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16 November 20
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Robert Reich | Trump's Refusal to Concede Is Just the Latest Gambit to Please Republican Donors
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting."
Millions who should be ranged against the American oligarchy are distracted and divided – just as their leaders want
eave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.
The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay-at-home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.
The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.
Trump is continuing this charade because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024, whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.
Leading Republicans like the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, are going along with it because donors are refilling GOP coffers.
The biggest beneficiaries are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.
Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47tn richer.
A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.
The upward redistribution of $47tn wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.
Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other people’s money and was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.
When Covid-19 hit, big tech cornered the market, the rich traded on inside information and the Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared while most of America has become poorer.
How could the oligarchy get away with this in a democracy where the bottom 90% have the votes? Because the bottom 90% are bitterly divided.
Long before Trump, the GOP suggested to white working-class voters that their real enemies were Black people, Latinos, immigrants, “coastal elites”, bureaucrats and “socialists”. Trump rode their anger and frustration into the White House with more explicit and incendiary messages. He’s still at it with his bonkers claim of a stolen election.
The oligarchy surely appreciates the Trump-GOP tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and the most business-friendly supreme court since the early 1930s. But the Trump-GOP’s biggest gift has been an electorate more fiercely split than ever.
Into this melee comes Joe Biden, who speaks of being “president of all Americans” and collaborating with the Republican party. But the GOP doesn’t want to collaborate. When Biden holds out an olive branch, McConnell and other Republican leaders will respond just as they did to Barack Obama – with more warfare, because that maintains their power and keeps the big money rolling in.
The president-elect aspires to find a moderate middle ground. This will be difficult because there’s no middle. The real divide is no longer left versus right but the bottom 90% versus the oligarchy.
Biden and the Democrats will better serve the nation by becoming the party of the bottom 90% – of the poor and the working middle class, of black and white and brown, and of all those who would be $47tn richer today had the oligarchy not taken over America.
This would require that Democrats abandon the fiction of political centrism and establish a countervailing force to the oligarchy – and, not incidentally, sever their own links to it.
They’d have to show white working-class voters how badly racism and xenophobia have hurt them as well as people of color. And change the Democratic narrative from kumbaya to economic and social justice.
Easy to say, hugely difficult to accomplish. But if today’s bizarre standoff in Washington is seen for what it really is, there’s no alternative.
A biomedic and a biologist work in a laboratory during the extraction of coronavirus genetic material. (photo: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images)
Moderna's Coronavirus Vaccine Found to Be Nearly 95 Percent Effective in a Preliminary Analysis
Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Washington Post
Johnson writes: "Biotechnology firm Moderna announced Monday that a preliminary analysis shows its experimental coronavirus vaccine is nearly 95 percent effective at preventing illness, including severe cases - a striking initial result that leaves the United States with the prospect that two coronavirus vaccines could be available on a limited basis by the end of the year."
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Aleem writes: "Trump is losing lawsuits in key states - and has lost some key members of his legal team as well.
ALSO SEE: Trump Campaign Jettisons Major Parts of Its
Legal Challenge Against Pennsylvania's Election Results
Trump's Far-Fetched Legal Campaign to Question the Election Seems to Be Falling Apart
Zeeshan Aleem, Vox
Aleem writes: "Trump is losing lawsuits in key states - and has lost some key members of his legal team as well."
Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff (L) and Rev. Raphael Warnock (R) wave to supporters during a 'Get Out the Early Vote' drive-in campaign event. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
How to Actually Help the Georgia Senate Runoff Elections
Katie Way, VICE
Way writes: "Where to put your time, money, and energy between now and January 5, according to organizers on the ground."
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Workers walk to the Lusail Stadium, one of the 2022 World Cup stadiums, in Lusail, Qatar. (photo: Hassan Ammar/AP)
Across the World, Sports Stadiums and Arenas Are a Gigantic Swindle
Abdul Malik, Jacobin
Excerpt: "From Calgary to Los Angeles, everyone knows that sports arenas are a bad deal for cities. But the problem isn't just the use of public subsidies for private profit: the whole multibillion-dollar sports venue industry is built on the backs of poorly treated, underpaid workers."
he North American sports market, worth $71 billion, is limping forward in spite of COVID-19 being transmitted among rosters and fans. Teams and leagues have made token gestures to assuage fears, from keeping players in isolated, lonely bubbles, to high-tech, low-impact, and extremely invasive forms of hygiene theater. However, there’s one spectator sports mainstay that can’t return to normal: the idea of fans enjoying games in stadiums and arenas.
While full attendance is on indefinite hiatus at all major sports arenas, and the nature of mass gatherings is fundamentally changing, new venue construction projects are still being built across North America. It clearly makes little sense, in the era of COVID-19, to go on funding new arenas and stadiums. But the lack of economic benefit these projects actually offer to the communities in which they’re built reveals something deeper than the waste of capital. The modus operandi of sports venue development hinges on the disposability of service labor.
You Can Keep Your Trojan Horse, Thanks
There’s a near-universal playbook when it comes to venue construction. When a lease on a current venue expires, or the building ages to a point that repairs become costly, owners ask the city to foot the bill for a new one, or else threaten to move. Owners cite the economic impact of capital flight on municipalities, speaking of job losses and spillover effects on business. And they claim that economic growth results from the construction of new venues through multiplier effects on local spending and investment.
This is all categorically untrue. Venue construction simply diverts public money upward to society’s wealthiest layers. Study after study has demonstrated a net negative effect on economic development. To maintain the illusion of economic benefit to cities, pro-venue studies will often duplicitously factor in the extraordinary and ever-increasing salaries of athletes themselves.
In fact, new venues often deflate wages, taken as a whole, in a city’s service sector. The advantages new construction provides are found in the concentrated economic benefits accruing to the venue and a small uptick in wages for arena workers. The alleged value new venues offer a city often results in net negative spending in other sectors.
Arena booms mean less spending on things like restaurants and movie theaters, and eventually have a negative impact on overall employment for service workers. And the tiny increase in pay that sports venue workers may enjoy doesn’t mean that things are particularly great for them, either.
Recognizing the Bluff
Many studies have demonstrated the negative impact of sports teams arriving in a new city or obtaining a new venue. But what happens when teams make good on a threat to move?
Very little, it seems. While not much has been written on the impact of team relocation on the losing city, one study found no observable impact on unemployment. While this may point to a neutral impact of stadiums and arenas, it’s easy to develop a more thorough explanation from this that underscores the precarity sports venues exploit.
Sports arenas encompass a broad range of service and hospitality work — food service and prep, cashier, cleaning, and so on. These jobs are largely low-paid and part-time. Along with work in the agricultural sector, such jobs account for society’s most precarious occupations. While new arenas contain more and more accommodation for wealthy ticketholders, jobs at venues, old and new, remain perilous.
Demand for an easily exploitable and replaceable workforce is largely unaffected by the presence of sports venues. Workers in cities that lose sports teams will easily find equally awful, precarious work elsewhere. Taxpayers often end up footing the bill for shitty jobs to be offered to their desperate neighbors. And, of course, the people who take the jobs at sports venues are perpetually left out of discussions concerning venues, relocation, and “job creation.”
In December 2019, Calgary City Council voted eleven to four to approve a new arena for the Calgary Flames, with the city footing 51 percent of the $565 million bill. A report from RP Erickson & Associates touted the development’s creation of 6,450 new jobs, of which only 2,920 are going to be full-time, with an average salary of $39,482.
But averages lie. Some workers will make more, many will make much less. In any case, this average salary — even assuming no dependents are in the picture — still just barely covers the cost of making ends meet in Calgary. And it doesn’t account for the rising cost of living associated with the other side effect of stadium and arena development: gentrification.
Sports megaprojects are an extraordinary gentrifying force, often anchoring a larger project of working-class displacement. In Edmonton, the relatively new Rogers Place arena was the lynchpin of a larger neighborhood development, called the Ice District, that was meant to gentrify the downtown core. It’s already interrupted and created tensions with vital services for the city’s most vulnerable.
The Ice District initiative was partly forced through by a threat to move the team to Seattle. Supporters of the new Calgary arena pitch it as part of a similar district project, which would return less than 1.5 percent a year to the municipality.
Gentrification’s net effect on cities pushes out residents from low-income demographics, increases commute times, and harms the overall health of workers. Sports venue development also exacerbates existing problems of urban accessibility.
In cities like Edmonton and Calgary, public transit has historically been a low priority for city councils. Calgary’s arena deal followed a sharp cut by the provincial government to a vital Green Line Light Rail Transit (LRT) project. While the provincial government renewed its commitment a year later, Calgary City Council approved funding for its new arena in lieu of covering the transit shortfall.
Because of the economic havoc wreaked by the ongoing pandemic, Calgary City Council is now considering large-scale austerity and further cuts to its LRT project. The city’s commitment to the new arena has compounded these economic woes. The proposed cuts will have an inordinate effect on workers who have been laid off because of COVID-19, who were previously employed in badly paid jobs — just like those to be found at Calgary’s impending sports arena.
The Relocation Fallacy
As more than one economist has observed, it would be more efficient for cities to throw money onto the streets than to subsidize a new stadium — to say nothing of using the cash for vital infrastructure. So why do cities still do it?
In theory, municipal pride is supposed to play a major part in creating popular support for arena projects. On closer inspection, the reality is often quite different. While most Calgarians wanted a new arena for their beloved Flames, local opinion was split down the middle over the use of public funds to make it happen.
When the Oakland Raiders moved to Las Vegas, it may have been disappointing for the team’s die-hard fanbase, but polling demonstrated that Oaklanders were overwhelmingly willing to lose the team if it meant they could use public funds to address homelessness and build housing instead. The city of Las Vegas spent $750 million on the Raiders’ new stadium.
In cases like Calgary’s, team owners used the threat of capital flight and the negative political fallout that would ensue as leverage to extract more public subsidies. And Calgary City Council flinched. Now the Stampeders have come knocking on the door of city council, expecting the same treatment.
The widespread notion that city councils capitulate because of civic pride masks the vital role of lobbying and political pressure. This mistaken belief obscures the cozy relationship between municipal governments and corporations that ultimately lines the pockets of the 1 percent. In Canada, nine major stadiums and arenas have been built with taxpayer funds since 2000. Out of six major sports venues opened in the last two years in the United States, four have benefited from public money, either in construction or tax breaks on the property itself.
Workers are caught in the middle of this public-private relationship. Sports teams straddle the worlds of commerce and culture, and athletes are often at the center of society’s most visible labor struggles. While players are workers — make no mistake about that — the resources at their disposal are clearly different in kind from those available to frontline workers. There is no specific data on unionization in sports venues, as they’re included in a variety of sectors. But we know that venue management engages in typical forms of union-busting, from dissuasion to an emphasis on hiring part-time and casual workers.
In the wake of the pandemic, the outright abandonment of arena staff bears witness to their lack of workplace protections. In some cases, players and other workers had to step in to cover pay for frontline workers before owners caved into public opinion.
Like most lucrative industries, professional sports relies heavily on public money and poorly paid staff to sustain private profit margins. In recent years, the trend toward privately funded venues has been increasing in the United States. But if cities really wanted to derive some economic benefits from sports, they could always nationalize the teams. It’s the only way workers who are fans could actually afford tickets.
'Amnesty International and local United Nations representatives have in recent days accused the police of using excessive force in their efforts to quell the unrest.' (photo: Sebastian Castaneda/Reuters)
Peru: Calls for Interim President to Resign, Three Die in Protest Crackdown
Deutsche Welle
Excerpt: "A violent crackdown on protesters angry at the recent removal of President Martin Vizcarra left at least three people dead and 13 injured in Peru on Saturday."
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Activist Greta Thunberg. (photo: Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press-Citizen)
A New Documentary About Greta Thunberg Shows the Personal Side of Her Public Fight
Suyin Haynes, TIME
Haynes writes: "Narrated by Thunberg in her native Swedish, and incorporating archival and family footage with scenes captured by Grossman, the film is a deeply personal look at the many dimensions of the world's most famous teenager."
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