THE BANKSTER-FUNDED DEMOCRAT PARTY'S WAR ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS

"Congress must prioritize four repairs for the immigration system before contemplating any DACA-style amnesty negotiation, said Brat: 1. Ending chain migration and the visa lottery; 2. Mandating employer use of E-Verify; 3. Construction of a southern border wall; and 4. Interior enforcement of immigration law." REP. DAVE BRAT

AMERICAN POVERTY and the LA RAZA MEXICAN WELFARE STATE on AMERICA’S BACKS.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-impact-of-obama-clintonomics-and.html

STAGNANT WAGES and the Dem Party’s obsession with open borders, amnesty and no damned legal need apply!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/wages-remain-stagnant-as-american.html

THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY for OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, 

NON-ENFORCEMENT, NO E-VERIFY and no Legal need apply!!!

The Democratic Party used to be the party of blue collar America- supporting laws and policies that benefited that segment of the U.S. population.  Their leaders may still claim to be advocates for American working families, however their duplicitous actions that betray American workers and their families, while undermining national security and public safety, provide clear and incontrovertible evidence of their lies…. MICHAEL CUTLER …FRONTPAGE mag

In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”

“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”

Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”

llustration by Lincoln Agnew*

• Peter Beinart
• July/August 2017 Issue

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-democrats-immigration-mistake/528678/

The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

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In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.

Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?

There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.

But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.

What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that 

“right-wing people in this country would love 

… an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of 

people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would 

be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I 

think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”

None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”

The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to  be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.

Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:

Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.

The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.

Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.

Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.

"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.

https://spectator.org/adios-california/?utm_source=American+Spectator+Emails&utm_campaign=6e1b467cf4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_20&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-6e1b467cf4-104520165

JUDICIAL WATCH:

America builds the La Raza “The Race” Mexican welfare state

Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/09/illegal-immigration-costs-u-s-taxpayers-stunning-134-9-billion-year/

PEW

MAP OF MUSLIM OCCUPATION OF EUROPE

MAP OF MEXICAN OCCUPATION of U.S.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/pew-muslims-will-take-over-europe-like.html

THE ENDLESSLY HISPANDERING DEMOCRAT PARTY funded by Wall Street’s biggest criminals says it is “ALL NEW”…. Meaning open borders to keep wages depressed and no regulation of plundering banks!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/10/democrat-party-shifts-further-towards.html

It’s Obama’s wet dream!

August 11, 2017

Russian Collusion in Democrat Inner Circle?

By Karin McQuillan

There has been enthusiastic collusion by the leadership of the Democratic Party with the Russian disinformation campaign to destroy President Donald Trump.  (See "A Brief History of 'Fake News'" on AT.)  The Democrat willingness to collude with Russia to overturn our democratically elected president is unprecedented.  There is the infamous case of Ted Kennedy approaching the Kremlin to help Democrats defeat Reagan, but never before has collusion with our enemies by a non-communist party been sustained and widespread.

What has changed?  We are reaping the results of a multi-decade effort by the communist and socialist left.  Leftists have finally dominated and transformed the Democratic Party – into something vicious and dangerous to our republic. 

Obama openly boasted that radicalized and mostly non-white Millennials will soon give leftists a permanent majority.  Our Constitution and two-party system were to be thrown in the dustbin of history.  When Trump destroyed their plans by winning the 2016 election, hard-left Democrats weren't willing to give up power.  The niceties of democracy, where the voters get to chose their leaders, do not fit the communist credo Obama and his inner circle were raised on.

As I wrote previously, Obama's entire innermost circle were children of communists.  That does not happen by coincidence. 

With the help of a partisan, unethical press, the Democrats normalized Obama's every aberrant trait.  But Obama is aberrant.  He is a Democrat in name only – in reality, he is a hard left "red diaper baby" – as were Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod.  Obama has had literally lifelong radical ties, starting with his grandfather and mother, as well as his Kenyan father, and Obama's beloved teenage mentor, child molester Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party.  According to Paul Kengor, Frank Davis's political work for the Soviets got him placed on the FBI's Security Index, so he could be immediately arrested in a national emergency – the Cold War equivalent of our terrorist watchlist.

In the White House, President Obama surrounded himself with more red diaper babies and communist-supporters.  CIA director John Brennan voted for the Communist Party candidate in the 1976 presidential election.  Obama biographerDavid Maraniss was a red diaper baby.  So was Obama's pick to head Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson.

Cold War historian Paul Kengor goes deeply into Obama's communistbackground in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview.  Another Kengor articledescribes the Chicago communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama.  Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power. 

Axelrod himself was discovered and launched in his career by Stalinists in Chicago, the Cantor family.

Harry was active in the old Industrial Workers of the World and had been secretary of the Boston Communist Party. ... In 1930, he ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Communist Party ticket. After that, he sojourned to the Motherland, taking his entire family to Moscow with him, including his son David, who one day would come know David Axelrod. ...

For the record, as I've noted separately, Davis – again, Obama's mentor – also knew and worked with Valerie Jarrett's grandfather and father-in-law in Communist Party/left-wing circles in Chicago in the 1940s.

Being the child of communists clearly does not make you a communist when you grow up.  It can make you a savvy fighter of communists, as David Horowitz exemplifies.  But when did Obama reject the radical Marxist beliefs he once openly espoused?  In college, he tells us he sought out Marxist professors and radical students (think the creepy SDS students you knew in college).  A Marxist student at Occidental College confirms that Obama was an outright Marxist.  When he graduated from Columbia, Obama tells us, he attended radical socialist conferences, which gave him his road map in life, with their plan to put a stealth black candidate in the White House. 

After law school, Obama's success in Chicago was based on the help of self-avowed communist Bill Ayers.  Obama's start in politics was as the anointed successor of an openly socialist state rep who was active in communist circles.  Obama joined the socialist New Party, which rejected the Democratic Party.  Obama's calling in life, to which he vows to return post-presidency, was work as a hard-left Alinskyite radical agitator ("community organizer").  Obama was a 20-year member of an openly Marxist church whose members had to take a pledge against the middle class.  So when did this man become a pragmatic centrist?  The day his Marxist backers decided to make him president?

Chief among these backers was Valerie Jarrett, whom Judicial Watch uncovered as another scion of a hardcore multi-generation communist family on the FBI watch list as a possible security threat to America.

Jarrett's dad ... Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows ... "has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line" and engages in un-American activities. ... The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett's maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.

Jarrett's father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett ... appeared on the FBI's Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would "disseminate the Communist Party line among ... the middle class."

It's been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

Paul Kengor summarizes the political import of a Democratic Party headed by a president and his two closest advisers, and the head of Homeland Security, all from communist families:

I've suffered ... a mix of amazement, agony, and despair for what has happened in this country. They are at once disturbing and depressing, yet further confirmation that the most politically extreme individuals who once agitated and propagandized in our blessed country were able to place their political children as high as the White House in the 21st century. For the old comrades, it simply took time for the seeds to root and flourish – and only then with the harvest made possible by really oblivious American voters who don't understand the ash-heap of ideological baggage they've permitted to be brought into the country's first house.

There is collusion with Russia going on in American politics today.  It has actually been going on for a long time.  (See Victor David Hanson on Obama'scollusion in the 2012 elections.)  President Trump is the target of the collusion.  So are we all, all his voters, all Americans who believe in our constitutional republic. 

The great mistake of the colluders is they cannot hide behind lies and media corruption, as the hardcore American left has done all these years.  It is all out in the open now.  The stink of the Mueller witch hunt is in our nostrils.  It is sickening, but the stench strengthens our resolve.  We are not going to let them annul our victory in the 2017 election with dirty tricks.

The author served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, was a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, and is an author whose a mystery novels highlight the wildlife and peoples of Kenya.  She currently writes for American Thinker.

As teachers face new battles against Trump

Lessons of the fight against Obama’s “school reform”—Part 1

By Nancy Hanover and Jerry White
4 January 2018

The new year will see a growth of the class struggle throughout the world and within the US, as the corporate and financial elites demand more austerity from the working class even as they wallow in levels of personal wealth not seen since the Gilded Age.

After overseeing the largest tax cut for the rich in 

US history, the Trump administration is gearing up

to destroy longstanding social benefits, including 

Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. It will 

make America, already the most unequal 

advanced economy in the world, far more unequal.

Trump’s tax legislation will have massive implications for public education. By capping state and local tax deductions for individuals, it will likely result in the loss of up to a quarter of a million public education jobs, as municipalities—which provide 90 percent of school funding—are unable to raise revenues. Governors, mayors and school district officials from both parties will announce that there is no money left to maintain quality schools, let alone decent salaries, classroom conditions and pensions.

Federally-funded education programs, including Title I, Special Education and Head Start, which provide benefits to poor or disadvantaged students, will be targeted to pay for the handouts to the wealthy and giant corporations.

On the other hand, the Trump measure provides, for the first time, the ability for wealthy families to invest in tax-free plans for private K-12 schooling, and continues the lucrative policy allowing charter schools to utilize tax-free Private Activity Bonds. These changes significantly shift the education tax structure in line with the privatization policies advocated by Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos.

Workers from throughout state joined in protesting Walker's cuts

A new stage of struggle is on the horizon for teachers, working-class parents and students. Past experience, however, demonstrates that spontaneous expressions of opposition are not enough. Educators need a new political strategy and organizations controlled by rank-and-file teachers and school employees themselves, to mobilize the working class to defend the right to high quality public education for all.

The period from 2007 to 2016 saw the fewest major work stoppages in the US of any decade since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began recording them in 1947. This was not the result of any complacency among workers, let alone satisfaction with the historic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top that occurred during the Obama years.

On the contrary, it was the outcome of the 

deliberate policy of the AFL-CIO and other 

unions, which guaranteed the Obama 

administration “labor peace” in the aftermath of 

2008 financial crash, giving the Democratic 

president a free hand to bail out the Wall Street 

banks, starve the states and school districts of 

funding, and restructure economic and social 

relations at the expense of the working class.

In order to maintain the political straitjacket of the Democratic Party over the working class and prevent any challenge from below to the financial oligarchy, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) worked overtime to smother the opposition of teachers—above all in the suppression of the powerful strikes and mass protests that exploded in Wisconsin in 2011, Chicago in 2012 and Detroit in 2015-16.

Each of these struggles expressed, in their own way, the determination of teachers to find an independent road of struggle. Their bold actions galvanized popular support among high school students, parents and broader sections of the working class and of middle-class people. To prepare the next stage of struggle, it is necessary to draw the critical political lessons from these experiences.

Lessons of Wisconsin

The struggle of Wisconsin teachers and public-sector workers nearly seven years ago was among the most the important class battles in the US in recent years. On February 14, 2011, Republican Governor Scott Walker introduced Act 10, also known as the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, into the state legislature, providing for sweeping cuts to public sector workers’ pensions and health care benefits, and outlawing strikes and collective bargaining. This included a massive $1.25 billion in cuts to school aid and local government.

The response by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) and other unions was to acquiesce to Walker’s budget-cutting demands. At the same time, the union officials organized token protests aimed solely at defending “collective bargaining.”

While workers interpreted this to mean protecting their right to fight for improved wages and conditions, the union bureaucracy had something very different in mind. As mass protests were beginning, WEAC President Mary Bell said, “This is not about protecting our pay and our benefits. It is about protecting our right to collectively bargain.” For the union apparatus “collective bargaining” means retaining their dues income and state-sanctioned “seat at the table,” where they negotiate away workers’ hard-earned wages and benefits.

Independently of the unions, high school students walked out of their classrooms to defend their teachers, who then followed with a campaign of sickouts. In a matter of days, the largest working class movement in the US since the 1980s erupted, with militant workers and young people occupying the state capitol in Madison, defying Walker’s threats to call out the National Guard, and teachers rejecting back-to-work orders by WEAC. Support was building for a general strike.

Protesters occupy the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison. Credit: Joe Rowley

The unions were thoroughly opposed to a general strike, which would quickly develop into a political clash not just with Walker but with the Democratic governors in Illinois, California, New York and other states, and with the Obama administration itself. The Democrats were carrying out similar austerity measures, albeit with the collusion of the unions. Wisconsin Democrats chastised Walker, boasting that his Democratic predecessor, Governor Jim Doyle, had imposed the deepest austerity cuts in state history, but had accomplished this without popular resistance, precisely because he worked with the unions.

The unions quickly shut down the mass movement and peddled the lie that the only means of opposing Walker was to support recall campaigns to replace the Republican governor and state senators with Democrats. In 2012, Walker defeated the Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a shill for big business in the mold of Hillary Clinton.

By demobilizing the working class, the unions paved the way for Walker to implement his reactionary program. Before Act 10 came into effect, the unions moved quickly to impose multi-year concession contracts on teachers and other state workers in a bid to maintain their position as bargaining agents.

For teachers, this has meant:

· 40 percent of school districts have moved to performance-based pay.

· Teachers are considered “free agents” and are bargained for competitively by various districts, creating chaos and “churn” of teachers, with 75 percent of school districts saying they have lost teachers because a competitor offered a better salary or benefits.

· Two-thirds of districts have cut or ended benefits for retirees.

· Class sizes have been increased and the workday has been lengthened.

· Sixty percent of districts surveyed said teachers’ average annual salary growth had either slowed (50%), stopped (8%) or reversed (3%).

· The divide between better off and poorer districts has been exacerbated. Rural schools and low-income schools are routinely losing teachers and are more likely to use inexperienced teachers or those with “emergency” credentials.