THESE POLS DO AND WILL FUCK OVER AN ENTIRE NATION TO KEEP THEIR OWN WELL FED!
Democrats on edge after Sessions attacks Andrew McCabe's pension
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, which will likely reduce his pension benefits, has Democratic lawmakers and a key government employee union warning that Republicans are coming after federal workers.
Sessions fired McCabe just before the FBI veteran's 50th birthday, stripping him of an early retirement option that by some estimates could have given him $60,000 per year in benefits immediately. Those will now be delayed until he's at least 57 years old, at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars to McCabe.
For Democrats, the message was clear: The Trump administration is going to war against federal workers, and Republicans are cheering him on.
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"The timing of President Trump's decision to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe raises serious concerns, and his repeated criticism of the hardworking men and women of the FBI weakens our nation's justice system," House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., told the Washington Examiner.
Hoyer said the rationale for firing McCabe needs to be explained immediately to Congress, "including why he was fired the day before his government pension was set to begin."
On the House floor Monday, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said McCabe's ouster is an explicit message to all the other federal workers who might still be examining Trump's alleged ties to Russia.
"It was a shot across the bow at other government officials who are doing their jobs," Cohen said.
"And if they don't agree with the Mueller investigation continuing, or if they see concerns about the U.S. president and his campaign and some involvement with Russia, or obstruction of justice or violations of emoluments clauses, that they too risk their jobs, and risk their pensions and risk their financial security," he said.
The National Federation of Federal Employees similarly warned that the rare move from Sessions was a "purely punitive action" against McCabe, and a form of corruption on the part of Republicans that needs to be stopped.
"Regardless of Mr. McCabe's guilt or innocence, the system was manipulated at some level to intentionally inject pain on a career employee," NFFE Executive Director Steve Lenkart told the Washington Examiner.
"This is why legitimate due process is so important to the career civil service," he said. "Due process is not a personal right of employees but rather a systematic protection against corruption and political exploitation."
Lenkart argued further that Republicans have been pushing for years to eliminate civil service protections, and want to "threaten apolitical career employees."
It's a trend others have noticed building for a while now. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who represents a district in northern Virginia that's home to thousands of federal workers, said that while Trump seems to have encouraged Sessions' move, Republicans have been looking to chip away at the rights of federal workers for years.
In the first few days of 2017, House Republicans revived the so-called Holman Rule, which allows lawmakers to single out specific federal workers in a spending bill and cut their salaries down to $1.
"That sent a shiver down a lot of spines," Connolly said.
Late last year, House Republicans voted to extend the normal probationary period for new federal workers from one year to two years. The change would let agencies more easily fire workers earlier in their careers.
Connolly said these events show that Sessions' firing of McCabe is just one link in the chain for Republicans.
"You have to look at this not as an isolated, mean-spirited act by the president and Jeff Sessions, but something in the context of something more alarming," Connolly said.
He said McCabe's firing shows that Republicans know what outcomes they want, and are willing to put real pressure on federal workers to deliver them those outcomes. Republicans are essentially telling federal workers, "We're willing to use pension and payment as a way of getting what we want out of you."
When it comes to which federal workers are most at risk, one Democratic aide said it seems most likely that political appointees are in more danger than career officials.
"Since the 19th century, due to a succession of reforms designed to insulate and protect the federal civil service from exactly the kind of petty and vindictive actions that occurred last week, most federal workers are not likely to experience what McCabe experienced with his pension," this aide wrote to the Washington Examiner. "That being said, Congress must work to ensure that political appointees, and even the president himself, do not punish federal employees for doing their jobs or roll back civil service protections."
But when it comes down to what Democrats can do about it, the consensus seems to be: ride it out.
Over the weekend, Michael Bromwich, former inspector general for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton, said there's not much that can be done but to "shudder in the knowledge that they could be next."
Connolly said the problem is clearly political in nature, and that the GOP agrees with the Trump administration's apparent effort to make life tougher for federal workers.
"The Republicans have decided they are going to play the role of enablers because they've struck a deal, in a sense, with the devil, because they can get some of their legislation through," he said. "That's dangerous to the future of the Republic, and that's not hyperbole."
Connolly also noted that this political problem for Democrats and their constituents probably has a political solution.
"The answer to all of that is, we've got to win the mid-terms," he said
20 March 2018
NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks:
E-Verify Ignored in DACA Negotiations Because ‘Members of Congress Know It Will Work’
Members of Congress broadly oppose a legislative nationwide E-Verify mandate for employers because “they know it will work,” said NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, explaining why E-Verify is not being pushed in congressional negotiations for an amnesty deal for recipients of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Jenks further noted that both parties are beholden to special interests supportive of “mass migration.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/07/peter-beinart-how-democrats-lost-their.html
Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
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OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
Teachers unions intensify efforts to suppress growing class struggle in the US
20 March 2018
On Sunday night, the National Education Association (NEA) shut down the strike by 4,000 teachers and support staff in Jersey City, the second-largest school district in the state of New Jersey. The NEA ordered educators to return to their classrooms without providing any details on the tentative deal, let alone allowing workers to vote on it. Presuming that an agreement actually exists, it will do nothing to address teachers’ demands to end soaring health care costs.
The one-day strike is the latest in a growing wave of protests and calls for strikes that have spread from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Tennessee, Colorado and other states, plus the US territory of Puerto Rico, where teachers struck against school privatization yesterday.
The struggle of Jersey City teachers exposes the role of the Democratic Party, which supports the assault on teachers and public education no less than the Republicans. At issue is a bill, known as Chapter 78, which forces public employees to pay up to 35 percent of their medical insurance premiums and eliminates fully funded pensions for future teachers. It was passed with the backing of the Democratic-controlled state legislature in 2011.
Within hours of the beginning of the strike, a Hudson County judge granted the city’s Democratic Party-controlled school board an injunction to order teachers back to work on the grotesque grounds that teachers—not the corporate-controlled politicians—were doing “irreparable harm” to Jersey City school children.
The Jersey City Education Association (JCEA) is acting in the same manner as the unions in West Virginia, which opposed any struggle of teachers and worked to end it and impose a sell-out deal as soon as they could. Under conditions of a growing desire for a unified fight across the country, the NEA, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the other state-affiliated organizations see as their central task the suppression of class struggle. They will do exactly the same thing wherever a struggle emerges, and not only among teachers.
Any worker who wants to understand the nature of these organizations should make a careful study of the article, “If the Supreme Court rules against unions, conservatives won’t like what happens next,” published in the Washington Post on March 1. Written by Shaun Richman, a former organizing director of the AFT, it spells out in extraordinarily blunt terms the value of the unions for the American ruling class.
The motivation for Richman’s comment is the ongoing US Supreme Court case of Janus vs. AFSCME, which will rule on the constitutionality of “agency fees”—the requirement that workers in public-sector unions in some states pay the equivalent of dues to unions even if they are not members.
“What the Janus backers (and most commentators) miss is that agency fees are not just compensation for the financial costs of representation,” Richman says, “but for the political costs of representing all the members in the bargaining unit and maintaining labor peace. As AFSCME’s lawyer pointed out in his oral arguments, the agency fee is routinely traded for a no-strike clause in most union contracts. Should those clauses disappear, employers will have chaos and discord on their hands.”
That is, the steady income stream for these organizations—in the form of a portion of workers’ income automatically deducted from their paychecks—is quid pro quo for the “political cost” of “maintaining labor peace” by preventing strikes.
Richman continues: “American labor laws, and the employers who benefit from them, prefer that if there’s going to be a union, only one should serve as the exclusive representative of all eligible employees in a workplace. That scheme imposes on unions a legal obligation to fairly represent all members of the bargaining unit, and a political imperative to defend the terms of any deal as ‘the best we could get’ (even if it includes concessions on benefits and work rules). It rewards the unions with a guaranteed right to exist and a reliable base of fee-paying membership. But it rewards employers with the far more valuable guarantee of the right to direct the uninterrupted work of the enterprise while union leadership has to tamp down rank-and-file gripes and discord for the length of the contract.” (emphasis added).
That is, it is not a matter of these organizations representing the workers against the employers, but of them representing the employers against the workers—by tamping down “rank-and-file gripes [!] and discord.” The unions are rewarded with an income stream, the companies are rewarded (far more!) with uninterrupted work, and the workers are “rewarded”…with concessions on benefits and work rules.
Exclusive representation, mandatory agency fees, no-strike clauses and “management’s rights,” Richman declares, “are the foundation of our peculiar labor relations system,” which, he says, is different from virtually every other country.
Richman’s reference to the “peculiar” system of labor relations in America perhaps unconsciously harkens back to an earlier “peculiar institution” in America, chattel slavery. In any case, Richman is describing an arrangement that emerged in the postwar period in which the unions, both private- and public-sector, agreed to forego any challenge to the rights of management in the workplace. This was bound up with a ruthless purge from the unions of socialist and left-wing militants that formed the backbone of the movement for industrial unionism in the 1930s.
In a 1956 address to arbitrators, Arthur Goldberg, the general counsel for the United Steelworkers of America (later Secretary of Labor under Kennedy, and Supreme Court justice), enumerated on management’s “inherent rights,” which were “not modified or diminished” by collective bargaining. “The union cannot direct its members to their work stations or work assignments… The union does not notify people who are discharged to stay put. The union does not tell employees to report for work after a layoff… Very often union men are disturbed by decisions they consider entirely wrong. Nevertheless, a company’s right to make its own judgments is clear.”
During the postwar period, under conditions of economic growth and the undisputed sway of US corporations over the world economy, workers were able to win certain gains despite the domination of the unions by right-wing bureaucrats.
This changed as American capitalism began its historical economic decline and the ruling class shifted from a policy of relative class compromise to class war and social counterrevolution. When Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers and jailed their leaders, the AFL-CIO did nothing, initiating a decades-long wave of unending betrayals that continues to this day. Incapable of any progressive response to capitalist globalization, the unions blocked any resistance by workers and colluded with corporations to shut down plants and wipe out millions of jobs.
During this period the unions went through a fundamental transformation. Though they still called themselves “unions,” they abandoned any of the tasks traditionally associated with unions, including calling strikes, addressing workplace grievances and opposing speedup and management abuse. Far from expanding the share of national income that goes to the working class, the unions colluded with the corporations and the government to reduce that share, in order to increase the share that goes to the top five percent of the population.
If the American union leaders were to “defend the income of the bourgeoisie from attacks on the part of workers; should they conduct a struggle against strikes, against the raising of wages, against help to the unemployed; then we would have an organization of scabs, not a trade union,” Leon Trotsky noted in 1937.
This is exactly what these organizations have become. It is necessary to avoid the tyranny of language. While workers have a desire to unite and organize joint opposition, they confront in the “unions,” not workers organizations, but corporatist instruments of management and the state, controlled by privileged, upper-middle-class executives. (AFT President Randi Weingarten has an annual salary of half a million dollars, while Richman was paid $200,000 for his “service” at the AFT).
The greatest fear of these organizations is that opposition will develop outside of their control. If the Janus ruling undermines the monopoly of the unions, Richman warns of “new unions that are more left-wing and militant (or at least crankier)” and “will not be satisfied with the current work rules and compensation and will have little incentive to settle.”
All those pseudo-left organizations that defend the unions do so because they want to maintain the organizational stranglehold that they have over the working class. They denounce the Socialist Equality Party as “sectarian” for supposedly refusing to “work within the unions.” In fact, the SEP carries out its political work wherever workers are, including in the corporatist syndicates, but it does so to fight for the independent organization and revolutionary initiative of the working class, not to uphold the authority of anti-working-class organizations.
For the working class, what is posed is not the formation of new unions that accept and defend capitalist property relations, let alone simply replacing the existing leadership. While there may be something “peculiar” about the openness within which unions in the US embraced the domination of management, the same process of degeneration and transformation has occurred within the nationalist, pro-capitalist labor organizations around the world.
Rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, based on the needs and rights of the workers, must be built to unify all sections of the working class in a common struggle. In opposition to the UAW, AFT, NEA and other corporatist organizations, these organizations must reject the subordination of the interests of the working class to the capitalist system and the state, and the relentless demands for austerity to enrich the financial oligarchy and finance new wars. Instead of acceding to management dictatorship in the factories and workplaces, these committees must assert the right to organize collective action to oppose all forms of corporate abuse and exploitation.
Above all, these committees must reject the lies peddled by Democrats and Republicans, who say there is no money for public education, decent wages, health care and pensions for public employees, while they squander trillions on corporate tax cuts and endless wars.
While fighting for such rank-and-file committees, the Socialist Equality Party insists that the class struggle must be fused with a new, socialist perspective and that the fight for the right to public education, living wages and fully paid health care and pension benefits, will not be possible outside of the independent political mobilization of the working class and a frontal assault on the entrenched wealth and power of the capitalist exploiters.
Jerry White
PARTNER WITH MEXICO, the LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY and the PRO-BUSINESS GOP to keep wages for LEGALS depressed (today they are depressed to 1973 levels).
But you will still get the tax bills for the Mex welfare state and crime tidal wave!
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“Illegal aliens are not supposed to work, and knowingly providing shelter for illegal aliens can be construed as harboring and shielding, elements of a felony under federal law, Title 8 U.S. Code § 1324.”
“Where aliens and jobs are concerned, even many categories of nonimmigrant aliens (temporary visitors) including aliens who lawfully enter under the Visa Waiver Program or with tourist visas may not work in the United States and immediately become subject to removal (deportation) if they seek gainful employment.” ----MICHAEL CUTLER – FRONTPAGE mag
IMPOSE E-VERIFY AND YOU INSTANTLY CREATE MILLIONS MORE JOBS AND FORCE WAGES UP!
NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks:
E-Verify Ignored in DACA Negotiations Because ‘Members of Congress Know It Will Work’
Members of Congress broadly oppose a legislative nationwide E-Verify mandate for employers because “they know it will work,” said NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, explaining why E-Verify is not being pushed in congressional negotiations for an amnesty deal for recipients of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Jenks further noted that both parties are beholden to special interests supportive of “mass migration.”
DEATH BY CORRUPTION:
What caused the destruction of the bankster-funded LA RAZA SUPREAMCY Democrat Party in America?
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/07/peter-beinart-how-democrats-lost-their.html
Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
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Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers.
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WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T KNOW?
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Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
BARACK OBAMA HAS COLLECTED NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS JOHN McCAIN
BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
July 1st 2008
Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to Barack Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg
Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.
Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily News analysis of campaign records shows.
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“The administration has been pushing hard for a settlement among state attorneys general, the nation's five largest mortgage servicers — Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. — and certain federal agencies.”
OBAMA’S CRONY CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY BETWEEN THE ACTOR PRESIDENT, AND HIS BANKSTER DONORS!
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants -Goldman Sachs
($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207)
and Citigroup ($358,054).
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a 11 TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
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