The Billionaires Have Programmed Too Many of Us Into Opposing Teams

The people of the United States have been sliced and diced by the billionaires into two large points-of-view over the last forty years, and deliberately so. The billionaires have used their money, their corporations, their control over the news media, as well as their control over the right-wing of the United States Supreme Court to divide a large segment of the U.S. population into two opposing camps; grassroots Democratic Party voters and Republican Party voters.

These people have been emotionally programed to support one side or the other, pretty much on par with English soccer fans, who will swap punches and riot over a referees call or a perceived slight where none might exist.

Many Democratic party members will cheer their team on with unbounded enthusiasm and little critical thought, especially if it means their Democratic Party team triumphs over the Republican party team, regardless of what those teams actually support. Many Republican Party voters are just as thoughtless.

One of my favorite examples is when Donald Trump was elected president. The Wall Street controlled Democratic National Committee (DNC) and its associate organizations immediately began to campaign that Donald Trump was the worst U.S. president of all time. Democratic voters were repeating this message even before Trump took office. Republican voters have been just as susceptible to this kind of messaging for decades.

Few Democratic voters are critical of Joe Biden because he won the election and that is all that counted. Our team won! The other team is the worst!

Forget that then Senator Biden continuously voted to redistribute $2.5 trillion for every year over the last twenty-five years from those who work for a living to the billionaires who pull his strings. That amounts to $50 trillion. Forget that Biden voted for numerous, but profitable wars, voted to incarcerate a high number of African-American males, and refuses to eliminate the senate filibuster for most things, like raising the minimum wage, immigration reform, and other things that would reduce the profits of the billionaires and their corporations. Many Democratic Party voters like to brush off these issues because, well, Biden is a Democrat, and he won, and when he won our team won. Hooray for our team!

That is the problem with Trump voters. When he lost, their team lost, and that is not acceptable.

Sliced and diced we have been. The billionaires have used social issues to divert our attention while financially raping each and every one of us for their own benefit. But we get emotionally lifted when our team scores a victory, or emotionally deflated, when our team loses. The billionaires can even lead many of the grassroots to feel great anger if our team loses.

All of which means the issues do not matter. Everything boils down to whether or not our team wins or loses, rather than how much the billionaires controlling both political parties close ranks to financially rape us using whatever corrupt means possible.

This is nice situation for the billionaires because we working folks are fighting each other rather than them and that is the point of it all.

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The Death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg Means and US Constitution and Democracy is Under Even Greater Seige

U.S. democracy and the U.S. Constitution will sorely miss Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was one of the few honest judges fighting against a political coup that has taken place, whereby the US Constitution and U.S. democracy has been overthrown by the billionaires wing of the United States Supreme Court. This vicious attack has been ongoing for several decades now.

Now, one of the great defenders of the Constitution will likely be replaced by a corporate hack willing to say and do anything to deprive the vast majority of citizens of their constitutional rights by giving more to the rich and their corporations.

The corporate/billionaire wing of the court has been waging class warfare against the 99 percent for forty years in violation of the US Constitution and legal precedence. The corrupt activist members of the Court who blithely favor billionaire money, wealth and power over all else will now find it easier to subvert the United States Constitution once again by whatever corrupt means is necessary. Those justices corrupted by powerful vested interests are John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brent Kavanaugh. All claim to be “original intent jurists.”

In other words, when they rule on a legal issue, they claim they follow the original intent of the founding fathers. Nothing could be further from the truth. All five have shown that their job is to rob the 99 percent of their Constitutional rights and to give more legal rights to the rich, which they have done time and again. This legal corruption makes it easier for the rich to steal from the rest of us.

The rich derive the vast majority of their political, economic and legal power from their ownership of limited liability corporations. Quite naturally, all five so-called original intent justices argue that publicly traded corporations are persons with all of the legal rights of human citizens. Imagine, these corrupt justices believe General Motors, Amazon, Microsoft, Exxon and Apple Inc. are people. These justices are not ignorant little boys. They know exactly what they are doing. Time and again they have given more Constitutional rights to the billionaires via their corporations and this diminishes the Constitutional rights of all others. The corrupt members of the court know this.

They know publicly traded corporations did not come out of a woman’s womb. They know corporations are simply an idea of a form of business structure given life by state legislation and are made up of inanimate objects (like computers, buildings and desks) glued together by state charters. They know the United States Constitution does not even mention the word corporation. They know that not a single one of the founding fathers ever mentioned “persons” and “corporations” together in any sentence, paragraph, or chapter of any of their voluminous writings. The idea that corporations are people subverts the original intent of the U.S. Constitution, which gives only individual person’s legal rights. Ideas of business models were never given any constitutional rights by anybody until corrupt supreme court justices decided it was so.

Since the rich control the mechanisms of corporations, the court’s decisions in this regard is to hand greater constitutional rights to this legislatively created tool of the rich, giving the 1 percent greater power than the founding fathers wanted or been able to imagine.

For example, the activist Supreme Court declared in its 2010 Citizen’s United ruling that corporations spending money on political advertisements is free speech, but nowhere in the United States Constitution is such power granted or even recognized. Ginsberg knew this was not true and that is why she dissented against Citizens United. She knew that nowhere in any founding father’s writings is such a power to be found. Nowadays, and as planned by the Justice Roberts and his corrupt collaborators, corporate advertisements are drowning out the free speech of all others, especially during election season.

In addition, this ruling eliminated one hundred years of campaign financing laws. Two corrupt US Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, “participated in political strategy sessions” to advance this case with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by the decision,” according to Common Cause.

The idea of conservative judges being original intent judges is a fairy tale used to substantiate their other fairy tales that justify rulings with the deliberate intention of redistributing income, wealth, constitutional rights and political power from the 99 percent to the billionaires and their corporations. The fairy tale lies that properties, and only properties which are united under a state issued corporate charter, is a person with constitutional rights takes far greater imagination than even a genius fairy tale creator such as J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. Our guns, bullets, teddy bears, cars, as well as our self-owned businesses, and our houses do not have constitutional rights, but the collective property we call shares in corporations gives that property constitutional rights, and the billionaires far greater constitutional rights through their corporations.

As for the argument that the constitution provides associations of people with constitutional rights, and corporations are associations of people and that somehow ownership of a corporation makes you an association with hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of other shareholders you will never meet and never know, much less associate wirh, is a complete made-up lie since the constitution only provides individual rights.

One of the great enemies of the Constitution and U.S. democracy is U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. He gave sworn testimony in his confirmation hearings before the US Senate that he would respect legal precedents. Other than abortion issues, he, obviously, lied under oath. Think about it. A known perjurer in now the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. He has shown that his job is to overthrow the US Constitution on behalf of his class solidarity, on behalf of the billionaires, just like the other corrupt corporate members of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has been doing a marvelous job. These corrupt activist justices have simply been making up shit in order to give the rich and their business tools called corporations greater Constitutional rights while diminishing the Constitutional rights of the 99 percent in the process.

The lies, the made-up make-believe that ideas, such as corporations, are people and that money is free speech, the perjuries, and working with the rich on cases the justices are about to rule on demonstrate without a doubt that the sole purpose of the five and soon to be six corrupted members of the court has been to wage class warfare on behalf of the rich by subverting the US Constitution. Doing so has allowed for a greater political rule and constitutional rights for the billionaires, generated massive income and wealth inequalities, and these activist class warriors have succeeded against the original intent of our founding fathers.

We the people will sorely miss you Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the dictatorship of the billionaires use their Supreme Court, which is their primary weapon in their class war against the rest of us, to tighten their grip on both major political parties, as well as government at all levels.

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The United States Economy: Real and not Fake Numbers When Comparing Obama vs Trump

The red arrow below shows the Exact Moment When President Donald Trump Saved the United States Economy from Democratic President Barack Obama

Donald Trump claims his economy has no relationship to the economy President Obama saved from the incompetent RepubliCON President George W. Bush. That, of course, is a lie. Both presidents reigned during the longest business expansion in United States history. So who had the better economic statistics between the two presidents? Obama did.

During Trump’s first 36 months in office, the US economy has gained 6.6 million jobs. But during a comparable 36-month period at the end of Obama’s tenure, employers added 8.1 million jobs or 23% more than what has been added since Trump took office. The average monthly gain so far under Trump is 182,000 jobs. During the last 36 months under Obama, employers were adding an average of 224,000 jobs a month.

I should also like to point out that at this point in his first and only term, President Jimmy Carter had enjoyed a gain of 10.1 million jobs. Employers added 8.5 million jobs during the first 36 months of Bill Clinton’s term and 7.8 million jobs during the first 36 months of Lyndon Johnson’s tenure, even though the labor force at that time was less than half the size of what it is today.

Total yearly corporate profits were also higher under Obama. Corporate profits peaked during the third quarter of 2014. That year also witnessed the greatest amount of total corporate profits in U.S. history. Corporate profits were higher in every year of Obama’s second term than in any year since Donald Trump became president.

In the three years under President Trump, Gross Domestic Product (GNP) has grown an average of 2.54 percent per year, while under the last three years of President Obama GNP rose 2.8 percent per year. Obviously, the economy grew faster under Obama.

President Trump pushed for and succeeded in getting tax cuts passed through congress almost exclusively for the rich and their corporations. The bill was signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. Most of the changes introduced by the bill went into effect on January 1, 2018.

Since the tax cuts went into effect, GNP has grown 2.4 percent per year, which is lower than during Trump’s first year, and lower than the last three years of Obama’s presidency.  As predicted in this blog, the tax cuts have had a negative impact on the growth of GNP, but they have pushed the United States economy into a far more serious stock market bubble that will have dire repercussions and likely send the United States into the deepest recession since the Great Depression. The official stats show that when Trump says the economy is better because of the tax cuts, he is lying, the numbers do not lie. He will deserve some significant blame for the severity of the coming recession due to his tax cuts.

Under Trump, stocks were up 14 percent per year as of February 14, 2020. That is to be expected given his ruinous tax cuts for the rich, which have pushed the market up higher than it otherwise would have gone. Meanwhile, under Obama, stocks flew higher by 13.8 percent on a yearly basis, and he managed this without the tax cut pushed by Trump.

Overall, it appears with Obama we had an economy on the rise, while with Trump we have an economy on the decline. That is not necessarily the fault of Trump. The business cycle must end, and it just might be on his watch.

Average median home prices have declined since the last quarter of 2017, the yield curve has inverted, U.S. vehicle sales declined last year, the number of individuals and households applying for food stamps has risen since last May, sales of vehicles in China plummeted by 8 percent last year suggesting China may be in recession already and before the coronavirus, total business sales in the United States have declined over the last year, U.S. manufacturing has been tanking since last year, durable goods employment is down, corporate debt is at an all-time high as is corporate share buybacks, and all are signs of a possible looming world recession.

Naturally, whoever is president next January will get the blame. If it is Trump, he will simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like Trump’s economy is riding the tailwinds of Obama’s economic miracle and saw him in the right place at the right time.

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Contrary To What the Corporate News Media Wants You to Believe: There Have Been a Number of Capitalist Nations That Failed

A recent Wall Street Journal story claimed socialism was an utter failure and no nation which has embraced capitalism has ever failed. That was a lie, plain and simple. There are plenty of examples and we can begin right here with the complete failure of capitalism in the United States.

The roaring twenties was a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality. This period was followed by the Great Depression beginning in 1929. The Depression devastated the U.S. economy. From 1929 to 1932, half of all banks failed, unemployment rose from 2.7 percent to 25.3 percent and homelessness became rampant. Housing prices plummeted 30%, international trade collapsed by 65%, the stock market suffered a 90+ percent loss of value, real Gross Domestic Product (GNP) fell 30.5 percent, wholesale prices fell 30.8 percent, and consumer prices fell 24.4 percent. Wages plummeted. In manufacturing, representing 4 of every 9 jobs in the non-farm economy at the time, weekly earnings dropped 37.5 percent from 1929 through 1932.

From 1929 to 1932, the pro-capitalist policies of the incumbent Republican Party President Herbert Hoover and the Republican congress had utterly failed. The market did not correct itself.

In the summer of 1932, Hoover insisted he would easily defeat the Democratic Party challenger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). At the time Hoover made this claim, the unemployment rate was 21.3 percent. However, 1932 was the year the Great Depression kicked into high gear. Manufacturing wages dropped more than 19 percent during that year alone, prices continued falling, and unemployment accelerated. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) collapsed by 12.9 percent, the highest fall on record. The capitalist economy of the United States was in a free fall in 1932, an utter failure of an economic system.

By the time FDR was inaugurated as president in March 1933, the unemployment rate was 25.3 percent. Unrest was occurring all over the nation; tax collectors were tar and feathered, and people were taking to the streets.

FDR infused socialism into capitalism to revive dead capitalism. His socialist policies arrested the collapse; GDP fell only -1.2 percent in 1933, and prices began to grow. GNP grew over ten percent in 1934, while prices and wages continued to rise. Socialist policies enacted by FDR included the Social Security Act to help protect the aged, unemployment insurance to keep people spending money, the minimum wage to stop wages from plummeting beyond a certain level, the Wagner Act which gave organized labor more rights to negotiate a better living with employers, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to police Wall Street criminals. Major federal programs and agencies included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Civil Works Administration (CWA), both of which put hundreds of thousands of people to work. FDR also created the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to provide relief to farmers from drought and falling prices.

As a result of the adoption of these and other socialist policies, GNP grew by robust amounts until FDR decided to curtail federal spending. The result was a short setback to the economy. FDR reversed course and continued federal deficit spending until the unemployment fell to less than 10 percent on the eve of World War II.

The United States has had a robust socialist sector as part of its economy ever since (Actually before then too). Think of all those public schools initiated 200 and more years ago in the United States, the Constitutionally mandated United States postal service (God damn socialist U.S. Constitution), the highway system, the military, the police, public parks, the court system, public employees, the national park system, the Food and Drug Administration, etc…. That is a lot of socialism for a capitalist nation, and the result has been a robust middle class, which has been weakened as the billionaires have taken over both major political parties (and your government in the process), privatized a lot of government services to take money from you and put it into their wallets, and redistributed trillions of dollars from the 99 percent to themselves during the last forty years. The rich love socialism for themselves, but not for you.

As for other capitalist nations that have failed a shortlist would include:

* Imperial Russia; people overthrew the capitalist system and replaced it with a communist system because the capitalist system had utterly failed. Yes, I know, the communist system also failed.

* Sweden: The late Nobel Prize-winning economist liked to tell the tale of the complete failure of Swedish capitalism. The Great Depression ushered in the first known nation that became heavily socialist by a vote of the people during the 1930s. The Swedes never looked back.

* The Weimar Republic was established as the representative democracy of Germany which aimed to give genuine power to all German adults. However, it had major flaws that contributed to its downfall in 1933-34, and it was replaced by Nazi Germany.

* Nazi Germany-the less said about it the better, but it did fall into the dustbin of history in 1945.

* Venezuela-Poverty ran rampant in capitalist Venezuela. Capitalism’s promises of prosperity failed miserably to improve the standards of living for the vast majority of Venezuela’s people, and that is why Hugo Chavez was elected and re-elected time and again up to his death. Thus the failure of capitalism gave birth to socialism. I know! I know! Somebody is going to say socialism has failed in Venezuela too! I will not argue that point.

On the other hand, I can name many successful socialist nations, like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, China, France, and by the way, you can also include the United States in that list, especially if one looks at all the ways the government enriches the wealthy through legislation, and through military spending, or how the Federal Reserve bailed out the rich with the $26 trillion bailout. $26 trillion? That’s socialism for you, well, not for you, but for the rich.

Socialism and capitalism have meshed together for ages. There is no pure socialist nation nor a purely capitalist nation. Purely capitalist nations have failed, and purely communist nations have failed. By the way, our capitalist health care system in the United States is the least efficient and most expensive system in the developed world, and also the only capitalist one.

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United States Income Inequality Continues to Surge

The gap between the richest and the poorest U.S. households is now the largest it’s been in the past 50 years according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

U.S. income inequality was “significantly higher” in 2018 than in 2017, the Census Bureau says in its latest American Community Survey report. Since the rich in the United States possess earnings and investments abroad, it is likely the income and wealth gaps are much larger than the Census Bureau measures.

The gap grew despite a surging national economy that has seen low unemployment and more than 10 years of consecutive GDP growth.

The most troubling thing about the new report, says William M. Rodgers III, a professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center at Rutgers University, is that it “clearly illustrates the inability of the current economic expansion, the longest on record, to lessen inequality.”

That is because the rich are using their political power to create income inequality in their favor.

When asked why the rising economic tide has raised some boats more than others, Rodgers lists several factors, including the decline of organized labor and competition for jobs from abroad. He also cites tax policies that favor businesses and higher-income families.

To understand even a little of how labor unions have been weakened you only need to look at a few of the legal decisions made by the corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court when it sided with the billionaires and their corporations in the Janus vs. AFSCME case. The corrupt wing of the court, lead by Cheif Justice John Roberts, decided to put an end to decades of legal precedent in which labor union members who did not want to pay union dues were required to pay a lesser fee to their unions to cover the cost of negotiating new contracts with management. Now labor unions are the only organizations in the United States that must provide free services to members who do not wish to pay. The corrupt wing of the court’s intention in making this decision was to weaken the power of labor unions, and working people in general, vis-a-vis the billionaires and their corporations.

Everybody knew the corrupt corporate wing of the court was going to vote in favor of Janus and end four decades of legal precedent in the process. Everybody knew the billionaires had the corporate wing in their hip pocket.

Income inequality is measured through the Gini index, which measures how far apart incomes are from each other. To do that, the index assigns a hypothetical score of 0.0 to a population in which incomes are distributed perfectly evenly and a score of 1.0 to a population where only one household gets all of the income.

The United States has been one of the most unequal of nations in the world using the Gini coefficient. The U.S. is ranked 103 in the world by the World Bank for income inequality, behind every major industrialized country, and up there with such nations as Haiti and Uganda. The U.S. was ranked at 73 ten years ago, so inequality continues to worsen here.

The billionaires’ control the corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court, the entire Republican Party, and most Democratic politicians at the national level. Therefore, you can expect income and wealth inequality will continue to get worse in the United States.

In other words, vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren for president.

US Census Bureau Report

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I Told You So! The Conservative/Corporate United States Supreme Court Keeps Abortion Alive! How the New York Times Lied to Us

A few years ago, I mentioned that the conservative/corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court would never vote to end abortion rights. Click here for that story.

The billionaire owned New York Times reported last month, “At Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s confirmation hearings 14 years ago, the first dozen questions were about whether he would respect the Supreme Court’s abortion precedents.” Well, last month Roberts voted with the court’s honest wing to strike down a Louisiana law that would have severely crippled abortion rights in the state.

The Times explained Roberts decision this way, “Although he offered no reason for his vote, there is little doubt that he wanted to avoid sending the message that the court was ready to discard a 2016 decision, a precedent, in which it struck down a similar Texas law.”

The Times explanation can be considered pure blather. Roberts does not care about “legal precedent” at all and never has. He has voted against legal precedent numerous times. For example, Roberts voted to unleash the financial power of the rich and their corporations by voting against campaign finance laws that curbed the ability of the rich to buy politicians and elections with overwhelming financial might, including the notorious Citizens United v. FEC case of 2010. That decision overturned 100 years of legal precedent. So the New York Times explanation for why Roberts elected to protect abortion rights is absurd, if not a downright lie intended to deceive its readers.

The real reason why the conservative/corporate United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts cast his vote to maintain abortion rights is more likely to continue to keep the Republican Party grassroots voters in line and their eyes only on one thing; abortion and the dying unborn.

Those rights won’t be significantly impeded legally because doing so would raise the hopes of the Republican faithful that their dreams of saving tens of thousands of the unborn every year would be fulfilled, and this great wedge issue would be legally resolved. Perhaps then many of the faithful would begin to clamor for a more equitable distribution of income, wealth, and political power, just like Jesus once did, and the leadership cannot have that.

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Does the Success of the Amendment 4 Florida Ballot Initiative Mean the End of Republican Party Presidents and No Second Term for President Trump?

‘He was a grateful man…just not in a good way.’

The citizens of Florida may have dealt President Trump a death blow to any reelection success when they voted yes to Amendment 4, which restored voting rights to 1.5 million former felons. Naturally, this proved to be a great disturbance within the minds of the Republican Party leadership who prefer to reduce the number of people voting, which enhances their opportunities to win, along with electoral fraud, such as rigging voting machines.

According to Vox, “Black people, who are disproportionately arrested and incarcerated, will benefit the most. In 2016, more than 418,000 black people out of a black voting-age population of more than 2.3 million, or 17.9 percent of potential black voters in Florida, had finished sentences but couldn’t vote due to a felony record, according to the Sentencing Project. (Again, this includes some people convicted of murders and felony sex offenses.)”

Donald Trump won the state of Florida on November 8, 2016, with a plurality of 49.0% of the popular vote that included a 1.2% winning margin over Hillary Clinton, who had 47.8% of the vote.

Amendment 4 might very well turn the presidential election to the Democratic candidate, especially if that candidate is Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Jeff Merkley, all of whom are progressive Democrats, the antithesis of such corporate and Wall Stree Democrats as Hillary Clinton and Ron Wyden.

The final word about the election is that it was not a blue wave. Instead, it was a progressive wave against the corruption of both major political parties by the billionaires and major corporations. This suggests that the end of billionaire rule in the United States may be nearing an end, with the restoration of democracy clearly in sight.

The only thing missing is something to provide a big push, such as a major recession, but that is coming. It is just a question of when.

Once both houses of Congress are restored to the people, only the corrupted US Supreme Court will remain in the hands of the billionaires and their corporations. The corrupted justices (John Roberts, Brent Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas) will continue to make rulings against the U.S. Constitution whenever the financial interests of the billionaires run up against it, and whenever the interests of the 99 percent may reduce the continued accumulation of wealth, income and political power on the part of the billionaires, and at the expense of the 99.9 percent.

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The Trade Gap With China Has Cost the United States Millions of Jobs and Fueled Income and Wealth Inequality

It’s not quite what you imagine it to be. President Trump is right to shout to the Twitterverse about how its trade deficit with China is costing the United States trillions of dollars and millions of jobs every year.

According to a recent study by the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which is hated by the conservatives and corporate Democrats alike, “…the growing trade deficit with China…has cost the U.S. millions of jobs throughout the economy since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, a finding validated by numerous studies.”

Of course, EPI did not report a few things that are important to their study, and for our interests. So, as you read through a few of the EPI highlights below, I will make comments here and there in bolded letters. However, let me state there are a few things in this report that are not mentioned, and the corporate news media do not want you to know.

• The U.S. trade deficit with China does not really exist in the sense that it is a trade deficit between China and the United States. In reality, the trade deficit is really between US corporations that manufacture their goods and services in the U.S.A. and U.S. corporations that have exported U.S. jobs to China and then exported their-made-in-China goods and services to the USA.
• Another thing not mentioned is that a variety of studies show the export of every 100 manufacturing jobs from the United States results in the loss of an additional 300 to 1700 U.S. jobs.
• The difference between the old higher wage exported U.S. jobs and the new lower wage Chinese jobs goes straight into the pockets of the billionaires who control both major political parties via higher corporate earnings, rising share prices, and surging dividends. Thus, much of the income and wealth inequality of recent history is the deliberately negotiated end result desired by corporate-backed U.S. politicians and U.S. negotiators.
  
• Currently, three people (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates) own more wealth than the bottom fifty percent of US citizens. Much of this is caused by the so-called trade deficit with China.
• Trade treaties are negotiated so that US corporations can export jobs, as well as create them over there rather than over here, and this also helps to manufacture U.S. income and wealth inequality.
• Pretty much 100 U.S. billionaires control both major U.S. political parties and quite naturally they have rigged the economy using the corrupted U.S. government, and especially a remarkably corrupt corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court, which includes two well-known perjurers in Brent Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts.
• In other words, the income and wealth inequality we experience has been caused by the corruption of all three branches of the federal government, which could not have occurred without the complete corruption of the corporate news media.
• Currently, the 1 percent steal somewhere between 22 to 38 percent of all the income produced in the United States, up from roughly 8 percent in 1980.

Here are a few of the highlights of the recent EPI report:

1. U.S. jobs lost are spread throughout the country but are concentrated in manufacturing, including in industries in which the United States has traditionally held a competitive advantage. Think Nike, Microsoft and Apple.

2. The growth of the U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2017 was responsible for the loss of 3.4 million U.S. jobs, including 1.3 million jobs lost since 2008 (the first full year of the Great Recession, which technically began at the end of 2007). Nearly three-fourths (74.4 percent) of the jobs lost between 2001 and 2017 were in manufacturing (2.5 million manufacturing jobs lost).

3. The growing trade deficit with China has cost jobs in all 50 states and in every congressional district in the United States.

4. The trade deficit in the computer and electronic parts industry grew the most: 1,209,000 jobs were lost in that industry, accounting for 36.0 percent of the 2001–2017 total jobs lost. (Think Dell Computers, Apple, Microsoft and a lot more.)

5. Surging imports of steel, aluminum, and other capital-intensive products threaten hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs in key industries such as primary metals, machinery, and fabricated metal products as well.

6. Global trade in advanced technology products—often discussed as a source of comparative advantage for the United States—is instead dominated by China. This broad category of high-end technology products includes the more advanced elements of the computer and electronic parts industry as well as other sectors such as biotechnology, life sciences, aerospace, and nuclear technology. (This is because Dell, Apple and Microsoft, among many other US high-tech corporations, have exported millions of US jobs to China, or created them there rather than here, and then exported their Chinese made products to the USA.)

7. In 2017, the United States had a $135.4 billion trade deficit in advanced technology products with China, and this deficit was responsible for 36.1 percent of the total U.S.–China goods trade deficit that year. In contrast, the United States had a $24.5 billion trade surplus in advanced technology products with the rest of the world in 2017. (See number six in bolded letters above.)

8. Growing trade deficits are also associated with wage losses (in the USA) not just for manufacturing workers but for all workers economywide who don’t have a college degree.

9. Between 2001 and 2011 alone, growing trade deficits with China reduced the incomes of directly impacted workers by $37 billion per year, and in 2011 alone, growing competition with imports from China and other low wage-countries reduced the wages of all U.S. non–college graduates by a total of $180 billion. Most of that income was redistributed to corporations in the form of higher profits and to workers with college degrees at the very top of the income distribution through higher wages.

The China toll deepens–Economic Policy Institute

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You will not be able to find a greater political hive of villainy and corruption than the corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court

Now that Right Wing Political Hack and Noted Perjurer Brett Kavanaugh is a US Supreme Court Justice, politicians, such as Republican US Senator from Alaska Lisa Murkowski, worry that the Supreme Court will lack credibility for impartiality when making decisions on cases. She need not worry.

The corporate wing of the US Supreme Court has been extremely partial toward Republican billionaires whenever their interests happen to be the case in front of them, so much so that one might rightly suspect the five judges are on the payroll of the billionaires or expect to receive some payback once they leave the court.

Perjurer Brett Kavanaugh now joins Perjurer Chief Justice John Roberts in ensuring the rollback of labor rights, voting rights, civil rights, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations, consumer protections against Wall Street investment banks and other large corporations, and anything else that might impede the growth of billionaire profits.

These corporate plutocrats (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and now Brett Kavanaugh) have raped and plundered the US Constitution with lies in order to ensure the billionaires who control the Republican Party are granted greater political and economic power at the expense of everybody else.

No better example exists than Chief Perjurer John Roberts. When referring to Roe vs. Wade during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings Roberts said, “There is nothing in my personal view…that would prevent me from applying precedents under stare decisis,” which is the legal principle of determining points in litigation according to precedent. Roberts also said, “I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent. Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness.” Roberts also testified he would act as an “honest umpire” when making decisions. It turns out all of these were lies. The so-called honest umpire threw evenhandedness and legal precedents out the window years ago.

In Citizens United vs the FCC, Roberts and the rest of the corporate wing of the court wiped out 100 years of legal precedent that allowed regulation of campaign finances. Conservative backers of Citizens United lost in lower courts repeatedly but always appealed, knowing that the conservative wing of the US Supreme Court would side with them. The same process occurred with Janus vs AFSCMC. Conservative supporters of Janus lost time and again in the lower courts, but knew, as did their liberal opponents, that once the case reached the Supreme Court it was a done deal. Forty years of legal precedents were eliminated by Robert’s utterly corrupt billionaire court.

Repeatedly, the Roberts corporate/billionaire court has rolled back voting rights, labor rights, campaign finance laws, all to the benefit of their billionaire backers and against the interests of the 99 percent, while eliminating legal precedents in the process.

Now we have Brett Kavanaugh on the court, a Republican political hack and even more notorious perjurer on the court than is Roberts.

How has the corporate wing of the court been able to do this? They have made up fables, things like corporations are people, international trade treaties are not international trade agreements, money is free speech, etc…. They have simply lied about all this stuff and used this make-believe to advance the Constitutional rights of the billionaires and their corporations while simultaneously pushing back the rights of the 99 percent, which would have stunned our founding fathers.

So do not believe it when you read about how Kavanaugh will change the court into a political hack organization. It has been for a long time already. It may be the most politicized branch of government, but one whose decisions are law, even if total corruption is behind these laws. We may need to begin ignoring Supreme Court rulings since corruption is the primary factor determining cases.

You will not be able to find a greater political hive of villainy and corruption than the corporate wing of the United States Supreme Court, which is nothing more than an arm of the billionaire controlled Republican Party.

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Study Shows Corrupt US Politicians Only Listen to the Rich

In the video above, was comedian George Carlin right about the US being a cesspool of political corruption? You better bet he was. Your vote is meaningless, and an academic study shows how true this is.

It is pretty obvious, isn’t it? We didn’t need an academic study to tell us the rich are using the government to financially bleed the rest of us dry. They’ve used the government to redistribute trillions upon trillions of dollars from the 99 to themselves over the last forty years.

Our democracy has been hijacked. Both major political parties have been hijacked. The United States Supreme Court has been hijacked, bought off really. Click here for more on this issue.

This is a no-brainer. The United States has one of the most corrupt governments in the world, aided and abetted by one of the most corrupt corporate news systems in the world if you can call it news. (Click here for how the media lies to us.) The billionaires use their corporate news media to manufacture public opinion in favor of whatever they want, regardless of how it might hurt average citizens (See Trans-Pacific Partnership below). If they can’t manufacture consent, most of the time they still get what they want, with rare exceptions.

Despite the obvious, academic research was conducted on this issue by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. The study has received lots of attention because the authors conclude that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter. Or as they put it, “economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”

The authors discovered that politicians, such as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, will be happy to fight in the halls of the US Congress for legislation that is desired by citizens of average means, but they “only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it.”

You can see in the graph below that as the percent of average citizen’s who want something from government rises from 0 to 100 percent the odds of them getting it remains tiny.

On the other hand, the graph below shows that as the economic elites and organized interest groups that control both major political parties form ranks behind legislation they want, politicians happily respond to them.  Nobody knows this better than Wall Street’s Senators Wyden, Mitch McConnell, the entire Republican Party, and the majority of the Democratic Party politicians.

Sometimes, to avoid raising the political awareness of the masses, the oligarchs who control the US and many state and local governments will decide not to do something the rich want, such as when then President Obama decided he did not have the votes in the US house and senate to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade treaty that would have redistributed trillions of dollars a year from the 99 to the 1 percent. Public resistance was too significant, but that was a rare defeat for the economic elite.

Why is income and wealth inequality so unequal? Political corruption is the answer. Why is this so? It is the golden rule in action: He who has the gold makes the rules. The US is not democracy except in illusion only. Instead, it is an oligarchy of the rich.

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