Friday, June 14, 2019

A NATION UNRAVELS - DEATHS AND DESPAIR DRIVEN BY HEALTH CARE COSTS - AS THE DEMOCRAT PARTY BUYS THE ILLEGALS' VOTES WITH "FREE" HEALTHCARE

Kamala Harris: Medicare for All Includes Illegal Aliens

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/05/viva-la-raza-supremacy-hispandering.html
Harris, a guest on CNN's "State of the Union," said "I support Medicare for all. It is my preferred policy." She said she supports the bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Rising US “deaths of despair” driven by health care costs, lack of access to care

A new report reveals that most US states are losing ground on key measures related to life expectancy, which has declined in each of the last three years. The Commonwealth Fund’s “2019 Scorecard on State Health System Performance” shows that “deaths of despair”—premature deaths from suicide, alcohol abuse and drug overdoses—continue to rise in nearly every state. The report further shows that these deaths are tied to rising healthcare costs that are placing an increasing financial burden on families across the country.
The Commonwealth Fund’s Scorecard assessed “deaths of despair” in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as ranked states on 47 measures of access to health care, quality of care, health care usage, health outcomes and income-based health care disparities. The report found that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act has been a central factor leading to meaningful gains in access to health care.
The reasons behind the decision of a person to take his or her own life, to take drugs resulting in a fatal overdose, or to drink alcohol in excess leading to health problems and death, are complex. But this new study shows that one of the major underlying causes of such tragedies is social inequality, in particular lack of access to health care and the associated financial struggles.

The opioid crisis, suicide and alcohol-related deaths

While the study finds that deaths from suicide and alcohol and drug abuse are a national crisis, it notes that states and regions are affected in different ways. Opioid use disorder has fueled a rise in drug overdose deaths with tragic outcomes for families across the country. The emergence of highly lethal synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, in the illicit drug supply has contributed to this national crisis.
The opioid epidemic has hit states in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and several Southeastern states particularly hard. West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Delaware and New Hampshire have the highest death rates from drug overdoses.
In Pennsylvania, Maryland and Ohio, death rates from drug overdose were at least five times higher than from alcohol abuse and about three times higher than suicide rates. In Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oregon and Wyoming, death rates from suicide and alcohol were greater than those from drugs.
Source: Commonwealth Fund. Data from National Vital Statistics System
West Virginia has been the state hardest hit by the opioid crisis, with 58.7 deaths per 100,000 residents—a staggering two-and-a-half times the national average. This was 25 percent more than the state with the next highest rate of opioid deaths, Ohio, which had 46.3 deaths per 100,000 residents. Opioid-related deaths in West Virginia increased fivefold in 12 years—rising from 10.5 deaths per 100,000 in 2005 to 57.8 in 2017.
The rate of death from drug overdose more than doubled across the US between 2005 and 2017. These deaths surged by 10 percent just between 2016 and 2017.
Suicide rates nationally have risen by nearly 30 percent since 2005. Parallel to the sharp rise in the death rate from drug overdose, the national suicide death rate rose more sharply between 2016 and 2017 than during any other one-year period in recent history. Similarly, the alcohol-related death rate rose by about 2 percent per year between 2005 and 2012 but increased by about 4 percent per year between 2013 and 2017.

Health insurance, access to care, cost

The Commonwealth Fund notes that the reductions in the uninsured population following the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) expansion of health coverage in 2014 have now stalled or even begun to erode in some states.
The ACA, commonly known as Obamacare, while expanding some access to health care coverage, has never challenged the domination of the for-profit health care industry. It required that individuals without insurance from their employer or a government program purchase insurance from a private insurance company.
Nearly all states saw substantial reductions in uninsured rates between 2013 and 2017 with the opening of the ACA’s insurance marketplaces, with fewer people citing cost as a barrier to receiving health care.
As the ACA was written, Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor jointly administered by the federal government and the states, was to be expanded to cover all US citizens and legal residents with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty line. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that it was up to the states whether or not to expand their Medicaid programs.
Almost all those states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA saw a reduction in rates of uninsured through 2015. However, after 2015 any progress in reducing the rates of uninsured had stalled in most states. From 2016 to 2017, more than half of states were simply treading water. Sixteen states saw a rise of 1 percent in the uninsured rate, including both those that did and did not expand Medicaid.
States that adopted Medicaid expansion have seen lower rates of the uninsured. As of January 1, 2017, Massachusetts had the lowest rate of uninsured, at 4 percent. The states with the highest rates of uninsured—Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas—were among the 19 states that had not expanded Medicaid as of January 1, 2017. In Texas, 24 percent—nearly a quarter of all residents—were uninsured.
Uninsured rates were particularly high in states with large African-American and Hispanic populations. In Florida, George and Texas, about 20 percent of black adults were uninsured in 2017, compared to the US average of about 14 percent. In Texas, more than a third of Hispanic adults were uninsured in 2017. Undoubtedly contributing to the uninsured among Hispanics is the denial of Medicaid and access to the ACA marketplace for undocumented immigrants.

Health care costs

In addition to the lack of health insurance, the high cost of coverage for those who are insured is contributing to the crisis in accessing health care. The report notes that as of the end of 2018, 30 million adults remained uninsured and an estimated 44 million people had insurance but were considered “underinsured” due to the high out-of-pocket costs for health care in relation to their income.
People with individual-market plans under the ACA were insured at the highest rates. However, the cost of private, employer-sponsored health care plans is rising, exposing workers and their families to increasingly higher deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. In most states, the amount that employees contribute to their employer coverage is rising faster than median income.
A key contributing factor to the uninsured and underinsured rates is the overall rate of growth in US health care costs compared to the slow growth in US median income. Workers face rising costs as insurers increase deductibles and other cost-sharing for enrollees. As workers in both ACA and employee plans are covered by the insurance industry, these private companies raise costs for the insured to boost their bottom lines.
The Commonwealth Fund’s report explodes the myth that people’s use of health care services is the primary driver of cost and premium growth. The report notes that there is growing evidence that the prices paid by private insurers to health care providers, particularly hospitals, are responsible for this growth.
The report notes, according to the Health Care Cost Institute, that “between 2013 and 2017 prices for inpatient services paid by private insurers climbed by 16 percent while utilization fell by 5 percent. The analysis found similar patterns for outpatient and professional services as well as prescription drugs.”
In other words, while workers and their families are struggling to obtain decent health care and to pay for it, the entire system of health care delivery in America is geared toward enriching the hospitals, pharmaceuticals and insurance companies. Those succumbing to “deaths of despair” are the victims of a health care system and a society that values capitalist profit over the health and very lives of its citizens.

SUICIDE IN AMERICA
Kay S. HymowitzBrian C. Anderson
May 29, 2019 
The Social Order
Kay Hymowitz joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss a challenge facing aging populations in wealthy nations across the world: loneliness. Her essay in the Spring 2019 issue, “Alone,” will be released online this Sunday.
“Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness,” Hymowitz writes. “Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair’ suggest a profound, collective discontent.”
Evidence of the loneliness epidemic is dramatic in other countries, too. Japan, for example, has seen a troubling rise in “lonely deaths.” The challenge, Hymowitz says, is to teach younger generations the importance of family and community before they make decisions that will further isolate them.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blogs podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Kay Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a longtime contributing editor at the magazine. Her latest piece in City Journal is called “Alone: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.” That's the subtitle. It's one of the great pieces she's ever written in City Journal and I encourage you to find it on our website. Lastly, just one more announcement. We created a new email address for the show, so if listeners want to get in touch and drop a comment or share an idea, you can now email us at podcast@city-journal.org. That's podcast@city-journal.org. That's it for the introduction. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Kay Hymowitz.
Brian Anderson: Hello again everyone. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal and joining us in the studio now is Kay Hymowitz. She's a contributing editor at City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow her on Twitter @KayHymowitz. And she's the author of many books, most recently the New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back, which came out in 2017. And prior to that, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, which came out in 2011. We're here today though to talk about her latest piece in City Journal called Alone. Kay, thanks very much for joining us.
Kay Hymowitz: I'm happy to be here, Brian.
Brian Anderson: So let's just start off. What made you want to write about the topic of loneliness, and what is the state of loneliness in America?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, let me start by saying I didn't actually set out to write about loneliness. I knew it was a great topic, but I wasn't exactly sure how to approach it. And I stumbled across an article that inspired me by two social scientists, I think they're demographers. And they described something called a rise of kinlessness, that is a rise in the number of people who have no kin, older people who have no kin. And it was very eye opening and I began to see that the breakdown of the family that I've been studying for maybe 15 years now and that I had mostly talked about in relation to its impact on children was also having quite an impact on older people, particularly aging adults. And that some of the despair that we were hearing about, the deaths of despair, the opioid crisis and so on so forth, are actually disproportionately made up of divorced and single, well, of men, in particular. So I realized that we're looking at something big here in terms of the family breakdown and its ultimate impact is something that I hadn't quite foreseen or thought of.
Brian Anderson: It's probably worth rehearsing some of the numbers in terms of this breakdown in family. Divorce rates for married couples, I think, are probably double what they were back in the 50s.
Kay Hymowitz: They are indeed.
Brian Anderson: But in some ways the picture's even darker. You have a 40% of kids, I think, are born to unmarried mothers now. That's up from 5% in 1960. And strikingly the rate of women who don't give birth at all, I think, has doubled or is much higher. Yeah. And you could go on and on in this vein. This is obviously the core of your argument that's having a big impact on loneliness and kinlessness and this whole phenomenon. So say a bit more about that and what do you think is driving it?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, I think that a lot of what's happening is due to a change in our understanding of what the family is, what its purpose is. I talk a lot in the article about the beginnings of what I see is the unraveling of the family, or shall we say, a kind of assault on, on the traditional family. I want to clarify that as we go on. I see the beginnings of it in something that demographers call the Second Demographic Transition. We sometimes talk about the, in ordinary parlance, we talk about the 60s or the Sexual Revolution. But those were actually an American reflection of something that has, as I said, demographers have been studying. The second demographic transition they believe is partly the result of affluence as he, as the societies in the west in particular, but also over time Japan and others, as they got richer, families were not as essential to mere survival as they had one been. Now this was intensified this fact by the introduction of the birth control pill, obviously because you could control sexual reproduction without worrying about whether you're married or not. And what the theory is that this would introduce a different set of values, anti-authoritarian, and little bit of anti-tradition. Individualistic. As people began to see they could be freer to find other ways of living than to depend entirely on family or depend mostly on their families. And in fact, following the second demographic transition, um, there was a huge increase as you, just as you just pointed out in your numbers in the percentage of divorces, the percentage of non-marital births. And this by the way, is not just true in the United States, but in other developed countries. Not all of them, but many. And also of fatherlessness. So I think that these ideas that emerged with affluence and the second demographic transition made it possible for people to think very differently about how they were going to live. And I should say now, because I'll be talking about the downsides of this, what followed from the second demographic transition. But it did really give people a lot of freedom. And there's no question that there were many people for relieved from very miserable and even violent marriages. As a result of the second demographic transition. There were many different ways to think about letting the people, it was possible to not be married if you really didn't want to. Which I think has worked nicely for some individuals. And of course it opened up the door to gay marriage, for much more freedom for gays and lesbians. So there is a tremendous upside and I don't want to discount that. But what I try to do in this article or show that there's some real downsides that we haven't quite understood.
Brian Anderson: What are some of those downsides? Why is it a problem for society that people are increasingly alone? And what are some of the manifestations of that that are negative?
Kay Hymowitz: Right. So one of the things that I try to do in the article is to remind people that kinship, those close family relations, blood and marital relations, have been kind of the linchpin of societies practically since we came out of the caves. It is absolutely fundamental to every society. The relationship between kin and what it does is... Those relationships define certain kinds of obligations. We tend to be more protective of kin and to understand our roles better when in relation to kin. Everything else, all of our other relationships may be very important to us, but we're making those up pretty much as we go along. And the kinship... As we've sort of gotten rid of that basic building block, or we've sort of undermined it through the divorce revolution, the sexual revolution in the second demographic transition, we've undermined the way kin work. So one point I make is that there's been a huge rise in cohabitation and particularly among less educated and lower income people. Cohabitation has become a kind of substitute for marriage. And the hope among, social scientists and sociologists and economists was always that gradually people would realize that you could cohabit, but you really ought to stay together. That it would be a kind of it, that it would be a kind of marriage or marriage light. But in fact, that's not what's happened. What's happened is that the, the norm of cohabitation is much more transitory, impermanent, fragile, and unpredictable. And those couples who were cohabitating and do not go onto marry tend to break up much, much more quickly.
Brian Anderson: This is even true when they have children?
Kay Hymowitz: Oh yes, definitely. The children of cohabiting couples are having a very, very different upbringing than the children of married couples. Now, it's true. we do have higher rates of divorce than we used to, although it's stabilized. And one of the reasons it's stabilized is that so many people are not getting married anymore, they are cohabiting. The upshot is that there are an awful lot of children, as I've pointed out many times before growing up in very unstable environments, but then an awful lot of parents, particularly men, who are losing direct contact with their kids. Now most men, after a divorce or after a child out of marriage, try to maintain some contact. But that tends to, it's not always true, that tends to fade out over time. Remember a lot of the people who are cohabiting, having children as their cohabiting are young, and understandably if that relationship doesn't work out, that go on and seek out another one. Well, what often happens is that there is a new family that develops out of that second union and possibly even a third or forth. So the child is faced with a, and fathers too, are faced with this rolling cast of people, none of whom have quite the connection of the kin of the old fashioned can relationships so that those men are frequently on their own as they get older. And if I could just add a little personal observation here that some people might not agree with, men just don't make homes or, you know make even make friends quite the way that women do. And we do have some data on this as well.
Brian Anderson: Looking around the world, and you noted this earlier, we know that the US isn't the only country facing problems of loneliness. One of the most striking examples in your story is Japan, which was seen just an incredible rise in what they call "lonely deaths." Maybe you could describe a little bit the situation there and how Japan is dealing with it?
Kay Hymowitz: Japan is an interesting contrast. to the United States in some ways in other western countries because non marital childbearing, single motherhood is relatively rare, unlike here. And also divorce is, relatively rare. It's getting, it's getting more common. What's happening instead is that an awful lot of people are not having children, so therefore their fertility rates are very, very low.
Brian Anderson: Well below replacement rate, I believe?
Kay Hymowitz: Well below replacement. Ours are low, but this is lower. I read one a social Japanese social scientists who said that the basic concept of the family in Japan is dead. So there's an awful lot of elderly people on their own, living alone. And by the way, dependent on the state to support them because they don't have any family to speak of. Or their family has moved away, or is extremely busy with work. We know that the Japanese are workaholics. But they started to see this rise in lonely deaths, which, we're beginning to see here too. And it became such a phenomenon in Japan that the newspapers started to cover, local newspapers would start to cover these stories that were happening very frequently. And in addition, this was the part that kind of, caused me to sit up and wonder. There are businesses now, there are cleanup companies, to take care of apartments after a lonely death because what happens is that when somebody dies and they're alone and nobody's really watching out for them, they often die in their apartment. Nobody knows they're dead. Nobody finds them until the telltale smell of decaying body. And it makes a huge mess for building owners or landlords. So they've started these companies, these cleanup companies. And I believe I mentioned the name of one of them, which is kind of grim. It's called Next.
Brian Anderson: Yeah.
Kay Hymowitz: But these companies, there are a fair number of them and they've become an essential, essential part of Japanese life.
Brian Anderson: It's a very, very grim reality. I've been reading a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism, and it's an argument against being immersed in social media and other forms of technologically driven distraction. He says, we need to set more time for our sanity sake to be alone or at least off of the Internet and this constant bombardment of, of connection with other people. In other words, he's saying technology is making us constantly exposed to other people in ways that can harm us. At least if it goes too far. How does social media and the constant judgment that people sometimes feel themselves under through social media if they're participating in it, how does that intersect with the argument that you're making?
Kay Hymowitz: Well social media, I'm thinking of Facebook in particular was supposed to bring us all together. Right? It was the social network. We were going to create all these new social networks and you know, I think some people have been able to use it that way. I have ordered up to make contact with old high school friends or whatever, but it has also added to a sense of anxiety as people post pictures of their happy family occasions. They can look like things are just so wonderful and peachy keen for everybody else while you're feeling down in the dumps. So what does that expression, "fomo," fear of missing out? You're missing parties that you might've been invited to... People are taking wonderful trips that you, you know, don't have anybody to travel with or whatever. So I think it can exacerbate loneliness in that way because you're constantly comparing yourself to other people at their peak moments because that's when people post their pictures. And there is something about, aside from the fomo, aside from that, the kinds of connections you make through social media don't seem to be the same as those should make in real life. I haven't seen wonderful research on this yet, but it seems to me an area ripe for exploration. It seems so clear somehow that you can be online, communicating, even playing games with people, from all over the world, and seemingly making new friends and still feel quite lonely and be lonely because you turn off the computer or walk into another room and you're alone.
Brian Anderson: A lot's been written, especially since the election of Donald Trump, about the state of rust belt communities. The opioid crisis, which you mentioned earlier. How much in your view is the family breakdown you're describing having an impact on those communities? And is it part of what's causing the problem or is it an outgrowth of the breakdown in those communities? Economic breakdown.
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah, there's no question that family breakdown exacerbates and intensifies the loss of these communities, or rather the jobs, the factories that have left. If you lose your job and you lose your wife or husband because to opioids, or they've just left, then you've got real trouble. You don't have anybody to support you through difficult times. One of the things I argue in that piece is that the breakdown in the family has not affected educated and well off people anywhere near to the extent that it has... well, blacks, and also now the white working class that came a little bit later. And I think what we underestimated, we who lived through the second demographic transition and played a role in pushing it actually because I was in college in the 1960s when a lot of these ideas were being tested out and promulgated. If the educated classes, the more well to do classes, were able to figure out a way to maintain their families, what they didn't anticipate, or that none of us anticipated, was that it would be much harder for people who were living more on the edge, who had evictions to worry about or layoffs or a factory closing. You need, in those cases, a culture that really supports, a cultural environment, that really supports the idea of the family and of kinship as people... as people that are there for you in hard times.
Brian Anderson: Providing a network of support...
Kay Hymowitz: That's right. That's right. And in those communities instead, we saw a more and more of a collapse of the family. Now was it possible that, we could have, in a different cultural environment, it could have been different? Maybe, maybe. It's very hard to disentangle the cause and effect here, but there's no question that they go hand... the loss of the working class or the manufacturing jobs, has definitely been related to the breakdown of the family in the working class. Now I should mention that one of the things that's happened as a result, well, related again to the breakdown of the family in those communities, is this opioid crisis. Opioids, as you may know, is now killing more people than traffic accidents, than car accidents. And I was amazed to see in a recent study that the victims or the people who die of opioid death are much more likely to be single, unmarried or divorced men. And that speaks of exactly what I've been trying to describe. I think that women are better at creating their own social networks. This was something that the sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a book called Going Solo, about people living alone. It's something he noticed as he started to interview people who were living alone. Even among the elderly women were more likely to want to live alone. They didn't want to remarry if there were widowed or divorced. But who kept fairly rich lives, they were still able to... they volunteered. They had friends, networks of friends that they could go out with, and that sort of thing. So, and if there were children, they were closer to the kids than a single father. So they had all those supports. Men seem to suffer much more loneliness than women. And you know, we can debate from here to eternity why that is. But there it is.
Brian Anderson: Well, to ask a final question, and it's how you conclude your piece: What might be necessary to start re-knitting the social fabric in a way that might address this problem. You mentioned Tom Wolfe's idea of a "Great Re-learning." Say a little bit about that?
Kay Hymowitz: Well first, I should say that there are a lot of government programs for seniors, a lot of, on the federal level and the city and local level. There are all kinds of ways that civil society jumps in. Seniors Helping Seniors is one group, Meals on Wheels, organizations like that. They are absolutely essential and beneficial and I don't want to knock them at all, but they don't begin to address the loss that a lot of people are feeling, or the loneliness. So one of the things that struck me in thinking about all this was how much joy and pleasure so many of my friends, and I should say I'm 70 years old, so many of my friends now with grandchildren, would mostly worry when their kids were growing up about their careers. They would focus so much on their education. Starting from early on, we were the beginning of helicopter parents, not quite as bad as today, but it did begin quite a while ago. But never talking about this other, what I consider to be the other big goal in life: to find a spouse, a kind and reliable and giving spouse who will make a good mother or father for your children. Because most people are going to want children. And society's depend on them wanting children. Those parents didn't talk to their kids about these things. And yet here I was going to weddings and watching these grandchildren being born and the parents were going nuts. I thought, well, why wouldn't they ever talk about the joy of this stage of life and of the connection that we now have with our children. And this is one lovely thing of the that has followed the second demographic transition is, I think, there's a much, much less of a generation gap between me and my kids then there was between me and my own parents because,
Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think that's true.
Kay Hymowitz: And there's a kind of companionship and friendship that I didn't see in my day so much. We have that, and it's a source of great comfort and pleasure. I think for most of the people that are able to experience it. So I note all that because I want readers to realize that this is something we don't talk about to our kids very much. And so we have another generation, growing up, who have never heard those words or any of those concepts from their parents or from anybody.
Brian Anderson: Well maybe it's a time for a different kind of conversation. In any case, don't forget to check out Kay's brilliant essay in City Journal, it's called Alone. It's in our latest issue you can find it on our website and we will link to it in the description. You can follow Kay on Twitter @KayHymowitz. You can also find City Journal on Twitter, @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI, and always, if you like what you've heard on the podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and thanks, Kay Hymowitz, for joining us.


CULTURE OF CORRUPTION
KAMALA HARRIS PROMISES ILLEGALS A VASTLY EXPANDED BORDER TO OPEN BORDER LA RAZA WELFARE STATE FOR ALL ILLEGALS WHO VOTE FOR HER.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/02/daniel-greenfield-californians-say-hell.html
Kamala Harris’s career received a boost from a patronage job in dubious circumstances. 
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Kamala Harris barely won her first race for California Attorney General in 2010. 
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 Kamala Harris was accused of using her state office to attack political enemies and reward friends. 
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 Kamala Harris was criticized for financial mismanagement during her 2016 U.S. Senate campaign.
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 Kamala Harris has been the star of viral video confrontations but has done little else in Washington.
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Kamala Harris faces new questions about a close aide who settled a $400,000 harassment lawsuit. ---- Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News


CALIFORNIA’S POVERTY…. AND YET THEY WANT MORE ILLEGALS TO VOTE DEMOCRAT AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED

Why are so many people poor in the Golden State?
California
Economy, finance, and budgets
California—not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four Californians is poor. Given robust job growth in the state and the prosperity generated by several industries, especially the supercharged tech sector, the question arises as to why California has so many poor people, especially when the state’s per-capita GDP increased roughly twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5 percent, compared with 6.27 percent).

It’s not as if California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty. Sacramento and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause, for decades now. Myriad state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line receive benefits, according to the California Policy Center. California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments, and “other public welfare,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some states—principally Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia—initiated welfare reform, as did the federal government under President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress. The common thread of the reformed welfare programs was strong work requirements placed on aid recipients. These overhauls were widely recognized as a big success, as welfare rolls plummeted and millions of former aid recipients entered the workforce. The state and local bureaucracies that implement California’s antipoverty programs, however, have resisted pro-work reforms. In fact, California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as if welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place. Immigrants are falling into it: 55 percent of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30 percent of natives, according to City Journal contributing editor Kay S. Hymowitz.
Self-interest in the social-services community may be at work here. If California’s poverty rate should ever be substantially reduced by getting the typical welfare client back into the workforce, many bureaucrats could lose their jobs. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort, and job security. In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base—to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, according to Governing, California has an enormous bureaucracy—a unionized, public-sector workforce that exercises tremendous power through voting and lobbying. Many work in social services.
Further contributing to the poverty problem is California’s housing crisis. Californians spent more than one-third of their incomes on housing in 2014, the third-highest rate in the country. A shortage of housing has driven prices ever higher, far above income increases. And that shortage is a direct outgrowth of misguided policies. “Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings,” explains analyst Wendell Cox. “Middle income households have been forced to accept lower standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by the high cost of housing.” The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed in 1971, is one example; it can add $1 million to the cost of completing a housing development, says Todd Williams, an Oakland attorney who chairs the Wendel Rosen Black & Dean land-use group. CEQA costs have been known to shut down entire home-building projects. CEQA reform would help increase housing supply, but there’s no real movement to change the law.
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. On some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50 percent higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan Institute study, “Less Carbon, Higher Prices,” found that “in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ‘energy poverty’—defined as energy expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all households.” A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that the rate could exceed 17 percent of median income in some areas. “The impacts on the poorest households are not only the largest,” states Winegarden. “They are clearly unaffordable.”
Looking to help poor and low-income residents, California lawmakers recently passed a measure raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022—but a higher minimum wage will do nothing for the 60 percent of Californians who live in poverty and don’t have jobs, and studies suggest that it will likely cause many who do have jobs to lose them. A Harvard study found evidence that “higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants” in the Bay Area, where more than a dozen cities and counties, including San Francisco, have changed their minimum-wage ordinances in the last five years. “Estimates suggest that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating),” the report says. These restaurants are a significant source of employment for low-skilled and entry-level workers.
Apparently content with futile poverty policies, Sacramento lawmakers can turn their attention to what historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly describes as a fixation on “remaking the world.” The political class wants to build a costly and needless high-speed rail system; talks of secession from a United States presided over by Donald Trump; hired former attorney general Eric Holder to “resist” Trump’s agenda; enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags, threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and is consumed by its dedication to “California values.” All this only reinforces the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast, to the disservice of millions of Californians whose values are more traditional, including many of the state’s poor residents.
California’s de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years.
Kerry Jackson is the Pacific Research Institute’s fellow in California studie

  

Behind Trump’s clash with the Fed: Looming economic crisis and class conflict

18 April 2019
The repeated calls by President Donald Trump for the US Federal Reserve to loosen its monetary policy and provide a further boost to the stock market expose the economic and political reality behind the mask of official ideology.
In his latest remarks, contained in a tweet last Sunday, Trump said the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be 5,000 or even 10,000 points above its present near-record level if the Fed had not tightened interest rates last year. He demanded that the central bank resume the program of “quantitative easing,” under which it poured trillions into the financial markets in the wake of the 2008 finance crash.
For more than three decades the stock market has served as the primary financial mechanism through which the American ruling class has carried out an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the working population to the rich. Under Democratic as well as Republican administrations, the Dow has risen 17-fold since 1985 on the basis of a relentless assault on workers’ jobs and wages and cuts in education, health care and other social services.
Under Obama, the Dow rose more than 250 percent. Under Trump, it has risen a further 32 percent.
The official refrain has been the lie that “there is no money” for schools, health care, housing or pensions, while unlimited sums have been squandered to pay for more yachts, private islands and Manhattan penthouses for the modern-day aristocrats, along with new and more deadly conventional and nuclear weapons to prepare a new military Armageddon.
Wealth and income inequality have reached record levels, consolidating the rule of the financial oligarchy over every aspect of American social and political life.
Trump is simply declaring openly what the Fed has been doing throughout this period, behind the official pretence of “neutrality” and “independence”—and demanding that it do more of it.
If there are objections to Trump’s comments from the New York Times and other key sections of the political and media establishment, on the grounds that they infringe on the Fed’s “independence,” it is not because of any disagreement with the fundamental direction of his policies. They are concerned that Trump is seeking to transform the US central bank from the instrument of the ruling class as a whole into that of his own faction. But Trump’s factional opponents within the ruling elite base themselves on the same forms of financial parasitism as those sections for whom the real estate swindler-turned president speaks.
The legal mandate of the Fed is to adjust monetary policy so as to ensure stable prices and maximum employment, irrespective of the ups and downs of the stock market. But the Fed has been directly tailoring its policies to prop up the financial markets since the stock market plunge of October 1987, when Wall Street fell more than 22 percent in a single day and the then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan announced that the financial spigots were open.
This led to what became known as the Greenspan put: That when the markets began to falter, the Fed would be ready to step in to boost them with the provision of cheap money. Greenspan did make one attempt to curb what he termed “irrational exuberance” in 1996, but such was the adverse reaction from the financial elites that it was never again attempted.
From then on, the official mantra was that it was impossible to tell if a financial bubble was in formation and the markets had to be given their head, with the Fed intervening to support them when their speculative activities gave rise to a crisis.
This program was intensified after the financial crash of 2008, when the government doled out hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks and the Fed initiated its policy of quantitative easing, providing trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money to ensure that the speculative binge continued and expanded.
At the same time, it was insisted that corporate taxes had to be continually reduced. This has now resulted in a situation where, as a recent analysis revealed, 60 US corporations, appropriating billions of dollars in profits, paid no tax in 2018, with some receiving a tax refund.
Trump’s latest intervention is accompanied by the claim that the US economy is powering ahead and could grow even faster if only the Fed stopped holding it back. But rather than indicating strength, Trump’s ultimatums express a deepening crisis and fear that the financial house of cards will collapse unless still more money is pumped into the system.
Claims of the underlying strength of the US economy are belied by basic facts. The present interest rate of between 2.25 percent and 2.5 percent is one of the lowest in economic history, but the Trump administration wants it cut by at least 0.5 percent.
The stock market, bloated by financial speculation, is like a drug addict who demands more as his underlying health continues to deteriorate. When the US financial markets neared bear market territory earlier this year and Wall Street demanded that the Fed halt its policy of incremental rate increases, the Fed snapped into line and Chairman Jerome Powell announced it would abandon its efforts to “normalize” interest rates, leading to the latest rally, which has pushed the Dow to within a few points of its record high.
At the end of 2017, Trump claimed that the trillions of dollars handed out in corporate tax cuts would cause the economy to roar ahead with expanded investment and the provision of well-paying jobs. This lie has been exposed as the vast bulk of the money the tax cuts provided has gone for share buybacks and other parasitic means of pumping more money into the coffers of the rich.
Now the global economy, upon which the US economy is dependent notwithstanding Trump’s claims of the success of his “America First” program, is experiencing a significant slowdown after a brief upturn in 2017.
In its latest economic outlook, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for global growth, warning that 70 percent of the world economy was undergoing deceleration, a phenomenon concentrated in the advanced economies, including the US. Those warnings have been underscored by the announcement on Wednesday by the German government that it was halving its forecast for economic growth in 2019 to just 0.5 percent.
The Trump administration is frightened by the prospect of a recession, or even a significant slowdown in the economy, fueling the growing wave of strikes and protests and transforming it into a social explosion, not only in the so-called rust belt areas that voted for his presidency, but across the country.
These fears extend beyond the White House. In a recent essay, the head of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, the multibillionaire Ray Dalio, warned that when there is a “very big gap” in the economic conditions of people, a downturn can lead to conflict and “revolutions of one sort or another.”
With interest rates already at historic lows, Dalio said he was “worried what the next economic downturn will be like, especially as central banks have limited ability to reverse it.”
It is above all the fear within the ruling elite of growing socialist sentiment in the working class that underlies both Trump’s self-proclaimed war against socialism and the bipartisan attack by the ruling elite on democratic rights.

POLITICIANS MUST FACE CONSEQUENCES FOR CRIMES THEY ENABLE

Malfeasant politicians must find no “sanctuary.”

June 12, 2019

Michael Cutler

The phrase, Failure is Not An Option served as the title of the book written by Gene Kranz, Flight Director for NASA who helped create the U.S. manned space program and was instrumental in successfully returning the crew of Apollo 13 to the earth after their spacecraft suffered a catastrophic explosion half-way to the moon.
In most professions, especially where lives are on the line, failure to do the job is not an option.  This is particularly true where law enforcement and the military are concerned.  
Politicians, not unlike members of the military and law enforcement officers, take oaths of office where they swear (affirm) that they will enforce our laws and defend the Constitution.  While law enforcement officers and members of the armed forces may face dire consequences for violating their oaths of office, politicians generally do not.
Their oaths of office do not provide an “escape clause” whereby they may opt to ignore any of the laws that are not to their liking.
Unlike the entries on the menu of a restaurant where the patrons order the food that they find palatable or where they may substitute one item on the menu for another, their oaths of office demand that those who take that oath agree to enforce all laws and honor and defend all of the provisions of our Constitution.
Dereliction of duty is a serious offense for members of the armed forces and for law enforcement officers and one that carries significant consequences.
We will not delve in the specifics of this ongoing case, but it is important to note that the deputy sheriff in this case has been charged with multiple crimes, some of which are felonies, all emanating from his alleged failures to act to protect the children who were killed in that school.
Contrast how that deputy is being prosecuted for alleged failures to act with the politicians who, with impunity, demand that law enforcement officers not act to cooperate with immigration law enforcement personnel - even when those actions result in the death of innocent victims.
The outrageous assertions that “Sanctuary” 

 policies protect immigrants from immigration law 

 enforcement are blatant lies.  Law abiding aliens, 

 immigrants and non-immigrants alike, need no 

 protection from ICE (Immigration and Customs 

 Enforcement) agents..
Aliens who violate our immigration laws, however, pose a threat to national security and public safety.  The 9/11 Commission was crystal clear that the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and other such attacks conducted by aliens in the United States were only possible because of multiple failures of the immigration system.
In fact, I would argue that violations of our borders and immigration laws must be seen as violations of our Constitution.
Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution provides:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.
Invasion is defined, in part, as an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity or an unwelcome intrusion into another's domain.
My recent article, Sanctuary Policies Kill, included a link to a May 21, 2019 ICE press release, ICE seeks custody of teen murder suspects for a second time- Local jurisdiction failed to honor previous detainers which began with this excerpt:
BALTIMORE – Following the recent arrest of two unlawfully present teens suspected in the violent murder of a young girl in Maryland, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers in Baltimore are again seeking to take custody of the illegal aliens through the ICE detainer process following the Prince George’s County Detention Center’s (PGCDC) failure to cooperate.
Josue Rafael Fuentes-Ponce and Joel Ernesto Escobar, both Salvadoran nationals, were previously arrested on May 11, 2018 when they were arrested by Prince George’s County Police Department (PGCPD) for attempted first-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, participation in gang activity, conspiracy to commit murder, attempted robbery, and other related charges. ICE officers lodged a detainer with PGCDC, however both were released on an unknown date and time without notification to ICE.
On May 16, 2019, PGCPD arrested the same individuals and charged them with first-degree murder.
That girl who was killed was stabbed and bludgeoned to death was just 14 years old, roughly the same age as some of the children who were shot to death at the Parkland school massacre.
She is no less dead than are the victims of the school shooting in Florida and her life is no less valuable.
Had the officials of Prince George’s County honored the ICE detainer, that young girl would still be alive today.
Tragically and infuriatingly, this is not an isolated case.  This refusal by “Sanctuary” jurisdictions to cooperate with ICE occurs across the United States with sickening regularity and all too frequently with innocent people being killed.
Malfeasance has been defined as the performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law.
It would certainly appear that the promulgation of “Sanctuary” policies constitutes malfeasance.
Furthermore, when the political leaders of a jurisdiction order law enforcement officers who are under their command to ignore immigration laws, they are inducing/coercing malfeasance by those sworn law enforcement officers.
Our nation’s borders and our nation’s immigration laws make no distinction about race, religion or ethnicity.  They were enacted to prevent the entry and continued presence of aliens who pose a threat to public safety, national security and the lives and livelihoods of Americans.
A review of one of the sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S. Code § 1182 that enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded from entering the United States dispels any doubts about the nature of our immigration laws.
Additionally, multiple failures of the House and Senate to fund a border wall, provide funding for enhancing the enforcement of our immigration laws from within the interior of, and provide legal remedies to failure of the immigration laws particularly where political asylum and the Flores Decision are concerned, further exacerbates the immigration crisis.
Adding fuel to the blazing fire that is the obvious crisis along the border, the Democrat-controlled Congress just passed a new version of the DREAM Act, as reported by CBS News on June 5, 2019, House passes latest DREAM Act, hoping to place millions of immigrants on path to citizenship.
Rather than deter illegal immigration, these legislative actions incentivize illegal immigration.
A section of the INA, 8 U.S. Code § 1324, establishes crimes that relate to the smuggling of aliens into the United States as well as the harboring, shielding such aliens from detection.  
That section of law also deems it to be a crime to encourage or induce aliens to enter the United States illegally or remain in the United States illegally or otherwise aids or abets these crimes or crimes relating to conspiracies to commit these crimes.
This law seemingly only applies to “mere” citizens but not to our political elites.
Either through litigation and/or elections, those politicians who obstruct immigration law enforcement and thus fail to adhere to their oaths of office and Constitutional responsibilities, must be made accountable.

Drug Rehab Centers are Fueling Homeless Epidemic in California


http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/12/19/drug-rehab-centers-are-fueling-homelessness-in-california/
13
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
by ADELLE NAZARIAN19 Dec 201737

Drug rehabilitation or “rehab” centers are increasingly being seen as a contributing factor in the homeless epidemic that has swept across the Golden State.

“There’s evidence to suggest a portion of the growth [of homelessness] in some Orange County cities, and to a lesser degree in Los Angeles, can be attributed to the rehab industry’s aggressive recruitment of addicts – and their lucrative insurance payments – from around the country,” the Orange County Register noted in a recent article.
The issue rests in the fact that the drug rehab centers’ business models actually wind up leaving addicts stranded on the streets. The rehab model is also highly lucrative, bringing in hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per year.
Often, once a patient’s insurance money runs out, rehab homes and facilities will kick him or her out on the street, which results in relapse and, often, homelessness.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, over 60 percent of people who receive drug rehabilitation will relapse. Many of these individuals wind up homeless.
In 2015, Forbes reported:
The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependency estimates that over 23 million Americans (age 12 and older) are addicted to alcohol and other drugs. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), just under 11% (2.5 million) received care at an addiction treatment facility in 2012. SAMHSA also estimates that the market for addiction treatment is about $35 billion per year.
According to Los Angeles County’s annual homeless count, the region’s homeless population has grown 23 percent since 2016. The study also found that the number of homeless people in L.A. County whose last residence was out of state increased by 21 percent.
The Register points out that in Florida, there is a strong link between rehab and drug-treatment facilities and homelessness, and particularly in Palm Beach County, where government counts reportedly found a 73 percent increase over the past two years in the number of homeless youth between the ages of 18 and 24.
“The (rehab patients) are not going back home to the Northeast,” Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, who leads the county’s Sober Home Task Force, told the Register. “The incentives are too great to remain here: the free rent, the free transportation, the lifestyle. They’ve set up these individuals for failure.”
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

 

Jeff Sessions Creates ‘Opioid Tsar’ as Overdose Deaths Surpass Those from Breast Cancer

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/12/21/jeff-sessions-creates-opioid-tsar-od-deaths-surpass-breast-cancer/
18
Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
by IAN MASON21 Dec 2017151

Attorney General Jeff Sessions created a new “senior position” at the Department of Justice Wednesday, director of opioid enforcement and prevention efforts, to help combat what is now far and away the deadliest drug epidemic in American history.

“With one American dying of a drug overdose every nine minutes, we need all hands on deck,” Attorney General Sessions said of the decision. He continued:
That’s why President Trump has made ending the drug epidemic a top priority. This Department of Justice embraces that goal, and we have taken a number of steps this year to do our part. We have indicted hundreds of defendants for drug related healthcare fraud, sent more prosecutors to where they’re needed most, and we’ve taken on the gangs and cartels. Today we take the next step: creating a senior level official position at the Department to focus entirely on this issue. This Department will continue to follow the President’s lead, and I am confident that we can and will turn the tide of the drug crisis.
The decision was announced the same day Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new numbers putting total estimated drug overdose deaths at 63,600 for 2016. This figure is more than triple that of 1999 and up sharply even from the beginning of this record-setting decade. The number outpaces earlier 2016 estimates of 59,000 and outstrips deaths from influenza and pneumonia.
The biggest driver of this tragedy is the rising of opioids, both traditional semi-synthetic or natural opioids like heroin and oxycodone and the newer fully-synthetic and extraordinarily potent opioids like fentanyl and carfentanyl that drug dealers have rapidly pushed into the supply stream. The latter category of deaths has increased especially rapidly, doubling just from 2015 to 2016, according to the CDC.
CNN’s interpretation of the numbers puts opioid overdoses at roughly two-thirds of drug deaths, 42,249, more than all deaths from breast cancer.
Sessions has made containing the opioid crisis a major focus of his tenure at DOJ. Last month, for example, he announced the first new Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) field office since the late 1990s. Located in Louisville, Kentucky, this office will cover West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The CDC’s new report indicates West Virginia is the state hardest hit by overdoses, with a shocking age-adjusted 52 deaths per 100,000 people.
“I know that this crisis is daunting- the death rates are stunning- and it can be discouraging,” Sessions said at that time. “But we will turn the tide. When the men and women of law enforcement work effectively in a focused way, we can stop the growth of destructive addiction, keep the American people safe, and save lives.”

  

Drug deaths drive down US life expectancy for second year

Two reports published yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reveal that the life expectancy of the American working class is declining due to an increase in drug overdoses and suicides.
The data reflects, in empirical terms, the social devastation wrought on the lives of millions of people by decades of bipartisan policies aimed at enriching the wealthy. The decline in life expectancy, a fundamental measure of social progress, is a historical milestone in the decline of American capitalism. This is the second year in a row that life expectancy has fallen in the US, marking the first time in nearly half a century that life expectancy has declined in consecutive years.
Life expectancy dropped from 78.7 years in 2015 to 78.6 years in 2016, driven by a 0.2-year decline from 76.3 to 76.1 years among men. Life expectancy for women remained at 81.1 years, as the gap between women and men reached an all-time high.
However, life expectancy for those who make it to old age continues to improve, and the mortality rates for heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses are declining as technological and medical advances improve the capacity to extend human life. The decline in life expectancy is caused by a dramatic increase in the mortality rate among those under age 44 who are overdosing, particularly on opioids, or taking their own lives.
The CDC report shows a 21 percent year-to-year increase in drug overdoses, which took the lives of 63,600 people in 2016. It is as if each year, a city the size of Palo Alto, California; Bismarck, North Dakota; or Fort Myers, Florida was killed off entirely. Since 2006, roughly 430,000 people have died of drug overdose, more than the number of US soldiers killed during World War II. An army of people who should be alive today is not.
A total of 42,249 people died from opioid overdoses in 2016, a 28 percent increase from the year before. While Barack Obama was traveling the country on behalf of Hillary Clinton, proclaiming, “America is already great,” over 90 people were dying each day from opioids alone.
Corporations have been flooding poor areas with pills and are shielded from prosecution by the government. Between 2007 and 2012, for example, drug distributor Miami-Luken shipped 11 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone into Mingo County, West Virginia, which has a population of 25,000.
Former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Joe Rannazzisi told 60 Minutes in October that it is “a fact” that companies inundate poor areas with the knowledge that many will die as a result. While lawsuits against the drug companies have forced paltry penalties of several million dollars, this is part of the cost of doing business. The Obama administration slashed the number of DEA cases against drug distributors by 69.5 percent between 2011 and 2014.
The decline in life expectancy and the increase in drug overdoses are the product of a massive growth in social inequality. Daniel Kim, a professor at Northeastern University, told Reuters yesterday that “what we know from numerous health studies is that a wider gap between the rich and the poor means that more people will die unnecessarily.”
Over the past 40 years, the Democratic and Republican parties have been engaged in a conscious strategy to pare back the gains won by the working class through the social struggles of the early 20th century. A bipartisan cabal has slashed wages, eliminated pensions, cut social programs, reduced taxes on the rich, and done away with employer-provided healthcare.
In the process, the government has transferred trillions from the working class into the bank accounts of the financial elite. Today, the top 10 percent owns 77 percent of the wealth. The richest 3 billionaires own as much as the poorest 160 million—half the country’s population.
The social counterrevolution was intensified under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, which oversaw the bailout of the banks following the 2008 financial crisis, conducted the bailouts of the auto industry that slashed the wages of autoworkers to historic lows, and enforced the Detroit bankruptcy. The enactment of Obamacare has coincided with a drastic increase in the number of drug overdose deaths. While the rate per 100,000 of overdoses was increasing by 3 percent from 2006 to 2014, it began increasing by 18 percent per year in 2014, the year Obamacare came into force.
The death rate will continue to rise as the Trump administration deepens tax cuts for the wealthy. Citing Kim’s research, Reuters wrote, “the income inequality produced by the [tax bill] will mean 29,689 more deaths each year, perhaps more.” Billions in cuts to Medicare, mandated by laws that require budget cuts to match drops in revenue, will lead to the deaths of thousands more.
The victims of the opioid crisis come from all regions and social backgrounds, but the overwhelming majority of those killed are poor and working class. According to last year’s CDC data, 90 percent were white, and most were men, with overdoses for whites roughly triple the rate for African-Americans and double the rate for Latinos. The Native American overdose rate equals the rate for whites.
This reality exposes the reactionary lies advanced by Black Lives Matter and its claims of “white supremacy,” and by the #MeToo movement, which asserts that society is organized on the principle of patriarchy and male domination.
New York Times contributor and racial politics proponent Michael Eric Dyson recently attempted to turn the opioid crisis into an example of white privilege when he said in March 2017, “White brothers and sisters have been medicalized in terms of their trauma and addiction. Black and brown people have been criminalized for their trauma and addiction.”
Seething with contempt for the working class, Dyson ignores the fact that if adequate medical services were available, tens of thousands would not die each year from drug overdose. Instead of helping the victims, state governments have responded by calling in the National Guard to police the streets (West Virginia) and by calling for quadrupling jail terms for opioid users (New Jersey). Meanwhile, both parties voted to increase military spending by $80 billion over last year’s levels.
The Socialist Equality Party calls for expropriating the billions of dollars the drug companies have made from the ongoing crisis. This money, and the personal wealth of the corporate and financial aristocracy, must be put into an emergency fund to pay for the immediate construction of a network of hospitals and health clinics, staffed with well-trained doctors, to provide permanent, free medical care to all those effected.
Rehabilitation centers must be expanded and new ones built so that the millions with addiction and dependency problems can seek help free of charge. A 90 percent tax must be imposed on all income above five million dollars to provide funds for massive jobs and public works programs in those areas hardest hit by the crisis to alleviate inequality and poverty.
These demands can only be met through the building of a mass movement of the working class, independent of the Democratic and Republican parties, aimed at linking workers of all races and nationalities in a common fight against the capitalist system.
EYE ON THE NEWS

An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis

Opioids are fueling homelessness on the West Coast.
Christopher F. Rufo
June 14, 2019
The Social Order
California
By latest count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has generated headlines and speculation about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.
Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.
For drug cartels and low-level street dealers, the 
business of supplying homeless addicts with 
heroin, fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids is 
extremely lucrative. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834 in drugs per month. Holding rates constant, we can project that the total business of supplying heroin and other opioids to the West Coast’s homeless population is more than $1.8 billion per year. In effect, Mexican cartels, Chinese fentanyl suppliers, and local criminal networks profit off the misery of the homeless and offload the consequences onto local governments struggling to get people off the streets.
West Coast cities are seeing a crime spike associated with homeless opioid addicts. In Seattle, police busted two sophisticated criminal rings engaged in “predatory drug dealing” in homeless encampments (they were found in possession of $20,000 in cash, heroin, firearms, knives, machetes, and a sword). Police believe that “apartments were serving as a base of operations that supplied drugs to the streets, and facilitated the collection and resale of stolen property.” In other words, drug dealers were exploiting homeless addicts and using the city’s maze of illegal encampments as distribution centers. In my own Fremont neighborhood, where property crime has surged 57 percent over the past two years, local business owners have formed a group to monitor a network of RVs that circulate around the area to deal heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines. Dealers have become brazen—one recently hung up a spray-painted sign on the side of his RV with the message: “Buy Drugs Here!”
What are local governments doing to address this problem? To a large extent, they have adopted a strategy of deflection, obfuscation, and denial. In her  #SeattleForAll public relations campaign, Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only one in three homeless people struggle with substance abuse, understating the figures of her own police department as well as the city attorney, who has claimed that the real numbers, just for opioid addiction, rise to 80 percent of the unsheltered.
The consequences of such denial have proved disastrous: no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts. Los Angeles, which spent $619 million on homelessness last year, has adopted a strategy of palliative care—keeping addicts alive through distribution of the overdose drug naloxone—but fails to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions. The city has been cursed, in this sense, with temperate weather, compounded by permissive policies toward public camping and drug consumption that have attracted20,687 homeless individuals from outside Los Angeles County.
No matter how much local governments pour into affordable-housing projects, homeless opioid addicts—nearly all unemployed—will never be able to afford the rent in expensive West Coast cities. The first step in solving these intractable issues is to address the real problem: addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless and must be confronted honestly if we have any hope of solving it.

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