The Super-Rich give
generously to the phony CLINTON FOUNDATION CHARITY which gives generously to
the Clintons and their cronies!
DO THEY EXPECT
HILLARY CLINTON TO SERVE THE 1% LIKE OBAMA AND BILLARY DID?
Campaign fundraising in 2016 US election cycle soars to new records
"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."
“In reality, the settlement falls
far short of holding JPMorgan accountable for its fraudulent sale of
mortgage-backed assets, which netted the bank tens of billions of dollars in
profits while exacerbating the sub-prime mortgage crash that led to over ten
million foreclosures in the US and a global economic downturn that thrust many
millions more into unemployment and poverty.”
“There is, of course, no acknowledgment that Clinton was part
of an administration that oversaw and continues to oversee the greatest
transfer of wealth from the bottom to “those at the top” in US history.”
AFTER 8 YEARS OF
BANKSTER LOOTING
UNDER OBAMA, CAN WE AFFORD
ANOTHER BANKSTER-OPERATED
WHITE
HOUSE?
This
week she’ll speak at an Ameriprise Financial conference in Boston. She’s also
been booked or given paid speeches at events sponsored by Fidelity, KKR and
Co., the Carlyle Groups and Goldman Sachs.
WE HAVE BEEN WITNESS TO THE ECONOMIC DEVASTATION OF BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS.
THESE SAME BANKSTERS HAVE ALREADY BOUGHT JEB BUSH AND HILLARY CLINTON.
Bush and Clinton are overwhelmingly favored by major financial firms, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reported that Bush “collected nearly $145,000 from employees at Goldman Sachs and almost $167,000 came from seven other big banks. Another $63,100 in contributions came from employees of the financial firm Neuberger Berman, run by his cousin, George Herbert Walker IV.”
The newspaper noted that during the six years Bush had worked as an adviser to the bankrupt Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers and then at Barclays, he made up to $2 million per year.
Clinton, meanwhile, collected “$300,000 from employees at the nation’s six largest banks, with about $88,000 coming from Morgan Stanley executives alone, and about $62,000 from workers at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.”
In addition to their myriad personal connections to the financial sector, the Bush and Clinton “dynasties” have proven faithful servants of Wall Street. Hillary Clinton's husband, former president
Bill Clinton, repealed a key section of the Glass–Steagall Act
separating commercial and investment banking, helping to set the
stage for the 2008 financial crash, while former president George
W. Bush, the older brother of Jeb Bush, initiated the bank bailout,
continued under Obama, that ultimately funneled as much as $7
trillion into major financial institutions.
CRONY OBAMANOMICS – HOW OBAMA SQUANDERED AMERICA FOR HIS LOOTING WALL STREET BANKSTERS!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-reality-of-obamas-crony-capitalism.html
$3.39T Quantitative Explosion: Fed Owns More
Treasuries and MBSs Than Publicly Held Debt Amassed From Washington Through Clinton.
JUDICIAL
WATCH:
OBAMA
RANKS AS THE MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENT IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY
BARACK
OBAMA and the DEATH of the AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS.
WITH THE MIDDLE-CLASS DEAD AND BURIED, WILL THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” HELP OBAMA BUILD HIS DICTATORSHIP? Do a search for Obama and La Raza Fascism!
RASMUSSEN POLL: Hillary Clinton is a bad clone of Barack
Obama owned by the same bankster paymasters as Obama
CRONY CAPITALISM and the FALL of A DEMOCRATIC NATION
OBAMA’S LOOTING BANKSTERS AGREE TO FUND HIS
DICTATORSHIP…. They owned him from day one!
“The
vast sums of money pocketed by bank executives are bound up with activities
that range from borderline legal to flagrantly illegal. Nearly all of the CEOs
included on the list head banks that have been the subject of multiple
investigations and fines related to the rigging of global interest and foreign
exchange rates, mortgage fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and other crimes.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics:
CEO PAY 300 TIMES GREATER
THAN WORKERS…. AMNESTY WILL MAKE THOSE FIGURES SOAR HIGHER!
“Historically
speaking, the rise in CEO compensation is tied to the global decline of
American capitalism and the increasing financialization of the economy. In 1965
the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to 1. By 1978 the ratio had only grown to
30 to 1. It was only in the 90s that CEO pay reached absurd heights, rising
from 59 to 1 in 1989 to 376 to 1 in 2000.”
“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.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics:
the final death of the
American middle-class
AMNESTY:
IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING
WAGES DEPRESSED.
"While it is
not spelt out directly, the BIS critique of the present policies is an
expression of the fact that, in the final analysis, the source of all forms of
profit is the surplus value extracted from the working class. Therefore, the
only way for capital to overcome its crisis and restore stability is a massive
increase in exploitation."
While the growth of social inequality has dramatically accelerated following the 2008 crash, this is a continuation of a decades-long process. The report notes, “Top 1 percent incomes grew by 80.0% from 1993 to 2014. This implies that top 1 percent incomes captured almost 60% of the overall economic growth of real incomes per family over the period 1993-2014.”
In fact, the US government’s response to the 2008 crash has been dedicated to inflating the wealth of the super-rich while driving down incomes for the vast majority of the population. The White House has protected Wall Street executives from legal prosecution, while the Federal Reserve has handed out trillions of dollars in cheap money through “quantitative easing” programs, leading share values to triple on major US exchanges.
On Thursday, US President Barack Obama plans to unveil what he has called a major new policy initiative in a speech in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The proposal entails new federal rules that would make an additional 3 percent of the US population eligible for overtime pay. If adopted, the change would add a mere $1.3 billion to worker’s wages annually. This is a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars that have been transferred to the financial elite since the 2008 financial crisis.
THE
MAN THAT CALLED HIS HOAX “HOPE & CHANGE”
'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used words to
describe the president: Pew Research Center
OBAMA: SERVANT OF THE 1%
Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth
The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.
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.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROY THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
OBAMANOMICS:
The escalation of global financial parasitism
In fact, the US government’s response to the 2008 crash has been dedicated to inflating the wealth of the super-rich while driving down incomes for the vast majority of the population. The White House has protected Wall Street executives from legal prosecution, while the Federal Reserve has handed out trillions of dollars in cheap money through “quantitative easing” programs, leading share values to triple on major US exchanges.
OBAMAnomics:
OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES LOOTING AMERICA!
These are only the most striking of a barrage of numbers reported in
recent weeks, demonstrating that for the US financial aristocracy, the Crash of
2008 has been used to engineer a historic redistribution of wealth.
HILLARY CLINTON: DEDICATED SERVANT TO
THE 1%, OBAMA’S CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS and DISCIPLE of OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS for
the super-rich.
The central aim of Clinton’s speech
was to reassure the American financial oligarchy that, despite her occasional
lukewarm denunciations of corporate criminality and social inequality, she is a
right-wing, pro-business defender of Wall Street.
The speech makes clear that a Clinton
presidency will pursue the same pro-Wall Street policies of the Obama
administration, seeking to expand the fortunes of the super-rich at the expense
of the great majority of society, while invoking “fairness” and “equality” as
window dressing.
*
THE HOPE AND CHANGE CLOWN ASSAULTS THE AMERICAN MIDDLE
CLASS AS HE HANDS BILLIONS IN WELFARE TO HIS BANKSTER DONORS!
Today,
President Obama will sign a bill to cut $8.7 billion from the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, slashing almost
$100 per month in benefits for nearly a million households.
The
attack on food stamps comes as Obama and the Democrats posture in the run-up to
this
year’s mid-term elections as opponents of social inequality and defenders
of the poor and
jobless. Nowhere in the establishment media is the glaring
contradiction between what the
Democrats say and what they do even discussed.
AMERICAN
BANKS and the CATASTROPHIC DEATH OF AMERICA
The
2008 crash and subsequent developments have revealed certain fundamental
realities about American society. All of the official institutions, including
the presidency, the courts, Congress and the financial regulators, have worked
single-mindedly to shield the banks and the financial elite and enable them to
grow even richer.
*
THE OBAMA ASSAULT
ON OUR PENSIONS
BIGGER PROFITS FOR
HIS WALL STREET DONORS IF PENSIONS ARE SLASHED
“Feinberg, who as the
Obama administration’s “pay tsar” rubber- stamped
multimillion-dollar executive bonuses to Wall Street banks bailed out with taxpayer funds,
will now be given power to slash workers’ benefits at his discretion.”
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.
OBAMA: SERVANT OF THE 1%
Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth
He’s got WALL STREET’S BIGGEST CRIMINALS
PUMPING MONEY INTO THE CLINTON – JEB BUSH MACHINES!!!
HILLARY CLINTON – SERVANT of the
1%, her FIRST FAMILY of CRIME, MUSLIM DICTATORS and the MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY
of LA RAZA…. can we really afford more OBAMANOMICS?
THE CRONY CLASS: always wants
endless hordes of ILLEGALS jumping our
borders and jobs to keep wages DEPRESSED!
*
OBAMA-CLINTONomics 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
WHY SHOULD
ANY WALL STREET CORPORATION HAND OVER BRIBES TO A POL IN THE FORM OF “SPEECH”
AND THEN HAVE TO PAY ANY TAX WHATSOEVER?
THAT DOES
NOT SOUND LIKE OBAMANOMICS!
Clinton
herself is far more likely to be on speaking terms with hedge-fund managers or
Silicon Valley billionaires than with the “typical American worker.” After a
recent campaign fundraiser at the home of John Chambers, the founding
billionaire of Cisco Systems, she pronounced herself interested in his proposal
to cut the corporate tax rate for overseas earnings so that Cisco and other
corporations holding more than $1.5 trillion in profits in foreign bank
accounts!!! might !!!! repatriate the money and use it in the United States.
“It doesn’t do our economy any good to have this money parked somewhere else in
the world,” Clinton told the Wall Street Journal.
Hillary
bellies up to Obama’s banksters – She
reeks of the smell of BRIBES and BAILOUTS
THE
OBAMA YEARS – THE GOLDEN AGE OF BANKSTER LOOTING AND BANKSTER WELFARE…
INCEST!
The case of bankster-owned Barack Obama and crony Jamie Dimon of JP MORGAN…
their looting continues!
“In reality, the
settlement falls far short of holding JPMorgan accountable for its fraudulent
sale of mortgage-backed assets, which netted the bank tens of billions of
dollars in profits while exacerbating the sub-prime mortgage crash that led to
over ten million foreclosures in the US and a global economic downturn that
thrust many millions more into unemployment and poverty.”
The vast sums being raised and spent by the Democratic and Republican candidates make a mockery of the claims that the United States is a democracy in which the people rule. It is big money that rules, dominating the entire process of selecting the candidates of the only two officially recognized parties and effectively determining the outcome of the vote on November 8, 2016.
Of the $390 million raised so far, $300 million has gone to the 15 announced candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, while $90 million has gone to four Democrats—$71.5 million of that to the Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. The disparity is misleading: once the primary contest is over, and a Republican is selected to face Clinton, there will be billions spent on each side in the general election campaign.
The role of big money in the presidential campaign has become so obvious that even the corporate-controlled media can’t cover it up any longer. The Washington Post, for example, published a report July 16 whose headline left little to the imagination: “2016 fundraising shows power tilting to groups backed by wealthy elite.” The article noted that “independent” expenditures by so-called super PACs—political action committees loosely linked to the candidates—would for the first time exceed the spending by the candidates and their official campaign committees.
On the Republican side, the pace has been set by Jeb Bush, brother of former president George W. Bush and son of former president George H.W. Bush. His campaign and two associated super PACs raised $119 million during the second quarter of 2015, the largest amount ever raised for a presidential candidate so early in the campaign.
Nearly all this money came from well-heeled donors: Bush himself gave more money to his own campaign ($399,720) than all of his small donors combined ($368,023). Besides the billionaires and multi-millionaires who gave up to $1 million apiece to the super PAC (the limit set by the Bush campaign), Bush raked in cash from lobbyists representing finance, oil, wholesale, real estate and a raft of other industries.
Super PACs are the offspring of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and subsequent court actions, which effectively removed any limit on what billionaires and corporations can give to political action committees (donations to candidates themselves are still limited to $2,700).
Super PACs first played a significant role in 2012, mainly in the Republican primary campaign, where billionaires Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess kept Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the field against Mitt Romney, himself a hedge fund boss and near-billionaire.
What is happening in 2016 is a further quantitative leap. Super PACs account for $230 million in funding for Republican candidates, compared to $65 million raised by the candidates themselves.
Every significant Republican candidate has a billionaire (or in the case of Donald Trump, is a billionaire), except Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose occasional objections to US military adventures overseas have cut him off from such funding, causing his campaign prospects to fade rapidly.
Super PAC funding has made Jeb Bush the frontrunner, while also boosting Senator Ted Cruz ($53 million) and Senator Marco Rubio ($44 million) to the status of serious contenders. Another top Republican hopeful, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, raked in $20 million for his super PAC before declaring his candidacy July 13.
Super PACs will sustain at least another half dozen Republican candidates. Three billionaires are funding former Texas Governor Rick Perry, with $16 million of the $17 million he has raised. Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is to announce next week, has $11.5 million, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie $10 million. Even Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a latecomer to the campaign, is backed by $9 million in super PAC money. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina also have enough big-money donors to run campaigns.
On the Democratic side, the same essential reality prevails, albeit masked by the pretense that the Democratic Party is the party of working people, and the populist rhetoric of some of the Democratic challengers to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Clinton’s fundraising has the same profile as the Republican candidates, with the difference that, not expecting a serious primary contest, Clinton’s strategists asked big money donors to hold their fire until the general election campaign. Most Democratic billionaires, like Warren Buffett, currency speculator George Soros, and investment banker Tom Steyer, are waiting until next year.
But Clinton has already raked in smaller amounts—essentially down payments—from media billionaires Haim Saban and Fred Eychaner, hedge fund operator Marc Lasny, J.B. Pritzer of the Hyatt family fortune, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, and numerous other Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street moguls.
Last week Clinton posted on her campaign web site the names of 122 “bundlers” who raised at least $100,000 for her campaign in the second quarter. These included corporate lobbyists for Dow Chemical, Microsoft, Exxon, PepsiCo, Verizon and MasterCard, among many, many others. The identity of one “bundler” is telling: Steven Rattner, the investment banker who headed Obama’s auto task force that imposed 50 percent pay cuts on newly hired autoworkers.
Clinton’s main challenger, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has no super PAC but raised $15.2 million anyway, mainly over the Internet. He actually raised more money than Clinton from small donors, those who gave less than $200. This shows that Sanders is performing his assigned function: using anti-billionaire rhetoric (which includes refusing to have a super PAC), to attract those disaffected by the right-wing policies of the Obama administration, and bringing them back into the orbit of the Democratic Party.
This entire process has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy. It shows how the US financial aristocracy manipulates public opinion, seeking to preserve the illusion of popular choice in the presidential election behind the most transparent of fig leaves. In the meantime, the billionaires will put the candidates through their paces, selecting the individual they will install in the White House to do their bidding.
Patrick Martin
"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
By Barry Grey
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.
CRONY CAPITALISM and the FALL of A DEMOCRATIC NATION
OBAMA’S LOOTING BANKSTERS AGREE TO FUND HIS
DICTATORSHIP…. They owned him from day one!
“The
vast sums of money pocketed by bank
executives are bound up with activities
that
range from borderline legal to flagrantly
illegal. Nearly all of the CEOs
included on the
list head banks that have been the subject of
multiple
investigations and fines related to
the rigging of global interest and foreign
exchange rates, mortgage fraud, money
laundering, tax evasion and other crimes.”
The US presidency for sale
20 July 2015
The 2016 US presidential election will be the most expensive in history, costing an estimated $10 billion, when all spending by candidates, the Democratic and Republican parties, super PACs and other corporate lobbies and trade unions is tabulated.The vast sums being raised and spent by the Democratic and Republican candidates make a mockery of the claims that the United States is a democracy in which the people rule. It is big money that rules, dominating the entire process of selecting the candidates of the only two officially recognized parties and effectively determining the outcome of the vote on November 8, 2016.
Of the $390 million raised so far, $300 million has gone to the 15 announced candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, while $90 million has gone to four Democrats—$71.5 million of that to the Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. The disparity is misleading: once the primary contest is over, and a Republican is selected to face Clinton, there will be billions spent on each side in the general election campaign.
The role of big money in the presidential campaign has become so obvious that even the corporate-controlled media can’t cover it up any longer. The Washington Post, for example, published a report July 16 whose headline left little to the imagination: “2016 fundraising shows power tilting to groups backed by wealthy elite.” The article noted that “independent” expenditures by so-called super PACs—political action committees loosely linked to the candidates—would for the first time exceed the spending by the candidates and their official campaign committees.
On the Republican side, the pace has been set by Jeb Bush, brother of former president George W. Bush and son of former president George H.W. Bush. His campaign and two associated super PACs raised $119 million during the second quarter of 2015, the largest amount ever raised for a presidential candidate so early in the campaign.
Nearly all this money came from well-heeled donors: Bush himself gave more money to his own campaign ($399,720) than all of his small donors combined ($368,023). Besides the billionaires and multi-millionaires who gave up to $1 million apiece to the super PAC (the limit set by the Bush campaign), Bush raked in cash from lobbyists representing finance, oil, wholesale, real estate and a raft of other industries.
Super PACs are the offspring of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and subsequent court actions, which effectively removed any limit on what billionaires and corporations can give to political action committees (donations to candidates themselves are still limited to $2,700).
Super PACs first played a significant role in 2012, mainly in the Republican primary campaign, where billionaires Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess kept Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the field against Mitt Romney, himself a hedge fund boss and near-billionaire.
What is happening in 2016 is a further quantitative leap. Super PACs account for $230 million in funding for Republican candidates, compared to $65 million raised by the candidates themselves.
Every significant Republican candidate has a billionaire (or in the case of Donald Trump, is a billionaire), except Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, whose occasional objections to US military adventures overseas have cut him off from such funding, causing his campaign prospects to fade rapidly.
Super PAC funding has made Jeb Bush the frontrunner, while also boosting Senator Ted Cruz ($53 million) and Senator Marco Rubio ($44 million) to the status of serious contenders. Another top Republican hopeful, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, raked in $20 million for his super PAC before declaring his candidacy July 13.
Super PACs will sustain at least another half dozen Republican candidates. Three billionaires are funding former Texas Governor Rick Perry, with $16 million of the $17 million he has raised. Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is to announce next week, has $11.5 million, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie $10 million. Even Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a latecomer to the campaign, is backed by $9 million in super PAC money. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina also have enough big-money donors to run campaigns.
On the Democratic side, the same essential reality prevails, albeit masked by the pretense that the Democratic Party is the party of working people, and the populist rhetoric of some of the Democratic challengers to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Clinton’s fundraising has the same profile as the Republican candidates, with the difference that, not expecting a serious primary contest, Clinton’s strategists asked big money donors to hold their fire until the general election campaign. Most Democratic billionaires, like Warren Buffett, currency speculator George Soros, and investment banker Tom Steyer, are waiting until next year.
But Clinton has already raked in smaller amounts—essentially down payments—from media billionaires Haim Saban and Fred Eychaner, hedge fund operator Marc Lasny, J.B. Pritzer of the Hyatt family fortune, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, and numerous other Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street moguls.
Last week Clinton posted on her campaign web site the names of 122 “bundlers” who raised at least $100,000 for her campaign in the second quarter. These included corporate lobbyists for Dow Chemical, Microsoft, Exxon, PepsiCo, Verizon and MasterCard, among many, many others. The identity of one “bundler” is telling: Steven Rattner, the investment banker who headed Obama’s auto task force that imposed 50 percent pay cuts on newly hired autoworkers.
Clinton’s main challenger, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has no super PAC but raised $15.2 million anyway, mainly over the Internet. He actually raised more money than Clinton from small donors, those who gave less than $200. This shows that Sanders is performing his assigned function: using anti-billionaire rhetoric (which includes refusing to have a super PAC), to attract those disaffected by the right-wing policies of the Obama administration, and bringing them back into the orbit of the Democratic Party.
This entire process has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy. It shows how the US financial aristocracy manipulates public opinion, seeking to preserve the illusion of popular choice in the presidential election behind the most transparent of fig leaves. In the meantime, the billionaires will put the candidates through their paces, selecting the individual they will install in the White House to do their bidding.
Patrick Martin
"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.
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