Tuesday, January 20, 2015

BARACK OBAMA and the RISE OF LA RAZA MEXICAN FASCISM IN AMERICA - Only Mexico has more contempt for our laws and borders than Obama! Obama Invites Illegal Alien to Be Guest of Honor at SOTU | CNS News

Obama Invites Illegal Alien to Be Guest of Honor at SOTU | CNS News


OBAMANOMICS:

The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.



In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the bottom half of the earth’s population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to just 92 billionaires. It fell to 80 in 2014.
 
Obama's 'Hispanicazation' of America
January 10, 2011
By: James Walsh
Casting a shadow on economic recovery efforts in the United States is the cost of illegal immigration that consumes U.S. taxpayer dollars for education, healthcare, social welfare benefits, and criminal justice. Illegal aliens (or more politically correct, “undocumented immigrants”) with ties to Mexican drug cartels are contributing to death and destruction on U.S. lands along the southern border.


While the declining job market in the United States may be


discouraging some would-be border crossers, a flow of

illegal aliens continues unabated, with many entering the

United States as drug-smuggling “mules.”
 
 
MUCH MORE ON MEXICO’S CRIME WAVE IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS HERE:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/04/gao-criminal-aliens-continue-to-burden.html

LA RAZA MEXICAN KIDNAPPING OF AMERICANS!
THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE SPREADS ACROSS AMERICA.
“While the Obama Administration downplays violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, authorities in Texas reveal that Mexican  have transformed parts of the state into a war zone where shootings, beheadings, KIDNAPPINGS and murders are common.”
GOP CHAIRMAN: Obama’s imperial amnesty is a nuclear threat.
Only Mexico has more contempt for our laws

and borders than Obama!
 

Delusion and deception in Obama’s State of Union … but isn’t that all he’s really good at? CON JOBS!?!

……… THE REAL REASON BEHIND AMNESTY AND OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG THE REAL (welfare) COST OF MEXICO’S OCCUPATION AND LOOTING TO THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS.

* Nine million workers are officially unemployed, another six million have dropped out of the labor force, eight million work part-time when they want full-time jobs and 12 million work for temporary employment agencies.

 

* Real wages have fallen steadily for American workers since 2007, dropping another five cents an hour in December 2014. The real income of the average working-class family is now back to the level of 2000—15 years of stagnation in living standards.

 

* The US poverty rate has risen from 12.6 percent in 2007 to 14.5 percent in 2013. Nearly half of all Americans and more than half of all US school children are poor or near poor.

 

* One fifth of American children do not get enough to eat, while the overall rate of food insecurity has jumped from 11 percent in 2007 to 16 percent in 2013. One million Americans will be cut off food stamp benefits this year.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Oxfam: Richest one percent set to control more wealth than the bottom 99 percent

OBAMANOMICS:

The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.

more here:

Oxfam: Richest one percent set to control more wealth than the bottom 99 percent


Parasitism is the social cloth from which the global plutocracy is cut. It makes its wealth not through production, but through cheating, speculation and plunder. It uses its immense resources to dominate political life and pursue policies aimed at its own enrichment at the expense of the great mass of mankind.

In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the bottom half of the earth’s population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to just 92 billionaires. It fell to 80 in 2014.


"The goal of the Obama administration, working with the Republicans and local governments, is to roll back the living conditions of the vast majority of the population to levels not seen since the 19th century, prior to the advent of the eight-hour day, child labor laws, comprehensive public education, pensions, health benefits, workplace health and safety regulations, etc."

 
"In response to the ruthless assault of the financial oligarchy, spearheaded by Obama, the working class must advance, no less ruthlessly, its own policy."

NAFTA BORDERS and BILLIONAIRES


 AMNESTY: America’s death warrant

 

THE CONSPIRACY to DESTROY AMERICA’S BORDERS… Obama and his Wall Street banksters

 

This nation no longer is a democratic republic...rather it has become a tool of the super-rich members of the above mentioned elite who preselect our presidents based on their cooperation and complicity with the elite’s ultimate goals. Obama has, in their opinion done superbly carrying out the plans well laid out for him by his backers.

 


 

STAGGERING ACCUMULATION OF WEALTH BY THE WEALTHY UNDER BARACK OBAMA.
The American middle-class pays the cost!
 
 
OBAMANOMICS AT WORK: SOARING POVERTY
 
 
MITT ROMNEY:
 
“Under President Obama the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in American than ever before,” Mr. Romney said, according to The New York Times.
Romney laid out three pillars for a potential new campaign, according to the Associated Press, which would focus on national security, providing more opportunity to the middle class, and “breaking the scourge of poverty.”
"It's a tragedy, a human tragedy, that the middle class in this country by and large doesn't believe that the future will be better than the past."
 
  
(THE BELOW FIGURES ARE A DECADE OLD. SINCE THEN WAGES HAVE
 NOW BEEN DEPRESSED 40 YEARS AGO!)
 
“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.”   Christian Science Monitor

 

 

OBAMA PROMISES MEXICO: Only 3 out of 100  invading looting Mexicans will ever be sent packing!

All will be handed jobs, anchor baby welfare, “free” gringo-paid healthcare, education and NO I.D.s to go out and vote Dem for more!
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times 
OBAMANOMICS: AS HIS WALL STREET 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.”
"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." 
"As for the state of Michigan, which once had among the highest living standards for workers in the country, it now ranks in the bottom 10 for per capita income in the US, barely ahead of Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas and other traditionally poor states."
The (real) state of American society as 2015 begins
6 January 2015
As the New Year begins, the social crisis gripping tens of millions of working people in the United States is worsening. Hunger, poverty and long-term joblessness remain at the highest levels in decades, while vital social services continue to be slashed.
The constant of domestic policy—enthusiastically pursued by both big-business parties—is an unrelenting assault on the working class.                  
AMNESTY: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED WITH ENDLESS HORDES OF ILLEGALS JUMPING OUR OPEN BORDERS!
CRONY CAPITALISM: How Obama’s Crony Capitalism destroyed the American Middle-Class and made his virtual dictatorship possible.
"Upon coming to office, however, Obama pursued the most right-wing agenda in US history. It  quickly emerged that whatever vague promises he made were insincere, and that his administration was committed to an acceleration of the policies of the Bush administration— overseeing a historic transfer of wealth to the rich, escalating military violence abroad, and deepening the attacks on democratic rights within the United States."
“That President Obama would lawlessly bring in more cheap labor at the request of corporate interests at a time when tens of  millions of Americans are unemployed speaks volumes.”
DROP BY MEXIFORNIA…. hunt for an American born, English
speaker in any service or construction sector job!!!
“Meanwhile, millions of native-born Americans, especially men, have abandoned the job market altogether. The percentage of men aged 25 to 54 who are working or looking for work has dropped to the lowest point in recorded history.”
 
SOARING INCREASE IN WEALTH FOR
BILLIONAIRES….
soaring poverty, joblessness for LEGALS as billionaires push for Obama’s AMNESTY to legalize Mexico’s looting and keep wages depressed.
“The American political system is not a democracy; it is a plutocracy—a government of, by and for the rich. The financial aristocracy of bankers and financial parasites runs the country by means of the CIA, the military and a thoroughly bribed retinue of politicians from the White House and Congress down to City Hall.”
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
 


 
President Barack Obama and Mexico Partner to Expand the LA RAZA
MEXICAN WELFARE STATE in America through "amnesty"
 
 
 
 
 
 
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES OBAMA’S SECRET AGENDA OF SURRENDERING AMERICA’S BORDERS TO NARCOMEX:


 

BILLIONAIRES partner with MEXICO, OBAMA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to

assault the AMERICAN WORKER…. Amnesty, it’s all about keeping wages depressed and

passing along the real cost of all that “cheap” mex labor to the American middle class.
 


OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS HORDES OF IMMIGRANTS POURING IN IS ONLY ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED


To cite just one example, if there is a shortage of U.S. engineers, are 1.5 million Americans with engineering degrees either unemployed or working in other fields? In all too many cases, U.S. tech companies prefer foreign workers on temporary visas because they are cheaper and more exploitable than Americans.



UNDER OBAMA, TWO-THIRDS OF JOBS GO TO HIS PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS!


“At the hearing, Dr. Rakesh Kochar, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Hispanic Center, testified that in the year following the official end of the recession (June 2009), foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost an additional 1.2 million jobs.”

"We have a situation where the job market — the bottom fell out, yet we kept legal immigration relatively high without even a national debate," he said. "As a consequence, a lot of the job growth has been going to immigrants."

Mr. Obama did take action this year to grant many illegal immigrants up to 30 years of age a tentative legal status that prevents them from being deported and authorizes them to work in the United States.

Some Republicans in Congress have criticized Mr. Obama's policy, saying it violates his powers and will mean more competition for scarce jobs.



ROMNEY on the future of the American MIDDLE-CLASS


THE “HOPE and CHANGE” CLOWN BARACK OBAMA LEAD THE NATION INTO MASSIVE BAILOUTS FOR CRONY BANKSTERS, MILLIONS OF JOBS FOR ILLEGALS, BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS AND A NATIONAL DEBT GREATER THAN ALL THE PRESIDENTS PUT TOGETHER.  THERE WAS NO CHANGE FROM BUSH. OBAMA SIMPLY IS BUSH’S THIRD AND FOURTH TERMS ON STEROIDS.


 
Capitalism and the global plutocracy
21 January 2015
The international charity Oxfam has issued a new report on social inequality showing that the gap between the super-rich and the majority of society is not only not shrinking—it is growing at an ever-faster pace.

In 2013, according to updated figures, the 92 richest multi-billionaires had as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of society. In 2014, this figure dropped to 80 billionaires. In other words, a group of people who can fit into a double-decker bus control more wealth than 3.5 billion people, equivalent to the combined populations of China, India, the United States and the European Union.
Inequality is growing at such a rapid pace that the richest 1 percent will control more wealth than the bottom 99 percent of society by next year. It is in fact quite possible that, on a global scale, society has never been so unequal through thousands of years of human history as it is today.

Oxfam timed the release of its report to coincide with the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which will be attended by some 2,500 billionaires, corporate executives, heads of state and their various hangers-on.

Oxfam Director Winnie Byanyima has been invited to co-chair the event, and the organization said in a statement that she will “use her position to call for urgent action to stem the rising tide of inequality.”

Byanyima will be directing her appeal, ironically enough, to the largest annual gathering of the global plutocracy whose enrichment the report decries. Many of the hundred or so billionaires—and countless hundreds of multi-millionaires—in attendance have seen their wealth double over the past five years. Meanwhile, as the report demonstrates, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.

Over the past year, a series of public figures, from US Treasury Secretary-turned multi-millionaire hedge fund manager Lawrence Summers, to International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, to US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, have publicly voiced their concerns over the growth of inequality.

The enormous chasm between the super-rich and the vast majority of the population, the working class, is the undeniable defining feature of life throughout the world. There is concern among some of those responsible for this state of affairs that capitalism is, as Marx and Engels put it, producing its own gravediggers in the form of an increasingly restive and hostile working class.

Yet conspicuously absent from any of these statements is any consideration of the class and political dynamics that gave rise to the growing gap between the rich and the majority of society. These commentators all proceed as though the growth of social inequality were merely the product of impartial processes, outside of the actions of governments and social classes.

In fact, the unending accumulation of wealth by the super-rich is the product of the single-minded policy of the ruling class carried out over decades and escalated since the 2008 financial crisis, itself triggered by the criminal activities of the financial elite. The US government alone has funneled nearly $7 trillion into the financial system, which has been used to prop up over $30 trillion in financial assets. Central banks throughout the world have followed suit.

Global corporations have used the mass unemployment arising from the economic downturn to slash wages and impose speedup on their workers, while governments around the world have utilized the economic crisis as an opportunity to impose deep austerity measures.

Nearly seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the policies undertaken in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash are leading to a new stage in the global crisis. The Chinese stock market bubble, which minted dozens of new billionaires this year, appears to be collapsing, having suffered its biggest loss since 2008 on Monday. Europe is in deflation, and analysts predict the Russian economy will shrink five percent this year. On Monday, the International Monetary Fund downgraded its estimate for economic growth this year.

The only response the ruling class has to the crisis of its system is to funnel even more cash to the coffers of the rich. “Monetary policy must… stay accommodative,” the IMF declared, “including through other means if policy rates cannot be reduced further,” a veiled reference to money-printing ("quantitative easing") programs.

Parasitism is the social cloth from which the global plutocracy is cut. It makes its wealth not through production, but through cheating, speculation and plunder. It uses its immense resources to dominate political life and pursue policies aimed at its own enrichment at the expense of the great mass of mankind.

The global plutocracy is a cancer on the human race. In the relentless defense of its own wealth and the capitalist profit system upon which this wealth rests, the ruling classes of the world have brought humanity to the brink of ruin. The major imperialist powers are engaged in a re-division of the world. This past year, in the anti-Russian offensive of the US and NATO over Ukraine, the possibility of a nuceliar world war, one hundred years after the First World War, emerged as a clear and present danger.

The response of the plutocracy to the growth of social tensions is not reform, but repression. Massive intelligence, police and military apparatuses have been erected, directed ever more openly at the population at home. The noxious political ideologies of the last century—fascism, chauvinism, authoritarianism—are being resurrected again, to be turned against any challenge from the working class to the rule of the plutocrats.

It is hopelessly naive to believe that any of the great problems confronting society can be resolved without breaking the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy. Its wealth must be expropriated; the corporations it controls must be nationalized under the democratic control of the working class, so they can be run in the interests of social need, rather than private gain.

For this, a political movement must be built, one that aims at unifying the international working class—the vast majority of the world’s population—on the basis of a revolutionary program to overturn the bankrupt capitalist system. This is the task of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International. We call on workers and young people throughout the world to make the decision to join the SEP and take up the fight for socialism.

Andre Damon

Delusion and deception in Obama’s State of Union

By Patrick Martin
21 January 2015
Two weeks ago, the World Socialist Web Site published its initial review of the results of the year 2014 and the prospects for 2015. We wrote, “In examining the strategies and policies of the ruling elites of one or another country, it would be a mistake to either underestimate their ruthlessness or overestimate their intelligence.”

The State of the Union speech delivered by President Barack Obama Tuesday night confirms this assessment in the case of the United States. The US ruling elite exhibits a determination to stop at nothing in the defense of its wealth and privileges, and pig-headed blindness and stupidity, both on a colossal scale.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Obama’s hour-long address, riddled with tired clichés and empty rhetoric, was the sheer unreality of the picture he presented of America, totally at odds with the actual experience of tens of millions of working people: mounting social and economic crisis, escalating attacks on democratic rights and the growing danger of world war.

“The shadow of crisis has passed,” Obama claimed, declaring that the US has successfully emerged from the economic slump that followed the 2008-2009 financial crash. “At this moment, with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production—we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.”

No one not hypnotized by the ever-rising share prices on the New York Stock Exchange can accept that as a serious description of American social reality. A few figures released in the past month make this clear:

* Nine million workers are officially unemployed, another six million have dropped out of the labor force, eight million work part-time when they want full-time jobs and 12 million work for temporary employment agencies.

* Real wages have fallen steadily for American workers since 2007, dropping another five cents an hour in December 2014. The real income of the average working-class family is now back to the level of 2000—15 years of stagnation in living standards.

* The US poverty rate has risen from 12.6 percent in 2007 to 14.5 percent in 2013. Nearly half of all Americans and more than half of all US school children are poor or near poor.

* One fifth of American children do not get enough to eat, while the overall rate of food insecurity has jumped from 11 percent in 2007 to 16 percent in 2013. One million Americans will be cut off food stamp benefits this year.

Obama evaded any discussion of such figures, substituting instead the proposal for “middle-class economics,” a term deliberately chosen to conceal the ongoing attack on jobs and living standards of American workers. It is the latest brand-name his speechwriters have concocted for the policy of both capitalist parties, Democratic and Republican alike, of promoting the interests of American corporations and banks against their foreign rivals and the working class at home.

The State of the Union speech made a brief reference to the monstrous growth of economic inequality, where “only a few of us do spectacularly well,” but Obama passed over in silence the connection between the growth of the fortunes of the super-rich and his own policies. Skyrocketing wealth for the few and mounting social misery for the many are not merely coincidental. They are product of a deliberate policy, spearheaded by the Obama administration, of handing trillions of dollars to the banks while orchestrating a coordinated attack on jobs, living standards and social programs.

Equally unreal was Obama’s depiction of the state of American democracy. “As Americans, we respect human dignity, even when we’re threatened,” he said, “which is why I’ve prohibited torture, and worked to make sure our use of new technology like drones is properly constrained.”

The formal prohibition of torture, however, has been combined with a lengthy rearguard action against the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, in the course of which Obama blocked any prosecution of the torturers. The White House is directly implicated in illegal activities, including the CIA’s spying on the US Senate and its efforts to withhold documents implicating the highest levels of the state in clear violations of national and international law.

As for “constraints” on the use of drones, there are none. The Obama administration has declared that the president has the unlimited right to order the assassination of any person on the planet, including American citizens, using drone-fired missiles, without any judicial review and without regard to US and international law.

Similarly, Obama claimed that “our intelligence agencies have worked hard … to increase transparency and build more safeguards against potential abuse.” In fact, the NSA, CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies carry out unlimited surveillance on the population of America and the world, vacuuming up all electronic communications, telephone and Internet, and creating massive databases and political dossiers.

In the 13 years since the 9/11 attacks, the threat of terrorism has been used as the pretext for building up the structure of a police state in America. This process will only accelerate in the wake of the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the attacks in Paris January 7. Obama declared, “We will continue to hunt down terrorists and dismantle their networks, and we reserve the right to act unilaterally, as we’ve done relentlessly since I took office.”

This was only one of the many occasions in the State of the Union speech where the US president asserted his willingness to use force to insure the primacy of American imperialism over all its rivals. Half his speech was devoted to such threats, including against Russia, a nuclear-armed power, over Ukraine, and against Iran, where Obama, for the second time in five days, threatened to go to war to destroy the country’s nuclear technology program.

Perhaps the bluntest assertion of American supremacy came when Obama discussed negotiations over trade practices within the Asia-Pacific region (including China and Japan, the world’s second-largest and third-largest economies). “We should write those rules,” Obama declared, as though no other country mattered.

While Obama claimed that he had brought the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a close, reducing the total troop deployment in the two countries from 180,000 to 15,000, this represents a shift in focus to a more extensive, not scaled-back, imperialist intervention. The US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) deployed forces to 133 countries in 2014, more than two thirds of the globe.
Obama concluded his speech with an appeal to the Republican Party, which now controls a majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, for bipartisan collaboration over the next two years. He warned against “always looking over your shoulder at how the base will react to every decision.”

This language was chosen, not so much to urge the Republicans to resist the pressure of their ultra-right Tea Party faction, as to urge the Democrats to get on with devising bipartisan attacks on the working class, regardless of the popular reaction among workers, particularly the poorest and most oppressed who, if they go to the polls, generally vote for the Democratic Party.

Obama proposed a handful of measures aimed at sustaining the threadbare pretense that the Democrats still adhere to policies of liberal reform—free tuition for community college students and a child care tax credit for working families, to be paid for by increased taxes on the wealthy and the banks. But no one in official Washington takes these seriously for a minute. They are window dressing, while the policy of the US ruling elite moves further and further to the right.

Aside from the delusional character of the speech, perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Obama’s remarks was the fact that, for the vast majority of the population, it was a non-event. Obama stands at the head of a state apparatus that, increasingly, is talking to itself.
 

Obama’s State of Delusion

22 January 2015
The delusional character of Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday—presenting an America of rising living standards and a booming economy, capped by his declaration that the “shadow of crisis has passed”—is perhaps matched only in its presentation by the media and supporters of the Democratic Party.

The general tone was set by the New York Times in its lead editorial on Wednesday, which described the speech as a “simple, dramatic message about economic fairness, about the fact that the well-off—the top earners, the big banks, Silicon Valley—have done just great, while middle and working classes remain dead in the water.”

The attempt to present Obama’s remarks as a clarion call to combat social inequality runs first of all into the inconvenient fact that the individual supposedly making this call has been the head of state for the past six years. The Times writes as if the policies of the Obama administration—the multitrillion-dollar bailout for the banks, the coordinated assault on wages, relentless cuts to social programs and the social counterrevolution in health care known as Obamacare—have nothing to do with the record levels of social inequality that prevail in the United States.

The Times quotes Obama’s question delivered toward the beginning of the speech: “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an
economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes an effort?”

Anyone listening to the speech with even a passing knowledge of the record of his presidency would immediately respond that, for Obama and for the entire political establishment that he heads, the answer is clearly the former.

As for the proposals themselves—including tuition assistance for community colleges, tax credits for child care and college education, an increase in the minimum wage and paid maternity leave—they consist of insincere and paltry measures, tailored to the interests of big business, that no one, least of all Obama, expects will pass.

The Times itself acknowledges, “Mr. Obama knows his prospects of getting Congress to agree are less than zero.” White House officials freely admitted ahead of the State of the Union that Obama had no expectations that the measures he proposed would be taken up on Capitol Hill. “We will not be limited by what will pass this Congress, because that would be a very boring two years,” White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer told the press before the speech.

Previous State of the Union speeches have produced similar wish lists aimed at generating illusions that Obama sought to advance a “progressive” agenda, proposals dropped as soon as the president completed the obligatory tour of photo-ops and speeches at college campuses.

In his 2014 State of the Union, Obama called for ending tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas, investing tens of billions in infrastructure projects to create jobs, making pre-kindergarten available to every four-year-old child, regardless of family income, and enacting equal pay for women. Instead, one million people were cut off food stamps, long-term unemployment remained stubbornly high, poverty increased, and wages stagnated.

On the other hand, every major initiative by Obama in domestic policy—the 2009 stimulus program, the 2010 health care reform legislation, the 2010 financial regulatory overhaul, countless budget deals with the congressional Republicans, right up to the executive order on immigration issued a month ago—was dictated by the needs of corporate America, and, in many cases, drafted by corporate lobbyists.

The consequences for working people—record long-term unemployment, a tidal wave of home foreclosures, the slashing of wages in basic industry, the steady decline in living standards over all—were not accidental. They were the deliberate goal of government policy, for both Democrats and Republicans, because mass suffering by the working class was required to obtain the resources needed to bail out the financial aristocracy.

The main purpose of Obama’s remarks was to give the various publications and organizations that orbit the Democratic Party—the Times, the Nation magazine (whose columnist John Nichols described the spech as a “serious effort to address income inequality”), the trade unions, and the network of pseudo-left organizations that present themselves as “socialist”—fodder for promoting the Democrats in the 2016 elections.

Thus, Obama’s speech was peppered with references aimed at the upper-middle class practitioners of various forms of identity politics (Time magazine, for example, enthused that Obama “made history Tuesday night” by the inclusion in his speech of one word: “transgender”).

Here is how to paint the Democratic Party in progressive colors, he was telling them. Here is how the Democratic Party will seek to fool the American people as it collaborates with the Republicans in enacting ever more right-wing policies over the next two years, combined with endless war abroad and the assault on democratic rights.

The delusions, self-delusions and lies of Obama and his supporters cannot, however, alter the underlying reality of American political life: the unbridgeable gulf between the entire state apparatus and the vast majority of the population. It is notable that Obama’s speech, delivered less than three months after the midterm elections, made no reference to the debacle that the Democratic Party suffered at the polls—due primarily to the collapse in voter turnout produced by six years of right-wing policies from the “candidate of change.”

Perhaps the most striking delusion of all is the belief by the ruling class and its representatives that it can, through a few honeyed and lying phrases, forestall the tidal wave of social opposition that is on the horizon.

Patrick Martin and Joseph Kishore