AMERICA'S SORRY STATE

“And the causes are complicated. A big part of
the story is the ascendency of corporate
America at the same time that American
communities were being defenestrated.”

It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards.

America's Sorry State

http://www.weeklystandard.com/americas-sorry-state/article/2007223?

11:50 AM, MAR 16, 2017 | By JONATHAN V. LAST
  
Art Credit: Thomas Fluharty
A few years ago I wrote a piece where I asked whether or the '00s had been worse than the '70s. At the time, I thought it was a close call, one that could go either way. Today, I'm not so sure.
I'd point you to two recent pieces that you simply have to read in order to understand America as it exists now. The first is by my colleague Christopher Caldwell, writing about the opioid epidemic over at First Things. It's an amazing, magisterial piece.
In taking full measure of where we are and how we got here, Caldwell argues that the scope of the problem we face is difficult to fully comprehend:
Salisbury, Massachusetts (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1638, and the opium crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The town lost one young person in the decade-long Vietnam War. It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years. Last summer, Huntington, West Virginia (pop. 49,000), saw twenty-eight overdoses in four hours. Episodes like these played a role in the decline in U.S. life expectancy in 2015. The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises. . . .

A heroin scourge in America's housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000. The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his soul ballad "Freddie's Dead." The crack epidemic of the mid- to late 1980s was worse, with a death rate reaching almost two per 100,000. George H. W. Bush declared war on drugs. The present opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 people per 100,000, and that is without the fentanyl-impacted statistics from 2016. In some states it is far worse: over thirty per 100,000 in New Hampshire and over forty in West Virginia.

And the causes are complicated. 

A big part of the story is the 

ascendency of corporate America

at the same time that American 

communities were being 

defenestrated. 

But it also has something to do with a culture that can't say no to anything, that doesn't believe in taboo, that feels the need to excuse and expunge and relieve people of agency.

 Again, go read Caldwell's piece. It's amazing.

The other blockbuster essay comes from my friend Nick Eberstadt in the new issue of Commentary.(And by the by, if you haven't subscribed to Commentary, you should. It's a truly great magazine.) In "Our Miserable 21st Century" Eberstadt takes a more general, 30,000-foot view of modern America. He examines reams of data—on finances, income, health, social mobility, and more—and the picture he paints is one of a nation in serious trouble. Decline, even.

Take economic growth: Economists now believe that the potential growth rate for the United States—that is, the rate at which the 
economy would grow at full employment—is just 1.7 percent. Which means that the long-term growth rate is under 1 percent. The work rates for the population have similarly been revised downward. The rosy unemployment numbers you hear on the 
news are based on the assumption that the percentage of Americans in the labor force will never again be as high as it was in 2001. 

BLOG: DURING OBAMA'S EIGHT YEARS of OPEN BORDERS, 2/3 OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN OR ILLEGALS!

Here's Eberstadt:

As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation's work rate today were back  up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers.

They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

What's worse, this collapse of work post-2000 has coincided with an explosion of wealth for the wealth-holders.

There's no way for these opposing trends to lead to either economic or cultural or political stability.

It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards. Where geographic mobility is in its third straight decade of decline and social mobility is collapsing, too. In 1977, the average 30-year-old was almost a sure bet to be earning more money than his parents were making at the same age—he had an 86 percent chance. Today, his odds are just about even-money—51 percent.

Like I said, go read Eberstadt's sensational piece. This is the America of 2017. Donald Trump isn't Reagan. And morning isn't coming.

AFTER DESTROYING THE DEMOCRAT PARTY and the 

 AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, OBAMA NOW VOWS TO 

 BUILD A PRO-MUSLIM DICTATORSHIP FUNDED BY 

 GEORGE SOROS AND OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS.


Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media. 

*

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

US health care debate: A bipartisan drive to lower life expectancy
16 March 2017
The new overhaul in the US health care system that is being prepared is a highpoint in a war against the working class in the United States. The debate in Washington and the media obscures the basic motivation guiding both big business parties: to restrict access to affordable health care and sharply reduce the life expectancy of American workers.
The divisions between the Democrats and Republicans are over secondary and tactical questions. Far from “repealing and replacing” Obamacare, the Republican proposal builds on its basic framework while driving up the number of uninsured workers, making health care unaffordable for older, lower- and middle-income workers, and accelerating the destruction of Medicaid and Medicare.
The aim is to free up resources for a massive increase in military spending, while funneling even more money to the stock market and the financial aristocracy. It is a continuation of a decades-long social counterrevolution, pursued regardless which party controlled the White House and Congress.
According to the Congressional Budget Office report released Monday, 21 million Americans will lose coverage by 2020, and 24 million by 2026. How many of these people will die as a consequence?
Under the Republican House plan, a 64-year-old worker earning $26,500 will see his or her premium increase from $1,700 to $14,600 by 2026 due to the disproportionate cuts in tax credits for older consumers. A 21-year-old earning the same amount would see his or her premium drop from $1,700 to $1,450.
In so far as overall premiums drop, this is because older workers—whose health care costs are higher—will simply leave the market because they can no longer pay for insurance. The result will be a sharp increase in mortality and fall in life expectancy, which is already on the decline in the US due to the rise in suicides, drug abuse and other social ills.
These changes are only a prelude to raising the eligibility age for Medicare to 67 and beyond and transforming it into a voucher program. At the same time, the Republican plan would slash funding for Medicaid—the federal entitlement program for the poor—by 25 percent by 2026, reducing the number of Medicaid beneficiaries by 17 percent, or 14 million people. Trump’s appointee to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Seema Verma, has already tested out work requirements for Medicaid and health savings accounts in Indiana.
When Medicare was passed in 1965, a byproduct of a powerful wave of social struggles, the average life expectancy of a male in the US was 66.8 years, and for working class men it was even lower. At the time, the government program was designed to provide a couple of years of health care. But to the growing horror of the American ruling class, increased access to health care and major advances in science and medicine led to a significant increase in life expectancy, with the government paying out benefits for a decade or two longer than had been anticipated.
The mid-1960s was also the period when many workers secured pensions and won retiree health care benefits, which enabled them to live many years after they stopped producing profits for corporate America.
This has provoked ever-greater anger and bitterness in the ruling class. By the 1990s, there was a chorus of complaints about the aging population, and how out-of-control health care costs were undermining the global competitiveness of US businesses. In 2005, Delphi CEO Steve Miller complained that “people are living longer these days.” He declared that employer-paid benefits made sense only in an era when “you worked for one employer till age 65 and then died at age 70…”
Obamacare was the first significant effort to reverse this trend by undermining the system of employer-paid health benefits and shifting the costs of medical care from the corporations and the government onto the backs of workers. The plan, drawn up by insurance and medical business interests, rationed care and dumped low-income workers into barebones plans.
In opposition to all of those who claimed Obamacare was a progressive social reform, the World Socialist Web Site explained that it was the opening shot of a health care counterrevolution aimed at stripping the working class of access to affordable and decent coverage, and substantially reducing life expectancy. This assault is now being vastly expanded.
The war against the working class in the US is inseparable from the criminal wars being fought abroad. In a major article in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2016, entitled, “Preserving Primacy: A Defense Strategy for the New Administration,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry and national security strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. concluded that expanding US military operations against China, Russia, Iran and preserving US military domination would require taking on “the expanding cost of entitlement programs.” The main confrontation the next administration would have would be on “the domestic front,” they wrote.
The assault on health care, like the attack on jobs and living standards, the attack on immigrants and democratic rights, and the drive to war, will provoke enormous social opposition. The fight against Trump requires a fight against the bankrupt capitalist system and both big business parties, which laid the groundwork for the most reactionary government in US history.
This requires the building of a revolutionary leadership to unite every form of social opposition in mass political movement of the working class for a workers’ government and socialism. This is the only way that profit can be taken out of health care and high quality medical coverage established as a social right for all.

OBAMA-CLINTON-TRUMPERNOMICS... Will it finish off the American middle-class?

"The Tax Policy Center finds that for the top 0.1 percent of income earners—those making more than $3.75 million annually—repealing this investment tax would amount to an average tax cut of $165,090."

 “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 eight years of the Obama administration--begun with promises of “hope” and “change” and filled instead with endless war, attacks on jobs and living standards, and the steady erosion of social services such as education and health care--created the conditions for the Republican takeover of Congress and finally the victory of Donald Trump.

….. the American Middle-Class at death’s door and knocking ….

THE DEATH OF AMERICA: MEXICO SERVES UP THE HEROIN.


In West Virginia, 5,182 children were in foster care in 2016, most orphaned by the heroin epidemic. 

The death toll translates into an average of one fatal overdose every 12 hours in the state of West Virginia.

THE DEATH of WHITE AMERICA

“Whites had the highest rate of overdose deaths of any ethnicity, more than double the combined death rate for blacks and Latinos.”

“The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart News.”

Republicans push plan to gut Medicaid and slash taxes for the wealthy
By Kate Randall
13 March 2017
Top Trump administration officials appeared on the political talk shows Sunday morning to promote the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the House Republican bill for the repeal and replacement of Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.
The Republican proposal builds on the core features of Obamacare, designed to boost the profits of the private insurers and slash health care costs for the government and big business.
The ACHA seeks to strengthen the grip of the for-profit health care delivery system in America while making sweeping cuts to Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor jointly funded by the federal government and the states. It also slashes financial assistance to low-income people seeking to purchase health coverage and cuts taxes for the wealthy and big business by an estimated $600 billion.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is expected to release its numbers on the Republican plan today. The Brookings Institution on Thursday predicted that the CBO’s analysis will likely find that at least 15 million people stand to lose coverage under the AHCA by the end of the 10-year scoring window.
In a prerecorded interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price attempted to evade moderator Chuck Todd’s question: “Can you say for certain that once this bill is passed nobody, nobody will be worse off financially when it comes to paying for health care?”
Price answered by pointing to the high premiums under Obamacare and the fact that patients are forgoing health care as a result of high deductibles and out-of-pocket costs. The HHS secretary, a rabid opponent of Medicaid, Medicare and government “intrusion” into health care, knows full well the Republican plan will make the situation for millions of working people, as bad as it is under Obamacare, even worse.
Todd pointed to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimate that the $4,000 tax credit that a 60-year-old in Fayette County, West Virginia would get under the AHCA “is almost $8,000 less than they would get under Obamacare.” Price brushed this off, defending the Republican plan’s tax credits, which would provide from $2,000 to $4,000 to those making up to $75,000, based purely on age and not income, with older people receiving the most.
A KFF analysis has found that for virtually every age group of individuals with incomes of $20,000-$40,000 and families making $40,000-$75,000, tax credits would be substantially lower under the ACHA than the subsidies provided under Obamacare.
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney appeared on ABC’s “This Week” program. Host George Stephanopoulos raised that independent analysts had projected that there will be about “$370 billion less in federal funding for Medicaid over the next 10 years” under the AHCA. He asked how this squared with Trump’s promises during his presidential bid that there would be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
The OMB director defended the Medicaid funding cuts, saying, “The Medicaid system as it exists today is a one-size fits-all system. We fixed that. You can provide better services for less if we get the federal government out of the way.”
In addition to the massive cuts to Medicaid, the AHCA would implement the de facto end of the program as an entitlement by 2020. Federal funding based on need would be replaced with a per capita cap, forcing states to cut benefits and deny coverage to qualified beneficiaries.
The plan would also eliminate the enhanced matching federal funds for Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, which has enrolled about 10 million people. Taken together, these cutbacks will result in denial of benefits and care to millions of poor, disabled and elderly people and to pregnant women. Some 74 million people are currently covered by Medicaid.
Republican opponents of the bill are pushing for the funding changes to Medicaid to be pushed forward to as early as next year. Mulvaney said he was willing to consider this and other amendments to the plan.
He said, “I think Congressman Morgan Griffith from Virginia had some really good ideas regarding things like changing the expansion date or perhaps putting work requirements in on Medicaid—those are great ideas that would improve the bill. If the House sees fit to make the bill better, they’d certainly have the support of the White House.”
A number of Republican governors are already pushing to impose a work requirement for Medicaid for low-income adults without disabilities.
Last year, under Obama, hundreds of thousands of so-called ABAWDs (able-bodied adults without dependents) were cut off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, due to the return in many areas of a three-month limit on benefits for unemployed adults aged 18-49 who are not disabled or raising minor children.
If a work requirement is implemented for Medicaid, recipients who cannot prove their disability, or are unable to find work, could summarily be denied benefits. Many of these individuals, the poorest of the poor, would be the same people who have lost their SNAP benefits.
Stephanopoulos raised new figures showing that the AHCA “will provide about $157 billion in tax cuts to people of incomes over $1 million in the next 10 years, yet older Americans, middle-income Americans, are going to be paying more for their insurance.”
The budget director was indifferent, saying, “Look, we promised to repeal the taxes for Obamacare. That’s what the bill does.” He pointed to features of the AHCA that would allow people at every income level to put away unlimited funds tax-free in health savings accounts (HSAs). He also claimed that “lower premiums that come from competition” would ease the burden on ordinary Americans.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that these unlimited HSAs would result in $19 billion in tax savings—almost exclusively for the wealthy. For workers and their families who are struggling to pay for basic necessities such as food, housing and utilities, the concept of squirreling away “surplus” money to pay for health care is an absurdity.
The Republicans’ AHCA is making its way through various House Committees, and Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, hopes to bring it before the full House before the end of March. The Democrats are opposing the legislation, making the defense of Obamacare their main domestic agenda, second only to their anti-Russian campaign against Trump.
However, the differences between the Democrats and Republicans on health care are essentially a conflict between two right-wing factions within the ruling elite. Both parties uphold the principle of private ownership and the subordination of the health care system to the capitalist private market. Obamacare has paved the way for an even more ferocious attack on health care for the working class by Trump and the Republicans.

 THE TRUMP AMNESTY…. Yes, he lied again!
"If true, it shows Trump being the ultimate cynic and not having the courage to state his true beliefs to the American public who elected him.  That's always been my biggest problem with Trump: his lack of integrity and consistent belief system." ----- ED STRAKER

THE DEATH of WHITE AMERICA
 “Whites had the highest rate of overdose deaths of any ethnicity, more than double the combined death rate for blacks and Latinos.”

THE IMPACT OF TRUMPERnomics AND THE MASSIVE TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE SUPER RICH

AMERICA: One paycheck and two illegals away from homelessness.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/12/america-one-paycheck-and-two-illegals.html

"The economists found that the pre-tax share of national income received by the bottom half of the US population has been cut nearly in half since 1980, from 20 percent to 12 percent, while the income share of the top one percent has nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 20 percent."

SOARING POVERTY IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/01/soaring-poverty-in-american-where.html

TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH:

“In the US, the working class will confront a government unlike any other in American history, which will continue and intensify a decades-long social counterrevolution overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The incoming Trump administration is manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries. It is a government of, by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every remaining gain won by workers over the past century.”

US ruling elite moves to repeal the 1960s

14 March 2017
The repeal of Obamacare, which began last week with the introduction of legislation drafted by Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, working in conjunction with the Trump administration, has become the vehicle for a much wider program of social reaction.
The new legislation, which will cut off health coverage for 24 million people, will essentially put an end to Medicaid, one of the major social reforms of the 1960s, a program that has funded health care for tens of millions of poor, blind or otherwise disabled people, as well as nursing home care for the low-income elderly. It sets the stage, as Ryan has indicated, for even more sweeping legislation that will undermine and eventually destroy Medicare, which has provided health coverage for most elderly people in the United States for more than 50 years.
The major social gains of the 1960s--the last period of significant social reform in American history--are in the final stages of liquidation. This is the culmination of a protracted historical process that began almost as soon as the American ruling elite made its decision, driven by the breakdown of the post-World War II economic boom, to shift from policies of relative class compromise to ruthless class warfare. The initial steps were taken as long ago as the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter (1977-81), which began to curb social welfare spending and targeted striking coal miners for government intervention under the Taft-Hartley Law.
The attacks were accelerated greatly under Republican Ronald Reagan, who smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike, giving the green light for a decade of corporate union-busting and wage-cutting, and slashed federal social spending to fuel a record military buildup. Reagan set the pace for further attacks on the programs established in the 1960s and even in the 1930s, from Clinton’s abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children to Bush’s targeting of aid to public education with his “No Child Left Behind” legislation, co-authored by Democrat Edward Kennedy, and the first steps towards the privatization of Medicare.
The Obama administration did not mark a reversal of this decades-long process, but rather its intensification. Obamacare was not an expansion of the welfare state, as its apologists claimed, but a reactionary effort to shift the cost of health care from employers and the government to working people. The all-out support of the Democrats for this legislation, worked out in collaboration with the insurance industry and the drug monopolies, testifies to the rightward evolution of the Democratic Party over the past 40 years.
The eight years of the Obama administration--begun with promises of “hope” and “change” and filled instead with endless war, attacks on jobs and living standards, and the steady erosion of social services such as education and health care--created the conditions for the Republican takeover of Congress and finally the victory of Donald Trump.
The ideologues of capitalism claim that the “free market” will work wonders if only the restraints placed upon its operations by past social reforms are removed. These “restraints” include every social benefit won through the struggles of the working class over more than a century. Now, every one of Great Society liberalism’s “big four,” as one historian described the laws enacted in a six-month period from April to October 1965, is targeted for destruction.
The Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965: This legislation provided the first extensive federal support for local public schools, which had become politically possible following the legal abolition of segregated public schools in the South. Funds were allocated to improve public schools in poor communities, expand libraries and take the first steps in what became known as “special education.” The law established the pre-school program Head Start as a permanent federal program.
Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa has introduced legislation that would rescind the Elementary and Secondary Act and bar the Department of Education from funding any educational program except state-controlled vouchers that could be used for charter or religious schools or for home schooling.
Medicare and Medicaid, established through the Social Security Act of 1965: This bill for the first time provided government-backed health insurance for those over 65, half of whom had no coverage in 1965. Medicare covered hospital care (Part A) and medical and nursing fees (Part B), but did not pay for vision, dental or prescription drugs. Medicaid covered the poorest sections of working people, including children, the disabled and the blind, as well as long-term nursing home care for the poorest elderly.
The Obamacare repeal legislation would put an end to Medicaid as an entitlement program beginning in 2020, when grants to the states would be capped, forcing them to ration care to the poor and disabled. Medicare was already significantly undermined through Obamacare itself, which cut $700 billion in reimbursements over 10 years, and the repeal legislation will set the stage for even larger cuts, based on Ryan’s plan to convert the program from an entitlement to a voucher program.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the most radical democratic measure enacted by a US Congress since post-Civil War Reconstruction. It targeted those states, mainly in the Deep South, where denial of the franchise to minorities was widespread. Before its passage, few blacks were allowed to register and vote in southern states from Texas to Virginia. Afterwards, voter participation among African-Americans rose sharply, as the federal Justice Department continued to oversee state electoral policies to block any efforts to discriminate.
The US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by a 5-4 decision in 2013 in Shelby vs. Holder, ruling that the targeting of the southern states for federal intervention could no longer be justified, despite repeated renewal and extension of the law by Congress, most recently in 2006. This decision was part of a wider effort led by Republicans in state after state to enact voter ID laws and other measures whose purpose was to resurrect discriminatory practices against minority and poor voters.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act after its leading Senate and House sponsors, abolished longstanding restrictions on immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and ended the preference for immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over those from Southern and Eastern Europe. It also allowed unlimited immigration of family members of US citizens and residents, encouraging the growth of immigrant communities.
Trump’s travel ban on visitors from six majority Muslim countries directly violates the 1965 law, which prohibits the use of national origin as a test for restricting immigration. His executive orders on immigration as well as the proposed wall along the US-Mexico border represent an effort to turn the clock back to the period of the exclusion laws that barred Asian immigrants and the bracero program that allowed Mexican immigrants only as semi-slave labor in the fields.
There are other reforms of the 1960s, from the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for Humanities, to the Clean Water Act and dozens of other anti-pollution laws, which led ultimately to the creation of the Environmental Protection Administration. All these are under attack by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress.
The Democratic Party has collaborated in one attack after another on the social reforms with which it was once identified. The Democrats have spearheaded the attacks on public education, introduced major cuts in Medicare funding as part of Obamacare, and did not lift a finger to restore enforcement after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. They oppose Trump, not in defense of social services, but on behalf of sections of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, attacking the new administration over its supposed softness towards Russia.
Even in the 1960s, Democratic Party liberalism was not a challenge to capitalism, but rather an effort, at the height of the post-World War II economic boom, to make American capitalism more palatable to the masses, and therefore safer for the capitalists, under conditions of growing mass struggles over civil rights, against the Vietnam War, and for better wages and working conditions. The measures of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” were far less ambitious than the welfare states built up in Western Europe during the same period.
As historian James T. Patterson wrote of that period: “The Great Society programs were… quintessentially liberal, not radical. Except in the area of race relations--a major exception--they made no serious effort to challenge the power of established groups, including large corporations. In no way did they seriously confront socio-economic inequality or seek to redistribute wealth.”
Today, under conditions of the protracted historical decline of American capitalism, exacerbated by the impact of the 2008 financial crash and the massive transfer of wealth from working people to bail out Wall Street, no section of the American ruling class can or will defend any of the social gains of the 1960s.
The supposed Democratic resistance to Trump’s program in Congress is merely for show. The Trump administration and the Republican Party will get nearly everything they want, while the Democrats wage a phony war and call on the victims of Trump’s attacks to wait until the 2018 elections.
The Democratic Party does not represent the popular opposition to Trump and the Republicans, as congressional Democrats and political charlatans like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren claim. Rather, its function is to serve as a brake on the actual resistance to Trump, from the working class, which will take on an increasingly explosive and politically radical form.
The working class must take the lead in the struggles to defend health care, education, environmental protection, the rights of immigrants and all basic democratic rights. It must answer the capitalist program of social counterrevolution with the working class alternative of social revolution. Workers must build a mass political movement independent of and opposed to the twin parties of big business, fighting on the basis of a socialist program.


TRUMPERNOMICS: IMPLEMENTING 

SEVERE OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO 

SERVE THE SUPER RICH!


“The Republican proposal builds on the core 

features of Obamacare, designed to boost the

profits of the private insurers and slash 

health care costs for the government and big 

business.”


TRUMPERNOMICS:

"The collection of billionaires, bankers, CEOs, generals and social arch-reactionaries that will comprise his cabinet and White House inner circle is pledged to remove all constraints on the ability of the rich to plunder American society for their own personal gain and profit."


THE IMPACT OF TRUMPERnomics AND THE MASSIVE 

TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE SUPER RICH

AMERICA: One paycheck and two illegals away from homelessness.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/12/america-one-paycheck-and-two-illegals.html

"The economists found that the pre-tax share of national income received by the bottom half of the US population has been cut nearly in half since 1980, from 20
percent to 12 percent, while the income share of the top one percent has nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 20 percent."


SOARING POVERTY

IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/01/soaring-poverty-in-american-where.html


TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH:

“In the US, the working class will confront a government unlike any other in American history, which will continue and intensify a decades-long social counterrevolution overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The incoming Trump administration is manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries. It is a government of, by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every remaining gain won by workers over the past century.”

 TRUMPERNOMICS: Serving the Rich, the 

Greedy and the Crooked.


TRUMP’S CABINET OF STOOGES, 

LOOTERS and CRONIES... and that's not 

just his own family!


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/12/trump-promises-wall-street-more-obama.html

Puzder’s nomination is of a piece with Trump’s other cabinet choices. Betsy DeVos, an enemy of public education, has been selected to head the Department of Education. Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon known for his antipathy towards government “interference” in housing regulation, has been nominated as the Housing and Urban Development Secretary.

 TRUMPERnomics:
AFTER OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS, THE LOOTING OF AMERICA BY THE RICH TO CONTINUE UNDER THEIR OWN, DONALD TRUMP
TRUMP FILLS THE “SWAMP” WITH CRONY BILLIONAIRES!
http://the-trump-white-house.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-billionaires-club-at-trump-white.html

"Far from Trump’s demagogic claims that he would 'drain the swamp,' the corrupt nexus between Wall Street and Washington is tighter than ever."

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS is now the new TRUMPERnomics!
TRUMP VOWS TO SERVE THE RICH WITH SUPER OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS!
 There is a vast chasm between this empty populist rhetoric and the personnel that Trump has selected to populate his government. The speech followed a series of cabinet picks, including billionaire asset strippers, Wall Street bankers, and dedicated opponents of financial and corporate regulations, public education and Medicare and Medicaid, to lead the Treasury, Commerce, Education and Health and Human Services departments.
http://the-trump-white-house.blogspot.com/2016/12/more-obama-clintonomics-ahead-trump.html
 TRUMP  IMPOSES  OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:  Cut Federal Pensions and Medicare to Cover Tax Cuts For the Super Rich
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/11/trump-and-paul-ryan-conspire-to-assault.html
"Trump is not the initiator of this class war against working people. It has been underway for decades, beginning in earnest with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and continuing under every succeeding administration, including the eight-year tenures of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The colossal redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom to the top of American society reached record proportions under Obama, whose legacy of falling living standards and worsening economic crisis for tens of millions of workers was a decisive factor in the victory of the fascistic demagogue and con artist Trump."

 TO COVER TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH, TRUMP VOWS TO STRIP MEDICARE
http://the-trump-white-house.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-trump-assault-on-medicare-as-he.html
 It is obvious that this scheme will mean a drastic decline in health care for the elderly and disabled and result in increased poverty and disease and premature death for millions of people. This is precisely what corporate America, which considers health care for the elderly and poor an intolerable drain on its profits, intends.

THE TWISTED ROAD TO REVOLUTION CAME DOWN WALL STREET

FIRST


TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH


"Between 2002 and 2015 annual earnings for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose by 

only 4.5 percent, while earnings for the top 1 percent grew by 22.7 percent, according to the

Economic Policy Institute. Under the Obama administration, more than 90 percent of 

income gains since the so-called “recovery” began have gone to the top one percent."

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/11/comes-revolution-class-struggle-in-us.html


 “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

 




TRUMPERNOMICS: The Goldman Sachs Doctrine of Unbridled Looting




THE FINAL TRANSFER OF AMERICA’ ECONOMY TO THE SUPER RICH!


 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/09/barack-obama-and-his-crony-bankstershow.html


AMERICA’S ECONOMIC ARMAGEDDON – The Impact of TRUMPERNOMICS
Under Obama-Clintonomics, the rich became VERY rich and we got the tax bills for their bailouts and crimes! Trump and his Goldman Sachs regime will double the numbers of rich and quadruple the number of LEGALS living in poverty.

TRUMPERNOMICS: A NATION RULED BY GOLDMAN SACHS:
IT WORKS!   BUT ONLY FOR THE SUPER RICH!!!

"The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s."


"He (Trump) is able to get a hearing because millions of people are being driven into economic insecurity and poverty while the rich and the super-rich continue to amass obscene levels of wealth. He is able with some success to divert mass discontent along reactionary nationalist and racialist channels precisely because what passes for the “left” in American politics, anchor by the Democratic Party, has moved ever further to the right, culminating in the Obama administration which has presided over endless war and an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of the economic ladder."

A NATION IN BORDER MELTDOWN:

MILLIONS OF JOBS TO ILLEGALS AND 

BILLIONS IN WELFARE


MEXICO WILL DOUBLE AMERICA’S POPULATION
IMMIGRANT SHARE OF ADULTS QUADRUPLED IN 232 COUNTIES


"More than 728,000 illegal immigrants have been shielded from being deported and 

 

granted work permits through President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty 

 

program, according to the Migration Policy Institute."

US government agency projects 24 million to lose health coverage under Republican plan

By Kate Randall 
14 March 2017
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Monday released its report on the House Republican plan to replace and repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Congress’s budget analysts project that by 2018 the number of uninsured Americans would rise by 14 million relative to the current law, popularly known as Obamacare.
Under the Republicans’ American Health Care Act (AHCA), the number of uninsured would rise by an additional 21 million by 2020, and by 24 million by 2026, leaving an estimated 52 million without insurance, compared to a projected 28 million under the ACA.
This massive surge in the uninsured would come largely on the backs of the poor, through draconian cuts to Medicaid, effectively ending it as an entitlement program. Also particularly hard hit would be those approaching retirement—under age 65 and not eligible for Medicare, the health insurance program for seniors—who would see their premiums and out-of-pocket costs soar.
The winners would be corporations and the wealthy, who would reap hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. Despite these tax cuts, the CBO estimates the legislation would reduce federal deficits by $337 billion over the 2017-2026 period, largely due to the cuts to Medicaid and to the tax credits to purchase insurance under the ACA, which would be replaced with much smaller credits.
Health and human services secretary Tom Price and Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney held a brief press conference Monday afternoon to respond to the CBO’s scoring of the AHCA. Price said that they “disagreed strenuously” with the report and its conclusions that millions more people would lose coverage.
Dismissing the CBO’s projections as anything approaching an accurate estimate, Price added, “We believe that our plan will cover more individuals at a lower cost and give them the choices that they want for the coverage that they want for themselves and their family, not that the government forces them to buy.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi also spoke briefly to the press after the CBO report’s release to give the Democratic Party response. They both denounced the AHCA as targeting Medicaid and seniors, with Pelosi calling on the Republicans to “pull the bill.”
The Democrats, however, have nothing to offer as an alternative but to maintain Obamacare. The truth is that the Republican proposal builds on the central features of the ACA, which has been designed to boost the profits of the private insurers and slash health care costs for the government and big business.
The AHCA seeks to further strengthen the grip of the for-profit health care delivery system, while leaving wide sections of the population with substandard insurance and health care, or no coverage at all. That millions of people stand to lose coverage under the Republicans’ plan is a natural outgrowth of the core regressive components of Obamacare.
The AHCA would reduce federal outlays for Medicaid by $880 billion over the 2017-2026 period, primarily through a reduction in enrollees. This reduction would culminate in 14 million fewer Medicaid enrollees by 2026, a decrease of about 17 percent relative to the number under current law.
Some of this decline in Medicaid recipients would come immediately, but most changes would begin in 2020, when the AHCA would terminate the enhanced federal matching rate for new enrollees under the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.
The Republican plan would place a per-capita-based cap on the federal government’s payments to states for medical assistance provided through Medicaid, effectively ending the program—which provides insurance to the poor, disabled and some elderly people—as an entitlement in which funding grows according to need. By 2026, federal spending for Medicaid would be about 25 percent less than what the CBO projects under the ACA.
The AHCA would save $673 billion, stemming mostly from the elimination of the ACA’s subsidies for nongroup health insurance sold on the Obamacare exchanges, which under current law provide refundable tax credits for premium assistance and subsidies to reduce health care cost sharing. This would be partially offset by $361 billion for the new tax credits for health insurance established by the AHCA beginning in 2020.
The CBO estimates a reduction in revenues of $210 billion from eliminating the penalties paid by uninsured people and employers. With the elimination of the Obamacare “individual mandate,” uninsured people would no longer be required to purchase coverage from a private insurer, and businesses with 50 workers or more would not be required to provide insurance to their employees.
Under the Republican plan, tax credits based on income would be replaced by tax credits based on age, ranging from $2,000 to $4,000 for those with incomes up about $75,000, with older people receiving higher tax credits. While under current law a 64-year-old can be charged up to three times more than a 21-year-old for coverage, under the AHCA the 64-year-old could be charged up to five times as much.
This would tend to reduce premiums for younger people and increase premiums for older people. Low-income people across all ages would lack insurance at higher rates under the Republican plan. For those with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($23,760 in 2016), by 2026 uninsured rates would double under the AHCA compared to the ACA.
Beginning in 2020, the AHCA would remove the ACA requirement that insurers who offer plans in the nongroup and small-group markets provide plans that cover at least 60 percent of the cost of covered benefits. This means that insurers could provide barebones or catastrophic coverage that leaves people “insured” in name only.
While the AHCA removes the Obamacare mandate, it requires insurers to apply a 30 percent surcharge on premiums for people who enroll in the nongroup or small-group markets if they let their insurance lapse for more than three months in a year.
The Republican plan is a boondoggle for the rich, repealing or delaying many of the changes the ACA made to the Internal Revenue Code. The single biggest tax cut is the repeal of the 3.8 percent tax the ACA applied to capital gains, dividend and interest income for families with $250,000 or more in income.
The Tax Policy Center finds that for the top 0.1 percent of income earners—those making more than $3.75 million annually—repealing this investment tax would amount to an average tax cut of $165,090.
The AHCA’s repeal of the 0.9 percent Medicare surtax, a tax on households with income in excess of $250,000 a year, would provide this same 0.1 percent of income earners an average annual tax cut of $30,520. Those households in the bottom 90 percent of earners would see virtually no benefit from these two tax cuts.
The differences between the Democrats and Republicans on health care are essentially a feud between two right-wing factions of the political establishment. Both parties uphold the for-profit health care industry and the subordination of health care to the private market.
The CBO’s scoring on the massive numbers of people who would become uninsured as a result of the House Republicans’ health care bill is further evidence that Obamacare—despite claims by the Democrats that it would provide “near universal,” quality health care—has paved the way for an even more brutal attack on the health and lives of the working class by Trump and the Republicans.