victory, even in an election when strong majorities of Americans oppose him. Since shamelessness and callousness are among Trump's central qualities, he's perfectly happy to exploit the coronavirus crisis to do it. Yep, that same crisis that he made exponentially worse with his negligence and open hostility to science — now he wants to use it to deprive American voters of their chance to kick him out on his keister in November.

For obvious reasons, a numerous states have decided to dramatically increase the ability of voters to vote by mail in November, especially after the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court forced in-person voting in April, leading to a spike in coronavirus cases in the weeks afterwards. No one can assume that the virus won't still be a threat this fall, and it's better to prepare now for the possibility that people won't be able to vote in person in November.

But Trump is certain — and for good reason — that if more people get to vote, he's likely to lose. So he's freaking out. He's particularly sweating the possibility that voters in swing states will be able to vote by mail in large numbers, since he knows his best chance of winning those states lies in making sure that as few people vote as possible.

"Breaking: Michigan sends absentee ballots to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election," Trump tweeted on Wednesday, in typical hyperventilating style. "This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!"

He deleted and reposted the tweet later to reflect it was ballot applications that were sent, not ballots themselves, but kept the more disturbing false claim that it's illegal to mail ballot applications to voters. He also threatened Nevada in similar fashion.

As Jack Holmes of Esquire pointed out, Trump is threatening two U.S. states in exactly the same way he threatened Ukraine: Claiming he will withhold funds authorized by Congress if the recipient doesn't help him cheat in the 2020 election. This is election fraud and blackmail, but this time directed at Americans.

Not only are these tweets an effort to blackmail the states, but they are also a direct effort to scare ordinary citizens out of voting.

As political analyst Judd Legum pointed out in his newsletter, Popular Information, "Telling someone that an absentee ballot application they receive was sent to them 'illegally' could dissuade them from voting."

Indeed, the tweets themselves are arguably voter intimidation, since Trump is literally trying to scare people into thinking they may be prosecuted if they fill out an application for a mail-in ballot. Voter intimidation is a federal criminal offense that could lead to jail time — except that Trump is hiding behind "executive privilege," which has been used to argue against legal punishment for all his criminal behavior.

Reply
May 22, 2020 09:28:19   #
Milosia2 Loc: Cleveland Ohio
 
A liar, a thief , traitor, now a murderer, who was impeached, just figured out a minority can’t win an election fairly, honestly, or truly.

Reply
May 22, 2020 10:10:13   #
lindajoy Loc: right here with you....
 
Milosia2 wrote:
A liar, a thief , traitor, now a murderer, who was impeached, just figured out a minority can’t win an election fairly, honestly, or truly.


Your obsession, hysteria is as bad as AF but at least funny to read, thanks...

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