"The decades-long stagnation of wages for US workers and the destruction of decent-paying jobs were reflected in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. According to the study, the mortality rate of white, middle-aged working-class Americans has dramatically increased since 1999, translating into nearly 100,000 more deaths than if it had remained flat over this period. This increase is largely due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicides, symptomatic of the social misery and distress that pervades the lives of a growing share of American workers."
“Positive” US jobs report belied by mass layoffs
By Josh Varlin
7 November 2015
The US economy added 271,000 jobs in October, according to the latest jobs report by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Media commentators hailed the jobs figure, which was higher than economists’ predictions of about 180,000 jobs, as “stellar,” “off the charts” and “sizzling.” Unemployment fell to 5 percent, the lowest level since April 2008.October’s report comes following lackluster figures in September and August, in which the US economy added only 137,000 and 153,000 jobs, respectively. President Barack Obama praised the jobs report in a speech Friday, declaring “Our businesses created 268,000 new jobs last month. They’ve created 13.5 million new jobs over the past 68 straight months—the longest streak on record.”
A recent wave of mass layoff announcements, however, belies the official triumphalism by the media and political establishment. The Kraft Heinz Company announced on November 4 that it was closing 7 factories across the country, thereby axing 2,600 jobs over the next two years, in addition to 2,500 jobs that were cut in August. Oscar Mayer, a subsidiary of Kraft Heinz, will lose its Madison, Wisconsin plant in the layoffs, affecting 1,200 workers in a medium-sized city. The layoffs are the direct result of the Merger of Kraft and Heinz announced in March.
GE Transportation announced 1,500 layoffs at its Erie, Pennsylvania locomotive production facility on November 6, pointing to low locomotive demand and falling commodity prices. The layoffs will affect mostly skilled workers. Chevron announced layoffs totaling between 6,000 and 7,000 jobs, along with a “similar” number of contract workers, on October 30. This is in addition to plans to lay off 1,500 workers and 600 contractors announced in July.
On Wednesday, Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son announced that layoffs at the company would be “in the thousands.” Sprint plans to cut spending by $2 billion a year and already cut 3,700 jobs at the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015.
The recently announced mergers of pharmaceutical giants Allergan and Pfizer, pharmacy chains Walgreens and Rite Aid, and health insurers Cigna and Anthem will likely entail job losses down the line as well. These mergers and acquisitions, which result in massive payoffs to Wall Street investors and corporate investments, create the conditions for slashing workers’ wages and benefits, the closure of workplaces and mass layoffs.
Wal-Mart announced last month that its sales for the year would be flat and that earnings per share would decrease next year. Target, meanwhile, announced that it was closing 13 of its stores nationwide, in a move that will likely spell unemployment for most of the workers at the affected locations.
The poor sales figures for Wal-Mart and Target express the worsening financial position of working people amid the decades-long stagnation of wages and continued mass joblessness despite the headline unemployment figure.
Wall Street reacted to the jobs report with a mild selloff early in the day, reflecting fears that if the real economy or employment situation improved, the Federal Reserve would be more likely to raise interest rates in December. Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said on Wednesday, before the jobs report, that a hike in the key interest rate that month is a “live possibility.”
Despite the better-than-expected jobs figures, the labor force participation rate, an important indicator of the actual job market, remained at its 38-year low of 62.4 percent. In other words, a whopping 37.6 percent of the population is neither employed nor actively seeking work, with many having simply given up on the prospect of finding a decent job.
The latest report comes in the context of a global economic slowdown and other figures pointing to deteriorating economic conditions in the United States. The US economy grew at a mere 1.5 percent annualized rate in the third fiscal quarter of 2015 after a 3.9 percent rate in the second quarter. The World Bank has projected that American GDP will grow 2.7 percent this year, but this has already been revised down from a January estimate of 3.2 percent.
When broken down by sector, the jobs report reveals much more than the headlines suggest. Manufacturing employment was unchanged in October at 12.3 million workers, compared to over 13 million before the financial crisis and recession. In other words, despite the “recovery,” relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs have failed to reach even pre-recession levels, let alone keep pace with population growth.
The positions added in October were overwhelmingly in the service industry, which is dominated by low-wage employment. The sector that hired the most workers was professional and business services, which added 78,000 jobs, followed by health care, which added 44,900, retail, which added 43,800 and leisure and hospitality, which added 41,000 jobs.
The professional and business services sector includes technical, management, administrative, support and waste management services, including custodial, clerical and security staff. Nearly one third of the jobs added in this sector were in temp agencies, which added 24,500 jobs.
The next-largest sector was health care, which includes home health aides in nursing homes, whose median hourly salary was $10.74 in 2014. The retail and leisure and hospitality sectors are notorious for their low wages. Cashiers at grocery stores had a median wage of $10.31 in 2014.
Leisure and hospitality workers made still less, with the median wage of nonsupervisory employees a mere $12.51 per hour and the median workweek only 25 hours. Fast-food cooks earned a median wage of only $9.13 per hour in 2014.
These industry sectors, staffed by underemployed and underpaid workers, represent the “new normal” of the American economy. The recession and subsequent “recovery” resulted in millions of formerly well-paying jobs being axed and replaced with poverty-wage employment. A 2014 report by the National Employment Law Project notes that while US businesses have added 1.85 million low-wage jobs over the past six years, they had eliminated 1.83 million medium-wage and high-wage jobs.
The decades-long stagnation of wages for US workers and the destruction of decent-paying jobs were reflected in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. According to the study, the mortality rate of white, middle-aged working-class Americans has dramatically increased since 1999, translating into nearly 100,000 more deaths than if it had remained flat over this period. This increase is largely due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse and suicides, symptomatic of the social misery and distress that pervades the lives of a growing share of American workers.
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This policy, along with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts and trillions of dollars in Fed bond purchases (“quantitative easing”), has underwritten an unprecedented profit bonanza for Wall Street and a stock market boom that has further enriched the multi-millionaires and billionaires.
The financial markets have been pressuring the Fed to further delay its long-promised tightening of interest rates, opposing even the slightest tapering of the flood of virtually free credit that has subsidized lucrative but entirely parasitic speculative activities such as mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks. Meanwhile, the corporations and banks have sharply reduced their investments in productive activities, keeping the rate of economic growth at about 50 percent of the post-World War II average, depressing wages, and holding down the creation of decent-paying full-time jobs.
Most of the questioning focused on the Fed’s supervision of major banks and other financial firms, with the majority Republicans denouncing the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed largely cosmetic regulatory changes, and demanding the lifting of all regulations on Wall Street.
Fed chair says rate hike in December a “live possibility”
Fed chair says rate hike in December a “live possibility”
By Barry Grey
5 November 2015
Testifying Wednesday before the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen said a hike next month in the central bank's key interest rate remained a “live possibility.”Yellen presented the “Semi-Annual Testimony on the Federal Reserve’s Supervision and Regulation of the Financial System,” as mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul. Most of the questioning focused on the Fed’s supervision of major banks and other financial firms, with the majority Republicans denouncing the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed largely cosmetic regulatory changes, and demanding the lifting of all regulations on Wall Street.
The Democrats on the committee, for their part, demonstrated their subservience to the banks by arguing against any increase in interest rates until 2016 at the earliest. The Fed has not raised rates for nine years and has kept the benchmark federal funds rate at zero to 0.25 percent since the height of the financial crisis in December of 2008.
This policy, along with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts and trillions of dollars in Fed bond purchases (“quantitative easing”), has underwritten an unprecedented profit bonanza for Wall Street and a stock market boom that has further enriched the multi-millionaires and billionaires.
The financial markets have been pressuring the Fed to further delay its long-promised tightening of interest rates, opposing even the slightest tapering of the flood of virtually free credit that has subsidized lucrative but entirely parasitic speculative activities such as mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks. Meanwhile, the corporations and banks have sharply reduced their investments in productive activities, keeping the rate of economic growth at about 50 percent of the post-World War II average, depressing wages, and holding down the creation of decent-paying full-time jobs.
Yellen gave a rose-tinted picture of the state of the US economy in order to reiterate the line adopted by the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) at its meeting last week. The October 28 FOMC statement referred explicitly to the committee’s “next meeting” in mid-December as the occasion for the Fed to decide on a possible rate increase.
Yellen told the House Financial Services Committee, “At this point, I see the US economy as performing well.”
She continued: “What the [FOMC] has been expecting is that the economy will continue to grow at a pace that’s sufficient to generate further improvements in the labor market and to return inflation to our 2 percent target over the medium term. If the incoming information supports that expectation, then our statement indicates that December would be a live possibility, but, importantly, that we have made no decisions about it.”
As she has been doing for months, Yellen went to great lengths to reassure Wall Street that any initial increase in rates would be minimal and would not signal a return any time soon to a more normal monetary policy. “Moving in a timely fashion,” she said, “is a prudent thing to do because we will be able to move in a more gradual and measured pace.”
She added, “It’s been a long time that interest rates have been at zero, but markets and the public should be thinking about the entire path of policy rates over time. And the committee’s expectation is that will be a very gradual path.”
Nevertheless, Yellen’s remarks halted a market rally and led to a modest fall for the day on the major US stock indexes. They also triggered a move out of US Treasury securities, as investors responded to expectations of a rise in interest rates. Immediately after Yellen’s remarks, the yield on two-year Treasury notes, which moves inversely to price, rose to 0.83 percent, its highest level in more than four years.
Despite Yellen’s generally bullish description of the US economy, most recent economic indicators have pointed to a sharp slowdown in growth. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department reported that US factory orders declined 1 percent in September, following a downwardly revised 2.1 percent drop in August.
The Commerce Department also reported that orders for non-military capital goods excluding aircraft, generally seen as a measure of business spending plans, slipped 0.1 percent.
Global markets cheer dismal economic figures
Global markets cheer dismal economic figures
By Andre Damon
3 November 2015
Stock markets in Europe and the Americas began November with a rally on Monday, following a surge in October that produced the biggest monthly increase in global stock prices in four years. America’s NASDAQ 100 index closed Monday at its highest level in a decade-and-a-half.The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more than 8 percent in October, the Euro Stoxx 50 climbed by more than 11 percent, Japan’s Nikkei was up by more than 5 percent and China’s Shanghai index surged nearly 9 percent.
What the markets are currently celebrating is not an improvement in the economic situation, but rather a barrage of negative economic data showing that the world economy remains mired in slump and is slowing further. The divergence between the financial markets and the real economy reflects the immense growth of financial speculation and parasitism, which has accelerated since the 2008 Wall Street crash.
The financial aristocracy sees economic stagnation as a positive incentive for central banks to continue pumping limitless sums of cheap credit into the financial markets, underwriting the inflation of stock and bond prices and subsidizing an orgy of profit-making, adding to the fortunes of the world’s billionaires. The other side of this process is relentless austerity and wage-cutting directed against the working class, and an unprecedented growth of social inequality.
The pattern continued Monday, as stocks rose while economic data fell. The Institute for Supply Management said its US manufacturing index fell for the fourth straight month in October, hitting its lowest level in two-and-a-half years, and figures from China showed its manufacturing sector unexpectedly contracting for the third straight month. In Europe, economic growth is insufficient to ward off the danger of deflation.
These are but the latest in a series of economic data points indicating a general slowdown in economic growth, including reports last week that orders for business equipment in the US fell, along with new home sales. The government reported last month that the US gross domestic product rose by only 1.5 percent in the third quarter, down from 3.9 percent in the second.
All over the world, governments and central banks are responding to the persistent malaise in the real economy by cutting interest rates further, ramping up quantitative easing (central bank bond purchases), or, in the case of the US Federal Reserve, delaying long drawn out plans to begin gradually raising interest rates for the first time in nine years.
Nearly six months after the European Central Bank (ECB) began a quantitative easing money-printing operation to the tune of €60 billion a month, European consumer prices were unchanged last month, showing that the central bank had failed to bring inflation anywhere near its target of 2 percent. Economists polled by Reuters were “almost certain” that the ECB would either expand its quantitative easing program or further lower interest rates this year.
Even after having cut interest rates six times over the past year, China’s central bank is expected to take further accommodative measures in the coming months.
The Federal Reserve, which delayed its plans to begin raising interest rates at its meetings in September and October, is expected by many economists to put off any move toward normalizing monetary policy until next year.
The markets are also buoyed by record levels of mergers and acquisitions and other parasitic operations such as stock buybacks. The extraordinarily easy monetary policy, combined with immense corporate cash hoards, has fueled a wave of mergers, particularly in the US health care sector.
Health care companies targeted for mergers and acquisitions were among the biggest beneficiaries of Monday’s rally. Dyax Corp. jumped 30 percent after Shire agreed to buy the drug maker for at least $5.9 billion, while Pfizer Inc. climbed 3.5 percent in anticipation of its announcing a takeover of Allergan.
Stock prices for oil producer Chevron soared Monday after the company announced it was cutting 7,000 jobs, bringing total job cuts at large publicly traded energy companies to nearly 113,000 since June 2014.
Internationally, the markets cheered the electoral victory of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), following a campaign characterized by widespread attacks on opposition parties and the press. The banks welcomed statements by AKP President Erdogan pointing in the direction of more pervasive authoritarian rule. The Turkish lira surged 4 percent against the dollar, while the country’s main stock index spiked by 5.5 percent.
These developments reflect the further consolidation of control over the world economy by the most parasitic, rapacious and reactionary sections of the capitalist class. They are engaged in a process of plunder, in which resources are diverted from productive investment to finance financial manipulations that boost the fortunes of the rich and the super-rich at the expense of society’s productive forces.
Last April, the International Monetary Fund acknowledged that there was no prospect any time soon of a return to normal rates of economic growth. It pointed to a 25 percent decline in productive investment in the older industrialized countries as the major factor in the ongoing slump. What it did not mention was the role of the new financial aristocracy and financial parasitism in this process.
This reality was summed up Monday in a Bloomberg News write-up of a research note sent to clients of Bank of America, which sought to quantify the impact of central bank policy since 2008 on social inequality. The report began by noting that there have been 606 separate interest rate cuts by world central banks since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, together with $12.4 trillion in central bank asset purchases.
Citing the unpublished report, Bloomberg wrote, “An investment of $100 in a portfolio of stocks and bonds since the Federal Reserve began quantitative easing would now be worth $205. Over the same time, a wage of $100 has risen to just $114.”
It added, “For every $100 US venture capital and private equity funds raised at the start of 2010, they are now raising $275, but for every $100 of US mortgage credit extended five years ago, just $61 was extended and accepted this June.”
It continued: “For every job created in the US this decade, companies spent $296,000 buying back their stocks, according to the New York-based [Bank of America].”
These are indices of an economic system in mortal crisis. The separation of the process of wealth creation for the ruling elite from the process of material production and the creation of real value reflects a decay and breakdown of the capitalist system at a fundamental level. The financial bubbles being inflated by governments and central banks are not sustainable. They are setting the stage for an even greater financial crisis than the Wall Street meltdown of 2008.
This global crisis of the capitalist system is likewise creating the conditions for a new eruption of the class struggle and a growing working class audience for the program of socialist revolution.
Top 1 percent own more than half of world’s wealth
Top 1 percent own more than half of world’s wealth
By Patrick Martin
14 October 2015
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.
"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."
“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.”
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."
"I think that the business model of Wall Street is fraud," said Sanders. "I think these guys drove us into the worst economic downturn in the modern history of America and I think they're at it again. I believe that when you have so few banks with so much power you have to ... break them up. That is not Hillary Clinton's position."
Wealth of America’s super-rich grows to $2.34 trillion
By Nick Barrickman
3 October 2015
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:
Did their crony banksters ultimately destroy the global economy?
Richest one percent controls nearly half of
global wealth
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.
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES
FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“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
in 2014
By Niles Williamson
19 September 2015
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.
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
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."
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 Continues To Rule By Executive Order, Will Bring Waves of Illegal into U.S.
By Suzanne Eovaldi
November 5, 2015
The way to the White House leads through Florida and with waves of illegal immigrants continuing to pour into the Sunshine State, Rubio and Bush will have a tough time garnering support from voters. The media was reported to have muted the favorable cheers for Trump at his Jacksonville rally while also refusing to display pics of the sizeable audience. But no matter how hard they try, they are unlikely to stop Trump because he knows THE PEOPLE; how to talk with them, what matters to them and how to address their likes and concerns.
. . .
http://www.coachisright.com/obama-continues-to-rule-by-executive-order-will-bring-waves-of-illegals-into-u-s/
Obama Continues To Rule By Executive Order, Will Bring Waves of Illegal into U.S.
By Suzanne Eovaldi
November 5, 2015
The way to the White House leads through Florida and with waves of illegal immigrants continuing to pour into the Sunshine State, Rubio and Bush will have a tough time garnering support from voters. The media was reported to have muted the favorable cheers for Trump at his Jacksonville rally while also refusing to display pics of the sizeable audience. But no matter how hard they try, they are unlikely to stop Trump because he knows THE PEOPLE; how to talk with them, what matters to them and how to address their likes and concerns.
. . .
http://www.coachisright.com/obama-continues-to-rule-by-executive-order-will-bring-waves-of-illegals-into-u-s/
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