Can Reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act Pass Congress

Seems obvious, but… Shepherded in 1994 through Congress by the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, one Joseph R Biden, Jr., the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) made domestic violence a federal crime. It addressed many sub-issues, such as the right to possess a gun as applied to domestic abusers, stalking, the plague of domestic violence in Native American reservations, sexual assault and victim support. And over the years, it has been fine-tuned to address evolving issues. While Congress separately authorizes funds in support of the VAWA, the act now faces a reauthorization vote that would bring the law up to modern realities. While there is bipartisan support, reauthorization has generated opposition over the years. The renewal legislation is about to face Congressional scrutiny, although no specific date has yet been set.

Hard to believe that reinforcing a solution to such a basic problem would not draw unanimous approval, but there is controversy, beginning with GOP pledges to oppose as much Biden-desired legislation as possible. Writing for the June 1st Los Angeles Times, Julia Barajas adds some details: “In recent years, the act has been rejected by some lawmakers, lobbyists and others who oppose recognizing the rights of transgender people and object to keeping guns from those who’ve been convicted of abusing someone they dated. Prison abolitionists argue that the act places a premium on putting offenders behind bars, instead of providing rehabilitation.” Even as statistics suggest that a domestic violence victim is five times more likely to be killed when an abusive partner has access to a gun, NRA supporters simply oppose restrictions on gun ownership in general, often with virtually no limitations. And that resonates with many GOP legislators.

“The latest version of the act also aims to improve accountability. Noting that the Department of Justice found that Indigenous women on some reservations are slain at more than 10 times the national average, the VAWA reauthorization reaffirms Tribal Nations’ authority to prosecute non-Indigenous offenders who commit crimes on tribal territory.

“The reauthorization act also seeks to close the ‘boyfriend loophole.’ Currently, federal law prohibits people who’ve been convicted of domestic violence from owning or purchasing firearms. However, this applies only to those who have been married to, lived with or have a child with the victim. The 2021 version of the act expands the prohibition to current and former dating partners, as well as those convicted of misdemeanor stalking.

“Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who drafted the provision and pressed for it to be included in the reauthorization act, says it’s an urgent matter of life and death… She and other lawmakers who favor keeping guns from violent dating partners cite the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which notes that when an abusive partner has access to a gun, a domestic violence victim is five times more likely to be killed.

“They also point to a 2018 study published in Preventive Medicine, an international journal on public health policy, which found that more than 4 in 5 domestic violence incidents reported to the police involve partners who are dating, not married…

“The VAWA update also includes provisions for women in prison. When deciding whether to assign a transgender or intersex person to a male or female facility, the Bureau of Prisons would have to consider whether a placement would ensure the prisoner’s health and safety and take the prisoner’s own views into account.

“To more effectively address sexual violence on college campuses, personnel would receive training on how to conduct interviews without judging or blaming victims for alleged crimes. When possible, they would also provide victims with a recording of the interview.

“To stop violence from happening in the first place, the new plan calls for increased investment in ongoing prevention education, encompassing themes ranging from dating violence to reproductive coercion, essentially attempts by male partners to promote pregnancy.” LA Times. This reauthorization and expansion legislation should not struggle through Congress when it is formally brought into formal consideration. But it just might, in an era when taking logical steps to prevent the spread of disease, where military assault weapons are fully legal and where statutes mandating that public classrooms cannot teach that there are historical patterns of racial injustice in the United States. Go figure. If we don’t talk about or deal with issues, they must not exist, right?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you care, please let your representatives in Congress know how you feel about reauthorizing and expanding the Violence Against Women Act.

Race to the Bottom

An estimated 60,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched along 

Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1925.

Race to the Bottom

Classrooms Bans of Criticizing Racial Injustice 

What do Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have in common these days? Republican legislators, backed by Republican governors are passing or contemplating passing constitutionally questionable statutes that threaten schools with being cut off from state support if they teach or allow teaching that certain people are, consciously or unconsciously, practicing or allowing the practice of any form of racial oppression. They have labeled this racist and ignoble “pursuit to ban” as banning “critical race theory.”

Writing for the May 31st Los Angeles Times/Associated Press, Bryan Anderson explains this ugly trend: “Teachers and professors in Idaho will be prevented from ‘indoctrinating’ students on race. Oklahoma teachers will be prohibited from saying certain people are inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously. Tennessee schools will risk losing state aid if their lessons include particular concepts about race and racism.

“Governors and legislatures in Republican-controlled states across the country are moving to define what race-related ideas can be taught in public schools and colleges, a reaction to the nation’s racial reckoning after last year’s police killing of George Floyd. The measures have been signed into law in at least three states and are being considered in many more.

“Educators and education groups are concerned that the proposals will have a chilling effect in the classroom and that students could be given a whitewashed version of the nation’s history. Teachers are also worried about possible repercussions if a student or parent complains.

“‘Once we remove the option of teachers incorporating all parts of history, we’re basically silencing the voices of those who already feel oppressed,’ said Lakeisha Patterson, a third-grade English and social studies teacher who lives in Houston and worries about a bill under consideration in Texas…

“Rep. John Torbett, a Republican who leads North Carolina’s House education committee, said the legislation was intended to promote equality, not rewrite history. ‘It ensures equity,’ Torbett said during a hearing this month. ‘It ensures that all people in society are equitable. It has no mention of history.’” Right… uh huh… sure.

We’ve already been white-washing history in textbooks, as one Texas classroom tome referred to slaves as “immigrants,” or as Tulsa schools somehow forgot about the 1921 genocide of over 300 African Americans in the relatively affluent Greenwood neighborhood. How many Americans know about the forced march of Native Americans from the Carolinas to Oklahoma, known as the Trail of Tears that began in 1838? Or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882? Or the internment camps for Americans of Japanese heritage during World War II? Or the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in 1916 and following? Assuming these “critical race” statutes withstand constitutional scrutiny, none of these matters could lawfully be discussed in the relevant classrooms. Could Brown vs Board of Education (Supreme Court racial integration ruling in 1954), the Voting Rights and Civil Rights federal statutes passed in the 1960s or the need to deploy to deploy federal troops to enforce those laws against systematic regional racism be taught in schools? The above photograph would run afoul of this ban, if effected.

What is fascinating, in a bad way, is how many right-wing laws are being passed – from anti-abortion laws, greater freedom to carry unlicensed guns in public, voter suppression statutes, “cancel culture” reversals, gerrymandering and now “critical race theory,” by red state legislatures. All this knowing that voting demographic trends are very much moving in the opposite direction, a fact which is amplified by the passing of rigid populist GOP elderly being replaced by the overwhelmingly more tolerant and diverse rising generations of young voters. 

Catering to a Trumpian but dwindling “base,” the GOP now has to stack the deck to delay their demise by fostering voter suppression, embracing substantial untruths about voting and elections, stacking the Supreme Court to solidify a right-wing agenda, a tribunal already out of touch with the electorate but likely to last for decades and pass these generally unpopular new laws. We are about to find out how far the newly configured Supreme Court is willing to go to reverse decades of precedent and nullify the freedoms enunciated within the body of the Constitution itself.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if this anti-democracy trend will continue, be sustained or if the democracy which we believe we have simply dies as the nation implodes in an orgy of reversionistic anti-constitutional legislative autocracy.

A Military Dictatorship in the United States

“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; 

nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” 

Charles De Gaulle

 Funny how true nationalists tend to call themselves “patriots,” or how right-wing business-first advocates label anything that could raise taxes or impose environmental or financial regulation as “creeping socialism.” There is no possible way for a political party that has built its unbending fealty to a dwindling white, socially conservative set of traditionals can continue to win elections or otherwise hold control over nation that is hyper-accelerating into a majority of ethnic, racial and gender diversity without distorting the system. Either by suppressing, even nullifying, voters who disagree with their policies… or by military force. 

We’re already viewed as a “flawed democracy,” not one based on fair representation, by most of the free world. Those descriptive words were first formalized by the prestigious UK periodical, The Economist but have been parroted with great frequency even before the attempted Trumpian autocracy. 

This denigration of the truth of “American democracy” is based on a simple reference to a system of government i. that accords two US Senators to California, with over 39 million residents, and two Senators each as to Wyoming and a few other underpopulated states, with populations under 600 thousand, ii. where rich people/institutions can spend unlimited sums in support of candidates and causes (via the 2010 Citizens United vs FEC Supreme Court decision – considered corruption in many other democracies), iii. where states, empowered by some ambiguous extent by the Constitution, seem to be able to write their own election laws that disenfranchise voters that might challenge the incumbents in power, and iv. where endemic discrimination of minorities seems unending and unstoppable.

But older, socially conservative, white traditional voters are dying off. Replaced with rising generations of younger voters who find intolerance, blind support of mega-wealth and failing to provide a future with sufficient and reasonable access to healthcare, education, a working infrastructure and a solution to the ravages of climate change. Replaced with expanding pockets of non-white, non-traditional voters. Replaced with educated voters who find archaic and inflexible intolerant “blame seeking” to be antithetical to progress and prosperity. But these rising new voters, frustrated with conservative incumbents, face not only both voter suppression and nullification but an increased willingness on the part of a growing segment of America that believe it is time to bear arms and take over the country, by force if necessary.

They totally believe the “Big Lie” that, without any serious proof of voter fraud, holds Donald Trump as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, oddly on the same purportedly fraudulent ballot that also elected the conservatives to Congress. They view the January 6th siege of the Capitol as an orderly and very normal protest, ignoring the death and violence that occurred, view the perpetrators as patriots and believe that true Americans would be most justified in overthrowing the government. Militias and conspiracy theories are their tools of choice. 

To folks who cannot contemplate an overthrow of our government by domestic terrorists, the same domestic terrorists that both Homeland Security and the FBI have described as the “greatest threat” to American democracy, may I suggest that they understand that the belief that it is time to “act” (read: stage a coup) now falls from the mouths of those recently in power: Jonah Goldberg, writing for the June 1st Los Angeles Times, reminds us with this example: “Over Memorial Day weekend, Michael Flynn, [a former US Army general] who briefly served as Donald Trump’s first national security advisor, appeared at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Dallas. During a Q&A session, an audience member said, ‘I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here.’

“What happened in Myanmar was an old-fashioned military coup… Flynn replied, ‘No reason. I mean, it should happen here.’… The crowd cheered both the question and the answer…

“Why aren’t more conservatives and elected Republicans more horrified by this and stuff like it?.. The timing of Flynn’s remarks was darkly fortuitous, and not just because he offered his comments on the eve of Memorial Day, when we honor the men and women who gave their lives defending our Constitution. They also coincided with a current debate about the nature of conservatism, and whether the right’s descent into such conspiracy-mongering paranoia and nationalism is a betrayal of conservatism or the inevitable result of conservative ideas. Some even argue that this is what conservatism was always about.

“It’s certainly true that the Trump era has revealed a lot about how serious — or rather, unserious — some prominent Republicans and conservatives really were about their reverence for the Constitution. But instead of going down various intellectual and historical rabbit holes, I’ll just say that trying to lay this at the feet of conservative ideas is a distraction.

“The core problem afflicting the right — and to a great degree, the country — is the elite surrender to populism. Definitions of populism vary, but for our purposes, it’s best understood as the politics of the mob. The defining emotions of populism and mobs are passion and the twin convictions that ‘we’ are right and ‘we’ have been wronged by ‘them.’” 

While the Cambridge Dictionary defines “populism” as “political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want,” the fact that what one “populist” constituency might want as a denial of the rights of those who disagree with that constituency is the beginning of understanding that terms. Certainly, of late, American populism has elevated one class/race of people over the rest, denial of the right to disagree with that class/race, and the belief that passionate commitments need not be based on truth, facts or require justification before being unleashed.

“Populism is often immune to reason and contemptuous of debate. ‘The people of Nebraska are for free silver, and I am for free silver,’ William Jennings Bryan proclaimed. ‘I will look up the arguments later.’…  Both parties have, at various times, hitched their wagons to populism. Bryan, Andrew Jackson, Huey Long and George Wallace rode the populist tiger, while Franklin Roosevelt and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama harnessed the beast for their purposes.

“Conservatives deserve special criticism for fomenting populism because conservatism is supposed to be temperamentally skeptical of excessive political passion. But that decision has less to do with conservative ideas than with the corruption of prioritizing political power over principle — an error that is inherent to politics and human nature, as the founders understood well. Certainly, on paper, intellectual progressivism provides as much permission for indulging populism as conservatism does.” LA Times. Democracy is far more frail, subject to destruction, than many believe. By way of example, Hitler and Putin initially were elected, purportedly under some form of democracy. But hate speech and finding categories of people to blame allowed these autocrats to rise and plow democracy into the dirt.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the onslaught of social media and hate speech seem to have challenged the sustainability of American democracy more than at any other time in our post-Civil War history.

The Two-Faced Lion Speaks

We keep forgetting the role of the United States is what I will describe as the “narcoization” of Mexico and points south. It can be egregious, like the CIA’s Iran Contra-gate involvement in support of the Reagan-era drug smuggling into the United States to fund illicit arms for various countries where we were not permitted to be directly involved, or pervasive: Like the rising consumer demand for narcotics across the United States, regardless of criminality, and the dramatic inability of our federal and state governments to contain this plague. This demand is the fuel that has created this massive narcoization in nations to our south. 

And then we have the mega-lax, almost non-existent, US legal restraints in the sale of guns of all shapes, sizes and capacity, particularly military grade assault rifles, which have been smuggled in abundance south of our border. Oh, and lest we forget that some of the most lethal operatives in the corruption and violence are gangs that began in the United States. Like MS-13 which was born in Los Angeles and has polluted El Salvador almost beyond redemption. 

It is no secret that revenues generated from the drug trade have created alternative quasi-military if not parallel governments all over Latin America. De facto civil wars. Cartels and gangs have enlisted the most senior elected officials, entire police forces and even the local judicial systems through the most pervasive corruption on earth in so many Latin American nations, particularly in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador (the “Northern Triangle Nations”)… with deep ties well into Mexico at every level. To many in these nations, the drug trade – from cultivation and processing through transshipment and smuggling – is the largest industry in the country.

We get angry at the number of residents from Latin American narco-states knocking on our door, seeking asylum from the chaos and violence in their home countries for which American failures are truly responsible. Donald Trump ignored that reality, and the Biden administration is seeking to apply mere palliatives (chump change compared to cartel “investments”) to turn narco-states into nations where their citizens can live without fear… and hence not seek asylum into the United States. We’ve sent high ranking US officials – even our Vice-President – on missions to undo deeply embedded violence and corruption to take pressure off our immigration nightmare. Good luck with that process.

Tracy Wilkinson, writing for the June 2nd Los Angeles Times, follows the efforts of our Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, as he meets with various heads of Latin states to sell his anti-corruption message… albeit to many leaders who are themselves massive beneficiaries of that corruption: “He could be facing a tough crowd. U.S. relations with the governments of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, in particular, are badly strained, complicating President Biden’s plan to use $4 billion over the next four years to boost democratic reforms and improve the economies in those three so-called Northern Triangle nations — the source of most migrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally…

“‘What we hope and expect to hear from our partners are commitments to address all the issues’ that drive illegal immigration, such as an erosion in democracy, poor security, poverty and corruption, Blinken said in a news conference at the Casa Presidencial in San Jose [Costa Rica], the capital… ‘We’re in many of these challenges together,’ he said. ‘What we’re seeing in too many places around the world, including this region, is backsliding from those basic principles’ of democracy, human rights and rule of law.

“Blinken is attending an annual meeting of the foreign ministers of the eight-member Central American Integration System, an economic and political association of all Central American countries plus the Dominican Republic.

“Administration officials say they have already made clear to the Central American presidents that very little of the $4 billion will go to the central governments but instead will be channeled through nongovernmental organizations and other private entities.

“To underscore that warning, the U.S. Agency for International Development last week announced that it was diverting all aid it gives El Salvador from the government to ‘civil society’ groups that monitor human rights and fight corruption. (USAID did not say how much money was involved.)

“The move came after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele fired the country’s attorney general and Supreme Court magistrates and then ignored entreaties from Washington and elsewhere to reconsider what was widely seen as an illegal power grab.

“‘We recognize that in some cases we don’t have perfect development partners,’ said Mark Feierstein, special advisor at USAID, ‘but we’re confident that we can identify in Central America ... reformers within government ... [and] civil society actors who can hold their governments accountable.’

“The Biden administration is concerned about what it sees as similar erosions of democracy in Guatemala, where President Alejandro Giammattei has sought to undercut the courts, and in Honduras, which has an especially difficult problem. Its president, the staunch Trump ally Juan Orlando Hernández, is under federal investigation in the U.S. on drug-trafficking allegations. Administration officials have said privately they will shun him.

“Meeting with the foreign ministers of those countries might yield better results as Blinken hopes to enlist their cooperation on immigration and hear plans for reforms at home… Blinken scheduled one-on-one encounters with the foreign ministers of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In addition to the Costa Rican president and foreign minister, Carlos Alvarado Quesada and Rodolfo Solano, he will meet with Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, who is attending as an observer.”

“Dealings with Nicaragua, which was also present at the summit, could become a point of contention. No U.S. administration has had a good relationship with Managua for years, ever since President Daniel Ortega began cracking down on the opposition and news media and staying in power through suspicious elections.” 

These problems have taken decades to reach the depths of despair and desperation, corruption on a level we have never seen before, and our efforts – selfishly focused on stemming illicit immigration – can only be described as too little, too late. We are pushing for vaccines to reach these nations, something we should have addressed a while ago. Even convincing US corporations to invest in these tarnished lands – 12 major corporations, including Microsoft and Nestle’s Nespresso – is just a drop in the bucket… assuming that these companies can even function in this toxic environment. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and it will take decades and massive US investments just to begin to reverse the tide that we have caused.

Truly Organized Crime – Hitting below the Border

I once wrote that Mexico should build a northern border wall and make the United States pay for it. The flood of assault rifles and automatic handguns into a nation with very strict gun control laws seemed almost exclusively to emanate from guns legally purchased in the U.S. and smuggled south across the border. This tsunami of guns has enabled the massive network of drug cartels to execute and bribe their way to control drug trafficking from South and Central America, through and within Mexico (and points north), ultimately to feed the consumer-demand that seems to defy containment in the United States. The ultra-violence has in turn motivated the flood of desperate immigrants poised on the border, plagued by fear and desperation, to enter the country whose demand for drugs caused it all.

The staggering wealth of the cartels has driven violence to a level that many view as civil wars in the Hispanic nations south of our border. Criminal syndicates often have such tight relationships with local and national police and elected officials from bottom to the highest elected office in the land that criminal prosecution of drug cartels is often a joke. Money flows. Officials cooperate with officials, who sometimes even participate, in narco-trafficking. While in some of the smaller states in Central America, the ties are strongest at the top, in the and deeply populated (127 million people) Mexico, it is often more important for cartels to focus on local elections since it is local officials who can be most reached by threats or bribery… and who happen to control local police actions.

With a mid-term election looming in Mexico on June 6th, the question is whether the popular and often labeled as populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – who is not himself standing for reelection – can maintain his party’s majority in most Mexican states. For officials running in small states and cities, unable to afford the expensive protection considered advisable for all candidates for Mexican public office, they face intimidation and violence of unparalleled force.

Recently, at a hastily called campaign rally in town of Moroleón, mayoral candidate Rosa Alma Barragán faced a convoy of well-armed cartel soldiers who sprayed her assembly with bullets. Barragán did not survive. Patrick McDonnell, writing for the May 31st Los Angeles Times, expounds on this harsh violent reality caused by the egregious level of consumer demand, mostly from the United States: “Barragán was the 34th office seeker killed in the run-up to national midterm balloting on June 6, according to Etellekt Consultants, a risk analysis firm. On Friday [5/28], a city council candidate in the southern state of Chiapas was found slain, police said, bringing the total to 35.

“Hundreds of other candidates have been threatened, leading some to drop out. The violence has struck across party lines, but the most frequent targets have been those opposing incumbent parties [most likely already to be on the take].

“Campaigning and killing have long been entwined in a shadowy embrace in Mexico. The best-known case in recent history is the 1994 assassination of presidential aspirant Luis Donaldo Colosio at a rally in Tijuana — a slaying still shrouded in conspiracy theories and doubts about the official story that it was the work of a lone gunman.

“But most attacks target small-town candidates lacking extensive protection details… In many ways, organized crime has more interest in local politics than in national politics. Control of city halls swells gang coffers and provides a path to broader influence as ‘bought’ officeholders ascend the political ladder… ‘Municipalities are the easiest point for organized crime to penetrate, but the consequences go way beyond the local orbit,’ wrote columnist Sergio Sarmiento in the daily Reforma… The politicians killed during the current electoral cycle constitute ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ he wrote. ‘We don’t know how many more have been pressured or have had to accept demands from organized crime to keep on competing.’”

Corruption runs deep in so many regions in Mexico. Entire local police departments, operating as enforcement wings of local cartels, have been totally removed and replaced by federales (Mexican federal police, not always free from corruption either). Turf wars between rival cartels are often more brutal than massive conflicts between police and the cartels themselves. The problem is more than mirrored in the smaller nations in much of Central America, particularly El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where the heads of state are often implicated in the narco-wars. Even in Mexico, senior officials from heads of the entire federal police force to past presidents have been implicated in corruption scandals.

Which brings me back to that notion of desperate immigrants, waiting for a shot at asylum into the United States, who face cartel executions and economic ruin generated by drug wars in their home countries, all because of excessive American demand for illicit drugs and the unlawful export of sophisticated guns acquired legally in the United States to the criminals that threaten them in their corrupted nations. See anything wrong with this situation? 

Our money, generated by the sale of illegal drugs within the United States, funds the very criminal activity, the cartels’ purchase of the very weapons that outgun local police (those few that are uncorrupted), that creates the necessity for many locals to flee, seeking hope or rescue by the nation that is at the root of it all. The United States has never figured out how to stem demand for illegal drugs. The purported “war on drugs” started in the Reagan years (when the Iran Contra Scandal actually put our CIA into the chain of drug smugglers) and continued thereafter is, was and probably will be a total failure. Yet we refuse to rescue those whose lives have been decimated by our inability to control the problem.

I’m Peter Dekom, and American politicians from both sides of the aisle still refuse to accept responsibility for the U.S.-generated cause of the severe and extensive violence and poverty that drive immigrants from south of our border to seek asylum here.

Pay Me, Don’t Play with Me

 

The macroeconomic shifts that began well before the pandemic experienced a heightened acceleration from the combined impact of the giant and unnecessary corporate tax cut in 2017 and the lockdowns and concomitant worker/consumer absence throughout the economy. Add cheap corporate borrowing ability, and the picture become even clearer. Even as the positive medical results in urban areas that imposed the severest lockdowns probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives and more than an equal number of businesses, the negative survivability impact on small, often undercapitalized businesses with limited access to debt was often devastating. What we might not have realized is that for large, well-capitalized businesses, those lockdowns were a Godsend. 

First, it allowed corporate America to lay workers off without much of a challenge, even from that small (under 7%) unionized private sector of workers. Debt for the biggest was plentiful, so survivability was not much of an issue for most service and manufacturing sectors, hitting hardest on travel, hospitality and entertainment/sports venues. That contraction of the workforce, sold as temporary until the disease were contained, was never really intended to be temporary for so much of corporate America. Instead, that downtime permitted so many companies to install and absorb automation, much more sophisticated systems that automated financial transactions (even retail, look at Amazon for example), warehousing, manufacturing robotics and even complex professions including medical and legal. All driven by artificial intelligence.

So as the economy reopens, even as there is increasing pressure from the Biden administration to standardize a living wage across the workplace, the harsh reality remains that increasingly human labor has been replaced by automation. Where workers once earned a living, much that revenue has been shifted to the companies that own the labor-replacing automated machinery, an amplifier of income inequality. People make less, company machines make more. In a world where AI is the dominating economic transitional force, it is moving us from an information age into a time where economics are increasingly a product of thinking machines replacing people. This is a big deal, one that has put a downward pressure on wages for all but the most skilled and educated workers, who are feeling that automation pressure at a lower, but rising, level. Workers who can implement artificial intelligence systems are experiencing soaring wages, however. More structured government jobs also have a more solidified earnings base.

Rick Newman, writing for the May 24th Yahoo/Finance, presents the underlying numbers: “The latest data shows there are 8.1 million jobs available in the U.S. economy, the most since at least 2000. But hiring is weak and the unemployment rate is going up, not down. Many Republicans claim federal unemployment benefits of $300 per week, on top of what states pay, are making it more lucrative for unemployed Americans to collect benefits than rejoin the labor force. At least 22 states—all with Republican governors—are ending the federal jobless benefit early.

“But many open jobs appear to pay less than they did before the coronavirus pandemic exploded a year ago, suggesting many workers are really refusing to take lousy jobs. A recent study by Bank of America finds that the average pay of open jobs is lower than before the pandemic in 12 of 15 sectors. Pay is up in 2 sectors and flat in 1. The data comes from research firm Revelio Labs, which uses algorithms to scrape data from job-posting sites such as Monster and Indeed.

“On average, the pay for posted jobs is 5% lower than the average for 2019, which Bank of America uses as a baseline for pre-pandemic wages. The biggest drop is in retail trade, where the average pay of posted jobs is 21% lower. The next biggest pay drop was in professional and business services, down 14%, followed by a 12% drop in transportation. Pay for open jobs in information, which includes many tech positions, rose by a startling 38%.” But as anyone going to a grocery store, seeking to buy or rent a home or tried to gas up their car has discovered, costs are skyrocketing…

“The drop in offered pay for open jobs suggests there’s a lot more slack in the labor force than other data does: Businesses can’t be that desperate for workers if they’re offering lower pay than they were 18 months ago. Some big employers, such as Amazon, Costco, McDonald’s and Chipotle, have said recently they’re raising pay to draw needed workers. But if offered pay is below pre-pandemic levels in most industries, that means many smaller companies are not following suit.

“To some extent, big pay declines are intuitive. The retail sector suffered badly as many businesses had to limit operations or shut down last year, so it would make sense that pay would be depressed as the industry tries to bounce back. Retail businesses that suffered losses may also be paying less by necessity, or seeing if they can shave labor costs while they get back on their feet…

“The biggest drop in jobs was in arts and entertainment, with a 25% decline, while pay for new jobs has fallen 9%. The hotel and restaurant industries have seen a 16% drop in employment, and a 4% drop in pay for advertised jobs. Cause and effect can be tricky to ascertain, but part of the reason for depressed pay in these fields is probably a glut of workers.”

It is strange that the political party associated with “understanding business” – Republicans – are mired in economic theories that actually push against economic growth. “Supply side” (aka “trickle down”) economics remains the most sacred axiom in the GOP economic platform, even though that theory has NEVER EVER worked in the real world. A dramatic misunderstanding of the change in the composition and operation of the job market in technologically advancing times has led to what can only be viewed as a GOP assumption that American workers are spoiled and lazy. It does not help when the misapplication of words – like “creeping socialism” – are used to support the fallacy of completely disproven economic theories that they are simply unwilling to relinquish. 

Fatal also is the failure to misunderstand that the damage of unwarranted tax cuts, deferred maintenance on critical infrastructure, expansion of military expenditures are economy killers, while investing in infrastructure, education, research and human capital actually are economic drivers with a hard dollar return on invested capital. That the purported “business representatives” on Capitol Hill no longer understand how an economy works, are more consumed with inane conspiracy theories and false economic assumptions, is a toxic reality. They believe that they can fool enough Americans with these false pledges and take back the Congress in 2022, fostering their gridlock mentality. They could be right, but that would be exceptionally unfortunate for a nation struggling to recover from the pandemic and unprecedented disunity.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the dissociation of facts from political platforms may prove to be our ultimate undoing.