On Monday afternoon, Bernie Sanders ended his second presidential campaign, not with a bang, but a whimper. The Vermont senator formally endorsed Joe Biden in a livestreamed discussion on the coronavirus pandemic.
The event was a groveling display on the part of Sanders, who did not make a single criticism of Biden.
Bernie Sanders (Flickr.com/Gage Skidmore) and Joe Biden (Flickr.com/Gage Skidmore)
The central theme of Sanders’ remarks was the call for unity. The imperative, he said, is for “all of us to work together to do what has to be done not only in this moment, but beyond.” The “unity” that Sanders is calling for is a unity of the political establishment, representing the ruling class, against opposition from below.
The social anger among workers and youth to the response of the ruling class to the coronavirus pandemic threatens revolutionary upheavals. Under these conditions, Sanders issued what amounted to a call for a national unity government around Biden. “Today I am asking all Americans, I am asking every Democrat, I’m asking every independent, I’m asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse.”
The two jointly announced a number of “task forces” to unite their campaigns and provide Sanders with the threadbare fiction that he is “influencing” the program of the Democratic Party and pushing it to the left.
Sanders and Biden heaped praise upon each other and stressed that there is little that separates them politically. Biden said that “people are going to be surprised that we are apart on some issues, but we are awfully close on a whole bunch of others.” Reading from the same script, Sanders directed the conversation to “some of the areas that I think we are actually fairly close.” Later he conceded that he and Biden “may disagree a little.”
Both Sanders and Biden are, in fact, in agreement on the basic framework of ruling class policy. Sanders’ last act before suspending his campaign was to vote for the massive bailout of Wall Street and the corporations that passed with the unanimous support of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate. The so-called CARES Act includes $450 billion for corporate bailouts and another $450 billion to back the US Federal Reserve’s unlimited transfer of money to Wall Street.
Sanders nodded as Biden issued mild criticisms of the Trump administration’s handling of the bailout, while asserting, “It is not about the legislation. The legislation has been good. It is about how it is being implemented.”
Biden went on to complain that “the biggest best-connected firms are getting assistance as fast as they can ask for it.” This, however, was the entire purpose of the legislation, rammed through using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext.
Sanders replied that “Joe” was “absolutely right.” He added that if corporations are going to get a massive bailout, there needs to be greater “transparency,” a meaningless phrase. Sanders’ proposal for additional action in response to the coronavirus pandemic includes a further handout of hundreds of billions to major industries.
Sanders said nothing about the coordinated campaign to force workers to risk their lives by going back to pumping out profits, which Biden backed in an op-ed column published in the New York Times on Monday.
The Sanders endorsement does not come as a surprise. The entire purpose of his campaign was to prevent social and political opposition from breaking free of the Democratic Party. As in 2016, but now under far more explosive social and political conditions, Sanders is exposing himself as a political hack for the Democratic Party and revealing his “political revolution” to be a cynical fraud.
Sanders is part of a broader campaign underway to mobilize the Democratic Party behind Biden. On Monday morning, the New York Times published an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which the congresswoman pledged her support for Biden and declared obsequiously, “I want to respect his win, he won because of his coalition building, he won because of his service, he won for a lot of different reasons.”
Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), did not include among her list of reasons the fact that Biden is the chosen candidate of Wall Street and the military.
While many workers supported Sanders out of a mistaken belief that he is a socialist, groups like the DSA and Socialist Alternative, and individuals like Jacobin magazine editor Bhaskar Sunkara, promoted his campaign as part of their own efforts to maintain the political authority of the Democratic Party.
The DSA and Sunkara backed Sanders not despite his opportunist politics, but because of them. They are now quickly maneuvering to position themselves as advisors to a Biden campaign. On Monday, Jacobin published an article by Branko Marcetic headlined, “I literally wrote the case against Joe Biden. But I’ve got some free advice for him.” The article urged Biden to adopt a “left” program in order to win the support of young people.
“If Biden and Democrats of his generation,” Marcetic writes, “could cravenly sell out their principles for political expediency and pretend to be something they’re not once, they can do it again, only for the good. For the first time in a long time, the direction things are heading mean the politically expedient thing is also the right thing to do.”
For such people, no argument in the service of the Democratic Party is too cynical or dishonest. Representing privileged sections of the upper-middle class, they are as terrified of the political radicalization of workers and youth as the Democratic Party itself. They are worried above all by the growing political influence of the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party, whose criticisms of Sanders and the DSA have once again been confirmed.
Workers and young people must draw the political conclusions from this experience. One is struck in the end by how vacuous and empty Sanders’ campaign, for the second time, has turned out to be. It does not have the character of even a genuine movement for social reform.
Sanders’ entire political career, including that stage waged under the banner of “political revolution,” has ended in a fawning endorsement of the most right-wing candidate in the Democratic Party. He is completing his integration into the political system as events are demonstrating to millions the bankruptcy of capitalism and the need for real revolutionary change. It was all so predictable and inevitable.
The only genuine socialist campaign in the 2020 elections is that of the Socialist Equality Party. Our campaign is based not on futile hopes of transforming the Democratic Party, of performing a form of political alchemy that has failed a hundred times before, but on the construction of a movement in the working class to prepare and lead the struggle for socialism in this era of revolution.
INCEST! THE CASE
OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA and CRONY JAMIE DIMON
- White House
sued for covering up crimes of JPMorgan
White House sued
for covering up crimes of JPMorgan
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS PARTY UP
AND STILL GIVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THE MIDDLE FINGER
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/02/obamas-crony-banksters-give-american.html
'Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm
to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a
devastating unemployment crisis.'
For much of Obama’s tenure,
Jamie Dimon was known as the White House’s “favorite banker.” According to
White House logs, Dimon visited the White House at least 18 times, often to
talk to his former subordinate at JPMorgan, William Daley, who had been named
White House chief of staff by Obama after the Democratic rout in the 2010
elections.
Sanders called
JPMorgan’s CEO America’s "biggest corporate socialist" — here’s why
he has a point
Sen.
Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the “biggest corporate socialist
in America today” in recent ad
PAUL
ADLER
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
Sanders called JPMorgan’s CEO
America’s "biggest corporate socialist" — here’s why he has a point
Sen.
Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the “biggest corporate socialist
in America today” in recent ad
PAUL
ADLER
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
BARACK
OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set themselves on America’s pensions next!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html
The new
aristocrats, like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the
lower orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government
panels documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest
banks both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every
other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the
sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international
interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican
drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally
foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal
debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the
Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
JPMorgan Chase records the biggest profit of any bank in US history
OBAMA CRONY DONORS Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan
Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a
web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false
pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign
exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and
lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent
borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of
energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
THE LONG HISTORY of BARACK
OBAMA and HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTER DONORS JP MORGAN…
STILL LOOTING AMERICA
AND THE WORLD!
This is the
unadulterated voice of finance capital speaking. It should be recalled that
JPMorgan is deeply implicated in the speculative operations that have
devastated the lives of hundreds of millions of workers around the world. In
March of this year, a US Senate committee released a 300-page report
documenting the criminal practices and fraud carried out by JPMorgan, the
largest bank in the US and the world’s biggest dealer in derivatives. Despite
the detailed revelations in the report, no action will be taken against the
bank’s CEO, Jamie who enjoys the personal confidence of the US president.
assault on America – THE OBAMA – JP MORGAN
Rather than
Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while
claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory
robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
“Records
show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of
financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS
AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
Why aren’t the Wall Street criminals
prosecuted?
In May 2012, only days after JPMorgan Chase’s
Jamie Dimon revealed that his bank had lost billions of dollars in speculative
bets, President Barack Obama publicly defended the multi-millionaire CEO,
calling him “one of the smartest bankers we’ve got.” What Obama did not mention
is that Dimon is a criminal.
JPMorgan is not the exception; it is the rule.
Virtually every major bank that operates on Wall Street has settled charges of
fraud and criminality on a staggering scale. In 2011, the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations released a 630-page report on the financial
crash of 2008 documenting what the committee chairman called “a financial snake
pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
These multiple crimes by serial lawbreakers have
had very real and very destructive consequences. The entire world has been
plunged into an economic slump that has already lasted more than five years and
shows no signs of abating. Tens of millions of families have lost their homes
as a result of predatory mortgages pushed by JPMorgan and other Wall Street
banks.
INCEST! The
case of bankster-owned Barack
Obama and
crony Jamie Dimon of JP
MORGAN…
their looting continues!
INCEST! THE CASE
OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA and CRONY JAMIE DIMON
- White House
sued for covering up crimes of JPMorgan
White House sued
for covering up crimes of JPMorgan
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS PARTY UP
AND STILL GIVE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THE MIDDLE FINGER
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/02/obamas-crony-banksters-give-american.html
'Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm
to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a
devastating unemployment crisis.'
For much of Obama’s tenure,
Jamie Dimon was known as the White House’s “favorite banker.” According to
White House logs, Dimon visited the White House at least 18 times, often to
talk to his former subordinate at JPMorgan, William Daley, who had been named
White House chief of staff by Obama after the Democratic rout in the 2010
elections.
Sanders called
JPMorgan’s CEO America’s "biggest corporate socialist" — here’s why
he has a point
Sen.
Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the “biggest corporate socialist
in America today” in recent ad
PAUL
ADLER
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
Sen. Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the
"biggest corporate
socialist in America today" in a recent ad.
He may have a point — beyond what he intended.
With his Dimon ad, Sanders is referring specifically to
the bailouts JPMorgan and other banks
took from the government during the 2008 financial crisis. But accepting
government bailouts and corporate welfare is not the only way I believe
American companies behave like closet socialists despite their professed love
of free markets.
In reality, most big U.S. companies operate internally in
ways Karl Marx would applaud as remarkably close to socialist-style central
planning. Not only that, corporate America has arguably become a laboratory of
innovation in socialist governance, as I show in my own research.
Closet socialists
But inside JPMorgan and most other big corporations, market
competition is subordinated to planning. These big companies often contain
dozens of business units and sometimes thousands. Instead of letting these
units compete among themselves, CEOs typically direct a strategic planning
process to
ensure they cooperate to achieve the best outcomes for the corporation as a whole.
This is just how a socialist economy is intended to operate. The
government would conduct economy-wide planning and set goals for each industry
and enterprise, aiming to achieve the best outcome for society as a whole.
And just as companies rely internally on planned cooperation to
meet goals and overcome challenges, the U.S. economy could use this harmony to
overcome the existential crisis of our age — climate change. It's a
challenge so massive and urgent that it will require every part of the
economy to
work together with government in order to address it.
Overcoming socialism's past problems
But, of course, socialism doesn't have a good track record.
One of the reasons socialist planning failed in the old Soviet
Union, for example, was that it was so top-down that it lacked
the kind of popular legitimacy that democracy grants a government. As a result,
bureaucrats overseeing the planning process could not get reliable information
about the real opportunities and challenges experienced by enterprises or
citizens.
Moreover, enterprises had little incentive to strive to meet
their assigned objectives, especially when they had so little involvement in
formulating them.
A second reason the USSR didn't survive was that its
authoritarian system failed to motivate either workers or
entrepreneurs. As a result, even though the government funded basic science
generously, Soviet industry was a laggard in innovation.
Ironically, corporations — those singular products of
capitalism — are showing how these and other problems of socialist
planning can be surmounted.
Take the problem of democratic legitimacy. Some companies, such
as General Electric, Kaiser Permanente and General Motors, have developed
innovative ways to avoid the dysfunctions of autocratic planning by using techniques that enable
lower-level personnel to participate actively in the strategy process.
Although profit pressures often force top managers to
short-circuit the promised participation, when successfully integrated it not
only provides top management with more reliable bottom-up input for strategic
planning but also makes all employees more reliable partners in carrying it
out.
So here we have centralization — not in the more familiar,
autocratic model, but rather in a form I call "participative
centralization." In a socialist system, this approach could be adopted,
adapted and scaled up to support economy-wide planning, ensuring that it was
both democratic and effective.
As for motivating innovation, America's big businesses face a
challenge similar to that of socialism. They need employees to be collectivist,
so they willingly comply with policies and procedures. But they need them to be
simultaneously individualistic, to fuel divergent thinking and creativity.
One common solution in much of corporate America, as in the old
Soviet Union, is to specialize those roles, with most people
relegated to routine tasks while the privileged few work on innovation tasks.
That approach, however, overlooks the creative capacities of the vast majority
and leads to widespread
employee disengagement and sub-par business performance.
Smarter businesses have found ways to overcome this dilemma by
creating cultures and reward systems that support a synthesis of individualism
and collectivism that I call "interdependent individualism." In my
research, I have found this kind of motivation in settings as diverse as Kaiser Permanent physicians, assembly-line workers at Toyota's NUMMI
plant and software developers at Computer Sciences Corp. These companies do
this, in part, by rewarding both individual contributions to the organization's
goals as well as collaboration in achieving them.
While socialists have often
recoiled against
the idea individual performance-based rewards, these more sophisticated
policies could be scaled up to the entire economy to help meet socialism's innovation
and motivation challenge.
Big problems require big government
The idea of such a socialist transformation in the U.S. may seem
remote today.
But this can change, particularly as more Americans, especially
young ones, embrace socialism. One reason they are
doing so is because the current capitalist system has so manifestly failed to
deal with climate change.
Looking inside these companies suggests a better way forward
— and hope for society's ability to avert catastrophe.
Paul Adler, Professor of
Management and Organization, Sociology and Environmental Studies, University of Southern
California
Sanders called JPMorgan’s CEO
America’s "biggest corporate socialist" — here’s why he has a point
Sen.
Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon the “biggest corporate socialist
in America today” in recent ad
PAUL
ADLER
FEBRUARY 13, 2020 9:59AM (UTC)
Sen. Bernie Sanders called JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the
"biggest corporate socialist in America today" in a recent ad.
He may have a point — beyond what he intended.
With his Dimon ad, Sanders is referring specifically to
the bailouts JPMorgan and
other banks took from the government during the 2008 financial crisis. But
accepting government bailouts and corporate welfare is not the only way I
believe American companies behave like closet socialists despite their
professed love of free markets.
In reality, most big U.S. companies operate internally in ways Karl Marx would applaud as
remarkably close to socialist-style central planning. Not only that, corporate
America has arguably become a laboratory of innovation in socialist governance,
as I show in my own research.
Closet socialists
In public, CEOs like Dimon attack socialist planning while
defending free markets.
But inside JPMorgan and most other big corporations, market
competition is subordinated to planning. These big companies often contain
dozens of business units and sometimes thousands. Instead of letting these
units compete among themselves, CEOs typically direct a strategic planning process to ensure they cooperate to achieve the best
outcomes for the corporation as a whole.
This is just how a socialist economy is intended to operate. The
government would conduct economy-wide planning and set goals for each industry
and enterprise, aiming to achieve the best outcome for society as a whole.
And just as companies rely internally on planned cooperation to
meet goals and overcome challenges, the U.S. economy could use this harmony to
overcome the existential crisis of our age — climate change. It's a
challenge so massive and urgent that it will require every part of the economy to work together with government in order to
address it.
Overcoming socialism's past problems
But, of course, socialism doesn't have a good track record.
One of the reasons socialist planning failed in the old Soviet
Union, for example, was that it was so top-down that
it lacked the kind of popular legitimacy that democracy grants a government. As
a result, bureaucrats overseeing the planning process could not get reliable
information about the real opportunities and challenges experienced by
enterprises or citizens.
Moreover, enterprises had little incentive to strive to meet
their assigned objectives, especially when they had so little involvement in
formulating them.
A second reason the USSR didn't survive was that its
authoritarian system failed to motivate either
workers or entrepreneurs. As a result, even though the government funded basic
science generously, Soviet industry was a laggard in innovation.
Ironically, corporations — those singular products of
capitalism — are showing how these and other problems of socialist
planning can be surmounted.
Take the problem of democratic legitimacy. Some companies, such
as General Electric, Kaiser Permanente and General Motors,
have developed innovative ways to avoid the dysfunctions of autocratic planning
by using techniques that
enable lower-level personnel to participate actively in the strategy process.
Although profit pressures often force top managers to
short-circuit the promised participation, when successfully integrated it not
only provides top management with more reliable bottom-up input for strategic planning but also makes all employees
more reliable partners in
carrying it out.
So here we have centralization — not in the more familiar,
autocratic model, but rather in a form I call "participative
centralization." In a socialist system, this approach could be adopted,
adapted and scaled up to support economy-wide planning, ensuring that it was
both democratic and effective.
As for motivating innovation, America's big businesses face a
challenge similar to that of socialism. They need employees to be collectivist,
so they willingly comply with policies and procedures. But they need them to be
simultaneously individualistic, to fuel divergent thinking and creativity.
One common solution in much of corporate America, as in the old
Soviet Union, is to specialize
those roles, with most people relegated
to routine tasks while the privileged few work on innovation tasks. That
approach, however, overlooks the creative capacities of the vast majority
and leads to widespread
employee disengagement and sub-par business performance.
Smarter businesses have found ways to overcome this dilemma by
creating cultures and reward systems that support a synthesis of individualism
and collectivism that I call "interdependent individualism." In my
research, I have found this kind of motivation in settings as diverse as Kaiser
Permanent physicians, assembly-line workers at Toyota's NUMMI plant and software
developers at Computer Sciences Corp.
These companies do this, in part, by rewarding both individual contributions to
the organization's goals as well as collaboration in achieving them.
While socialists have often recoiled against the idea individual performance-based rewards,
these more sophisticated policies could be scaled up to the entire economy to
help meet socialism's innovation and motivation challenge.
Big problems require big government
The idea of such a socialist transformation in the U.S. may seem
remote today.
But this can change, particularly as more Americans, especially
young ones, embrace socialism.
One reason they are doing so is because the current capitalist system has so
manifestly failed to deal with climate change.
Looking inside these companies suggests a better way forward
— and hope for society's ability to avert catastrophe.
Paul Adler,
Professor of Management and Organization, Sociology and Environmental
Studies, University of Southern California
This article is republished from The Conversation under
a Creative Commons license.
Why aren’t the Wall Street criminals prosecuted?
In May 2012, only days after JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon revealed
that his bank had lost billions of dollars in speculative bets, President
Barack Obama publicly defended the multi-millionaire CEO, calling him “one of
the smartest bankers we’ve got.” What Obama did not mention is that Dimon is a
criminal.
JPMorgan
is not the exception; it is the rule. Virtually every major bank that operates
on Wall Street has settled charges of fraud and criminality on a staggering
scale. In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a
630-page report on the financial crash of 2008 documenting what the committee
chairman called “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest
and wrongdoing.”
These
multiple crimes by serial lawbreakers have had very real and very destructive
consequences. The entire world has been plunged into an economic slump that has
already lasted more than five years and shows no signs of abating. Tens of
millions of families have lost their homes as a result of predatory mortgages
pushed by JPMorgan and other Wall Street banks.
Amid poverty wages
and tax cuts for the rich
"This
decades-long ruling class offensive was accelerated in response to the 2008
financial crisis. President Barack Obama oversaw the channeling of trillions of
dollars to the banks and financial markets in order to pay off the debts of the
bankers and speculators, whose reckless and criminal activities had led to the
crisis, and make them richer than ever. At the same time, he imposed a
restructuring of the auto industry based on a 50 percent across-the-board pay
cut for new-hires and an expansion of temporary and part-time labor,"
The devastating human cost of the plundering of society by the
corporate-financial oligarchy is registered in declining life
expectancy, rising mortality and record suicide and drug addiction
rates.
BARACK
OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set themselves on America’s pensions next!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html
The new
aristocrats, like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the
lower orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government
panels documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest
banks both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every
other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the
sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international
interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican
drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally
foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal
debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the
Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
JPMorgan Chase records the biggest profit of any bank in US history
JPMorgan Chase, the most valuable private bank in the world,
made $36.4 billion in 2019, the biggest annual profit of any bank in American
history. The news, reported Tuesday, sent the company’s stock up by 2 percent.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, the company took in $8.5 billion, also a record,
making it the tenth largest publicly traded company in the world, with a market
cap of $437 billion.
JPMorgan Chase’s record profits were joined by Morgan Stanley,
which also reported both record profits and record revenues for 2019, sending
its stock price surging 6.6 percent on Thursday.
News of these record gains came as the six largest US banks
revealed that they saved a combined $32 billion last year from President Donald
Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut. The tax windfall was up from 2018 for all but
one of the banks. JPMorgan’s tax cut went from $3.7 billion in 2018 to $5
billion last year.
At Wednesday’s signing ceremony for the phase one trade deal
with China, attended by an array of corporate executives, Trump turned to Mary
Erdoes, a top executive at JPMorgan Chase. Calling the bank’s earnings report
“incredible,” he joked, “Will you say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President,’ at least?”
The tax cuts for the corporations and the rich,
enacted with only token opposition from the
Democrats, are only one factor in the surge
in profits over the past year. When stocks
plunged at the end of 2018, Trump stepped
up his demand that the Federal Reserve
reverse its policy of gradually raising interest
rates to more normal levels, following years
of near-zero rates in the aftermath of the 2008
financial crisis. Acting as the mouthpiece of
Wall Street, he demanded that the Fed begin
cutting rates once again in order to pump
more cash into the financial markets.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell dutifully complied, cutting interest
rates three times in 2018 and assuring the markets that he had no intention of
raising them again any time soon. Then, beginning in the late fall, the Fed
began pumping tens of billions of dollars a week into the so-called “repo”
overnight loan market, resuming the money-printing operation known as
“quantitative easing.”
This de facto guarantee of unlimited public funds to backstop
stock prices has produced record highs on all of the major US indexes, sending
billions more into the private coffers of the rich and the super-rich.
These measures are a continuation and intensification of
policies carried out on a bipartisan basis for four decades to redistribute
wealth from the working class to the corporations and the financial elite. They
have effected a fundamental restructuring of class relations in America,
drastically lowering the social position of the working class. Decent-paying,
secure jobs have been wiped out and largely replaced by poverty-wage,
part-time, temporary and contingent employment—the so-called “gig” economy
exemplified by corporations such as Amazon and Uber.
This decades-long ruling class offensive was accelerated in
response to the 2008 financial crisis. President Barack Obama oversaw the
channeling of trillions of dollars to the banks and financial markets in order
to pay off the debts of the bankers and speculators, whose reckless and
criminal activities had led to the crisis, and make them richer than ever. At
the same time, he imposed a restructuring of the auto industry based on a 50
percent across-the-board pay cut for new-hires and an expansion of temporary
and part-time labor.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has actively participated in this
process, enshrining the new “flexible” labor system in sellout contracts in
2015 and 2019. This template of expendable, benefits-free labor has become the
new norm for labor relations across the country and throughout the world.
Meanwhile, state, local and federal government programs have
been dramatically slashed. Education, housing, Medicaid and food stamps have
been particularly hard hit. This process has been accelerated under Trump,
along with the removal of occupational safety and environmental regulations,
with no opposition from the Democrats, who represent sections of the financial
elite and wealthy upper-middle class.
The devastating human cost of the plundering
of society by the corporate-financial oligarchy
is registered in declining life expectancy,
rising mortality and record suicide and drug
Institution found that 53 million people in the US—44
percent of
all workers—“earn barely enough to live on.” The study found
that
the median pay of this group was $10.22 per hour, around
$18,000 a year. Thirty seven percent of those making $10
an
hour have children. More than half are the primary earners
or
“contribute substantially” to family income.
Similarly, a Reuters report from 2018 found that the average
income of the bottom 40 percent of workers in the United States was $11,600.
A recent study by Trust for America’s Health found that in
2017 “more than 152,000 Americans died from alcohol- and drug-induced
fatalities and suicide.” This was highest number ever recorded and more than
double the figure for 1999. Among those in their 20s and early 30s, the prime
working life age, drug deaths have increased more than 400 percent in the last
20 years.
At the other pole of society, the Dow Jones Industrial index is
now double what it was at its peak in 2007, prior to the implosion of the
financial system. Between March 2009 and today, the Dow has risen from 6,500 to
over 29,000. The stock market, buttressed by central bank and government
policy, has become the central instrument for funneling wealth from the bottom
of society to the top. As a result, the top 10 percent of society now owns
about 70 percent of all wealth, whereas the bottom 50 percent has, effectively,
nothing.
In the midst of this orgy of wealth accumulation at the very top
of society, every demand of workers for jobs, decent pay, education, housing,
health care and pensions is met with the universal response: “There is no
money.” Hundreds of thousands of teachers have struck over the past two years
to demand the restoration of funds cut from the public schools and substantial
increases in pay and benefits. None of their demands have been met. The same
applies to auto workers who struck for 40 days last fall to demand an end to
two-tier pay systems and the defense of jobs.
JPMorgan’s $36.4 billion profit in 2019 is more than half the
education budget of the US federal government.
Meanwhile, Americans are deeper in debt to JPMorgan and the
other banks than at any time in history. Collective consumer debt in the United
States approached $14 trillion last year. Credit card debt has surpassed $1
trillion for the first time. Auto debt is at $1.3 trillion and mortgage debt is
now $9.4 trillion. Student loan debt has increased the fastest, surging from
$500 billion in 2006 to $1.6 trillion today.
These are the conditions, rooted in the historical bankruptcy
and crisis of the capitalist system, that have sparked a global upsurge in the
class struggle and the growth of anti-capitalist and pro-socialist sentiment.
The past year has seen a dramatic expansion of working class struggle that is
only a glimpse of what is to come. India, Hong Kong, Mexico, the United States,
Puerto Rico, Lebanon, Iraq, France, Chile and Brazil are only some of the
places where mass struggles have erupted.
What is becoming increasingly clear to hundreds of millions of
people around the world is that the social problems confronting humanity in the
21st century—poverty, debt, disease, global warming, war, fascism, the assault
on democratic rights—cannot be solved so long as this parasitic and
oligarchical financial elite continues to rule. The turn is to the American and
international working class—to unite, take power and seize control of the
wealth which it produces to ensure peace, prosperity and equality for all
people.
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