Thursday, September 24, 2015

OBAMA-CLINTONomics - PROTECTING THE LOOTING OF THE 1% - China, emerging economies and commodities roil financial markets

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS ON HILLARY’S SERVITUDE TO OBAMA’S CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS… their looting continues unabated.



…. but will Mexico elect LA RAZA SUPREMACIST Hillaria?

"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."




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-CLINTONomics: the never end war on the American middle-class. But we still get the tax bills for the looting of their Wall Street cronies and their bailouts and billions for Mexico’s welfare state in our borders.


While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.



In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.


In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 

2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States

fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the 

rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are 

more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 

percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. 

This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.



HILLARY CLINTON: DEDICATED SERVANT TO THE 1%, 

OBAMA’S CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS and DISCIPLE 

of  OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS for the super-rich.


The central aim of Clinton’s speech was to reassure the American financial oligarchy that, despite her occasional lukewarm denunciations of corporate criminality and social inequality, she is a right-wing, pro-business defender of Wall Street.



The speech makes clear that a Clinton presidency will pursue the same pro-Wall Street policies of the Obama administration, seeking to expand the fortunes of the super-rich at the expense of the great majority of society, while invoking “fairness” and “equality” as window dressing.

RASMUSSEN POLL: Hillary Clinton is a bad clone of Barack Obama owned by the same bankster paymasters as Obama


Hillary’s BIGGEST DONORS are Obama’s criminal crony banksters! What does that tell you???

CRONY CAPITALISM and the FALL  of A DEMOCRATIC NATION
OBAMA’S LOOTING BANKSTERS AGREE TO FUND HIS DICTATORSHIP…. They owned him from day one!


“The vast sums of money pocketed by bank executives are bound up with activities that range from borderline legal to flagrantly illegal. Nearly all of the CEOs included on the list head banks that have been the subject of multiple investigations and fines related to the rigging of global interest and foreign exchange rates, mortgage fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and other crimes.”


China, emerging economies and commodities roil financial markets

China, emerging economies and commodities roil financial markets

By Barry Grey 
24 September 2015
Signs of a deepening slump in the world economy, led by a marked slowdown in China, continue to roil financial markets. Last week’s decision by the US Federal Reserve to delay a promised hike in interest rates due to “global conditions” has only heightened fears of new financial crisis.
Stock prices on global markets have been generally down since the Fed announced its decision last Thursday. This week, US stock indexes fell sharply on Tuesday and slid further on Wednesday. Asian markets, including the Shanghai Composite and Japan’s Nikkei, fell broadly Wednesday following a negative report on Chinese manufacturing.
The week began with further declines in commodity prices, a marker for falling trade, production and demand. The ongoing commodities slump is linked to an intensifying crisis of the so-called emerging market economies, most of which are heavily dependent on commodity exports, particularly to China. As a group, they are caught in a downward spiral of falling growth, plunging currencies, mounting debt and capital flight.
The very economies that were hailed as the engines of global growth following the Wall Street crash of September 2008—China and “emerging” markets such as Brazil, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, etc.—are now at the forefront of a deflationary crisis that threatens to plunge the world into a full-scale depression.
On Tuesday, copper prices tumbled 3.6 percent on the London Metal Exchange, aluminum fell 1.7 percent, and zinc declined 1.8 percent. Brent crude oil was down 1.4 percent at 48.22 a barrel.
Stock prices of major mining companies plunged across the board. Shares in Glencore, a giant commodity-producing and trading company, fell 15 percent to a new record low. Since Glencore’s initial public offering in 2011, its shares are down 80 percent. The company has lost more than 60 percent of its market capitalization this year, making it the worst performing firm on London’s FTSE 100 stock index.
In an attempt to stave off collapse, the heavily-indebted company recently announced a major retrenchment in production and investment and suspended dividend payments.
Anglo-American, a large copper producer, fell by more than 6 percent to its lowest level in 15 years. Antofagasta was down more than 6 percent.
Commodity markets are experiencing their sharpest downturn since the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. David Hufton of PVM, an oil brokerage, told the Financial Times: “The Fed decision is alarming because of the implications. It implies that Fed policymakers are so concerned about events in China and emerging markets that they are prepared to risk… the US economy financially overheating yet again.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that analysts have become even more bearish about the price of oil, predicting that crude will remain below $60 a barrel through 2016. Goldman Sachs said it believed it was possible for crude to fall as low as $20 a barrel, noting that “the potential for oil prices to fall to such levels… is becoming greater.”
The position of many emerging market economies further deteriorated as the week began. Brazil led the downward charge of these countries’ currencies, with its real reaching its lowest point versus the US dollar since the Brazilian currency was introduced in 1994. The real has lost 35 percent of its value against the dollar thus far in 2015.
Yields on the country’s real-denominated government bonds have soared to 16 percent, and trading in credit default swaps that would pay off if Brazil defaulted has surged. The country’s central bank has raised interest rates five times this year in an attempt to contain inflation, and its rating has been downgraded to junk by Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services.
Brazil is highly dependent on commodity exports to China, its biggest trading partner.
This week has likewise seen further declines in the currencies of other emerging market countries. On Tuesday, the Mexican peso was off 1.4 percent and there were sharp declines for the Korean won, the Turkish lira, the Russian rouble and the Malaysian ringgit. Developing countries’ currencies, on average, have declined to the lowest levels since 2002.
The Financial Times, citing Oxford Economics, reported Wednesday that emerging market gross domestic product growth rates are set to fall to 3.6 percent this year on average, their lowest level since the 2008–2009 financial crisis. The newspaper cited analysts at Commerzbank as saying: “The majority of market participants are concerned that China could see a hard landing which would drag the global economy—or at least the emerging economies—down with it.”
These fears were compounded Wednesday when a new report on manufacturing in China showed the biggest contraction since March of 2009. The preliminary Caixin/Markit China Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) dropped to 47.0 for September, falling below market expectations of 47.5 and declining from August’s final 47.3. Levels below 50 signify a contraction.
Reuters quoted Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda in London, as saying, “The decline was driven by a fall in new orders and new export orders. Falling demand both domestically and abroad is only going to make the task of achieving 7 percent growth that much harder.”
In fact, the day before, the Asian Development Bank had lowered its growth forecast for China in 2015 to 6.8 percent.
John Burbank, whose Passport Capital hedge fund has profited from bets against commodities and emerging markets, told the Financial Times, “I think we are on the precipice of a liquidation in emerging markets.” He added, referring to the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, that “this feels the way that the fourth quarter of 1997 felt.”
In a Financial Times commentary published Tuesday, headlined “Signs point to deepening China distress,” Henny Sender wrote: “More importantly, the Fed matters far less for world growth than China does. Indeed, the US as a market generally also matters less. In spite of the fact that the Fed’s low rates were meant to trigger a new corporate investment cycle, the only thing that corporate financial officers have been signing off on is share buybacks—and those too are dwindling….
“The Fed has helped China and many emerging markets by not raising rates. Yet neither the Fed nor anyone else has a clue where global growth will come from in future.”
The prospect of the US economy, supposedly the “bright light” in an otherwise dismal world picture, providing the impulse to restore global growth was given a further jolt by reports this week on the housing and manufacturing sectors.
On Monday, the National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales in the US fell 4.8 percent in August, the sharpest month-to-month decline since January.
On Wednesday, the financial data firm Markit released its preliminary US Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index for September, reporting a level of 53. That is the same as August, which was the lowest level since October 2013. The index’s job creation figure also slowed in September, hitting its lowest level since July 2014.
“The survey is indicating the weakest manufacturing growth for almost two years,” said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit.


THE ENTIRE REASON FOR THE AMNESTY HOAX TO LEGALIZE MEXICO’S LOOTING IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!



 “The U.S. Chamber is in the pocket of Communist

China and big companies seeking cheap labor in the

United States. We think it is morally repugnant for 

the chamber to pursue, as a matter of public policy, 

initiatives which exploit the poor and oppressed, 

just so they can keep labor costs down for their 

fortune 500 member companies.”


The Pope in America.... A NATION IN MELTDOWN

The Pope in America

Beneath his white robes, the man Obama was praising, the 

former archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, is 

personally implicated in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976-

1983). In the name of the struggle against Marxism, the 

Church under Bergoglio’s leadership supported the military 

junta while it caused an estimated 30,000 workers, students 

and intellectuals to “disappear,” and while tens of thousands 

more were abducted and tortured. So much for Obama’s 

champion of freedom!

The Pope in America

24 September 2015
The address by Pope Francis to a joint session of the United States Congress today represents a milestone in the rightward march of the American political establishment, which is jettisoning what little remains of its democratic heritage in favor of the open embrace of reaction.
As he parades with his entourage through Washington, at the center of a massive security operation, the pope, decked out in his medieval vestments, looks out on an America whose democracy is in shambles.
No pope has ever been invited to address the American legislature, from the first meeting of the Continental Congress in 1774 to the current 114th US Congress, which convened in 2015. The pope’s unprecedented address is a direct affront to the secular foundations of the American republic as well as to the US Constitution.
The first clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, incorporates the principle of the separation of church and state and prohibits Congress from establishing any religion. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the First Amendment was intended to erect a “wall of separation” between church and state, a measure considered essential for free thought and individual liberty.
This fundamental democratic conception is nowhere to be found in the wall-to-wall media coverage of the papal visit or the comments of politicians. The empty-headed fawning and gushing over “His Holiness” is a slap in the face to atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims and all others who have a democratic right to live in a society where the state does not take any position on religion in general or any particular creed.
President Obama set the tone with his official greetings at the White House, addressing the pope as “Holy Father” and “Your Holiness,” and beginning by saying, “What a beautiful day the Lord has made.” The words “God” (5), “Lord” (2), “Jesus” (1), “holy” (6) and “holiness” (2) together appeared a total of 16 times in Obama’s 10-minute welcome. For his part, the pope spoke about family values, religious liberty and the environment, making one reference to the “Creator” and concluding with, “God Bless America.”
“You remind us that people are only truly free when they can practice their faith freely,” Obama declared. This was said with a straight face to the leader of the institution responsible for the Holy Inquisition, i.e., centuries of repression, torture and murder of Europe’s “heretical” scientists, philosophers and artists. This is the same Catholic Church that maintained close ties with the fascist regimes in Spain, Italy, Poland, Croatia and Slovakia, and signed the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany in 1933.
Beneath his white robes, the man Obama was praising, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, is personally implicated in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976-1983). In the name of the struggle against Marxism, the Church under Bergoglio’s leadership supported the military junta while it caused an estimated 30,000 workers, students and intellectuals to “disappear,” and while tens of thousands more were abducted and tortured. So much for Obama’s champion of freedom!
The mutual love-fest between Obama and Francis calls to mind the words of Jefferson: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
But the American media is not concerned with such things. Instead, the various news outlets are shamelessly competing to outdo each other in kowtowing before the visiting pontiff. A deluge of articles and television programs have appeared on such subjects as the minutiae of the papal wardrobe, the papal entourage, the papal itinerary and the papal automobile.
Nothing resembling democratic or historical consciousness is anywhere to be found in the vast effusion of media coverage of the papal visit. One would not know from watching this media spectacle, for example, that the United States had no diplomatic relations with the Holy See from 1867 until 1984, when relations were first established under President Ronald Reagan.
Nor would the viewer have any inkling that the election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, was deeply controversial. As a presidential candidate in 1960, Kennedy was attacked on the grounds that his Catholic faith meant that as president he would be taking orders from Rome.
“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy declared in a major speech responding to his critics, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”
Kennedy prided himself on his record of “declared stands against an ambassador to the Vatican,” and added, “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”
The contrast between Kennedy and Obama could not be more stark. However, this is not a question of individuals, but a reflection of the protracted decay of American democracy over the past half-century. The Kennedy administration by no means represented a golden age, but it provides a reference point for measuring the impact of decades of political reaction and the increasing subordination of all of the country’s institutions to a criminal and ever-wealthier financial aristocracy.
The first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century has witnessed a direct assault on basic democratic rights and institutions across the board, accompanied by an accelerating growth of social inequality and military aggression abroad. America is a country where the government spies on all of the activities of its citizens, where torturers and killer cops enjoy complete impunity and where the president invokes the right to order the assassination of any person anywhere in the world. The electoral process has been stripped of any genuinely democratic content, reduced to a degrading contest between various frontmen for billionaire oligarchs divided between two parties completely controlled by the corporate-financial elite, the military and the CIA.
The deliberate promotion of religious obscurantism serves definite political ends. The papal visit occurs in the midst of a relentless campaign to revive medieval and reactionary notions—anti-rational, anti-scientific, anti-democratic—in order to mobilize social forces that can be used to block and suppress popular opposition.
Last year, for example, the US Supreme Court decided that Hobby Lobby, a “Christian corporation,” had the “right” to impose religious views on its employees. Last month, a reactionary campaign was organized around Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on the grounds of “God’s authority.” And several Republican presidential candidates are openly appealing to anti-Muslim bigotry.
The socialist position on the separation of church and state was clearly stated by Lenin in 1905. “Complete separation of church and state is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church,” Lenin wrote.
“Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule.”
The total prostration of the American political establishment and media before the pope underscores the basic fact that in our era, the defense of democratic rights, including the principle of separation of church and state, is completely bound up with the development of a mass socialist movement of the working class.
Tom Carter