“The recovery has been very strong,” Donald Trump said last week. Then the Commerce Department reported the U.S. economy contracted between April and June at the fastest pace in nearly three-quarters of a century, which is as long as economists have been keeping track. The drop wiped out five years of economic growth.

But pesky facts have never stopped Trump. Having lied for five months about the coronavirus, he’s now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he can dupe his way to election day.

The comeback “won’t take very long,” he reassured Americans on Thursday. But every indicator shows that after a small uptick in June, the US economy is tanking again. Restaurant reservations are down, traffic at retail stores is dwindling, more small businesses are closing, the small rebound in air travel is reversing.

What’s Trump’s plan to revive the economy? The same one he’s been pushing for months: just “reopen” it.

He wants the public to believe the shutdown orders that began in March caused the economy to tank in the first place, so reversing them will bring the economy back.

Rubbish. It was the virus that caused the downturn, and its resurgence is taking the economy down again. The virus is surging back because governors reopened prematurely, before the virus was under control – at Trump’s repeated insistence.

The sequence of cause-and-effect is clear. The virus has surged most in states that were among the first to reopen, such as Florida, South Carolina, Texas and much of the rest of the Sun Belt.

Because of this resurgence, many states are pausing plans to reopen and some are reimposing restrictions. But these restrictions are not the reason the economy is slowing. They are the necessary consequence of allowing the pandemic to get out of control.

Even the White House’s own coronavirus taskforce concludes that 21 states have outbreaks serious enough to justify more restrictions.

Notably, the economy is sliding again even though the government has pumped trillions of dollars into it. 

What happens when the money stops? We’re about to find out. Senate Republicans can’t agree among themselves, let alone with House Democrats, about more funding, while Trump says “we really don’t care” about reaching a spending agreement.

That means starting this week more than 30 million Americans will no longer receive $600 in extra weekly employment benefits. As a result, tens of millions will not be able to make rent or mortgage payments. More will go hungry, including children. The economy is likely to slide even further.

The White House argues that the extra unemployment payments have discouraged workers from seeking jobs because some are receiving more money in benefits than they would earn by working.

“We don’t want to create disincentives to work,” says Trump adviser Larry Kudlow.

More rubbish. A study by Yale economists finds “no evidence” that people who have lost their jobs are choosing to stay unemployed because of the extra federal aid. In fact, “workers facing larger [unemployment] expansions generally appear to be quicker to return to work than others, not slower.”

People can’t go back to work because there is very little work for them to do. Fourteen million more people are unemployed than there are jobs.

In fact, the extra benefits have been keeping some 3 million employed because the money has gone into the pockets of people who spend it, thereby sustaining economic activity. Shrinking those benefits will put less money into consumer pockets, with the result that millions more jobs will be lost.

Lies about the economy are harder to spot than lies about the coronavirus because the virus’s grim death count is painfully apparent while the economy is complicated. 

But Trump’s economic lies are no less egregious than his coronavirus lies, and, like the coronavirus lies, his economic ones are about to cause a great deal of unnecessary suffering.

How Mitch McConnell’s Republicans are Destroying America

Senate Republicans don’t want to extend the extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits, even though unemployment has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression.

Even before the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. Now many are desperate, as revealed by lengthening food lines and growing delinquencies in rent payments.    

McConnell’s response? He urges lawmakers to be “cautious” about helping struggling Americans, warning that “the amount of debt that we’re adding up is a matter of genuine concern.” 

McConnell seems to forget the $1.9 trillion tax cut he engineered in December 2017 for big corporations and the super-rich, which blew up the debtdeficit.  

That’s just the beginning of the GOP’s handouts for corporations and the wealthy. As soon as the pandemic hit, McConnell and Senate Republicans were quick to give mega-corporations a $500 billion blank check, while only sending Americans a paltry one-time $1,200 check.

The GOP seems to believe that the rich will work harder if they receive more money while people of modest means work harder if they receive less. In reality, the rich contribute more to Republican campaigns when they get bailed out.

That’s precisely why the GOP put into the last Covid relief bill a $170 billion windfall to Jared Kushner and other real estate moguls, who line the GOP’s campaign coffers. Another $454 billion of the package went to backing up a Federal Reserve program that benefits big business by buying up their debt.

And although the bill was also intended to help small businesses, lobbyists connected to Trump – including current donors and fundraisers for his reelection – helped their clients rake in over $10 billion of the aid, while an estimated 90 percent of small businesses owned by people of color and women got nothing.

The GOP’s shameful priorities have left countless small businesses with no choice but to close. They’ve also left 22 million Americans unemployed, and 28 million at risk of being evicted by September. 

For the bulk of this crisis, McConnell called the Senate back into session only to confirm more of Trump’s extremist judges and advance a $740 billion defense spending bill. 

Throughout it all, McConnell has insisted his priority is to shield businesses from Covid-related lawsuits by customers and employees who have contracted the virus.

The inept and overwhelmingly corrupt reign of Trump, McConnell, and Senate Republicans will come to an end next January if enough Americans vote this coming November.

But will enough people vote during a pandemic? The HEROES Act provides $3.6 billion for states to expand mail-in and early voting, but McConnell and his GOP lackeys aren’t interested. They’re well aware that more voters increase the likelihood Republicans will be booted out.

Time and again, they’ve shown that they only care about their wealthy donors and corporate backers. If they had an ounce of concern for the nation, their priority would be to shield Americans from the ravages of Covid and American democracy from the ravages of Trump. But we know where their priorities lie.

5 Key Demands for the New Coronavirus Bill

COVID-19 has left the economy in tatters, put millions of people on the brink of financial devastation, and taken the lives of over 145,000 Americans. Congress has just days left to pass legislation that will keep struggling Americans afloat and stave off economic catastrophe. 

Here are five key demands for the new bill.

1. Contain COVID-19. Its catastrophic rates of sickness and death, as well as tragic economic consequences, require the boldest remedies this country is capable of mustering. There will be no economic recovery until the virus is contained.

Other nations – among them, Germany, South Korea, and Italy – have contained the pandemic with comprehensive testing, contact tracing, and isolation. The House of Representatives wants to provide $75 billion for these measures in addition to free access to coronavirus treatment and support for hospitals and other providers. This is the absolute minimum of what’s needed.

2. Extend unemployment benefits to help people survive the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Previous coronavirus relief legislation added $600 to weekly unemployment and extended coverage to gig workers and others not normally eligible. But those payments are about to end for roughly 25 million people. If they do, we can expect more human suffering, and more joblessness because the extra purchasing power has helped sustain the economy. The payments should be continued at least through the end of the year, as the House bill provides.

Some say the extra unemployment benefits have discouraged recipients from seeking jobs. That’s highly unlikely. Given the size of the economic collapse, few jobs are available anyway. And normal unemployment benefits typically pay a small fraction of the wages of jobs that were lost. 

Even with the extra benefits, working people will have a strong economic incentive to return to work once COVID is contained and these benefits expire. Not to mention it’s good for the economy when people have extra money to spend to sustain remaining economic activity. Finally, it is beneficial to the public’s health that as many people as possible avoid workplaces that pose any risk of infection. Keeping people home to contain the virus is the only way we get the economy back on track.

3. Prevent a potential wave of evictions and foreclosures. 32 percent of households missed their July rent or mortgage payments. The bill must extend the federal eviction moratorium, and provide assistance for renters and homeowners to pay rent, mortgages, utilities, and other related costs. Substantial additional resources for housing assistance is a no-brainer.

4. Shore up state and local budgets. State and local governments are facing huge budget shortfalls over the next three years. Without federal aid, vital public services will be on the chopping block – schools, childcare, supplemental nutrition, mental health services, low-income housing, healthcare – at a time when the public needs them more than ever. 

For public schools, the issue isn’t so much whether to reopen but how to do so in a way that doesn’t risk the health of students, teachers, and other school personnel. This will require substantial additional resources. If we could afford to give corporations a $500 billion blank check in the last round of relief legislation, we can surely afford to help struggling state and local governments. The House Bill provides nearly $1 trillion to state and local governments, which is minimally adequate.  

5. Don’t compromise what’s needed in the bill out of concern about the national debt. The real issue is the ratio of debt to the size of the economy. The government must spend large sums now to help the economy recover faster – thereby reducing the ratio of debt to the overall economy over the long term. Besides, as we learned during the Great Depression and World War II, large spending to reduce human suffering and promote economic wellbeing is well worth the cost. It’s what almost every other nation is doing.

None of this should be controversial. This bill is perhaps our only chance to get COVID-19 under control, Americans fed, and the economy back up and running. 

Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and demand they fight to protect the American people. The window to act is closing, so raise your voice now.

Trump’s Worst Attacks on Workers

Well, here’s a clue: Tucked away on page 203 of the COVID stimulus package backed by Trump, is an obscure provision that delivers a whopping $135 billion in tax breaks to millionaire real estate developers and hedge fund managers. One real estate tycoon who stands to profit handsomely from the provision is none other than the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
In total, the cash secretly spent on tax cuts for millionaires in the COVID-19 package is more than three times as much money as was included for emergency housing and food relief.

Kushner isn’t the only Trump insider getting paid off during the pandemic. Forty lobbyists with ties to Donald Trump have helped clients secure more than $10 billion in federal COVID aid. And if Trump succeeds in getting the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans will get an average additional tax cut of $198,000 each per year.

Donald Trump is no working-class champion. He’s a corporate con man – the culmination of a rigged-for-the-rich system that’s shafting working Americans at every turn.

The Real Choice: Social Control or Social Investment

Some societies center on social control, others on social investment.

Social-control societies put substantial resources into police, prisons, surveillance, immigration enforcement, and the military. Their purpose is to utilize fear, punishment, and violence to divide people and keep the status quo in place — perpetuating the systemic oppression of Black and brown people, and benefiting no one but wealthy elites.

Social-investment societies put more resources into healthcare, education, affordable housing, jobless benefits, and children. Their purpose is to free people from the risks and anxieties of daily life and give everyone a fair shot at making it.

Donald Trump epitomizes the former. He calls himself the “law and order” president. He even wants to sic the military on Americans protesting horrific police killings. 

He has created an unaccountable army of federal agents who go into cities like Portland, Oregon – without showing their identities – and assault innocent Americans. 

Trump is the culmination of forty years of increasing social control in the United States and decreasing social investment – a trend which, given the deep-seated history of racism in the United States, falls disproportionately on Black people, indigeneous people, and people of color.

Spending on policing in the United States has almost tripled, from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017.

America now locks away 2.2 million people in prisons and jails. That’s a 500 percent increase from 40 years ago. The nation now has the largest incarcerated population in the world.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has exploded. More people are now in ICE detention than ever in its history.

Total military spending in the U.S. has soared from $437 billion in 2003 to $935.8 billion this fiscal year.

The more societies spend on social controls, the less they have left for social investment. More police means fewer social services. American taxpayers spend $107.5 billion more on police than on public housing.

More prisons means fewer dollars for education. In fact, America is now spending more money on prisons than on public schools. Fifteen states now spend $27,000 more per person in prison than they do per student.

As spending on controls has increased, spending on public assistance has shrunk. Fewer people are receiving food stamps. Outlays for public health have declined.

America can’t even seem to find money to extend unemployment benefits during this pandemic.

Societies that skimp on social investment end up spending more on social controls that perpetuate violence and oppression. This trend is a deep-seated part of our history.

The United States began as a control society. Slavery – America’s original sin – depended on the harshest conceivable controls. Jim Crow and redlining continued that legacy.

But in the decades following World War II, the nation began inching toward social investment – the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and substantial investments in health and education.

Then America swung backward to social control.

Since Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” four times as many people have been arrested for possessing drugs as for selling them. 

Of those arrested for possession, half have been charged with possessing cannabis for their own use. Nixon’s strategy had a devastating effect on Black people that is still felt today: a Black person is nearly 4 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than a white person, even though they use it at similar rates.

Bill Clinton put 88,000 additional police on the streets and got Congress to mandate life sentences for people convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug offenses. 

This so-called “three strikes you’re out” law was replicated by many states, and, yet again, disproportionately impacted Black Americans. In California, for instance, Black people were 12 times more likely than white people to be incarcerated under three-strikes laws, until the state reformed the law in 2012. Clinton also “reformed” welfare into a restrictive program that does little for families in poverty today. 

Why did America swing back to social control?

Part of the answer has to do with widening inequality. As the middle class collapsed and the ranks of the poor grew, those in power viewed social controls as cheaper than social investment, which would require additional taxes and a massive redistribution of both wealth and power.

Meanwhile, politicians whose power depends on maintaining the status quo, used racism – from Nixon’s “law and order” and Reagan’s “welfare queens” to Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric – to deflect the anxieties of an increasingly overwhelmed white working class. It’s the same old strategy. So long as racial animosity exists, the poor and working class won’t join together to topple the system that keeps so many Americans in poverty, and Black Americans oppressed.

The last weeks of protests and demonstrations have exposed what’s always been true: social controls are both deadly and unsustainable. They require more and more oppressive means of terrorizing communities and they drain resources that would ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive. 

This moment calls on us to relinquish social control and ramp up our commitment to social investment.

It’s time we invest in affordable housing and education, not tear gas, batons, and state-sanctioned murder. It’s time we invest in keeping children fed and out of poverty, not putting their parents behind bars. It’s time to defund the police, and invest in communities. We have no time to waste.

Donald Trump said that June’s jobs report, which showed an uptick, proves the economy is “roaring back.”

Rubbish. The Labor Department gathered the data during the week of June 12, when America was reporting 25,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day. By the time the report was issued, that figure was 55,000.

The economy isn’t roaring back. Just over half of working-age Americans have jobs now, the lowest ratio in over 70 years. What’s roaring back is Covid-19. 

Until it’s tamed, the economy doesn’t stand a chance.

The surge in cases isn’t because America is doing more tests for the virus, as Trump contends. Cases are rising even where testing is declining. Deaths have resumed their gruesome ascent.

The surge is occurring because America reopened before Covid-19 was contained.

Trump was so intent on having a good economy by Election Day that he resisted doing what was necessary to contain the virus. He left everything to governors and local officials, then warned that the “cure” of closing the economy was “worse than the disease.” Trump even called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public health restrictions.

Yet he still has no national plan for testing, contact tracing and isolating people with infections. 

It would be one thing if every other rich nation in the world botched it as badly as has America. But even Italy – not always known for the effectiveness of its leaders or the pliability of its citizens – has contained the virus and is reopening without a resurgence.

There was never a conflict between containing Covid-19 and getting the economy back on track. The first was always a prerequisite to the second. By doing nothing to contain the virus, Trump has not only caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but put the economy into a stall.

The uptick in jobs in June was due almost entirely to the hasty reopening, which is now being reversed. Across America, a vast re-closing is underway, as haphazard as was the reopening. 

In the biggest public health emergency in US history, in which nearly 136,000 have already lost their lives, still no one is in charge.

Brace yourself. Not only will the virus take many more lives in the months ahead, but millions of Americans are in danger of becoming destitute. Extra unemployment benefits enacted by Congress in March are set to end July 31. About one in five people in renter households are at risk of eviction by September 30. Delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March.

An estimated 25 million Americans have lost or will lose employer-provided health insurance. America’s fragile childcare system is in danger of collapse, with the result that hundreds of thousands of working parents will not be able to return to work even if jobs are available.

What is Trump and the GOP’s response to this looming catastrophe? Nothing. Senate Republicans are trying to ram through a $740 billion defense bill while ignoring legislation to provide housing and food relief.

They are refusing to extend extra unemployment benefits beyond July, saying the benefits are keeping Americans from returning to work. In reality, it’s the lack of jobs.

Trump has done one thing, though. He’s asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. If the court agrees, it will end health insurance for 23 million more Americans and give the richest 0.1% a tax cut of about $198,000 a year.

This is sheer lunacy. The priority must be to get control over this pandemic and help Americans survive it, physically and financially. Anything less is morally indefensible.

After the bruising crises we’re now going through, it would be wonderful if we could somehow emerge a fairer nation. One possibility is to revive an old idea: sharing the profits.

The original idea for businesses to share profits with workers emerged from the tumultuous period when America shifted from farm to factory. In December 1916, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report on profit-sharing, suggesting it as a way to reduce the “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers, thereby “fostering the development of a larger spirit of harmony and cooperation, and resulting, incidentally, in greater efficiency and larger gains.”

That same year, Sears, Roebuck and Co., one of America’s largest corporations, with 30,000 to 40,000 employees, announced a major experiment in profit-sharing. The company would contribute 5 percent of net earnings, without deduction of dividends to shareholders, into a profit-sharing fund. (Eventually the company earmarked 10 percent of pretax earnings for the plan.) Employees who wished to participate would contribute 5 percent of their salaries. All would be invested in shares of Sears stock. The plan’s purpose, according to The New York Times, was to “to engender loyalty and harmony between employer and employee.” In reviewing its first three years, The Times noted that 92 percent of Sears’s employees had joined up and that “the participating employee not only found an ever-increasing sum of money to his credit, but eventually discovered he was a shareholder in the corporation, with a steadily growing amount of stock to his name.”

Sears’s plan was admirably egalitarian. Distributions of shares were based on years of service, not rank, and the longest-serving workers received nearly $3 for every dollar they contributed. By the 1950s, Sears workers owned a quarter of the company. By 1968, the typical Sears salesman could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing movement included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak, S.C. Johnson, Hallmark Cards and U.S. Steel — some because it seemed morally right, others because it seemed a means to higher productivity.

Profit-sharing did give workers an incentive to be more productive. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions, because payroll costs dropped as profits did. But it subjected workers to the risk that when profits were down, their paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, they’d lose all their investments in it. (Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018.) The best profit-sharing plans came in the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wished, on top of predictable base wages.

Profit-sharing fit perfectly with the evolution of the American corporation. By the 1950s, most employees of large companies had spent their entire working lives with the company. Companies and their employees were rooted in the same communities. C.E.O.s typically worked their way up, and once at the top rarely earned more than 20 times the average wage of their employees (now they’re often paid more than 300 times more). Over a third of private-sector workers were unionized. In 1958 the United Auto Workers demanded that the nation’s automakers share their profits with their workers.

Some remnants of profit-sharing remain today. Both Steelcase Inc., an office-furniture maker in Grand Rapids, Mich., and the Lincoln Electric Company, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of welding equipment, tie major portions of annual wages to profits. Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif.

But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same.

This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers. Paradoxically, it was the beginning of profit-sharing with top executives and “talent.” Big Wall Street banks, hedge funds and private-equity funds began doling out bonuses, stock and stock options to lure and keep the people they wanted. They were soon followed by high-tech companies, movie studios and start-ups of all kinds.

Even before tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and incomes in the current pandemic, the pay of the typical worker had barely risen since the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, ever-greater wealth continues to concentrate at the very top.

Since 2000, the portion of total national income going to American workers has dropped farther than in other rich nations. A steadily larger portion has gone into corporate profits, which have been reflected in higher share prices. But a buoyant stock market doesn’t help most Americans. The richest 1 percent now own half the value of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent, 92 percent.

Those higher share prices have come out of the pockets of workers. Daniel Greenwald at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, Martin Lettau at the University of California’s Haas School of Business and Sydney Ludvigson at N.Y.U. found that from 1952 to 1988, economic growth accounted for all the rise in stock values, but from 1989 to 2017, growth accounted for just 24 percent. Most came from “reallocated rents to shareholders and away from labor compensation” — that is, from workers.

Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty.

If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904.

There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees.

It’s impossible to predict what kind of America will emerge from the crises we’re now experiencing, but the four-decade trend toward higher profits and lower wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. Sharing the profits with all workers is a logical and necessary first step to making capitalism work for the many, not the few.

Corporate Hypocrisy on Racism

But when you peel back their PR stunts and press releases, the truth comes into focus: far from being the solution to systemic racism in America, these billionaires and their corporations are actively perpetuating it.

Consider Jamie Dimon, billionaire CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who recently took a knee before a lineup of cameras at a branch of his bank. In a statement, Dimon urged his employees to “be inclusive in our work and in the neighborhoods where we operate." 

Let’s take a look at that inclusivity, shall we? In 2017, the bank paid $55 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing it of discriminating against Black and Latino mortgage borrowers — causing some 53,000 borrowers tens of millions of dollars in damages. According to the lawsuit, even when the bank knew about the discrimination, they did nothing to stop it.

When it’s not discriminating against its customers, JPMorgan Chase is excluding Black people from its upper echelons of management. Just 4 percent of the bank’s top executives are Black, despite years of bragging about increasing diversity. Under Dimon, the bank also agreed to pay $19.5 million in a settlement for racial discrimination against Black employees in 2018.

It’s not just Chase. Larry Fink, CEO of the giant investment firm BlackRock, recently wrote a letter to colleagues opining that “These [racist] events are symptoms of a deep and longstanding problem in our society and must be addressed on both a personal and systemic level.” 

That’s rich, considering BlackRock is one of the largest investors in the notorious private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. If Larry Fink was serious about addressing structural racism, he would stop BlackRock’s investment in an industry that disproportionately incarcerates and terrorizes Black and brown men.

It doesn’t end there. Wall Street even manages to profit off police brutality. Cities often issue municipal bonds to cover the costs of settlements related to wrongful police shootings, beatings, and imprisonments. These so-called “police brutality bonds” have earned banks and investors more than a billion dollars in profits in recent years. As if this weren’t egregious enough, banks – including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America – collect heavy fees on these bonds. Of course, this hasn’t stopped them from rolling out empty statements declaring “Black Lives Matter”.

Hypocrisy isn’t limited to Wall Street. Amazon has pledged to fight systemic racism but refuses to provide paid sick-leave to all warehouse and delivery workers, the majority of whom are people of color. 

Walmart, the nation’s largest corporate employer of Black Americans, recently announced that it would create a center on racial equality, but has overworked and mistreated its Black employees for decades. The company also donates to Republican politicians, including Senator Tom Cotton who openly called for the military to crack down on predominantly Black protestors. 

Similarly, AT&T, whose CEO called on companies to speak out against racism, has donated to Senator Rand Paul, who stalled legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime.

Many CEOs also fight against instituting a living wage and universal basic income, two policies that would lift more Black Americans out of economic oppression. 

And the very banks plastering Black Lives Matter banners on their websites not only oppose tighter regulations against red-lining, they also have provided $5.5 billion in credit to the payday lending industry. Of course, both redlining and payday lending disproportionately hurt Black and brown communities.

Don’t be fooled by glitzy press releases and flashy PR stunts. Wall Street and corporations profit from and reinforce systemic racism in America. 

We have the power — as their consumers, clients, and employees — to demand these companies and their CEOs stop their racist practices. It’s time they back up their lofty rhetoric with fundamental change.

Raise your voices, and stay vigilant.

Monopoly Mayhem: Corporations Win, Workers Lose

In the late nineteenth century, corporate power was a central concern. “Robber barons,” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed unprecedented wealth for themselves by crushing labor unions, driving competitors out of business, and making their employees work long hours in dangerous conditions for low wages. 

As wealth accumulated at the top, so too did power: Politicians of the era put corporate interests ahead of workers, even sending state militias to violently suppress striking workers. By 1890, public anger at the unchecked greed of the robber barons culminated in the creation of America’s first anti-monopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

In the following years, antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office; but after 1980, it virtually disappeared. The new view was that large corporations produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Power, the argument went, was no longer at issue. America’s emerging corporate oligarchy used this faulty academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust.

As the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, American industry grew more and more concentrated. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks. It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to just four today. Three giant cable companies came to dominate broadband. A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry.

Today, just five giant corporations preside over key, high-tech platforms, together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.

The monopolies of yesteryear are back with a vengeance.

Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation.

Meanwhile, big investors have made bundles of money off the growing concentration of American industry. Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest men, has been considered the conscience of American capitalism because he wants the rich to pay higher taxes. But Buffett has made his fortune by investing in monopolies that keep out competitors.

– The sky-high profits at Wall Street banks have come from their being too big to fail and their political power to keep regulators at bay.

– The high profits the four remaining airlines enjoyed before the pandemic came from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions.

– High profits of Big Tech have come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and disproportionate power that prevents innovative startups from entering the market.

If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he’d be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power and creating incentives for startups to enter the marketplace and increase competition.

This mega-concentration of American industry has also made the entire economy more fragile – and susceptible to deep downturns. Even before the coronavirus, it was harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses formed had already been halved from the pace in 1980. And the coronavirus has exacerbated this trend even more, bringing new business formations to a standstill with no rescue plan in sight.

And it’s brought workers to their knees. There’s no way an economy can fully recover unless working people have enough money in their pockets to spend. Consumer spending is two-thirds of this economy.

Perhaps the worst consequence of monopolization is that as wealth accumulates at the top, so too does political power.

These massive corporations provide significant campaign contributions; they have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers and directly employ many voters. So items they want included in legislation are inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped. 

They get tax cuts, tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory exemptions. When the government is handing out money to stimulate the economy, these giant corporations are first in line. When they’ve gone so deep into debt to buy back their shares of stock that they might not be able to repay their creditors, what happens? They get bailed out. It’s the same old story.

The financial returns on their political investments are sky-high.

Take Amazon – the richest corporation in America. It paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018. Meanwhile, it held a national auction to extort billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies from cities eager to house its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, its home headquarters, to back away from a tax on big corporations, like Amazon, to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the city’s sky-high rents, caused in part by Amazon!

And throughout this pandemic, Amazon has raked in record profits thanks to its monopoly of online marketplaces, even as it refuses to provide its essential workers with robust paid sick leave and has fired multiple workers for speaking out against the company’s safety issues.

While corporations are monopolizing, power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. 

In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.2 percent of them are.

Since the 1980s, corporations have fought to bust unions and keep workers’ wages low. They’ve campaigned against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. They fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so is minor compared to the profits that come from discouraging unionization. 

Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Under shareholder capitalism, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. You can guess the kind of chilling effect that has on workers’ incentives to take a stand against poor conditions.

As a result of this power shift, workers have less choice of whom to work for. This also keeps their wages low. Corporations have imposed non-compete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements, further narrowing workers’ alternatives. 

Corporations have used their increased power to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. In 1988, General Electric threatened to close a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana that made electrical motors and to relocate it abroad unless workers agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. The Fort Wayne workers eventually agreed to the cut. One of the factory’s union leaders remarked, “It used to be that companies had an allegiance to the worker and the country. Today, companies have an allegiance to the corporate shareholder. Period.”

Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so too has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have made it easier for workplaces to unionize.

All the while, corporations have been getting states to enact so-called “right-to-work” laws barring unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. Since worker representation costs money, these laws effectively gut the unions by not requiring workers to pay dues. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, extended “right-to-work” to public employees.

This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. Trump took full advantage.

All of this has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II. 

That’s true even during a severe downturn. For the last decade, most profits have been going into stock buybacks and higher executive pay rather than new investment.

The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with the decline in unionization. Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Shareholders have gained because workers stopped sharing the gains.

So, what can be done to restore bargaining power to workers and narrow the widening gap between corporate profits and wages?

For one, make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before the SEC legalized them under Ronald Reagan. This would prevent corporate juggernauts from siphoning profits into buybacks, and instead direct profits towards economic investment.

Another solution: Enact a national ban on “right-to-work” laws, thereby restoring power to unions and the workers they represent.

Require greater worker representation on corporate boards, as Germany has done through its “employee co-determination” system.

Break up monopolies. Break up any bank that’s “too big to fail”, and expand the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to find monopolies and review and halt anti-competitive mergers. Designate large technology platforms as “utilities” whose prices are regulated in the public interest and require that services like Amazon Marketplace and Google Search be spun off from their respective companies.

Above all, antitrust laws must stop mergers that harm workers, stifle competition, or result in unfair pricing.

This is all about power. The good news is that rebalancing the power of workers and corporations can create an economy and a democracy that works for all, not just a privileged few.