BIDENOMICS - The Massive Transfer of Wealth to the Rich and Wall Street and Then Illegals Get Our Jobs to Keep Wages Depressed.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-fool-in-white-house-biden-economy.html
Old Joe Biden has been a liar his entire public life, from his plagiarism in law school and on the presidential campaign trail to his lies about the accident that killed his first wife and the innumerable lies he has told while pretending to be president. It is no exaggeration to say that Joe Biden is one of the most untrustworthy men on the planet. On Friday he reinforced that reputation with a major speech on the May jobs report, in which he had the breathtaking audacity to say that the smoking ruin of an economy over which he is presiding, and which his far-Left policies created, is actually doing great. Maybe if we tilt our heads and squint, we’ll be able to see it.
Poll: Half of Americans now predict U.S. may 'cease to be a democracy' someday
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that most Democrats (55%) and Republicans (53%) now believe it is “likely” that America will “cease to be a democracy in the future” — a stunning expression of bipartisan despair about the direction of the country.
Half of all Americans (49%) express the same sentiment when independents and those who do not declare any political affiliation are factored in, while just a quarter (25%) consider the end of U.S. democracy unlikely and another quarter (25%) say they’re unsure.
At the same time, however, a large number of Americans seem indifferent to the high-profile hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — an effort to get to the bottom of one of the most dramatic assaults on the democratic process in U.S. history.
In fact, the new survey of 1,541 U.S. adults — which was conducted from June 10 (the day after the committee’s first hearing) to June 13 (the day of its second) — found that fewer than 1 in 4 (24%) say they watched last Thursday’s initial primetime broadcast live. Only slightly more (27%) say they caught news coverage later. Nearly half (49%) say they did not follow the hearings at all.
So while the data indicates that many Americans seem to be losing faith in the future of U.S. democracy, relatively few seem interested in reckoning with a real-life attempt to undermine it. That raises a disturbing question: Have Americans simply given up on democracy?
The poll doesn’t go quite that far. But it does suggest that Americans have largely given up on each other.
As usual, partisanship is key to understanding what’s happening here. Live viewership of the hearings was lowest among Donald Trump voters (9%), Republicans (13%) and Fox News viewers (22%); it was highest among Joe Biden voters (47%), Democrats (44%) and viewers of MSNBC (52%). Nearly three-quarters (72%) of those who watched identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.
In part as a result, less than half of Americans (45%) say they believe the Democrat-led committee’s central claim: that the Jan. 6 attack “was part of a conspiracy to overturn the election.” The rest either say it was not (35%) or that they’re unsure (20%).
Likewise, just 37% of Americans believe there was a conspiracy and that “Donald Trump was at the center of [it]” — the committee’s other major argument.
Again, partisan affiliation defines these views: 84% of Biden voters and 77% of Democrats believe the attack was part of a conspiracy to overturn the election; 71% of Trump voters and 59% of Republicans believe the attack was not part of such a conspiracy. Independents are evenly split — 39% yes versus 41% no — on the question.
But if Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are largely dismissive of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, then why are most of them pessimistic about the future of democracy? For the same reason most refused to watch the hearings in the first place: because they see Democrats — not the Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol — as the real problem.
And Democrats largely feel the same way about Republicans.
When asked to choose the phrase that best “describes most people on the other side of the political aisle from you,” a majority of Republicans pick extreme negatives such as “out of touch with reality” (30%), a “threat to America” (25%), “immoral” (8%) and a “threat to me personally” (4%). A tiny fraction select more sympathetic phrases such as “well-meaning” (4%) or “not that different from me” (6%).
The results among Democrats are nearly identical, with negatives such as “out of touch with reality” (27%), a “threat to America” (23%), “immoral” (7%) and a “threat to me personally” (4%) vastly outnumbering positives such as “well-meaning” (7%) or “not that different from me” (5%).
Meanwhile, the number of Trump and Biden voters who say the other side is primarily a threat to America (28% and 25%, respectively) is double the number who say the other side is primarily “wrong about policy” (14% and 13%).
This explains why 43% of Republicans continue to say that “left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad” deserve “the most blame” for Jan. 6, versus just 7% who blame Trump himself, 10% for “Trump supporters who gathered at the Capitol” and 12% for “right-wing groups like the Proud Boys” — even though there is zero evidence that liberals were involved.
It also helps explain why members of the Jan. 6 committee have their work cut out for them if they hope to move public opinion. The new Yahoo News/YouGov survey suggests that outrage toward the targets of the House investigation has only eroded over the last seven months.
While still confined to a small minority, belief that the attack on the Capitol was “justified” (17%) has risen 5 percentage points since December (12%); it is now the highest it has ever been.
The number of Americans who describe Jan. 6 participants as “primarily peaceful and law-abiding” (30%) has also gone up 6 points (from 24%) since December.
At the same time, the number of Americans assigning “a great deal” of blame to Trump for the Jan. 6 attack has fallen 6 points (from 45% to 39%), as have the numbers saying the same about “Republicans who claimed the election had been stolen” (down from 42% to 36%) and “Trump supporters who gathered at the U.S. Capitol” (down from 50% to 43%).
And while 60% of Americans said in December that they believed “another attack like January 6 could happen in the future,” fewer (53%) say that now.
The survey does contain one small kernel of hope for the House committee. In December, 72% of Republicans predicted the committee would not “tell the truth” about Jan. 6. But today, the number of Republicans who say the committee is not telling the truth is 12 points lower (60%), while the number who say they’re not sure is 10 points higher (28%). That could suggest some openness to persuasion.
Yet even such uncertainty is likely to be consumed by partisan animosity in the end. A full 60% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans now believe America is becoming a “less democratic country”; just 23% say the country is becoming “more democratic.”
Republicans in particular are far more inclined to agree that America treated “people like them” fairly “in the past” (71%) than “today” (36%) — though more Democrats also say the former (50%) than the latter (46%).
A majority of Republicans (52%) also say it’s likely that “there will be a civil war in the United States in [their] lifetime”; half of independents (50%) and a plurality of Democrats (46%) agree. In each group, fewer than 4 in 10 say another civil war is unlikely.
And perhaps most unsettling of all, only about half of Americans are willing to rule out “physical violence” (50%) and “taking up arms against the government” (47%) when asked if there are times when such measures “would be justified in order to protect the country from radical extremists.” About a quarter of Americans say that violence (26%) and taking up arms (23%) could be justified.
These tendencies, it’s worth noting, are particularly pronounced on the right — as Jan. 6 itself demonstrated. Nearly 8 in 10 Trump voters (79%) say “limiting free speech” is off-limits as a method to protect the country from radical extremists; 65% say the same about “protesting outside personal residences of government officials.” Yet only 39% reject taking up arms against the government in such situations — and nearly as many (31%) say it could be justified.
Just 15% of Biden voters agree.
VIDEO OF THE END
Chris Hedges | American Republic IS DEAD
Wall Street slide continues in lead-up to crucial Fed decision
The slide on Wall Street continued yesterday ahead of the Federal Reserve Board’s decision on interest rates tomorrow, after the stock market entered bear market territory on Monday closing at a level more than 20 percent below its record high in January.
The S&P 500 Index dropped a further 0.4 percent after tumbling by 3.9 percent the previous day. So far this month it has fallen by 9.6 percent and is now 22 percent down from its previous high. The fall in the tech-heavy and highly interest rate-sensitive NASDAQ index is now down 33 percent from its previous high.
The immediate trigger for Monday’s sharp fall, which took place mainly in the last hour of trading, was a report in the Wall Street Journal that the Fed was actively considering lifting its base interest rate by 0.75 percentage points (75 basis points) rather than the 50-point increase that had been foreshadowed.
Irrespective of the Journal report, the 75-basis point rise was put on the table by the announcement on Friday that the Consumer Price Index for May was 8.6 percent. This dashed claims that the slight fall in the inflation rate for April meant that the price surge had peaked.
The demands of the ruling financial elites were set out in an editorial published in the Washington Post yesterday.
It said that “ideally” Federal Board Chair Jerome Powell and the central bank’s policy-making body should announce an increase in the benchmark rate by 1 percent.
“For the past month, top Fed officials have been signalling they will do a 50-basis-point increase, but that was before the disastrous May inflation report … that showed large price shocks in gas, groceries, rent, airfare, cars and various services. Inflation is broad-based. It won’t be easily cured.”
It said the “biggest risk” for the Fed was not doing enough to fight inflation. It had made this mistake earlier in the year and should not stumble again and “at a minimum” should enact a 50-basis-point rise and “heavily signal the possibility of a larger hike in July.”
The notion advanced by the Fed, propagated throughout the media, that it is somehow fighting inflation is an example of how all the agencies of the capitalist state seek to cover over the essential class content of their policies by insisting they are acting in the interests of the economy and the population.
Interest rate increases will do nothing to halt price rises. They will not untangle the global supply chains, thrown into chaos by the refusal of capitalist governments to take action to eliminate the COVID-19 pandemic, nor will they halt the price rises set off by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine.
They have one central purpose—to clamp down the rising wages struggles of the working class in the face of intolerable price increases now cutting living standards every time workers fill up the tanks of their cars and make purchases at a grocery story.
At the same time the interest rate hikes will see an escalation in mortgage repayments on inflated housing prices in the US and around the world, imposing a real cut in the disposable income of working class families struggling to put a roof over their heads.
For the past several months, since the Fed abandoned the fiction that inflation was “transitory,” Powell has referred to the “tight” labour market in all his public statements, insisting it is incompatible with the central bank’s stated aim of bringing down inflation to its stated target of 2 percent.
There have been continued references in the media to the experience of the 1970s and early 1980s when the struggles of workers, driven by major price hikes, shook governments around the world. In that period inflation was only brought under control by a deadly combination aimed at crushing that struggle.
The Fed, under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker, lifted interest rates to record highs—20 percent at one stage—inducing what was, to that point, the deepest recession since the 1930s while the trade union bureaucracy, starting with the betrayal of the air traffic controllers in 1981, worked to defeat every struggle of the working class.
Fearing above all else the development of the class struggle induced by the price hikes, the ruling classes are turning again to these methods. Powell has expressed his admiration for Volcker on numerous occasions as the “pro-union” President Biden relies on the union bureaucracies to suppress the rising tide of wages struggles.
As the Fed moves to lift interest rates, there are growing signs of a recession, with the rapid movements in the bond market providing an indication of what is to come. There has been a major selloff in Treasury bonds with the yield on the two-year Treasury note rising to a 15-year high of 3.45 percent yesterday. [The yield on bonds rises as their price falls.]
With the yield on the 10-year bond at 3.5 percent, the yield curve has come close to an inversion, where the yield on short-term debt is higher than that that on longer term bonds—often taken as an indication that the economy is about to enter a recession.
On Monday, the Financial Times reported that nearly 70 percent of leading academic economists that it had polled predicted the US economy would move into a recession by next year.
According to the FT, the survey results, collected earlier this month, “run counter to the Fed’s stance that it can damp demand without causing substantial economic hardship and pain.”
There are also indications that a major financial crisis is brewing. The pumping of trillions of dollars into the financial system by the Fed and other central banks over the past 15 years has created a massive speculative bubble which now threatens to burst.
The plunge in the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is an indication of this. Since reaching a record high of more than $3 trillion last November the market value of cryptocurrencies has fallen to less than $1 trillion – decline of more than 66 percent.
A month after the collapse of the crypto Terra stablecoin, Celsius Network, a major lender in crypto, which attracted investors with claims it could bring returns of 17 percent, announced on Sunday evening that it was halting withdrawals and transfers “due to extreme market conditions.” This was followed by the decision of Binance, a major crypto exchange, that it was halting bitcoin withdrawals.
The turbulence is not confined to cryptocurrencies. Reporting on Monday’s Wall Street selloff, Bloomberg cited a portfolio manager at an investment firm who said the situation recalled the conditions of the 2008 financial crisis. “Liquidity in the market is worse than it was leading up to Lehman,” he said, referring to the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers which triggered the crash.
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