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15 Signs That America Is In Much Worse Trouble Than We All Thought
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/06/millions-of-americans-face-eviction-as.html
The Fed's Urgent WARNING: Prepare for Economic Collapse
The Biden administration is leading the campaign to deny economic reality just as it is on COVID. At a press conference after the GDP figures were announced, Yellen said economists and most Americans had a definition of recession that included job losses and mass layoffs, private sector activity slowing considerably and “family budgets under immense strain,” and that is “not what we’re seeing right now.”
JOE BIDEN’S ‘GREEN AMERICA’ WHICH TRANSLATES TO MASSIVE PROFITS FOR BIG OIL. IT’S BIDENOMICS UP CLOSE!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/06/corporatist-joe-biden-and-bid-oil.html
The top 25 oil corporations made a combined $205 billion in profits in 2021. Since the beginning of 2022, the five largest oil companies—Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips—have enjoyed a 300 percent increase in profits over the first quarter of 2021. ConocoPhillips, for example, earned profits of $4.3 billion between January and March, an increase of 375 percent over the previous year.
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Ralph Nader: Biden's First Year Proves He Is Still a "Corporate Socialist" Beholden to Big Business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jTIUtjkDss&t=28s
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors. Alexander Nazaryan
Fed policies are always couched in various forms of jargon that cover up the real agenda through a series of mystifications aimed at making it appear the central bank somehow stands above class interests, regulating economic life in the interests of the population.
OPEN BORDERS.... IT'S ALL ABOUT KEEPING EAGES DEPRESSED!
This assault is being waged through the mechanism of higher interest rates, which are being lifted at the fastest rate in decades under the banner of the fight against inflation. But interest hikes will not bring down gas prices or untangle supply chains. The objective is to bring about an economic contraction so that pay demands are suppressed.
The class dynamics of the Fed’s recession program
On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported that the US economy shrank for the second quarter in a row, bringing it into a “technical recession.”
The economic contraction is being accompanied by a series of layoffs that threatens to become a torrent as the economy slows further. This month, more than 30,000 layoffs occurred in the technology sector alone. Last week, Ford announced 8,000 layoffs, heralding a further bloodbath in the auto industry.
Amid the swirl of economic data, it is always necessary to understand that these numbers are the abstract expression of underlying social and class forces, that “the economy” is not some kind of machine but is based on definite social relations and operates through them. This is particularly necessary when considering the latest economic data.
A debate has now broken out in the media and financial commentary circles as to whether this “technical recession”—defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction—is a real one or not.
The key issue here is not one of definitions but what are the essential class interests at work, particularly with regard to the policies of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the key financial institution of the capitalist state.
Fed policies are always couched in various forms of jargon that cover up the real agenda through a series of mystifications aimed at making it appear the central bank somehow stands above class interests, regulating economic life in the interests of the population.
Amid the flurry of words, the essence of the present situation is this: The central bank, the guardian of the interests of the corporations and finance capital, has set out to engineer a marked slowdown and, if necessary, a major economic contraction. The aim is to suppress the wage demands of the working class under conditions where inflation has risen to the highest level in four decades.
This assault is being waged through the mechanism of higher interest rates, which are being lifted at the fastest rate in decades under the banner of the fight against inflation. But interest hikes will not bring down gas prices or untangle supply chains. The objective is to bring about an economic contraction so that pay demands are suppressed.
The present policy agenda reprises that of Fed Chair Paul Volcker in the 1980s when interest rates were lifted to record heights inducing the deepest recession to that point since the Great Depression. Today’s Fed Chair Jerome Powell has expressed his admiration for Volcker on numerous occasions, making clear he is more than prepared to follow the same path.
Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has insisted that containing inflation means inducing higher jobless levels for five years or a 10 percent unemployment rate for at least a year.
As with every other economic issue and statistic, inflation is embedded in the class structure of society, a historical examination of which reveals the origins of the present US and global spiral.
OBAMA-BIDENOMICS AT WORK!
The global financial crisis of 2008, set off by the more than two decades of increasing financial speculation preceding it, led to the largest corporate and financial bailout in history. The government handed out hundreds of billions of dollars in rescue packages, and the Fed began the policy of “quantitative easing”—injecting money into the financial system so that the speculation on Wall Street that had precipitated the crisis could continue.
And continue it did. After reaching a nadir in March 2009, the stock market went on a spectacular bull run. But it was based on a continuous supply of cheap money by the Fed.
In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Wall Street and financial markets went into a meltdown fearing that the imposition of necessary public health safety measures would impinge on the flow of profits extracted from the working class, and the stock market bubble would collapse.
Two key policies resulted. Under the banner of the “cure cannot be worse than the disease,” the necessary policy of COVID-19 elimination was rejected in the US and by governments around the world. At the same time trillions more dollars were pumped into the financial system. In the US the Fed, doubled its holdings of financial assets from $4 trillion to $8 trillion, virtually overnight, at one point spending a million dollars a second.
Herein are the origins of the global inflationary spiral. The refusal to undertake a global policy of COVID-19 elimination because of its potential impact on the stock markets had major consequences in the real economy, as the spread of COVID-19 led to a supply chain crisis.
The monetary system was expanded by the central banks, leading to still further asset speculation in 2020 and 2021. Another factor is the endless increases in military spending as billions are funneled into the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
In their drive to increase interest rates, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, along with other central bankers, continually refer to what they call the “tight labour” market in which demand must be brought into balance with supply.
Under conditions where the deaths inflicted by COVID-19, ongoing infections and the growing impact of Long COVID have led to the withdrawal of millions from the workforce, the only way to lift the increase of the supply of labour above demand is through the imposition of unemployment.
And that process is already underway as a result of the interest rate hikes initiated by the Fed so far. The auto industry has indicated new hirings are at a standstill, and layoffs are set to follow. In the interest-rate sensitive sectors of high-tech, layoffs have already started with more to come.
In the face of the daily cuts in their standard of living resulting from the highest inflation in more than four decades, workers are compelled to undertake a struggle for necessary wage increases. But as they are driven into this fight, it necessary to understand what is at stake in order to better conduct the battle at hand.
Workers are not just in a conflict with individual employers but are engaged in a political struggle in which the union bureaucracy functions as the chief enforcer of the demands of the capitalist state and its agencies.
Moreover, the fight for wage increases, necessary as that is, is a struggle against the effects of much deeper going problems. A review of the economic history of the past period shows that every measure taken by the ruling class to deal with an economic crisis led inevitably to its eruption in a new and more malignant form.
Thus the “solution” to the financial crisis of 2008 set up the conditions where in 2020 rational scientific measures to deal with COVID-19 were rejected lest their implementation would lead to a financial market collapse. But the “let it rip policy” that ensued has now led to an inflationary spiral which the leading agencies of finance capital are determined “resolve” by making the working class pay, if necessary through mass unemployment.
This signifies that starting with the fight against the effects of the ongoing economic breakdown, the working class must develop a strategy which comes to grips with the underlying cause of the crisis, and that means the struggle for an independent socialist perspective directed at ending the profit system and replacing it with socialism, a higher form of social and economic organisation.
Matt Gaetz: Ignoring Pain of Legal Migration Is a ‘Boomer Approach’
The federal government’s refusal to recognize the costs of legal migration is a “boomer approach” to immigration policy, said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
The immigration problem “is not just the illegal immigration,” Gaetz told Breitbart News:
It’s the legal immigration where you now have a system where we tell these young people go get your STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] degree, go learn how to code [software], and then they do that — they accrue massive amounts of college debt — and then we bring in somebody from India who is able to do the job for $50,000 or $60,000 bucks a year on some work visa.
Big tech scoops all those up and it deprives a lot of Americans of jobs.
So we have to think about immigration, not just at the broken border. I think that’s almost like a very Boomer approach to the broader immigration challenge we have that informs on both legal and illegal immigration.
Gaetz’s comments are interesting because they might show some GOP leaders — even former President Donald Trump — are willing to challenge the legal migration policies that have allowed coastal investors to import their own foreign workforces.
Some GOP leaders, notably Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), have already drafted proposals to level the free market for labor in the United States.
The post-1990 visa worker policies have tilted the national economy in favor of California and New York — and it has also tilted the labor market against American college graduates
The visa worker rules have shut many Americans out of good Fortune 500 careers because they have allowed CEOs to keep a huge foreign labor force in many vital jobs. These foreign workers — perhaps 1.5 million workers — now hold many important jobs, such as search-engine designers at Google, content screeners at Twitter, news editors at Facebook, engineering jobs at Intel, and research jobs at Qualcomm.
Those no-rights foreign visa workers are preferred by CEOs because they are cheaper, compliant, and cannot quit to create innovative companies.
These visa workers are imported via the H-1B, OPT, TN, J-1, H4EAD, O-1, and E-2 visa programs. Many additional foreigners illegally work in the hidden pyramids of Fortune 500 subcontractors after illegally overstaying their visas, forging documents, and arriving on B-1/B-2 non-work visas.
The federal government makes very little effort to reduce fraud and often encourages foreigners to take these vital jobs.
Congress’s decision to let the coastal investors have their own labor pipeline also ensured that the high-tech economy was built in California, Washington state, and a few other locations. Investors now face little pressure to hire heartland Americans — or to create satellite offices in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Maine, etc — because they can hire their new workers by sending a bus down to LAX airport.
During his term in office, Trump was slow to reform the white-collar migration policies, such as the H-1B visa program.
His deputies did launch useful reforms in his last year — but those reforms were not anchored by law or regulation, and were quickly washed away by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies.
That failure to reform the white collar programs likely cost Trump much support among white collar, suburban voters. In turn, that loss helped tip the election against him in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
This year, heartland Republican Senators — chiefly, Sen. Todd Young, (R-IN) —blocked an investor-backed Democratic plan to dramatically expand the replacement of American graduates by foreign graduates.
Extraction Migration
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants —plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers.
The inflationary policy makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.
Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.
Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
Business-backed migration advocates hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration is good for migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
The polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration — but they also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
The Biden administration is leading the campaign to deny economic reality just as it is on COVID. At a press conference after the GDP figures were announced, Yellen said economists and most Americans had a definition of recession that included job losses and mass layoffs, private sector activity slowing considerably and “family budgets under immense strain,” and that is “not what we’re seeing right now.”
In an effort to burnish her “left” credentials in sections of the Democratic party, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote an op-ed piece in the WSJ this week that partially lifted the lid on what is really taking place.
She noted that the aggressive rate hikes by the Fed are largely ineffective against the inflation spike and warned that the interest rate hikes were aimed at “dampening demand.” If the Fed hiked too much or too abruptly, she wrote, “the resulting recession will leave millions of people… with smaller paychecks or no paycheck at all.”
Warren pointed to the remarks of former Democratic treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, who recently told the London School of Economics: “We need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to contain inflation—in other words, we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment.”
But always anxious to ensure that the working class remains corralled within the confines of the Democratic party, Warren praised the actions of the Biden administration and said it recognised that the US had “many tools for fighting inflation that wouldn’t make the economy smaller and Americans poorer.”
Such claims ignore two facts: that the limited measures of the administration will do little or nothing to bring down prices, and that Biden has declared he stands four-square behind the actions of the Fed.
Elizabeth Warren Seemingly Blames ‘Big Corporations’ for Current State of Economic Affairs
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is setting her focus on “big corporations” rather than Democrat policies as Americans grapple with 41-year high inflation and experience two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
“It’s time for Congress to do its part to get our economy on a sounder footing, and the Inflation Reduction Act would do exactly that—bringing down costs for families and stopping giant corporations with massive profits from skipping out on the bill at tax time,” Warren said on Thursday:
She followed up with a similar sentiment on Friday, placing the blame on “big corporations” in a tweet to her 6 million Twitter followers.
“When giant corporations have all the power, they wriggle their way out of paying taxes. They gobble up smaller competitors. They jack up prices just because they can. I’m fighting to put power in the hands of working people, where it belongs—and I’m in this fight all the way,” she added:
Warren’s remarks coincide with news of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrinking 0.9 percent in the second quarter this year, marking two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth under Democrat leadership — a reality many use as a marker for a recession:
The economy contracted by 1.6 percent in the first quarter. Many Americans consider two straight quarters of recession to be the marker of a recession. Economists, however, rely on the determination of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to say when a recession starts. The NBER has a more complex and subjective definition of recessions and typically does not declare a recession until several months after it has begun.
Like President Biden, Warren appears to be wilfully ignoring the impact Democratic policies have had on the economy during their reign in Washington, DC, over the last year and a half — from dismantling American energy independence to spending trillions of dollars:
This is not the first time the Massachusetts Democrat has rerouted blame for the current state of economic affairs. Earlier this month, Warren blamed 41-year high inflation on Russian President Vladimir Putin, the coronavirus, and corporate monopolies:
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