TRUMP IMPOSES OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
Cut Federal Pensions and Medicare to Cover Tax Cuts For the Super Rich
"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."
Republican Congress, Trump plan assault on Medicare
By Kate Randall
26 November 2016
During his election campaign, Donald Trump declared that he had no plans to make “substantial” changes to Medicare, the government-run health insurance plan for the elderly and disabled that covers 55 million Americans. The president-elect’s web site now says his administration will work to “modernize Medicare” and allow more “flexibility” for Medicaid, the health care program for the poor jointly administered by the federal government and the states.
These are code words signaling the readiness of the incoming administration to work with the Republican-controlled Congress to shift Medicare from a guaranteed government program to a plan with fixed government contributions—or vouchers—and to pave the way for the program’s privatization and dismantlement. Medicaid is to suffer a similar fate.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (Republican of Wisconsin) has been explicit about plans to gut Medicare. Under his plan, the government would give those in traditional Medicare a fixed amount to buy insurance. This amount would be tracked to the country’s overall growth rate or another index, plus a percentage increase, but it would not keep pace with rising health care costs. Seniors would eventually pay a larger share of costs, while government costs would shrink.
In an earlier version proposed by Ryan, cost-sharing—where the government currently pays roughly 70 percent of Medicare costs and beneficiaries pay 30 percent—would flip, leaving seniors responsible for 70 percent of costs and the government only 30 percent.
Skimpy vouchers would replace the current government guarantee, leaving traditional Medicare with a sicker, more costly insurance pool, with higher premiums. The New York Times quotes John K. Gorman, a former Medicare official who is now an insurance consultant, who said, “Regular Medicare would become the province of affluent beneficiaries who can buy their way out of” private plans.
The vast majority of working-class and middle-income seniors would be squeezed out of Medicare and left with narrow network Medicare Advantage plans, which are run by private corporations. Such a shift would have catastrophic consequences for the millions of seniors who rely on Medicare. They would see their access to specialist doctors and hospitals, life-saving treatments and procedures sharply curtailed, resulting in unnecessary suffering and death.
The attack on Medicare is part of a frontal assault to be carried out by the Trump administration against all that remains of the social reforms wrested by the working class from the ruling elite over the last century. None of the social programs enacted in the 1930s and 1960s, including Social Security, the government retirement program, will be outside the scope of the social counterrevolution that is being prepared.
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.
Trump’s victory, however, with its shift to “fortress America” nationalism, signals a sharp escalation of this class war policy.
No one should take for good coin claims by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats that they will wage a serious fight against measures to undermine Medicare. In the short period since the General Election, President Obama and the Democrats have fallen all over themselves to pledge support for the incoming administration, maintaining a cowardly silence over the fact that Trump lost the popular vote by millions of ballots. The trade union bureaucracy has likewise signaled its eagerness to work with Trump in pitting American workers against their class brothers and sisters in China, Mexico and the rest of the world.
Trump’s plans for “flexibility” in Medicaid include transforming funding for the program into block grants for the states, in which a fixed and likely reduced grant would be provided to states to administer the health program for the poor. In those states that have expanded Medicaid under the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), including those run by Republican governors, block grants would mean deep cuts to already meager benefits.
While Trump and the Republicans rail against the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare, and vow to repeal many of its features if not the entire program, the Ryan plan for Medicare draws on some of the ACA’s most regressive features. Since Obama’s signature domestic program became law in 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has worked at breakneck speed to transform Medicare’s fee-for-service payments into a system that rewards doctors and hospitals for cutting costs.
HHS projects that nearly every fee-for-service payment to Medicare will be tied in some way to “value” by 2018. A recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office anticipates a reduction in Medicare spending under Obamacare of $716 billion from 2013 to 2022.
The ferocity of the coming attacks on the basic social needs of the working class—health care, education, decent-paying jobs, pensions—is prefigured in the gang of billionaire parasites being assembled by Trump to staff his cabinet, virtually all of whom have made their fortunes by savaging workers’ living standards and attacking social programs.
Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, is a leading proponent of charter schools and vouchers and vehement enemy of teachers and public education. Investor and former banker Wilbur Ross, Trump’s likely pick for secretary of commerce, made his fortune through leveraged buyouts of distressed steel and coal companies. He made billions by downsizing firms, slashing wages and pensions, and selling off what remained for a hefty profit.
The incoming administration has singled out the 2.7 million US federal employees for attacks on jobs, employment security and pensions.
Millions of workers are in for a huge shock when they see the reality behind Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again.” The realization that they have once again been deceived by a capitalist con man will fuel the growth of social opposition.
Democratic Party politicians, on the other hand, who insisted during the election that Trump was “unfit” for the presidency, are now working to accommodate themselves to his agenda. It is not the wealthy upper-middle class that forms the Democrats’ main base of support, beyond Wall Street and the military/intelligence establishment, that will be hammered. Indeed, as the stock market surge since Trump’s election indicates, they stand to make themselves even richer off of the misery of working people and youth.
This party of big business, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, is a thousand times more fearful of a mass movement of the working class against capitalism than it is of Trump’s ultra-right agenda.
That can be halted only by a political movement of the working class consciously directed against the entire political order and the capitalist system it defends.
Incoming Trump administration prepares assault on federal workers
Incoming Trump administration prepares assault on federal workers
By Nick Barrickman
25 November 2016
The incoming Trump administration has singled out civilian federal employees for attacks on jobs, employment security and pensions. According to the Washington Post,
“President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are drawing up plans to take on the government bureaucracy they have long railed against, by eroding job protections and grinding down benefits that federal workers have received for a generation.”
The federal civil service, which consists of over 2.75 million workers, excluding members of the armed forces, the judiciary and elected officials, has come under relentless attack from the political right for decades. Right-wing propaganda depicts federal workers as overpaid and privileged drones in an attempt to divide the working class and divert anger over declining living standards and growing inequality against a section of the working class itself. The aim is to dismantle whatever remains of job protections
and benefits that are based on civil service laws and contracts with federal employee unions. This is despite the best efforts of the unions over many years to help impose job cuts and wage and benefit concessions.
In 2012, House Republicans proposed a 10 percent federal workforce reduction as part of their fiscal budget for that year.
According to the Post, the incoming administration will implement “[h]iring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a
green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions.” In addition, the Trump White House will seek “guidance” from the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who in 2011 provoked mass protests at the state capital by shredding
public employee rights and imposing sweeping concessions on public workers.
The new administration will also follow the example of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who, as governor of Indiana, tied
state worker pay to performance ratings.
According to Jason Chaffetz, Republican congressman from Utah and chairman of the House Committee on Government
Oversight and Reform, the plan to slash federal employee pensions will be modeled on his home state, which recently replaced defined benefit pensions with market-based defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. The switch from
traditional pensions will initially affect newly hired workers, according topress reports.
The assault on federal workers is based on the ten-point “Contract with the American Voter” released by Donald Trump in late October. The statement declared that within its first 100 days in office, the Trump administration would enact “a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health).”
The Post quotes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of Trump’s transition team, as saying that Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief White House strategist, will lead the
attack on federal workers. Until signing on as the head of Trump’s presidential campaign last August, Bannon headed the Breitbart News web site, a platform for the fascistic alt-right that regularly rails against the so-called “privileged
class” of government workers in Washington.
Contrary to the myth of a ballooning “big government” promoted by the right wing, the US civil service has undergone numerous cutbacks in its workforce under both Republican and Democratic presidents. As a result, the number of federal employees today is consistent with the number employed in the 1960s, despite a near-doubling of the US population since then.
A likely precedent for Trump’s plan to slash workers’ pay and job protections is the 2014 Veterans’ Choice Act, signed into
law by President Obama. Passed during the scandal at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) that year, the law facilitates the firing of VA workers while giving employees less than a week to appeal their dismissal.
Prior to the Veterans’ Choice Act, workers had the option of appealing their dismissal to the Merit Systems Protection Board, established as part of the civil service system to prevent politically motivated firings.
Under a Trump administration, such firings are likely to become the rule. During the presidential campaign, Trump regularly declared that if elected he would shut down government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. At the same
time, Trump is pledging a massive increase in military spending and packing his administration-in-waiting with military figures.
The planned assault on federal workers exposes the cynicism behind repeated statements by Democratic Party leaders—from Obama and incoming Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—suggesting that Trump may enact measures to improve the lot of workers and pledging their readiness to collaborate with him.
The American Federation of Government Employees
(AFGE), the largest federal employee union, has remained silent on Trump’s agenda. On November 9, the day after the election, AFGE President J. David Cox Sr. released a brief press statement declaring, “We will work with the Trump administration on areas of common ground, as we have with every administration for generations.”
THE REALITY OF A NATION ENDLESSLY LOOTED BY
WALL STREET'S BILLIONAIRE CLASS
"The brutality of this society, compounded by
militarism and police violence, falls hardest
on the young. One study has found that the
prevalence of serious depression among
teenagers increased by 37 percent between
2005 and 2014. Another reported that
children from 10 through 14 are for the first
time more likely to die from suicide than from
a car accident."
SOARING POVERTY AND UNEMPLOYMENT UNDER OBAMA’S OPEN
BORDERS POLICIES.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/millions-of-americans-legals-unemployed.html
SOARING POVERTY AND DRUG ADDICTION UNDER OBAMA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/08/soaring-poverty-under-obama.html
"These figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH:
The slow and painful death of America that dominates American society."
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/08/serving-super-rich-obama-clintonomics.html
THE OBAMA SOLUTION TO END WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA:
DRUG ADDICTION!!!
MEXICO: AMERICA’S DRUG DEALER!
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.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/08/obama-clintonomics-their-crony.html
“This study follows reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.”
THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS HAVE GREATLY BENEFITED FROM BARACK OBAMA’S SABOTAGE OF HOMELAND SECURITY.
"The choice of debt-ridden Greece, Europe's worst economic basket case, was oddly appropriate as the location for the start of the swansong tour of the U.S. president who has produced as much American national debt in eight years as all previous American presidents had produced over a span of 220 years combined. "
To watch Barack Obama's pathetic final non-victory lap around the world this past week, one can't help but recall his stomach-churning "Apologize for America Tour" at the start of his administration. You'll recall that in ...
November 25, 2016
Bookends to a Disastrous Presidency
By William F. Marshall
To watch Barack Obama's pathetic final non-victory lap around the world this past week, one can't help but recall his stomach-churning "Apologize for America Tour" at the start of his administration. You'll recall that in April 2009, he went to Europe, which we sacrificed tens of thousands of American lives to liberate 70-plus years ago, and informed Europeans that America "has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" of Europe.
Last week, Mr. Obama could not resist the urge to dis his country once again, telling the "global community," again from a foreign shore, that in the age of the internet, nationalism (read: Donald Trump) is rearing its ugly head. "Faced with this new reality where cultures clash, it's inevitable that some will seek a comfort in nationalism or tribe or ethnicity or sect," he informed us from Athens. He reassured his audience that "American democracy is bigger than any one person." (Wink, wink, Donald.) Fittingly, he then went on to tour the ruins of ancient Greece, before flying off to Berlin to cry on the shoulder of his globalist soul mate, Angela Merkel, another leader looking at a potential uprising by her constituency, frightened by her insane immigration policies.
The choice of debt-ridden Greece, Europe's worst economic basket case, was oddly appropriate as the location for the start of the swansong tour of the U.S. president who has produced as much American national debt in eight years as all previous American presidents had produced over a span of 220 years combined. One must wonder if Mr. Obama views pauper Greece as the model America should emulate.
These two globetrotting tours by the man-child president expressing disdain for both his own country and the choices of its people seem the perfect bookends to Obama's presidency.
His is a presidency that will likely produce shudders for years to come for all sentient Americans who had the misfortune to live through it, but particularly for Democrats. It was a sheer disaster, both in terms of the reversals the Democrats will see in their policy initiatives and in the depth of Democratic Party political losses down to the state and local levels.
As for the Democrats' agenda, Marc Thiessen neatly summed it up in the Washington Post. Mr. Obama and his Democratic fan base (what is left of it) are going to learn how all of those "accomplishments" of his administration, achieved by means of presidential fiat in executive orders, executive actions, regulatory "guidance," and regulations, can be as easily undone by President Trump. Even the rare policy Obama bothered to have codified into law – albeit with zero bipartisan support – like the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") will be gratifyingly rescinded with the GOP controlling both houses of Congress and all polls showing either a majority or plurality of Americans hating it.
And make no mistake: the Democratic Party's political losses this past Election Day were enormous. Due to the decimation that has occurred of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party is arguably in the strongest position it has been in a century, if not longer. In addition to controlling the White House and both houses of the U.S. Congress, as reported by Real Clear Politics, the GOP now controls over two thirds of the 98 state legislative bodies across the country. Additionally, it has control of both the governorship and both state legislative chambers in 23 states, whereas the Democrats can say that of only seven states.
Ironically, Barack Obama turned out to be the greatest gift to the Republican Party since Confederate general George Pickett ordered his infantry to make a headlong charge across three quarters of a mile of open field against barricaded Union artillery. That blunder led to victory for the Union army at Gettysburg and in turn to ultimate victory for our Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, in the Civil War.
Obama's obtuseness in recognizing how a majority of Americans feel about him, his policies, and the Democratic Party he represents continues unabated, despite the shellacking his agenda took on Election Day. He's just the gift that keeps on giving, which he demonstrated in another talk, again on foreign soil.
When asked by reporters if he would adhere to George W. Bush's decision not to criticize his successor's policy choices, Mr. Obama suggested that he will not remain silent as Mr. Trump pursues his own policy course. "As an American citizen who cares deeply about our country," Mr. Obama intoned last weekend in Lima, Peru, "if there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislative proposal or battle or go to core questions about our values and ideals, and if I think that it's necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, I'll examine it when it comes." Translation for us rubes: "I'll be screaming from the peanut gallery."
How noble of him. It is just this sort of hubris – this failure to recognize that we do not want to hear from him anymore – that drove Americans crazy and to the polls to throw Hillary Clinton (Barack Obama in a pantsuit) into the political abyss two weeks ago.
I say to Mr. Obama: bring it on. Your constant hectoring of the American people for the last eight years about what American values supposedly are (if I hear that "that's not who we are" line one more time, I may slit my wrists) repulses us. Your professorial sneering and snide comments toward Middle America from your earliest days of campaigning for president grated on us like fingernails on a chalkboard. Who can forget that immortal quote in ad-libbed comments made by Mr. Obama to the Democratic cognoscenti in San Francisco way back in 2008, that Americans in Pennsylvania – you know, one of those "toss-up" states that (shockingly!) went for Donald Trump – are people who just "cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations"? Gotta love that down-home feel he has for us regular 'Mericans.
When asked by the New Yorker's David Remnick what he told his daughters following his party's massive defeat on Election Day, Mr. Obama said he actually told his children (I am not making this up) that his fellow American citizens are "living organisms" who are "messy." Yes, that's what we are, Professor Obama. Just icky microbes in a Petri dish to be studied and manipulated by brilliant Democratic thinkers like you. If we don't appreciate your genius, well – pfff – we just don't, since we are only one-celled amoebae, after all. Can't pack a whole lotta thinkin' in that little gelatinous blob, now, can we?
So let us hope that Mr. Obama keeps to his word and yelps about every policy President Trump chooses to enact, or every Obama executive order he decides to repeal. That pompous nattering will remind everyday Americans just why, on November 8, 2016, they rejected his party and their candidates lock, stock, and barrel.
Yes, just keeping talking, Mr. Obama. You'll ensure that the Republicans hold a solid majority of political offices across the country for the next 30 years – at least.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government and private sector for 30 years. Presently he is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc. (The views expressed are the author's alone and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
Thanksgiving 2016 and the social crisis in America
Thanksgiving 2016 and the social crisis in America
24 November 2016
On October 3, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation authored by Secretary of State William H. Seward declaring the last Thursday of November “a day of thanksgiving.”
Despite a Civil War of “unequalled magnitude and severity,” the declaration stated, the conflict had not “arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship,” while “the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.” The proclamation concluded, “The country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.”
The ravages of the Civil War would last another year and a half. Nevertheless, it was true that society was being transformed by railroads, steamboats and the telegraph, an expansion in productive capacity that would accelerate with the rapid industrialization fostered by the Second American Revolution. The Civil War would clear the way for capitalist progress—and the explosive growth of the class struggle—by abolishing slavery.
As families throughout the United States gather to share a meal this Thanksgiving, relatively few will agree with Seward’s assessment that the country can expect “years with large increase of freedom.” Rather, for many, Thanksgiving will serve only to underline the economic hardship and oppression they face.
More than one in eight households will have had difficulty
putting food on the table the year before, and millions will
have a Thanksgiving meal only by standing in line at a food
pantry or soup kitchen.
Over a million-and-a-half people were homeless last year,
including some 300,000 children and 450,000 disabled
people. Millions more live in substandard housing, doubled
up with other families, or in motels. Such conditions may
affect only a minority of American families directly. But the
great majority of the population is economically insecure.
Forty-six percent of adults are so financially strapped that “they either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400, or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money,” according to a survey released by the Federal Reserve this year.
Under these circumstances, the announcement that the average premium under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), supposedly designed to insure lower-income people, will increase 25 percent next year means that millions will either lose their health coverage or face hundreds, or even thousands of dollars in additional expenses.
The terrific stress caused by living in households one accident or illness away from financial ruin, in which young people are burdened by debt and face narrowing prospects, while the elderly confront rising medical costs and decreasing retirement benefits, produces many signs of social distress.
The brutality of this society, compounded by
militarism and police violence, falls hardest
on the young. One study has found that the
prevalence of serious depression among
teenagers increased by 37 percent between
2005 and 2014. Another reported that
children from 10 through 14 are for the first
time more likely to die from suicide than from
a car accident.
Perhaps the most devastating manifestation of the social
malaise is America’s drug epidemic. This year, a shocking
28,000 people will die from opioid overdose, almost as many
as the number killed in car accidents. For tens of thousands
of families, Thanksgiving will be a time of mourning for
those who have lost their lives to heroin, fentanyl or
prescription painkillers.
Many of the states most affected by the drug epidemic are those worst hit by joblessness and deindustrialization. Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the “rust belt” states that backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but swung behind Donald Trump in the 2016 election, all saw their rates of opiate overdose increase by more than 10 percent between 2013 and 2014.
The social crisis in the United States is fueling an immense growth of oppositional sentiment, including significant signs of renewed class struggle and political radicalization that found only initial expression in the elections. This came first in the widespread support during the Democratic primaries for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who called himself a socialist and denounced the “billionaire class” and social inequality.
Sanders’ “political revolution” concluded ignominiously with an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, who ran on the claim that, in the words of President Obama, America is doing “pretty darn great.” The implication of this delusional narrative was that those who disagreed and were swayed by Republican candidate Donald Trump’s demagogic appeals to social discontent were part of the “white racist working class,” seeking to defend their “privileged” status against blacks and other minorities. Basing her campaign on various forms of identity politics, Clinton pitched her appeal to the affluent and complacent. The result was a sharp decline in votes for the Democratic candidate within all sections of the working class.
Trump, who is being installed in the White House with the blessings of the outgoing president and both parties, will not “make America great again.” Neither he nor any section of the ruling class has a solution to the social crisis gripping America. His “America first” economic nationalism will exacerbate the global capitalist crisis and mean sharper attacks on workers within the United States. His program of tax cuts for the
wealthy, the elimination of regulations on corporations, cuts
in social programs and an immense increase in military
spending will fuel social discontent and anger.
Trump’s election marks a turning point in the looming showdown between the financial parasites he personifies and the great mass of the population, the working class.
Andre Damon
Surgeon general’s report: One in seven Americans face substance addiction
Surgeon general’s report: One in seven Americans face substance addiction
By Kate Randall
19 November 2016
One in seven Americans will become addicted to drugs or
alcohol in their lifetimes, but only 10 percent of those affected
will ever receive any help in treating their addictions. These
are some of the grim statistics provided in a new report
released Thursday by the US surgeon general and the
Department of Health and Human Services.
“Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health” reports that over 27 million people in the United States reported current use of illicit drugs or misuse of prescription drugs in 2015, and over 66 million people reported binge drinking in the past month.
The victims of this health and societal crisis are the tens of thousands of lives lost and ruined each year due to substance misuse. Substance addiction cuts across all segments of society, but has hit rural communities, the deindustrialized Rust Belt and impoverished areas of Appalachia partic