Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the capitalist system itself.
A liberal on so-called
social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the
home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of
wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled
since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Billionaire ex-NYC Mayor Bloomberg takes steps to run for Democratic
nomination
The New York
Times reported Thursday that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire
ex-mayor of New York, is taking steps toward running for the Democratic Party
2020 presidential nomination.
The
newspaper cited Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson as saying: “Mike believes that
Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our nation. We need to
finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated—but Mike is increasingly
concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do
that.”
Bloomberg reportedly
filed on Friday to run in the March 3 Alabama Democratic primary. That contest,
one of 14 taking place on what is known as “Super Tuesday,” has the earliest
filing deadline of any state primary. The next deadline is November 13 for the
New Hampshire primary, which is the second contest in the primary season,
following the Iowa caucuses in February.
Press
reports say Bloomberg has not made a final decision on whether he will join the
current field of 16 Democratic aspirants. But his move marks a reversal of
statements he made last March ruling out a presidential bid.
As a
practical matter, there appears to be little chance of Bloomberg winning the
nomination for himself. He would not appear in any debate because his campaign would
be entirely self-financed and therefore would not meet the requirement of
200,000-plus individual donors to qualify. Press reports indicate that he would
not seriously compete in the four initial contests in February—Iowa, New
Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina—where he has no campaign organization and
voting begins in less than 90 days.
But he could
run in the March 3–17 primaries, which will choose nearly two-thirds of the
total number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Using his vast
fortune for campaign advertising, he could possibly win a sufficient number of
delegates to give him leverage in the event of a negotiated or brokered
nomination. He would use it to block the nomination of Warren or Sanders.
The very
fact that a potential run by a multibillionaire ex-politician garners immediate
media attention and is instantly seen as credible testifies to the immense
power exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy over American politics.
Whether or not he decides to run, Bloomberg’s move is clearly calculated to
shift the Democratic campaign further to the right.
The
statement issued by Wolfson is an expression of skepticism toward the prospects
of the current leading “centrist” in the Democratic field, former Vice
President Joe Biden. While Biden still holds a lead over Elizabeth Warren and
Bernie Sanders in national polls, his margin has shrunk and he is faltering in
the initial primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden’s
slump and the rise of Warren, who is competing with Sanders to capture growing
anti-capitalist sentiment on the basis of demagogic promises and channel it
back behind the Democratic Party, is increasing the fears within the ruling
elite of a rising tide of working-class struggle. Oligarchs such as
Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people
could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the
capitalist system itself.
It is not
Warren or Sanders who concern figures such as Bloomberg, Bill Gates and
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, all of whom have attacked calls by the two candidates
for tax increases on multimillionaires and billionaires. These long-time
Democratic Party operatives are known quantities with solid records in defense
of the profit system and the global interests of US imperialism. Rather, the
oligarchs fear the rising wave of strikes and protests in the US and
internationally that these “left”-talking Democrats are seeking to contain and
dissipate.
They see in
proposals for social reforms paid for by increased taxes on the rich an
intolerable infringement on their prerogatives. They also see a danger of
fueling popular expectations and encouraging social unrest. They want to block
any expression in the 2020 elections of popular anger over social inequality.
Particularly
since Warren released her “Medicare for all” plan last Friday, the outpouring
of negative comments and warnings from corporate executives and media pundits
has increased. In the plan, which Warren is well aware will never be passed by
either big-business party, she calls for a 6 percent tax on all wealth over $1
billion to fund a government-paid and government-run universal health insurance
program.
Dimon
complained on the financial cable channel CNBC this week that Warren “uses some
pretty harsh words” about the rich, which “some would say vilifies successful
people.”
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, whose personal
fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos
(whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials
denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms) said
Wednesday, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation,
innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies—I do think
you risk that.”
Last
January, Bloomberg, whose net worth is $53 billion, said an earlier proposal by
Warren to tax wealth above $50 million at two percent was “probably
unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s antisocialist propaganda, he warned that seriously
pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to
Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
New York Times columnist and
multimillionaire financier Steven Rattner published an op-ed piece this week
headlined “The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way.” Defending the “free enterprise
system,” he wrote: “Thanks for providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence
that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your
surge in the polls… Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech
giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in
driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated.”
Rattner was
appointed by Obama to head his Auto Task Force in 2009, where he imposed an
across-the-board 50 percent pay cut on new-hires at GM and Chrysler, along with
thousands of layoffs and cuts in retiree benefits. He was forced to leave his
post on the auto panel when he was cited on corruption charges by the Securities
and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg’s
political career has demonstrated the fundamental identity between the two
corporate-controlled parties that comprise the US two-party system. He has
changed parties almost like he changes business suits.
Bloomberg was
a Democrat until 2001, when he reregistered as a Republican to run for mayor of
New York City because he could not win the Democratic primary. He was reelected
as a Republican in 2005, reregistered as an independent in 2007, and won
reelection in 2009, in a campaign in which he spent $70 million, a staggering
sum for a mayoral race. He remained an independent until October 2018, when he
reregistered as a Democrat, although he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and
had a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.
Besides
spending more than $200 million of his own money to get elected three times in
New York, he poured over $110 million into the 2018 Democratic campaign to help
the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, and he has pledged
to spend $500 million in the 2020 elections.
A liberal
on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of
New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further
redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has
more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Bloomberg
viciously attacked city workers, imposing a five-year wage freeze after the
2008 financial crisis, demanding cuts in pensions and health care for retirees,
eliminating more than 6,000 teaching positions, closing 20 fire companies and
slashing youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing
education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.
He continued
the brutal “stop and frisk” policing policy imposed by his predecessor, Rudy
Giuliani, and imposed concessions on school bus strikers who struck in 2013.
This is the
man praised by Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader
Charles Schumer of New York, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” program. Hahn,
now a “liberal” radio host, called Bloomberg an “excellent mayor for the city
of New York,” and added that he “might be just what the doctor ordered to shake
this thing up right now.”
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
3 Nov 2019184
4:31
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In
an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained
that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American
economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at
the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans
need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy
competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,”
Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are
trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make
a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires
are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m
not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help
sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and
that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses
who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re
not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And
you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational
corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your
profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at
the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and
bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same
corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less
committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued.
“That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to
restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push
up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country,
and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new
ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you
shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to
start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to
kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably
believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech
sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you
have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call
it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free
trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat
Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with
hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to
China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country
is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the
machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and
down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of
policies over some decades now.”
As
Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how
Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda
and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The
billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest
earners. A study released last month revealed
that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other
Americans.
Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican
Cartels
6 Nov 2019220
3:30
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that “enough is enough” and
called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials and cartel members
complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.
Hawley called for
harsh retribution against the Mexican cartels complicit in ambushing and
murdering nine American women and children near the New Mexico border.
In
the wake of the attack on Americans, as well as the Mexican cartels’ complicity
in Missouri’s meth crisis, the Missouri conservative called for the U.S.
government to sanction the cartel members who are “openly slaughtering American
citizens.”
“With
Mexico, enough is enough. US government should impose sanctions on Mexican
officials, including freezing assets, who won’t confront cartels,” Hawley
tweeted Wednesday. “Cartels are flooding MO [Missouri] w/ meth, trafficking
children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the
other way.”
Hawley
said that just over the last 14 days, there had been over 40 drug overdoses
coming from drugs across America’s southern border.
Hawley
continued, “In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses &
multiple deaths from drugs coming across [the] southern border. Story is the
same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for
our own security, we cannot allow this to continue.”
With Mexico, enough is enough. US
government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing
assets, who won’t confront cartels. Cartels are flooding MO w/ meth, trafficking
children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the
other way
In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses
& multiple deaths from drugs coming across southern border. Story is the
same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for
our own security, we cannot allow this to continue
Hawley spent
much of his August recess traveling across rural Missouri, learning what
matters to the average Missourian.
This AM I had the great privilege of
meeting Brittany Tune, a nurse, a mother of two, a follower of God, and a
remarkable woman. Born & raised in rural Shannon Co., she has raised two
kids on her own while putting herself through nursing school & dedicating
her life to others
Brittany says meth is hammering this community. She has
many friends & family members who have been touched by this epidemic. She
worries about what it means for her own kids, ages 15 & 10. It’s much worse
now than when she was growing up, she says
In
an interview with Breitbart News in September, Hawley said that
meth coming from Mexico is destroying local Missouri communities.
“Come
with me to any town, any town in the state of Missouri of any size, and I will
show you communities that are drowning in meth, drowning in it. It is literally
killing people; it is destroying families it is destroying schools and whole
communities,” he said.
“Missouri
is a border state,” Hawley said, adding that “we have to got to secure the
border to stop the meth” and “stop the flow of illegal immigration.”
Hawley’s
remarks about the Mexican cartel attack on Americans mirrors that of President
Donald Trump, who said Tuesday that
the United States was ready for war against the drug cartels.
“This
is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the
drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” the president tweeted.
Trump
has campaigned on cracking down on violence on the southern border as well as
handling the drug cartels.
During
an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Trump said he is “very seriously”
thinking of designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations
(FTOs).
“It’s
psychological, but it’s also economic,” Trump told Breitbart News in March. “As
terrorists — as terrorist organizations, the answer is yes. They are.”
Sen.
Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart
News in May that he would back Trump’s potential designation of the Mexican
cartels as FTOs and that seizing cartel leader El Chapo’s assets would build
the wall and make the cartels pay for it. In a similar manner to Missouri,
Daines told Breitbart News about how Montana has been ravaged by meth from
Mexican cartels.
Daines said that by seizing “billions” of El Chapo’s assets, it
“would absolutely fulfill President Trump’s promise to build the wall and make
Mexico pay for it. In this case, it would be a Mexican cartel paying for it
would be an excellent idea.”
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The
report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich
and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That
increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic
research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.