AMERICA'S BILLIONAIRE CLASS WILL FINISH OFF MIDDLE AMERICAN AND STILL DEMAND BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS AND MORE TAX CUTS!
OBOMB’S BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY!
JOE BIDEN DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS!
THE SECRET LIFE OF A BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/obamas-marxism-still-hankering-for.html
CRONY CAPITALISM
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS
THE CRONY CLASS:
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.”
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES (THERE'S A REASON WHY GEORGE SOROS RUNS OBAMA'S BID FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE).
Socialism and the case for expropriation
“Socialism is back in fashion,” declares the cover story of this week’s Economist, the British weekly newspaper founded 176 years ago. Despite proclamations of the “end of history” following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the newspaper roots the “remarkable” growth of popular support for socialism in decades of growing social inequality.
“Socialism is storming back because it has formed an incisive critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies,” the magazine writes, adding, “inequality in the West has indeed soared over the past 40 years.” The growth of socialist sentiment is accompanied by a global strike movement by the working class, in which the number of people who went on strike in the US last year grew 20-fold compared to 2017.
The same week as the Economist published its warning about growing popular support for socialism, a series of events have made clear the vast and entrenched power of the most predatory sections of the financial oligarchy in the United States, which is intent on intensifying an ongoing and massive upward redistribution of wealth.
About-face by the Fed
Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reiterated the decision by the Fed to stop raising interest rates following a mild market sell-off.
While at the beginning of this year the Fed had planned three interest rate increases, now it envisions none. In fact, “the next policy adjustment is increasingly likely to be a rate cut,” Lindsey Piegza, the chief economist for Stifel Fixed Income, told CNN.
As a result, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared over 1,500 points. At the current pace, it is set to smash through record highs set late last year, within a matter of weeks. Jeff Bezos is $20 billion richer, and Bill Gates is $11 billion richer.
In other words, the Federal Reserve was compelled to scrap plans it was working on for years to build up ammunition to respond to the next financial crisis, after a drop of just ten percent in the stock market.
A green light for monopoly
Within hours of Powell’s testimony, a federal appeals court rejected the Justice Department’s challenge to the merger of AT&T and Time Warner in one of the largest corporate consolidations in US history. The Justice Department, for its part, said it would not challenge the ruling, effectively clearing the way for the merger.
The deal creates a massive vertical monopoly, with the company that controls one third of all mobile phone traffic, and one sixth of broadband internet, also now controlling HBO, Warner Bros. and CNN.
In addition to fueling a wave of anticompetitive behavior, including actions newly legalized with the ending of net neutrality, the new ruling can be expected to jack up consumer prices on not just internet and phone service, but on digital content distribution, with the profits passed on to billionaire investors.
Soaring share buybacks
Share buybacks are already on track to eclipse the record $1 trillion in buyback activity set last year. CNN reported that buybacks by corporate clients of Bank of America Merrill Lynch are up by a staggering 91 percent this year, putting the United States “on pace for another record year,” as corporations divert ever-greater sums away from productive investment and into pumping up their own stock prices.
All these factors have created what economist Gabriel Zucman called a return “to Gilded Age levels” of inequality. Commenting on a research paper he published earlier this year, Zucman recently wrote, “What the data show is that wealth concentration in the United States has returned to the level of 1920. Forty percent of total household wealth belongs to the top 1 percent. About 20 percent belongs to the top 0.1 percent, which is about the same as the bottom 90 percent’s wealth share.”
It is the reality of capitalism that is fueling the growth of the class struggle and a resurgence of interest in socialism. The ruling class is terrified of the implications and is preparing its response.
Already, this backlash has taken the form of the Trump administration’s declaration of a war on socialism, with the fascistic president’s proclamation that “The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere.” Trump is speaking not for himself, but for the most predatory layers of the capitalist system, which see in growing popular support for socialism the specter of social revolution, which it will attempt to crush with all the forces of the state.
On the other hand, various figures and organizations in and around the Democratic Party are attempting to propagate the fiction that measures can be implemented to address social inequality without a frontal assault on the wealth of the ruling class and the capitalist system itself. It is, moreover, to be achieved through the Democratic Party, a right-wing capitalist party that has been instrumental in overseeing the massive redistribution of wealth to the rich.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for a 70 percent marginal tax rate for incomes above $10 million. Like everything the congresswoman proposes, the demand is “aspirational,” meaning whatever would be implemented by the party that totally gutted financial regulation in the 1990s would be a massively watered-down version of the original proposal.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, is calling for “a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion.” This wealth tax would raise annually some $275 billion, or approximately one percent of the nearly $30 trillion the US government, by one estimate, committed to bailing out the US financial system after 2008.
In its latest issue, Jacobin magazine, affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, is dedicated to promoting the election campaign of Democrat Bernie Sanders. The magazine spells out “A Plan to Win Socialism in America,” which it describes as little more than profit-sharing, via a “share levy on profitable companies to build up union-controlled funds.”
Jacobin fails to make clear how this “socialism” would be substantially different from the current arrangement at US automakers, whose retiree health-care insurance pools are run as slush funds for the corporatist UAW, and which give workers piddling profit-sharing checks once a year after ruthlessly exploiting them.
What none of these self-styled reformers address is how, in the face of a ruthless and reactionary ruling elite, even these extremely modest proposals are to be carried out. If the Federal Reserve cannot raise rates—in defense of the long-term interests of capitalism—and the courts ride roughshod over existing anti-trust laws, it is not difficult to imagine the furious backlash to even the most limited effort to increase taxes on the rich.
No struggle against capitalism is possible without the full expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the source of their power: the exploitation of human beings through capitalist property relations.
What is necessary are not “aspirational” proposals to raise taxes by a few percentage points—measures that will never be achieved under capitalism—but the expropriation of the ruling class. All large corporations and banks must be placed under public ownership and democratic control. The stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic, and therefore political, life, must be broken.
The social force that will carry out this sweeping transformation of society, the international working class, has already entered into struggle. It must take up the program of socialism, that is, the reorganization of society in the interest not of the top 1 percent, not of their envious hangers-on in the top ten percent, but of the bottom 90 percent of society: the great mass of the working class that creates all wealth.
By Kate Randall
“Deaths of despair” continue to soar
US deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide at all-time high
By Kate Randall
8 March 2019
More than 150,000 Americans died from alcohol and drug-induced fatalities and suicide in 2017. This is more than twice as many as in 1999 and the highest number since recordkeeping began in that year. This skyrocketing rate of so-called deaths of despair was confirmed in a new analysis released this week by Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and Well Being Trust (WBT).
TFAH and WBT analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) between 2016 and 2017 and found that the national rate for deaths due to alcohol, drugs and suicide increased 6 percent over that year, from 43.9 deaths per 100,000 to 46.6 deaths per 100,000. While the rate of increase is lower than in the previous two years, it is still higher than the 4 percent average annual increase since 1999.
The new analysis provides insight into the CDC’s findings last years that showed a drop in life expectancy from 78.7 years to 78.6 years, the third consecutive year-on-year decline. In the years since the 2008 financial crisis many workers and their families have confronted an unprecedented crisis of social misery, which is literally cutting life out from under them.
Certain groups of Americans have been hardest hit by the “deaths of despair” examined in the new analysis:
• Ages 35–54: The rate of death from alcohol, drugs and suicide was 72.4 per 100,000. This was a 35 percent increase over 2007 figures.
• Males of all ages: A death rate of 68.2 deaths per 100,000 was found among men.
• Regional disparities: West Virginia, with 81 deaths per 100,000, and New Mexico, with 77, had the highest rates of “deaths of despair” among the 50 US states.
Death by suicide
The suicide rate in 2017 was 4 percent higher than in 2016, rising from 13.9 deaths per 100,000 to 14.5 deaths per 100,000. In 2017, 47,200 Americans died as a result of suicide. Deaths by suicide were particularly high among males (22.9 per 100,000), whites (16.6 per 100,000) and people living in rural areas (19.4 per 100,000)
Over the past decade suicide rates increased by 22 percent. Suffocation and hanging suicides have risen by 42 percent since 2008, while firearm suicides saw a 22 percent increase. These methods are often chosen by suicide victims over less violent means because they are more likely to result in death.
One of the most disturbing trends over the last decade has been the rise is deaths by children ages 1–17. Although suicide deaths in 2017 were still lower than for other age groups, at 2.4 per 100,000, they have risen by 16 percent since 2016. Over the last decade, 12,660 youth under the age of 17 took their own lives, according to the CDC.
Suicide rates over the past decade have also increased proportionally more among blacks (30 percent rise) and Latinos (36 percent) than among other racial and ethnic groups.
Research published by the CDC last year showed that the overall suicide rate increased by 25 percent across the US over the two decades ending in 2016. These figures paint a picture of a social crisis driving increasing numbers of people, both young and old, to take their own lives in the face of personal crises, mental health issues, substance abuse and economic despair.
In 2017, 35,800 Americans died of alcohol-induced causes. The TFAH/WBT report included deaths from alcohol induced causes, including alcohol poisoning, liver and other diseases. It did not include alcohol-related vehicle accidents, violence or accidental fatalities.
Alcohol-induced deaths rose 2 percent in 2017 over 2016, the smallest increase since 2008–2009. The alcohol death rate has increase by 38 percent since 2008. Alcohol-related deaths were highest among males (16.2 per 100,000), whites (12.2 per 100,000), adults ages 55–74 (26.4 per 100,000) and in rural areas (13 per 100,000).
People 55–74, who should be enjoying their retirement, instead are abusing alcohol in record numbers. Those 18–34—who should be gainfully employed, studying or embarking on new careers—have seen a 69 percent rise in alcohol-related deaths over the past decade, as they suffer through unemployment, layoffs and drown in college debt.
Drug deaths
The synthetic opioids fentanyl and carfentanil are 50 to 100 times and 10,000 times more potent than morphine, respectively. Natural/semisynthetic opioids include hydrocodone, oxycodone, morphine and heroin.
Two decades ago, synthetic opioids were responsible for less than 10 percent of all drug deaths in the US. In 2017, they accounted for 38 percent of all drug deaths, with an average of 547 Americans succumbing to opioid overdose deaths every week .
The synthetic opioid crisis has taken its toll on every segment of American society, but has especially hit males (with 12.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2017), blacks (8.6 deaths per 100,000), whites (9.5 deaths per 100,000), adults ages 18–54 (15.2 deaths per 100,000) and those living in metropolitan areas.
A recent study showed that opioid overdose death rates among US teens and children have tripled over the past 17 years. The study, published online in JAMA Network Open, found that young children died from either accidentally ingesting narcotics or from intentional poisoning. Teens more often died from unintentional overdoses, using prescription painkillers found in their homes or drugs bought on the streets.
The Northeast region had the highest opioid mortality rate in 2017 (15.7 deaths per 100,000), followed by the Midwest (12.1 deaths per 100,000). Drug deaths in the Midwest, which includes the Rust Belt ravaged by industrial decline, saw a 122 percent increase in all drug deaths from 2007 to 2017.
The surge in synthetic drug deaths must be laid at the feet of the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies, who have flooded neighborhoods with these potent opioids. Drug companies have pushed prescription narcotics through bribing doctors to prescribe the addictive substances, and by secretly and deliberately increasing their addictive properties.
While politicians of both big business parties have feigned outrage at such practices, they are on the payroll of Big Pharma, receiving millions of dollars from drug company lobbyists. In 2018 alone, the pharmaceutical and health products industry spent a record $280 million on their lobbying efforts.
The war against the health and lives of American workers has been a bipartisan conspiracy conducted over decades as part of a conscious strategy to claw back the gains of the working class begun over a century ago.
For the 150,000 Americans who died from alcohol and drug-induced fatalities and suicides in 2017, millions more have been affected—family, friends, co-workers. But for politicians in Congress and pharmaceutical CEOs this devastating toll is seen as the “cost of doing business.”
The US health care crisis—exemplified by these “deaths of despair” and falling life-expectancy—is a true national emergency, in contrast to the “national emergency” on the Southern US border fabricated by Donald Trump and his fascistic advisers.
The epidemic of alcohol-, drug- and suicide-related deaths is a social crisis that requires a socialist response. Such social misery cannot be battled under conditions where the health and welfare of the vast majority is subjugated to the private wealth of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies and giant healthcare chains. These capitalist enterprises must be expropriated, transformed into public utilities and run on the basis of social need, not profit.
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