US Oligarchs Won't Pay for Weapons and War: We Will

No money for student debt relief, universal healthcare, schools and teachers, public housing, childcare, and on and on. War?  Money materializes like magic and flows directly to US weapons manufacturers, the “defense” industry.

The business press spells out US spending priorities in no uncertain terms because the US business press speaks to and for the ruling elite. Regular people get mainstream media war propaganda.

An editorial in the March 8 issue of the Wall Street Journal lays elites’ cards on the table. As always, the working class and poor will pay for the latest US proxy war. Champagne and yachts for corporate CEOs, the oil and gas industry, and the military/industrial complex! Inflation and austerity for the rest of us.

Laying the ground work

 “In Europe and the U.S., public finances have long favored social spending over public goods such as defense.” Head-smacking emoji. They sure fooled me.

“Western democracies now face a more uncertain and dangerous world than they did two weeks ago. Navigating it will require significantly higher levels of defense and security spending.” Get ready for who’s going to pay.

Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2022.

Here it comes

“Paying for higher levels of defense spending will force most governments either to raise taxes or cut spending. Tax increases raise risks to growth.” Ah, I get it. Cut spending; it’s the only viable alternative.

“A significant tax increase in the U.S. would need to be accompanied by fundamental tax reform, dialing back income taxes (as with the 2017 reduction in corporate tax rates) and increasing reliance on consumption taxes.”  Consumption taxes are the most regressive of all taxes—they apply to everyday products that the working class and poor need to survive. Corporate taxes? Those always need to be dialed back. Trickle down, baby.

Working class, don’t expect to retire

“Spending offsets to accommodate higher defense spending would surely require slowing the growth in social-insurance spending.”

“Spending on social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has come to dominate the federal budget….It is possible to slow the growth of this spending while preserving access to such support for lower-income Americans. Accomplishing that will require focusing net taxpayer subsidies on lower-income Americans…”

Translation: social security and Medicare will be on the chopping block via means testing—you only get the benefits if your low income qualifies you. Means testing turns these programs from an everyone’s-in social benefit to a welfare program, thus drastically cutting the number of recipients.

Or get healthcare

“…Accomplishing that will require focusing net taxpayer subsidies on lower-income Americans, along with undertaking market-oriented health reforms.”

The current market-oriented (profit-based) US healthcare gave us 1 million covid deaths—the highest number in the world. But let’s double down on this shithole system so there’s even more money for the healthcare oligarchs and more deaths and sickness for everyone else.

Meanwhile

Oligarchs like Bezos can cruise the world (on unconfiscated yachts) happily unconcerned with the peons.

His old yacht; the new one’s on order.

Politicians’ Solution to Inflation: “Ensuring Competition”

Last week’s Mazza’s Take explained how Congress does American Hospital Association’s bidding by asking the feds to investigate nurse staffing agencies for “profiteering” and “anti-competitive behavior.”

Congress directed to cap nurses’ pay. Hospitals want Congress and the feds to dictate staffing agencies’ prices, which means dictate nurses’ wages. For public consumption, Congress and the feds bloviate about “ensuring competition” because it sounds a whole lot better than saying hospitals need to protect profits and executive compensation by capping nurses’ pay.   Of course, hospitals could match travel nurses’ pay and put the staffing agencies out of business, but that’s off the table. 

Do the Feds Cap Prices in Other Industries?  Absolutely Not!

The same federal agencies tasked with capping nurses’ wages blather about inflationary price increases and record industry profits, but are they capping those industries’ prices? Hell no! They’re changing regulations and offering subsidies to “ensure competition.” Here’s a sampling from recent business press articles.

Meat. four US meat-packing companies Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS, and National Beef Packing—control 55% to 85% of the hog, cattle, and chicken markets. Rising meat prices, the fastest rise in 30 years, affect millions of American families. Meanwhile, the meat packers are earning record profits.  Have the feds proposed capping the price of pork chops? Uh no. Biden proposed $1 billion in subsidies to encourage independent/smaller meat packers. Following this line of bullshit logic, the solution to staffing agency pricing is $1 billion in subsidies to encourage the formation of more staff agencies!

Hearing Aids. According to a Wall Street Journal article on Feb. 5, hearing aids cost consumers, primarily seniors, up to $5000.  Only four manufacturers control the hearing aid market and so can charge exorbitantly high prices.  Are the Feds going to cap the price of hearing aids?  Not a chance. They’re going to “increase competition” by changing regulations to allow over-the-counter sales...if that actually happens over the objection of the hearing aid manufacturers’ lobby.

Hospitals. A recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal called out Indiana NON-PROFIT hospitals for price gouging.  You read that right—NON-PROFIT hospitals. The editorial claimed that hospital prices in Indiana are the 5th highest in the country and that non-profit Indiana University Health’s prices are 50% higher than the national average.

“When most people hear the word ‘nonprofit’ they think of a benevolent organization driven by a desire to serve the community. This is certainly true of the public’s perception of nonprofit hospitals, which—like charities and churches—don’t pay federal, state and local taxes. Yet many large nonprofit hospitals charge unjustifiably high prices, which have led to irresponsible costs, exorbitant executive salaries and wasteful capital projects.”

The editorial raises fears that Indiana’s hospital price gouging/profiteering is so out of control that the hospitals risk public demand for a national single-payer healthcare plan, a fate worse than death for hospital profits and healthcare execs (and something candidate Joe Biden rejected out of hand). 

Politicians can’t readily “ensure competition” by funding and building a competing public hospital. And the editorial’s writers don’t propose that the fed dictate hospitals’ prices. Instead, they gently suggest that the culprit hospitals lower their own prices—over 3 years!—and only because the alternative (a public push for single-payer national healthcare) is so onerous to the business class.

Last year, We Do the Work published our own analysis of the non-profit hospital grift.

When It Comes to Inflation, Only Wages Can Be Capped

While Americans struggle with 7% inflation, politicians steer clear of capping prices in every US industry except healthcare staffing. In our capitalist corporate-controlled political system, wages are fair game but prices and profits are not.

Nurse Rebellion!

Cap Nurse Pay: Hospitals’ Wish Is Congress’s Command

Two weeks ago, 200 US House members (both Dems and Republicans, including two members of the so-called Squad) sent a letter to Jeffrey Zeints, Biden’s covid czar, asking for a federal investigation into nurse staffing agencies’ pricing practices. The legislators complain that nurse staffing agencies are pandemic profiteering, and they want federal agencies to step in and stop it. The letter’s writers, under the guise of ensuring “competition” and “protecting patients,” want the feds to investigate healthcare staffing agencies and cap the amount staffing agencies can charge hospitals for travel nurses. (The American Hospital Association, the hospitals’ lobbying organization, undoubtedly wrote the letter; AHA sent its own letter a year ago and again a few days after this one.)

Across the country, for more than two years, travel and staff nurses busted their asses, risked their and their families’ lives and health, and singlehandedly kept the US healthcare system from imploding. Their reward?  A sneak attack on their pay directed by their hospital employers and US congressional lawmakers doing the hospitals’ bidding.

Nurses see through the plan and are having none of the hospitals’ bullshit.

Cap travel agency rates = cap travel nurse pay = cap ALL nurses’ pay

Within a week of the infamous letter, a new Facebook group, United Nurses March, started planning a massive nurse march on Washington.  Within days, 176,000 nurses joined.

FACT:  if hospitals paid appropriate wages and improved nurse-to-patient ratios, they wouldn’t lose nursing staff and have to rely on staffing agencies.

FACT: hospitals can match travel nurse rates and put the staffing agencies out of business.  They aren’t gonna do that. It would cut into profits and executive pay.

Nurses Say F**k You, Cap CEO Pay!

Both staff and travel nurses are furious. Check out the nurse posts on a Reddit message board. A sampling:

  • What do the CEOs even do?  Ours makes $4+ million/year not including bonuses.  If he disappears tomorrow, would anyone notice?

  • We have a CEO?

  • CEOs are sociopaths. . . . They have one goal, money.

  • …We probably only have to eat one really rich person to get the rest in line. I mean...if we can get the EMS guys to fire up the BBQ, I'll git in on that.

  • I always find it bizarre how on weekends the parking ramps are empty and the hospital runs without a hitch. Then Monday comes and 5000 extra staff show up who do nothing

  • C-suites’ whole job is to figure out how hellish they can make your working conditions before they create a problem for themselves, and it looks like that bubble has finally popped

  • … Senior administrative positions like CEOs are expensive cancers…administrators as a whole are a cancer [that] plagues all aspects of society.

  • Our CEO walks around the hospital all day looking for someone to fire. She also reviews security tapes to see if anyone is doing anything that she doesn’t approve of in the hallways.

                    Holy shit. I hate her for you.

  • No one would want to be a CEO if the rest of the population held them accountable for their bad treatment of their workers. It's getting a little french revolutiony in here.

  • We run society, not the rich. And, according to the CDC, we only need to strike for 10 days to shut the whole economy down and demolish the owner class.  [CDC said nurses with covid could return to work in only 5 days implying a 10-days quarantine could collapse the system]

Who’s Jeffrey Zeints, the Letter Recipient?

Zeints, Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, has a net worth is $90 million.  He’s an investor, former Obama economic advisor, former member of Facebook’s board of directors, and former COO and CEO of two consulting firms that went public netting him millions.  He has no background in medicine or public health. He doesn’t give two shits about nurses’ wages or patient care, only about hospitals’ profits.

Hospital Execs Know What Nurses Want—Therapy for Burnout

Nurses demanding higher pay and safe staffing ratios aren't getting either, and are quitting hospitals in droves. What do hospital executives say nurses need to improve retention? According to a survey last week in Becker’s Hospital Review, not money or safe staffing ratios. (Only executives need money to get motivated—and lots of it.) Nurses would rather have:

  • Joy and satisfaction

  • Flexible schedules, psychological well-being, career growth and meaningful work

  • An inclusive culture

  • “Elimination of silos, feudalism and random acts of microaggressions against peers and colleagues” [what?]

  • Wellness programs that address burnout

  • A workplace culture of ownership

    Cultural transformation and the values of a modern workforce [huh?]

  • Resources for self-care

  • Self-value

  • “Strong clinical-administrative dyad leadership structures so decisions made make sense from both the financial/operations perspective and from a clinical perspective” [consultant-speak bafflegab]

Hospital Execs/Congress Pour Gasoline on a Healthcare Fire

In normal times and in the middle of a global health crisis, hospitals can’t function without nurses. Even so, they’ll cap nurse pay and risk a full-system meltdown to protect their profits and exec compensation. Hard to believe. Not hard to believe: Congress takes orders from healthcare corporations.

The US for-profit, $4 trillion/year healthcare system has been a pot of gold for hospitals, insurers, pharma, consultants, software companies, and healthcare execs. We have the world’s leading covid death rate to prove it.

Time to pay the people who do actual health care the money they’re so worth. Time for worker rebellion. Nurses, lead the way!

Inflation Bafflegab Masks Corporate Profiteering

Exhausted from two+ years of a worldwide pandemic, American workers and families now face budget-crushing inflation, the highest in 40 years.  Prices are rising fast on the goods and services families most need:  food, gas, clothing, appliances, cars, healthcare, and so much more.

Rampaging inflation will surely cost the Biden administration the mid-term elections, and the Federal Reserve response—raising interest rates—could push the economy into recession, an even bigger hit for working people.

Where are the pitchforks?

Here’s where. Politicians, corporations, and the mainstream media cover up corporate price gouging in a word salad of economic bafflegab to keep blame far away from the people doing the gouging.

The con

Corporate executives raise prices, not some mysterious, unalterable economic force. They do it to make more money. But unless you read the business press, you won’t see that stated.   Here’s what you’ll be told.

Inflation (rising prices) is a force of nature. It happens when there’s too much demand and limited supply. No one actually decides to increase prices, it just happens automatically in response to consumers demanding too much stuff, especially if they got pandemic relief money from the government. If there isn’t enough of some of the stuff to go around because so many people want it, prices just go up.

Why isn’t there enough of the stuff that people want?  The pandemic screwed up the “supply chain.” Workers are off sick, and so companies can’t make more stuff. (The fact that the US has outsourced manufacturing to countries with low labor costs somehow doesn’t get blamed for pandemic-related supply chain problems. Instead, media focuses on ships backed up and unloaded at the Port of Los Angeles, particularly workers not putting in enough hours, not on companies offshoring their manufacturing and buying components from overseas suppliers. Recall New York City nurses suited up in trash bags in the early days of the pandemic because China made all the PPE.)

And then there’s the old standby:  workers are demanding higher wages and so prices have to rise. (Wage increases lag price increases, but that’s never stated.) It’s workers’ fault—so greedy!

Only the business press will state the obvious.

“These added costs, at every step from production to sale, lead to price increases for consumers, with some companies SEIZING ON A RARE OPPORUNITY TO RAISE PRICES.” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 14. 2021.

Restated in all its ugliness: A global pandemic is a rare opportunity to raise prices and make more money! Woot woot!

The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 21, 2021.

The subhead above reads:  

“Nearly two out of three of the biggest US publicly traded companies reported fatter profit margins than they did before the pandemic; “A Very Unprecedented Environment.”

Unprecedented indeed.

Here’s another media technique. “Industries have seen their profits rise.”  Notice the grammatical construction of that sentence. No one and no company actually RAISES PRICES TO INCREASE PROFITS.  Instead, “industries” just observe that their profits [magically] go up.

And more from the same article. “Widespread inflation makes it easier to broach the topic of raising prices with customers…”  Wait, what? Did some company broach the topic with you? “Look, Mr. and Ms. Public, we’ve got to raise prices on our used cars.  Are you OK with that?”

Mainstream CNN is going to blame someone! Who?

CNN Business, November13, 2021.

“The pandemic.” 

Well, of course.

Early on, lockdowns and widespread unemployment did make consumers stop spending and caused companies’ profits to decline.

Then, according to CNN, the government passed a $1.9 trillion stimulus, consumers got some free government money, and they started spending again. But it wasn’t easy starting up global manufacturing after a worldwide shutdown.

Cars, for example, require huge numbers of parts, many manufactured in China and other parts of Asia. Production and shipping couldn’t start up just like that, and so car production stalled for lack of parts. But greedy consumers, now flush with free government money and savings from staying home, demanded cars. And that made car prices go up.  It just happened.

Nope. Car dealers made record profits in 2021 because dealers jacked up their prices.

The CNN article goes on to say that inflation may ease up when supply chain problems resolve. If not, the government can increase interest rates to slow inflation (and risk recession, another head blow to workers).

Investopedia at least says that companies raise prices, not some mysterious economic forces.

Consumers “willing to pay” more?  Or stuck paying more?

It’s simple: Companies raise prices to jack profits

Corporate executives decide to raise prices, and they decide how much.  The goal: make more money. Because when companies make more money (announce record profits), executives and shareholders make out like bandits.

You’ll hear that corporations are merely passing along their own increased costs from their suppliers. True, because execs and down the supply chain make the same price increase decisions with profits in mind. 

If corporate profits declined during the early days of the pandemic, as they did, execs will raise prices to cover earlier losses.  If corporations have to pay more for components, execs will raise prices to cover that cost as well. If competitors raise prices, execs will raise prices too, particularly in industries with a few huge players (like meat packing). Pepsi raised its prices and Coke immediately followed with its own price increase.  Coke rationale: Why leave money on the table?  (That’s exactly the phrasing execs use in these discussions—I’ve heard it.) People will buy either Coke or Pepsi, why should Coke lose out on extra profit?

Corporations raise prices whenever they can get away with it

Even so, they don’t want the public to think inflation is corporations’ fault.  So corporate execs and PR departments  come up with all kinds of semi-plausible/bullshit explanations to avoid pissing off the public—the pandemic, consumers with too much free money, the supply chain, the Fed, wages, mysterious economic forces.

Uh no.

Companies’ pricing decisions cause every inflation. 

Even Fed Chair Jerome Powell says corporations are raising prices, well, simply because they can.

Because they want to make more money.

And raising prices is a lot easier than inventing new products, buying robots, building overseas plants, and the like. Once execs calculate the potential profit, raising prices is just a keystroke.

For the win

2021 Year-end corporate reports—stay tuned to see who’s hitting the jackpot

From the article:

“U.S. corporations pulled in more profits in the three months ended in September than ever before. Not just in dollar terms—something that happens frequently—but as a share of the economy. 

But there’s a deeper structural reason for inflation, one that appears to be growing worse: the economic concentration of the American economy in the hands of a relative few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.

Top executives have been well aware of their ‘pricing power’ during this inflationary moment, and if you pay close enough attention, they're letting slip how great this time is for profit-making. CEOs and CFOs of companies from PepsiCo to McCormick spices have openly announced likely price increases through the rest of this year, bolstering revenues even as costs increase [i.e., they’re raising prices enough to cover costs AND turbocharge profits to record highs].”

2021 Year-end corporate reports—stay tuned for who hit the jackpot

They’ll be more to come on Mazza’s Take as corporations start reporting full 2021 financial results this month and next. Stay tuned.

Grocery Workers Strike! Kroger: Let Them Eat . . . Nothing

Last week, 8000 union workers at Kroger’s King Soopers Colorado stores walked off the job demanding better pay and benefits. At the same time, the workers’ union, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) released a report on the state of Kroger workers.

HUNGRY AT THE TABLE: White Paper on Grocery Workers at the Kroger Company

Economic Roundtable, hired by UFCW, wrote the report based on a survey of Kroger workers in three geographic areas: Colorado, the Puget Sound region of Washington, and southern California. Over 10,000 workers responded resulting in these barbaric stats:

  • 36% of respondents said they were worried about eviction.

  • 66% said they struggle to survive due to low wages and part-time schedules.

  • 78% said they are food-insecure.

  • 1 in 7 faced homelessness in the past year.

"There are workers sleeping in RVs or couch surfing or living in parks somewhere," Peter Dreier, a researcher on the project, told Insider. "Americans go to their local supermarket every week and smile at the person cashing them out, not aware that the person they're talking to is going to sleep in a car after they clock out."

Kroger claims the report is “distorted.” Yet as far back as 2017, according to a leaked internal presentation, Kroger knew that workers couldn’t afford necessities and struggled to survive, and that 20% of workers relied on some form of government assistance.

While workers struggle, company execs make out like bandits

Kroger, the 2nd largest retailer in the US, owns 22 grocery chains in 17 states, some under the Kroger name and others under a local chain name, for a total of over 2700 stores. As befitting a behemoth retailer, the company is highly profitable it good part due to low-cost labor. 

There’s more. Kroger nixed employees’ hazard pay in May 2021, and actually closed stores in communities (southern California and Seattle) where local governments required an extra $4/hour in “hero pay,”

“Meanwhile, the pandemic has been extremely profitable for Kroger. . . .The company earned $4.1 billion in profits in 2020, and by the end of the third quarter of 2021, had $2.28 billion in cash on hand.

Company executives received raises and bonuses as a result. [CEO Rodney] McMullen made over $22 million, nearly doubling the $12 million he made in 2018. Kroger also gave their stockholders $1.3 billion in stock buybacks in the first three quarters of 2021, the researchers estimate. The median worker pay at Kroger was $24,617 in 2021, they also found, meaning the CEO made 909 times the pay of the average worker.”

Kroger’s 2020 SEC Annual Report lists executive compensation including a combination of salary and hefty stock awards, stock options, and cash bonuses. (2021’s annual report and table of executive compensation should be out in February.)

Kroger just spent $2 BILLION to buy back its own stock

In 2020, Kroger had so much cash on hand that it did two rounds of stock buybacks—one in June of 2021 ($1 billion) and one for another $1 billion just last month (December 2021)  The December buyback replaced the June one, which had $157 million left over.

Why do corporations buy back their own stock? Answer: To jack up earnings per share (profits divided by shares of common stock), a move that typically raises the company’s stock price. Simple example: $10 million profit spread over 1 million shares = earnings per share of $10. If the company buys back and retires 500,000 shares, profits of $10 million spread over the remaining 500,000 shares = $20 earnings per share

A rise in the stock price juices executive compensation, the majority of which comes from stock awards and stock options. Say a CEO gets an incentive stock award of 25,000 shares and the share price goes up by $40. It’s an instant $1 million windfall. What’s not to like? And more: some executive incentive plans pay out based on earnings per share. The higher the earnings per share, the more money the executive gets. Good to know when CEOs blather that they EARN outrageous compensation by “hard work.”

All this is why stock buybacks were illegal from the 1930s until the Reagan administration. Then all bets were off, and wealth flowed like a river to the 1%.

For more background on stock buybacks, check out this 2014 Harvard Business Review report entitled “Profits without Prosperity.”

“Those commenters who are worried about poor Kroger's bottom line would do well to keep in mind a recent tweet from Pitchfork Economics host Nick Hanauer: ‘Whenever a corporation whines about raising wages, just Google '[name of company] stock buybacks' and you'll see where all their profits are really going.”

Source

Workers pay vs CEO bullshit

Deli counter, Aurora, Colorado King Soopers, customer post on Facebook.

No one except teenagers living at home can afford Denver housing at these wages.

Meanwhile Kroger CEO McMullen’s $22 million in 2020 compensation works out to $10,500 AN HOUR, adding to his $75-$100 million net worth.

Touting his humble beginnings and blue-collar parents, McMullen makes statements like the following.

“My parents had the kind of jobs where if the economy was soft, you got laid off. You don’t want anyone to have the fear I had growing up.”

 “My personal story is so much like so many of the people at Kroger. You start out as a job, and it becomes a career. I always tell people if you like food and you like people; it’s a wonderful place to be. Because you get to feed people, help them have a little bit better day. What more could you ask for?”

In a 2017 Wall Street Journal puff-piece video interview, “How I Work,” the interviewer mentions that McMullen is a book collector and asks him for his favorite book.

He replies Charles Dickens’  A Christmas Carol. He says he re-reads the book every holiday season to remind himself of the true meaning of Christmas.  

While this CEO burnishes his image for the business media and politicians, grocery workers live in a brutal state of food insecurity and near homelessness.

How long will America’s appalling inequality be sustainable?

How long before workers revolt?





The Elites Agree on One Thing: Utter Contempt for Teachers

This weekend, I read columnist (and former Reagan speech writer) Peggy Noonan’s weekly op ed in Jan. 8 Wall Street Journal, The Endless Loop of Covid 19. She criticized Biden’s recent speech and record on Covid 19 in the face of massive infections and hospitalizations, lack of testing, contradictory and confusing CDC guidance [most recently driven by Delta Airlines]. Fair points; with US cases and deaths the highest in the world, (Liberals: Biden is no better than Trump at protecting the vulnerable.) Noonan went on to credit Biden for insisting on keeping schools open (apparently without teachers, bus drivers, and support staff, quite a magic trick).

USA Today, Jan. 5, 2022.

And then, describing the agreed-on stance of the business class and their Democrat, Republican, and media lackeys, Noonan writes:

“The biggest single thing he [Biden] could say to convince American parents that he was on their side, being serious and trying to end this pandemic well, is to put himself and his party in some jeopardy by finally, late in the game, going forcefully against the most reactionary force in American public life, the teachers unions. The selfish, uncaring attitude they weren’t ashamed to show regarding the closing of schools, their fantasies about how uniquely vulnerable they themselves now are, and their pleasure in flexing political muscle—they covered themselves in shame the past two years.”

Teachers unions, the” most reactionary force in American public life”?  The US leads the world in Covid cases and deaths because of. . .teachers unions?

According to this business-class spokeswoman, the selfish and uncaring are:

  • Teachers trying to protect their own, their families’ and their students’ health and safety.

  • Teachers locked in a classroom with 30 or more susceptible kids, bad ventilation, and a wildly contagious virus affecting both the vaxxed and unvaxxed.

The Illinois Covid curve:

  • Teachers trying to teach with massive student absences while covering for sick colleagues (so many teachers are out sick, some kids are just warehoused in school gyms and lunchrooms).

It’s physically impossible to teach in this situation. Teachers know that. They know that a distance learning break will help schools, teachers, and students learn as much as possible, safely, until the latest Covid wave passes. Whatever happened to flatten the curve?

But in-person learning isn’t the endgame regardless of all the breast-beating about children’s education, socialization, and mental health.  The president, politicians, Democrat Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot (who just got Covid herself), and the business class all agree: schools have to stay open so parents can go to work generating profits.

And just like clockwork, within days, the Chicago Teachers Union leadership herded the teachers back into petri-dish classrooms, kowtowing yet again to the Democrat Party, Chicago’s Democrat mayor/former corporate attorney, and Illnois’ billionaire Democrat governor JB Pritzker, all happy as hell to see the teachers and students sacrifice for the economy.

Forget education; school has become a training ground for the working class. Keep going, students and teachers, until you’re too sick to produce anything for the important people.

New York City’s new Democrat mayor Eric Adams said it clearly: “It’s time to open up and feed our ecosystem, our financial ecosystem.”   Fuck the frontline workers who have to keep this “financial ecosystem” shitshow going. Expendable.

In-person learning with a vertical spike in cases and overwhelmed hospitals is insanity only the Chamber of Commerce and the donor class could dream up from the safety of their home office Zoom meetings.

The Coddled but Unessential: Office Peeps Vaxxed to the Teeth and Still Working from Home

While ground-down teachers and healthcare workers care for scores of exposed kids and sick people, major corporations including Facebook (Meta),  major New York City Banks, and others just extended work-from-home arrangements for their frightened, coddled office workers, causing a ripple effect on offices’ nearby businesses still waiting for customers.

The same governors, urban mayors, and elitist columnists excoriating teachers aren’t calling office workers “selfish and uncaring” for cowering at home and killing dependent downtown businesses. They wouldn’t dare.

Democrats long ago jettisoned the working class. Its new voter base, the professional/managerial class, simply must be protected from infection.

Last week in a press conference, NYC’s mayor Adams berated corporations for extending work-from-home arrangements claiming absent office workers are causing financial hardship for small Manhattan businesses and their workers. Other mayors have tried the same guilt trip. To no effect. Corporations don’t take orders from politicians; it’s the other way around

(Adams tripped over himself in his appeal to NYC business leaders and generated howls of outrage. “My low-skill workers, my cooks, my messengers, my shoe-shine people, those who work in Dunkin Donuts, they don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office.” Wait, I thought they were essential workers. And “my”? Comedian and commentator Tim Black ripped Adams and his elitist “low-skill” slam of working people: “Sounds like he’s running a plantation.”)

Learning to Live with Covid: A Class War on All Workers

Under a new mantra, “learning to live with Covid,” the business class demands heroics from the people they once called essential workers (note that mainstream media has disappeared this term). Translated: Let the working class get Covid to keep the economy moving.  Unmentioned: Also the already- ill and elderly; they’re expendable too.

Hold it sideways and we have officially flattened the curve!

Meanwhile, overwhelmed US hospitals are rationing care in a MASH unit triage fiasco. Old folks with strokes or broken hips or heart attacks, and anyone of any age with any non-Covid emergency, risk substandard care and death or prolonged disability.

The Corporate Controlled CDC Weighs In

Last week on” Good Morning America,” a reporter interviewing CDC chief Rochelle Walensky said that the vaccines are working well to prevent serious illness even in the face of Omicron and then asked Walensky. “Should we be rethinking how we’re living with this virus?”  Walensky’s answer (unmentioned that it was related to a recent study on outcomes for the vaxed):

“The overwhelming number of deaths, about 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities so really these are people who are unwell to begin with.”

Restated: we’re losing people who are unwell to begin with—also elderly people, equally as unproductive and with the added bonus of saving on social security payments.

Not everyone cheered that the majority of Covid deaths occur among the “unwell.” From Matthew Cortland, a disabled lawyer and activist for healthcare and patient rights.

In service to their capitalist overlords, public officials simply become blatantly inhumane. Or maybe they’re selected for that trait.

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School Reopening Clusterf*ck

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Tuesday, Chicago public school teachers said hell no.

Chicago teachers voted to refuse in-person work and switch to remote learning until Covid cases substantially decline or the teachers’ union approves school safety protocols. The blowback was fast and furious. Mayor Lightfoot threated to withhold their pay and tried guilt-tripping the teachers (who risk their and their families’ health) by accusing them of harming children’s safety, education, and nutrition.

People responding to Lightfoot’s tweets say Lightfoot’s own daughter attends a private school that switched to distance learning after the holiday break.

But the bars are open!

And then there was this ripper from a Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner:

“When I think of a big city that is open right now, in what world would we close something essential like in-person education when we have seen negative effects, when our bars are open.”

If Covid is OK for drunks and partiers, then it’s OK for kids and teachers. More wisdom from the professional/managerial class working from home offices like millionaire hospital administrators have been doing for two years while their ERs turned into MASH units.

No plans but full steam ahead

At the national level, Joe Biden, state governors, and federal and state agencies pressured schools across the country to reopen.

And open they did—with missing, sick teachers, bus drivers, support staff, and substitutes. With massive testing shortages (after two years of Covid, the feds still can’t get free tests available everywhere). And with millions of kids in classrooms wearing useless cloth masks (after two years, the feds can’t provide free N95s). What could go wrong?

To counter the predictable omicron debacle while keeping workers on the job generating profit, Delta Airlines directed the CDC to reduce workers’ Covid-positive isolation time from 10 days to 5. (Flight attendants union president Sara Nelson sent a “strongly worded” letter to the CDC but with no threat of labor action.) The CDC said yes sir to Delta, and the nation’s schools districts jumped on board too.

In the face of massive testing shortages in every state, some districts are trying the CDC’s latest test-to-stay plan, which is supposed to keep schools open as kids get infected. Under the guidelines, exposed unvaccinated kids can remain in school  if they “adhere to CDC quarantine guidance outside of the K-12 school setting and are tested in school.” 

Tested with what?  Schools don’t have a steady supply of tests or the staff to administer them. Test-to-stay is physically impossible in school districts with staff and resource constraints—that means pretty much all but the wealthiest ones.

Minneapolis public schools reopened with over 280 teachers out, but the school administration is determined to stay open. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, like the flight attendants, also didn’t call for labor action, although union president Greta Callahan described the school staffing situation:

“It’s a disaster. It’s utter chaos.”

From another part of the country, a teacher says:

“It feels like walking into a trap…”

Chicago Public Schools Testing Train Wreck

Chicago Public Schools tried to test all its students before reopening. One report says that 70% of the PCR tests distributed to CPS students came back invalid and another 18% were positive.

Fedex box overflowing with Chicago Public School student Covid tests, CBS News, Chicago, January 2, 2022

25,000 test kits couldn’t be processed within the required window because of Fedex shipping delays due to staff shortages and weather. Schools reopened anyway, and students were back in class with no tests—until the teachers weighed in. (What management genius picked a mail-in test strategy when winter weather and sick pilots pretty much ensure failure?)

Vax, vax, vax—the feds’ one-trick pony

Tuesday, while Chicago teachers voted, Biden gave another press briefing on Covid preparedness where he yet again hectored the public about vaccinations and boosters,  hyped not-yet-available treatment pills, and cited the money given to states in the American Rescue Plan, which apparently solved all school districts’ problems of testing, staffing, and building ventilation. (Infuriating aside: One source says Merck is charging $700 for a per-patient pill regimen that costs $17.74 to produce. The federal government is buying 20 million treatment courses from Pfizer for $530 per course—no information on the actual cost to produce each one. Profiteering?)

And, as always, Biden blamed the unvaxxed for taking up hospital beds and causing death and destruction to everyone. After two years of Covid, the unvaxxed are dug in and not listening, which makes them the perfect scapegoat for every pandemic system failure and death.

Anything to avoid calling out profiteering, healthcare grifting, incompetence, hospital unpreparedness, and years of hospital closures, bed reductions, and short staffing. Anything to avoid mentioning that a pandemic has been predicted for decades. Or that both global and federal health agencies wrote detailed pandemic preparedness and response plans that Western governments ignored (too many to link). Or that the US profit-based healthcare system didn’t do a damn thing because pandemic preparation would have cut into profits.

The business class: Keep the economy open at all costs [to workers]

While politicians, media pundits, and the business class bloviate about kids’ education and mental health, the business press tells who’s really calling the shots and why. The business class needs parents in the workforce to keep profits flowing.   

Bloomberg, Dec. 29, 2021.

Workers are like…

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CEOs Calling the Shots in a Global Healthcare Crisis and a President Lies to the Public Again

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On December 21, the CEO of Delta Airlines asked the CDC for help as sick employees threaten airline profits [or as he phrases it, ”our workforce and operations”].

Reuters, Dec. 21,2021.

And just like that, the CDC changed its guidelines.

NPR Dec. 27,2021.

Healthcare workers too

Earlier last week, the CDC downgraded its isolation guidelines for healthcare workers undoubtedly at the behest of now-imploding hospital systems.

  • “Healthcare workers with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic can return to work after 7 days with a negative test, and isolation time can be cut further if there are staffing shortages.

  • Healthcare workers who have received all recommended COVID-19 vaccine doses, including a booster, do not need to quarantine at home following high-risk exposures.”

When do the frontline workers weigh in?

They don’t. They’re the ones taking the risk, they’re the ones dealing directly with the infected public and coworkers, they’re the ones who can’t zoom from their living rooms. Where are the goddamn unions? Writing letters to the CDC?

Biden lies as healthcare collapses

Last week, Biden was interviewed by David Muir on ABC World News Tonight. He made these statements:

  • “Last year [pre-vaccine] you had serious backups in hospitals that were causing great difficulties.”  LAST YEAR? That’s over now? 

  • “We are prepared for what’s coming [the Omicron wave].”

  • “Nobody saw Delta or Omicron coming.”

  • No, I don’t think [our lack of tests] is a failure. I wish I had thought about it a year ago, six months ago, 2 months ago…I’ve ordered  half a billion pills [he meant test kits].”

Lies:

  1. The US is not prepared for what’s coming; hospitals have been overwhelmed for months and months. The situation will only get worse. The workers themselves say so: “A reply to President Biden from California healthcare workers: “No, the country is not better prepared for COVID than last year!”

  2. Scientists said from the get-go that with without vaccinating the rest of the world, we would face more, and more virulent, variants.

  3. Testing: It’s a complete and total failure. Vanity Fair just reported that in October the administration rejected a plan to provide free test kits for the holidays.

No tests and no masks

Quick, at-home test kits have been unavailable, and lines for PCR tests snake for hours, The currently sold-out kits sell for  $23. After January, Biden says you can submit claims to your insurance company—if you have insurance and want to spend hours of your time interacting with claims people. Cloth masks do nothing against Omicron; one article called them fashion accessories.  For Omicron, people need N95s (best), KN95s, or surgical masks.

People have to buy their own N95s  ($50 for a box of 20), or KN95s for $25, or surgical masks. Good luck to people who can’t afford it. Biden just approved a $768 billion 2022 defense budget, but the feds can’t provide tests and protective masks to save lives because some company has to make a buck. Tests and masks should be available to everyone everywhere for free.

If we’re all alive after corporations manage the pandemic, we can look forward to capitalism managing the climate crisis.