Elizabeth Warren Aims High on Trade Policy

Elizabeth Warren plans to put an end to Wall Street control of the Democratic Party if she becomes president. The first place she would begin is with international trade policies, drawing sharp contrasts with Wall Street puppet’s Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton in the process, along with Democratic Party Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden and dozens of other Democrats in political office.

Wyden has long been one of the architects of the growing income and wealth inequality in the United States over the last thirty years. He has continuously championed the exporting of tens of millions of American jobs on behalf of Wall Street investment banks and corporate bigwigs. The difference between the old higher U.S. wages and the new much less third world wages goes straight into the already fat wallets of the billionaires. My ex-wife calls Wyden, accurately as it turns out, a RepubliCon on all economic matters.

As for Warren, her plans include nine issues every nation would have to meet before negotiating a trade deal with the United States. Those standards include upholding and enforcing the labor rights laid out by the International Labour Organization, eliminating all domestic fossil fuel subsidies, fulfilling commitments from the Paris Climate Agreement, not running afoul of the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights, and not being on the Treasury Department’s monitoring list for manipulative currency practices. Warren’s requirements would apply not only to new trade deals but to existing treaties that Warren pledges to renegotiate.

Naturally, RepubliCons and Corporate/Wall Street Democrats, such as Wyden, will be opposed to Warren’s standards. So are the billionaires, Wall Street investors, and the so-called news media they control. Their only standard is to redistribute income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent even if the world burns.

Taken together, Warren’s mandates would fundamentally change American trade policy, potentially excluding many countries that would see the requirements as too onerous for the parasitic elites who control those governments, and who want to continue the maldistribution of income and wealth that existing trade agreements have been negotiated to bring about.

“For decades, big multinational corporations have bought and lobbied their way into dictating America’s trade policy,” Warren wrote, calling the policies across Republican and Democratic administrations a “failed trade agenda.”

“Trade can be a powerful tool to help working families but our failed pro-corporate agenda has used trade to harm American workers and the environment. My plan represents a new approach to trade — one that uses America’s leverage to boost American workers and raise the standard of living across the globe.”

In effect, Warren aims to reverse the income and wealth stolen from 99 percent of Americans and given to the billionaires by Wyden, Clinton, Obama, and the entire RepubliCon Party.

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The United States is the Most Overworked Nation in the World

George W. Bush was born with a golden spoon in his mouth, and he was pretty stupid, along with being one of the, if not the, worst presidents in U.S. history. As president, he actually had the stupidity to tell a working-class woman how “uniquely American” it is for her to work three jobs. In other words, the guy who took several months of vacation during his first year as the U.S president told the woman how uniquely American it was to be overworked, that is, if you work for a living.

According to a recent study, the people of the United States are the most overworked in the developed world. We are talking about the 99 percent, not the rich. On this matter, their fates are inversely entwined. Anyway, studies show American workers work more hours and have more stress-related illnesses than workers in Europe and Japan.

The authors point to rising economic inequality as one possible reason for the culture of overwork. The United States has the most unequal maldistribution of income and wealth in the developed world. It is not a coincidence that income and wealth inequality and Americans being overworked and overstressed are happening at the same time.

As income and wealth are redistributed by the major political parties from the 99 to the 1 percent since 1980 using state and federal governments, the 99 percent has had to work more and more hours to make ends meet.

That, in a nutshell, is why working folks in the United States are most overworked and overstressed people in the developed world.
The United States is the Most Overworked Nation in the World–Forbes

Here’s How Many Hours the Average American Works per Year-Vox

Why Are Americans Spending So Much Time at Work–The Guardian

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The 1 Percent Has Stolen So Much Money From the Rest of Us They Do Not Know What to Do With the Stolen Cash

According to Business Insider, the one percent has so much money they don’t know what to do with it.

Top corporations have been engaged in rigging the stock markets by buying their stocks and pushing the price of their stocks higher than would otherwise be the case. As much as 59 percent of all corporate profits have gone to stock buybacks rather than investing in new products or machinery. Until 1982, stock buybacks were illegal in the United States.

One of the more obvious things corporations could do with this money would be to pay their workers more, but “that would be terrible for the stock market,” said Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics. However, paying their employees more would stimulate the demand for goods and services, but doing so would leave less financial wiggle room for corporations to buy back more of their own shares, which would then depress the value of those shares, while devaluing the stock options received by CEOs.

In other words, stock options are good for CEOs but bad for the rest of the economy as a whole.

Corporations spent $1.1 trillion in stock buybacks in 2018, and they are “on track to surpass that number this year. But they still have record cash holdings of close to $3 trillion.

“Wealthy households and individuals, according to the report, are pouring money into asset managers, betting on companies that lose $1 billion a year, bonds from little-known Middle Eastern republics, and giving hot Silicon Valley start-ups more venture capital than they can handle.

And private equity companies have seen so much cash flow that these firms have $2 trillion of unused capital.

But even that hasn’t been enough to account for all the new money. The top 1% of US households are holding a record $303.9 billion of cash, a quantum leap from the under $15 billion they held just before the financial crisis.”

In other words, the rich are sitting on $303.9 billion and don’t know what to do with it, corporations are sitting on $3 trillion and don’t know what to do with it, private equity firms are sitting on $2 trillion and don’t know what to do with it. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars the rich, corporations and private equity firms have invested have been used to create a large unsustainable financial bubble that will burst with the coming of the next recession.

Given that after-tax corporate profits are down for the last two quarters for which statistics have been fully completed and given the inversion of the yield curve (which has always signaled the coming of recessions since the 1970s), all those trillions of dollars will likely vanish into nothingness when the bubble bursts. However, had the majority of that money gone to pay increases, which would have stimulated demand for goods and services, the economy would likely continue on its growth trajectory with greater Gross Domestic Product growth.

This unequal distribution of income and wealth has been brought about due to inequality in the political markets. The golden rule has been used to bring this about. He who has the gold makes the rules.

The report blames free trade for placing significant pressure downward on wages, the Trump tax cuts for the rich and their corporations which have provided even more money for corporations to buy back their shares, thereby jacking up their share prices and allowing them to give more and higher dividends to shareholders.

Click here for the report from Business Insider.

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