"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on
Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-recovery-that-never-happened-except.html
"One of the premier
institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued
an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008
crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis”
was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that
effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of
the potential impact of central bank actions in driving
inequality between asset owners and labor." Growing attacks on socialism in Democratic presidential race
With polls showing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders the likely first-place finisher in tomorrow’s Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, Sanders’ opponents have focused their attacks on his public identification as a “democratic socialist.”
Friday night’s seven-candidate debate in New Hampshire began with former Vice President Joe Biden claiming that Sanders at the top of the ticket would doom Democratic candidates for other offices on the ballot November 3. “Bernie’s labeled himself … a democratic socialist,” Biden said. “I think that’s the label that the president’s going to lay on everyone running with Bernie if he’s a nominee.”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar joined in the attack, suggesting that Sanders would “out-divide the divider in chief,” i.e., Trump. “I think we need someone to head up this ticket that actually brings people with her, instead of shutting them out,” she said, touting her own appeal to “moderate Republicans” and voters “in the middle.”
From left, Democratic presidential candidates former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Senator Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
At a rally at Dartmouth College Saturday, Klobuchar’s staff handed out copies of newspaper editorials endorsing her, including from the ultra-right Manchester Union-Leader, the largest circulation paper in the state. “I don’t agree with everything that’s said on that debate stage,” Klobuchar told the audience. “When they asked should a socialist lead the ticket, I raised my hand and said ‘no.’”
The issue dominated the appearances by Democratic presidential hopefuls on network and cable television interview programs on Sunday. Sanders himself was interviewed on four programs and was asked about his identification as a democratic socialist on three of them.
It is remarkable that in a country where socialism has been the subject of official vilification and witch-hunting for a century, where anticommunism has been elevated to the status of a state religion, and where genuine socialists are subject to a media blackout, that the “s word” has suddenly become a major subject of media discussion.
It attests to the worsening of social inequality and the growing consciousness among millions of working people and youth that the concentration of wealth under the control of a tiny handful of multimillionaires and billionaires has become both an impassable obstacle to social progress and a deadly threat to democratic rights. Poll after poll has shown deepening popular hostility to capitalism and rising support for socialism, particularly among the younger generation.
This shift to the left in popular consciousness finds only the most distorted expression within the corporate-controlled two-party system. In 2016, it took the form of an explosion of support for the Sanders campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, surprising the senator himself and the entire US political establishment. Sanders attracted mass support, enthusiastic rallies, a huge outpouring of small-dollar donations over the internet, and ultimately 13 million votes.
The Vermont senator originally sought to occupy the gadfly role played by Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich and similar candidates in the Democratic presidential primaries, giving a “left” cover to this staunchly pro-capitalist party while it chose yet another right-wing nominee for the position of “commander-in-chief” of US imperialism.
After being unexpectedly catapulted into the position of a major figure in capitalist politics, Sanders bowed to the dictates of the US ruling elite, accepted his defeat in 2016, and endorsed and campaigned for the Democratic nominee, the choice of Wall Street and the CIA, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Sanders is not a socialist. He is not seeking public ownership of industry or nationalization of the giant corporations. He wants to tax the wealth of the billionaires at a slightly higher rate, not confiscate it to use it to meet social needs. He cites as his models the wholly capitalist countries of Denmark and Sweden, and even Germany, where the neo-Nazis are the main opposition party in parliament and dictate policy to the coalition government headed by Angela Merkel.
In the 2020 campaign, after being largely ignored by the corporate media for months, Sanders has surged in the polls, held the largest rallies, and raised far more money than any of his non-billionaire rivals, largely in small donations from working people. His top contributors are teachers as well as the low-paid employees of Amazon, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Target and the US Postal Service.
After his strong showing in Iowa, he leads in polls ahead of the vote Tuesday in New Hampshire, and a virtual panic has broken out in the Democratic Party establishment and its media allies that Sanders is now the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, told the Wall Street Journal that declaring Sanders the frontrunner was premature and that the socialist label was “a big pill for a lot of voters to swallow.”
On Sunday, former Vice President Biden appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” where he reiterated his attack on Sanders, telling interviewer George Stephanopoulos, “Now, you’ve been around, George, as much as anybody, you’re going to win with that label, you’re going to help somebody in Florida win with the label democratic socialist? Because it’s going to go all the way down the line. That’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to win in North Carolina? You’re going to win in Pennsylvania? You’re going to win in those states in the Midwest?”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the other ostensibly “progressive” candidate along with Sanders, said on Sunday: “I am a capitalist. I believe in markets, but markets need rules.”
Sanders was asked directly on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” on CNN’s “State of the Union,” and on Fox News Sunday to reply to charges that his socialist label—which he claims less and less frequently—will doom him and the Democratic Party to defeat in November. In each instance he evaded a direct answer, instead criticizing Trump or attacking economic inequality and the failures of the profit-driven US health care system.
When NBC interviewer Chuck Todd cited likely charges by Trump that Sanders had a record of “cozying up” to Latin American “left” leaders like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Sanders responded with a similar red-baiting attack on Trump, citing the president’s efforts to woo Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. “If you want to talk about cozying up to communists around the world, it ain’t me, it’s Donald Trump,” Sanders said.
On Fox, Sanders adopted the most “left” pose in any of the four interviews, telling interviewer Chris Wallace, “We are a campaign of the working class, for the working class, and by the working class.” He declared that health care should be a basic right, although he went on to assert, as he did in other interviews, that his health care program would slash spending by trillions of dollars. And he told Wallace, in response to a question about Trump’s denunciations, that Trump “knows I’m not a communist.”
Sanders never used the word “socialist” to describe his own political beliefs, either in the nearly 40 minutes of interviews on four television networks or during the two-hour debate on Friday night.
He is evidently seeking to appease his right-wing critics in the Democratic Party, as demonstrated by his conciliatory response on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday when interviewer Jake Tapper asked him about efforts by Democratic Party officials to mask his victory in the Iowa caucuses, where he outpolled former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg by 6,000 votes.
Tapper cited criticisms by Sanders’ supporters who said the call for a recanvass of the Iowa results issued by Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Tom Perez on Thursday appeared timed to overshadow news that Sanders had a comfortable lead in the votes cast by caucus-goers and was nearly tied with Buttigieg in “state delegate equivalents.” The exchange continued:
Tapper: Do you think the Democratic Party is trying to openly hurt your campaign?
Sanders: Look, all I can say about Iowa is, it was an embarrassment…
Tapper: Do you think that the Democratic Party, whether the Iowa Democratic Party or the DNC, was trying to hurt you, though?
Sanders: I have no idea. And that's—we’re going to monitor the situation closely, but that’s not my impression at this point.
While Sanders said this on Sunday, there is little doubt that if he wins the New Hampshire primary, the hysteria in the Democratic Party establishment over his supposed “socialism” will reach new heights.
If the current group of right-wing alternatives—Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar—looks unviable, there is likely to be a shift to support billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has entered the contest but will not appear on any ballot until the March 3 “Super Tuesday” primaries, when 40 percent of the delegates to the Democratic convention will be selected, including from such large states as California, Texas, Massachusetts and Virginia.
BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND THE RICH PARTNER WITH TRUMP TO FIGHT … economic
equality.
"JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who was known as Barack Obama’s
favorite banker and who has been a major donor to
the
Democratic Party, centered his annual letter to shareholders on a
denunciation of socialism."
BANKSTER SOCIALISM
Dimon’s bank received tens of billions of dollars in
government bailouts and many billions more from the
Obama administration’s ultra-low interest rate and “quantitative
easing” money-printing policies. He told his shareholders that
“socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption” and
“authoritarian government,” and would be “a disaster for our
country.”… UNLESS IT IS SOCIALISM FOR BANKSTERS AND WALL STREET!
"This paved
the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and
backwardness of the ruling oligarchy."
"The
very fact that the US government officially acknowledges a growth of
popular support for socialism, particularly among the nation’s youth,
testifies to vast changes taking place in the political consciousness of
the
working
class and the terror this is striking within the ruling elite. America is,
after all, a country where anti-communism was for the greater part of
a century a state-sponsored secular religion. No ruling class has so
ruthlessly
sought to exclude socialist politics from political discourse as the
American ruling class."
Socialism haunts the American ruling class In the
two months since Donald Trump vowed in his State of the Union Address that
“America will never be a socialist country,” the right-wing demagogue president
and the Republican Party have embraced anti-socialism as the defining theme of
their campaign in the 2020 elections.
WALL STREET CRIMINALS and the ultimate death of America’s
middle-class
Jim Carrey: America ‘Doomed’ If
We Don’t Regulate Capitalism
"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 will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned
an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility
to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance
between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the
statesmanship of today.” THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
*
"But
what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of
the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power,
use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and
venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear
to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy
- AMERICANTHINKER.com
AMNESTY AND OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL TO
SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
STARING IN THE FACE of AMERICA’S UNRAVELING and the ROAD TO
REVOLUTION
“It will more likely come on the heels of
economic dislocation and dwindling wealth to redistribute.”
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” -- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
"The
kind of people needed for violent change these days are living in
off-the-grid rural compounds, or the “gangster paradise” where
the businesses of drugs, guns, and prostitution are much more
lucrative than “transforming” America along Cuban lines." BRUCE
THORNTON
There can be no
resolution to any social problem confronting the population in the United
States and internationally outside of a frontal assault on the wealth of the
financial elite.
The political system
is controlled by this social layer, which uses a portion of its economic
plunder to bribe politicians and government officials, whether Democratic or
Republican.
LOOMING
REVOLUTION!
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” – Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
Amnesty is
all about keeping wages depressed and passing the true cost along to what is
left of the America middle-class.
The
huge inflow of migrants and asylum seekers forced officials to issue 400,000 work permits in
2017. That is roughly one new migrant worker for every 10 Americans who entered
the workforce that year. The huge inflow has also jammed the immigration
courts, ensuring that new migrants can work for a few years before a judge
decides their case.
The inflow of asylum-seeking
migrants, nonetheless, is far smaller than the inflow of legal immigrants and
temporary visa-workers, which added roughly 2 workers in 2017 for every four
Americans who entered the workforce.
Nationwide,
the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost
economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the
market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood
of outside labor spikes profits
and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for
manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees.
The
cheap labor policy widens wealth
gaps, reduces high tech
investment, increases state
and local tax burdens, hurts kids’
schools and college education, pushes Americans
away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans
and their families, including many who are now struggling with
fentanyl addictions.
Immigration
also steers investment and wealth away from towns in heartland
states because coastal investors can more easily hire and
supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in
coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up
coastal real-estate prices, pricing poor U.S. Latinos and blacks out of
prosperous cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland. NEIL MUNRO
The fourth annual report on “US Attitudes Toward Socialism,
Communism, and Collectivism,” commissioned by the anticommunist Victims of
Communism Memorial Foundation and conducted by YouGov, found a sharp growth in
interest in socialism among youth in the US over the past year.
The study has been conducted annually since 2016 and bases
itself on interviews with over 2,000 people.
This years’ results reveal a significant radicalization taking
place among youth, particularly in the Millennial Generation (those aged 23-38)
and Gen Z (aged 16-22). Compared to last year’s report, favorable views of
capitalism dropped 6 percentage points and 8 percentage points for Gen Z and
Millennials, respectively.
Other notable findings include:
* 70 percent of Millennials say they would be “somewhat likely”
or “extremely likely” to vote for a socialist candidate. The percentage of
Millennials who say they would be extremely likely to vote for a socialist
candidate has doubled (from 10 percent in 2018 to 20 percent in 2019).
* Overall, 83 percent say they know at least a little about
socialism, and 39 percent of Americans say they “know a lot”—a nearly 40
percent increase from 2018.
* Nearly half of Millennials think the government should provide
a job to everyone who wants to work but cannot find it.
* Forty percent of Americans (45 percent of Gen Z and
Millennials) think all higher education should be free.
* Around one in five Millennials thinks society would be better
off if all private property were abolished.
* Seventy percent of Americans say the divide between the rich
and the poor is a serious issue.
* Of the more than half (63 percent) of Americans who think the
highest earners are “not paying their fair share,” 54 percent think increased
taxes are part of the answer, and 47 percent say a complete change of the
economic system is needed.
* Thirty-seven percent of Millennials think the US is one of the
most unequal societies in the world.
* Over a quarter of Americans across all generations said Donald
Trump is the biggest threat to world peace.
The source of this radicalization is not hard to find. The chief
characteristic of life for Millennials and Gen Z has been skyrocketing social
inequality. Many are forced to work two, three or even four jobs to make ends
meet. One in five millennials is living below the poverty line.
The growing interest in and support for socialism coincides with
a significant growth of class struggle and social protest internationally. In
Lebanon, massive protests have brought an estimated one quarter of the
country’s six million people onto the streets. In Chile, millions of people
continue to flood the streets protesting social inequality and state violence
in the largest demonstrations in the country’s history.
In the US, the strike by 32,000 Chicago teachers and support
staff is in its second week, following the largest autoworker strike in 30
years by GM workers.
This eruption of the class struggle on a global scale terrifies
the ruling class. They are acutely aware of social tensions and the growing
interest in socialism.
The response of the Trump administration has been an open turn
towards fascistic and authoritarian forms of rule. His hysterical denunciations
of socialism, now a feature of nearly every rally, express the growing fear of
the rich that demands for social reform will set off a mass movement for social
equality.
On the other hand, the Democrats, speaking for another faction
of the ruling elite, are determined to avoid anything that would mobilize
popular anger against Trump. They are systematically keeping out of their
impeachment inquiry any reference to Trump’s brutal crackdown on immigrants and
refugees, unending war and the social catastrophe confronting workers and
youth. Instead, they have focused their impeachment campaign on issues of
foreign policy.
It is within this framework that the Democratic Party’s
elevation of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez must
be understood. In order to provide a left cover for their right-wing policies,
these self-proclaimed “socialists” have been brought forward to direct growing
social anger back behind the Democratic Party.
In this latest campaign rally in Detroit on Sunday, Sanders once
again directed his remarks against social inequality, listing many of the
social ills confronting workers and youth. Most significant, however, was what
was not said.
Sanders made no reference to the more than month-long strike by
General Motors workers, which was just shut down by the United Auto Workers on
the basis of a contract that facilitates the massive expansion of temporary
workers, which has become the “new normal” for young people. Sanders also made
no reference to the ongoing Chicago teachers strike.
The omissions were not accidental. The Democratic Party, through
figures like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, propose a “socialism” (though they
almost never use the word) that does not involve the class struggle. Ending the
domination of the “billionaire class” is supposedly to be achieved without any
mass social movement or any challenge to the economic domination of the
capitalist class.
And it is supposedly to be done within the framework of the
Democratic Party, which is no less responsible than the Republicans for the
social conditions confronting workers and young people.
The critical question is to build a socialist leadership in the
working class and youth, to explain what genuine socialism is and how it must
be fought for. The fight for socialism means the fight to establish democratic
control of the giant banks and corporations by the working class. It means an
end to social inequality through a radical redistribution of wealth and the
expropriation of the ill-gotten gains of the corporate and financial
aristocracy. It means an end to war and abolition of the military-intelligence
apparatus.
The foundation for a socialist movement is the working class, in
the United States and internationally. The reorganization of economic life on a
world scale, on the basis of social need, not private profit, requires the
independent mobilization of the working class to take power and establish a
workers’ government.
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