https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dk7YFBBXtg&ab_channel=TheSerfTimes
Sunday, April 4, 2021
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland: The integration of the Native American elite with the Democratic Party
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/haal-a03.html
Kayla Costa
13 hours ago
On March 15, the US Senate voted 51-40 to confirm Democratic Representative Deb Haaland as the Interior Department’s secretary under the Biden administration, making her the first Native American to hold any Cabinet position.
Her selection has been praised as a “historic moment” since she is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and thus is being portrayed as someone who will defend and fight for the interests of all Native American people.
“This is a big deal,” tweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on December 17, describing Haaland as “a visionary Native woman in charge of federal lands. Unequivocally progressive. Green New Deal champion. Exquisitely experienced.”
Secretary Deb Haaland swearing-in with Vice President Kamala Harris (Credit: U.S. Department of the Interior)
Nathan Rott with National Public Radio wrote on the day of her confirmation, at which she wore traditional Native dress and ornaments: “Her confirmation is as symbolic as it is historic. For much of its history, the Interior Department was used as a tool of oppression against America’s Indigenous peoples. In addition to managing the country’s public lands, endangered species and natural resources, the department is also responsible for the government-to-government relations between the U.S. and Native American tribes.”
Elle magazine published an essay by Crystal Echo Hawk, member of the Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma and nonprofit leader, headlined: “The Revolutionary Power of Deb Haaland.” Echo Hawk wrote: “Deb Haaland’s secretary of the Interior confirmation is transformational for Native people. Finally, a leader who can help Americans understand that we are human beings—not caricatures or mascots. We aren’t peoples that don’t exist anymore. We are here.”
The gushing admiration for Haaland by major media outlets focuses exclusively on her cultural identity and personal story, as well as her support for Green New Deal reforms and environmental protections. These components allegedly make her the woman who will reverse Trump’s reckless environmental policies, combat climate change, fight for working people and resolve the historic oppression of Native Americans in the United States, all within Biden’s next four years.
In reality, Haaland is a longtime representative of the Democratic Party and American capitalism, including the capitalist ventures carried out on tribal lands. Her record as a businesswoman, successful campaigner and fundraiser for Democratic officials, and years as an elected representative in New Mexico have made it clear that she can be trusted to carry out the strategic aims of the Biden administration.
Her presence in the Cabinet is designed to provide Biden with a left cover. The Democratic Party is attempting to hide its true class policy—including the continuation of military aggression against China and Russia, horrific deportations of immigrants, fueling the spread of COVID-19 by reopening schools and workplaces before it is safe to do so—with the promotion of racial, gender and sexual diversity.
Early years and rise to prominence
Haaland was born in Winslow, Arizona. She is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, located 45 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her mother is Native American and served in the United States Navy and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs, while her father, a Norwegian American from Minnesota, was an officer in the US Marine Corps and fought in the Vietnam War in the course of his military career.
Growing up in a military family, she moved throughout her life, then finally settled in Albuquerque, where she graduated from Highland High School. She often refers to her military background with pride, even serving on the Armed Services Committee and taking a trip to the Middle East during her two years in Congress.
After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1994, she struggled to support her newborn child as a single mother, relying on food stamps at certain points until she graduated from UNM Law School in 2006. Haaland also started a small salsa business for additional income.
In 2007, she participated in a program with Emerge New Mexico, a nonprofit organization that develops women to run for elected office under the Democratic Party. This prepared her for her role in the Democratic Party and the management of tribal businesses, during which she established her own career while channeling social discontent among Native American and working class voters behind the Democrats in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.
By 2010, Haaland served as the Native American Vote Manager for the Democratic Party in the gubernatorial election won by Republican Susana Martinez. In 2012, she led the state’s Native American voter drive for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, while also being the Native American Caucus Chair for the Democratic Party of New Mexico.
From 2013 to 2015, she was an administrator for the San Felipe Pueblo tribe. Then she ran for Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico in 2014 on the ticket with then-Attorney General Gary King, who has a record as an energy consultant for the state and federal governments. This ticket was defeated as Martinez won a second term.
Between 2015 and 2017, Haaland was the chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, praised for her hand in producing record fundraising and voter turnout. In a Rolling Stone interview from August 2018, she explained her time as chairwoman. “We had lost our Statehouse in 2014 after 60 years, and the party had accumulated seven years worth of debt. I said I would pay off the debt and win back our Statehouse, and we did both.”
As chair of the state’s Democratic Party, she did not endorse either Sanders or Clinton in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination. Once it was clear that Clinton had won the primary contest, Haaland endorsed her and led the state party’s drive to get out the vote for her in 2016. A similar situation took place during the 2020 primaries, although Haaland was considered more favorable to Elizabeth Warren, who later advocated for her position in the Biden Cabinet.
In 2018, she ran in the Democratic Party primary election for the First Congressional District, for the seat left open when Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham ran for governor. In a contest with a heavy focus on identity politics, multiple Hispanic candidates split the vote and Haaland won the primary with 41 percent. She won the general election easily, joining Sharice Davids of Kansas as the first two Native American woman ever elected to Congress.
Her congressional record includes supporting every major element of the Democratic Party’s platform. She supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” which is code for a supposedly “humane” deportation of undocumented immigrants. She encourages “business-friendly policies” to lure businesses to areas with low tax rates to “create jobs.” During the pandemic, she voted for the CARES Act in March 2020, which funneled around $4 trillion into the financial markets while allowing COVID-19 to spread throughout the country.
Her support for the Democrats’ pro-corporate and anti-worker policies is masked behind her focus on token measures to address “environmental justice, climate change, missing and murdered indigenous women, and family-friendly policies [at workplaces].”
Laguna Development Corporation and the Native elite
Notably, in the course of her political activity between 2010 and 2015, Haaland also served on the Laguna Development Corporation (LDC) Board of Directors and became the first appointed chairwoman of the organization.
LDC is a business management firm led by a board of Native American, Hispanic and Caucasian executives, who oversee tribal retail, gaming, food and beverage, entertainment and hospitality enterprises. They currently manage Route 66 Casino, Thunder Road Steakhouse & Cantina, Legends Theater, Dancing Eagle Casino and over two dozen other sites. Its website states that the LDC’s “vision is to be a multi-billion dollar diversified corporation. Through its people and successful business development we will achieve a return on shareholder equity greater than our industry.”
The profits generated from these corporate enterprises are presented as ways to fund welfare programs, education and other public resources on tribal lands, needed since the federal government provides abysmally low levels of resources and support. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed to allow tribes to operate full-scale casino gambling to generate revenue to use however they wish. By 2013, annual Indian gaming revenue reached $28.3 billion.
A tiny elite layer of the Native population has profited from this arrangement, while the vast majority of the Native community exists as the most oppressed social layer in American society. Tom Love, for example, is a member of the Chickasaw Tribe in Oklahoma with a net worth of $5 billion from his ownership of the “Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores” chain.
The Laguna Development Corporation incorporates this privileged capitalist layer of the Pueblo tribes in New Mexico. Board members often have a background with oil and gas companies, agricultural business. One current member, Maxine Velasquez, managed the Laguna Construction Company, which held multiple contracts with the US Air Force and military.
Throughout her own time on the board, the “unequivocally progressive” Haaland completely accepted this capitalist framework and ties to the US war machine (which she grew up in) and was praised as a corporate leader, who pushed Laguna to adopt “commitments to earth-friendly business practices.”
A “left” face in the right-wing Biden administration
Her actual political record runs counter to the conventional narrative that Haaland will fight for the urgent needs of the Native American population, the environment and the working class. This presentation is designed to capture the increasingly left-wing and progressive sentiments among workers and youth in order to sow illusions in the Democratic Party in a time of immense social and political crisis.
The Biden administration, like the Democratic Party as a whole, is using identity politics to give a “left” gloss to a conventionally right-wing, pro-capitalist and militaristic administration. At the time of his inauguration, all media attention was on the diversity of the Cabinet members.
At the first official meeting of the Cabinet, held Thursday, the main focus of the media was the contrast between Trump’s Cabinet, 75 percent white males, and Biden’s, with the first gay Cabinet member, nearly half women, the first Native American, the first black Pentagon chief, and so on. Of the 23 Cabinet-level positions filled by Biden, 11 are female, 12 are nonwhite, and only six are straight white males.
All, of course, are proven defenders of the capitalist system and of American imperialism. The gay Secretary of Transportation was an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. The black Pentagon chief oversaw the war in Iraq and then all US military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. The female Secretary of the Treasury opened the financial spigots for Wall Street during her term as chief of the Federal Reserve Board. The Hispanic Secretary of Education, a former teacher, made his name from his ruthless drive to reopen schools in Connecticut despite the pandemic.
The Native American population faces extremely difficult circumstances of deep poverty and social isolation, compounded now by the pandemic. None of these conditions will be altered by the elevation of a Native American to head the Department of Interior, which includes oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, long the spearhead of the oppression of Native Americans, particularly those living on tribal reservation lands.
Haaland will follow in the footsteps of countless African American and Hispanic mayors and police chiefs, whose installation has done nothing to alter the conditions of poverty and oppression faced by black and Hispanic workers in the major cities. Capitalist politics, whether the faces are white or black or brown, offers nothing to working class. The question is the building of an independent political movement to unite the working class on the basis of a socialist program.
Nathan Rott with National Public Radio wrote on the day of her confirmation, at which she wore traditional Native dress and ornaments: “Her confirmation is as symbolic as it is historic. For much of its history, the Interior Department was used as a tool of oppression against America’s Indigenous peoples. In addition to managing the country’s public lands, endangered species and natural resources, the department is also responsible for the government-to-government relations between the U.S. and Native American tribes.”
Elle magazine published an essay by Crystal Echo Hawk, member of the Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma and nonprofit leader, headlined: “The Revolutionary Power of Deb Haaland.” Echo Hawk wrote: “Deb Haaland’s secretary of the Interior confirmation is transformational for Native people. Finally, a leader who can help Americans understand that we are human beings—not caricatures or mascots. We aren’t peoples that don’t exist anymore. We are here.”
The gushing admiration for Haaland by major media outlets focuses exclusively on her cultural identity and personal story, as well as her support for Green New Deal reforms and environmental protections. These components allegedly make her the woman who will reverse Trump’s reckless environmental policies, combat climate change, fight for working people and resolve the historic oppression of Native Americans in the United States, all within Biden’s next four years.
In reality, Haaland is a longtime representative of the Democratic Party and American capitalism, including the capitalist ventures carried out on tribal lands. Her record as a businesswoman, successful campaigner and fundraiser for Democratic officials, and years as an elected representative in New Mexico have made it clear that she can be trusted to carry out the strategic aims of the Biden administration.
Her presence in the Cabinet is designed to provide Biden with a left cover. The Democratic Party is attempting to hide its true class policy—including the continuation of military aggression against China and Russia, horrific deportations of immigrants, fueling the spread of COVID-19 by reopening schools and workplaces before it is safe to do so—with the promotion of racial, gender and sexual diversity.
Early years and rise to prominence
Haaland was born in Winslow, Arizona. She is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, located 45 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her mother is Native American and served in the United States Navy and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs, while her father, a Norwegian American from Minnesota, was an officer in the US Marine Corps and fought in the Vietnam War in the course of his military career.
Growing up in a military family, she moved throughout her life, then finally settled in Albuquerque, where she graduated from Highland High School. She often refers to her military background with pride, even serving on the Armed Services Committee and taking a trip to the Middle East during her two years in Congress.
After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1994, she struggled to support her newborn child as a single mother, relying on food stamps at certain points until she graduated from UNM Law School in 2006. Haaland also started a small salsa business for additional income.
In 2007, she participated in a program with Emerge New Mexico, a nonprofit organization that develops women to run for elected office under the Democratic Party. This prepared her for her role in the Democratic Party and the management of tribal businesses, during which she established her own career while channeling social discontent among Native American and working class voters behind the Democrats in the aftermath of the 2008 recession.
By 2010, Haaland served as the Native American Vote Manager for the Democratic Party in the gubernatorial election won by Republican Susana Martinez. In 2012, she led the state’s Native American voter drive for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, while also being the Native American Caucus Chair for the Democratic Party of New Mexico.
From 2013 to 2015, she was an administrator for the San Felipe Pueblo tribe. Then she ran for Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico in 2014 on the ticket with then-Attorney General Gary King, who has a record as an energy consultant for the state and federal governments. This ticket was defeated as Martinez won a second term.
Between 2015 and 2017, Haaland was the chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, praised for her hand in producing record fundraising and voter turnout. In a Rolling Stone interview from August 2018, she explained her time as chairwoman. “We had lost our Statehouse in 2014 after 60 years, and the party had accumulated seven years worth of debt. I said I would pay off the debt and win back our Statehouse, and we did both.”
As chair of the state’s Democratic Party, she did not endorse either Sanders or Clinton in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination. Once it was clear that Clinton had won the primary contest, Haaland endorsed her and led the state party’s drive to get out the vote for her in 2016. A similar situation took place during the 2020 primaries, although Haaland was considered more favorable to Elizabeth Warren, who later advocated for her position in the Biden Cabinet.
In 2018, she ran in the Democratic Party primary election for the First Congressional District, for the seat left open when Representative Michelle Lujan Grisham ran for governor. In a contest with a heavy focus on identity politics, multiple Hispanic candidates split the vote and Haaland won the primary with 41 percent. She won the general election easily, joining Sharice Davids of Kansas as the first two Native American woman ever elected to Congress.
Her congressional record includes supporting every major element of the Democratic Party’s platform. She supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” which is code for a supposedly “humane” deportation of undocumented immigrants. She encourages “business-friendly policies” to lure businesses to areas with low tax rates to “create jobs.” During the pandemic, she voted for the CARES Act in March 2020, which funneled around $4 trillion into the financial markets while allowing COVID-19 to spread throughout the country.
Her support for the Democrats’ pro-corporate and anti-worker policies is masked behind her focus on token measures to address “environmental justice, climate change, missing and murdered indigenous women, and family-friendly policies [at workplaces].”
Laguna Development Corporation and the Native elite
Notably, in the course of her political activity between 2010 and 2015, Haaland also served on the Laguna Development Corporation (LDC) Board of Directors and became the first appointed chairwoman of the organization.
LDC is a business management firm led by a board of Native American, Hispanic and Caucasian executives, who oversee tribal retail, gaming, food and beverage, entertainment and hospitality enterprises. They currently manage Route 66 Casino, Thunder Road Steakhouse & Cantina, Legends Theater, Dancing Eagle Casino and over two dozen other sites. Its website states that the LDC’s “vision is to be a multi-billion dollar diversified corporation. Through its people and successful business development we will achieve a return on shareholder equity greater than our industry.”
The profits generated from these corporate enterprises are presented as ways to fund welfare programs, education and other public resources on tribal lands, needed since the federal government provides abysmally low levels of resources and support. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed to allow tribes to operate full-scale casino gambling to generate revenue to use however they wish. By 2013, annual Indian gaming revenue reached $28.3 billion.
A tiny elite layer of the Native population has profited from this arrangement, while the vast majority of the Native community exists as the most oppressed social layer in American society. Tom Love, for example, is a member of the Chickasaw Tribe in Oklahoma with a net worth of $5 billion from his ownership of the “Love’s Travel Stops and Country Stores” chain.
The Laguna Development Corporation incorporates this privileged capitalist layer of the Pueblo tribes in New Mexico. Board members often have a background with oil and gas companies, agricultural business. One current member, Maxine Velasquez, managed the Laguna Construction Company, which held multiple contracts with the US Air Force and military.
Throughout her own time on the board, the “unequivocally progressive” Haaland completely accepted this capitalist framework and ties to the US war machine (which she grew up in) and was praised as a corporate leader, who pushed Laguna to adopt “commitments to earth-friendly business practices.”
A “left” face in the right-wing Biden administration
Her actual political record runs counter to the conventional narrative that Haaland will fight for the urgent needs of the Native American population, the environment and the working class. This presentation is designed to capture the increasingly left-wing and progressive sentiments among workers and youth in order to sow illusions in the Democratic Party in a time of immense social and political crisis.
The Biden administration, like the Democratic Party as a whole, is using identity politics to give a “left” gloss to a conventionally right-wing, pro-capitalist and militaristic administration. At the time of his inauguration, all media attention was on the diversity of the Cabinet members.
At the first official meeting of the Cabinet, held Thursday, the main focus of the media was the contrast between Trump’s Cabinet, 75 percent white males, and Biden’s, with the first gay Cabinet member, nearly half women, the first Native American, the first black Pentagon chief, and so on. Of the 23 Cabinet-level positions filled by Biden, 11 are female, 12 are nonwhite, and only six are straight white males.
All, of course, are proven defenders of the capitalist system and of American imperialism. The gay Secretary of Transportation was an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. The black Pentagon chief oversaw the war in Iraq and then all US military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. The female Secretary of the Treasury opened the financial spigots for Wall Street during her term as chief of the Federal Reserve Board. The Hispanic Secretary of Education, a former teacher, made his name from his ruthless drive to reopen schools in Connecticut despite the pandemic.
The Native American population faces extremely difficult circumstances of deep poverty and social isolation, compounded now by the pandemic. None of these conditions will be altered by the elevation of a Native American to head the Department of Interior, which includes oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, long the spearhead of the oppression of Native Americans, particularly those living on tribal reservation lands.
Haaland will follow in the footsteps of countless African American and Hispanic mayors and police chiefs, whose installation has done nothing to alter the conditions of poverty and oppression faced by black and Hispanic workers in the major cities. Capitalist politics, whether the faces are white or black or brown, offers nothing to working class. The question is the building of an independent political movement to unite the working class on the basis of a socialist program.
AOC on What's Happening At The Border (In-Depth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGJXVG6yMFE&ab_channel=HardLensMedia
March jobs growth dominated by low-wage sectors
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/jobs-a03.html
Shannon Jones
12 hours ago
Despite a better than expected jobs report for the month of March, one month after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the US remains blighted by high levels of unemployment, including a stubbornly high number of long term unemployed.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that employment rose 916,000 in March, a number boosted by large numbers of hotel, restaurant and other service workers returning to work as states moved rapidly and prematurely to remove COVID-19-related restrictions. Employment in education also rose significantly as the Biden administration moved ahead with the forced reopening of public schools.
People wait for a distribution of food in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, April 18, 2020. (Credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
The official unemployment rate fell to 6.0, still well around the pre-pandemic figure. However, a more realistic measure of the unemployment rate, which takes into account so-called discouraged workers and those forced to work part time who want full time work, stands at 10.7 percent. Known as the U6 rate, this figure gives a more accurate picture of the degree of social distress.
Reflecting the reentry of lower-paid workers into the labor force, average hourly earnings fell slightly in March.
In another indication of the depth of the social crisis, more than 4.2 million have been out of work for more than six months, and that number rose slightly in March from the previous month.
The largest job gains in March came from leisure and hospitality with a 280,000 increase. Bars and restaurants added 176,000 jobs, while arts, entertainment and recreation saw 64,000 new hires. These three sectors, typically low-wage and seasonal, accounted for well over half of the March job gains.
Local, state and private education added 190,000 jobs in March as schools reopened in cities across the US under the pressure of the Biden administration and Democratic Party politicians, who see the schools as a child care service for potential workers. This homicidal policy will only serve to add new fuel to the pandemic, which despite vaccinations, is surging in Michigan and a number of other states.
Construction added 110,000 jobs in March, while manufacturing added 53,000. Manufacturing is down 515,000 jobs since February 2020. Altogether, through March the US economy is still down 8.4 million jobs since before the pandemic.
While some economists predict that April will also show strong employment gains and an optimistic report by the Wall Street Journal predicted monthly job gains averaging 500,000 for the rest of the year, that would leave overall unemployment below pre-pandemic levels. According to the Federal Open Market Committee, a return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate prior to the pandemic would take until the end of 2023 in the unlikely event there are not intervening economic shocks.
Another measure, the labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of the population employed or actively seeking work, was little changed in March at 61.5 percent. That compares to the prepandemic level of 63 percent. The number of workers forced to work part time who wanted full time employment stood at 5.8 million, 1.4 million higher than February 2020. The number of discouraged workers stood at 523,000, unchanged from the previous month.
The release of the jobs report follows the publication of the Department of Labor report on weekly unemployment claims that showed an increase of 61,000 state claims from the previous week to 719,000. This marks more than one year of historically unprecedented numbers of new unemployment filings. In addition there were 237,025 new claims filed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that provides assistance to contract and self-employed workers not covered by regular unemployment benefits.
In the face of the rising employment numbers, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell rushed to reassure markets that the cash spigot would be left open despite signs of an improving economy. The US central bank has been propping up equities markets through the purchase of $120 billion in bonds each month while keeping interest rates near zero. Were this flow of money to be stopped or even slow down, the inflated stock market would likely crash.
The precarious nature of the financial boom was illustrated earlier this week by the stock selloff around the collapse of investment firm Archegos Capital that resulted in massive losses for major banks. The degree to which the failure of even a relatively small firm could threaten to spark a panic in the markets testifies to the highly leveraged and unstable character of the world financial system, inflated by the infusion of ultra-cheap money.
In a sign of continuing social distress, food banks report no let-up in demand. According to a local news report, the Alameda County Food Bank in the San Francisco Bay Area is continuing to see high demand. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the food bank distributed 3.2 million pounds of food. In March 2021, that number was 6.0 million. The food bank went from helping one in five residents of the county to rising over the course of the past year to one in four.
At the Mission Food Hub in San Francisco, donations are collected for farm workers. It has gone from distributing food to 300 families a year to over 9,000. "The pandemic has caused them to get COVID and they can't work. And when they can't work they get no money. They don't have savings and 401Ks," organizer Roberto Hernandez told KTVU News. "You have people who lost their jobs a year ago. And they won't be able to go back to those jobs because a lot of those businesses are gone."
According to a report released by the Georgia Food Bank Association, an additional 344,000 residents of the state have been forced into food insecurity since the start of the pandemic. The report said that 1.7 million people in the state face food insecurity, including 562,000 children.
Nationwide food bank network Feeding America projects that 1.4 million New York City residents will struggle to secure adequate food this year. Enrollment in food stamps had increased 12 percent to 1.66 million city residents as of January.
Food Bank for New York City, which distributes food through a network of 1,000 food banks and charities, has seen a 61 percent increase in demand over the prior year. Zac Hall, vice president of programs for the nonprofit, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the same level of response that we have today is going to at least be needed for the next couple of years.”
The official unemployment rate fell to 6.0, still well around the pre-pandemic figure. However, a more realistic measure of the unemployment rate, which takes into account so-called discouraged workers and those forced to work part time who want full time work, stands at 10.7 percent. Known as the U6 rate, this figure gives a more accurate picture of the degree of social distress.
Reflecting the reentry of lower-paid workers into the labor force, average hourly earnings fell slightly in March.
In another indication of the depth of the social crisis, more than 4.2 million have been out of work for more than six months, and that number rose slightly in March from the previous month.
The largest job gains in March came from leisure and hospitality with a 280,000 increase. Bars and restaurants added 176,000 jobs, while arts, entertainment and recreation saw 64,000 new hires. These three sectors, typically low-wage and seasonal, accounted for well over half of the March job gains.
Local, state and private education added 190,000 jobs in March as schools reopened in cities across the US under the pressure of the Biden administration and Democratic Party politicians, who see the schools as a child care service for potential workers. This homicidal policy will only serve to add new fuel to the pandemic, which despite vaccinations, is surging in Michigan and a number of other states.
Construction added 110,000 jobs in March, while manufacturing added 53,000. Manufacturing is down 515,000 jobs since February 2020. Altogether, through March the US economy is still down 8.4 million jobs since before the pandemic.
While some economists predict that April will also show strong employment gains and an optimistic report by the Wall Street Journal predicted monthly job gains averaging 500,000 for the rest of the year, that would leave overall unemployment below pre-pandemic levels. According to the Federal Open Market Committee, a return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate prior to the pandemic would take until the end of 2023 in the unlikely event there are not intervening economic shocks.
Another measure, the labor force participation rate, which measures the percentage of the population employed or actively seeking work, was little changed in March at 61.5 percent. That compares to the prepandemic level of 63 percent. The number of workers forced to work part time who wanted full time employment stood at 5.8 million, 1.4 million higher than February 2020. The number of discouraged workers stood at 523,000, unchanged from the previous month.
The release of the jobs report follows the publication of the Department of Labor report on weekly unemployment claims that showed an increase of 61,000 state claims from the previous week to 719,000. This marks more than one year of historically unprecedented numbers of new unemployment filings. In addition there were 237,025 new claims filed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that provides assistance to contract and self-employed workers not covered by regular unemployment benefits.
In the face of the rising employment numbers, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell rushed to reassure markets that the cash spigot would be left open despite signs of an improving economy. The US central bank has been propping up equities markets through the purchase of $120 billion in bonds each month while keeping interest rates near zero. Were this flow of money to be stopped or even slow down, the inflated stock market would likely crash.
The precarious nature of the financial boom was illustrated earlier this week by the stock selloff around the collapse of investment firm Archegos Capital that resulted in massive losses for major banks. The degree to which the failure of even a relatively small firm could threaten to spark a panic in the markets testifies to the highly leveraged and unstable character of the world financial system, inflated by the infusion of ultra-cheap money.
In a sign of continuing social distress, food banks report no let-up in demand. According to a local news report, the Alameda County Food Bank in the San Francisco Bay Area is continuing to see high demand. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the food bank distributed 3.2 million pounds of food. In March 2021, that number was 6.0 million. The food bank went from helping one in five residents of the county to rising over the course of the past year to one in four.
At the Mission Food Hub in San Francisco, donations are collected for farm workers. It has gone from distributing food to 300 families a year to over 9,000. "The pandemic has caused them to get COVID and they can't work. And when they can't work they get no money. They don't have savings and 401Ks," organizer Roberto Hernandez told KTVU News. "You have people who lost their jobs a year ago. And they won't be able to go back to those jobs because a lot of those businesses are gone."
According to a report released by the Georgia Food Bank Association, an additional 344,000 residents of the state have been forced into food insecurity since the start of the pandemic. The report said that 1.7 million people in the state face food insecurity, including 562,000 children.
Nationwide food bank network Feeding America projects that 1.4 million New York City residents will struggle to secure adequate food this year. Enrollment in food stamps had increased 12 percent to 1.66 million city residents as of January.
Food Bank for New York City, which distributes food through a network of 1,000 food banks and charities, has seen a 61 percent increase in demand over the prior year. Zac Hall, vice president of programs for the nonprofit, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think the same level of response that we have today is going to at least be needed for the next couple of years.”
US and Iran Finally Start Talking About Deal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqCZqKu8tQ&ab_channel=HardLensMedia
Military clashes raise danger of major escalation between Russia and Ukraine
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/03/ukra-a03.html
Clara Weiss
12 hours ago
The past week has seen a significant escalation of fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass region. While the Western media is decrying an alleged “Russian aggression,” the military clashes have, in fact, taken place against the backdrop of a series of major provocations by the Ukrainian government which is calculating to receive NATO support in a potential war with Russia.
The level of tensions between Russia and Ukraine is greater now than at any time since a US-German-backed coup by far-right forces toppled the Yanukovich government in February 2014. The coup, part of a decades-long strategy by imperialism to encircle Russia, triggered the annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin and a civil war in the east of the country, which has claimed the lives of over 13,500 people.
A Ukrainian soldier, donning U.S. made equipment, takes his front line position at destroyed Butovka coal mine in the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. (AP Photo/Vitali Komar)
Earlier in March, Kiev approved a strategy aimed at “recovering Crimea.” The peninsula in the Black Sea is of major geopolitical importance and and home to the naval base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Any move by Kiev to seize it would be tantamount to a declaration of war.
On March 25, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky approved a new military strategy which emphasizes the need to prepare for the mobilization of the entire population in a war against Russia that would be conducted on Ukrainian soil. The strategy acknowledged that no such war could be won without NATO support and mentions Ukraine’s planned accession to the military alliance no less than 19 times.
In a recent interview, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Colonel General Ruslan Khomchak, discussed a possible offensive to retake the separatist-controlled Donbass in East Ukraine. Acknowledging that such an offensive would require huge civilian casualties, Khomchak stressed that Zelensky “has every power to give the command or take a decision.”
At the same time, a hysterical anti-Russian atmosphere is being whipped up in Ukraine. Over the past months, Zelensky has cracked down on key outlets and TV channels of the pro-Russian faction of the Ukrainian oligarchy. The leader of the opposition, the billionaire Viktor Medvedchuk, who has close ties to the Kremlin, has been sanctioned. On Friday, the head of the Independent Miners’ Union, Mikhail Volyntsev, spoke in the Ukrainian Rada (parliament), accusing Russia of a supposed attack on Ukraine’s electrical grid.
This week, reports have emerged of significant Russian troop movements in Crimea and East Ukraine, involving infantry fighting vehicles and anti-tank missiles. Reports have also indicated that Belarusian troops are being mobilized on the border of Ukraine.
On Wednesday, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has warned that “Ukraine may take provocative actions which could lead to war.” He accused the US of using Ukraine as a means to create conditions for war, stating, “The West is preparing for nothing less than war with us.” That same day, Russian president Vladimir Putin met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss the situation in Ukraine.
On Friday, US President Joe Biden spoke with Zelensky for the first time since he took office. Biden pledged “unwavering support” for Ukraine against Russia. Throughout the week, there were at least three high-level calls between the American and Ukrainian government, involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The Wall Street Journal described the crisis as a “test” for the Biden administration.
Map of the Black Sea region
Since coming into office, the Biden administration has made clear that it would pursue an extremely aggressive course toward Russia. In one of his first foreign policy acts as president, Biden bombed an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia position on the Syria-Iraq border, a move that was targeted against not just Iran, but also Russia. At a NATO summit last week, the NATO powers launched a “NATO 2030” effort to prepare for nuclear war against Russia and China. Just before the summit, Biden called Putin a “killer without a soul” in an interview—an extraordinary attack on the head of state of another country—triggering a diplomatic crisis. Underlying the growing danger of war and the increasingly reckless moves of the imperialist powers and their allies is the profound crisis of the world capitalist system which has been significantly accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
In Ukraine, the social and political crisis is particularly sharp. Over a year into the pandemic, the coronavirus is ripping through the impoverished population completely unhinged. On April 1, 421 people died, and new daily infections hit the second highest number in the pand e mic. Over 33,200 people have officially died from the virus, but the real number is likely much higher. With hospitals overwhelmed and some people reportedly taking medication meant for animals, an adviser to the Ukrainian health ministry recommended people who contracted COVID-19 to be prepared “to die at home.”
The same imperialist powers that have pumped billions of dollars into Ukraine’s far right and military to prepare for war against Russia have refused to provide any meaningful help with COVID-19 vaccine distribution. The Zelensky government has rejected the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, arguing that accepting it would mean a “geopolitical blow.” As a result, only 220,000 people out of a population of 44 million had received the first jab of a vaccine and only two individuals were fully vaccinated as of March 30. Millions of migrant workers have lost their jobs, while many more were laid off or experienced significant income losses. In the war zone in East Ukraine, millions of people lack access to drinking water, with some villages having no access to water at all, according to UNICEF. Like capitalist governments across the world, the Ukrainian government, far from doing anything to alleviate the social suffering, used the crisis to carry out further social attacks on the working class.
While the Ukrainian oligarchy’s reckless provocations are no doubt in part an effort to divert the enormous class tensions outward, the main driving force behind the conflict is the historic decline of US imperialism and its efforts to offset it by military means. Aiming to gain full control over the vast resources of the former Soviet Union, the US and NATO have systematically encircled Russia since 1991 and orchestrated numerous coups on its borders, including two in Ukraine, in 2004 and 2014.
A 2019 document by the RAND Corporation, one of the most important think tanks advising the US government, outlined a strategy of forcing Russia to “overextend” itself militarily in conflicts on its borders. The aim of this strategy is to weaken the Putin regime economically and politically while enabling the US to focus more directly on its main strategic rival: China. The military conflict in East Ukraine is a central part of that strategy.
The report noted, “The Ukrainian military already is bleeding Russia in the Donbass region (and vice versa). Providing more U.S. military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it.” It then warned that such a strategy could come at a significant cost to the US itself and was extremely risky, yet it is precisely this strategy that the US has been pursuing.
Over the past seven years, the US has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Ukrainian military, and US military advisers play a major role in training the Ukrainian army. The RAND Corporation acknowledged that all its proposed strategies involved the risk of an uncontrollable military escalation, including the deployment of nuclear weapons—risks US imperialism is clearly prepared to take.
The working class is confronting the catastrophic consequences of the 1991 dissolution of the USSR by the Soviet bureaucracy, which grew out of the Stalinist betrayal of the socialist October revolution of 1917. As the ICFI wrote at the time, the dissolution of the USSR did not mark the end of socialism, much less a period of the “triumph of capitalism.” Rather, it opened up a new period of imperialist wars of plunder and social revolution. 30 years later, this assessment has been fully confirmed. The critical question now is the construction of a socialist anti-war movement in the working class, based on these historical lessons. For more on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, click here.
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