Dispatches

DEMS MARCH AHEAD WITH COVID RELIEF WHILE REPUBLICANS WHINE.

The US has passed 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 and while millions mourn friends and family who are gone, the Biden administration and Democratic House and Senate are moving forward in trying to restore the lives and livelihoods of the living. The week of Jan. 22, their $1.9 trillion effort to do that should move forward in the House, where the Budget Committee took up the full package of the COVID relief bill. On the Senate side, the process of running provisions of the bill through the Senate parliamentarian continues, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (2/22).

The key element Democrats are closely watching is a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. On CNN (2/21), Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders said he is “confident that the parliamentarian will advise next week that we can raise the minimum wage through the reconciliation process.”

That would certainly ease passage of the bill, if the Senate didn’t have to take votes on overruling the Parliamentarian on whether that piece of the bill can stay in. If the Parliamentarian accepts it, it will stay in the bill on the House side. If she says it doesn’t stay in, the House could strip it out before a final floor vote, which should come Feb 26, or possibly the 27th. That means the Senate could vote the following week, giving some breathing room to all the people on emergency unemployment insurance whose benefits will expire on March 14 if the bill doesn’t pass before then.

Thus far, the process has proven remarkably smooth, with Biden using his considerable experience and personal relationships to keep Democratic lawmakers engaged and mostly supportive. “Everyone is in the same place,” one House Democrat told CNN. “There are things we want fixed, but we aren’t aggressively opposed. It is the President’s first major package, and there are a lot of people who feel like this is his first ask, so for all those factors people are not aggressively threatening not to vote for it.” There’s also the fact that this is an ongoing crisis that requires decisive and major action to mitigate. Going big now—even though it’s months and months late thanks to Trump and Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate—will shorten the period of economic pain and help the country recover.

The package as a whole also is exceedingly popular, and Biden’s team has made a point of highlighting that. In the Feb. 16 town hall in Wisconsin, Biden was asked what he had learned in his first month on the job about selling such a massive proposal. “I learned based on the polling data that they want everything that’s in the plan,” Biden said. “Not a joke. Everything that’s in the plan.” That message has been reinforced with lawmakers by Biden’s team. CNN reports that in the past three weeks, Biden’s legislative affairs team has met with leadership in the House and Senate multiple times a week, has met directly with 33 House members, and has had meetings with more than 100 key senior congressional staff. That’s allowed members to be included in the process—always a plus—but has also enhanced the legislation.

For example, it includes the potentially transformative boost to families with children that can lift hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty. It also includes $1,400 one-time payments—survival checks—to low-and middle-income people, everyone making up to $100,000 a year as an individual, with reduction in payments starting above $75,000/annually. The child tax credits will be paid out monthly as opposed to annually, and raise the maximum credit from $2,000 to $3,000 for children between ages 6 and 17 and to $3,600 for children under 6. The bill also provides $400 a week boosts to unemployment benefits and continues their availability to gig and self-employed workers. It provides hundreds of billions in funding to state and local governments and to schools; help to specific industries including airlines, bars, and restaurants; and billions for both COVID-19 testing and vaccine distribution. All of which the people—including state and local Republican officials—have been clamoring for.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are trying to work the refs, to get media on their side to say that Biden would really be with them and let them help write this bill if only his totally partisan staff would let it happen. The primary source for this particular story at CNN seems to be Sen. Susan Collins, who apparently leaked the story about how she pleaded with Biden on Super Bowl Sunday to allow Republicans to have input. Supposedly Biden “was sounding out Collins, speaking freely to her and leaving the Republican with the distinct impression that he was receptive to deal-cutting with the GOP.” And also supposedly, the “call quickly turned south after White House staff chimed in, with Collins and White House economic adviser Brian Deese engaging in an exchange about housing funding in the proposal—and the Senate Republican contending there was outstanding money yet to be spent.”

Never mind that it’s Joe Biden himself who has told Republicans, and the public, that their proposals just aren’t big enough. “What would they have me cut? What would they have me leave out?” he asked reporters, rhetorically, last Feb. 19 when he was touring a Pfizer facility. The White House, and Biden himself, have time and again said that Republicans are perfectly willing to join in the effort, but as a White House official told CNN, “he believes that what the Republican group put forward earlier this month is inadequate, and he has not wavered from that view in any of the negotiations around this bill.”

He’s been remarkably consistent with that message since he gave Republican senators their meeting, which was summed up by Press Secretary Jen Psaki. In the meeting, she said Biden “reiterated his view that Congress must respond boldly and urgently, and noted many areas with the Republican senators’ proposal does not address.” She said Biden made clear to them “that while he is hopeful that the Rescue Plan can pass with bipartisan support, a reconciliation package is a path to achieve that end.” He also told them, according to Psaki, that “he will not slow down on work on this urgent crisis response, and will not settle for a package that fails to meet the moment.” Biden did, however, invite them to “continue to discuss ways to strengthen” the package and “find areas of common ground.” Just not by undermining this urgent assistance to the nation.

US SUPREME COURT DENIES TRUMP EFFORT TO BLOCK RELEASE OF HIS TAX RETURNS. The US Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s efforts to block enforcement of a subpoena for his accounting firm to turn over eight years of the ex-president’s tax returns and other financial documents to a grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. while Trump was still in office, Jessica Corbett reported at CommonDreams (2/22).

Vance welcomed the high court’s unsigned, one-sentence order in a short statement: “The work continues.”

Ryan Thomas, a spokesperson for the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, also celebrated the decision, saying that “Trump’s shameful effort to block his financial records from investigators is yet another reminder of the lengths he’s gone to to avoid accountability.”

“This decisive defeat once again shows that no one—including Donald Trump—is above the law,” added Thomas. “Trump must be held accountable by state and federal prosecutors for his criminal conduct.”

While Vance’s probe involves hush-money payments to women who said they had affairs with Trump, recent court filings suggest the investigation could also include tax and insurance fraud as well as falsifying business records.

As NBC News explained:

“Now that the Supreme Court has cleared the way for Vance to enforce the subpoena, the president has exhausted his legal options to block it. The full tax return documents, or portions of them, would become public only if Vance brings criminal charges at some future date and seeks to introduce them as evidence.”

Vance in 2019 issued a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, for his tax returns from 2011 to 2018. Federal lawmakers also sought the then-president’s tax returns—which he refused to make public before or during his four-year term, bucking a precedent followed by several of his predecessors.

Last July, the Supreme Court ruled that Vance could enforce the subpoena but blocked Congress from obtaining the financial records. In both 7-2 decisions, Trump appointees Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority while Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. Those rulings preceded the September death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Trump’s appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed by a GOP-controlled Senate in October.

After the justices rejected claims by Trump’s attorneys that he was immune from state investigations while serving as president, his legal team tried to argue that the subpoena was issued “in bad faith” and amounted to political “harassment”—a position rejected by a US district judge in August, a federal appeals panel in October, and now the nation’s highest court.

The appeals panel’s decision came shortly after the New York Times began publishing a damning series of reports based on over two decades of Trump’s tax documents obtained by the newspaper. The twice-impeached former president currently faces not only Vance’s investigation but also probes by the New York attorney general’s office into his business empire and a Georgia prosecutor regarding election interference.

Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, said in a statement, “The Supreme Court has now proclaimed that no one is above the law. Trump will, for the first time, have to take responsibility for his own dirty deeds.”

WITH TRUMP GONE, CNN PULLS PLUG ON WHITE HOUSE PRESS BRIEFINGS. After creating new programming rules for the Trump administration and airing virtually every minute of every White House press briefing live and in its entirety, CNN has quietly cut the cord with the new Democratic administration, Eric Boehlert reported at Pressrun.Media (2/22).

“Just one month into President Joe Biden’s term, the all-news cable channel stopped airing the daily White House press briefings. Perhaps the events weren’t entertaining enough, as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki has routinely declined to insert Biden into cultural war debates, refused to castigate reporters, and won’t make stuff up in the name of partisan warfare, the way her Republican predecessors did.

“Instead, Psaki has answered questions as best she can about White House policy, while treating journalists with respect, instead of mocking them in search of cheap political points.

“That’s no longer considered must-see TV at CNN. Fox News also stopped airing the briefings, which is completely expected. MSNBC as of last week was still airing the live Q&A’s from the White House.

CNN’s move represents one of the most dramatic ways the press has changed the way it covers Biden, as compared to Trump. Suddenly gone is the nonstop, unfiltered coverage of White House briefings, which defined cable news during the past four years.”

In January 2017, Boehlert noted, the rules changed overnight when Trump was inaugurated and suddenly the media sessions were treated as breaking news events. That, despite the fact that during the final six months of Barack Obama’s presidency, just 3% of daily White House press briefings aired live, according to Media Matters.

“In other words, Obama briefings were not aired. Trump’s were. Now, Biden’s are not. So much for liberal media bias.”

DEFEATED AND IMPEACHED, TRUMP STILL COMMANDS LOYALTY OF GQP VOTERS. If there’s a civil war in the Republican Party, the voters who backed Donald Trump in November’s election are ready to choose sides. Behind Trump.

An exclusive Suffolk University/USA Today Poll finds Trump’s support largely unshaken after his second impeachment trial in the Senate, this time on a charge of inciting an insurrection in the deadly assault on the Capitol Jan. 6.

By double digits, 46%-27%, those surveyed say they would abandon the GOP and join the Trump party if the former president decided to create one. The rest are undecided, USA Today reported (2/21).

Half of those polled say Republicans should become “more loyal to Trump,” even at the cost of losing support among establishment Republicans. One in five, 19%, say the party should become less loyal to Trump and more aligned with establishment Republicans. 

The survey of 1,000 Trump voters, identified from 2020 polls, was taken by landline and cellphone Feb. 15-19. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Eric Boehlert noted at PressRun.Media on the first day of the trial (2/9) that there continues to be reluctance to present impeachment as a political plus for Democrats. “A recent on-screen caption at CNN asked, “Will the rush to impeach backfire on the Dems?” During Trump Impeachment I, the press asked if Democrats were moving too slowly. Now the concern is they’re moving too quickly.”

Touting its latest polling data, ABC News claimed “a narrow majority of Americans” say Trump should be convicted. But it wasn’t “narrow” at all — a clear majority of 56% wanted Trump convicted, while 43% do not. A Morning Consult poll found that even more — 58% — want Trump barred from ever holding public office again.

“Those results are especially telling because that means there are millions of Republicans who voted for Trump who now want him convicted and barred from office,” Boehlert noted.

REPUBLICANS WHO VOTED TO CONVICT TRUMP IN IMPEACHMENT TRIAL FACE BACKLASH. The seven Republicans who sided with Democrats by voting to convict former President Donald Trump have been rebuked in their states and criticized by other factions within the party.

The rift over Trump comes as the GOP hopes to win back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

Backlash has been swift and unrelenting for Republicans in Congress who voted alongside Democrats in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, CNBC reported (2/16/21).

Some of the seven senators who voted to convict Trump on the charge of inciting the deadly Capitol riot are facing censure and criticism from within the party. One Republican who voted to impeach Trump in the House was even denounced by members of his own family.

“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!” read a letter to Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)., signed by multiple family members who support Trump, the New York Times reported (2/15).

After Trump’s Senate acquittal, several of the Republicans who sided with Dems in the Senate trial have been rebuked in their states.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), was unanimously censured by the Central Committee of the North Carolina Republican Party following his vote to convict. The party said it “agrees with the strong majority of Republicans in both the US House of Representatives and Senate that the Democrat-led attempt to impeach a former President lies outside the United States Constitution.”

Sen Pat Toomey (R-PA), has been censured by some county-level Republican parties for his vote to convict. “His betrayal of the Constitution and his oath of office required conviction,” Toomey tweeted after the vote.

“We did not send him there to vote his conscience” or to “’do the right thing’ or whatever he said he was doing,” Washington County Republican Chairman Dave Ball told a local CBS affiliate. “We sent him there to represent us.”

Neither Burr nor Toomey are seeking reelection in 2022. Only one GOP senator who voted for conviction, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, faces voters in the next election cycle.

“I cannot allow the significance of my vote to be devalued by whether or not I feel that this is helpful for my political ambitions,” Murkowski told Politico after the vote.

Maine’s Republican Party could censure Sen. Susan Collins over her vote to convict, the Bangor Daily News reported (2/15).

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana broke ranks with Republicans twice — first by voting that the Senate had jurisdiction to try a former president, and then by voting to convict. “I have no illusions that this is a popular decision,” Cassidy tweeted (2/15).

His state’s Republican Party censured him hours after the final vote.

Republican Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Mitt Romney of Utah also voted to convict.

“Obviously there is a move at county and state levels across the country to have the Republican Party focus even more on the personality of Donald Trump, but I don’t think that’s healthy,” Sasse told NPR (2/16) after some Nebraska Republicans moved to censure him.

Even senators who voted for acquittal have been criticized by other Republicans after accusing Trump of wrongdoing.

Minutes after voting “not guilty” in the trial, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), said Trump “is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an ally of the former president, called McConnell’s speech “an outlier regarding how Republicans feel about all this.”

VOTING MACHINE COMPANY SUES PILLOW CEO TO QUASH STOLEN ELECTION LIES. Dominion Voting Systems is suing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for $1.3 billion as part of an effort to fight the big lie, pushed by Donald Trump for months, that the election was stolen, that President Biden won only through theft. The specific lie involved in this lawsuit is that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems deleted votes for Trump or double-counted votes for Biden or were manipulated by foreign governments, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (2/22).

But the specific lie matters—in the world at large, not just to Dominion—because of the power of the big lie. Trump spent months pushing the claim that the election was stolen, delegitimizing Biden’s presidency, and polls show that large majorities of Republicans—65% in one poll, 76% in another—believe there was widespread fraud or that Biden’s win was not legitimate. And in this, as in so many things, Trump continues to lead the institutional Republican Party. On Feb. 21, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise went on ABC’s This Week and repeatedly insisted that Biden’s win was related to there being “a few states that did not follow their state laws.”

That right there is all the evidence you need that Trump has made the effort to undermine U.S. democracy mainstream in the Republican Party.

Dominion’s lawsuit against MyPillow CEO Lindell, which also names MyPillow, relates to a less establishment-friendly form of the big lie, but it’s all part of the same effort, and Lindell wasn’t pushing his Dominion claims alone. This lawsuit follows similar ones by Dominion against Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Voting company Smartmatic similarly sued Giuliani, Powell, Fox News, and some Fox hosts for $2.7 billion.

In the lawsuit, Dominion alleges, “Acting in concert with allies and media outlets that were determined to curry favor with one of their biggest sponsors and to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election, Lindell launched a defamatory marketing campaign about Dominion that reached millions of people and caused enormous harm to Dominion.”

As for those media outlets, Lindell paid to air his lies about the election and Dominion in a two-hour documentary that ran on One America News. OAN offered an extensive disclaimer about how the documentary was just Lindell’s opinion, “not the product of OAN’s reporting.” But it also promoted the show as “a never-before-seen report breaking down election fraud evidence & showing how the unprecedented level of voter fraud was committed in the 2020 Presidential Election.” The video was subsequently pulled from YouTube for violating the platform’s presidential election integrity policy.

OAN, one of Trump’s current favorite media outlets since he turned against Fox News, has been the target of a defamation suit by a Dominion executive and, following cease and desist letters from Dominion itself, quietly removed a bunch of election-related conspiracy theory coverage from its website in January.

REPUBLICANS ARE SHOCKED! BY PARTISAN ANIMOSITY. It’s traditional for new presidents to lose one of their nominees for cabinet-level posts, Kevin Drum noted at Jabberwocking.com (2/22). “The opposition party needs a scalp to maintain their sense of self esteem, and they’re usually able to dredge up a micro-scandal of some kind that gives them an excuse to demand one.

“But this year is different. Republicans are after two scalps, and neither is associated with any kind of scandal. One is Neera Tanden, head of the Center for American Progress, who has an unfortunate habit of getting into Twitter feuds with people. The other is Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, who loves to mix it up with Republicans.

“And that’s it. The GOP is threatening to vote unanimously against both of these nominees because … they’re not always nice. This might not matter if Democrats were united behind the nominees, but Democrat Joe Manchin has already announced that he’ll vote against Tanden because her “overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact” on her relationship with Congress.

“This is absurd. Tanden deserves to get dragged a bit, but she’s done nothing even remotely worth denying her confirmation. Ditto for Becerra. If Democrats let themselves get suckered into believing that Republicans are delicate little flowers who can’t abide partisan nastiness (Jeff Sessions! Mike Pompeo! Bill Barr! Mick Mulvaney!) then I guess they deserve whatever they get. But make no mistake: this is just fakery and no one should take it seriously.”

LAWMAKERS PULL IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS ON VOTING RIGHTS. The 2021 legislative sessions have begun in all but three states, and state lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills aimed at election procedures and voter access — vastly exceeding the number of voting bills introduced by roughly this time last year, the Brennan Center for Justice reported (2/8).

In a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, Republican legislators have introduced well over four times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to roughly this time last year. Thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in 15 states on 2/3/20).

These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) slash voter registration opportunities; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges. These bills are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election.

Arizona leads the nation in proposed voter suppression legislation in 2021, with 19 restrictive bills. Pennsylvania comes in second with 14 restrictive policy proposals, followed by Georgia (11 bills), and New Hampshire (10 bills).

Of course, other state lawmakers are seizing on an energized electorate and persistent interest in democracy reform (which is likewise reflected in Congress). To date, 37 states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 541 bills to expand voting access (dwarfing the 188 expansive bills that were filed in 29 states as of 2/3/20). Notably 125 such bills were introduced in New York and New Jersey.

With unprecedented numbers of voters casting their ballots by mail in 2020, legislators across the country have shown particular interest in absentee voting reform, with more than a quarter of voting and election bills addressing absentee voting procedures. Only six of the 44 states that have introduced election bills have not proposed policies to alter absentee voting procedures in some way.

Also in reaction to 2020, seven states have proposed legislation that would modify how presidential electors are allocated, and 14 states have introduced bills to adopt the national popular vote compact, which binds state electors to the winner of the national vote.

FEDERAL JUDGES CONTINUE TO STEP BACK, ALLOWING BIDEN TO CHOOSE THEIR REPLACEMENTS. There’s been a sustained flow of federal judges stepping aside in the almost month since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (2/18). Most are not retiring, but taking “senior status,” in which they step back without actually stepping down, still taking cases but fewer of them, and opening up their seats for new judges to come in. Since the election, 13 judges stepped back, and another 22 announced their intention of doing so in the coming months, while a few more indicated that they were retiring.

This is an easy win for Biden: he gets a few dozen immediate vacancies to fill all the while judges principled enough to have remained in their seats until there was no danger of being replaced by Trump remain on the courts. Judges who have served at least 15 years and whose combined age and years of service add up to 80 are eligible to take senior status. That so many are deciding to do so is good for the judiciary, to somewhat lessen the effects of being crammed with Trump judges. But it also helps the courts which are overburdened, without congressional action to add seats to the courts to help with the backlogs of cases that have only grown larger because of the pandemic. It’s not a long-term solution, Congress is going to have to act to add seats to the courts, but it will help.

Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) indicates he will give free rein to Biden on his appeals court nominees, while honoring “blue slips,” which allows Republicans to veto district court choices in their home states. That’s how Republicans handled it vis-a-vis Democrats. 

The crisis in caseloads is very real, with caseloads per active judge in the circuits increasing from an average of 148 in 1971 to 324 in 2017. There haven’t been new seats added to appeals courts in 30 years. “The problem is that over time the courts of appeal have not added to their ranks at quite the rate that appeals have been filed,” Merritt McAlister, a professor at the University of Florida College of Law who studies judicial administration told Bloomberg Law.

As far as filling vacancies go, Biden has prioritized identifying nominees. Biden’s team reached out to Democratic senators in December, requesting that they get their nominees in ASAP and informing them that going forward, they expected nominations for vacancies within 45 days of the vacancy being announced. Biden also stressed that he wants judicial nominees who come from diverse demographic, personal, and professional backgrounds. He wants to see a bench with more women, more people of color, more judges with backgrounds in criminal defense and who served as public defenders. “With respect to U.S. District Court positions, we are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life,” the letter from Biden’s team read.

Two senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper from Colorado, apparently didn’t read the memo. They’ve recommended Regina Rodriguez, a partner at corporate law firm WilmerHale, for a district court opening. Yes, she’s a Latina. But she’s a corporate lawyer, with a bulky corporate defense portfolio that includes “defending McDonald’s in a racial-discrimination lawsuit in 2006 and defending the office of former Republican senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell in an age discrimination suit the year prior.” Her track record really is pretty abysmal when it comes to representing the little guy. Meaning she really hasn’t. She fought a suit for Dianon Systems brought by a client who underwent an unnecessary prostate removal because of a botched biopsy result. She’s represented Eli Lilly and a dietary supplement company against patients bringing suits for misleading promotional claims that resulted in harm.

Chances are, Bennet and Hickenlooper put her name in the mix because she had previously been nominated by then Republican Sen. Cory Gardner and Bennet in 2016, when McConnell was blockading any nominees from President Obama. That was then, though. Now Biden has specifically called for a different kind of nominee, because after Trump there are plenty on the bench who will be looking out for corporate America. This could be laziness on Bennet’s part, he had all the paperwork handy and didn’t have to conduct a new search for a nominee. Whatever the reason, it’s a blatant and arrogant disregard of Biden’s expressed wishes.

ANTI-BLACK HATE CRIMES HAVE PLUMMETED IN US. Hate crimes in the US against Black people have dropped over the past 15 years, from 126 per million population in 2004 to 70 per million in 2019, the FBI reported (via Kevin Drum).

Violent assaults on Black people also have gone down by nearly half since 2005, from 33 per thousand then to 19 per thousand in 2019, far more than violent assaults in general. In this case, however, the decline has been fairly steady over the entire period, Drum noted.

“The FBI is not the only authority on hate crimes and the NCVS is not the only authority on victimization. Still, they’re generally well respected and use the same methodology from year to year. This probably represents reality pretty well.”

Drum noted that “just because something is declining doesn’t mean we don’t still have a lot of work left to get it even lower.

“However, despite the decline it’s still the case that the rate of anti-Black hate crime is considerably higher than the rate against any other ethnicity.”

PANDEMIC RECESSION PAIN CONTINUES, WITH 3.5M JOBS GONE FOR GOOD. Another 1.38 million Americans filed applications for initial unemployment benefits the week of Jan. 18, with 16 million more now receiving continuing  benefits from state or federal programs than was the case at this time last year. Some 25.5 million workers—15% of the workforce—are either unemployed, furloughed, or have seen their hours and pay cut because of the pandemic. Most of the unemployed will sooner or later go back to work at their old jobs, especially now with a growing number of people being vaccinated against the coronavirus. Even before vaccines were available, millions who had filed for benefits since March 2020 when pandemic-related economic restrictions were first put in place returned to earning a paycheck months ago, Meteor Blades noted at DailyKos (2/18).

But in the past two months, the number of people now categorized as long-term unemployed—out of work for six months or longer—has risen to 3.5 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As various assessments since April have concluded, many jobs those long-timers have been laid off from have permanently vanished. “We’re recovering, but to a different economy,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said in November. “Even after the unemployment rate goes down and there’s a vaccine, there’s going to be a probably substantial group of workers who are going to need support as they’re finding their way in the post-pandemic economy,” he said.

According to the Pew Research Center, 66% of the jobless say they have seriously considered changing their occupation or field of work. Just 52% said as much during the Great Recession.

In a soon-to-be-released report previewed by reporters at The Washington Post this week, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that 20% of business travel won’t come back. The fallout means fewer jobs at airlines, hotels, restaurants, and retail shops, plus the automation of office support roles as well as some factory jobs.

In November, the Brookings Institution reported:

“… we see a large number of workers transitioning out of the labor market altogether. The permanently unemployed are particularly likely to leave the labor force, but there is also a small stream of workers on temporary layoff who depart as well. This trend is even more troubling—and a sign of structural damage to the economy that could take longer to heal, because workers who are out of the labor force, even those saying [they] want a job, have relatively low reemployment rate For example, even in more normal job market conditions, only roughly 40 percent of those out of the labor force who say they want a job are back in the labor force within 12 months.”

It’s important to reiterate how profoundly unequal improvements in the economy have been since April and May. Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor, said in a speech a month ago:

“The damage from COVID-19 is concentrated among already challenged groups. Federal Reserve staff analysis indicates that unemployment is likely above 20 percent for workers in the bottom wage quartile, while it has fallen below 5 percent for the top wage quartile. Black and Hispanic unemployment stood at 9.9 percent and 9.3 percent, respectively, in December, while White unemployment was 6.0 percent. Labor force participation for prime-age workers has declined, particularly for parents of school-aged children, where the declines have been greater for women than for men, and greater for Black and Hispanic mothers than for White mothers.”

To say it another way, the jobless rate of the poorest 25% of Americans is four times the rate of the richest 25%. People of color have been disproportionately hurt by these job losses. They are more likely to be low-wage “essential” workers who are unable to work remotely while more affluent workers have been able to work from home with the same pay and benefits as before the pandemic. Those higher-wage jobs are typically less likely to become automated, at least until Alexa becomes self-aware.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2021

Populist.com