OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON OUR JOBS IS BORDERLESS

OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED LA RAZA DEM

“The response of the administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even before coming to power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the bailouts, which he subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration dominated by the interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”
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THE REASON OBAMA BROUGHT IN GEITHNER, BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTERS’ WELFARE, WAS TO SIGNAL HIS BANKSTER DONORS THERE WOULD BE NO CHANGE!

“Rattner’s evident involvement in the scheme underscores the criminal character of the Wall Street financiers who the Obama administration put in charge of destroying the jobs and living standards of auto workers. Selected by Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers—who were both deeply involved in the deregulation of the finance industry and the Wall Street bailout”
Here’s what Obama did for GM and against the workers:
The crisis in the auto industry—provoked by the 2008 financial breakdown and the plunge in auto sales to the lowest per-capita rate since World War II—was used by Wall Street and the US government to destroy jobs and wages and transform the industry into a lucrative investment for the same speculators who provoked the catastrophe.
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HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN OBAMA’S SABOTAGE OF E-VERIFY, WHICH WOULD KEEP MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS OUT OF AMERICAN JOBS???

The economic crisis has led to a jobs crisis unlike anything seen since the Great Depression. The administration has rejected any government hiring programs. Throughout the crisis, Obama has endlessly repeated the claim that employment levels are a “lagging indicator.”
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THE ENTIRE REASON OUR BORERS ARE LEFT OPEN AND UNDEFENDED IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR HIS CORPORATE PAYMASTERS! THE BIGGEST ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS AND AMNESTY, BEYOND MEXICO’S DEMAND FOR SAME, IS THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE WHICH FRONTS FOR BIG BUSINESS! MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA!
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tonight, we’ll have all the latest on the devastating floods in the Midwest and all the day’s news from the campaign trail. The massive corporate mouthpiece the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is holding a “North American Forum” to lay out its “shared vision” for the United States, Canada and Mexico – which is to say a borderless, pro-business super-state in which U.S. sovereignty will be dissolved.

Undercover investigators have found incredibly lax security and enforcement at U.S. border crossings, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office. This report comes on the heels of a separate report by U.C. San Diego that shows tougher border security efforts aren’t deterring illegal entries to the United States.
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OBAMA LIED WHEN HE SAID HIS OBAMACARE DID NOT INCLUDE ILLEGALS! Tired of being Mexico’s welfare system???
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The principal domestic program for which Obama is associated is the overhaul of the health care system. The bill was entirely tailored to the interests of insurance companies and giant corporations.
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WSWS.org….. get on their free no ads E-NEWS!
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After the elections: Behind the Democratic debacle
4 November 2010
Only a day after the midterm elections, the US media quickly coalesced around a narrative, accepted by everyone in the political establishment, that the victory of the Republican Party was a popular repudiation of the supposedly left-wing policies of the Obama administration. In his press conference on Wednesday, Obama himself adopted this analysis, pledging to work closely with the Republican Party, find some compromise on tax cuts for the wealthy, and improve his relations with corporate America.
Underlying this claim are two premises, both of which are false: 1) that Obama has carried out an anti-corporate program during his first two years; and 2) that the population as a whole has used the election to give a rousing affirmation of capitalism and big business. These premises are not only absurd, they clash with the basic facts.
In the flood of political commentary, no one in the mainstream media has suggested a far more plausible explanation: After coming to power by posing as the tribune of “hope” and "change you can believe in," Obama, through his pro-corporate and pro-war policies, has succeeded in alienating and politically demoralizing large sections of the population that had voted for him.
The event that secured Obama's election was the spectacular collapse of Wall Street in September of 2008, which shattered whatever was left of the credibility of the Bush administration and deeply discredited the capitalist system itself. Obama came into office with an overwhelming mandate for radical reform.
The response of the administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even before coming to power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the bailouts, which he subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration dominated by the interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
The administration opposed any constraints on executive compensation and rejected out of hand sanctions against or the prosecution of those responsible for the economic catastrophe. Over the past two years, the wealthiest individuals have vastly expanded their share of the national income and the largest banks are expected to hand out record compensation packages.
The economic crisis has led to a jobs crisis unlike anything seen since the Great Depression. The administration has rejected any government hiring programs. Throughout the crisis, Obama has endlessly repeated the claim that employment levels are a “lagging indicator.”
After bailing out Wall Street, Obama oversaw the forced bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler, demanding that workers accept deep cuts in jobs, wages and benefits. As a result, profits for the auto giants have soared while the assault on auto workers’ wages has become the model for wage-cutting in every economic sector and in every part of the country.
The consequences can be seen in the collapse of support for the Democratic Party in the industrial Midwest, the site of half the seats lost by Democrats in the House of Representatives. In Michigan, a center of the auto industry, the Republicans swept state and local offices, amid a turnout of only 45 percent. In Detroit, which had voted for Obama overwhelmingly in 2008, barely one in five voters showed up at the polls.
The principal domestic program for which Obama is associated is the overhaul of the health care system. The bill was entirely tailored to the interests of insurance companies and giant corporations. For the sake of “bipartisanship,” Obama abandoned anything that hinted of progressive reform, including the “public option.” Elderly voters, in particular, quite correctly saw the entire measure as a step toward cutting Medicare benefits and rationing care, resulting in a significant electoral swing to the Republican Party, which recorded an 18 percent advantage among voters over 60.
On foreign policy, Obama came to power on a wave of opposition to war. In the Democratic primaries in 2008, his main argument against rival Hillary Clinton was that he had not voted to support the Iraq war. On assuming office, Obama quickly moved to reappoint those responsible for the war under Bush, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus. His administration has continued the occupation of Iraq, vastly expanded the war against Afghanistan and Pakistan, threatened new wars against Yemen and Iran, and deployed CIA drones to kill people all over the world.
In every election since 2002, the issue of war has played a dominant role. Through the actions of the Obama administration, however, it is becoming clear to millions of people that it is impossible to end war by voting for the Democratic Party. Among young people, where opposition to war is particularly strong, turnout on Tuesday fell precipitously. Whereas voters aged 18 to 29 made up 18 percent of the electorate in 2008, they comprised only 10 percent this election.
To the list of right-wing policies in Obama's first two years must be added: expanding the attack on democratic rights and opposing any prosecution of those responsible for torture and domestic spying; defending the profits of energy giant BP, responsible for the greatest environmental disaster in US history; and rejecting any moratorium on home foreclosures, despite evidence of massive fraud carried out by the very banks that are throwing millions out of their homes.
Under the peculiar conditions of American politics, which excludes any opposition to the two parties of big business, mass disaffection with the Democratic Party found expression in the victory of the Republicans. In addition to capitalizing on the collapse in voter turnout for Democrats, Republicans were able to exploit the fact that all of Obama’s betrayals and his lack of principle exposed the insincerity and duplicity that permeates the Democratic Party and its liberal backers. The rhetoric of the Republicans resonated in sections of the population that felt they had been duped.
The failure of the Obama administration is not simply failure of one individual. It is one expression of the failure of an entire political and economic system. Under conditions of long-term economic decline, American capitalism has no response to the capitalist crisis outside of an ever-expanding attack on the working class.
The trade unions and the array of liberal and middle-class organizations that promoted Obama will point to the victory of the Republicans to insist once again that the Democrats must be supported. This is utterly bankrupt. The claim that the growth of extreme right-wing forces can be stopped by the election of Democrats is the opposite of the truth. The promotion of the Democratic Party facilitates its own anti-working class policies while creating the conditions for even more right-wing forces to come to the fore.
The elections must be seen as a warning. The political system, including both parties, is moving ever further to the right. The aftermath of the elections will bring a deepening of the attacks on jobs and wages, a further erosion of democratic rights, and an expansion of war, including preparations for a global conflict with unimaginable consequences.
In the midst of this crisis, American politics takes on a diseased character. Like an impacted tooth that leads to infection, the anger and discontent felt by millions of people are denied any genuine expression. So long as the working class remains trapped within the framework of the Democratic Party and the capitalist two-party system, it is the right wing that will exploit the situation to its advantage.
Workers and young people have to seriously think through the implications. There is no way forward through the Democratic Party and capitalist politics. What is necessary is the building of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class in the struggle for socialism. This is the perspective that the Socialist Equality Party is fighting to bring to the broadest sections of workers and youth.
Joseph Kishore
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“The crisis in the auto industry—provoked by the 2008 financial breakdown and the plunge in auto sales to the lowest per-capita rate since World War II—was used by Wall Street and the US government to destroy jobs and wages and transform the industry into a lucrative investment for the same speculators who provoked the catastrophe.”
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It's Official: The Government Isn't Getting Its Money Back Out of GM
Nov 2 2010, 12:46 PM ET 117
Well, they've priced the GM IPO, and it looks like they've valued the firm at just about what we lent it: $50 billion. Since the government only took a 60% stake, that's well below what would be needed for the government to recover its investment. Even with the billions they've already "paid back"--by not using all the money--Uncle Sam needed the company to be worth more like $70 billion to break even on the bailout.

IPOs are usually priced at a discount, in order to ensure that a lot of buyers are interested; this creates a robust, liquid aftermarket in the stock, so that if the company needs to go raise more capital, there will be lots of buyers and sellers. But even if you think that the price will go up in the aftermarket, the government is going to take a hefty 30% loss on the $10 billion worth of shares that will be sold in the initial public offering.

Moreover, the big block of stock that the government still owns will put some downward pressure on the price in the aftermarket. Everyone knows that the government is going to want to get rid of the remainder of its shares sooner rather than later, which means that secondary offerings will follow in fairly short order. Unless GM turns in some pretty spectacular profits, it looks to me like the government is going to lose at least $10 billion on this deal.

So can they turn in those profits? Mickey Kaus called me a "cheap date" for visiting GM and deciding that maybe the bailout wasn't such a bad idea after all. But that wasn't quite what I said: I said that with the competitive advantages conveyed by the bankruptcy, the company was probably viable; and that the bailout wasn't the worst thing the government had done in the past two years. I think both those statements are true!

But that is not an endorsement of the bailouts, which remain an expensive boondoggle. We could have given every autoworker $100,000, offered retraining and relocation assistance to tens of thousands of employees at their suppliers, and still come out ahead on this deal. Had we done this, we would have helped eliminate some of the overcapacity in the global auto industry, and sent a clear signal to CEOs that they should not emulate Rick Wagoner's pigheaded refusal to prepare for a possible reorganization.
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The crisis in the auto industry—provoked by the 2008 financial breakdown and the plunge in auto sales to the lowest per-capita rate since World War II—was used by Wall Street and the US government to destroy jobs and wages and transform the industry into a lucrative investment for the same speculators who provoked the catastrophe.
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Wsws.org… get on their free no ads E-NEWS
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Obama’s car czar faces new lawsuits in kickback scheme
By Jerry White
23 November 2010
On the same day that Wall Street celebrated a windfall from General Motors’ stock sale last week, one of the chief architects of Obama’s forced bankruptcy and restructuring of the US automaker was hit with two lawsuits. Steven Rattner is accused of participating in a kickback scheme to gain $150 million in business from the New York State pension fund.
New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed the lawsuits against Rattner, the co-founder of the Quadrangle Group private equity firm, who was chosen by the White House to head the Auto Task Force. Cuomo is investigating illegal payoffs aimed at influencing investment decisions by pension fund officials who oversee $130 billion in assets. Charges have already led to several guilty pleas from key players.
The attorney general is seeking a $26 million settlement from Rattner and to bar him from the securities industry in New York for the rest of his life. The Securities and Exchange Commission has already obtained a less severe settlement with Rattner over the so-called “pay-to-play” allegations.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Rattner agreed to pay $6.2 million in his SEC settlement. He is also banned for two years from associating with any investment adviser or broker dealer. Rattner settled with the SEC without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
On Monday, Henry “Hank” Morris—the former chief political advisor to former New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi—pled guilty to securities fraud. He acknowledged that he had used his influence with Hevesi, who manages the New York pension fund, to steer investments to some of Wall Street’s largest firms, including the Carlyle Group, HM Capital and Rattner’s Quadrangle Group.
According to Cuomo’s securities fraud suit, Rattner hired Morris for $1 million as part of a scheme to win an investment for Quadrangle, which Rattner then headed. In 2004 and 2005, the state retirement fund channeled $150 million to Quadrangle.
Rattner’s former company reached a settlement with the attorney general’s office last spring and agreed to cooperate in the probe of Rattner. Quadrangle issued a statement saying, “We wholly disavow the conduct engaged in by Steve Rattner. That conduct was inappropriate, wrong and unethical.”
Rattner’s evident involvement in the scheme underscores the criminal character of the Wall Street financiers who the Obama administration put in charge of destroying the jobs and living standards of auto workers. Selected by Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers—who were both deeply involved in the deregulation of the finance industry and the Wall Street bailout—Rattner wrote in his recently released book Overhaul that his lack of knowledge of the auto industry was not important. “This was not a managerial job it was a restructuring and private equity assignment,” he wrote.
The crisis in the auto industry—provoked by the 2008 financial breakdown and the plunge in auto sales to the lowest per-capita rate since World War II—was used by Wall Street and the US government to destroy jobs and wages and transform the industry into a lucrative investment for the same speculators who provoked the catastrophe.
Rattner recently told investors that, after its restructuring, GM would soon “gush” profits. As for the lack of popular enthusiasm for an auto industry rescue, which benefited only Wall Street, Rattner told MSNBC, “The American people seem to have trouble processing the success not only of this [auto] bailout but even the bank bailout. These are things that saved the country.”
Rattner left a career as a New York Times business reporter to go to Wall Street in the early 1980s. He rose through the ranks at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley before landing the number two spot at investment firm Lazard Freres & Co. At Lazard he was an integral player in media mega-deals, such as the sale of Paramount Communications to Viacom. In 2000, Rattner co-founded a private equity firm, Quadrangle Group LLC, which manages New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $13 billion-plus personal fortune and advises him on his media empire.
According to Fortune, the man who demanded that auto workers accept poverty level wages and retirees do without optical and dental care lives in a “sprawling” Manhattan apartment building—also the residence of billionaire George Soros—which “overlooks Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where he is on the board).” The magazine continued, “He has a horse-farm in North Salem, New York, in northern Westchester County, near his friend, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and is building a 15,575-square foot house on the water in Martha’s Vineyard”—where he often pilots his private jet.
On his way up the financial ladder, the Washington Post reported, Rattner also became a central figure in Democratic politics and a leading fundraiser for Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. His wife is former Democratic National Committee finance chairwoman Maureen White.
With friends in such high places, Rattner has vowed to fight the lawsuits and accused Cuomo of “bullying” him. Rattner suggested Cuomo was resentful because Rattner and his wife had provided financial support for political rivals of the attorney general and now governor-elect of New York.
Having sought to loot the pension fund for thousands of New York state employees, Rattner worked with the UAW to offload GM’s retiree health care fund on the union, paid with GM stock. This was a key factor in boosting the value of GM shares last week. While the UAW officials cashed in—receiving more than $3 billion during GM’s IPO—the union-controlled retiree trust is severely under funded and is expected to push through even deeper cuts in health care benefits.

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WHY OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS LOVE ’IM:
“This ignores, for one thing, the fact that US banks and corporations are already sitting on a cash hoard of over $1 trillion.”
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WSWS.org …get on their free emails
Obama unveils pro-business “jobs” plan
By Tom Eley
9 September 2010
President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech on the economy in Cleveland, Ohio was an exercise in deceit and demagogy. Presenting himself as a defender of the middle class against the wealthy, Obama outlined a “jobs plan” based on a series of corporate tax give-aways that have long been championed by the Republican Party. The president made no proposals for direct job creation.
The Cleveland speech is part of a campaign to stave off what are widely predicted to be major losses for the Democrats in the upcoming November elections. It comes on the heels of Obama’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee and in advance of a Friday press conference on the economy.
Obama’s new plan hinges almost exclusively on tax breaks for corporations, justified with the threadbare claim that the windfalls will convince firms to hire more workers. This ignores, for one thing, the fact that US banks and corporations are already sitting on a cash hoard of over $1 trillion.
By way of defending his opposition to public works programs or other forms of government job creation, Obama offered a bald statement of his subordination to big business. “I’ve never believed that government’s role is to create jobs or prosperity,” he said. “I believe it’s the private sector that must be the main engine of our recovery.”
New give-aways for corporations in his plan include allowing them to deduct from their taxes the full value of new equipment purchases. He also proposed to increase and make permanent a tax credit for corporate research and development.
As for Obama’s proposed $50 billion in funding for transportation development—a tiny fraction of the financial outlay required to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure—it would merely extend existing funding that is currently set to expire, while establishing an “infrastructure bank” that would attempt to secure profits for private investors in public projects.
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(THERE ARE NOW 38 MILLION ILLEGALS HERE WITH MORE COMING OVER OUR OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS DAILY!... BUT NOT ALL ARE CRIMINALS! SOME ARE JUST PREGNANT AND WANT 18 YEARS OF ANCHOR WELFARE, AND SOME JUST WANT YOUR JOB!)
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All told, the new economic measures would cost about $180 billion. According to economist Mark Zandi, the program might “a year from now… create tens of thousands of jobs.” As the Washington Post noted, “This would be a drop in the bucket compared with the 7.6 million jobs lost during the recession that began in December 2007.”
Meager as it is, the proposal has virtually no chance of passing, a fact underscored by its cool reception among many congressional Democrats. “Republicans noted that top Democratic leaders and embattled candidates were virtually silent on the proposals,” the Wall Street Journal observed. “House Democratic leadership aides said they did not want to move forward without assurance that the Senate could pass the measures. And Senate aides gave no such promises.”
As always, the Democrats, who hold historically large margins in both houses, claim their hands are tied by Republican opposition. “The only way we can get anything done is with cooperation of Republicans, and that’s been in short supply in recent months,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
What Obama presented as the main difference between the White House and congressional Republicans—whether or not to extend Bush administration tax cuts for the wealthy set to expire in January—is also more pretense than reality.
Obama claims to favor continuing the tax breaks only for households that earn less than $200,000 a year for an individual or $250,000 for a couple, about 98 percent of all households. But prominent Democrats, including Reid and former Office of Management and Budget head Peter Orszag, have already signaled their support for an extension of the cuts for the 2 percent with incomes above the cut-off levels as well.
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(“Cut regulations for special interests” … OBAMA DID THAT FOR HIS BANKSTER DONORS WITH HIS GEITHNER NO REAL BANKSTER REGULATION. BANKSTER CRIMES SOARING, PROFITS SOARING, AND SO ARE FORECLOSURES!..... OBAMA’S CONFESSION: “We saw financial firms and CEOs take in record profits and record bonuses”)
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In his speech, Obama sought to obscure the Democrats’ share of responsibility for the economic disaster, pinning blame on the “governing philosophy” of the Bush years: “Cut taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires. Cut regulations for special interests. The idea was that if we had blind faith in the market; if we let corporations play by their own rules; if we left everyone else to fend for themselves, America would grow and prosper.”
“For a time, this idea gave us the illusion of prosperity,” Obama continued. “We saw financial firms and CEOs take in record profits and record bonuses… But while all this was happening, the broader economy was becoming weaker... The wages and incomes of middle-class families kept falling while the cost of everything from tuition to health care kept rising. Folks were forced to put more debt on their credit cards and borrow against homes that many couldn’t afford in the first place. Meanwhile, a failure to pay for two wars and two tax cuts for the wealthy helped turn a record surplus into a record deficit.”
These remarks reveal the Obama administration’s contempt for the intelligence of the public. The White House seems to assume that the American people are suffering from collective amnesia.
The policies of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation have long been bipartisan. They were expanded during the Clinton years.
And they have continued under Obama. One wonders whether Obama and his handlers think the public has forgotten that Obama supported the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street under Bush and extended it once he came to power. And that Obama intervened to block legislation that would have imposed modest restrictions on the pay of bank executives, while insisting that government loans to General Motors and Chrysler be made contingent on a 50 percent wage cut for newly hired auto workers.
In its staggering dishonesty, the administration’s public relations campaign on the economy is strikingly similar to its effort during the BP Gulf catastrophe to appear “tough,” even as every step it took had as its overriding concern the protection of oil giant’s profits. Last spring Obama staged a visit to the Gulf, followed by a White House meeting with BP executives and a prime-time press conference to present the $20 billion cleanup fund—set up according to BP’s requirements—as a great boon to workers and small businesses victimized by the company’s negligence and criminality.
Similarly, the White House has stage-managed a series of events this week to package another bonanza for the corporate-financial elite as a lifeline to the “middle class.”
Yet even as Obama attempts to pose as an advocate of jobs and the middle class, the White House has been at pains to refute any notion that the latest proposals constitute a “stimulus,” or that they will significantly add to the deficit.
“I am absolutely committed to fiscal responsibility, which is why I’ve already proposed freezing all discretionary spending unrelated to national security for the next three years,” Obama declared, referring to his long-term budget plan dubbed “A New Era of Responsibility.”
The speech was two-faced throughout. Appealing to elderly voters, he promised to fight “the efforts of some in the other party to privatize Social Security, because as long as I’m president, no one is going to take the retirement savings of a generation of Americans and hand it over to Wall Street.”
But minutes later, Obama signaled to the ruling class that he was preparing, after the elections, to impose harsh cuts in basic entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. “[O]nce the bipartisan fiscal commission finishes its work,” Obama said, “I will spend the next year making the tough choices necessary to further reduce our deficit and lower our debt.”
Obama was referring to his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which in December—one month after the elections—is expected to propose a series of “reforms” of Social Security, including reductions in benefits, an increase in the retirement age, and the introduction of private “add-on retirement accounts.” (See “US ruling class prepares attack on Social Security”)
Obama is playing his role in a carefully orchestrated political act. The media incessantly claim that the primary concern animating voters is their fear of “deficit spending,” and that businesses have frozen hiring due to excessive government intervention from the Obama administration. This is counterposed to the Republicans’ central policy goal—the extension of tax breaks for the extremely wealthy and the rejection of any form of assistance to the vast majority of the population.
In reality, both the Democrats and Republicans are committed to making the population foot the full bill for the economic crisis, the bailout of Wall Street, and the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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