Friday, November 9, 2018

KOCH BROTHERS' RENT BOY PAUL RYAN'S REPUBLICANISM FOR PELOSI'S OPEN BORDERS AND MORE TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH... TANKS AGAIN!


Midterms: Paul Ryan’s Republicanism Tanks at the Ballot Box. Again


Paul Ryan Holds Weekly Press Briefing At The Capitol
Getty Images
7:50




The night before the midterm elections, House Speaker Paul Ryan touted “tax reform 2.0,” the economy, and the rebuilding of the United States military as the agenda accomplishments of the Republican-controlled Congress.

“Frankly, our members feel pretty good because they have a really good message … I mean look at what we’ve just been able to achieve in Congress with the President in the last two years,” Ryan told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “A record economy, the military being rebuilt, people feeling better about things … wages growing faster than they have since before the recession.”
The accomplishments of the GOP Congress, though, have been slim with Ryan in charge. Despite President Trump winning the 2016 presidential election with a populist message on healthcare and a nationalist message on immigration, Ryan and the Republican Congress failed to deliver reforms on either of the issues.
That failure was evident in the midterm elections Tuesday night as Democrats regained control of the House running on the talking point that Republicans have been unsuccessful in bringing down the cost of healthcare.
In the first year of Trump’s presidency, no immigration plan was coordinated and the populist initiative that the president touted on healthcare — allowing Americans to buy plans across state lines — quickly fell apart in the House and Senate when Republicans did not have the votes to replace Obamacare.
A handful of healthcare reforms were enacted, mostly by Trump through regulation changes and an executive order, but Republicans were unable to coalesce a national message around their subtle reforms. This ultimately led to individual Republicans having to defend themselves against attacks that they would strip away protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions.
The only major piece of legislation in the two years of Ryan’s speakership under Trump came in the form of tax cuts — which since its passing has become increasingly unpopular.

House Speaker Paul Ryan speaks after the House passed its version of the tax overhaul in the Rayburn Room of the US Capitol on November 16, 2017 in Washington, DC. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Last year, the White House released an extensive list of immigration principles that the administration was looking for the GOP Congress to adopt with legislation.
Trump’s manifesto included full funding for a border wall, making E-Verify mandatory to stop illegal hiring, ending the process of “chain migration” that has driven mass legal immigration to the country, and ending the unpopular Diversity Visa Lottery which gives out 50,000 visas every year to a random selection of foreign nationals.
Even with a terrorist attack suspected to have been committed by a foreign national who arrived in the U.S. on the Visa Lottery program, Ryan’s GOP Congress did not make any reforms to the country’s immigration system.
Thus, the first year of Trump ended with no successful legislative agenda from Ryan and the Republicans on immigration or health care.
Months later, in April of this year, the Republicans came upon a moment to secure full funding for Trump’s proposed border wall. The omnibus spending bill presented an opportunity for Trump’s pro-American immigration reforms.
Yet again, the effort failed with the leadership of Ryan.
Instead, the omnibus spending bill only gave Trump $1.6 billion for his border wall and barred him from building a wall using the prototypes that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had been testing in the San Diego desert. The omnibus spending bill has relegated Trump to building new border wall barriers of the same materials used by the Bush and Obama administrations.
During the Fox News interview the night before the midterms, Ryan noted Democrats’ campaign to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
“Look, people do care about national security,” Ryan said. “We want a secure border, that’s really clear. The Democrats want to abolish ICE, it’s ridiculous.”
But, the omnibus spending bill did not fund the 1,000 new ICE agents that Trump had asked and allowed for more Catch and Release at the border by not funding adequate detention space for border crossers and asylum seekers to be housed in while they await their hearings.
Less than a year after Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty program for more than a million illegal aliens, a group of “Never Trump” Republican House members tried to force a DACA amnesty through Congress through a discharge petition.
Ryan did not thwart the discharge petition, nor did he have funding pulled from the congressional members involved with the petition. Many of those DACA amnesty House Republicans lost in the midterms, including Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) and Rep. Mia Love (R-UT).
The billionaire Steve Schwarzman who convinced Trump for months not to end the DACA program is one of the largest donors to the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) which is closely aligned with Ryan.
Between March and October, the eight months leading up to the midterm elections, immigration became the number one priority of GOP voters, conservatives, and Trump supporters. Tax reform was consistently one of the lowest priorities of voters.
Among all U.S. voters, health care and immigration were the biggest issues facing the nation.
For Ryan, the health care and immigration priorities of Americans continued to be of no concern to him as he refused to sway from his economic libertarian agenda despite there being no support for such a plan even amongst his own constituency.
“The one thing that got away from us, which is my signature issue, is entitlement reform,” Ryan said in an April interview.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), surrounded by American families, and members of the House Republican leadership introduce tax reform legislation November 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News in May, Trump adviser Stephen Miller said immigration would be the leading issue heading into the midterm elections. Trump, likewise, increasingly shifted his midterm election message away from tax cuts and towards immigration.
Still, Ryan and the Republican establishment focused their attention on tax reform and their disdain for Obamacare despite providing no legislative track on the issue.
“And the Democrats are talking about rolling back and raising taxes, more spending, they’re proposing basically to undo all the progress we’ve been having,” Ryan said in his last interview before the midterm elections. “And they want socialized medicine which would be a disaster for our country plus a $32 trillion tax increase to pay for it.”
Then, with the latest defense spending bill, Trump’s border wall was ignored once again despite voters’ brewing frustration that the president’s nationalist immigration agenda was being held up by his own party in Congress.
The final days leading up to the midterm elections, Trump ignited his base and swing voters by raising the issue of birthright citizenship where the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens are given automatic U.S. citizenship. The policy has resulted in an anchor baby population of at least 4.5 million with nearly 300,000 being rewarded with citizenship every year.
Ryan punted the issue, telling local media that Trump did not have the authority to end the anchor baby policy through executive action, comparing the president to Obama.
“You cannot end birthright citizenship with an Executive Order,” Ryan said. “We didn’t like it when Obama tried changing immigration laws via executive action, and obviously as conservatives, we believe in the Constitution.”
Meanwhile, Republican voters and conservatives sided with Trump against Ryan’s comment, with more than 7-in-10 Republicans telling pollsters just before the midterms that birthright citizenship should be ended.
At the ballot box, U.S. voters elected Democrats to take back control of the House. In exit polls, voters confirmed what Trump had known all along but what Ryan had refused to deliver on in favor of his conservative beltway platform.
American voters for the ninth consecutive month said health care and immigration were the issues that drove them to the polls. Both remain unresolved.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

AMERICA, THE ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE STATE
“Through love of having children we're going to take over."  Augustin Cebada, Information Minister of Brown Berets, militant para-military soldiers of Aztlan shouting at U.S. citizens at an Independence Day rally in Los Angeles, 7/4/96

“The children of illegal aliens are commonly known as “anchor babies,” as they anchor their illegal alien and noncitizen parents in the U.S. There are at least 4.5 million anchor babies in the country, a population that exceeds the total number of annual American births.”   JOHN BINDER
“As Breitbart News recently reported, there are more anchor baby births in the Los Angeles, California metro area than the total U.S. births in 14 states and the District of Colombia. Every year, American taxpayers are billed about $2.4 billion to pay for the births of illegal aliens.” JOHN BINDER


Ann Coulter: I’m Glad to See the Pro-Amnesty Republicans Go



 679
2:25

Ann Coulter joined Breitbart News and SiriusXM Patriot on Tuesday for special coverage of Election Night 2018.

Breitbart News Editor in Chief Alex Marlow, along with co-hosts Andrew Wilkow of the Wilkow Majority, David Webb of the David Webb Show, and Rick Ungar of the Steele & Ungar show were joined by special guest Ann Coulter on Tuesday night for special live coverage of Election Night 2018 on SiriusXM Patriot. (Interview begins above at time-code 2:05:40.)
Coulter seemed optimistic, despite the GOP being in imminent danger of losing the House of Representatives.
“I always figured the House was lost,” said Coulter, “I was worried about the Senate, and wow, we did not lose the Senate.”
“We held seats, picked up seats,” said Coulter excitedly, “The Senate is the important body, as the Kavanaugh hearings just demonstrated. We can still confirm the judges, Trump isn’t being removed from office, and this temporary [Democrat] control of the House, I mean, that’s the way things go.”
“How many seats did Obama lose in his first midterm election?” Reminisced Coulter, “It was like 63, it was a blowout.”
Coulter added that she was glad to get rid of “deadwood” Republicans in the House.
“It’s never good for Democrats to have control of anything, don’t get me wrong.”
“I’m glad to see a lot of those Republicans go — and also, now Trump can’t sit around blaming the admittedly useless congressional Republicans. So, maybe someone will remind him that he’s the Commander-in-chief, and he doesn’t need Congress to build the wall.”
“Just build the wall and put lots of judges on the courts — and you’ll guarantee your reelection,” said Coulter, as advice to President Donald Trump.
Coulter closed her interview by reminding our hosts what the future will be like under Democratic Party leadership in the House.
“The annoying thing — and I mean, it’ll be annoying to Trump, but I think he should get over it,” laughed Coulter, “It’s going to be fantastic, and will guarantee his reelection — what we’re going to see is a lot more of Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.




Midterm ElectionPoliticsVideo2018 midterm electionsAmnestyAnn CoulterDonald TrumpimmigrationU.S. House of Representatives

Pro-American Reformers: Stealth Amnesty Bills Coming in Lame-Duck Session






amnesty
Mark Wilson/Getty
7:43

Businesses and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, will try to sneak a bipartisan amnesty bill through Congress’ lame-duck session in December as voters are distracted by Christmas, say pro-American immigration reformers.

“This is why they come back for a lame duck — so they can accomplish all the things they could not do when the voters’ eyes on them,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government relations for NumbersUSA.
The lame-duck session is scheduled for December because GOP and Democratic leaders stalled 2019 spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security and the border wall. Without 2019 funding, some subsidiary DHS offices will close in December.
One huge danger ahead, said Jenks, is that retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan will push an amnesty bill to help Wall Street and the cheap-labor lobbyists in Washington. “I fully expect that Paul Ryan will do as much as he possibly can on his way out the door because he is just on the other side” of the public’s preference for a low-immigration, high-wage, economic policy, she said. 
“The big fear is that we go back into [White House] talks about exchanging DACA for a border wall,” she said. “That is not acceptable because a wall [alone] is not going to have a significant impact on illegal immigration.” For example, cartel smugglers advise their illegal-migrant clients to claim asylum and to bring children, because those tactics trigger the catch-and-release loopholes which allow migrants to walk through the existing fences and into U.S. jobs, she said. 
“A [wall-for-DACA] deal like that would just set us for the next amnesty” once more migrants rush their children across the border to declare them as the next generation of DACA migrants, she said.
The Democrats’ no-strings DACA deal would put roughly 3 million resident illegals on a fast-track to citizenship and the ballot-box, and also allow the new immigrants to bring millions of their family members via unreformed chain-migration rules. 
The wall-for-DACA deal is damaging, which is “precisely why [Sen. Chuck] Schumer and [Rep. Nancy] Pelosi were willing to go along with it last time,” she said. 
An amnesty-for-wall deal is not needed.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he expects to get another $1.6 billion for border-fence funding in December. That number will bring his total spending on the wall up to $4.8 billion in three years.
Also, Trump’s “Hire American,” no-amnesty policies are successfully pushing voters’ wages up before the 202o elections. Wages are rising because CEOs complain they cannot hire additional cheap legal immigrants or visa workers — and because they increasingly risk prosecution if they hire even cheaper illegal migrants.
Also, Trump is using the no-cost experts and rules provided by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to help curb border migration.
But CEOs will push for a last-minute December amnesty because the push will cost them nothing to try, because they want to flood the labor market to stall Americans’ rising wages, and because they are losing many of their House GOP supporters in January.
Roughly half of the GOP’s 34 legislators who openly backed business-backed amnesty measures in 2017 and 2018 will be gone from Congress in January, according to a survey by Breitbart News. The legislators will be gone because they were defeated by Democrats or because they retired before the election.
The roughly 16 exiting legislators include Virginia’s Rep. Scott Tayler, Florida’s Chris Curbelo, Utah’s Mia Love, Pennsylvania’s Charlie Dent, Colorado’s Mike Coffman, New Jersey’s Leonard Lance, Texas Joe Barton, and several others.
The pro-amnesty GOP legislators backed a Discharge Petition in May 2018 which threatened to let Democrats pass a huge pro-amnesty bill in Ryan’s House, or signed a pro-amnesty letter in December 2017 which called for a no-strings amnesty for roughly 3 million ‘DACA’ illegal immigrants.
The two pushes were backed by many business donors, via such groups as the Congressional Leadership Fund and FWD.us, a lobbying group for West Coast investors, including Mark Zuckerberg.
Both amnesty pushes were used by Ryan and his deputies to zig-zag towards an amnesty bill. Ryan’s plans crashed in June when 111 GOP legislators voted against his draft amnesty bill. A pro-American version of the reform bill, drafted by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, was blocked by 41 business-first GOP legislators, with the tacit approval of Ryan.
Retiring Ryan has been a strong advocate for a cheap-labor amnesty for many years, along with several of his top allies, including Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, a business-first legislator who runs the critical rules committee.
But Ryan is retiring, and Sessions was defeated in his immigrant-heavy Dallas County district after 22 years in Congress. “In 2010, I was proud to lead the effort to bring in a wave of conservatism and put our country on the path towards economic prosperity,” Sessions said in his concession speech. “Unfortunately, that success was not enough to stem the liberal tide of people who have moved here from across the country.”
Another group of GOP legislators quietly backed Kansas Rep. Kevin Yoder’s July 25 push to provide fast-track green cards to roughly 300,000 Indian and Chinese visa-workers and their families.
The green-card giveaway was added in a surprise last-minute move by Yoder to the 2019 spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security. The Yoder giveaway was combined with a rollback of border security, plus an expansion of H-2A and H-2B work-visas for farmers and the landscaping industry, and it was sweetened with the promise of $5 billion for a border wall. GOP legislators knew Yoder’s measure was unpopular, so they approved it via an anonymous, unrecorded voice-vote.
Those Yoder provisions are in the House spending bill. Some form of the DHS bill must be approved by the House and merged with the Senate funding bill.
Yoder used the promise of a green-card giveaway to win votes from Indian immigrants in his Kansas district — but he was defeated by a massive turnout of American college-graduate voters who would lose jobs and salaries to Yoder’s wave of college-grad outsourcing workers. Yoder’s campaign was publicly opposed by a group of U.S. professionals who rented billboards in his district.
“Somebody should learn some kind of lesson from” Yoder’s defeat, Jenks said. But, she added, the pro-amnesty GOP legislators “don’t normally learn lessons from anything.”
Democrats also fail to recognize that voters dislike cheap-labor amnesties. In 2014, Schumer lost nine Senate seats after pushing the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty. After that experience, he quickly ended his pro-amnesty plan in January to block government funding once overnight polls showed it was very unpopular.  
In the House, yet more GOP legislators pushed hard for a new “H-2C” work visa program that would allow their farm-district supporters to hire foreign farmworkers for much less than they have to pay to use the fast-growing H-2A farm-worker visa.
The H-2C push was largely blocked by West Coast agribusiness groups who are closely allied to Democrats. In turn, Democratic legislators want at least 1 million illegal farm-workers to get a fast-track to green cards and citizenship.
The temporary failure of the H-2C push is now forcing farms and dairies to pay higher salaries to their existing workforces and to buy additional farm machinery from American factory workers.
Jenks’ fear is that the various pro-amnesty GOP legislators who support the DACA amnesty, the green-card giveaway, the H-2B expansion, and the H-2C program may be united by Ryan and Trump in December for another dash towards a big bipartisan cheap-labor amnesty in exchange for a wall that cannot stop savvy asylum-seeking economic migrants.
“You can hear the bipartisan talk about ‘solutions’ now,” said Jenks. “That is never good on immigration.”
Washington knows the Democrats will be running the House next year, Jenks said. “It is now a matter of stopping bad deals … that is what we need [GOP legislators] to focus on.”

CITIZENSHIP AND CHOICE

How our current immigration system is a political scam.




9
Reprinted from American Greatness.
As caravans of would-be illegal migrants head for our southern border, each bigger and better organized than the last; as Chinese travel agencies schedule trips to America for mothers-soon-to-be; as the number of births to foreigners and illegals added to the results of chain migration (a.k.a “family reunification”) make up an ever-growing part of the voting public; and as the Democratic Party stakes its future power on importing a new set of Americans it can control, more and more of today’s Americans are realizing that our immigration system since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 is a political scam.
It is past time we address the question of whom we shall call to join this political enterprise called the United States of America as full members—and why we should be calling them—with the seriousness it deserves. The short answer has to be: that we choose to admit them because they understand, love, and are eager to support what this country is about.
With few exceptions (Indians, descendants of slaves and of the fewer than 3 million who set the country’s character in 1776-89) today’s Americans are people or descendants of people who chose to join this country and its character. Uniquely in history, America has been able to assimilate people of all colors and creeds because these people very much wanted to be assimilated. Many were Americans at heart before they got here. That’s why they came.
My friend, Peter Schramm, recalled his father—realizing that the 1956 revolution against the Soviets was going to fail—telling the family that they would flee to America. Now Peter, who was 10 years old at the time, would have gone anywhere his father asked him to go, but he was confused about why his dad had chosen America, so he asked, “Why America?” His father’s answer is instructive: ““Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”
My own experience confirms his. On the foggy morning of August 8, 1955, as the S.S. Constitution slipped past the Statue of Liberty, I stood with a couple of hundred other immigrants on the port rail of the third-class section. There were tears, and not a few sobs. None of us spoke any English. I was 13 and, like the others, had seen America in the movies, had heard stories, and had gone through the extensive screening process. We knew the basics: equality, freedom, opportunity, non-stop work, and utter seriousness. Having chatted with many of the others over the 10-day voyage, it seemed that I was already an American patriot in the company of American patriots.
Had we read what Lincoln had to say about immigrants becoming citizens, “equal in all things with us,” we would have cheered even more than did his 1858 audience: “When they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, [loud and long continued applause] and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.”
Mutual choice is what successful immigration-cum-assimilation is all about. Joining bodies and souls in mutual affection and support is a matter of mutual commitment, much like marriage. If you’ve got mutual commitment, you’ve got everything. If you don’t, you are just buying trouble.
We had chosen America. But, boy, oh boy! America had chosen us as well. The quota system was just the beginning. There had to be sponsors who were confident enough of us (just my widowed mom and myself) to pledge their substance. Our jobs were already secured, and zero blemishes of any kind had to be certified before the personal screening could begin. Two days of interviews covered personal habits, practices, and preferences, very much including religion and politics. Our examiners spent a long time on our views and expectations of America. I recall an hour answering questions about my Communist uncles, Pietro and Luigi. The examiner was skeptical. But my status in the top tier of the (then) highly competitive Italian educational system seemed to have tipped the scales favorably.
How then are we to think about citizenship for illegals, their children, as well as “anchor babies?”
Lyman Stone’s recent article in The Federalist argues that “Birthright citizenship creates birthright loyalty, whereas denying citizenship to foreign children helps alienate the entire family and slows down assimilation.” This sidesteps the crucial matter of mutual choice. To suggest that granting citizenship to all who are born here encourages their illegal parents, or their “birth tourist” parents “to see themselves as Americans,” looks at allegiance from the wrong end. How is granting someone the status and powers of citizenship supposed to make up for his failure to see himself as an American in the first place? How does satisfying a hunger and capacity for which there is no evidence generate that very hunger and capacity?
In the same breath, but without showing any causal relationship, Stone cites the short time of residence that Canada and Australia require to grant citizenship to immigrants as evidence that easy grants of citizenship make for successful assimilation. But that has it backwards as well: Successful assimilation results from both sides’ willingness to assimilate. Unreflectively, but correctly, he points out both these countries choose carefully to whom they extend the privilege of immigration and that, unlike the United States, neither country allows the uninvited to remain.
The United States might well follow their example, especially that of Australia, which summarily expels illegals. Or we might return to our pre-1965 practice, or even grant citizenship even more quickly to those immigrants we choose to take. Shucks! Americans would have risked nothing by immediately granting citizenship to those with whom I stood as we passed by the Statue of Liberty in 1955. They had chosen us, and we had chosen America.
On the table right now, however is merely whether to grant a share of rule to people, some yet unborn, who we don’t know. It is difficult to imagine something quite so inherently stupid.



The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
DEMOCRATS and their FAKE NEWS DEMOCRAT MEDIA support - - -
1) Illegal Immigration;
2) Birthright citizenship / ILLEGAL parents;
3) Chain Migration;
4) Lottery Immigration;
5) VISA overstays;
6) Sanctuary States, and Sanctuary Cities.
7) Doing away with ICE.
.
And because they refuse to completely FUND the Border Wall - they have proven that they support:
1) drug trafficking,
2) sex trafficking,
3) Latin American Gangs, and other Crimes.
.
DEMOCRATS want the US Taxpayers to support ILLEGALS at all levels of Government. (Current cost approx. $115 BILLION each year at all levels of government. It costs approx. $10,000 per year for the education of 1 child.)
http://MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

ALL BILLIONAIRES SUPPORT THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S AMNESTY, CHAIN MIGRATION AND EVER WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND LIFT CAPS ON ALL VISAS SO THEY CAN HIRE FOREIGN.


"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."


"The election campaign itself exemplified the corrupt, 

manipulated and antidemocratic character of so-called 

democracy in America. A midterm record of $5 billion was 

spent, provided mainly by billionaire oligarchs, to revamp 

the personnel and alter the balance of power in Congress and 

in state houses to more effectively continue the transfer of 

wealth from the working class to the oligarchy. More 

corporate money went to the Democrats than the 

Republicans."


The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.

DEMOCRATS and their FAKE NEWS DEMOCRAT MEDIA support - - -
1) Illegal Immigration;
2) Birthright citizenship / ILLEGAL parents;
3) Chain Migration;
4) Lottery Immigration;
5) VISA overstays;
6) Sanctuary States, and Sanctuary Cities.
7) Doing away with ICE.
.
And because they refuse to completely FUND the Border Wall - they have proven that they support:
1) drug trafficking,
2) sex trafficking,
3) Latin American Gangs, and other Crimes.
.
DEMOCRATS want the US Taxpayers to support ILLEGALS at all levels of Government. (Current cost approx. $115 BILLION each year at all levels of government. It costs approx. $10,000 per year for the education of 1 child.)

After midterm elections, Democrats call for bipartisan unity with Trump

8 November 2018
Following an election campaign dominated by President Donald Trump’s use of anti-immigrant racism to whip up fascistic elements and justify the domestic deployment of troops and attacks on the Bill of Rights, the Democratic Party regained control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans increased their control over the Senate.
Under conditions of massive popular opposition to the Trump administration, the Democrats conducted a right-wing campaign that virtually excluded the issues of central concern to the working class: social inequality, war and authoritarianism. They responded to the election by appealing to Trump for bipartisan collaboration.
During the campaign, the Democrats refused 

to even speak about their token opposition to 

Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.
The result, hardly the much-vaunted “blue wave,” was what the Democratic Party wanted: An election that would allow Trump to consolidate his control while giving the Democrats more input. As the Democratic leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said in the run-up to the vote, control of the House would give the Democrats “leverage.” They intend to use that influence to pressure Trump to pursue a more aggressive confrontation with Russia and a wider war in Syria.
Wall Street signaled its delight at the 

outcome with a stock surge. All of the 

major indices shot up, with the Dow Jones

Industrial Average climbing more than 500

points.
The election campaign itself exemplified the corrupt, manipulated and antidemocratic character of so-called democracy in America. A midterm record of $5 billion was spent, provided mainly by billionaire oligarchs, to revamp the personnel and alter the balance of power in Congress and in state houses to more effectively continue the transfer of wealth from the working class to the oligarchy. More corporate money went to the Democrats than the Republicans.
The Democrats used the election to deepen their orientation to privileged and wealthy layers of the middle class. The bulk of the House seats they picked up were in better-off suburbs. Perhaps a dozen of the newly elected Democratic congressmen came from the party’s contingent of former military, intelligence and State Department figures recruited as candidates by the party leadership. These “CIA Democrats” will set the tone for the Democratic caucus in the incoming Congress.
Amid the mutual mudslinging and lies, the working class is completely excluded from any input into the policies and decisions of the government.
Trump held a press conference Wednesday to make clear there would be no let-up in his right-wing policies. He attacked a reporter as an “enemy of the people” and warned the Democrats that any attempt to use their majority in the House to investigate his finances would result in a “warlike posture.” At the same time, he praised Pelosi and offered to supply Republican votes to assure her election as speaker of the new House that takes office in January.
Pelosi then held a rambling press conference in the course of which she used the terms “bipartisan” and “work together” dozens of times.
The New York Times posted an editorial spelling out the Democratic agenda of collaboration with Trump and intensification of his administration’s right-wing course. There is to be no talk of mild reforms broached early on in the campaign by so-called “progressive” Democrats, such as “Medicare for all” and the “abolition” of the Gestapo-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Instead, the Democrats are to talk about ethics “reform,” “transparency” and similar empty phrases. The “I” word (impeachment) is to be avoided, as is an excess of subpoenas and investigations. Instead, the Timesstates, “Finding a compromise path with Mr. Trump would be good policy and good politics.”
The central issue posed by the election is this: The rearrangement of seats in Congress, from the standpoint of the interests of the working class, is largely irrelevant. No positive change is possible outside of the independent intervention of the working class.
One thing is certain: the decisions that 

affect the lives of millions in America and 

billions around the world will remain in the

hands of a parasitic financial oligarchy. This 

modern-day aristocracy of multimillionaires and billionaires, 

personified in the repulsive figure of Trump, will pursue its selfish 

and criminal interests ruthlessly, regardless of tactical shifts and 

changes in the personnel of its bribed politicians. The class axis, 

strategic orientation and interests served remain the same.
A major factor driving the Democrats ever more desperately into the arms of Trump and the Republicans is the initial expression of a new upsurge of the class struggle. This year has seen a threefold increase in the number of major strikes in the US, including statewide strikes by teachers, strikes by hotel workers, walkouts by college instructors and contract rejections by hundreds of thousands of workers at United Parcel Service. This is part of an international growth of strikes and working-class protests.
The growth of the class struggle is an objective and inevitable process, driven by the staggering levels of social inequality. These social struggles will intensify.
The Democratic Party has nothing to offer the working class. It is one of two major right-wing parties of American capitalism. Its 

base, beyond Wall Street and the 

military/intelligence apparatus, is the wealthy 

upper-middle-class layers obsessed with 

racial and gender politics, which are seen as 

a means of carving out a bigger share of the 

wealth of the top 10 percent.
The Democrats give Trump and his neo-fascist allies free rein to seek to channel the anger of impoverished sections of the working class in the direction of nationalism.
The only progressive alternative is the development of the class struggle and its conscious mobilization in opposition to the entire political establishment and the capitalist system it upholds.
The broad mass of workers and youth are shifting to the left and increasingly looking for a socialist solution to the crisis. What they lack, however, is a clear understanding of the history of the class struggle and a political program that articulates the independent historic interests of the working class. This program must be brought into the working class by the revolutionary party—the Socialist Equality Party.
The answer to the dead end of the capitalist two-party system and the immense dangers of war and dictatorship is the building of the SEP to lead the coming mass struggles. The time to join and build this party is today.

Billionaires, corporate money swing toward Democrats

By our reporter 
7 November 2018
The 2018 midterms have been the most expensive congressional elections in US history, with an estimated $5.2 billion raised and spent by Election Day, according to data collected and reported by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). The total not only rose 35 percent over the previous midterm record in 2014, it exceeds the money spent on congressional races during the 2016 presidential election year.
Significantly, the Democratic Party and affiliated political action committees raked in the lion’s share of the record fundraising. Of the $4.7 billion spent by the latest reporting period, Democrats accounted for $2.5 billion, compared to $2.2 billion for Republican candidates and committees. Republicans have traditionally enjoyed a massive fundraising edge.
Democrats enjoyed a huge fundraising advantage in the contests for 435 seats in the House of Representatives, raising $951 million compared to $637 million for the Republicans, who held the majority of seats, 242 to 193. The Democratic advantage was particularly notable in the 29 seats considered “toss-ups,” where Democratic candidates raised an average of $5.5 million apiece, nearly twice the $3 million average for the Republicans.
Democrats also held the fundraising advantage in the Senate, $513 million to $361 million, but that was a smaller edge than in the House and actually represents a significant gain for the Republicans, since the Democrats had the advantage of incumbency in 26 of the 35 Senate seats that were at stake.
Overall, spending by the Democratic Party and associated groups was projected by the CRP to rise 44 percent over 2014, while the Republican Party and associated groups boosted their spending by only 21 percent.
Despite the claims that small-dollar donors were the driving force in the Democratic fundraising advantage, on the model of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2016, donations of under $200 accounted for only 16 percent of the funds raised by House candidates and 27 percent of the money raised by Senate candidates—with the latter figure swelled mainly by the small-donor fundraising for Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who raised a colossal $70 million for his campaign, more than double the cost of a typical presidential campaign 30 years ago.
Among the most significant changes in big-

money fundraising is the shift by Wall Street, 

with the securities and investment sector 

raising its spending by $100 million compared

to 2014 and favoring Democratic 

congressional candidates over Republicans 

by 52 percent to 46 percent. This is the first 

time Wall Street has favored congressional 

Democrats since 2006, the last time the 

Democratic Party won control of the House of

Representatives. Finance also backed the 

Democratic Party in 2008, by a margin of 58 

percent to 42 percent, but the bulk of that 

funding went to the presidential campaign of 

Barack Obama.
In 2010, Wall Street swung its funding back to the Republicans, who raked in 69 percent of the funds from stockbrokers and hedge fund bosses.
According to the CRP report, “Sixteen of the top 20 recipients of investment group affiliates are now Democrats, with Sen. Claire McCaskill taking the top spot at nearly $2 million.”
Other industries shifting towards the Democrats include hospitals and nursing homes, health professionals (doctors) and retail, while software services firms and law firms, already pro-Democratic, increased their contributions as well.
The top individual financial supporter of the Republicans was casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who spent $113 million in 2018, more than the $93 million he spent in support of Republicans in 2012. The second-ranking Republican moneyman was Richard Uihlein, who gave $39 million to Republican candidates.
These Republican billionaires were matched nearly dollar for dollar by two Democratic billionaires, hedge fund boss Tom Steyer, who spent $51 million, and media mogul Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, who pledged $100 million and had delivered $38 million by the time of the latest filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Self-funding candidates were led by Democratic House candidate David Trone in Maryland, who effectively bought a safe Democratic seat vacated by retirement, spending $16 million of his liquor fortune, and Republican Senate candidates Rick Scott in Florida (an estimated $50 million) and Bob Hugin in New Jersey ($27 million).

The amounts of money spent on individual races underscores the oligarchic character of American politics. What passes for democracy in America is actually the monopoly of the super-rich. For example, Senate contests in Florida and Texas have cost more than $100 million, those in Nevada, Arizona, Missouri and Indiana more than $30 million.

"A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”



"The ruling class was particularly terrified by the teachers’ 

walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were 

organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the 

unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate 

organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for 

decades."

“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.”

"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."


"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."

White House report on socialism

The specter of Marx haunts the American ruling class

6 November 2018
Last month, the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency of the Trump White House, released an extraordinary report titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” The report begins with the statement: “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the younger electorate.”
The very fact that the US government 
officially acknowledges a growth of popular 
support for socialism, particularly among the 
nation’s youth, testifies to vast changes taking
place in the political consciousness of the 
working class and the terror this is striking 
within the ruling elite. America is, after all, a 
country where anti-communism was for the 
greater part of a century a state-sponsored 
secular religion. No ruling class has so 
ruthlessly sought to exclude socialist politics 
from political discourse as the American ruling
class.

The 70-page document is itself an inane right-wing screed. It seeks to discredit socialism by identifying it with capitalist countries such as Venezuela that have expanded state ownership of parts of the economy while protecting private ownership of the banks, and, with the post-2008 collapse of oil and other commodity prices, increasingly attacked the living standards of the working class.
It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e., the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment.
The report’s arguments and themes find expression in the fascistic campaign speeches of Donald Trump, who routinely and absurdly attacks the Democrats as socialists and accuses them of seeking to turn America into another “socialist” Venezuela.
What has prompted this effort to blackguard socialism?
A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”
Last November, a poll conducted by YouGov showed that 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 21 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country.
In August of this year, a Gallup poll found that for the first time 
since the organization began tracking the figure, fewer than half 
of Americans aged 18–29 had a positive view of capitalism, while
more than half had a positive view of socialism. The 
percentage of young people viewing 
capitalism positively fell from 68 percent 
in 2010 to 45 percent this year, a 23-
percentage point drop in just eight years.

This surge in interest in socialism is bound up with a resurgence of class struggle in the US and internationally. In the United States, the number of major strikes so far this year, 21, is triple the number in 2017. The ruling class was particularly terrified by the teachers’ walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for decades.
The growth of the class struggle is an objective process that is driven by the global crisis of capitalism, which finds its most acute social and political expression in the center of world capitalism—the United States. It is the class struggle that provides the key to the fight for genuine socialism.
Masses of workers and youth are being driven into struggle and politically radicalized by decades of uninterrupted war and the staggering growth of social inequality. This process has accelerated during the 10 years since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The Obama years saw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in history, the escalation of the wars begun under Bush and their spread to Libya, Syria and Yemen, and the intensification of mass surveillance, attacks on immigrants and other police state measures.
This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling oligarchy.
Under conditions where the typical CEO in the US now makes in a single day almost as much as the average worker makes in an entire year, and the net worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans has doubled over the past decade, the working class is looking for a radical alternative to the status quo. As the Socialist Equality Party wrote in its program eight years ago, “The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in the United States”:
The change in objective conditions, however, will lead American workers to change their minds. The reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society.
The response of the ruling class is two-fold. First, the abandonment of bourgeois democratic forms of rule and the turn toward dictatorship. The run-up to the midterm elections has revealed the advanced stage of these preparations, with Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants, deployment of troops to the border, threats to gun down unarmed men, women and children seeking asylum, and his pledge to overturn the 14th Amendment establishing birthright citizenship.
That this has evoked no serious opposition from the Democrats and the media makes clear that the entire ruling class is united around a turn to authoritarianism. Indeed, the Democrats are spearheading the drive to censor the internet in order to silence left-wing and socialist opposition.
The second response is to promote phony socialists such as Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left organizations in order to confuse the working class and channel its opposition back behind the Democratic Party.
In 2018, with Sanders totally integrated into the Democratic Party leadership, this role has been largely delegated to the DSA, which functions as an arm of the Democrats. Two DSA members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, are likely to win seats in the House of Representatives as candidates of the Democratic Party.
The closer they come to taking office, the more they seek to distance themselves from their supposed socialist affiliation. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, joined Sanders in eulogizing the recently deceased war-monger John McCain, refused to answer when asked if she opposed the US wars in the Middle East, and dropped her campaign call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

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.”

Record high income in 2017 for top one percent of wage earners in US
By Gabriel Black
20 October 2018
In 2017, the top one percent of US wage earners received their highest paychecks ever, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Based on newly released data from the Social Security Administration, the EPI shows that the top one percent of the population saw their paychecks increase by 3.7 percent in 2017—a rate nearly quadruple the bottom 90 percent of the population. The growth was driven by the top 0.1 percent, which includes many CEOs and corporate executives, whose pay increased eight percent and averaged $2,757,000 last year.
The EPI report is only the latest exposure of the gaping inequality between the vast majority of the population and the modern-day aristocracy that rules over them.
The EPI shows that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners have increased their pay by 22.2 percent between 1979 and 2017. Today, this bottom 90 percent makes an average of just $36,182 a year, which is eaten up by the cost of housing and the growing burden of education, health care, and retirement.
Meanwhile, the top one percent has increased its wages by 157 percent during this same period, a rate seven times faster than the other group. This top segment makes an average of $718,766 a year. Those in-between, the 90th to 99th percentile, have increased their wages by 57.4 percent. They now make an average of $152,476 a year—more than four times the bottom 90 percent.
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
Even more, while the bottom 90 percent of the population may take in 61 percent of the wages, large sections of the workforce today barely pull in any income at all. For example, Social Security Administration data found that the bottom 54 percent of wage earners in the United States, 89.5 million people, make an average of just $15,100 a year. This 54 percent of the population earns only 17 percent of all wages paid in America.
However unequal, these wage inequalities still do not fully present the divide between rich and poor. The ultra-wealthy derive their wealth not primarily from wages, but from assets and equities—principally from the stock market. While the bottom 90 percent of the population made 61 percent of the wages in 2017, they owned even less, just 27 percent of the wealth (according to the World Inequality Report 2018 by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman).
The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.
Wages are so low in the United States that roughly half of the population falls deeper into debt every year. A Reuters report from July found that the pretax net income (that is, income minus expense) of the bottom 40 percent of the population was an average of negative $11,660. Even the middle quintile of the population, the 40th to 60th percentile, breaks even with an average of only $2,836 a year.
As the Social Security Administration numbers show, 67.4 percent of the population made less than the average wage, $48,250 a year in 2017, a sum that is inadequate to support a family in many cities—especially, with high housing costs, health care, education, and retirement factored in.
For the ruling class, though, workers’ wages are already too much. The volatility of the stock market and the deep fear that the current bull market will collapse has made politicians and businessmen anxious of any sign of wage increases.
In August, wages in the US rose just 0.2 percent above the inflation rate, the highest in nine years. Though the increase was tiny, it was enough to encourage the Federal Reserve to increase the interest rate past two percent for the first time since 2008. Raising interest rates helps to depress workers’ wages by lowering borrowing and spending. As the Financial Times noted, stopping wage growth was “central” to the Federal Reserve’s move.
Further analysis of the Social Security Administration data shows that in 2017, 147,754 people reported wages of 1 million dollars or more—roughly, the top 0.05 percent. Their combined total income of $372 billion could pay for the US federal education budget five times over.
These wages, however large, still pale in comparison to the money the ultra-rich acquire from the stock market. For example, share buybacks and dividend payments, a way of funneling money to shareholders, will eclipse $1 trillion this year.
Whatever the immediate source, the wealth of the rich derives from the great mass of people who do the actual work. Across the United States and around the world, workers, young people, and students have entered into struggle this year over pay, education, health care, immigration, war and democratic rights. This growing movement of the working class must set as its aim confiscating the wealth and power of this tiny parasitic oligarchy. Society’s wealth must be democratically controlled by those who produce it.

Democrats care about illegal aliens, not you


A buddy shared a heart-wrenching story with me during dinner.  His mom was killed Christmas Eve by a drunk-driving illegal alien.  The illegal had been caught four times driving drunk by police, never deported.  My buddy is number nine of his amazing mom's thirteen kids.  She was old-school Italian, waking up 3 A.M. five days a week to bake fresh bread and prepare meals for their family.  Dad cooked on weekends.
Christmas Eve 2002, she decided to make a quick run to the store for a few ingredients she needed to bake pies.  You can imagine the devastating horror their family felt upon being notified by police that their mother had been killed.
The illegal alien drunk driver received seven years and served only three and a half.  Two of my buddy's brothers attended the illegal alien's parole hearing to keep him behind bars, to no avail.  The multiple-offender illegal alien drunk driver was set free to roam the streets of America, not deported.
As I watched my buddy struggle to maintain his composure, my heart went out to him.  I thought, "Why are all of mainstream media's and Democrats' compassion and sympathy always given to illegals and nothing for Americans?"
While strolling with her dad on a San Francisco pier, 32-year-old Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal alien.  Kate's killer had a long criminal record.  The sanctuary city repeatedly welcomed back the illegal, deported five times and a seven times convicted felon, with open arms.  A liberal San Francisco jury found Kate's killer not guilty.  President Trump said their verdict was disgraceful.  Kate's dad recalls her last words as he held her in his arms: "help me, Dad." 
San Francisco politicians, mainstream media, and Democrats celebrated the leftist jury's outrageous not guilty verdict.  These leftists did not express an ounce of sympathy for American citizen Kate Steinle and her family.
Sixteen-year-old Kayla Cuevas was brutally murdered by MS-13 gang members who illegally invade our country.  Did Democrat Nancy Pelosi express an ounce of sympathy for Kayla's mom, Evelyn Rodriguez?  No.  Pelosi angrily attackedTrump for calling MS-13 gang members animals.  No compassion or sympathy for Americans.
Folks, I could fill this article with incidences in which American lives have been devastated by illegal repeat criminals and illegal gangs coddled by Democrats who run sanctuary cities.
Democrat California governor Jerry Brown actually signed a bill making California a "sanctuary state."  Brown's bill says his state will not cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement, putting American lives at risk.  Why is Brown gifting illegals rights while denying the rights of his American constituents?  While Californians struggle to find housing, Brown is assisting illegals with housing.  Illegals in California receive college tuition and numerous other benefits unavailable to legal citizens. 
So why are mainstream media and Democrats obsessed with opening our borders for the free flow of illegals and getting them addicted to government freebies?  One reason is that we have allowed old hippies to indoctrinate our kids in public schools for decades.  This has created a generation that believes that America is the greatest source of evil in the world, founded by white straight Christian men who stole everything from the rest of the world.  Our youths believe that it is morally unjust for America to have borders.  We must share what we stole.
Insidiously, the second reason why Democrats desire to flood the country with illegals is to gain political power.  Immigrants have contributed greatly to our culture.  The vast majority of illegals are unskilled workers easily seduced by Democrat politicians who promise to take care of them.  Democrats will do to illegals what they have done to blacks for decades: give them just enough to keep them poor, on welfare, and faithfully voting for Democrats.
This is why mainstream media and Democrats pretend to have all the compassion and sympathy in the world for illegals while ignoring the dire consequence coddling illegals has on the lives of Americans.
Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Help Lloyd spread the Truth: http://bit.ly/2kZqmUk
http://LloydMarcus.com

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


WALL STREET and the LOOTING of AMERICA

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.



WEST HOLLYWOOD WELCOME MAT FOR ILLEGALS… Not a single employer of illegals ever prosecuted in this LA RAZA SANCTUARY CITY where they print voting ballots in Spanish so illegals can vote for more! 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/does-reformation-hardware-in-west.html

The Democrats' Leadership Crisis



As we approach the midterm elections, the "leaders" of the Democratic Party sign on to a variety of hard-left proposals, including "Medicare for All."  The fact that many of the proposals are brutally expensive and would lead us into a brave new Venezuela seem completely lost in the woods.  One must also wonder at the ludicrous speed at which previously "rational" Democrats have swung from working across the aisle to become feet-in-stone resisters.  What is the source of the rage that turned mere humans into Green Hulks?
One might look at the occupants of senatorial and congressional seats for the answer.  After all, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are all members of "congressional leadership."  With varying degrees of extremism and volume, they all espouse pretty much the same rhetorical territory staked out by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the oblivious (to facts and history) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
We should have Medicare for All and a "living wage," regardless of work skills or industriousness, and we should relegate the police and prisons to the dustbin of the history of "justice."  Only Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum has gone that far to date, and the Pittsburgh massacre has led to that rhetoric being momentarily shelved.
To say these proposals are scary to Republicans would be an understatement.  As Peggy Noonan notes regarding the Kavanaugh cabaret, Republican senators are "amazed" and "terrified" that “seemingly, and without very much thought, nearly half the United States Senate has abandoned the presumption of innocence in this country, all to achieve a political goal.”
This isn't happening in a vacuum.
To any thoughtful observer, it is painfully clear that there are two distinct parts of the Democrat plantation: the D.C. swamp and the useful idiots in the streets.  The relationship between the two is intuitively obvious but seldom exposed.  The swamp exists because it has enough vocal support, both on the streets and in the press.  The very air it breathes is on the pages of the New York Times and commentary on CNN, fed by cameras in Berkeley and on the steps of the Supreme Court.
That brings us to the key question.  Which came first: the useful idiots, or the swamp?
No politician can survive without votes.  To get those votes, he takes positions he thinks will attract the maximum number of voters.  His problem is to identify just what those voters want and put on political clothes that make him look like a member of their movement, whatever that might be.  Thus, the joke that you can tell when a politician is lying when his lips are moving is usually a close representation of truth.
Today, a loud youth movement rebels against norms.  That's what juveniles do.  They push boundaries.  They haven't developed either an accurate vocabulary or an effective BS-detector.  In a solid family, they'd get called out for misbehaving like "Young Sheldon."  But when kids don't have firm parents (like Ben Carson's mother), they act out, searching for boundaries.  If parents enforce rules, children learn that they are safe inside those rules.  If there are no limits, kids push farther and farther looking for them.
In a mollycoddling society, where success is not rewarded and failure isn't punished, there are no safe spaces.  This creates fear.  No one is safe, because no one knows quite how far you can stray without lions and tigers and bears coming for you.
You can be a boy today, and a girl tomorrow.  No one can call you out on it, because that might somehow harm your psyche.  So now we have large numbers of completely confused young adults pushing boundaries, looking for limits, not realizing that their movement has declared limits to be off limits.  The safety they crave has been completely destroyed by the unfettered license they've been granted.  The result is chaos.
We should not be surprised when this mob of self-absorbed lemmings uses language badly while wielding batons against otherwise inoffensive adults.  These people have been trained to do this by their minimally more mature peer group, who is holding down claw-footed chairs inside the stone walls of academia.  That group has been certified in underwater basket-weaving and social activism as a reward for its own rebellion.  And its checks are signed by barely more mature administrators, whose own rudderless lives create total fear of that uncontained critical mass of effluvium called a student body.
In short, we have a huge mass of people who have, as Pat Paulsen noted, "a right to go to high school and end up with a third grade education."  Their "enthusiasm is exceeded only by their extreme lack of judgment."  And they vote.  Or at least enough of them voted to help elect Barack Obama.  Pat Paulsen was right.
Because of this uncritical mass of low-hanging fruit, the Political Pandas of the Left imagine an easy electoral win if they can convince the great unwashed that the Democrats are their saviors.  So instead of standing on any principle, they listen to the dumb masses and their echo chambers in the press.  Perceiving that the wind is blowing in a particular direction, they declare that they are, and have always been, totally in tune with them.  That's the very definition of Panda-ing.  If the masses don't wake up and Walk Away, those votes are in the bag.
Paul Joseph Watson puts it this way.  "Hello fellow humans.  I am celebrity No. 2932, I believe in everything that is safe and popular with people aged 18-35.  You may now praise me on the social media platform of your choice..."  "I agree.  Our agreement with each other's views means we are right and the other side's evil hatred must be stopped!"  In short, the Democrat "leaders" are in fact NPCs – Non Player Characters in video games, controlled by the program, with no vestige of real humanity.  The masses are equally NPCs.  "Well, I got all of the accounts suspended, but why do I still feel so empty and pathetic?"  You have to ask?
Dianne Feinstein used to support corporate bailouts and restrictions on union organizing.  As mayor of San Francisco, she vetoed domestic partner legislation and refused to march in a gay rights parade.  Now she is firmly in the LGBTQ corner and strongly supports labor unions.  This is typical of the left.  As long as leftists can keep themselves seated in the U.S. Capitol, they will take any stance whatever, as long as it looks as if it aligns with the loudest voices.
We can easily add example after example, but it's clear that the "leaders" of the left are no such thing.  A leader stands up for principles and propositions.  He defends them and works to achieve results consistent with them.  With the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, the left's "leaders" are NPCs.
Those "leaders" are people who, whether by accident of circumstance or political skill, have managed to position themselves to surf the current wave of loud emotion.  With rare exceptions, they have no established positions of their own.  So when all the rage is "against," they become "The Resistance."  When Ocasio-Cortez pushes for "Medicare for All," the other "leaders" follow the sound of the shouting.
The number of actual leaders on the left is small.  Bernie Sanders took a (misguided) position in favor of outright socialism long ago and has stuck with it.  He had little charisma to attract followers nationally, but when his longstanding convictions came in sync with the street, he came within an eyelash of winning the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
The Schumers and Pelosis of the Democratic Party are leaders, but not of the party.  Rather, they are organizational leaders of the Democrat caucus in D.C.  To have a voice in that caucus, you must toe the line they establish.  But even they shift their stances when the wind changes.  So they are followers of the mob.  They are the ultimate groupies, willing to surrender all principle in order to keep their positions of power in the halls of Congress.
"Where are they?  What are they doing?  I must find them!  I am their leader!"
Image credit: Amio Cajander.

The left is desperate and floundering badly



Readers of AT are likely to have seen the many, many clips of deranged leftists who spew their anti-Trump venom 24-7 on CNN and MSNBC.  No reason to name them all – they all say exactly the same things.  Each one of them morphs seamlessly into the next one.
It is hard to imagine the level of their rhetoric being worse than it was throughout the 2016 campaign, but it is.  They have gone off the rails, out of their minds.  While the published polls show most races in the midterms as very, very close, they may suspect that they are going to lose badly.  So bedeviled by Trump's success in all aspects of the government except illegal immigration, thanks to the Democrats and RINO republicans, they are melting down like the Wicked Witch of the West.
The left's accusations have ramped up beyond calling Trump Hitler, Stalin, tyrant, dictator, etc.  They call him racist a thousand times a day, even though the man has never said or done a racist thing in his life.  You can Google him with Rosa Parks and countless other African-American leaders with whom he has had long and close relationships.  These people who are pontificating all day long about Trump's "racism" are idiots spewing talking points with which they've been up-armored in order to turn Americans against the man.
It's not working.  The more they spout their groundless allegations of racism, homophobia, etc., the more they alienate the Americans who are gladly aware, day after day, of how much Trump has accomplished in just under two years.  Their lives are better.  The formerly jobless have jobs.  The tax cuts have let workers keep more of the money they earn.
Trump's detractors are embarrassing themselves, and most Americans are paying no attention to them.  These talking heads of the left have rendered themselves irrelevant.  So invested in destroying the president, they've lost their minds and any sense of journalistic ethics they might once have had.
There are only four days left before the midterm elections, and the bad behavior of the left media has escalated: fake mailers, fake threats (if you're a hunter, don't vote), etc.  There is no end, no low too low, for the Democrats; they mean to win by any means necessary.  Will all their dirty tricks (false allegations against Kavanaugh as a last-ditch effort to derail his nomination, find a dupe to charge with fake mail bombs) help them win on November 6?  Let us hope to God that Americans are not that gullible.  Let us pray they realize that the left today hopes for Trump's failure.  His successes are killing them.  They are horrified by every economic triumph.  These wins make them angrier and more desperate. 
We now know one thing for certain: The left does not care one bit about the daily lives or the prosperity of the 300-plus million American citizens who actually work for their livings, who are happy but not wealthy, who love their families and their country.  So desperate now, they are encouraging, fomenting the invasion of thousands of migrants from Central America.  This invasion has been organized, choreographed, and funded by leftists, here, there, and everywhere, including the ubiquitous George Soros, whose mission it has been for decades to destroy capitalism.
It was not so long ago that these same Democrats opposed exactly what they are promoting now – Clinton, Harry Reid, Feinstein, all of them.  Desperate now, they've changed their tune in order to create a permanent underclass and guaranteed votes.  These people, our leftists, are loathsome, and they are anti-American.
Those of us who are horrified by what the American left has become are terrified by the possibility that the Democrats retake the House.  They have made clear their plans for the destruction of Trump, the economy, and the country; they want revenge for his electoral victory.
Oleaginous Adam Schiff is still stuck on stupid regarding the claim that Trump colluded with Russia.  Maxine Waters, the most corrupt and moronic member of the House, is planning all manner of Trump harassment once head of the Banking and Financial Services Committee.  Demented Nancy Pelosi?  One can only speculate as to her plans to prevent Trump from governing.
If this possibility does not send voters toward an all Republican ticket, then we are fatally gullible.  These Democrats who are salivating at the prospect of wreaking havoc on the Trump administration are enemies of the state.  What they plan, if they win, will negatively affect all of our lives.  They want to undo the tax cuts and increase taxes on all of us.  They want to bring back all the purposefully destructive regulations Obama imposed on businesses across the board that hamstrung the economy.  They will make worse the damage already done to our health and medical care by Obamacare.  Trump has eased some of that pain; they want to make it painful again.  They will again engage with the worst actors on the world stage, as Obama did.  They will torment Israel, as Obama did.
Every bit of their campaign promises and slogans is a lie.  The left, as demonstrated by all the videos posted by Project Veritas, prove that the Democrats dissemble, lie, and cheat to win, and they are proud of their fakery.  They must not prevail, must not win on Tuesday.  They mean to ruin America as founded.  They mean to turn us into something the Founders meant to preclude: a class-based tyranny of the elite.  They mean to control every aspect of our lives, especially how we vote.
Don't fall for their treachery.  Let them flounder like the fish out of water they are.

ELECTION DAY: THE CLEAR-CUT CHOICE AMERICANS FACE

The stark contrast between the two parties.




Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
This year’s midterm election offers the starkest contrast between the two parties in recent memory, making the choice of which to vote for obvious. We have reached a critical point in the long-developing transformation of our country from a democratic republic to the concentrated power and “soft despotism” of a technocratic elite. This year’s vote will determine whether Donald Trump’s pushback against that transformation will continue, or whether it will stall.
Democrats, of course, have been the main engine of that transformation. For over a century their politics and policies have relentlessly shifted further and further toward the progressive left. They have embraced and institutionalized the doctrines of technocracy based on a rejection of the Constitutional order and its philosophical assumptions that common sense, practical experience, virtue, and traditional wisdom are sufficient to make people capable of self-rule.
Democrats also rejected the Founders’ deep-seated fear of concentrated and centralized power, a lesson taught on every page of political history for 2500 years: No amount of technical training or knowledge can change a flawed human nature and its permanent vulnerability to the lust for power that always ends in tyranny. Hence the Founders’ separation and dispersal of power among the sovereign states and the three branches of the federal government. Protected by divided powers, the liberty of self-reliant and self-governing citizens became the bulwark against the self-aggrandizement of power by elites, and the tyranny that follows.
The more the Democrat Party moved toward progressive technocracy, the more it abandoned ordered liberty as the most important reason for government to exist in the first place. Instead it endorsed the grand narrative of modernity: The inevitable progress and improvement of people and society, based on “human sciences” presumably as successful as physics and mathematics at effecting improving changes, would create the brave new world that avoided the miseries and sufferings of the benighted past. Technological progress became the model for this dream, its success in the material world now to be achieved in the human, social, and political realm. Of course, such a regime required “experts” to be installed in the centralized bureaus and agencies of the federal government, and to be given the power over policy once the purview of the representatives elected by the sovereign people and accountable to them at the ballot box. Now divided and balanced power was scorned as an 18th century anachronism and systematically degraded.
Accelerating under Franklin D. Roosevelt, this ideological program relentlessly moved forward, bringing along many Republicans who accepted the inevitability of the technocratic, redistributive state, and found that the centralization of power and privilege served their own interests as well. They embraced the Democrats’ underlying technocratic assumptions, and ceded their legislative authority to the cadres of unelected, unaccountable federal workers, and to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, which now essentially legislate laws, enforce them, and determine their legitimacy.
Eventually, this bipartisan progressive paradigm provided the foundations of the “ruling center” in which Democrats set the bounds of acceptable policy and political discourse, and Republicans practice the “preemptive cringe” in the face of Democrat overreach. This dynamic is lauded as “bipartisanship,” the preferred method of progressive rule by political technicians, who see citizens as their wards and clients, and dismiss the Constitution’s separation and balancing of power and factions as inefficient “partisanship” that keep us from “solving problems.”
What accelerated this long-developing transformation of the political order and brought us to this momentous choice was Barack Obama. Exploiting our dysfunctional racial narrative of indelible white racism and guilt, Obama was twice elected on the hope of racial redemption on the cheap, and the promise of technocratic expertise and “science-based” government. All voters had to do was ignore his public record of leftist progressivism, and whites would be forgiven. Then the races could start coexisting like human beings in a world with “no white Americans, no black Americans,” rather than remain trapped in an eternal racial melodrama in which whites always have to pay.
But the Democrats’ true intensions soon became clear. Racial reconciliation was a pipe-dream, as Obama and his Attorney General interfered in racial conflicts and stoked the fires. Policies like Obamacare well beyond the progressive-lite center began to emerge. Crackpot ideas of the cultural left escaped from the universities and began an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights in service to an illiberal identity politics. Political correctness, imposed on the country and enforced by the technocratic federal overlords, grew ever more intrusive and totalitarian. Citizens who resisted their patronizing tutelage were insulted as “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” “deplorables,” or “wacko-birds,” as the Dems’ favorite conservative John McCain called them. Protesting the admission of nearly two million poorly vetted immigrants a year was decried as “xenophobia” and “racism.” Patriotism and national pride were demonized, and American sovereignty subordinated to the global technocratic elite and its “rules-based order” alleged to be superior to a toxic American exceptionalism.
But typical of all tyrants, the Democrats overreached. Obamacare, growth-killing regulations, and higher taxes at home; and a foreign policy of retreat, “leading from behind,” and apology for America’s sins abroad marked the progressives’ hubristic certainty that they could ride roughshod over the bipartisan consensus that at least had checked some of the left’s ambitions by reminding them––in 1968 1972, and 1980–– that the US remained a center-right country most of whose citizens self-identified as conservatives or moderates. The political success of “New Democrat” Bill Clinton followed his recognition of this truth, which he brilliantly exploited as a “Third Way” and more cynically, as “triangulation.”
The Dems’ arrogance at ignoring Clinton’s strategy during the Obama years was punished with the loss of the House and then the Senate, along with most of the state governments. A sluggish recovery and foreign policy debacles like Benghazi, the rise of ISIS, and the catastrophic Iran deal showed starkly the failure of the technocratic elite when its utopian delusions and ideological pretensions met the stern taskmaster of a world of hard, cruel men who respected only brutal force. The wages of progressive statism––more intrusive federal power, illiberal policies backed by executive fiat and the courts, the corruption of federal agencies by partisan interests, and a worsening of race relations­­–– had earlier fueled the Tea Party, which galvanized the discontent and helped the Republicans take the House in 2010.
Then came Donald Trump.
Trump launched an all-fronts assault on the bipartisan consensus. The establishment Republicans, who used the Tea Party for electoral gain but didn’t address the larger discontents it gave voice to, revealed with some exceptions their fealty to the social and cultural shibboleths that marked the elite apart from the middling classes and non-college educated working class of flyover country. In contrast, Trump spoke in the direct, earthy, and at times vulgar idiom that has been part of American folkways since the Republic’s beginning. His disdain both for totalitarian censorship by politically correct commissars, and for the illiberal neo-tribalism of identity politics, captured the citizens’ anger at the double-standards and hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou nomenklatura virtue-signaling as it grubbed for more privilege and power. The progressives helped stoke the anger even more with their eternal media savaging of the president that culminated in the still festering Russia collusion show-trial and the shameful slandering of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Equally important, on issues such as hyper-regulation of the economy, the relentlessly metastasizing federal bureaucracy, the addiction to high taxes, the excesses of activist federal courts, and the dysfunctions of our immigration policies, Trump expressed the common sense that many ordinary people used to understand just how much our government has failed the people.
And, so far, his policies have worked. Trump is reshaping the courts, appointing 84 federal judges, including two Supreme Court Justices, who promise to rein in for decades the judicial activism the progressives have relied on to implement their policy preference without having to face the voting citizens. On the economic front, wages and salaries have the highest year-to-year gain, 3.1%, in a decade. Economic growth has reached 3.5% this quarter, a rise that progressive economic savants had announced impossible. Unemployment is the lowest in decades, and more new jobs have been created than people available to fill them. Consumer confidence is at an 18-year high. Tax reform has put more money in people’s pockets. Repatriated corporate taxes have fueled investment in the domestic economy rather than abroad.
Finally, Trump has returned common sense to our foreign policy. He has backed out of multinational treaties like the Paris Climate Accords, and the disastrous agreement to bribe Iran into delaying for less than a decade its development of nuclear weapons. Both were manifestations of the long failure of the decrepit “rules-based international order” that served mainly the transnational global elites at the expense of national sovereignty and the people. He has moved our country closer to the traditional mission of foreign policy, which is to serve the interests and security of American citizens and put them first, not the interests of some fantasy “global community” or the “cosmopolitan” functionaries of transnational institutions. This credo of putting America first, and his full-throated expression of this sentiment has revived and celebrated the patriotism and national pride that progressives and Davos Man have long scorned and slandered as the nursery of fascism rather than of democratic freedom for distinct and diverse national identities.
On Tuesday we will face the choice: continue to push back against the progressive agenda to “fundamentally transform America,” or continue to feed the progressive Leviathan at the cost of our freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, and national identity of a people who have never been perfect, but have advanced and inspired prosperity and freedom more than any other country in history.
Common sense tells us the choice is obvious. Vote for freedom, and vote for America.

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


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.”


"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.


No comments: