Saturday, October 10, 2015

OBAMA-CLINTONomics: THE PUSH TO CUT PENSIONS AND WAGES - AND THEN RAISE TAXES TO SUPPORT THE CORPORATE WELFARE STATE - The government-union conspiracy to raid US workers’ pensions

THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON OUR PENSIONS

BIGGER PROFITS FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS IF PENSIONS ARE SLASHED


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


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."



“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.”

The government-union conspiracy to raid US workers’ pensions

The government-union conspiracy to raid US workers’ pensions

10 October 2015
This month the Teamsters Central States pension fund, one of the largest retirement funds in the United States, unveiled the details of its plan to slash pension benefits for over 400,000 current and retired truck drivers, parcel carriers and other employees. Workers received letters informing them that pension benefits for which they had worked for decades, and which had been guaranteed by law, had simply gone up in smoke.
While the pension cuts amount to an average of 23 percent of workers’ benefits, for many it will mean a reduction of 50 percent, reducing tens or even hundreds of thousands to poverty and destitution in their old age.
The move is the result of a conspiracy by the 

Obama administration, Wall Street, major 

corporations and the trade unions to slash 

hundreds of billions of dollars from multi-

employer pension funds.

In December 2014 Congress passed the Multiemployer 
Pension Reform Act of 2014, with essentially no public 
discussion, setting up a mechanism for slashing the pension 
benefits of 1 million employees in “underfunded” multi-
employer pension funds. This year, the White 
House appointed longtime Wall Street fixer 
Kenneth Feinberg to oversee the benefit cuts, giving him the unilateral authority to impose cuts even if beneficiaries vote them down.
A multi-employer plan is a pension plan created through an agreement between two or more employers and a union, usually in the same or related industries. They are governed by trustees appointed jointly by the unions and management. These funds allow workers to accrue benefits even when they switch employers in the same industry, and were nominally protected by the federal government from corporate default.
But the funds have been systematically underfunded by major corporations, 
with the direct collaboration of their union “partners.” The multibillion-dollar 
funds were used not only to produce sinecures for union functionaries, but also 
as bargaining chips in the unions’ haggling with corporations in their efforts to 
shore up their income streams.
A case in point was the Central States plan, which was essentially given a deathblow when Teamsters officials allowed UPS to exit the fund in 2007, removing the largest base of active employees. In exchange, the Teamsters were given the privilege of extracting union dues from UPS’s recently acquired freight division.
As a result of this and similar deals, the fund now takes in one dollar for every three it pays out. The Teamsters’ response to shortfall was given in the title of a document it helped draft with major corporations in 2013: “Solutions, not bailouts.” Despite the fact that the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation was legally obligated to protect the pension benefits of workers in the plan, no money was to come from the government. Rather, it was workers’ benefits that would be cut, ensuring the continued existence of a capital stock that highly paid union functionaries see as their own personal property.
One can say without exaggeration that this government-sponsored robbery makes the days when the Teamsters union was run by the mafia look like a model of financial integrity.
The drive to dismantle employee pensions expresses the anti-working class character of the trade unions, which have been transformed from organizations that bargained for better wages and conditions within the framework of capitalism to junior partners of major corporations in slashing workers’ wages and benefits.
For decades, the unions have sought to shore up their declining dues base by taking on the management of workers’ retirement and benefit accounts, in the process becoming major players in the financial markets. A case in point was the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA), set up by the auto companies in 2007 to give the United Auto Workers direct control over the multibillion-dollar health care benefit fund for retirees.
In the current contract being negotiated with Fiat Chrysler, the UAW is seeking to establish a health care “co-op,” modeled on the VEBA, to manage the health care benefits of active employees, further establishing the union as a health insurance business. Autoworkers should take a warning from the assault on the Teamsters pension plan: The UAW will have no qualms about slashing and ultimately eliminating workers’ health care benefits for its own financial gain.
The drive to cut multi-employer pension benefits is one component of the nationwide assault on pension benefits in the wake of the Detroit bankruptcy, which set a precedent for using a “financial emergency” to slash workers’ constitutionally protected pensions. The unions were key allies of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr in imposing a significant reduction in workers’ pension benefits as part of an overall restructuring of the city in the interests of the rich.
In the wake of the bankruptcy settlement last year, states throughout the country, most notably Illinois and California, launched campaigns to slash retiree pensions without having to go to the trouble of a bankruptcy proceeding. At the same time, the assault on multi-employer pensions has kicked into high gear at the national level.
Seven years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the assessment made by the World Socialist Web Site that the ruling class would seek to use the financial meltdown as an opportunity to restructure class relations and make the working class shoulder the burden of the capitalist crisis has proven to be correct. While the wealth of the richest 400 people in the US has doubled since 2009, the income of a typical household has fallen by more than 5 percent, on top of a 7 percent decline between 2007 and 2010.
Now, with the International Monetary Fund predicting the slowest global growth this year since 2008-2009, and with mounting signs that the latest financial bubble is on the verge of collapse, the ruling class, working with its trade union allies, is doubling down on its drive to impoverish the working class.
Andre Damon


"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."


SEN. BERNIE SANDERS

“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER

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




"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
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.
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 tracked 
American wealth.” Forbes makes note that 
the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.
While a majority of billionaires have prospered, their wealth underwritten by the massive government bailouts of financial institutions and near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a significant fraction of the wealthy elite have lost ground in the turbulent stock markets of recent months.
The ratio of winners and losers among the billionaires was ten to one last year, but this year was much closer to 50-50. Forbes noted that the top three position-holders on the list, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, each saw a drop in their total net worth of at least 5 percent in the last year. This did nothing to threaten the position of Gates, number one at $76 billion, or Buffett, number two at $62 billion, but Ellison’s third-place position, with $47.5 billion, left him “only” $500 million ahead of the fourth-place multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.
The majority of those on the Forbes list were associated with some form of financial speculation, or with computer software and the Internet. According to the industry breakdown supplied by Forbes, its 400 include 126 engaged in investment, real estate and finance, 81 from computer technology and media, 36 from food and beverage, 32 from retail and fashion (including five members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart), 31 from oil & gas, 20 from health care, 19 from miscellaneous services (including six members of the Pritzker family, owners of Hyatt Hotels), and 19 from sports and gaming.
This left only 35 listed as making their fortunes in manufacturing, automotive, construction, and logistics. The largest manufacturing fortune is the $7.4 billion of Harold Kohler, whose company makes toilets and other plumbing fixtures. Perhaps that is symbolic, given the state of manufacturing in the United States, once the world leader in industry, but no longer.
The growth of financial parasitism has underwritten the wealth of many on the Forbes 400. In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list saw figures directly involved in finance making up only 4.4 percent of the total wealth on the list. As of today, this group now makes up more than 21 percent of billionaires on the list.
Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has held the number one spot on the Forbes 400 for 22 years, has less than 13 percent of his fortune in stock in the company he founded. According toForbes, the majority of Gates’ wealth is bound up in Cascade, the software mogul’s investment firm, which specializes in “investing in stocks, bonds, private equity and real estate.”
Besides the well-known super-rich of Silicon Valley like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with $33.3 billion and $32.6 billion, respectively) and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social media web site Facebook, the seventh wealthiest man in America with $40.3 billion in total assets, there are numerous other newly minted Internet billionaires, including the owners and co-owners of Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, GoPro and GoDaddy.com.
Jeffrey Bezos, owner of the online retailer Amazon, saw the largest gain in wealth for the year, making $16 billion in 2015, placing his total net worth at $47 billion and catapulting him to fourth place. Nearly half of Bezos’ gains came within a single day last July, when his company announced gains in the second quarter, leading to a speculative frenzy which bid up stock values for Amazon by over 18 percent.
Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of 

employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious 

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

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

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

billion fortune is extracted from his international network of 

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

OBAMA-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’S  CRONY  BANKSTER-DRIVEN  ECONOMY

First he  sabotaged America’s borders and then invited endless waves of illegals to grab America’s jobs and keep wages depressed.

Then he went after America’s pensions, medicare and social security towards his design of destroying the American middle-class.

AND IT’S WORKING!
                                        

“Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America (ALL MAJOR DONORS TO BARACK OBAMA) and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the  Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.



IS THE UAW A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE OR SIMPLY IN BED WITH CRIMINALS IN THE WAR AGAINST THE AMERICAN WORKER…. their execs serve their Wall Street paymasters!



“The United Auto Workers (UAW) is also complicit. The union has maintained a studied silence throughout the entire course of the affair. This is hardly surprising. As one of the largest stockholders of GM through control of a retiree health care trust fund, the UAW’s chief concern is ensuring maximum corporate profits.”

BILLARY CLINTON'S SEX LIFE RETOLD.................... Book: Hillary hates the Reagans, 'It's like night and day'

Book: Hillary hates the Reagans, 'It's like night and day'

BILLARY CLINTON’S SORDID SEX LIFE

HILLARY CLINTON’S ASSAULT ON BILLARY’S RAPE VICTIMS….

“Ironically, Bill Clinton’s first alleged rape was of a 19-year-old coed named Eileen Wellstone. We believe that he was not prosecuted because the State Department did not want a Rhodes Scholar charged with rape.”

“Hillary is the woman who has been in an arguably sham marriage and a cynical political union with Bill Clinton for 41 years. Hillary was the one who was hiring private detectives, such as Ivan Duda, since 1982 so that she could get the names and addresses of Bill’s girlfriends so that she could “get rid of all these bit    ches he’s seeing.”

 DICK MORRIS:
The shady, shabby and sordid political lives of Hillary and Billary – America’s premiere white-collar criminals.


“The Bushes have breathed new life into the Frankensteins (Clintons), and the resulting monsters may yet devour them — and us.”  Dick Morris
*
IBTimes’ review of the Clintons’ annual financial disclosures also revealed that 13 companies lobbying the State Department paid Bill Clinton $2.5 million in speaking fees while Hillary Clinton headed the agency.
 reality unfolds.....
the Clinton impact on America's rapid decline:


THE CRONY CLASS: The Democrat Party and their Bankster paymasters….

OBAMA-CLINTONomics  was created by BILLARY CLINTON!
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.”

A NATION'S DRIFT TO MELTDOWN - Video: Ferguson, Missouri residents speak on social conditions, autoworkers struggle



VIDEO: FERGUSON UNDER OBAMANOMICS

Video: Ferguson, Missouri residents speak on social conditions, autoworkers struggle


“You have the support of a lot of other people”

Video: Ferguson, Missouri residents speak on social conditions, autoworkers struggle

By Zac Corrigan and Eric London 
7 October 2015
More than one year has passed since the police murder of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri. The peaceful protests that followed the killing were violently suppressed by police forces and the National Guard, which deployed military-grade vehicles and weapons against US citizens.
World Socialist Web Site reporters returned to Ferguson to ask residents for an update on the living conditions in this impoverished St Louis suburb. They discussed with Ferguson residents the ongoing fight of US autoworkers who, for the first time in decades, have voted down a sell-out contract pushed by the United Auto Workers union.


AMERICA’S DRIFT TOWARDS REVOLUTION:



The American people stand up to crooked politicians’ cronies, crooked unions 

and the Mexican occupation, crime TIDAL WAVE and welfare state in our 

open borders.


*


"The American elites, comfortable in their current lifestyle, had better wake up 

to the rumbling beneath their feet before the volcano erupts."





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

however the number of employed Americans has only 

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

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

the number of Americans living in poverty has increased by 

61%.


OBAMA-CLINTONomics…. will it destroy this nation?



THE RISE of BARACK OBAMA and the FALL of AMERICA: ''

WHO WILL ULTIMATELY PAY FOR HIS LIES AND 

CRIMES?



Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering 

corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s 

battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and 

regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.




These are only the most striking of a barrage of numbers 


reported in recent weeks, demonstrating that for the US 


financial aristocracy, the Crash of 2008 has been used to 


engineer a historic redistribution of wealth.




KATRINA: BARACK OBAMA’S WAR of LIES


…. ON BLACK AMERICA








What if the Great Hispanderer worked as hard for BLACK 

AMERICANS as he has invading Mexicans?  …. See for yourself!

 ... do a search for Obama and LA RAZA!




OBAMA IN SELMA: Is it his biggest hoax and 

lie to date?




"The lies and demagogy in Obama’s Selma speech cannot conceal 

the huge class gulf between the government he heads and the self-

sacrificing workers and youth who led the fight for civil rights. 

They fought for equality. He represents privilege."







"Any grant of legal status will serve as a magnet to 
prospective illegal immigrants and further depress employment opportunities and wages for African-Americans," Kirsanow wrote Obama in August. "Given that the labor force participation rate is at an historic low, the unemployment rate is 6.2 percent, and there has been a precipitous decline in household wealth, the timing for such a grant of legal status could not be worse."