The Obama Assault on BLACK AMERICA - AL SHARPTON & JESSE JACKSON 2 CORPORATE WHORES

BARACK OBAMA KNOWS THAT IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH HE IGNORES THE PLIGHT OF BLACK AMERICA, HOW MUCH HE HISPANDERS FOR THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES, OR HOW MANY ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY  NUMBERS ARE IN AMERICAN JOBS… BLACK AMERICAN WILL STILL ACCEPT THE CRUMBS HE KNOCKS OFF HIS TABLE THEIR WAY, AND VOTE FOR HIM AGAIN!

“Belafonte, like others, has criticized some of the policies of President Barack Obama, but has also said that he will vote for his reelection.”

HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT BARACK OBAMA HAS VIRTUALLY NOTHING TO DO WITH BLACK AMERICA?

NOT SEGMENT OF AMERICAN SOCIETY IS MORE HARMED BY THE INVASION AND OCCUPATION BY MEXICO, THAN BLACK AMERICANS. ILLEGALS, USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY  NUMBERS HAVE STOLEN MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS, AND THEN LOOTED THE AMERICAN PEOPLE OUT OF BILLIONS IN WELFARE, TAX FRAUD, OR SIMPLY WHOLESALE THEFT OF AMERICA(PHOENIX IS THE SECOND LARGEST CENTER FOR MEXICAN KIDNAPPING, HOME INVASION, AND CAR THEFT, ALONG WITH BEING THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS GATEWAY TO THE U.S. SOUTHWEST).

THANKFULLY NO ADMIN IN HISTORY IS MORE INFESTED WITH THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST PARTY THAN BARACK OBAMA. FORMER LA RAZA SUPREMACIST V.P. CECELIA MUNOZ OPERATES AND IS FUNDED BY THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE!

OBAMA HAS TURNED OVER MILLIONS OF TAX DOLLARS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA TO GET OUT THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES!

OBAMA’S NOMINEE TO THE HIGH COURT, SONIA SOTOMAYER IS A CORPORATE PANDERING LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER THAT VOTED !!! NO !!! AGAINST STATES’ RIGHT TO IMPOSE E-VERIFY! OBAMA HAS SABOTAGED E-VERIFY IN ARIZONA, AS HE HARASSED THIS AMERICAN STATE WITH LAWSUITS AND NO BORDER DEFENSE ON BEHALF OF HIS LA RAZA PARTY BASE.

OBAMA’S SEC. of (illegal) LABOR IS LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS.

WHILE THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE VIRTUALLY FLIES THE MEXICAN FLAG, HIS ONLY LIAISON WITH BLACK AMERICA IS A CORRUPT CLOWN NAMED SHARPTON!

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WHERE’S THE REAL RACISM?

“In Mexico, a recent Zogby poll declared that the vast majority of Mexican citizens hate Americans. [22.2] Mexico is a country saturated with racism, yet in denial, having never endured the social development of a Civil Rights movement like in the US--Blacks are harshly treated while foreign Whites are often seen as the enemy. [22.3] In fact, racism as workplace discrimination can be seen across the US anywhere the illegal alien Latino works--the vast majority of the workforce is usually strictly Latino, excluding Blacks, Whites, Asians, and others.”

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CAN YOU IMAGINE THE DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING BEING A CORPORATE WHORE LIKE SHARPTON AND JACKSON?

Harry Belafonte provides an historical insight into the civil rights movement’s decay

By Fred Mazelis
25 May 2012

Tom Eley’s May 1 article, “Behind the right-wing racial politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,” makes clear the class gulf between these two defenders of big business and the working class.

As the article explains, Jackson and Sharpton are “two individuals who personify the decay of the civil rights movement and the cultivation of a wealthy black elite that is fundamentally hostile to the social aspirations of workers, both black and white.” Jackson “has sought to portray himself as the heir to Martin Luther King, Jr., the leading figure in the struggle for black equality form the 1950s to his death in 1968. However, both King and the civil rights movement of the earlier period were of a very different character.”

Additional confirmation of this different character is provided in a recent memoir by an important eyewitness to civil rights history, singer and political activist Harry Belafonte. Belafonte, who marked his 85^th birthday about three months ago, published a memoir last year, entitled “My Song.”

While he became famous as a calypso performer and later in other genres and also as an actor, Belafonte is also well known for his social and political activism. He was one of the sharpest opponents of the Iraq War, which he correctly characterized as a war crime.

Belafonte first met Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956, in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Both men, not yet 30 years old, had already become famous in their respective fields. The singer and civil rights leader immediately forged a bond, and Belafonte went on to help raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and to develop a strong collaborative friendship with King. When King was in New York, he and his closest advisers—Belafonte among them—often met at the singer’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Belafonte’s memoir describes in some detail his last meeting with King. It took place on March 27, 1968, exactly a week before the civil rights leader was assassinated. King was in the midst of planning for the Poor People’s Campaign, including the erection of a shantytown near the White House, to protest “until Congress passed an economic rights bill to alleviate poverty in America,” Belafonte writes.

A party was held at Belafonte’s large apartment. After the guests had left, King and some of his closest colleagues stayed and talked about the conditions in the country and the state of the civil rights movement. Among those present, in addition to King and Belafonte, were King’s lawyer, Clarence Jones, his secretary and bodyguard, Bernard Lee, and Andrew Young, who would later become a congressman, the mayor of Atlanta, and also the US ambassador to the United Nations under President Jimmy Carter.

This passage in Belafonte’s book deserves careful examination. The political establishment had reacted with fury to King’s denunciation of the Vietnam War. The ghetto rebellions had erupted in nearly every major northern US city over the previous four summers. King was intensely affected by these conditions. In the midst of the discussion, he exclaimed:

“Somehow, frustration over the war has brought forth this idea that the solution resides in violence. What I cannot get across to these young people is that I wholly embrace everything they feel! It’s just the tactics we can’t agree on. I have more in common with these young people than with anybody else in this movement. I feel their rage. I feel their pain. I feel their frustration. It’s the system that’s the problem, and it’s choking the breath out of our lives.”

Belafonte continues, “In the pause that followed, Andy [Young] replied, ‘Well, I don’t know, Martin. It’s not the entire system. It’s only part of it, and I think we can fix that.’

“Suddenly, Martin lost his temper. ‘I don’t need to hear from you, Andy,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard enough from you. You’re a capitalist, and I’m not. And so we don’t see eye to eye—on this and a lot of other stuff.’ FACE IT! OBAMA IS PRESIDENT FOR THE 1% AND ILLEGALS ONLY!

“It was an awkward moment. Martin was really angry. But I understood the subtext. Deep down, Andy was ambivalent about the Poor People’s Campaign…

“The tension peaked. ‘The trouble,’ Martin went on, ‘is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level…That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we’re going to have to change the system.’

“At heart, Martin was a socialist and a revolutionary thinker. He spoke not just in anger, but in anguish. His voice dropped to a more reflective tone as he continued. ‘We fought hard and long, and I have never doubted that we would prevail in this struggle. Already our rewards have begun to reveal themselves. Desegregation…the Voting Rights Act…’ He paused. ‘But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we’ve taken toward integration, I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.’

“We had not heard Martin quite this way before. I felt as if our moorings were unhinging. ‘Damn, Martin! If that’s what you think, what would you have us do?’ I asked.

“He gave me a look. ‘I guess we’re just going to have to become firemen.’”

King was a pacifist and a reformist. If he had been a revolutionary thinker, it is likely that his tone would have been one of determination, not anguish, as Belafonte describes it. Nevertheless, his sincerity as a fighter for the interests of the exploited and the poor comes through quite clearly in this passage, and it is significant but not surprising that this side of his political views is rarely presented as he has been transformed into a public icon.

What is even more important is what this account shows about the bitter tensions within the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King felt himself almost alone, surrounded by right-wing figures like Young or preachers who did not share his broader outlook and political views. The isolation of King also has sinister implications, when one considers that his every move was being followed by the FBI, and that his assassination, about which numerous unanswered questions persist to this day, took place just one week later.

Belafonte has little to say about Jesse Jackson. He describes him as among those who “vied for places of influence” with the slain civil rights leader’s widow, Coretta Scott King, adding that “[s]oon [Jackson] would go back to Chicago and brandish the ‘bloody garment’ that Martin was wearing when he died.”

King’s outburst directed against Young could just as well have been addressed to Jackson, who later came to personify the policy of “black capitalism” embraced by the Nixon administration. Jackson and Young came from different backgrounds and pursued slightly different paths, but their views were very similar. Young worked to some extent behind the scenes, while also pursuing a career in “public service” by running for office as a Democratic politician. Jackson—like Sharpton after him—played the demagogue and looked for big headlines. The tactics sometimes differed, but the aim was the same—in Jackson’s words, to “keep hope alive” in the system and specifically in the Democratic Party.

Belafonte’s eyewitness account of the March 1968 discussion is all the more revealing because he himself is part of this privileged layer, although his history is a different one. He came of age politically in New York in the late 1940s, and his hero was Paul Robeson. He was radicalized as a young man and, as he describes it in his book, moved in circles of “socialists and communists [who] embraced the working class as the bedrock of a new political order.” Belafonte “never signed on as a member of the American Socialist or Communist party, or even viewed myself as a fellow traveler, as the jargon of the day had it.” It is clear from his memoir that Belafonte was not driven to study, to examine the political programs and the differences among the various tendencies within the socialist movement. While he has remained a critic of specific policies, he has also made his peace with the system.

This is the significance of Belafonte’s statement that he felt his “moorings were unhinging” when he heard King denounce the system. While King was searching for a way to fight back, Belafonte was exhibiting the demoralization and conservatism that was encouraged in the circles in which he had earlier traveled, influenced above all by the Communist Party and its slavish subservience to the Democratic Party.

When King was killed, Belafonte drew no political conclusions from this final discussion in his apartment. In fact, ten pages further into the memoir, Belafonte boasts that he quickly decided, after King’s death, to “help elect black candidates at every level of the political system…I helped persuade Andy Young to run for Congress in Georgia, gave him money, and staged a lot of free concerts.” Belafonte made “four- and five-figure contributions” to help elect black mayors in Cleveland, Gary, Indiana and other cities. Where King had called for “firemen” to deal with the “burning house” of capitalism, his epigones turned in the opposite direction.

Belafonte, like others, has criticized some of the policies of President Barack Obama, but has also said that he will vote for his reelection.

Behind the right-wing racial politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton

By Tom Eley
1 May 2012

Protests spread throughout the US in the aftermath of the killing of 17-year old Trayvon Martin in February. The killing of Martin found a point of connection with broad popular anger over injustice, inequality, and the promotion of right-wing, vigilante laws. Martin’s parents played a central role in raising awareness of their son’s killing, and in demanding the arrest and trial of his killer.

The political establishment in the United States also mobilized in response to this anger, bringing forward certain individuals and organizations that make it their profession to manipulate and redirect popular anger. The aim always is to keep opposition within acceptable parameters, to try to ensure that it does not pose any threat to the capitalist system and its political representatives, Democrat and Republican.

The professional politicians of race, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, played a particularly cynical role. Together with their supporters in the International Socialist Organization and other pseudo-left groups, Jackson and Sharpton used the Trayvon Martin killing as an opportunity to insist that race, not class, is the fundamental issue in American society. The more immediate aim is to prepare the ground for the reelection campaign of Barack Obama, who is now presiding over a massive assault on the working class of every race.

It is worth reviewing the political pedigree of Jackson and Sharpton, two individuals who personify the decay of the civil rights movement and the cultivation of a wealthy black elite that is fundamentally hostile to the social aspirations of workers, both black and white. In the course of their services to capitalist politics, both have become multi-millionaires, even as the conditions of life for the vast majority of black workers and youth have deteriorated. These are not, in any meaningful sense of the term, individuals on the “left.”

Jackson’s emergence coincided with the first stage of the breakdown of the civil rights movement. He has sought to portray himself as the heir to Martin Luther King, Jr., the leading figure in the struggle for black equality from the 1950s to his death in 1968. However, both King and the civil rights movement of the earlier period were of a very different character.

King, whose rise to prominence grew with the mass resistance of the black workers in the South, had come to believe by the late 1960s that the oppression of blacks was fundamentally a question of class. In one instance he noted that the gains achieved by the civil rights movement had been “limited mainly to the Negro middle class,” and that to challenge the degradation of the majority of blacks would require an interracial movement of poor people. “We are saying that something is wrong … with capitalism,” King said. “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

King was not a revolutionary socialist but a reformist, and, ultimately, the demise of the mass civil rights movement stemmed from this fact, and under the leadership of reformist clergymen, it accepted the profit system that was the basis of racial and class oppression. Instead of providing an impetus for the struggle against American capitalism as a whole, King and others ushered the civil rights movement back into the Democratic Party, which, ironically, had ruled the South since the days of slavery.

Nonetheless, his acknowledgement of the class nature of the oppression of black workers would place King well to the left of traditional civil rights groups like the NAACP, to say nothing of today’s money-grubbing racial hustlers. King’s linking of US imperialism (“the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”) to the oppression of the poor within the US made him an enemy of the American state, as FBI documents have made clear. It very likely led to his assassination in 1968, an event that has never been adequately explained.

In the wake of King’s assassination the civil rights leadership, led by Jackson, moved sharply to the right. It abandoned talk of systemic change, muted its criticism of US imperialism, and, in line with the affirmative action policies promoted by the Johnson and Nixon administrations, began to dedicate itself to the cultivation of a privileged black elite.

This movement to the right was not due to the fading of militancy among black workers. On the contrary, the assassination of King was followed by a wave of urban eruptions, the growing influence of radical political tendencies among black workers, and the strike wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s in which black workers figured prominently.

Jackson was an anodyne to all of this, as was quickly noticed in ruling circles looking for a “new face” for the civil rights movement. As the New York Times wrote in 1972, Jackson is “good copy but safe copy; radical in style, not in action. The Jesse Jackson of today is not a threat to established institutions.”

Jackson’s most important political patron was not King, who according to aides viewed the younger man with suspicion, but the millionaire black entrepreneur, T.R.M. Howard. Howard, who occupied a right-wing position in the civil rights movement, hailed Booker T. Washington—the prominent 19th century black leader who called for political passivity in favor of individual self-improvement—as a “towering genius”. Howard hated socialism. At one point he said he wished that “one bomb could be fashioned that would blow every Communist in America right back to Russia where they belong.”

Howard’s resources and influence were critical in founding Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in 1971 as a vehicle for Jackson after he was suspended for “administrative improprieties” from Operation Breadbasket, which had been linked to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. PUSH specialized in applying pressure to corporations and businesses to place blacks in positions of power.

There was nothing particularly oppositional in this. PUSH was simply acting to accelerate the implementation of affirmative action policies, whose main backer was the Republican president, Richard Nixon. In the aftermath of the ghetto uprisings of the 1960s, Nixon sought to cultivate people like Jackson, to give them “a piece of the action,” as the president put it. Jackson was only too happy to oblige.

“By 1974, Jesse Jackson had created his own economic patronage machine,” writes biographer and civil rights veteran Barbara Reynolds. “To black entrepreneurs, especially the big ones, Jesse Jackson is a benevolent godfather.”

From the 1970s on, PUSH focused on pressuring major corporations to hire black executives and to do business with black-owned firms, culminating with its ongoing Project Wall Street. Jackson summed up his Booker T. Washington-style political philosophy in a 2001 self-help book he co-authored with his son Jesse Jackson, Jr., entitled It’s About the Money!: The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony: How to Build Wealth, Get Access to Capital, and Achieve Your Financial Dreams.

PUSH combined its overriding aim—lining the pockets of the black elite—with highly public political stunts relating to single-issue grievances of oppressed black workers in urban areas, such as welfare issues and police brutality cases. But these were always subordinated to the city administrations now run by black Democratic Party politicians and police chiefs—Chicago; Detroit; Gary, Indiana, etc.

Keeping workers subordinated to the Democratic Party was also Jackson’s central aim with his runs for the presidency in 1984 and 1988 and the formation of his Rainbow Coalition. Jackson’s campaigns, which occupied a “left” position in the nominating process, struck a chord with white workers as well as blacks suffering under the blows of deindustrialization and wage-cutting. He far exceeded expectations, finishing third in 1984 and second in 1988 to the eventual establishment nominees Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, respectively, both of whom went down to lopsided defeats in the general elections. After 1988, Jackson folded the Rainbow Coalition back into PUSH.

If Jackson embodies the first stage of the decline of the civil rights movement, then Al Sharpton epitomizes its final degeneration into little more than a money-hustling operation. Sharpton, born in 1954, was a child preacher and then a Baptist minister, before signing up with Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket (predecessor to Operation PUSH) in 1969. He played no role in the civil rights struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and did promotional work for black-owned record labels and black performers.

Sharpton came to public attention through his involvement in a series of racially charged conflicts in New York, including the shootings by subway vigilante Bernard Goetz and attacks on black youth in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, predominately white areas of Queens and Brooklyn.

He attained notoriety with his role as adviser to Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old African American girl who claimed in 1987 to have been gang-raped a by white men in upstate New York. Without providing any evidence, Sharpton publicly and repeatedly accused a local assistant district attorney, Steven Pagones, of participating in the alleged rape. Brawley’s charges turned out to be a pack of lies, and a court ultimately forced Sharpton to pay $345,000 to Pagones for defamation.

It has been widely reported that Sharpton worked as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the 1980s. It is probable that his participation contributed to the arrest and imprisonment of boxing promoter Don King. Others have alleged that Sharpton sought to set up black radicals for arrest by the FBI.

Unfazed by the failure of the Brawley provocation, Sharpton has become increasingly influential and wealthy over the past 25 years, seizing the limelight whenever the opportunity presents itself in the form of police brutality, racially motivated shootings, or the countless other social tragedies that American capitalism produces in such abundance. “Reverend Al” swoops in, makes a few clichéd remarks, preens before the cameras, passes the hat, and moves on.

Naturally, these talents made him a success in capitalist politics as well. He has run repeatedly for office, including US senator from New York State, for mayor of New York City, and in 2004 for president of the United States, where he was accorded equal status with senators, governors and congressmen seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

More recently Sharpton has taken on a lucrative position as host of “PoliticsNation” on the news network MSNBC. Journalist Wayne Barrett suggested that this was a reward for services rendered, as Sharpton played a role in clearing obstacles to the merger of media empires Comcast and NBC, a $30 billion deal inked in 2009. That same year Comcast gave $140,000 to Sharpton’s organization National Action Network (NAN). He subsequently sent a letter backing Comcast to the Federal Communications Commission, while it was reviewing the merger, and helped push a “comprehensive diversity agreement” on minority employment at the media behemoth. Sharpton also bestowed a top award on MSNBC President Phil Griffin at NAN’s 2011 conference.

Jackson and Sharpton are only the most prominent of a social layer, black Democratic Party politicians invariably labeled as “progressive” by the Nation magazine, the ISO, the Stalinists of the Communist Party USA, and other liberal and pseudo-left groups. This layer does not speak for the interests of black workers, but has its own, independent, purely selfish social interests—political positions, particularly in the major cities, lucrative contracts, high-profile media and corporate advisory roles.

Their preeminent role in such tragedies as the Trayvon Martin killing is to obscure the socio-economic and class issues and subordinate political thinking to an unchanging template of racial politics. Hence the mindless comparisons of Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till—as though nothing had been accomplished by the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s—and the attempts to once again put a fresh coat of paint on the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, presenting this reactionary party of Wall Street and American imperialism as though it was the vehicle of social progress.

The overriding effect of these efforts is not simply to channel workers back into the framework of fruitless appeals to the Democratic Party. The main concern is to conceal the class chasm that has developed within the black community itself. Black workers and youth have far more in common with their white, Hispanic, Asian and immigrant co-workers than with the thin layer of black multimillionaires like Jackson, Sharpton, or Obama.

The fundamental problems facing workers—declining living standards, attacks on democratic rights, and war—are confronted by workers of all colors and nationalities. Their resolution requires a unified struggle of the entire working class for socialism, and the exposure those who attempt to divide workers along racial, gender, or national lines.

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JUDICIAL WATCH.... get on their free emails

Obama Administration Hostile to Illegal Immigration Enforcement

The Obama administration is once again undermining the enforcement of our nation's immigration laws.

Last week I told you about the administration's attempts to undermine 287(g), a highly successful federal program that trains local law enforcement officers in illegal immigration enforcement techniques. Well, this week, two stories hit the press that show just how far the administration is willing to go to protect illegal alien criminals and punish law enforcement officers who are simply doing their jobs.

First, as reported by The Associated Press, the Obama administration is taking another swipe at one of its favorite bogeymen, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known as "America's toughest Sheriff" for his no-nonsense approach to enforcing the law, including laws against illegal immigration. Here's the scoop:

An Arizona sheriff known for aggressively cracking down on illegal immigration has been stripped of some of his special power to enforce federal immigration law, and he claims the Obama administration is taking away his authority for political reasons.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose office faces racial profiling allegations over crime and immigration sweeps in some heavily Latino areas of metro Phoenix, said officials from Washington won't let him renew a deal that let his deputies make federal immigration arrests.

Make no mistake. This move by the Obama administration is a strong message to local police departments: "If you seek to enforce immigration laws, we will strip you of your power." When taken in context with the "reforms" to 287(g) that we discussed last week, it is clear the administration is intent on not only undermining, but completely dismantling the 287(g) program and any effort by local law enforcement officers to assist the relatively small cadre of federal agents responsible for enforcing immigration laws.

 (By the way, you may recall Judicial Watch Director of Research and Investigations Chris Farrell led a congressional delegation to Arizona in July to assess the situation at the nation's southern border. This included a tour of Sheriff Arpaio's "Tent City Jail." Click here for more information.)

The good news is Sheriff Arpaio won't back down and will continue to enforce the law.

But the attack on 287(g) and the good sheriff is not the only tactic by this administration to undermine the rule of law. The Wall Street Journal reported this nugget earlier in the week:

The Obama administration is expected on Tuesday to unveil an outline of sweeping changes for the nation's immigration-detention system, saying it will decide whom to lock up and for how long based on the danger and flight risk posed by detainees...

...Until now, the Obama administration has been reluctant to revise detention standards, which were updated late in the administration of former President George W. Bush. The immigration detention system expanded dramatically during the Bush years as the government took a much tougher line against illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration's reforms include the construction of new and improved detention facilities, increased medical care, improved "custodial conditions" and a new "classification system" for illegal alien detainees. (The Obama administration believes holding illegal aliens who are marked for deportation in jail cells is cruel and unusual punishment. One proposed reform suggests putting them up in hotels and nursing homes instead!)

Leftists and their media allies have systematically been attacking the current detention system for the last two years. They are seemingly opposed to any detention system (hence, the Obama administration's emphasis on getting alien criminals out of jail).

The fact is many of the illegal aliens being "detained" in jails are simply awaiting deportation after having served time for other crimes, including crimes of violence. The federal government reimburses localities for jailing these bad guys. Certainly makes sense from a public safety perspective.

Of course, the whole idea of the Obama plan is to bring the entire system under federal control, which apparently means more money and less enforcement. Signs point to expensive "Club Feds" for illegal alien criminals.

So the twofer from the Obama administration this week is this: don't arrest illegal aliens and coddle them if they are arrested.

And so the illegal alien crisis will continue.

Proving that President Obama is the first choice of Wall Street and the American super-rich, his reelection campaign announced Wednesday that it had broken all previous records for fundraising, raking in $86 million during the second quarter of this year.

Obama campaign raises record sums from the wealthy

By Patrick Martin
15 July 2011

Proving that President Obama is the first choice of Wall Street and the American super-rich, his reelection campaign announced Wednesday that it had broken all previous records for fundraising, raking in $86 million during the second quarter of this year.

The $86 million total dwarfed the previous record for presidential reelection fundraising, the $50 million raised by George W. Bush in the third quarter of 2003. It was far above the $60 million target set by Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina.

Obama for America, the official name of the reelection effort, raised $47 million, while the Democratic National Committee collected $38 million, largely from fundraising events featuring the president, where big donors are allowed to give up to $30,800 apiece. Individual donations to Obama for America are limited under federal election laws to a maximum of $5,000.

By comparison, the leading Republican fundraiser, former Massachusetts governor and investment banker Mitt Romney, raised $18.25 million in the April-June quarter. The total raised by all the Republican presidential hopefuls who have filed reports with the Federal Election Commission came to only $36 million, less than half Obama’s haul.

The Obama reelection campaign will be the most lavishly funded in American history. It is expected to dwarf the $745 million Obama raised in 2008, and could top the $1 billion mark. Only two decades ago, $20 million was sufficient to finance a full-scale presidential campaign.

According to press accounts, the Obama campaign has already opened 60 offices in various states around the country, nearly a year and a half before Election Day, and hired hundreds of full-time operatives.

The vast fund-raising comes in two relatively distinct components: over half a million small donors, reflecting lingering illusions in Obama in sections of the population; and large donors, from the wealthy and the most affluent sections of the upper-middle class.

A total of 552,462 individuals gave money during the second quarter, including 260,000 who made no donations during the 2008 campaign. Of these, 98 percent were of $250 or less, with an average contribution of $69. Based on that average, the small donations accounted for less than half the total raised, about $37 million.

The remainder, about $49 million, came in large-dollar contributions, including thousands who gave the maximum of $35,800—$30,800 to the DNC and $5,000 to Obama for America.

The Washington Post noted, “Much of the tens of millions Obama raised through the Democratic National Committee came from big fundraising events that the president attended throughout the spring. Donors to the DNC can give up to $30,800, and many of those who made the maximum contribution got to attend intimate, invitation-only dinners at which the president took their questions behind closed doors.”

Moreover, the total number of small donors was deliberately inflated by a promotion run by the campaign in which anyone who gave as little as $5 was entered into a lottery for a dinner with Obama and Vice President Biden.

The Obama campaign, clearly concerned about releasing information that would demonstrate corporate America’s enthusiasm for the president’s reelection, declined to say how much Obama for America raised from large donors. These numbers will be buried in the 15,000-page report the campaign files Friday with the FEC.

The report to the FEC will also detail the amount raised by “bundlers,” those who solicit donations from a group of individuals and reach a total set by the campaign, of $350,000 or more, as well as a group called Gen44, consisting of individuals younger than 40 who raise $100,000 or more.

While the 2008 Obama campaign was regularly described as fueled by small donors, the actual figures demonstrate the opposite: Obama did indeed raise $180 million from that source, but that came to less than one-quarter of his overall fundraising. Nearly half of his total—and the bulk of the early money, critical to sustaining his campaign against the initial frontrunner, Hillary Clinton—came from big donors.

Some details of the wooing of big-ticket donors were reported in the Washington press. The Post reported June 29, “Campaign officials are working to broaden Obama’s network of ‘bundlers,’ the well-connected rainmakers tasked with soliciting big checks from wealthy donors, while seeking to preserve the aura of a grass-roots movement by luring back the kind of small Internet donations that helped shatter fundraising records four years ago. Obama has attended 28 fundraisers from coast to coast—a pace that could continue, or even accelerate, over the next several months.”

The Post noted that White House Chief of Staff William Daley, former vice chairman of JP Morgan Chase “has huddled in recent weeks over breakfasts and dinners with business leaders and Wall Street financiers in Chicago, New York and Washington,” while campaign manager Messina “made his pitch during at least two meetings in Manhattan with Wall Street executives.”

Politico described one Wall Street fundraising dinner held at Daniel, a top-drawer restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side: “The tables were filled with moneymen like Marc Lasry, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Avenue Capital; Robert Wolf, the chief executive of UBS Group Americas; and Mark T. Gallogly, a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.”

While noting the absence of Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, this was said to be by mutual agreement—an effort to avoid photographs of the president shaking hands with the CEOs of the largest recipients of federal bailouts.

“While Wall Street executives still complain about the president’s name-calling and pressure for a regulatory overhaul,” Politico observed cynically, “many say privately that his bark has been worse than his bite.”

The event raised $2.3 million in a single evening, far more than the projected $1.5 million. Politico concluded that “Obama’s campaign set a goal of getting 400 individuals to each help raise $350,000 by year’s end. That may sound like a tall order—especially with much of Wall Street on the sidelines—but early indications suggest the effort is on track, according to people

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Obama promotes corporate profits in the name of job creation

By Barry Grey
14 June 2011

In the face of rising unemployment, a disastrous jobs report for May and a contraction in economic growth in the US and internationally, President Barack Obama made it clear at a meeting Monday with his Jobs and Competitiveness Council that no government measures will be taken to create jobs or provide serious relief for the unemployed.

The meeting was held at the manufacturing headquarters of Cree, Inc., a producer of LED lighting equipment in Durham, North Carolina. After the meeting, Obama gave a speech to Cree employees in which he touted the proposals of the corporate-dominated Jobs Council, which he set up last February as part of White House efforts to shore up business support for his administration following the Democratic debacle in the November 2010 congressional elections.

The photo-op was designed at one level to fool the public into believing that the administration is seriously working to create jobs and put an end to mass unemployment. But the main focus of Obama and other White House officials was to reassure the corporate and financial elite that there will be no retreat from policies of austerity, wage-cutting and deregulation despite the worsening economic and social crisis.

In remarks to the Jobs Council prior to his speech to the Cree workers, Obama was shameless in his fawning before the corporate CEOs whom he had selected for the purported purpose of spearheading the drive for jobs.

Obama declared: “So we’ve got a combination of factors, as Jeff [Council Chairman Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric] said, that come into how do we create jobs. I cannot think of a better group of people to help us tackle it than those who are sitting around the table.”

That group included the CEOs of GE, Intel, Xerox, UBS, American Express, Southwest Airlines, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Comcast, Facebook, and the banking giants Citigroup and UBS. It also included Obama’s longtime financial backer Penny Pritzker, a multi-millionaire Chicago real estate mogul, and Joseph T. Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, who is also on the council, did not attend the event.

Obama repeated the complacent mantras of White House spokesmen about 2 million new jobs having been created over the past 15 months (compared to 7 million jobs lost since the current recession began) and dismissed the rise in unemployment to 9.1 percent (9.7 percent in North Carolina) and the virtual collapse in payroll gains as “headwinds.”

He made a point of reiterating his support for massive cuts in social spending, boasting that Washington was “getting its act together and making sure that we’ve got a credible plan for not simply raising the debt limit but also medium- and long-range deficit reduction.”

Noting that at the first meeting of the council in March the assembled CEOs and bankers had demanded a reduction of regulations on business, Obama said, “I took this very much to heart.” He continued: “So what we’ve done is to initiate a full-scale review not just of pending regulations, but actually looking back for the first time at all existing regulations.”

Obama went on to brag that the White House had already singled out scores of regulations for elimination by executive order. One can only surmise that the corporate bosses and bankers in the room were rubbing their hands in anticipation of the increased profits that will result from the gutting of rules designed to protect worker health and safety, safeguard and the environment, and limit consumer fraud.

Obama made sure, before completing his remarks, to repeat the obligatory obeisance to capitalism, declaring: “As Jeff said, ultimately job growth is going to be driven by the private sector.”

The role of government, Obama reiterated, is to enact policies that facilitate profit-making. “But we can make some smart decisions,” he said, “to encourage businesses to feel like this is the right time to invest and that America is the right place to invest.”

In his remarks to the employees, Obama sought to play up token job creation proposals from the Jobs Council that are so paltry as to be insulting. “And today, with the Jobs Council,” he said, “we’re announcing an all-hands-on-deck strategy to train 10,000 new American engineers every year.”

This is said in a country with, according to official figures, nearly 14 million unemployed, including 6 million out of work for six months or more!

The president went on to tout a proposal to bring together community colleges and companies to train people for high-skill jobs. Meanwhile, the White House is presiding over an unprecedented assault on public education and vicious attacks on teachers across the country.

Obama also announced an utterly vague Better Buildings Initiative that will supposedly put construction workers back to work upgrading buildings for energy efficiency.

In a Wall Street Journal column published Monday, Jobs Council Chairman Immelt and American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, another council member, listed deregulation and four other proposals which they said could generate 1 million jobs over two years. Even were this figure accurate, it would barely make a dent in an economy that needs to create 11 million jobs to make up for those lost combined with the normal growth in the labor force.

Entirely absent from Obama’s remarks was any acknowledgment of the social crisis and worsening human suffering in America. Words such as “poverty,” “foreclosure,” “homelessness” and “hunger” were not uttered.

White House officials who accompanied Obama were, if anything, even more transparent in their indifference toward the American people and servility toward big business. White House adviser and Chicago real estate multi-millionaire Valerie Jarrett said in a briefing with reporters: “We have had 15 straight months of private sector job creation and seven straight quarters of growth. We are moving in the right direction… There is broad agreement that the recovery will be driven by the private sector.”

Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview on Bloomberg TV, “We want to be for any policies that are going to help incentivize and stand up the private sector to drive the recovery.”

Nothing was said about the fact that the corporate elite represented by the members of the council is raking in record profits and awarding itself ever-higher compensation, while sitting on a cash hoard of $2.6 trillion and refusing to spend it on hiring workers.

The reality is that corporate America, with the support of the government, is using mass unemployment as a bludgeon to drive down wages, destroy working conditions and force workers to accept poverty wages and sweatshop conditions. The same process is unfolding internationally, as the bourgeoisie utilizes the crisis of its own making to destroy social gains won by the working class over more than a century of struggle.

Council Chairman Immelt’s company, GE, is a case in point. It made a profit of $14.1 billion in 2010, and yet it paid no federal taxes. On the contrary, the government paid it $3.2 billion in tax credits.

Immelt himself saw his compensation double to $15 million. Meanwhile, GE earlier this year sought to impose a 25 percent pay cut on new-hires at its River Works plant in Lynn, Massachusetts as the price for keeping a section of the complex open. When the workers balked, GE finalized the facility’s closure.

The complete subordination of the Obama administration to Wall Street was further documented in an article published Monday by the New York Times on the feverish efforts of the White House to make amends with bankers and financiers alienated by the very minor restrictions contained in the financial regulatory bill passed last year. The campaign is being led by his chief of staff, William Daley, the former JPMorgan Chase executive Obama appointed last year to replace the outgoing Rahm Emanuel.

The article reported that Obama hosted a White House dinner last March for two dozen Wall Street executives, which was followed in April by back-to-back meetings of his 2012 reelection campaign manager with Wall Street donors in New York. This month Obama will travel to New York to host a dinner with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the exclusive Upper East Side Manhattan restaurant Daniel.

There is a minority within the Democratic Party establishment that is concerned over the political and social implications of the jobs crisis and the Obama administration’s openly right-wing, pro-corporate response. In the short term, they fear Obama will lose the 2012 election. More fundamentally, they fear the growth of social opposition.

One of these, Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under Bill Clinton, pleaded with Obama on the Sunday news interview program, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour,” to propose a jobs program. He suggested something akin to Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps for the 6 million people unemployed for six months or more.

There is emphatic opposition to any such measure within the corporate-financial elite and, as Monday’s public relations event demonstrated, Obama rejects any government job-creation program or any other measure that might cut into corporate profits.

The presence on the reactionary Jobs and Competitiveness Council of union leaders Trumka and Hansen underscores the corporatist and anti-working class character of the official trade union organizations. They support the destruction of the living standards of the working class, seeking only to secure the position and privileges of the union executives as accomplices in the attacks on working people.

As in Europe and Asia, where governments are pursuing ruthless austerity policies to impoverish the workers, working people in the US can defend the social right to a job and a living wage only on the basis of a revolutionary political struggle against the capitalist system and all of its political representatives.

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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-obama-duped-nation-but-his-bankster.html

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“All of these writers proceed from a fact of American life that is becoming impossible to deny: the sharp divergence in the fortunes of the banks and investors, on the one hand, and the broad mass of the population, on the other. The Wall Street giants, the very firms that precipitated the financial crisis, are doing better than ever. They are planning record bonuses while unemployment continues to soar and wages are declining at a rate not seen in decades.”

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“Herbert (“Safety Nets for the Rich,” October 20), adopts a populist tone, complaining, “Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families’ heads, the wise guys on Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses—this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached.”

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Underlying both columns is the concern that the Obama administration’s promises of “hope” and “change” are increasingly perceived by those who voted for Obama as hollow phrases. Rich complains that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is “tone deaf” and that “an air of entitlement” wafts from the administration.

People are beginning to feel that they have been duped into lending their support to a government that is unreservedly serving the interests of the banks. To the layer of the liberal establishment represented by Obama’s journalistic would-be advisers, the eruption of opposition to the Obama administration would be an unmitigated disaster.

"Despite his solemn promise to the American people to keep lobbyists out of his Administration, two more have slipped in. The Hill reports:

The waivers were provided for Jocelyn Frye, director of policy and projects in the Office of the First Lady, and Cecilia Munoz, director of intergovernmental affairs in the executive office of the president.
Munoz was a senior vice president for the National Council of La Raza, where she supervised all legislative and advocacy activities on the state and local levels. Munoz was heavily involved in the immigration battles in Congress in recent years, and is now a principal liaison to the Hispanic community for the administration.

Thanks for all the lies, Obama!!"

“PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”… does that mean assault the legals of Arizona that must fend off the Mexican invasion, occupation, growing criminal and welfare state, as well as Mex Drug cartels???


OBAMA TELLS ILLEGALS “PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”


Friends of ALIPAC,

Each day new reports come in from across the nation that our movement is surging and more incumbents, mostly Democrats, are about to fall on Election Day. Obama's approval ratings are falling to new lows as he makes highly inappropriate statements to Spanish language audiences asking illegal alien supporters to help him "punish our enemies."