The Obama Zone

By Ernest Stewart [print_link]

On The Road To Los Angeles

As Alice exclaimed after falling down the rabbit hole, “Curiouser and curiouser!” I know what little Alice was feeling after I fell down into the Obama Zone. It’s a strange land full of sound bites and rhetoric signifying nothing!

Many see Obama’s presidency as one misstep after another but to anyone paying attention it’s never been a misstep. Every step has been carefully calculated. Obama’s latest step ought to remove any remaining doubt about what Barry is up to but I’m sure his supporters are even now denying reality with carefully chosen rhetoric about how he’s sending in more troops to create peace. This latest influx will bring peace and democracy to Afghanistan even if they have to kill everybody to do it! I’ll bet those dimwits in Oslo are beginning to have second thoughts about giving their peace prize to a war criminal!

Barry has failed the Truman test and has bowed down to pressure from the Pentagoons and, as rumor has it, is preparing to send 40,000 more of our children into the meat-grinding morass of a money pit that is Afghanistan. You can almost hear the clinks from glasses full of Stolichnaya held high at the Kremlin as they watch us make the very same empire ending mistakes that they, the English, and the Persians made in Afghanistan. Dasvidaniya, tovarich!

Meanwhile the Chinese and Indians are licking their lips anticipating the power vacuum that will be created by our fall and how they can best take advantage of it. Goodbye Taiwan, goodbye Kashmir! While all over Europe and in Tel Aviv politicians are fast learning Mandarin and Hindi! And suddenly doesn’t the 12-21-2012 date seem a whole lot less fantastic than it did before? You betcha!

In Other News

Isn’t it funny how there is no money for Medicare type healthcare for the masses but there’s plenty of money for oppression at home and our many illegal wars throughout the world? Funny thing that, huh? Barry recently signed a bill allotting $724 billion for the Pentagoons and Fatherland..er..Homeland Security for next year, while less than 10% of that would assure Americans have the same chance at seeing a doctor that the rest of the industrial world gets without going bankrupt.

Of course, the measly $130 billion slice of the pie for Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t enough according to Field Marshal Mullen, who would beg another $50 billion just to make sure we can kill everyone in Afghanistan ten times over, thus assuring democracy comes to Kabul!

On the home front Frau Napolitano of Homeland Security has $44 billion to keep track of you and yours just as she kept track of all those pesky Mexican Americans when she was governor of Arizona. Money to track your every move in cyber space, on your telephone, your cell phone (Did you know that they can listen in and track your every move even when your cell phone is turned off?). Your every move on Twitter, your every keystroke when you text. Not to mention all those cameras on every street corner in every city, all for your own safety and for no other reason. (If you buy that then you might want to buy this bridge that I own in Brooklyn? It’s a real money maker!) All Hail Big Brother… or else!

And Finally

Seems old Barry can’t do a thing without my approval, not only my approval but my money as well. Here’s his latest ploy and my reply…

From: President Barack Obama info@barackobama.com

To: Ernest Stewart Uncle-ernie@journalist.com

Sent: Sun, Nov 8, 2009 1:42 am

Subject: Making history

“Ernest —

This evening, at 11:15 p.m., the House of Representatives voted to pass their health insurance reform bill. Despite countless attempts over nearly a century, no chamber of Congress has ever before passed comprehensive health reform. This is history.

But you and millions of your fellow Organizing for America supporters didn’t just witness history tonight — you helped make it. Each “yes” vote was a brave stand, backed up by countless hours of knocking on doors, outreach in town halls and town squares, millions of signatures, and hundreds of thousands of calls. You stood up. You spoke up. And you were heard.

So this is a night to celebrate — but not to rest. Those who voted for reform deserve our thanks, and the next phase of this fight has already begun.

The final Senate bill hasn’t even been released yet, but the insurance companies are already pressing hard for a filibuster to bury it. OFA has built a massive neighborhood-by-neighborhood operation to bring people’s voices to Congress, and tonight we saw the results. But the coming days will put our efforts to the ultimate test. Winning will require each of us to give everything we can, starting right now.

Please donate $5 or whatever you can afford so we can finish this fight.

Tonight’s vote brought every American closer to the secure, affordable care we need. But it was also a watershed moment in how change is made.

Even after last year’s election, many insider lobbyists and partisan operatives really thought that the old formula of scare tactics, D.C. back-scratching and special-interest money would still be enough to block any idea they didn’t like. Now, they’re desperate. Because, tonight, you made it crystal clear: the old rules are changing — and the people will not be ignored.

In the final phases of last year’s election, I often reminded folks, “Don’t think for a minute that power concedes without a fight,” and it’s especially true today. But that’s okay — we’re not afraid of a fight. And as you continue to prove, when all of us work together, we have what it takes to win.

Please donate to OFA’s campaign to win this fight and ensure that real health reform reaches my desk by the end of this year:

https://donate.barackobama.com/History

Let’s keep making history,

President Barack Obama

Yo Barry,

Oh yippee, so we passed the “Health Insurance Company Protection Act of 2009” and you want me to send you money? No, you send me money to pay for this act of treason because we’re going to need it lest we be sent to a “Happy Camp” by some insurance company death panel for not buying enough of their product. Who needs food and shelter when you have worthless insurance? Thanks Barry, thanks for selling us out.

Let’s examine sections 7203 and 7201 of this outrage.

Section 7203: – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

Section 7201: – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.

Minimum cost is about $6,000 a year for a single person and $15,000 a year for a family. If this is your idea of affordable Heath Care then the Republicans were right, we don’t need any Health Care changes. All this will do is send 48,000,000 Americans to the Happy Camps and drain what little is left in the treasury into the pockets of the Insurance Goons. This seems to me to be an act of war against the poorest American citizens. Those 48,000,000 Americans didn’t have insurance not because they didn’t want it but because they couldn’t afford it and we both know with this Act the insurance prices are only going to sky rocket making even more Americans without insurance and thanks to your bill criminals!

Ernest

, and distributes a free newsletter on current affairs.

Reflections of Fidel (Taken from CubaDebate) [print_link]

HOW I regret having to criticize Obama, knowing that in that country there are other potential presidents worse than him. I understand that in the United States that office is currently a tremendous headache. Perhaps nothing could explain it better than the information in yesterday’s Granma that 237 members of the U.S. Congress; in other words, 44% of them, are millionaires. That does not mean that every one of them is obliged to be an incorrigible reactionary, but it is very difficult that they might think like any of the many millions of U.S. citizens who lack medical care, are unemployed or have to work hard to earn a living.

Obama, of course, is not a beggar, he possesses millions of dollars. As a professional he was outstanding; his domination of language, his eloquence and his intelligence are undisputed. Despite being an African American he was elected president for the first time in the history of his country in a racist society that is suffering from a profound international economic crisis, the responsibility for which falls upon itself.

It is not about being or not being anti-American, as the system and its colossal media try to describe its adversaries.

The U.S. people are not responsible for, but the victims of an unsustainable system and, what is worse, one that is now incompatible with the life of humanity.

The intelligent and rebel Obama who had to endure humiliation and racism during his childhood and youth understands that, but the Obama who is educated and committed to the system and the methods that led him to the presidency of the United States cannot resist the temptation to pressure, threaten and even deceive others.

He is obsessive in his work; possibly no other president of the United States would be capable of committing himself to a program as intensive as the one that he proposes to undertake in the next eight days.

According to his program, a wide-ranging tour will take him to Alaska, where he is to talk with troops deployed there; to Japan, Singapore, the People’s Republic of China and South Korea; he is to take part in the meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); he will have talks with the prime minister of Japan and His Majesty Emperor Akihito in the Land of the Rising Sun; the president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang; of Russia, Dmitri Medvedev, and of the People’s Republic of China, Hu Jintao; he will give speeches and press conferences; he will carry his nuclear briefcase that we trust he will not need to use during his accelerated tour.

His security adviser has informed that he is to discuss with the president of Russia extending the START-1 Treaty, which expires on December 5, 2009. Certain reductions in the enormous nuclear arsenal will doubtless be agreed, without significance for the economy and world peace.

What is our illustrious friend thinking of taking on during his intensive voyage? The White House has solemnly announced it: climate change, economic recovery, nuclear disarmament, the war in Afghanistan, the risks of war in Iran and in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. There is enough material here to write a book of fiction.

But how is Obama going to resolve climate problems if the position of his representation in the preparatory meetings for the Copenhagen Summit on greenhouse gas emissions was the worst of all the industrialized and rich countries, both in Bangkok and in Barcelona, because the United States has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, nor is that country’s oligarchy disposed to genuinely cooperate.

How is he going to contribute to the solution of the grave economic problems affecting a large part of humanity, when the total debt of the United States – which includes federal government, state and local governments, companies and families – amounted at the end of 2008 to $57 trillion, equivalent to more than 400% of its GDP, and when that country’s budget deficit rose to close to 13% of its GDP in the fiscal year 2009, a figure that Obama is doubtless aware of.

What can he offer Hu Jintao when his policy has been openly protectionist in order to hit Chinese exports; when he is demanding at all costs that the Chinese government should revalue the yuan, which would affect growing Third World imports proceeding from China.

The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff “…almost half of humanity is now living below the poverty level. The richest 20% consume 82.49% of all the Earth’s wealth and the 20% poorest have to sustain themselves with a miniscule 1.6%.” He quotes the FAO warning that “…in the coming years there will be between 150 and 200 million climate refugees.” And he adds that in his estimate: “humanity is now consuming 30% more than its reposition capacity… The Earth is showing unequivocal signs that it cannot take any more.”

What he affirms is a fact, but Obama and the U.S. Congress have not as yet heard that.

What is he leaving us in the hemisphere? The shameful problem of Honduras and the annexation of Colombia, in which country the United States is to install seven military bases. They also established a military base in Cuba more than 100 years ago and still occupy it by force. On it they installed the horrific torture center known worldwide, which Obama has been unable to close as yet.

I sustain the belief that before Obama concludes his mandate there will be six to eight rightist governments in Latin America allied to the empire. Likewise in the near future, the most right-wing sector in the United States will try to limit his mandate to a period of four years. A Nixon, a Bush or somebody like Cheney will once again be new presidents. Then one would see with all clarity the significance of those absolutely unjustifiable military bases that are now threatening all the peoples of South America on the pretext of combating drug trafficking, a problem created by the tens of billions of dollars from the United States being injected into organized crime and drug production in Latin America.

Cuba has demonstrated that in order to combat drugs what is needed is justice and social development. In our country, the crime figure per every 100,000 inhabitants is one of the lowest in the world. No other [country] in the hemisphere can show such low indices of violence. It is known that in spite of the blockade, none other possesses such high educational levels.

The peoples of Latin America will know how to resist the onslaughts of the empire!

Obama’s tour would seem to be a science fiction story.

Fidel Castro Ruz

November 11, 2009

Dateline (original version): Monday, January 31, 2005

The bilious Fred Halliday

Much like Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz, Halliday now has made his piece with the global  imperial system, and joined the growing phalanx of intellectual turncoats befouling the  idea of authentic class struggle.

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BY LOUIS PROYECT

Halliday before a class of young minds.

One thing that a number of high-profile self-described leftist enemies of “Islamofascism” have in common is that they were all once members of the editorial board of the New Left Review. What they also had in common was support for NATO’s war in the Balkans, which implied a much different attitude toward imperialism than that found in classical Marxism.

Ex-editors Quentin Hoare and his wife Branka Magas spent most of the late 1990s writing article after article demonizing the Serbs and demanding that they be bombed into submission.

In October 2000, the NLR asked Marko Attila Hoare, the progeny of Quentin and Branka, to write an article on the anti-Milosevic revolt. However, editor Susan Watkins nixed the article since it implied political support for the forced absorption of Yugoslavia into Western European economic and political institutions. (Watkins is married to Tariq Ali and appears to be one of the more radical-minded of the editors there. Apparently–despite her husband–she hates the idea of the left voting for John Kerry.)

While not as visible on the frontlines as the Hoare and Magas, Norman Geras and Chris Bertram were also being seduced by the notion of Cruise missiles as agencies of Yugoslav democracy. For reasons that remain somewhat murky, Hoare, Magas, Geras and Bertram all resigned from the NLR in 1993. What is clear, however, is that they are for Woodrow Wilson style imperialist interventions as the need arises–a variant on the bastardized socialism that compelled Lenin to draft the Zimmerwald manifesto at the start of WWI.

Although I don’t know if ex-NLR editor Fred Halliday left with this crowd back in 1993 and am not aware of any pronounced hostility toward the Serbs on his part, he certainly has emerged as a prominent supporter of military efforts to tame the unruly Moslem. Halliday’s earlier work, like “The Making of the Second Cold War” in 1983, is written from a fairly conventional academic leftist standpoint but more recent work reflects a kind of creeping Thomas Friedman sensibility about the need to punish “bad” Islamists and reward good ones. So, this means supporting the war in Afghanistan while at the same time pressing for Turkey’s admission to the European Union. You find a certain convergence between Halliday and the batty ex-radical and current Sufi neo-conservative Stephen Schwartz, whose latest book also makes the case for sorting out good Islam from bad. Needless to say, the bad Moslems are those who tend to attack Israeli or US interests.

Like others who have traveled this route, Halliday is developing a rather bilious personality that is rapidly encroaching on Christopher Hitchens’ turf. I refer you in particular to an item in last Sunday’s Observer penned by Halliday and titled “It’s time to bin the past” (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1401742,00.html). It rather shamelessly appropriates Leon Trotsky’s verdict on the Mensheviks being consigned to the dustbin of history, since Halliday–an ex-Trotskyist–must surely be aware that Trotsky was attacking reformists just like him.

Halliday discusses three “dustbins” of history in his screed. The first two relate to the former Soviet Union and Washington and make rather obvious points about Putin and Bush. It is the third dustbin that gets Halliday into a proper lather:

“The Third Dustbin is that of the contemporary global protest movement, to a considerable degree a children’s crusade of intellectual demagogues, recycled 1960s bunkeristas with their fellow travellers in literary circles, dreamers and political manipulators, of the old and new lefts, whose claim to moral and analytic superiority too often masks a set of unexamined, and themselves often recycled, platitudes from the Cold War period and, indeed, from the ideology of the communist world.”

Which intellectual demagogues would Halliday be railing against here? Naomi Klein, the most prominent spokesperson of this global protest movement? Is she recycling ideology from the communist world? Sigh, if only this were the case. Halliday lurches ahead:

“Indeed the contents of this Third Dustbin are familiar enough: a ritual incantantion of ‘no war’ that avoids any substantive engagement with problems of international peace and security, or reflection on how positively to help peoples in zones of conflict; a set of vague, unthought out, uncosted and often dangerous utopian ideas about an alternative world; a pleasing but vapid invocation of global human values and internationalism that blithely ignores the misuses to which that term was put in the 20th century (for example by Stalin or Mao); a complacent attitude, innocent when not indulgent, towards political violence (witness the cult of Che Guevara, a cruel and dangerous man, and the invitees from Northern Ireland, Palestine and Iran, to name but three at the London Social Summit in October).”

One has to wonder if the editor assigned to Halliday’s piece was drunk when he worked on it, since the above citation can barely stand on its own feet. Not only is it a 129 word sentence in clear violation of the Gunning fog factor, it also spells ‘incantation’ wrong.

With respect to the “cult of Che Guevara, a cruel and dangerous man,” one can only wonder if Halliday must be upset by the hit film “Motorcycle Diaries,” which inspired an over-the-top verbal assault from Christopher Hitchens on Slate. One supposes that Che gets people like Halliday and Hitchens all upset because he reminds them of their long frozen-over youthful idealism. And those invitees from Northern Ireland, Palestine and Iran. They should have known better than to be born in such places. Far better for them to have been born elsewhere or at least to have forsaken radical politics as Halliday did long ago. Our angry professor concludes:

“We can assess the outcome of discussions in Davos and Porto Alegre to see if thinking on the current crises of the world has moved on. Here ideas and policies should meet what I term the ‘Vilanova Test’, named after the flinty Spanish writer Pere Vilanova, who, on the basis of years of political engagement and debate in Spain and the Arab world, has argued consistently for pensamiento duro, ‘tough thinking’, in the contemporary world. We certainly have, and may again be treated to, plenty of the other.”

What can I say, when I hear business about “tough thinking”, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik comes to mind. This, after all, is what Halliday and his co-thinkers are about–reshaping the planet in pursuit of geopolitical goals. I don’t mind if that’s their agenda. The least they can do is can the leftish rhetoric.

LOUIS PROYECT has a long and distinguished career as a left activist and political teacher. His site, Unrepentant Marxist says it all.  A former Trotskyst, Proyect currently moderates a Marxist mailing list at http://www.marxmail.org .

By Michael Parenti

23 January , 2009
Michaelparenti.org [print_link]

PLEASE NOTE: this is a reprint.

After the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe, capitalism was paraded as the indomitable system that brings prosperity and democracy, the system that would prevail unto the end of history.

Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Master of the Universe and above mere national governments.

The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.

Plutocracy vs. Democracy  Let us consider democracy first. In the United States we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, “capitalist democracies.” In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.

The Constitution itself was fashioned by affluent gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to repeatedly warn of the baneful and dangerous leveling effects of democracy. The document they cobbled together was far from democratic, being shackled with checks, vetoes, and requirements for artificial super majorities, a system designed to blunt the impact of popular demands.  In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.

Today conservative forces continue to reject more equitable electoral features such as proportional representation, instant runoff, and publicly funded campaigns. They continue to create barriers to voting, be it through overly severe registration requirements, voter roll purges, inadequate polling accommodations, and electronic voting machines that consistently “malfunction” to the benefit of the more conservative candidates. At times ruling interests have suppressed radical publications and public protests, resorting to police raids, arrests, and jailings—applied most recently with full force against demonstrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Capitalism vs. Prosperity

It is ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of economic prosperity when most attempts at material betterment have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class. The history of labor struggle provides endless illustration of this.  To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.

A Self-devouring Beast

The capitalist state has two roles long recognized by political thinkers. First, like any state it must provide services that cannot be reliably developed through private means, such as public safety and orderly traffic. Second, the capitalist state protects the haves from the have-nots, securing the process of capital accumulation to benefit the moneyed interests, while heavily circumscribing the demands of the working populace, as Debs observed from his jail cell.

There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself. Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace.

In addition, there is the frequently overlooked self-destruction created by the moneyed players themselves. If left completely unsupervised, the more active command component of the financial system begins to devour less organized sources of wealth.  Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.

Some years later, in the United States, came the multi-billion-dollar plunder perpetrated by corporate conspirators at Enron, WorldCom, Harkin, Adelphia, and a dozen other major companies. Inside players like Ken Lay turned successful corporate enterprises into sheer wreckage, wiping out the jobs and life savings of thousands of employees in order to pocket billions.  These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism’s. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save “caveat emptor.”

In the meltdown of 2008-09 the mounting financial surplus created a problem for the moneyed class: there were not enough opportunities to invest. With more money than they knew what to do with, big investors poured immense sums into nonexistent housing markets and other dodgy ventures, a legerdemain of hedge funds, derivatives, high leveraging, credit default swaps, predatory lending, and whatever else.  Among the victims were other capitalists, small investors, and the many workers who lost billions of dollars in savings and pensions. Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as “a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back “with money that wasn’t there,” as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.

Is the crisis of 2008-09 caused by a chronic tendency toward overproduction and hyper-financial accumulation, as Marx would have it? Or is it the outcome of the personal avarice of people like Bernard Madoff? In other words, is the problem systemic or individual? In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive. Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them. The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.

The big bankers used some of the bailout, we do know, to buy up smaller banks and prop up banks overseas. CEOs and other top banking executives are spending bailout funds on fabulous bonuses and lavish corporate spa retreats. Meanwhile, big bailout beneficiaries like Citigroup and Bank of America laid off tens of thousands of employees, inviting the question: why were they given all that money in the first place?

While hundreds of billions were being doled out to the very people who had caused the catastrophe, the housing market continued to wilt, credit remained paralyzed, unemployment worsened, and consumer spending sank to record lows.

If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens “our way of life,” it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.

www.michaelparenti.org.

Dateline: October 05, 2009

What do you know: they were right after all.

By Paul Craig Roberts

“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Karl Marx

Lenin in his office, 1918. He saw the economy more clearly than Nobel laureates with all their fancy formulas.

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If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics.

for which the Nobel Prize has been given and are closer to the money than the predictions of Federal Reserve chairmen, US Treasury secretaries, and Nobel economists, such as Paul Krugman, who believe that more credit and more debt are the solution to the economic crisis.

In this first decade of the 21st century there has been no increase in the real incomes of working Americans.  There has been a sharp decline in their wealth.  In the 21st century Americans have suffered two major stock market crashes and the destruction of their real estate wealth.

Some studies have concluded that the real incomes of Americans, except for the financial oligarchy of the super rich, are less today than in the 1980s and even the 1970s.  I have not examined these studies of family income to determine whether they are biased by the rise in divorce and percentage of single parent households.  However, for the last decade it is clear that real take-home pay has declined.

The main cause of this decline is the offshoring of US high value-added jobs. Both manufacturing jobs and professional services, such as software engineering and information technology work, have been relocated in countries with large and cheap labor forces.

The wipeout of middle class jobs was disguised by the growth in consumer debt. As Americans’ incomes ceased to grow, consumer debt expanded to take the place of income growth and to keep consumer demand rising. Unlike rises in consumer incomes due to productivity growth, there is a limit to debt expansion.  When that limit is reached, the economy ceases to grow.

This was done by substituting cheap foreign labor for American labor.

Corporations offshored or outsourced abroad their manufacturing output, thus divorcing American incomes from the production of the goods that they consume.  The next step in the process took advantage of the high speed Internet to move professional service jobs, such as engineering, abroad.  The third step was to replace the remains of the domestic work force with foreigners brought in at one-third the salary on H-1B, L-1, and other work visas.

based on financial services, and by shills in the education business, who justified work visas for foreigners on the basis of the lie that America produces a shortage of engineers and scientists.