SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CAN WIN EVEN WITH A HOSTILE SUPREME COURT

By Mukund Rathi, Truthout.

November 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/social-movements-can-win-even-with-a-hostile-supreme-court/




With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, how will the Supreme Court decide future cases? Most people will probably think of it as a “6-3 Court” and expect decisions based on the number of justices nominated by each of the two ruling parties. Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act, was a perfect 5-4 split between the justices nominated by Democrats and Republicans at the time.

The justices, of course, disagree. They admit the nominations are political but the justice is not, “once that black robe goes on.” After all, it was Trump-nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch who wrote Bostock v. Clayton County, which guaranteed the Civil Rights Act’s anti-discrimination protections to gay and transgender workers.

Politicians generally respond to the question of how the Supreme Court decides cases with a convenient mix of both answers. The opposing party’s nominees are partisan hacks, but the rest of the justices (fine print: who we nominated) are faithfully applying the “written text” and/or “true values” of the Constitution!

All of these accounts, however, miss a key factor: social movements. We know that movements won our rights — from abortion to voting to joining a union — but they are forgotten when we talk about the Supreme Court. Politicians and the justices only admit to the influence of politics in terms of partisanship, not strikes and protests by ordinary people. The result is an incomplete and unbearable national conversation around the Supreme Court, which most recently played out in Barrett’s nomination hearing.

Introducing social movements to the conversation would not just make it bearable — it would make it exciting. The stories of why the Supreme Court upheld reproductive rights, civil rights protections and workers’ rights to organize are our stories. By telling them, we can prepare ourselves to continue those fights inside and outside the courtroom today.
The Fight Leading Up To Roe V. Wade

The women who fought for the right to choose — then and now — saw legal rulings as a potential part of their liberation, but not the whole ballgame. As one organizer put it, “the objective was not to change the law per se,” but to “use the process of changing the law, which would be a good thing to do, to further the goals of the women’s movement overall.”

In Connecticut, the movement used law as an organizing tool to fight severe criminalization of abortion — a woman committed a felony by even asking for one. In 1971, the organizers of “Women versus Connecticut” recruited as many women as possible as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, and in the process, they educated people about (and organized them around) reproductive freedom. These hundreds of women sued Connecticut and filed affidavits about their experiences with illegal abortions or being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. At a plaintiffs’ meeting, one of the lawyers (all of whom were women) argued that their lawsuit had to be about “flesh and blood people,” because “after listening to more and more judges, if we present it as a matter of law, they are going to think we are daft.”

The women won, as a federal court struck down the law criminalizing abortion. The decision recognized the “extraordinary ramifications for a woman” of pregnancy and childbirth, such as pressure to “curtail or end her employment or educational opportunities.”

The feminist movement had many other victories like this on the way to Roe v. Wade in 1973, using mass legal action, protests, and other creative tactics to shift consciousness and pressure politicians. In 1967, California’s Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a state law decriminalizing abortion. By the early 1970s, over 20 states had passed similar or stronger legislation. The movement’s influence was so great that of the four justices appointed by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court, one of them wrote Roe itself, and two of them joined the majority. Nixon and these justices preceded the growth of the right-wing legal movement we know today and were not necessarily anti-choice stalwarts. Nonetheless, this victory against the odds is a benchmark for us.

Today, giving non-answers about Roe is a sport for Republican nominees, just as asking futile questions about Roe seems to be one for Democratic senators. Both sides fixate on the legal correctness of landmark cases like Roe, but we need to unpack the stories of how they actually came to be.
The Supreme Court’s Passive Record On Civil Rights

The one question that no Supreme Court nominee can duck is about Brown v. Board of Education — “super-precedent,” as Barrett took to calling it. But the conversation stops there, without going on to who did the actual work of ending Jim Crow segregation. It was not the Supreme Court, which merely told the South to implement Brown with “all deliberate speed.” Martin Luther King Jr. described the Court’s impact as “stark tokenism.” The actual work was done by the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Black protesters under siege by police and white supremacists all over the country.

The Supreme Court itself was often hostile to civil rights protesters. During the massive campaign in 1963 to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, when cops and dogs and fire hoses were let loose, bureaucrats played their Jim Crow part by denying permits for civil rights marches. The marches went forward in defiance of an Alabama court injunction, and MLK and the other organizers were charged with jail time and fines. The Supreme Court upheld those charges. It faulted the organizers for “disobeying the injunction” and the permit process rather than “challeng[ing] it in the Alabama courts.” The Court’s advice to MLK was that “respect for judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law.”

Instead, the movement’s major victories were in Congress, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The Supreme Court, which upheld them as constitutional, played a more passive role. That’s not to discount the movement’s influence on the Court, which was nearly unanimous in acknowledging the need to “banish the blight of racial discrimination.”

Just as the feminist movement racked up state victories on the way to the Supreme Court, the civil rights movement went through Congress first. Even when the Supreme Court is hostile, social movements can uphold their victories through mass upheaval and by moving against the Court’s own institutional power.

That’s what happened during the Great Depression.
Workers Fight For — And SCOTUS Upholds — The Right To Organize

During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term (1933-1937), the Supreme Court routinely struck down his New Deal legislation for violating the freedom of contract and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The U.S. Congress could only tinker with “interstate commerce” — not economic activity within a single state, including large steel and auto manufacturing plants. But then, in 1937, the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which protected workers’ legal right to organize. What changed?

Employers defied the NLRA after it was passed in 1935, expecting it to be struck down. Indeed, every lower court which ruled on the NLRA said it could not constitutionally protect manufacturing workers because they did not participate in “interstate commerce.” The courts defied the clear popular mandate for the New Deal, expressed in FDR’s smashing reelection victory in 1936.

Rather than rely on the courts to protect their rights, rank-and-file workers took matters into their own hands. In a wave of successful “sit-down strikes,” they fought for union recognition and halted production in manufacturing plants by occupying them with massive numbers. In 1936 and 1937, nearly half a million workers participated in a sit-down. In one of the greatest labor conflicts in U.S. history, thousands of workers at the General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, staged a sit-down strike beginning in December 1936. It ended in victory two months later.

Their primary demand was that GM obey the NLRA and recognize their union. GM at first refused to negotiate, condemning the workers for “striking at the very heart of the right of possession of private property” by occupying the plants.

The workers argued that the sit-down was necessary to defend their right to organize under the NLRA, refused to follow court injunctions that ignored this reality, and battled police who tried to evict them.

While FDR was publicly silent on the sit-down strategy, he lobbed his own controversial attack against the Supreme Court. He threatened to “pack the Court” through legislation allowing him to appoint more liberal justices who would uphold his policies.

Sit-down strike wave, popular mandate, court-packing threat — this was the context of April 1937, when the Supreme Court ruled on the NLRA. First, it upheld the NLRA as applied to interstate transportation and communication businesses — this was squarely within the Commerce Clause.

But second, it also upheld the NLRA as applied to manufacturing plants, even those within a single state. The Court was clear about how the strike wave factored into its decision:

“When industries organize themselves on a national scale, making their relation to interstate commerce the dominant factor in their activities, how can it be maintained that their industrial labor relations constitute a forbidden field into which Congress may not enter when it is necessary to protect interstate commerce from the paralyzing consequences of industrial war?”
Our Movements Can Win In Court

Our predecessors won these rights through social movements, and we need to adapt their approaches to the courts to our situation today. Shelby County and Bostock, which respectively weakened and strengthened the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, echo our failures and successes in living up to the civil rights movement’s accomplishments. In other words, it’s not enough to grill Republican nominees about what they will do about Roe and abortion rights — we have to ask ourselves that same question.

Our movements generally have the right instincts when it comes to “legal” issues. When grand juries and courts are considering cases of police violence, we take to the streets. We dress up as handmaids to protest anti-choice judicial nominations. We stall the expansion of oil pipelines through civil disobedience as environmental lawsuits crawl through the courts. But as our movements grow and aim higher, these good instincts run up against conventional wisdom about the courts and their supposed impartiality. Rebutting that lie and staying on the course of mass action will require a deeper discussion — in the streets and our workplaces (and, of course, our homes) — about how our social movements can win in court today.

How can we defend Roe and win greater reproductive freedom? Do we follow the feminist movement and shift consciousness through state victories, and perhaps clinic defenses? How do we pressure the Supreme Court to abolish qualified immunity, which protects police from liability for civil rights violations? Do we go directly to the Court or through Congress first? In either case, mass upheaval and initiatives to reform or pack — if not abolish — the Supreme Court will be necessary.

TRUMP’S ZEALOTS: WHITE SUPREMACISTS AND EVANGELICALS

By Gilbert Mercier, Telesur English.

November 2, 2020



https://popularresistance.org/trumps-zealots-white-supremacists-and-evangelicals/



Gearing Up For A New Civil War?

What the gun-toting, Trump 2020 and Confederate-flag waving Trump have been organized and likely paid to do, is to make sure the U.S. goes back to work as soon as possible.

Let us not be naive. If President Trump recently called on his adoring followers to “liberate” states like Michigan, Virginia, Maryland*, and Minnesota, which all happen to have Democrat governors, this is not about freeing people from the supposed tyranny of lockdown and social distancing measures. What the gun-toting, Trump 2020 and Confederate-flag waving Trump storm-troopers have been organized and likely paid to do, is to make sure the United States goes back to work as soon as possible. Naturally, this is despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging in all 50 states, at various levels, with no end in sight.

The rush to “open America back for business” is an imperative dictated by Wall Street corporations large and small and, last but not least, Trump’s desperate attempt to be reelected in November. For Trump, it is likely to be a futile effort to find a way out of the massive global economic crisis. This is, of course, a symptom of capitalism‘s borderline criminal logic that the survival of the economy and the financial markets should matter more than human life. Capitalism is a ruthlessly blind killer that has always favored, in times of war or peace, profit over people.
Civil War Redux: The United States Of Trumpistan?

Technically the American Civil War ended on April 9, 1865. But after 155 years, the war between the Confederate states and the North lives in the American psyche. The dark stain of the racism that embraced slavery and inherent superiority of white men has faded somewhat but is still there. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 made it okay for it to be openly shown again without any of the shame of appearing politically incorrect. Trumpistan is more or less the rebirth of the old Confederacy. It is anchored in geography but is mostly a state of mind.

Trumpistan is America’s barely told heart of darkness from another era, which pillared the gun and the Bible. It is a state of mind so schizophrenic that the sanctity of the life of the unborn does not contradict the near worship for the US military war machine. Trumpistan is where Donald Trump won the 2016 election. He is planning to do it again in November 2020 regardless of his poor handling of the COVID-19 crisis, and the economic crash. Trump is a political animal concerned only with his survival. One can expect from him and his sycophants an absolute ruthlessness in the coming months. Trump and the money and media apparatus that supports him are counting on and investing in two different segments connected to reliable voting blocks: first, the fascist “rebel flag” nostalgic heirs of the Confederacy; second the Evangelical Christians.
Fascist White Supremacists: Capitalism‘s Foot Soldiers

During the recent protests in Michigan against the lockdown and stay-home state policies, one protester’s sign read: “Social Distancing = Communism.” This is the ideological angle of Trump’s most belligerent storm-troopers. It is about galvanizing the conservatism electorate into believing that run-of-the-mill mainstream corporate Democrats are the fifth column of socialism’s radical left. The fallacy is enormous, but through history, propaganda 101’s rule of thumb has always been that the bigger the lie, the more likely gullible people will swallow it whole, no questions asked. Who exactly is behind the supposed grassroots protests by the so-called patriots? At the forefront of it — and he was omnipresent with a bullhorn in hands in Austin, Texas, on April 17 — is Trump’s underground propagandist, InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Alex Jones was more instrumental than anyone would like to admit in Trump’s 2016 election win.

While InfoWars and other more obscure far-right websites have been activated, one can only speculate about the deep pockets behind what appears to be a rather complex and concerted strategy to undermine Democrat-controlled states. Mercer’s hedge fund, the financial entity behind Breitbart has been mentioned, as well as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who is a billionaire, a creationist like Vice President Pence and, last but not least, the sister of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. DeVos and Mercer can only be called alleged sponsors of the “reopen America patriots,” because so far no tangible money trails have materialized, and it is likely to remain that way. Regardless of the ideological smokescreen, the action is a desperate effort to jolt a moribund economy. The pragmatics in Trump’s inner circle know that it’s the economy, stupid! and that, with 30 to 40 million people unemployed, Trump will not win his reelection bid.
Evangelical Christians

The Evangelical Christian component of Trump’s core support might not be as monolithic as the above group and like it was a few years ago. Quite a few sincere Evangelicals have seen the light shining on Trump’s hypocrisy, lies, and misdeeds. Also, regardless of religious beliefs, it has become hard to forgive the president for his questionable character and the callousness of his behavior, not to mention a vacillating competence and unstable temperament. In this period of fear, where death seems to lurk from everywhere, even believers can appreciate a steady hand guiding the ship. While they are convinced Jesus will save them, their inherent human fiber might make them want to delay their ultimate journey.
Elections In The Times Of COVID-19

Everything should be at stake in the upcoming post-COVID-19 U.S. elections in November 2020, but very little will be. Here and elsewhere democracy has been dead so long it has become the shadow of a ghost. Without real alternative visions and new societal options, it will be yet another lesser-of-two-evils scenario. The main precept will be the safekeeping of the global corporate empire enforced by NATO and the U.S. military. It will be another imperial election from which the outcome will be either our modern-day Caligula’s second term or Barack Obama‘s third term. While this mindless charade takes place, many thousands of human lives worldwide will be sacrificed on the altar of global capitalism to try to prevent its imminent collapse.

TESTIMONIES FROM THE GLORIA QUINTANILLA WOMEN’S COOPERATIVE OF NICARAGUA

By Friends of the ATC.

November 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/testimonies-from-the-gloria-quintanilla-womens-cooperative-of-nicaragua/



“The Land Is Our Mother”

When a group of campesinas in the community of Santa Julia, Nicaragua founded the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative in 2008 with the Rural Workers’ Association (Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo – ATC), one of their basic rules was that men were not allowed to hurt women. With much struggle, they have rid their rural community of machismo and established a high value on women’s work. In collaboration with the ATC and the Sandinista government, the women have fought for and won land titles in their names, their own homes, access to education, improved roads, and most recently, a community water well.

In this new publication, “The Land is Our Mother,” the women of the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative explain that they consume what is native to the land so their children and grandchildren can be healthy. They use agroecology to ensure that the land, their second mother, stays strong. They prioritize education and involvement of youth in their organization so that the next generation carries out the Gloria Quintanilla Cooperative’s vision for advancement in Santa Julia and Nicaragua.

These testimonies were collected as part of a project of the Friends of the ATC’s July 2019 “Solidarity with Nicaragua” delegation. You can read all published testimonies here.
Excerpt From “The Land Is Our Mother”:

Lola

My name is Lola del Carmen Esquivel Gonzales. I am from Nicaragua and represent the women of the countryside.

At the very young age of 11 years (during the Somoza dictatorship), I worked in the fields, the campesino life. I didn’t have land; I was an agricultural worker. It was hard because there was no education, no protection for children. There were no rights for women. There was no healthcare. My mother and I were nomads, moving through various departments looking for work, harvesting cane sugar. We didn’t have a home. I became a woman: I learned to walk with a machete, cut coffee and cotton and cane, sell fruit, and clean rooms in Corinto, Chinandega.

In 1979, at the age of 14, I met the Rural Workers Association (ATC) and I woke up. I never thought I would learn to defend my rights, to defend the rights of others. The main thing was to be in solidarity, to see ourselves not for our color but for the heart we have to serve.

Ten years later, I learned to write my first letters, to train myself, I learned what a forum is, what it was like to speak in public (a process that made me sweat and tremble). Then it allowed me to do concrete things like form a union and go to the Ministry of Labor with a worker. This also allowed me to stand up at the mayor’s office, to fight for the right to water, the right to have roads. The ATC guided me on what my rights are and how to apply them by organizing.

In 1983, we came up with the idea of forming a union under the name of Imelda Gonzales, a woman heroine of the same calibre as myself who has since died. We had the idea of forming a cooperative in 2008.

All these years, from 1979 to 2019, have been a very rich accumulation of experience that has allowed me to defend my rights with all my might. If I see a woman being abused, I get involved and defend her. If I see the government being bad-mouthed, I get involved and defend it. I was a woman who never went to school, yet today I have traveled to other countries to speak out and talk about all of the good things that we have in this country from the perspective of the peasantry.

The main achievement of the Revolution is property. It’s important that everyone has their piece of land. The second point is the struggle for water. The third point is organization: if we were not organized, we would not be able to achieve all that we have here. The fourth point is education because a country without knowledge is not prepared to struggle. Even though I didn’t go to a school and neither did Eloísa, we are happy that Lea, Claudia, and all the young people are studying, because the community continues developing.

The other point is food production because we cannot live without food. Today the land is diversified. There is no one who doesn’t have avocados, bananas, or yucca. The change is gigantic. Twenty years ago we had to borrow rice because there was no food. Now we have food in the community. It is very important because if there is education and there is food, there are people who want to move forward.

Read Lola’s full testimony and access all seven testimonies of the publication here.

‘LET THE WORLD REMEMBER HOW WE LOST PALESTINE’

By Quds N.

November 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/let-the-world-remember-how-we-lost-palestine/



The 103rd Anniversary Of Balfour Declaration.

Occupied Palestine – Today, Palestinians and human rights advocates around the world are marking 103 years since the Balfour Declaration was issued on November 2, 1917.

Using the hashtag #Balfour103, Palestinian and pro-Palestine activists have called to participate in a campaign they launched to commemorate the 103rd anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, rejecting the ominous promise.

The Balfour Declaration was issued by Britain when Arthur James Balfour, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, sent a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, one of the leaders of the World Zionist movement, indicating the British government’s support for the establishment of a “national homeland for Jews” in Palestine.

It is simply the promise of “he who does not own, to he who does not deserve”, according to activists. The Balfour Declaration promised the Zionist movement to grant it Palestine where the natives made up more than 90 percent of the population while Jewish immigrants constituted less than 10 percent of the population at that time.

Upon the start of the British mandate, Britain began to facilitate the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from 9 percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population.

HOW MAHER AL-AKHRAS IS RESISTING ISRAEL’S ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION

By Neve Gordon, Middle East Eye.

November 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/how-maher-al-akhras-is-resisting-israels-administrative-detention/



Refusing To Eat.

The Palestinian father of six has spent months on hunger strike to oppose administrative detention and, by extension, the colonial regime that enforces it.




Facing imminent death, 49-year-old Maher al-Akhras has been refusing to eat in prison for more than three months. The Palestinian father of six has been protesting his repeated arbitrary arrests; he is currently in administrative detention, without charge or trial.

Like many hunger strikers before him, Akhras does not seek death, although he is evidently prepared to die. The hunger strike is his way of refusing to become a modern-day Sisyphus, completing one administrative detention only to begin another. Reclaiming his body from the hands of Israeli authorities, he now wields his own life as a card to make a straightforward and just demand: Put me on trial or release me.

This demand is personal, but also deeply political. By asserting the cruelty and unfairness of administrative detention, Akhras gives voice to more than 350 Palestinians, including two minors, currently being held in Israeli prisons without charge or trial.

The irony is that Akhras and others share their animus towards administrative detention with at least one late influential Zionist leader. Not long after the state of Israel was established, Menachem Begin, years before he became prime minister, expressed concern that the Israeli government had adopted the British colonial practice of administrative detention within its own legal system.

“Does a bad law become a good one just because Jews apply it?” he queried in a 1951 Knesset committee discussion. “I say that this law is bad from its very foundation and does not become good because it is practiced by Jews … We oppose administrative detention in principle. There is no place for such detention.”

While Begin rejected administrative detention when he sat in the opposition, he did not follow through on his objections after becoming prime minister.

The use of administrative detention from 1948 until today is perhaps not surprising, but it is telling, dispelling the notion of a liberal Israel that was polluted only after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. It underscores that due process for Palestinians was never on the table; from the beginning, Palestinians could not trust the legal apparatus.
Arsenal Of Resistance

Israel, in other words, had dramatically restricted the repositories of nonviolent Palestinian opposition – a fundamental, yet often overlooked, point when thinking of Palestinian resistance.

In prison, the arsenal of resistance is particularly limited, leaving inmates with very few options. Akhras has chosen one of the few methods of protest at his disposal – perhaps the most extreme. And he is by no means alone.

In his forthcoming book, Refusing to Eat, Nayan Shah, a historian at the University of Southern California, chronicles a century of hunger strikes, revealing how a profound commitment to social justice has motivated almost all of them. He explores suffragists pushing for women’s right to vote, Irish liberation fighters demanding independence, Indian activists aiming to end British colonial rule, Japanese Americans protesting their internment in camps during WWII, South Africans struggling against apartheid, and prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay.

Although every hunger strike is different, Shah points to a recurring dynamic: prisoners refuse to eat because they are treated as less than human, while prison authorities then reassert their power by force-feeding them or rejecting their demands. Over time, the strikers’ bodies weaken until, ultimately, some die. The struggle becomes a test of who will outlast whom.
Existential Commitment

It has become clear that Akhras will not back down. He has taken control of his body to resist administrative detention and, by extension, the colonial regime that deploys this form of imprisonment. He has, in the words of political theorist Banu Bargu, who studied hunger strikes in Turkish prisons, “weaponised his own life”, where his own self-destruction becomes a form of political resistance.

Ultimately, Akhras is refusing to live a life where he is repeatedly placed in administrative detention. This refusal constitutes an existential commitment to a different kind of life with a different political horizon. Israel realises this, and it appears set to make him pay with his life.

TRUMP FCC TURNED THE INTERNET INTO A ‘WILD WEST’ FOR THE TELECOMS

https://popularresistance.org/trump-fcc-turned-the-internet-into-a-wild-west-for-the-telecoms/



By Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG.

November 2, 2020
| PODCAST



Five years ago, the movement for internet freedom won an important victory when the Federal Communications Commission reclassified the internet as a common carrier, making it like a utility that everyone should have equal access to without discrimination. That was quickly reversed in 2017 under the new chair of the FCC, Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, who deregulated the internet giving the government no authority to oversee the internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T. I speak with Josh Stager of the Open Technology Institute about the ongoing fight to protect the internet and what we need to do next.

Listen here:
Subscribe to our show on iTunes, SoundCloud, MixCloud or Stitcher.

Review us on iTunes! Click here … Then click on “View in iTunes … Then click “Ratings and Reviews.”

Guest:

Joshua Stager is the senior policy counsel and government affairs lead at the Open Technology Institute. He specializes in telecommunications law and policy, including OTI’s efforts to protect net neutrality and promote broadband competition.

Prior to New America, Stager was Sen. Al Franken’s law fellow on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he focused on antitrust, consumer privacy, and surveillance law. He was previously a law clerk at the Department of Justice, a legislative aide in the House of Representatives, and an assistant editor at Congressional Quarterly.

Stager earned a J.D. from New York University and a B.A. in political communication and geography from George Washington University.

Republicans, Not Biden, Are About to Raise Your Taxes

Buried in Trump's 2017 Tax Cut Act are automatic tax increases every two years from 2021 to 2027. All taxpayers with incomes of $75,000 and under (about 65 percent of taxpayers) will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019. Elections matter.




November 2, 2020 Joseph E. Stiglitz NEW YORK TIMES




https://portside.org/2020-11-02/republicans-not-biden-are-about-raise-your-taxes




The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.

Looking at the analyses of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation at the time the December 2017 tax bill was enacted, we see very clearly how different income groups are affected by the Trump tax plan. And it’s disturbing.The current poverty line for a family of four is $26,200: People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed. The C.B.O. and Joint Committee estimated that those with an income of $20,000 to $30,000 would owe an extra $365 next year — these are people who are struggling just to pay rent and put food on the table.

Of course, the poor have never mattered much to the Republican Party, but those on the edge of poverty have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic and the recession it has caused, so Trump’s planned tax increases seem especially heartless, and impractical, when you consider that their higher tax payments, while a huge burden for them, will add little to the budget.

By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not.

At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year.

The tax loss and benefit estimates just described were calculated before the pandemic. Now, incomes for almost everyone but top earners have taken a hit, so the loser group will likely be considerably larger than anticipated; and with people like Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, doing even better than expected, Trump’s gift to him is even bigger.

This analysis makes clear that the vast majority of Americans will be better off with the likely tax reforms that will emerge from a Biden administration than they would be by sticking with Mr. Trump’s ill-conceived tax bill. You might well ask: Why didn’t Mr. Trump just give everyone a tax cut? The Republicans — who suddenly lost their grasp on their self-described fiscal conservatism when they came into office in 2017 — saw a chance to give their rich friends and corporations a big thank you for campaign contributions. But the tax cuts they promised these donors produced projections that the resulting budget deficits were well beyond $1 trillion.

To reduce that stomach-churning amount, they had to phase-in higher taxes on ordinary Americans. While this kind of budget gimmickry has been used before under President George W. Bush’s administration, Mr. Trump carried it to a new level.

The Republicans have one more feeble defense: their old friend trickle-down economics. The tax cut to the corporations would, they promised, trickle-down to citizens at the bottom of the income ladder. We’ve now seen how that hasn’t happened. In fact the money gushed up to those at the very top in the form of stockholder dividends, chief executive bonuses and a record level of stock buybacks (nearly $1 trillion in 2018 alone.)

Some economic models predicted the Trump tax law would lead to significantly higher wages because of more investment and higher growth. But projections showed that when the 2017 bill’s temporary tax cuts changed to tax increases, growth would likely slow significantly and wage increases would be anemic. And those calculations were made before the pandemic hit.

Mark Zandi and Bernard Yaros of Moody’s Analytics have done the most credible and thorough analysis comparing the Biden and Trump plans, including Mr. Trump’s stealth increases and other promised tax and expenditure changes. Mr. Biden’s plan wins by an enormous margin: 7.4 million more jobs and a much quicker recovery from this recession. That means higher wages and incomes for most Americans.

Elections matter. Elections gave Republicans the power to enact these tax shenanigans. Neither conscience nor principles stopped them.

The problem now is that unless the Democrats win a majority in the House and the Senate and clinch the presidency, these Republican tax increases, already legislated, are likely to go into effect. The increases, unfairly aimed at the vast majority of Americans who are disproportionately suffering in the pandemic, will cause even more hardship.

They must be stopped.