THE BILLIONAIRE
CLASS WAGES WAR ON AMERICA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/bill-gates-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos.html
"GOP estb. is using
the $5 billion border-wall fight to hide up to four blue/white-
collar cheap-labor
programs in lame-duck DHS budget. Donors are worried that
salaries are too
damn high, & estb. media does not want to know."
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
Forbes 400 List
Wealth of 400 richest Americans hits record $2.9 trillion
By Alec Andersen
4 October 2018
On Wednesday, the US finance magazine Forbes released its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans, revealing an immense increase in wealth among the top social stratum in the United States.
The total net worth of the 400 people included on the list hit a record $2.9 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion last year. The most heavily represented sector was finance, from which 88 people on the list, including bank executives, hedge fund managers and investors, drew their wealth.
The next highest proportion comes from technology giants such as Google and Facebook. The CEO of Twitter and payments firm Square, Jack Dorsey, registered the greatest percentage growth in wealth from the previous year, an increase of 186 percent to $6.3 billion. This was due in large part to a jump in Square’s stock price.
The threshold necessary for inclusion on the list rose to $2.2 billion in 2018, up $100 billion from last year’s threshold. Fully one-third of billionaires in the United States, a record 204 individuals, failed to make this year’s Forbes 400 list.
The average net worth of billionaires on the list rose to $7.2 billion, an increase of a half-billion over last year’s average of $6.7 billion.
As Forbes notes, the vast increase in wealth among the very richest Americans is largely thanks to a continuing surge in US stock indexes. They have reached new record highs in part due to unprecedented levels of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which are parasitic diversions of wealth away from productive investment in areas that produce decent-paying jobs and to the detriment of pursuits such as research and development. The billionaires on the Forbes 400 list have also benefited immensely from the Trump tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy signed into law in December 2017.
Topping the list is Amazon CEO and world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, whose $160 billion is $63 billion more than the second-wealthiest person on the list, Bill Gates, and a full $78.5 billion more than last year. Bezos has made his fortune through the super-exploitation of warehouse workers around the world, enabling Amazon to move its products faster and at cheaper prices than its retail competitors.
The staggering increase in Bezos’s wealth over the past year has been due to the more than 100 percent increase in Amazon’s stock price. The $2,950 Jeff Bezos has earned per second in 2018 is more than the $2,796 a fulfillment center worker in India makes in an entire year.
Ironically, the Forbes report was published the same day that the press was full of praise for Bezos’s supposed generosity and humanitarian concern for his workers, occasioned by the announcement that he was raising the minimum wage of his US-based employees to the poverty-level wage of $15 an hour.
If the $160 billion fortune Bezos holds were divided among Amazon’s global workforce of 500,000, each worker would receive $320,000.
Coming in second on the list with a net worth of $97 billion is Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates, who had topped the Forbes list since 1994. The top 10 wealthiest people on the list alone have a total net worth of $730 billion, up from $610 billion in 2018.
However, just the top 45 individuals out of the 400 on the list accounted for fully half of the total wealth, or $1.45 trillion. That amounts to an average fortune of more than $32 billion each, which is more than the estimated $30 billion required to end world hunger, according to a United Nations estimate.
The Forbes report illustrates that the barrier to resolving societal ills, such as poverty, hunger and disease, is the siphoning off and hoarding of a growing proportion of society’s resources by the wealthiest segment of society.
The $2.9 trillion in the hands of these 400
richest people in the United States is roughly
three-quarters of the total federal budget. It
represents nearly three times the 2018
budget for the Department of Health and
Human Services, which was slashed from
over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion
this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion
budget for the Department of Education in
2018.
richest people in the United States is roughly
three-quarters of the total federal budget. It
represents nearly three times the 2018
budget for the Department of Health and
Human Services, which was slashed from
over $1.126 trillion in 2017 to $1.112 trillion
this year, and 176 times the $16.4 billion
budget for the Department of Education in
2018.
Rather than addressing these issues, the Democratic Party’s midterm election campaign has instead been centered on a right-wing effort to channel opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump behind a #MeToo-style hysteria over alleged sexual abuse.
The timing of the release of the Forbes list is significant, coming
as it does on the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)—the $700 billion bank
bailout that set the stage for the trillions that were essentially
stolen from the working class to rescue the financial oligarchy
and make it richer than ever. The result of the decade-long
plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both
Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-
increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in
the new Forbes 400 list.
plundering of society since the crash, carried out by both
Republican and Democratic administrations, is the ever-
increasing concentration of wealth at the very top reflected in
the new Forbes 400 list.
As CEO compensation soars and banksters' plunder to new heights
"Another Fed study, “The
Demographics of Wealth,” found that people born in the 1980s, part of the
millennial generation, were at the greatest risk of becoming a “lost
generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. This age group is one of the most
likely to be saddled with student debt."
While workers are told by politicians of both big business parties that there is “no money” to pay for decent wages, education, health care or retirement, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index are sitting on the largest cash stockpile in history, with estimates varying between $1.8 and $2.2 trillion as of the end of 2017.
Fifty-one million
US households cannot afford “survival budget”
By Kate Randall
Newly released data cast a revealing light on the state of income inequality in America a decade after the Great Recession. While CEO pay soars to unheard of heights, nearly 51 million US households cannot afford basic necessities like housing, food and health care. The figures show that a tiny oligarchy of the super-rich continues to tighten its grip over society, as more and more families struggle to get by.
The New York
Times on Friday published the Equilar 200 Highest-Paid CEO Rankings
for 2017. The survey, conducted annually by the executive compensation
consulting firm Equilar, lists the pay packages awarded to CEOs at US public
companies with more than $1 billion in revenue.
Entries regarding the 10
highest-paid CEOs in 2017 show not only massive compensation packages, but huge
percentage increases over 2016.
· No. 1: Hock E. Tan of Broadcom, total compensation of
$103,211,163—a 318 percent increase over 2016
· No. 2: Frank J. Bisignano of First Data, total compensation of
$102,210,396—a 646 percent increase over 2016
· No. 10: Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor, total compensation of
$43,160,584—a 3,400 percent increase over 2016
This year for the first
time, as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank banking law, publicly traded US
corporations must begin publishing comparisons between the pay of their chief
executive and the median compensation of other employees. (Figures are not yet
available for all of the highest-earning CEOs.)
The following are just a
few of the pay ratios for 2017:
· Mindy Grossman, Weight Watchers International, with $33,371,856 in
total compensation, received 5,908
times the median employee pay ($6,013).
· Margaret H. Georgiadis, Mattel, with $31,275,289 in total
compensation, received 4 , 987 times the median
employee pay ($6,271).
· Michael Rapino, Live Nation Entertainment, whose total
compensation rose by 577 percent to $70,615,760, received 2,893 times the median
employee pay ($24,416).
Put another way, a
Walmart worker earning the company’s median salary of $19,177 would have to
work for more than 1,000 years to earn the $22.2 million that company CEO Doug
McMillon was awarded in 2017.
Among the companies that
disclosed CEO pay ratios, the median was 275 to 1, i.e., the typical employee
would have to work 275 years to earn the annual compensation of his or her
company’s CEO.
While CEO compensation
continues to climb—with the top 200 CEOs receiving an average raise of 14
percent in 2017, compared to 9 percent in 2016 and 5 percent in 2015—there are
50.8 million US households that cannot afford a basic monthly budget, including
housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a smart phone. The
new data was made available Tuesday by the United Way ALICE Project.
Those struggling to meet
a basic monthly budget include 16.1 million households living below the
official federal poverty level, an abysmally low $24,300 for a family of four
in 2016. Also included, however, were another 34.7 million families called
ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In other
words, these households include working members and are not “officially” poor,
but cannot afford basic necessities.
As the ALICE Project
press release on the data notes, “ALICE is the nation’s child care workers,
home health aides and store clerks—those men and women who work at low-paying
jobs, having little or no savings and are one emergency from poverty.” Workers
at companies whose CEOs rank in the top 200 in pay fall into this category,
including McDonald’s, Walgreens, Office Depot and food service companies
Aramark and Sysco.
Data highlighted by the
research includes the following:
· Two-thirds of all US jobs in the country are low-paying—less than
$20 an hour, or $40,000 a year if full-time.
· More than 30 percent of households in each state cannot afford a
basic “survival budget.” The percentage of these families ranges from 32
percent in North Dakota to 49 percent in California, New Mexico and Hawaii.
· Those families earning over the poverty level but struggling to
afford basic necessities outnumber similarly struggling households living in
poverty in all 50 states.
· California, Texas and Florida—the first, second and fourth most
populous states, respectively--have the largest number of ALICE households in
the country.
Also published Tuesday
was a study by the Federal Reserve Board that exposes the precarious financial
situation facing millions of American workers and their families. The “Report
on the Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2017” found that 4 in 10 adults,
if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either be unable to cover it
or would pay for it by selling a possession or borrowing money.
For working class
families, such unexpected expenses could include a medical bill, a car repair,
home repairs, appliance replacement, unexpected taxes or fines—the list goes
on. While the CEOs in the top 200 have assets stashed away in rainy day funds
in the millions, an unexpected emergency can mean going without food, being
forced deeper into credit card debt, debt collection or eviction. The study
found that 3 percent of renters were evicted or moved because of the threat of
eviction in the last two years.
The report noted that
one-fifth of non-retired adults are pessimistic about their future employment
opportunities. A substantial number of workers are in precarious employment,
with one-sixth having irregular work schedules imposed by their employer, and one-tenth
receiving their work schedules less than a week in advance.
The study reported that
over half of college attendees under age 30 have taken on debt to pay for their
education. Those who failed to complete a degree, and those who attended
for-profit institutions, were more likely to have fallen behind on their
payments. Among those making payments on their student loans, the typical
monthly payment was between $200 and $300, or 6 to 9 percent of total income
for someone working full-time at $20 an hour.
Another Fed study, “The
Demographics of Wealth,” found that people born in the 1980s, part of the
millennial generation, were at the greatest risk of becoming a “lost
generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. This age group is one of the most
likely to be saddled with student debt. While all families headed by someone born
in 1960 or later have failed to recover economically since the Great Recession,
those born in the 1980s are the least likely to have recovered to their
pre-1980 financial level.
Not surprisingly, the
“Economic Well-Being” report found that less than two-thirds of non-retired
adults thought their retirement savings are on track. One-fourth had no
retirement savings or pension whatsoever.
While workers are told
by politicians of both big business parties that there is “no money” to pay for
decent wages, education, health care or retirement, companies in the Standard
& Poor’s 500 stock index are sitting on the largest cash stockpile in
history, with estimates varying between $1.8 and $2.2 trillion as of the end of
2017.
The obscene levels of
compensation doled out to the CEOs and the corresponding struggle of working
class families to pay basic monthly bills provoke no serious response from the
Democratic Party, which is fixated on the claims of Russian “meddling” in the
2016 elections.
The Democrats have
provided the votes to fund the Pentagon’s record $700 billion budget and secure
the confirmation of black-site torture administrator Gina Haspel to head the
CIA. They put up no serious opposition to Trump’s multi-trillion-dollar tax cut
for corporations and the rich. Meanwhile, work requirements are being imposed
on Medicaid and food stamps, with virtually no opposition from the Democratic
Party.
The working class must
break from both parties of the capitalist class and build a mass socialist
movement to seize the wealth of the financial elite and put an end to the
profit system. This is the only basis for meeting essential social needs.
THE STAGGERING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY UNDER OBAMA'S ADMINISTRATION SERVING THE
BILLIONAIRE CLASS.
THE
ENTIRE REASON BEHIND AMNESTY IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG THE REAL
COST OF "CHEAP" MEXICAN LABOR TO THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.
AND IT'S WORKING!
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS
“Calling
income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue
of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost
unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the
richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion
public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs."
A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for
women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher
taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and
universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care
system. Expanded Social Security benefits.” WASHINGTON
EXAMINER
of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost
unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the
richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion
public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs."
A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for
women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher
taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and
universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care
system. Expanded Social Security benefits.” WASHINGTON
EXAMINER
YOU THOUGHT OBAMA INVITED
OBAMANOMICS and started the assault on the American middle-class?
NOPE!
“By the
time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992,
the Democratic Party had completely
repudiated its association with the reforms of
the New Deal and Great Society periods.
Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an
ample supply of cheap labor for the rich
(WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS
AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing
layer of black capitalists, and passed the
1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious
“three strikes” provision that has helped
create the largest prison population in the
world.”
the Democratic Party had completely
repudiated its association with the reforms of
the New Deal and Great Society periods.
Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an
ample supply of cheap labor for the rich
(WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS
AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing
layer of black capitalists, and passed the
1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious
“three strikes” provision that has helped
create the largest prison population in the
world.”
Clinton
Foundation Put On Watch List Of Suspicious ‘Charities’
OBAMA: SERVANT OF
THE 1%
Richest one
percent controls nearly half of global wealth
The richest one percent of the
world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46
percent last year.
The report found that the growth of global inequality has
accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial
assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019
By Gabriel Black
18 June 2015
Households with more than a million
(US) dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global
private wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston
Consulting Group (BCG).
This large percentage, however,
only includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held
through managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves
out businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial
portion of the rich’s net worth.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41
percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that
collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in
liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
In total, the world added $17.5
trillion of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that
nearly three quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth.
In other words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing
assets increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.
This trend is the result of the
massive infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks.
The policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the
stock market even while global economic growth has slumped.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace,
there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards
the very top.
In
2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase
11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion
in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report,
“This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of
households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound
growth on their wealth in the next five years.
Those families with wealth between
$20 and $100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent
increase in their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In
five years they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.
Coming in last in the “high net
worth” population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private
wealth. These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent
each year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several
percentage points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.
The
gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the
experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth accumulation
has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not
even begun to recover from the past recession.
An Oxfam report from
January, for example, shows that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s
population went from having about 56 percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to
having 52 percent of it in 2014. Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth
rise from 44 to 48 percent of the world’s wealth.
In
2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median
household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to
$56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during
the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and
2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent.
This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
As the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between
2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times
more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015
report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all from
income growth.”
Another report by Knight
Frank, looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes
that in 2014 these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their
collective wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8
trillion.
The report also draws attention to
the disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the
growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated
global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its
forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”
DICK MORRIS:
On America’s First Family of Crime….. NO! Not
the Bushes again!
Clinton global hucksterism – Selling out America
like they sold out the Lincoln Bedroom.
HILLARY CLINTON: CRONY CLASS’ “Hope
and Change” huckster’s successor!
“I serve Obama’s cronies first, illegals second
and together we will loot the American middle-class to double our figures. It’s
called BAILOUTS! Evita Peron Clinton
At this point, Clinton is
the choice of most multimillionaires to be the next occupant of the White
House. A recent CNBC poll of 750 millionaires found 53 percent support for
Clinton in a contest with Republican Jeb Bush, 14 points better than Obama’s
showing in the 2012 election with the same group.
Sen. Bernie Sanders – America’s answer to Wall
Street’s looting, the war on the American middle-class and jobs for legals!
“At this point, Clinton is the choice of
most multimillionaires to be the next occupant of the White House. A recent
CNBC poll of 750 millionaires found 53 percent support for Clinton in a contest
with Republican Jeb Bush, 14 points better than Obama’s showing in the 2012
election with the same group.”
THE CRONY
CLASS:
OBAMACLINTONOMICS
was created by BILLARY CLINTON!
Income inequality grows
FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the
time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely
repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society
periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap
labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a
growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill,
with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest
prison population in the world.”
*
“Calling
income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time,"
Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer
wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion
public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A
$15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick
leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at
all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health
care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON
EXAMINER
OBAMA’S WALL STREET and the
LOOTING of AMERICA – SECOND TERM
The
corporate cash hoard has likewise reached a new record, hitting an estimated
$1.79 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, up from $1.77 trillion in
the previous quarter. Instead of investing the money, however, companies are
using it to buy back their own stock and pay out record dividends.
Megan McArdle Discusses How
America's Elites Are Rigging the Rules - Newsweek/The Daily Beast special correspondent
Megan McArdle joins Scott Rasmussen for a discussion on America's new Mandarin
class.
PATRICK
BUCHANAN: OBAMA’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA BEGINS AT OUR BORDERS
WHO
REALLY PAYS FOR THE CRIMES OF OBAMA’S
CRONY DONORS???
CRONY DONORS???
LAST WEEK BARACK OBAMA
CELEBRATED FIVE YEARS OF THE LOOTING BY HIS WALL STREET BANKSTERS… now it’s
back to cutting social programs to pay for all that rape by the 1% he
represents. The following week it will be back to the AMNESTY HOAX to legalize
Mexico’s looting of America and make it legal that Mexicans get our jobs first…
they already do!
As in previous budget
crises under the Obama administration, the events are being stage-managed by
the two corporate-controlled parties to give the illusion of partisan gridlock
and confrontation over principles—in this case, whether to go forward with the
implementation of the Obama health care program—while behind the scenes all factions
within the ruling elite agree that massive cuts must be carried through in
basic federal social programs.
OBAMA’S
CRONY CAPITALISM – A NATION RULED BY CRIMINAL WALL STREET BANKSTERS AND OBAMA
DONORS
GET THIS BOOK
Culture of
Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
by Michelle Malkin
In her shocking new
book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff,
revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout
his administration.
PATRICK
BUCHANAN
After Obama
has completely destroyed the American economy, handed millions of jobs to
illegals and billions of dollars in welfare to illegals…. BUT WHAT COMES NEXT?
OBAMANOMICS: IS IT WORKING???
Millionaires
projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019
By
Gabriel Black
18 June 2015
Households with more than a million (US)
dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global private
wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston Consulting
Group (BCG).
This large percentage, however, only
includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held through
managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out
businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion
of the rich’s net worth.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households
owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means
that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in
liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
In total, the world added $17.5 trillion
of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three
quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth. In other
words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets
increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.
This trend is the result of the massive
infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks. The
policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock
market even while global economic growth has slumped.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at
a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy,
skewed towards the very top.
In 2014, those with over $100 million in
private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone.
Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the
world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected
to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.”
They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next
five years.
Those families with wealth between $20 and
$100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in
their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years
they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.
Coming in last in the “high net worth”
population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth.
These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each
year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage
points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.
The gains in private wealth of the
ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the experience of billions of people
around the globe. While wealth accumulation has sharply sped up for the
ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not even begun to recover from
the past recession.
An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows
that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56
percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014.
Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the
world’s wealth.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found
that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the
United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich
also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that
money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US
went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income
gain on record.
As the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between
2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times
more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The
2015 report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all
from income growth.”
Another report by Knight Frank,
looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014
these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective
wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.
The report also draws attention to the
disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the
growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated
global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its
forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”
THE CRONY CLASS:
OBAMACLINTONOMICS
was created by BILLARY CLINTON!
Income inequality grows
FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the
time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely
repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society
periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap
labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a
growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill,
with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest
prison population in the world.”
*
“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great
moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably
expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and
middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million
good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay
equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes
on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A
Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security
benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER
OBAMA’S WALL STREET and the
LOOTING of AMERICA – SECOND TERM
The
corporate cash hoard has likewise reached a new record, hitting an estimated
$1.79 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, up from $1.77 trillion in
the previous quarter. Instead of investing the money, however, companies are
using it to buy back their own stock and pay out record dividends.
Megan McArdle Discusses How
America's Elites Are Rigging the Rules - Newsweek/The Daily Beast special
correspondent Megan McArdle joins Scott Rasmussen for a discussion on America's
new Mandarin class.
POLL: MOST INCOMPETENT AND
DISHONEST PRESIDENT SINCE…. Well, isn’t Obama merely Bush’s THIRD and FOURTH
TERMS??
OBAMA’S CRONY CAPITALISM
A NATION RULED BY CRIMINAL WALL STREET
BANKSTERS AND OBAMA DONORS
PATRICK BUCHANAN
After Obama has completely destroyed
the American economy, handed millions of jobs to illegals and billions of
dollars in welfare to illegals…. BUT WHAT COMES NEXT?
OBAMANOMICS: IS IT WORKING???
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of
global private wealth by 2019
By Gabriel Black
18 June 2015
Households with more than a million (US) dollars in private wealth
are projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth in 2019 according to a
new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
This large percentage, however, only includes cash, savings, money
market funds and listed securities held through managed
investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out businesses,
residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion of the rich’s
net worth.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent
of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these
17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about
$4 million per household.
In total, the world added $17.5 trillion of new private wealth
between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three quarters of all these
gains came from previously existing wealth. In other words, the vast majority
of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets increasing in value—not the
creation of new material things.
This trend is the result of the massive infusions of cheap credit
into the financial markets by central banks. The policy of “quantitative
easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock market even while global
economic growth has slumped.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there
is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very
top.
In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their
wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households
owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According
to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both
the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent
compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.
Those families with wealth between $20 and $100 million also rose
substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in their wealth in twelve short
months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years they will surpass $14 trillion
according to the report.
Coming in last in the “high net worth” population are those with
between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth. These households are expected
to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each year, going from $49 trillion to
$70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage points below the highest bracket’s
12 percent growth rate.
The gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast
to the experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth
accumulation has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of
people have not even begun to recover from the past recession.
An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows
that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56
percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014.
Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the
world’s wealth.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and
2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from
$87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth
drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between
2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1
percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) has noted, in the United States “between 2007 and 2013, net wealth fell
on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times more (26 percent) for those at
the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015 report concludes that
“low-income households have not benefited at all from income growth.”
Another report by Knight Frank, looks at those with
wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014 these 172,850
ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective wealth by $700
billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.
The report also draws attention to the disconnection between the
rich and the actual economy. It states that the growth of this ultra-wealthy
population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated global economic growth. During
2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its forecast increase for world output
from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics: the
never end war on the American middle-class. But we still get the tax bills for
the looting of their Wall Street cronies and their bailouts and billions for
Mexico’s welfare state in our borders.
While the wealth of the rich
is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the
super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
In
2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase
11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion
in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report,
“This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of
households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound
growth on their wealth in the next five years.
In 2014 the Russell Sage
Foundation found that between
2003 and 2013, the median
household net worth of those in
the United States fell from
$87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36
percent. While the rich also saw
their wealth drop during the
recession, they are more than
making that money back.
Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent
of all the income gains in
the US went to the top 1 percent.
This is the most distorted
post-recession income gain on
record.
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND
HIS WALL STREET CRONIES
collapse
of household income in the US… STILL BILLIONS IN WELFARE HANDED TO ILLEGALS…
they already get our jobs and are voting for more!
INCOME
PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA… most jobs go to illegals.
AS HIS CRONY BANKSTERS
CONTINUE TO LOOT, INCOMES PLUMMET FOR AMERICANS (LEGALS).
GOOD TIME FOR AMNESTY FOR
MILLIONS OF LOOTING MEXICANS?
MORE HERE:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/09/and-still-democrat-party-wants-millions.html
“The yearly income of a
typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six
years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013
Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents
a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration
of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”
"During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job." EVEN AS JEB BUSH, HILLARY CLINTON and BERNIE SANDERS PREACH AMNESTY! AMNESTY! AMNESTY!
"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
HILLARY CLINTON'S BIGGEST DONORS ARE OBAMA'S CRIMINAL CRONY
BANKSTERS!
"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."
Federal Reserve documents stagnant state of US economy
Federal
Reserve documents stagnant state of US economy
By Barry Grey
21 July 2015
The
US Federal Reserve Board last week released its semiannual Monetary Policy
Report to Congress, providing an assessment of the state of the American
economy and outlining the central bank’s monetary policy going forward. The
report, along with Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s testimony before both the House of
Representatives and the Senate, as well as a speech by Yellen the previous week
in Cleveland, present a grim picture of the reality behind the official talk of
economic “recovery.”
In her prepared remarks to Congress last Wednesday and Thursday, Yellen said, “Looking forward, prospects are favorable for further improvement in the US labor market and the economy more broadly.”
She reiterated her assurances that while the Fed would likely begin to raise its benchmark federal funds interest rate later this year from the 0.0 to 0.25 percent level it has maintained since shortly after the 2008 financial crash, it would do so only slowly and gradually, keeping short-term rates well below historically normal levels for an indefinite period.
This was an expected, but nevertheless welcome, signal to the American financial elite, which has enjoyed a spectacular rise in corporate profits, stock values and personal wealth since 2009 thanks to the flood of virtually free money provided by the Fed.
"But as Yellen’s remarks and the Fed report indicate, the explosion of asset values and wealth accumulation at the very top of the economic ladder has occurred alongside an intractable and continuing slump in the real economy."
In her prepared testimony to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen noted the following features of the performance of the US economy over the first six months of 2015:
* A sharp decline in the rate of economic growth as compared to 2014, including an actual contraction in the first quarter of the year.
* A substantial slackening (19 percent) in average monthly job-creation, from 260,000 last year to 210,000 thus far in 2015.
* Declines in domestic spending and industrial production.
In her July 10 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, Yellen cited an even longer list of negative indices, including:
* Growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) since the official beginning of the recovery in June, 2009 has averaged a mere 2.25 percent per year, a full one percentage point less than the average rate over the 25 years preceding what Yellen called the “Great Recession.”
* While manufacturing employment nationwide has increased by about 850,000 since the end of 2009, there are still almost 1.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs than just before the recession.
* Real GDP and industrial production both declined in the first quarter of this year. Industrial production continued to fall in April and May.
* Residential construction (despite extremely low mortgage rates by historical standards) has remained “quote soft.”
* Productivity growth has been “weak,” largely because “Business owners and managers… have not substantially increased their capital expenditures,” and “Businesses are holding large amounts of cash on their balance sheets.”
* Reflecting the general stagnation and even slump in the real economy, core inflation rose by only 1.2 percent over the past 12 months.
The Monetary Policy Report issued by the Fed includes facts that are, if anything, even more alarming, including:
* “Labor productivity in the business sector is reported to have declined in both the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.”
* “Exports fell markedly in the first quarter, held back by lackluster growth abroad.”
* “Overall construction activity remains well below its pre-recession levels.”
* “Since the recession began, the gains in… nominal compensation [workers’ wages and benefits] have fallen well short of their pre-recession averages, and growth of real compensation has fallen short of productivity growth over much of this period.”
* “Overall business investment has turned down as investment in the energy sector has plunged. Business investment fell at an annual rate of 2 percent in first quarter… Business outlays for structures outside of the energy sector also declined in the first quarter…”
The report incorporates the Fed’s projections for US economic growth, published following the June meeting of the central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. They include a downward revision of the projection for 2015 to 1.8 percent-2.0 percent from the March projection of 2.3 percent to 2.7 percent.
That the US economy continues to stagnate and even contract is indicated by two surveys released last week while Yellen was testifying before Congress. The Fed reported that factory production failed to increase in June for the second straight month and output in the auto sector fell 3.7 percent. The Commerce Department reported that retail sales unexpectedly fell in June, declining by 0.3 percent.
These statistics follow the employment report for June, which showed that the share of the US working-age population either employed or actively looking for work, known as the labor force participation rate, fell to 62.6 percent, its lowest level in 38 years. During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job.
The disastrous figures on business investment are perhaps the most telling indicators of the underlying crisis of the capitalist system. The Fed report attributes the sharp decline so far this year primarily to the dramatic fall in oil prices and resulting contraction in investment and construction in the energy sector. But the plunge in oil prices is itself a symptom of a general slowdown in the world economy.
Moreover, a dramatic decline in productive investment is common to all of the major industrialized economies of Europe and North America. In its World Economic Outlook of last April, the International Monetary Fund for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis acknowledged that there was no prospect for an early return to pre-recession levels of economic growth, linking this bleak prognosis to a general and pronounced decline in productive investment.
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process.
The economic crisis in the US and internationally is not simply a conjunctural downturn. It is a systemic crisis of global capitalism, centered in the US. A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself.
While the economy is starved of productive investment, entirely parasitic and socially destructive activities such as stock buybacks, dividend hikes and mergers and acquisitions return to pre-crash levels and head for new heights. US corporations have spent more on stock buybacks so far this year than on factories and equipment.
The intractable nature of this crisis, within the framework of capitalism, is underscored by the IMF’s updated World Economic Outlook, released earlier this month, which projects that 2015 will be the worst year for economic growth since the height of the recession in 2009.
In her prepared remarks to Congress last Wednesday and Thursday, Yellen said, “Looking forward, prospects are favorable for further improvement in the US labor market and the economy more broadly.”
She reiterated her assurances that while the Fed would likely begin to raise its benchmark federal funds interest rate later this year from the 0.0 to 0.25 percent level it has maintained since shortly after the 2008 financial crash, it would do so only slowly and gradually, keeping short-term rates well below historically normal levels for an indefinite period.
This was an expected, but nevertheless welcome, signal to the American financial elite, which has enjoyed a spectacular rise in corporate profits, stock values and personal wealth since 2009 thanks to the flood of virtually free money provided by the Fed.
"But as Yellen’s remarks and the Fed report indicate, the explosion of asset values and wealth accumulation at the very top of the economic ladder has occurred alongside an intractable and continuing slump in the real economy."
In her prepared testimony to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen noted the following features of the performance of the US economy over the first six months of 2015:
* A sharp decline in the rate of economic growth as compared to 2014, including an actual contraction in the first quarter of the year.
* A substantial slackening (19 percent) in average monthly job-creation, from 260,000 last year to 210,000 thus far in 2015.
* Declines in domestic spending and industrial production.
In her July 10 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, Yellen cited an even longer list of negative indices, including:
* Growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) since the official beginning of the recovery in June, 2009 has averaged a mere 2.25 percent per year, a full one percentage point less than the average rate over the 25 years preceding what Yellen called the “Great Recession.”
* While manufacturing employment nationwide has increased by about 850,000 since the end of 2009, there are still almost 1.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs than just before the recession.
* Real GDP and industrial production both declined in the first quarter of this year. Industrial production continued to fall in April and May.
* Residential construction (despite extremely low mortgage rates by historical standards) has remained “quote soft.”
* Productivity growth has been “weak,” largely because “Business owners and managers… have not substantially increased their capital expenditures,” and “Businesses are holding large amounts of cash on their balance sheets.”
* Reflecting the general stagnation and even slump in the real economy, core inflation rose by only 1.2 percent over the past 12 months.
The Monetary Policy Report issued by the Fed includes facts that are, if anything, even more alarming, including:
* “Labor productivity in the business sector is reported to have declined in both the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.”
* “Exports fell markedly in the first quarter, held back by lackluster growth abroad.”
* “Overall construction activity remains well below its pre-recession levels.”
* “Since the recession began, the gains in… nominal compensation [workers’ wages and benefits] have fallen well short of their pre-recession averages, and growth of real compensation has fallen short of productivity growth over much of this period.”
* “Overall business investment has turned down as investment in the energy sector has plunged. Business investment fell at an annual rate of 2 percent in first quarter… Business outlays for structures outside of the energy sector also declined in the first quarter…”
The report incorporates the Fed’s projections for US economic growth, published following the June meeting of the central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. They include a downward revision of the projection for 2015 to 1.8 percent-2.0 percent from the March projection of 2.3 percent to 2.7 percent.
That the US economy continues to stagnate and even contract is indicated by two surveys released last week while Yellen was testifying before Congress. The Fed reported that factory production failed to increase in June for the second straight month and output in the auto sector fell 3.7 percent. The Commerce Department reported that retail sales unexpectedly fell in June, declining by 0.3 percent.
These statistics follow the employment report for June, which showed that the share of the US working-age population either employed or actively looking for work, known as the labor force participation rate, fell to 62.6 percent, its lowest level in 38 years. During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job.
The disastrous figures on business investment are perhaps the most telling indicators of the underlying crisis of the capitalist system. The Fed report attributes the sharp decline so far this year primarily to the dramatic fall in oil prices and resulting contraction in investment and construction in the energy sector. But the plunge in oil prices is itself a symptom of a general slowdown in the world economy.
Moreover, a dramatic decline in productive investment is common to all of the major industrialized economies of Europe and North America. In its World Economic Outlook of last April, the International Monetary Fund for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis acknowledged that there was no prospect for an early return to pre-recession levels of economic growth, linking this bleak prognosis to a general and pronounced decline in productive investment.
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process.
The economic crisis in the US and internationally is not simply a conjunctural downturn. It is a systemic crisis of global capitalism, centered in the US. A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself.
While the economy is starved of productive investment, entirely parasitic and socially destructive activities such as stock buybacks, dividend hikes and mergers and acquisitions return to pre-crash levels and head for new heights. US corporations have spent more on stock buybacks so far this year than on factories and equipment.
The intractable nature of this crisis, within the framework of capitalism, is underscored by the IMF’s updated World Economic Outlook, released earlier this month, which projects that 2015 will be the worst year for economic growth since the height of the recession in 2009.
Ten years since the 2008 bank bailout
Ten years ago today, the US Congress and the Bush administration initiated the largest bank bailout in human history.
With the passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which created the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the US Treasury was authorized to spend some $700 billion to purchase “troubled assets” from leading Wall Street banks. This was to be merely a down payment, with total support from the US government, largely overseen by the Obama administration, figuring in the trillions.
The passage of TARP was the initial response of the American ruling class to the crisis brought on by the collapse of the US housing bubble, itself the outcome of decades of increasing speculation and financialization. Major banks and financial institutions had made billions through the fraudulent marketing and packaging of subprime mortgages. When the manic and lucrative party came to an end, they held trillions of dollars of essentially worthless (“troubled”) assets.
In public statements, leading figures of the American ruling elite issued dire warnings about the consequences if the government did not immediately intervene to save the banks. All the resources of society had to be pressed into bailing out the financial system. No expense could be spared, and no questions asked.
While the 2008 crisis was rooted in fundamental contradictions of American and world capitalism, deliberate decisions were made to create the best conditions for a massive transfer of wealth to the ruling elite.
The immediate cause of the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008 was the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, which sent shockwaves throughout the global economy. In his memoir, Timothy Geithner, then president of the New York Fed and later Obama’s treasury secretary, outlined the calculations of the actors centrally involved in the crisis.
“Even in a world where we somehow rescued Lehman,” Geithner wrote, “and then still went ahead and rescued [insurance giant] AIG, we would not have eliminated the fundamental factors driving the crisis. The economy was collapsing, and the financial system would have kept lurching toward disaster—undercapitalized, overleveraged, still burdened by mortgage assets the markets wouldn’t touch, still under threat of a broader run. It took the fall of Lehman and the impending collapse of AIG to persuade President Bush and [Treasury Secretary] Hank [Paulson] to seek legislative authority to try to repair the entire system.” [italics added]
That is, the American financial system was insolvent, choked with trillions of dollars in speculative bets gone bad. It was necessary to create the conditions in which previously unimaginable and massively unpopular decisions could be rammed through, in which these bets could simply be taken over by the American government.
Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and Paulson summoned leading lawmakers to a meeting in which they laid out the demands of the banks—the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Congressional Democrats, including Charles Schumer, Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, took a leading role in promoting this scheme.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who had been leading Democrat Barack Obama in the polls up until September, was sharply reprimanded by Paulson and Bernanke for his unwillingness to clearly endorse the proposed bailout. “McCain… seemed unwilling to work actively for a solution,” Bernanke complained in his memoir. Paulson, for his part, accused McCain of “slinging populist rhetoric on the campaign trail, excoriating Wall Street, talking about protecting taxpayers, and using the word bailout.”
The Republican Paulson was far more impressed with Obama. “There didn’t seem to be ‘politics’ or maneuvering in Obama’s approach to me,” Paulson later wrote. “He wanted to avoid doing anything publicly—or privately—that would damage our efforts to stabilize the markets.”
Indeed, it was Obama’s intervention that secured the passage of TARP, and he in turn became the favored candidate of Wall Street, helping him secure the presidency in November 2008. Over the course of the next eight years, Obama, who had been marketed as the candidate of “change” and “hope,” would oversee a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich.
In a clear signal to Wall Street that the bailout would continue and expand, Obama appointed Geithner as his treasury secretary on January 26, 2009. In the face of mounting popular opposition and often heated debates within the federal government, the two men prevailed in every case in ensuring that the response to the economic crisis would directly align with the demands of Wall Street.
Despite announcing a multi-billion-dollar program to prevent foreclosures, the Obama White House ensured that it spread out home foreclosures in such a way as to minimize losses for the banks, while doing nothing to help ordinary people stay in their homes.
Even as former Fed chair Alan Greenspan warned that “it may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring,” Obama made it clear that nothing of the sort would happen, declaring, “We’ve got big private capital markets and ultimately that’s going to be the key to getting credit flowing again.”
When, on March 16, 2009, the financial insurance giant AIG announced that its financial products unit would pay out $165 million in bonuses, Obama publicly expressed his outrage and privately allowed the company to make the payouts, despite the fact that the American government was in effect the company’s majority shareholder.
The Obama administration ensured that not a single individual responsible for a crisis that caused untold misery around the world was held accountable for their criminal actions. No CEOs were fired from bailed-out firms, let alone hauled off to jail.
The logical corollary to the bailout of Wall Street was the assault on the jobs and living conditions of the working class. While the banks were bailed out, Geithner made clear that there would be no federal support to states and municipalities facing financial crises. This paved the way for a wave of austerity, including the 2013 bankruptcy of Detroit, which slashed the pensions of municipal workers and sold off city assets to billionaire speculators.
In the 2009 restructuring of the auto industry, the Obama White House predicated federal assistance to the Big Three auto makers on the expansion of the two-tier wage system and mass layoffs, setting the standard for a wave of pay cuts and labor casualization that swept through the entire American economy. This was made possible by the suppression of working class struggle by the corporatist trade unions.
The social suffering created by the crisis and its aftermath remains almost impossible to calculate, expressing itself in forms as diverse as the crisis of public education, the opioid epidemic, the fall in life expectancy, and a persistent rise in suicide.
The outcome of these policies is as was intended. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than tripled since 2009, propped up by a new financial bubble created by the Federal Reserve’s four trillion dollars in quantitative easing. The ruling class is richer than ever. Yet none of the contradictions that produced the 2008 crisis have been resolved. They have merely been recreated on a higher level.
In March 2009, David North, the chairman of the World Socialist Web Siteeditorial board wrote, “The most essential feature of a historically significant crisis is that it leads to a situation where the major class forces within the affected country (and countries) are compelled to formulate and adopt an independent position in relationship to the crisis. That is, they are driven to advance a solution to the crisis in which their own social needs and interests are expressed.”
In their response to the 2008 financial crisis, Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, Bush and Obama all spoke for the ruling class. Their actions were repeated in different forms by capitalist ruling elites throughout the world. They are being continued and escalated under the Trump administration, while the Democrats are doing everything they can to suppress and divert opposition.
The working class has yet to articulate in a politically organized and conscious manner its independent interests in response to the crisis that erupted in 2008. This year, however, has seen the initial expressions of the growth of class struggle internationally. In their struggles, workers must draw the lessons of the 2008 crash, which has discredited the capitalist system in the eyes of billions of people all over the world and created a mass audience for socialism.
In the coming struggles, the greatest political task will be to imbue the response of the working class with the same determination of the ruling class, the corrupt and decadent oligarchy that extracts its riches from the labor of the great mass of humanity. A political leadership must be built to organize the struggles of the working class in a revolutionary socialist movement against the capitalist system.
One man could end world hunger, but he won’t – by Lee Camp
I do not want to talk about Jeff Bezos. But in order to not talk about Jeff Bezos, I have to talk about Jeff Bezos.
We all know the Lex Luthor-looking head of Amazon is the richest human in the world.
He’s achieved a net worth of more than $150 billion by selling everything that has ever existed… with free shipping. (It turns out the only thing stopping the human race from giving all our money to one man was that pesky $4.99 shipping fee.)
But let me stop right here. Even the way we talk about economics is influenced by a capitalist culture that tells us amassing money is the answer to everything. Did you notice I said Bezos “achieved” a net worth of $150 billion, and that seems like a normal way to phrase it? However, would you say, “Jeffrey Dahmer achieved eating the hearts of 10 different people?” No, that would sound odd to you. Yet having $150 billion is nearly as sociopathic, and still we use terminology as if it’s GREAT!
But, like I said, this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about clean water.
Clean water is one of the most important things to anyone and everyone (second only to nacho cheese). Yet millions around the world don’t have clean water or struggle to get it. A report by the UN“estimated that 300 million people on the continent [of Africa], more than a third of the population, have no fixed supply [of clean water].” About 2.5 billion lack proper sanitation. The CDC says 2,200 children die a day from diarrheal diseases – mostly from unclean water.
Millions of people in total die each year from a lack of clean water. So how much would it cost to change that? It would cost $10 billion a year to bring pure water to the entire world.
Jeff Bezos himself could provide the world with clean water for the next 15 years.
He could save millions upon millions of lives. But instead of doing that, he will continue to enrich himself by delivering sex toys in a box with a smiley on it.
But this is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about world hunger. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty while the UN in 2015 estimated it would cost $30 billion a year to end world hunger. Imagine – not a soul hungry! And big shock – when people aren’t hungry, there’s less crime, less hatred, better decision-making, and so forth. Hunger correlates with all kinds of sh*tty stuff, which means we all benefit when there’s no hunger. Think about it; you probably have co-workers who miss lunch and start spraying hate crimes around the office. Then you have to say, “Leslie, I think if you just had a taco, you would stop using the C-word so much.” Now imagine Leslie on a global scale.
Jeff Bezos himself could end world hunger for five straight years. If he teamed up with the Koch brothers, they could do it for eight to 10 years.
But Bezos wouldn’t do that. Instead, he’ll just make billions convincing people to put Amazon Echo spy systems into their own homes.
This column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about Flint, Mich.
You remember how upset we were about Flint’s water? It was poisoned with lead. It was destroying lives of people who were already poor to begin with. Then the authorities came to the conclusion it would cost $216 million to fix, and everyone was aghast. That’s an insane amount of money. How could ANY city afford that?!
Jeff Bezos could pay to repair Flint’s water supply 694 times over.
He could pay for it 690 times over and still have $864 million left to pay for a cast of people to dance around him dressed like wood sprites and sprinkle glitter on his shining bald head for the rest of his f***ing life. (So don’t say he wouldn’t be happy.)
But this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about homelessness.
There are 554,000 homeless people in the US, one of the richest countries in the world. What would it cost to give each of these struggling people his or her own apartment? Recent numbers show the cheapest apartments to rent in America are in Wichita, Kan. (because why would ya?… unless you were heavily invested in grasshoppers). In Wichita an apartment costs $632 per month. (In San Francisco, that’s the cost of the monthly utility bill for a dog house.) So $632 per month amounts to $7,584 per year. Therefore, the total cost to give every American houseless person an apartment in Wichita would be $4.2 billion.
Jeff Bezos could give every homeless person their own apartment for the next 36 YEARS.
This is one man we’re talking about! But Jeff Bezos would never do that. He’d rather push a bag of 3,000 live ladybugs on someone actually searching Amazon for “Lady Bugs” the Rodney Dangerfield film (which was apparently intended as a children’s movie, but now seems like a guidebook for how to become a #MeToo predator).
But this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about education.
When people go to college without coming out stuck under immense debt, it often changes their whole lives. They can get better jobs, eat healthier, provide for their family. “According to the American Association of Community Colleges,” this source says, “the average yearly cost of tuition and fees for community college students in the US is $3,347…” It usually takes two years to graduate from community college, so the cost for two years is $6,694.
Jeff Bezos could pay for the entire community college education of 22.4 million students.
That’s more than the entire number of college students enrolled this year across our country. Of course you’d have to pay for your own beer bongs, posters of John Belushi in the “college” sweater, macaroni stuck to the floor and pregnancy tests. (But I know a guy who can get you a homemade pregnancy test for 35 cents. It’s made out of alkaline batteries and sawdust, but it’ll spot a freakin’ baby a mile away.)
However, this column is not about Jeff Bezos. It’s about the system that created Bezos.
If you removed Bezos from Amazon tomorrow and vacuumed all his money away, he would be replaced by another sick hoarder of egregious wealth. This is because we have a deathly ill economic system. Think about it this way – the goals of our economy (and any economy),
- Pursuit of abundance (all people’s basic needs are met)
- Sustainability (can the system keep going forever)
- Liberation of humanity from hard and dangerous labor (nobody doing jobs they hate)
- Adaptation to emerging technologies and variables
Makes sense – we should seek a sustainable system where nobody is dying or miserable. Here’s the problem – unfettered capitalism doesn’t even claim to be ATTEMPTING any of that. Our economy’s mission statement is basically to “… preserve inefficiency for the sake of monetary circulation, economic growth and power preservation.”
Profit over all else. It doesn’t matter how many people die or work at an Amazon warehouse for pennies. Does. Not. Matter. So it’s not that capitalism is failing in this new Gilded Age. Rather, capitalism is succeeding at what it was meant to do: amass all the money in a tiny number of hands and exploit everyone else.
That’s what this column is about.
This article was originally published by Truthdig.
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What’s behind Amazon’s plan to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour?
By Jerry White
3 October 2018
With great fanfare on Tuesday, Amazon announced it will raise the minimum wage it pays to 250,000 workers and 100,000 seasonal temps to $15 an hour. In the United Kingdom, the company is raising the wages of 40,000 permanent and temporary workers to £10.50 (US $13.69) an hour in London and £9.50 (US $12.39) across the rest of the country.
The wage increases, which will go into effect for Amazon and Whole Foods workers on November 1, are a response to the deep opposition of Amazon workers to the poverty level wages and brutal working conditions at the giant retail and logistics company. The growing militancy of Amazon workers is, moreover, part of a wider sentiment among workers in the US and internationally, who after a decade of declining real wages since the 2008 financial crash are determined to fight for substantial improvements.
The pay increase, however, is minimal and will do little to improve the living standards of Amazon workers. The median Amazon worker was paid $28,446 last year, according to company filings, which comes out to about $13.68 an hour. An increase to $15.00 an hour—$1.32 more for the median worker—would amount to a yearly wage of $30,000. This is 120 percent of the official poverty rate for a family of four and will do little to help workers keep their heads above water, particularly in urban centers with higher costs of living.
Internal company documents available to Amazon workers make clear that the raise will be accompanied by the elimination of various incentive bonuses and other programs, which workers rely on to help with bills and car payments. This includes all or parts of the Variable Compensation Plan (VCP) and MyReward bonuses based on attendance and site performance goals. Also cut is the limited stock vesting program, known as the Restricted Stock Units (RSU) plan.
“We are phasing out the incentive pay component and the $15 will be simple minimum with no targets required,” one message from the company to workers said. Another read, “We will be phasing out the RSU grant program for stock which would vest in 2020 and 2021 … replacing it with a direct stock purchase plan before the end of 2019.”
According to Amazon, full-time workers at its US fulfillment centers already make an average hourly wage of over $15 an hour, including stock and incentive bonuses. It is not clear, therefore, if workers will see any net benefit from the much-promoted raise.
“At first, I thought, $15 an hour, that’s a start. But when you do the math, it does not add up to very much,” Shannon Allen, a worker from Amazon’s fulfillment center in Haslet, Texas, who became homeless after suffering a serious workplace injury, told the International Amazon Workers Voice.
“There will be a raise, but they are taking away our bonus at the end of the month and the stocks we were entitled to. Workers are still not getting medical treatment after getting injured. Workers are still starving. Workers are still homeless. What about the workers in India? Are they going to get $15 too or are they still going to be getting $267 a month? I would love to know that,” Allen said.
The move by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was carefully orchestrated with the Democratic Party to bolster the image of the company. Last month, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation, called the Bezos Act, to tax corporations for what their low-wage workers receive in government health-care benefits or food stamps.
“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do and decided we want to lead,” Bezos said in a statement Tuesday. “We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.” Bezos said the company would also lobby for an increase in the federal minimum wage, which has not increased from $7.25 in a decade.
Sanders, right on cue, hailed the move, saying, “Today I want to give credit where credit is due, and that is that Mr. Bezos and Amazon have done the right thing. This is a significant step forward for many thousands of Amazon employees.”
Sanders added, “Not only does this make a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees, it also sends a message to the fast food industry, the airline industry and the retail industry in general that the time is now to begin paying workers a living wage.”
To call $15 a “living wage” is ludicrous. The average hourly wage in manufacturing four decades ago would be the equivalent of $23 an hour in 2018 dollars. The $15 mark advocated by Sanders and the union- and Democratic Party-aligned “Fight for $15” campaign has increasingly become the new norm, including in the auto industry.
The billionaire CEO is not being motivated by high ideals but by cold, hard cash considerations. With the official unemployment rate falling to the lowest level in nearly two decades, large employers like Amazon are increasingly competing for workers, particularly for the upcoming holiday rush. In January, Walmart raised its minimum wage to $11. Facebook boosted its minimum wage for janitorial staff, food-service workers and other contractors to $15 an hour and Costco pays $14 an hour. Target, which plans to hire 120,000 temporary workers this holiday season is paying $12 an hour and offering a chance at $500 gift cards.
Amazon’s move takes place after the company’s proposal last month for 2 to 4 percent raises was met with disgust from workers. “It wasn’t enough at all,” one part-time worker in San Bernardino, California, told Bezos’ Washington Postabout a 40-cent increase that would raise her pay to $13.15. “The HR manager in the room was like, ‘Aren’t you excited? Come on, clap!’ We started a slow clap, with no emotions on our faces. A 3 percent raise in four years—it feels like damage control.”
After a four-decade decline in real wages, workers are earning barely enough to subsist. If some employers are raising wages it is because they need workers in their factories to pump profits out of them. Analysts have already said the meager raise will have no negative effect on the bottom line of the company whose market capitalization reached $1 trillion last month.
Nor will it make a dent on Jeff Bezos, whose net worth increased to $165 billion earlier this summer making him the richest man in modern history. If this wealth was divided equally among Amazon’s global employees, each would get a check for $300,000.
Whatever raise is given to Amazon workers will be more than made up through ever greater exploitation, higher pace, and more workplace injuries. The company already uses electronic devices to monitor productivity and time workers during their bathroom breaks and now new technology is being tested that will use sound pulses to redirect a worker’s hand if he moves it in the wrong direction while moving items from a bin to a delivery box.
It is well worth examining what Bezos is doing from the standpoint of history. More than a century ago another corporate magnate, Henry Ford, more than doubled the wages of his workers, raising them to $5 per day, from about $2.38 a day. The move was not motivated by a sudden burst of generosity from Ford, then the richest man in the world.
Instead, Ford wanted to lower the turnover rate at his Highland Park, Michigan, factory where workers were leaving in droves because of brutal speed up on the new assembly lines. Ford was also alarmed by the growing support for socialist and labor organizers. After introducing the new wage in 1914, his profits doubled, and Ford declared two years later, “The payment of $5 a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.”
Under conditions of growing class conflict in the US and around the world and the growth of socialist and anti-capitalist sentiment, Sanders and the Democratic Party would have workers believe that they can improve their conditions, not through collective struggle, but through appeals to the magnanimity of billionaires like Bezos.
New Amazon facility in Oregon: Tax cuts for corporation, poverty wages for workers
By Kayla Costa and Emily Edison
27 September 2018
After years of tax-break negotiation and construction, a new Amazon fulfillment center will soon be running at full speed in Troutdale, Oregon, a town 15 miles east of Portland. Amazon anticipates the opening of 1,500 full-time positions at the fulfillment center, which would immediately double the number of Oregon employees working for the Seattle-based internet retail and logistics giant.
Residents in the area have been inundated with radio advertisements and news articles about the new facility, which present Amazon as a benevolent provider of “competitive wages, benefits, stocks, and a pre-paid tuition program.” Presenting the $14 an hour that will be paid at the fulfillment center as generous is a cruel joke, especially given the staggeringly high rental and living costs in the greater Portland area.
The massive 855,000-square foot facility is the first of its scale in Oregon, and cost $180 million to build. Operating with Amazon’s notorious logistics model, based on fast-paced labor and automated machines, the fulfillment center will specialize in large-sized products, such as exercise equipment and furniture. There will also be massive fulfillment centers opening in Salem, Oregon this year, and in North Portland next year.
Local and state officials offered a total of $213.1 million in tax breaks to provide Amazon free rein to expand its exploitation of the working class in Oregon, specifically in rural and suburban resource-poor areas of the state. Amazon has acquired $1.12 billion in tax cuts across the United States since 2000, but Oregon achieved the highest amount promised to the corporation of all fifty states.
Of this giant amount, $176 million would come through Oregon’s Strategic Investment Program, for a proposed data center in the city of Hermiston. Corporations in Oregon pay below 8 percent in excise taxes, and account for only 38 percent of all state taxes, the 4th lowest percentage of the 50 states and Washington D.C.
These tax cuts will be paid for by working and middle-class people in the state through the form of more cuts in essential public services. Oregon already trailed West Virginia and Louisiana in per pupil school funding, according to the 2016 Annual Survey of School System Finances, U.S. Census Bureau. Several school districts, including Portland, have carried out budget cuts and layoffs.
In the summer of 2017, the government bodies of Port of Portland and Troutdale handed the trillion-dollar corporation $9.6 million in tax breaks for the construction of the Troutdale super-hub. In an effort to justify this tax giveaway, politicians in Troutdale said Amazon would pay workers at least $15 an hour in total compensation, including all benefits.
The approval of tax breaks for the construction of the Troutdale and North Portland hubs went through unanimous votes by Port of Portland commissioners. The commission is a nine-member body, appointed by the governor and approved by the state Senate, that oversees economic development of airports, marine terminals and business parks in the area.
Most of these commissioners are trusted members of the corporate and political elite and their flunkeys in the union bureaucracy. They include Vice President of Nike, Inc., and former Obama aide Sean O’Hollaren, President of Oregon AFL-CIO Tom Chamberlain, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 48 Gary Young; and Intel Corporation Vice President Pat McDonald.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown, center, with local officials at site of Amazon fulfillment center in Troutdale in June 2017
Democratic Governor Kate Brown, who has appointed at least two commissioners since she was elected in 2014, praised the opening of the Amazon center. At a press conference about the approval of the fulfillment center in June of last year, she told the crowd of commissioners and business elites, “Today is a celebration…that this community created together.” She continued by praising the local government’s “vision and leadership that paved the way for this investment” and thanking “Amazon for seeing Troutdale and Oregon as a promising part of your future.”
Kate Brown speaks as a representative of the entire political establishment at local and state levels, which is dominated by the Democratic Party in Portland and the Republican Party in the southern and eastern parts of the state.
Port of Portland commissioners, in conjunction with Troutdale leaders, used Amazon’s contract to launch the construction of a 344,000-square foot facility at the Troutdale Reynolds Industrial Park, to host Amazon, FedEx, and other corporate industrial centers.
Like many other locations chosen by Amazon, the industrial park is the site of a former manufacturing plant, where workers once had relatively secure and good paying jobs. The Reynolds aluminum manufacturing plant operated for 60 years and was one of the biggest employers in the Portland area, with 800 workers at its peak, before it was closed by Alcoa in 2000.
Between the Portland metro-area cities of Troutdale, nearby Gresham and Wood Village, there exists a working-class area of just under 170,000 residents. While official unemployment rates in the area remain close to the national average of 5 percent, 18.8 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line, mostly between the ages of 18 and 40 years old, according to Data USA. Many workers are employed in warehousing, retail, food and health services, where they have all seen wages stagnate alongside soaring costs of living.
According to a 2017 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Portland area is $1,242. The coalition says a minimum wage of $23.88 an hour at forty hours per week would be required to afford rental costs. The average renter, however, earns under $15 an hour.
In order to afford housing, on top of food, healthcare, clothing and other basic necessities, workers often have to live in precarious conditions or take on multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Such is the situation of hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers internationally. Many are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and still others must rely on dwindling social assistance in addition to their income from Amazon in order to survive. Around the country, Amazon workers are being driven to exhaustion and physical deterioration, broken down with injuries, then cast aside and ignored by management.
These poverty conditions stand in stark contrast to the $1 trillion value of the Amazon corporation, along with the $160 billion personal wealth of CEO Jeff Bezos, who makes $3,000 per second off the backs of the company’s highly exploited workers.
Amazon workers are in a powerful position, however, to launch their own offensive to improve their conditions and living standards. Connected to millions of other workers through an interconnected logistics and technology chain in the US and global economy, a collective struggle by Amazon workers would quickly impact virtually every sector of the economy.
Silicon Valley’s corrupt nexus: War, censorship and inequality
17 September 2018
On Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, will give the keynote address to the US Air Force Association’s annual conference. Bezos will discuss “how industry can better partner” with the US military.
Bezos’ speech comes amid his Seattle-based firm’s lobbying to win a $10 billion contract, known as “Project JEDI,” to host large sections of the Pentagon’s operations infrastructure on the internet cloud. In a move that will likely win him points with the military brass awarding the contract, Bezos recently donated $10 million to a Virginia-based super PAC seeking to elect veterans to office and create a “less polarized government.”
The Amazon CEO will appear as the representative of the world’s second-largest company by market capitalization, the second-largest employer in the United States, the world’s biggest provider of cloud computing services, and America’s largest e-commerce retailer, with twice the sales of the next nine competitors.
Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, is among America’s most powerful oligarchs. His speech to the Air Force Association embodies the corrupt nexus between the military, the financial oligarchy, the media and the high-tech companies, all of which are working to create a regime of censorship targeting left-wing, anti-war and socialist viewpoints.
This partnership expresses, in practice, the vision laid out in the Pentagon’s latest National Security Strategy, which calls for “the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military.”
This is a formula for a society in which all of the mechanisms of social control are jointly harnessed to defend and expand the wealth and power of America’s financial oligarchy. Toward this authoritarian end, Bezos and company are mobilizing one of the critical mechanisms—the media.
Bezos’ Washington Post has prepared its owner’s appearance at the Air Force event with a series of op-eds and editorials calling for a closer partnership between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. More than any other major US newspaper, the Post has argued for the fusion of America’s high-tech sector with its military, in line with the Pentagon’s so-called “third offset” strategy, which aims to regain America’s “military edge” by “harnessing a range of technologies, including robotics, autonomous systems and big data,” in the words of the Economist.
The Post’s campaign for a further integration of technology corporations with the military has been combined with attacks on tech workers who oppose the alliance of the firms for which they work with the US war machine.
Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of America’s brightest minds have gone to work in Northern California’s Silicon Valley and its offshoot in Seattle, lured by promises that “people with passion can change the world for the better,” in the words of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and the promise that they would help “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” in the words of Google’s mission statement.
But each year, more and more technology workers have found themselves involved in developing the means to carry out mass murder, censorship and political repression, prompting protests by workers at Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
In June, Amazon workers issued an open letter opposing the company’s provision of facial recognition technology to police forces as well as its cloud computing contracts with the agencies carrying out Trump’s Gestapo-style attacks on immigrants.
That same month, Google announced that it would end its involvement in a Pentagon program to build artificial intelligence capabilities for military drones after more than a thousand Google employees signed a letter demanding that Google swear off building “weapons of war.”
The Washington Post has opposed these protests. In an August 8 op-ed, two executives from Anduril Industries, a military defense contractor seeking to sell virtual reality systems to the Pentagon, condemned the protesting workers. “We understand that tech workers want to build things used to help, not harm,” the executives wrote. “We feel the same way,” they continued. “But ostracizing the US military could have the opposite effect of what these protesters intend: If tech companies want to promote peace, they should stand with, not against, the United States’ defense community.”
The authors added: “The world is safer and more peaceful with strong US leadership. That requires the US government to maintain its advantage in critical technologies such as AI. But doing so will be difficult if Silicon Valley’s rising hostility toward working with Washington continues.”
The Post reiterated these points in an editorial last week entitled “Silicon Valley should work with the military on AI.” Bezos’s newspaper made the cynical argument that the technology companies should partner with the Pentagon because the result might be technologies with applications outside of mass murder. “DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] contractors will probably develop products with non-lethal applications,” the Post declared.
The open secret of Silicon Valley’s collaboration with the Pentagon is that the wars to be fought with the help of artificial intelligence will not take place only beyond America’s borders—they will also include class and civil wars.
America’s financial oligarchy, whose wealth has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crash, is issuing warnings about the dangers posed to its wealth by an increasingly restive and angry working class. In a report published last week, JPMorgan Chase warned about the potential impact of a new financial crisis in fueling political opposition.
The report by the biggest US bank stated: “The next crisis is also likely to result in social tensions similar to those witnessed 50 years ago in 1968”—a year that saw urban rebellions and mass protests against the Vietnam war in the US, the May–June general strike in France, and a global radicalization of the working class.
“In 1968,” the report continued, “TV and investigative journalism provided a generation of baby boomers access to unfiltered information on social developments such as Vietnam and other proxy wars, civil rights movements, income inequality, etc. Similar to 1968, the internet today (social media, leaked documents, etc.) provides millennials with unrestricted access to information on a surprisingly similar range of issues. In addition to information, the internet provides a platform for various social groups to become more self-aware, polarized and organized.”
Such groups “span various social dimensions based on differences in income/wealth,” warned the bank. In other words, the looming financial crisis will likely spark a mass movement of the working class against social inequality.
Recognizing the immense power of the internet to mobilize opposition to the existing social order, under conditions where a mass audience for socialism is emerging among workers and young people, America’s leading technology companies, working with the state, are scrambling to impose political censorship.
At a congressional hearing last week, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg pledged to replace “bad speech” with “alternative facts” in users’ news feeds. She boasted that her company now employs some 20,000 people to censor content.
Google, for its part, has continued and intensified its censorship of left-wing, anti-war and socialist websites. Since the World Socialist Web Site first reported last year that changes to Google’s algorithms had led to a sharp fall in the readership of 13 left-wing sites, the search traffic of these sites has plunged even further, hitting a combined decline of 50 percent.
The reactionary nexus between Silicon Valley, the CIA and the Pentagon must be—and will be—opposed. All over the world, workers are entering into struggle—from teachers and Amazon, UPS and postal workers in the United States, to pilots and cabin crew in Europe, to construction workers in Turkey. These workers must understand that they are the targets of censorship, and that they must mobilize to fight the drive to silence socialist and left-wing oppositional views.
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