Amid a pandemic crisis with by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the very survival of working-class households is now at stake. the $500bn dollars of public money that Congress’s relief bill provides will be used for a corporate bailout, with only little oversight. 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.
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.
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 the next stimulus package comes, a total ban on share buybacks for any of the corporations that accept this bailout is required, rather than the temporary restrictions in last week’s bailout.
“Buying back shares” is just another term for shareholders extracting value from a company. After Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect in 2018, corporations took the windfall and collectively spent over $1tn on buybacks, for the sole purpose of adding to the incomes of shareholders and executives.
Over the past five years alone, airline executives – who were first in line clamoring for a bailout – spent $52bn in corporate cash on buybacks, at the expense of employee wage increases, capital expenditures and investments in innovation. Now that these businesses are being handed government funds, what is needed is that top executives and wealthy shareholders don’t do this again: channel money into their own bank accounts while leaving employees wondering how they are going to pay their bills.
The bail-out cannot allow a small number of executives and shareholders to profit from taxpayer funds that we have injected into these corporations for reasons of pure emergency.
No comments:
Post a Comment