Friday, December 22, 2017

A.G. JEFF SESSIONS CREATES 'OPIOID TSAR' AS OVERDOSE DEATHS SURPASS THOSE FROM BREAST CANCER

Jeff Sessions Creates ‘Opioid Tsar’ as Overdose Deaths Surpass Those from Breast Cancer


Attorney General Jeff Sessions created a new “senior position” at the Department of Justice Wednesday, director of opioid enforcement and prevention efforts, to help combat what is now far and away the deadliest drug epidemic in American history.

“With one American dying of a drug overdose every nine minutes, we need all hands on deck,” Attorney General Sessions said of the decision. He continued:
That’s why President Trump has made ending the drug epidemic a top priority. This Department of Justice embraces that goal, and we have taken a number of steps this year to do our part. We have indicted hundreds of defendants for drug related healthcare fraud, sent more prosecutors to where they’re needed most, and we’ve taken on the gangs and cartels. Today we take the next step: creating a senior level official position at the Department to focus entirely on this issue. This Department will continue to follow the President’s lead, and I am confident that we can and will turn the tide of the drug crisis.
The decision was announced the same day Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new numbers putting total estimated drug overdose deaths at 63,600 for 2016. This figure is more than triple that of 1999 and up sharply even from the beginning of this record-setting decade. The number outpaces earlier 2016 estimates of 59,000 and outstrips deaths from influenza and pneumonia.
The biggest driver of this tragedy is the rising of opioids, both traditional semi-synthetic or natural opioids like heroin and oxycodone and the newer fully-synthetic and extraordinarily potent opioids like fentanyl and carfentanyl that drug dealers have rapidly pushed into the supply stream. The latter category of deaths has increased especially rapidly, doubling just from 2015 to 2016, according to the CDC.
CNN’s interpretation of the numbers puts opioid overdoses at roughly two-thirds of drug deaths, 42,249, more than all deaths from breast cancer.
Sessions has made containing the opioid crisis a major focus of his tenure at DOJ. Last month, for example, he announced the first new Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) field office since the late 1990s. Located in Louisville, Kentucky, this office will cover West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The CDC’s new report indicates West Virginia is the state hardest hit by overdoses, with a shocking age-adjusted 52 deaths per 100,000 people.
“I know that this crisis is daunting- the death rates are stunning- and it can be discouraging,” Sessions said at that time. “But we will turn the tide. When the men and women of law enforcement work effectively in a focused way, we can stop the growth of destructive addiction, keep the American people safe, and save lives.”

Drug deaths drive down US life expectancy for second year

22 December 2017
Two reports published yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reveal that the life expectancy of the American working class is declining due to an increase in drug overdoses and suicides.
The data reflects, in empirical terms, the social devastation wrought on the lives of millions of people by decades of bipartisan policies aimed at enriching the wealthy. The decline in life expectancy, a fundamental measure of social progress, is a historical milestone in the decline of American capitalism. This is the second year in a row that life expectancy has fallen in the US, marking the first time in nearly half a century that life expectancy has declined in consecutive years.
Life expectancy dropped from 78.7 years in 2015 to 78.6 years in 2016, driven by a 0.2-year decline from 76.3 to 76.1 years among men. Life expectancy for women remained at 81.1 years, as the gap between women and men reached an all-time high.
However, life expectancy for those who make it to old age continues to improve, and the mortality rates for heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses are declining as technological and medical advances improve the capacity to extend human life. The decline in life expectancy is caused by a dramatic increase in the mortality rate among those under age 44 who are overdosing, particularly on opioids, or taking their own lives.
The CDC report shows a 21 percent year-to-year increase in drug overdoses, which took the lives of 63,600 people in 2016. It is as if each year, a city the size of Palo Alto, California; Bismarck, North Dakota; or Fort Myers, Florida was killed off entirely. Since 2006, roughly 430,000 people have died of drug overdose, more than the number of US soldiers killed during World War II. An army of people who should be alive today is not.
A total of 42,249 people died from opioid overdoses in 2016, a 28 percent increase from the year before. While Barack Obama was traveling the country on behalf of Hillary Clinton, proclaiming, “America is already great,” over 90 people were dying each day from opioids alone.
Corporations have been flooding poor areas with pills and are shielded from prosecution by the government. Between 2007 and 2012, for example, drug distributor Miami-Luken shipped 11 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone into Mingo County, West Virginia, which has a population of 25,000.
Former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Joe Rannazzisi told 60 Minutes in October that it is “a fact” that companies inundate poor areas with the knowledge that many will die as a result. While lawsuits against the drug companies have forced paltry penalties of several million dollars, this is part of the cost of doing business. The Obama administration slashed the number of DEA cases against drug distributors by 69.5 percent between 2011 and 2014.
The decline in life expectancy and the increase in drug overdoses are the product of a massive growth in social inequality. Daniel Kim, a professor at Northeastern University, told Reuters yesterday that “what we know from numerous health studies is that a wider gap between the rich and the poor means that more people will die unnecessarily.”
Over the past 40 years, the Democratic and Republican parties have been engaged in a conscious strategy to pare back the gains won by the working class through the social struggles of the early 20th century. A bipartisan cabal has slashed wages, eliminated pensions, cut social programs, reduced taxes on the rich, and done away with employer-provided healthcare.
In the process, the government has transferred trillions from the working class into the bank accounts of the financial elite. Today, the top 10 percent owns 77 percent of the wealth. The richest 3 billionaires own as much as the poorest 160 million—half the country’s population.
The social counterrevolution was intensified under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, which oversaw the bailout of the banks following the 2008 financial crisis, conducted the bailouts of the auto industry that slashed the wages of autoworkers to historic lows, and enforced the Detroit bankruptcy. The enactment of Obamacare has coincided with a drastic increase in the number of drug overdose deaths. While the rate per 100,000 of overdoses was increasing by 3 percent from 2006 to 2014, it began increasing by 18 percent per year in 2014, the year Obamacare came into force.
The death rate will continue to rise as the Trump administration deepens tax cuts for the wealthy. Citing Kim’s research, Reuters wrote, “the income inequality produced by the [tax bill] will mean 29,689 more deaths each year, perhaps more.” Billions in cuts to Medicare, mandated by laws that require budget cuts to match drops in revenue, will lead to the deaths of thousands more.
The victims of the opioid crisis come from all regions and social backgrounds, but the overwhelming majority of those killed are poor and working class. According to last year’s CDC data, 90 percent were white, and most were men, with overdoses for whites roughly triple the rate for African-Americans and double the rate for Latinos. The Native American overdose rate equals the rate for whites.
This reality exposes the reactionary lies advanced by Black Lives Matter and its claims of “white supremacy,” and by the #MeToo movement, which asserts that society is organized on the principle of patriarchy and male domination.
New York Times contributor and racial politics proponent Michael Eric Dyson recently attempted to turn the opioid crisis into an example of white privilege when he said in March 2017, “White brothers and sisters have been medicalized in terms of their trauma and addiction. Black and brown people have been criminalized for their trauma and addiction.”
Seething with contempt for the working class, Dyson ignores the fact that if adequate medical services were available, tens of thousands would not die each year from drug overdose. Instead of helping the victims, state governments have responded by calling in the National Guard to police the streets (West Virginia) and by calling for quadrupling jail terms for opioid users (New Jersey). Meanwhile, both parties voted to increase military spending by $80 billion over last year’s levels.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for expropriating the billions of dollars the drug companies have made from the ongoing crisis. This money, and the personal wealth of the corporate and financial aristocracy, must be put into an emergency fund to pay for the immediate construction of a network of hospitals and health clinics, staffed with well-trained doctors, to provide permanent, free medical care to all those effected.
Rehabilitation centers must be expanded and new ones built so that the millions with addiction and dependency problems can seek help free of charge. A 90 percent tax must be imposed on all income above five million dollars to provide funds for massive jobs and public works programs in those areas hardest hit by the crisis to alleviate inequality and poverty.
These demands can only be met through the building of a mass movement of the working class, independent of the Democratic and Republican parties, aimed at linking workers of all races and nationalities in a common fight against the capitalist system.
Eric London


"It will, in fact, no more provide decent-paying jobs and improved wages than the previous tax “reforms” carried out over the past three-and-a-half decades. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cut in 1997 and George W. Bush’s tax “reform” of 2001 were all part of a ruling class offensive against the working class, which included sweeping attacks on wages, jobs, pensions, education, health care, housing and other social benefits."

It will, in fact, no more provide decent-paying jobs and improved wages than the previous tax “reforms” carried out over the past three-and-a-half decades. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cut in 1997 and George W. Bush’s tax “reform” of 2001 were all part of a ruling class offensive against the working class, which included sweeping attacks on wages, jobs, pensions, education, health care, housing and other social benefits."

US Congress passes tax windfall for corporations and the rich

By Barry Grey
21 December 2017
Congress’ passage of the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the rich marks a new stage in the decades-long social counterrevolution in the United States. It will make America, already the most unequal advanced economy in the world, far more unequal, entrenching the rule of an unaccountable financial oligarchy.
The Senate passed the bill on a strict party-line 51 to 48 vote in the early morning hours of Wednesday following a truncated and perfunctory debate. The House followed suit later on Wednesday, passing the bill 224 to 203, with 12 Republicans joining all 191 voting Democrats to oppose the measure. Most of the Republican “no” votes came from the high-tax states of California, New York and New Jersey, which will be hard hit by provisions limiting federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes.
The legislation is designed to massively transfer wealth from the working class to the ruling elite. At the same time, it will sharply increase budget deficits and the national debt, providing the pretext for an attack on domestic programs, with particular emphasis on the basic entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Congressional Republicans rushed to pass the legislation in the face of multiple opinion polls showing that a majority of the American people oppose the bill and that popular opposition has grown over the past month. A series of non-partisan analyses of the measure, including by congressional agencies, have concluded that the tax cuts will go overwhelmingly to the wealthiest 10 percent, and that by the end of the decade, the majority of Americans will see their taxes increase.
The centerpiece of the bill is a permanent cut in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. It is estimated that this will raise corporate revenues by more than $6 trillion over the next decade.
Other pro-business provisions include the elimination of the corporate alternative minimum tax and a 20 percent tax reduction for owners of “pass-through” companies, such as partnerships and S corporations. At the last minute, commercial real estate developers were added to the list of covered “pass-through” firms, greatly benefiting Trump personally.
On the individual side, the bill slashes the top federal income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, reduces the individual alternative minimum tax, and doubles the exemption for estate taxes to $22 million for married couples.
It includes two provisions to modestly reduce taxes for many middle-income households: a doubling of both the standard deduction and the child tax credit. However, these are largely offset by other provisions that eliminate or reduce current tax deductions, such as on mortgage interest and state and local taxes.
It replaces the Consumer Price Index with the so-called “chained” CPI, which underestimates the inflation rate. As a result, taxpayers will move more quickly into higher tax brackets, and many low-income households will become ineligible for the earned income tax credit.
The bill also ends the Obamacare requirement that individuals not otherwise covered buy health insurance from private providers, in many cases with the help of government subsidies. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this will result in 13 million more people without health insurance by 2027 and a 10 percent yearly increase in premiums for policies bought on the individual market.
All of the individual tax breaks included in the bill expire at the end of 2025, meaning that millions will suddenly face increased taxes beginning in 2026.
In the first year of the tax “reform,” middle-income taxpayers will see an average cut of less than $1,000, while the average member of the top 1 percent will receive $51,140.
According to various non-partisan analyses, by 2027, 83 percent of the tax benefits will go to the top 1 percent of earners, while 53 percent of the population, including all those making less than $75,000, will pay higher taxes.
This far-reaching legislation, which will impact every section of American society, has been rammed through Congress in little more than seven weeks, without a single congressional hearing. Trump and the Republicans have sought to sell it to a skeptical public on the basis of brazen lies, insisting that they are cutting taxes for corporations in order to help the “hard-working middle class.”
The Democrats, for their part, have done nothing to seriously oppose this naked piece of class legislation. They themselves advocate a deep tax cut for corporations and spent most of their efforts pleading with the Republicans to be included in talks on the plan.
The entire process has been a travesty of democratic procedures, exposing the fraud of American democracy and underscoring the basic fact that the United States is ruled by an oligarchy that controls the political system and both major parties. It wanted the money and was prepared to do whatever was necessary to get it.
Trump is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming days, although there are reports he may hold off until after the New Year. Following its passage, he told reporters at the White House, “This bill means more take home pay. It will be an incredible Christmas gift for hardworking Americans.”
Later, in a celebratory demonstration with Republican lawmakers on the Capitol steps, he declared that the bill “means jobs, jobs, jobs!”
It will, in fact, no more provide decent-paying jobs and improved wages than the previous tax “reforms” carried out over the past three-and-a-half decades. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cut in 1997 and George W. Bush’s tax “reform” of 2001 were all part of a ruling class offensive against the working class, which included sweeping attacks on wages, jobs, pensions, education, health care, housing and other social benefits.
Regressive tax changes have played a major role in engineering a redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top that has brought social inequality in America to its highest level since the 1920s. The World Inequality Report published last week by a team of economists headed by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman noted that since 1980, the top 1 percent and the bottom half of income earners in the US have essentially flipped positions. While the bottom 50 percent received 20 percent of national income in 1980, that figure declined to just 13 percent by 2016. Conversely, the top 1 percent steadily increased their share of national income from 10 percent to 20 percent.
The report warned that the Republican tax cut plan would “turbocharge” a further growth of inequality in America.
The Democratic Party has been no less complicit in this social counterrevolution than the Republicans. The Reagan tax cuts were carried out on a bipartisan basis, and the Bush tax cut of 2001 won the support of a significant section of Democratic lawmakers.
Now the Democrats are using verbal denunciations of the tax bill and party-line votes in opposition to obscure their tacit support for tax changes that benefit the corporations and the wealthy. They are largely attacking the Republican bill from the right, on the basis of fiscal responsibility and economic nationalism.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, while warning of “plutocracy” (despite personal wealth estimated at nearly $200 million), has denounced the bill for “exploding the deficit.” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni published an op-ed piece Wednesday promoting the Democrats as the “new Republicans,” i.e., the true party of “fiscal responsibility,” along with family values, patriotism, law-and-order, national security and decency.
Bernie Sanders, interviewed Wednesday on CNN, denounced the bill for encouraging US companies to invest abroad and ship “American” jobs to Mexico and China.
The Democrats and their allies in the trade union leadership have not called a single protest against the tax bill, despite broad popular opposition. Their priorities are elsewhere: fomenting anti-democratic campaigns such as the hysteria over alleged sexual misconduct, the war-mongering against Russia and the linked crusade against “fake news.” All of these are designed to mobilize the Democrats’ upper-middle class base around a program to prepare for war, criminalize political opposition and censor the internet.
While they want nothing to do with a mobilization of popular anger over the tax windfall for the rich, the threat to the CHIP children’s health insurance program or the impending mass roundup of young immigrants currently protected under the DACA program, it is reported that the Democrats are preparing for nationwide protests against any move by Trump to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
They are the staunchest defenders of the American secret police and the military, which are being prepared to violently suppress working class opposition to the capitalist system and all of its depredations.

AMERICA: AN OPEN BORDERS NATION WHERE ILLEGALS HAVE MORE RIGHTS THAN LEGALS


“I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks,” he writes. “I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them, bringing illness, disability and death.”

The United States of Inequality

18 December 2017
Last week, as Congress rushed to pass a tax bill that will transfer trillions of dollars to the financial oligarchy, two separate teams of experts published damning reports documenting the growth of social inequality in the United States.
On Thursday, a group of leading inequality researchers, including Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, published its 2018 World Inequality Report, which shows that the United States is far more unequal than the advanced economies of Western Europe, as well as much of the rest of the world.
The researchers reported that the income share of the top 1 percent of US income earners rose from 10 percent in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, while the income share of the bottom 50 percent fell from 20 percent to 13 percent over the same period. The bottom 90 percent controls just 27 percent of the wealth today, compared to 40 percent three decades ago.
Another graphic indictment of American society was offered by Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who argued in a report published Friday that the prevalence of extreme poverty amid unimaginable opulence in the US is a violation of basic human rights.
The fact that the United States 
has invaded, bombed and 
destabilized countries all over the 
world on the pretext of defending 
“human rights” is no doubt one of 
the reasons the corporate-
controlled media has chosen to 
bury both of these reports.
Alston writes of the “sewage filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility,” of “people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor,” and of “soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction.”
He notes that the extreme concentration of wealth has eroded the foundations of American democracy, writing: “There is no other developed country where so many voters are disenfranchised… and where ordinary voters ultimately have so little impact on political outcomes.”
In its Sunday edition, the New York Times published an editorial titled “The Tax Bill That Inequality Created.” The newspaper criticizes the bill being rammed through Congress for “lavishing breaks on corporations and the wealthy while taking benefits away from the poor and the middle class.” The editors add, “What many may not realize is that growing inequality helped create the bill in the first place.” A “smaller and smaller group of people” have become “in effect, kingmakers,” seeking to “bend American politics to serve their interests… rich families have supported candidates who share their hostility to progressive taxation, welfare programs and government regulation of any kind.”
The editors place the onus on Republicans, though they acknowledge that “donations from Wall Street and corporate America have… pushed many Democrats to the center or even to the right on issues like financial regulation, international trade, antitrust policy and welfare reform.”
There is a striking disconnect between the Times’ portrait of American society and its prescription, which, in the end, is to support the Democratic Party. The editorial concludes by hailing the election of right-wing Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama as proof that “inequality in America does not have to be self-perpetuating.”
The Times does not see fit to mention that in the 2016 elections it wholeheartedly backed a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who is completely beholden to “Wall Street and corporate America.” Nor does it recall that just last month it published an editorial declaring its full support for corporate tax cuts, the heart of the Republican tax plan. The Times wrote, “If Republicans worked with Democrats, they could reach a compromise to lower the top corporate tax rate.”
Entirely absent from the Times account is any explanation of why and how the United States has come to this point, or what the colossal levels of social inequality imply for the future of American society. This is because to do so would mean raising the question of the capitalist system itself, which the newspaper fervently supports.
The present situation did not arise from nowhere. Nor is it simply the product of the nefarious operations of one party. The emergence of oligarchic forms of rule, or “kingmakers,” is the product of a long historical evolution.
The ideological foundations of 20th century American capitalism—the “American Dream,” the idea that the development of American capitalism would “lift all boats,” that each generation would be better off than the last—are now a distant memory.
During the first part of the last century, the American ruling class responded to the eruption of class conflict and the threat of socialist revolution, represented above all by the Russian Revolution, with social reforms—Roosevelt’s New Deal (including Social Security), increases in taxes on the wealthy, and the Great Society programs of the 1960s (including Medicare and Medicaid).
These measures, however, were implemented within the framework of preserving a social and economic system based on private ownership of the banks and corporations. Moreover, they were premised on the strength of American capitalism and its dominant position in the world economy.
The shift in ruling-class strategy corresponded with a shift in the position of American capitalism. Over the past half-century, the ruling class has sought to offset the decline in its economic position externally through military aggression and internally through the upward redistribution of social resources from the great mass of the population to the financial oligarchy. The results can be seen in the curve of social inequality, which shows the top one percent steadily amassing a greater share of wealth and income.
The trajectory has continued under both Democrats and Republicans. The Times editorial refers to the enormous growth of inequality over the past three decades. However, during this period Democrats occupied the presidency for 16 years (two terms for Clinton, two terms for Obama), compared to 12 years for Republicans (one term for Bush Sr, two for Bush Jr.). The processes of deregulation and financialization and the slashing of social programs have continued unabated, regardless of the political party controlling the White House and Capitol Hill.
All the institutions of American society have had their role to play in this social counterrevolution. The trade unions have transformed themselves into appendages of corporate management, relinquishing all claim to being “workers’ organizations.” During the 1980s, they isolated and suppressed every single strike or struggle against the onslaught of the rich. Today, they serve as cheap-labor contractors and industrial police for the ruling class, while providing comfortable sinecures for the upper-middle class functionaries that control them.
The Trump administration and its tax bill, far from being an aberration, are the continuation of this class policy.
The state of American society—to which ruling classes around the world look as a model—is a confirmation of Marxism. Capitalism is characterized by an irreconcilable conflict between the working class, the vast majority of humanity, and the ruling elite. The state is not a neutral arbiter, but an instrument of class rule. The working class must organize itself independently, with the aim of restructuring social and economic life.
The Democrats are no less terrified of this prospect than the Republicans. Hence the endless attempts to divert and disorient—from the anti-Russia campaign to the current hysteria over sexual harassment being promoted by the New York Times, among others.
When the Workers League in the US took the decision to form the Socialist Equality Party 22 years ago, it noted that the dominant feature in political life was “the widening gap between a small percentage of the population that enjoys unprecedented wealth and the broad mass of the working population that lives in varying degrees of economic uncertainty and distress.”
This analysis has been confirmed over the subsequent two decades. Just as the meteoric rise of social inequality is the inexorable outcome of the capitalist system, so too is the socialist transformation of society the only means to rid American and world society of the scourge of social inequality and the domination of the financial oligarchy, whose grip over social and economic life has become the principal obstacle to human progress.
Andre Damon

UN rapporteur “shocked” by deep 

poverty in US


By Eric London
18 December 2017
On Friday, United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston published a report on poverty and democratic rights in the United States titled “Statement on Visit to the USA.”
In 1831, the French intellectual and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States and compiled notes on what he saw, publishing an optimistic report titled Democracy in America. One hundred and eighty six years later, Alston, an Australian academic and New York University professor, traveled through a country in the throes of a social catastrophe. His report might well be titled Destitution in America .
Alston recently concluded his trip through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington DC, visiting working-class neighborhoods and talking with experts and local officials.
“I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks,” he writes. “I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them, bringing illness, disability and death.”
His concludes that the government does not recognize “rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable health care, or growing up in a context of total deprivation.”
Forty million Americans live below the official poverty line, with 18.5 million living in deep poverty. The US infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world. Obesity is rampant. The US is 36th in the world in access to water and sanitation. Its incarceration rate is the highest in the world. Youth poverty is nearly double the rest of the industrialized world. “Neglected tropical diseases” are “increasingly common.”
Hookworm is spreading in poor areas of Alabama as sewage flows openly through homes and streets. The US is 35th out of 37th among all industrialized countries in terms of inequality and poverty.
The UN report suggests that poverty and inequality are the product of the domination of the political system by a corporate oligarchy. “Successive administrations, including the present one, have determinedly rejected the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights,” Alston notes.
His statement begins:
“My visit coincides with a dramatic change of direction in US policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty. The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1 percent and the poorest 50 percent of Americans. The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by the president and Speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes.”
The report notes that at the federal level, proposals to cut Medicare will be “disastrous.” Underfunding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will “have devastating [effects] on the health of millions of poor children.” If funding for the Federal Qualified Health Centers (FQCHs) is eliminated, “9 million patients could lose access to primary and preventative care.”
Alston describes a situation where the police, courts and public agencies treat impoverished workers like criminals. “In many cities and counties the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue to fund not only the justice system but diverse other programs,” he writes.
Over 730,000 people are in jail, “of whom almost two-thirds are awaiting trial, and thus presumed to be innocent.” The government sets bail at extremely high levels, “which means that wealthy defendants can secure their freedom, while poor defendants are likely to stay in jail.”
Intrusive policing policies for welfare, food stamps and other public benefits include forcing workers to undergo drug tests, in-home inspections and other humiliating procedures.
“Calls for welfare reform take place against a constant drumbeat of allegations of widespread fraud in the system,” Alston writes. “The contrast with tax reform is instructive. In that context, immense faith is placed in the good will and altruism of the corporate beneficiaries, while with welfare reform the opposite assumptions apply.”
Alston rejects the notion that poverty is primarily a racial issue. “The poor,” he says, “are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants.’ The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks… The face of poverty in America is not only Black or Hispanic, but also White, Asian and many other colors.”
Child poverty is widespread across races: “Contrary to the stereotypical assumptions, 31 percent of poor children are White, 24 percent are Black, 36 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are indigenous.”
Conditions for Native Americans, ignored by Black Lives Matter and other identity politics groups, are particularly deplorable. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, conditions are “comparable to Haiti... Nine lives have been lost there to suicide in the last three months, including one six-year-old. Nevertheless, federally funded programs aimed at suicide prevention have been de-funded.”
The growth of inequality has “steadily undermined” democratic forms of rule, Alston writes. In fact, democracy is incompatible with the ruling class’s efforts to expand and protect its wealth at the expense of the working class. This process is not accidental, but the product of the policies implemented by both major capitalist parties, whose aim over recent decades has been to eviscerate all benefits and protections won by the working class through more than a century of social struggle.
The corporate-controlled media is complicit in the growth of inequality and poverty. This shocking and disturbing UN report, which speaks frankly of the immense levels of economic inequality and destitution in America, reflecting the stark class divide that dominates US social and political life, has barely been reported by the establishment broadcast and print media. Meanwhile, the same media outlets are devoting endless coverage to allegations of sexual harassment made for the most part by wealthy and privileged women against prominent figures in the worlds of entertainment, the arts and politics.


Drug Rehab Centers are Fueling Homeless Epidemic in California


Drug rehabilitation or “rehab” centers are increasingly being seen as a contributing factor in the homeless epidemic that has swept across the Golden State.

“There’s evidence to suggest a portion of the growth [of homelessness] in some Orange County cities, and to a lesser degree in Los Angeles, can be attributed to the rehab industry’s aggressive recruitment of addicts – and their lucrative insurance payments – from around the country,” the Orange County Register noted in a recent article.
The issue rests in the fact that the drug rehab centers’ business models actually wind up leaving addicts stranded on the streets. The rehab model is also highly lucrative, bringing in hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per year.
Often, once a patient’s insurance money runs out, rehab homes and facilities will kick him or her out on the street, which results in relapse and, often, homelessness.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, over 60 percent of people who receive drug rehabilitation will relapse. Many of these individuals wind up homeless.
In 2015, Forbes reported:
The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependency estimates that over 23 million Americans (age 12 and older) are addicted to alcohol and other drugs. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), just under 11% (2.5 million) received care at an addiction treatment facility in 2012. SAMHSA also estimates that the market for addiction treatment is about $35 billion per year.
According to Los Angeles County’s annual homeless count, the region’s homeless population has grown 23 percent since 2016. The study also found that the number of homeless people in L.A. County whose last residence was out of state increased by 21 percent.
The Register points out that in Florida, there is a strong link between rehab and drug-treatment facilities and homelessness, and particularly in Palm Beach County, where government counts reportedly found a 73 percent increase over the past two years in the number of homeless youth between the ages of 18 and 24.
“The (rehab patients) are not going back home to the Northeast,” Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, who leads the county’s Sober Home Task Force, told the Register. “The incentives are too great to remain here: the free rent, the free transportation, the lifestyle. They’ve set up these individuals for failure.”
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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