Aff - GND Updates 2 - Michigan 7 2023 CPSW

Aff- Plutocracy
Contention 1: Plutocracy
1. Best data shows covid has dramatically accelerated inequality. Big government action like a federal jobs guarantee is the only way to reverse it
Adamczyk 20
(Alicia, money reporter at CNBC Make It. She formerly covered personal finance at Money Magazine and Lifehacker. Adamczyk has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/23/coronavirus-is-exacerbating-economic-inequality-in-the-us.html)
Experts, who have been trying to sound the alarm on the growing economic inequality in the United States for the past few decades, are seeing their worst fears realized during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since mid-March, tens of millions of Americans across the country have lost their jobs as a result of the economic fallout from the pandemic. No group has been spared: men and women, young and old, Black and White. But as the economy starts to recover, some groups are faring significantly worse than others, including Blacks, Hispanics, millennials, mothers and low-wage workers in the service industry. They are not returning to work at the same rate as White professional workers. The same groups, ironically, are also overrepresented in frontline industries that were deemed essential during the peak of the crisis, including health care, child care, cleaning services and grocery stores. In North Carolina, these frontline workers are 65% women and around 30% Black, according to the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, disproportionate to the percentage of the total workforce those two groups account for. Economic recessions never impact every group the same. But the degree to which Black and White workers are seeing their fortunes diverge post-Covid is one of the reasons many economists have deemed the ongoing recovery “K-shaped.” While White Americans have recovered more than half of the jobs they lost between February and April, Black Americans have recovered only around one-third. As recovery drags on, the coronavirus recession has turned into the most unequal in modern U.S. history. “The recession is almost over for white collar jobs with good benefits,” says Patrick McHugh, research manager at the nonpartisan North Carolina Budget and Tax Center. “But we’re still a long way away from recovering for people in the middle, and particularly low wage jobs.” Even before the Covid-19 crisis, many North Carolinians, like many Americans generally, still hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession. While the number of white collar jobs in the financial and tech sectors have grown in the state over the past decade, job growth in mid-income industries like manufacturing has been stagnant. “A lot of the other job growth was in extremely low paying positions that don’t have real opportunities for career advancement and would come with entirely meager benefits, if any,” says McHugh. With those middle-income jobs disappearing, many individuals, especially Black workers, settled for lower paying work and have not been able to build up the assets they would need to cushion another financial blow: Before coronavirus, 42% of North Carolina households would have been unable to cover all of their expenses for three months without assistance, including 33% of White households and 63% of Black households. Covid-19 has decimated those low-wage industries. Temporary furloughs in these fields are turning into permanent job loss. Long-term unemployment is on the rise. “We have to get a handle on income disparity,” says Ken Schorr, executive director of the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy, based in Charlotte, NC. “This will not be a society that anybody wants to live in if we don’t get a handle on providing a better deal for working people in the bottom half of the income spectrum.” Systemic racism means people of color face the worst outcomes Centuries of systemic racism have made the financial outcomes disproportionately worse for Black and Hispanic Americans, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported earlier this month. Black Americans, especially, have been kept from higher-paying white collar jobs, and are over-represented in the service and hospitality sectors, which have borne the brunt of the coronavirus layoffs. That is further bifurcating the U.S. economy. Across the country, just 20% of Black workers are able to work from home, compared to 30% of White workers and 37% of Asian workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. While white collar professionals work remotely, service industry workers must go to work and risk being exposed to Covid-19 or go without income at all. “Racism forms the foundation of inequality in our society, and it threatens our economy and limits economic opportunity for people of color,” the Fed wrote. And not only are Black workers more likely to lose their jobs, they are also more likely to have their unemployment insurance claims denied by their employers and more likely to receive less aid when they do get approved, according to research from Nyanya Browne and William Spriggs of Howard University. That’s no accident. It’s “the legacy of white supremacy” in North Carolina, says McHugh. States with higher populations of Black residents, especially in the South, have slashed unemployment insurance budgets and intentionally designed the systems so that they are more difficult to access, he says. Even more stark are the health disparities. Black Americans are disproportionately dying of Covid-19. In fact, APM Research Lab estimates that the virus is responsible for the death of 1 in 920 Black Americans, compared to 1 in 1,840 White Americans. The age-adjusted Covid-19 mortality rate is 3.2 times as high for Black Americans as it is for Whites. “Inequality has been building for decades, and the pandemic ripped it open,” says Schorr. How to move forward Another Covid-19 recovery package from the federal government is necessary to help the 23 million Americans still without work and keep inequality from growing even worse. The CARES Act, passed in March, included $2 trillion in enhanced unemployment, stimulus checks for individuals, food assistance and much more. Aid was disbursed quickly and was well-targeted to those who needed it, say the experts interviewed for this article. Fewer people fell into poverty than would have been expected, according to recent research from Columbia University. But now many of the most helpful provisions have expired. Yet the crisis is ongoing, and though some jobs have come back, the recovery has flat lined. Meanwhile, Congress has been negotiating another deal for months but has so far been unable to agree on what to include in the next aid package. Without more relief, everyone loses, says Eliza Forsythe, a labor economist and assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Some economists believe if we had been more proactive, we could have gotten back to recovery faster,” says Forsythe. “The CARES Act was really successful in terms of mitigating the effects. But we’re not giving [workers] more support. That prolongs the recovery.” Enhanced unemployment benefits, a sticking point of the negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress, are important. They helped prop up the economy in the early months of the crisis, says Forsythe, ensuring families could pay all of their bills. Without them, households are falling behind. Now is the time to think big Just as important as the benefits themselves is the continuity of providing them, says Megan Curran, a researcher at the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Households need the short- and long-term assurance that they will have income. “We know that when families are experiencing huge fluctuations in income, it can have a [domino] effect. It can lead to them losing their homes, or to debt that can end up costing them way more than the original bill,” says Curran. “Without action even more folks are going to be losing out.” Federal assistance for state and local governments is also crucial, says North Carolina Budget and Tax Center’s McHugh. With tax revenues down across the country, this would allow local governments to offer more aid to their citizens. Now is the time to think big, says William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University. The virus has demonstrated the need for an expanded national health-care program and a federal jobs guarantee. The latter would essentially be a national payroll to ensure people could have income whenever there was a need, not on the “sporadic basis” Congress is providing now, says Darity. Nationalized health care would mean that if people lost their jobs, they wouldn’t automatically lose their health insurance. Without more relief, inequality in the U.S. will continue to grow. That hurts individuals and families, and the economy as a whole. “The data is clear that the need is high,” says Curran. “As a poverty researcher, we’re trying to sound the alarm here. We know action that was taken earlier this year worked, but we know that it wasn’t enough and we know that families need more. Congress can do something, but they need to take action.”
2. Inequality has reached an all time high -neg defense is a snapshot that ignores the trend
Baum, PhD, 6-9-23
(Rick, PoliSci@CCSF https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/09/the-u-s-has-made-great-progress-at-increasing-economic-inequality/
One of the more impressive accomplishments of the United States in recent decades is how it has achieved greater economic inequality in line with what Marx expected from a capitalist economy. There are periods of setbacks—in which economic inequality is reduced–followed by improvements resulting in even higher levels of inequality. Advancing economic inequality has been a bipartisan undertaking. The actions of both the Democrats and Republicans in power have increased economic inequality as their leaders, together, champion the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle and working classes. Additionally, despite the growth in the diversity of the ruling class, economic inequality has continued to widen. Examples of progress towards greater economic inequality that results in unmet needs and misery for many is made apparent in media stories such as a recent one in the Guardian with the title “I can’t afford groceries’: why one-third of US college students don’t have enough to eat.” Wealth Inequality Wealth is the value of what one owns minus one’s debts. Many people owe more than all of what they own is worth. They have negative wealth. Then there are those at the top who have played a major role in our country’s success at achieving such high levels of economic inequality. They include our “generous” good friends, the “job creators,” Musk, Bezos and Gates, the wealth of each is more than $100 billion. The Federal Reserve Board, the banker’s bank, has been providing data on the distribution of wealth in the U.S. going back to 1989. The share of the nation’s wealth held by the wealthiest has grown tremendously. In 1989, the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent held 8.7% of the nation’s wealth rising to 12.6% as of the end of 2022. The Fed’s data show that in 1989, the wealth of the .1% was 2.26 times greater than the poorest 50%. At the end of 2022, the value of their holdings, $17.6 trillion, was more than four times greater than the wealth, $4.16 trillion, of the poorest 50% of the U.S. population.
3. Recent WHO report proves inequality is the vital internal link to trust/social stability breakdown
Baniya 7-13-23
(Sudesh Baniya https://www.euronews.com/2023/07/13/inequality-decimating-social-trust-in-europe-finds-who-report)
A World Health Organisation (WHO) report has linked declining levels of trust between people and institutions across Europe to yawning inequality. Analysis by WHO's Regional Office for Europe highlighted the connection between widening health and social inequities - reflected by the ever-increasing number of people living insecure lives - and reduced trust. People have increasingly turned away from governments and public institutions feeling they do not benefit them, while others enjoy privileges, explained the report. For those on low incomes, trust in others is 40% lower compared to high earners, it added. Trust in governments has also declined significantly since the start of the pandemic for people out of work, according to the report. It detailed that a lack of social protection for the vulnerable has further widened the inequality. “All governments and policymakers should take note of the report’s ominous findings and implement concrete policy solutions that benefit everyone, including and especially the most neglected," WHO Regional Director for Europe Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge said. The report also detailed the fatal consequences of widening health and economic inequalities. Some 600,000 preventable deaths across member states with comparatively less health care spending in Europe were observed, it estimated. “Our new analysis further confirms that ‘profit-only’ economic policies do not work,” warned Christine Brown, Head of WHO European Office for Investment for Health and Development. A government's failure to improve people's lives can lead to a "breakdown" of social stability, Brown added, calling for accountable and transparent public policies focused on well-being in Europe. The analysis called for five policies — such as ensuring that social support was catered to the vulnerable, an equitable distribution of health and care resources, and universal protection system — as a way forward to build and strengthen social cohesion, resilience and trust, while reducing inequalities.
4.Plutocracy is an existential risk- neg arguments are a product of entrenched wealth protecting its interests via media manipulation and junktanks
Monbiot, MA, 7-15-23
(George, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/15/food-systems-collapse-plutocrats-life-on-earth-climate-breakdown)
According to Google’s news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk. The new paper explores the impacts on crop production when meanders in the jet stream (Rossby waves) become stuck. Stuck patterns cause extreme weather. To put it crudely, if you live in the northern hemisphere and a kink in the jet stream (the band of strong winds a few miles above the Earth’s surface at mid-latitudes) is stuck to the south of you, your weather is likely to be cold and wet. If it’s stuck to the north of you, you’re likely to suffer escalating heat and drought. In both cases, the stuck weather, exacerbated by global heating, affects crops. With certain meander patterns, several of the northern hemisphere’s major growing regions – such as western North America, Europe, India and east Asia – could be exposed to extreme weather at the same time, hammering their harvests. We rely for our subsistence on global smoothing: if there’s a bad harvest in one region, it’s likely to be counteracted by good harvests elsewhere. Even small crop losses occurring simultaneously present what the paper calls “systemic risk”. A woman holds a malnourished child at the nutrition unit of Gode General Hospital, in Gode, Ethiopia, on 11 January 2023. The last five rainy seasons since the end of 2020 have failed, triggering the worst drought in four decades in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. Number of people going hungry has risen by 122m since 2019, UN says Read more Already, regional climate shocks have helped cause a disastrous reversal in the trend of global chronic hunger. For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since. This is not because of a lack of food. The most likely explanation is that the global food system has lost its resilience. When complex systems lose resilience, instead of damping the shocks that hit them, they tend to amplify them. The shocks amplified across the system so far have landed most heavily on poor nations that depend on imports, causing local price spikes even when global food prices were low. If this happens when harvests are affected in just one country or one region, we can only imagine the results if extreme weather simultaneously hits several major growing regions. Other papers have been published with similar themes, showing, for example, the impacts of the rising frequency of “flash droughts” and concurrent heatwaves in grain-producing regions, and how global heating hits food security. All have been largely or entirely ignored by the media. We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other. There are plenty of signs, some of which I’ve tried to explain in the Guardian and, with a sense of rising urgency, in a presentation to parliament, suggesting that the global food system may not be far from its tipping point, for structural reasons similar to those that tanked the financial sector in 2008. As a system approaches a critical threshold, it’s impossible to say which external shock could push it over. Once a system has become fragile, and its resilience is not restored, it’s not a matter of if and how, but when. So why isn’t this all over the front pages? Why, when governments know we’re facing existential risk, do they fail to act? Why is the Biden administration allowing enough oil and gas drilling to bust the US carbon budget five times over? Why is the UK government scrapping the £11.6bn international climate fund it promised? Why has Labour postponed its £28bn green prosperity fund, while Keir Starmer is reported to have remarked last week “I hate tree huggers” (a pejorative term for environmental campaigners)? Why are the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express competing to attack every green solution that might help to prevent climate chaos? Why does everything else seem more important? The underlying problem isn’t hard to grasp: governments have failed to break what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the patrimonial spiral of wealth accumulation. As a result, the rich have become ever richer, a process that seems to be accelerating. In 2021, for example, the ultra-rich captured almost two-thirds of all the world’s new wealth. Their share of national income in the UK has almost doubled since 1980, while in the US it’s higher than it was in 1820. The richer a fraction of society becomes, the greater its political power, and the more extreme the demands it makes. The problem is summarised in one sentence in the resignation letter of the UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith: instead of attending a crucial environment summit, Rishi Sunak went to Rupert Murdoch’s summer party. We cannot work together to solve our common problems when great power is in the hands of so few. What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests. Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise

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