OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
THE "HOPE & CHANGE" PSYCHOPATH WHO BECAME BUSH'S THIRD AND FOURTH TERMS ON STEROIDS!
"The EPI report refers to one particularly revealing episode in the
operations of the wealthy parasites who dominate American
society: the bipartisan deal in 2012, between Obama and the
congressional Republicans, which extended the Bush tax cuts for
all but the highest earners."
"Under the Obama administration, economic inequality has grown
worse, and the growth is accelerating. In 15 states, the top 1 percent
captured all of the income growth between 2009 and 2013. In 10 of
these, the top 1 percent captured more than 100 percent of all
income growth, with the result that incomes of the bottom 99
percent actually fell."
“I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world."
US wages and jobs decline, inequality rises
US wages and jobs decline, inequality rises
By Patrick Martin
23 June 2016
Two reports issued over the past week document the drastic worsening of the economic position of the American working class, and the consequent rapid rise in economic inequality.
Men with a high school education now make barely 50 percent of the wages of men with a college degree or more, according to data presented Monday by the White House Council of Economic Advisers. This is down from near equality between the college-educated and the non-college-educated 40 years ago (see Chart 1).
The CEA correlated the declining economic position of blue collar workers (using education as a surrogate for occupation) with the plunge in labor force participation rates among men of prime working age, those between 25 and 54 years of age (see Chart 2).
While 98 percent of men of prime working age were in the labor force in 1954, that figure has fallen to 88 percent today (81 percent actually working and 7 percent unemployed but available for work). The same divergence based on education was shown in these figures: 94 percent of male college graduates aged 25 to 54 were in the labor force, but only 83 percent of men with only a high school education.
The proportion of American men not in the labor force has risen six-fold over 60 years, from 2 percent to 12 percent. This compares to 7 percent in Spain and France and only 4 percent in Japan, countries which provide considerably better social benefits for the long-term jobless. In other words, men outside the labor force are both more numerous in the United States, and treated far worse by society.
The CEA report, like most such government and academic studies, is heavily laden with statistical jargon. But one passage makes clear that the brutal wage-cutting and job-slashing directed at workers in manufacturing and other semi-skilled occupations—carried out with the collaboration and support of the unions in those industries that are unionized—is a key factor in this social retrogression.
The report says: “In addition to reducing wages, abrupt demand shifts for less-skilled workers create inconsistencies between workers' expectations of the types of jobs they have traditionally had access to (and that were closely associated with their identity) and the realities of the jobs currently available to less-educated workers—for example, the decline in available jobs in manufacturing. This mismatch between what workers seek and what the job market offers may lead them to leave the labor force …”
In plain English, workers leave the labor force because they can no longer earn a living and support their families, which has a crushing moral and psychological impact in many cases.
The CEA report further finds that “the drop in the labor force participation rate for men over the past several decades may be explained by a decline in job opportunities for middle-skill workers and their reluctance to take jobs in other industries and skill classes.”
Again, in plain English, workers are dropping out of the labor force because they refuse to go from decent-paying factory jobs to low-paying work at WalMart, fast food or other so-called service industries.
Other details in the CEA report document regional differences, with the lowest rates of labor force participation in smaller industrial centers in the Midwest, the mining areas of Appalachia, and in rural, agricultural areas throughout the country—all areas where there has been little economic diversification and which are remote from high-tech centers or the booming financial markets.
The worst impact of the decline in labor force participation and the relative decline in blue-collar wages has been for black men. This is associated not so much with racial discrimination in employment, which is much less overt today than 60 years ago, as with the enormous increase in incarceration rates.
Men in prison are not included in the jobless figures and their appalling conditions are not recorded in reports like that issued by the CEA. But men who have been released from prison are far less likely to find decent-paying work and consequently leave the labor force altogether. These are disproportionately black and Latino.
The second report issued this past week was by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank supported by the AFL-CIO. This provided a state-by-state picture of the growth of economic inequality over the past century, supplementing reports issued last year on economic inequality at the national level.
The report found that income inequality declined in every state from 1928 until 1979. From 1979 through 2013, by contrast, economic inequality has risen in every state, and in many states it has now reached the level of 1928, the height of the stock market boom before the Great Depression.
Under the Obama administration, economic inequality has grown
worse, and the growth is accelerating. In 15 states, the top 1 percent
captured all of the income growth between 2009 and 2013. In 10 of
these, the top 1 percent captured more than 100 percent of all
income growth, with the result that incomes of the bottom 99
percent actually fell.
For the US as a whole, the top 1 percent captured 85.1 percent of all income growth for that five-year period. The average income of the top 1 percent grew 17.4 percent from 2009 to 2013, while the average income of the bottom 99 percent grew only 0.7 percent. The result is that by 2013, the average income of the top 1 percent was 25.3 times the average for the bottom 99 percent.
The EPI profiled the 10 states with the biggest increase in the share of the top 1 pecent from 1979 to 2007. These included: “four states with large financial services sectors (New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois), three with large information technology sectors (Massachusetts, California, and Washington), one state with a large energy industry (Wyoming), one with a large gaming industry (Nevada), and Florida, a state in which many wealthy individuals retire.”
The EPI report refers to one particularly revealing episode in the operations of the wealthy parasites who dominate American society: the bipartisan deal in 2012, between Obama and the congressional Republicans, which extended the Bush tax cuts for all but the highest earners.
This legislative change touched off a frenzy of “tax planning” (i.e., fraud) by the super-rich, which caused them to reduce their incomes significantly in 2013. This means that the disparities reported by the EPI study are significantly understated, since the wealthy deliberately avoided “earning” income in 2013 to avoid paying taxes.
Taken together, the CEA and EPI reports document a society that is deeply dysfunctional, unjust and unstable. For the workers who produce the wealth of society, wages and participation in the labor force are plunging. For the parasites in the financial aristocracy who owe their vast fortunes to the labor of others, incomes are rising faster than ever.
It is figures like these that underlie the upheavals that have already shaken the US political system in the course of the 2016 election campaign, which has many months to run its course and more shocks to endure. More fundamentally, these figures are infallible indicators that American society faces an eruption of mass struggle, as young people and working people rebel against the destruction of their jobs, living standards and social rights.
Working-Class Families Now Majority of Americans Squatting
Working-Class Families Now Majority of Americans Squatting
• Tens of thousands of average Americans reduced to living illegally in vacant buildings, paying to live in tents.
By Victor Thorn —
From the beginning, Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency has been based more on illusion than real hope and change—the illusion of peace, the illusion of reform, the illusion of government transparency, and the illusion of an economic recovery.
Take Obama’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example. These government economists have regularly cooked the books soterribly that it’s as if America’s entire financial foundation rests upon rigged statistics, stock market bubbles, artificial money, and trillions in unfunded mandates that can never be repaid.
Today, more Americans collect food stamps than ever before in our country’s history, and the labor participation rate is lower than it was during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
In 2008, Obama’s handlers, aided by a sycophantic press, misdirected the electorate with slick razzle-dazzle rhetoric without discussing how this candidate would enter the Oval Office with less business experience than an eight-year-old kid running a lemonade stand.
Reflecting his ineptitude, Obama surrounded himself with Keynesian pie-in-the-sky theorists, Marxist professors who advocated big government at any cost, and Wall Street crony capitalists intent on manipulating industries such as “greenenergy,” healthcare, and higher education.
Amid this seven-year stretch of economic stagnation, the renewed trend of squatting plagues many communities.
In Mira Mesa, California, for instance, squatters caused an apartment fire, resulting in $50,000 in damages to the building.
And only weeks after a police sweep cleared hundreds of squatters out of the former Seattle Times office building, the structure was once again overrun by homeless people.
That’s only the beginning.
Californians are renting out tents in posh suburban areas at a rate of $1,000 per month. In Colorado, a Denver SWAT team was forced to evacuate drifters residing in makeshift trailers.
At other locales, the working poor are reduced to shacking up in tent cities, the backseats of cars, shanty towns, or abandoned buildings.
A particularly troublesome example can be found near Atlanta, Georgia. There, a black woman named Daquisha Barber and her five children squatted in a home for months after forging the signature of a bogus real estate agent. The home they opportunistically took over had been placed on the market by its owner. It ended up costing the man over $10,000 in legal fees to finally evict her from the premises.
The same tactics were utilized in Charlotte, North Carolina when another black woman, Ninti El-Bey, returned to squatting in a home even after having been arrested and jailed for doing the same thing in another house.
Circumstances have reached such dire levels in Detroit that homeowners in a northwest neighborhood are actively seeking squatters to occupy a rash of abandoned or foreclosed residences in hopes of preventing vandalism or arson.
On November 16, AMERICAN FREE PRESS interviewed Ryan Hertz, president and CEO of Detroit’s South Oakland Shelter.
When asked about his city’s desperate housing situation, Hertz replied: “It’s an interesting concept, but not a solution. I would never encourage anyone to squat. It’s not our public position, and we can certainly do better. When homeless peoplelive in vacant properties, who’ll keep them up to par in terms of maintenance?”
As for the so-called Obama recovery, Hertz posited: “We’ve seen a change in the demographics of those who are displaced. It’s been a transition from the chronically homeless, disabled, and mentally ill to first-timers whose unemployment has run out. You’d never expect to see these people in shelters, and I’d estimate that 50%-80% of these folks are generally from working-class families. They don’t fit the mold of what you’d anticipate.”
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and author of over 50 books.
Poverty has become more concentrated under Obama
Poverty has become more concentrated under Obama
By Nancy Hanover
2 May 2016
Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level. Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the Brookings Institution.
All in all, more than half of the nation’s poor are now concentrated in these high-poverty neighborhoods. This means that on top of the difficult daily struggle to make ends meet, they face a raft of additional crushing barriers because of where they live.
The Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program report, “Concentrated poverty continues to grow post recession,” is authored by Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes and scrutinizes this unprecedented shift in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown.
The report, based on an analysis of US census tracts, shows that concentrations of poverty have grown under the Obama administration in all geography types: large metropolitan areas, small cities and rural areas. In fact, the number of poor people living in concentrated poverty in suburbs grew nearly twice as fast as in cities, putting paid to the myth of affluence or even stability in America’s suburbs.
The growth of social and economic distress within large parts of the US is demonstrated by the statistics. Pockets of high poverty exist in virtually every part of the country, including adjacent to the nation’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Since 2000,
according to the report, the total number of poor
people living in high-poverty neighborhoods has
doubled to 14 million Americans. This is five
million more than prior to the Great Recession.
Referring to the “double burden” facing the poor when they live in high-poverty neighborhoods, Kneebone and Holmes say, “Residents of poor neighborhoods face higher crime rates and exhibit poorer physical and mental health outcomes. They tend to go to poor-performing neighborhood schools with higher dropout rates. Their job-seeking networks tend to be weaker and they face higher levels of financial insecurity.”
These effects are clearly discernible once a neighborhood’s poverty rate exceeds 20 percent, the report explains. During the study period, between 2005-09 and 2010-14, the number of such high poverty neighborhoods grew by more than 4,300.
Across many demographics: City and suburb, black and white
Suburbs accounted for one-third of the newly high-poverty neighborhoods, a higher share than cities, rural or small metro areas. The share of poor black and Hispanic suburban residents climbed by 10 percent while poor white residents climbed by eight percent, almost as much.
The palpable effects of the auto industry restructuring, with the Obama administration’s stipulation of a 50 percent cut in wages for new autoworkers, is demonstrated in the growth of poverty in the sprawling auto-dominated Detroit region. Out of metro Detroiters living in poverty, 58 percent now reside in suburban districts, according to a survey by Oakland County Lighthouse.
A recent and similar demographic study by the Century Foundation states that the six-county region has the highest concentration of poverty among the top 25 metro areas in the US by population. This represents 32 percent of the poor living in concentrated tracts.
There has been a staggering growth of poor neighborhoods in and around Detroit, Kneebone told the Detroit Free Press, adding that the number “grew almost fivefold between 2000 and 2010-14.” Detroit now has an official poverty rate of 39 percent, the highest in the US among cities with more than 300,000 residents.
“Sadly this report reinforces what we have been seeing year after year in Detroit and across Michigan.” Gilda Jacobs, of the Michigan League for Public Policy told the World Socialist Web Site. “Poverty is too high, and where people—especially kids—live has a direct and significant impact on their economic standing, health and other outcomes.”
From the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt
Detroit, however, is just the most concentrated expression of the national trend. “Among the nation’s largest metro areas, two-thirds (67 percent) saw concentrated poverty grow between 2005-09 and 2010-14,” the Brookings study found. The authors note that some of the “largest upticks included a number of Sun Belt metro areas hit hard by the collapse of the housing market—like Fresno, Bakersfield and Stockton in California and Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona—and older industrial areas in the Midwest and northeast—like Indianapolis, Buffalo, and Syracuse.”
Eight metro areas now show concentrated poverty over 30 percent: Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, Wisconsin (30.1 percent); Memphis, Tennessee (31.1 percent); Bakersfield, California (31.7 percent); Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, Michigan (32 percent); Syracuse, New York (32.4 percent); Toledo, Ohio (34.9 percent); Fresno, California (43.8 percent); and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (52.3 percent).
As the WSWS has previously reported, all job growth over the last decade has been “temp” or contingency employment, traditionally the lowest wage levels of any job and paying no benefits. This loss of hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs has impacted communities throughout the US. Concentrated poverty in suburbs has jumped 2.4 points in the wake of the recession, to a record high of 7.1 percent.
What is the “double burden” of concentrated poverty?
In her remarks to the WSWS, Gilda Jacobs elaborated on the double burden of concentrated poverty: “So many detrimental factors come with living in high-poverty neighborhoods. There are no viable jobs, public transportation, childcare, or grocery stores. Crime rates are high, there’s blight and abandoned buildings, and the health risks of lead exposure and asthma. Even Detroit’s public schools are unhealthy and even dangerous.
“This is what Detroit kids and other low-income children are dealing with every day, and what they have to try to overcome in improving their futures. These living and learning conditions are all connected, and harm kids’ development and learning, their academic outcomes and their future job prospects. It is called toxic stress when kids are under constant strain. This study reiterates that so many factors affecting poverty are external and environmental, making them nearly impossible to defeat alone,” she stressed.
A series of studies [including George Galster’s “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications” and others] have documented how poor neighborhoods undermine even the most determined individual efforts to escape poverty.
Taken together, these studies demonstrate how the escalating growth of poverty concentration exacts an ever-higher toll on American society, affecting many aspects of life and particularly destroying the potential of the next generation.
*Education. High-poverty neighborhoods exert “downward pressure” on school quality. Data from the Stanford Data Archive has recently shown a staggering effect upon child learning capacities of attending impoverished school districts. Utilizing 215 million state accountability test scores, the study showed that “Children in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty score an average of more than four grade levels below children in the richest districts [emphasis added].”
*Violence. Exposure to violence has reached epidemic proportions for low-income youth, particularly among minorities. Parental stress over neighborhood violence is a substantial factor motivating families to move—when they can—from high-poverty neighborhoods, compounded by fears of negative peer influences upon their children. Youth and adults who have been exposed to violence as witnesses or victims suffer increased stress and documented declines in mental health.
*Toxic exposures. Poor areas are chronically associated with higher concentrations of air-, water- and soil-borne pollutants. Lead poisoning is most often associated with older housing stock. Researchers have demonstrated that depression, asthma, diabetes and heart ailments are correlated with living in high-poverty neighborhoods. Additionally, individuals in poor neighborhoods often receive inferior health care and reduced government services.
* Other effects of physical decay . The inability to exercise outdoors is a known factor in the rise of obesity, especially among children. High levels of noise pollution produce stress, and prolonged exposure to run-down surroundings can lead to hopelessness.
*The poor pay more. Prices in poor neighborhoods are notoriously higher and the goods of poorer quality than those in better-off areas. Food and health-care “deserts” are common. The costs of home and car insurance are usually substantially higher.
*Lack of social cohesion. Disorder and lack of social cohesion are associated with both crime and mental distress. Children who live without a cohesive neighborhood network are more likely to have behavioral problems and have lower verbal skills. Those in areas of concentrated poverty are typically more isolated within their households and have fewer educated or employed friends and neighbors. Low levels of employment in distressed neighborhoods also destroy the informal networks crucial for workers to find good jobs.
OBAMA’S ASSAULT ON AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS IT CALLED “THE OPEN BORDERS PROJECT”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/06/would-trump-put-americans-legals-in.html
“I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world."
THE IMPACT OF OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS,
OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY AND NO
LEGAL NEED APPLY!
Can Anybody Save the Whites?
Can Anybody Save the Whites?
• White males, now down to 31% of the population, have become the only Americans against whom it is not only permissible, but commendable, to discriminate.
By Patrick J. Buchanan —
“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”
The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata in The New York Times of a stunning study by the husband-wife team of Nobel laureates, Angus Deaton and Anne Case.
Deaton could cite but one parallel to this social disaster: “Only HIV/AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this.”
Middle-aged whites are four times as likely as middle-aged blacks to kill themselves. Their fitness levels are falling as they suffer rising levels of physical pain, emotional stress, and mental depression, which helps explain the alcohol and drug addiction.
But what explains the social disaster of white Middle America?
First, an economy where, though at or near
full employment, a huge slice of the labor force
has dropped out. Second, the real wages of
working Americans have been nearly stagnant
for decades.
Two major contributors to the economic decline of
the white working-class: Scores of millions of
third-world immigrants, here legally and illegally,
who depress U.S. wages, and tens of thousands of
factories and millions of jobs
shipped abroad under the label of “globalization.”
Another factor in the crisis of middle- and working-class white men is the plunging percentage of those who are married. Where a wife and children give meaning to a man’s life, and to his labors, single white men are not only being left behind by the new economy, they are becoming alienated from society.
“It’s not surprising,” Barack Obama volunteered to his San Francisco high-donors, that such folks, “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
We all have seen the figure of 72% of black children being born out of wedlock. For working-class whites, it is up to 40%.
A lost generation is growing up all around us. In the popular culture of the 1940s and 1950s, white men were role models. They were the detectives and cops who ran down gangsters and the heroes who won World War II on the battlefields of Europe and in the islands of the Pacific. They were doctors, journalists, lawyers, architects and clergy. White males were our skilled workers and craftsmen—carpenters, painters, plumbers, bricklayers, machinists, mechanics. They were the Founding Fathers, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton, and the statesmen, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun.
Lincoln and every president had been a white male. Middle-class white males were the great inventors: Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers.
They were the great capitalists: Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. All the great captains of America’s wars were white males: Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant and John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.
What has changed in our culture? Everything.
The world has been turned upside-down for white children. In our schools the history books have been rewritten and old heroes blotted out, as their statues are taken down and their flags are put away.
Children are being taught that America was “discovered” by genocidal white racists, who murdered the native peoples of color, enslaved Africans to do the labor they refused to do, then went out and brutalized and colonized indigenous peoples all over the world.
In Hollywood films and TV shows, working-class white males are regularly portrayed as what was once disparaged as “white trash.”
Republicans are instructed that demography is destiny, that white America is dying, and that they must court Hispanics, Asians, and blacks, or go the way of the Whigs.
Since affirmative action for black Americans began in the 1960s, it has been broadened to encompass women, Hispanics, Native Americans, the handicapped, indeed, almost 70% of the nation.
White males, now down to 31% of the population, have become the only Americans against whom it is not only permissible, but commendable, to discriminate.
When our cultural and political elites celebrate “diversity” and clamor for more, what are they demanding, if not fewer white males in the work force and in the freshman classes at Annapolis and Harvard?
What is the moral argument for an affirmative action that justifies unending race discrimination against a declining white working class, who have become the expendables of our multicultural regime?
“Angry white male” is now an acceptable slur in culture and politics. So it is that people of that derided ethnicity, race, and gender see in Donald Trump someone who unapologetically berates and mocks the elites who have dispossessed them, and who despise them.
Is it any surprise that militant anti-government groups attract white males? Is it so surprising that the Donald today, like Jess Willard a century ago, is seen by millions as “The Great White Hope”?
Patrick J. Buchanan is a writer, political commentator, presidential candidate and author.
"Growing mortality rates for working people
are not the outcome of accidental or
unavoidable processes, but rather a social
counterrevolution which has been consciously
directed at dramatically lowering the living
standards of the working class. The impact of
the implementation of multi-tier wage
structures, the elimination of employer-paid
health care, the eradication of defined-benefit
pensions and the slashing of retiree pension
benefits is finding expression in these
statistics."
US death rate rose in 2015
US death rate rose in 2015
By Niles Niemuth
2 June 2016
The death rate in the United States increased across the board last year for the first time since 2005 according to preliminary figures released this week by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The report provides yet another piece of information documenting the deep social distress which is fueling the growth of social opposition in the working class.
Earlier this year the CDC reported that life
expectancy at birth for white Americans had
fallen between 2013 and 2014 from 78.9 years
to 78.8 years, after remaining flat between
2012 and 2013.
Not all Americans are being affected equally, with income and social class overwhelmingly determining the quality of an individual’s health and the length of their life. A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April found that income was the most critical factor in longevity and that the life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest is widening.
Growing mortality rates for working people are not the
outcome of accidental or unavoidable processes, but rather
a social counterrevolution which has been consciously
directed at dramatically lowering the living standards of the
working class. The impact of the implementation of multi-
tier wage structures, the elimination of employer-paid
health care, the eradication of defined-benefit pensions and
the slashing of retiree pension benefits is finding expression
in these statistics.
Policymakers have been quite open about their desire to drive down the life expectancy of the working class and poor. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the leading architects of the Obama administration’s health care overhaul, has called for the rationing of health care based on income and has discouraged people from getting potentially life-saving medical screenings. On Tuesday, the day before the CDC’s figures were released, Emanuel called for raising the cost of prescription antibiotics, nominally in the name of halting over-prescription. “Low prices reduce the barrier to prescribing antibiotics, while high patient demand fosters overprescribing,” Emanuel declared.
In reality, Emanuel and his co-thinkers would be more than pleased if the rise in the death rate continued in the coming years and decades. While its full impact has yet to be felt, one of the unstated goals of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act is to reduce workers’ access to health care, reducing the life expectancy for all those who cannot afford to pay in order to pad the profits of health insurers and corporations.
Decades of deindustrialization and austerity, accompanied by a dramatic rise in economic inequality and associated social ills, are finding expression in the broadest of social indicators: mortality and life expectancy.
In its latest estimates, adjusted to account for an aging population, the CDC found that the death rate was 729.5 per 100,000 in 2015, up from 723.2 in 2014. The leading causes of death following heart disease were cancers, lung disease, accidents (including automobile crashes, falls, shootings and drug overdoses) and stroke.
The national mortality rate has declined significantly and almost continuously since 1940, when the rate was 1,785 per 100,000. Above all the growth in life expectancy was the outcome of fierce struggles waged by the working class in the first half of the 20th century for better wages; shorter working hours; company-paid pensions, to provide for them in old age; and health care, which gave them access to revolutionary new medicines and treatments. Workers also fought for the implementation of safety standards and regulations which dramatically decreased the number of people killed or sickened on the job.
Yearly increases in the overall mortality rate have been relatively rare: last year was only one of seven instances in the last 36 years in which the national rate ticked upwards.
According to the CDC, the rate was driven upwards last year by an increasing rate of death from Alzheimer’s, drug overdoses and suicides. At the same time, the rate of death from heart disease, the leading cause of mortality in the US, on the decline for decades, edged up slightly.
The suicide rate in the US increased from 12.7 in the third quarter of 2014 to 13.1 in the same quarter of 2015. The rate has increased more than 24 percent since 1999, with much of the increase coming since 2006. The biggest surge in the suicide rate has occurred among young girls between the ages of 10 and 14 and men between 45 and 64.
The rate of deaths from drug overdoses also increased substantially, from 14.1 in the second quarter of 2014 to 15.2 last year. A majority of drug overdose deaths were unintentional, and opioids, including prescription pain medication and heroin, accounted for an increasing share of these deaths. The number of opioid overdoses and deaths has exploded in the last few years, an ongoing epidemic impacting cities and counties in every part of the country.
The long-term reversal of the social gains
made by the working class has only
accelerated in the wake of the 2008 economic
crisis. President Obama has overseen one of
the greatest transfers of wealth from the
working class to the rich in world history.
Obama’s much-hailed economic recovery has seen 95 percent of all income gains go to the top 1 percent and all job growth over the last decade has come from people working as independent contractors, temps through contract agencies or on-call. Median household income has declined as workers have seen their wages and benefits stagnate or decline.
These are the objective social conditions which are driving the anger and discontent that has found an initial expression in the 2016 presidential primaries.
The fascistic and xenophobic Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has found support posing as an opponent of the political establishment and tapped into social anger over the decline of living standards, promising to “Make America Great Again.”
Under conditions where the leading Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is the favored candidate of Wall Street and the corporations that have immiserated the working class, millions of workers and young people have cast their ballot for Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders.
While the ultimate purpose of Sanders’ campaign is to direct workers and young people back into the Democratic Party, he has garnered substantial support because he promotes himself as a socialist and a staunch opponent of the “billionaire class” and the status quo which has contributed to the dramatic decline in living standards.
Growing opposition to the political establishment has been accompanied by the eruption of social struggles, including the recent strike by 39,000 communication workers at Verizon; mass protests against the poisoning of residents in Flint, Michigan; and opposition to the destruction of public education in Detroit, Michigan, the historic center of the US auto industry.
THE SABOTAGE OF HOMELAND
SECURITY BY BARACK OBAMA.
WILL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE LET HIM
DEVISE A MUSLIM-STYLE
DICTATORSHIP BY VIOLATING OUR
LAWS AND BORDERS?
For Obama, destroying the American middle
class financially and with endless waves of
Mexican flag wavers is the first step in
reordering of America to mirror his Muslim
crony dictators over there.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/12/amnesty-hoax-to-keep-wages-depressed.html
The social roots of the mass shooting in Orlando
"Gun homicides in America kill about as many people as car
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