America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Thursday, July 16, 2020
TRUMP PROMISES WALL STREET MASSIVE PROFITS DURING THE DEPRESSION
The massive run-up in stock prices and the profits of banks has only one explanation: The capitalist state has put at the disposal of its masters in the financial oligarchy unlimited amounts of money, the central purpose of which is nothing other than the enrichment of the wealthiest people in the world. As a result of the massive surge in the markets, US billionaires have become some $600 billion richer since mid-March.
Markets soar as the corpses pile up
16 July 2020
Wednesday was a disaster in the United States. There were 71,670 new cases of COVID-19 recorded, the second-worst day on record. Nearly 1,000 people lost their lives to the disease, according to official figures.
With Texas hospitals at 90 percent capacity, dozens of mobile morgues are being dispatched to the state. In Florida, 54 hospitals now have zero available beds in their intensive care units. And, amid a full-on drive to reopen schools, officials said that one third of children who were tested in Florida were positive, adding to the body of evidence that children can play a major role spreading the disease.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington reported that it estimates 224,089 people will die from COVID-19 by November 1, an upward revision of 20,000 from just one week ago.
Meanwhile, the most basic medical supplies, such as masks, gowns, gloves and disinfectants, “simply are not readily available' from the usual sources our physicians use,” the American Medical Association reported.
The economic situation is equally disastrous. American Airlines said it would likely furlough 25 , 000 workers later this year, adding to the 36,000 furloughs announced at United Airlines last week. These layoffs are scheduled to take place despite the $25 billion bailout of the airline industry by the federal government.
Amid all of this death and economic devastation, the stock markets surged, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing up for the fourth trading day in a row, with an increase totaling over a thousand points. The S&P 500 is now significantly higher than it was one year ago today.The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) now predicts two possible scenarios by the end of 2020. Its “pessimistic” scenario is one in which the unemployment rate remains at 11.3 percent and economic output falls by 7.3 percent, both worse than any other recession since World War II. Its “more pessimistic” scenario is one in which the unemployment rate is 12.9 percent and economic output falls by 8.5 percent.
Wednesday’s market binge was triggered by the announcement early in the day that Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, posted one of its most profitable quarters ever, doubling the predictions of analysts.
There is no longer any question of the extent to which the stock market and the fate of society have totally separated. “The stock market and the economy have parted ways,” Mark Zandi, chief of Moody’s Analytics, told the Washington Post.
The massive run-up in stock prices and the profits of banks has only one explanation: The capitalist state has put at the disposal of its masters in the financial oligarchy unlimited amounts of money, the central purpose of which is nothing other than the enrichment of the wealthiest people in the world. As a result of the massive surge in the markets, US billionaires have become some $600 billion richer since mid-March.
To date, the Federal Reserve has funneled more than $3 trillion dollars into the financial markets, in addition to the $2 trillion in economic stimulus—much of it in the form of corporate bailouts—created by the CARES Act passed in late March.
All the claims that the bailout of major corporations by the CARES Act and the Fed’s bailout of Wall Street had anything to do with helping the mass of the population are totally exposed by what has taken place.
It would be hard to imagine a more corrupt social order than currently exists. The pandemic has become a favorable factor for enriching the financial oligarchy. As long as the crisis provides the pretext for massive bailouts by the Federal Reserve, there is no incentive to bring it under control.
If there were, even for a minute, any cutoff of the massive subsidies to the markets, there would be a devastating crash on the scale of that which took place in March, when the Dow fell by 50 percent.
The financial oligarchy lives at the expense of society, not just through class exploitation in factories and workplaces, but through the massive upward redistribution of wealth through the mechanism of the market.
While it has been hell for millions of people, the pandemic will be seen by sections of the ruling class as a certain golden age. As the bodies piled up, the oligarchs quarantined themselves in their beachfront properties and condominiums, flying between their residences on private helicopters and, at the sign of the slightest sniffle, attended to by private physicians.
It makes no difference that corpses are piling up in refrigerated trucks around the country. The bank accounts of the rich keep getting bigger and bigger.
As millions die, the ruling class and its media mouthpieces have only two demands: Reopen the schools and cut unemployment benefits. “American children need public schools to reopen in the fall,” declared the lead editorial of the New York Times on Friday. On Wednesday, it called for “a plan to reduce the payments” to workers “as the economy recovers.”
In the endless discussion of the pandemic in the media, there is never any examination of the social interests that drove the back-to-work campaign and the ensuing resurgence of the pandemic.
During the First World War, a major factor in keeping the war going—even as tens of millions died in the trenches—was the immense fortunes generated through war profiteering. So too now, it is the massive fortunes piled up that explain why there is no effort to bring the pandemic under control. While the oligarchy that dominates society makes trillions exploiting the crisis, there will be no serious effort to stop the daily toll of death and destruction.
Under these conditions, the expropriation of the capitalist class and the shutdown of Wall Street become a matter of public health. There will be no end to the pandemic without the class-conscious intervention of the working class, in a struggle against capitalism and the establishment of socialism, which will create the conditions for an effective response to the disease.
Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale. Once again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
Fed’s Brainard Warns US Economy May Be Slowing Again, Urges More Support
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard warned Tuesday that the U.S. economy appears to be slowing after an initial burst of recovery and called for the Fed to take aggressive steps to bolster growth.
Brainard said that hiring and consumer spending bounced back more strongly than expected in May and June. But that rebound mostly reflected a rapid reopening of restaurants, bars and other businesses in many states, she said, and those reopenings have since caused ongoing spikes in viral infections that could reverse much of that progress.
Brainard is an influential “dove” on the Fed’s board, which means she typically prioritizes keeping interest rates low to support jobs and worries less about inflation. She said that a worsening viral outbreak now or in the fall could cause a “double-dip” recession in which the economy shrinks again after expanding.
“Rolling flare-ups or a broad second wave of the virus may lead to widespread social distancing—whether mandatory or voluntary—which could weigh on the pace of the recovery and could even presage a second dip in activity,” Brainard said. “Some high-frequency indicators tracked by Federal Reserve Board staff … suggest that the strong pace of improvement in May and the first half of June may not be sustained.”
Brainard’s warning comes as California’s governor has reimposed a broad business shutdown in that state in response to a jump in new cases of the coronavirus. Several other states, including Florida and Texas, are also reversing their efforts to reopen their economies. Confirmed case counts are rising in at least 38 states.
Brainard said in virtual remarks to the National Association for Business Economics that Fed policy should do more to boost the economy. She noted that “forward guidance,” in which the Fed explicitly indicates when it might make changes to its interest rate policies, “constitutes a vital way” that the Fed could support the economy. The Fed previously used such policies after the 2008-2009 recession, in an effort to give businesses and consumers more certainty about future interest rates.
As an example of forward guidance, the Fed could indicate that it will refrain from lifting its benchmark short-term interest rate from its current level of nearly zero until inflation returned to the central bank’s 2% target, she said.
Other Fed officials have also said that the resurgence of the coronavirus has threatened the economy. Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said last week that rising hospitalization and death rates are “having a chilling effect on economic growth.”
Brainard cited the stubbornly high number of people that are requesting unemployment benefits each week, which has been stuck at close to 1.4 million for several weeks, as evidence that economy’s improvement may have slowed.
Fed policymakers may also want to consider targeting near-zero interest rates on short- and medium-term bonds, Brainard said, a groundbreaking policy that the Fed hasn’t used before but that has been pursued by central banks in Japan an Australia.
Still, Brainard said that Fed officials would likely need to carry out more analysis before adopting such a policy, known as yield curve control. Fed policymakers discussed yield curve control at its June meeting but few officials appeared to support such an approach.
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama
administrations orchestrated the bailout of
Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed securities,
that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of
speculation. As a result, social inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate cash
hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion
was funneled into stock buybacks.
Biggest U.S. Banks Say They Underestimated Coronavirus Impact
NEW YORK (AP) — With tens of millions of Americans out of work and many businesses shut down or operating under restrictions due to the coronavirus, three of the nation’s biggest banks set aside nearly $30 billion in the second quarter to cover potentially bad loans that were fine only a few months ago.
The results from JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup on Tuesday offer perhaps the broadest glimpse yet into how badly the pandemic is impacting the financial health of American consumers and businesses. Bank executives, in conference calls with analysts and reporters, said they underestimated how long the pandemic would last and its impacts on the overall economy.
Bank customers ranging from credit card holders to homeowners to oil and gas companies are in danger of defaulting due to the downturn. Thanks largely to the funds set aside for bad loans, JPMorgan’s profit fell by half in the April-June quarter, Citigroup’s sank about 70% and Wells Fargo reported its first quarterly loss since the financial crisis of 2008.
Back in April the talk among many economists and Wall Street analysts was that the U.S. economy was going to go through a “V-shaped” recovery: the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders would cause massive job and business losses, but once reopened, things would quickly return to normal.
That scenario has not played out.
The U.S. coronavirus pandemic is now in month five, with infections hitting records in Florida, Texas and California, causing state and local authorities to again shut down parts of their economies. The trillions of dollars in economic support passed in April to keep Americans and businesses afloat is now mostly running out. Enhanced unemployment benefits expire at the end of the month unless Congress acts, and at this point many consumers are upward of 90 days past due on debts that would be in collections if it wasn’t for government and bank-sponsored forbearance programs.
Bankers now seem to be bracing for the economy to keep struggling in the months ahead. The efforts to reopen local economies across the U.S. have contributed to the growing number of infections. California, the nation’s most populous state, on Monday scaled back many of its reopening initiatives as virus cases, hospitalizations and deaths all rise.
The Federal Reserve last month told the nation’s biggest banks to brace for a potential double-dip recession, with things deteriorating once again later this summer and into fall.
“The pandemic has a grip on the U.S. economy and it doesn’t look like it will loosen until a vaccine is available,” said Michael Corbat, the CEO of Citigroup, in a call with investors.
In a call with reporters, JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Piepszak said the bank now expects “a much more protracted downturn” than what it forecast back in April.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told reporters that the true impact of the recession will be “down the road,” referring to the fact trillions of dollars in stimulus start to wear off in the coming months. The bank expects unemployment to remain above 10% into 2021 — it currently stands at 11.1%.
In its second-quarter results, JPMorgan said it set aside $10.5 billion to cover potentially bad loans. That’s on top of the $8.3 billion the bank set aside in April, when the pandemic was only just starting to impact the U.S. economy.
The situation was just as bad at Citigroup and Wells Fargo. Citi, which is heavily exposed in credit cards, set aside an additional $7.9 billion to cover potentially bad loans. Wells Fargo, which did not set aside as much money as its peers in April, had to play catch up this quarter, setting aside $8.4 billion to cover potentially bad loans.
“Our view of the length and severity of the economic downturn has deteriorated considerably from the assumptions used last quarter,” said Wells Fargo’s CEO Charlie Scharf in the company’s earnings release.
With the individual banks, the pain was magnified in the particular industries they focus on:
At Citigroup, which is one of the largest credit card issuers in the country, the bank said roughly 6% of all accounts were now in forbearance. That’s roughly 2 million customers. However both Citi and JPMorgan said that consumers were at least trying to make debt payments if they could. Citi cited the relief checks that went out to Americans as a possible reason borrowers were keeping up with their debts.
Wells Fargo’s pain has been compounded by the fact the bank has a large oil and gas lending business. The drop in oil prices this year has put many drillers and refiners out of business, which caused even larger loan losses for Wells on top of losses in its consumer business.
The bright spot for Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase was their investment banking divisions, particularly trading. While March saw massive declines in the stock market, in the second quarter the market has gone more or less straight back to where it was in February. Both Citi and JPMorgan’s profits were bolstered by strong trading revenue.
BLOG: DURING THE EIGHT YEARS OF THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME WE NEVER HEARD GROPER JOE COMPLAINT ABOUT THE LOOT HANDED OVER TO THEIR BANKSTER DONORS OR A COMMENT ON SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (ENDORSED BIDEN) AND HER CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO!
Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small businesses.
Biden wants a new stimulus 'a hell of a lot bigger' than $2 trillion
By Michael Grunwald
Joe Biden wants a more progressive approach to economic stimulus legislation than Washington has taken so far, including much stricter oversight of the Trump Administration, much tougher conditions on business bailouts and long-term investments in infrastructure and climate that have so far been largely absent from congressional debates.
In a fiery half-hour interview with POLITICO, the presumptive Democratic nominee sounded a bit like his angrier and less moderate primary rivals, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, though in unexpurgated Biden style. The former vice president said that the next round of coronavirus stimulus needs to be “a hell of a lot bigger” than last month’s $2 trillion CARES Act, that it needs to include massive aid to states and cities to prevent them from “laying off a hell of a lot of teachers and cops and firefighters,” and that the administration is already “wasting a hell of a lot of money.”
Biden has been running a low-profile campaign during the pandemic, tweeting, filming videos and appearing on Sunday shows from his Delaware home while President Donald Trump has briefed the nation daily from the White House. Biden has let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speak for the Democratic Party during the debates over economic relief, offering supportive public statements that have faded into the background.
But stimulus is a subject close to his heart, and he passionately contrasted his own management of President Barack Obama’s $800 billion Recovery Act in 2009 with President Donald Trump’s approach to the trillions of dollars flowing out of Capitol Hill.
The Obama stimulus was wildly controversial, but it won bipartisan praise for its strict oversight and unusually low levels of fraud. In the interview, Biden was at his most indignant when he recounted how he recruited a gruff law enforcement veteran and government watchdog named Earl Devaney to oversee the Recovery Act in 2009, and how President Donald Trump fired the Pentagon inspector general who had been selected to oversee the CARES Act almost immediately after he signed it.
“I wanted to bring in the toughest son-of-a-b***h in the country—I really mean it, I’m not joking—because we wanted to make sure we did it by the numbers with genuine oversight,” Biden said. “Right now, there’s no oversight. [Trump] made it real clear he doesn’t have any damn interest in being checked. The last thing he wants is anyone watching that $500 billion going to corporate America, for God’s sake.”
The Trump campaign said it would not comment on the firing of Pentagon inspector general Michael Atkinson beyond the president’s public comments on April 4, when he attacked Atkinson for giving Congress the original whistleblower report about his call with the Ukrainian president that eventually led to his impeachment. “I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible,” the president said at the time. “He took a fake report and brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump fan—that, I can tell you.”
Biden repeatedly unloaded on big business and big banks, noting that “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out,” accusing the Trump administration of managing the stimulus for their benefit. He railed about banks like Wells Fargo that are “only alive because of the American taxpayer” giving their large corporate clients the first shot at CARES Act aid intended for small businesses. Over the last month, 26 million Americans have lost their jobs, and Biden said many of those jobs could be gone for good if mom-and-pop operations get left behind.
“We knew from the beginning that the big banks don’t like lending to small businesses,” Biden said. “I’m telling you, though, if Main Street businesses don’t get help, they’re gone.”
The CARES Act and three smaller coronavirus relief bills have all passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Biden was careful to avoid criticizing Pelosi and Schumer even as he criticized the results of the compromises they negotiated. He said he’s “in constant conservation” with both Democratic leaders, letting them know his priorities without interfering with their negotiations; he credited them with securing major increases in unemployment benefits and other improvements to Republican proposals that were initially skewed even further towards big business.
He was clearly disappointed that Pelosi and Schumer failed to secure any new aid to states in this week’s $484 billion package, but he suggested that could work out politically, because in the next round they’ll be able to blame Trump and other Republicans for looming state budget cuts and layoffs of first responders.
“They got what they could get,” Biden said. “I’ve been in too many negotiations to second-guess anybody else’s.”
Still, Biden suggested that after four rounds of legislation designed primarily to stanch the economic bleeding, the next round should include more forward-looking investments that could help the economy start to recover and grow once the virus is contained. He suggested a “trillion-dollar infrastructure program that can be implemented really rapidly,” as well as “dealing with environmental things that create good-paying jobs.”
Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have suggested that “green stimulus” would be a non-starter with Republicans, but Biden said investments in light rail, clean drinking water, and half a million electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s highways could help retool the economy for the future.
Biden also argued that long-term growth initiatives are America’s only hope to rein in a budget deficit that has suddenly ballooned to an unprecedented $4 trillion, and is sure to continue to expand as Washington continues to spend. He said that repealing the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut would help limit the red ink—“It wasn’t worth the powder it will take to blow it to hell”—but ultimately, restoring jobs and investing in the future is “the only thing that grows the economy back so the deficit doesn’t eat you alive.”
Biden has loved talking about stimulus ever since he ran the Recovery Act, and he sounded comfortable returning to the topic from his Delaware home, although there were a couple of typically hard-to-follow tangents, and one brief coughing interruption that he attributed to swallowing a peanut the wrong way.
His main theme was the contrast between his legendary harassment of the Cabinet secretaries, governors and mayors in charge of spending Recovery Act dollars—he reminded me that he spoke with every governor except Alaska’s Sarah Palin, most of them repeatedly—and “the malpractice of this administration.”
“There’s no coordination. There’s no accountability. Come on, the guy waits to hold up money because he wants to make sure his name is on the checks!” Biden said.
Biden has been firing off a steady stream of tweets attacking Trump for failing to make sure America has enough tests and protective equipment, for complaining about his media coverage, and most recently for suggesting that drinking bleach might help cure the virus. But while Biden clearly hopes to persuade some 2016 Trump voters to back him in November, he also needs to make sure that progressive Sanders and Warren supporters don’t stay home.
BLOG: HERE’S GROPER JOE’S NEW PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEK. THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY IS NOW A ‘POPULIST’
This week, Biden has taken flak from the left for including the corporate-friendly Democratic economist Lawrence Summers on internal calls. But on Friday night, he denounced corporate America as “greedy as hell,” echoing the structural critiques of the modern economy that fueled the Sanders and Warren campaigns.
He called for stronger assurances that small-business loans will go to small businesses, and that aid to larger corporations will come with strings prohibiting stock buybacks, executive bonuses or worker layoffs. But he also went beyond policy prescriptions, saying the pandemic might convince Americans that grocery clerks “and all the other folks out there saving our rear ends and risking their lives for eight bucks an hour” deserve a better deal. He thinks there could be a backlash against big corporations who have poured their profits into buybacks and dividends rather than worker training and research and development. He thinks the virus could deal a blow to short-term economic thinking and anti-government political thinking.
“I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time,” Biden said. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”
Amid simmering crisis over sexual assault charges Nancy Pelosi endorses Biden
28 April 2020
On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party candidate in the 2020 presidential election. In an eleven-minute video, Pelosi lavished praise on the pro-war, pro-corporate long-time senator and vice president under Barack Obama, the most right-wing of the major contestants for the nomination.
Pelosi called the 77-year-old, semi-senile political hack a “voice of reason” in the coronavirus crisis and absurdly described him as “a leader who is the personification of hope and courage, values and integrity.” In the midst of the greatest corporate bailout in world history, she specifically praised Biden for his role in the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street during the 2008–2009 financial crisis.
Pelosi’s endorsement followed endorsements earlier this month by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, marking the line-up of the so-called “progressive” wing of the party behind the candidate of the party apparatus, whose official imprimatur was signaled by the endorsement the same week by Barack Obama.
But the unity at the top has not resolved the party’s deep crisis. Biden is despised by broad sections of the working class and especially youth and younger workers, and there are many indications that large sections of those, especially young people, who supported the Sanders campaign may not accede to Sanders’ post-capitulation demand that they vote for Biden.
Their disquiet has been increased by the news last week that Biden’s chief economic adviser is Larry Summers, a key architect from the 1990s to the present of the policies of deregulation and economic parasitism that have enabled the financial aristocracy to monopolize ever greater portions of society’s wealth.
This has been compounded by a simmering scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse against Biden by Tara Reade, a one-time staffer in Biden’s Senate office, who filed a complaint with Washington DC police in March accusing the then-senator from Delaware of having assaulted her in 1993.
The alleged incident occurred 26 years ago, there were no other witnesses, Reade did not file a complaint with the police at the time, and the statute of limitations has long since expired. Biden himself has said nothing, but his campaign has denied the charges.
has no way of knowing whether Reade’s allegations are true. One thing is clear, however. The response of the Democratic Party and media organizations aligned with it, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, which have spearheaded the #MeToo witch hunt and reveled in the “take down” of dozens of prominent men on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, has exposed their rank hypocrisy.
The Times and the Post failed to report Reade’s allegations for weeks after the story was broken by Sanders supporter Katie Halper on her podcast in March. In mid-April they posted articles emphasizing inconsistencies in Reade’s story and insisting that it had to be carefully examined and Biden given the presumption of innocence before reaching any conclusion as to his guilt.
The Democratic National Committee has said nothing, nor has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sanders, Warren or most of the dozen or so women on Biden’s short list for his vice presidential running mate. Pelosi has spoken publicly only once on the matter, telling MSNBC on April 17 that she was “satisfied” with Biden’s denial. She appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program and was not asked by moderator Jake Tapper about the issue.
The contrast between the treatment of Biden by the Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic media and the treatment of a host of targets of #MeToo sex charges could not be more blatant. The mantra “believe women” that was proclaimed repeatedly, including by Biden himself during the September 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been supplanted by a sudden (dishonest) affirmation of the democratic principles of due process and the presumption of innocence.
What has been exposed is the role of the #MeToo campaign as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Its proponents have changed their tune because the McCarthyite methods of #MeToo in this particular case cut across the interests of the Democratic Party and substantial sections of the ruling class that are backing Biden in the contest with Trump.
There are, however, forces aligned with the Democratic Party that are pushing Reade’s allegations and calling out the party apparatus for seeking to quash them. The Intercept has published a number of articles as have some pseudo-left Sanders promoters, including Jacobin magazine.
This opposition has increased since the posting Friday by Newsbusters of a video clip from an August 1993 CNN “Larry King Live” program in which a woman, identified by Reade as her mother, calls in and cites the case of her daughter, who was “working for a prominent senator and could not get through with her problems at all.” The caller does not identify the senator and does not mention sexual harassment, but the clip seems to confirm Reade’s claim that she told her mother of the incident with Biden at the time.
The video has been widely reported by Fox News and other right-wing media, but largely suppressed by the rest of the corporate media.
Fox News reported Monday that the hashtag #dropoutbiden was trending on Twitter on Sunday, until it was allegedly removed. Nick Brana, Sanders’ former national outreach coordinator, tweeted over the weekend that the Democratic National Committee should either force Biden to drop out or “admit that suppressing progressives is the true purpose of your party.”
Another former Sanders senior adviser, Winnie Wong, tweeted: “The video of Tara Reade’s late mother calling into Larry King to blow the whistle about Tara’s sexual assault is being met with relative silence from a cadre of progressives right now and I want you all to know that I see you. We all do.”
Within this context, Pelosi’s abrupt endorsement of Biden appears to be an effort to contain and silence the voices calling for him to step aside and make explicit the party’s demand that the matter be dropped. Pelosi’s video appears to be part of a circling of the wagons around Biden.
On Monday, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal (Democrat from Washington state), endorsed Biden, after having served as the Sanders campaign’s national chair for health policy. Biden was the most strident opponent of Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” during the primary contest, repeatedly denouncing it on the grounds that it would cost several trillion dollars. Of course, both he and Sanders are now supporting a bailout of the corporate-financial elite that has already reached some $10 trillion.
“I am ready to work with him [Biden] to craft and then implement the most progressive agenda of any candidate in history,” Jayapal said in a statement.
Her endorsement followed that of two other former Sanders campaign officials. The Progressive Congressional Caucus’s other co-chair, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, endorsed Biden last week, as did Representative Ro Khanna of California. Pocan and Khanna served as co-chairmen for Sanders.
There is nothing progressive in the efforts of disaffected Democrats and their pseudo-left allies to dislodge Biden on the basis of unsubstantiated sex allegations. Even assuming that Reade is telling the truth, in which case Biden should be held to account, the fact is that Biden and his party are guilty of far greater crimes.
The wars Biden supported in Afghanistan and Iraq alone killed hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children. The Obama administration, in which Biden served as second-in-command, made drone assassination a major instrument of US foreign policy, asserting the right to murder US citizens and carrying out the assassination of at least three Americans. In 2010, Biden himself declared persecuted journalist Julian Assange to be a “hi-tech terrorist.”
It is not a question of replacing Biden with some other servant of American imperialism and Wall Street and promoting the middle class politics of racial and gender identity. The crisis requires the mobilization of the mass of workers, who are increasingly fighting back against the return-to-work campaign of both big business parties, and behind them all genuinely progressive elements in the middle class, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program in opposition to the entire two-party system and the ruling class it defends.
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama
administrations orchestrated the bailout of
Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed securities,
that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of
speculation. As a result, social inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate cash
hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion
was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale. Once again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
What Happened to the Record Income Taxes Americans Paid Last Year?
Even when adjusted for inflation, that was the most in individual income taxes the federal government had ever collected. It edged out fiscal 2018, when the government collected a then-record $1,683,537,000,000 (or $1,712, 347,440,000 in constant September 2019 dollars) in individual income taxes.
Of course, the federal government imposed more than just individual income taxes on American taxpayers in fiscal 2019. It also collected $1,243,087,000,000 in social insurance and retirement taxes; $230,245,000,000 in corporation income taxes; $98,915,000,000 in excise taxes; $70,784,000,000 in customs duties; $16,672,000,000 in estate and gift taxes; and $84,637,000,000 in other miscellaneous taxes.
All this added up to $3,462,196,000,000 in total tax collections, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.
But that $3.46 trillion in taxes was not enough for the federal government.
In fiscal 2019, you see, it spent a record $4,446,584,000,000.
Before fiscal 2019, the most the government had ever spent in a fiscal year was in 2009. That was the year Congress enacted the Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out banks and President Barack Obama's stimulus, theoretically aimed at propelling America out of the recession that ended that June.
Total federal spending in Obama's first fiscal year reached $4,186,882,840,000 (in constant September 2019 dollars). But that was still $259,701,160,000 less than the new record in spending the federal government achieved last year.
With its record spending in fiscal 2019, the federal government ran a deficit of $984,388,000,000 — even as it collected record individual income taxes.
So, what are Americans getting for the dollars the federal government extracts from their income?
It counted $917,779,000,000 in federal spending on these types of "benefits and services" in fiscal 2018 alone.
A section of the report provides "caveats" about how one should understand these "benefits and services."
"Programs included here are not social insurance," it says. "That term refers to programs intended to insure Americans against the loss of wages and work-related benefits due to retirement, disability, or temporary unemployment (e.g. Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance). Social insurance benefits are generally entitlements earned through work."
The CRS report also warns against considering the programs it counts as "welfare."
"Programs in this report cannot be collectively characterized as welfare," it says. "Welfare is typically thought of as government assistance to help poor people pay for necessities. As defined in this report, low-income programs are much broader, and include in-kind benefits and activities such as education, social services, and community development, among others."
So, what were the most significant "benefits and services" the federal government spent this $917,779,000,000 on in fiscal 2018?
"Four programs accounted for 68% of low-income spending in FY2018 and ten programs made up 82%," the report said. "Medicaid alone represented 48% of the total.
"In addition to Medicaid," the report said, "the top four include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the refundable portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)."
In fact, according to the report, the federal government spent $441,392,000,000 on Medicaid in fiscal 2018; $63,111,000,000 on SNAP; $58,640,000,000 on the refundable portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit; and $57,934,000,000 on Supplemental Security Income.
In fiscal 2018, when the federal government was directing $917,779,000,000 (in 2018 dollars) to the programs counted in the CRS report, it was collecting the then-record $1,683,537,000,000 (in 2018 dollars) in individual income taxes.
If, for the sake of argument, you assume all of the $917,779,000,000 the federal government spent in FY2018 on the "benefits and services for low-income people" counted in the CRS report was paid for with revenue derived from the then-record $1,683,537,000,000 the Treasury collected in individual income taxes, that would leave $765,758,000,000 in individual income tax revenue to be spent on other things.
Then assume that some of that remaining $765,758,000,000 was used to pay the $324,697,000,000 in net interest on the federal debt the Treasury paid in fiscal 2018.
That would leave $441,061,000,000 in revenue from individual income tax collections not yet spent.
Now assume all of that remaining $441,061,000,000 was used to help pay for the $600,706,000,000 the government spent on the Department of Defense and Military Programs in fiscal 2018.
After expending every dollar of remaining individual income tax revenue, the government would still need to find another $159,645,000,000 to fully fund the nation's defense.
Thus, after funding the "benefits and services for people with low income" that were counted in the Congressional Research Service report and the net interest on the debt and a portion of the Defense Department and Military Programs, there would be no revenue left from individual income tax collections to pay for such things as a Department of Justice or a Department of State.
Or a White House, House or Senate.
They would need to be funded from other sources of federal tax revenue — or with more debt.
(Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSNews.com.)
By Terence P. Jeffrey | July 15, 2020 | 4:47am EDT
No comments:
Post a Comment