Monday, February 17, 2020

DEMOCRATS AND BILLIONAIRES FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS - PAYING LIVING WAGES TO LEGALS IS IMPLY DAMNED SOCIALISM!


 Soros ambition is without borders -- “The Soviet Empire is now the Soros Empire.” “I’m the Pope’s boss now.” And so on, ad nauseum. Yet, like other tyrants, he is untouchable. Those he has made richer and more powerful protect him.


NEW YORK — Demand Justice, an organization founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and associated with a “social welfare organization” financed by billionaire activist George Soros, is raising money for an eventual court fight against what the group describes as President Trump’s proposed “racist, unnecessary wall.”


“Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”

Alan Dershowitz: George Soros Asked Barack Obama to Investigate Undisclosed Person

Hungarian-born US investor and philanthropist George Soros looks on after having delivered a speech on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting, on January 23, 2020 in Davos, eastern Switzerland. (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)
Getty
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Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Breitbart News Sunday this weekend that billionaire left-wing financier George Soros told then-President Barack Obama to investigate someone.
Dershowitz would not identify who, precisely, the target of the investigation was, but said that the name would soon emerge in in a lawsuit that had yet to be filed.

“President @BarackObama personally asked the @FBI to investigate somebody on behalf of ...” -@AlanDersh on @BreitbartNews Sunday with @joelpollak. For 's full commentary on , , and the trial, go to @siriusxm OnDemand!



Embedded video



The revelation was so startling that this host had to double-check:
Q: But let me just ask you — you said that George Soros asked Barack Obama to have his Justice Department investigate somebody?
Dershowitz: We’re — that’s going to come out in a lawsuit in the near future. Yeah
Q: Wow, well, we look forward to hearing more about that new.
Dershowitz: That’s not unusual. That is not unusual. People whisper to presidents all the time. Presidents whisper to [the] Justice Department all the time. It’s very common. It’s wrong, whoever does it, but it’s common, and we shouldn’t think that it’s unique to any particular president. I have in my possession the actual 302 form [an FBI record of an interview], which documents this issue, and it will, at the right time, come out. But I’m not free to disclose it now because it’s a case that’s not yet been filed.
In addition, Dershowitz reflected on his experience in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, noting that his argument had been grotesquely distorted by CNN — so much so that he could, if he wanted to, sue the network.
CNN — and House impeachment managers — claimed Dershowitz said that the president can do whatever he wants to do, as long as he claims to have believed he was acting in the public interest. Dershowitz had specifically said that criminal-like behavior was indeed impeachable.
Dershowitz also said that former Trump associate Roger Stone deserved a new trial, given new revelations about the extreme political bias of the jury foreperson, who opposed both Trump and Stone.
Moreover, Dershowitz said that if Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) won the Democratic presidential nomination, it might force him to leave the Democratic Party and campaign against him nationwide.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.


The Soros Plan To Flip Legislatures For Redistricting Is Moving Forward

January 17, 2020 
Daniel Greenfield

The question is are Republicans ready for it?
Democrats are readying a massive $50 million effort of their own to shape the next 10 years of elections by flipping state legislative chambers in places as red as Texas and West Virginia next November.
The plan, backed by Democratic megadonors like Donald Sussman and the Soros family as well as small-dollar donors giving online via ActBlue, represents a sea change for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, a former backwater in Democratic politics that has transformed as the party grappled with the importance of redistricting. In 2020, the last election before states redraw their political boundaries using new Census data, the winners of many state legislatures get the power to draw congressional lines that will last an entire decade.
Data that, thanks to Dem judges and Justice Roberts, will be fundamentally fraudulent.
In preparation, the DLCC has quadrupled its staff, partnered with a slew of other large Democratic groups including EMILY’s List and Barack Obama’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, and planned to target as many as 14 states, according to plans shared first with POLITICO. The group will start by targeting one or more chambers in Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas, and potentially expand over the course of the election to target additional legislative chambers in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Montana, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The DLCC is chiefly targeting states where flipping just a handful of seats will give Democrats a seat at the governing table in 2021. Six target states are currently under full Republican control, with Democrats locked out of both the governorship and state legislative majorities. And the group is particularly interested in states where state lawmakers have absolute power over the congressional maps and the governor has little influence, like North Carolina.
Republicans have disclosed relatively few details about how they plan to win 2020’s pre-redistricting elections. Their central committee, the Republican State Leadership Committee — which helps elect lieutenant governors and other officeholders in addition to state legislators — recently announced it raised $19 million in 2019. The group has also recruited former House Speakers Paul Ryan, John Boehner and Newt Gingrich to help its efforts.
Why do I have an uneasy feeling about that last paragraph?

  

Soros-Linked Group Gets Six GOP Governors to Resettle More Refugees

Ralph Freso/Getty Images
 11 Dec 20192,319
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A pro-mass immigration organization with links to billionaire George Soros has successfully lobbied six Republican governors to resettle more refugees in their states.
For Fiscal Year 2020, President Donald Trump will continue cutting refugee admissions by reducing former President Barack Obama’s refugee inflow by at least 80 percent. This reduction would mean a maximum of 18,000 refugees can be resettled in the U.S. between October 1, 2019, and September 30, 2020. This is merely a numerical limit and not a goal federal officials are supposed to reach.
Coupled with the refugee reduction, Trump signed an executive order that gives localities, counties, and states veto power over whether they want to resettle refugees in their communities.
Executives at World Relief and the Evangelical Immigration Table — an organization with links to the Soros-funded National Immigration Forum — have been lobbying governors across the country to bring more refugees to their states. So far, six Republican governors have signed off to resettle refugees in their states, including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.
The New York Times notes:
Jenny Yang, vice president for advocacy at World Relief, an evangelical agency whose work includes resettlement, has been steering an effort to lobby governors to keep their states open to refugees. [Emphasis added]
She said about 16 governors have submitted written consent, six of them Republicans. Gov. Doug Ducey, Republican of Arizona, agreed after receiving a letter supporting resettlement signed by 250 evangelical leaders. Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas, who leads the state that received the most refugees last year, has not yet offered his view, despite a plea from the mayor of Fort Worth to continue accepting refugees. [Emphasis added]
Refugee contractors, like the Lutheran Social Services organization, have deployed a campaign to get mayors, local officials, and governors to admit more refugees to their states. Those contractors’ budgets every year are reliant on ensuring that as many refugees are resettled across the U.S. as possible.
It remains unclear which six Republican governors, aside from Burgum and Ducey, have been successfully lobbied by the Soros-linked group.
This week, the Evangelical Immigration Table sent letters to the governors of California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin to ask them to bring refugees to their states.
The federally mandated refugee resettlement program has brought more than 718,000 refugees to the U.S. since January 2008 — a group larger than the entire state population of Wyoming, which has 577,000 residents. In the last decade, about 73,000 refugees have been resettled in California, 71,500 resettled in Texas, nearly 43,000 resettled in New York, and more than 36,000 resettled in Michigan.
Refugee resettlement costs American taxpayers nearly $9 billion every five years, according to the latest research. Over the course of five years, an estimated 16 percent of all refugees admitted will need housing assistance paid for by taxpayers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

 

AXIS OF EVIL, GREED AND CORRUPTION: THE SOROS – OBAMA – CLINTON CONSPIRACY

 

“The Lawlessness of the Obama Administration: A never-ending story.” Michael
Barone – American Historian – Washington Examiner

His ambition is without borders -- “The Soviet Empire is now the Soros Empire.” “I’m the Pope’s boss now.” And so on, ad nauseum. Yet, like other tyrants, he is untouchable. Those he has made richer and more powerful protect him.

‘Deplorable’ Americans however confounded Soros by not voting for “What can we do for you, George?” Hillary Clinton.

 

GEORGE SOROS AND THE CLINTON GLOBALIST AGENDA FOR BANKSTERS AND  OPEN BORDERS
*
NEW YORK — Demand Justice, an organization founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and associated with a “social welfare organization” financed by billionaire activist George Soros, is raising money for an eventual court fight against what the group describes as President Trump’s proposed “racist, unnecessary wall.”
*
*
“Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”
*
“Hillary was always small potatoes, a placeholder as it were. Her health was always suspect. And do you think the plotters would have let a doofus like Tim Kaine take office in the event that Hillary became disabled?”

THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION CHARITY slush fund


“There is no controlling Bill Clinton. He does whatever he wants and runs up incredible expenses with foundation funds,” states a separate interview memo attached to the submission.

“Bill Clinton mixes and matches his personal business with that of the foundation. Many people within the foundation have tried to caution him about this but he does not listen, and there really is no talking to him,” the memo added.
GLOBALIST BARACK OBAMA AND NANCY PELOSI’S CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY AND KEEP AMERICA FLOODED WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS


"Along with Obama, Pelosi and Schumer are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY

 

One of the most disgusting things to come out of the Obama administration was "Operation Fast and Furious," where members of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed illegal gun sales to go through – commonly referred to as "gun walking" – in order to track buyers and sellers they believed were connected to the Mexican drug cartels. Nearly 2,000 firearms were sold and were eventually found throughout the United States and Mexico. Two of them were used to k ill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. BETH BAUMANN


THE CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY

The Democrat Party’s secret agenda for wider open borders, more welfare for invading illegals, more jobs and free anything they illegally vote for…. All to destroy the two-party system and build the GLOBALISTS’ DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/frontpage-hidden-agenda-of-pueblo-sin.html

 

Demonstrably and irrefutably the Democrat Party became the party whose principle objective is to thoroughly transform the nature of the American electorate by means of open borders and the mass, unchecked importation of illiterate third world peasants who will vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats and their La Raza welfare state. FRONTPAGE MAG

CLOSET MUSLIM BARACK OBAMA’S CONSPIRACY FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE

First, destroy Trump and put Hillary away if she doesn’t end up in jail.


HE PARTNERS WITH ZUCKERBERG, SOROS AND LOUIS FARRAKHAN

“Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”

“Hillary was always small potatoes, a placeholder as it were. Her health was always suspect. And do you think the plotters would have let a doofus like Tim Kaine take office in the event that Hillary became disabled?”

“Obama has the totalitarian impulse. After all, he went around saying he didn't have Constitutional authority to legalize the illegals, and then he tried anyway. The courts stopped him.”

“The bottom line 2 is this: Barack Obama is a Communist. This was all an Obama operation. Why is anyone surprised that a communist (Obama) tried to subvert an election. That is what Communists do. It is Barack Obama and his people like Brennan and Clapper behaving to type. That's what Maduro does in Venezuela. That's what the Castro brothers did. That's what every communist and socialist nation does. THEY FIX ELECTIONS!!”

Hillary kept a secret server overflowing with national security info which, more than likely, was hacked. June 28, 2016, on a Phoenix tarmac, Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch to seal a deal insuring Hillary would not be prosecuted.”

Obama, of course, covered up his own role, depicting his presidency as eight years of 

heroic efforts to repair the damage caused by 

the 2008 financial crash. At the end of those 

eight years, however, Wall Street and 

the financial oligarchy were fully 

recovered, enjoying record wealth, while 

working people were poorer than before, 

a widening social chasm that made possible 

the election of the billionaire con man and 

Demagogue in November 2016.”

David Bernstein & The Heritage Foundation - “Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.”

“The Lawlessness of the Obama Administration: A never-ending story.” Michael
Barone – American Historian – Washington Examiner

 

 

George Soros: A New Kind of Tyrant?

 

The venomous careers of Hitler and Stalin provoked the study of totalitarian regimes as the very epitome of evil, depriving their citizens of freedom and of life itself. A state captured by a demagogue is considered a sure sign of danger ahead -- hence the alleged justification by the Left for their hysteria over “rabble rouser” Donald Trump’s election. Overlooked until more recently are the unelected, bloated bureaucratic fiefdoms and regulatory encroachments of both national and global government and non-governmental institutions, which have created the opportunity for a sinister, large scale violation of political power.
This new abuse was foreshadowed in the career of FBI architect and director, the corrupt J. Edgar Hoover. It has been notched up to a planetary level of hyper-coordination by George Soros as preliminary to the installation of his global Open Society. In this grandiose plan, state governments (specifically the USA) will be reduced to the level of relay stations for a supranational, Sauron-like centralization of power.
What unites the totalitarian and the new tyrant are three personality characteristics, proposed by Professor John D. Mayer in his 1993 article, “The Emotional Madness of the Dangerous Leader.” The first is indifference. The tyrant is consumed by a single-minded, fanatical purpose and has no regard for the suffering wreaked on others during its implementation. The second is intolerance of those whose opinions differ, facilitated through control of the media, secret and insider knowledge, revenge against anyone who thwarts, and a paranoid mania to shut down all opposition. The third character trait (the foundation of the previous two), is psychopathic grandiosity. The power-abuser assumes a messianic pose of unifying society under a utopian plan and persuading others to participate. The very intensity of the tyrant’s narcissism is transferred to vulnerable supporters eliciting a narcotic rush of enthusiasm.
What is easily overlooked is that the sham scheme is not a political health remedy, but a device for maintaining the megalomaniac’s sense of personal omnipotence. In Soros’ own words, “Next to my fantasies about being God, I also have very strong fantasies of being mad. In fact, my grandfather was actually paranoid.” Soros seems disarming in his frankness. But delusions of grandeur preclude self-knowledge, as Soros’ next statements reveal. “I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it.”
Soros has spilled bucketloads of words proclaiming he is “amoral,” “self-interested,” and that “normal rules do not apply” to him. “I am unnatural. I am a sort of deux ex machina. I’m very comfortable with my public persona, because it is the one I have created myself.” And this from the man who controls politicians and bureaucrats like a boss giving dictation to his secretary. This is the man who has perfected the subversion of governments, who has robbed failing states, and lavishly endowed every organization and movement destructive of traditional Western society, from abolishing the Electoral College to abolishing life itself if it is in utero, drug-addicted, or senile. His ambition is without borders -- “The Soviet Empire is now the Soros Empire.” “I’m the Pope’s boss now.” And so on, ad nauseum. Yet, like other tyrants, he is untouchable. Those he has made richer and more powerful protect him.
In March 1933 the Germans voted. They could have voted for the moderate Center Christian party. Instead they voted in Hitler. ‘Deplorable’ Americans however confounded Soros by not voting for “What can we do for you, George?” Hillary Clinton. Yet where are the congressional and Senate investigations into Soros? Where is the RICO indictment? Governments have been bought. The media has been bought. The Soros NGO empire operates an invasive, parasitic web currently devouring the body politic of the USA and many other nations besides.
What Trump’s election has revealed is the limitation of the Presidency in withstanding the transfer of power to unelected, publicly unaccountable bureaucrats, and venal politicians, more concerned with their benefices than their constituents. That void has allowed Soros to install himself as de facto puppet-master. We require bureaucracy, and we cannot prevent the existence of associations, but there is an urgent need for reform by abolishing permanency in government and establishing citizens’ tribunals of appeal against abuses of administrative power. 
Recently in an interview on his simpering NPR, Soros confessed he was unprepared for the populist opposition to his insurrectionary agenda. Let us continue our opposition. Let us demand Soros be investigated and brought to justice as conditional for obtaining our vote. Those with connection to him must be banned from public office, and his assets frozen. Then his parasitical minions will shrivel, like leeches desiccated by a pinch of salt. If not, although we may escape the mass slaughter of the twentieth century, it will be at the cost of vassalage beneath a tyrant like George Soros.



Obama’s 50 Lies / Obama Not Exactly

List documents fifty lies told by Barack Obama.


Claim

A list circulating online contains 50 false statements by President Barack Obama
·  Selma Got Me Born – LIAR, your parents felt safe enough to have you in 1961 – Selma had no effect on your birth, as Selma was in 1965.
This criticism is based on an overly-literal interpretation of Barack Obama’s 2007 speech in Selma, Alabama, which we covered in a separate article.
 


·  Father Was A Goat Herder – LIAR, he was a privileged, well educated youth, who went on to work with the Kenyan Government.
These attributes are not mutually exclusive: Barack Obama’s (biological) father was all of these things at different times in his life, as Obama described in his book, Dreams from My Father:
[My father] was as African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father — my other grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama — had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers. My father grew up herding his father’s goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise. He eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States.


·  Father Was A Proud Freedom Fighter – LIAR, he was part of one of the most corrupt and violent governments Kenya has ever had.
We are unaware of Barack Obama’s ever having claimed his father was a “proud freedom fighter.” Obama has written (and spoken) at length about his father’s returning to Africa from America to work for the Kenyan government, with that country’s political turmoil eventually leaving him a “bitter drunk” and “a defeated, lonely bureaucrat.”


·  My Family Has Strong Ties To African Freedom – LIAR, your cousin Raila Odinga has created mass violence in attempting to overturn a legitimate election in 2007, in Kenya. It is the first widespread violence in decades.
As we discussed in a separate article, Kenyan politician Raila Odinga has recently claimed to be Barack Obama’s cousin, but there is no substantive evidence documenting his claim, and the two men share no meaningful familial connection.


·  My Grandmother Has Always Been A Christian – LIAR, she does her daily Salat prayers at 5am according to her own interviews. According to the New York Times: “I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent interview in Kenya.’ Not to mention, Christianity wouldn’t allow her to have been one of 14 wives to 1 man.
The author has apparently confused Obama’s grandmothers. In the instance cited above, Obama was speaking of his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, not his paternal grandmother. (In 2007 Obama described his maternal grandparents as “nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists.”)


·  My Name is African Swahili – LIAR, your name is Arabic and ‘Baraka’ (from which Barack came) means ‘blessed’ in that language. Hussein is also Arabic and so is Obama.
Many Swahili words and names are of Arabic origin (just as many English words originated with other languages). “Barack” is a Swahili name that entered the language via historical trade and cultural ties with Arabia.


·  I Never Practiced Islam – LIAR, you practiced it daily at school, where you were registered as a Muslim and kept that faith for 31 years, until your wife made you change, so you could run for office.
The topic is already covered in our separate article about the (false) claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim.


·  My School In Indonesia Was Christian – LIAR, you were registered as Muslim there and got in trouble in Koranic Studies for making faces (check your own book).
Barack Obama attended more than one school in Indonesia, one of which was a public school that included Islamic religious instruction among its curriculum, and one of which was a private Catholic school.


·  I Was Fluent In Indonesian – LIAR, not one teacher says you could speak the language.
We are unaware of Barack Obama’s ever having claimed he was “fluent” in any Indonesian language (beyond the level of competence that could reasonably be expected of the non-native child speaker he was at the time he lived in that country). He did acquire (and apparently still has) a passable command of Bahasa, as Time magazine noted in a 2007 article:
When prominent Indonesians visit the U.S., the first person they want to meet is Obama, says Parnohadiningrat Sudjadnan, the Indonesian ambassador to the U.S. “Back home people think of him as one of us, or at least one who understands us,” he says, adding that they are delighted to find that Obama speaks passable Bahasa, the language spoken in Indonesia and Malaysia.


·  Because I Lived In Indonesia, I Have More Foreign Experience – LIAR, you were there from the ages of 6 to 10, and couldn’t even speak the language.
We have not found any citation for Obama’s having claimed that his childhood in Indonesia qualified him as having “more foreign experience” (what the comparative “more” refers to also isn’t clear). Barack Obama did live in Indonesia for four years as a child, and he could in fact speak the local language passably well. Whether his time in that country provided him more “foreign experience” is argumentative, but people other than Obama himself have suggested that it might:
Some would argue that his childhood experiences, as well as his mixed heritage (his father was Kenyan, his mother from Kansas), gives him a better inner compass on foreign policy than most Americans. They cite the pioneering work of Ruth Hill Useem, the late sociologist of Michigan State University, who spent her career studying what she called Third Culture Kids — the millions of U.S. children (an estimated 20 million since the advent of mass air travel) who have been carted abroad by their missionary, diplomatic, corporate or military parents. These frequent-flier kids don’t spend enough time in their adopted countries to become fully bicultural, but they take pieces and add it to their home values and traditions — creating millions of “Third Cultures.” Studies have shows that kids who have spent time abroad are more likely to go to college, to relate to one another despite the influences of vastly differing cultures, and to latch on to one aspect of their culture — in Obama’s case African Americanism.


·  I Am Stronger On Foreign Affairs – LIAR, except for Africa (surprise) and the Middle East (bigger surprise), you have never been anywhere else on the planet and thus have NO experience with our closest allies.
Barack Obama has lived in, traveled to, or otherwise spent time in countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, the Palestinian Territories, Afghanistan Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as serving as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Whether his experiences make him “stronger on foreign affairs” is argumentative, but again, people other than Obama have suggested that it might:
“Living abroad does give you a wider view of the world,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser under Jimmy Carter, and a Polish-American who spent four years as a child living in Germany with his diplomat father. Obama is “a person with genuine sensitivity of world affairs,” says Brzenzinski, who is supporting Obama. “It’s not the conventional mouthing of culture sensitivities.” Brzezinski points to Obama’s greater willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations and his early resistance to the war in Iraq as examples of his superior intuition on foreign policy.


·  I Blame My Early Drug Use On Ethnic Confusion – LIAR, you were quite content in high school to be Barry Obama, no mention of Kenya and no mention of struggle to identify – your classmates said you were just fine.
Obama wrote at length in his two books about his experiences growing up as the child of mixed-race parents and the issues that accompanied that status, and he noted in his first book, Dreams From My Father that before entering politics he had used marijuana and cocaine. His drug use, he wrote, was “… something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory” and said in a 2006 interview that his drug use was “… reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy. Teenage boys are frequently confused.”
 


·  An Ebony Article Moved Me To Run For Office – LIAR, Ebony has yet to find the article you mention in your book. It doesn’t, and never did, exist.
We could not find an instance in either of Barack Obama’s books (or elsewhere) where he claimed that his decision to run for public office was influenced by an article in Ebony magazine.
 


·  A Life Magazine Article Changed My Outlook On Life – LIAR, Life has yet to find the article you mention in your book. It doesn’t, and never did, exist.
In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama writes of a childhood experience occurring on a day when his mother dropped him off at a library on her way to work, and he began thumbing through issues of LIFE magazine:
Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.
He must be terrible sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybem or an albino — I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.
I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss — why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.
As far as we know, no one has yet found any matching article in the pages of LIFE magazine. However, that does necessarily not mean Barack Obama saw no such article; it may simply mean that, writing decades after the fact, he misremembered the title of the magazine he was viewing.



·  I Won’t Run On A National Ticket In ’08 – LIAR, here you are, despite saying, live on TV, that you would not have enough experience by then, and you are all about having experience first.
In 2004, just after winning election to the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama said during apress conference, in response to a question about his possibly running for national office, that:
I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job, and I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now, there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I’m not one of them.


·  Present Votes Are Common In Illinois – LIAR, they are common for YOU, but not many others have 130 NO VOTES.
A legislative “present” vote (which essentially counts as a “No” vote but does not go on record as such) is, as the New York Times observed, “not unusual in Illinois,” a tactic often used in concert with other party members and leaders:
An examination of Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way.
In more than 50 votes, he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy.
In other cases, Mr. Obama’s present votes stood out among widespread support as he tried to use them to register legal and other objections to parts of the bills.
In Illinois, political experts say voting present is a relatively common way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure. It can at times help avoid running the risks of voting no, they add.
·  Oops, I Misvoted – LIAR, only when caught by church groups and Democrats, did you beg to change your misvote.
We’re unsure what supposed “misvote” this line references.
 


·  I Was A Professor Of Law – LIAR, you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
Barack Obama was indeed a professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School, a fact verified by that institution itself:
The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as “Senior Lecturer.”
From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School’s Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.


·  I Was A Constitutional Lawyer – LIAR, you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
Between 1993 and 2002, Barack Obama worked as a civil rights lawyer with the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
 


·  Without Me, There Would Be No Ethics Bill – LIAR, you didn’t write it, introduce it, change it, or create it.
It’s unclear what ethics bill this statement references. Obama did help pass a major ethics reform bill as an Illinois State Senator, and 110th U.S. Congress passed the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act, which “closely mirrored and drew key provisions from a bill (S. 230) that Senators Obama and Feingold introduced in January 2007.” We could find no reference to document Obama’s supposedly having said that neither of those bills would exist if not for him.
 


·  The Ethics Bill Was Hard To Pass – LIAR, it took just 14 days from start to finish.
Again, it’s unclear which ethics bill this statement references, nor could we find any reference to document Obama’s supposedly having said such a bill was “hard to pass.’
 


·  I Wrote A Tough Nuclear Bill – LIAR, your bill was rejected by your own party for its pandering and lack of all regulation – mainly because of your Nuclear Donor, Exelon, from which David Axelrod came.
As the New York Times reported in February 2008:
When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”
“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.
A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.
Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.


·  I Have Released My State Records – LIAR, as of March, 2008, state bills you sponsored or voted for have yet to be released, exposing all the special interests pork hidden within.
We couldn’t find a reference for Barack Obama’s supposedly claiming that he had “released” his state records, only that he said he “didn’t have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records” and that they might not exist. Politico.com noted in October 2008 that:
Obama’s Senate files became an issue after he pressed Hillary Rodham Clinton during their nomination battle to release the schedules from her eight years as first lady.
When her campaign demanded Obama release his state Senate files, he told reporters he did not “maintain a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn’t have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records.” The records “could have been thrown out. I haven’t been in the state Senate now for quite some time,” he said.
His campaign later said that “files pertinent to ongoing casework” were passed to his successor, but Obama didn’t save correspondence with the general public, state associations or lobbyists, or memos on legislation and correspondence with Illinois state agencies. Some of the records that have surfaced have done little to dampen the demand for a more complete accounting.


·  I Took On The Asbestos Altgeld Gardens Mess – LIAR, you were part of a large group of people who remedied Altgeld Gardens. You failed to mention anyone else but yourself, in your books.
In Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father, beginning at the start of Chapter 9, he writes in detail about the efforts of community organizers to push a grassroots campaign advocating the removal of asbestos from the Altgeld Gardens housing project in Chicago. Although in his book Obama emphasizes his own role in the effort, many other people who took part in are indeed mentioned as well.
 


·  My Economics Bill Will Help America – LIAR, your 111 economic policies were just combined into a proposal which lost 99-0, and even YOU voted against your own bill.
It is unclear to us what bill or statement is supposedly being referenced here.
 


·  I Have Been A Bold Leader In Illinois – LIAR, even your own supporters claim to have not seen BOLD action on your part.
We couldn’t find a reference for Barack Obama’s having described himself as a “bold leader in Illinois,” but certainly some of his supporters have claimed that of him (just as some of his critics have claimed the opposite).
 


·  I Passed 26 Of My Own Bills In One Year – LIAR, they were not YOUR bills, but rather handed to you, after their creation by a fellow Senator, to assist you in a future bid for higher office.
Barack Obama did pass 26 bills in his final year as an Illinois state senator. We could not find any reference to his claiming that all of them were “my own” bills, but he certainly received a boost in passing them from Illinois Senate President (and fellow Democrat) Emil Jones, who “helped Obama learn the ways of the state legislature and gave Obama the chance to work on the ethics legislation and death penalty reforms that Obama now boasts about in his presidential campaign”:
Emil Jones Jr. helped Obama master the intricacies of the Legislature. When Democrats took control of the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on high-profile legislative initiatives that he now boasts about in his presidential campaign.
And when Obama wanted a promotion to the U.S. Senate, Jones provided critical support that gave the little-known legislator legitimacy, keeping him from being instantly trampled by the front-runners.


·  No One Contacted Canada About NAFTA – LIAR, the Candian Government issued the names and a memo of the conversation your campaign had with them.
As FactCheck.org noted in March 2008 about the ‘NAFTA-Gate‘controversy:
It’s now clear that a Canadian news report that started this flap wasn’t accurate. No evidence has surfaced to show that any Obama “staffer” telephoned the Canadian ambassador in Washington, and all concerned deny that any such conversation took place. But it is equally clear that Obama’s senior economic adviser did visit Canada’s consulate in Chicago on Feb. 8, and that NAFTA was one of the several topics discussed.
Exactly what was said is not so clear, however. The memo says Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance was described as just “political maneuvering,” but the adviser says he said no such thing. The campaign says the adviser wasn’t authorized to convey any message from the candidate anyway. No audio recording or verbatim transcript of the disputed conversation is available, and there’s no reason to expect that any exists.


·  I Am Tough On Terrorism – LIAR, you missed the Iran Resolution vote on terrorism.
In September 2007, the U.S. Senate voted on a resolution to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization:
Charged with defending the system put in place after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Guards answer to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and are revered by many for their defense of the country during the 1980s war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The legislative move to classify Shiite Muslim-dominated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard force as terrorist would be first such move against a foreign government entity and would freeze any of its assets under U.S. jurisdiction.
It would also allow the U.S. Treasury Department to move against firms subject to U.S. law that do business with the Guard, which have vast commercial interests at home and abroad.
Senator Obama was on the campaign trail at the time and did not return to Washington for the vote.
 


·  I Am Not Acting As President Yet – LIAR, after the NAFTA Memo, a dead terrorist in the FARC, in Colombia, was found with a letter stating how you and he were working together on getting FARC recognized officially.
On March 1, a Columbian Army strike on a FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) rebel camp in Columbia killed 24 people, including Raul Reyes, the FARC’s foreign minister. Files in a laptop computer seized from the wreckage of the rebel camp included references to U.S. diplomatic overtures which the Associated Press described as “scintillating, if vague”:
In a Dec. 11 message to the secretariat, [Ivan] Marquez writes: “If you are in agreement, I can receive Jim and Tucker to hear the proposal of the gringos.”
Writing two days before his death, Reyes tells his comrades that “the gringos,” working through Ecuador’s government, are interested “in talking to us on various issues.”
“They say the new president of their country will be (Barack) Obama,” he writes, saying Obama rejects both the Bush administration’s free trade agreement with Colombia and the current military aid program.
Exactly who the referenced “gringos” were and whether they had any substantive connection to Barack Obama is unknown.
 


·  I Didn’t Run Ads In Florida – LIAR, you allowed national ads to run 8-12 times per day for two weeks – and you still lost.
In August 2007, major Democratic candidates signed a pledge to not campaign in Florida because that state had moved its primary election up to 29 January 2008, one week earlier than the Democratic national rules allowed. In January 2008, the Obama campaign launched national television advertisements on CNN and MSNBC that were also shown in Florida. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton maintainted that they had asked CNN and MSNBC to pull Florida from the ad buy, but those networks said they could not.
 


·  I Won Michigan – LIAR, no you didn’t.
Senator Obama didn’t seriously claim to have “won” Michigan; during an 8 March 2008 Today Show interview he misspoke and inadvertently mentioned Michigan among a list of states which he had won. In accordance with the agreement mentioned in the previous entry, Barack Obama’s name didn’t even appear on the Michigan ballot.
 


·  I won Nevada – LIAR, no you did not.
Senator Obama didn’t claim to have “won” Nevada (a state that holds caucuses rather than direct-election primaries); he noted, correctly, that although Senator Hillary Clinton tallied more overall votes at the Nevada caucuses, he actually picked up more national delegates from that state:
Mitt Romney took Nevada’s Republican caucuses, while Democrats debated whether their party had rendered a split decision.
New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the vote count among those at the caucuses, but Illinois Sen. Barack Obama claimed a slight advantage in national convention delegates on the strength of his showing in rural areas.
Obama said in a statement released by his campaign that he came from 25 points behind and nearly beat Clinton today because he did well across all of Nevada — “including rural areas where Democrats have traditionally struggled.”
Obama’s campaign said his performance in rural areas of the state helped him win a total of 13 national convention delegates, versus 12 for Clinton.


·  I Want Americans To Decide – LIAR, you prefer caucuses that limit the vote, confuse the voters, force a public vote, and only operate during small windows of time.
Senator Obama has no influence or power over the holding of caucuses rather than primary elections; that choice is made by each state individually, and candidates have to abide by whatever is decided.
 


·  I passed 900 Bills in the State Senate – LIAR, you passed 26, most of which you didn’t write yourself.
We could not find any reference to document Barack Obama’s having claimed he passied “900 bills in the [Illinois] state senate.”


·  My Campaign Was Extorted By A Friend – LIAR, that friend is threatening to sue if you do not stop saying this. Obama has stopped saying this.
We are unsure what “extortion” claim this statement supposedly references.
 


·  I Believe In Fairness, Not Tactics – LIAR, you used tactics to eliminate Alice Palmer from running against you.
In April 2007, the Chicago Tribune wrote of Barack Obama’s first campaign for public office:
The day after New Year’s 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city’s South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.
But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckled arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.


·  I Don’t Take PAC Money – LIAR, you take loads of it.
Senator Obama didn’t say that has never accepted money from political action committees. (He used PAC money in his previous U.S. Senate and Illinois state Senate races.) He pledged that he would not accept PAC money for his 2008 presidential bid, a pledge that he has upheld.
 


·  I don’t Have Lobbysists – LIAR, you have over 47 lobbyists, and counting.
As Politico.com noted in May 2008:
In his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama is refusing donations from federally registered lobbyists and excluding them from his official campaign staff. (They can still be advisers and volunteers, and their spouses’ checks are certainly welcome.)
The Wall Street Journal observed in November 2008 that:
Democratic lobbyists are wondering about their future in an Obama administration. Although Sen. Obama has taken a tough line toward registered lobbyists, he has allowed himself some maneuvering room. Like Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama has banned lobbyists from working on his campaign until after they quit their lobbying jobs.
Senator Obama also said that his administration would not employ federally registered lobbyists, although (as the New York Times noted) he has allowed himself some “wiggle room” in that regard:
Turning to campaign promises in which he pledged sweeping ethics restrictions, President-elect Barack Obama will bar lobbyists from helping to pay the costs of his transition to power or working for it in any area in which they have represented clients in the last year, his transition team said.
The new rules do seem to leave some wiggle room. Aides to Mr. Obama, who declared during the campaign that lobbyists would not “find a job in my White House,” said the guidelines allowed for lobbyists to work on the transition in areas where they have not done any lobbying.
Further, the rules apply to lobbyists who must register with the federal government; many people who work for lobbying firms or in other areas of the influence business in Washington do not have to register, because they do not personally lobby federal officials on specific issues.


·  My Campaign Had Nothing To Do With The 1984 Ad – LIAR, your own campaign worker made the ad on his Apple in one afternoon.
A widely-circulated spoof of Apple Computer’s famous 1984 television advertisement for their (then-new) Macintosh computer was not created by an Obama campaign worker. It was, as explained in a statement issued by the managing director of Blue State Digital (a firm contracted to provide technology services to the Obama Campaign), created without authorization by an employee of that company:
Statement from Thomas Gensemer, Managing Director, Blue State Digital
On Wednesday afternoon, March the 21st, an employee at our firm, Phillip de Vellis, received a call from Arianna Huffington of “The Huffington Post” regarding the “1984” video currently circulating online. Initially, de Vellis refused to respond to her requests. He has since acknowledged to Blue State Digital that he was the creator of the video.
Pursuant to company policy regarding outside political work or commentary on behalf of our clients or otherwise, Mr. de Vellis has been terminated from Blue State Digital effective immediately.
Blue State Digital is under contract with the Obama Campaign for technology pursuits including software development and hosting. Additionally, one of our founding partners is on leave from the company to work directly for the campaign at headquarters.
However, Blue State Digital is not currently engaged in any relationship with the Obama Campaign for creative or non-technical services.
Mr. de Vellis created this video on his own time. It was done without the knowledge of management, and was in no way tied to his work at the firm or our formal engagement [on technology pursuits] with the Obama campaign.
I have spoken with David Plouffe, Sen. Obama’s campaign manager, to inform him of this action and am appreciative of his understanding and ongoing support of our work.


·  I Have Always Been Against Iraq – LIAR, you weren’t in office to vote against it AND you have voted to fund it every single time, unlike Kucinich, who seems to be out gutting you Obama. You also seem to be stepping back from your departure date – AGAIN.
Senator Obama expressed opposition to the war in Iraq well before he gained a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004. (The vote that authorized U.S. military action in Iraq was held in 2002.) He has since voted in the Senate to authorize funding for that war, for reasons he defended in a February 2008 Democratic debate:
The two Democrats exchanged pointed words over each other’s records on the war in Iraq, which contrast sharply even as economic and domestic concerns become dominant in the race. Clinton voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion, which Obama opposed from the start. After Obama again touted a high-profile antiwar speech he gave in Chicago before the war, Clinton pointed out that he, like her, had subsequently voted for war funding, and that their records on Iraq were similar since he came to the Senate in 2005.
“When it wasn’t just a speech, but it was actually action, where is the difference?” she said. “Where is the comparison that would in some way give a real credibility to the speech that he gave against the war?”
Obama shot back: “Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out.”


·  I Am As Patriotic As Anyone – LIAR, you won’t wear a flag pin and you don’t put your hand over your heart during the Anthem. There is a Cuban Flag with Che Guevara Displayed at Barack Obama Campaign Office which you allow to be displayed. You voted against making english the official language of the United States. You voted to give illegal aliens social security benefits, which would bankrupt the social security system for Americans legally paying into it.
These items are covered here in separate articles about the national anthemChe Guevara, and Social Security.


BLOOMBERG AND WOMEN:
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a 4,000-word profile of Bloomberg that documented a long series of allegations by female employees, largely about profane and sexist comments, many of them demeaning, some outright threatening. These were not #MeToo-style allegations of personal misconduct, but charges that Bloomberg encouraged a hostile work environment for women employees. These conditions generated dozens of lawsuits and numerous settlements in six and seven figures.

Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will 

demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a 

“progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist 

party, which does the bidding of Wall Street and the CIA.

Bloomberg’s billions and the politics of oligarchy
17 February 2020
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million on television and internet ads that present “Mike” as an up-from-poverty, self-made fighter for progress and decency, a friend of the common man.
The marketing of Bloomberg involves distortions so grotesque that one commentator recalled the massive advertising campaign by Ford Motor Company, in the early days of television, to promote an exciting new model named the Edsel, arguably the ugliest and most unsuccessful car ever produced.
The Bloomberg campaign is spending more than $1 million a day on average just on Facebook ads. In advance of the March 3 primaries dubbed “Super Tuesday,” when there will be voting in 14 states, Bloomberg has spent $40 million on television and internet advertising in California, $33 million in Texas, $9.5 million in North Carolina and $6 million in Massachusetts. He is the only candidate to air TV ads in Virginia and Alabama. Except for fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, no other Democratic candidate has thus far spent even $10 million in all 14 states combined.
Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston [Credit: AP Photo/David J. Phillip]
The electoral impact of Bloomberg’s vast expenditures—a drop in the bucket from his $60 billion fortune—is difficult to estimate in advance of the voting on “Super Tuesday.” March 3 will be the first time that the former mayor of New York City is on a primary ballot. Polls suggest that Bloomberg is close to the 15 percent mark required to win delegates to the Democratic convention. His aim, should he fail to win enough delegates to gain the nomination, is to combine with other “moderate” candidates to block a victory by the current front-runner, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Whatever the outcome of the primary 
campaign, it is clear already that 
Bloomberg’s spending exerts a vast influence 
on the Democratic Party establishment and 
on the corporate media (of which Bloomberg 
News, part of his empire, is a major 
component). It is safe to say that no other 
Democratic presidential hopeful could have 
survived last week’s series of press reports 
on Bloomberg’s support for “stop-and-frisk” 
police attacks on minority youth, his blaming 
the 2008 Wall Street crash on loans to 
minority borrowers, and his abusive 
treatment of female employees.
Last week, reports surfaced of Bloomberg’s 2015 comments on his policy as New York mayor of “stop-and-frisk,” in which he declared, “Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25.” He went on to add, “The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”
In response, the Bloomberg campaign immediately rolled out endorsements of his campaign by three African-American members of Congress.
Anticipating the crisis, Bloomberg had already met with a group of prominent black pastors who had been critical of “stop-and-frisk” but were willing to administer absolution if the billionaire candidate was sufficiently apologetic—and generous. As Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, put it, with revealing frankness, “He used his money, which is one of the reasons I continue to support him, to express his sincerity.”
As a 5,000-word profile in the New York Times Sunday edition detailed, Bloomberg, who spent $270 million on his three successful campaigns to buy the mayoralty of New York City (2002-2013), built “an empire of influence” through targeted donations to an array of liberal and pro-Democratic Party groups over the past decade. According to the Times account:
Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes. His personal fortune, built on a financial information and news company, is estimated at over $60 billion. It fuels an advocacy network that has directed policy in dozens of states and cities; mobilized movements to take on gun violence and climate change; rewritten election laws and health regulations; and elected scores of politicians to offices as modest as the school board and as lofty as the Senate.
This includes an estimated $270 million to gun control campaigns, largely through the Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety group. He has pumped large sums into the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, charter school advocacy groups and similar organizations, giving himself near-veto power over their campaigns.
In one incident described by the Times, the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party think tank, edited a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States to remove a chapter on New York City police spying on Muslim mosques and communities that had eight references to Bloomberg by name. Bloomberg gave nearly $2 million to the organization.
A longtime Democrat who adopted the Republican label in 2001 to run for mayor, then ran for reelection as a Republican in 2005 and as an “independent” in 2009, Bloomberg supported Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. He returned to the Democratic Party as an endorser only in 2016, when he backed Hillary Clinton. He later changed his registration to Democratic.
In 2018, Bloomberg spent more than $100 million supporting Democratic Party candidates for Congress through his personal super PAC, and he has pledged to spend $1 billion to elect Democrats this year, whether or not he wins the party nomination.
Among those now singing the praises of Bloomberg are dozens of current and former mayors, many of them African-American, from cities including Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, Tampa, Sacramento, Miami and Washington DC. This only demonstrates the completely corrupt and cynical character of identity politics, which a layer of the black upper-middle class has used to obtain a bigger share of the wealth and status of the top 10 percent, while the conditions of the vast majority of black workers and youth have continued to deteriorate.
In the wake of the “stop-and-frisk” controversy, an array of video and audio clips has surfaced documenting Bloomberg’s long record of racist and sexist comments.
The Associated Press reported last week that Bloomberg made comments in 2008 in which he blamed the collapse of the mortgage security market, which triggered the Wall Street crash, on efforts to restrict the practice of “redlining”—racial discrimination by bankers against predominately minority residential neighborhoods. A spokesman for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition called this “a billionaire defending other billionaires and placing the blame on lower-income homeowners.”
In a 2018 conversation with International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde, made public Sunday, Bloomberg can be heard opposing minimum wage laws and defending the finger printing of food-stamp recipients. He called the minimum wage one of “these impediments to job creation” that he favored eliminating.
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a 4,000-word profile of Bloomberg that documented a long series of allegations by female employees, largely about profane and sexist comments, many of them demeaning, some outright threatening. These were not #MeToo-style allegations of personal misconduct, but charges that Bloomberg encouraged a hostile work environment for women employees. These conditions generated dozens of lawsuits and numerous settlements in six and seven figures.
Any of these episodes would have destroyed another candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. But for Bloomberg and his media acolytes, it is a big “so what?” Being a right-wing, dictatorial, foul-mouthed, racist, sexist billionaire is not a problem for the Democratic Party establishment, as long as the billionaire’s money finds its way into their own pockets.
What dominates the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans under Trump, is the politics of oligarchy. It is naked and shameless.
The financial aristocrats, the multimillionaires 

and billionaires, control the two-party system 

and dictate the course of the stage-managed 

political events called “primaries,” 

“conventions” and “elections.”
Later this week, Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders are likely to appear on the same platform, if Bloomberg, as expected, qualifies for Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sanders claims that his campaign is the means to transform the Democratic Party into an instrument of progressive reform, a weapon against the rule of the super-rich. Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a “progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist party, which does the bidding of Wall Street and the CIA.

Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more in taxes

 

Many of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bloomberg, the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a lock on the nomination.
The immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and Sanders.

The second event was Warren’s announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1 billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.
Neither of these taxes would be passed by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated and suppressed.
But the modern-day lords and ladies who inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.
They do not fear Warren, a self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.
The levels of wealth wasted on this parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:
It is very difficult to comprehend what a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.
And yet, there are 607 people in the United 
States with a net worth of over a billion 
dollars.
Bloomberg, a liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.
Last January he denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist 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.”
Over the past several months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s Medicare plan.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,” complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft founder 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 last week, “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.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.
Hedge fund owner Leon Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s potential candidacy.
The New York Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel, he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and Chrysler workers.
But for fawning toward the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column by the Times ’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”
Calling for “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs… Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened, they want a strong leader.”
This is under conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’ share has tripled since the 1980s.
In their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in 2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since 1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half, dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.
The United States is not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.
The ferocious response of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the nomination.
There is no way to address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast majority of the population.
The corporations and banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized to meet human needs, not private profit.
This is a revolutionary task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a conscious political leadership.

Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers

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 12 Nov 2019382
2:32

President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.

“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.
Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.
“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“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,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”

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