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
Getty Images
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.”
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of
the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further
diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.
Mike
Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans
Pay Raises and
Training Expand in Donald Trump's Tight Labor Market
Rasmussen Shows
2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration
Munro: WashPost
Message to U.S. Graduates -- Drop Dead
few skills, it is low-skilled American workers,
including many blacks and Hispanics, who have
suffered most from this wage dip.”
Key findings in the report:
- Shortages should not occur in a free market
- Tight labor markets benefit
marginalized groups
- Wages have been stagnant over the long
term
- Labor force participation is down over
the long term
- Domestic industries should hire
Americans
- Natives participate in all major
occupations
- Plenty of STEM workers are available
- Gains to the economy are not the same
as gains to natives
- Immigration is not an efficient
solution to population aging
BLOG:
IS THIS FOR REAL?!?!?
·
But Bloomberg also wraps his
economic demand for more immigrants in a progressive-style cultural message.
·
Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that
amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”
·
In December, Bloomberg said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our
cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but
without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions,
and dialogues do not meet his standards.
Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More
Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
3:19
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of
the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further
diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said
recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to
compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations
to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we
ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working
in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where
wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are
artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re
artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I
respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into
America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least
amounts, would be better to take care of
their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is
centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the
U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and
becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent
dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of
Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to
do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal
aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they
bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to vote
and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare …
plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial
divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the
big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much
foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and
importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants
annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly
naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next
two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15
million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in
the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring
an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM
Patriot Channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00
p.m. Pacific).
Mike
Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans
Investor,
CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says
he
would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best”
workers
from around the world instead of Americans.
BLOG:
‘THE BEST’ ARE NOT HIS ILLITERATE MEXICANS HE IS HISPANDERING TO!
“This country needs more immigrants
and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on
January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the
best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We
want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want
to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for
cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper
than Americans.’
“If business were able to hire without restrictions from
anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be
foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration
Studies. He continued:
Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings,
whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because]
Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would
not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.
Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is
trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration
rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those
things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’
value,” he said.
“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously
different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he
is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to
immigration,” he added.
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing
workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling.
(Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane.
And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American
citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First,
America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of
our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens
are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will
fill that job.
In December 2018, departing House
Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Bush’s
“any willing worker” goal, saying:
[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior
enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that
it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to
play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.
This “any willing worker” idea
encouraged Ryan to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration
groups.
Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when
they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said
Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad,
but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people
in legally.”
In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a
promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration
via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the
huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply
of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans —
despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage
increases.
Almost 50% of U.S. employees got higher
wages in 2019, up from almost 40% in 2018.
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business. http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business. http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7
Pay Raises and
Training Expand in Donald Trump's Tight Labor Market
Bloomberg’s “best worker” pitch is not a problem for the
Democrats’ 2020 base of “woke” progressives, said Krikorian:
He is running in the Democratic primary and there is an overlap
between the plutocrat assault on national borders and the leftist assault on
national borders. They come at the issue from the different starting points but
they have the same enemy, which is Americans’ sovereignty. It is not obvious
that his [pro-employer] immigration stance is going to be a turn-off to Democratic
primary votes.. How different are the specifics of his immigration proposal
from [Joe] Biden, Sen. [Bernie] Sanders or [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren?
Biden, Sanders, and Warren endorse
wide-open borders as a form of charity towards unlucky foreigners fleeing from
home country persecution. For example, a January 5 tweet from Biden said:
Our Statue of Liberty invites in the tired, the poor, the
huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Donald Trump has slammed the door in
the face of families fleeing persecution and violence.
Bloomberg’s pro-employer view is coherent and likely sincere,
said Krikorian.
Bloomberg aspires to a single global labor market, and
everything else follows from that. A concern about improving the lot of
less-skilled American workers is by definition contrary to that view because
there is no such thing as an American labor market. There is only a global
labor market. Domestic employers are not thinking about the consequences for
people from Pennsylvania when they hire people from Tennessee, and Bloomberg
wants that same approach across the entire world.
There is even an altruistic way of viewing that — which I
assume guys like this have — that it improves the lot of Hondurans [and other
migrants] who are coming here.
The issue is not that Bloomberg and his guys are factually
incorrect. It is that their values are contrary to the values that most
Americans hold – which is that we have a greater loyalty and obligation to our
fellow countrymen than to foreigners. Guys like Bloomberg reject that
[obligation] in principle.
A Rasmussen survey shows likely voters by
2:1 want Congress to make companies hire & train US grads & workers
instead of importing more foreign workers.
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE
Rasmussen Shows
2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration
But Bloomberg also wraps his economic demand for more immigrants
in a progressive-style cultural message.
Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that
amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”
In December, Bloomberg said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our
cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but
without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions,
and dialogues do not meet his standards.
Bloomberg also echoes the Democrats’ claim that the U.S is a
diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country built by similar-minded
settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said,
without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg has long supported greater
immigration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to
create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and
politicians then pushed for
passage of the failed Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of
the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million
immigrants in ten years would cause Americans’ wages to shrink, the report
said. “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 the profits and 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.”
For Bloomberg, Krikorian said, U.S.
“employers have no greater obligation to fellow Americans than to Hondurans [or
other foreign workers] … what Bloomberg is saying is that immigration laws
should not interfere with the pursuit of shareholder value [because] employers
can hire anyone from anywhere at any wage, period.”
Estb. media and esp. WashPo journos cannot,
or dare not, follow the $$$ in immigration politics.
For example, the WashPo article on @SenMikeLee's @S368 bill to expand the outsourcing of U.S. grads' jobs.
Maybe b/c the money ends up in Jeff Bezos' pocket. http://bit.ly/2tChhYt
For example, the WashPo article on @SenMikeLee's @S368 bill to expand the outsourcing of U.S. grads' jobs.
Maybe b/c the money ends up in Jeff Bezos' pocket. http://bit.ly/2tChhYt
Munro: WashPost
Message to U.S. Graduates -- Drop Dead
EconomyImmigrationPoliticsAmnestyDonald TrumpGeorge W. BushH-1BimmigrationMichael BloombergMigrantsmigrationNation of
Immigrantsvisa workerswages
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