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Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20th in the midst of unprecedented opposition from both inside and outside of the establishment. The corporate media has been intensely focused on the CIA and the Democratic Party's accusation that Trump’s victory is the product of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The hundreds of thousands that will descend on Washington for the inauguration have listed Trump's racism and sexism as markers of illegitimacy. Yet little has been said about an important aspect of the Trump phenomenon. Trump is the next President of the United States in part because the economic crisis inherited by the Obama Administration continues with no end in sight.

One wouldn't know this from the corporate media. The economic collapse in 2008 was called a recession rather than a depression or a crash. Mainstream economists have painted a rosy picture of the Obama era. The Obama Administration has spent the last two years boasting of the durability of the US economy. Recent reports of a US unemployment rate of 4.7 percent and a rise in median household income appeared to validate Obama's confidence.

Yet the wide disparity between Obama's confidence in the current state of US capitalism and existing economic conditions suggests a different reality. A recent analysis of Federal Reserve data reports that millennials make twenty percent less than their parents did at the same age. In other words, young workers are making far less money than their parents. The child poverty rate in the US is at an all time high. One out of every two Americans could be considered poor and the poverty rate has risen every year of Obama’s Presidency.

Unemployment fares little better, even if the US census reports record lows for the year of 2016. The unemployment measurement has been historically deceptive, as it fails to count those who have stopped looking for work or finished receiving unemployment benefits. The labor participation rate is currently in a 39-year low at 62.8 percent. According to economists at Shadowstats, the real unemployment rate is closer to 23 percent. Joblessness has thus become a permanent fixture of the US economy despite the trillions of dollars in federal stimulus that was given to Wall Street banks during Obama's tenure.

Black Americans were hit particularly hard by the 2008 crisis and its aftermath. Black America's household net worth fell from $6700 to $1700 over this time span. The gap between white American wealth and Black American wealth reached historic highs under Obama. A study conducted in 2016 confirms that it would take 228 years for Black families to amass the equivalent wealth of white America. Black unemployment remains double that of whites. Obama's education and austerity cuts to programs such as SNAP disproportionately affected his Black constituency.

The 2016 elections were a perfect barometer of exactly how working people in the US were feeling about these conditions. For eight years, the Obama Administration firmly stuck to the position that the US economy was as strong as ever. Hillary Clinton ran for President on the same position. Yet far more people were inspired by Bernie Sanders’ admission that working people in the US were being fleeced by Wall Street. When the GOP lost its base to Trump, the Democrats chose to highlight Trump’s personal shortcoming rather than sticking to the day to day reality of working people.

Because the US political system has for decades sought to suppress the miserable reality of the working class, few people understand the cause of their plight. US capitalism is in crisis because it has become too large to maintain. Some Marxist economists have called this period the era of "permanent inflation" but it could be more accurately described as one of permanent crisis. Capitalist expansion requires such a high level of monopolization and technological development that it has become a drag on growth. As more and more workers have become displaced by technology, the productivity of the system has been unable to keep up with the need for workers to buy what is sold. Thus, overproduction has become unmanageable and a steady decline in the rate of profit has followed.

Capitalist enterprises have tried everything to stimulate production, whether by waging new wars or creating new credit schemes such as refinanced mortgages. None of these temporary solutions have been able to curb the system’s endless crisis. Right after the holidays, Macy's reported the closure of hundreds of stores due to the growth of online retail. A number of other retail monopolies reported similar plans. Meanwhile, the economic growth rate in the US was close to zero in 2016. US capitalism is at a dead-end.

US capitalism's internal logic ensures that crisis will be a long-term trend regardless of who is President. Technological innovation in the hands of the profit motive means more joblessness and less development. Corporations are shedding workers to compete, but these same workers are too impoverished to purchase what is produced. Another collapse looms on the horizon. There is no crystal ball for when this will occur. However, what is certain is the role the economic crisis has played in the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump. The two corporate parties are the face of the crisis and Trump has readily filled the political vacuum.

*(Donald Trump speaking to supporters at an immigration policy speech at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Image Credit: Gage Skidmore/ flickr).