Without significant oversight, Congress’s economic relief bill will leave millions of everyday Americans in financial peril.
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 $500 billion 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…
To read the entire article from The Guardian, click https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/13/with-working-americans-survival-at-stake-the-us-is-bailing-out-the-richest
