Saturday, December 26, 2015

WILL MEXICO ELECT LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILLARY CLINTON AS THE SECOND LA RAZA PRESIDENT AFTER OBAMA? - During the early years of the Clintons' presidency their only child, daughter Chelsea, was in full awkward pre adolescence -- slightly chubby, braces on her teeth, unruly curly hair. The Clintons admirably decreed then:"It's t...

During the early years of the Clintons' presidency their only child, daughter Chelsea, was in full awkward pre adolescence -- slightly chubby, braces on her teeth, unruly curly hair. The Clintons admirably decreed then:

"It's t...

FOR THE LAST TEN YEARS HILLARY CLINTON HAS HISPANDERED TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA "The Race".

SHE HAS PROMISED THEM EVERYTHING FROM AN EXPANDED TRILLION DOLLAR MEXICAN WELFARE STATE, TO CHAIN MIGRATION THAT WOULD PERMIT THE REST OF MEXICO TO INVADE, OCCUPY AND LOOT, TO DEFACTO CITIZENSHIP IN THE FORM OF DRIVER'S LICENSES AS WELL AS OPEN BORDERS, CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT AND NO E-VERIFY!

December 26, 2015

Hispandering Hillary

By Ethel C. Fenig

"It's the request of the president and Mrs. Clinton that Chelsea be allowed to have as normal a childhood as possible while living at the White House," said Neel Lattimore, the first lady's spokesman.

But that was over 20 years ago and now another Clinton is running for president and the grown up, married, mother and mother to be, Chelsea, is not only an active part of her mother's campaign she's allowing her daughter, the Clintons' granddaughter, to be exploited to advance her mother's presidential pursuit. She publicly announced both her pregnancies and allowed her daughter to be used in a campaign ad targeted to those from Spanish speaking countries as a way to humanize her mother as a grandmother "7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela", formerly "7 ways Hillary Clinton is just like your abuela." The last word is Spanish for grandmother.

It’s no secret that Hillary is loving her role as grandma. And she was thrilled to learn that next summer, her granddaughter Charlotte will have a sibling to play with.

She’s always happy to talk about her “beautiful, perfect” granddaughter, she’s an eager volunteer for babysitting duty, and whenever she travels around the country, she makes sure to bring back a gift for Charlotte—sound familiar?

Too familiar in the wrong way to wise Hispanics. Throwing in some Spanish words on the site, white skin privileged, wealthy, bleached blonde, highly educated Hillary condescendingly explains to potential voters from Spanish speaking countries she's just like their grandmother. Except she isn't and her identity politics, targeted audience fought back hard on twitter, contemptuously labeling her attempt Hispandering and forcefully insisting #Not My Abuela or, in Spanish, #Not Mi Abuela.

And there they told her off. A sampling from these sites:

phoebe ‏@phoebeyonce Dec 22

my abuela was a long-suffering,low-wage agricultural worker&mother of 9 who was never afforded your privileges, @HillaryClinton #NotMyAbuela

Ben Walters ‏@TheBenWalters 2d2 days ago

Reminder-- GOP has 2 Latinos and 3 fluent Spanish speakers. D's have phony politician who gave us the term #Hispandering. #NotMyAbuela

Daniel T. Clark ‏@Danieldcclark 2d2 days ago Sorry last I checked abuelitas don't run political campaigns funded by big banks and the private prison lobby #NotMyAbuela #Hispandering
Latino Rebels ‏@latinorebels 2d2 days ago
#Hispandering at its worst by @HillaryClinton campaign leads to #NotMyAbuela http://www.latinorebels.com/2015/12/22/just-when-you-thought-hillary-clinton-couldnt-hispander-any-more-she-did-it-again/ …

Christina Torres ‏@biblio_phile 2d2 days agoKalaoa, HI

Christina Torres Retweeted Latino Rebels

Oh Hilary. No. Just because you throw a Spanish word on it doesn't make it Latino. please stop #hispandering.

Andrew Baldizon‏@andrewbaldizon My Abuelas are not political props

Gonzales Vargas ‏@G0nzales_Vargas 14h14 hours ago

hillary is a FAKE politican, she is NOT latino and she is racist who ASSUMES we will vote for her

Viva la causa! ‏@70torinoman Dec 22 Ya, I remember the good old days when my abuelita conspired with the CIA to topple a democratically elected govt in Honduras. NotMyAbuela

mixer ‏@AryanaaBM Dec 22 Mi abuela wouldn't try to buy Latino votes by using Spanish words & trying to seem relatble to struggles she'll never know #NotMyAbuela

Nick Short ‏@PoliticalShort Dec 22 Nick Short Retweeted Hillary Clinton

Such a conundrum for @HillaryClinton as she panders in Spanish while her donors speak Arabic. #NotMyAbuela

Fausta Rodriguez Wertz, of Puerto Rican descent, exploded at the insult and lack of cultural understanding. http://datechguyblog.com/2015/12/23/no-hillary-you-most-definitely-are-notmyabuela/#readability

First, the breach in etiquette: In all Spanish-language countries, you have to expect that bringing up to complete strangers someone’s mother (tu madre) or grandmother (tu abuela) directly in the familiar (tu abuela instead of su abuela), especially without using the more genteel abuelita, will be taken as an insult. I don’t know how no one in the campaign, the focus group, or the chain of people coming up with this list could not have realized it.

Compound the breach in etiquette with this,

She isn’t afraid to talk about the importance of el respeto (especially when it comes to women) …

for a double whammy of ironic, patronizing cluelessness. As a native speaker of both English and Spanish, I’m fine with R-E-S-P-E-C-T, thank you, regardless of gender.

The list then completes the Hispandering checklist by showing Hillary with Marc Anthony,

Everybody loves abuela—even this guy.

Proud of her heritage but not totally identified by it, Rodriguez Wertz forcefully continues

Let alone that the question, how does being a grandmother uniquely qualifies anyone aspiring for President of the United States?, lays bare the fact that Hillary is running only because she’s put up with Bill all these years, and their deal is that it’s now her turn. Nothing else in her entire life uniquely qualifies her. Hillary – who may know who Mary Pickford was – is too old to call herself “America’s sweetheart,” so she settles for “America’s grandmother,” opportunistically changing the latter word for Hispandering.

I won’t debase my own Puerto Rican grandmothers by listing the thousand ways Hillary Clinton could never measure up to them,

And btw Hillary, another helpful hint for you and your increasingly clueless, out of touch campaign staff: if you try your identity politics pandering with other groups you will definitely be schlonged again because not only are you #not my abuela they will indignantly inform you that you are #not my bubbe, #not my yaya, #not my opa, #not my nanna, #not my bunica, #not my oba-chan, #not my savta, #not my maimeó, #not my babushka. And definitely #not my grandmother.

Hillary Clinton’s promise to illegals: 49 more Mexifornias.

The staggering cost of Mexico’s looting of America

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/09/why-mexico-endorses-hillary-clinton-her.html

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Mexico prefers to export its poor, not uplift them…. they also export their criminals, drug cartels, and anchor baby breeders for welfare!

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0330/p09s02-coop.html

HILLARY TAKES $500,000 BRIBE FROM MEXICO TO IMPLEMENT OBAMA’S AMNESTY HOAX TO LEGALIZE LA RAZA’S LOOTING.

But, hey…. Mexicans loot the stupid gringos BILLIONS AND BILLIONS…. So, what’s half a million???

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/05/hispandering-hillary-clinton-and-la.html

The Mexico City annual conference of the Telmex Foundation, headed by Mexican billionaire (and New York Times investor) Carlos Slim, included speeches by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Slim was perhaps repaying the honor of having received the 2012 Global Citizen Award from the Clinton Global Initiative.

FIFTEEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT LA RAZA “THE RACE” and the LA RAZA DEMS’ PUSH TO EXPAND MEX SUPREMACY TO BUY THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES:

by Michelle Malkin

Only in America could critics of a group called "The Race" be labeled racists. Such is the triumph of left-wing identity chauvinists, whose aggressive activists and supine abettors have succeeded in redefining all opposition as "hate."

Karl Rove was one of the keynote speakers at this year's annual National Council of La Raza

Conference. The event was held in Los Angeles (the eventual capital of Atzlan). Other speakers included Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, and the virulent racist L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The fact that Karl Rove is the President's top political adviser and addressed the group with Bush's blessing, is a strong indicator that this nation is being subverted at the very highest levels.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/05/hillary-clintons-long-history-of.html

HERE’S No. 6 OF THE FIFTEEN THINGS ABOUT HILLARY’S LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS:

(FROM HER FIRST RUN FOR THE PRESIDENCY)

6. Former "Race" president Raul Yzaguirre, Hillary Clinton's Hispanic outreach adviser, said this: "U.S. English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks." He was referring to U.S. English, the nation's oldest, largest citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. "The Race" also pioneered Orwellian open-borders Newspeak and advised the Mexican government on how to lobby for illegal alien amnesty while avoiding the terms "illegal" and "amnesty."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/05/hillary-clintons-long-history-of.html

American Taxpayers Being Forced To Support Latino Nazi Party

By Dave Gibson

In 2005, the Latino group known as La Raza (The Race) was given $15.2 million in U.S. federal grants. La Raza also received an additional $4 million in so-called 'earmarks' tucked into the 2005 Housing Bill, which our Congress passed and President Bush signed. Considering the racist agenda of La Raza, giving federal funds to this group is tantamount to the U.S. funding the Nazis in the 1930's.The comparison to the Nazi Party is well deserved. La Raza openly supports pushing all but Latino Americans out of a portion of the United States (ethnic cleansing), they call for 'Reconquista' or the re-conquest of the American Southwest by Mexico (the re-occupation of the Sudetanland), and the establishment of 'Atzlan' which is the utopian all-Latino version of the American Southwestern states (Adolf Hitler planned to called his utopia Germania).

If La Raza was a white supremacist group with equally deep pockets, the U.S. government would place them on a terrorist watch list, infiltrate them with undercover FBI agents, and subject them to constant harassment by the Internal Revenue Service. Eventually, the group's leaders would be jailed and the group itself would be rendered irrelevant. However, because La Raza is a Latino supremacist group, the Bush administration and most of Congress offer them financial support!

Monday, December 21, 2015

IS BERNIE SANDERS AS CORRUPT AS HIS APPARENT MISTRESS, HILLARY CLINTON?

HILLARY CLINTON IS NOTHING MORE THAN A CLONE OF BARACK OBAMA, ONE OF THE MOST INCOMPETANT AND CORRUPT PRESIDENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

LIKE THE OBOMB, HILLARY IS OUT THERE HISPANDERING FOR THE ILLEGALS' VOTES WITH PROMISES OF OBAMA'S AMNESTY, CONTINUED OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY.

"As long as the public is gullible enough to buy into this strategy, and even if they don’t, Hillary will continue to set up these sham topics. She has no choice. She was not only a failure as a Secretary of State but she seized upon her position in government to enable her husband to make tens of millions in speaker’s fees. Her emails prove her participation. "

"Hillary’s handling of emails as Secretary of State is a very serious issue. She violated many Title 18 provisions and committed many federal felonies. If not for the FOIA requests of Judicial Watch the voting public would not have seen any of her emails. She did everything possible to cover up her felonious behavior."

December 21, 2015

Bernie Sanders is Hillary's Sham Opponent

By Michael Bargo Jr.

This is very suspicious, since Democrats never admit to anything. Before both of her Presidential campaigns, for many months Hillary wouldn’t even admit she was running for President. For Bernie Sanders to admit at a debate venue on national TV that his campaign was engaged in unethical campaign practices is out of step with the Democrats’ characteristic of never admitting to mistakes.

This is not just out of character for Democrats, it follows the comment of Bernie Sanders at the first campaign that he is tired of hearing about Hillary’s “damn” emails. Hillary’s handling of emails as Secretary of State is a very serious issue. She violated many Title 18 provisions and committed many federal felonies. If not for the FOIA requests of Judicial Watch the voting public would not have seen any of her emails. She did everything possible to cover up her felonious behavior.

This is typical Clinton strategy: to commit crimes or violate ethical rules, then refuse to cooperate with investigations, delay them for years, then say there’s nothing there, then lie and deny. Bernie Sanders helped her continue the lying and denying about emails at the first debate, now he’s interjecting a new attempt to rescue her campaign by making her a victim of abuse perpetrated by his campaign.

This tactic of distraction was also practiced by her husband Bill Clinton, who as President would create faux crises to distract the news media from the ongoing investigations of his unethical behavior. He would often use foreign issues since he had total control of them, such as the 1998 bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Africa. That occurred when he was under investigation for his improperly -- and technically illegal -- affair with an intern working at the White House.

Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair was covered up by the left-leaning press, just as Hillary’s emails were. In both cases it took outside investigators to uncover and publicize the wrongdoing. Matt Drudge exposed the Lewinsky affair, and Judicial Watch relentlessly sued in Federal Court to force Hillary to turn over emails. The major news outlets willingly participate in efforts to protect Bill and Hillary, even when they commit crimes.
Now Hillary is enjoying the willing cooperation of Bernie Sanders at televised debates. Sanders is playing his role as fall guy in order to make Hillary look like a victim. Hillary could have avoided the email investigation if she had simply followed the well-known rules of handling classified communications at the State Dept. as the lowest paid employees do. She cannot claim that she is competent and intelligent enough to be President while committing the most obvious and outrageous acts of incompetence and recklessness.

Bernie Sanders now has two roles to play: his first role is to act as a far Left candidate in order to make Hillary look more middle of the road, and now his second role is to help her play her famous victim card: that she is a poor, helpless victim of the vast right wing conspiracy. The first topic was the emails; the second topic is that she is the target of Bernie Sanders’ Watergate style campaign interference. This identification with Watergate enables Hillary to tie into past Republican misdeeds.

As long as the public is gullible enough to buy into this strategy, and even if they don’t, Hillary will continue to set up these sham topics. She has no choice. She was not only a failure as a Secretary of State but she seized upon her position in government to enable her husband to make tens of millions in speaker’s fees. Her emails prove her participation. So she had to use Bernie Sanders to make the email investigation look like a political tactic. The only real political tactic here is Bernie Sanders’ behavior.

It will be interesting to see what new topic Bernie will come up with at the next debate. Hillary has to resort to these tactics to cover up her potential federal felonies in her email scandal and her tenure as Secretary of State. Lincoln once noted that “you can fool some of the people all of the time.” Whether this number of people that can be fooled is enough to get Hillary elected is another issue.

Trump is popular with Republican voters because he is an outsider; he symbolizes a break away from traditional Republican insider politics. Hillary Clinton is not only an insider -- the quintessential insider – she also represents the worst characteristics of traditional politicians, using her official status to make money, deceive voters, and pursue her self interest.

If Democrat voters have evolved far enough to see through her act, and that Bernie Sanders is part of her manipulation of her campaign and the public’s perceptions of her campaign, then there’s a chance that real change will happen in Washington. We can only hope for change. Yes we can.

Once again Saturday night Bernie Sanders was playing his part to enable Hillary Clinton to pretend to be a victim, a strategy that has worked for her in the past. The newest topic is that she was victimized by Bernie Sanders’ political campaign. Sanders used the debate on December 19 as an opportunity to apologize to her for alleged abuse of her voter information.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/bernie_sanders_is_hillarys_sham_opponent.html#ixzz3uysg8y00
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OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: Serving their crony banksters and Wall Street paymasters!

THE RECOVERY THAT NEVER WAS... EXCEPT FOR CRONY BANKSTERS!

“Sentiment is horrendous. It’s the worst since the financial crisis—and it’s getting worse every day.”

"The lack of confidence in the country’s growth prospects in the upper echelons of the financial and economic elites is exemplified by the flight of capital, with foreign exchange reserves recording their third-largest monthly fall in November."

"His decrees range from the idiotic to the grotesque -- his order to the EPA to shut down the coal industry, the repurposing of NASA as a Muslim PR effort, the post-legislative changes to ObamaCare (the most recent requiring full coverage for sex-change operations), and perhaps the most egregious, his gift of one and a half trillion dollars to his pals in the financial industry."

"More than seven years after the 2008 financial meltdown, not only is there no genuine economic recovery, the measures taken to rescue the banks and the financial elite have compounded the underlying contradictions of the world capitalist system, bringing it to the brink of an even more catastrophic breakdown."

"Critics say the central bank's actions made Wall Street and the super-rich even fatter, fueling a stock market surge while leaving many ordinary workers no better off and widening the nation's wealth inequality."

"First, the supply of trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money by the Fed and other central banks has done nothing either to resolve the crisis which erupted in 2008 or bring about a genuine economic recovery."

"Yellen seemed flustered and largely dodged the question. She could not provide a convincing answer because the collapse in oil and commodity prices and the persistence of ultralow inflation reflect the reality of economic slump and the failure of the Fed and the other major central banks to engineer a genuine recovery in the real economy, despite the funneling of trillions of dollars into the banking system.

"It has, however, subsidized a vast transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, fuelling a tripling of stock prices, record corporate profits and CEO bonuses, and ever greater levels of social inequality. The vast sums handed to the banks and hedge funds have not, for the most part, been invested in production, but used instead to fund parasitic activities such as job-slashing corporate mergers, stock buybacks and dividend increases. To pay for the resulting bankrupting of state treasuries, governments around the world have imposed brutal austerity measures against the working class."

"Second, these policies have only created the conditions for another financial crisis, whose consequences are potentially even more devastating than those triggered by the sub-prime mortgage collapse. The deepening decline in the real economy and the mounting signs of financial distress demonstrate that the source of the global economic crisis is the capitalist system itself, which cannot be reformed, but must be overthrown and replaced by the international working class in the fight for socialism."

"The figures are remarkable. The share of the national wealth accruing to middle-income households, the study reported, was 43 percent in 2014, down from 62 percent in 1970. The median wealth of middle-income households has fallen by 28 percent over the past decade and a half. The share of income going to upper-income households has risen from 29 percent to 49 percent over the same period."

"This analysis was absolutely correct, and more than two-and-a-half decades of ever greater appropriation of the national wealth by the top fraction of the super-rich, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, have only imparted greater ferocity and bitterness to those "terrific tensions."

“As a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”

After Fed rate hike, global economic fault lines deepen

19 December 2015

After an initial rise following the decision by the US Federal Reserve to lift interest rates by 0.25 percentage points on Wednesday, stock markets around the world have experienced significant declines over the past two days.

The biggest falls were in the United States, where the Dow was down by 368 points at the close of trade on Friday, a drop of more than 2 percent, while the more broadly based S&P 500 fell by 1.8 percent. The CBOE VIX index, which measures market volatility and is often referred to as the “fear gauge,” went over 20, a level regarded as indicating a high degree of market stress.

Markets also fell around the world after rising in the immediate aftermath of the Fed decision. The Euro Stoxx index dropped by 1.4 percent on Friday after rising earlier in the week. In Japan, the Nikkei index closed 1.9 percent lower.

Underlying the volatility on share markets are a series of widening fault lines in the global economy produced by the deepening trend toward stagnation and slump. The increased turbulence in financial markets is an expression of the fact that massive financial speculation, fuelled by the Fed and other central banks’ pumping of trillions of dollars into the banking system since the 2008 Wall Street crash, is being overwhelmed by developments in the real economy, particularly the decline in industrial production.

So far, this interaction has found its sharpest expression in the market for high-yield, or “junk,” corporate bonds, particularly in the energy sector, because of the sharp fall in oil and other energy prices, coupled with the decline in basic industrial commodity prices to their lowest levels since the global financial crisis.

This week, the price of Brent crude oil hit a seven-year low of $36.33 per barrel, further heightening problems in the energy junk bond market, where money poured in to finance risky ventures when the price of oil was trading at around $100 per barrel less than two years ago.

But the turbulence is not confined to energy-related finance. According Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company that supplies information to financial markets, investors withdrew $5.1 billion from US mutual funds that purchase bonds rated as investment grade by credit-rating agencies—the largest such withdrawal since 1992. This was accompanied by a further withdrawal of $3 billion from junk bond funds. In the week to December 16, it is estimated that $15.4 billion was withdrawn from taxable bond funds.

In a report on the state of financial markets issued this week, the Office of Financial Research (OFR), set up by the US Treasury after the 2008 crisis, painted a picture of, in the words of Financial Times economic commentator Gill Tett, a “distinctly distorted American financial system” resulting from seven years of ultra-low interest rates.

The OFR said that “credit risk in the US non-financial business sector is elevated and rising.” It went on to warn that “higher base rates may create refinancing risks… and potentially precipitate a broader default cycle.”

In other words, a situation has been created where a default or a series of defaults in high risk areas could set off a chain reaction in the system as a whole, recalling the effects of the sub-prime mortgage collapse. When that crisis emerged in 2006 and 2007, then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke brushed it off as a relatively small problem that could be easily contained.

The worsening financial situation is compounded by the divergence in the policies of the world’s major central banks. While the Fed has moved towards tightening, although at a very gradual pace, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan are continuing with various forms of “quantitative easing” aimed at pumping more money into the financial system.

BLOG: HERE COME THE NEXT ROUND OF CRONY BANKSTER BAILOUTS!

In the midst of growing financial turbulence, however, the official mantra is that the US is in the midst of an expanding economic recovery and is considered to be a “bright spot” in the world economy.

This soothing scenario is belied by both longer-term developments and the immediate situation. Since the US economy started growing in the June quarter of 2009, its gross domestic product has increased by only 2.2 percent per year, the lowest pace for any post-recession phase in post-World War II history. As a result, it took five years for the US economy just to make up for the loss of employment and economic output sustained as a result of the financial crisis.

Now figures from the industrial sector point to another downturn. US industrial production last month was down by a seasonally adjusted 0.6 percent from October, the biggest drop since March 2012 and the third straight month it has fallen. Manufacturing output, which comprises three quarters of industrial production, was flat. Mining output was down 1.1 percent for the month and is now 8.2 percent below the level of a year ago.

According to a report published in the Financial Times on Tuesday, a common theme of major companies supplying industry, such as Caterpillar and Deer & Co, is that “tough times are back,” with some even pointing to “the arrival of an industrial recession.”

The stagnation in US industry is part of an emerging global trend. Data on industrial employment in China—the world’s major manufacturing centre—shows that aggregate employment in manufacturing fell by 1.9 percent in the year ending in October. In the third quarter, employment growth in the sector was at its lowest rate on a quarterly basis since 2000. The biggest declines are in heavy industry, with iron ore mining and processing employment down by 12 percent, coal mining down 7 percent, and steel employment down 6 percent.

The slowdown in China is impacting on so-called emerging markets more generally. Of 22 big emerging markets tracked by JPMorgan Chase, 21 have had their growth forecasts for 2016 downgraded. Brazil, which is highly dependent on the Chinese economy, is the sharpest expression of this trend. Its economy is contracting by 4.5 percent according to the latest data. Brazil’s worsening situation was highlighted this week when Fitch became the second of the major credit rating agencies to downgrade the country’s debt to junk status.

The World Bank has warned of “the beginning of an era of weak growth for emerging markets.” This will have a significant impact, as these economies account for almost 40 percent of global output. They could also be hit by significant financial turbulence, with the International Monetary Fund warning that they have incurred $3 trillion more in debt than is warranted by commodity prices and global demand.

Two inescapable conclusions flow from the latest economic data and the growing turbulence in financial markets.

First, the supply of trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money by the Fed and other central banks has done nothing either to resolve the crisis which erupted in 2008 or bring about a genuine economic recovery.

It has, however, subsidized a vast transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top, fuelling a tripling of stock prices, record corporate profits and CEO bonuses, and ever greater levels of social inequality. The vast sums handed to the banks and hedge funds have not, for the most part, been invested in production, but used instead to fund parasitic activities such as job-slashing corporate mergers, stock buybacks and dividend increases. To pay for the resulting bankrupting of state treasuries, governments around the world have imposed brutal austerity measures against the working class.

Second, these policies have only created the conditions for another financial crisis, whose consequences are potentially even more devastating than those triggered by the sub-prime mortgage collapse. The deepening decline in the real economy and the mounting signs of financial distress demonstrate that the source of the global economic crisis is the capitalist system itself, which cannot be reformed, but must be overthrown and replaced by the international working class in the fight for socialism.

Nick Beams

FEDERAL RESERVE BEGINS "DOVISH TIGHTENING" AS LIMITED BY ORDER OF OBAMA-CLINTON'S CRONY BANKSTERS!

Federal Reserve begins “dovish tightening” with first rate hike in nine years

"Critics say the central bank's actions made Wall Street and the super-rich even fatter, fueling a stock market surge while leaving many ordinary workers no better off and widening the nation's wealth inequality."

"It's also a font of conspiracy theories stoked by radical libertarians, who insist the Fed is debauching the currency and will ultimately bankrupt the country."

"His decrees range from the idiotic to the grotesque -- his order to the EPA to shut down the coal industry, the repurposing of NASA as a Muslim PR effort, the post-legislative changes to ObamaCare (the most recent requiring full coverage for sex-change operations), and perhaps the most egregious, his gift of one and a half trillion dollars to his pals in the financial industry."

"Yellen seemed flustered and largely dodged the question. She could not provide a convincing answer because the collapse in oil and commodity prices and the persistence of ultralow inflation reflect the reality of economic slump and the failure of the Fed and the other major central banks to engineer a genuine recovery in the real economy, despite the funneling of trillions of dollars into the banking system."

"That they were generally prepared, after two years, to accept small and gradual increases was bound up with mounting signs that the regime of virtually free credit, which had generated windfall profits and a further shift of wealth from the bottom to the very top, had produced a new debt and credit crisis that threatened once again to bring down the financial system."

Federal Reserve begins “dovish tightening” with first rate hike in nine years

By Barry Grey
17 December 2015

As widely anticipated, the US Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday announced a quarter percentage point increase in the federal funds rate, the interest banks charge one another for overnight loans of reserves kept at the central bank. It was the Fed’s first increase since June 2006 and it lifted the benchmark rate from a range of zero to 0.25 percent, where it had remained since the height of the financial crisis in December 2008, to a range of 0.25 percent to 0.50 percent.

The Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its chairwoman, Janet Yellen, took great pains to characterize the increase as small and stress that further increases would be gradual and incremental, and that the Fed would hold rates below normal for an indefinite period and continue to pursue an “accommodative” monetary policy.

That this was what the financial markets wanted to hear was obvious from the response of US stock indexes. The long-signaled shift to what is being called “dovish tightening,” with the emphasis on “dovish,” triggered a run-up of prices on all three major indexes.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had risen by 76 points before the FOMC released its statement at 2 PM, spurted upward and continued to climb during Yellen’s press conference, ending the trading day with a gain of 224 points (1.28 percent). The Standard & Poor’s 500 index and the Nasdaq had similar trajectories, ending the day with gains of 29 points (1.45 percent) and 75 points (1.52 percent), respectively.

Ever since the previous Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, had signaled his intention to move toward a normalization of monetary policy by hinting in December of 2013 that the central bank would begin to “taper” its massive bond-purchasing and money-printing program, known as “quantitative easing,” the banks and hedge funds had exerted pressure against any increase in interest rates.

That they were generally prepared, after two years, to accept small and gradual increases was bound up with mounting signs that the regime of virtually free credit, which had generated windfall profits and a further shift of wealth from the bottom to the very top, had produced a new debt and credit crisis that threatened once again to bring down the financial system.

Since December 16, 2008, when the Fed slashed the federal funds rate to near-zero, the Dow has risen by 96 percent, the S&P 500 by 124 percent, and the Nasdaq by 214 percent. Over this period, the Fed has pumped $3.5 trillion into the banking system. The wealth of the 400 richest Americans has doubled. Meanwhile, the destruction of decent-paying jobs and wage cutting across the economy have decimated working-class living standards.

But the ongoing slowdown in the real economy globally, reflected in collapsing prices for oil, gas, metals and other basic committees, declining trade, and slumping demand for manufactured goods, is now destabilizing the US bond market and threatening to collapse the financial house of cards that has been built up by the policies of the Fed, the Obama administration and central banks and governments in Europe and Asia.

Over the past week, a mounting crisis in the US high-risk, high-yield junk bond market came to a head with the closure of three energy-based junk bond funds. Their collapse was triggered by the decline in oil prices to well below $40 a barrel and a wave of client redemption orders that the highly leveraged firms could not fulfill.

Funds managed by Third Avenue, Lucidus Capital Partners and Stone Lion Capital barred redemptions, triggering a selloff on the $1.3 trillion junk bond market. This high-risk market, based on bonds issued by firms with low credit ratings and high levels of debt, has expanded prodigiously since the Fed lowered rates to near zero and took other measures to force down long-term interest rates.

These policies, far from reining in speculative and parasitic financial activities, subsidized their expansion. Hedge funds and similar financial operations, such as exchange-traded funds that track bond markets, seeking new ways to realize high returns after the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble, turned to junk bonds. According to Dealogic, US junk bond issuance hit a record $361 billion in 2013, more than double the volume in the years before the financial crisis.

Last week, junk bond funds were hit with $3.5 billion of withdrawals, the most for 70 weeks. And the crisis is spreading beyond junk bonds. Prices of bonds issued by firms in the pharmaceuticals, media, telecommunications, semiconductor and retail industries have fallen in recent months.

The Financial Times on Wednesday cited Bonnie Baha, head of global developed credit at DoubleLine Capital, as saying: “It brings back memories of 2008 all over again and that’s what has been fueling this. Defaults are ticking up. Energy is leading the way but it’s starting to spread to other sectors. It’s not just an energy or metals and mining issue.”

In a report Tuesday, the US Office of Financial Research found “elevated and rising credit risks” among nonfinancial companies and emerging market borrowers. The agency warned that a significant shock that impacted credit quality “could potentially threaten US financial stability.”

That the widening crisis in corporate bonds played a role in the Fed’s decision, after multiple delays, to begin hiking rates was indicated in the language of the FOMC statement. Discussing future rate increases, the statement included among the factors the Fed would consider “financial and international developments.” The reference to financial developments, in particular, was a departure from previous FOMC statements.

The FOMC statement gave a generally upbeat appraisal of the US economy, and Yellen, in her press conference, was, if anything, even more sanguine. She began by declaring that the move to begin hiking rates was a vote of confidence in the strength of the US economy and its recovery from the Great Recession.

Yellen and the FOMC all but ignored the sharp slowdown in US manufacturing and industrial production in recent months, which has been exacerbated by the rise in the exchange rate of the dollar resulting from expectations of monetary tightening by the Fed. The higher dollar has further depressed US exports. The actual launch of rate hikes will likely cause a further increase in the dollar and heighten the impact on US exports.

Earlier this month, the Institute for Supply Management reported that manufacturing in the US contracted in November, falling to its lowest level since June 2009. Industrial production contracted in three of the last six months, and data released Tuesday showed that factory activity in New York State declined for the fifth straight month in December.

Yellen was asked at her press conference about the rout in junk bonds and the closure of Third Avenue’s Focused Credit Fund last Thursday. She noted the pressure on junk bonds while brushing off the Third Avenue collapse as a one-off event.

Another reporter challenged the Fed’s claim, reiterated in Wednesday’s FOMC statement and Yellen’s opening remarks to the press, that the drastic fall in oil prices and low inflation rate were “transitory” phenomena that would dissipate in the coming months, bringing the inflation rate close to the Fed’s goal of 2 percent. The reporter noted that the Fed has been making this assessment for some two years, and it has never materialized.

Yellen seemed flustered and largely dodged the question. She could not provide a convincing answer because the collapse in oil and commodity prices and the persistence of ultralow inflation reflect the reality of economic slump and the failure of the Fed and the other major central banks to engineer a genuine recovery in the real economy, despite the funneling of trillions of dollars into the banking system.

The continuing threat of deflation, more than seven years after the Wall Street crash, is an expression of the systemic crisis and breakdown of the capitalist system itself, something Yellen can neither address nor acknowledge.

Has the Fed waited too long to raise interest rates?

Don LeeContact Reporter

Almost everyone agrees that the Federal Reserve's extraordinary action to cut interest rates to near zero in the depths of the Great Recession helped save the country from a deeper downturn — or even another depression.

But as the Fed prepares to make a historical rate increase for the first time in nearly a decade, some critics question whether the central bank administered its monetary medicine too long.

They say the Fed's easy-money policies, including huge bond purchases and a seven-year period of record low rates, had diminishing effect over time and subjected the nation to side effects that could lead to serious problems in the future.

On Wednesday, Fed officials are widely expected to announce a modest 0.25 percentage point boost in interest rates, closing an unprecedented chapter in U.S. economic policy and leaving behind a legacy that historians will debate for years to come.

Critics say the central bank's actions made Wall Street and the super-rich even fatter, fueling a stock market surge while leaving many ordinary workers no better off and widening the nation's wealth inequality.
Stimulative policies begun under former Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and continued by his successor, Janet L. Yellen, inadvertently channeled huge amounts of money into economic competitors abroad, including billions of dollars that bolstered China's industries and exports.
And by flooding the global economy with cheap cash, the Fed's prescription produced a frothy financial climate that encouraged speculative investment and excessive risk-taking.

As savers, pension funds and insurance companies sought relief from the pain of low interest rates, the issue now is "whether they ended up taking up risks that were greater than they realized," said Donald Kohn, the Fed's former vice chairman under Bernanke. "I think it's too soon to know."
To defenders of the Bernanke-Yellen Fed, including Kohn, such complaints amount to Monday morning quarterbacking from critics who did not face the pressure to act quickly to avert disaster.
Moreover, they say many of the problems afflicting the present-day economy were developing all along and beyond the power of any Fed chair to cure. Income inequality and wage stagnation for the middle class, for example, have been building for decades.

BLOG: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS LONG BEEN HELL BENT ON KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED FOR THEIR PAYMASTERS WITH OPEN BORDERS, NON-ENFORCEMENT AND NO E-VERIFY!

Income inequality and wage stagnation for the middle class, for example, have been building for decades.

And the Fed has had to stand largely alone, as most other developed nations struggled with their own financial problems and Congress and the White House became paralyzed by partisan politics.
The Fed has a dual mandate to maximize employment and stabilize inflation, which it tries to achieve primarily by pushing up or down the federal funds rate, the benchmark short-term financing cost for banks that influences a wide range of borrowing rates for households and businesses.

When Bernanke and his colleagues lowered the rate to near zero in December 2008 — it had been 5.25% just 15 months earlier — the financial crisis was in full swing. Wall Street brokerage Lehman Bros. had collapsed in September 2008, and job losses were mounting by the month, to more than 750,000 in November. Despite the Fed's bland, understated statement of "further weakening" in the economy that accompanied the decision of the new rock-bottom rate, the significance of the moment was not lost in the discussions inside the Fed's marbled headquarters.

"As you know, we are at a historic juncture — both for the U.S. economy and for the Federal Reserve," Bernanke told his colleagues, later adding: "Today is the end of the old regime. We have hit zero. We can't go further."

The Fed also undertook in late 2008 the first of three rounds of large-scale bond purchases, an unconventional stimulus in which the central bank essentially creates money to drive down long-term interest rates, thereby encouraging more borrowing and investments, particularly in more risky assets like stocks. A second round came in late 2010, followed by a third two years later, all of which fattened the Fed's debt holdings to more than $4 trillion today.

Yellen and Bernanke, who stepped down in January 2014 after serving two four-year terms as chairman, have said they left interest rates at record lows because they did not want to act prematurely or risk hurting the halting recovery, particularly progress in the hard-hit labor market. U.S. economic growth has remained sluggish throughout the recovery, which officially began in mid-2009, but job growth has been fairly steady for more than three years. That has increased Yellen's confidence that the timing is right to start the process of normalizing interest rates.
Bernanke and other Fed officials have frequently cited the effect of the Fed's policies in stimulating car sales, which lately have been on pace to exceed a record 18 million units this year, nearly double 2009 levels. The average interest rate on a 48-month new-car loan dropped to 4.1% this summer from more than 7% at the end of 2008, though it's changed little in the last two years.

"All these folks buying automobiles on pretty cheap credit, surely that's helped put people back to work," said Kohn, Fed vice chairman from 2006 to 2010 and who now works at the Brookings Institution, where Bernanke also holds a position.

Kohn said the Fed's policies also aided the slower-to-recover housing market. On the whole, he added, without the Fed policies, the jobless rate would be higher than the current 5% and the inflation rate would be even further below the Fed's 2% target.

Bluford Putnam, managing director and chief economist at CME Group, the world's biggest futures market operator, agreed that the Fed's near-zero interest rates and bond purchases helped stabilize financial markets and bolstered the economy — but only for a while. Putnam doesn't think auto lending rates would have been much higher had the Fed begun to let off the monetary stimulus earlier. Consumer demand would have been there anyway, he said. And Putnam isn't convinced that the Fed's policies created jobs.

"When you step back and look at the whole picture, we just can't find the evidence," he said. Instead, the super-low interest rates helped bank profitability while leaving savers high and dry, he said. "It was a transfer of wealth from the retirees into corporations who didn't use the money to create jobs," Putnam said.

Bernanke declined to comment for this article, but in his book "The Courage to Act," a memoir of the financial crisis published this fall, he acknowledges that it's impossible to know exactly how much of the U.S. recovery can be attributed to the Fed's actions. But he wrote that one reason to believe they were effective is that the U.S. economic recovery was much stronger than that of the Eurozone's, where monetary and fiscal policies were much tighter than in the U.S.

During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke was acutely aware of the public's deep resentment of the Fed's emergency bailout of financial giants such as AIG as well as policies that inevitably favored the wealthy by spurring the stock market. One of the legacies of his eight years as Fed chief is how he dramatically opened up the communications of the once-secretive institution, appearing in town-hall meetings and interviews during which the onetime Princeton economics professor talked about his small-town roots in Dillon, S.C., and how he had never worked on Wall Street. (Since leaving the Fed, Bernanke has been an advisor to a large hedge fund.)

Bernanke frequently said that the Fed's monetary policies were good for Main Street. But at the same time, the Fed's stimulative policies helped fuel a surge in the stock market, which, even with the recent declines, remains far above pre-recession levels. With the wealthiest Americans better positioned to take advantage of the gains, the wealth of upper-income households in 2013 rose to 6.5 times greater than that of middle-income households, up from 4.5 times in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.

The flow of cheap money didn't stop in the U.S. Financial experts say it ended up chasing higher returns all over the world, especially in emerging markets, where investors supplied the capital for projects in places such as China and Brazil and contributed to the excesses in property markets including London; Sydney, Australia; and Vancouver, Canada.

"It's even impacted the art market," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer with BMO Private Bank in Chicago, citing the auction sale this spring of a Picasso painting for a whopping $179 million.
More recently, capital has been leaving developing economies as investors look to the U.S. for higher earnings. That has shaken currency and financial markets and put new pressures on politicians and central bankers abroad.

Yellen and her colleagues held off raising rates this fall in part because of the shaky Chinese economy and uncertainties in international markets. That hesitancy intensified criticisms that the Fed's aggressive stimulus policies — and now its plans for reversing them — were leaving emerging markets vulnerable to volatile streams of capital.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that some of the countries at risk, such as Brazil and Malaysia, were weak to begin with. And although some smaller economies may consider stronger capital controls to avert volatile investment flows, he said, "in the end, if either the U.S. or the Chinese economy undergoes a major shift [in monetary policy], it will have an effect. There's no question about it."

On the legacy of the Fed's seven-year run of record low interest rates, Posen said he thinks "it continued to do some good, though nothing as big as the first couple of years." He said, however, there was "this wrong perception" that the Fed should have somehow resolved problems that have little to do with monetary policy. "It hasn't saved us from bad fiscal policies or a productivity slowdown. It hasn't saved us from a drop in the labor force," Posen said.

Posen said he was disappointed not with the Fed but with corporate America. Despite the Fed's extended easy-money policies, he said companies generally did not make a lot of capital investments, and instead used the low borrowing costs to fund stock buybacks and mergers.

“Is America drifting towards civil war?”

“Sentiment is horrendous. It’s the worst since the financial crisis—and it’s getting worse every day.”

"The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the

largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is

fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected

authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries,

put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a

welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed

to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public servants”

and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and

purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The

greatest threats to our economy and national security are not

foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt

government leaders and the money masters they serve."

PSYCHOPATH BARACK OBAMA: SERVANT TO HIS CRONY BANKSTERS!

"His decrees range from the idiotic to the grotesque -- his order to the EPA to shut down the coal industry, the repurposing of NASA as a Muslim PR effort, the post-legislative changes to ObamaCare (the most recent requiring full coverage for sex-change operations), and perhaps the most egregious, his gift of one and a half trillion dollars to his pals in the financial industry."

No president has more abused the power of the executive. Obama was raised in Indonesia during key formative years, a nation that in the 1960s was run as a strict military autocracy. At the time that Obama was attending school there, the state’s founder Achmed Sukarno had just been overthrown by Gen. Mohammed Suharto. Accompanying this transfer of power had been a nationwide purge that murdered at least 100,000. (The government shrugged the victims off as communists, but it was a lot more complicated than that). Afterward, Suharto merrily set about becoming what a number of sources state to be “the most corrupt leader in history,” stealing over $30 billion while his family accounted for another $4 or 5 billion. During the same period he sanctioned further massacres in East Timor and West Irian.

This is the environment in which Obama’s consciousness of the world emerged, while sitting in a classroom presided over by a portrait of Suharto in his black songkok. It’s from here, rather than any later encounter with Alinsky or Ayers, that he gets his idea of government. While his left-wing pals may have poured in the ideology, the jug had been shaped for some time. In the privacy of his head, Obama is not a president at all -- he’s a pemimpin, the Indonesian term for führer. (This can also be seen in his constant vacations, golf rounds, etc. The Indonesian rulers got their idea of a leader’s lifestyle from the sultans. Obama picked that up too.)

One of the major techniques he learned is rule by decree -- to give orders without any effort at gaining consensus. How does he get away with it? In large part because he controls the agencies. Obama has discovered that the bloated hypertrophy of the bureaucracy has effectively put him beyond the reach of our system’s constitutional safeguards.

His decrees range from the idiotic to the grotesque -- his order to the EPA to shut down the coal industry, the repurposing of NASA as a Muslim PR effort, the post-legislative changes to ObamaCare (the most recent requiring full coverage for sex-change operations), and perhaps the most egregious, his gift of one and a half trillion dollars to his pals in the financial industry. If any GOP president had done such a thing, he’d have been dropped on a desert island to chat with a volleyball for the rest of his life. With Obama, it goes utterly unnoticed.

It’s long been understood that agencies such as the EPA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy are useless. It’s now clear that they are a threat to the commonwealth. A loaded pistol pointed at the American Republic, awaiting the next moron… or worse.

Obama, in his inept way, has set the pattern, and created a sense of wild surmise in the minds of every potential Nero in this country.

The Democrats ought to be the most concerned. But they typically behave as if they’re going to be in office forever (an old fantasy on their part that didn’t begin with James Carville). So they create these structures, these methods of short-circuiting the political process, and are shocked -- shocked -- when somebody else takes advantage of them. (e.g., Joe McCarthy imitating Harry Hopkins’s tactics.)

Agency abuse well be self-limiting in that the liberal elite will have a sudden change of mind as soon as the GOP seizes on it. Then it’ll suddenly become taboo. Then we’ll hear all sorts of Montesquieuan rhetoric, accompanied by a flurry of laws and proposals.

But the idea of depending on a liberal reaction is nightmarish in and of itself. One of the worst elements of this development is how, amid all the debate and crosstalk concerning Obama and his methods, this has gone almost completely unmentioned. (I say “almost” solely because I haven’t read every last comment on Obama -- in truth, I haven’t seen it mentioned at all.) The real problem here is that the progressives -- and possibly a much larger segment of the country -- have simply forgotten how the American system is supposed to work. And that may well be the most lethal aspect of all.

One virtue possessed by all bad presidents, whether they’re evil, venal, lazy, or incompetent, is that they always reveal the weakness of the political system at the time of their tenure. In this, Obama is no different than any other bozo that has inhabited the White House.

Separation of powers is the one element that distinguishes the United States from previous democratic systems. (And before people hurt themselves in their rush to point out that “the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy” -- a “republic” is any governmental system that’s not a monarchy. Nazi Germany and the USSR were “republics.” The U.S. is a republic utilizing a system of representative democracy.)

The French political thinker Montesquieu was the author of De l’esprit des loix (The Spirit of the Laws), a book from the same shelf as The Wealth of Nations and The Influence of Sea Power on History, as being massively influential though generally unread. In this, one of the first works of serious political science, Montesquieu made three major arguments -- the one that concerns us here involves separation of powers.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Montesquieu

Book XI, chapter 6, the most famous of the entire book -- had lain in his drawers, save for revision or correction, since it was penned in 1734. It at once became perhaps the most important piece of political writing of the 18th century.

Montesquieu’s understand of history informed him that concentration of power leads inevitably to despotism -- no matter how solidly a democratic system was founded, eventually an Augustus or a Lorenzo would show up, concentrate all power in his own person and eventually undermine senate or council. From that point on, whatever it might call itself, the state was a simple autocracy. There was never a way back, and the usual sequel was degeneration and collapse.
Montesquieu’s solution was separation of powers:

Dividing political authority into the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, he asserted that, in the state that most effectively promotes liberty, these three powers must be confided to different individuals or bodies, acting independently.

Montesquieu’s thinking proved critical both in the UK’s liberalizing constitutional monarchy and, more to the point, the infant American republic. The Founders carried out the the first experiment in true separation of powers, interwoven with a system of checks and balances, with the powers and limitations of each branch carefully delineated (a major reason why Gouverneur Morris, who had the clearest legal style, was chosen to write the Constitution).

The final touch was given by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review by the Supreme Court.

This political format has served us well -- it has been abrogated rarely, the most infamous incident being Andrew Jackson’s response to the Worcester v. Georgia decision, in which Court found that the Cherokee tribe was an independent nation not subject to orders from the U.S.: “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Jackson defied the Court and the Cherokees marched west. Nobody since has ever appealed to Old Hickory.
Though often criticized -- largely by progressives who knew what had to be done and wanted what amounted to a temporary dictatorship to do it -- separation of powers has been a great success. At no point, even during the Civil War, has the United States ever been in danger of the deterioration into autocracy that plagued previous republics. But as the Obama administration has clearly revealed, separation of powers has been crippled for the better part of a century through the metastasis of the executive branch.

The source of this lies in the aforementioned progressives, in the person of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The explosion of agencies under the New Deal, each of which was touted as necessary for the salvation of the country and most of which accomplished absolutely nothing, introduced a factor unforeseen by the Founders: concentration of power in the executive through organizational hyperdevelopment. All those agencies are under direct presidential control, and subject to his orders with no effective oversight from the other branches. Fortunately, FDR had no despotic tendencies and was not tempted to abuse his power (that was left to Harry Hopkins). Not so several of his successors.

Progressive agency creation has an inherent ratchet effect: once created, no agency could ever be dissolved. Agency creation after WW II was a byproduct of the progressive effort to control the postwar world, which culminated in Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” of the 1960s.

To keep a neverending story short, this is how, eighty years later, we’ve attained our current state of a government overburdened with agencies that solve nothing while constantly spinning off sub-organizations.

This has badly skewed the balance of powers toward the executive, something that Obama has been quick to seize on in his effort at permanent transformation of the American system.

No president has more abused the power of the executive. Obama was raised in Indonesia during key formative years, a nation that in the 1960s was run as a strict military autocracy. At the time that Obama was attending school there, the state’s founder Achmed Sukarno had just been overthrown by Gen. Mohammed Suharto. Accompanying this transfer of power had been a nationwide purge that murdered at least 100,000. (The government shrugged the victims off as communists, but it was a lot more complicated than that). Afterward, Suharto merrily set about becoming what a number of sources state to be “the most corrupt leader in history,” stealing over $30 billion while his family accounted for another $4 or 5 billion. During the same period he sanctioned further massacres in East Timor and West Irian.

This is the environment in which Obama’s consciousness of the world emerged, while sitting in a classroom presided over by a portrait of Suharto in his black songkok. It’s from here, rather than any later encounter with Alinsky or Ayers, that he gets his idea of government. While his left-wing pals may have poured in the ideology, the jug had been shaped for some time. In the privacy of his head, Obama is not a president at all -- he’s a pemimpin, the Indonesian term for führer. (This can also be seen in his constant vacations, golf rounds, etc. The Indonesian rulers got their idea of a leader’s lifestyle from the sultans. Obama picked that up too.)

One of the major techniques he learned is rule by decree -- to give orders without any effort at gaining consensus. How does he get away with it? In large part because he controls the agencies. Obama has discovered that the bloated hypertrophy of the bureaucracy has effectively put him beyond the reach of our system’s constitutional safeguards.

His decrees range from the idiotic to the grotesque -- his order to the EPA to shut down the coal industry, the repurposing of NASA as a Muslim PR effort, the post-legislative changes to ObamaCare (the most recent requiring full coverage for sex-change operations), and perhaps the most egregious, his gift of one and a half trillion dollars to his pals in the financial industry. If any GOP president had done such a thing, he’d have been dropped on a desert island to chat with a volleyball for the rest of his life. With Obama, it goes utterly unnoticed.

It’s long been understood that agencies such as the EPA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy are useless. It’s now clear that they are a threat to the commonwealth. A loaded pistol pointed at the American Republic, awaiting the next moron… or worse.

Obama, in his inept way, has set the pattern, and created a sense of wild surmise in the minds of every potential Nero in this country.

The Democrats ought to be the most concerned. But they typically behave as if they’re going to be in office forever (an old fantasy on their part that didn’t begin with James Carville). So they create these structures, these methods of short-circuiting the political process, and are shocked -- shocked -- when somebody else takes advantage of them. (e.g., Joe McCarthy imitating Harry Hopkins’s tactics.)

Agency abuse well be self-limiting in that the liberal elite will have a sudden change of mind as soon as the GOP seizes on it. Then it’ll suddenly become taboo. Then we’ll hear all sorts of Montesquieuan rhetoric, accompanied by a flurry of laws and proposals.

But the idea of depending on a liberal reaction is nightmarish in and of itself. One of the worst elements of this development is how, amid all the debate and crosstalk concerning Obama and his methods, this has gone almost completely unmentioned. (I say “almost” solely because I haven’t read every last comment on Obama -- in truth, I haven’t seen it mentioned at all.) The real problem here is that the progressives -- and possibly a much larger segment of the country -- have simply forgotten how the American system is supposed to work. And that may well be the most lethal aspect of all.

A new tipping point in the global economic crisis

By Nick Beams

The announcement by the global mining giant Anglo American that it will sack 85,000 workers world-wide, put 60 percent of its assets up for sale, and reduce its mining sites from 55 to just 20 signifies that the crisis of the world capitalist economy is heading toward a new tipping point. The world economy is threatened by a plunge into deep slump, coupled with a financial crisis even more devastating than that which erupted in 2007–2008.

The immediate cause of the Anglo American decision is the plunge in prices for all major industrial commodities—iron ore, coal, copper, nickel and manganese—to name but a few. Having reached their lowest levels since 2009, they are continuing to fall, signifying that, despite the trillions of dollars poured into financial markets over the past seven years by the world’s central banks, the over-riding tendency in the world economy is towards recession.

Nowhere is this more sharply expressed that in China, the centre of global manufacturing. Earlier this week, official data showed that Chinese exports slowed markedly in November due to falling global demand, while the currency, the renminbi, hit its lowest level in four years. The expectation is that if Chinese financial authorities withdraw support, the renminbi will rapidly fall still lower, sending another deflationary wave through the global economy.

The lack of confidence in the country’s growth prospects in the upper echelons of the financial and economic elites is exemplified by the flight of capital, with foreign exchange reserves recording their third-largest monthly fall in November.

In the years immediately following the 2008 financial crisis, the conventional wisdom was that the so-called BRICS countries together with emerging markets would provide a new base of stability for world capitalism. That rose-tinted scenario has been shattered.

The downturn in China is now ripping through world markets. The Brazilian economy is experiencing a contraction on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s, Russia is in recession, India faces mounting corporate debt problems, and South Africa, together with economies across the continent, is being hit by falling commodity prices. The future for emerging markets is exemplified in Venezuela, the site of some of the largest oil reserves in the world, where the economy is set to shrink by 10 percent this year.

In its quarterly review of the world economy issued earlier this week, the Bank for International Settlements warned that the “uneasy calm” that had characterised global financial markets could soon be disrupted by the motion of “deeper economic forces that really matter.”

Over the past period, financial markets, sustained by the flood of cheap money from central banks, have seemingly been able to continue ever upwards in defiance of deepening global recessionary trends. However, the conditions have been created for this house of cards to collapse as the “deeper forces” assert themselves.

One of the most significant areas to which cheap money has flowed is the financing of high-yielding “junk” bonds, often issued by energy companies. With the price of oil reaching over $100 per barrel as recently as the early months of 2014, it seemed to be a viable strategy. But with oil now trading at below $40 and threatening to plunge even further, possibly down to $30, it is rapidly unravelling.
The rise of energy-related debt defaults is only a symptom of a more general process.

Last Friday, the Financial Times reported that more than $1 trillion in US corporate debt had been downgraded so far this year, as defaults climbed to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis. Analysts with the three major credit rating agencies—Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch—expect the default rates to increase over the next 12 months, a process that could be accelerated if the Federal Reserve decides to lift is base interest rate next week.

An analysis by Deutsche Bank, portions of which were published on the Financial Times ’ web site this week, pointed to the potential for a rapid shift in financial markets.

“Late stages of every credit cycle,” it noted, “… are built on the theory as to why this time is different. This type of attitude was prevalent going into 2015, when credit markets largely dismissed the oil sector distress, choosing to believe this was an isolated issue and will stay that way.”
But, as the assessment went on to elaborate, this has proven not to be the case, as the percentage of corporate bonds designated as being “in distress” has steadily risen.

“From its starting point in energy a year ago, it has now reached other commodity-sensitive areas such as transportation, materials, capital goods and commercial services. But it did not stop here and is also visible in places like retail, gaming, media, consumer staples and technology—all areas that were widely expected to be insulated from low oil prices, if not even benefiting from them.”
The growing potential for a renewed financial crisis was also highlighted in a report issued by the US investment bank Goldman Sachs last month. It noted that corporate leverage in the US was now at its highest level in a decade.

Low interest rates and the incessant profit demands of speculators had encouraged corporate America to go on a spending spree, financing share buybacks, dividend hikes and a series of merger and acquisition deals, funded through the issuing of bonds. But the flow of cash has not kept pace with bond issuing, with the result that the total amount of debt on balance sheets is “more than double pre-crisis levels.”

Goldman reported that even after the energy sector was stripped out, the net debt to earnings ratio was at its highest point since the financial crisis. “The spectre of rising rates, potential global disinflation (dare we say ‘deflation’?), declining operating profits and wider credit spreads continues to create near-term consternation for weak balance sheet stocks,” the report concluded.

The Bank of England has added its voice to those expressing concern over the stability of financial markets, warning of the consequences of the divergence between the policies of central banks, as the Fed moves towards tightening while the European Central Bank and the Bank of England maintain a loose monetary policy.

The bank’s Financial Policy Committee said it was difficult to predict how markets would react to any increase in the Fed rate. The minutes of a meeting held at the end of last month and released on Wednesday state, “Capital flows had been sensitive to diverging prospects for monetary policy around the world and there was a risk of further volatility as that policy divergence progresses.”
The deepening global economic crisis is one of the driving forces for the eruption of militarism, especially over the past month. At the same time, the escalation of the war drive can only exacerbate the economic and financial situation. This underscores the fact that the mounting world economic and political disorder is not the result some kind of temporary or passing disequilibrium, but the expression of an ongoing and deepening breakdown of the global capitalist system.

Junk bond panic signals new stage in crisis of world capitalism

14 December 2015
There are many indications that last week’s selloff on stock and bond markets signifies a new and explosive stage in the world capitalist crisis.

Amid plunging prices for oil and other basic commodities (the US oil benchmark sank below $36), a further contraction in trade by China and worsening economic conditions in the “emerging markets,” stock prices in the US, Europe and Asia fell sharply. The major US stock indexes declined by more than 3 percent, bringing the Dow and the S&P 500 into negative territory for the year.

Even more ominous was the continued rout of US high-risk, high-yield corporate bonds, or “junk bonds.” In the course of the week, investors removed $3.8 billion from junk bond funds.

Prices of high-risk securities fell to levels not seen in six years—in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street crash. The yields on these low-rated bonds, which move in the opposite direction of price, continued to soar, as did the cost of credit default swaps purchased to hedge against bond defaults.
Further roiling the markets was the prospect of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade when it meets this week. Even though Fed Chair Janet Yellen has repeatedly assured the markets that any increase will be small and rates will remain well below normal for an indefinite period, any increase will tend to further depress junk bond prices.

Jeffrey Gundlach, head of the Doubleline Total Return Bond Fund, expressed the fears on Wall Street, declaring, “We’re talking about raising interest rates with the credit markets in corporate credit absolutely tanking. They’re falling apart.”

The most threatening development was the collapse Thursday of Third Avenue Management’s Focused Credit mutual fund, which invests in energy-related junk bonds. Facing mounting debts, declining revenues, rising borrowing costs and a wave of redemption orders by clients, the fund suddenly announced that it would not redeem customers’ withdrawal orders and would block them from getting access to their money.
This follows Stone Lion Capital’s suspension of redemptions in its credit hedge funds and the partial suspension of redemptions by a Carlyle Group asset management fund. Black Rock’s junk bond exchange-traded fund, the largest of its kind, fell Friday to its lowest level since 2009.
This is merely the tip of the iceberg. Standard & Poor’s Rating Service recently warned that 50 percent of energy junk bonds could default, along with 72 percent of bonds in the metals, mining and steel industries. Distressed debt in the US is at its highest level since the official end of the recession in June of 2009. Corporate defaults have topped 100 this year, nearly one-third being oil, gas or energy companies. There have been 40 bankruptcy filings by North American oil and gas producers this year, and more than $1 trillion in US corporate debt has been downgraded.
The mounting crisis in the junk bond market has profound and convulsive implications for the entire credit system, in the US and internationally, because these bonds, particularly those tied to the oil and energy industry, have mushroomed in volume since the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble in 2007-2008.
High-yield bond assets at US mutual funds hit $305 billion in June 2014, triple their level in 2009. Outstanding debt in the US junk bond market has soared to more than $1.2 trillion from less than $700 billion in 2007—an increase of 71 percent.
This massive growth in the US junk bond market is an expression of the ever more pervasive role of speculation and parasitism in the US and world capitalist economy. Far from reining in the socially destructive and semi-criminal activities of banks and hedge funds that triggered the financial disaster and resulting depression, the US Federal Reserve and the government—first under Bush and then under Obama—rewarded the “banksters” with trillions in taxpayer bailouts and virtually free cash in the form of zero interest rates and Fed bond purchases (“quantitative easing”). The same policies were pursued by central banks and governments in Europe and Asia.
In an environment of super-low long-term interest rates, suppressed by the Fed in order to push money into the stock market and increase the wealth of the financial elite, finance capital, having crashed the housing market, had to find new outlets to realize high returns on its speculative bets.
Banks and corporations spurned investment in the productive forces and the creation of decent-paying jobs because the returns were too low. Instead, money flooded into the junk bond market, which paid high returns precisely because the companies issuing the bonds had doubtful or poor credit, or were involved in highly volatile economic sectors, such as energy.
This new wave of parasitism was accompanied by a ruthless attack on the working class. Wage-cutting and austerity became universal, and they continue unabated throughout the world.
Corporations with bad credit, however, enjoyed voracious demand for their bonds. They borrowed hand over fist, especially energy and other commodity extracting companies seeking to take advantage of $100 a barrel oil prices and ever-rising demand from China and the emerging market countries. They and the rest of the corporate world used their vast hoards of cash not to invest in production, but to further enrich the CEOs and billionaire investors by indulging in dividend increases, stock buybacks and a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions.
It is no accident that the inflation of the junk bond bubble has coincided with a record level of mergers and acquisitions, set to hit more than $4.38 trillion this year. Last week, even as stocks and bonds were plummeting, chemical giants DuPont and Dow announced a $120 billion merger—yet another job-slashing, cost-cutting exercise in parasitism.
But the slowdown in China and the mounting crisis in the once-booming emerging market countries—Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Russia, South Africa, Indonesia, etc.—have pulled the rug out from under the junk bond house of cards.
The collapse of Third Avenue’s junk bond fund eerily recalls the collapse in July 2007 of two subprime mortgage hedge funds owned by the late investment bank Bear Stearns. Eight months later, Bear Stearns itself collapsed, and six months after that, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and the insurance giant AIG was bailed out by the Federal Reserve.
The decay of American and world capitalism that underlies the mounting crisis is reflected in the rise to the top of an underclass of financial parasites. One representative is the founder of Third Avenue Management, Martin Whitman, revered on Wall Street as the dean of “vulture investors.” Whitman has assembled a multi-billion-dollar fortune by gambling on distressed assets.
The junk bond crisis exemplifies the diseased state of capitalism that finds expression in the political superstructure in the ever-rising tide of militarism and war, the drive toward dictatorship and the relentless assault on the living conditions of the broad mass of working people. The tectonic shifts at the economic base of society sent shockwaves throughout the political system, intensifying class tensions and conflicts between the major powers.
But these shockwaves also thrust ever-broader layers of workers into struggle against the system. The claims of economic “recovery” are being shattered by the reality of ever deeper and permanent crisis and slump. The turn is to the working class and the struggle to put an end to the capitalist system and replace it with socialism.
Barry Grey

Stocks plunge amid fears of global slump and credit meltdown

By Barry Grey

Global stock markets plunged Friday as oil prices hit new lows, threatening to crash the junk bond market and trigger a new financial meltdown. Investor nervousness was heightened by the prospect of the US Federal Reserve Board raising interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade when it meets next week.

Fed officials have repeatedly signaled to the financial markets that any increase will be small and interest rates will remain well below normal levels for an indefinite period. However, any increase from the current near-zero level will likely intensify a selloff of junk bonds, a large percentage of which are energy-related, threatening to destabilize the entire credit system.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 309 points (1.76 percent), the Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 39 points (1.94 percent), and the Nasdaq index fell 111 points (2.21 percent). For the week, the S&P 500 fell 3.8 percent, its worst week since late August, at the height of the global selloff that followed China’s surprise currency devaluation. The Dow dropped 3.3 percent for the week and the Nasdaq plunged 4.1 percent.

European markets also fell sharply, with the major indexes in Britain and Germany declining by more than 2 percent and the French CAC 40 sliding by more than 1.8 percent. The composite EURO STOXX 50 fell by 2.04 percent.

Most Asian markets were also down substantially, and the MSCI all-country index fell 1.44 percent.
The deepening global slowdown, reflected in collapsing prices for oil and other basic commodities, as demand falls and markets grow increasingly glutted, is now wreaking havoc on the corporate bond market. Energy and other commodity-producing companies are finding it increasingly difficult to finance debt loads that grew rapidly when oil was selling for $100 a barrel and central banks were flooding the financial markets with virtually free credit.

Now, write-downs and defaults on high-yield, high-risk “junk” bonds issued by these firms are rising, heightening the prospects of a new financial crisis even worse than the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Energy and other firms facing rising borrowing rates and declining prices for their stock are cutting costs by slashing jobs and selling assets. This week, the global mining giant Anglo American announced that it will eliminate 85,000 workers, 60 percent of its workforce; put 60 percent of its assets up for sale and close more than half of its mining sites.

US employment in mining, a category that includes oil extraction, fell by 123,000 jobs in November from a year earlier. This massive downsizing is, however, just the beginning. The new year promises to see a further decline in commodity prices and an acceleration of layoffs.

Crude oil prices fell to their lowest levels in seven years on Friday. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell to $37.36 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate, the US oil benchmark, slid to $35.67 a barrel. These benchmarks declined 13 percent and 11 percent respectively just in the past week.
The new declines were largely triggered by two developments. Last week, the OPEC oil cartel removed formal limits on production, and on Friday, the International Energy Agency said Iran’s return to world markets next year, when sanctions are removed, would increase the glut in supply.
Crude oil is down 63 percent from 2014, but other basic commodities are also collapsing. Natural gas is down 52 percent and copper is down 40 percent. Prices for iron ore, aluminum and platinum have also plummeted. This week, the Bloomberg Commodity Index plummeted to its lowest level since June 1999.

The free-fall in commodity prices is a sharp expression of the global economic slowdown that was long underway even as stock and bond prices continued to soar, fueled by cheap credit and an ever more ruthless assault on the living standards of the working class. The slowdown in China as well as the so-called emerging market economies has sapped demand for goods.

In Europe, Japan and North America, growth was been negative or anemic, in large part because corporations have reduced their investments in production and diverted funds to speculative and parasitic operations such as stock buybacks, dividend increases and mergers. This has further enriched the financial aristocracy while driving the living standards of the broad masses of people even lower.

This week, it was reported that imports to China fell 8.7 percent in November compared with a year earlier, and Chinese exports fell 6.8 percent year on year. Productive activity in the world’s largest manufacturing center has been steadily declining. The slowdown was reflected in a fall in the Chinese currency Friday to its lowest level in four-and-a-half years, sparking concerns of a new devaluation.

As for the United States, the Institute for Supply Management reported last week that manufacturing in the US contracted in November, falling to its lowest level since June 2009.

Concerns over the impact on the bond market of the fall in oil prices and the general economic slowdown spiked Friday after a large mutual fund specializing in high-risk, high-yield corporate bonds linked to the oil industry suddenly announced it was liquidating and blocking investors from getting their money back.

Third Avenue Management closed its $788 million Focused Credit Fund in the face of a rush of redemption orders from clients that it could not meet. The firm failed even to notify the Securities and Exchange Commission in advance of its announcement, underscoring the desperate character of the move.

This could be just the tip of the iceberg. Standard & Poor’s Rating Service warned recently that 50 percent of energy junk bonds are “distressed,” meaning at risk of default. The situation is, if anything, worse for bonds in the metals, mining and steel industries, of which, according to S&P, 72 percent are distressed.

Overall, some $180 billion of debt is distressed, the highest level since the official end of the “Great Recession” in June of 2009. S&P reports that corporate defaults topped 100 this year, the first time that has occurred since 2009. Almost one-third of these were oil, gas or energy companies. There have been 40 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings by North American oil and gas producers.

In all, more than $1 trillion in US corporate debt has been downgraded this year. Moody’s Investors Service predicts that corporate defaults will increase to 3.8 percent next year from 2.8 percent this year, under conditions where corporate debt is at is highest levels since the 2008 crash.

CNN Money on Friday cited an analyst who covers the metals and mining industry as saying, “Sentiment is horrendous. It’s the worst since the financial crisis—and it’s getting worse every day.”
The Financial Times quoted John Roe, a fund manager at Legad & General Investment Management, harking back to the lead-up to the 2008 crash by noting, “We saw this kind of thing before in 2008-09 in the property market, when a number of funds had to be closed because of liquidity problems.”

Billionaire speculator Carl Icahn, who is heavily invested in one of the distressed oil companies, Chesapeake Energy, wrote on his Twitter account Friday, “Unfortunately, I believe the meltdown in high yield is just beginning.”

More than seven years after the 2008 financial meltdown, not only is there no genuine economic recovery, the measures taken to rescue the banks and the financial elite have compounded the underlying contradictions of the world capitalist system, bringing it to the brink of an even more catastrophic breakdown.
UNDER BANKSTER BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BARACK

OBAMA ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IS FOUR TIMES

GREATER THAN IT WAS UNDER GEORGE BUSH!

DURING THE SO CALLED RECOVERY (FROM THE

WHOLESALE LOOTING OF AMERICA BY CRONY

BANKSTERS, 75% OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN

BORN, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL!

"This analysis was absolutely correct, and more than two-and-a-half decades of ever greater appropriation of the national wealth by the top fraction of the super-rich, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, have only imparted greater ferocity and bitterness to those “terrific tensions."

Social inequality and the disintegration of the American middle class

Social inequality and the disintegration of the American middle class

12 December 2015

The implications of the changes in American social life indicated by the findings recently published by the Pew Research Center on the sharp decline in the number of middle-income households are enormous. The data revealed that, by Pew’s definition, middle-income households for the first time no longer constituted the majority of American society.

The figures are remarkable. The share of the national wealth accruing to middle-income households, the study reported, was 43 percent in 2014, down from 62 percent in 1970. The median wealth of middle-income households has fallen by 28 percent over the past decade and a half. The share of income going to upper-income households has risen from 29 percent to 49 percent over the same period.

The Pew report is only the latest in a series of studies pointing to the malignant class divide in American society. The US economy has been transformed over the past four decades entirely to the benefit of the corporate-financial aristocracy. Only the very, very rich have prospered. America is now a full-blown plutocracy.

The great majority of the population has experienced an unrelenting deterioration in income, benefits and conditions of life.
The very poorest have suffered the most. Many survive on next to nothing. One in 50 Americans has no income at all and lives on food stamps. Fifty million people are food insecure on an annual basis. Fifteen million people in the US earn $10 an hour or less. In terms of purchasing power, the annual income of a minimum wage earner has declined by 32 percent since 1968.

A “fair day’s pay” and a “decent job” are things of the past for most of the population. Workers in industry, union or nonunion, have been pummeled in recent decades. The experience of the autoworkers, whose starting pay has been halved and benefits eviscerated, is one of the sharpest expressions of a generalized process. A sizable portion of what was once considered the solid American middle class, as the Pew data suggests, faces increasingly precarious and straitened circumstances: managers, administrators, technicians, health care professionals, high-tech workers, office workers of every type and description.

To provide only a few examples of some of the once better-off groups: The Coalition on the Academic Workforce reports that as of 2009, 75 percent of the instructional workforce of nearly 1.8 million in two- and four-year institutions of higher education in the US “were employed in contingent positions off the tenure track… Although most faculty members serving in contingent positions hold a master’s degree or higher and almost all hold at least a baccalaureate degree, their earnings are not remotely commensurate with their training and education.” One commentator refers to the “growing proletarianization of legal careers.” He continues: “Little by little, the professional in the liberal tradition leaves the scene. The legal professional is increasingly an employee—of the state as a judge, a prosecutor, or a public defender; of large business; or of a law firm.” Another speaks of physicians’ “loss of political, economic, and cultural authority.”
The ruling elite in the US and its apologists in the media and the trade unions have been peddling the myth of the “great American middle class” since the 1950s. This was part of the struggle against the influence of socialism. One cultural commentator notes that the fact that the American middle class was large and would continue to get larger “was one of the nation’s proudest achievements” and was “also ammunition against communism.” At the height of American capitalism’s affluence, a host of shallow, self-serving observers proclaimed the failure of Marxism. Ben Wattenberg, an author and commentator associated with leading Democratic politicians in the 1960s and 1970s, smugly claimed that contrary to Marx, “the American working class…became the middle class.”
Stewart Alsop, a Newsweek columnist, commented in 1969, “Something has happened in this country which, as any good Marxist will tell you, can’t happen…the proletariat has become bourgeois.”

This line of reasoning, of course, was also the basis for “New Left” protest politics and remains a staple of the pseudo-left today.
The argument that America was a middle class-dominated society was always a lie, even at the height of the postwar boom, concealing the brutalities of the class struggle. Now such claims stand completely exposed by the course of social evolution.

Marxists have long analyzed these developments and foreseen their consequences. Almost exactly 17 years ago, on December 21, 1998, in response to the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the World Socialist Web Site editorial board posted a statement, “Is America drifting towards civil war?”

The statement argued that the crisis in Washington arose “from an interaction of complex political, social and economic processes,” and that bourgeois democracy was “breaking down beneath the weight of accumulated and increasingly insoluble contradictions.”

The editorial board pointed, above all, to “the proletarianization of vast strata of American society, the decay in the size and economic influence of the traditional middle classes, and the growth of social inequality, reflected in the staggering disparities in the distribution of both wealth and income.” Large numbers “of white-collar, professional and middle management workers have been affected by corporate downsizing and restructuring, with their salaries, benefits and job security dramatically eroded.”
The WSWS statement continued: “The unprecedented degree of social inequality imparts terrific tensions to society. There is a vast chasm between the wealthy and the working masses that is hardly mediated by a middle class. The intermediate layers which once provided a social buffer, and which constitute the main base of support for bourgeois democracy, can no longer play that role.” This analysis was absolutely correct, and more than two-and-a-half decades of ever greater appropriation of the national wealth by the top fraction of the super-rich, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, have only imparted greater ferocity and bitterness to those “terrific tensions.”

The seismic socioeconomic shifts have objectively and decisively undermined the basis for bourgeois democracy. It is a commonplace that a stable middle class is the necessary foundation of any parliamentary system.

As part of the general unraveling, the American ruling elite has itself undergone a transformation. It relies more and more for its wealth and privileges on financial swindling and manipulation. A relatively small section of the upper-middle class has also benefited from the stock market bonanza and other forms of parasitism.
Ruthlessly determined to defend every penny of their ill-gotten gains, the ruling elite and its political representatives in the two major parties have moved dramatically to the right. The American establishment, openly in some cases, more discreetly in others, is actively working to establish authoritarian, police state dictatorship. This reactionary drive goes hand in hand with militarism and a policy of endless global warfare.

The rise of a fascistic element is personified by the ignoramus-billionaire Donald Trump. His xenophobia and occasional populist demagogy are part of an effort to channel the outrage and fears of desperate, unstable sections of the petty bourgeoisie, in particular, in a deeply reactionary direction. The emergence of such a tendency is a serious warning to the working class, against whom its blows will ultimately be aimed.

The polarization of American society into a fabulously wealthy elite, at one end, and broad sections of the population who depend on a wage (at best), at the other, sets the stage for convulsive struggles. The Pew statistics and all the figures on deepening social inequality lead to one overwhelming political reality: there is no reform solution to the crisis of American capitalism.
The putrefaction of American capitalism is producing not only Trumps and Carsons, and, for that matter, Obamas, it is preparing a mass revolt by the working population. What is becoming an open rebellion of autoworkers against the companies and the union, behind which stands the state, belongs to the same historical moment. The bourgeoisie offers poverty, dictatorship and war. The working class will find a way out of its impasse through revolution.
David Walsh

November 3, 2015

The Causes of Income Inequality

By Catherine Sellers

The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages.

ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions.

Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations.

Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.

DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS

This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.

Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories.
The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events.

The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.

Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation.

Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages.

ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions.

Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations.

Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.

This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.

Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories.
The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events.

The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/the_causes_of_income_inequality.html#ixzz3qSBDYQVs

AMNESTY: THE HOAX TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG THE REAL COST OF WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

"The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation."

"It is clear that the overarching goal of a succession of administrations and many members of Congress, irrespective of political party affiliation, is to keep our borders open and take no meaningful action to stop that flow of aliens into the United States."

326,000 Native-Born Americans Lost Their Job in November: Why This Remains the Most Important Jobs Chart

By Tyler Durden

ZeroHedge.com, December 5, 2015
. . .
We are confident that one can make the case that there are considerations on both the labor demand-side (whether US employers have a natural tendency to hire foreign-born workers is open to debate) as well as on the supply-side: it may be easier to obtain wage-equivalent welfare compensation for native-born Americans than for their foreign-born peers, forcing the latter group to be much more engaged and active in finding a wage-paying job.

However, the underlying economics of this trend are largely irrelevant: as the presidential primary race hits a crescendo all that will matter is the soundbite that over the past 8 years, 2.7 million foreign-born Americans have found a job compared to only 747,000 native-born. The result is a combustible mess that will lead to serious fireworks during each and every subsequent GOP primary debate, especially if Trump remains solidly in the lead.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-05/326000-native-born-americans-lost-their-job-november-why-remains-most-important-jobs

Placating Americans with Fake Immigration Law Enforcement

How our leaders create fantasy 'solutions' for our immigration-related vulnerabilities.

By Michael Cutler

FrontPageMag.com, December 4, 2015
. . .
Therefore the Visa Waiver Program should have been terminated after the terror attacks of 9/11 yet it has continually been expanded.

It is clear that the overarching goal of a succession of administrations and many members of Congress, irrespective of political party affiliation, is to keep our borders open and take no meaningful action to stop that flow of aliens into the United States.
. . .
The obvious question is why the Visa Waiver Program is considered so sacrosanct that even though it defies the advice and findings of the 9/11 Commission no one has the moral fortitude to call for simply terminating this dangerous program. The answer can be found in the incestuous relationship between the Chamber of Commerce and its subsidiary, the Corporation for Travel Promotion, now doing business as Brand USA. The Chamber of Commerce has arguably been the strongest supporter of the Visa Waiver Program, which currently enables aliens from 38 countries to enter the United States without first obtaining a visa.
The U.S. State Department provides a thorough explanation of the Visa Waiver Program on its website.

Incredibly, the official State Department website also provides a link, “Discover America,” on that website which relates to the website of The Corporation for Travel Promotion, which is affiliated with the travel industries that are a part of the “Discover America Partnership.”
. . .http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261005/placating-americans-fake-immigration-law-michael-cutler

Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest

By Michelle Malkin and John Miano

Mercury Ink, 480 pp.

Hardcover, ISBN: 1501115944, $16.80

http://smile.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1501115944/centerforimmigra

Kindle, 10644 KB, ASIN: B00VBW3SYQ, $14.99

Book Description: The #1 New York Times bestselling author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and selling out America’s best and brightest workers.

In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst perpetrators screwing America’s high-skilled workers, how and why they’re doing it—and what we must do to stop them. In this book, they will name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly told myths spread in the media like these:

Lie #1: America is suffering from an apocalyptic “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math workers.

Lie #2: US companies cannot function without an unlimited injection of the most “highly skilled” and “highly educated” foreign workers, who offer intellectual capital and entrepreneurial energy that American workers can’t match.

Lie #3: America’s best and brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate that they’ve made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to foreign labor.

For too long, open-borders tech billionaires and their political

enablers have escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and

motives. Sold Out is an indictment of not only political corruption

in Washington, but also the journalistic malpractice that enables it.

It’s time to trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers

deserve better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.

Lawless: The Obama Adminstration’s Uprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law

The Heritage Foundation, Lehrman Auditorium
214 Massachusetts Ave NE
Washington DC 20002-4999http://www.heritage.org/events/2015/11/lawless

Overview: In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein offers a scholarly and unsettling account of how the Obama Administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. He documents how the President has presided over one constitutional debacle after another – from Obamacare to unauthorized wars in the Middle East to attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights, and more.

Respect for the Constitution’s separation of powers has been violated time and again. Whether in amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memorandum legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, the current Administration ignores not only Congress, but also the Constitution’s critical checks and balances.

In Lawless, Professor Bernstein shows how the Constitution as well as the President’s own stated principles have been betrayed. In doing so, serious and potentially permanent damage has been done to our constitutional system and repairs must be addressed by the next President of the United States.
Obamacare open enrollment: A widening health care disaster for workers

3 November 2015

“All of Obama’s policies have been geared toward increasing social inequality. … The claim that the health care overhaul is an oasis of progress in this desert of social reaction is simply a lie”— World Socialist Web Site, March 22, 2010

Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) began November 1 for plans taking effect January 1. The coming year will be the third in which the ACA, signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, will be operational. The World Socialist Web Site’s assessment five years ago that the “reform” commonly known as Obamacare would usher in a frontal assault on the health care available to working people is being richly confirmed.
The ACA has nothing in common with universal health care. That was merely the slogan initially advanced to disguise a corporate-designed scheme to dramatically shift health care costs onto the working class.
The central component of the scheme, the “individual mandate,” requires that individuals and families without health insurance through their employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid obtain insurance or pay a tax penalty. Low-income people can qualify for modest tax subsidies to go toward premiums.
The uninsured are required to purchase coverage from private, for-profit insurance companies on the health care “exchanges” set up under the law. This vastly increases the market for private insurance firms without placing any real restraints on the prices they charge—a formula for windfall profits.
By the government’s own forecast, enrollees will face a 7.5 percent average premium rate increase in 2016. Other sources project rate hikes in excess of 20 percent. A recent study showed that many insurers are requesting double-digit rate increases next year and state insurance commissions are approving them.
A frenzy of mergers in the health care industry will fuel further premium increases. In the space of a few weeks in July, Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. merged in a $37 billion deal, and Anthem Inc. agreed to acquire Cigna Corp. for $54 billion. As a result, the five largest health insurers in the US were consolidated into three.
Drug makers Allergan and Pfizer are in the advanced stages of talks to merge and form the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, valued at $330 billion. The price of top brand name prescription drugs are already surging, having increased by 12.9 percent in 2013, the last year for which data is available.
Last week the giant drug store chain Walgreens announced a deal to take over one of its main competitors, Rite Aid, creating a mega-chain to compete with CVS for total domination of the market.
Premiums and drug costs are only one aspect of the burden to be borne by those purchasing coverage under the ACA. The average deductible for the lowest tier “bronze” plans on the exchanges was $5,200 in 2015, and the prevalence of such “high-deductible” plans is sure to expand in 2016. This means that aside from mandated “essential services,” such as certain forms of wellness care and screenings, no medical care is covered until the entire deductible is paid out of pocket. Co-payments for doctor visits and other services are also required.
Research published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 135 health plans in 34 state marketplaces available during last year’s open enrollment period. The study found that as of April 2015, 18 plans in nine states lacked in-network specialists for at least one specialty. These included obstetricians/gynecologists, dermatologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, oncologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists and pulmonologists.
What all of this means is that a substantial portion of the 12 million people who have purchased coverage on the health care exchanges will be forced to self-ration medical care due to economic necessity. Workers and their children will forego doctor visits, prescriptions for life-saving medicines will go unfilled, needless suffering and deaths will occur.
This appalling state of affairs is not an unfortunate byproduct of the ACA. By design from its inception, the legislation has been crafted to cut costs for the government and corporations and boost the profits of the health insurers, pharmaceutical corporations and health care chains.
According to the big business parties and their corporate sponsors, Americans are living too long and health care costs are sucking up too much of the national wealth. There is a calculated drive to lower life expectancy for working people.
That is why the introduction of Obamacare has been accompanied by a concerted drive to restrict access to basic medical tests—that is, to ration health care for workers. In recent months, official bodies have called for reducing or delaying mammograms, pap smears, prostate tests and other standard screening procedures.
One indication of the catastrophic implications of the assault on health care is a recent study showing that since 1998, the death rate for middle-income white Americans age 45-54 has risen sharply, resulting in half a million deaths, comparable to the 650,000 Americans who have lost their lives from AIDS since 1981. Researchers point to suicides and substance abuse, driven by increasing financial stress, as the main contributing factors. The ACA will only increase the number of such tragedies.
The implications of Obamacare go far beyond those buying insurance on the ACA exchanges and extend to all segments of health care. The legislation is serving as a model for the assault on employer-sponsored health care coverage as well as the bedrock government-run programs Social Security and Medicare.
Today, approximately half of all Americans receive their health care coverage through their employers. Employer-paid health benefits was an important social gain wrested from the corporations by the struggles of workers in the aftermath of World War II and has been central in raising the living standards of working class families.
But the workings of Obamacare aim to destroy these gains. As Ezekiel Emanuel, a close ally of Obama and key architect of the ACA, predicted in 2009: “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance.” These plans will give way to vouchers handed out to employees to purchase coverage on insurance exchanges, either those set up under the ACA or others.
In the current contract struggle of US autoworkers, the drive by the auto companies and their union partners to dismantle the “cradle-to-grave” medical coverage won by autoworkers and retirees is in line with the Obama administration’s policy of shifting health care costs to workers.
The recent budget deal between Obama and congressional Republicans rolls back a significant provision in the ACA, the requirement that businesses with more than 200 workers automatically enroll their employees for health insurance. And while employers are basically absolved of responsibility for providing insurance, fines for individuals for not obtaining insurance will rise substantially in 2016—to $695, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher.
Paul Ryan, the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, has advocated transforming Medicare into a voucher program and partially privatizing Social Security. That he is now presented as a “moderate” unifying force by the ruling elite and the media is an indication of how far to the right the political establishment in America has veered. The foundations are already being laid for the dismantling of Medicare and Social Security.
As the real content of Obamacare becomes clear to millions of workers and middle class people, who suddenly discover that they cannot get access to drugs or doctors and standard medical procedures are no longer covered by their insurance plans, there will be an explosive growth of social opposition.
The third year of the Affordable Care Act is the occasion to call the reactionary legislation by its rightful name: a health care counterrevolution. The only rational and progressive solution to the health care crisis in America is to replace the privately owned and controlled system with socialized medicine, in which the health care industry is nationalized, restructured, and placed under the democratic control of a workers government. This will make possible the provision of quality health care for all as a basic social right.
Kate Randall

"Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of

employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious

for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-

Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson

Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4

billion fortune is extracted from his international network of

sports apparel-producing sweatshops."

OBAMA-CLINTONomics is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the American middle-class!

"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere. Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich. The corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/obama-clintonomics-protecting-rich.html

OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class

"Obama expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a low-wage economy."

"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."

Wealth of America’s super-rich grows to $2.34 trillion

By Nick Barrickman
3 October 2015

The wealth of the 400 richest Americans

continues to soar, according to the results of

the new Forbes 400 list, published annually

by the business magazine of the same name.

At $2.34 trillion, the total net worth for the multi-billionaires on the list set new records, displacing last year’s all-time high of $2.29 trillion.

OBAMA-CLINTONomics: MELTDOWN!

Did their crony banksters ultimately destroy the global economy?

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/global-ponzi-scheme-threatens-to-implode.html

Richest one percent controls

nearly half of global wealth

In 2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion. Today, nearly six years into the so-called economic “recovery” fostered by the Obama administration, the wealthiest Americans have nearly doubled their hoard. The total wealth of the richest 400 Americans managed to reach new heights even while financial markets have been roiled by tumultuous swings.

The Forbes report notes that in 2015, “It was

harder than ever to join the 400. The price of

entry this year was $1.7 billion, the highest

it’s been in the 33 years that Forbes has

racked American wealth.” Forbes makes note

that the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.

While a majority of billionaires have prospered, their wealth underwritten by the massive government bailouts of financial institutions and near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a significant fraction of the wealthy elite have lost ground in the turbulent stock markets of recent months.

The ratio of winners and losers among the billionaires was ten to one last year, but this year was much closer to 50-50. Forbes noted that the top three position-holders on the list, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, each saw a drop in their total net worth of at least 5 percent in the last year. This did nothing to threaten the position of Gates, number one at $76 billion, or Buffett, number two at $62 billion, but Ellison’s third-place position, with $47.5 billion, left him “only” $500 million ahead of the fourth-place multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.

The majority of those on the Forbes list were associated with some form of financial speculation, or with computer software and the Internet. According to the industry breakdown supplied by Forbes, its 400 include 126 engaged in investment, real estate and finance, 81 from computer technology and media, 36 from food and beverage, 32 from retail and fashion (including five members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart), 31 from oil & gas, 20 from health care, 19 from miscellaneous services (including six members of the Pritzker family, owners of Hyatt Hotels), and 19 from sports and gaming.

This left only 35 listed as making their fortunes in manufacturing, automotive, construction, and logistics. The largest manufacturing fortune is the $7.4 billion of Harold Kohler, whose company makes toilets and other plumbing fixtures. Perhaps that is symbolic, given the state of manufacturing in the United States, once the world leader in industry, but no longer.

The growth of financial parasitism has underwritten the wealth of many on the Forbes 400. In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list saw figures directly involved in finance making up only 4.4 percent of the total wealth on the list. As of today, this group now makes up more than 21 percent of billionaires on the list.

Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has held the number one spot on the Forbes 400 for 22 years, has less than 13 percent of his fortune in stock in the company he founded. According toForbes, the majority of Gates’ wealth is bound up in Cascade, the software mogul’s investment firm, which specializes in “investing in stocks, bonds, private equity and real estate.”

Besides the well-known super-rich of Silicon Valley like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with $33.3 billion and $32.6 billion, respectively) and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social media web site Facebook, the seventh wealthiest man in America with $40.3 billion in total assets, there are numerous other newly minted Internet billionaires, including the owners and co-owners of Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, GoPro and GoDaddy.com.

Jeffrey Bezos, owner of the online retailer Amazon, saw the largest gain in wealth for the year, making $16 billion in 2015, placing his total net worth at $47 billion and catapulting him to fourth place. Nearly half of Bezos’ gains came within a single day last July, when his company announced gains in the second quarter, leading to a speculative frenzy which bid up stock values for Amazon by over 18 percent.

Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of

employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious

for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-

Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson

Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4

billion fortune is extracted from his international network of

sports apparel-producing sweatshops.

While safeguarding the ill-gotten wealth of the Forbes billionaires remains an ironclad principle of both the Republican and Democratic parties, working people throughout the US continue to suffer the brunt of attacks on their living standards. A US Census report released earlier this month shows that 14.8 percent of the US population lives in poverty; a figure that is unchanged from a year earlier. The Census findings show that 6.6 percent of the population lives in “deep poverty,” or less than half of the already unrealistically low official poverty line in the US.

Obama’s crony banksters face the guillotine

AMERICA’S DRIFT TOWARDS

REVOLUTION:

The American people stand up to crooked politicians’ cronies, crooked unions and the Mexican occupation, crime TIDAL WAVE and welfare state in our open borders.

"The American elites, comfortable in their current lifestyle, had better wake up to the rumbling beneath their feet before the volcano erupts."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-coming-revolution-not-since.html

The nation’s population has grown by 35% since 1988;

however the number of employed Americans has only

increased by 27% while those who have dropped out and are

no longer in the labor force has escalated by 50%. Further

the number of Americans living in poverty has increased by

61%.

OBAMA-CLINTONomics…. will it destroy this

nation or will they simply hand us the tax bills for

their newest bailouts and crimes?

Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate

socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate

America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory

robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/obama-clintonomics-who-pays-for-their.html

These are only the most striking of a barrage of

numbers reported in recent weeks,

demonstrating that for the US financial

aristocracy, the Crash of 2008 has been

used to engineer a historic redistribution of

wealth.

THE COMING GLOBAL MELTDOWN:

a nation pays the ultimate price for OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the death of the American middle-class

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-world-convulsed-by-crises.html

OBAMA-CLINTONomics: Their cronies loot…

“This is Obama’s new “middle class,” working for half the wages of their grandparents and barely keeping one step out of a homeless shelter.”

ttp://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/perpetrating-obamanomics-at-michigan.html

"Corporate profits are at their highest share of GDP since World War II, while the portion of national economic output going to labor has fallen to the lowest postwar level."

THE OBAMA DOCTRINE:

BUILD A DICTATORSHIP BY DESTROYING THE AMERICAN

MIDDLE-CLASS.

HIS CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED TRILLIONS IN HOME

EQUITY, HIS ILLEGALS HAVE BUILT A TRILLION DOLLAR LA

RAZA WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS…. AND ALL JOBS GO TO

NON-AMERICANS!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/temporary-visas-surge-under-obama-in.html

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES

FASTER under Obama than Bush.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/12/obamanomics-at-work-depressed-wages-and.html

“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”

US poverty rate and income growth stagnated in

2014

By Niles Williamson
19 September 2015

The US Census Bureau released its annual income and poverty report this week which showed that median household income and the national poverty rate held steady between 2013 and 2014.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/millions-of-jobs-for-illegals-along.html

The report found that 14.8 percent of the country’s population lived in poverty in 2014, statistically unchanged from a year prior. Blacks had the highest poverty rate in 2014 at 26.2 percent, which was a one percentage point increase over 2013. Among children and teenagers under the age of 18, approximately 15.5 million, or 21.1 percent, lived in poverty.

OBAMANOMICS: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses…and Muslim Dictators

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/11/obamas-crony-capitalism-obama-was.html

OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/assault-on-american-worker-obama.html

OBAMA-CLINTONomics is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the American middle-class!

"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere.

Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich. The corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/obama-clintonomics-protecting-rich.html

THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON OUR PENSIONS

BIGGER PROFITS FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS IF PENSIONS ARE SLASHED

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-obama-doctrine-destroy-american.html

“Feinberg, who as the Obama administration’s “pay tsar” rubber- stamped multimillion-dollar executive bonuses to Wall Street banks bailed out with taxpayer funds, will now be given power to slash workers’ benefits at his discretion.”

Top 1 percent own more than half of world’s wealth

By Patrick Martin
14 October 2015

A new report issued by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse finds that global wealth inequality continues to worsen and has reached a new milestone, with the top 1 percent owning more of the world’s assets than the bottom 99 percent combined.

Of the estimated $250 trillion in global assets, the top 1 percent owned almost exactly 50 percent, while the bottom 50 percent of humanity owned collectively less than 1 percent. The richest 10 percent owned 87.7 percent of the world’s wealth, leaving 12.3 percent for the bottom 90 percent of the population.

The Credit Suisse report focused not on the top 1 percent, but on a slightly smaller group, the 0.7 percent of adults with assets of more than 1 million US dollars. This figure includes both financial assets and real assets, such as homes, small businesses and other physical property.

The report’s eye-catching “Global Wealth Pyramid” divides the human race into four categories by wealth: 3.4 billion adults with net assets of less than $10,000; 1 billion with net assets from $10,000 to $100,000; 349 million with net assets from $100,000 to $1 million; and 34 million with net assets over $1 million.

The lowest category comprises 71 percent of all adults and owns only 3 percent of total wealth; the next-poorest group comprises 21 percent of adults and owns 12.5 percent of the wealth; above this is a group comprising 7.4 percent of adults and owning 39.4 of the wealth; and finally the top layer, 0.7 percent of adults owning 45.2 percent of the wealth.

This top layer, defined by the report as “high-net-worth individuals,” is itself divided very unequally, as shown in a second pyramid: 29.8 million with assets of $1 million to $5 million; 2.5 million with assets of $5 million to $10 million; 1.34 million with assets of $10 million to $50 million; and finally, 123,800 with assets over $50 million.

These 123,800 “ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” as the report calls them, are the true global financial aristocracy, exercising decisive sway not only over banks and corporations, but over governments and international institutions as well. Of these, nearly 59,000, almost half the total, live in the United States. Another quarter live in Europe (mainly Britain, Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy), followed by China and then Japan.

The Credit Suisse report notes the particularly rapid rise in inequality since the Wall Street crash of 2008 and relates it directly to the stock market boom that followed the bailout of the banks, initiated by the Bush administration and greatly expanded by the Obama administration. A key passage reads:

“There are strong reasons to think that the rise in wealth inequality since 2008 is mostly related to the rise in equity prices and to the size of financial assets in the United States and some other high-wealth countries, which together have pushed up the wealth of some of the richest countries and of many of the richest people around the world. The jump in the share of the top percentile to 50 percent this year exceeds the increase expected on the basis of any underlying upward trend. It is consistent, however, with the fact that financial assets continue to increase in relative importance and that the rise in the USD (US dollar) over the past year has given wealth inequality in the United States—which is very high by international standards—more weight in the overall global picture.”

In other words, deepening global economic inequality is being driven above all by American capitalism, with the United States being both the wealthiest and by far the most unequal country in the world. The US has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but a staggering 46 percent of the world’s millionaires.

Far from demonstrating the health of the US economy, this disproportionate growth of the super-rich resembles the spread of a cancer that is rapidly metastasizing, with fatal consequences for the entire social organism.

Never have the rich increased their wealth so quickly as in America since the financial crash of 2008. But side by side with the amassing of previously unthinkable private fortunes, the infrastructure of America is crumbling, education, health care and other social services are starved of funding, and the living standards of the vast majority of the population, the working people who produce the wealth, are declining.

The Credit Suisse report also calls attention to significant regional differences within the structure of global capitalism, focusing on the diverging fortunes of three main regions: North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific.

Total global wealth declined slightly in 2015, according to the report, but only because the bank’s calculations were in US dollars, and thus were affected by the depreciation of the euro, the Japanese yen, the Russian ruble, the Canadian dollar and many other currencies against the US dollar.

US wealth rose $4.6 trillion, despite a global decline of $12.7 trillion, with Japan, Russia and the European Union countries showing the biggest drops, largely because of currency depreciation. Australia and Canada lost $1.5 trillion in wealth between them, a substantial drop for the two mid-sized economies, which are heavily dependent on resource extraction.

China, whose currency is loosely pegged to the dollar, saw a $1.5 trillion gain. But this has likely already evaporated, since the report is based on figures ending June 30, 2015 and the Chinese financial markets have plunged 25 percent since then, as the report’s foreword notes.

These disparities between countries, like the growing social disparities within countries, have immense significance for world politics. They are a major factor in the increasingly explosive character of international relations, particularly the conflicts between the major imperialist powers—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain—and countries like Russia, China and Iran that are being targeted for their huge natural and human resources.

US imperialism uses both its preeminent military position and the role of the dollar, still the world’s main reserve currency, as weapons in seeking to offset its economic decline relative to its major rivals. America is both a social powder keg, with class tensions at home approaching the breaking point, and the most destabilizing force in world politics, seeking to maintain its position of global dominance by increasingly reckless and militaristic methods.

Stopping the Flow of Illegal

Immigrants

National Review Online, November 13, 2015

Estimates from the Center for Migration Studies and the Pew Research Center show that, of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, approximately 2.5 million arrived after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Yet the overall number of illegal immigrants in the country has remained fairly static, meaning that illegal immigrants have been coming and going in about equal numbers. Why? Because, contrary to much political rhetoric, many illegal immigrants are not here to stay, and so are very sensitive to incentives: When the prospect of profitable work outweighs the risk of falling afoul of law enforcement, they come; when it doesn’t, they leave.
. . .
It is crucial, though, that we end the flow of illegal immigrants across our borders before dealing with those already here — otherwise, an amnesty will inevitably only draw the next population of illegal immigrants. To that end, a Republican administration should, among other things, seek to erect physical barriers along the southern border, end catch-and-release policies, and work with Congress to defund sanctuary cities.

Only after enforcement measures such as E-Verify are fully implemented and the illegal population has been actually declining should any other major measures be considered. We’re always told that it is urgent to bring illegal immigrants “out of the shadows.” But the plight of illegal immigrants is no more urgent now than it was a few years ago, or a few years before that.
. . .
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427000/illegal-immigration-modest-but-comprehensive-solution-editors