Saturday, September 2, 2017

"The combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans was $2.4 trillion in 2016, a number that has only grown as the stock market continues to rise. This is more than 12 times the estimated damages from Hurricane Harvey. The net income of US banks last year alone was $171 billion. The annual budget of the US military—used to fund an ever-expanding drive of global conquest that threatens to unleash a third world war—is more than $600 billion."


Who will pay for the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey?
2 September 2017
As some residents begin to return to their homes and rescuers search the still flooded buildings in and around Houston, Texas, the massive extent of the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey is only now being fully revealed. The consequences of what by some measures is the greatest natural disaster in American history will be far-reaching, not only for the millions of people directly affected, but for social and political stability in the United States.
The official death toll for the storm increased to 46 on Friday, though this figure is expected to rise in the coming days. As many as one million people have been displaced by the floods, turned into internal refugees. The number of flooded structures is estimated at 136,000 just in Harris County, which includes Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country.
Nearby Beaumont (population 118,000), which has been transformed into a virtual island, remains without running water, and it is it is not known when the city’s pumps will be repaired. Chemical and refinery plants throughout the region, like the Arkema facility that is the location of an ongoing fire, are still flooded. An unknown number of bridges and roads have been severely damaged and in some cases swept away.
AccuWeather is estimating that the overall cost of the storm could rise to $190 billion, or the equivalent of one percent of the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in an entire year. This is nearly as much as Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Hurricane Sandy (2012) combined. Such estimates do not include many additional costs, such as the additional health care expenses for thousands of people due to the toxic mix of chemicals and waste in floodwaters, or the impact of the rising cost of gas as oil companies seize the opportunity to raise prices.
The single hurricane will have a sizeable impact on the overall economy in the United States this year, perhaps cutting growth in half. Large parts of Houston will be uninhabitable for weeks or months due to water damage, disrupting economic activity and leaving tens of thousands without an income.
It is the poor and working class who will be the hardest hit. More than 80 percent of homeowners in the region most severely impacted by the hurricane do not have flood insurance, meaning they will be left to rebuild with inadequate loans from various federal agencies, if they are able to get even these.
As the true extent of the damage becomes clear, its more far-reaching consequences will be felt. Harvey has hit the United States under conditions of deep social, economic, and political crisis. Neither the Trump administration nor its opponents within the ruling class command any significant popular support. The American ruling class, riven by deep internal divisions over foreign policy, confronts an economic system built on massive speculative bubbles and an increasingly angry and hostile working class.
Over the past week, the American media and political establishment have organized their forces to perform a well-choreographed political theater, combining hypocritical and insincere commentary on the “tragedy” of Hurricane Harvey, with the deliberate avoidance of any discussion on who is responsible and what must be done. The aim is to somehow prevent workers from drawing the necessary conclusion: that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey is a crime of capitalism, for which the American ruling class is to blame.
The potential for flooding on this scale was neither unforeseeable nor unforeseen. The most basic measures, such as ensuring that there was a way for rainfall in the north of the city to reach the Gulf of Mexico without flooding the city itself, were simply ignored, as documented in a interview with risk management expert Robert Bea. No plan was in place for an orderly evacuation of the region in the event of a disaster, even though the region is prone to hurricanes.
Adequate preparation would require a level of planning and foresight of which the ruling elite is incapable. For the past forty years, under both Democrats and Republicans, it has engaged in a single-minded policy of upward wealth redistribution, corporate deregulation, and financial speculation. The results are seen not only in Houston, but throughout the country: record social inequality, deindustrialized cities, declining life expectancy, and eroded infrastructure—witnessed in the poisoning of the water in Flint, Michigan among countless other examples.
Even before the waters have receded, the main concern of the political representatives of the ruling elite is to make sure that those responsible for the catastrophe will not have to pay for it. Some form of emergency federal funding bill will likely be passed. As was the case following Hurricane Katrina and Sandy, however, those requiring assistance will have to fight tooth and nail to receive pitifully inadequate funds, generally in the form of loans.
One way or another, the ruling class will force workers to foot the bill. The overriding domestic policy priority of the Trump administration is to pass a massive corporate tax cut. Before Harvey hit, and even as the floodwaters rose, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were touring the country to promote their “tax reform” proposal.
Along the same lines, Republican John McCain published an op-ed Thursday in the Washington Post entitled, “It’s time Congress returns to regular order,” in which he did not mention the hurricane, and instead called for Congress to move ahead with “tax reform”—a euphemism for slashing corporate taxes—as well as increasing defense spending. Democrats, meanwhile, have repeatedly stated their support for working with the Trump administration to “simplify” the tax code by cutting taxes on corporations.
The working class must advance its own program. All those affected by the hurricane must be made whole, with full restitution for damaged homes and property. Those displaced by the hurricane must receive quality housing. A multitrillion-dollar public works program must be initiated to rebuild the city and develop public infrastructure throughout the country.
To fund and implement such a program requires a frontal assault on the wealth and power of the corporate and financial elite. The combined net worth of the 400 richest Americans was $2.4 trillion in 2016, a number that has only grown as the stock market continues to rise. This is more than 12 times the estimated damages from Hurricane Harvey. The net income of US banks last year alone was $171 billion. The annual budget of the US military—used to fund an ever-expanding drive of global conquest that threatens to unleash a third world war—is more than $600 billion.
The vast wealth created by the working class must be taken out of the hands of a privileged few and used to meet social need. The giant corporations and banks, which control the entire political system and dictate policy, must be transformed into public utilities, democratically controlled by the working class.
Hurricane Harvey cannot be separated from all the other manifestations of social crisis in the United States and internationally. For the working class, the great question is to organize in a struggle for political power. It is not a matter of pressuring the ruling elite, or replacing one section of that elite with another. The working class must organize itself as a political force and make itself the master of society. To lead this struggle is the overriding task of the Socialist Equality Party.
Joseph Kishore


THE FACE OF AMERICA'S SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION AS MEXICO SUCKS OUT OF THE U.S. HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS EVERY YEAR

WHILE THE SWAMP KEEPER TWITTER TRUMPER SERVES THE SUPER RICH…. The wall remains a joke on Legals and HUNDREDS OF STORES across America’s OPEN BORDERS are being shuttered by the hundreds!

"She did not even think it worthy of a reference, let alone an explanation, as to why, in view of this “strong economy,” hundreds of millions of ordinary working people in the US and around the world are seething with discontent and anger over an economic system that is continually reducing their living standards and social conditions, while the financial speculators, responsible for the crisis, accumulate vast wealth."

Amid warnings of a new financial crash, Fed Chairwoman promotes illusions at Jackson Hole conference
By Nick Beams
26 August 2017
Yesterday’s speech by Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen to the conclave of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, recalled events at the gathering 12 years ago. At that meeting, the growing signs of the devastating financial crisis that was to strike in 2008 were completely ignored. That was likewise the situation at this year’s meeting, held under conditions where the surge in stock markets is bringing warnings of a major collapse.
The 2005 meeting was organised as a celebration of the achievements of “The Maestro,” Fed chief Alan Greenspan, whose policies, it was claimed, had brought a new era of prosperity to the global economy. Only one discordant note was sounded in remarks by the then International Monetary Fund economist Raghuram Rajan that easy money may be creating the conditions for a financial crisis. But he was firmly put in his place.
This year’s address by Yellen is widely expected to be her last as Fed chairwoman as her current term expires in February next year and president Trump, who decides on the position, has denounced her in the past.
The circumstances of this year’s conclave are, of course, very different from that of 12 years ago following the eruption of the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But nonetheless there are similarities between the two.
BLOG: AS RETAIL STORES CLOSE BY THE HUNDREDS!
Yellen’s speech could be described as a celebration of the achievements of the Fed and other regulatory authorities in putting in place measures to prevent any recurrence of the events of 2008, while totally ignoring the growing signs of the build-up of conditions for another financial disaster.
Yellen began her remarks with a reference to the crisis of a decade ago and then went to a defence of the limited regulations introduced since then which are now threatened by the plans of the Trump administration to introduce sweeping deregulation.
The measures introduced over the past decade both in the US and around the world had improved financial regulation “to limit both the probability and the adverse consequences of future financial crises,” she claimed.
These reforms had strengthened the financial system, credit was broadly available on good terms, lending had advanced in line with economic activity, “contributing to today’s strong economy.”
She did not even think it worthy of a reference, let alone an explanation, as to why, in view of this “strong economy,” hundreds of millions of ordinary working people in the US and around the world are seething with discontent and anger over an economic system that is continually reducing their living standards and social conditions, while the financial speculators, responsible for the crisis, accumulate vast wealth.
According to Yellen, the resilience of the financial system had been boosted, banks were safer, the problem of “too big to fail had been reduced” and a system had been put in place “to effectively monitor and address risks that arise outside the regulatory perimeter.”
“Our resilient financial system is better prepared to absorb, rather than amplify, adverse shocks, as has been illustrated during periods of market turbulence in recent years.”
Of course Yellen could not maintain, as was the case 12 years ago, that the threat of financial crisis had been overcome. The memories are still much too fresh amid the ongoing impact of the disaster and, as she herself acknowledged, even at the Jackson Hole gathering of 2007 the discussion was “fairly optimistic about the possible economic fallout from stresses in the financial system.”
BLOG: HERE COME THE NO STRINGS BAILOUTS!
So while “we can never be sure that new crises will not occur” if the lessons of the past are kept in mind, “we have reason to hope that the financial system and economy will experience fewer crises and recover from any future crisis more quickly, sparing households and businesses some of the pain they endured during the crisis that struck a decade ago.”
Yellen’s speech was the promotion of illusion over reality. It was entitled “Financial Stability a Decade after the Onset of the Crisis,” but the Fed chairwoman passed over without comment one of the most significant financial developments in economic history—the massive accumulation of financial assets by the Fed and other central banks around the world.
One of the reasons Yellen did not even touch on this issue could well be that markets are now so fragile that any indication of how the Fed plans to reduce its asset holdings could itself touch off a financial panic by reducing the cash flows on which speculation has fed.
The Fed’s balance sheet has expanded to $4.5 trillion, from around $800 billion before the crisis, while the combined balance sheets of the top four central banks, the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England now exceeds $13 trillion. These assets comprise 36 percent of the combined gross domestic product of these countries, triple the share in 2007.
Last year, according to a report by Bloomberg, the world’s 10 largest central banks increased their asset holdings to $21.4 trillion, a 10 percent increase over the previous year.
This further increase in central bank holdings has coincided with the global rise in equity markets, fuelling growing concerns that the formation of a new financial bubble is well advanced.
The warnings come from a number of quarters. In a report prepared for its most recent meeting, Fed staff stated that “vulnerabilities associated with asset valuation pressures had edged up from notable to elevated.”
A report published this week in the Financial Times noted: “The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio of the US stock market has been higher only during the peak of the dotcom boom, and with bond yield still near record lows there is mounting evidence of investors turning to convoluted, potentially risky bets in search of precious returns.”
Among those risky bets is a return to investment in credit default swaps which played a critical role in the financial crisis of 2008, along with new forms of speculation such as purchases of the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
This week Bloomberg published a report that three major banks HSBC, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley see mounting evidence of a major downturn in the business cycle.
“Analysts at the Wall Street behemoths cite signals including the breakdown of long-standing relationships between stocks, bonds, and commodities as well as investors ignoring valuation fundamentals and data. It all means stock and credit markets are at risk of a painful drop,” the report stated.
Andrew Sheets, a market strategist at Morgan Stanley, linked conditions to those that prevailed between 2005 and 2007.
But even as they warn of what is to come, the major banks and finance houses continue on the path to disaster, recalling the infamous remarks of Citigroup chief Chuck Prince in July 2007 that “as long the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance” and “we’re still dancing.”
The 2008 financial crisis caught the American and international working class by surprise and it was unprepared for the social devastation that followed. Now the lessons of the past decade must be drawn and acted upon. Not only do the ruling political and financial elites have no answer to the contradictions of the profit system over which they preside, their very actions have prepared the conditions for an even bigger disaster.
No one can predict when a new financial crash will strike, but the conditions for it are well advanced. It will bring the eruption of social struggles and intensified class conflicts in which the decisive question is the fight for a socialist program and the construction of a revolutionary leadership.

WHILE THE SWAMP KEEPER TWITTER TRUMPER SERVES THE SUPER RICH…. The wall remains a joke on Legals and HUNDREDS OF STORES across America’s OPEN BORDERS are being shuttered by the hundreds!
"Dalio wrote that the economic and social divisions in the US are similar to the revolutionary upheavals of this previous period. “During such times conflicts (both internal and external) increase, populism emerges, democracies are threatened and wars can occur.” He added that he could not say how bad it would get, but he was not encouraged. “Conflicts have now intensified to the point that fighting to the death is probably more likely than reconciliation."
Behind the political warfare in the US: Rising fears of financial collapse, social unrest
22 August 2017
There are growing concerns in US and global financial circles that the rise in the US stock market that accelerated with the election of Donald Trump is heading for a major downturn. These concerns shed a revealing light on some of the underlying forces driving the virtual civil war in the US political establishment.
The growing view among Wall Street speculators and corporate executives is that the “Trump trade”, which sent the Dow Jones and other market indexes to record highs, has run its course, with the president increasingly becoming an economic liability. The tipping point in business sentiment came in the wake of the conflict over the Charlottesville Nazi rampage. Trump’s remarks defending neo-Nazis were seen as undermining the interests of American imperialism internationally and threatening to unleash social and political instability at home.
However, concerns over the instability caused by Trump reflect deeper fears. The American ruling class confronts problems that extend far beyond the current occupant of the White House.
In a comment published yesterday, Ray Dalio, the head of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, said that politics was now set to “probably play a greater role than we have experienced before in a manner that is broadly similar to 1937.” Whether the US was able to overcome political conflicts would have a greater effect on the economy than “classic monetary and fiscal policies.”
The reference to 1937 is significant. The first half of that year saw a major downturn in the US economy—the decline took place at an even faster rate than in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. The year also saw the eruption of the class struggle in the auto and steel industries.
Dalio wrote that the economic and social divisions in the US are similar to the revolutionary upheavals of this previous period. “During such times conflicts (both internal and external) increase, populism emerges, democracies are threatened and wars can occur.” He added that he could not say how bad it would get, but he was not encouraged. “Conflicts have now intensified to the point that fighting to the death is probably more likely than reconciliation.”

In his comment, Dalio wrote that, when one looked at average figures, “one might conclude that the United States economy is doing just fine, yet when one looks at the numbers that comprise those averages, it’s clear that some are doing extraordinarily well and others are doing terribly, with gaps in wealth and income being the greatest since the 1930s.”
Dalio and others couch references to the growing social and political divide in terms of “populism,” but their real fear is the emergence of overt class conflict. “The majority of Americans,” he wrote, “appear to be strongly and intransigently in disagreement about our leadership and the direction of our country” and were “more inclined to fight for what they believe in than to try to figure out how to get beyond their disagreements to work productively based on shared principles.”
In other words, the nostrums of the “American dream” and America as the “land of economic opportunity,” which functioned historically as a kind of political glue, have disintegrated. What terrifies the ruling class 
is that the working class will intervene, 
under conditions in which all signs 
point to a collapse of the financial 
bubble created by the world’s central 
banks since the financial crisis of 2008.
The complete disintegration of financial markets nine years ago was only prevented by the injection of trillions of dollars into the global financial system—the US Fed alone poured in more than $4 trillion. But the chief effect of these measures has not been to stimulate a significant recovery in the “real” economy—investment rates in the US and other major economies remain at historically low levels—but to facilitate a financial market boom.
The latest expression of the speculative mania is the rise of the crypto currency Bitcoin. After taking more than 3,000 days to reach a level of $2,000, the currency, which is used in Internet trading, went from $2,000 to more than $4,000 in just 85 days. The overall market valuation of Bitcoins has expanded to $140 billion, as major investors, including Goldman Sachs, move in.
This is only one expression of bubbles that have developed in virtually every financial asset.
With the provision of ultra-cheap money by the Fed and other central banks, one of the chief mechanisms by which companies have been able to maintain share values is by using borrowed funds to organise share buybacks. But this process is reaching its limit, as already over-leveraged companies cannot borrow more to sustain their share values.
As the Financial Times noted in a comment yesterday, based on longer term historical valuations, US stocks “appear more expensive than at any time bar the months before the great crash of 1929, and the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000.”
Under what were once considered to be “normal” circumstances, money would move into bond markets to take advantage of higher rates of return. However, bond markets are also in a bubble, trading at historical highs, with interest rates (which move in an inverse relationship to the price) at record lows.
In 2008, the American ruling class responded to the financial collapse through political and economic mechanisms. On the one hand, they installed Obama to the US presidency—proclaiming the “audacity of hope” and “change you can believe in”—with the support of the trade union bureaucracy and the various organisations of the privileged middle class, who hailed his election as a “transformative” moment.
On the other, they undertook the greatest injection of money into the financial system seen in economic history to finance an orgy of speculation and organize a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich. Far from resolving the contradictions, these measures have reproduced them at a higher level.
While sections of the ruling class are terrified of the growth of class conflict, they can propose no measures to address the conditions that are leading inexorably toward social explosions. While Trump has pursued a policy of developing an extra-parliamentary movement of the extreme right, his critics within the ruling class are working to reorganize his administration to place it even more firmly under the direction of the military and the financial elite.
A new period of economic and political convulsion is emerging, for which the working class must prepare through the building of a revolutionary leadership, based on an internationalist and socialist program, to resolve the historic crisis of the capitalist profit system in its interests.
Nick Beams

Bernie Sanders promotes illusions in the Democrats at Detroit town hall meeting

By Tom Hall
26 August 2017

Senator Bernie Sanders spoke Tuesday before a crowd of more than 1,000 people at a town hall meeting in Detroit. The event, where Sanders appeared alongside long-time Democratic Representative John Conyers, focused on Sanders’ “Medicare for All” campaign, which proposes to expand the federal health care program for the elderly into a universal, single-payer health care program.
Since the Democratic Party debacle in the 2016 elections, Sanders has become the de facto leader of an effort to prop up the party—to which he does not formally belong—and overcome the (correct) popular sentiment that the Democrats are completely indifferent to poverty and social distress, which was greatly exacerbated under eight years of pro-Wall Street policies of the Obama administration.
Sanders and his supporters have seized upon the issue of health care in order to bolster the Democrats’ flagging credentials as a “people’s” party committed to a program of social reform. In part this is to salvage the electoral fortunes of the Democrats in 2018 and 2020, but the more important goal is to impede any break by working people from the whole structure of the two-party system.
While polls have shown that Sanders remains the most popular politician in the country, the composition of the crowd suggested that his post-election efforts have had a limited impact among broader layers of the population. While reporters for the World Socialist Web Site encountered some students and young people, the capacity crowd was dominated for the most part by those with a direct interest in efforts to salvage the Democratic Party as an institution: trade union functionaries, aging 1960s-era radicals, and pseudo-left groups oriented towards the Democrats, who promoted Sanders during the primary elections last year. Despite the fact that the meeting itself was held in a predominantly working-class area, workers were largely absent.
Sanders and Conyers presented a universal, single-payer health care system as a logical extension of the “advances” supposedly made in access to health care under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. “Thank god we were able to beat back these ugly and horrific Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” Sanders declared. “But what we have to recognize is that even with the gains of the Affordable Care Act … today 28 million people still have no health insurance.”
In reality, the Affordable Care Act was a reactionary piece of legislation aimed at bolstering the profits of the health care and insurance industries and corporate America more generally. It included more than $700 billion in cuts to Medicare over 10 years, and sought to shift the cost of health care coverage from the employers and the government to working people.
Sanders and company were unable to totally paper over the devastating impact of the policies of the Obama administration, which oversaw the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history, has had on broad layers of workers, particularly youth. The meeting began with testimonials purporting to show how the Affordable Care Act has made a positive impact in people’s lives. One of the hand-picked speakers, Candice Adams, told the meeting how she is tens of thousands of dollars in debt from student loans, is unable to find work in her field, and was recently laid off from an auto parts supplier. She thanked Obamacare for allowing her to pay for at least some sort of health insurance, to the enthusiastic applause of the audience.
Sanders’ remarks were noteworthy as much for what they glossed over or omitted entirely as for what they focused on. Listening to the self-described “socialist’s” remarks, one would have no idea that the ruling class is embroiled in the most intense factional political warfare since the Civil War, that a US nuclear attack on North Korea is being considered as a real possibility, or that the specter of military dictatorship has arisen, primarily with the support of the Democrats, in the aftermath of Trump’s support for the fascist demonstration in Charlottesville.
After making only two tersely-worded press releases in the week after the Nazi rampage in Charlottesville, Sanders delivered somewhat lengthier remarks at the Detroit meeting denouncing Trump’s failure to distance himself from the fascist demonstrators, which were widely reported in the national press. “What was even worse than seeing Nazis march, what we have never seen before, whether the president was a Democrat or Republican, was a president who could not condemn in the strongest possible terms Nazis and white supremacists,” Sanders exclaimed, adding that “four hundred thousand Americans died fighting against Hitler and Nazism and fascism.”
These remarks reflect anxieties within the ruling class that Trump’s open solidarizing with neo-Nazi layers has damaged the political authority and legitimacy of the American imperialist state, inviting mass unrest at home and undermining American prestige abroad. For all the nationalist mythologizing of America’s entry into World War II as a war against fascism, leading US industrialists like Henry Ford had been supporters and even business partners with the Nazi regime before the outbreak of war. The comments by Sanders, like those of Republican senators and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reflect concerns that the promotion of American imperialist interventions as wars for “democracy” against new incarnations of Adolf Hitler has been dealt a serious blow.
In the days following the events in Charlottesville, the cabal of military figures in Trump’s cabinet, openly cheered on and supported by the Democrats and the “liberal” media, has been to consolidate their control over the executive branch, undermining civilian control over the military. This raises even more serious and immediate dangers to democratic rights than Trump’s promotion of fascism, which is not yet a mass movement in the United States. Yet Sanders did not even acknowledge this in his remarks.
In fact, Sanders bears a particular political responsibility for allowing Trump a free hand to attempt to cultivate a new far-right movement. His winding down of his primary campaign, which appealed to the growing popular opposition to poverty and social inequality, and his embrace of Hillary Clinton in the general election, the choice of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, guaranteed that the immense social discontent in the US could only find expression, within the confines of the American two-party system, in Trump’s right-wing populist campaign.
Sanders has long been associated with economic nationalist appeals, blaming workers in China and Mexico for the impoverishment of workers in the United States, and identifying the interests of American workers with those of American corporations. He has frequently co-sponsored bills with right-wing Republicans attacking legal immigration and “free trade.” In the aftermath of Trump’s election victory, Sanders declared in a televised town hall that he was prepared to work with him and “with anybody who wants to work together to develop a trade policy which tells corporate America they have to look beyond their greed.”
As usual, Sanders said nothing about foreign policy, despite the fact that Trump announced a major new troop buildup in Afghanistan the night before. His claim to be a “socialist” is belied most directly by his longstanding support for America’s imperialist wars, beginning with the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which he seeks to cover up by avoiding public discussion of foreign policy as much as possible. Sanders’s support for wars fought in the interests of American capitalism is closely tied to his economic nationalism.
It is also noteworthy that Sanders, speaking in the center of the American auto industry in front of a crowd that included many trade union functionaries, said nothing about the massive and growing bribery scandal surrounding the United Auto Workers union, or the UAW’s debacle in a failed union certification vote at a Nissan plant in Mississippi, which Sanders himself campaigned heavily for. These two events, the bribery by Fiat-Chrysler of top UAW negotiators, and the decisive rejection of the UAW by Mississippi workers, who felt no reason to join an organization responsible for wages at the major Detroit automakers that are even lower than at the non-union Nissan plant, demonstrate that the UAW is a corporatist organization dedicated to enforcing management’s dictates against its own members.
The town hall meeting showed that Sanders is attempting to prop up the Democratic Party under conditions of mounting popular disaffection with the entire official political system. He reiterated his calls to improve voter turnout in order to ensure higher returns for Democratic candidates, and called upon younger people attracted to his campaign to run as Democrats in local elections. In response to an audience question calling on him to found a new “people’s party,” Sanders responded, “I don’t want Trump around for another four years. I don’t want Republicans in control of the House and Senate. I want Democrats to open the door; I want Democrats to be the party not of corporate interests, but of the working class.”
Sanders ran for office as an independent (at least in name) for decades, while caucusing with the Democrats. Now he abandons even the fig leaf of independence out of concern that any breach in the political monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans would lead to the emergence of a mass political movement of the working class that escapes the control of bourgeoisie.



AMERICA UNRAVELS:

"The top 10 percent of Americans now own roughly three-quarters of all household wealth."

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/america-unravels-millions-of-children.html

 WALL STREET TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: DIE YOUNG… your company pension dies with you!


OPOID AND ALCOHOL ADDICTION KILLS OF MIDDLE AMERICA

SOARING POVERTY AND DRUG ADDICTION UNDER OBAMA
"These figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty 
  

AMERICA UNRAVELS:

Millions of children go hungry as the super- rich gorge themselves and ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE!

"The top 10 percent of Americans now own roughly three-quarters of all household wealth."


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/america-unravels-millions-of-children.html

"While telling workers there is “not enough money” for wage increases, or to fund social programs, both parties hailed the recent construction of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford, a massive aircraft carrier that cost $13 billion to build, stuffing the pockets of numerous contractors and war profiteers."

SOARING POVERTY AND DRUG ADDICTION UNDER OBAMA
"These figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty. 

Worsening hunger for older Americans.... as U.S. lets Mexico suck out hundreds of billions in welfare, drug sales and remittances. 

By Gary Joad
22 August 2017

The growth of seniors who are food-insecure has seen a staggering growth in twenty-first century America. Some 14.7 percent of this age group are said to be food-insecure, totaling at least 9.8 million in the US senior population. Compared to 2001, this constitutes a rise of 37 percent, with the number of seniors increasing in the same period 109 percent.
In an update posted at Feeding America’s web site earlier this month, Professors James Ziliak from the University of Kentucky and Craig Gundersen from the University of Illinois confirmed this worsening hunger situation for Americans age 60 and over. According to the US Census Bureau, about 10,000 people a day turn age 60 in the United States, a trend that will continue through 2030.
Feeding America’s study, titled “The State of Senior Hunger in America 2015” (and updated this month), noted that the threat of hunger to older people was especially harsh in the South and Southwestern US. And the publication noted that economic hardship constituted the main reason seniors could not obtain sufficient food, despite the government’s declaration of an improved economy and the dramatic explosion of Wall Street stock valuations.
The study also concluded that seniors living below the federally recognized poverty line have a 45.3 percent risk of hunger, and that the threat of food insecurity was significantly greater for elderly single adults than for marrieds. The threat of hunger was noted to be three times higher for the disabled elderly. If the seniors had grandchildren in the home, the risk of hunger was twice as high. The number of children living with their grandparents increased 64 percent between 1991 and 2009, to about 7.8 million. At the same time, the majority of hungry seniors live above the official poverty line, with nearly two-thirds reporting insufficient access to needed calories per day to remain healthy.
Almost three of four seniors facing hunger are white, and almost half of the retired seniors in the United States are today at risk for not having enough to eat. The top 10 states with the most persons at and over age 60 who are food-insecure are Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, New York, West Virginia, Indiana, Oklahoma and Georgia. The sharpest increase in all the groupings of elderly at risk for hunger came after the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
On August 12, 2014, the Annals of Emergency Medicine published the results of a two-month review of 138 senior citizens admitted to an emergency department in 2013 and noted that 60 percent were declared malnourished. The reasons included inability to buy food, poor dentition and depression.

Seniors the most food-insecure

Feeding America has referred to seniors as the most food-insecure segment of the US population, noting that one third of its food bank clients are over age 60. On the financial collapse of 2007-2008, Feeding America noted that more than half of its clients over the age of 65 appeared at food banks monthly, and that persons over the poverty line were often not eligible for the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, for food relief.
Feeding America considers SNAP, which suffers regular budgetary cutbacks, the first line of defense for all food-insecure persons.
The Feeding America studies also note that from 2001 to the present, hunger has cut into a younger and younger demographic, noting that in 2011, 65 percent of the elderly food bank visitors were under age 69. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of elderly food-insecure jumped 50 percent.
The Feeding America hunger study uses a questionnaire from the Current Population Survey (CPS) of the US Census Bureau, submitted to households each December using an 18-question survey focusing on the person’s experiences of food stress in the last 30 days and the previous 12 months. A 10-question survey is used for households without children. One to three positively answered questions categorizes a household as under food stress of varying degrees.
Data for the study was also utilized from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS/CDC), a subsidiary of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), wherein 5,000 persons, 50 percent children and 50 percent adults, with seniors purposely over-sampled, are interviewed and examined related to health.
The major findings for hungry seniors concluded that they were taking in 14 percent less iron and 12 percent less protein than their food-secure peers. Health outcomes included an increased risk of at least nine diseases, including a 53 percent increased risk of heart attacks, a 52 percent increased risk of asthma, a 40 percent increased risk of congestive heart failure, along with increased reporting of diabetes and hypertension. Depression unsurprisingly increased 60 percent with hunger. Also, the increased rate of falling and resulting injuries soared among the hungry and malnourished elderly. The measure of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) fell dramatically, which includes eating, bathing, and dressing oneself independently.
Food insecurity exists in every county of the United States, from 3 percent in Grant County, Kansas, to 38 percent in Jefferson County, Mississippi. Poor households with children are hungry at a rate of 17 percent, and homes with a single mother are food-insecure at 30 percent; single men with children are at 22 percent.
As of 2015, 59 percent of food-insecure households participated in at least one of three federal relief food programs, including SNAP, the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
Feeding America provides food assistance to some 46.5 million people a year in the US, including 12 million children and 7 million seniors. Those assisted at Feeding America who also receive food stamps total about 55 percent, and 24 percent are getting food through the WIC program. Nearly all of the families, 94 percent, subscribe to the school lunch program. More than half of the persons receiving assistance had at least one employed person in the household. The median income for households is at $9,175.

550,000 very low food-secure seniors

About 48 million Americans live in food-insecure households, including 24.4 million people age 18 to 64 and 14.5 million children. The majority of people who are food-insecure, 57 percent, are not officially recognized by the US government as poor, which means living with an income below 100 percent of the federal poverty level. It is also estimated that almost 550,000 seniors are now essentially starving, with very low food security.
In 2013, one half of those on Medicare had an income below $23,500, or 200 percent of the federal poverty level of 2015. According to the US Census Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) in 2014, one out of seven persons over the age of 65 have incomes rendering them impoverished, including 45 percent of women over 65.
In a recent National Geographic article on “Hunger in America,” Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at City University of New York, was quoted as saying, “Today more working people and their families are hungry because of wages that have declined.”
The article noted that more than half of the US hungry are white, and the total of over 48 million food-insecure people constituted a fivefold jump since the early 1960s, including a 57 percent increase since the early 1990s. The article noted that in the 1980s there existed just a few hundred food pantries in the US. Now, there are over 50,000. One in six persons runs short of food at least once a year in the US, compared to about one in 20 in the European Union.
By 2013, the federal food relief budget had reached $75 billion, or about $133.07 per hungry person a month, constituting less than $1.50 allotted for each meal, often referred to as a “minimum wage diet.” Moreover, hundreds of thousands of poor people in the US do not own or have access to a car, and live more than one half-mile from any source of food, if they had the money to buy it. In Houston, Texas, alone, at least 43,000 households reside in a so-called food desert.
As a global food availability specialist, Raj Patel, told National Geographic, “The problem can’t be solved by merely telling people to eat more fruits and vegetables, because at the heart of this [crisis]

SOARING POVERTY AND DRUG ADDICTION UNDER OBAMA

"These figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty. 

FROM THE FIRST DAY OF HIS FIRST TERM, BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC HOLDER HAD COMMENCED BUILDING A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP FUNDED BY CRONY BANKSTERS AND MEXICO.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/seth-barron-obama-and-building-of.html

 “Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level 


Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of  groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing .”


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