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Amy Klobuchar, endorsed by New York Times, denounced for
railroading black teenager to prison for life
3
February 2020
Amy Klobuchar is the senior US senator from Minnesota and a
candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, having received the
endorsement in January of the New
York Times (along with Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts).
The Times praised
Klobuchar as someone “with an empathy that connects to voters’ lived
experiences, especially in the middle of the country.” The newspaper has
relentlessly promoted identity politics, an obvious factor in its endorsement
of the two female candidates.
In fact, like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and, for that
matter, Warren herself, Klobuchar personifies the manner in which gender and
racial politics provides a phony “progressive” veneer to the malicious
ambitions of middle class reactionaries of all colors, ethnicities, genders,
and sexual orientations.
Amy Klobuchar speaking in Iowa [Credit: Gage Skidmore]
Various polls currently place Klobuchar fifth behind Joe Biden,
Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Warren in the Democratic primary race, but
she has enjoyed a certain “surge” recently, the product of considerable
promotion by the US media. As a result, some surveys put her in third place in
Iowa on the eve of that state’s Democratic Party caucuses on Monday.
Now, a well-researched Associated Press (AP) story suggests that
Klobuchar used the railroading of a black teenager, Myon Burrell, to prison for
life as a springboard for her political career. Klobuchar was then the
prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis.
Various organizations, including the Minneapolis NAACP, the
Racial Justice Network, Black Lives Matter Twin Cities, and Communities United
Against Police Brutality, have called for Klobuchar to suspend her campaign for
president.
In themselves, the allegations concerning Klobuchar are not
astonishing. The Democratic Party teems with former prosecutors, CIA agents and
military officers, enemies of the working class and the oppressed at home and
abroad.
But there is something special and appropriate about the
exposure and possible downfall of the wretched Klobuchar, recently described by
the Times, in
its inimical pompous jargon of deceit and dishonesty, as “the very definition
of Midwestern charisma, grit and sticktoitiveness.”
Klobuchar has made the death of Tyesha Edwards, an 11-year-old
girl killed by a stray bullet in 2002, and the subsequent conviction of Burrell,
central to her campaign, proving supposedly both her toughness on crime and her
sensitivity to the African American community and the problem of gun violence.
In regard to the Edwards-Burrell case, the AP explains that it
went through more than 1,000 pages of police records, court transcripts and
other documents, and interviewed dozens of inmates, witnesses, and family
members.
Summing up, the AP notes that the case relied heavily “on a teen
rival of Burrell’s who gave conflicting accounts when identifying the shooter,
who was largely obscured behind a wall 120 feet away.” With no other
eyewitnesses, the story continues, “police turned to multiple jailhouse
snitches. Some have since recanted, saying they were coached or coerced. Others
were given reduced time, raising questions about their credibility. And the
lead homicide detective offered ‘major dollars’ for names, even if it was
hearsay.”
The AP goes on: “There was no gun, fingerprints, or DNA. Alibis
were never seriously pursued. Key evidence has gone missing or was never
obtained, including a convenience store surveillance tape that Burrell and
others say would have cleared him.” Burrell, now 33, has rejected all plea
deals and insisted on his innocence.
A co-defendant, Ike Tyson, insists he was the triggerman: “I
already shot an innocent girl,” said Tyson, serving a 45-year sentence. “Now an
innocent guy—at the time he was a kid—is locked up for something he didn’t do.
So, it’s like I’m carrying two burdens.”
To be blunt, the conviction and jailing of Burrell was a
scandalous state frame-up, organized by the police and the prosecutors,
including, centrally, Klobuchar.
Adding insult to injury, Klobuchar has since attempted to reap
political gain out of the destruction of Burrell and his family. At the Democratic
Party candidates’ debate in Houston in September, Klobuchar bragged about
finding and putting in jail “the killer of a little girl named Tyesha Edwards
who was doing her homework at her kitchen table and was shot through the
window.” Zak Cheney-Rice in New
York magazine suggested that Klobuchar in advertising
Burrell’s case “as a special victory for black safety in Minneapolis … plumbs
new depths.”
Both Burrell’s father, Michael Toussaint, and Tyesha Edwards’
stepfather, Leonard Winborn, see through Myon Burrell’s railroading. Toussaint
expressed sympathy for Tyesha: “She didn't deserve to die … This is a child,
studying at her table.” But he also wanted justice for his son, “a young man,
just 16 years old ... convicted of a case that he didn't do.”
Explaining why he and others were demanding that Klobuchar
suspend her presidential effort, Toussaint argued that “Amy used my son’s case”
in her campaign. Toussaint said Klobuchar wanted a political advantage.
Winborn told the Minnesota
Spokesman-Recorder: “If that man [Burrell] hasn’t done nothing,
then he doesn’t need to be in there at all … Whatever happens, I would never
want to see somebody do some time for somebody else’s wrongdoing.”
Perceptively, Winborn also pointed to prosecutor Klobuchar’s political
ambitions at the time: “Looking at it right now, it was an elevation thing … I
know all the players. I think my family got hoodwinked.”
One publication notes that Klobuchar “is the most unapologetic
hawk of the senators in the [Democratic Party] race.” It adds: “She has voted
for all but one, or 95 percent, of the military spending bills since 2013…
Klobuchar supported the US-NATO-led regime change war in Libya in 2011, and her
public statements suggest that her main condition for the US use of military
force anywhere is that US allies also take part, as in Libya … Klobuchar
received $17,704 in ‘defense’ industry contributions
for her 2018 reelection campaign.”
The Minnesota senator is a slavish supporter of Israeli violence
against the Palestinians and an eager participant in the McCarthyite
anti-Russia campaign, being one of six Democratic senators who introduced
legislation in 2017 that would have created an independent counsel with the
ability to probe potential Russian cyber attacks on political systems and
investigate efforts by Russians to “interfere” in American elections.
The New
York Times did not endorse her despite this
reactionary record, but because of
it. This “standard bearer for the Democratic center,” lyricized the Times, whose “vision goes
beyond the incremental,” had “the best chance to enact many progressive plans.”
Given the most recent turn of events, the Times ’ observation that
Klobuchar’s “more recent legislative accomplishments are narrower but
meaningful to those affected, especially the legislation aimed at helping crime
victims,” which “is not surprising given her background as the chief prosecutor
in Minnesota’s most populous county,” is especially cynical.
The notion that Klobuchar must represent something progressive
because of her gender should be an insult to the public intelligence by now. In
April 2019, the New
Republic, one of the unpleasant voices of self-satisfied,
upper-middle class public opinion in the US, described the then-group of
Democratic female presidential candidates, including Klobuchar—who were
“already making history” and who represented “a profound shift in the political
landscape”—as “Women of Substance.”
In fact, Klobuchar is something well known and horribly insubstantial — an unscrupulous big
business politician, who, like Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party
hierarchy, would think nothing of climbing over heaps of bodies to make
her career.
Hypocritical, conventional and cruel, Klobuchar might well step
out of the pages of Main
Street, Babbitt, It Can’t Happen Here or another of the novels
of Sinclair Lewis, the Minnesota-born American author and social critic.
But in her role as ruthless and striving prosecutor, she may
most closely resemble Orville W. Mason, the district attorney in Theodore
Dreiser’s An American
Tragedy, who anticipates a murder trial in the light of the
“prominence and publicity with which his own activities in connection with this
were very likely to be laden!”
Dreiser continues: “At once he got up, energetically stirred. If
he could only catch such a reptilian criminal, and that in the face of all the
sentiment that such a brutal murder was likely to inspire! The August
convention and nominations. The fall election.”
This is the Democratic Party. This is contemporary American
politics, including its utterly fraudulent “identity politics” wing, which has nothing remotely progressive about it.
Klobuchar
Received Thousands from Corporations While Introducing Legislation That
Benefitted Them
Sen. Amy Klobuchar
(D-MN) has a troubling pattern of introducing legislation favored by major
institutions in corporate America around the same they make large contributions
to her campaign.
As a senior member of the Senate
Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Klobuchar is uniquely situated
to impact the bottomline of corporate interests. Unlike her more progressive
rivals, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Klobuchar
has not been reflexively opposed to such interests. Rather, as Schweizer
details, the Minnesota Democrat has become particularly adept at using her
legislative powers not only to benefit corporate institutions, but herself as
well.
A prime example of this occurred in
May 2011 when Klobuchar introduced legislation to deter internet piracy.
Although Klobuchar was first-term senator mainly known her being “Minnesota
nice,” the bill sparked widespread controversy
The legislation’s critics alleged it
was draconian, pointing to a provision in the bill that made it a felony to
illegally stream TV shows or films off the internet. One of the most prominent
critics, the pop star Justin Bieber, even suggested that Klobuchar was the one
who deserved to be “locked up” for proposing such a strict law.
The response from the entertainment
industry, though, was exactly the opposite. Many industry executives not only
lined up behind the bill, but it seems that many had already begun favoring
Klobuchar even before its introduction.
“In the ninety days before she introduced the bill, something
unusual started happening,” Schweizer writes. “Over a one-week period in February,
seven executives from 20th Century Fox sent her donations. Three more wrote her
checks in March.”
Other entertainment industry giants quickly followed suit.
Warner Bros., which would have reaped huge benefits from the proposed
anti-piracy law, donated $20,000 through its political action committee.
Soon afterwards, no fewer than 15 of its executives donated thousands to
Klobuchar. Individuals associated with the Motion Picture Association of
America and Comcast similarly made large-scale donations in the weeks leading
up to the bill’s introduction.
“In all, the entertainment industry sent her more than $80,000,
a flow of cash she had not experienced before; all of it was collected in the
brief period before she introduced the bill,” Schweizer notes.
That troubling pattern has been on display throughout most of
Klobuchar’s tenure in the United States Senate. In 2011 and 2017, respectively,
Klobuchar’s campaign coffers saw a flood of incoming donations from Xcel
Energy, a Minnesota-based utility holding company.
The money would not have drawn much scrutiny if not for it
arriving in what appeared to be a coordinated fashion.
“At the end of September 2011, over a six-day period, no fewer
than twenty-one executives from Xcel Energy wrote campaign checks to Klobuchar,”
Schweizer writes. “Weeks earlier, Klobuchar introduced legislation … to give a
‘renewable electricity integration’ [tax] credit to utility companies.
If enacted, the legislation would have allowed companies like
Excel to claim thousands if not millions of dollars in federal tax credits for
producing renewable energy.
Likewise, Klobuchar’s decision to co-sponsor the Clean Energy
for America Act in May 2017, coincided with another surge of campaign donations
from Exel’s executives.
“Beginning at the end of May 2017 over a ten-day period,
twenty-eight executives from Xcel Energy sent her contributions totaling
$12,500,” Schweizer writes.
The bill, if passed, would have extensively expanded the tax
credits available to energy companies.
Klobuchar’s intermingling of legislative prowess and campaign
finance has made her a powerhouse fundraiser among Senate Democrats. In her
most recent reelection in 2018, she raised more than $17 million—thirty-eight
times the amount brought in by her Republican opponent. The astronomical sum
was made possible by Klobuchar’s strong backing from corporate America and
their special interest representatives in Washington, D.C.
“She took in donations from the CEOs of eleven of Minnesota’s
twenty-five largest corporations,” Schweizer writes. Klobuchar “has done
particularly well with law firms and lobbyists—they have donated more than $3
million to her three Senate races.”
The revelations posed in Profiles in Corruption emerge
as Kolobuchar’s 2020 campaign picks up steam, buoyed by a high-profile endorsement by The
New York Times.
In announcing its endorsement
the Times lauded
Klobuchar for her legislative accomplishments, arguing she was “most productive
senator among the Democratic field in terms of bills passed with bipartisan
support.”
As Schweizer shows, however, those accomplishments often
resulted in mutual benefit for the senator as well as the corporations donating
to her campaign.
Schweizer:
Warren, Klobuchar Have ‘Cashed in’ from Corruption
21 Jan 202023
2:10
After detailing the corruption seen
among former Vice President Joe Biden and his family, Schweizer described how
his fellow 2020 Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren
(D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) had “cashed in” from corruption.
Schweizer said there is a
“three-layer cake of corruption” with Warren.
“[Warren] was actually a government
consultant paid by the U.S. Congress in the 1990s to rewrite our bankruptcy
laws,” Schweizer outlined. “OK, that’s all fine and good, but she did the
typical Washington crony move: She cashed in. After she rewrote those
laws, what did she do? She went to the corporations who would benefit from the
law and said, ‘Hire me, and I will help you interpret the law that I myself
wrote.’ And she made millions of dollars doing that.”
He continued, “She’s also got a
daughter who set up a business. She was setting up that business while
Elizabeth Warren was head of the TARP Oversight Committee, and what ends up
happening is the daughter gets her business financed and gets advisors from the
very investment banks that Elizabeth Warren’s TARP Committee was bailing out.”
Schweizer said Klobuchar has
“mastered the art of shaking down contributors and then pushing their
legislation.”
He stated, “[Klobuchar] was a
prosecutor before she was a U.S. Senator — very selective, did not go after people
that were donors of hers, who were clearly engaged in corruption. And as a U.S.
Senator, she has mastered the art of shaking down contributors and then pushing
their legislation. There are instances where dozens of executives from a
corporation over a three-day period will give her the donation, and then
literally a few days later, she introduces legislation on their behalf.”
Amy
Klobuchar Selectively Prosecuted White-Collar Crimes, Failed to Pursue Massive
Ponzi Scheme—Despite Evidence
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
selectively enforced the law regarding financial crimes as a local prosecutor,
often to the benefit of friends and political allies.
Klobuchar cut a profile as a
tough-on-crime prosecutor during her tenure as the chief legal officer of
Minnesota’s most populous county in the early 2000s. Not only did she push for locking
up more juvenile offenders, but she was also a leading exponent of the “broken
windows” theory of policing.
“What I’ve heard again and again is
that no crime is a small crime and that we must enforce the law down the line,”
she wrote in a policy paper at the
time.
Left unsaid, though, is that certain
“small” crimes were more likely to warrant prosecution than others, especially
depending on one’s personal connection to Klobuchar. As Profiles in Corruption notes,
that inequitable approach was nowhere more apparent than “white-collar” crimes.
While Klobuchar aggressively pursued
small actors, like airline pilots not paying state income taxes or a home
remodeler upcharging his clients, bigger and more nefarious financial crimes
were ignored.
“But the largest financial fraud by
far in her jurisdiction involved a massive conspiracy that she never even
appeared to investigate, despite plenty of warning signs,” Schweizer writes.
“It involved the second-largest Ponzi scheme in American history to date.”
The man at the center of the crime
was Tom Petters, a Minnesota philanthropist and longtime Democrat campaign
donor. Petters, who counted among his friends not only Klobuchar, but also
former Vice President Walter Mondale, operated a series of shady investment
funds.
Between 1998 and 2008, roughly the
years spanning Klobuchar’s tenure as prosecutor, Petters raised nearly $4
billion for his hedge funds. More of than not, individuals entrusting him with
their money would never see a penny of their investment returned.
As Schweizer elaborates, there were
plenty of warning signs that something was off. Petters was consistently facing
legal troubles, either from clients he had failed to repay or from his own
improper conduct, like writing bad checks. More troubling, however, was the
fact that his business associates kept getting convicted of wrongdoing, often
by Klobuchar herself.
“In January 1999, just weeks into her
tenure, potential evidence of the Ponzi scheme began to cross her desk,”
Schweizer writes. “Officers from her office raided the home of Richard Hettler
and Ruth Kahn. They were Petters investors.”
Documents seized during the raid
reportedly implicated Petters in a “mutually beneficial and highly illegal
financial scheme.” Despite securing convictions for both Hettler and Khan,
Klobuchar seemed to make no attempt to move against Petters or “apparently even
investigate” his part in the matter.
Klobuchar’s unwillingness to look
into Petters coincided with a time their professional relationship was
flourishing.
When Klobuchar first ran for county
attorney in 1998, Petters and his associates only donated $8,500 to her
campaign. By the time she was running for the United States Senate in 2006,
Petters had emerged as one of Klobuchar’s most prolific financial backers.
During that campaign alone, the Ponzi scheme operator donated more than $120,000, earning him the
designation of being one of Klobuchar’s single largest campaign contributors.
The donations also seemed to signal
a strong personal relationship. When the FBI finally caught up to the illegal
operation and raided Petters’ office and home in 2008, he admitted on a
wire-tap recording that Klobuchar had called him in the aftermath. Even though
the confines of that conversation were never made public, the events that
followed seemed to indicate Klobuchar was sympathetic to the plight of her
longtime donor.
“Reportedly Klobuchar’s aides
suggested a close family friend, Doug Kelley … provide legal help,” Schweizer
writes. “Kelley had been a longtime friend of Klobuchar’s father, both as a
lawyer to help him with legal issues and as a mountain-climbing partner.”
Ultimately, Kelley was unable to
make much of a difference. Petters’ fate seemed to be sealed as soon as court
proceedings began, especially when law enforcement and judicial officers
expressed disbelief that he was able to operate for so long with so many red
flags.
“But, it looks to me like [Petters]
had friends in high places,” Garrett Vail, an attorney who initially worked on
case against Kuhn in 1999, told the Daily Caller. “The
only way he ran a $3 billion Ponzi scheme was [that] he had politicians in his
pocket.”
In December 2009, Petters was
convicted on 20 different counts of mail fraud, money laundering, and wire
fraud. He was sentenced to more than 50 years in prison for defrauding
investors of more than $3.7 billion.
Klobuchar, for her part, escaped the
situation relatively unscathed. The senator was reelected overwhelmingly in
2012, despite attempts by her Republican challenger to make Petters an issue.
Reelected again in 2018, Klobuchar is now vying for the Democrat presidential
nomination on a platform that relies heavily on her accomplishments in public
office.
Those accomplishments, however, only
underscore Klobuchar’s selective approach to exercising political power,
as Profiles in Corruption exposes.
Amy Klobuchar: The
favorite Democrat of Senate Republicans
Senator Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign
exemplifies the anti-working class and right-wing politics of the Democratic
Party. Her campaign platform addresses almost none of the pressing issues
confronting millions of workers and youth in the United States. She is one of a
group of candidates offering themselves as “center-left” substitutes in case
the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden should fall apart.
Like a company offering multiple products to
saturate the market, often made using the same ingredients in minutely
different proportions, she is one of many right-wing candidates fielded by the
Democratic Party who is differentiated from the rest by a slightly varied hue
of alleged progressive politics.
Klobuchar announcing her 2020 presidential
campaign in Boom Island Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 10, 2019.
(Credit: Lorie Shaull)
In some ways, Klobuchar seems a candidate
prepared in the laboratory to meet the specific requirements of the 2020
campaign: years of experience in the US Senate, check; background as a tough
law-and-order prosecutor, check; female, check; visibly younger than Biden and
Trump, check; represents a state in the Midwest, the key battleground of 2016
and likely of 2020, check. And one might add: proven defender of corporate
America and US imperialism, check, check, check.
Corporate
lawyer and defender of police
violence
Born on May 25, 1960 in Plymouth, Minnesota,
Klobuchar attended Yale University as an undergraduate. She was a member of the
Yale College Democrats and the Feminist Caucus. While still an undergraduate,
Klobuchar interned in the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, former vice
president and former Minnesota senator, who would go on to lose to Ronald
Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
After Yale, she attended the University of
Chicago Law School, graduating in 1985 and becoming a corporate lawyer. She was
a partner at the Minnesota law firms Dorsey & Whitney and Gray Plant Mooty,
specializing in telecommunications law.
In 1994, Klobuchar first ran for Hennepin County
Attorney in Minnesota but quit the race to support incumbent Michael Freeman.
After Freeman stepped aside in 1998 to run for governor, Klobuchar ran again
and won, narrowly defeating Sheryl Ramstad Hvass, making her the chief
prosecutor in the largest county in Minnesota, including the city of
Minneapolis, with a population of more than 1.5 million.
As county attorney, Klobuchar oversaw the
systematic cover-up of police murders and
violence. During her approximate tenure as
county
attorney, the city of Minneapolis paid out
$4.8
million in legal settlement fees for 122
police
misconduct incidents. Meanwhile, during
this
same period, local police and Hennepin
County
sheriffs killed 29 people.
Klobuchar did not once file criminal charges
against police for misconduct, even when they killed people. Instead, she put such
cases for decision by a grand jury, a process which was heavily criticized for
its secrecy and for having the reputation of allowing testimonies in favor of
police.
Tahisha Williams Brewer, whose 14-year-old son
was killed by Minnesota police in 2004, wrote to Klobuchar at the time, “The
grand jury is a way of hiding that the prosecutor is not giving the full
information of guilt to the grand jury. I want this process out in the open,
where everyone can observe it and make sure that it is fair to my son.”
Minneapolis police union leaders backed her
candidacy for Hennepin County Attorney in both 1998 and 2002, when the
Republican Party tacitly supported her as well, failing to field a candidate to
challenge her reelection.
A
friend to Republicans in the US Senate
In 2006, Klobuchar won election to the United
State Senate, running as a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor
Party, Minnesota’s affiliate of the Democratic Party. As in 1998, she filled a
vacancy left when a Democratic incumbent dropped out to run for governor, in
this case, multi-millionaire Mark Dayton. She was reelected easily in both 2012
and 2018.
As a senator, Klobuchar has been identified as a
“middle of the road” Democrat, that is, one who combined right-wing Democratic
Party positions with excursions into bipartisanship, boasting of her ability to
work closely with Republicans in Washington, both in the Senate itself and when
the White House was in Republican hands.
Former President George W. Bush with Klobuchar in
2007. (Credit: White House)
This has won her a certain recognition as the
2020 Democratic presidential candidate with the most support among Republican
leaders. A report on Politico.com after she announced her candidacy in February
carried the headline, “Republicans gush over Klobuchar.”
It began: “Amy Klobuchar has an unusual constituency
behind her as she launches her run for president: Senate Republicans … numerous
Republicans are raving about Klobuchar—her personality, her respect for the
other party, even her competitiveness in a general election.” The article went
on to observe, “a dozen GOP senators were so effusive in interviews this month
that some worried they might damage her candidacy.”
Conservative columnist
George Will raved that Klobuchar was “the person perhaps best equipped to send
the current president packing.” The editorial board of the Wall Street
Journal agreed, arguing that because Klobuchar “hasn’t parroted lefty
slogans … She may be the Democrat best able to beat Mr. Trump.”
Klobuchar actively promotes the anti-Russia
hysteria which the Democratic Party has promulgated since the election of
Trump. She once told ABC News, “You cannot compare any leaders in our country
to what Vladimir Putin has done. This is a man and a regime that has taken down
a passenger plane in Ukraine, killing hundreds of people … This is a regime
that, we believe—17 intelligence agencies in our own country have said—has
tried to influence our own election. I don’t think there’s any comparison.”
She backed investigating
social media websites like Facebook on the pretense they swayed the 2016 US
presidential elections in favor of Trump via Russian interference, telling
the New York Times, “We need to know if Facebook, or any entity
affiliated with or hired by Facebook, ever used any of the vast financial and
data resources available to them to retaliate against their critics, including
elected officials who were scrutinizing them.”
In June, Klobuchar blamed Russia on Twitter for
online racist attacks against presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She
tweeted, “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are
unacceptable. We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against
this type of vile behavior.” Such an accusation implying Russia was responsible
was made without the slightest shred of evidence and made to intentionally
confound and whip up support to her campaign among right-wing elements.
Referencing her tweet, a CNN anchorman asked her if she believed Russia was
behind the attacks, Klobuchar responded she had “no idea.”
Klobuchar’s career as a senator has
received
blessings from large corporations. According
to
opensecrets.org, from 2013 to 2017, her
campaign
and PAC committee received donations from
the
likes of Facebook, Target, Comcast, Best
Buy,
Morgan Stanley, Alphabet Inc. (the owner of
Google), Amazon.com, General Motors, Ford
and
more.
For the same period, the top contributors to her
campaign and PAC committee were: Delta Air Lines at $85,314; her former law
firm Dorsey & Whitney at $65,435; and Walt Disney Co. at $64,081.
A
banal, right-wing presidential campaign
Klobuchar announced her candidacy for president
in February 2019. In words presumably prepared in advance, she declared, “On a
cold February day in Minneapolis on the mighty Mississippi River, with
thousands of friends and supporters at my side I announced that I’m running for
President of the United States. As I said that day in our nation’s heartland,
we must heal the heart of our democracy and renew our commitment to the common
good.”
Such forgettable words express the overall banality
of her presidential campaign. A reading of her presidential campaign website
says almost nothing significant. The cut and pasted stances fail to address the
growing problems and struggles of workers in the United States.
Klobuchar with former Republican Senator John
McCain and current Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. (Credit: Ernests Dinka)
But of what little is said, along with her
history as senator, should be taken as a warning. For Klobuchar, the “common
good” amounts to her nationalistic, pro-war agenda. Just two lines are devoted
to the subject of foreign politics on her campaign website, one of which states
Klobuchar “would invest in diplomacy and rebuild the State Department and
modernize our military to stay one step ahead of China and Russia, including
with serious investments in cybersecurity.”
But this says plenty. Klobuchar’s call to
“modernize” a military whose budget
already
exceeds the next eight countries combined,
would
mean further attacks on the working class by
way
of slashing support programs to funnel
more
money into the military. To stay “one step
ahead of China and Russia,” both nuclear-armed countries, implies Klobuchar
fully supports the continued amassing and building of nuclear weapons.
Klobuchar’s voting record for military budgets is
a consistent yes. She repeatedly voted in favor of continued funding for both
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, she supported the bloody intervention in
Libya which left the country in ruins. This year, she supported the attempted
coup in Venezuela by the Trump administration.
Recently, she voted against the new federal
fiscal budget beginning October 1 that includes a record $738 billion for the
military. The hawkish Klobuchar has not been reformed. Her “no” vote was made
knowing full well the budget would pass regardless. It was a cynical attempt to
distance herself from the militaristic policies of the Trump administration.
Klobuchar espouses the nationalistic politics of
the Democratic Party and has fervently attacked China in an attempt to blame
Chinese workers for the deepening impoverishment affecting American workers. In
a 2017 letter to Trump, Klobuchar stated, “You have consistently reaffirmed
your commitment to supporting steelworker jobs, and Chinese steel dumping is a
major contributor to American manufacturing job loss.”
On domestic issues, Klobuchar has been careful to
present herself as a “moderate,” opposed to the supposed extremes represented
by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—who themselves are limited entirely to
the framework of the capitalist profit system.
As a Washington
Post report in May put it, “The senator has been willing to say no to
some of the purity tests being pushed by far-left activists. Klobuchar has
expressed skepticism of packing the Supreme Court, for example, and she has
said that some of her rivals who are promising free university tuition and
college-debt forgiveness are not being straight with voters. On health care,
Klobuchar endorses a public option but stops short of Medicare-for-all.”
On immigration, her campaign website
states,
“Amy supports a comprehensive immigration
reform bill that includes the DREAM Act,
border
security and an accountable pathway to
earned
citizenship.”
Klobuchar surrounded by the Minnesota National
Guard in Iraq. (Credit: Office of Amy Klobuchar)
With this generic right-wing profile, and her
bland campaign, it is not a surprise that Klobuchar is running ninth or tenth
in the polls and other measures of support for the Democratic presidential
nomination. She participated in the first two debates without notable impact,
and has met the slightly higher requirements to qualify for the third debate
next month in Houston.
Minnesota is the state which supplied much of the
leadership of the Democratic Party in the second half of the 20th century,
including three senators who were major presidential candidates, two of them
becoming vice president—Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale—and the third
playing a key role in ousting a sitting president—Eugene McCarthy.
Humphrey, McCarthy and Mondale all represented
the Democratic Party during the period when it was still associated with a
program of limited social reform and improved living standards for working
people, although Mondale, as vice president under Jimmy Carter, was part of a
Democratic administration that broke with that tradition, inaugurating the
steady shift to the right by the Democrats over the next four decades.
Some 35 years after Mondale went down to a
landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan, the current Minnesotan seeking
the Democratic presidential nomination, Amy Klobuchar, is closer politically to
Reagan than to the liberal politics of the Minnesota Democratic Party in its
heyday.
No
Labor Shortage: 11M Americans Out of Work, but All Want Full-Time Jobs
Scott
Olson/Getty Images
10 Jan 20201,070
2:53
There remain more than 11 million
Americans who are out of work but want full-time jobs, despite claims by
corporate interests and the big business lobby of a so-called “labor shortage.”
The latest unemployment data from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals there is still slack in the labor market
for disenfranchised Americans to enter the workforce rather than business
bringing foreign workers to the U.S. to take jobs.
Overall, about 5.8 million Americans
are unemployed — 12.6 percent of whom are teenagers who generally seek
entry-level jobs and 5.9 percent of whom are black Americans. These nearly six
million unemployed also include about 1.2 million Americans who are considered
“long-term unemployed” because they have been out of work for more than six
months.
Another 4.1 million Americans are
working part-time jobs but want full-time employment. Additionally, 1.2 million
Americans are out of the labor force entirely after looking for a job sometime
within the last year. These marginally attached Americans are available for
work and want full-time jobs.
Roughly 277,000 of the 1.2 million
Americans out of the labor force completely are considered “discouraged
workers” because they do not believe there are jobs in the labor market for
them.
In total, about 11.1 million
Americans are either unemployed, out of the labor force, or underemployed;
however, all have said they want good-paying, full-time jobs.
The
constant cry from corporate lobbyist @USChamber and "newsplainer" @voxdotcom is that America is "running out of workers." If that were true
there wouldn't be people to come off the sidelines and take jobs.
While Americans have enjoyed
significant wage growth in Trump’s
economy for blue-collar and working-class Americans, corporate interests have
increasingly suggested that the U.S. must continue importing millions of
foreign workers every year to fill jobs.
In April 2019, former Chamber of
Commerce President Tom Donohue said the U.S. needed more
legal immigration because the country is “out of people.”
Extensive research by economists
like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s
current legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled
workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working
and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth
every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.
Camarota, director of research for
the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one percent increase
in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their
weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American
worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of
current legal immigration levels.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
CBO:
Immigration Has ‘Negative Effect on Wages’
NEIL
MUNRO
9 Jan 2020230
7:01
Immigration makes all of America richer, but it can make some
Americans poorer, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says in a report
issued January 9.
“Immigration, whether legal or illegal, expands the labor force
and changes its composition, leading to increases in total economic output,”
said the non-partisan report, titled “The Foreign-Born
Population and Its Effects on the U.S. Economy and the Federal Budget—An
Overview.”
But this national expansion does “not necessarily [deliver] to
increases in output per capita,” or income per person, the report said:
For example, business leaders say the nation’s enormous
population of immigrants has expanded the nation’s workforce, increased
consumption, and driven up housing prices. But that inflow has also shrunk the
wages of less-educated Americans, the report said:
Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign
born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of
relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of
their birthplace.
The CBO report contradicts business claims that a bigger economy
ensures bigger wages for everyone.
More ominously, the report also suggests that the American
middle-class — including millions of young college graduates — may suffer a
similar economic disaster if immigration policy is shifted to raise the inflow
of foreign college graduates. The report says:
The effects of immigration on wages depend on the
characteristics of the immigrants. To the extent that newly arrived workers
have abilities similar to those of workers already in the country, immigration
would have a negative effect on wages.
Many business advocates in Washington are calling for a dramatic
increase in “high-skilled immigration” — meaning foreign college graduates who
would compete for the same jobs as American college graduates. For example,
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is trying to pass his S.386 bill that offers the prize of
renewable work-permits — and eventual citizenship — to an unlimited number of
foreign graduates.
Each year, up to 120,000 foreign graduates — and their spouses
and children — can get green cards via their employer’s sponsorship, even as
perhaps 800,000 Americans graduate from college with skilled degrees.
But Lee’s bill creates a new legal status called “Early
Adjustment.” This status would allow an uncapped number of college graduate
migrants to apply for renewable work permits long before they can get a green
card to become a legal immigrant and citizen.
Existing law allows an uncapped number of foreigners to legally
get short-term work permits and jobs after enrolling in U.S. colleges. The
migrants can get jobs by first paying tuition to a university, and then getting
short-term work permits via the uncapped “Curricular Practical Training” and
the “Optional Practical Training” programs. These workers must leave the United
States after a few years until they enroll themselves in work permit programs.
But Lee’s bill would remove any caps on this foreign worker
population by allowing an unlimited number of foreign workers to get “Early
Adjustment” status from their employers.
DHS
posts videos of Indian migrants buying fake documents from ICE's Farmington U.
sting operation.
The #OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run
labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if #S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh
Many migrants already use the CPT and OPT work permits to get
jobs and to also compete for entry into the H-1B visa worker program. Once in
the H-1B program — which accepts 85,000 new workers each year — many of the
migrants also ask their employers to sponsor them for green cards.
The sponsorship allows them to stay working in the United States
until they eventually get their valuable green card, long after their temporary
visas have expired. Congress has not set an annual limit on the number of visa
workers who can be sponsored for green cards, so the resident population of
permanent “temporary workers” is growing fast — and is helping to suppress
wages for American graduates.
Roughly 1.5 million foreign visa workers hold white-collar jobs
throughout the U.S. economy. This number includes at least 750,000 Indians who
are allowed to work via the supposedly temporary CPT, OPT, L-1, and H-1B visa
programs. Roughly 300,000 of these Indians — plus 300,000 family members — are
being allowed to stay in the United States because they asked their employers
to sponsor them for green cards.
The CBO report shows that immigrants comprise roughly 40 percent
of the population of people who did not graduate from high school — and
that immigrants already comprise roughly 20 percent of all people with a
“graduate degree.”
Congressional Budget Office
The 20 percent share likely would quickly rise if the Senate
approves Lee’s S.386 plan — and that rise could sharply reduce salaries for
American college graduates.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10
percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills
probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent” as the extra
workers compete for jobs, says George Borjas, a labor economist at Harvard.
That extra labor does expand the economy — but that expansion is dwarfed by the
transfer of the wage reductions to investors, he wrote in 2016:
I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in
the total wealth of the native population—to be about $50 billion annually. But
behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to
another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native
winners [mostly employers] is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.
“In low-skilled occupations, a one percent increase in the
immigrant composition of an individual’s occupation reduces wages by [0].8
percent,” said a 1998 report by the Center for
Immigration Studies.
A 2013 CBO report predicted that the 2013
“Gang of Eight” amnesty and immigration bill would reduce the share of income
that goes to wage earners and increase the share that goes to
investors. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the
labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after
enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost corporate profits and spike
the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be
higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout
the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers
forces down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to
have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told
Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs,
wages are going to go up.”
Are rising wages good
for national politics?
“You’re damn right they are,” US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue said,
adding: "They are good for national politics if you’re a politician, for
sure."http://bit.ly/2FwwCg7
Claims
of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True
America's
September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969,
according to the most recent Department of Labor report.
The tight
labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For
example, New
Seasons Market, a
West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and
prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom
Equipment, a
Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a
work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.
For the
first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning
significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of
workers enjoyed faster wage growth than their higher-paid peers.
Unfortunately,
this positive trend could be short-lived. Corporate special interests are
whining about a labor shortage -- and are spending millions to lobby for higher
levels of immigration, which would supply companies with cheap, pliable
workers.
Hardworking
Americans need their leaders in Washington to see through this influence
campaign and stand up for their interests. Scaling back immigration would
further tighten the labor market, boosting wages and helping the most
disadvantaged Americans find jobs.
The U.S.
economy is the strongest it has been in years. Employers added 136,000 new jobs
in September, marking 108 months of consecutive
job growth.
But
there's still more progress to be made. Approximately 6
million Americans
are currently looking for jobs but remain unemployed. Another 4
million desire
full-time positions but are underemployed as part-time workers. Millions
more, feeling
discouraged about their bleak prospects, have abandoned the job search
altogether. Indeed, among 18 through 65-year-olds, 55
million people
aren't working.
Many of
these folks have limited or outdated skills. Others have criminal records or
disabilities. So they might require a bit more training than traditional job
applicants.
Rather
than put in this extra effort, some big businesses want to eliminate their
recruiting challenges by importing cheap foreign workers. These firms have
instructed their lobbyists to push for more immigration, which would introduce
more slack into the labor market.
The CEO
of the Chamber of Commerce recently claimed that America needs a massive
increase in immigration because we're "out of people." Chamber
officials said their lobbying efforts would center on sizeable increases to
rates of legal immigration.
The
National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, recently released a proposal which would effectively double
the number of H-1B tech worker visas, import more seasonal low-skilled laborers
on H-2A and H-2B visas, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And the agriculture
industry is lobbying for a path to legalization for
illegal laborers and is seeking to expand "temporary" guest-worker
programs to include stable, year-round positions on dairy farms and meatpacking
plants -- jobs that Americans will happily fill for the right wage. The
Association of Builders and Contractors, Koch Industries, and dozens more
companies have called for similar measures.
There are
already 45
million immigrants
in the United States -- 28 million of which are employed -- and counting. More
than 650,000
people crossed
into the United States illegally in the past eight months alone, already
exceeding last fiscal year's totals. And the U.S. government grants an
additional 1 million lifetime work permits to immigrants every year.
Those
figures will skyrocket even higher if business groups get their way. Such an
expansion would hurt hardworking Americans.
The
majority of foreigners who cross the border illegally or arrive on guest worker
visas lack substantial education. Naturally, they seek out less-skilled jobs in
construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service -- and directly compete
with the most economically vulnerable Americans. The labor surplus created by
immigration depresses the wages of native-born high school dropouts up to $1,500 each year.
Several
proposals under consideration in Washington could alleviate American workers'
woes.
A
recent bill from Senator Chuck Grassley
(R-IA) would mandate all businesses use a free, online system called E-Verify,
which determines an individual's work eligibility in mere seconds.
The
system would make it extremely difficult for employers to hire illegal
immigrants, roughly 40
percent of whom
have been paid subminimum wages at some point. Without a pool of easily abused
illegal laborers, businesses would raise pay for Americans.
Several
senators also recently introduced the Raise
Act, a bill that
would reduce future levels of legal immigration.
It's time
for our leaders in Washington to scale back both legal and illegal immigration.
By doing so, they can further tighten the labor market and force businesses to
bring less-advantaged Americans back into the workforce.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES
DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working
class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic
hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
PELOSI,
FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWOMS’S MEXIFORNIA
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s
workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or
stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are
Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In
2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1%
higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars)
(Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the
10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979
to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the
state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to
wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new
income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage
points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross
Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146
billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages
finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the
Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are
partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free
entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in
supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s
flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says,
even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s
pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade
alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in
the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working
families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends
meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more
than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults
are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted
median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while
inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35
hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and housing problems are made worse —
especially for families — by the loss of
employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting
costs. The report says:
Many workers are being paid
little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has
risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their
employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars
and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high
cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has
declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working
conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like
their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on
contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in
many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job
or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal
protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to
blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions.
But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of
mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In
2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for
Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the
economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do
a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was
the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was
about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45
an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically
got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los
Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower
than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour
at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood
that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor
can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099,
which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity
also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007,
the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing
Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino
gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members
include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside
California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring
employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings
rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34,
that increase was 7.6%.
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