Pelosi’s great “achievement” in her first stint as Speaker was the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, aimed at shifting much of the burden of paying for health insurance from businesses and the government onto the backs of workers.
In 2007, she worked closely with her top aides, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, to block any efforts to impeach President George W. Bush and ensure an unending stream of funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
PAUL KRUGMAN
The disintegration of California,
a Mexican satellite welfare state of poverty, crime and high taxes
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/04/paul-krugman-look-at-california-under.html
"Chairman of the DNC Keith Ellison was even
spotted wearing a shirt stating, "I don't believe
in borders" written in Spanish.
According to a new CBS news poll, 63 percent of Americans in competitive
congressional districts think those crossing illegally should be immediately
deported or arrested. This is undoubtedly contrary to the views
expressed by the Democratic Party.
Their endgame is open borders, which has become evident over
the last eight years. Don't for one second let them convince you
otherwise." Evan Berryhill Twitter @EvBerryhill.
US House Democrats reaffirm right-wing program of austerity, bipartisanship
The 116th Congress opened Thursday with a nearly unanimous vote by the Democrats in the House of Representatives reaffirming their commitment to austerity by adopting a rules package which includes a “pay as you go” provision, requiring any increased spending on social programs or tax cuts to be offset by equivalent budget cuts or tax increases. The Democrats took control of the House for the first time in eight years following November’s midterms while the Republicans increased their majority in the Senate.
The new rules were moved by Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi who was re-elected to the position of Speaker of the House earlier in the day, giving her effective control of its legislative agenda. Pelosi became the first woman to be elected Speaker when she held the position from 2007 to 2011. As Speaker, she is now second in line of succession for the presidency behind Vice President Mike Pence.
Pelosi’s great “achievement” in her first stint as Speaker was the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, aimed at shifting much of the burden of paying for health insurance from businesses and the government onto the backs of workers. In 2007, she worked closely with her top aides, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, to block any efforts to impeach President George W. Bush and ensure an unending stream of funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hoyer and Clyburn have been returned to those positions for the 116th Congress.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy congratulates Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. [Credit: C-Span]
Pelosi’s re-election as Speaker was welcomed by President Donald Trump Thursday during an afternoon press conference called to pressure the Democrats on funding for his proposed wall along the US-Mexico border, in which he expressed his hope that they would work together on infrastructure and “so much more.” Trump has forced a partial shutdown of the government, now approaching the third week, with 800,000 federal employees either furloughed or working without pay, over his demand for $5 billion to fund the construction of the border wall.
The House passed two bills on Thursday which would reopen the government. However, the bills, modeled on legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Senate last year, must win Senate passage again in the new legislative session. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he will not allow action on the House legislation because Trump has already declared he will not sign it since it does not include his demand for border wall funding.
While Pelosi told NBC News in an interview Thursday morning that it was an “open question” if Trump could be criminally indicted while in office or should be impeached, she has maneuvered over the last two years to suppress any efforts among House Democrats to move for impeachment. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer met publicly with Trump at the White House last month in an effort to strike a deal on immigration reform where they assured the president that they supported increased border security but sought a rhetorical climbdown on his part in relation to the wall.
“I think it’ll be a little bit different than people are thinking,” Trump quipped about his relationship with Speaker Pelosi while flanked by Border Patrol union officials Thursday.
Indeed, her first speech as Speaker was an olive branch to the right-wing within her own party as well as to the Republicans in Congress, singling out for praise Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and calling for bipartisanship, meaning an even further shift to the right by the Democratic Party.
Pelosi was elected in a carefully orchestrated vote Thursday afternoon with the support of all but 12 Democratic representatives. The vote came after weeks of horse-trading and backroom deals in which Pelosi had to agree to a four-year term limit to win over a dozen members, mainly on the right wing of the Democratic caucus, who had threatened to block her election.
Among those who voted for Pelosi were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both members of the pseudo-left Democratic Socialists of America faction of the Democratic Party. That they both cast their votes for Pelosi’s right-wing promise of bipartisanship, and Tlaib for a rules package which commits the House to austerity, shows that their association with socialism is entirely false, meant only to misdirect youth and workers who are looking for a genuine alternative to capitalism, and trap them within the Democratic Party.
Newly elected CIA Democrats made up a significant portion of those who did not vote for Pelosi, opposing her from the right, including former CIA officers Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Afghan war veteran Max Rose of New York.
Despite the much touted “historic” character of the newly sworn-in Congress, which will see the most female and minority representatives seated in US history, all of them go to Washington, D.C., as representatives of the capitalist class and enemies of the working class. The growing number of women, African Americans, Muslims and other minorities will do nothing to push Congress to the left.
The majority of members of Congress are millionaires and those who are not are vetted to ensure they will serve the interests of the rich and are increasingly drawn directly from the military-intelligence apparatus. The non-millionaires entering Congress for the first time will find their fortunes rising quite rapidly. The median Congressperson had a net worth of at least $1.1 million in 2015, and the figure has only continued to rise.
According to the latest data analyzed by Open Secrets, Speaker Pelosi had an estimated net worth of $100 million in 2013. Among her declared property holdings that year were a 59,000 square foot warehouse in San Francisco, worth between $5 and $25 million, and a vineyard in Napa Valley, also declared at $5 to $25 million. According to one admiring media profile, her main skill as a Democratic Party leader was as a fund-raiser, having raked in $728 million for Democratic congressional candidates since 2002.
Democrat Elizabeth Warren enters US presidential race
On New
Year’s Eve, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts announced the formation
of an exploratory committee to prepare a campaign for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 2020. The formation of the committee is the main
preliminary to launching a campaign, allowing Warren to raise money, hire staff
and build a campaign organization.
Warren joins
four lesser-known candidates who have already declared their intention to run,
including former representative John Delaney of Maryland, former Obama housing
secretary Julian Castro, West Virginia state senator Richard Ojeda and
multimillionaire Andrew Yang.
The entry of
the first major candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is the
beginning of a political fraud that will unfold over the next 673 days, until
November 3, 2020. The Democratic Party will pretend to offer a progressive
alternative to the politics of racism, reaction and militarism espoused by
President Donald Trump. Its allies in the media, the trade unions and the
pseudo-left groups will seek to present this reactionary party of big business
as the advocate and defender of working people.
Some three
dozen Democrats are reportedly mulling presidential campaigns, including as many
as 10 senators, four governors, four members of the House, four mayors or
former mayors, two billionaires (Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer) and former
vice president Joe Biden, considered the front-runner if he enters the race.
The list is
less an embarrassment of riches than an embarrassment, full stop. It
demonstrates not the vigor of the Democratic Party, but its sclerotic
character. The two leading candidates, Biden and Sanders, are 76 and 77 years
old, respectively. This matches the three top leaders of the Democrats in the
House of Representatives, who are 78, 79 and 78. Warren herself will be 71 on
Election Day. Not a single candidate is identified with a significant social
reform. Not a single candidate has any genuine connection to the struggles of
working people.
Judging by
the four-and-a-half-minute video released by Warren as she made the
announcement, her campaign is aimed at securing the “left” lane in the contest
for the Democratic nomination, displacing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has
not yet announced his intentions but shows every sign of preparing to run
again.
The video,
narrated by Warren, portrays her
as an
untiring fighter against corporate greed
and the
wealthy, who are portrayed, for good
reason, as
having robbed the American
people
blind. Graphs and charts show the
decline in
incomes for working-class families
—referred to
always as the “middle class”—in
contrast
to the accumulation of wealth at the
top of
American society.
The
video, for all its populist pretensions, is notably silent on the role of the
Democratic Party in the growth of economic inequality, particularly the Obama
administration’s bailout of the banks and its decision to block any efforts to
punish the Wall Street speculators who triggered the 2008 global financial
collapse. Obama is mentioned only for his role in appointing Warren to set up
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the toothless agency
established after the financial collapse to provide a pretense of reform.
The video
makes no reference at all to the Trump administration’s savage persecution of
immigrants, including the ban on visitors from Muslim countries, the forcible
separation of children from parents seeking asylum, the mobilization of federal
troops to the border or the ongoing confrontation over Trump’s demands for a
border wall.
While the
language of Warren’s criticism of Wall Street is radical-sounding, the
practical measures she proposes do not touch the fundamentals of the profit
system. Along with several cosponsors, she introduced a bill last summer, the
Accountable Capitalism Act, aimed at promoting a political swindle of the first
order: the claim that the capitalist system, based on the exploitation of the
labor of tens of millions of workers for the profit of a handful of
capitalists, can be made “accountable” and “fair” for working people.
The bill
would compel every corporation worth more than $1 billion to seek a federal
charter—all US corporations currently operate under state charters, frequently
issued by the state of Delaware, a notoriously lax regulator—under which measures
similar to the German system of “co-determination” would be required. This
would include placing “representatives” of the employees, usually union
officials, on the boards of directors, limiting stock buybacks and other
methods of enriching executives and big shareholders, and restricting corporate
political contributions.
Aside from
the obvious perks for the unions, the major purpose of the bill was to set out
a case for capitalism and divert the rising support for socialism among working
people and rank-and-file Democratic Party voters, who, according to polls
published last year, preferred socialism to capitalism by a significant
majority. That Warren would embrace such a perspective is no surprise, given
her background as a longtime Republican who voted for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and
George H. W. Bush, and has always supported conventional conservative “free
market” economic policies.
Warren
switched to the Democratic Party only in the mid-1990s, after her appointment
to a tenured position at Harvard and after her focus on bankruptcy law led to
rising prominence as an expert on the exponential rise in personal bankruptcies
among working people. She wrote several best-selling books on the impact of
declining incomes and rising health care costs on the budgets of working
families, before coming to national attention as the chair of a committee
appointed by Congress to oversee the Wall Street bailout.
After Obama
nominated her to head the CFPB, and Republicans blocked the nomination with a
filibuster, Warren launched her political career, returning to Massachusetts
and defeating Republican Senator Scott Brown in 2012. She won reelection easily
in November and her reelection campaign staff has now transitioned to her
presidential operation.
Despite
her tub-thumping attacks on Wall Street, Warren has been a patsy for big
business in every serious crisis. She firmly supported the bailout of the auto
industry, in which the Obama administration demanded a 50 percent cut in
starting pay for all newly hired workers, escalating the spread of two-tier
wage systems throughout manufacturing. She appeared at a conference of “left”
Democrats in Detroit in 2014 and made no mention of the bankruptcy being
imposed on Detroit by the Republican state government with the support of the
Obama White House, in which a Democratic bankruptcy lawyer, Kevyn Orr, was
installed as emergency financial manager and effective dictator over the city.
Orr ruthlessly carried out his assigned task of imposing budget and pension
cuts.
Entirely absent
from Warren’s campaign video and her statement announcing the formation of an
exploratory committee is any reference to foreign policy. In that, as well as
her anti-billionaire demagogy, she might appear to be following the example of
Sanders in 2016, who said little or nothing about foreign policy and made no
appeal to popular antiwar sentiment against the notoriously hawkish Hillary
Clinton.
But Warren
has been preparing a substantive foreign policy position of an entirely
conventional, pro-imperialist character. This began with obtaining a coveted
seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2017, followed by trips to the
war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan with Republican senators John McCain and
Lindsey Graham, adamant advocates of US military intervention abroad.
Warren gave
a major foreign policy speech in November at American University in Washington
in which she cited the need to end “unsustainable and ill-advised military
commitments” around the world, including an end to the war in Afghanistan and a
reduction in the resources devoted to the Pentagon. Echoing the recent Pentagon
revision of its national defense posture, which declared that great power
competition, not terrorism, was now its central focus, she said that “after
years as the world’s lone superpower, the United States is entering a new
period of competition.”
The
Democratic senator criticized some specifics of the Trump administration’s
foreign policy, saying, “In some cases, as with our support for Saudi Arabia’s
proxy war in Yemen, US policies risk generating even more extremism.” She
called for stepped-up sanctions on Russia for its alleged intervention in
Ukraine and “meddling” in US elections, and attacked the Trump administration
for its denial of climate change and its pullout of the Paris climate
agreement.
This was followed by an article published in
the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs, the principal
journal of the US national security establishment, in which she espouses a
criticism of globalization that frequently dovetails with that of Trump. In one
passage, after hailing the “victory” of the United States in the Cold War, she
writes that after this, “Policymakers were willing to sacrifice American jobs
in hopes of lowering prices for consumer goods at home and spreading open
markets abroad.” She continues: “They pushed former Soviet states to privatize
as quickly as possible despite the risk of corruption, and they advocated
China’s accession to the World Trade Organization despite its unfair trading
practices.”
Warren warns
that the focus on the “war on terror” has undermined US military capabilities
for fighting more powerful rivals, and distracted Washington’s attention away
from pressing challenges in Asia, Europe and Latin America (she cites Venezuela
as a particular concern).
There is not
a hint of an appeal to popular antiwar sentiment, but rather the voicing of
concerns, similar to those of Trump, that Washington must focus on China and
Russia and rebuild its manufacturing and technology base against supposed
inroads from abroad.
In other
words, Warren offers a warmed-over
liberal
imperialism, with a bit of anti-Wall
Street
demagogy to disguise what is a firm
commitment
to the defense of US corporate
interests
and strategic positions around the
world.
OPEN BORDERS FACILITATE AMERICA’S RACE TO THE BOTTOM
“Cheap labor” is anything but cheap.
January 2, 2019
For decades the United States government, on all levels, has betrayed its own citizens, promoting open borders policies that have come to undermine national security, public safety, public health, and jobs and wages for American workers.
The massive influx of alien children who lack English language proficiency also has a profound impact on the education of American kids. Increasingly schools across the United States are forced to provide costly ESL (English as a Second Language) services draining funds that could and should be used to provide quality education for American children. Additionally, as autism rates soar and with it the growing need for special services and early intervention for such learning challenged children, money that should be spent on those vital programs that could help so many of those children live better and more productive lives is being used, instead, to fund those ESL programs for illegal aliens and frequently the children of illegal aliens who do not speak English in their homes.
When early intervention is withheld from at-risk students, the results are frequently catastrophic, yet with all of the emotional arguments posed by the immigration anarchists who call for compassion for illegal aliens, their calls for compassion utterly disregard the plight of American children.
Open borders policies permit huge numbers of foreign workers to enter the United States and displace American workers, not because American’s “won’t do these jobs” as claimed by the duplicitous politicians, but because these foreign workers are willing to accept lower wages and worse conditions than would the American workers whom they displace.
We can all think back to the days when we were growing up and sought our very first jobs to provide us with some spending money, enabling us to put our foot on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
We often encountered the conundrum of not being able to get a job without a reference. In order to get a reference we had to have a previous employer vouch for us. This made getting that very first job all the more difficult and, at the same time, all the more important.
I remember my first job, when I was 14 yeas old, working during my summer vacation in a Kosher delicatessen, a short bike ride from home in Brooklyn where I washed dishes, fried potatoes and served hot dogs at the counter, waited on tables and delivered sandwiches to the women who spent hours at the nearby beauty parlors.
It was exciting and empowering to be earning money instead of asking my parents for an allowance. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, that job also provided me with an education in life lessons, teaching me to be responsible, punctual and take instructions from an employer. That job also taught me the value of money, I was far less likely to squander money when I had to work so hard to earn it.
Finally, that job provided me with that important first reference that helped me get other jobs in the future as I climbed the economic ladder to a successful life.
Many of my friends also worked in nearby restaurants. Brooklyn has no shortage of great places to eat, often small “mom and pop” restaurants and everyone of those establishments routinely hired teenagers and college students who were desperate to earn money.
Today most of those jobs in all too many local restaurants and other businesses are not taken by teenage American kids, but but illegal aliens, thereby shutting out Americans.
Consequently, these American kids are often unable to get that first job that would mean so much to them and provide them with important life lessons including a sense of self-worth and empowerment.
Unable to find legitimate employment, some kids, particularly in the poor neighborhoods, resort to committing crimes to get their hands on some money to take a girl on a date or make purchases. This often puts these teenagers on a trajectory that does not end well for them or for their communities, or for America.
Illegal alien day laborers often displace construction workers, resulting in massive unemployment for American and lawful immigrant workers, boosting the profits of their employers who hire them “off the books” and pay them extremely low wages.
The open-borders/immigration anarchists are quick to invoke arguments about the need for compassion. The reality is that there’s no compassion in the exploitation of vulnerable foreign workers nor is there compassion in the destruction of wages and jobs for Americans.
Now with the legalization of marijuana in many cities and states across the United States the issue not being raised in the media is that inasmuch as many companies test their employees for illegal drugs, it is likely that those who are encouraged to smoke marijuana will lose their jobs, perhaps leading to the globalists claiming that not only are lazy Americans not willing to take physically demanding jobs, and too dumb to take hi-tech jobs but are now too stoned to take any jobs.
The displacement of American workers is not limited to the economic bottom rung jobs. America has been increasingly importing computer programmers and other hi-tech workers from India and other countries to displace Americans.
The Democratic Party used to act in the interests of American workers and, as a part of their efforts to protect the jobs and wages of Americans, opposed the importation of foreign workers. Today, the Democratic Party no longer represents American workers and, in fact, has come to betray American workers and their families. Today’s Democratic Party insists on raising the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour to achieve “wage equality.” This works out to an annual wage of slightly more than $30,000. The question that is never asked, particularly by the mainstream media is: “with whom would these workers become equal?”
It would be one thing if they insisted on a $15.00 minimum wage to help America’s working poor. But to tout that wage as a means of achieving “wage equality” should give all Americans cause for pause.
As I noted in an article I once wrote about the veiled attack on the middle class,
The Wage Equality Deception, Alan Greenspan the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, invoked the notion of wage equality way back on April 30, 2009 when he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship that was, at that time, chaired by Chuck Schumer.
The subject of the hearing was “Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do It and How?” Greenspan's prepared testimony included this assertion:
But there is little doubt that unauthorized, that is, illegal, immigration has made a significant contribution to the growth of our economy. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, it accounted for more than a sixth of the increase in our total civilian labor force. The illegal part of the civilian labor force diminished last year as the economy slowed, though illegals still comprised an estimated 5% of our total civilian labor force. Unauthorized immigrants serve as a flexible component of our workforce, often a safety valve when demand is pressing and among the first to be discharged when the economy falters.Some evidence suggests that unskilled illegal immigrants (almost all from Latin America) marginally suppress wage levels of native-born Americans without a high school diploma, and impose significant costs on some state and local governments.
Greenspan must not have gotten the memo- when America’s poorest workers suffer wage suppression they are likely to become homeless and, indeed, across the United States, homelessness has increased dramatically. This not only creates chaos in the lives of the homeless and their children, but imposes severe economic burdens on cities that have to cope with this disaster.
Greenspan went on to state the United States must accede to Bill Gates’ demand for more H-1B visas as Gates noted in his testimony at a previous hearing, that we are "driving away the world's best and brightest precisely when we need them most."
Where I come from, “the world’s best and brightest” are AMERICANS! This is what is commonly referred to as “American Exceptionalism.”
Greenspan supported his infuriating call for many more H-1B visas by the following “benefits” for America and, as you will see, the last sentence of his outrageous paragraph addresses the notion of reducing “wage inequality” by lowering wages of middle class, highly educated Americans whom Greenspan had the chutzpah to refer to as “the privileged elite”!
Consider this excerpt from his testimony:
First, skilled workers and their families form new households. They will, of necessity, move into vacant housing units, the current glut of which is depressing prices of American homes. And, of course, house price declines are a major factor in mortgage foreclosures and the plunge in value of the vast quantity of U.S. mortgage-backed securities that has contributed substantially to the disabling of our banking system. The second bonus would address the increasing concentration of income in this country. Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at noncompetitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.
Generally, the prospect of high-paying jobs incentivized American students to go on to college and acquire costly and time-consuming educations to be qualified to take those exciting and well-paying jobs. If wages for high-tech professionals are slashed, those jobs will no longer be attractive to Americans.
Greenspan, Schumer and their cohorts are
determined to create a $15.00 per hour “standard
wage” to be paid to all workers irrespective of
education or the nature of their jobs. This is called
Communism!
determined to create a $15.00 per hour “standard
wage” to be paid to all workers irrespective of
education or the nature of their jobs. This is called
Communism!
Many have said that the Democrats want to import immigrants who will vote for their candidates.
What is often overlooked is that the downward economic spiral caused by the massive influx of cheap alien labor pushes ever more beleaguered Americans to vote for the Democrats who promise to help the hapless, financially strapped Americans for whom, no matter how hard they may strive, the “American Dream” has become an unattainable dream.
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