Thursday, January 28, 2021

MODERN CAPITALISM CAN'T WORK??? - WALL STREET DOESN'T CARE WHAT WORKS SO LONG AS IT ENDS UP IN THEIR POCKETS - GOV EXISTS TO ASSURE THAT IT DOES AND THAT NO BILLIONAIRE OR BANKSTER EVER GOES TO PRISON

 Biden is a creature of the state, having worked in national 

politics for nearly half a century. As we have noted, he lives in 

that universe. His central concern is to refurbish the state 

apparatus and collaborate with the Republican Party, to 

establish what is in effect a government of national unity 

directed against the working class. The framework of official 

politics is moving not to the left, but to the right, with the 

fascistic forces cultivated by Trump further integrated into thE

structure of the state itself.


Joe Biden Kills Office Protecting Job Rights of U.S. Graduates

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 03: Joe Biden supporters hold signs ahead of Biden's Super Tuesday night event on March 03, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. 1,357 Democratic delegates are at stake as voters cast their ballots in 14 states and American Samoa on what is known as Super Tuesday. …
Mario Tama/Getty Images
NEIL MUNRO
6,660
11:01

The Biden administration is eliminating an office that was recently created to protect many millions of American graduates — including Biden’s young voters — from government-fueled corporate discrimination in hiring, pay, and workplace rights.

The worker-rights office was announced January 13 by President Donald Trump’s deputies and canceled January 26 by Biden’s deputies.

The short-lived office was intended to document and expose the corporate discrimination against Americans that is fueled by the huge Occupational Practical Training (OPT) program.

In 2019, the OPT program provided work permits to 400,000 foreign graduates so they can take the jobs and opportunities needed by graduates — including Biden’s voters — under rules that make foreign workers much cheaper to hire and easier to manage than American graduates are. OPT workers are foreign, temporary, contract workers — not immigrants.

The Biden cancellation is bad news for the many college students and graduates who pulled the lever for Biden in November 2020, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, which fights the replacement of American graduates. “Biden was selected by the corporatocracy [which sees] no role for American graduates,” he said. American graduates “are not needed” by employers who can import many compliant, cheap, and disposable foreign workers, he said.

Correspondingly, the cancellation was celebrated by the immigration lawyers who help Fortune 500 CEOs import foreigners to take the jobs needed by young Americans, including many debt-burdened black and Latino graduates.

On the same day, the administration canceled another graduate protection plan leftover from the Trump administration.

The plan — which was blocked by corporate insiders in Trump’s White House — was to halt the award of work permits to the spouses of the almost one million H-1B foreign contract workers who have jobs in the United States. This H4EAD program was created by President Barack Obama — not by Congress — and it added another 250,000 foreign contract workers who compete for jobs against American graduates.

The cancellation was celebrated by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. He is a Twitter spokesman for the investor-backed American Immigration Council, which is a spinoff of the American Immigration Lawyers Association:

Biden’s officials have also canceled a recent move by the Department of Labor to limit the outsourcing of U.S. jobs via the huge H-1B program. They are also expected to undermine other Trump regulations that help protect American graduates from the H-1B program.

The administration’s actions match the demands of its corporate donors and cheerleaders, such as the major universities that help deliver the OPT work permit to fee-paying foreign graduates.

Biden’s team is also backed by many corporate employers of OPT and H-1B workers, including Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Apple, Amazon, Deloitte, Microsoft, and their trade groups. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us advocacy group praised the preservation of the H4EAD program, which has helped keep married H-1B contract workers from leaving the United States:

We commend the Biden-Harris Administration for taking immediate action to turn the page from the Trump-Pence Administration’s disastrous immigration policies, and to do right by more than 100,000 hardworking immigrants who are contributing to the United States every single day in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

The FWD.us group also praised the Biden team for dropping a draft “unlawful presence” rule that would require the foreign student to go home after they get credentials from U.S. colleges. Without the rule, many foreign graduates overstay their visas and work as white-collar illegal aliens in the jobs needed by American graduates.

The Trump administration announced the OPT office on January 13.

The agency “is currently unable to evaluate the impact OPT has had on U.S. workers and foreign students who have obtained work authorization through the programs,” said the January 13 message from the Student and Exchange Visitor Program within the  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

“To remedy this, SEVP is announcing the development of a new unit — the OPT Employment Compliance Unit — that will be dedicated full-time to compliance matters involving wage, hours, and compensation … the first report will be published on ICE.gov by July 31, 2021,” said the statement. It continued:

For example, if the unit were to detect evidence that an employer is using OPT in a discriminatory manner (e.g., as a means to hire only foreign nationals, or only individuals of certain nationalities to the exclusion of others), or in a manner that negatively impacts wages, this unit may notify DOL and the U.S. Department of Justice of such evidence, where HSI is unable to address such matters, so that the evidence can be investigated further.

…

The loss of employment many U.S. workers have faced since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as employers lay off significant portions of their workforce (while still, in some cases, seeking to hire more foreign workers), makes this work particularly timely.

On January 26, Biden’s deputies announced they would cancel the transparency program:

After conducting an additional review of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s optional practical training (OPT) compliance effort, the program determined that it is already performing much of the work outlined in the Broadcast Message. As such, the creation of the new unit is not necessary at this time.

Before Trump’s arrival, the federal government released minimal information about the huge OPT program. In 2018, Trump’s deputies released some limited information, allowing Breitbart News and the FBI to expose widespread fraud.

But the federal government provides little information about the jobs and wages lost to the OPT program. The federal website provides some basic data about annual numbers, the major OPT employers, that the universities which profit from the OPT program. But the agency provides little data about the operation of the program, the wages paid to OPT, workers, the many small companies that use OPTs to fill Fortune 500 outsourcing contracts, or about reported hiring discrimination against Americans.

However, many foreign and American workers tell Breitbart News that the OPT program — and its sister program, the Curricular Practical Training (CPT) program — provides the workforce for the lowest level of the Fortune 500’s labor pyramid.

The OPT and CPT workers — plus many white-collar illegal aliens and overstays — work long hours at meager pay because they hope to get promoted into full-time jobs and then into the H-1B program. They want to get into the H-1B program because it allows them to eventually get green cards.

The one million-plus foreign workers in this Green Card Workforce displace many American graduates from vital gateway jobs in science, software, accountancy, or health care. The flood of labor in this hidden pyramid also cuts salaries for college graduates — and boosts stock prices for investors and older Americans — including the parents and teachers of the American graduates.

For example, a group of economists estimated in January that Trump’s recent curbs on corporate use of H-1B contract workers nicked the stock market value of Fortune 500 companies “by about 0.45% — representing a total loss of around $100 billion.”

Other evidence suggests that the Fortune 500’s reliance on many foreign contract workers is sidelining qualified Americans, damaging corporate innovation, helping China, and also diverting investment, jobs, and wealth from central states to the coastal states.

But this hidden labor market is rarely covered in corporate media, such a Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, or in the pro-migration New York Times.

However, Lynn and his member of American professionals are trying to raise awareness of how the OPT program pushes young Americans out of good careers.

“The OPT work permit masquerades workers as ‘students,’ so employers are under no obligation to pay them fair market wages,” Lynn noted, adding:

The Biden Administration is under the false delusion that these international students are the best and brightest in the world, so deserve to stay here permanently. Research by the [left-wing] Economic Policy Institute shows that the majority of these students are not the best and brightest, and are entering low-ranked US universities with low entrance requirements [to get work permit]. Universities profit because international students pay full freight tuition, while American students are graduating with immense student loan debt and having to now compete with OPT work-permit holders.

The ICE data shows that the OPT program delivers many foreign workers into Fortune 500 jobs, where managers have a lot of freedom to hire within their own ethnic networks. For example, since 2003, Amazon has hired 12,173 people via the program, while Deloitte has hired 5,799 foreign graduates, and Apple has hired 2,667 people.

For years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration — or the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, nonracist, class-based, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles that still push the 1950’s “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

Migration allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, shortchange labor in the cities, and impose tight control pay cuts on American professionals.

Migration also helps corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American graduates, undermine Americans’ labor rights, and redirect progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities and claims.

Davos Great Reset: French Prez Macron Declares Modern Capitalism ‘Can No Longer Work’

French President Emmanuel Macron attends a video conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris on January 26, 2021, as part of World Economic Forum (WEF) which usually takes place in Davos, Switzerland. - The Davos Agenda from January 25 to January 29, 2021, is an online edition due to the …
FRANCOIS MORI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
KURT ZINDULKA
625
3:18

At the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) virtual Davos Agenda summit on Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that in the wake of the Chinese coronavirus modern capitalism “can no longer work”.

Appearing before a question and answer session conducted with ‘Great Reset’ architect and founder-chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, Mr Macron said that while capitalism has historically driven down poverty globally, he claimed that it came with the cost of furthering inequality.

“We will get out of this pandemic only with an economy that thinks more about fighting inequalities,” Macron said.

“The capitalist model together with this open economy can no longer work in this environment,” he added.

The French president pronounced that capitalism has resulted in a “deep moral and economic crisis” in which “hundreds and thousands of people throughout the world had this feeling of losing their usefulness.”

Macron said there were “two kings in this system—shareholders and consumers,” and that capitalism has failed to support labourers and has been detrimental to the environment.

Mr Marcon — who has been seen largely as an economically neo-liberal leader — went on to claim that the world needs to “move beyond” the hostility towards state intervention into the economy and that companies must be bound by the responsibilities of alleviating economic inequality and reducing their alleged impact on the climate.

He argued that for the “economy of tomorrow” to succeed, businesses must balance competitiveness with fighting supposedly man-made climate change and reducing Carbon Dioxide emissions.

Macron went on to express his gratitude for President Joe Biden’s decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords — which the United States left under the leadership of former President Trump — yet called for leaders to “revise upwards” their green agenda goals.

The calls to reshape the economic order in the wake of the Chinese coronavirus were seconded by President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who said: “We must learn from this crisis. We have to change the way we live and do business to be able to keep what we value and hold dear.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel took the opportunity to call for more globalism post-pandemic, saying that the coronavirus shows “how much we are interlinked, how globally interdependent,” the world is and that “trying to isolate yourself fails.”

While Mr Macron did not lay out any firm policy proposals to reshape capitalism, he did endorse the model of ‘Stakeholder capitalism‘, promoted by Klaus Schwab, which calls for “shared prosperity and equitable growth, based on sustainable production and consumption.”

The WEF has said that governments across the world should adopt more socialist-style policies such as wealth taxes and heavy-handed regulations on businesses, as well as introducing giant Green New Deal type policies.

Laying out the ‘Great Reset’ in June of last year, Shwab used the excuse of the Chinese coronavirus crisis to declare that the “world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies” and that there is a need for a “Great Reset of capitalism“.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

But with the transfer of the White House from the Republicans to the 

Democrats, it is necessary to counter illusions about what this 

government will or even can do. Its actions will be determined by the 

interests of the ruling class under conditions of an unprecedented 

social, economic and global crisis. However, efforts are underway to 

chloroform the public about the realities of the procapitalist, imperialist 

politics of the Biden administration and the catastrophic economic and 

social conditions under which it begins.

The rise of financial parasitism and the emergence of fascism

Nick Beams

In his report “The Trump coup and the rise of fascism: Where is America going?” David North traced out the historical processes that led to the events in Washington on January 6.

He explained that while extreme right-wing and fascistic movements had always been present within the American body politic, these malignant political and social forces had been able to be contained so long as the US was a rising economic power.

The present situation is fundamentally different. America is no longer a rising power. For the past 50 years it has been in an inexorable historic decline that has seen two existential financial crises in the space of 12 years—the 2008 meltdown of the banking system and the potentially even bigger disaster of mid-March 2020, when the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a freeze-up of all financial markets in the US and globally.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

In his report, North insisted that the crisis and its significance could be grasped only when placed within its historical and international context. Accordingly, he located its economic origins in the decision of President Nixon on August 15, 1971 to remove the gold backing from the US dollar, effectively destroying at one stroke the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 that had formed the basis of post-war global capitalist economy.

The pillar of that agreement, which provided a key foundation for the restabilisation of world capitalism after the 30 years of carnage beginning with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, was the establishment of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, redeemable for gold at the rate of $35 per ounce.

Barely a quarter of a century after that commitment had been given, it was scrapped because of the decline in the position of the United States within the world economy. The build-up of the US balance of trade and balance of payments deficits meant that to honour the pledge to redeem dollars with gold would bring national bankruptcy.

“In historical retrospect,” North wrote, “this action marked a turning point not only in the global economic position of the United States, but also in the fate of American democracy.”

This vital point in locating the economic origins of the present political crisis can be established through an examination of the trajectory of American capitalism over the past 50 years, and particularly the developments in the monetary and financial system.

That history could be summed up as the unending rise of finance capital, the most rapacious and predatory form of capital as a whole, and its domination over the entire economy.

This process, as we shall trace out, forms the underpinning and has now provided the economic impulse for changes in the political superstructure that have seen the emergence of the real and present danger of fascist forms of rule.

It has not been confined to the US. The developments within the United States are only the most violent expression, at least so far, of what has been a global process manifested in every country. But as the saying goes, the fish begins to rot from the head.

The shock of August 1971 was the initial expression of a major turn in the development of the global capitalist economy—the ending of the post-war economic boom.

In 1974–75, following a significant downturn in the rate of profit in the US and across the world from the end of the 1960s onward, world capitalism entered the deepest recession to that point since the 1930s.

It was quite unlike the recessions of the1950s and 1960s. After their passing, they had given way to a new upswing in the business cycle and greater economic growth than previously.

The recession of 1974–75 passed, but it was not replaced by anything resembling the upturns of the past. Rather, under conditions of reduced growth, it ushered in what became known as “stagflation”—the combination of rising prices and high unemployment. The so-called Keynesian measures, based on government stimulus, not only proved to be ineffective in bringing a revival, they only made the situation worse.

Key sections of the ruling class in the US and internationally understood, at least at some level, there was no way out of the morass with half-measures based on the industrial framework of the post-war boom. They had tried to increase the level of exploitation within the old order to boost profits, but this only provoked a series of militant struggles by powerful sections of the working class—the miners’ strike in Britain of 1973–74, which brought down the Heath Tory government, being one of the more graphic examples.

Based on this experience, they recognised that nothing less than the restructuring of the capitalist economy was necessary and a new regime of production had to be developed if the decline in the rate of profit was to be arrested.

This involved the closure of less profitable sections of industry, coupled with the elimination of the major concentration of workers they employed; the introduction of new job-cutting technologies in those that remained; and the outsourcing of production internationally to take advantage of much cheaper sources of labour.

This program was spearheaded internationally by the Thatcher and Reagan governments. The chief economic weapon used to impose the restructuring agenda was wielded by the US Federal Reserve under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker. Appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979, he raised interest rates to historically unprecedented levels, hitting 20 percent at one point.

Conducted under the banner of the fight against inflation, the central target of these measures was the working class. A major turn in the class struggle came in 1981, when Reagan carried out the mass sacking of air traffic controllers and jailed the leaders of their union, PATCO.

Volcker was later to praise Reagan for his strikebreaking, declaring that the defeat of the PATCO workers was the most important factor in bringing inflation under control. The PATCO outcome, he said, was decisive in its “psychological effect on the strength of the union bargaining position on other issues—whatever the issues were.”

A member of the Fed’s interest rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee put the issue even more directly, saying at a meeting in February 1981 that “inflation would not be securely defeated… until all those workers and their unions agreed to accept less. If they were not impressed by words, perhaps the liquidation of several million more jobs would convince them.”

But these measures could go forward only with the direct collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy, which refused to lift a finger in defence of the PATCO workers, setting the pattern for the betrayal of a host of major industrial battles that were to follow in the rest of the decade.

The destruction of vast sections of US industry and the consequent war against the working class was a component of a vast reorganisation of the American economy—its transformation into the centre of parasitic profit accumulation via financial manipulation and speculation.

It began with the buying up of companies in hostile takeovers, financed by junk bonds, and then hollowing them out and selling off the component parts. The accumulation of profit was carried out not through production, but through parasitic activity financed by debt—the start of a process that has now reached stratospheric heights.

In his report, North referred to the growth of outright criminal activity in the political sphere, exemplified by Reagan’s laying of a wreath at a cemetery in the German town of Bitburg in 1985, where members of the Waffen SS were buried, followed by the Iran-Contra scandal a year later.

This involved the Reagan administration, in violation of a law passed by Congress, funding death squads in Nicaragua seeking the overthrow of the left-wing Sandinista government. Congressional hearings revealed that Colonel Oliver North, while directing the murderous operations in Nicaragua, was also involved in plans for the detention of 100,000 Americans in the event of a national emergency.

There were parallel developments in the underlying financial structure of American capitalism, as methods that had been regarded as illegal in the past became the norm. In 1982, Congress passed legislation allowing companies to buy back their own shares in order to boost their price—a practice that has now become a major component of Wall Street’s operations. Previously, this activity had been outlawed by the Securities and Exchange Commission as market manipulation.

A new breed of financial operators emerged to organise financial speculation, particularly through the issuing of less than investment grade, or junk, bonds for the financing of hostile takeovers.

One of the most significant of these, Michael Milken, was eventually jailed. But the methods he developed rapidly became standard operating procedure on Wall Street—a fact recognised by President Trump in February 2020, when he granted Milken a pardon to the applause of finance capital. In praise of the decision, the Wall Street Journal declared: “Mr. Milken was one of the great financial innovators of the 20th century. In the 1980s he invented the high-yield bond market that is now a financial staple.”

However, the orgy of speculation unleashed in the 1980s, made possible by successive waves of deregulation that widened the scope for the activities of finance capital, did not proceed smoothly. It erupted in a major crisis that exposed the growing rot and decay at the very centre of US capitalism.

In October 1987, Wall Street experienced its largest one-day fall in history—eclipsing the October 1929 crash—as the Dow plunged by more than 22 percent. It was brought back from this near-death experience, which lasted for some weeks, only by the intervention of the US Federal Reserve. Its actions were not one-off, but signified a qualitative transformation in its role in US financial system.

In the post-war period, the role of the Fed was summed up in 1955 by its chairman, William McChesney Martin: “In the field of monetary and credit policy, precautionary action to prevent inflationary excesses is bound to have some onerous effects… Those who have the task of making such policy don’t expect you to applaud. The Federal Reserve… is in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.”

In the fall of 1987, the newly appointed chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, issued a one-sentence statement on the share market crash. “The Federal Reserve,” he said, “consistent with its responsibilities as the nation’s central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.”

This meant opening the money spigots of the Fed to the finance houses. The scale of its actions, though dwarfed by subsequent interventions, was extensive for the time. Altogether, the central bank supplied $17 billion to the banking system, an amount equal to more than 25 percent of bank reserves and equivalent to seven percent of the national money supply.

It was the start of a new program, as Greenspan was to make clear. The task of the Fed was not to act against inflationary asset bubbles and deflate them before they became dangerous, but to allow them to develop, and when they burst, to pump out money to clean up the mess and prevent the bankruptcy of the banks and finance houses that had engaged in the speculation that had produced the bubbles.

This was based on the understanding that such methods were now becoming central to the functioning of the American economy. Instead of taking away the punchbowl, Greenspan made clear that the role of the Fed was to add more alcohol to it.

The decade of the 1990s was marked by a series of crises: the Mexican peso crisis, the Asian crisis of 1997–98, the collapse of the Russian rouble. These developments led to the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, which was bailed out by the New York Federal Reserve to prevent the hedge fund’s demise from sparking a crisis throughout the financial system.

The development of the internet was accompanied by the growth and collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000–2001. In 2001, the energy company Enron, whose reported profits were the result of “creative accounting” signed off by a major accounting firm, collapsed when its profits were revealed to be completely fictitious.

These crises were not a series of accidents, but the expression of a deepening malaise flowing from the relentless accumulation of profit through financial activities completely divorced from the underlying real economy and the production of real value.

At every point, the reaction of the Fed was the same. It lowered interest rates and created the conditions for the next bubble. Throughout the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, the last vestiges of the regulatory mechanisms that had previously been put in place were removed, culminating in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of the 1930s, which separated the banking and investment activities of the major banks.

In 1999, when financial derivatives began to assume greater importance as a means of speculation, Clinton’s treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, strenuously opposed making them subject to regulation.

The crisis of 2008 marked a qualitative turning point in the historic crisis of American and global capitalism, Here it was a question of not just the activities of an individual firm such as Enron or a hedge fund, as in the case of Long Term Capital Management, that had collapsed.

The crisis that began in the $50 billion sub-prime mortgage market, a relatively small part of the financial market, became all-embracing because the methods employed there were rife throughout the system as a whole. After the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, the government and the Fed had to rescue the insurance giant AIG to prevent a collapse of the entire financial system.

The massive intervention by the Bush and the Obama administrations, involving corporate bailouts and the pouring of trillions of dollars into the financial system by the Fed. The US central bank’s balance sheet expanded from around $800 billion to more than $4 trillion as a result of the continuous purchase of financial assets under its quantitative easing program. This signified that the so-called “free market” could not survive for a single day without the support of the state.

These interventions, coupled with the further restructuring of the labour market under Obama, including the expansion of the two-tier wage system and the scrapping of regular labour contracts, accelerated a process that had begun decades before—the siphoning of the wealth of society up the income scale, creating the greatest levels of social inequality ever seen in history.

The intervention of the Fed through the purchase of government bonds and the reduction of interest rates to historic lows, essentially providing free money to the financial oligarchs, were declared to be temporary measures, to be withdrawn once conditions returned to normal.

That day never came. The new normal was that continuous Fed support was essential for the day-to-day operations of the financial markets. Any effort by the central bank to wind back its measures was met with a violent reaction on Wall Street, bringing an immediate back-down. Such was the case in 2018, when the Fed carried out four interest rate rises, each of 0.25 percentage points, and indicated it would wind down its holdings of financial assets at the rate of $50 billion a month. The markets tanked and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced that he was halting further rate hikes.

The 2008 crisis was the outcome of the rise and rise of financial parasitism over the previous three decades and more. This did not arise from a change in the mindset of the ruling classes that could somehow be reversed if only another policy were adopted. Rather, it arose from deep-seated objective contradictions within the capitalist profit system that had come to the surface with the ending of the post-war boom.

Through all the ups and downs of the business cycle following the end of the boom, profit rates in the spheres of industrial production never returned to the levels they had enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the driving force behind the ever-increasing turn to financial methods of profit accumulation.

Therefore, the response to the 2008 crisis was to lift parasitic profit accumulation to ever greater heights through the provision of essentially free money to the financial oligarchy, while launching austerity programs against the working class on the basis that there was “no money.”

When the pandemic struck, it exposed the devastating social consequences of the institutionalisation of the accumulation of wealth at the heights of society at the expense of the mass of the population. No effective measures based on science, which would have involved the lockdown of non-essential workplaces and the payment of compensation to the workers affected, could be implemented to combat the pandemic because this would have set off a crisis on Wall Street.

The reason is to be found in the nature of the financial assets that have now assumed such gargantuan proportions. Finance capital is essentially fictitious. That is, it does not embody value in and of itself, but, in the final analysis, is a claim on the surplus value extracted from the working class in the process of capitalist production.

When an industrial concern makes a profit from its activity, real value has been created and surplus value has been generated from the exploitation of the working class in the process of production. However, when shares are traded on Wall Street at a profit, when profits are made on currency transactions, such the $2 billion raked in by George Soros by betting against the pound sterling in 1992, or a financial killing is made from derivative trades, to name just a few examples, not an atom of new value has been created.

These fundamental economic relationships are the basis and driving force of some of the most significant changes in the physiognomy of US capitalism over the past 40 years.

The continuous driving down of real wages, despite vast increases in the productivity of labour, coupled with the intensification of exploitation, has become an indispensable feature of the capitalist economy, as the vampire of fictitious capital demands the ever greater extraction of surplus value to sustain it.

Likewise, the destruction of social services—the attacks on education and the nightmare that is the US health care system—serves the same end, because, in the final analysis, all social spending represents a deduction from the mass of surplus value available to Wall Street.

The rise of fictitious capital and the consequent development of parasitism as the dominant mode of profit accumulation point to another significant development. The past 30 years have seen the launching of continuous wars by US imperialism—wars of plunder aimed at trying to enhance the flow of wealth to Wall Street and counter America’s economic decline by military means.

At the same time, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the US has increasingly pursued economic warfare against its rivals—not only against China, but also increasingly against Europe—to achieve the same objective. It has now reached the point where the dollar, the world’s major reserve currency, has become “weaponised.” Corporations and states deemed to be acting at variance with US objectives—trading with Iran, for example—can be excluded from key financial markets.

The onset of the pandemic not only exposed the devastating social consequences of financial parasitism, it made clear how the conditions for a new financial crash, going even beyond the scale of 2008, had been created in the ensuing 12 years.

This is the significance of the mid-March 2020 crisis on Wall Street, extending into the entire global financial system, when markets froze across the board.

The extent and intensity of this financial heart attack was revealed in the fact that it was centred in the $20 trillion US Treasury bond market—the bedrock of the American and global financial system. In periods of significant market turbulence, the Treasury bond market acts as a kind of financial safe haven, with money flowing into the purchase of US government bonds. On this occasion, however, there was a bond market sell-off in what has been described as a “dash for cash” that threatened to bring down the entire financial system.

The circumstances of this crisis reveal the significance of the class struggle for the operation of the financial system and why all stops are pulled by the political establishment and its servants in the trade union bureaucracy to suppress it.

In March, as the effects of the pandemic and the enormous dangers it posed became apparent, there were walkouts and strikes by significant sections of workers, particularly in the auto industry, demanding that effective measures be taken to combat it. This sent a shiver of fear through the financial oligarchy, petrified at the prospect that this movement would grow and develop.

The initial movement was blocked, above all by the actions of the trade unions. But the fear has not gone, as exemplified by the worried response to the strike by Hunts Point Produce Market workers in New York City, driven by concern that the strike could be the catalyst for an explosion of pent-up social anger in wider sections of the working class.

The scale of the Fed’s intervention in mid-March revealed the extent and depth of the financial crisis. Virtually overnight, it stepped in to act as the guarantor of all areas of the financial system, committing to increase its bond purchases, guaranteeing the commercial paper market, the market for municipal bonds, student loan and credit card debt and, for the first time in history, purchasing corporate debt.

This intervention, which took place in combination with the provision of hundreds of billions of dollars to major corporations under the CARES Act, has seen the Fed’s balance sheet expand from around $4 trillion to more than $7 trillion. The Fed has pledged to keep interest rates at virtually zero for the indefinite future, and is buying Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities at the rate of $120 billion a month—that is, more than $1.4 trillion a year.

These measures, going far beyond what was undertaken after 2008, mean that the capitalist state has become the guarantor of the financial oligarchy.

Fed and government action has driven a 75 percent rise on Wall Street since its mid-March nadir, resulting in the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars to the coffers of the financial oligarchy.

The financial house of cards is being lifted to ever greater heights even as its foundations become increasingly shaky, amid warnings from within Wall Street itself that the situation is inherently unstable and unsustainable.

It is from these processes that the objective economic impulses for vast changes in the political superstructure, including the emergence of fascism as a significant and highly dangerous force, emanate.

In their pronouncements on the events of January 6, the various pseudo-left tendencies in the US and around the world have sought to chloroform the working class as to their meaning. Their universal response, flying in the face of a growing mountain of evidence, is that the storming of the US Capitol was not a fascist coup attempt. Bourgeois democracy still enjoys support in key sections of the state and the invasion of the Capitol was nothing but a piece of theatre, motivated by a deranged president, but without backing in decisive sections of the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus, they declare.

Above all, they maintain that there are no fundamental economic processes that would necessitate the development of a fascist movement to enforce the dictates of the bourgeoisie. The ruling classes are continuing to make money hand over fist and there is no significant social opposition that the ruling classes need to counter with fascist forces.

These dangerous political fictions, which so clearly reveal the class basis of the pseudo-left tendencies as agencies of the bourgeoisie, are exposed through an examination of the origins of the fascist forces that gathered in Washington.

They grew and developed in a campaign against lockdowns to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The fascist plot to capture Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, put her on trial for treason and execute her, was motivated by the limited lockdowns she had imposed in the state.

When these forces held demonstrations, involving the display of arms, to demand the opening of the economy, they were given significant coverage in the media. This was because their demands were in line with those of powerful sections of the ruling class. They were summed up in the pronouncement of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the “cure cannot be worse than the disease,” which became the banner under which Trump, supported in large measure by the Democrats, pursued the homicidal policy of “herd immunity.”

Nothing could be allowed to stop the flow of surplus value. Wall Street quite literally began to feed on death.

This policy, spearheaded by fascist forces, was the direct and immediate expression of the most basic interests of the financial oligarchy. They may not have liked the fascists’ methods, but they agreed with their objectives.

Once their own position was secured by the actions of the Trump administration and the Fed, all of which were supported by the Democrats, the financial elites demanded a return to work, recognising that any effective measures to deal with the pandemic would bring a crisis on Wall Street, as the near-death experience in mid-March had revealed.

Any assertion that the ruling classes as a whole and the dominant financial oligarchy have no need for fascist bands, let alone a coup, because they are continuing to make money ignores both the lessons of history and the explosive contradictions within the very heart of American capitalism and its financial system.

The fundamental issue is that the accumulation of vast wealth at the top and the rise of social inequality to historically unprecedented levels portend the eruption of massive social and class struggles, which, by their very nature, will very rapidly assume a political form. One of their immediate effects will be to produce a crisis in the financial markets, whose rise has been made possible not least by the suppression of the class struggle by the trade union apparatuses over the past three decades.

In this context, the pronouncements of Trump against the dangers of Marxism and his continuous denunciations of socialism as he has sought to build his fascistic movement should not be dismissed as the deranged outpourings of an individual.

They are the recognition by a section of the financial elites, out of which Trump emerged, of the dangers they confront—that under conditions of worsening economic conditions for the mass of the population and vast problems confronting young people, there is an enormous build-up of social anger and a shift to the left.

It is not necessary to point to Trump, who has sought to steer this anger in a rightward direction, to identify this phenomenon. Every serious study of the current economic situation in the US and worldwide points to the acceleration of social inequality and the dangers it poses for the capitalist ruling class.

For example, the latest edition of the Global Risks Report of the World Economic Forum, the organiser of the annual Davos gathering of the international elites, warns that many young people “are now entering the workforce in an employment ice age.” Youth disillusionment will become a “critical threat to the world in the short term,” as the current generation “loses faith in today’s economic and political institutions.”

In examining the connection between the rise of financial parasitism to truly stratospheric heights and the emergence of fascist forces, it is necessary to distinguish between fascism and other forms of authoritarian of rule. The bourgeoisie much prefers to use the existing forms of capitalist rule to enforce its demands and dictates. But under certain conditions it has the need for other mechanisms.

As Leon Trotsky noted, the bourgeoisie is by no means enamoured of fascism. It regards the fascist method “much as a man with a swollen jaw dislikes having his teeth pulled.” But under certain conditions, of the kind now unfolding in the US and internationally, the big bourgeoisie has need of the fascist dentist.

A fascist movement, developing under conditions of economic and social breakdown, seeks to mobilise dispossessed sections of the petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors, individual traders and sections of workers, impoverished and disoriented because of the decades-long betrayals of the trade union bureaucracy, into a political force.

Because of its social base, its ideology generally has a superficial “left” colouration. It claims to be fighting the deep state, the corrupt corporate media, the political establishment, even at times the giant monopolies that oppress the little man and woman. It doing so, it trades on real social grievances.

But everywhere and always it seeks to turn them in a reactionary direction, serving the interests of the ruling class against the working class. This connection is exemplified by Trump, who, while railing against the establishment and the elites and claiming to be fighting for the “forgotten people,” continually hailed the rise of Wall Street and demanded it be boosted even further.

Fascism feeds on the social distress and despair produced by capitalism and the operations of its financial system, under conditions where there is no basis for any meaningful reform within the existing economic order. Therefore, the ground can be cut from under it only when the working class advances and fights for its own independent program for the re-organisation of the economy and society.

Fascism cannot be undermined by appeals to disoriented layers of the population to respect the existing order, for that very order is responsible for their plight and has sent them in search of desperate means to overcome it.

Let us draw a balance sheet of the present situation. The attempted fascist coup by Trump enjoyed deep support within considerable sections of the Republican Party, with whom Biden now calls for unity.

It was actively supported by sections of the state apparatus, some openly, but many more covertly, which continue to serve under the Biden administration.

The social and economic base of the Trump fascistic movement in dispossessed layers of the population, many of them in rural areas, is not going to disappear with the change in the presidency. It will continue to grow as the crisis of American capitalism deepens. There is no New Deal to be implemented and Biden serves the rapacious oligarchs of Wall Street just as Trump did.

The real and present danger of fascism, whether under the leadership of Trump or someone else, will remain until the working class advances and fights for its own independent program for the reconstruction of society. Such a program must begin by tackling head on the source of the financial parasitism that has played such a crucial role in creating the social breeding grounds for fascism.

This means that at the very centre of the program advanced by the working class must be the fight for the expropriation of the entire financial system—the Fed, the private banks, the investment houses—bringing them into public ownership under democratic control, in order to begin the construction of a socialist society, in which human need, not private profit, is the guiding force and principle.

The fight for this program has a burning immediacy. The events of January 6 have revealed that as a result of a gathering crisis rooted in the very heart of American capitalism, democracy, in its bourgeois form, is on its death bed. It can be revived and developed only on new, socialist foundations.

The Biden administration: Illusion and reality

Niles Niemuth

There is an intense effort in the Democratic Party-aligned media to present the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as a fundamental turning point in American politics.

No doubt there is immense relief among millions in the US and around the world to see the fascist Trump leave Washington, two weeks after he spurred on an insurrection aimed at stopping the congressional certification of Biden’s victory.

But with the transfer of the White House from the Republicans to the Democrats, it is necessary to counter illusions about what this government will or even can do. Its actions will be determined by the interests of the ruling class under conditions of an unprecedented social, economic and global crisis. However, efforts are underway to chloroform the public about the realities of the procapitalist, imperialist politics of the Biden administration and the catastrophic economic and social conditions under which it begins.

New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman declared that “Biden Can Heal What Trump Broke” in an op-ed Wednesday. “America is now being led by a decent, experienced public servant who cares about improving his constituents’ lives,” Wegman proclaimed.

Writing in the Guardian, Senator Bernie Sanders declared that an opportunity has now opened up for Biden and the Democrats to “put an end to business as usual” and address the array of problems confronting the country, from the Trump administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic to wealth inequality.

With control of the White House and both the Senate and the House, Sanders said, Democrats “must summon the courage to demonstrate to the American people that government can effectively and rapidly respond to their pain and anxiety.” Sanders vowed that he would set a positive example for Biden and his congressional colleagues to follow as the incoming chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

The United States has been here many times before. In 1993, when the “man from Hope,” Bill Clinton, came into office, it was proclaimed to be the end to the right-wing Reagan/Bush era. At home, Clinton brought an end to welfare “as we know it,” while abroad he waged war in the Balkans and dropped bombs on Iraq. Obama, the candidate of “hope and change,” expanded on the wars begun by George W. Bush, while funneling trillions of dollars to Wall Street, overseeing what was at the time the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top of society.

This is, of course, not a purely American phenomenon. One only has to look to the recent experiences of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in the UK, where promises of radical change beyond anything promised by Biden were quickly dispensed with once coming to power or, in the case of Corbyn, leadership.

Much has been made of the flurry of executive orders signed by Biden in his first days in office—including orders halting construction of Trump’s border wall, reversing the anti-Muslim travel ban and rejoining the Paris climate agreement—as representing far-reaching and transformational policy changes. If one looks, however, they consist of bits and pieces that do nothing to fundamentally alter the conditions of broad masses of the population. An extension of the national moratorium on evictions does not apply to most loans or relieve unpaid rent, just as the extension of the “pause” on student loan interest payments does nothing to ease the burden of $1.7 trillion in debt still owed by tens of millions.

Biden’s pandemic plan consists of a limited mask mandate and promises of more rapid vaccine distribution to administer 100 million doses in the first 100 days. Biden’s advisors have already acknowledged that it will still be months before most people can get a shot, even if they meet their goals. Biden has ruled out shutting down nonessential production to get the spread of the virus under control and has declared that all K-8 schools will be reopened within three months. This under conditions in which more than 3,000 people are dying every day, and hospitals are overflowing with COVID-19 patients.

The Biden administration is already slow-walking its meagre promises for $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief. Despite Democratic control over Congress, Biden has insisted that the bill have Republican support, meaning it will be further whittled down in negotiations. With another 900,000 Americans filing for unemployment last week, CBS News reported that it could take months for the $1,400 stimulus checks—which Biden and the Democrats campaigned on in the Georgia Senate races as an immediate $2,000 payment—to be passed and sent out to Americans.

Everything the administration does will be within the framework of 1) what is acceptable to the financial oligarchy and Wall Street, and 2) the requirements of the global geostrategic interests of American imperialism. The Democrats are making clear that when it comes to the pandemic, they will continue to pursue the murderous “herd immunity” policy followed by Trump, which has pleased the markets.

As far as foreign policy, the Senate confirmation hearings for Biden’s cabinet nominees have made clear that his policies around the world will be a continuation of Trump’s in many respects, along with a further ratcheting up of tensions with Russia. The central issue upon which the Democrats waged their opposition to Trump was over US relations with Russia. The Biden administration is being stacked with alums of the Obama administration who pushed for war on Libya, stoked the civil war in Syria and broadly expanded American drone war operations.

Under questioning from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, secretary of state nominee Anthony Blinken declared Iran a “state sponsor of terrorism,” rejected the claim that Israel is a racist nation, opposed the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and told Central Americans fleeing poverty and violence not to come to the United States. Avril Haines, who was quickly confirmed as director of national intelligence on Wednesday, said she supported the “aggressive stance” towards China that was pursued by Trump.

The orientation of the Biden administration is for “unity,” that is, unity with the Republican Party on the basis of a right-wing, pro-imperialist policy.

Biden is a creature of the state, having worked in national politics for nearly half a century. As we have noted, he lives in that universe. His central concern is to refurbish the state apparatus and collaborate with the Republican Party, to establish what is in effect a government of national unity directed against the working class. The framework of official politics is moving not to the left, but to the right, with the fascistic forces cultivated by Trump further integrated into the structure of the state itself.

A year after the first case was confirmed in the country, American society has been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has triggered a sharp rise in unemployment, hunger and homelessness. More than 418,000 have died, and 25 million have been infected. Tens of thousands of small businesses have permanently closed, while the rich have seen their wealth rise through the stratosphere along with the stock market.

The conditions are ripe for a massive eruption of class conflict. The strike of more than 1,400 workers at Hunts Point Produce Market this week in the Bronx is just an initial indication of much broader social anger. This must be developed in opposition to capitalism.

As all those who opposed his candidacy suspected, he is doing China's bidding.  Of course he is; the Chinese own him.  Every single person he has appointed to his Cabinet is aligned with China as well.  PATRICIA McCARTHY

THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY

 

RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs


Schweizer: ‘It’s Going to Be Business as Usual’ for Hunter’s Dealings

 

IAN HANCHETT

20 Jan 2021185

0:52

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer said he reads President Biden’s statements about his son Hunter’s deals as a declaration that “it’s going to be business as usual in the Biden administration as far as these deals are concerned.”

Schweizer said, “Joe Biden has said there are going to be no sketchy overseas deals during his second term. Here’s the problem: He does not believe that the early deals that Hunter was involved in, the China deal, Burisma, he’s never described those as sketchy. So, I read that as saying, it’s going to be business as usual in the Biden administration as far as these deals are concerned.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

 

THE BANKSTER OLIGARCHY THAT DESTROYED AMERICA

 

COVERS THE FRADULENT 'POPULIST' HOAX STAGED BY OBAMA, CLINTON AND BIDEN EVEN AS THEY SERVED WALL STREET BANKSTERS AND THE SUPER RICH... AND FILLED THEIR POCKETS DOING SO.

 

Chris Hedges: How Republicans, Democrats, and the Media Have Weakened US Democracy


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2jyzp09_g8

 

Flashback: Biden’s DHS Nominee Tied to China, Visas-for-Sale Swamp Scandal

FILE - In this July 25, 2013, file photo Alejandro Mayorkas, President Obama's nominee to become deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on his nomination. President-elect Joe Biden is filling out his administration …
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
MICHAEL PATRICK LEAHY
1,000
17:00

President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used his government job in 2011 to green-light a citizenship-for-sale swamp scheme that included top Democrats, Chinese investors, and $141 million. 


One week in, Biden administration shows its exquisite cruelty

By Patricia McCarthy

Joe Biden was inaugurated a week ago, and like the dictator his handlers have long yearned to install, his has started out as a cruel administration.  His 22 executive orders so far, more than any other president in history, have already sent tens of thousands of jobs down the drain with coldhearted carelessness.  He stopped construction of the Keystone XL pipeline with the stroke of his pen.  He has put all those who were working on the border wall out of work.  As all those who opposed his candidacy suspected, he is doing China's bidding.  Of course he is; the Chinese own him.  Every single person he has appointed to his Cabinet is aligned with China as well.  It is quite likely that Biden has no idea how catastrophic the E.O.s he has apparently signed have already been for blue-collar workers across the country.

Biden's handlers are leading him around by the nose, putting the words they compose on his teleprompter, which he has difficulty reading.  It took the Obama administration a year to do this much damage.  This crowd, believing they have absolute power in every sense of the phrase, have set about implementing the transformation of the U.S. from a democratic republic to a communist oligarchy.  In a flash, there is no more freedom of speech or assembly.  This new regime is about to make the COVID vaccine mandatory.  Medical treatment cannot be mandatory.  President Trump got the vaccine up and running, but now we must wonder how many Chinese scientists were in on its design. 

Every American most likely realizes that filling D.C. with military troops for the inauguration was a farcical performance of political theater and a costly one at that.  The horrific treatment of those troops is typical of the left; leftists have long loathed our troops, whom they view as virtual slaves, instruments of the wars leftists initiate for financial gain.  They were made to sleep on the ground of a parking garage.  They were given toddler snacks to eat.

So confident in their new fascist control over us all, leftists are suddenly unafraid of overtly demonstrating their contempt for those of us not members of their superior class.  Now that they hold all the cards, no need to pretend they care about "we the people."

So along with Biden's dictatorial executive orders comes Schumer's plan to further constrain our freedoms due to the "climate emergency."  But there is no climate emergency.  It's just another hoax, a fear-mongering ruse to create a global government.  The planet has survived all manner of climate changes.  We humans can no more affect the climate here than we can on Mars.  And even if we could, we are not responsible for the irresponsibility of nations like China and India re: filthy air.  The Paris Climate Accord is only about making U.S. taxpayers pay billions of dollars to those nations to equalize the quality of life on the planet.  Not a single prediction of the Gorist climate alarmists has come true.  Snow still falls from the sky; there are no more hurricanes than normal; polar bears are alive and thriving; droughts occur here and there as they have throughout the millennia.  But the Biden administration is going to use climate alarmism to continue restricting the American population from living their lives. 

President Trump energized our economy, made us energy independent.  Biden has in the span of a week tanked it in order to make us dependent on Saudi Arabia again.  He is about to ban coal-mining, too.  What will happen to those miners?  These green jobs he claims all those suddenly unemployed workers are going to transition to do not exist.  The arrogant Buttigieg, the new transportation secretary, a job he is uniquely unqualifed for, when Ted Cruz asked what would happen to those people, snarkily replied, "They'll get other union jobs."  Exactly where and when he did not say.  He can't.  Those jobs do not exist.

This is a nasty group of radicals, this Biden Cabinet of now out-of-the-closet communists.  They are wildly overreaching in a country that is based on individual liberty. 

So drunk with their newfound power, the left's pundits have let loose with the vitriol they really feel for us peons.  Katie Couric thinks we all need to be reprogrammed, and she is not alone.  That PBS lawyer thinks our children should be confiscated and re-educated.  New press secretary Jen Psaki wants to disallow all conservatives from W.H. press conferences!  How's that for the end of our democratic republic?  And DHS is about to surveil all conservatives as potential domestic terrorists.  They've done this without a shred of evidence or threat.  It is clear that they hope to incite a few militia types to make their case for eavesdropping on us all. 

Within one week, this new and illegitimate administration has revealed itself to be the most fascist, the most illiberal in U.S. history.  These people intend to continue to use COVID as a weapon, the vaccine as a weapon, a second faux impeachment as a weapon. 

Where is the mass press conference attended by every Republican in Congress?  Why are they not on every cable news program decrying what the left is doing?  We must be grateful for Cruz, Hawley, Johnson, Jordan, Gaetz, et al., who are the precious few doing what each and every one of them should be doing: fighting back as if our lives depended upon their fighting back.  This new administration is destroying America as founded faster than we can say "Constitution."

Where are the rest of the elected Republicans sent to D.C. to represent us?  Cowering in their basements?  It seems so.  If they are not going to fight for us, why are they there?  It appears they are there to become part of the get-rich-quick swamp.  That is why they hate Trump so much.  He was already rich, and he did fight for "we the people."  He exposed them all for who they really are — self-serving jerks.

"You always know the mark of a coward. A coward hides behind freedom. A brave person stands in front of freedom and defends it for others." —Henry Rollins


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