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
Monday, May 29, 2023
DOES THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S RULING CLASS OF GAMER LAWYERS SERVING THE RICH WELL ENOUGH?
Gabbard: Democratic Party ‘an Elitist Cabal of Warmongers — Corrupt Politicians, Propaganda Media, Big Tech and the National Security State’
THE DEMOCRATS' WAR ON LIVING WAGES FOR AMERICANS (LEGALS
His shrewd critique of identity politics and the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exposes mechanisms by which the highly educated and prosperous divide and delegitimize the working class. Patrick J. Deneen
“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD
The number of foreign nationals holding jobs in the United States has hit the highest level since the Labor Department began tracking the data in 1996 as the employment of native-born Americans declines, a trend under President Joe Biden.
In 2022, foreign-born workers saw their share of the labor market hit the highest level in almost 30 years at more than 18 percent, with close to 30 million now holding U.S. jobs, according to data published in the Wall Street Journal.
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
WE KNOW WHO SERVES THE ELITES, THE BANKSTERS FOR BAILOUT AND BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. THEIR NAMES ARE NOTED BELOW
His sharp observations that follow about the new version of the old conflict between the people and the elites illuminate destabilizing tensions within liberal democracy in America and elsewhere in the West
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) (WHAT ABOUT THE CHINA BIDEN PENN CENTER?) and the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE, HUNTER, JAMES, FRANK) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER). AND DOCUMENTED LYING LAWYER ADAM SHIFF. BRIAN C JOONDEPH
Patrick Deneen’s Common-Good Conservatism Manifesto
REVIEW: ‘Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future’ by Patrick J. Deneen
"No sensible reader of the news could look at America and think it is flourishing," sensibly writes Patrick Deneen in the first sentence of Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. His sharp observations that follow about the new version of the old conflict between the people and the elites illuminate destabilizing tensions within liberal democracy in America and elsewhere in the West. His restatement of the classical account of the mixed regime underscores the enduring political imperative to balance conflicting principles and interests. His astute reflections on the vices of expert knowledge and the virtues of custom and commonsense highlight freedom’s dependence on tradition and experience. His shrewd critique of identity politics and the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exposes mechanisms by which the highly educated and prosperous divide and delegitimize the working class. And some of his near-term public-policy proposals to improve the federal government, reform higher education, and bolster family and community would strengthen the country. Still, no sensible reader of Deneen’s book could think that the regime change he espouses provides humane and workable long-term remedies to what ails the nation.
Deneen’s new polemic takes up where the anti-liberal zealotry of his previous one left off. A University of Notre Dame political science professor, Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed in 2018 to acclaim, not least from Barack Obama. The former president admired the book’s "cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril." Obama’s anodyne praise obscured the radical critique of American political ideas and institutions that paradoxically made Deneen a hero to common-good conservatives and turned him into a celebrity public intellectual engaging in national and transnational discussion about the decline of the West.
Deneen argued in 2018 that nearly all the West’s troubles worth mentioning—and America’s in particular—derive from the "liberalism" in liberal democracy. By liberalism, he meant the roughly 400-year-old modern tradition of individual liberty, equality under the law, limited government, free markets, and extensive and diverse civil society—consisting of families, communities, religious institutions, and civic associations—that liberal democracy safeguards. Liberalism, Deneen charged, not only eroded "meaning and community" but also poisoned culture, education, the economy, the environment, moral and intellectual virtue, citizenship, family, religious faith, and just about every other human good under the sun.
Liberalism’s metastasizing malignity having finally come into focus in the first decades of the 21st century—Marx and Nietzsche claimed as much from rival vantage points in the 19th century—the time for ordinary politics was ending. "We may rather be witnessing an increasingly systemic failure, due to the bankruptcy of its underlying political philosophy, of the political system we have largely taken for granted," Deneen wrote. "The fabric of beliefs that gave rise to the nearly 250-year-old-American constitutional experiment may be nearing an end."
To reach the chilling verdict that liberalism deserves to die because of the ruination it has systemically visited on our moral and political lives, Deneen—like progressive proponents of the systemic racism thesis—rigged the evidence. He reduced the modern tradition of freedom—a rich and complex school that encompasses John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Abraham Lincoln, Friedrich Hayek, and Raymond Aron—to an insidious ideology that "proposed transforming all aspects of human life to conform to a preconceived political plan." He read back into the modern tradition of freedom the postmodern dogmas that human beings are self-creating sources of value and that government’s job is "to grant pure and unmitigated freedom." And, without troubling to put America’s failings—and blessings—in comparative and historical perspective, he contended that liberalism proved "true to itself" by generating devastating social and political pathology, economic injustice, and moral indignity.
Although demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the American constitutional order was irredeemably flawed and doomed from the start to self-destruct, Deneen declined on principle in 2018 to offer an alternative political theory and explicitly rejected revolutionary politics. Five years ago, he stressed that "the impulse to devise a new and better political theory in wake of liberalism's simultaneous triumph and demise is a temptation that must be resisted." Acquiescence to the impulse would repeat liberalism’s error: "The search for a comprehensive theory is what gave rise to liberalism and successor ideologies in the first place." Needed was "Not a better theory, but better practices." Since "political revolution" against the liberal order "would produce only disorder and misery," Deneen counseled retreat to local, tight-knit communities "focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life." Lost on the political science professor was the irony that American constitutional government—thanks in no small measure to religious liberty, federalism, and civil society—provided just the setting for such "experiments in living."
This time around, Deneen again scorns the American regime as "structurally liberal" and "exhausted." To pursue reforms in the face of the nation’s formidable challenges—income inequality; enormous and mounting national debt; urban blight; deteriorating family structure and the sexualization of popular culture; addiction to drugs, entertainment, and social media; and authoritarian demands from left and right—is to miss the point, he contends, because America’s manifold ills stem from a pervasive evil: an "increasingly tyrannical liberalism."
While reaffirming that America’s descent into tyranny "is not a contradiction of liberalism, but its fulfillment," Deneen reverses himself in Regime Change without acknowledgment or explanation concerning what is to be done. Succumbing to the dangerous delusions of comprehensive theorizing against which he solemnly warned in 2018, he expounds in his new book "a new and better political theory" to guide the construction of a "postliberal order." And notwithstanding his earnest counsel five years ago against unleashing the turmoil of revolution, he advances a new regime of sentiments, morals, and purposes.
Adjusting Marx’s revolutionary formula in The Communist Manifesto to the demands of the moment, Deneen envisages fellow members of the educated and credentialed class joining him in emancipating themselves from modern freedom’s delusions and corruptions to embrace his sweeping plans for remaking the nation. Operating as "‘class traitors’ to act on behalf of the broad working class, articulating the actual motives and effects of widespread elite actions," Deneen and his comrades will form a new "ruling class" that frees the people from false consciousness by understanding them better than they understand themselves. "Even if relatively small, an elite cadre skilled at directing and elevating popular resentments, combined with the political power of the many, can bolster populist political prospects as a working governmental and institutional force." He urges that "a new elite can be formed, or the old elite reformed, to adopt a wider understanding of what constitutes their own good—a good that is indivisible and common—and to steer America to a state of flourishing."
How Deneen’s new ruling class will handle production, commerce, finance, diplomacy, and defense is anyone’s guess. He also leaves mysterious the extent to which his elite vanguard will protect liberty under the law while implementing its elevated conception of the common good. It would have been clarifying for the would-be revolutionary to examine why previous Marx-inspired efforts by self-appointed elites to manipulate popular resentments and reconstruct society based on comprehensive visions of the good—Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution come to mind—have produced cruelty and death on an epic scale.
Instead, Deneen turns to the classical tradition of the mixed regime launched by Aristotle’s Politics to elaborate a grand theory that he calls "aristopopulism." Deneen rightly maintains that the conflict between the few and the many, to which the mixed regime is a response, persists in liberal democracy. Yet the new regime he sketches, which fuses aristocracy and populism by enlisting the elites to uphold custom and community on the people’s behalf, departs in ill-advised ways from Aristotle’s sober political science.
Aristotle, for example, cautions against grand theorizing about politics. Deneen revels in it. Aristotle dispassionately examines political institutions and citizens’ character to identify incremental reforms for preserving the typically defective regimes within which self-interested and fallible human beings reside. Deneen parodies American manners and mores and demonizes the U.S. political system in hopes of transforming the nation. Aristotle focuses on improving small, homogenous cities. Deneen decries, and seeks to remake, a transcontinental, religiously and ethnically diverse nation-state. Aristotle explores the benefits and disadvantages of a wide range of regimes. Deneen considers only liberal democracy in America’s disadvantages while overlooking its many and varied benefits—among them, a freedom of speech so expansive that it allows tenured professors to achieve fame and fortune by advocating regime change.
Deneen’s dramatic deviation from Aristotle’s sober assessment of the few and the many deserves special attention. The few, Aristotle observes, tend not to be the aristocrats endowed with moral and intellectual virtue for whom Deneen’s theory calls, but wealthy, keen to dominate, and prone to arrogance. Meanwhile, the many in Aristotle’s account are not defined by traditionalist predispositions and longings as in Deneen’s romantic rendition of the people, but by modest possessions, envy of the wealthy, and a desire not to be ruled. Both the few and the many want the regime to reflect their divergent opinions about justice, according to Aristotle. The goal, he counsels, is not to refashion the elites’ and the people’s character as Deneen envisages but rather to reform the regime so that it gives expression to both the wealthy’s claims to preeminence and the people’s demand for equality. Unlike Deneen, who aims at "the creation of a new elite that is aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people"—but consistent with the classical liberalism he abhors—Aristotle’s mixed regime takes the few and the many as they are and blends oligarchic and democratic institutional elements to accommodate the opposing classes’ conflicting political claims.
In contrast, Deneen’s aristopopulism idealizes the few and the many. Thanks to their supposed superior moral and intellectual virtue, his aristocrats see through the people’s expressed wants, needs, and desires to cultivate their deeper yearnings—which the people can neither defend nor articulate—for binding custom and local community. Yet Deneen says little about how members of what he regards as our contemptible elites will acquire the virtues and fulfill "their responsibility to give voice to the nature of the good itself." Given his scathing critique of existing educational institutions and his failure to consider who will educate the educators, his appeal to the disciplining and elevating task of true liberal education seems fanciful.
Deneen gives scant attention, moreover, to institutional guardrails to prevent his aristocrats from exploiting the sweeping power with which his theory entrusts them and to restrain the people from going overboard in the "powerful political resistance" his aristopopulism commends. His ominous endorsement of "pressure from the people" and of "the application of Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends" (emphasis in the original) reinforces the suspicion that Deneen’s ambitious political project authorizes subterfuge, lawlessness, and brutality.
Aristotle’s mixed regime, which institutionalizes moderation, constitutes a reproach to Deneen’s utopian aristopopulism. The best that is practicably attainable in politics, Aristotle argues, "depends on the middling sort" because "it is readiest to obey reason." Contrary to Deneen, however, Aristotle does not advise combining the few and the many into the middle class. Rather, Aristotle recommends a middle class that "is superior to both of the other parts, but if not, superior to either of them; for when added to one it will tip the scale and prevent the opposing excesses from arising" (Politics, Book IV, Chapter 11). And contrary to Deneen's theory, in which a ruling aristocracy improved by the people's "muscular populism" in turn elevates the people, Aristotle argues that rule by the few over the many provides a recipe for instability. The people will "not know how to rule but only how to be ruled, and then only to be ruled like a slave," while the elites will "not know how to be ruled by any sort of rule, but only to rule like a master." The result "is a city not of free persons but of slaves and masters, the ones consumed by envy, the others by contempt."
Perhaps to shroud his radicalism, Deneen purports to recover "an older and forgotten but better form of conservatism, one that seeks the mutual betterment of both the elite and the people." Aristopopulism, he contends, reflects a "conservative common-good political tradition" that revolves around "[c]ontinuity, balance, order, and stability, grounded in the unchanging truths knowable through human reason and also present in the Christian inheritance of the West." Deneen’s theorizing, however, not only warps Aristotle but also misuses language, promulgates illusory revisionist history, and suppresses the varieties of the common good.
First, Deneen turns conservatism on its head by contending that it demands upending the inherited political order. In addition, Deneen’s goals—stability and balance rooted in reason and the West’s Christian inheritance—could well describe those of his sworn enemy, classical liberalism, provided that the modern tradition of freedom’s assumptions, aims, and arguments are not, as is Deneen’s wont, grossly oversimplified, caricatured, and ridiculed.
Second, to make the case that his revulsion for America reflects true conservatism, Deneen—like Yoram Hazony and Adrian Vermeule—absurdly accuses American conservatives who contend that the United States was founded on classical liberal principles of falsifying the historical record. If, however, a nation whose Declaration of Independence proclaims that government’s primary purpose is to secure unalienable rights and whose Constitution elaborates a limited federal government of "few and defined powers" lacks classically liberal credentials, then no nation qualifies.
Third, like many of his common-good conservative comrades, Deneen conflates the common good and the greatest good. He wants government not only to protect the exercise of virtue but to promote it wholeheartedly, to rise above ensuring religious freedom to guiding citizens to salvation, and to go beyond providing the toleration and prosperity that allow for the pursuit of happiness to authoritatively defining and administering happiness.
Aristotle would not approve. Central to his political science is the distinction between the common good that is achievable in practice and the greatest good that resides above politics. Aristotle’s best regime—the regime devoted to virtue, human flourishing, and the highest happiness—serves as a standard for reforming actual imperfect regimes. It does not provide a model for a viable constitution. Aristotle’s advice was to grasp actual regimes’ animating principles and tendency to absolutize them; to appreciate the partial truth in classes’ competing opinions about justice and their disposition to press their one-sided views to the hilt; and to design institutions and provide education that moderated the propensities to "factional conflict" built into human nature and politics and which encouraged a shared affection for the regime.
Deneen gets things backward. Although professing fidelity, he abandons Aristotelian political science by equating the common good and the greatest good. And while he excoriates it for radically breaking with premodern thought, the American constitutional order, which exemplifies the modern tradition of freedom, demonstrates continuity with Aristotle by limiting the political common good—not to deny the greatest good but to give individuals, families, and communities the opportunity to pursue their conflicting understandings of it.
Contrary to Deneen’s contention that the American experiment in ordered liberty aims at "transformative progress," the nation rests on the moral premise that human beings are by nature free and equal. It was formed against the backdrop of ardent clashes over virtue and salvation that marked early modernity, not least the protracted violence between Catholics and Protestants that generated oceans of blood during the 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century European wars of religion. It derived inspiration from biblical faith, the civic-republican school, and British common law. And it holds that because human beings are born equal in basic rights and fundamental freedoms but differ considerably in their beliefs about happiness and faith, the common good to which individuals should consent is the establishment of democratic government that protects individual rights under the law.
Deneen is, therefore, flat-out wrong to assert that "Liberalism is a denial that there can be any objective good for humans that is not simply the aggregation of individual opinion." The modern tradition of freedom teaches that the securing of individual rights is the part of the objective good that citizens can achieve through government.
This confinement of the political common good reflects no disparagement of tradition, duty, or faith. To the contrary, securing of basic rights and fundamental freedoms depends on the virtues and enables citizens—with their families, communities, and associations—to cultivate character and pursue their differing conceptions of the good life.
Despite his praise of mixing, Deneen obfuscates the modern tradition of freedom’s reconciling and combining of virtue and individual rights. To establish virtue’s primacy, he maintains that for English statesman Edmund Burke, "The true ‘rights’ of citizens are not reducible to individual rights but must foremost consist in the right to be well-governed, a right that rests on an intergenerational capacity to develop the virtues." Yes, but for Burke, good government—including the freedom to cultivate virtue—must be limited government. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, the preeminent father of modern conservatism affirms "the real rights of men" (emphasis in original), which encompass the classically liberal freedom to be left alone under the law: "Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself."
Burke’s love of freedom and of virtue fits well with the constitutional conservatism that grows out of America’s founding principles. Rooted in respect for the nation’s many-layered moral and political inheritance, constitutional conservatism fosters government that secures rights equally for all, not least by providing—within the confines of its proper powers—for freedom’s material and moral preconditions. Grateful for the blessings of liberty, constitutional conservatism today soberly takes the measure of America’s fractured institutions, and of the rampant follies and frauds, derelictions of duty and abuses of power, and resentments and enmities that disfigure contemporary politics. And ever mindful of government’s limits, constitutional conservatism fashions remedies for the ailments of liberal democracy in America that cohere with the principles of liberal democracy.
Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick J. Deneen Sentinel, 288 pp., $29
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on Twitter @BerkowitzPeter.
IT WAS HILLARY WOULD WAS SUCKING BRIBES FROM PUTIN!
Hillary Clinton Scandal Exposed By The Durham Report
Two enduring aphorisms emerged from the Watergate affair, both directed at then-president Richard Nixon. The one at the outset of the investigation was delivered in the form of a question: “What did he know and when did he know it?” The second came at the end in the form of a warning to future presidents: “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”
Thanks to the Durham report, we know the date that then-president Barack Obama learned about what John Durham calls the “Clinton Intelligence plan.” If CIA Director John Brennan’s notes are to be believed, that date was August 3, 2016.
This was the day Brennan briefed Obama and other key players about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services."
To be fair, Barack Obama likely had no more role in the orchestration of the Clinton Intelligence plan than Richard Nixon did in the 1972 bugging of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate. Obama did, however, play the critical role in the cover-up of the Clinton Intelligence plan. It could not have happened without him.
This past Sunday, former congressman Devin Nunes raised the cover-up issue on Maria Bartiromo’s show. Said Nunes, “We now know from Durham that Obama knew and his team knew that in August 2016 this was a dirty trick from the Clinton campaign.”
So what did Obama do with this information? Right after the November election, said Nunes, “He got all the intelligence agencies involved and they leaked out to the fake news media that, ‘Oh, the Russians must have done something and they were trying to help Trump.’
Had Nixon blamed Watergate on Cuba -- several Cubans were, in fact, arrested -- he would have been laughed out of office. Unlike Obama, however, Nixon did not have an obsequious media eager to ignore his mischief nor to explain away that which could not be ignored. With the FBI and the intelligence community in his pocket, Obama executed the most elaborate -- and destructive -- political cover-up in American political history.
Peter Strzok, the FBI agent heading “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI investigation into Trump’s apocryphal collusion with Russia, confirmed Obama’s role on August 5, two days after the August 3 meeting. Texting with his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok quoted an unnamed bigwig, likely Brennan, as saying, “The White House is running this.”
Strzok wasn’t happy. He believed the White House was intruding on FBI turf. On August 15, Strzok memorably signaled the shared motive of all the conspirators. “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected -- but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted Page. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” On September 2, Page confirmed Obama’s involvement. “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing,” she texted Strzok.
The insurance policy proved insufficient. Shocked and understandably frightened by Trump’s victory, the conspirators got more methodical in their plotting. As part of the plot, Obama was to keep his hands clean -- or at least appear to. In his 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, intimate Obama adviser Ben Rhodes makes a claim so deep in exculpatory BS it needs to be read in full:
Of course, we had no idea -- Obama had no idea -- at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House, and I wouldn’t even learn about it until long after I left government, in the press.
The “time” in question was two weeks before Election Day 2016, nearly three months after the initial August meeting. In Rhodes, Obama had found just the right person to move this hogwash forward, but then again Obama had a gift for choosing the unscrupulous. In nominating John Brennan first as deputy national security advisor and later as director of the CIA, Obama picked the rare American intel chief openly fond of Marxism.
From the beginning, Brennan served as Obama’s fixer. He came to the job well prepared, having written in his graduate thesis, “The democratic process may involve, at some point, the violation of personal liberties and procedural justice.”
Brennan met at least one potential fellow traveler in Obama’s inner intelligence circle. In 2013, the same year Brennan was named director of the CIA, Obama chose the seemingly apolitical James Comey to head the FBI. Like Brennan, however, Comey had a past. In 2003, he acknowledged his leftist roots in a New York magazine interview, telling reporter Chris Smith, “I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now.”
A globalist and a cradle progressive, National Security Advisor Susan Rice shared with Brennan and Comey a penchant for situational ethics. She proved her mettle in 2012 telling the same Benghazi lie on five different shows one Sunday morning. She upped her game following a meeting that took place in the White House on January 5, 2017.
In conference with Obama was his national security team including all the usual suspects: Comey, Brennan, Biden, Rice, James Clapper, and acting attorney general Sally Yates. After the meeting, Obama asked Yates and Comey to stick around along with Rice, his trusted scribe and factotum.
Obama had a reason for singling out Comey and Yates. Unlike the others, they were staying on in their jobs. On the very day at the very moment Trump was being inaugurated, the soulless Rice sent to “self” a peculiar email. It read:
President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book.” The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
There is no “book” that justifies what Comey and pals did in the weeks immediately following this meeting while Obama was still president. The next day, January 6, 2017, the conspirators released the declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).
Commissioned a month earlier by Obama, the ICA was John Brennan’s way of welcoming the president-elect to Washington. Titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the report concluded that Putin “ordered” an influence campaign, the goal of which was “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
The “Obama dossier,” as Nunes called the ICA, reads like one of my college term papers, filled with sundry bits of information gathered from here and there just hours before the due date. Although Christopher Steele had conspicuously failed to corroborate any of his alleged evidence against Trump, Comey lobbied to have the Steele dossier included in the body of the text. He settled for the appendix. On January 10, BuzzFeed published the entire dossier.
Given what we know now, the ICA’s bold-faced claims -- “Putin Ordered Campaign To Influence US Election” or the “Influence Effort Was Boldest Yet in the USA" -- seem laughably crude. Lacking human intelligence in the Kremlin, the conspirators had no idea what Putin did or did not order, but facts no longer mattered.
By the time he left office on January 20, 2016, Obama had all his cucks in a row -- prominent sycophants in every branch of the government and in every major newsroom prepared to ruin Donald Trump’s presidency in service to a lie.
“He weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie,” Ben Rhodes writes about Putin, “using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus.”
I imagine Obama reading this and saying, “Vladimir, hold my beer.”
Our 44th president was still operating behind the scenes -- scheming with his old cronies to blunt Trump’s effectiveness, to pack the media with lies about him, to keep the violent far-left wing of the Democratic Party in a constant state of anti-Trump outrage, to engineer his impeachment, and much more; and since Trump’s departure from the White House, Obama has, at the very least, been one of those who have been pulling the strings of the current puppet-in-chief.
Obama’s threat took two presidential terms to gather momentum; former President Trump temporarily stalled its course, but then Obama managed to get a shot at a third term in 2020 – vicariously through his former Vice President Joe Biden.
JOE BIDEN = BARACK OBAMA'S PATHWAY TO A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE
marionette stooge for what's in fact a third Obama
term.
WHICH IS THE GREATEST DANGER TO AMERICA? JOE BIDEN, BARACK OBAMA OR THEIR PAYMASTER GEORGE SOROS???
“To understand the crisis of the Biden administration,” observes Daniel Greenfield, “we have to go back to its origins in the Obama administration.”
Victorious Democrats would also end congressional investigations into the Hillary-Deep State-DNC-Russian-Clinton Foundation collusion and corruption. All the players in these massive, sordid affairs will be deemed “too big to jail” – and too closely tied to the Democratic Party to be investigated further. Paul Driessen
His (BILLARY CLINTON) wife is equally and personally
devious and corrupt; she had the fake “dossier” concocted she
was certain would take Trump out of the running for president
in 2016. Hillary used her position as Secretary of State to rake
that money from other nations that sought to benefit from her
largesse when President. PATRICIA McCARTHY
DYNAMICS OF A SOCIOPATH:
Patriots rot in jail for meandering around the Congress for a couple of hours two years ago while young people are encouraged by their teachers to celebrate Antifa and BLM thugs who have burned houses down. Blacks who love liberty are smeared as “white supremacists” while Muslims who love jihad are depicted as virtuous victims.
Not so long ago, America had a great economy, the lowest unemployment ever for a range of demographic groups, energy independence, an increasingly secure southern border, a strong international profile, and no new wars. It had freedom. It had national pride. And all because it had a highly skilled president of unabashed patriotism who was devoted to the best interests of his people.
Now we’re being readied to eat bugs while our overlords dine on steaks. To live in “fifteen-minute cities” while they fly to conferences in Fiji. To tighten our belts to prevent rising sea levels while they luxuriate in sea-level mansions in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard. In a direct challenge to parental authority, common-sense values, and sensible pedagogical priorities, government schools indoctrinate children in Critical Race Theory and transgender ideology. To shatter our sense of security and restrict our freedom of movement, Soros prosecutors turn major cities over to violent felons. Patriots rot in jail for meandering around the Congress for a couple of hours two years ago while young people are encouraged by their teachers to celebrate Antifa and BLM thugs who have burned houses down. Blacks who love liberty are smeared as “white supremacists” while Muslims who love jihad are depicted as virtuous victims.
Then there’s what happened during the pandemic. Churchgoing was banned, violent street protests permitted. Small businesses were forced to close and went bankrupt; giant chain stores stayed open and reaped record profits. Americans, but not illegal immigrants, were ordered to mask and vaccinate. Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi, with imperial condescension, violated their own lockdowns.
In this new world order, “our democracy” means the tyranny of the unelected (including the FBI, CIA, DHS, and DoJ), propped up by a Pravda-like corporate media. Their message? If we want to be known as supporters of equality, models of compassion, and friends of the planet, we’ll knuckle under, obey them, and parrot their progressive creed -- as spelled out in that chilling Independence Hall speech in which Joe Biden, against a Bismarckian blood-red backdrop, demonized MAGA voters as enemies of freedom.
Of course, this dystopia in the making didn’t begin with Biden. It’s a carry-over from the Obama years, interrupted by that Belle Époque, the Trump interregnum. “To understand the crisis of the Biden administration,” observes Daniel Greenfield, “we have to go back to its origins in the Obama administration.” This statement appears in Greenfield’s introduction to an engaging and definitive new collection of essays, Barack Obama’s True Legacy. How He Transformed America,which, under the editorship of Jamie Glazov, does precisely that: it ponders Obama and his appalling presidential tenure from a number of angles, and in doing so gives us what seems to me the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet of who Obama really is, what he did to America, and why.
Political scientist John Drew recalls the Obama whom he met in 1980 when they were both students dreaming of Communist revolution. At first glance, Obama struck Drew as a child of “wealth and privilege”: he “carried himself with the dignity and poise of a model,” he “talked like a white guy,” he came off “like a foreign prince visiting the United States.” Drew also thought Obama was gay -- an impression later confirmed, sort of, by a letter in which Obama wrote: “I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.” Politically, soon enough, both Drew and Obama shifted to “a more practical view,” deciding that politics, not revolution, was “the preferred route to socialism”; Drew eventually left the Left entirely, but, as we know, alas, Obama did not.
New Zealand author and filmmaker Trevor Loudon also reaches some distance into the past, tracing Obamacare to the 1930s, when Quentin Young, a young Communist doctor in Chicago, first began thinking about socialized medicine. In the 1990s he advised Hillary Clinton on health care; later still (he lived until 1992), he collaborated with Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy. As it happens, Young shared his medical practice for two decades with Obama’s personal physician, David Scheiner, and was present at the meeting, hosted by former terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, at which it was announced that Obama, also present, would be running for Congress. Along the way, he played a huge role in shaping Obama’s views on health-care coverage.
Glazov’s book includes several contributions on Islam and the Middle East. Highlighting Obama’s hideous 2012 statement at the UN criticizing “those who slander the prophet of Islam,” counterintelligence expert Stephen C. Coughlin recounts the Obama Administration’s purging of counterterrorism pros (largely in response to pressure from terrorist-linked CAIR) and reports that Muslims at DHS, founded to combat Islamic terrorism, shifted its focus 180º to target “Islamophobes” -- that is, American patriots who dare to worry about terrorism. In other essays, former Knesset member Dov Lipman corrects “historical inaccuracies” about Israel in Obama’s memoir A Promised Land, and Greenfield and Clare M. Lopez supply cogent takes on Obama’s treachery toward Israel and championing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then there’s Raymond Ibrahim on Obama’s abominable treatment of Middle East Christians: his refusal to use U.S. leverage on their behalf, his resistance to Capitol Hill pressure to address religious freedom, his prioritizing of Muslim over Christian refugees, and his denial that Muslim-on-Christian violence in Nigeria had a religious basis. (Ibrahim quotes Newt Gingrich: “This is an administration that never seems to find a good enough excuse to help Christians, but always finds an excuse to apologize for terrorists.”) And in three trenchant pieces, Robert Spencer studies Obama’s refusal to label the Fort Hood massacre as a terrorist act (thus denying certain benefits to victims and their families), his insistence that the Islamic State had nothing to do with Islam, and his attitude, at the time of the Iran deal, that “the side that needed to show a good faith commitment to peace was not Iran, but the United States.”
There are two strong items on immigration: Loudon considers Obama’s desire to bestow citizenship on millions of illegals, and Matthew Vadum ponders Obama’s view “that immigration…was a right.” And J.R. Nyquist tackles Obama and Russia, pointing out in his opening sentences that Obama’s parents met in a Russian-language class. Why, he wonders, were they there? We know they hated capitalism; did they love the USSR? Certainly, Obama’s Russia policy, posits Nyquist, was “exactly what one might expect from a president who was born of pro-Soviet parents and mentored by a likely KGB agent (i.e., Frank Marshall Davis).” Nyquist also serves up a couple of fascinating anecdotes that, if true, would fill in a big piece of the Obama puzzle: in 1983, a Communist speaker at UC Irvine reportedly said that his fellow Reds were “infiltrating the left wing of the Democratic Party”; in the 1990s, American physicist Tom Fife claims to have encountered Obama at a social event in Moscow where the later was described as being groomed by the Soviets to be America’s first black president.
The closing pages of Barack Obama’s True Legacy take us to the end of Obama’s presidency and beyond. Greenfield reflects on the truly tragic way in which Obama’s “naked racial rhetoric… transformed America” from an essentially post-racial country into the present “war-torn nation deeply divided by race.” In three incisive essays, Joseph Klein indicts Obama for his persecution of General Michael Flynn (who, by the way, contributes a solid foreword to this book); argues that Obama should have been impeached for what Andrew McCarthy has rightly called his singular pattern of “presidential lawlessness” (which Klein catalogs at illuminating length); and details Obama’s nefarious and unprecedented attempt, after his own presidency was over, “to sabotage the legitimacy of his duly elected successor.”
When Donald Trump took the oath of office, most of us thought the Obama era was over. We were wrong. Our 44th president was still operating behind the scenes -- scheming with his old cronies to blunt Trump’s effectiveness, to pack the media with lies about him, to keep the violent far-left wing of the Democratic Party in a constant state of anti-Trump outrage, to engineer his impeachment, and much more; and since Trump’s departure from the White House, Obama has, at the very least, been one of those who have been pulling the strings of the current puppet-in-chief. But of course, all this malicious mischief was nothing new for the man who once said that “the sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer”: as Spencer puts it in his savvy afterword, Obama was, from the beginning of his term until, well, this present moment, “actively working against the interests of the United States.” That he managed to do so much damage to this country and its people is breathtaking to behold -- as is the fact that there remains a large cohort of low-information Americans who actually revere this traitor as a paragon of virtue and wisdom.
DIVIDING AMERICA WAS OBAMA AND GEORGE SOROS' GAMEPLAN FOR OBOMB'S PATH TO A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE.
THERE HAS PROBABLY NEVER BEEN A GREATER DANGER TO AMERICAN THAN OBAMA, UNLESS ONE CONSIDERS JOE BIDEN AND HILLARY CLIONT
“Before Obama,” writes Greenfield, “71 percent of Americans had thought that relations between black and white people were generally good.” A year after the Ferguson riots in 2014, “more than half the country thought relations were bad.” It was the Obama administration that had “started the fires and then led the fire brigade, but instead of water, its hoses were filled with oil.” Upon Obama’s departure from office, Donald Trump inherited a country that wasn’t healed but primed for an even more heated racial conflagration.
On the cusp of the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama galvanized an ecstatic crowd at Missouri University by claiming that he and his supporters were “five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Not making America great again, but fundamentally transforming her. This unsettling vow, from the man who would later declare that American exceptionalism was no more valid than British or Greek exceptionalism, promised not restoration, but revolution. It made clear that his incoming administration intended to toss the greatest country in the world onto the trash heap of history to make way for a Progressive utopia centered on social justice and on the dismantling of American power.
Obama’s threat took two presidential terms to gather momentum; former President Trump temporarily stalled its course, but then Obama managed to get a shot at a third term in 2020 – vicariously through his former Vice President Joe Biden. Under the decrepit figurehead Biden, Obama and his muses Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett could accelerate the fundamental change he promised. Indeed, it has been cascading to fruition so rapidly that one is reminded of a Hemingway character’s explanation about how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
The Biden administration is already securing its place in history as the most disastrous American presidency to date. In less than two-and-a-half years, the angry Divider-in-Chief Biden has presided over more domestic and foreign policy debacles than Barack Obama could ever have hoped for. As General Michael Flynn catalogs in the foreword to a brand new book titled Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America, our nation now faces
chronic unemployment and inflation, a border crisis, grave threats to our constitutional liberties, increased violence and lawlessness from the leftist groups Antifa and Black Lives Matter, a weakening dollar, the emboldening of our enemies worldwide, and even worse on the horizon… This is the world Barack Obama has made. This is his legacy.
All of this and more is addressed in Obama’s True Legacy, a collection of eighteen original essays edited by FrontPage Magazine’s longtime editor Jamie Glazov, and featuring numerous FrontPage Mag regulars such as Daniel Greenfield, Robert Spencer, Joseph Klein, Matthew Vadum, and Raymond Ibrahim, among other contributors.
“To understand the crisis of the Biden administration, we have to go back to its origins in the Obama administration,” writes Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield in his introduction to the book, because the latter’s “impact is not past tense. It is present tense… [W]e are still living through the Obama nightmare.” And that is what these eighteen essays analyze and illuminate. From political scientist (and former Marxist) John Drew’s fascinating account of his college days with the fellow radical in “Obama: The Young Communist I Knew,” to Knesset member Dov Lipman’s closing critique of the anti-Israel lies in Obama’s memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s True Legacy is the definitive one-volume guide to the catastrophic influence on U.S. and world politics of Barack Hussein Obama.
The anti-colonialist Obama waged war against America on a broad range of fronts, and they are seemingly all covered in this book. New Zealand author and filmmaker Trevor Loudon traces “The Marxist Origins and Goals of Obamacare” and “Obama’s Illegal Marxist Immigrant Amnesty Movement.” Middle East expert Raymond Ibrahim explains “How Obama Enabled the Persecution of Christians.” Jihad Watch Director Robert Spencer focuses on “Obama’s Enabling of Jihad and Stealth Jihad” in addition to his empowering of the monstrous terror group ISIS and his balance-of-power-altering nuclear deal with Iran. Journalist Joseph Klein exposes “Obamagate: The Coup Attempt Against President Trump” and makes the case for “Why Obama Should Have Been Impeached.”
There is much more in Barack Obama’s True Legacy. Award-winning journalist Matthew Vadum lays bare the damage Obama wreaked on America’s border security. Author and former military intelligence analyst Stephen Coughlin details the “Muslim Brotherhood’s Penetration of the US Under Obama.” Clare Lopez, founding member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, explicates Obama’s “Benghazi Betrayal and the Brotherhood Link.” Political analyst J.R. Nyquist shines a light into the dark corners of “Obama’s Russia collusion.”
No account of Barack Obama’s legacy would be complete without addressing, as Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield puts it, his “enabling of racial strife and domestic terror.” Though Obama surfed into the White House on a wave of hope that the nation’s first black president would bring long-awaited racial healing and unity, Greenfield calls the intentional shattering of race relations in America under his watch “Obama’s true enduring legacy.”
“Before Obama,” writes Greenfield, “71 percent of Americans had thought that relations between black and white people were generally good.” A year after the Ferguson riots in 2014, “more than half the country thought relations were bad.” It was the Obama administration that had “started the fires and then led the fire brigade, but instead of water, its hoses were filled with oil.” Upon Obama’s departure from office, Donald Trump inherited a country that wasn’t healed but primed for an even more heated racial conflagration.
“But Obama wasn’t done once he finally left the White House,” writes Joseph Klein in his essay about the Radical-in-Chief’s “Post-Presidential War on America.” Klein details how the ex-President went on to spread disinformation in an attempt to delegitimize his successor Trump, to foment generational war by nurturing “the next generation of community-organizing Obama mini-mes,” to discredit Fox News – the only mainstream cable outlet that leaned right – and to turn Netflix into his own private propaganda mill, all while hypocritically amassing a personal fortune that contradicted his socialist assertion, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”
Obama’s corrosive impact wasn’t limited to our shores. On an international level, for example, Daniel Greenfield addresses, in “Obama’s Betrayal of Israel,” the breakdown in relations between the United States and our close ally in the Middle East. That alliance fractured thanks to a “total divergence of worldviews” – “moral, cultural, and strategic” – between Obama and Biden on the one hand, and Benjamin Netanyahu on the other. “Previous administrations had viewed Islamic terrorists and the Iranian regime as threats. The Obama administration, however, saw them as victims of American foreign policy… Obama believed that Israel, like America, and other allies in the region, was part of the problem.”
And our current administration, of course, shares and perpetuates that anti-Israel perspective. The result is that the entire volatile Middle East is once again a tinderbox, even as that administration exacerbates tensions in other parts of the world too, such as Ukraine, where we risk tumbling headlong into a world war that could have been averted had Donald Trump been elected in 2020.
But the chaos is all part of the plan. As Robert Spencer reminds us in his epilogue to Barack Obama’s True Legacy, Obama was photographed in 2008 clutching a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World, a finger keeping his place in the pages. Spencer writes,
Zakaria’s book predicting America’s inevitable decline turned out to be a veritable blueprint for Obama’s presidency. Throughout his eight years in office, as this present book abundantly illustrates, Obama seemed determined to make Zakaria’s “post-American world” a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria’s wishful thinking about America’s decline become a reality.
Now, in his de facto third term, the shadowy radical continues to exert his subversive influence on the Constitution, the citizens, and the country he is committed to destroying. Barack Obama’s True Legacy could not be a timelier and more important read. As Spencer concludes,
This book stands as a warning and as a primer on just how devastating Obamaism was for the United States and will be again unless vigilant, courageous, and patriotic American citizens stand, determined to employ all lawful means to defend freedom.
Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, focusing on popular culture. He is also the host of an original podcast on Frontpage, “The Right Take With Mark Tapson.”
Reader Interactions
Obama torpedoed U.S. relations with Russia -- to perpetuate lies about Trump, Durham report found
Oh, not about the election of Donald Trump, of course, if his public statements were any indication.
He was supposedly angry, so angry, at Russia and its supposed interference in our 2016 election that he got out his pen and phone and expelled 35 Russian diplomats.
WASHINGTON — President Obama struck back at Russia on Thursday for its efforts to influence the 2016 election, ejecting 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposing sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services.
The administration also penalized four top officers of one of those services, the powerful military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U.
Intelligence agencies have concluded that the G.R.U. ordered the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations, with the approval of the Kremlin, and ultimately enabled the publication of the emails it harvested to benefit Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
The Hill reported that it was quite an array of sanctions at the time:
The measures include a slate of economic sanctions, diplomatic censure, and public “naming and shaming.” The president also hinted at possible covert cyber measures but did not provide details.
The president also announced that the State Department will expel 35 Russian intelligence operatives and shutter two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used by Russia for intelligence purposes.
Taken together, the sweeping actions announced by the White House, the Treasury, the State Department and intelligence agencies on Thursday amount to the strongest American response yet to a state-sponsored cyberattack. They also appeared intended to box in President-elect Trump, who will now have to decide whether to lift the sanctions on Russian intelligence agencies when he takes office next month.
Obama even amended his own executive order to extend his powers to sanction, with travel bans and asset freezes on some Russian officials.
Just one problem: The Russians didn't do what the embittered Democrats claimed they were doing -- to Get Trump.
Nothing. They didn't hack the DNC and they didn't collude with Donald Trump to get him elected to the presidency. The charges, the expropriations, the sanctions -- were all for innocent people. Even the Russian state was innocent.
That was what Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse found buried at the bottom of the Durham report.
♦ First, John Durham clearly shows in his 306-page report with a 48-page classified appendix, that Russia did nothing to interfere in the 2016 election. The entire Russian Interference operation was a Clinton fabrication, later enhanced by a Federal Bureau of Investigation who used the fabrication as a cover-up justification to hide their surveillance of the Trump campaign.
♦ Second, accepting the empirical, factual, and inherently true reality of the first point – consider that President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats to retain the Clinton fabrication and FBI lies. Think about this one carefully, the Obama administration expelled Russian diplomats in order to retain a domestic political ruse! President Obama did this *after* CIA Director John Brennan briefed him about the Clinton fabrication.
There were no Russian diplomats involved; there was no Russian election interference; there was no Russian hacking of the DNC; it was all a fraud created by the intelligence community (IC), FBI and Main Justice to support Hillary Clinton’s lies and then cover their own targeting tracks.
♦ Third, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, with the full support of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, indicted 14 Russian entities under completely bogus pretenses. All of that effort was done to assist the Clinton narrative, cover for Obama and then use the special counsel to cover up the Trump targeting operation. The totally bogus construct explains why the fabricated indictments were sealed in the DOJ National Security Division in perpetuity, thereby keeping the fraudulent construct hidden from public review forever.
So Obama's wrath was nothing but a fiction to protect the partisan Democrat narrative that they had been promoting about Trump and the Russians, which originated from the embittered political camp of losing Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.
How would you feel about that if you were a Russian, especially now, reading that it was all a political hoax with you the one chosen to be the whipping boy? You got sanctioned, you got kicked out, you got travel bans, you incurred costs, and some "name and shame" all based on lies.
Might you start thinking of the U.S. as kind of a sleazy, dishonest player on the world scene? Would you have problems trusting them? Might you step up your activities against it? It would seem natural.
The Russians, remember, had already calculated by their own devices that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election and the Kremlin was planning for that, so they were as surprised as anyone that the American voters thought otherwise when the election results came in in November 2016.
That they were blamed for the result and sanctioned for hacking and colluding they didn't do, and knew they didn't do, and knew that Obama knew they didn't do, surely must have made them angry.
Russian President Vladimir Putin initially adopted a wait-and-see attitude to see if Trump would set things back to rights, but by March of 2017, three months into his term, Trump had appointed Democrat ally Fiona Hill to be his Russia advisor, and although she was smart enough to generally pooh-pooh the Russia collusion claims in her statements, apparently nothing was done to restore the Russia relations after Obama's partisan fit of pique at Russia's expense.
Net result: By May, Putin expelled 755 American diplomats and staff and expropriated two American properties in retaliation. That was to get the numbers of embassy personnel even, as the U.S had a much bigger official diplomatic presence in Russia than the Russians had in the U.S. That certainly didn't serve U.S. interests to say the least, given that the U.S. must have had a much bigger spy operation going on against Russia than Russia did against the U.S., or, at the least official one which seems most likely.
In other words, how did it serve U.S. interests to falsely accuse and sanction Russia for something it didn't do?
Stuff like that makes countries mad, and fosters considerable distrust. Was that in the U.S. interest? Did that raise our standing and reputation in the world or did it contribute to emerging problems? The Russians were remarkably patient for a while as the accusations were leveled but the lies kept coming and then things got ugly.
It's horrible stuff when we consider the bigger picture, and the picture we see today. Right now, the U.S. and Russia are in a proxy war against one another over Ukraine, with several hideous sideshows involving cowardly and let-the-Americans-do-it allies, as well as huge amounts of money spent at a time of high inflation with little accountability. Our military readiness has been affected just on the supply front. There are odd fires at U.S. food factories over here even as we read reports of strikes at strategic assets inside Russia. The Nordstream II gas pipeline somehow got blown up and somehow nobody knows who did it.
And as this unwelcome, unpopular, and costly entanglement with Russia goes on, China is on the rise, with increasingly aggressive actions amid reports out there that they could beat us in a shooting war. Another inconvenient development: Russia has allied with China.
The worst of this is that it need never have happened. Foreign policy should always be off limits to partisan disputes, but apparently not by Obama. Relations with Russia could have been good and ties friendly. Russia could have advanced economically and moved closer to the West had these sleazy Obama fictions never happened.
Russia has always been torn between leaning east or leaning west, and for most of the 21st century has leaned westward. Keeping Russia friendly to the U.S. would have been a boon for keeping China in check and Russia peaceable. Instead, the Russians were a convenient target for abuse by Democrats and were thrown to the wolves, all to promote the lie that Democrats were "victims" of Russian machinations instead of simply rejected by U.S. voters for their utterly repellent agenda.
That's been an expensive lie for us in the aftermath because any smart superpower should go out of its way to keep as many friends as it can, especially among the those with nuclear weapons. Making Russia an enemy for nothing more than partisan political purposes is not the act of someone who represents America. It's the act of a community organizer, a partisan political hack, a creep who shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power, owing to an inability to distinguish the national interest from the partisan interest.
That's the old Obama we know however, and now he's disgraced us on the world stage as a dishonest sleazeball country, not a nation founded on fairness and democracy. His act and the acts of the Deep State were not only detrimental to democracy here, they were very detrimental to foreign policy abroad. False charges open the door to harsher spying, retaliation, and belligerent actions. It was yellow journalism and other schemings on the American side that got us into the Spanish-American war of 1898 when Spain was baselessly blamed for blowing up an American ship in the Caribbean. Any questions as to why Brittney Griner got such a harsh sentence for such a piddly crime in Russia? Or why a young Wall Street Journal reporter sits in some Russian prison on phony espionage charges? What on earth do the Russians think? And how can anyone fail to understand them at least for whatever they are doing with this blotch on our nation's record? Who started this garbage? How do the decent among us make it right?
HE ENABLED, ABETTED AND CONDONED HILLARY CLINTON'S SELL OUT TO PUTIN AND THE MUSLIM DICTATORS TO FUND HER PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND,
CLINTON WAS ENABLED BY NOT HAVING TO REPORT THE BRIBES AS SEC. OF STATE.
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) (WHAT ABOUT THE CHINA BIDEN PENN CENTER?) and the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE, HUNTER, JAMES, FRANK) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER). BRIAN C JOONDEPH
James Comer Believes Barack Obama Knew of Biden Family’s Foreign Deals
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) suggested Friday that former President Barack Obama knew of the Biden family’s foreign deals with adversaries of the United States.
Speaking with Lou Dobbs on the Great America Show, Comer said Obama must have known about the Biden family business.
“I believe, Lou, that it’s because he knew what Joe Biden was doing the last year of his vice presidency,” Comer said in reference to payments worth millions the family’s business collected.
Comer revealed Wednesday that over the course of several years the family business received over $10 million from schemes in Romania and China in return for what appears to be influence peddling.
“He knew his son [Hunter Biden] was no good, and he knew this was nothing but a political liability not just for our country, not just for the democrat party, but for Obama’s legacy,” Comer added. “Because a lot of this happened during the Obama administration.”
U.S. President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden attend the annual Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on April 10, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Comer also believes Obama’s knowledge of the family’s business informed his opposition to Joe Biden’s 2020 candidacy.
“So, I think that’s why Obama didn’t want Joe Biden to run for president. I think they knew about this,” Comer said about the business. “And remember, a lot of these coverups would have happened during the Obama administration with Obama appointees in these deep state bureaucracies.”
Comer said an establishment media journalist should ask Obama if Comer’s hunch is true: “This would be a great question for Obama: Were you aware of what was going on with Joe Biden with respect to foreign policy and some of these ragtag countries around the world?”
Friday on FNC’s “Hannity,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) blasted the FBI and the Department of Justice for how it has handled the investigation into possible wrongdoing of the Biden family while attempting to indict former President Donald Trump for misdemeanors.
The South Carolina lawmaker said her track record showed she wasn’t in the tank for Trump and asserted the amount of evidence against first son Hunter Biden was “ridiculous.”
“I will tell you, this is, as you say, Sean — everything you said was a hundred percent true, and this is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “And here we have a DOJ and FBI, who are who are indicting Trump on misdemeanors and then will not investigate Biden for betraying his country. And I have to tell you, absolutely, no one can accuse me of being hyper-partisan or being in the tank for Donald Trump. But good lord, the amount of evidence, in this case, is ridiculous. They weren’t hiring Hunter Biden for his brains. They weren’t hiring certainly Hunter Biden for his brawn. They were hiring him to pay for access to the White House, and we see this pattern repeat itself over and over and over again.”
“The reports that we saw at the Treasury would appear to be racketeering,” Mace added. “That comes to mind money laundering, wire fraud. Why were they able to enrich themselves with tens of millions of dollars, including as you say, a grandchild, nieces and nephews, current wives, ex-wives, a brother, a son, you name it, and the list goes on? That family tree is very, very big, and they made a lot of money off of Joe Biden.”
Instead, the Biden family name has really stood for only two things: buffoonery and corruption. For fifty years, Joe Biden has managed to hold onto some slice of power in D.C. as a senator, vice president, and Oval Office stooge not because he is renowned for his erudition or virtue but rather because his doltish behavior and venal character make him ideal for others to control. Perhaps no other Washington relic has accomplished so little for the American people over such a prolonged government career or managed to harness those defects for lucrative advancement more successfully than China Joe.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
The media have no clothes
Our mostly complicit, compliant, sycophant press has no concern about facts, only Democrat power
69% of Voters Call Biden Influence-Peddling Charges ‘Serious Scandal’ - ABC, CBS, NBC Give 0 Seconds to Breaking News
Top State Official Sounded Alarm About ‘Conflict of Interest’ Linked to Hunter Biden’s Work in Ukraine
The Obama administration allowed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter to continue working for Ukrainian company Burisma, even after learning that the firm and its owner were corrupt, top U.S. State Department official George Kent testified, according to transcripts released Thursday.
Fast-forward to today's still vocal Obama gang. Why no indictments? Mum's the word. Can anyone hold to the faith in American justice? Those who support the rule of law feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. It's coming — oh, wait, it's coming...oh, wait... GORDON WYSON
Judicial Watch: Only Crimes in Russia Scandal Are from ‘Obama Gang’
If Obama was a fully recruited agent of Moscow, tasked with giving Russia a significant military advantage over the United States, and economically weakening and socially dividing the nation, how would he have conducted his presidency (or his post-presidency) any differently? TREVOR LOUDON
*
We are all victims of the Obama cabal’s collusion with Russia – President Trump’s voters and all Americans who believe in our free and fair election
Democrats Allow Communists to Infiltrate Their Party Across the Nation
Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes America
Durham’s report also revealed that former FBI Director James Comey demanded, through an intermediary, the New York Field Office “cease and desist” their Clinton Foundation investigation.
Durham and the truth
Tucker: Trump was right about this
It’s time the media and other Democrats stopped misleading the public that they believe in equal treatment and that no one is above the law
The Justice Department was involved from the start.
Maybe the IRS should spend their time administering the tax code instead of targeting people they don't like and protecting criminals whose policies they like.
These days, it is no different than when the IRS targeted Tea Party members for the sole reason that they did not like President Obama's big government and high-tax policies.
Biden compared Tea Party members to domestic terrorists back then, just like he compares MAGA Republicans to domestic terrorists today.
It is Democrats who continually gin up racial hate and division while they pretend they want unity and most of the media cheers.
Why should we hire 87,000 more IRS agents when the ones we have are more interested in protecting themselves instead of doing their job?
According to an exclusive report late Monday night from The New York Post, the IRS "removed the 'entire investigative team' from its long-running tax fraud probe of first son Hunter Biden in alleged retaliation against the whistleblower who alleged a coverup."
Biden's latest financial disclosures are out and he showed no gifts. What about the gifts when Hunter uses kickbacks to pay Daddy's bills? I bet those gifts have never been shown on any gift tax return. I bet IRS agents don't care.
What about all the times Joe and his family spend vacations at a billionaire's house for free? Where are the gift tax returns?
The leftist media has been spending lots of time trying to destroy Clarence Thomas for free vacations, even though that is not a violation, but they actively support Biden no matter how corrupt he is and how many ethical violations he has.
Royalties from a pair of books he published years earlier: $2,933. Interest from one bank account: $15,000 or less. Gifts to declare: none
Meanwhile, Special Counsel John Durham's report shows how corrupt and politicized the Justice Department has become. They have interfered in all elections since at least 2016 with endless witch hunts. The corruption by the Obama and Biden Justice Department dwarfs Watergate.
There have been endless witch hunts seeking to destroy Trump and associates yet the corrupt Justice officials remain free.
It is a joke when the Justice Department says the reforms they have put in place will stop this. They are targeting Catholics, parents, pro-life people, and trespassers with no regard for equal justice or the truth.
The corruption in 2020 was as bad as 2016 when they colluded with the media to bury the truth about the Biden family corruption.
And the media cheers and continues to intentionally lie to the public that the 2020 election was clean.
If the media and other Democrats dispose of Trump, they will go after Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis or whoever else is the Republican candidate. They also trashed Reagan, Bush, McCain, and Romney. The only Republicans they pretend to support are Republicans when they are attacking other Republicans.
Is the media going to call out Rep. Adam Schiff for all his intentional lies? Nope, they will continue to have him lie about Comey's and Jordan's investigations into the massive corruption of Joe Biden. The truth hasn't mattered for a long time to the sycophant media. They only care about power.
The swamp must be drained before the U.S. collapses. The younger generation is being indoctrinated with garbage, like the lies about climate change and white privilege.
There is nothing progressive about the media and other Democrats that call themselves progressive. They are intentionally moving the country backwards. They should be referred to as depressives, oppressives, destructives, or regressives.
AT readers know well the array of dementia signs in the current occupant of the White House. I’m sure most would contend that Biden is not mentally capable of the office. And yet, how many AT essays and comments decry this or that policy of Biden or this or that statement that he manages to utter as if they were his policies and statements? One of Biden’s chief functions for the left is his role as Straw Man in Chief. If you attack him, you’re not attacking them. (Leftist) Mission accomplished. Conservatives/patriots set themselves up here in what will be an exceedingly adept ploy from the left. Once the left gets rid of Biden, their minions will claim “problem solved.” Now let’s all Hail our new (Democrat) President ___________ [fill in the blank].
So, what is the proper approach that conservatives/patriots should take? Utter dismissiveness! Refuse to engage with any argument that centers on Biden. Refuse to acknowledge him. It will drive his minions crazy but, much more importantly, it will remind AT readers that Biden is merely the tip of the pimple that sits atop the festering subdermal abscess that is Democrat leftism. Eliminating Biden will accomplish nothing except proceeding to the next chapter that the left has written.
So how am I so sure that other hands man the steering wheel in our headlong plunge over the abyss? Little things. The mighty get tripped up so many times by just that, little things.
For example, Biden did not bother attending the coronation of the monarch of perhaps our closest ally. The estimable Mrs. Biden did. I’m not a partisan of Charles, but I do respect the British people. Biden’s actions are inexcusable in that regard. And the petty meanness of the swipe seems odd. What exactly in Biden’s Senate or Vice Presidency past betokens his antipathy to the British or their monarch? In truth, nothing. That his mother didn’t like the British is not relevant to him in his role as White House occupant and the American people’s representative.
And then there’s this: Remember that bust of Winston Churchill that Barry Obama had summarily removed from the WH after his inauguration? The one that President Trump put back in place? Well, it seems (from none other than CNN) that Biden had it removed again.
Now we know that Biden can be petty and vindictive (ask Hunter’s disowned daughter), but even the petty and vindictive need a motive. Only one person would have the pettiness, vindictiveness, and the hatred to troll that low. And that would be Barack Hussein Obama.
So, with Susan Rice’s recent stint in the Biden White House as further argument about the real power behind the Oval Office chair (not to mention the estimable Merrick Garland as AG,) it really does appear that the Transformation of America is proceeding apace with the same cast of characters leading the way (where are Valerie Jarrett and Eric Holder these days btw?).
Now this begets yet another question: How can a guy not bright enough to write his own autobiography lead a transformative revolution—both cultural and political—that has enveloped the U.S.? Like a series of infernal nesting dolls, we will likely find that the ultimate fingers working the strings belong to someone(s) still as yet uncovered, but not Barry.
But back to our theme here, don’t believe for a second that Joseph Robinette Biden pulls his own strings. That mirage only favors the left’s goals. And besides, he is about to be thrown under their bus anyway. They just await the moment of maximum gain.
It is very true that, to defeat your enemy, you must first know them. Just realize, it isn’t Biden. If someone shoots you, you don’t take it out on the bullet. You go after the shooter! (Except if your name is Alec Baldwin, of course). So, with us, don’t waste time on Biden. Focus on one row back. Biden is about to be history, courtesy of his current masters. But we will get only more of the same or worse.
THERE IS NO GREATER DANGER TO AMERICA THAN JOE BIDEN!
Special Counsel John Durham dropped a bombshell on Monday. "Russiagate"—the biggest media story on the planet for four years—was never justified by the evidence.
According to Durham's scathing report, the FBI initiated its investigation of former president Donald Trump's 2016 campaign without sufficient proof of collusion and then ignored mounting contrary evidence. Durham criticized the FBI for relying on the later-debunked Steele dossier to get a warrant to surveil Trump's campaign; for coziness with Hillary Clinton, Trump's Democratic opponent; and for repeatedly accepting information from anti-Trump sources, if not showing the same bias itself.
Each of Durham's findings of FBI misconduct could be—and have been—applied to the corporate press, which breathlessly reported each twist in the FBI's false narrative and helped to drive American politics off a cliff.
Reliance on the Steele dossier: Like the FBI, media outlets touted the most salacious allegations compiled by former British spy Christoper Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign. They did so, to borrow a term of art, "without evidence."
Even after the dossier and Steele himself were discredited, the media insisted the FBI's investigation of Trump was super serious.
Prominent journalists earnestly discussed the possibility that Trump was a Manchurian candidate, recruited by Russia three decades earlier.
Coziness with Clinton: While the FBI ignored concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton's campaign, according to Durham, the media let the Democrat spout off, largely unchallenged, about her supposed certainty that the 2016 election was rigged against her. (The reaction was a little different when Trump questioned his loss in 2020.)
Bias against Trump: Agents deemed too biased or unprofessional by the FBI were welcomed on the airways to pontificate on the investigation they had compromised. Peter Strzok—a senior FBI agent who oversaw both the Trump and Clinton investigations until he was fired for anti-Trump texts in 2018—immediately became a regular on-air contributor for MSNBC. And former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who was pushed out for leaking, landed a similar gig at CNN.
After seven years of experience, and a pseudo-reckoning, has the corporate press learned anything? Let's see whom CNN brought on to discuss the Durham report.
In a statement Monday, the FBI said its leadership has "already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time," in response to the problems highlighted by Durham. "Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented."
It's currently unknown whether he met with foul play or voluntarily dropped out of sight. However, what is well established is that since that fateful interview with the FBI in March 2019, Luft has made powerful enemies in both Chinese and American intelligence and, of course, in the Biden syndicate.
Clinton Foundation Put On Watch List Of Suspicious ‘Charities’
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy
GRIFTER AND PHONY CHARITY FOUNDATION FRAUDSTER HILLARY CLINTON’S LONG SERVICE TO AMERICA’S MOST EVIL BANKSTERS
The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”
“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
Is it a signal that she's back in the game because she's selling her president-ability to the world's global billionaire crowd and laying the groundwork for more funds? There are all kinds of ways for foreign billionaires to get money to the U.S. without consequences, after all. What's more, it's pretty much the biggest base of support she has, which is at least one reason why she lost the 2016 election.
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service” into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they
do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
TALKS ABOUT THE GUTTED AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS
Robert F Kennedy Jr: "We need a peaceful revolution"
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) (WHAT ABOUT THE CHINA BIDEN PENN CENTER?) and the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE, HUNTER, JAMES, FRANK) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER). BRIAN C JOONDEPH
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic
Party had completely repudiated its association with the
reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton
gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap
labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS
AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black
capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its
notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the
largest prison population in the world.”
The second time was as Barack Obama’s vice president, where little was heard from him, but much has since surfaced about family conflicts of interest during that period, including illicit family business relationships with several adversary foreign countries.
As a senator, Biden (a.k.a. "credit card" joe biden) vigorously voted for several similar bills. In short, based on his voting record, Joe Biden is not (and never was) a champion of disadvantaged Americans, unless you consider multi-billion-dollar credit card corporations and millionaires “disadvantaged.” Chris Talgo
“I believe that if Hillary had been elected she would have found a way to give amnesty and eventually citizenship to all the millions of Hispanics who are now here illegally and would have, in theory, have opened the border so that more and more could cross and be eligible to vote, until an undefeatable voting block would have been created, putting a more and more progressive electorate into power.” CHARLIE DANIELS
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
Globalism: Google VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the most.
LOOK FOR GAMER PARSITE LAWYERS CLINTONS, OBAMAS AND BIDEN CRIME FAMILY IN EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:
"The ruling class monopolizes the gateways to power and congeals its influence in the top 9.9 percent (incomes above $158,000) in an ooze of bureaucrats and corporate toadies."
"Whereas the United States used to draw its best and brightest into physics and engineering, now it draws them into finance, where they make more convoluted instruments for the hucksterism of the kleptocracy."
"The function of elite universities is to instill an education in both ruling class mores and diversity."
"Every regime needs religion for both legitimacy and sacrifices. It turns to moralistic priests to sanctify its power and indoctrinate its own children as well as to give subjects an identity and sense of meaning."
"The priests of identity politics explain race and gender identity, attaching each individual to a group with certain rights and duties."
"The ruling class claims a right — by birth, wealth, and education — to rule others without their consent. It speaks of vague ideals like 'democracy,' the 'Constitution,' and 'the rule of law' while staging the hoax of popular government in ritual public elections and televised press conferences."
"As the kleptocrats bask in their power, they are cut off from the problems of the people they rule, and they resent challenges to their legitimacy."
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“I don’t know that anybody since John Rockefeller has had as unfeathered power as Mark Zuckerberg has right now where no one stands up to him inside his company, no one stands up to him on the board, no one stands up to him in Congress, no one stands up to him at the White House, no one really stands up to him in the media. He is a robber baron. Elon Musk is a robber baron. These people are robber barons,” Scarborough proclaimed. JOE SCARBOROUGH
WHY ARE ALL THESE FUKERS DEMS FOR BIDEN AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS AND NO CAPS ON VISAS TO IMPORT 'CHEAP' TECH WORKERS???
Profits of Doom: Globalist Elites Doubled Their Wealth During Coronavirus Pandemic
American Greatness regularly provides a long essay by an erudite writer whom the site describes as a "Weekend Read." The May 6 offering was by Kevin Slack, Ph.D., University of Dallas, now on the political science/philosophy faculty at Hillsdale College of Michigan, a well regarded conservative institution. The essay is an edifying exposition of the rise of the Western (American and European) elites to become despots.
Plato favored rule by oligarchs, persons of distinction, but Plato ignored the potential for what Lord Acton observed about power and corruption: "Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you super add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."
Oligarchy often deteriorates to despotism because many ambitious men are bereft of the virtues and morals essential to a good ruler and political leader. An oligarch can be good or bad. The bad ones become despots, who rule in a cruel or oppressive manner.
The concept of self-governance espoused by the founders requires embracing the principles of stoicism. We have lost what was advocated by the American founders and led John Adams to wisely assert, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Morality and virtue are the foundation of our republic and necessary for a society to be free." The success of the American Republic requires a moral and ethical populace and leadership.
In his writing, Dr. Slack is not careless in his assertions or negligent in his presentation of evidence that present-day America and Western civilization are in the thrall of despots in various positions, public and private — elected and appointed officials, corporate plutocrats, mavens and doyens of academia and the arts, media, and other sectors of the culture. All of these sectors have been impacted by a growing number of despots and kleptocrats.
Slack provides ample evidence of the rise of despots in all aspects of American culture, business, and politics and displays impressive reach and understanding of the implications of what he chronicles. He points out that the seeds for our destruction were planted a long time ago, in 19th-century humanist progressivism, then amplified by Teddy, Woodrow, FDR, and then later progressives followed by aggressive socialist statist fascists.
This is not a recent sabotage of America; it is a long time developing, most of the destruction energized and organized by atheist and commie infiltrators marching under the banners of liberalism and progressivism, hiding their nihilist amorality and destructive quest for power and control. Well, here we are, and we did it to ourselves.
I stopped reading Professor Slack's essay a number of times because it was so stunningly depressing. In fact, before I had finished, I called him at Hillsdale and asked if I should give up. He assured me that, in the book from which the essay is excerpted, he also has a chapter of optimism and how to reverse the trend. He said, to paraphrase, I have five children. I can't give up on America and Americans.
Here are a few of the points made about the rise of despotism:
"the evidence ... exposes the globalist American empire as a kleptocracy that has betrayed the country, outsourced its wealth and defense, and degraded its people."
"Today's globalist American empire is a kleptocracy filled with princelings of the political and corporate elite who inherited — and now drain — the wealthiest and most powerful empire in history."
"the kleptocrats claim science's authority to subdue the populace"
"[T]hey enlist an identity politics priesthood to stoke racial hatred against middle-class whites, who suffer indignities, humiliations, and loyalty tests."
"Following the COVID lockdowns and unlawful 2020 election, the last vestige of legitimacy has collapsed, and the kleptocracy has revealed itself as an incompetent, corrupt class of degenerates."
"In their palaces at the center of a rotting kingdom, the despots surround themselves with harems, catamites, and vicious eunuchs to administrate a world of performance rituals and sadomasochistic fantasies even as their people and world hegemony decline."
How's that for a starter? Need a break?
Slack goes on to describe the deterioration of America in excruciating detail. The wealthy become a form of shadow government because wealth is used to obtain and retain political control in a fascist state, where the distinction blurs between government and corporate entities and power centers. Slack summarizes:
While each fiefdom helps preserve the order and negotiates for its privileges, at the center are the 3,000 tyrants, a ruling class of kleptocrats who ally with, stroke, tax, or intimidate the monopolies they secure. ... [This group] controls more than half of the nation's industrial and banking assets and more than three-quarters of its insurance assets. ... [and] over half of all the assets of private foundations and two-thirds of all private university endowments. They direct the nation's largest and best-known law firms in New York and Washington, as well as the nation's major civic and cultural organizations. They make the largest political campaign contributions. They occupy key federal government positions in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
Amazon and Google are the Government
Slack doesn't let up. He reminds us that Amazon and Google are the government. Banking and credit card companies are another example of the creeping fascism and monopolization of activities that have dominated economies and politics the past decade in particular:
"The ruling class monopolizes the gateways to power and congeals its influence in the top 9.9 percent (incomes above $158,000) in an ooze of bureaucrats and corporate toadies."
"Whereas the United States used to draw its best and brightest into physics and engineering, now it draws them into finance, where they make more convoluted instruments for the hucksterism of the kleptocracy."
"The function of elite universities is to instill an education in both ruling class mores and diversity."
"Every regime needs religion for both legitimacy and sacrifices. It turns to moralistic priests to sanctify its power and indoctrinate its own children as well as to give subjects an identity and sense of meaning."
"The priests of identity politics explain race and gender identity, attaching each individual to a group with certain rights and duties."
"The ruling class claims a right — by birth, wealth, and education — to rule others without their consent. It speaks of vague ideals like 'democracy,' the 'Constitution,' and 'the rule of law' while staging the hoax of popular government in ritual public elections and televised press conferences."
"As the kleptocrats bask in their power, they are cut off from the problems of the people they rule, and they resent challenges to their legitimacy."
The Book: War on the Republic
Slack's recent book is a historically ordered discussions of political developments — 19th-century humanist progressivism, a result of the enlightenment, evolving to the progressive periods of Teddy and Woodrow, then the progressive socialist early liberal era of Walter Lippmann and the effects of Marxist communism, a big acceleration with the administrative statist socialist/progressive FDR, the liberalism surge, then in the '60s the appearance of radicalism with a commie tinge, followed by neo-liberalism and identity politics mixed with communist-inspired racialism and ending with despotism and a fascist consolidation of power in the hands of a small ruling class. Slack's exegesis certainly reminded me of the work of Angelo Codevilla and Thomas Sowell, who have warned about the negative impact of the anointed, the elites, the intellectuals who think they were born to be in power.
The book looks at the massive political disaster that has been coming for a century, beginning with Teddy and continuing 'til today — progressive-era administrative state changes mixed with communism. Slack looks at the charnel house and examines the remains — looking at the dead elements of a once vigorous dynamo of capitalism, citizen freedom, and republican self-governance. There is no sector of society that has escaped the corruption that has been amplified the last two decades, and in the book, Slack provides the report on the dying patient, the American Republic.
I told you he said he wrote an optimistic chapter — and he told me I shouldn't polish up my ritual short sword (wakizashi). Well, the chapter is titled "Conclusion," and it proposes that a return to the foundations is the solution for The New Right — a constitutional republic restored, what has become a fascist alliance of despots destroyed in favor of the people, and a government that protects the rights of a newly alert citizenry that demand a limited government and consent of the governed.
Slack reminds me of Victor Davis Hanson writing about the Greeks. He is an authority on political history and philosophy, and he shows it. The War on the American Republic is a classic. Most authors would consider it a magnum opus and take a victory lap and go home to domestic chores and an early bedtime. However, I suspect there is more to come from Dr. Slack. For our benefit, he is young and sounds energetic and enthusiastic about his work.
Thomas Sowell is 90; Victor Davis Hanson is 70 this year. Slack can do this as long as he likes, and his readers and students will be rewarded.
John Dale Dunn is a retired emergency physician, consultant, and inactive attorney in Brownwood, Texas.
As the world was buffeted by a coronavirus tsunami leaving forced lockdowns, supply-chain problems, economic upheaval, and poverty in its wake, globalist financial elites “have had a terrific pandemic” according to a report released Monday.
The world’s 10 richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $1.9 trillion, at a rate of $1.6 billion a day, over the past 12 months, proving elites have largely been spared the misery and financial ruin inflicted on so many by endless enforced lockdowns.
A confederation of charities that focus on alleviating global poverty, Oxfam said members of the globalist financial elites saw their wealth rose more during the pandemic more than it did the previous 14 years, when the world economy was suffering the worst recession since the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
These are some of the main points from Oxfam’s latest report, Inequality Kills, which has been released as global business leaders meet virtually this week for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
“We have a situation where 10 men hold more wealth than that of two-thirds of humanity,” Lyn Morgain, chief executive of Oxfam Australia, told Australia’s ABC news outlet.
“Not only that, but that bottom 40 percent are hanging on by a thread.”
The report highlights what the charity says are “unprecedented” levels of global inequality as coronavirus sharpens the divide between “us and them,” the “haves and have nots.”
Jeff Bezos speaks about his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into space during a press conference on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Meanwhile the likes of Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, enjoyed the greatest year-on-year growth since records began, the report outlined.
At a time when a group of these men were using their riches to rocket into outer space, the charity said, the World Bank had projected that more than 160 million people had been pushed into poverty.
In all, 20 new “pandemic billionaires” have also been created in Asia thanks to the international response to coronavirus, according to the charity.
Forbes listed the world’s 10 richest men as: Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, U.S. investor Warren Buffet and the head of the French luxury group LVMH, Bernard Arnault.
The Oxfam report follows a December 2021 study by the group which found that the share of global wealth of the world’s richest people soared at a record pace during the pandemic.
FAKEBOOK and GOOBLE ASSAULT FREE SPEECH TO BUILD THE GLOBALISTS’ BILLIONAIRES’ DICTATORSHIP FOR THE RICH
In the book, Byrne describes her as “distant, cold, dishonest, and a habitual liar.” When asked about this, he told American Thinker, “Americans need to know that Mrs. Clinton is not a leader. She displays a holier-than-thou attitude, ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ When I heard her say Bill Clinton would work with her on the economy, my first thoughts, ‘what steps will she take to protect young women working at the White House from him?’ Her pattern is reflection, deception, and lies.”
AND THE BRIBES POURED IN.........
In June 2010, several of his companies received deals or concessions from the Colombian government following back-to-back meetings that Bill Clinton and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had with the President of Colombia. Giustra has given tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation since 2005.
HILLARY CLINTON, MEXICO and GOOGLE: THE CONSPIRACY TO FLOOD AMERICA WITH “cheap” LABOR.
“Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.” NEIL MUNRO
“If you see a Latino Googler in the office (California/New York), please give them a smile,” Murillo wrote. “They are probably hurting right now. It’s tough to handle now that we know not all of us were against this, so we may be even more divided than ever. At least in CA/NY though, you can rest assured that the Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts and prayers, at least for them and their families.”
Charlie Daniels: We Need a Wall – But That’s Just the Beginning
“I believe that if Hillary had been elected she would have found a way to give amnesty and eventually citizenship to all the millions of Hispanics who are now here illegally and would have, in theory, have opened the border so that more and more could cross and be eligible to vote, until an undefeatable voting block would have been created, putting a more and more progressive electorate into power.” CHARLIE DANIELS
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILLARY CLINTON’S
TRILLION DOLLAR WELFARE HANDOUT TO NARCOMEX!
Clinton amnesty plan would cost taxpayers $1.2 trillion
Hillary Clinton's plan to bring 11 million illegal aliens "out of the shadows" would cost American households an immediate tax increase of $1.2 trillion, or $15,000 per household, according to a study by the National Academy of Sciences.
Their net worth today is now in excess of $150 million, accumulated not by traditional means of work and investment, but rather by pay-for-play influence peddling through speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising -- with the tacit understanding that the Clintons would be in a position to return favors to donors after Hillary won the 2016 presidential election.
Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson- Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’
THE DEMISE AND ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION of HILLARY CLINTON
"Hillary Clinton is a known liar, a criminal of monstrous proportions; others have gone to prison for crimes she has committed over and over: lying to Congress, lying to the FBI, violating national security laws by which she was bound as Secretary of State, etc. It's a long list."
Clinton, the candidate favored by most of Wall Street and the corporate elite and large sections of the Republican Party establishment, is seeking to assemble something akin, within the framework of the US political setup, to a grand coalition between the Democratic Party and the Republican leadership.
Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’ health benefits; and huge cuts in income taxes for the wealthy and corporate taxes.
Analysis: Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Would Make the Rich Even Richer
Sean Gallup/Chip Somodevilla/Jeff Gentner/Drew Angerer/Getty Images
President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” is set to give a tax cut to about 67 percent of the nation’s richest Americans — those earning more than $885,000 every year.
A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reveals that the filibuster-proof reconciliation package will give a tax cut to two-thirds of the top one percent of earners even as the top one percent now hold more wealth than the entire American middle class.
“This is true despite the fact that Build Back Better would raise taxes substantially for the extremely rich (mainly those making over $10 million per year),” the analysis states.
In effect, those in the top one percent would receive an average tax cut of more than $16,000 in 2022 under Biden’s plan. The tax cuts for the wealthy would be a result of the plan’s increasing the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap.
As Breitbart News has reported, the plan amounts to a $625 billion tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans living primarily in blue states.
(Chart via Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)
“In other words, the largest tax cuts in dollars in Build Back Better would go to households in the top five percent and especially the top one percent,” the analysis continues. “Many make millions of dollars of annual income and tens of millions of dollars in assets.”President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” is set to give a tax cut to about 67 percent of the nation’s richest Americans — those earning more than $885,000 every year.
A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reveals that the filibuster-proof reconciliation package will give a tax cut to two-thirds of the top one percent of earners even as the top one percent now hold more wealth than the entire American middle class.
“This is true despite the fact that Build Back Better would raise taxes substantially for the extremely rich (mainly those making over $10 million per year),” the analysis states.
In effect, those in the top one percent would receive an average tax cut of more than $16,000 in 2022 under Biden’s plan. The tax cuts for the wealthy would be a result of the plan’s increasing the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap.
As Breitbart News has reported, the plan amounts to a $625 billion tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans living primarily in blue states.
“In other words, the largest tax cuts in dollars in Build Back Better would go to households in the top five percent and especially the top one percent,” the analysis continues. “Many make millions of dollars of annual income and tens of millions of dollars in assets.”
At the same time, Biden’s plan would squeeze an extra $200 billion out of American taxpayers by mostly targeting working and middle class earners with more Internal Revenue Services (IRS) audits.
The plan ensures nearly 600,000 more working and middle class Americans earning $75,000 or less a year would be audited by the IRS. Of those new IRS audits, more than 313,000 would target the poorest of Americans who earn $25,000 or less a year.
Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” has already passed the House, thanks entirely to Democrat support, and now awaits scrutiny in the United States Senate.
In 2017, former President Trump had the SALT deduction capped at $10,000. Since then, Democrats have sought to deliver their wealthy, blue state donors with a massive tax cut by eliminating the cap altogether or greatly increasing it.
Biden, for instance, had sought to include tax cuts for his billionaire donors in a Chinese coronavirus relief package earlier this year. The plan was ultimately cut from the package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in May 2020, also tried to include the plan in a coronavirus relief package.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in May 2020, also tried to include the plan in a coronavirus relief package.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
House Democrats pass stripped-down social welfare bill with massive tax cut for the rich
House speaker Nancy Pelosi
On Friday morning, the House of Representatives passed its version of President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate bill. As expected, the measure was approved on a party-line vote, with 220 Democrats voting “Yes” and all 212 Republicans voting “No.” One Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative former Marine who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, broke ranks and voted in opposition to the bill.
Golden had announced that he would oppose the bill because it included a massive tax break for the wealthy. The outcome of months of internal Democratic Party wrangling was the decision of the Biden White House and the party leadership to strip the bill of all major tax increases opposed by big business and slash the top line figure for social programs and climate protection in half, from $3.25 trillion to $1.75 trillion over 10 years.
That, however, did not satisfy the Wall Street and corporate interests that dictate government policy and control both major parties. Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incorporated into the bill a measure demanded by wealthy donors in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. It was the lifting of a $10,000 cap on deductions on federal income taxes to compensate for state and local taxes. The cap was imposed as part of the Trump tax bill passed in December of 2017, which slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy.
Until then, there was no limit on the amount of federal tax deductions for state and local taxes that wealthy people in generally pro-Democratic high-tax states could claim by itemizing their federal tax returns. In imposing the limit, Trump and the Republicans were targeting states that historically vote “blue” in federal elections.
This infuriated the Democrats’ wealthy backers, who demanded that the Biden budget bill raise the limit on so-called SALT (state and local tax) deductions. The Democrats acceded by adding to the bill a provision raising the limit to $80,000 for each of the next nine years.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this tax windfall for the wealthy will cost the federal government $285 billion over the 10-year span covered by the bill, making it the second most costly item in the legislation. It is topped only by a combined $390 billion for universal pre-school for three- and four-year-old children and limited subsidies for child care.
It is considerably higher than the allocation for clean energy and climate resilience ($220 billion), four weeks of paid family and medical leave ($195 billion), clean energy and electricity tax credits ($190 billion), affordable housing ($170 billion), Medicaid home- and community-based services ($150 billion), a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit ($130 billion), and tax credits for health insurance premiums under Obamacare ($125 billion).
It would help pay for programs that were severely cut or dropped outright from the bill under pressure from big business and its most open mouthpieces in the Democratic Party, such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These include free community college (eliminated); the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, thereby lowering their costs (reduced to a shell program affecting only a handful of drugs and not even starting until 2024); and Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and vision (reduced to limited subsidies for hearing aids).
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“Anything you do to eliminate the SALT cap is going to be regressive, because that tax is overwhelmingly paid by very high-income people,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. “Anything you do to lower that tax doesn’t matter for most people.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) reported that a family of four in Washington D.C. making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deductions as a middle-class family would receive from an expansion of the child tax credit. The CRFB said that two-thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase in the state and local property tax deduction.
Pointing to the brazen hypocrisy of Biden and the Democratic Party, Marx Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, said, “We’re debating about whether to give lower- and middle-class families a thousand dollars more a year through the child tax credit, while giving upper-class families $10,000 or more through SALT. That’s counter to everything the Democrats have been saying Build Back Better is about and everything they said about the Trump tax cuts.”
According to a report from the Tax Foundation, raising the SALT cap would more than offset other tax increases for the wealthy in 2022 included in the House bill. These include a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, increased taxes on US companies’ foreign profits, and a surtax of 5 percent on those with adjusted gross income over $10 million and 8 percent on those making more than $25 million.
In a column in the Financial Times on Thursday, Edward Luce alluded to the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and linked it to the Build Back Better bill:
The result is a bill that caters best to the most powerful slice of Americans—the very wealthy. They can sleep easy now that the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity partners to be taxed at lower than ordinary income rates—as Warren Buffett pointed out, they pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries—is probably safe. As it stands, the bill will also give wealthy Americans a bigger tax cut than they got from Trump’s big 2017 tax bill.
Even this miserable travesty of social reform will be further gutted if not blocked outright in the Senate, where passage will require the support of all 50 Democrats. Neither Manchin nor Sinema has signed on to the bill, the former having declared his opposition to even a completely inadequate a four-week paid leave provision, while calling for means testing and work requirements for other social benefits.
The so-called “progressives”—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, the more than 100-strong House Progressive Caucus—capitulated to the demand of Biden and the most right-wing factions in the Democratic caucuses to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. This bill was backed by virtually every corporate lobby group, without having secured the agreement of Manchin and Sinema to support Senate passage of the broader “Build Back Better” social spending bill, against which the corporations have waged a massive lobbying campaign.
Sanders, for his part, has denounced the inclusion of the SALT provision in the House bill but is supporting a modified version in the Senate bill, according to which eligibility for expanded tax deductions would be limited to people making less than $400,000 a year. On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, widely known as the “senator from Wall Street,” is supporting an even bigger deduction than that provided by the House.
BEZOSHEAD REDEFINES THE TERM 'CAPITALIST PIG'
Amazon, this year alone, petitioned for nearly 3,000 employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers and foreign nationals seeking to take high-paying white collar jobs. Microsoft and Google, likewise, petitioned for more than 3,300 employment-based green cards.
WHAT IF THIS PIG HANDED OVER TO THE TORNADO VICTIMS THE SAME
AMOUNT OF LOOT HE SQUANDERED TAKING
A TEN MINUTE JOY RIDE INTO SPACE???
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”
As a senator, Biden vigorously voted for several similar bills. In short, based on his voting record, Joe Biden is not (and never was) a champion of disadvantaged Americans, unless you consider multi-billion-dollar credit card corporations and millionaires “disadvantaged.” Chris Talgo
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough blasted Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla founder and space entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday.
Scarborough described the two tech giants as “robber barons.” He also lamented the tax cuts from the 1980s and 1990s, which he supported, as well as the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, arguing they “created the greatest income redistribution in the history of the planet.”
“I don’t know that anybody since John Rockefeller has had as unfeathered power as Mark Zuckerberg has right now where no one stands up to him inside his company, no one stands up to him on the board, no one stands up to him in Congress, no one stands up to him at the White House, no one really stands up to him in the media. He is a robber baron. Elon Musk is a robber baron. These people are robber barons,” Scarborough proclaimed.
“And we have seen the greatest transfer of wealth, which Republicans love to say, ‘Oh, we don’t like to redistribute income.’ Oh, really? Well, the tax policies that I have supported through the ’80s and ’90s and continued to be supported by Republicans in the 21s century have created the greatest income redistribution in the history of this planet from middle-class Americans to the Elon Musks of the world,” he added. “It’s grotesque.”
The World Inequality Report 2022, released by the global research initiative World Inequality Lab, found that the COVID-19 pandemic has widened the financial gap between the rich and poor to a degree not seen since the rosy days of world imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.
The world’s billionaires enjoyed the steepest increase in their share of wealth last year since the World Inequality Lab began keeping records in 1995, according to the study released Tuesday. Billionaires saw their net worth grow by more than $3.6 trillion in 2020 alone, increasing their share of global wealth to 3.5 percent. Meanwhile, the pandemic has pushed approximately 100 million people into extreme poverty, boosting the global total to 711 million in 2021.
“Global inequalities seem to be about as great today as they were at the peak of western imperialism in the early 20th century,” the report said. “Indeed, the share of income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between western countries and their colonies.”
The report showed the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population takes 52 percent of global income, compared to the 8 percent share of the poorest half. On average, an individual in the top decile earns $122,100 (€87,200) per year, while a person from the poorest half of global earners makes $3,920 (€2,800) a year.
Global wealth inequality is even more pronounced than income inequality. The poorest half of the world’s population only possess 2 percent of the total wealth. In contrast, the wealthiest 10 percent own 76 percent of all wealth, with $771,300 (€550,900) on average.
The ultra-rich have siphoned a disproportionate share of global wealth growth over the last few decades. The top 1 percent took 38 percent of all additional wealth generated since 1995, whereas the bottom 50 percent have only captured 2 percent of it. The wealth of the richest individuals has grown between 6 to 9 percent per year since the mid-1990s, compared to the global 3.2 percent average.
Inequality levels vary across the regions. In Europe, the top decile takes about 36 percent of income share, while it holds 58 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. However, inequalities between countries have declined in the last two decades, whereas inequality within “rich” countries has risen sharply. In the United States, the top 1 percent owned 35 percent of the country’s wealth, approaching Gilded Age levels of inequality.
This massive accumulation of capital has come at the expense of public wealth over the last four decades. The share of wealth held by public actors is close to zero or negative in “rich” countries, indicating that the totality of wealth is privately owned, a trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
The report also studied connections between wealth inequality and inequalities in contributions to climate change, showing the top 10 percent of emitters are responsible for close to 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, while the bottom half produces 12 percent of the total. This disparity is also seen within nominally rich countries. The bottom half of the population in Europe, East Asia, and North America is responsible for an average of 3 to 9 metric tons of emissions per person a year. This contrasts sharply with the emissions of the top 10 percent in these regions: 29 metric tons in Europe, 39 in East Asia, and 73 in North America.
Given this diverse and severe inequity, the authors of the report propose a series of “modern progressive taxes” on wealth used to invest in education, health, and ecological restoration.
But such a path is a dead end; All the official and semi-official institutions of government are subordinated to the interests of the financial aristocracy and serve to constrain and block any measure that threatens their hoards of wealth.
This is demonstrated by the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with governments around the world declaring the pandemic over and eliminating remaining protective measures. Rather than being driven by concern for public health, the actions of governments have been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of the upper echelons of society.
The glaring contradiction between the world’s richest people and the precarious circumstances billions are living in is fueling a growing wave of working class militancy. The working class must demand the massive amount of wealth and resources hoarded by the wealthiest layers be seized and directed to fight the global pandemic.
The chief obstacle to solving the world’s burning social questions—whether the devastating impact of COVID-19 or the widespread growth of inequality—is the private profit interests of the capitalist ruling class. To save lives and avert even further disaster, workers must build an international socialist movement based on the interests of the working class.
THERE IS NO GREATER THREAT TO AMERICAN, THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS OR AMERICAN BORDERS THAN AS PERPETRATED BY THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY
BIDEN CRONY JEFF 'BEZOSHEAD' BEZOS RECENTLY HANDED THE PHONY OBAMA LIBRARY A 'GIFT' OF $100 MILLION. JOE LOVES THE SMELL OF THAT! HE'S PLANNING A 'PRESDIENTIAL LIBRARY' AS WELL.
Make Amazon Pay wrote in a list of demands on its website: “The pandemic has exposed how Amazon places profits ahead of workers, society, and our planet. Amazon takes too much and gives back too little. It is time to Make Amazon Pay.”
Pelosi: Dems Are Using Cash for Kids As 'Leverage' to Pass BBB
(CNSNews.com) - Unless Senate Democrats join House Democrats in passing the partisan "Build Back Better Act (BBB)," there will be no more direct cash payments to millions of American families with children.
On Tuesday, a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) if she would consider a stand-alone bill extending the monthly Child Tax Credit payments so the direct cash infusions can continue in 2022.
Pelosi admitted that she's using the payments as "leverage" to force passage of the Democrat agenda, much of contained in the multi-trillion-dollar BBB:
"Of course, we could pass that in the House," said Pelosi, who repeatedly insists that everything she does is “for the children."
Whether we could pass it in the Senate remains to be seen. But I don't want to let anybody off the hook on the BBB to say, well, we covered that one thing, so now the pressure is off. I think that that is really important leverage in a discussion on BBB that the children and their families will suffer without that payment.
Not everybody gets it on a monthly basis, but those who need it the most do. And so, we're just still optimistic about BBB passing. And perhaps even if it were after the first of the year, which I hope it is not, that it could be retroactive if it's early enough in the first of the year.
The Child Tax Credit gives qualifying families up to $3,600 a year for every child under age six and up to $3,000 a year for every child 6-17.
Normally, the credit is deducted from a family's taxable income. But Democrats, in the American Rescue Plan, raised the amount from $2,000 and delivered the credit in the form of monthly cash payments.
They also made families with little or no income -- those who don't pay any taxes -- eligible for the monthly payments.
Yesterday's (Dec. 15) payment could be the last one of its kind, unless Democrats pass the BBB, which extends the cash infusions for one year -- in addition to establishing other big government programs such as subsidized child care, paid family and medical leave, free pre-school for toddlers, help with home purchases, the green new deal, and much more -- all of it supposedly "fully paid for," as President Biden and his supporters insist.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee argue that "[g]ood jobs and rising paychecks do more to lift Americans out of poverty than dependence on never-ending government checks. There are a number of factors contributing to poverty. Rewarding work and helping the poor become self-sufficient is the surest path out of poverty," they say.
Republicans say Democrats intend to make the monthly cash payments permanent, starting with the one-year extension contained in BBB.
Republicans reject the Democrat claim that the Child Tax Credit has reduced child poverty by 40 percent.
"There is no sound evidence to back up this claim. Democrats cite a flawed study by the Poverty Center at Columbia University that assumes all eligible children are enrolled in the program -– which they are not," they say.
"In July, a left-leaning organization noted that only 720,000 of the approximately 7 million kids that are eligible but not already registered with the IRS were successfully receiving new child tax credit -- and that 90 percent or more of the kids the IRS needed to reach have not been reached."
Republicans also point to studies showing "that many recipients have used the Child Tax Credit to pad their savings or save for retirement. While commendable, that’s not its purpose," they say.
Moreover, the monthly payments are believed to be contributing to the shortage of willing workers.
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. JOE BIDEN IS RIGHT THERE RUNNING THEIR SHOW!
GEORGE SOROS AND BARACK OBAMA CREATE THE PUPPET REGIME OF JOE BIDEN, AN AMERICAN DUPE FOR THE RICH
he second time was as Barack Obama’s vice president, where little was heard from him, but much has since surfaced about family conflicts of interest during that period, including illicit family business relationships with several adversary foreign countries.
What kind of man must Joe Biden be to accept being illegitimately put into the Oval Office?
We’ve all seen the clips. Nearly every recent Joe Biden public appearance has been an embarrassment. The media called his garbled statements 'gaffes,' as if they were innocent, harmless mistakes, but many have suggested far worse age-related cognitive failures. We experienced embarrassment with him, and pitied a man clearly past his prime. What seemed most prominent about Joe Biden, other than his mental decline, was his obsession with one singular goal -- to be president of the United States.
He first ran for president in the 1988 presidential election. He didn’t last until the first primary, being forced to drop out when caught in multiple lies about his background, his upbringing, his academic record, and for plagiarizing other politicians. Twenty years later, he ran again in the 2008 presidential election, but dropped out after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucuses, with less than 1% of the vote. He was later chosen as Barack Obama’s running mate.
After eight years of office there, and four years out, he announced his run in the 2020 presidential election, where his plagiarism problem came up again as some of his policy positions were lifted verbatim from other organizations. The blame was immediately deflected to his staff, and the scandal seemed not to touch him.
For most politicians, such scandals end careers, but Joe Biden outlasted the scandals, and remained in office for more than four decades, really only rising above the noise on three occasions.
The first was as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where he conducted what Thomas called “a high tech lynching” of a black man who dared to be a conservative. Thomas was still confirmed, though, and remains on the court today.
The second time was as Barack Obama’s vice president, where little was heard from him, but much has since surfaced about family conflicts of interest during that period, including illicit family business relationships with several adversary foreign countries.
Third, and finally, is the present day. While the election is still contested, and more evidence of widespread Democrat fraud surfaces daily, Biden speaks and behaves as if he were the clear and universally accepted victor.
Looking back, one may ask, ‘Why didn’t Biden run in 2016 as the heir-apparent after eight years as vice president?’ He claims it was due to the death of his son, but here's the far more likely answer: Because Obama lacked confidence in him.
Obama said of Hillary, in 2016: "I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office."
When Biden announced his 2020 run, Obama reportedly told him, “You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t.”
During the campaign, Obama said of Biden, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” In reference to a connection to the Democrat electorate, Obama said, “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
Obama’s own Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, wrote in his 2014 memoir, while Obama and Biden were still in office, that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, wrote, "...in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”
The picture is getting clearer as to the kind of man Joe Biden is, from those who worked closest with him.
But there’s more.
In 1972, only weeks after Biden’s first election to the Senate, Neilia and Naomi Biden were tragically killed in a collision with a tractor trailer. His sons, Beau and Hunter, were both seriously injured and hospitalized. Neilia was Joe Biden’s first wife, and Naomi his 13-month old daughter. During a public appearance in 2007, Biden told his audience, “A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons …” He had also told the story in 2001.
The truck driver was Curtis C. Dunn, and he was not drunk. In 2008, Delaware Superior Court Judge, Jerome O. Herlihy, who oversaw the police investigation as chief prosecutor, recalled that Mrs. Biden drove into the path of Dunn’s tractor-trailer, and he did all he could to avoid hitting the car, including overturning his truck and trailer. Following the collision, Dunn ran to the car and was the first to render aid. He remained traumatized by the accident, and the media’s repeated retelling of it, for 27 years, until his death in 1999.
In 2008, Dunn’s daughter, Pamela Hamill, said she had had enough of Joe Biden’s lies about her father, and demanded an apology. “I just burst into tears,” Hamill said. “The story already is tragic enough. Why did he have to sensationalize it by saying my father was drunk? My family is outraged.”
Hamill told Politico in 2019 that Biden did apologize in 2009, a full ten years too late for the man he had wrongfully and repeatedly publicly humiliated.
In 1977, Joe married Jill after her first marriage had broken up. They met on a blind date in 1975. That’s the romantic story they tell, but her first husband, Bill Stevenson, tells it differently. He says he and Jill had helped on Biden’s first campaign in 1972, and that he first suspected they were having an affair in 1974. "Then one of her best friends told me she thought Joe and Jill were getting a little too close. I was surprised that she came to me.” Soon afterward, he discovered the truth. Today, Stevenson says, “Joe Biden stole Jill from me.”
It’s clear Joe Biden is not the type whose intelligence, competence, or mastery of even a single topic has ever been a point of envy. Those he worked with have not thought highly of him, and the few times he has risen into the spotlight, he has failed to accomplish anything of note on his own accord. Without the coattails of another, namely Barack Obama, Joe Biden would have vanished from public life over a decade ago. Had it not been for other Democrats sabotaging Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democrat primary, Biden would have certainly fallen away early. If he hadn’t sold his soul to the socialist and progressive wings of their fractured party to get support, the Democrats couldn’t have manufactured enough votes to save him.
There is one certainty about Joe Biden, and Barack Obama capitalized upon it. So did China. So did Ukraine. So did Iraq. So did Kazakhstan, and others. One thing he has proven time and time again is that he’s for sale. He will take the position and use his elected powers to implement the policy most beneficial to Joe Biden and his family. Remember the flip-flopping fracking fiasco? He is a piece of moldable flesh, a useful idiot, who will do what he’s told and paid to do. His positions change as his handlers change. He is wholly void of any core beliefs, a single bank of knowledge he could be considered an expert in, the ability to think for himself, or any recognizable moral principles. His Catholic faith does not even conform to the Catholic Church teachings.
The question is not whether Joe Biden is a liar, it is whether he is a compulsive liar (sees his lies as clearly untrue, but cannot stop himself from telling them; lies out of habit), or a pathological liar (sometimes believe their own lies; plan their lies in advance). He’s also a serial liar(lies repeatedly over time). But whatever type, he is undoubtedly a liar. Proof: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. That’s more than enough.
So back to the original question: What kind of man must Joe Biden be to accept being illegitimately put into the Oval Office? From his speech on Monday, after the Electoral College vote, I must reiterate everything above, and add one more word: Oblivious.
Donald N. Finley is a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel.
JOE BIDEN: A DEDICATED SERVANT OF WALL STREET, THE RICH, AND BANKSTERS….
JOE BIDEN’S GLOBALIST AGENDA: BANKSTERS, BAILOUTS and a BORDERLESS AMERICA
The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C. DANIEL GREENFILED, FELLOW, SHILLMAN JOURNALISM, FREEDOM CENTER
The Hunter Biden laptop unrolls two ragged threads. One is the descent of Joe Biden’s son into new depths of depravity and the other are the foreign investors who bought into Joe Biden Inc.
If they can buy an election for Biden, the theory is, they can buy it for anyone.
Oligarchies always have lots of money even when workers go hungry and lose their homes. And they get that money by seizing the centers of power and consuming the wealth of nations.
Yang: ‘Return to the Obama Years’ Not Enough for Biden — They Were Left Behind in Those Years,’ ‘They’re Pissed Off’
Late Tuesday on CNN, former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, now a CNN contributor, warned that his old opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden could not defeat Trump with just a pledge to return to the years of former President Barack Obama alone.
According to Yang, it needed to start with an understanding of what problems facing the country led to Trump’s presidency.
“Donald Trump needs to be defeated,” he explained. “Forty-two percent of my supporters said they would not support the Democratic nominee in the general, in large part because when I ran, I ran for the problems that predated Trump. Like, Donald Trump would never be our president today if things were going well for a lot of people around the country. Bernie Sanders would not have almost been the nominee last time if things were going well for people around the country. So even as Joe Biden saying, ‘Hey, we need to defeat Donald Trump,’ he also has to say, ‘Look, things have not been working for millions of Americans, and after we defeat Donald Trump,’ we need to get deep into these problems, get our hands dirty and solve them. This can’t be a, ‘Hey, I’m better than Trump’ race. It has to be, ‘Hey. I understand how Trump became our president.'”
Yang told a CNN panel people were left behind in the Obama-Biden years, and they were not happy about it. He called on Biden to recognize that situation and address it, which he said would better his chances in the 2020 general election.
“I think he’s been talking about restoring a culture, tone and a soul of the country,” Yang added. “I was talking about putting more money in Americans’ hands because I saw we decimated entire ways of life in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. And because I was talking in those terms about the real problems these people have experienced, again, 42% of my supporters were not going to support the Democratic nominee. I’m hoping that we can get some of those people to support Joe. But it would be helpful if Joe acknowledged it because one of the weaknesses of saying, ‘Hey, return to Obama years’ is that there are many Americans who were getting behind in those years, too, and they’re pissed off. And so, if you say, I’m going to revert, that loses to that group of people. There are so many Americans who just don’t think their institutions are working for him at all, and Joe Biden’s’s weakness is he represents those institutions. I’m endorsing Joe. We need Joe to beat Trump. But we’ll have a much better chance of that if Joe recognizes that our institutions have been failing many Americans for a long time.”
Obama’s State of Delusion ... OR JUST ANOTHER "Hope & Change" HOAX?
22 January 2015
”The delusional character of Obama’s State of the Union
address on Tuesday—presenting an America of rising living
standards and a booming economy, capped by his declaration
that the “shadow of crisis has passed”—is perhaps matched
only in its presentation by the media and supporters of the
“The general tone was set by the New York Times in its lead editorial on Wednesday, which described the speech as a “simple, dramatic message about economic fairness, about the fact that the well-off—the top earners, the big banks, Silicon Valley—have done just great, while middle and working classes remain dead in the water.”
OBAMANOMICS:
The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.
In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the bottom half of the earth’s population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to just 92 billionaires. It fell to 80 in 2014.
THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
“The goal of the Obama administration, working with the Republicans and local governments, is to roll back the living conditions of the vast majority of the population to levels not seen since the 19th century, prior to the advent of the eight-hour day, child labor laws, comprehensive public education, pensions, health benefits, workplace health and safety regulations, etc.”
“In response to the ruthless assault of the financial oligarchy, spearheaded by Obama, the working class must advance, no less ruthlessly, its own policy.”
New Federal Reserve report
US median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”
The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.
New Federal Reserve report
US median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”
The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.
The report makes clear that the drop in a typical household’s income was not merely the result of what is referred to as the 2008 recession, which officially lasted only 18 months, through June 2009. Much of the decline in workers’ incomes occurred during the so-called “economic recovery” presided over by the Obama administration.
In the three years between 2010 and 2013, the annual income of a typical household actually fell by 5 percent.
The Fed report exposes as a fraud the efforts of the Obama administration to present itself as a defender of the “middle class”. It has systematically pursued policies to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the very top of the income ladder. These include the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, near-zero interest rates to drive up the stock market, and austerity measures and wage cutting to lift corporate profits and CEO pay to record highs.
The Federal Reserve data, based on in-person interviews, show a far larger decline in the median income of American households than indicated by earlier figures from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.
In line with the figures on household income, the report shows an ever-growing concentration of wealth among the richest households. The Fed’s summary of its data notes that “the wealth share of the top 3 percent climbed from 44.8 percent in 1989 to 51.8 percent in 2007 and 54.4 percent in 2013,” while the wealth of the “next 7 highest percent of families changed very little.”
The report states that “the rising wealth share of the top 3 percent of families is mirrored by the declining share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent,” which fell from 33.2 percent in 1989 to 24.7 percent in 2013.
The ongoing impoverishment of the population is an indictment of capitalism. There has been no genuine recovery from the Wall Street crash of 2008, only a further plundering of the economy by the financial aristocracy. The crisis precipitated by the rapacious, criminal practices of the bankers and hedge fund speculators has been used to restructure the economy to the benefit of the rich at the expense of everyone else.
Decent-paying jobs have been wiped out and replaced by low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs, with little or no benefits. Pensions and health benefits have come under savage attack, as seen in the bankruptcy of Detroit.
Not surprisingly, the Fed report has been buried by the American media, confined to the inside pages of the major newspapers.
Measured in 2013 dollars, a typical household received an income of $53,100 in 2007. By 2010, this had fallen to $49,000. It hit $46,700 by 2013. At the same time, the average income for the wealthiest tenth of families grew by ten percent.
While median income fell between 2010 and 2013, mean (average) income grew, from $84,100 to $87,200. The report noted that, “the decline in median income coupled with the rise in mean income is consistent with a widening income distribution during this period.”
For the poorest households, the drop in income has been even more dramatic. Among the bottom quarter of households, mean income fell a full 10 percent between 2010 and 2013.
The report reveals other aspects of the social crisis. The share of young families burdened by education debt nearly doubled, from 22.4 percent to 38.8 percent, between 2001 and 2013. The share of young families with more than $100,000 in debt has grown nearly tenfold, from 0.6 percent to 5.6 percent.
These statistics reflect both a historic and insoluble crisis of the profit system and the brutal policies of the American ruling class, which is carrying out a relentless assault on working people and preparing to go even further by dismantling bedrock social programs such as Medicare and Social Security. The data undercuts the endless talk of “partisan gridlock” in Washington and the media presentation of a political system paralyzed by irreconcilable differences between the Democratic and Republican parties.
There has, in fact, been a seamless continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations in the pursuit of reactionary policies of war abroad and class war at home. The two parties have worked hand in glove to make the working class pay for the crisis of the capitalist system.
The Federal Reserve has itself played a critical role in the growth of social inequality in the US. The bailout of the banks, estimated at $7 trillion, has been followed by six years of virtually free money for the banks.
Every facet of American life is dominated by the immense concentration of wealth at the very top of society. The grotesque levels of wealth amassed by the parasites and criminals who dominate American business, and the flaunting of their fortunes before tens of millions struggling to pay their bills and keep from falling into destitution, are fueling the growth of social anger. This anger will increasingly be directed against the entire economic and political system.
The figures released by the Fed reflect a society riven by class divisions that must inevitably trigger social upheavals. The explosive state of social relations is itself a major factor in the endless recourse by the Obama administration to military aggression and war, which serve to deflect internal tensions outward.
The growth of inequality likewise underlies the relentless attack on democratic rights in the US, including the massive domestic spying exposed by Edward Snowden and the use of militarized police to crack down on social opposition, as seen most recently in Ferguson, Missouri.
THE OBAMA devastation of America (wall street's poster boy for corruption)
THE SPEEDING TRAIN WRECK TO DESTRUCTION: BARACK OBAMA'S CRONY CAPITALISM, WALL STREET'S UNFETTERED LOOTING AND THE INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA. . .. one man's utter destruction of America!
The US economy added fewer jobs last month than any other month this the year, according to the latest US jobs report, published Friday by the Labor Department.
US employers added 142,000 jobs in August, far lower than the average of more than 200,00 for the prior twelve months, and below the 230,000 that had been forecast by economists.
In addition to the worse-than-expected statistics for August, the report revised down estimates for job growth in earlier months by 28,000.
Stocks rallied at the dismal jobs report, reflecting the perverse relationship between the real economy and the financial markets, which interpret any worsening of the economic situation as a signal that the Federal Reserve will be reluctant to raise interest rates and slow its “Quantitative easing” asset purchases.
The S&P 500 hit a new record Friday, closing up by 10 points, or 0.5 percent, to 2,007. The NASDAQ also rose by .45 percent, to 4,582, and the Dow Jones industrial average rose by 0.4 percent, to 17,137.
While the stock market sets record after record, fueled by zero-interest rate policies and cash infusions from the world’s central banks, the real economy and conditions for working people show no signs of improvement.
The unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, as 268,000 people gave up looking for jobs and left the workforce. The number of such “missing workers” grew to 5.91 million last month, according to figures from the Economic Policy Institute.
The labor force participation rate fell to 62.8 percent, its lowest level in three-and-a-half decades, as the number of adults not in the labor force hit a new record.
Wages were flat over the previous twelve months, with a 2.1 percent nominal wage increase wiped out by a 2 percent inflation rate over the same period.
While there were zero jobs added in manufacturing, the economy added 112,000 jobs in the service sector, which pays significantly lower median wages than goods-producing industries. The healthcare sector added 42,000 jobs, while bars and restaurants added 21,500.
Temporary help services added 13,000 jobs. Earlier this month, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) reported that both the number of people working for labor contractors and the percentage of the workforce employed by such companies have hit record highs.
New Federal Reserve report
US median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”
By Andre Damon
6 September 2014
The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.
The report makes clear that the drop in a typical household’s income was not merely the result of what is referred to as the 2008 recession, which officially lasted only 18 months, through June 2009. Much of the decline in workers’ incomes occurred during the so-called “economic recovery” presided over by the Obama administration.
In the three years between 2010 and 2013, the annual income of a typical household actually fell by 5 percent.
The Fed report exposes as a fraud the efforts of the Obama administration to present itself as a defender of the “middle class”. It has systematically pursued policies to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the very top of the income ladder. These include the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, near-zero interest rates to drive up the stock market, and austerity measures and wage cutting to lift corporate profits and CEO pay to record highs.
The Federal Reserve data, based on in-person interviews, show a far larger decline in the median income of American households than indicated by earlier figures from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.
In line with the figures on household income, the report shows an ever-growing concentration of wealth among the richest households. The Fed’s summary of its data notes that “the wealth share of the top 3 percent climbed from 44.8 percent in 1989 to 51.8 percent in 2007 and 54.4 percent in 2013,” while the wealth of the “next 7 highest percent of families changed very little.”
The report states that “the rising wealth share of the top 3 percent of families is mirrored by the declining share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent,” which fell from 33.2 percent in 1989 to 24.7 percent in 2013.
The ongoing impoverishment of the population is an indictment of capitalism. There has been no genuine recovery from the Wall Street crash of 2008, only a further plundering of the economy by the financial aristocracy. The crisis precipitated by the rapacious, criminal practices of the bankers and hedge fund speculators has been used to restructure the economy to the benefit of the rich at the expense of everyone else.
Decent-paying jobs have been wiped out and replaced by low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs, with little or no benefits. Pensions and health benefits have come under savage attack, as seen in the bankruptcy of Detroit.
Not surprisingly, the Fed report has been buried by the American media, confined to the inside pages of the major newspapers.
Measured in 2013 dollars, a typical household received an income of $53,100 in 2007. By 2010, this had fallen to $49,000. It hit $46,700 by 2013. At the same time, the average income for the wealthiest tenth of families grew by ten percent.
While median income fell between 2010 and 2013, mean (average) income grew, from $84,100 to $87,200. The report noted that, “the decline in median income coupled with the rise in mean income is consistent with a widening income distribution during this period.”
For the poorest households, the drop in income has been even more dramatic. Among the bottom quarter of households, mean income fell a full 10 percent between 2010 and 2013.
The report reveals other aspects of the social crisis. The share of young families burdened by education debt nearly doubled, from 22.4 percent to 38.8 percent, between 2001 and 2013. The share of young families with more than $100,000 in debt has grown nearly tenfold, from 0.6 percent to 5.6 percent.
These statistics reflect both a historic and insoluble crisis of the profit system and the brutal policies of the American ruling class, which is carrying out a relentless assault on working people and preparing to go even further by dismantling bedrock social programs such as Medicare and Social Security. The data undercuts the endless talk of “partisan gridlock” in Washington and the media presentation of a political system paralyzed by irreconcilable differences between the Democratic and Republican parties.
There has, in fact, been a seamless continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations in the pursuit of reactionary policies of war abroad and class war at home. The two parties have worked hand in glove to make the working class pay for the crisis of the capitalist system.
The Federal Reserve has itself played a critical role in the growth of social inequality in the US. The bailout of the banks, estimated at $7 trillion, has been followed by six years of virtually free money for the banks.
Every facet of American life is dominated by the immense concentration of wealth at the very top of society. The grotesque levels of wealth amassed by the parasites and criminals who dominate American business, and the flaunting of their fortunes before tens of millions struggling to pay their bills and keep from falling into destitution, are fueling the growth of social anger. This anger will increasingly be directed against the entire economic and political system.
The figures released by the Fed reflect a society riven by class divisions that must inevitably trigger social upheavals. The explosive state of social relations is itself a major factor in the endless recourse by the Obama administration to military aggression and war, which serve to deflect internal tensions outward.
The growth of inequality likewise underlies the relentless attack on democratic rights in the US, including the massive domestic spying exposed by Edward Snowden and the use of militarized police to crack down on social opposition, as seen most recently in Ferguson, Missouri.
THE OBAMA devastation of America (wall street's poster boy for corruption)
THE SPEEDING TRAIN WRECK TO DESTRUCTION: BARACK OBAMA'S CRONY CAPITALISM, WALL STREET'S UNFETTERED LOOTING AND THE INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA. . .. one man's utter destruction of America!
In a remarkable commitment to their tireless fight against climate change and wealth inequality, Barack and Michelle Obama reportedly are purchasing a magnificent $15-million oceanfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, presumably as a much-needed retreat to supplement the $9-million mansion they already own in one of the most exclusive areas of the nation’s capitol.
A fierce opponent of fossil fuels and wealth inequality, the former president has harshly criticized rich people for the oversized, carbon-gluttonous houses they buy. On April 25, 2010, the president who would become fabulously wealthy in retirement scolded Wall Street CEOs with this admonition:
I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.
His views about the sin of making too much money haven’t changed. During a speech last year in South Africa, this shining example of environmental stewardship and unparalleled concern for the poor spoke passionately about the unfairness of some people having more money than others in blasting rich people for their excessively lavish lifestyles:
There’s only so much you can eat; there’s only so big a house you can have; there’s only so many nice trips you can take. I mean, it’s enough.
That direct quote came from the lips of a man who, along with his wife, is sitting atop a nest egg estimated at a meager $135 million. But don’t feel sorry for them, because there’s much more to come: with money barreling their way like a runaway train, the concerned couple is rapidly becoming a billion-dollar brand.
Sharing with the less fortunate: During the five years from 2000-2004, a period when they earned $1.2 million, Barack and Michelle Obama donated less than one percent of their income to charity, ten times less than the tithing guidelines of their professed Christian faith. Only when Obama decided to run for president did the couple’s charitable instincts improve.
Protecting the planet: During his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed without his suit jacket. Senior advisor David Axelrod explained: “He’s from Hawaii, okay? He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.” While campaigning, Obama vowed to exhibit environmental leadership if elected: “We can’t drive our SUV’s and eat as much as we want and keep our thermostats set at 72 degrees. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen [with me].”
In decreeing that rich people make too much money and that global warming is an imminent threat to our very survival, this ultra-wealthy man and his ultra-wealthy wife decided to indulge themselves in another opulent mansion, this one sitting on 29 oceanfront acres on one of the most exclusive islands in the world. While homeless people are sleeping on the streets and our planet is being destroyed by CO2, the Obamas are living large, a pitifully small reward for two remarkable people who bend over backwards to show leadership in the fight against climate change and wealth inequality.
An electrical engineering graduate of Georgia Tech and now retired, John Eidson is a freelance writer in Atlanta. American Thinker recently published related article of his titled "Harrison Ford, Climate Hypocrite" and "A $600 fill-up?"
THE OBOMBS HAVE ALWAYS LIVED LIKE THE 1% WHOM THEY SERVED AND GROVELED AT THE FEET OF.
Nolte: Michelle Obama Condemns ‘White Flight’ After Purchasing Home in Martha’s Vineyard
Former first lady Michelle Obama condemned white people for fleeing minority neighborhoods just weeks after she and her husband purchased a $15 million estate in Martha’s Vineyard.
Martha’s Vineyard is 95 percent white and just two percent black.
Martha’s Vineyard is almost as white as an Elizabeth Warren rally.
Martha’s Vineyard is whiter than my subdivision here in rural North Carolina.
Martha’s Vineyard is whiter than MSNBC.
During a Tuesday appearance at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago, she said, “But unbeknownst to us, we grew up in the period — as I write — called ‘white flight.’ That as families like ours, upstanding families like ours … As we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented.”
“And I always stop there when I talk about this out in the world because, you know, I want to remind white folks that y’all were running from us.” She went on, “This family with all the values that you’ve read about. You were running from us. And you’re still running, because we’re no different than the immigrant families that are moving in … the families that are coming from other places to try to do better.”
Did I mention that Michelle and Barry just purchased a $15 million estate in Martha’s Vineyard, which is 95 percent white?
Oh, and did I mention the Obamas own a second home, an $8 million mansion, in the exclusive DC neighborhood of Kalorama, which is 80 percent white and just four percent black.
Oh, and did I mention the Obamas have a third home, a $5.3 million mansion, in Rancho Mirage, California, which is 89 percent white and just 2.6 percent black.
Oh, sure, the Obamas still own their Chicago home in Hyde Park, which is at least 26 percent black. But you would think they could do better than 26 percent!
I like Michelle Obama. I have always liked Michelle Obama. I’ve never said an unkind word about her, quite the opposite, and while I find her politics ignorant, she was a terrific first lady.
But this is nuts…
Not only is she attacking white people for seeking a better standard of living, which I can assure you (as I will explain below) has little to do with racism, she is also attacking whites after she herself “fled” to 95 percent white Martha’s Vineyard (I will never stop repeating this point) and two other homes in areas where the black population is less than 5 percent.
Worse still, she is putting white people in a position where they can never win, where they are damned if they do or don’t, where they are always and forever racist.
If white people move out of a black neighborhood, they’re racists engaging in white flight.
But…
And this is important…
If white people move into a minority neighborhood, they are also racists for either engaging in gentrification — which is just another form of cultural genocide, donchaknow — or cultural appropriation.
Now I’m going to tell you a little something about white flight, from my own experience…
Because I was poor, back in the mid-eighties, I lived in the inner-city of Milwaukee for two years. My wife and I did not flee (my wife is not white, by the way) because of “icky minorities” (did I mention my wife is not white?), we fled because it was not safe to live there. It was never safe. Over those two years, we had been mugged, robbed, and had our car stolen. That’s why we left.
And when we fled, it was to a community that was still not as white as *ahem* Martha’s Vineyard.
In 2002, my wife and I moved to California for nine years and lived in an East Los Angeles neighborhood that was just four percent white. For nearly a decade, I was outnumbered 96-4 and never gave it a thought because I was not outnumbered. A darker skin tone, an accent, and different religious traditions did not make my neighbors any less American than me, and when I am among Americans I am among my own. We left because predominantly white leftists are destroying California.
Then there’s my poor dad…
He moved to the Northside of Milwaukee in 1980, and spent decades, a lot of money, and a ton of sweat, remodeling his home, building a garage, and paying that home off. He intended to retire there. And yes, there were black people in his neighborhood when he moved in, and for most of his adult life he worked in predominantly black institutions. He never intended to move, and held on for as long as he could… He didn’t flee because of black people. He was not forced to start all over at age 67 because he suddenly decided he didn’t like blacks. He left because he was robbed, because gangs started tagging his house and garage, because it was no longer safe to live there.
You know…
If we’re going to shame people for such things, what does it say to black people when other black people, especially the first black president and his family, reject them? What the hell kind of message is this to send to black Americans, especially when the Obamas can afford the security to live safely in any neighborhood they choose?
And if the Obamas wanted to live in Southern California, why choose Rancho Mirage over Ladera Heights, the Black Beverly Hills, a predominantly black neighborhood as swank as any in America?
Shame on Michelle and Barack Obama. They have the money and profile to make an important statement on this issue, but they obviously prefer to live in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Diamond Life: Michelle Obama rents out $23-million Hollywood Hills mansion for a night
Apparently, a hotel, even a luxury hotel, was not good enough.
Former first lady Michelle Obama had to go big, renting out a $23-million Hollywood Hills mansion for...a night. The New York Post has the pictures of it here. Several news accounts explained it as possibly a rental to try and buy, something most home-buyers don't get to do. Whether she actually paid is also a big question mark, and if so, whether she paid market value (which would have cost more than a fancy hotel) or received her night there a "gift," which presents its own ethics problems.
The Shark House, which is located in the 9200 block of Swallow Drive, is thus named due to its open air shark aquarium. It also has a full spa, a humidor room, movie theater and walk-in wine room.
It's on the market, currently listed for a cool $22.9 million.
A source told TMZ the Obamas may be looking at real estate in the Hollywood Hills area, but that was not confirmed.
If they're in the market to buy that, they've got a lot more money than the press is reporting. We know they're loaded. But not that loaded. Not Louis XIV loaded, which is about the range for this sort of place. Or is it a sweetheart deal in the works we're talking about? Maybe they'll end up buying it for "a dollar." Don't know yet, but neither possibility makes them look good.
It's all part and parcel of the Obamas' long, luxurious post-presidency, a nonstop vacay that costs taxpayers millions. It's as though we're financing kings now, not retired presidents. For a while there, the Obamas were jetting around with billionaires and staying on private islands. Then they bought that expensive Kalorama mansion in Washington, D.C., all supposedly for the benefit of their daughter Sasha, who was finishing high school. Surprise, surprise, it actually seems to primarily serve as a political watch post for longtime Obama loyalist and consigliere Valerie Jarrett. They did some audience tours and hung out with more billionaires. There were those lucrative Goldman Sachs speeches by the celebrity president (which certainly weren't based on economics anyone would want to trade on).
And all of this has been financed by taxpayers, who pay his $207,000 pension, along with bennies such as unlimited air travel, transition expenses, office expenses, presidential library funds, and lifetime Secret Service detail.
Apparently, to the Obamas, there's no reaching that "certain point" at which "you've made enough money."
For Michelle, just call her "Mooch." Is this really what an ex-presidency is supposed to be like? Hitting the money jackpot? What he makes on his own is his own business (subject to bribery laws), but taxpayers shouldn't be financing this level of movie-star billionaire luxe life. Maybe it's time for some pension reform from Congress. Would be quite a thing to see that idea presented to the House's ruling Democrats.
OBAMAnomics:
Billionaire Class Enjoys 15X the Wage Growth of American Working Class
The billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class since 1979, new wage data reveals.
Between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent — the country’s working and lower middle class — have grown by only about 22 percent, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers find.
Compare that small wage increase over nearly four decades to the booming wage growth of America’s top one percent, who have seen their wages grow more than 155 percent during the same period.
The top 0.01 percent — the country’s billionaire class — saw their wages grow by more than 343 percent in the last four decades, more than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
In 1979, America’s working class was earning on average about $29,600 a year. Fast forward to 2017, and the same bottom 90 percent of Americans are earning only about $6,600 more annually.
The almost four decades of wage stagnation among the country’s working and middle class comes as the national immigration policy has allowed for the admission of more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled immigrants every year.
(Public Citizen)
In the last decade, alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual low-skilled immigration scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates as every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’ hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
Four million young Americans enter the workforce every year, but their job opportunities are further diminished as the U.S. imports roughly two new foreign workers for every four American workers who enter the workforce. Even though researchers say 30 percent of the workforce could lose their jobs due to automation by 2030, the U.S. has not stopped importing more than a million foreign nationals every year.
For blue-collar American workers, mass immigration has not only kept wages down but in many cases decreased wages, as Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues importing more foreign nationals with whom working-class Americans are forced to compete. In 2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Study: Elite Zip Codes Thrived in Obama Recovery, Rural America Left Behind
Wealthy cities and elite zip codes thrived under the slow-moving economic recovery of President Obama while rural American communities were left behind, a study reveals.
The Economic Innovation Group research, highlighted by Axios, details the massive economic inequality between the country’s coastal city elites and middle America’s working class between the Great Recession in 2007 and Obama’s economic recovery in 2016.
Between 2007 and 2016, the number of residents living in elite zip codes grew by more than ten million, with an overwhelming faction of that population growth being driven by mass immigration where the U.S. imports more than 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants annually.
The booming 44.5 million immigrant populations are concentrated mostly in the country’s major cities like Los Angeles, California, Miami Florida, and New York City, New York. The rapidly growing U.S. population — driven by immigration — is set to hit 404 millionby 2060, a boon for real estate developers, wealthy investors, and corporations, all of which benefit greatly from dense populations and a flooded labor market.
The economic study found that while the population grew in wealthy cities, America’s rural population fell by nearly 3.5 million residents.
Likewise, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While it only took about five years for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost by the recession, it took “at risk” regions of the country a decade to recover, and “distressed” U.S. communities are “unlikely ever to recover on current trendlines,” the report predicts.
A map included in the research shows how rich, coastal metropolises have boomed economically while entire portions of middle America have been left behind as job and business gains remain concentrated at the top of the income ladder.
(Economic Innovation Group)
(Economic Innovation Group)
Economic growth among the country’s middle-class counties and middle-class zip codes has considerably trailed national economic growth, the study found.
For example, between 2012 and 2016, there were 4.4 percent more business establishments in the country as a whole. That growth was less than two percent in the median zip code and there was close to no growth in the median county.
The same can be said of employment growth, where U.S. employment grew by about 9.3 percent from 2012 to 2016. In the median zip code, though, employment grew by only 5.5 percent and in the median county, employment grew by less than four percent.
“Nearly three in every five large counties added businesses on net over the period, compared to only one in every five small one,” the report concluded.
Elite zip codes added more business establishments during Obama’s economic recovery, between 2012 and 2016, than the entire bottom 80 percent of zip codes combined. For instance, while more than 180,000 businesses have been added to rich zip codes, the country’s bottom tier has lost more than 13,000 businesses even after the economic recovery.
(Economic Innovation Group)
(Economic Innovation Group)
The gutting of the American manufacturing base, through free trade, has been a driving catalyst for the collapse of the white working class and black Americans. Simultaneously, the outsourcing of the economy has brought major wealth to corporations, tech conglomerates, and Wall Street.
The dramatic decline of U.S. manufacturing at the hands of free trade—where more than 3.4 million American jobs have been lost solely due to free trade with China, not including the American jobs lost due to agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS)—has coincided with growing wage inequality for white and black Americans, a growing number of single mother households, a drop in U.S. marriage rates, a general stagnation of working and middle class wages, and specifically, increased black American unemployment.
“So, the loss of manufacturing work since 1960 represents a steady decline in relatively high-paying jobs for less-educated workers,” recent research from economist Eric D. Gould has noted.
Fast-forward to the modern economy and the wage trend has been the opposite of what it was during the peak of manufacturing in the U.S. An Economic Policy Institute studyfound this year that been 2009 and 2015, the top one percent of American families earned about 26 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent of Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Record high income in 2017 for top one percent of wage earners in US
In 2017, the top one percent of US wage earners received their highest paychecks ever, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Based on newly released data from the Social Security Administration, the EPI shows that the top one percent of the population saw their paychecks increase by 3.7 percent in 2017—a rate nearly quadruple the bottom 90 percent of the population. The growth was driven by the top 0.1 percent, which includes many CEOs and corporate executives, whose pay increased eight percent and averaged $2,757,000 last year.
The EPI report is only the latest exposure of the gaping inequality between the vast majority of the population and the modern-day aristocracy that rules over them.
The EPI shows that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners have increased their pay by 22.2 percent between 1979 and 2017. Today, this bottom 90 percent makes an average of just $36,182 a year, which is eaten up by the cost of housing and the growing burden of education, health care, and retirement.
Meanwhile, the top one percent has increased its wages by 157 percent during this same period, a rate seven times faster than the other group. This top segment makes an average of $718,766 a year. Those in-between, the 90th to 99th percentile, have increased their wages by 57.4 percent. They now make an average of $152,476 a year—more than four times the bottom 90 percent.
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
Even more, while the bottom 90 percent of the population may take in 61 percent of the wages, large sections of the workforce today barely pull in any income at all. For example, Social Security Administration data found that the bottom 54 percent of wage earners in the United States, 89.5 million people, make an average of just $15,100 a year. This 54 percent of the population earns only 17 percent of all wages paid in America.
However unequal, these wage inequalities still do not fully present the divide between rich and poor. The ultra-wealthy derive their wealth not primarily from wages, but from assets and equities—principally from the stock market. While the bottom 90 percent of the population made 61 percent of the wages in 2017, they owned even less, just 27 percent of the wealth (according to the World Inequality Report 2018 by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman).
The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.
Wages are so low in the United States that roughly half of the population falls deeper into debt every year. A Reuters report from July found that the pretax net income (that is, income minus expense) of the bottom 40 percent of the population was an average of negative $11,660. Even the middle quintile of the population, the 40th to 60th percentile, breaks even with an average of only $2,836 a year.
As the Social Security Administration numbers show, 67.4 percent of the population made less than the average wage, $48,250 a year in 2017, a sum that is inadequate to support a family in many cities—especially, with high housing costs, health care, education, and retirement factored in.
For the ruling class, though, workers’ wages are already too much. The volatility of the stock market and the deep fear that the current bull market will collapse has made politicians and businessmen anxious of any sign of wage increases.
In August, wages in the US rose just 0.2 percent above the inflation rate, the highest in nine years. Though the increase was tiny, it was enough to encourage the Federal Reserve to increase the interest rate past two percent for the first time since 2008. Raising interest rates helps to depress workers’ wages by lowering borrowing and spending. As the Financial Times noted, stopping wage growth was “central” to the Federal Reserve’s move.
Further analysis of the Social Security Administration data shows that in 2017, 147,754 people reported wages of 1 million dollars or more—roughly, the top 0.05 percent. Their combined total income of $372 billion could pay for the US federal education budget five times over.
These wages, however large, still pale in comparison to the money the ultra-rich acquire from the stock market. For example, share buybacks and dividend payments, a way of funneling money to shareholders, will eclipse $1 trillion this year.
Whatever the immediate source, the wealth of the rich derives from the great mass of people who do the actual work. Across the United States and around the world, workers, young people, and students have entered into struggle this year over pay, education, health care, immigration, war and democratic rights. This growing movement of the working class must set as its aim confiscating the wealth and power of this tiny parasitic oligarchy. Society’s wealth must be democratically controlled by those who produce it.
THE STAGGERING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY UNDER OBAMA'S ADMINISTRATION SERVING THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS.
THE ENTIRE REASON BEHIND AMNESTY IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG THE REAL COST OF "CHEAP" MEXICAN LABOR TO THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.
AND IT'S WORKING!
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS
“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER
YOU THOUGHT OBAMA INVITED OBAMANOMICS and started the assault on the American middle-class?
NOPE!
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
Clinton Foundation Put On Watch List Of Suspicious ‘Charities’
The report found that the growth of global inequality has accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019
Households with more than a million (US) dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
This large percentage, however, only includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held through managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion of the rich’s net worth.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
In total, the world added $17.5 trillion of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth. In other words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.
This trend is the result of the massive infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks. The policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock market even while global economic growth has slumped.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.
Those families with wealth between $20 and $100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.
Coming in last in the “high net worth” population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth. These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.
The gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth accumulation has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not even begun to recover from the past recession.
An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56 percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014. Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the world’s wealth.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between 2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015 report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all from income growth.”
Another report by Knight Frank, looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014 these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.
The report also draws attention to the disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”
DICK MORRIS:
On America’s First Family of Crime….. NO! Not the Bushes again!
Clinton global hucksterism – Selling out America like they sold out the Lincoln Bedroom.
HILLARY CLINTON: CRONY CLASS’ “Hope and Change” huckster’s successor!
“I serve Obama’s cronies first, illegals second and together we will loot the American middle-class to double our figures. It’s called BAILOUTS! Evita Peron Clinton
At this point, Clinton is the choice of most multimillionaires to be the next occupant of the White House. A recent CNBC poll of 750 millionaires found 53 percent support for Clinton in a contest with Republican Jeb Bush, 14 points better than Obama’s showing in the 2012 election with the same group.
Sen. Bernie Sanders – America’s answer to Wall Street’s looting, the war on the American middle-class and jobs for legals!
“At this point, Clinton is the choice of most multimillionaires to be the next occupant of the White House. A recent CNBC poll of 750 millionaires found 53 percent support for Clinton in a contest with Republican Jeb Bush, 14 points better than Obama’s showing in the 2012 election with the same group.”
THE CRONY CLASS:
OBAMACLINTONOMICS was created by BILLARY CLINTON!
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER
OBAMA’S WALL STREET and the LOOTING of AMERICA – SECOND TERM
The corporate cash hoard has likewise reached a new record, hitting an estimated $1.79 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, up from $1.77 trillion in the previous quarter. Instead of investing the money, however, companies are using it to buy back their own stock and pay out record dividends.
Megan McArdle Discusses How America's Elites Are Rigging the Rules - Newsweek/The Daily Beast special correspondent Megan McArdle joins Scott Rasmussen for a discussion on America's new Mandarin class.
WHO REALLY PAYS FOR THE CRIMES OF OBAMA’S CRONY DONORS???
LAST WEEK BARACK OBAMA CELEBRATED FIVE YEARS OF THE LOOTING BY HIS WALL STREET BANKSTERS… now it’s back to cutting social programs to pay for all that rape by the 1% he represents. The following week it will be back to the AMNESTY HOAX to legalize Mexico’s looting of America and make it legal that Mexicans get our jobs first… they already do!
As in previous budget crises under the Obama administration, the events are being stage-managed by the two corporate-controlled parties to give the illusion of partisan gridlock and confrontation over principles—in this case, whether to go forward with the implementation of the Obama health care program—while behind the scenes all factions within the ruling elite agree that massive cuts must be carried through in basic federal social programs.
OBAMA’S CRONY CAPITALISM – A NATION RULED BY CRIMINAL WALL STREET BANKSTERS AND OBAMA DONORS
Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
by Michelle Malkin
In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.
PATRICK BUCHANAN
After Obama has completely destroyed the American economy, handed millions of jobs to illegals and billions of dollars in welfare to illegals…. BUT WHAT COMES NEXT?
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019
By Gabriel Black 18 June 2015
Households with more than a million (US) dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
This large percentage, however, only includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held through managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion of the rich’s net worth.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
In total, the world added $17.5 trillion of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth. In other words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.
This trend is the result of the massive infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks. The policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock market even while global economic growth has slumped.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.
Those families with wealth between $20 and $100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.
Coming in last in the “high net worth” population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth. These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.
The gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth accumulation has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not even begun to recover from the past recession.
An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56 percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014. Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the world’s wealth.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between 2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015 report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all from income growth.”
Another report by Knight Frank, looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014 these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.
The report also draws attention to the disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”
THE CRONY CLASS:
OBAMACLINTONOMICS was created by BILLARY CLINTON!
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER
OBAMA’S WALL STREET and the LOOTING of AMERICA – SECOND TERM
The corporate cash hoard has likewise reached a new record, hitting an estimated $1.79 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, up from $1.77 trillion in the previous quarter. Instead of investing the money, however, companies are using it to buy back their own stock and pay out record dividends.
Megan McArdle Discusses How America's Elites Are Rigging the Rules - Newsweek/The Daily Beast special correspondent Megan McArdle joins Scott Rasmussen for a discussion on America's new Mandarin class.
After Obama has completely destroyed the American economy, handed millions of jobs to illegals and billions of dollars in welfare to illegals…. BUT WHAT COMES NEXT?
Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019
By Gabriel Black 18 June 2015
Households with more than a million (US) dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
This large percentage, however, only includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held through managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion of the rich’s net worth.
At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
In total, the world added $17.5 trillion of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth. In other words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.
This trend is the result of the massive infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks. The policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock market even while global economic growth has slumped.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.
Those families with wealth between $20 and $100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.
Coming in last in the “high net worth” population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth. These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.
The gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth accumulation has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not even begun to recover from the past recession.
An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56 percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014. Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the world’s wealth.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between 2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015 report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all from income growth.”
Another report by Knight Frank, looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014 these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.
The report also draws attention to the disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics: the never end war on the American middle-class. But we still get the tax bills for the looting of their Wall Street cronies and their bailouts and billions for Mexico’s welfare state in our borders.
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.
In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between
2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in
the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36
percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the
recession, they are more than making that money back.
Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in
the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted
post-recession income gain on record.
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES
collapse of household income in the US… STILL BILLIONS IN WELFARE HANDED TO ILLEGALS… they already get our jobs and are voting for more!
“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”
"During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job." EVEN AS JEB BUSH, HILLARY CLINTON and BERNIE SANDERS PREACH AMNESTY! AMNESTY! AMNESTY! "The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process." HILLARY CLINTON'S BIGGEST DONORS ARE OBAMA'S CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS! "A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself." Federal Reserve documents stagnant state of US economy
Federal Reserve documents stagnant state of US economy
By Barry Grey 21 July 2015
The US Federal Reserve Board last week released its semiannual Monetary Policy Report to Congress, providing an assessment of the state of the American economy and outlining the central bank’s monetary policy going forward. The report, along with Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s testimony before both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a speech by Yellen the previous week in Cleveland, present a grim picture of the reality behind the official talk of economic “recovery.” In her prepared remarks to Congress last Wednesday and Thursday, Yellen said, “Looking forward, prospects are favorable for further improvement in the US labor market and the economy more broadly.” She reiterated her assurances that while the Fed would likely begin to raise its benchmark federal funds interest rate later this year from the 0.0 to 0.25 percent level it has maintained since shortly after the 2008 financial crash, it would do so only slowly and gradually, keeping short-term rates well below historically normal levels for an indefinite period. This was an expected, but nevertheless welcome, signal to the American financial elite, which has enjoyed a spectacular rise in corporate profits, stock values and personal wealth since 2009 thanks to the flood of virtually free money provided by the Fed. "But as Yellen’s remarks and the Fed report indicate, the explosion of asset values and wealth accumulation at the very top of the economic ladder has occurred alongside an intractable and continuing slump in the real economy." In her prepared testimony to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen noted the following features of the performance of the US economy over the first six months of 2015: * A sharp decline in the rate of economic growth as compared to 2014, including an actual contraction in the first quarter of the year. * A substantial slackening (19 percent) in average monthly job-creation, from 260,000 last year to 210,000 thus far in 2015. * Declines in domestic spending and industrial production. In her July 10 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, Yellen cited an even longer list of negative indices, including: * Growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) since the official beginning of the recovery in June, 2009 has averaged a mere 2.25 percent per year, a full one percentage point less than the average rate over the 25 years preceding what Yellen called the “Great Recession.” * While manufacturing employment nationwide has increased by about 850,000 since the end of 2009, there are still almost 1.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs than just before the recession. * Real GDP and industrial production both declined in the first quarter of this year. Industrial production continued to fall in April and May. * Residential construction (despite extremely low mortgage rates by historical standards) has remained “quote soft.” * Productivity growth has been “weak,” largely because “Business owners and managers… have not substantially increased their capital expenditures,” and “Businesses are holding large amounts of cash on their balance sheets.” * Reflecting the general stagnation and even slump in the real economy, core inflation rose by only 1.2 percent over the past 12 months. The Monetary Policy Report issued by the Fed includes facts that are, if anything, even more alarming, including: * “Labor productivity in the business sector is reported to have declined in both the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.” * “Exports fell markedly in the first quarter, held back by lackluster growth abroad.” * “Overall construction activity remains well below its pre-recession levels.” * “Since the recession began, the gains in… nominal compensation [workers’ wages and benefits] have fallen well short of their pre-recession averages, and growth of real compensation has fallen short of productivity growth over much of this period.” * “Overall business investment has turned down as investment in the energy sector has plunged. Business investment fell at an annual rate of 2 percent in first quarter… Business outlays for structures outside of the energy sector also declined in the first quarter…” The report incorporates the Fed’s projections for US economic growth, published following the June meeting of the central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. They include a downward revision of the projection for 2015 to 1.8 percent-2.0 percent from the March projection of 2.3 percent to 2.7 percent. That the US economy continues to stagnate and even contract is indicated by two surveys released last week while Yellen was testifying before Congress. The Fed reported that factory production failed to increase in June for the second straight month and output in the auto sector fell 3.7 percent. The Commerce Department reported that retail sales unexpectedly fell in June, declining by 0.3 percent. These statistics follow the employment report for June, which showed that the share of the US working-age population either employed or actively looking for work, known as the labor force participation rate, fell to 62.6 percent, its lowest level in 38 years. During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job. The disastrous figures on business investment are perhaps the most telling indicators of the underlying crisis of the capitalist system. The Fed report attributes the sharp decline so far this year primarily to the dramatic fall in oil prices and resulting contraction in investment and construction in the energy sector. But the plunge in oil prices is itself a symptom of a general slowdown in the world economy. Moreover, a dramatic decline in productive investment is common to all of the major industrialized economies of Europe and North America. In its World Economic Outlook of last April, the International Monetary Fund for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis acknowledged that there was no prospect for an early return to pre-recession levels of economic growth, linking this bleak prognosis to a general and pronounced decline in productive investment. The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process. The economic crisis in the US and internationally is not simply a conjunctural downturn. It is a systemic crisis of global capitalism, centered in the US. A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself. While the economy is starved of productive investment, entirely parasitic and socially destructive activities such as stock buybacks, dividend hikes and mergers and acquisitions return to pre-crash levels and head for new heights. US corporations have spent more on stock buybacks so far this year than on factories and equipment. The intractable nature of this crisis, within the framework of capitalism, is underscored by the IMF’s updated World Economic Outlook, released earlier this month, which projects that 2015 will be the worst year for economic growth since the height of the recession in 2009.
Obama had found just the right person to move this hogwash forward, but then again Obama had a gift for choosing the unscrupulous. In nominating John Brennan first as deputy national security advisor and later as director of the CIA, Obama picked the rare American intel chief openly fond of Marxism.
New Zealand author and filmmaker Trevor Loudon also reaches some distance into the past, tracing Obamacare to the 1930s, when Quentin Young, a young Communist doctor in Chicago, first began thinking about socialized medicine. In the 1990s he advised Hillary Clinton on health care; later still (he lived until 1992), he collaborated with Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy. As it happens, Young shared his medical practice for two decades with Obama’s personal physician, David Scheiner, and was present at the meeting, hosted by former terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, at which it was announced that Obama, also present, would be running for Congress. Along the way, he played a huge role in shaping Obama’s views on health-care coverage.
Sharing with the less fortunate: During the five years from 2000-2004, a period when they earned $1.2 million, Barack and Michelle Obama donated less than one percent of their income to charity, ten times less than the tithing guidelines of their professed Christian faith. Only when Obama decided to run for president did the couple’s charitable instincts improve.
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
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