Maxine Waters Unfit to Chair House Financial Services Committee
Considering her record and documented history of poor ethical and moral fitness, it’s outrageous that Maxine Waters is up for chair of the ultra-powerful House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the country’s banking system, economy, housing, and insurance.
With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, come January the 14-term California congresswoman is expected to head the committee, which also has jurisdiction over monetary policy, international finance, and efforts to combat terrorist financing.
Throughout her storied political career, Waters
has been embroiled in numerous
controversies, including abusing her power to
enrich family members, getting a communist
dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black
Panther fugitive still wanted by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and accusing
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of
selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods.
A few months ago, the 80-year-old Democrat from Los Angeles encouraged violence against Trump administration cabinet members. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they are not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said at a summer rally in Los Angeles. Judicial Watch filed a House ethics complaint against Waters for encouraging violence against Trump Cabinet members.
Among her most corrupt acts as a federal legislator is steering millions of federal bailout dollars to her husband’s failing bank, OneUnited. Waters allocated $12 million to the Massachusetts bank in which she and her board member husband held shares. OneUnited subsequently got shut down by the government and American taxpayers got stiffed for the millions.
Judicial Watch investigated the scandal and obtained documents from the U.S. Treasury related to the controversial bailout. The famously remiss House Ethics Committee, which is charged with investigating and punishing corrupt lawmakers like Waters, found that she committed no wrongdoing. The panel bought Waters’ absurd story that she allocated the money as part of her longtime work to promote opportunity for minority-owned businesses and lending in underserved communities even though her husband’s bank was located thousands of miles away from the south Los Angeles neighborhoods she represents in Congress.
The reality is that without intervention by Waters OneUnited was an extremely unlikely candidate for a government bailout through the disastrous Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The Treasury Department warned that it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending and OneUnited clearly didn’t meet that criteria.
Documents uncovered by Judicial Watch detail the deplorable financial condition of OneUnited at the time of the government cash infusion. The records also show that, prior to the bailout, the bank received a “less than satisfactory rating.” Incredibly, after that scandal Waters was chosen by her colleagues to hold a ranking position on the House Financial Services Committee she will soon chair. The only consequence for blowing $12 million on her husband’s failing bank was a slap on the hand to Waters’ chief of staff (her grandson) for violating House standards of conduct to help OneUnited.
Waters, who represents some of Los Angeles’ poorest inner-city neighborhoods, has also helped family members make more than $1 million through business ventures with companies and causes that she has helped, according to her hometown newspaper. While she and her relatives get richer (she lives in a $4.5 million Los Angeles mansion), her constituents get poorer.
The congresswoman was also embroiled in a fundraising scandal for skirting federal election rules with a shady gimmick that allows unlimited donations from certain contributors. Instead of raising most of her campaign funds from individuals or political action committees, Waters sells her endorsement to other politicians and political causes for as much as $45,000 a pop.
It wouldn’t be right to part without also noting some of Waters’ international accolades. She has made worldwide headlines for her frequent trips to communist Cuba to visit her convicted cop-assassin friend, Joanne Chesimard, who appears on the FBI’s most wanted list and is also known by her Black Panther name of Assata Shakur.
Chesimard was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted by a jury of the 1979 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper. With the help of fellow cult members, she escaped from jail and fled to Cuba. Outraged U.S. lawmakers insisted she be extradited but Waters always stood by her side, likening the cop-assassin to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
In fact, Waters wrote Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro a letter to assure him that she was not part of the group of U.S. legislators who voted for a resolution to extradite the cop murderer. Waters told Castro that she opposed extradition because Chesimard was “politically persecuted” in the U.S. and simply seeking political asylum in Havana, where she still lives.
In the 1980s Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine to blacks in her south-central Los Angeles district to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine operations in Latin America, including a guerrilla army. During the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots the congresswoman repeatedly excused the violent behavior that ironically destroyed the areas she represents in the House. She dismissed the severe beating of a white truck driver by saying the anger in her district was righteous. She also excused looters who stole from stores by saying they were simply mothers capitalizing on an opportunity to take some milk, bread, and shoes.
Should this ethically and morally challenged individual, who has repeatedly displayed behavior unbecoming of a federal lawmaker, be at the helm of an influential congressional committee that oversees the financial sector?
MAXINE WATERS USES NAZIS TACTICS TO HARASS
TRUMP…. But where was her big mouth when Obama and the Clinton were sucking in
bribes and looting the poor of Haiti, or operating a fraudulent slush fund
charity????
"But
what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of
the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power,
use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and
venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear
to every person on the planet by now."
---- Patricia McCarthy -
AMERICANTHINKER.com
BANKSTERS’
RENT BOY FORMER ATTORNEY GEN ERIC HOLDER POSES WITH HITLER PRAISING LEADER OF
RACIST, HOMOPHOBIC, ANTI-SEMITIC HATE MONGER LOUIS Farrakhan.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point
even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD /
FRONTPAGE MAG
MAXINE WATERS, LOUIS FARRAKHAN, ERIC HOLDER
and BARACK OBAMA – RACIST, VIOLENT HATE MONGERS!
Rep. Maxine Waters is fine with Farrakhan. And the left is fine
with Waters. Eric Holder recently posed with Farrakhan. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION
"This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are
extravagantly wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never
be exposed to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the
crime or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
Democrat Corruption is a Clear and Present Danger to America
On
November 6, it seemed the Republicans might hold their majority in the Senate
and in the House. Sadly, they lost their majority in the House. The
mystery is why so many Democrat candidates who are so obviously ethically
challenged won in races that should not have even been close.
How and why do Democrats continue to vote for unqualified,
dishonest candidates? Elizabeth Warren is a proven liar, a cheat who
claimed Native American heritage in order to get a job at
Harvard. Her baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was her
plan to wield control over all bank and non-bank institutions without
Congressional interference. In short, she is a
hard-left socialist who means to control how Americans earn,
spend and borrow money, how they use their savings. Warren is a
blight on the Constitution and the guaranteed freedoms of US citizens. She is
an advance operative for the socialist America the left envisions.
Andrew
Gillum, the left's choice to be Governor of Florida, is the failed mayor of
Tallahassee. He remains
under FBI investigation for corruption. Given the
information about that investigation that has been released, he appears yet
another greedy and corrupt Democrat pol in the Hillary Clinton
mold. The stability of Tallahassee declined catastrophically under
his leadership; crime
and murder rose drastically.
Gillum
sold out his city for money, and cries racism when confronted with his
crimes. He should never have been the candidate for the Governor of
Florida but the left cares only about race and power, not ethics or
honor. For progressives, race trumps everything else, even
character. If Gillum wins after the cheating Broward County is
infamous for, Florida will suffer the slings and arrows that are inevitable
under politicians like Gillum. Why was this race even
close? Have half the nation's voters scuttled any semblance
of traditional values in order to win? Yes.
Then there is Robert Menendez, the credibly accused pedophile
senator of New Jersey. He should be in prison but was saved by one
juror in his corruption trial with whom he partied after his win on November
6. Who votes for a man like this? There
is plenty of proof that he took bribes from a wealthy client for numerous
favors, trips to the Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls
being one of them. But New Jersey just re-elected this
man. They too have lost all sense of right vs. wrong.
Stacey
Abrams, the still grasping gubernatorial contender in Georgia, is a
hard-left, anti-capitalist, anti-Second Amendment candidate. She
owes about $200K in credit card debt and wants to run Georgia? She
too is corrupt and incompetent. She is also willing to cheat to win.
Are Georgians ignorant of her many, many negatives? If they are, they voted for
her anyway. Again, skin color trumps everything.
The
left ignores fine men like John James, who ran for
the House in Michigan against Debbie Stabenow. The
left ignored Eddie Edwards who ran in
New Hampshire. Both men are conservative African Americans. The
American left today pretends such candidates do not exist. They have
ignored fine people like James and Edwards as they have always ignored
brilliant men like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Jason Riley,
and Larry Elder. They revile the brilliant Clarence
Thomas. They don't like to be reminded of men like Frederick
Douglass or Booker T.
Washington. Neither of them, like Sowell, Steele,
Williams and Elder ever promoted the idea that African Americans were or would
be perennial victims. Each of them advocated for quite the opposite,
for self-reliance and independence.
This
notion of personal responsibility is anathema to today's left; they need and
promote subservience and dependency among their flock of reliable but
uninformed voters. This is why they encourage the immigration of so
many millions of illegal migrants. They assume they will be able to win for
them the right to vote. Judging by the number of them who likely
voted in the midterms, their plan is succeeding.
This is how they will destroy America from
within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are extravagantly
wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed
to the downside of the invasion of millions of migrants, the crime
or the financial burden. They have nothing but contempt
for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being
intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human
traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans;
like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us.
Then
there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the thoroughly-ignorant-of-everything
candidate who won her district by 80%! This young woman
knows nothing about how any government works, let alone ours. She is
hopelessly uniformed; she knows even less about US history or the
Constitution. She is clueless about the economy. When
asked how she would pay for all the give-away programs she touts, she replied
that that was a "puzzling question"! "You
just pay for it" she answers. She has no
idea; no idea about anything. She thinks she will be
"inaugurated" to the House! Most fourth graders know more
than she does about US history. And yet she is already
thinking about running for President! This is a wholesale indictment
of our politicized, dumbed-down system of education. Many of her
constituents are immigrants; we are obviously not educating them at
all. They voted for all the free stuff -- college, medical care,
basic income, housing, that Ocasio-Cortez has promised to
deliver. This is what socialist Democrats dream
about: perpetual power over a populace too ignorant to
rebel. American as founded is at grave risk.
In
addition to ODasio-Cortez, Gillum, Ilhan Omar, Abrams, Sinema,
who very likely cheated to
take the Arizona Senate seat, there is Linda
Sanchez. Kirsten Gillibrand is a Hillary clone; she only
cares about her own political power. She speaks like a small child but is also
considering a run for the presidency. She was best pals with Bill
Clinton and Harvey Weinstein until they were politically
inconvenient. Amy Klobuchar, who embraced the vicious and obviously
false allegations against Judge Kavanagh, was re-elected! Like every
other Democrat member of the judiciary committee, she knew those accusations
were false, without a shred of corroboration, but her constituents re-elected
her! Who are these voters? How do they reconcile voting
for people willing to destroy a fine man for political purposes? She
is exactly who every Democrat member of that committee is, who every member of
the Democrat Party is: nothing more than power-hungry political
operatives out to ruin any and all opponents by any means necessary. They
are a clear and present danger to American as founded.
Young
people are no longer taught the truth of American history. They are
not taught the truth of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism
is acceptable, even promoted, by the Democrats. They
embrace Linda
Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan without
shame. Young people don't know that communism killed over a
hundred million people in the twentieth century. Their
calculated-by-leftists ignorance is destroying our country. They try
to sell the idea that gender is not a factor of biology! They
attempt to convince young people that climate change is man-made (a travesty)
and that global warming causes wild fires (a lie). Having control
over academia, they have willfully brainwashed students for nearly two
generations. Unless your children are a strong-willed, independent
thinkers, do not send them to college!
How
and why the American left has devolved into the kind of party one finds in a
banana republic is a mystery. That our media is so anxious to
promote their corrupt candidates and the low-brow
tactics they employ is a tragedy. Do they do it because they
can no longer win by promulgating their Orwellian vision of a socialist state,
mandated equality of outcome? Perhaps. They will never
sell socialism to enough sentient Americans to win. They need
millions of uninformed voters to succeed.
We must not let them cheat their way to power over the rest of
us. Their ongoing vote fraud must be stopped and the Democrats need
to take a look at themselves and at what they have become. It's not a pretty
picture. What they have become threatens to destroy the greatest
nation on the planet and they are doing it on purpose. They have
nothing but contempt for the US as founded and for those of us who love this
country.
BARACK
OBAMA, LA RAZA FASCISM and the CULTURE of DEM CORRUPTION
They
Destroyed Our Country
“They
knew Obama was an unqualified crook; yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was
a train wreck waiting to happen; yet they made him president, to the great
injury of America and the world. They understood he was only a figurehead, an
egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made him king, doing great harm to our republic
(perhaps irreparable.)”
'Incompetent'
and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the president: Pew
Research Center
The
larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters
much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.
CRONY
CAPITALISM ...the rise of Barack Obama and the fall of America!
OBAMA'S
ASSAULT ON AMERICA -WHY WALL STREET, ILLEGALS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and the 1%
LOVE HIM, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS THE SHAFT TO PAY FOR HIS CRONY CAPITALISM
CEO
pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm separating the rich and super-rich
from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than 11 percent
between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of the Obama “recovery”—while the
incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually shrank.
Meanwhile,
Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the
next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from
Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED
APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
In the July/August version of the Atlantic,
columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their
Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate
should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must
abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented
population to zero.”
Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to
the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz,
and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for
deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed
“costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals
want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom
immigrants compete.”
llustration by Lincoln Agnew*
The myth, which liberals like myself find
tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves,
Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a
feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full
story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A
decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock
many progressives today.
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In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration
wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the
rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006,
a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic
workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage
immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the
inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote,
“When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes
feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to
communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator
was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged
its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to
citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that
low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and
strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals
today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely
painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform
called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot
continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented,
and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally,
and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language
was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a
problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on
the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration
section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country
“illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the
word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,”
says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic
Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is
passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this
come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’
shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground
has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades
preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented
population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The
number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down
significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic
concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.
What’s
Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political.
Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the
country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win
the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure
white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino
base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward
the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s
2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of
wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they
were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for
reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the
administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June
2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the
administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented
immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various
other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing
growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of
his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who
could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate
America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B
visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and
News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly
immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped
found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for
Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard
way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for
president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox.
Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider
“sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open
borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he
scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would
love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3
an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have
to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among
economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate
attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant
labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the
sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away
from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post
titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The
senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S.
are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven
incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016,
FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this
issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually
been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006,
Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of
low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable
that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today.
To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a
near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by
Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty;
Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures /
Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to …
immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result
of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes
de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and
politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for,
or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations.
Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops
up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New
York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the
Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading
scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend
to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is
indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into
high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his
research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program.
Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause.
Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions
economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from
Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work,
and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic
research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus,
Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their
“desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists
have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George
Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s,
his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes
its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social
scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his
perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who
takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s
claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of
policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of
discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the
wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose
immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants
and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be
valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too.
Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working
age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs
like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to
boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’
incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the
extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants
compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even
a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the
least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the
most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups
liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against
each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which
allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the
country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach
that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this
idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who
are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts
the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the
poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to
wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration
harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and
service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the
money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately,
while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it
also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates,
immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have
larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes.
According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with
children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and
12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children.
In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the
money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in
the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to
expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants
compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and
others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less
willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when
large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s
research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation
just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and
cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that
if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans
would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of
community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our
politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he
declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we
will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously
Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and
greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white
Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This
means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting
immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers
that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s
diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review,
Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis,
examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants.
Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often
assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal
immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the
U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for
undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from
receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant
to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting
people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a
separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by
many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require
immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars
believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation.
And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity
between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not
equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again
and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his
or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For
liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to
citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States.
The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential
run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship
doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S.
illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto.
Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented
themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to
be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and
verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would
presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able
to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as
a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s
research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward
immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because,
according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning
English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton
proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she
rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying,
among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”
The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by
Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the
center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently,
native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more
likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will
also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who
consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam
Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a
voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People
living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been
heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen
Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and
applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to
aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased
expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and
behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit
intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our
sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those
words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004
Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a
conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and
Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is
among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity.
They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to
effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man
with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote
than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting
pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary
Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she
had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and
globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the
slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined
to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration
brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by
focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be
president today.
Fannie Mae and
'Freddie Maxine'
Democratic
Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of
the House's powerful Financial Services Committee. Waters is pledging to be a
diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that
when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies,
"We are going to do to them what they did to us." I'm not going to
cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats
in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.
But here we go again asking the fox
to guard the henhouse.
Back during he the financial crisis
of 2008 to 2009, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth and
retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major arsonists in
charge of putting out the fire. Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut
and former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts were the co-sponsors
of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will recall that good old
Barney resisted every attempt to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and said
he wanted to "roll the dice" on the housing market. That worked out
well.
Meanwhile, Dodd took graft payments
in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing the skids
for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or at least
being dishonorably discharged from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank bill to
regulate the banks.
Enter Maxine Waters. Back in 2009,
I had a run-in with "Mad Maxine," as she is called on Capitol Hill.
The two of us appeared together on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher,"
and when she pontificated about the misdeeds of the housing lobby, I confronted
her on the money she took from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac PACs for her campaign.
Here is how the conversation went:
MAHER: Don't you think Wall Street
needs regulation? That's where the problem is: that there was no regulation.
MOORE: Well, let's talk about
regulation. One of the biggest institutions that have failed this year was
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is an institution that your friends, the
Democrats, in fact, you, Congresswoman Waters, did not want to regulate. You
said it wasn't broke five years ago at a congressional hearing, and you took
$15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie.
WATERS: No, I didn't.
MOORE: Yeah, you did. It's in the
FEC (Federal Election Commission) records.
WATERS: No, it's not.
MOORE: And so did Barney Frank. And
so did Chris Dodd.
WATERS: That is a lie, and I challenge you to find $15,000 that I
took from Fannie PAC.
I have to confess that Waters is
very persuasive. I feared when the show was over that I had gotten my numbers
wrong and that I had falsely charged the congresswoman of corruption. But
several fact-checking groups looked it up, and sure enough, I was right. She
took $15,000 from the PAC and another $17,000, all told.
I was also right about her
statements during a 2004 congressional hearing when she said:
"Through nearly a dozen
hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something (Fannie and Freddie) that
wasn't broke. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and
particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin
Raines."
We learned the hard way just four
years later; this was all a fraudulent claim to avoid oversight of her campaign
contributors. Imagine if a Republican had said these things.
She took in more than $100,000 from
Wall Street this year as well. None of this is illegal, but it calls into
question her shakedown tactics. First, she threatens to put their head in a
noose as chairman of the Financial Services Committee — as she is getting them
to pony up campaign contributions. Pay to play? You decide.
Waters has had run-ins with the
House Ethics Committee because of fundraising tactics and insider wheeling and
dealing. Back during the financial crisis, she was suspected of helping arrange
meetings with Treasury Department officials and getting bailout money for
OneUnited, a troubled bank that her family owned major stock holdings in. She
beat the rap of corruption, but it sure smelled bad.
So will Maxine Waters be the
crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and save America from the next
financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots of harassment and
shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall Street excesses.
If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy raising money from the
people she is now in charge of regulating.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and
an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Fueling
Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy."
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