Tuesday, April 28, 2020

NANCY PELOSI ENDORSES JOE BIDEN - 'Joe will protect Democrat Party bribes suckers from prosecution, keep our wars going, hand bailouts to bankstes and amnesty to 40 million illegals so they may bring up the rest of Mexico and vote Democrat for more.'

Amid simmering crisis over sexual assault charges Nancy Pelosi endorses Biden

28 April 2020
On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party candidate in the 2020 presidential election. In an eleven-minute video, Pelosi lavished praise on the pro-war, pro-corporate long-time senator and vice president under Barack Obama, the most right-wing of the major contestants for the nomination.
Pelosi called the 77-year-old, semi-senile political hack a “voice of reason” in the coronavirus crisis and absurdly described him as “a leader who is the personification of hope and courage, values and integrity.” In the midst of the greatest corporate bailout in world history, she specifically praised Biden for his role in the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street during the 2008–2009 financial crisis.
Pelosi’s endorsement followed endorsements earlier this month by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, marking the line-up of the so-called “progressive” wing of the party behind the candidate of the party apparatus, whose official imprimatur was signaled by the endorsement the same week by Barack Obama.
But the unity at the top has not resolved the party’s deep crisis. Biden is despised by broad sections of the working class and especially youth and younger workers, and there are many indications that large sections of those, especially young people, who supported the Sanders campaign may not accede to Sanders’ post-capitulation demand that they vote for Biden.
Their disquiet has been increased by the news last week that Biden’s chief economic adviser is Larry Summers, a key architect from the 1990s to the present of the policies of deregulation and economic parasitism that have enabled the financial aristocracy to monopolize ever greater portions of society’s wealth.
This has been compounded by a simmering scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse against Biden by Tara Reade, a one-time staffer in Biden’s Senate office, who filed a complaint with Washington DC police in March accusing the then-senator from Delaware of having assaulted her in 1993.
The alleged incident occurred 26 years ago, there were no other witnesses, Reade did not file a complaint with the police at the time, and the statute of limitations has long since expired. Biden himself has said nothing, but his campaign has denied the charges.
has no way of knowing whether Reade’s allegations are true. One thing is clear, however. The response of the Democratic Party and media organizations aligned with it, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, which have spearheaded the #MeToo witch hunt and reveled in the “take down” of dozens of prominent men on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, has exposed their rank hypocrisy.
The Times and the Post failed to report Reade’s allegations for weeks after the story was broken by Sanders supporter Katie Halper on her podcast in March. In mid-April they posted articles emphasizing inconsistencies in Reade’s story and insisting that it had to be carefully examined and Biden given the presumption of innocence before reaching any conclusion as to his guilt.
The Democratic National Committee has said nothing, nor has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sanders, Warren or most of the dozen or so women on Biden’s short list for his vice presidential running mate. Pelosi has spoken publicly only once on the matter, telling MSNBC on April 17 that she was “satisfied” with Biden’s denial. She appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program and was not asked by moderator Jake Tapper about the issue.
The contrast between the treatment of Biden by the Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic media and the treatment of a host of targets of #MeToo sex charges could not be more blatant. The mantra “believe women” that was proclaimed repeatedly, including by Biden himself during the September 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been supplanted by a sudden (dishonest) affirmation of the democratic principles of due process and the presumption of innocence.
What has been exposed is the role of the #MeToo campaign as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Its proponents have changed their tune because the McCarthyite methods of #MeToo in this particular case cut across the interests of the Democratic Party and substantial sections of the ruling class that are backing Biden in the contest with Trump.
There are, however, forces aligned with the Democratic Party that are pushing Reade’s allegations and calling out the party apparatus for seeking to quash them. The Intercept has published a number of articles as have some pseudo-left Sanders promoters, including Jacobin magazine.
This opposition has increased since the posting Friday by Newsbusters of a video clip from an August 1993 CNN “Larry King Live” program in which a woman, identified by Reade as her mother, calls in and cites the case of her daughter, who was “working for a prominent senator and could not get through with her problems at all.” The caller does not identify the senator and does not mention sexual harassment, but the clip seems to confirm Reade’s claim that she told her mother of the incident with Biden at the time.
The video has been widely reported by Fox News and other right-wing media, but largely suppressed by the rest of the corporate media.
Fox News reported Monday that the hashtag #dropoutbiden was trending on Twitter on Sunday, until it was allegedly removed. Nick Brana, Sanders’ former national outreach coordinator, tweeted over the weekend that the Democratic National Committee should either force Biden to drop out or “admit that suppressing progressives is the true purpose of your party.”
Another former Sanders senior adviser, Winnie Wong, tweeted: “The video of Tara Reade’s late mother calling into Larry King to blow the whistle about Tara’s sexual assault is being met with relative silence from a cadre of progressives right now and I want you all to know that I see you. We all do.”
Within this context, Pelosi’s abrupt endorsement of Biden appears to be an effort to contain and silence the voices calling for him to step aside and make explicit the party’s demand that the matter be dropped. Pelosi’s video appears to be part of a circling of the wagons around Biden.
On Monday, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal (Democrat from Washington state), endorsed Biden, after having served as the Sanders campaign’s national chair for health policy. Biden was the most strident opponent of Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” during the primary contest, repeatedly denouncing it on the grounds that it would cost several trillion dollars. Of course, both he and Sanders are now supporting a bailout of the corporate-financial elite that has already reached some $10 trillion.
“I am ready to work with him [Biden] to craft and then implement the most progressive agenda of any candidate in history,” Jayapal said in a statement.
Her endorsement followed that of two other former Sanders campaign officials. The Progressive Congressional Caucus’s other co-chair, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, endorsed Biden last week, as did Representative Ro Khanna of California. Pocan and Khanna served as co-chairmen for Sanders.
There is nothing progressive in the efforts of disaffected Democrats and their pseudo-left allies to dislodge Biden on the basis of unsubstantiated sex allegations. Even assuming that Reade is telling the truth, in which case Biden should be held to account, the fact is that Biden and his party are guilty of far greater crimes.
The wars Biden supported in Afghanistan and Iraq alone killed hundreds of thousands of people, including women and children. The Obama administration, in which Biden served as second-in-command, made drone assassination a major instrument of US foreign policy, asserting the right to murder US citizens and carrying out the assassination of at least three Americans. In 2010, Biden himself declared persecuted journalist Julian Assange to be a “hi-tech terrorist.”
It is not a question of replacing Biden with some other servant of American imperialism and Wall Street and promoting the middle class politics of racial and gender identity. The crisis requires the mobilization of the mass of workers, who are increasingly fighting back against the return-to-work campaign of both big business parties, and behind them all genuinely progressive elements in the middle class, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program in opposition to the entire two-party system and the ruling class it defends.

After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama 

administrations orchestrated the bailout of 

Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts, 

particularly in mortgage-backed securities, 

that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of 

speculation. As a result, social inequality 

increased to record levels. Corporate cash 

hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion 

was funneled into stock buybacks.



Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences

of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply 

been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale. Once 

again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to 

restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.

The Great Wall Street Heist of 2020

28 April 2020
The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have devastating consequences for the vast majority of the population in the United States. The new month begins on Friday, which means that rents and mortgages will come due for tens of millions of workers who have no income to pay for them.
More than 20 million people have filed for unemployment benefits over the past five weeks. In March, less than 30 percent of those who filed received any benefits. Millions more are ineligible for any assistance.
Millions of people have yet to receive anything, including the $1,200 federal cash stimulus, and are desperately attempting to stave off destitution. Food banks are overwhelmed by demand and are running out of staple goods. According to the Economic Policy Institute, more than nine million people who lost their jobs have also lost their health insurance through April 11, with millions more in the weeks that have followed.
There are, however, two realities, two 
Americas. While the economic destitution of 
workers is being used in an effort to drive 
them back to work over widespread 
opposition, the corporate and financial 
oligarchy has seen its fortunes increase.
Gigantic corporations, many of which have massive cash hoards, are laying off employees while continuing to pay executives. Entertainment giant Disney recently came under public scrutiny over the fact that it has furloughed more than 100,000 workers while maintaining its executive compensation program. But this is the general rule.
US billionaires, since mid-March, have 
increased their wealth by $282 billion. The 
collective fortune of these 614 individuals, 
which totals $3.2 trillion, has been buoyed by 
the continued rise of share values on Wall 
Street, which increased sharply again on 
Monday.
A headline in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel yesterday captured the economic situation: “The death toll in the US is rising—so are the markets.” Noting that while businesses remain shut down and joblessness exceeds by far anything seen in American history, Der Spiegel writes: “So if the fundamental economic data actually offer so little incentive to buy, what is behind the rally? The solution to the riddle has three letters: Fed.”
The Fed—that is, the US Federal Reserve—has made clear that it will do everything in its power to support Wall Street. As a consequence, the markets keep going up. “If you wanted to bet on price losses,” Der Spiegel remarks, “you would have to bet against an institution whose funds are practically infinite.”
Beginning in March, as the Trump administration and the media were downplaying the danger posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the Federal Reserve began funneling money into the markets—first by reducing interest rates to zero, then by initiating a raft of programs to buy up assets from banks and corporations, providing them with cash to purchase stocks.
The activity of the Federal Reserve was endorsed unanimously by the US Congress in late March, when it passed the “CARES Act,” which allocated $454 billion to finance up to $4 trillion in asset purchases. Every single senator voted for the CARES Act, including the erstwhile “democratic socialist” from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
The Fed is spending something on the order of $80 billion every day. The central bank’s balance sheet is expected to increase to as much as $11 trillion, from less than $4 trillion last year and less than $1 trillion before 2008. This would bring the overall value of assets held by the Fed to nearly half the entire annual economic output of the United States.
One should call things by their right names. Terms such as “asset purchases” and “quantitative easing” tend to obscure what is happening. This is plunder, thievery, robbery on an unprecedented scale. Since stock ownership is overwhelmingly concentrated among the rich, it is the rich who are benefiting.
The Great Wall Street Heist of 2020 has been aided and abetted at every stage by the Democratic and Republican parties. The various institutions of the state, including the mainstream media, have exposed themselves as nothing more than the paid hirelings of Wall Street, to put the matter delicately. Others might have more expressive terms.
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama administrations orchestrated the bailout of Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts, particularly in mortgage-backed securities, that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of speculation. As a result, social inequality increased to record levels. Corporate cash hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced to pay for the economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and corporations have simply been bailed out again, this time on a far larger scale. Once again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
Everything turned over to Wall Street will be paid, in one form or another, by the working class--through austerity, the further destruction of social programs and intensified exploitation. Hence the relentless campaign to return everyone back to work, risking a new wave of the pandemic and the deaths of countless thousands of people.
Such measures, we are told, are necessary to “save the
economy.” But “the economy,” like the “American people,” is an abstraction. “The economy” that has been “saved” is the economy of the rich, capitalism. Every measure taken has 
been based on protecting the interests of  the oligarchy at the expense of society. 
Every policy has been guided by class interests.
A socialist response, that is, one based on the interests of the working class, is of an entirely different character. Trillions must be allocated, not to bail out Wall Street, but to implement an emergency program to build up health care infrastructure and provide protective equipment to all essential workers.
The loans and other mechanisms through which the income of workers is earmarked for payments to the banks must be immediately forgiven. Student debt ($1.5 trillion), car loans ($1.3 trillion) and credit card debt ($1.08 trillion) could all be wiped out with the money that has been turned over to Wall Street, with trillions still left over.
All workers must continue to receive their full income for the duration of the pandemic. The highest quality health care must be available to all, free of charge and on a completely equal basis.
There must, moreover, be real assistance to small businesses. The so-called Paycheck Protection Program passed by Congress, ostensibly to aid small businesses, has turned out to be another massive swindle for large corporations, including restaurant chains, hotel conglomerates and hedge funds.
Such actions and other emergency measures to secure the interests of the working class, in the United States and internationally, could not and cannot be secured within the framework of the existing state institutions.
The entire response to the pandemic—from the initial downplaying of the threat to the failure to organize any significant response, the massive handout to Wall Street and the present campaign to force workers back to work even as the pandemic rages—is proof of the Marxist theory of the state. The state is not a neutral body. The financial oligarchy rules. It is their state. The politicians are their politicians. The media is their media.
The logistics, food production, health care, energy, manufacturing and other basic industries must be restructured to meet social needs, under the democratic control of the working class. The massive bailouts of Wall Street must be reversed, with the social resources redirected to securing the financial well-being and health of the working class.
Such policies cannot be realized within the existing political system. They raise the necessity for the revolutionary mobilization of the working class to take political power in its own hands through the establishment of a workers’ government—that is, a government of the workers, by the workers and for the workers—that will implement the socialist policies required to save mankind from disaster.

Questions Swirl as Fed Meets Amid Deepening Economic Crisis

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve has largely calmed turbulent financial markets. Yet a far tougher task remains: Helping rescue an economy and job market that appear to be free-falling into the worst catastrophe since the Great Depression.

Fed policymakers will meet Tuesday and Wednesday against a backdrop of dismal data: More than 26 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits since the coronavirus forced widespread business closures. Retail sales have dropped by a record pace. Home sales have plunged.
In the meantime, inflation has started to fall amid the collapse in economic activity and is sure to sink further below the Fed’s 2% target level. With beleaguered hotels, airlines and retailers slashing prices, inflation could fall to 1% or less by year’s end. That poses another problem for the Fed: Declining prices can eventually lead consumers to delay spending, thereby slowing the economy further.
In response, the Fed has slashed its benchmark interest rate to near zero in two emergency moves and launched an alphabet soup of lending programs — nine in total — to pump cash into financial markets. The central bank has also bought about $1.4 trillion in Treasury securities to ensure that banks can swap Treasurys for cash and keep rates low.


AS THE MASSIVE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE EXPANDS TO ALL STATES, PENSIONS FOR LEGALS MUST BE DESTROYED TO MAKE THE NUMBERS WORK. IN CALIFORNIA, THE FIRST PRIORITY ARE ILLEGALS SO THEY  KEEP VOTING DEMOCRAT.

Neither McConnell nor the Democrats have any problem giving free money—in unlimited amounts—to Wall Street.

On Wednesday, Forbes published a commentary titled “Kiss Your State Pension Goodbye.” It noted: “This is hardly the first time letting states file for bankruptcy to escape trillions of dollars in promised retirement benefits has been proposed.”

 

Senate Majority Leader McConnell calls for states to declare bankruptcy and gut pensions


25 April 2020
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday called for state governments facing mounting deficits linked to the coronavirus crisis to file for bankruptcy instead of receiving financial aid from the federal government.
Specifically targeting public sector workers’ pensions, the Kentucky Republican told right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt: “I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated. There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.”
States currently have no legal right to declare bankruptcy, but McConnell suggested a law to permit it, saying, “I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route.” He added, “We have governors regardless of party who would love to have free money.”
McConnell’s office on Wednesday released a statement titled “Stopping [Democratic-led] Blue State Bailouts.”
Declaring bankruptcy would allow state governments to override laws and even state constitutional provisions that guarantee the pension benefits of retired public workers. On Wednesday, Forbes published a commentary titled “Kiss Your State Pension Goodbye.” It noted: “This is hardly the first time letting states file for bankruptcy to escape trillions of dollars in promised retirement benefits has been proposed.”
The author cited a 2011 column by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the Los Angeles Times calling for change in federal bankruptcy laws to allow states to “reorganize their finances.”
Neither McConnell nor the Democrats have any problem giving free money—in unlimited amounts—to Wall Street. The Senate majority leader’s statement came one day after the Senate voted by unanimous consent for a new $484 billion bill that will funnel money disproportionately to large businesses, in the guise of aiding small businesses and their employees. The bipartisan bill was approved by the House of Representatives on Thursday, with only one dissenting Democratic vote, and signed into law Friday by President Donald Trump.
The new legislation includes an additional $310 billion for the so-called “Paycheck Protection Program” (PPP) enacted last month as part of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act corporate bailout. The Democrats dropped their demands that the new legislation include money to aid state and local governments and additional funding for food stamps. They claimed that aid to the states and localities facing collapsing tax revenues would be forthcoming in a new bailout bill to be negotiated with the White House and congressional Republicans.
Trump reiterated at his Thursday White House briefing that he was open to discussing aid to the states as part of the next bailout bill, but he added that “a lot of people” were sympathetic to McConnell’s position, and he singled out for attack “blue” states, naming Illinois. The White House is seeking to use the fiscal crisis of state and local governments and the possibility of federal aid as leverage to force them to reopen their economies more rapidly.
The Democrats voted to top up the PPP, which exhausted its $349 billion funding in less than two weeks, even though multiple reports had emerged that the vast majority of family-owned businesses had been shut out of the loan program while scores of large publicly traded companies had received millions of dollars in forgivable loans, and the Wall Street banks assigned to handle the Small Business Administration financing had made $10 billion in fees.
In saying it would be preferable to allow states and cities to go bankrupt rather than provide them with a small fraction of the trillions doled out by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to corporations and banks, McConnell was expressing the outlook of the corporate-financial oligarchy that runs America. Working through both of its political parties, it has responded to the deadly pandemic by opposing any diversion of resources from its private wealth to save lives and contain the virus, and instead orchestrated the unlimited transfer of taxpayer money to prop up the stock market and make itself even richer.
Now it is moving to use the crisis to lay waste to what remains of social services and benefits on which hundreds of millions of working class people depend. This too is, in all essentials, a bipartisan policy.
The Democratic-aligned Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, published an editorial Friday that chastised McConnell and called for aid to states and cities. At the same time, it lined up behind McConnell’s attack on pensions, denouncing the call by the Illinois Senate president, a Democrat, for $10 billion in federal aid to stave off the collapse of the state’s pension system. It declared that the federal government should not aid pension systems whose problems are “self-inflicted.”
The National Governors Association has requested $500 billion in federal aid, a fraction of the trillions injected into the financial markets, to avert a collapse of basic social services, from education and health care to sanitation and firefighting, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, as well as the wages and pensions of state and municipal workers.
State and local officials of both parties fear a social explosion as the ruling class demands that workers return to work without any protection from infection, unemployment reaches Depression-era levels, millions of laid off workers are blocked from applying for benefits as a result of antiquated and overwhelmed state benefit systems, and outrage grows over the callous indifference of the political establishment to massive human suffering and death.
McConnell’s statement has intensified tensions between the states and the federal government. Trump has rejected calls by governors for federal money and coordination to ramp up coronavirus testing. Last month he suggested that New York state be quarantined, provoking Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo to call it a “civil war measure.” Earlier this month Trump declared that he had “absolute authority” to force the states to reopen their economies on his timeline.
Democratic governors, in particular, have denounced McConnell’s proposal. On Thursday, Cuomo called the bankruptcy suggestion “one of the saddest, really dumb comments of all time.” On Friday he denounced it as “un-American.”
Some Republicans have joined in. New York Congressman Peter King called McConnell’s remarks “shameful and indefensible,” and dubbed him the “Marie Antoinette of the Senate.”
However, none of them have pointed to the contrast between the senator’s attitude to providing money to maintain social services and pensions and his avid support for bailing out Wall Street. That is because the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans, supports the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the oligarchy.
Even as Democratic governors and mayors criticize Trump and the Republicans for withholding federal aid, they are preparing massive budget cuts. Not one has even proposed raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy to avoid the destruction of vital services and the impoverishment of working class families.
Moody’s Analytics has warned that states may face combined deficits of $158 billion to $203 billion through the 2021 fiscal year. More than 2,100 cities across the country expect budget deficits this year.
New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, has frozen more than $1 billion in spending and cut property tax rebates for homeowners. Responding to McConnell’s bankruptcy proposal, Murphy said Wednesday that without federal support his state would not go bankrupt. Instead, he declared, “We will just cut, cut, cut and cut.”
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, is seeking to freeze $2.3 billion in new spending, scuttling a program for free tuition at community colleges and canceling an increase in the state minimum wage.
Washington state Governor Jay Inslee, also a Democrat, this month vetoed budget items projected to cost $445 million over three years, including a plan to hire 370 school guidance counselors.
New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced last week that he would slash over $2 billion in city services over the next year. He plans to close public pools, reduce sanitation pickups, suspend the summer youth employment program and impose a hiring freeze.
Michigan may have a deficit as high as $7 billion over the next 18 months. Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan, has threatened to throw the city back into bankruptcy and bring in an emergency financial manager to impose new cuts in social services, pensions and jobs.
Whatever their policy differences, the two parties are united in ruling out any challenge to the capitalist profit system and the entrenched wealth of a parasitic ruling elite. They all agree that the full burden of the pandemic crisis must be borne by working people.


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