With Working Americans Survival At Stake, The US Is Bailing Out The Richest: M. Pearl, W. Lazonick
'With working Americans survival at stake, the US is bailing out the richest.' Without significant oversight, Congress’s economic relief bill will leave millions of everyday Americans in financial peril. By Morris Pearl, Wm. Lazonick, The Guardian, April 13, 2020.
- "If not properly managed, this economic disaster has the potential to be the worst in American history." -
Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives who, while enriching themselves, spent the past decade pushing business corporations to the edge of insolvency. The very survival of working-class households is now at stake. Yet the $500bn dollars of public money that Congress’s relief bill provides will be used for a corporate bailout, with the only oversight in the hands of an independent council similar to the one used in the 2008 financial crisis. While that body was able to report misuses of taxpayer money, it could do nothing to stop them.
Moving forward, we need a guarantee from Congress that public money will not help billionaire shareholders or corporate executives protect, and even augment, their personal wealth. As currently structured, there is nothing to keep this bailout from, like its predecessor, putting cash directly into the hands of those at the top rather than into the hands of workers. Without strong regulation and accountability, asking corporations to preserve jobs with these funds will be nothing more than a simple suggestion, leaving millions of everyday Americans in financial peril. Productive work and consumer spending are the dual engines that keep our economy running, which is why this pandemic poses such an acute threat.
Therefore, the purpose of further government support must be to keep as many employees working as long and as productively as possible.
Working people were not prepared for this disaster. There are still tens of millions of American households that haven’t recovered from the Great Recession; nearly 50% of Americans were already living paycheck to paycheck before millions lost their jobs in the last few weeks, and 40% did not have enough savings accrued to cover a $400 emergency. It’s imperative that they be given the lifelines that they desperately need to survive. Keeping Americans indoors to reduce their risk of spreading Covid-19 has almost completely shut down our massive service economy.
It is fundamental that we ensure every company’s employees are able to be both productive and safe, and we can do that only by using every cent of corporate cash to put paychecks into their hands. America’s working class, not corporate executives, are the ones on the frontlines of America’s factories and service industries; they produce what these companies sell and make up the majority of our consumer economy. America’s workers will be the ones to resuscitate our economy long before excessively paid executives do.
When the House and Senate return to write the next stimulus package, they need to institute a total ban on share buybacks for any of the corporations that accept this bailout, rather than the temporary restrictions in last week’s bailout...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/13/with-working-americans-survival-at-stake-the-us-is-bailing-out-the-richest
Authors: - Morris Pearl is chair of Patriotic Millionaires, which focuses on promoting public policy solutions that encourage political equality, guarantee a sustaining wage for working Americans, and ensure that wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fair share of taxes. He previously was a managing director at BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment firms
- William Lazonick is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and co-director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness
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Instead, it's all these people:
