Thursday, February 1, 2018

AMERICA'S TRUE STATE OF THE UNION: MASSIVE OPIOID ADDICTION, OPEN BORDERS AND THE MEXICAN HERION CARTELS, STAGGERING POVERTY AND HOMELESSNESS AND ENDLESS CALCULATED PLUNDER BY WALL STREET'S BIGGEST BANKSTERS

Trump’s State of Delusion

1 February 2018
Amidst the nauseating spectacle of Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, perhaps the most remarkable feature was the inability of the ruling class—not only Trump, but also the Democratic opposition and the media commentary—to deal seriously with any of the myriad crises engulfing American and world capitalism.
The State of the Union address was, as originally conceived, intended as an occasion for the president to outline to Congress and the American people the overall economic, social and geo-political situation facing the country. However, over the past four decades, and particularly since the Reagan White House, the event has become an increasingly hollow charade, full of bombast and empty boasting, incapable of acknowledging the mounting crisis of American capitalism.
This period has seen an accelerating decline in the global economic position of the United States. The American ruling class has sought, particularly since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, to offset its decline by military means. But more than a quarter-century of unending war—in the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, and North Africa—has produced only a series of debacles.
The United States finds itself increasingly isolated in the Middle East, challenged economically by a rising China, and estranged from its traditional allies in Europe. Last month, the new National Defense Strategy suddenly announced that the official justification over the past 17 years for war and the buildup of police state powers at home, the global “war on terror,” has been supplanted by the preparation for “great power conflicts,” i.e., a new world war.
Within the borders of the United States, the decay of social conditions, combined with the consolidation of a new financial aristocracy and unprecedented levels of economic inequality, have brought class tensions to the breaking point. The entire political establishment is discredited in the eyes of the broad mass of the working class. Disgust with capitalism and interest in socialism are growing.
And amidst the general ruling class euphoria over massive tax cuts for the rich and an ever-rising stock market, more sober observers are warning of a financial crash even more traumatic than the collapse that occurred ten years ago.
The extreme crisis and instability of bourgeois rule in the US is manifested in the political warfare that continues to rock Washington, with sections of the ruling class and the state openly discussing removing Trump from office either through impeachment, invocation of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, or forced resignation.
None of this could be hinted at, let alone seriously addressed, in Trump’s speech. Instead, Trump presented a fairytale narrative of a resurgent America and a happy and grateful population. This was the backdrop for a pledge to double down on the policies of militarism, Wall Street plunder and repression that have brought the country to the brink of a social explosion.
Trump’s attempt to project at the onset of his remarks a tone of optimism and confidence in the American people actually pointed to the opposite. He praised the American “heroes” who responded to the series of disasters over the past year—hurricanes, wildfires, floods, mass shootings—all of which exposed in different forms the disastrous state of American capitalism. There was no mention of the fact that half a million people in Puerto Rico remain without power more than four months after Hurricane Maria.
Trump’s fictional America provided the framework for advancing the fascistic policies of the financial oligarchy he embodies: preparation for nuclear war against Iran, North Korea, Russia, China; anti-immigrant racism and economic nationalism; an expansion of police powers and repression, symbolized by his order to keep the Guantanamo camp open and send more alleged terrorists there to be tortured and imprisoned indefinitely.
The Democratic “opposition” is no more able to address the real issues confronting the American people. They are constrained by the fact that their main social base—Wall Street—enthusiastically supports Trump’s economic policies. The state forces they serve, beginning with the CIA, oppose Trump from the standpoint that he is insufficiently aggressive in the confrontation with Russia.
They can offer no policies to address the social crisis and promote instead a combination of right-wing identity politics and anti-Russian war fever, recalling the demagogy of the Joe McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, they push anti-democratic campaigns such as the #MeToo sex hysteria and the crackdown on free speech on the Internet mounted under the fraudulent cover of combating Russian-inspired “fake news.”
For the past year, the Democratic Party has devoted all its efforts to suppressing mass opposition to Trump and diverting it along reactionary and militaristic channels.
As for the corporate-controlled media, its generally laudatory response to Trump’s speech was as delusional as the president’s remarks. The Washington Post editorial board gushed that Trump’s performance showed him to be “a consummate showman, and his stagecraft was top notch.” One of its articles carried a headline calling the speech “high-minded.” The New York Times’ Ross Douthat called Trump’s semi-fascistic tirades an attempt by the president to “pitch himself as a centrist dealmaker.”
The inability of the ruling class to address the reality of the situation it confronts is itself an expression of its perplixity and disarray. The real “state of the union” is one of historic and systemic crisis. It is the manifestation in the center of world capitalism of a global crisis that confronts mankind with the alternatives of socialism or barbarism, i.e., nuclear war and fascist dictatorship. The same crisis that is driving the capitalist class to world war is propelling the working class into revolutionary struggle.

Barry Grey

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS to serve the filthy rich

The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s.

“This study follows reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.”

OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!

Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US

history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.

OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. 

PHONY “POPULIST” BERNIE SANDERS


For all of his talk about leading “political revolution” against

the “billionaire class,” Sanders backed Clinton, a shill of Wall Street 

and the Pentagon, who has nothing but contempt for the tens of 

millions of workers devastated by the 2008 financial crash and 

Obama’s pro-corporate policies.

Oxfam: Bottom half of world’s population received none of the wealth created in 2017

By Niles Niemuth 
23 January 2018
With the world’s elite and their political representatives converging on Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum this week, Oxfam released its annual report on global inequality, exposing the historic growth of social inequality over the last year.
Nearly all global wealth growth in 2017, 82 percent, went to the top one percent, while the bottom half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people, saw nothing at all. Last year saw the largest increase in the number of billionaire’s worldwide in history. The number of dollar billionaires currently stands at 2,043, with a new billionaire created every two days.
Every year, the Oxfam report reveals an increasingly irrational and untenable political and economic setup, in which a handful of elites engorge themselves on the wealth created by the labor of billions.
“All over the world our economy of the 1% is built on the backs of low paid workers, often women, who are paid poverty wages and denied basic rights,” the report notes. Women provided $10 trillion in unpaid care work last year in support of the global economy, according to data cited by Oxfam.
A recent survey by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that nearly one in three workers in emerging and developing countries live in poverty, and that this figure is only increasing. Even more exploited are the 40 million who were enslaved in 2016, forced to work for nothing as modern slaves in a host of industries including harvesting shrimp, sewing garments and cleaning buildings. The ILO estimates that 25 million of the enslaved worldwide are forced labor.
Over the course of the past year, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth increased by $762 billion, enough to eliminate extreme poverty from the face of the planet seven times over. From 2006 to 2015, the typical worker saw their average income rise by just two percent a year. This was dwarfed by a 13 percent annual increase in billionaire wealth.
Rather than being the result of hard work on the part of the world’s billionaires, the report found that two-thirds of billionaire wealth is the product to inheritance, monopoly, and cronyism. The 500 richest people in the world are expected to hand down $2.4 trillion to their heirs over the next two decades, an amount larger than the GDP of India.
Oxfam notes that the world’s billionaires utilize their extreme wealth and connections to manipulate public policy, take advantage of privatization deals, procure natural resource giveaways, and benefit from tax exemptions and loopholes to further enrich themselves at the public expense.
The super-rich can dodge taxes by hiding their money in an international network of offshore tax havens. Accord to data contained in the leaked Panama and Paradise Papers, some $7.6 trillion is being shielded from taxation. An analysis of the data by economist Gabriel Zucman found that the super-rich are avoiding $200 billion in taxes through the use of tax havens.
Nearly every country can lay claim to a handful of rich elites who control enough wealth to eliminate hunger, poverty and all other social ills.
The report found that the richest man in Nigeria, Aliko Dangote, earns enough just in interest on his $13 billion in wealth to pull two million out of extreme poverty. At the same time that Dangote has become one of the richest people in history, poverty has risen in Nigeria.
The four richest men in Indonesia owned more wealth in 2017 than the bottom 100 million people in the world’s largest island country. Nearly half of the country’s population, approximately 133 million people, continues to languish in poverty.
Meanwhile, in Brazil a worker earning the minimum wage must work 19 years to make the same amount that someone in that country’s top 0.1 percent makes in a single month.
When it comes to social inequality within so-called developed countries, the United States is in a league of its own. In little more than a day, a typical CEO in the US earns as much as the average worker will make in a year. The three richest people in the US owned as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, approximately 160 million people.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Seattle-based Amazon, recently became the richest person in world history with a net worth of $105.1 billion, which he acquired off the backs of a highly exploited international workforce of some 300,000 employees. Amazon workers in India make as little as $233 per month, while workers in the US average less than $13 an hour.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates follows closely behind Bezos with $92.3 billion, while Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, claims a net worth of $87 billion. The implementation of tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump late last year will only accelerate the growth of the gap between the top and the bottom.
The ever-increasing concentration of so much wealth into so few hands to the detriment of the billions who toil every day just to meet their basic needs makes the case for the expropriation and redistribution of the global plutocracy’s ill-gotten gains.
In just one instance cited by Oxfam, it would cost only $2.2 billion to raise all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage. This is just one third of the amount that was paid to the shareholders in the country’s top five garment sector corporations last year.

"Its overriding purpose is to cut business costs and increase profitability, and that means restricting further the access of workers to quality care."


"Dimon was fully implicated in the criminal machinations on Wall Street that led to the financial crash of 2008 and has been named in a series of financial swindles since then. Bezos has made his fortune by running the world’s biggest sweatshop operation, subjecting workers in his distribution centers to backbreaking labor at poverty wages."

"Trump economic adviser and former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, who played a central role in drawing up Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich, endorsed the Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan plan on Tuesday. “We’re doing the same thing here at the White House,” he said."

"The sheer size of the three firms points to the increasing stranglehold of oligopolistic entities over society."

Corporate giants announce partnership to cut employer health care costs

By Barry Grey
31 January 2018
Three of the biggest corporations in the world—Amazon, Berksire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase—sent shockwaves through the US health care industry Tuesday with a joint announcement of plans to form a company dedicated to cutting employer health care costs.
The press release issued by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Berkshire head Warren Buffet and JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon provided few details beyond a general goal of utilizing advanced technology to slash the cost of providing health care for the firms’ combined US work force of over 1 million. However, Dimon, who heads America’s biggest bank, hinted that their ambitions went beyond their own employees when he said, “Our goal is to create solutions that benefit our US employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans.”
The initiative heralds a further monopolization of health care by a handful of billionaire-run corporations and a further subordination of social needs to Wall Street. Health care in the US is a $3.3 trillion industry that accounts for 18 percent of the American economy. Whoever controls it stands to pocket untold billions in personal wealth.
Despite the companies’ talk of improving the availability and quality of health care for workers, the initiative announced Tuesday signals a further rationing of care for the working class. Its overriding purpose is to cut business costs and increase profitability, and that means restricting further the access of workers to quality care.
Even before Tuesday’s announcement, the monopolization of health care in the US was accelerating, encouraged by the market-based “reform” enacted by the Obama administration in the form of “Obamacare.” According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association, the pace of consolidation doubled between 2011 and 2015.
Last year saw a wave of hospital mergers, the largest of which combined Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, uniting their 139 hospitals and 700 care sites across 28 states. A number of major mergers of health insurers and pharmacy companies were announced, topped off by the $69 billion purchase of insurance giant Aetna by the CVS drug store chain.
But the sheer wealth, power and weight of the three firms involved in Tuesday’s announcement constitute a threat to the industry’s middlemen, from insurers and pharmacies to benefits managers. The new entity could eventually negotiate directly with drug makers, hospitals and doctors, undercutting the more traditional industry behemoths.
As a result, the announcement triggered panic selling of shares of major health insurance and pharmacy firms, which in turn sparked a broader selloff on US markets on Tuesday. At the close of trading, CVS was down 4.11 percent, Walgreens had lost 5.16 percent and UnitedHealth Group suffered a drop of 4.35 percent.
The Dow fell 362.6 points, or 1.4 percent, after falling 177.2 points on Monday, bringing its two-day loss to 540 points. This was the biggest two-day loss for the Dow since June 2016. The Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq indexes also declined sharply.
The executives chosen by Bezos, Buffett and Dimon to head up the new venture underscore the dominant role of financial capital in the further private carve-up of the health care system. Amazon named Beth Gialetti, a senior vice president who had served as FedEx’s vice president for planning. Berkshire named investment banker Todd Combs, who was a hedge fund manager before joining Buffett’s firm. JPMorgan chose Marvelle Sullivan Berchtold, the global head of mergers and acquisitions at drug maker Novartis before joining JPMorgan last year.
The sheer size of the three firms points to the increasing stranglehold of oligopolistic entities over society. Amazon has 542,000 employees around the world. Berkshire Hathaway employs 367,000 and JPMorgan Chase has more than 240,000 employees.
These are corporations that have overseen massive attacks on working class living standards. Dimon was fully implicated in the criminal machinations on Wall Street that led to the financial crash of 2008 and has been named in a series of financial swindles since then. Bezos has made his fortune by running the world’s biggest sweatshop operation, subjecting workers in his distribution centers to backbreaking labor at poverty wages.
The combined market capitalization of the three companies is $1.61 trillion, a sum larger than the gross domestic product of Spain ($1.2 trillion). Bezos, with a net worth of $115.6 billion, is the world’s richest person. Buffett, with $93.2 billion, ranks second. Dimon, despite an annual salary of $28 million, is a piker compared to his new partners, with net holdings of “only” $1.26 billion.
The combined wealth of Bezos and Buffett alone ($210 billion) is almost twice the combined fiscal year 2018 budget levels proposed by the Trump administration for the departments of education, housing and labor.
While the three CEOs in their joint press release said they had as yet no concrete policy proposals for their new company, some business commentators speculated as to the likely approach that would be taken. The New York Times spoke of a “wider use of telemedicine and virtual doctor visits,” and telemedicine companies saw a rise in their stock price.
Bloomberg posted an opinion piece stating: “The one thing we can say, however, is that if it succeeds, its success may help usher in an era of even tighter employer control over employees’ lives… There are probably considerable savings to be had if employers use their power to guide employees toward better decisions about everything from ER use to smoking.
“But one big reason that our health care system is such an expensive mess is that Americans hate being told what to do. They demand maximal, expensive freedom of choice about their health care. They rebel if they can’t get it. Worse still, if they are denied it, they call their legislators, who do things like telling insurers to stop denying so many claims for experimental treatments of dubious worth.”
Another Bloomberg piece declared bluntly, “The most effective way to reduce health care costs is to restrict choice.”
Trump economic adviser and former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, who played a central role in drawing up Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich, endorsed the Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan plan on Tuesday. “We’re doing the same thing here at the White House,” he said.
In his statement to the press, Buffett declared that growing health care costs “act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” This is a completely false and self-serving presentation of the situation. The tapeworm is not an excess of money spent to provide health care for the population—although the existing corporate-dominated system is rife with corruption and profit-gouging. Rather, it is the financial oligarchy that rules over economic and political life under capitalism, of which the three CEOs are a part.
The diversion of ever more obscene amounts of money and resources into the bank accounts of a parasitic elite, made possible by private ownership of the health care industry and all of the economic levers of society, makes any rational and humane approach to social needs, including health care, impossible.
The essential step in solving the health care crisis and providing quality care for all is the expropriation of the fortunes of oligarchs like Bezos, Buffett and Dimon and the transformation of the banks and large corporations into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities—that is, a struggle by the working class to put an end to capitalism and establish socialism.


OPIOID ADDICTION IN AMERICA:
OBAMA AND HIS CRONIES IN BIG PHARMA AT WORK!


OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!

Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.


OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the 

wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. 

EVEN BEFORE HE TOOK OFFICE, BARACK OBAMA HAD SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN ANY OTHER PRESIDENT IN HISTORY!

Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors

are employees of financial industry giants -Goldman Sachs

($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207)

and Citigroup ($358,054).

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS to serve the filthy rich

The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s.

“This study follows reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.”
Oxfam: Bottom half of world’s population received none of the wealth created in 2017
By Niles Niemuth 
23 January 2018
With the world’s elite and their political representatives converging on Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum this week, Oxfam released its annual report on global inequality, exposing the historic growth of social inequality over the last year.

Nearly all global wealth growth in 2017, 82 percent, went to the top one percent, while the bottom half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people, saw nothing at all. Last year saw the largest increase in the number of billionaire’s worldwide in history. The number of dollar billionaires currently stands at 2,043, with a new billionaire created every two days.
Every year, the Oxfam report reveals an increasingly irrational and untenable political and economic setup, in which a handful of elites engorge themselves on the wealth created by the labor of billions.
“All over the world our economy of the 1% is built on the backs of low paid workers, often women, who are paid poverty wages and denied basic rights,” the report notes. Women provided $10 trillion in unpaid care work last year in support of the global economy, according to data cited by Oxfam.
A recent survey by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that nearly one in three workers in emerging and developing countries live in poverty, and that this figure is only increasing. Even more exploited are the 40 million who were enslaved in 2016, forced to work for nothing as modern slaves in a host of industries including harvesting shrimp, sewing garments and cleaning buildings. The ILO estimates that 25 million of the enslaved worldwide are forced labor.
Over the course of the past year, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth increased by $762 billion, enough to eliminate extreme poverty from the face of the planet seven times over. From 2006 to 2015, the typical worker saw their average income rise by just two percent a year. This was dwarfed by a 13 percent annual increase in billionaire wealth.
Rather than being the result of hard work on the part of the world’s billionaires, the report found that two-thirds of billionaire wealth is the product to inheritance, monopoly, and cronyism. The 500 richest people in the world are expected to hand down $2.4 trillion to their heirs over the next two decades, an amount larger than the GDP of India.
Oxfam notes that the world’s billionaires utilize their extreme wealth and connections to manipulate public policy, take advantage of privatization deals, procure natural resource giveaways, and benefit from tax exemptions and loopholes to further enrich themselves at the public expense.
The super-rich can dodge taxes by hiding their money in an international network of offshore tax havens. Accord to data contained in the leaked Panama and Paradise Papers, some $7.6 trillion is being shielded from taxation. An analysis of the data by economist Gabriel Zucman found that the super-rich are avoiding $200 billion in taxes through the use of tax havens.
Nearly every country can lay claim to a handful of rich elites who control enough wealth to eliminate hunger, poverty and all other social ills.
The report found that the richest man in Nigeria, Aliko Dangote, earns enough just in interest on his $13 billion in wealth to pull two million out of extreme poverty. At the same time that Dangote has become one of the richest people in history, poverty has risen in Nigeria.
The four richest men in Indonesia owned more wealth in 2017 than the bottom 100 million people in the world’s largest island country. Nearly half of the country’s population, approximately 133 million people, continues to languish in poverty.
Meanwhile, in Brazil a worker earning the minimum wage must work 19 years to make the same amount that someone in that country’s top 0.1 percent makes in a single month.
When it comes to social inequality within so-called developed countries, the United States is in a league of its own. In little more than a day, a typical CEO in the US earns as much as the average worker will make in a year. The three richest people in the US owned as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, approximately 160 million people.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Seattle-based Amazon, recently became the richest person in world history with a net worth of $105.1 billion, which he acquired off the backs of a highly exploited international workforce of some 300,000 employees. Amazon workers in India make as little as $233 per month, while workers in the US average less than $13 an hour.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates follows closely behind Bezos with $92.3 billion, while Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, claims a net worth of $87 billion. The implementation of tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump late last year will only accelerate the growth of the gap between the top and the bottom.
The ever-increasing concentration of so much wealth into so few hands to the detriment of the billions who toil every day just to meet their basic needs makes the case for the expropriation and redistribution of the global plutocracy’s ill-gotten gains.
In just one instance cited by Oxfam, it would cost only $2.2 billion to raise all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage. This is just one third of the amount that was paid to the shareholders in the country’s top five garment sector corporations last year.


Trump’s State of the Union address: A spectacle of reaction and militarism

By Patrick Martin
31 January 2018

US President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, delivered Tuesday night, was a festival of reaction and political filth. The speech dragged on for more than 80 minutes, interrupted by ovations from the assembled members of the Senate and House of Representatives. It was filled with paeans to the police and military (which won the particular support of Democrats), fascistic attacks on immigrants, and invocations of religion, patriotism and the American flag, culminating in howls of “USA! USA!” during the closing section of the address.
The annual State of the Union speech has long since decayed into a hollow ritual, whose essential emptiness is an expression of the crisis and decay of American democracy, weighed down by militarism and rampant economic inequality.
With Donald Trump, the real state of the union is revealed, not by the endless torrent of lies fashioned by his speechwriters, or the people they exploited as human props, but in the persona of the president himself: the first billionaire to occupy the White House, preening over the signal accomplishment of his first year in office—trillions of dollars in tax breaks for corporations and the super-rich.
In a speech that quickly received positive responses in the media, Trump cited the record-breaking rise in the stock market and the decision of major corporations to repatriate funds to the United States—since they can now do so virtually tax-free—as though these would benefit American workers.
However, Trump’s efforts to paint a portrait of a country on the rise, with living conditions improving, will not have fooled anyone. Only a few minutes after claiming that Americans have never had it so good, he noted that 64,000 people died of drug overdoses in America last year, a record number. This was one of his few concessions to social reality, which Trump used to demand increased police powers.
Trump’s arrogant demeanor reflected something of the political conjuncture. The Democrats pretended to oppose the tax cut, but did nothing to stop it, because their most important social base, Wall Street, supported it enthusiastically. 
There is little point in attempting to provide a point-by-point rebuttal of the barefaced lies in Trump’s speech. He was describing America as it is seen by the billionaires, for whom, as he said, this seems the best of times, with stock prices and profits soaring, income and corporate taxes slashed, government regulations on business either not enforced or scrapped outright.
On foreign policy, Trump said relatively little, but all of it was reactionary. He called for Congress to “fully fund our great military,” hailed US military operations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, while announcing he had signed an executive order to keep open the US torture prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to house new prisoners seized in the “war on terror.” He insisted that alleged “terrorists” should be treated as “enemy combatants,” and made clear that the US would maintain and expand its network of detention and torture centers.
He threatened Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, as well as the more than 100 countries that voted in the UN General Assembly to condemn the US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He cited North Korea as a nuclear threat to the United States and promised a further build-up of the US nuclear arsenal.
The truly foul character of the speech, the media coverage and the ceremony as a whole only testifies to the exclusion of any genuine opposition to the political and social agenda of corporate America. Official American politics consists of various gradations of right-wing politics, from the pro-corporate, pro-CIA agenda of the Democratic Party to the fascistic ravings of sections of the Republican Party who view even Trump as too soft on immigrants.
The official Democratic Party response, delivered by Massachusetts Representative Joseph Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, combined demagogic posturing, mostly along the lines of identity politics, but with some criticism of Wall Street profiteering thrown in, and scaremongering against Russia, which he described as “knee-deep in our democracy.”
Even at his most demagogic, however, Kennedy could make no reference to the working class or to any movement from below against the growth of economic inequality. That is because the Democratic Party is just as much an instrument of the corporate and financial aristocracy as the Republican Party. Whatever differences they have on secondary issues and matters of tactics are subordinated to a common defense of the profit system and the interests of Wall Street and American imperialism.
The State of the Union showed an extremely degraded and reactionary president and an impotent and bankrupt “opposition.” The real opposition, to both Trump and the Democratic Party, must come from below, from an independent movement of the working class in opposition to the capitalist profit system.


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