Tuesday, March 16, 2021
WORKERS INSIST THE $15 MINIMUM WAGE FIGHT ISN’T OVER
By Joe Maniscalco, DC Report.
March 15, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/workers-insist-the-15-minimum-wage-fight-isnt-over/
Labor Groups Angry That Biden And Democrats Didn’t Push For The New Base Pay In The $1.9 Trillion COVID Relief Legislation.
Women comprise the overwhelming majority of frontline workers who risk their lives and the lives of their families during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But the Democrats who they helped retake the White House and the Senate don’t seem so interested in rewarding that support.
The proposal to set a $15 an hour minimum wage by 2025 in President Joe Biden’s signature $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan could have helped lift some 74 million poor and low-income women out of poverty, according to the Poor People’s Campaign.
But eight Senate Democrats opposed the measure. Team Biden also declined to challenge arcane and non-binding parliamentary procedures, supposedly prohibiting a $15 minimum wage in the coronavirus relief package. That’s understandably left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who helped get Democrats elected. It also stoked a renewed and fiery determination to press the fight until it’s won.
“During the presidential election, we had over 1,700 laid off hospitality workers knocking on doors of three million voters in four battleground states — and that made a critical difference in the results,” said Marlene Patrick Cooper, president of UNITE HERE Local 23. It represents more than 4,000 airport workers in 13 states from Georgia to Idaho.
Election Support
Members of Local 23 — overwhelmingly women of color suffering pandemic-related layoffs — joined other worker advocates in knocking on 1.5 million doors in the successful effort to elect Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate from Georgia.
“Our folks sacrificed time away from home and their families canvassing, knocking on doors, to get out the vote because their lives depended on it,” Cooper said. “Now, it’s time for us to continue to hold this administration accountable and push them to pass transformative legislation for working people.”
According to the Poor People’s Campaign, in a report titled A Call for a Moral Revival, women constitute almost 60% of low-wage workers who have all been hit hardest by the pandemic.
Rhiana Ford, a server earning a pre-tip wage of $5 an hour at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida, broke her foot during canvassing efforts in Georgia as a member of the union’s Local 355. She also provides care for her 90-year-old father.
“I left my home, I left my dad, I left my sister, I left my fiancé — I left everyone here and risked my life to go to Georgia during a pandemic to make sure I could have a better future…
“And I’m coming back home, and we still don’t have $15? Why?” Ford says. “Does no one think we deserve it; that the job that I do is so nothing?”
‘Refuse Pennies’
The lack of support for better pay is making many workers rethink the idea that those at the top earned their money by tolerable, if not perfectly fair, means. The idea that wage suppression helps wealth pile up at the top is gaining acceptance, which, at a self-preservation level at least, ought to concern the best-paid one in a thousand households, the ones with million-dollar-plus annual paychecks.
“I broke my ankle in Atlanta — and I’ll do it again for this $15 an hour,” Ford says. “I refuse to take pennies while people live in mansions.”
Recent history makes it clear, that’s exactly what millionaire political elites on both sides of the aisle think.
The frustration of low-paid workers like Ford could spell serious trouble for Democrats in 2022 as Republicans assert they are poised to take back the House by appealing to a combination of people frustrated over the pandemic and disaffected workers unhappy with the Biden administration.
Just how Republican policies would benefit low-paid workers isn’t something the GOP says much about. But if voters like Ford simply stay home in 2022, the Republicans, who generally want to end minimum wage requirements, would benefit.
Both Parties To Blame
Antagonism toward raising the minimum wage, which adjusted for inflation was worth about $12 an hour in the 1960s, persists in both parties.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) can’t bring himself to match even the $12 an hour minimum wage that Hillary Clinton advocated in 2016.
Then there’s Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) who last month moaned during a House Education and Labor Committee meeting that the aborted Raise the Wage Act “doesn’t deal with the realities of what it takes to run a business.”
Politicians opposed to any minimum wage increase typically assert that businesses will go broke, ignoring the fact that businesses can raise prices, especially as America is on the cusp of what economists predict will be a year of robust economic expansion.
The current $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage has not budged since 2009. Adjusted for inflation it’s really just $5.82 an hour.
Clinton-Cain Deal
The sub-minimum wage for tipped workers in restaurants has been fixed at $2.13 since 1993, under a deal President Bill Clinton agreed to with former takeout pizza executive Herman Cain. In 2021 dollars that’s about $1.18 an hour with tips filling in the shortfall to $7.25.
Overall, some 140 million Americans are poor or low-income. They are also those hit hardest by the pandemic. Women comprise more than 30% of the low-wage workforce, while roughly half of all U.S. children are subsisting near or below the poverty line.
Rev. William Barber, who started the Moral Mondays demonstrations at the North Carolina state capitol, says it was the desire by poorly paid workers to earn $15 an hour that was behind the Democrats taking control of the Senate this year.
“The two senators from Georgia got elected because of $15 — let’s be real about that,” said Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. “If they had run on just dealing with racism and health care, they would not have made it.”
Barber is not surprised that no Senate Republican backed the push for $15 an hour minimum wage, which if phased in over the next four years would only be worth about $13.50.
“We already knew what they were going to do because they stood with Trump,” Barber says.
“But when eight Democratic senators — seven white men, one white woman — cross over and block $15 and a union, which is a compromise in and of itself, and hide behind a parliamentarian and say, it’s not the time, but I’m ready to do $11 over three years — we cannot accept that.”
Romney’s 30-Cent Raise
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) co-sponsored a competing plan to raise the minimum wage to $10 by 2025, which adjusted for inflation would be an increase of about 30-cents compared with today, leaving the lowest-paid workers far short of where they were in 2009.
Organized labor’s drive for a $15 an hour minimum wage has always been a modest proposal — even when it was first launched in New York City way back in 2012.
In 2016, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare East — the largest healthcare union in the nation — backed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders for president, along with many other powerful unions — even though Clinton failed to match Sanders’ commitment to a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.
At the time, George Gresham, the chapter president who was also then head of N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “Campaign for Economic Justice,” said that worker advocates would first have to win a $15 an hour minimum wage — and then fight for indexing it to inflation.
Today, indexing the federal minimum wage to productively alone would pay low-wage American workers more than $24 an hour.
“We don’t want to scare people,” Gresham told me five years ago. “First we’ve got to get a living wage established. Then we fight to index that going forward into the future.”
Inflation-Adjusted Tax Breaks
In contrast, many of the tax breaks awarded to wealthy people with Republican sponsors are automatically adjusted for inflation.
Despite some crucial pandemic aid, worker advocates who stumped hard for the Democratic ticket insist they’ve more than earned the right to criticize the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package where it fails to deliver for working people.
“We know how to say what part of it is good; we know how to say what part of it is bad — and we know how to say what part of it is nice. But at the end of the day, the bill did not go far enough,” Cooper says.
Sunita Viswanath, a co-founder of Sadhana and Hindus for Human Rights, is also upset that a minimum wage hike was cut from Biden’s pandemic relief legislation.
“I am so disheartened that even after we elected the Democrats back to power — this is the side that is supposed to care about the poor and equity — we’re still fighting this fight like this,” Viswanath says. “There’s a lot in the stimulus bill has a lot in it that’s good — and we applaud that. We like the expanded child tax credit — but how does it make sense to give a child tax credit and give the parents poverty wages? The stimulus package as it stands is not the best we can do.”
Shailly Gupta-Barnes, policy director for the Poor People’s Campaign and The Kairos Center, challenges the Biden White House narrative that the child tax credit contained in the president’s Rescue America Plan will halve child poverty.
“It is not, on its own, enough to address child poverty, let alone cut it in half,” she says.
‘Get With The People’
Mary Kay Henry, head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — the leading union behind the nearly decade-old Fight for $15 movement — says passage of Biden’s signature policy goal is “not a time for celebration.”
She said that the eight Democratic senators who voted against a $15 minimum wage need to “get with the people of their state.”
“We will win a $ 15-hour minimum wage and we will win every fight for justice that is part of this incredible fusion movement,” said Henry. It is unclear whether union Democrats will try to unseat any of the eight.
Traditionally, organized labor has generally backed establishment Democrats even in the face of increasingly diminishing returns. But when it comes to a $15 minimum wage, Cooper says the Democrats should not expect trade unionists and their allies on the front lines to “dance and be happy.”
“We cannot,” says Cooper, the union local leader representing airport workers seeking $15 an hour at least. “We will not stop and we are not going away.”
The Biden White House says it has not given up the fight for $15. It has not made clear just how it could achieve that goal since Senate Republicans can still block legislation requiring a 60-vote Senate majority and Democrats hold only 50 seats.
BUILDING OR UNBUILDING AMERICA?
By Nomi Prins, Tom Dispatch.
March 15, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/building-or-unbuilding-america/
Infrastructure Should Be The Great Economic Equalizer.
During the Trump years, the phrase “Infrastructure Week” rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline. What began in June 2017 as a failed effort by The Donald’s White House and a Republican Senate to focus on the desperately needed rebuilding of American infrastructure morphed into a meme and a running joke in Washington.
Despite the focus in recent years on President Trump’s failure to do anything for the country’s crumbling infrastructure, here’s a sad reality: considered over a longer period of time, Washington’s political failure to fund the repairing, modernizing, or in some cases simply the building of that national infrastructure has proven a remarkably bipartisan “effort.” After all, the same grand unfulfilled ambitions for infrastructure were part and parcel of the Obama White House from 2009 on and could well typify the Biden years, if Congress doesn’t get its act together (or the filibuster doesn’t go down in flames). The disastrous electric grid power outages that occurred during the recent deep freeze in Texas are but the latest example of the pressing need for infrastructure upgrades and investments of every sort. If nothing is done, more people will suffer, more jobs will be lost, and the economy will face drastic consequences.
Since the mid-twentieth century, when most of this country’s modern infrastructure systems were first established, the population has doubled. Not only are American roads, airports, electric grids, waterways, railways and more distinctly outdated, but today’s crucial telecommunications sector hasn’t ever been subjected to a comprehensive broadband strategy.
Worse yet, what’s known as America’s “infrastructure gap” only continues to widen. The cost of what we need but haven’t done to modernize our infrastructure has expanded to $5.6 trillion over the last 20 years ($3 trillion in the last decade alone), according to a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Some estimates now even run as high as $7 trillion.
In other words, as old infrastructure deteriorates and new infrastructure and technology are needed, the cost of addressing this ongoing problem only escalates. Currently, there is a $1-trillion backlog of (yet unapproved) deferred-maintenance funding floating around Capitol Hill. Without action in the reasonable future, certain kinds of American infrastructure could, like that Texas energy grid, soon be deemed unsafe.
Now, it’s true that the U.S. continues to battle Covid-19 with more than half a million lives already lost and significant parts of the economy struggling to make ends meet. Even before the pandemic, however, America’s failing infrastructure system was already costing the average household nearly $3,300 a year.
According to ASCE, “The nation’s economy could see the loss of $10 trillion in GDP [gross domestic product] and a decline of more than $23 trillion in business productivity cumulatively over the next two decades if current investment trends continue.” Whatever a post-pandemic economy looks like, our country is already starved for policies that offer safe, reliable, efficient, and sustainable future infrastructure systems. Such a down payment on our future is crucial not just for us, but for generations to come.
As early as 2016, ASCE researchers found that the overall number of dams with potential high-hazard status had already climbed to nearly 15,500. At the time, the organization also discovered that nearly four out of every 10 bridges in America were 50 years old or more and identified 56,007 of them as already structurally deficient. Those numbers would obviously be even higher today.
And yet, in 2021, what Americans face is hardly just a transportation crisis. The country’s energy system largely predates the twenty-first century. The majority of American electric transmission and distribution systems were established in the 1950s and 1960s with only a 50-year life cycle. ASCE reports that, “More than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity.” That means our systems weren’t and aren’t equipped to handle excess needs — especially in emergencies.
The country is critically overdue for infrastructure development in which the government and the private sector would collaborate with intention and urgency. Infrastructure could be the great equalizer in our economy, if only the Biden administration and a now-dogmatically partisan Congress had the fortitude and foresight to make it happen.
American History Offers A Roadmap For Infrastructure Success
It wasn’t always like this. Over the course of American history, building infrastructure has not only had a powerful economic impact, but regularly garnered bipartisan political support for the public good.
In July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. That landmark bill provided federal support to an already ongoing private effort to build the first transcontinental railroad. Though at the time all its ramifications weren’t positive — notably escalating conflicts between Native Americans and settlers pushing westward — the effort did connect the country’s coastal markets, provided jobs for thousands, and helped jumpstart commerce in the West. Believe it or not, most of that transcontinental railroad line is still in use today.
In December 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill authorizing the construction of a dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River in the American Southwest, a region that had faced unpredictable flooding and lacked reliable electricity. Despite the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, by early 1931, the private sector, with government support, had begun constructing a structure of unprecedented magnitude, known today as the Hoover Dam. As an infrastructure project, it would eventually pay for itself through the sale of the electricity that it generated. Today, that dam still provides electricity and water to tens of millions of people.
Having grasped the power of the German system of autobahns while a general in World War II, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, under the guise of “national security,” launch the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, with bipartisan support, creating the interstate highway system. In its time, that system would be considered one of the “greatest public works projects in history.”
In the end, that act would lead to the creation of more than 47,000 miles of roads across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. It would have a powerful effect on commercial business activity, national defense planning, and personal travel, helping to launch whole new sectors of the economy, ranging from roadside fast-food restaurants to theme parks. According to estimates, it would return more than six dollars in economic productivity for every dollar it cost to build and support, a result any investor would be happy with.
Equivalent efforts today would undoubtedly prove to be similar economic drivers. Domestically, such investments in infrastructure have always proven beneficial. New efforts to create sustainable green energy businesses, reconfigure energy grids, and rebuild crippled transit systems for a new age would help guarantee U.S global economic competitiveness deep into the twenty-first century.
Infrastructure As An International Race For Influence
In an interview with CNBC in February 2021, after being confirmed as the first female treasury secretary, Janet Yellen stressed the crucial need not just for a Covid-19 stimulus relief but for a sustainable infrastructure one as well.
As part of what the Biden administration has labeled its “Build Back Better” agenda, she underscored the “long-term structural problems in the U.S. economy that have resulted in inequality [and] slow productivity growth.” She also highlighted how a major new focus on clean-energy investments could make the economy more competitive globally.
When it comes to infrastructure and sustainable development efforts, the U.S. is being left in the dust by its primary economic rivals. Following his first phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Biden noted to a group of senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee that, “if we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.” He went on to say, “They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment, and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”
As this country, deep in partisan gridlock, stalls on infrastructure measures of any sort, its global competitors are proceeding full speed ahead. Having helped to jumpstart its economy with projects like high-speed railways and massive new bridges, China is now accelerating its efforts to further develop its technological infrastructure. As Bloomberg reported, the Chinese are focused on supporting the build-up of “everything from wireless networks to artificial intelligence. In the master plan backed by President Jinping himself, China will invest an estimated $1.4 trillion over six years” in such projects.
And it’s not just that Asian giant leaving the U.S. behind. Major trading partners like Australia, India, and Japan are projected to significantly out-invest the United States. The World Economic Forum’s 2019 Global Competitiveness Report typically listed this country in 13th place among the world’s nations when it came to its infrastructure quality. (It had been ranked 5th in 2002.) In 2020, that organization ranked the U.S. 32nd out of 115 countries on its Energy Transition Index.
Despite the multiple stimulus packages that Congress has passed in the Covid-19 era, no funding — not a cent — has been designated for capital-building projects. In contrast, China, Japan, and the European Union have all crafted stimulus programs in which infrastructure spending was a core component.
Infrastructure Development As A Political Equalizer
Infrastructure could be the engine for the most advantageous kinds of growth in this country. An optimal combination of federal and private funds, strategic partnerships, targeted infrastructure bonds, and even the creation of an infrastructure bank could help jumpstart a range of sustainable and ultimately revenue-generating businesses.
Such investment is a matter of economics, of cost versus benefit. These days, however, such calculations are both obstructed and obfuscated by politics. In the end, however, political economics comes down to getting creative about sources of funding and how to allocate them. To launch a meaningful infrastructure program would mean deciding who will produce it, who will consume it, and what kinds of transfer of wealth would be involved in the short and long run. Though the private sector certainly would help drive such a new set of programs, government funding would, as in the past, be crucial, whether under the rubric of national security, competitive innovation, sustainable clean energy, or creating a carbon-neutral future America. Any effort, no matter the label, would undoubtedly generate sustainable public and private jobs for the future.
On both the domestic and international fronts, infrastructure is big business. Wall Street, as well as the energy and construction sectors, are all eager to learn more about Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan, which he is expected to take up in his already delayed first joint address to Congress. Actions, not just words, are needed.
Expectations are running high about what might prove to be a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure initiative. Such anticipation has already elevated the stock prices of construction companies, as well as shares in the sustainable energy sector.
There are concerns, to be sure. A big infrastructure package might never make it through an evenly split Senate, where partisanship is the name of the game. Some economists also fear that it could bring on inflation. There is, of course, debate over the role of the private sector in any such plan, as well as horse-trading about what kinds of projects should get priority. But the reality is that this country desperately needs infrastructure that, in turn, can secure a sustainable and green future. Someday this will have to be done, and the longer the delay, the more those costs are likely to rise. The future revenues and economic benefits from a solid infrastructure package should be key drivers in any post-pandemic economy.
The biggest asset managers in the country are already seeing more money flowing into their infrastructure and sustainable-energy funds. Financing for such deals in the private sector is also increasing. Any significant funding on the public side will only spur and augment that financing. Such projects could drive the economy for years to come. They would run the gamut from establishing smart grids and expanding broadband reach to building electric transmission systems that run off more sustainable energy sources, while manufacturing cleaner vehicles and ways to use them. Going big with futuristic transit projects like Virgin’s Hyperloop, a high-speed variant of a vacuum train, or Elon Musk’s initiative for the development of carbon-capture technology, could even be included in a joint drive to create the necessary clean-energy infrastructure and economy of the future.
Polling also shows that such infrastructure spending has broad public support, even if, in Congress, much-needed bipartisan backing for such a program remains distinctly in question. Still, in February, the ranking Republican senator on the environment and public works committee, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, said that “transportation infrastructure is the platform that can drive economic growth — all-American jobs, right there, right on the ground — now and in the future, and improve the quality of life for everyone on the safety aspects.” Meanwhile, the committee’s chairman, Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, stressed that “the burdens of poor road conditions are disproportionately shouldered by marginalized communities.” He pointed out that “low-income families and peoples of color are frequently left behind or left out by our investments in infrastructure, blocking their access to jobs and education opportunities.”
Sadly, given the way leadership in Washington wasted endless months dithering over the merits of supporting American workers during a pandemic, it may be too much to hope that a transformative bipartisan infrastructure deal will materialize.
Infrastructure As The Great Economic Equalizer
Here’s a simple reality: a strong American economy is dependent on infrastructure. That means more than just a “big umbrella” effort focused on transportation and electricity. Yes, airports, railroads, electrical grids, and roadways are all-important economic drivers, but in the twenty-first-century world, high-capacity communications systems are also essential to economic prosperity, as are distribution channels of various sorts. At the moment, there’s a water main break every two minutes in the U.S. Nearly six billion gallons of treated water are lost daily thanks to such breaks. Situations like the one in Flint, Michigan, in which economic pressure and bankruptcy eventually led a city to expose thousands of its children to poisonous drinking water, will become increasingly unavoidable in a country with an ever-deteriorating infrastructure.
The great economic equalizer is this: the more efficient our infrastructure systems become, the less they cost, and the more they can be readily used by those across the income spectrum. What American history shows since the time of Abraham Lincoln is that, in periods of economic turmoil, major infrastructure building or rebuilding will not only pay for itself but support the economy for generations to come.
For the next generation, it’s already clear that clean and sustainable energy will be crucial to achieving a more equal, economically prosperous, and less climate-challenged future. A renewables-based rebuilding of the economy and the creation of the jobs to go with it would be anything but some niche set of activities in the usual infrastructure spectrum. It would be the future. High-paying jobs within the sustainable energy sector are already booming. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that among the occupations projected to have the fastest employment growth from 2016 to 2026 will be those in “green” work.
Wall Street and big tech companies are also paying attention. Amazon, Google, and Facebook have become the world’s biggest corporate purchasers of clean energy and are now planning for some of the world’s most transformational climate targets. That will mean smaller companies will also be able to enter that workspace as innovation and infrastructure drive economic incentives.
The Next Generation
It may be ambitious to expect that we’ve left the Groundhog Day vortex of “infrastructure week” behind us, but the critical demand for a new Infrastructure Age confronts us now. From Main Street to Wall Street, the need and the growing market for a sustainable, efficient, and clean future couldn’t be more real. An abundance of avenues to finance such a future are available and it makes logical business sense to pursue them.
It’s obvious enough what should be done. The only question, given American politics in 2021, is: Can it be done?
The economy of tomorrow will be built upon the infrastructure measures of today. You can’t see the value of stocks from space, nor can you see the physical value of what you’ve left to the next generation from stat sheets. But from the International Space Station you can see the Hoover Dam and even San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. What will future generations see that we’ve left behind? If the answer is nothing, that will be a tragedy of our age.
TEN PROBLEMS WITH BIDEN’S FOREIGN POLICY AND ONE SOLUTION
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Popular Resistance.
March 15, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/ten-problems-with-bidens-foreign-policy-and-one-solution/
The Biden presidency is still in its early days, but it’s not too early to point to areas in the foreign policy realm where we, as progressives, have been disappointed–or even infuriated.
There are one or two positive developments, such as the renewal of Obama’s New START Treaty with Russia and Secretary of State Blinken’s initiative for a UN-led peace process in Afghanistan, where the United States is finally turning to peace as a last resort, after 20 years lost in the graveyard of empires.
By and large though, Biden’s foreign policy already seems stuck in the militarist quagmire of the past twenty years, a far cry from his campaign promise to reinvigorate diplomacy as the primary tool of U.S. foreign policy.
In this respect, Biden is following in the footsteps of Obama and Trump, who both promised fresh approaches to foreign policy but for the most part delivered more endless war.
By the end of his second term, Obama did have two significant diplomatic achievements with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal and normalization of relations with Cuba. So progressive Americans who voted for Biden had some grounds to hope that his experience as Obama’s vice-president would lead him to quickly restore and build on Obama’s achievements with Iran and Cuba as a foundation for the broader diplomacy he promised.
Instead, the Biden administration seems firmly entrenched behind the walls of hostility Trump built between America and our neighbors, from his renewed Cold War against China and Russia to his brutal sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and dozens of countries around the world, and there is still no word on cuts to a military budget that has grown by 15% since FY2015 (inflation-adjusted).
Despite endless Democratic condemnations of Trump, Biden’s foreign policy so far shows no substantive change from the policies of the past four years. Here are ten of the lowlights:
1. Failing to quickly rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement. The Biden administration’s failure to immediately rejoin the JCPOA, as Bernie Sanders promised to do on his first day as president, has turned an easy win for Biden’s promised commitment to diplomacy into an entirely avoidable diplomatic crisis.
Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and imposition of brutal “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran were broadly condemned by Democrats and U.S. allies alike. But now Biden is making new demands on Iran to appease hawks who opposed the agreement all along, risking an outcome in which he will fail to reinstate the JCPOA and Trump’s policy will effectively become his policy. The Biden administration should re-enter the deal immediately, without preconditions.
2. U.S. Bombing Wars Rage On – Now In Secret. Also following in Trump’s footsteps, Biden has escalated tensions with Iran and Iraq by attacking and killing Iranian-backed Iraqi forces who play a critical role in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Biden’s February 25 U.S. airstrike predictably failed to end rocket attacks on deeply unpopular U.S. bases in Iraq, which the Iraqi National Assembly passed a resolution to close over a year ago.
The U.S. attack in Syria has been condemned as illegal by members of Biden’s own party, reinvigorating efforts to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force that presidents have misused for 20 years. Other airstrikes the Biden administration is conducting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are shrouded in secrecy, since it has not resumed publishing the monthly Airpower Summaries that every other administration has published since 2004, but which Trump discontinued a year ago.
3. Refusing to hold MBS accountable for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khasssoghi. Human rights activists were grateful that President Biden released the intelligence report on the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that confirmed what we already knew: that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS) approved the murder. Yet, when it came to holding MBS accountable, Biden choked.
At the very least, the administration shcould have imposed the same sanctions on MBS, including asset freezes and travel bans, that the U.S. imposed on lower-level figures involved in the murder. Instead, like Trump, Biden is wedded to the Saudi dictatorship and its diabolical Crown Prince.
4. Clinging to Trump’s absurdist policy of recognizing Juan Guaidó as President of Venezuela. The Biden administration missed an opportunity to establish a new approach towards Venezuela when it decided to continue to recognize Juan Guaidó as “interim president”, ruled out talks with the Maduro government and appears to be freezing out the moderate opposition that participates in elections.
The administration also said it was in “no rush” to lift the Trump sanctions despite a recent study from the Government Accountability Office detailing their negative impact on the economy, and a scathing preliminary report by a UN Special Rapporteur, who noted their “devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela.” The lack of dialogue with all political actors in Venezuela risks entrenching a policy of regime change and economic warfare for years to come, similar to the failed U.S. policy towards Cuba that has lasted for 60 years.
5. Following Trump on Cuba instead of Obama. The Trump administration overturned all the progress towards normal relations achieved by President Obama, sanctioning Cuba’s tourism and energy industries, blocking coronavirus aid shipments, restricting remittances to family members, putting Cuba on a list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” and sabotaging Cuba’s international medical missions, which were a major source of revenue for its health system.
We expected Biden to immediately start unraveling Trump’s confrontational policies, but catering to Cuban exiles in Florida for domestic political gain apparently takes precedence over a humane and rational policy towards Cuba, for Biden as for Trump.
Biden should instead start working with the Cuban government to allow the return of diplomats to their respective embassies, lift all restrictions on remittances, make travel easier, and work with the Cuban health system in the fight against COVID-19, among other measures.
6. Ramping up the Cold War with China. Biden seems committed to Trump’s self-defeating Cold War and arms race with China, talking tough and ratcheting up tensions that have led to racist hate crimes against East Asian people in the United States. But it is the United States that is militarily surrounding and threatening China, not the other way round. As former President Jimmy Carter patiently explained to Trump, while the United States has been at war for 20 years, China has instead invested in 21st century infrastructure and in its own people, lifting 800 million of them out of poverty.
The greatest danger of this moment in history, short of all-out nuclear war, is that this aggressive U.S. military posture not only justifies unlimited U.S. military budgets, but will gradually force China to convert its economic success into military power and follow the United States down the tragic path of military imperialism.
7. Failing to lift painful, illegal sanctions during a pandemic. One of the legacies of the Trump administration is the devastating use of U.S. sanctions on countries around the world, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria. UN special rapporteurs have condemned them as crimes against humanity and compared them to medieval sieges. Since most of these sanctions were imposed by executive order, President Biden could easily lift them. Even before taking power, his team announced a thorough review, but, three months later, it has yet to make a move.
Unilateral sanctions that affect entire populations are an illegal form of coercion, like military intervention, coups and covert operations, that have no place in a legitimate foreign policy based on diplomacy, the rule of law and the peaceful resolution of disputes. They are especially cruel and deadly during a pandemic and the Biden administration should take immediate action by lifting broad sectoral sanctions to ensure every country can adequately respond to the pandemic.
8. Not doing enough to support peace and humanitarian aid for Yemen. Biden appeared to partially fulfill his promise to stop U.S. support for the war in Yemen when he announced that the U.S. would stop selling “offensive” weapons to the Saudis. But he has yet to explain what that means. Which weapons sales has he cancelled?
We think he should stop ALL weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, enforcing the Leahy Law that prohibits military assistance to forces that commit gross human rights violations, and the Arms Export Control Act, under which imported U.S. weapons may be used only for legitimate self defense. There should be no exceptions to these U.S. laws for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Egypt or other U.S. allies around the world.
The U.S. should also accept its share of responsibility for what many have called the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, and provide Yemen with funding to feed its people, restore its health care system and rebuild its devastated country. A recent donor conference netted just $1.7 billion in pledges, less than half the $3.85 billion needed. Biden should restore and expand USAID funding and U.S. financial support to the UN, WHO and World Food Program relief operations in Yemen. He should also press the Saudis to reopen the air and seaports, and throw U.S. diplomatic weight behind the efforts of U.N. Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to negotiate a ceasefire.
9. Failing to back President Moon Jae-in’s diplomacy with North Korea. Trump’s failure to provide sanctions relief and explicit security guarantees to North Korea doomed his diplomacy and became an obstacle to the diplomatic process under way between Korean presidents Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, who is himself the child of North Korean refugees. So far, Biden has continued this policy of Draconian sanctions and threats.
The Biden administration should revive the diplomatic process with confidence-building measures such as opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American and North Korean families, permitting U.S. humanitarian organizations to resume their work when COVID conditions permit, and halting U.S.-South Korea military exercises and B-2 nuclear bomb flights.
Negotiations must involve concrete commitments to non-aggression from the U.S. side and a commitment to negotiating a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. This would pave the way for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and the reconciliation that so many Koreans desire — and deserve.
10. No initiative to reduce U.S. military spending. At the end of the Cold War, former senior Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee that U.S. military spending could safely be cut by half over the next 10 years. That goal was never achieved, and instead of a post-Cold War “peace dividend,” the military-industrial complex exploited the crimes of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify an extraordinary one-sided arms race. Between 2003 and 2011, the U.S. accounted for 45% of global military spending, far outstripping its own peak Cold War military spending.
Now the military-industrial complex is counting on Biden to escalate a renewed Cold War with Russia and China as the only plausible pretext for further record military budgets that are setting the stage for World War III.
Biden must dial back U.S. conflicts with China and Russia, and instead begin the critical task of moving money from the Pentagon to urgent domestic needs. He should start with at least the 10 percent cut that 93 Representatives and 23 Senators already voted for. In the longer term, Biden should look for deeper cuts in Pentagon spending, as in Rep. Barbara Lee’s bill to cut $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget, to free up resources we sorely need to invest in health care, education, clean energy and modern infrastructure.
A Progressive Way Forward
These policies, common to Democratic and Republican administrations, not only inflict pain and suffering on millions of our neighbors in other countries, but also deliberately cause instability that can at any time escalate into war, plunge a formerly functioning state into chaos or spawn a secondary crisis whose human consequences will be even worse than the original one.
All these policies involve deliberate efforts to unilaterally impose the political will of U.S. leaders on other people and countries, by methods that consistently only cause more pain and suffering to the people they claim – or pretend – they want to help.
Biden should jettison the worst of Obama’s and Trump’s policies, and instead pick the best of them. Trump, recognizing the unpopular nature of U.S. military interventions, began the process of bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, which Biden should follow through on.
Obama’s diplomatic successes with Cuba, Iran and Russia demonstrated that negotiating with U.S. enemies to make peace, improve relations and make the world a safer place is a perfectly viable alternative to trying to force them to do what the United States wants by bombing, starving and besieging their people. This is in fact the core principle of the United Nations Charter, and it should be the core principle of Biden’s foreign policy.
https://popularresistance.org/ten-problems-with-bidens-foreign-policy-and-one-solution/
The Biden presidency is still in its early days, but it’s not too early to point to areas in the foreign policy realm where we, as progressives, have been disappointed–or even infuriated.
There are one or two positive developments, such as the renewal of Obama’s New START Treaty with Russia and Secretary of State Blinken’s initiative for a UN-led peace process in Afghanistan, where the United States is finally turning to peace as a last resort, after 20 years lost in the graveyard of empires.
By and large though, Biden’s foreign policy already seems stuck in the militarist quagmire of the past twenty years, a far cry from his campaign promise to reinvigorate diplomacy as the primary tool of U.S. foreign policy.
In this respect, Biden is following in the footsteps of Obama and Trump, who both promised fresh approaches to foreign policy but for the most part delivered more endless war.
By the end of his second term, Obama did have two significant diplomatic achievements with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal and normalization of relations with Cuba. So progressive Americans who voted for Biden had some grounds to hope that his experience as Obama’s vice-president would lead him to quickly restore and build on Obama’s achievements with Iran and Cuba as a foundation for the broader diplomacy he promised.
Instead, the Biden administration seems firmly entrenched behind the walls of hostility Trump built between America and our neighbors, from his renewed Cold War against China and Russia to his brutal sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and dozens of countries around the world, and there is still no word on cuts to a military budget that has grown by 15% since FY2015 (inflation-adjusted).
Despite endless Democratic condemnations of Trump, Biden’s foreign policy so far shows no substantive change from the policies of the past four years. Here are ten of the lowlights:
1. Failing to quickly rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement. The Biden administration’s failure to immediately rejoin the JCPOA, as Bernie Sanders promised to do on his first day as president, has turned an easy win for Biden’s promised commitment to diplomacy into an entirely avoidable diplomatic crisis.
Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and imposition of brutal “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran were broadly condemned by Democrats and U.S. allies alike. But now Biden is making new demands on Iran to appease hawks who opposed the agreement all along, risking an outcome in which he will fail to reinstate the JCPOA and Trump’s policy will effectively become his policy. The Biden administration should re-enter the deal immediately, without preconditions.
2. U.S. Bombing Wars Rage On – Now In Secret. Also following in Trump’s footsteps, Biden has escalated tensions with Iran and Iraq by attacking and killing Iranian-backed Iraqi forces who play a critical role in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Biden’s February 25 U.S. airstrike predictably failed to end rocket attacks on deeply unpopular U.S. bases in Iraq, which the Iraqi National Assembly passed a resolution to close over a year ago.
The U.S. attack in Syria has been condemned as illegal by members of Biden’s own party, reinvigorating efforts to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force that presidents have misused for 20 years. Other airstrikes the Biden administration is conducting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are shrouded in secrecy, since it has not resumed publishing the monthly Airpower Summaries that every other administration has published since 2004, but which Trump discontinued a year ago.
3. Refusing to hold MBS accountable for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khasssoghi. Human rights activists were grateful that President Biden released the intelligence report on the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that confirmed what we already knew: that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS) approved the murder. Yet, when it came to holding MBS accountable, Biden choked.
At the very least, the administration shcould have imposed the same sanctions on MBS, including asset freezes and travel bans, that the U.S. imposed on lower-level figures involved in the murder. Instead, like Trump, Biden is wedded to the Saudi dictatorship and its diabolical Crown Prince.
4. Clinging to Trump’s absurdist policy of recognizing Juan Guaidó as President of Venezuela. The Biden administration missed an opportunity to establish a new approach towards Venezuela when it decided to continue to recognize Juan Guaidó as “interim president”, ruled out talks with the Maduro government and appears to be freezing out the moderate opposition that participates in elections.
The administration also said it was in “no rush” to lift the Trump sanctions despite a recent study from the Government Accountability Office detailing their negative impact on the economy, and a scathing preliminary report by a UN Special Rapporteur, who noted their “devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela.” The lack of dialogue with all political actors in Venezuela risks entrenching a policy of regime change and economic warfare for years to come, similar to the failed U.S. policy towards Cuba that has lasted for 60 years.
5. Following Trump on Cuba instead of Obama. The Trump administration overturned all the progress towards normal relations achieved by President Obama, sanctioning Cuba’s tourism and energy industries, blocking coronavirus aid shipments, restricting remittances to family members, putting Cuba on a list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” and sabotaging Cuba’s international medical missions, which were a major source of revenue for its health system.
We expected Biden to immediately start unraveling Trump’s confrontational policies, but catering to Cuban exiles in Florida for domestic political gain apparently takes precedence over a humane and rational policy towards Cuba, for Biden as for Trump.
Biden should instead start working with the Cuban government to allow the return of diplomats to their respective embassies, lift all restrictions on remittances, make travel easier, and work with the Cuban health system in the fight against COVID-19, among other measures.
6. Ramping up the Cold War with China. Biden seems committed to Trump’s self-defeating Cold War and arms race with China, talking tough and ratcheting up tensions that have led to racist hate crimes against East Asian people in the United States. But it is the United States that is militarily surrounding and threatening China, not the other way round. As former President Jimmy Carter patiently explained to Trump, while the United States has been at war for 20 years, China has instead invested in 21st century infrastructure and in its own people, lifting 800 million of them out of poverty.
The greatest danger of this moment in history, short of all-out nuclear war, is that this aggressive U.S. military posture not only justifies unlimited U.S. military budgets, but will gradually force China to convert its economic success into military power and follow the United States down the tragic path of military imperialism.
7. Failing to lift painful, illegal sanctions during a pandemic. One of the legacies of the Trump administration is the devastating use of U.S. sanctions on countries around the world, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria. UN special rapporteurs have condemned them as crimes against humanity and compared them to medieval sieges. Since most of these sanctions were imposed by executive order, President Biden could easily lift them. Even before taking power, his team announced a thorough review, but, three months later, it has yet to make a move.
Unilateral sanctions that affect entire populations are an illegal form of coercion, like military intervention, coups and covert operations, that have no place in a legitimate foreign policy based on diplomacy, the rule of law and the peaceful resolution of disputes. They are especially cruel and deadly during a pandemic and the Biden administration should take immediate action by lifting broad sectoral sanctions to ensure every country can adequately respond to the pandemic.
8. Not doing enough to support peace and humanitarian aid for Yemen. Biden appeared to partially fulfill his promise to stop U.S. support for the war in Yemen when he announced that the U.S. would stop selling “offensive” weapons to the Saudis. But he has yet to explain what that means. Which weapons sales has he cancelled?
We think he should stop ALL weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, enforcing the Leahy Law that prohibits military assistance to forces that commit gross human rights violations, and the Arms Export Control Act, under which imported U.S. weapons may be used only for legitimate self defense. There should be no exceptions to these U.S. laws for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Egypt or other U.S. allies around the world.
The U.S. should also accept its share of responsibility for what many have called the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, and provide Yemen with funding to feed its people, restore its health care system and rebuild its devastated country. A recent donor conference netted just $1.7 billion in pledges, less than half the $3.85 billion needed. Biden should restore and expand USAID funding and U.S. financial support to the UN, WHO and World Food Program relief operations in Yemen. He should also press the Saudis to reopen the air and seaports, and throw U.S. diplomatic weight behind the efforts of U.N. Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to negotiate a ceasefire.
9. Failing to back President Moon Jae-in’s diplomacy with North Korea. Trump’s failure to provide sanctions relief and explicit security guarantees to North Korea doomed his diplomacy and became an obstacle to the diplomatic process under way between Korean presidents Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, who is himself the child of North Korean refugees. So far, Biden has continued this policy of Draconian sanctions and threats.
The Biden administration should revive the diplomatic process with confidence-building measures such as opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American and North Korean families, permitting U.S. humanitarian organizations to resume their work when COVID conditions permit, and halting U.S.-South Korea military exercises and B-2 nuclear bomb flights.
Negotiations must involve concrete commitments to non-aggression from the U.S. side and a commitment to negotiating a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. This would pave the way for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and the reconciliation that so many Koreans desire — and deserve.
10. No initiative to reduce U.S. military spending. At the end of the Cold War, former senior Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee that U.S. military spending could safely be cut by half over the next 10 years. That goal was never achieved, and instead of a post-Cold War “peace dividend,” the military-industrial complex exploited the crimes of Sept. 11, 2001 to justify an extraordinary one-sided arms race. Between 2003 and 2011, the U.S. accounted for 45% of global military spending, far outstripping its own peak Cold War military spending.
Now the military-industrial complex is counting on Biden to escalate a renewed Cold War with Russia and China as the only plausible pretext for further record military budgets that are setting the stage for World War III.
Biden must dial back U.S. conflicts with China and Russia, and instead begin the critical task of moving money from the Pentagon to urgent domestic needs. He should start with at least the 10 percent cut that 93 Representatives and 23 Senators already voted for. In the longer term, Biden should look for deeper cuts in Pentagon spending, as in Rep. Barbara Lee’s bill to cut $350 billion per year from the U.S. military budget, to free up resources we sorely need to invest in health care, education, clean energy and modern infrastructure.
A Progressive Way Forward
These policies, common to Democratic and Republican administrations, not only inflict pain and suffering on millions of our neighbors in other countries, but also deliberately cause instability that can at any time escalate into war, plunge a formerly functioning state into chaos or spawn a secondary crisis whose human consequences will be even worse than the original one.
All these policies involve deliberate efforts to unilaterally impose the political will of U.S. leaders on other people and countries, by methods that consistently only cause more pain and suffering to the people they claim – or pretend – they want to help.
Biden should jettison the worst of Obama’s and Trump’s policies, and instead pick the best of them. Trump, recognizing the unpopular nature of U.S. military interventions, began the process of bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, which Biden should follow through on.
Obama’s diplomatic successes with Cuba, Iran and Russia demonstrated that negotiating with U.S. enemies to make peace, improve relations and make the world a safer place is a perfectly viable alternative to trying to force them to do what the United States wants by bombing, starving and besieging their people. This is in fact the core principle of the United Nations Charter, and it should be the core principle of Biden’s foreign policy.
More European countries suspend use of AstraZeneca vaccine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcNsZy0qE7M
Mitch McConnell THREATENS "Scorched Earth" if Democrats abolish Filibuster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p7DoE_IP8Q
Biden launches barbaric attack on immigrants
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/16/immi-m16.html
Eric London
17 hours ago
The scenes playing out across the US-Mexico border disqualify the US government from ever lecturing the world on “human rights,” its favorite pretext for invading countries and laying waste to entire societies.
The number of immigrant children detained by the US government has risen from 3,200 to 4,200 this week. Children report to attorneys that they are not allowed to shower and that they have not seen the sky in days. Yesterday, the Biden administration announced that instead of releasing children to family members, the government will transport 3,000 teenage boys to a Dallas convention hall, which they have chillingly dubbed an “immigrant decompression center.”
The events make clear that far from representing a break with Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is continuing and deepening his anti-immigrant policies. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the situation at the border a “humanitarian crisis,” as though the Biden administration and her own party were not primarily responsible for it.
The scant media attention to the attacks on immigrants has focused on the mass detention of unaccompanied children, presenting the matter as a “crisis.” Republican members of Congress traveled to the border on Monday, masquerading as the Child Protection League, declaring that the “barbaric” conditions of migrant children traveling to the US border “broke their hearts.” In other words, they want them kept out.
Perhaps even worse than the conditions imposed by the Biden administration on the children and youth that it has allowed to enter the country is its decision to summarily expel all arriving adult immigrants and those children crossing with relatives on the grounds that they pose a health risk due to the coronavirus.
In a late January letter to the Biden administration, dozens of medical experts explained that such “Title 42” expulsions serve no medical purpose: “Imposing restrictions on asylum seekers and other migrants based on immigration status is discriminatory and has no scientific basis as a public health measure.” Title 42 abolishes due process, ends the right to apply for asylum or other relief, and denies immigrants the right to appear for a hearing before expulsion. Seventy percent of the over 100,000 people who attempted to cross the border in February, including thousands of children, were expelled in this manner.
Those immigrants deported under Title 42 are sent back across the border after US authorities strip them of their possessions, including their shoelaces, leaving them to shuffle across bridges into Mexico. Many are flown hundreds of miles away from where they crossed, to be expelled at a different point along the border. Thousands presently find themselves homeless or detained along the US-Mexico border where the pandemic is spreading unabated.
In Mexico, immigrants are held in government facilities that a Doctors Without Borders official described as “worse than a makeshift camp, you don’t even have access to proper water.” The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced yesterday it has detained 1,000 children in such facilities, complying with demands by the Biden administration for a harsher crackdown. Mexican officials have also conducted a series of high-profile mass raids in recent weeks on behalf of the US.
The crackdown has resulted in death on a mass scale. On Saturday, the Guatemalan town of Comitancillo held a funeral for 11 town residents, who were murdered by gang members and their bodies burned in a car fire while trying to enter the US in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas in January—a crime which Mexican authorities covered up. Earlier this month, a car packed with immigrants crashed while attempting to enter the US, killing 13 immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Adult immigrants and accompanied children who are “fortunate” enough to make it into the United States without summary expulsion are held in crowded detention centers where COVID-19 is also spreading like wildfire. There are presently 420 active cases in detention centers, up from 370 at the end of last week. A total of 10,000 detainees have been infected with the virus since the start of the pandemic.
As for those who are able to win release from detention centers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been dropping off sick COVID-positive immigrants in towns on the Texas side of the border to fend for themselves without medical attention and without informing medical officials or local non-profits.
This reality exposes the lie that the Democratic Party represents a “lesser evil” compared to the Trump administration’s fascistic attack on immigrants. Even under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, immigrants were ostensibly allowed to apply for asylum, unlike today.
The Biden administration will soon introduce its main immigration bill, the US Citizenship Act. In announcing the bill, Biden and Democrats will spew meaningless platitudes about how America is “a nation of immigrants” (one might add, despite their best efforts). But the bill does nothing to undo the criminalization of immigrants and will pave the way for millions of deportations, especially of those who are now trying to enter the United States, as well as those with criminal records.
Under the bill, immigrants will still have no right to an attorney, the network of immigration jails will remain open, the immigration court system will remain under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), child detention will remain “legal,” the border will be further militarized, hundreds of millions of dollars will go to arming Central American police and death squads and a “public information campaign” will be conducted to scare Central Americans away from trying to reach the US border.
Workers in the United States and Europe must come to the defense of their class allies in Mexico, Central and South America, rejecting the xenophobic propaganda coming from the capitalist parties and the corporate media.
Those risking their lives to enter the US and EU are workers, small farmers and ruined small shopkeepers from countries whose natural resources have been plundered and whose population has been exploited and suppressed by powerful corporations and imperialist-backed dictators for over a century.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed nearly 800,000 across Latin America. The World Economic Forum estimated that 500 million people will fall into poverty, while the International Labor Organization predicted that 1.6 billion informal jobs worldwide—including a large section of the working class in Latin America—will be lost or see huge wage cuts. The total amount of income loss suffered by the international working class in 2020 was $3.4 trillion, roughly equal to the amount gained by the world’s richest people. The World Bank reported that 800 million immigrant family members have lost $110 billion in remittance transfers from the US and Europe for food and other necessities.
Workers in the advanced and underdeveloped countries alike confront hardship as a direct result of the policies of the ruling classes. The global working class must mobilize its tremendous social power in the struggle against these conditions by uniting across national boundaries. For this reason, defending the democratic rights of immigrant workers is a strategic imperative in the fight for socialist revolution.
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