Ask Prof Wolff: Pandemic Economics = Capitalism's Failures
Worker Unions Endorsed Biden, Members Got Screwed
Biden lied, American jobs died.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
When Joe Biden ran for office, he told the members of the United Steelworkers that he would keep President Trump's steel tariffs on Europe in place. The tariffs, which protect the jobs of American steelworkers, were one of the few Trump policies that Biden kept after taking office.
Even most government insiders thought the tariffs would stay in place because they created American jobs in key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Abandoning them would risk not just the White House, but Democrat House and Senate losses in 2022 and 2024.
United Steelworkers endorsed Biden and he promised them that he would keep the tariffs in place right until he jetted off to Europe in Air Force One, with its presidential suite and gym, and then toured Rome in an 85-vehicle motorcade to discuss the "environmental crisis".
Biden’s foreign policy priorities haven’t been focused on American security or jobs. After turning over Afghanistan to Al Qaeda for September 11, he decided to do to American steel jobs what he had done to Afghanistan by cutting a deal to partially lift President Trump’s steel tariffs.
The Biden administration’s environmentalist and tax hike priorities required making some concessions to the Europeans in exchange for agreeing to a minimum corporate tax of 15% (which Biden believes will make it easier to hike America’s corporate tax rates) and massive reductions in functional energy like coal and oil in exchange for non-functional green energy.
The steelworkers of Ohio and Pennsylvania, already on the hit list of Biden’s Big Green donors, were the sacrifice that “Middle Class Joe” made so his San Francisco donors can get even richer trading in carbon credits while salivating at the prospect of turning the entire American economy into a corrupt scheme for taxing and trading the imaginary “carbon” commodity.
To save the planet. Before flying off to their seaside coastal mansions.
United Steelworkers is now stuck trying to sell the latest Biden betrayal to its members as a very good thing by repeating the White House talking points of an alliance with Europe against Chinese steel. That promise, like the tariff promise, will turn out to be just as much of a sham.
Steelworkers could have taken a cue from the miners who have been lied to by Democrats.
The United Mine Workers of America had actually endorsed John Kerry, who went on to wage an environmentalist war on coal, because he had promised to protect coal jobs.
Kerry, now Biden's Climate Czar, tried to recently gaslight coal miners by falsely claiming that, "Workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, over the last few years they’ve been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense, no it’s not."
Then he suggested that coal miners get jobs installing solar panels.
“Secretary Kerry trying to equate the job of an electrician in a coal mine who makes $110,000 to a solar tech, who might make $35,000 to $40,000, is not a good analogy for our state," Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia pointed out.
Kerry’s current priority is trying to convince the Biden administration to surrender everything to China in exchange for asking the Commies to use less coal. Which they’re buying from us.
China is now the second largest market for American coal. Biden and Kerry are bribing the Chinese to stop buying our coal. Has any other government hated its own country this much?
The United Mine Workers of America didn’t even bother with a presidential endorsement. After Hillary Clinton announced that she would kill coal miner jobs, the UMWA threw in the towel. In the last election, most UMWA members voted Trump. The same was true of the steelworkers.
Biden not only lied to the steelworkers, and waged war on coal miners, he lied and betrayed those American miners who were hoping that there would be some future for mining jobs.
During the campaign, miners were "privately" told by the Biden campaign that his administration would encourage domestic mining of rare earth metals.
The Biden pitch was that his environmental strategy would require lots of rare earth metals for solar panels and electric cars, and that would actually boost rare earth mining in America.
It was a familiar twist on the scam that was sold to the steelworkers.
Big Green lobbies have repeatedly sold the same lie that "investing" in their energy scams would create jobs. The only place it ever creates jobs is in China and among the venture capitalists of San Francisco. Not to mention the EPA bureaucrats tasked with dragging out environmental reviews for years so nothing gets built who then turn around and get six figure jobs as environmental consultants to "help" businesses get things built.
There's no room for American workers in this dirty green racket.
After the worthless "private" assurances, once in office the Biden administration announced that it would be relying on foreign rare earth metals. Middle Class Joe’s betrayal of miners and the country had devastating consequences as China used the Taliban to secure Afghanistan’s rare earth mines even as a chip shortage wreaked havoc on the global supply chain.
Biden’s betrayal of miners also increased the prices of cars, laptops, and smartphones. Printer prices shot up 20%. And yet very few Biden voters understand that their own politician decisions are why they have to pay more for consumer electronics.
But the one thing you can count on from Democrat unions is that they will put the party first and their members last. And no matter how much their Democrat bosses humiliate them and spit in their faces, they’ll line up to ask for more while selling out their members one more time.
Democrats used to spout their love for the working class, now they have nothing but contempt for them. The dying breed of politicians who still know how to talk to working unions like Biden are nothing but puppets dancing for the amusement of their New York and SF donor bosses.
Biden betrayed steelworkers and miners. He’ll betray all workers and unions the same way. Even municipal unions, usually the pets of the Dems because of their role in taking the money from the contracts negotiated with their politicians and funneling it right back to them, were forced to swallow vaccine mandates and the firing of their members. And even the most combative radical unions like SEIU, usually willing to shut down everything, swallowed, and told their members to shut up and thank the union for its representation.
Over the spring, the United Mine Workers of America held a press conference cheering on Biden's plan to kill coal jobs and asking for money to "retrain" its members for new jobs.
Like shining Biden's shoes with green shoe polish.
“It’s not fair to take somebody’s job away from them and push them into another career,” a union member complained. “I love my job. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in this world. And I hope coal is continued to be mined for years after I’m gone.”
UMWA members are mad as hell about it. If only they had a union to represent them.
Democrat White Working Class Voters Are Dying Off
As Oprah said, “older people, who were born, and bred, and marinated” in racism “have to die”.
The usual urban lefty sneer has been that the older generations of white working-class voters are racist coal miners and just need to die. Now they're getting their gruesome wish and it's tilting the white working-class vote further Republican.
White non-college-educated voters in the Rust Belt have historically voted to the left of their demographic nationwide. As Catalist notes, working-class whites in Wisconsin are about “2 to 3 percentage points” more Democratic than they are nationally.
Unfortunately, this relative liberalism is partly the vestige of a bygone era. It derives in no small part from organized labor’s erstwhile strength in the state, and an older generation of working-class whites, who came of age at a time when the Democratic Party was more closely associated with their communities.
In Wisconsin, 47 percent of whites 65 and over voted for Biden in 2020; among whites between the ages of 45 and 64, that figure was 41 percent. This discrepancy wasn’t new: In each of the last four presidential elections, white seniors in Wisconsin have voted to the left of the state’s white middle-agers.
Thus, as older Wisconsites pass from this mortal coil, white working-class voters in the state are growing less exceptionally liberal.
Translation, the older white people that Oprah and her fellow supporters dreamed would die off were actually more likely to vote their way. The younger generation of working-class whites with no college education have fewer union loyalties and came of age with a Democrat Party that has nothing but contempt for them.
In some heavily white blue-collar parts of Maine and Michigan, senior citizens actually vote to the left of those under 30.
Don't trust anyone over 30.
Survey: Elite-Imposed Migration Is Transforming National Politics
Many Democrats want to see American society transformed by migration and diversity, according to a survey by the left-leaning Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
“More than six in ten Democrats (64%), mostly agree that they prefer the U.S. to be made up of people from all over the world” — instead of from American families and communities, said the survey, titled “Competing Visions of America: An Evolving Identity or a Culture Under Attack? Findings from the 2021 American Values Survey.”
The late-September survey asked 2,508 Americans about various aspects of immigration and diversity. The results showed that Democrats are becoming increasingly radical but also that more Republicans are openly opposing their planned demographic replacement — and that Latinos increasingly dislike imposed diversity.
For example, more Republicans are resisting the nation’s open-door policy, according to the poll:
Republicans (28%) are less likely to have positive views of immigrants today than they were in 2018 (34%) and in 2011 (39%), and have grown more likely to believe that immigrants threaten American values (71% today, 65% in 2018, and 55% in 2011).
‘Two-thirds of Republicans (65%) say instead that immigrants are a burden because they take jobs, housing, and health care,” the report said.
But the survey also reported that “more than eight in ten Democrats (82%) say that immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents.”
PRRI president Robert Jones spotlighted the huge shift in American politics since the 1950s-era.
Back then, domestic politics were dominated by left vs. rights arguments over how to distribute the huge profits generated by the nation’s huge manufacturing economy.
Those class-and-wages politics continue, but they get little attention from the establishment media since the bipartisan establishment doubled immigration in 1990. That doubling helped to stagnate wages, supercharge the stock market, and also shifted media coverage onto the “diversity” disputes that are used to break up the social norms developed by Americans to help share civic and economic wealth.
“Increasingly, this what American elections have been about — less about particular policies and more about who we are …, [and] ‘Are we kind of an evolving identity or are we a culture that’s been under attack?'” Jones said in a press briefing on November 1:
What we’re struggling over, I think in the bigger debates in the country, is “What is America about? Was there a golden age right for America?” and we’re seeing this very different vision among Democrats and Republicans.
Democrats have moved left on immigration and diversity since 2012, largely because they followed their Democratic leaders, who have increasingly championed the claim that the United States is a diversifying “Nation of Immigrants,” not of Americans. This stance has also prompted Democrats to revive racial demands so they can argue that Americans’ culture must be transformed by migrants and diversity.
For example, the Democrats’ candidate for governor in Virginia called on November 1 for a dramatic reduction in the percentage of teachers who are white: “Fifty percent are students of color and yet 80 percent of teachers are white: We all know what we have to do …. to make everybody feel comfortable,” he threatened.
Democrats are signaling they are more comfortable with the demographic and cultural changes caused since immigration numbers were doubled in the 1990 bipartisan deal between President George H. Bush and Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. The survey said:
[Only] three in ten Democrats (31%) agree with the idea that things have changed so much that they often feel like strangers in their own country, compared to 39% of independents and 56% of Republicans.
There is nearly a 50-percentage-point gap between Republicans (80%) and Democrats (33%) on this question. Independents mirror all Americans closely (50% agree vs. 49% disagree).
One reason for the Democrats’ comfort amid diversity is that their coalition is increasingly based on the groups that oppose Americans and their pro-solidarity norms. Those groups include religious minorities, status-seeking college progressives, immigrant cultural minorities, comfortable suburbanites, investors, and corporate employers.
“Democrats are four times more likely to say the decline of the white population in the 2020 Census is mostly positive vs. negative (39% vs. 9%),” the survey noted.
In contrast, Republicans “are more than five times less likely to say this change is positive vs. negative (6% vs. 33%),” the report said.
The poll showed that college-educated Americans are especially eager to welcome lower-status and often compliant migrants: “White Americans with college degrees are more likely than those without college degrees to hold positive opinions of newcomers (69% vs. 43%).”
That Democrats’ pro-diversity policy may shift back towards the center if more college-graduate voters object to government-fueled hiring discrimination, or if Latino voters continue their shift towards the populist wing of the GOP.
But the survey shows that Latino voters are increasingly skeptical about additional immigration, in part, because their wages are cut and their housing costs are increased: “Hispanic Americans are less likely to believe that newcomers strengthen American society today (62%) than they were in 2018 (72%) but remain similar to 2011 levels (64%).”
The PRRI poll argues that national public support for amnesty remains level as the two parties are moving further apart:
Democrats have grown more supportive of this [amnesty] policy, from 71% in 2013, when the question was first asked, to 76% today. Republicans have become less likely to say that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be allowed a way to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements (43%) than they were in 2013 (53%). Today, 13% of Republicans say they would prefer undocumented immigrants to be eligible for permanent residency status but not citizenship, and 44% say all immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be deported.
The poll does not include any questions that highlight most Americans’ agreement that the government should favor Americans over immigrants, especially for jobs.
Many polls show that labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents. Migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other. The polling — and the census data — debunks the 1950s claim by Mayorkas and other advocates that Americans must live in a “nation of immigrants.”
Yet business and progressive groups repeatedly insist that 300 million Americans must subordinate their priorities to the goals of migrants. “Citizenship Day is a reminder that the job of every single one of us is to ensure that America remains a country worthy of immigrants’ aspirations,” President Joe Biden said in a September 17 video. The same pro-migrant message is being pushed by his border chief, Alexandria Mayorkas:
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