Monday, April 15, 2019

AMERICA ON STRIKE - OBAMA'S CORRUPT WELFARE CITY OF CHICAGO, WHICH HAS AN OPEN DOOR FOR ILLEGALS, CAN'T PAY THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

MILLIONAIRE PHONY SOCIALISM BERNIE’S LA RAZA 
SOCIALISM to keep the “cheap” labor flowing into our jobs


 Bernie supports immigration reform that will address the legal status of the 11 million undocumented people  (EXCEPT THERE ARE 40 MILLION ILLEGALS HERE ALREADY) in our country, protect American jobs by way of visa reform, secure the border, and protect undocumented workers from labor exploitation.

The website states that Sanders supports a pathway to citizenship for all people who are in the United States illegally, the Dream Act, “Visa reform” and border security “without building a fence.”
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Sanders also voted for the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill in 2013 that would have given amnesty to all of the people in the United States illegally.
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According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s 2017 report, illegal immigrants, and their children, cost American taxpayers a net $116 billion annually -- roughly $7,000 per alien annually. While high, this number is not an outlier: a recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that low-skilled immigrants (including those here illegally) cost Americans trillions over the course of their lifetimes, and a study from the National Economics Editorial found that illegal immigration costs America over $140 billion annually. As it stands, illegal immigrants are a massive burden on American taxpayers.

CLINTON – OBAMA – TRUMPERNOMICS:

STEAL FROM THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS and HAND IT TO THE SUPER RICH ON A SILVER PLATTER!


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/clinton-obama-trumpernomics-rich-get.html

"The Wealth-X report shows that the world’s billionaire population has grown by 15 percent, to 2,754 people, since 2016, and that the wealth of these billionaires “surged by 24 percent to a record level of $9.2 trillion,” equivalent to 12 percent of the gross domestic product of the entire planet."

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com

WAR ON THE AMERICA WORKER: FEINSTEIN, PELOSI, OBAMA, and the CLINTON CRIME DUAL

“Senator Dianne Feinstein warned, at the time, they had to solve this crisis now—of immigrants coming in illegally and getting these jobs.”

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/senator-dianne-feinstein-looking-to-buy.html


“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to 

chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they 

were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited 

migration”.  DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE 

MAGAZINE 

EL TRUMPO SAYS HELL NO! TO PAYING LIVING WAGES TO LEGALS AT SWAMP PALACE MAR-A-LAGO!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-trump-assault-on-american-workers.html

No one should take Trump’s performances on border security, jobs for legals or his pretend wall seriously. No more seriously than the rest of his twitter drivel.

 

TRUMP WAS NEVER GOING TO BUILD THE WALL….after all he hires ILLEGALS to tend to SWAMP PALACE at Mar-a-lago!

CUT LA RAZA’S WELFARE AND FIND THE FUNDS TO BUILD THE WALL AGAINST THE LA RAZA HEROIN CARTELS! http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/monica-showalter-cut-billions-in.html

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. 


 AP: Unions Worry 2020 Democrats Ignoring ‘Kitchen-Table Economics’ for Divisive Far-Left Issues



NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 18: Members of IBEW Local 3 cheer during a rally of hundreds of union members in support of IBEW Local 3 (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) at Cadman Plaza Park, September 18, 2017 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. More than 1800 members …
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
BREITBART NEWS
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LAS VEGAS (AP) — Ardently liberal, pro-labor and anti-corporate cash, the field of Democrats running for president may look like a union activist’s dream. But some key labor leaders are starting to worry about the topics dominating the 2020 conversation.

The candidates are spending too much time talking about esoteric issues like the Senate filibuster and the composition of the Supreme Court and not enough time speaking the language of workers, several union officials said. Those ideas may excite progressive activists, they said, but they risk alienating working-class voters.
“They’ve got to pay attention to kitchen-table economics,” said Ted Pappageorge, president of the Las Vegas Culinary Union that represents 60,000 hotel and casino workers. “We don’t quite see that.”
Terry McGowan, president of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 139, in Wisconsin, said many of the issues driving the 2020 primary so far are distractions.
“The people that are into politics, the people who like sideshows, they’re into that,” he said, citing the debates over reparations for slavery and immigration as examples. “The masses just want to feed their families.”
The unease may be an early warning sign for Democrats, who watched as many white, working-class voters, including many union members in key Rust Belt states, chose Trump three years ago. Democrats are hoping to win back some of those voters next year, a challenge that is made harder, some argue, by labor’s struggle to build its membership and influence its rank and file. Democrats’ early messages may not help, some said.
“You see where some of the party’s being driven. It’s no secret,” said Rusty McAllister, executive secretary of the Nevada AFL-CIO.
McAllister pointed to “Medicare for all” — the health care proposal of choice for several candidates — as an example of Democrats’ not seizing on labor’s top priorities. Many unions already organized and fought for private health insurance for their members. “That’s not something that I think that labor is as much focused on as some of the progressives are.”
Such concerns — which stretched from the progressive-minded organizing halls of Nevada to the Rust Belt precincts — were typically focuse on the conversation, not the candidates. The early 2020 primary has included detours into debates over the Senate filibuster, the composition of the Supreme Court and breaking up technology companies.
Ken Broadbent, business manager of the Pittsburgh-based Steamfitters Local 449, worried that Democrats are too focused on environmental plans like the Green New Deal, a blueprint for shifting the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels, and will neglect the importance of swing-state Pennsylvania’s rich natural gas deposits in creating jobs.
“Jobs is where we’ve got to keep things focused,” Broadbent said.
To be sure, many unionists are excited about the presidential field. Contenders include liberal stalwarts like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign became the first in U.S. history with a unionized work force, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who joined striking Stop & Shop workers on a picket line in New Hampshire on Friday. California Sen. Kamala Harris hired a top Service Employees International Union executive for her campaign and made her first proposal one to raise teacher’s pay.
Former Vice President Joe Biden made clear that he plans to appeal to union workers, if he gets in the race. “You are coming back,” he told the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers last week. “We need you back.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the competition in the crowded field has amplified workers voices and issues.
She noted that prominent presidential candidates quickly supported Los Angeles public school teachers when they struck in January. Warren, Sanders, Harris and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker have all proposed various taxes on higher-earning families, a departure from most past Democratic hopefuls who have treaded carefully on the issue.
“It feels different than at other times,” Weingarten said. “There is far more attention and focus on working people’s economic needs.”
Major endorsements are likely several months away, especially because the labor movement is treading carefully after complaints that its leadership was too quick to back Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary over Sanders.
For labor, much is at stake. Despite Republican gains, particularly with trade union members, labor remains an essential part of the Democrats’ coalition. Unions spent $169 million in 2018 on federal elections, largely on Democrats’ behalf, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Democrats won union workers by a strong 59%-39% margin in 2018, according to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate.
But other big donors and — small, online ones, too — increasingly compete with labor’s organizing muscle as key to Democratic victories. Activists on a broad array of issues, from gay rights to criminal justice, compete with unions for candidates’ attention. And the labor movement itself is split on its priorities, with some pushing for a focus on trade while other who represent more diverse workforces want to zoom in on immigration.
All this comes as Republicans have pushed several state laws weakening organized labor. And, last year, the Supreme Court ruled that government workers can’t be forced to contribute to the unions that represent them in collective bargaining, dealing a blow to public service union’s pocketbooks.
As candidates court unions for endorsements, labor leaders say they are listening for a comeback plan.
Any proposal aimed at workers “must include ensuring the opportunity to join a union, no matter where you work, since that’s the best way to raise wages, improve working conditions, create family-sustaining jobs and begin to fix our rigged economy and democracy,” said SEIU president Mary Kay Henry.
At a National Association of Building Trades Unions in Washington on Wednesday, several Democratic contenders talked about outlawing so-called “right to work” laws that prevent unions from automatically deducting dues from members, said the group’s president, Sean McGarvey. But, he added, he heard “very little about the actual structural changes to the National Labor Relations Act, or things they could put in place to give people a real free choice to join a union.”

“It seems to be class warfare”

Chicago Symphony Orchestra clarinetist John Bruce Yeh speaks on musicians strike

Musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) are currently in the sixth week of their longest-ever strike. Last week, they courageously rejected the intransigent “last, best and final” offer of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association (CSOA), which could destroy their pensions and lower the artistic standards of the symphony.
At last week’s free concert at St. James Cathedral, which was one of many widely attended and successful free concerts performed by the musicians, the WSWS spoke with striking CSO musician John Bruce Yeh about the issues at stake in the strike.
Yeh joined the CSO in 1977 at the age of 19 and is the longest-tenured clarinetist in the orchestra’s history. Yeh has been the assistant principal clarinetist and E-flat clarinetist. In 1979, he became the founder and director of the chamber ensemble, Chicago Pro Musica. The first recording of the ensemble of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldatwon the 1985 Grammy award for the best new classical artist. Yeh also taught at DePaul University’s School of Music for more than two decades and joined the faculty of Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts in 2004.
Interview with John Yeh at St. James Cathedral. Video edited by Michael Walters
Yeh, a charismatic performer and music educator, spoke about the strike last week and its broader implications. “We’ve been on strike into the fifth week,” he said. “This is unprecedented in the 128 years of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It is a very serious and dire situation that we have been put into.
“When I joined in 1977, we were clearly the leaders in all aspects of conditions, compensation, pension benefits and, of course, artistic quality. Our music director at the time, Sir Georg Solti, would always come to us and give us a pep talk and say, ‘My dears, we must maintain our standard. And we must raise our standard! This is a very difficult thing, but we must do it!’”
Solti was one of the more influential conductors of the CSO, from 1969 to 1991. He was replaced by world-famous conductor Daniel Barenboim, from 1991 to 2006. The current music director is Ricardo Muti, who directed the CSO musicians after Barenboim’s departure.
“Solti understood the importance of keeping the standard high, both musically and with respect to our conditions that allow us to be musically the greatest,” Yeh noted.
“The two major issues in our strike are our retirement benefits, which we have been guaranteed now for 50 years. We have a defined-benefit pension plan that our management has been insistent on removing. What we can deduce from that is they don’t really care about the money issue, I believe. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is an ideological agenda of our Board of Trustees. Our arts organization is a cultural jewel of the world.”
“It seems to be class warfare,” he added, “and we will not accept that.”
What the musicians confront in the strike is even bigger, in fact, than the issue of pensions and salary, as vital as that is, and bigger than the problem of the individual oligarchs and billionaires who control the CSOA board, such as Helen Zell, the wife of multi-billionaire real estate mogul, Sam Zell.
CSO musicians confront the aristocratic principle in defending not only pensions and salary, but music and art in general. Art, music and culture cannot survive under a society where the financial aristocracy and the ruling class determine what is acceptable, even as three billionaires control more wealth than half of the population in the United States.
Life under capitalism today is characterized by immense global social inequality, endless wars, attacks on democratic rights, police violence, poverty conditions for millions of workers and increasing authoritarianism and the danger of fascism. Funding for arts and education in the US has been decimated, with the support of both parties of big business, the Democrats and the Republicans, and with the complicity of the trade unions and their boosters.
Such conditions make life for millions intolerable and certainly will not allow art and music to flourish, let alone allow the preservation of a good pension for musicians. Most orchestra musicians today make around $30,000 a year, on par with the poverty wages of teachers, who emerged into mass struggles in the last year in the United States and globally.
John Bruce Yeh
“Salaries,” Yeh noted, “have not kept pace with other major orchestras, our peer orchestras. We are trying to maintain and preserve and raise the standard of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.” CSO musicians have had to accept salary increases below inflation in previous contracts and are currently demanding higher raises than the proposals by management, which would continue to be below inflation.
“It is so heartwarming and amazing to see great support worldwide, from Chicago and the public, the teachers, the construction workers, the stagehands of course,” he added, about the immense support the musicians have received.
“If there is a silver lining to this terrible cloud,” he said about the strike, “it has brought the musicians even closer, we have greater solidarity. Because we not only fight for ourselves, for our successors, for our tradition, but for all orchestras throughout the United States. If we give out, if we give in, we will have let everybody down. We don’t intend to do that.”
Daniel Gingrich played the horn at the St. James Cathedral free public concert last Wednesday. Dennis Michel played the bassoon, Mio Nakamura played the piano and William Welter played the oboe. The musicians performed stirring renditions of the Sonata in B Flat Major, HWV 357 by George Frideric Handel, the Sonata in F Minor, Op. 120, No. 1 by Johannes Brahms and the Quintet in E Flat Major, K. 452 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
“We played music that is very, very dear to our hearts,” Yeh reflected. “I played the Brahms Sonata for clarinet and piano, the first of two sonatas that he wrote.
“They were the last instrumental pieces that Brahms wrote,” he added. “They are both autumnal in their beauty and also very optimistic in their end. That encapsulates the emotions we face today.
“And we played Mozart, which is always happy music. The Mozart quintet we played is reputed to be the favorite piece that he wrote. The Handel oboe sonata was played by one of our newest members, William Welter, a fabulous young oboe player. And I have to give a tip of the hat to our pianist Mio Nakamuro, who has been such a champion to join us in this concert and many concerts throughout the city during this time that we have been out of orchestra hall.”
Continuing to speak on the strike, Yeh noted, “The way we feel that the fight that we carrying on right now is that we are demanding to be valued for what we are and what we do. We really feel that we are being devalued on a constant basis—not enough money. When we have discussions, negotiations, it’s always about them trying to take away from us. In doing so, they take away from our ability to provide society with what we need to nurture and nourish our society. Our traditions need to be examined.”
When asked what he thought about the rise of nationalism, fascism and increasing forms of authoritarianism internationally and the role of the musician, he said, “Music, the arts, all sorts of arts, are food for the soul. We need to nurture and nourish our soul. We need to continue to fight to have the opportunity to do that. If we have massive inequality, poverty and rising authoritarianism, then that is just antithetical to have a society that is raised up, where everybody is raised up with cultural benefits, with music, art, with just joy. Unfortunately our society today is going in the opposite direction.”
“We are committed to fighting for continued growth in the arts and the ability to have music for everybody,” he said about the importance of broad access to arts and culture. “Our music director Maestro Muti is very keen on taking our message all around the world to people who don’t have access to it. We played in prisons, in places where people don’t ordinarily have the chance to hear our music at this level.
“Our very, very good friend, Yo-Yo Ma, is another one who has really used his ability and artistry to draw people towards understanding that art and music is really food for the soul. And we can rise above strife, above poverty, if we use art as a means of communication. It’s a means to connection.”
On Saturday, musician Ma performed Bach’s Suite No. 1 for the cello at the Juarez-Lincoln international bridge at the US-Mexico border to oppose the attacks on immigrants by the Trump administration and the political establishment.
Striking musicians at St James
“We have an international orchestra,” Yeh said about the world-class musicians in the CSO. “When I joined the orchestra in 1977, I was the first Asian member of the orchestra, but I was born in America. Now we have about 20 musicians who are immigrants, from South America, from Scandinavia, from all corners of the world. We are an international group of musicians. To devalue anybody because they are not born in America is antithetical to common sense. We reject the notion that immigrants should be devalued in any way. We will continue to stand up for that.”
Speaking about the recent wave of teachers strikes, Yeh added, “What we as musicians, as artists do, is encourage this sort of activity by reaching out and giving strength to the uprising of the working class. I really want to emphasize that. We are with the working class. We are the working people!”
While there is a constant refrain by the CSOA board and the rest of the political establishment that there is no money for pensions and other social programs, trillions of dollars continue to be spent to carry out criminal wars and boost the profits of Wall Street and the super rich. The fortunes of just the Zells ($5.5 billion) alone could fund a 100-person orchestra making $150,000 a year for the next 367 years.
The United States is home to 540 billionaires, with immense wealth concentrated in a few hands at the expense of the vast majority. Resources exist, but it poses the question of who controls society—the vast majority of the world’s working class that produce society’s wealth, or a tiny handful of social parasites who control it?

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