Saturday, November 9, 2019

BLOOMBERG WILL RUN TO SAVE THE BILLIONAIRES' DEMOCRAT PARTY - "A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top."

GLOBALIST BLOOMBERG IS AN ADVOCATE FOR AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED

Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the capitalist system itself.

A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.

 

Billionaire ex-NYC Mayor Bloomberg takes steps to run for Democratic nomination

 

The New York Times reported Thursday that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York, is taking steps toward running for the Democratic Party 2020 presidential nomination.
The newspaper cited Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson as saying: “Mike believes that Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our nation. We need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated—but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that.”
Bloomberg reportedly filed on Friday to run in the March 3 Alabama Democratic primary. That contest, one of 14 taking place on what is known as “Super Tuesday,” has the earliest filing deadline of any state primary. The next deadline is November 13 for the New Hampshire primary, which is the second contest in the primary season, following the Iowa caucuses in February.
Press reports say Bloomberg has not made a final decision on whether he will join the current field of 16 Democratic aspirants. But his move marks a reversal of statements he made last March ruling out a presidential bid.
As a practical matter, there appears to be little chance of Bloomberg winning the nomination for himself. He would not appear in any debate because his campaign would be entirely self-financed and therefore would not meet the requirement of 200,000-plus individual donors to qualify. Press reports indicate that he would not seriously compete in the four initial contests in February—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina—where he has no campaign organization and voting begins in less than 90 days.
But he could run in the March 3–17 primaries, which will choose nearly two-thirds of the total number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Using his vast fortune for campaign advertising, he could possibly win a sufficient number of delegates to give him leverage in the event of a negotiated or brokered nomination. He would use it to block the nomination of Warren or Sanders.
The very fact that a potential run by a multibillionaire ex-politician garners immediate media attention and is instantly seen as credible testifies to the immense power exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy over American politics. Whether or not he decides to run, Bloomberg’s move is clearly calculated to shift the Democratic campaign further to the right.
The statement issued by Wolfson is an expression of skepticism toward the prospects of the current leading “centrist” in the Democratic field, former Vice President Joe Biden. While Biden still holds a lead over Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in national polls, his margin has shrunk and he is faltering in the initial primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden’s slump and the rise of Warren, who is competing with Sanders to capture growing anti-capitalist sentiment on the basis of demagogic promises and channel it back behind the Democratic Party, is increasing the fears within the ruling elite of a rising tide of working-class struggle. Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the capitalist system itself.
It is not Warren or Sanders who concern figures such as Bloomberg, Bill Gates and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, all of whom have attacked calls by the two candidates for tax increases on multimillionaires and billionaires. These long-time Democratic Party operatives are known quantities with solid records in defense of the profit system and the global interests of US imperialism. Rather, the oligarchs fear the rising wave of strikes and protests in the US and internationally that these “left”-talking Democrats are seeking to contain and dissipate.
They see in proposals for social reforms paid for by increased taxes on the rich an intolerable infringement on their prerogatives. They also see a danger of fueling popular expectations and encouraging social unrest. They want to block any expression in the 2020 elections of popular anger over social inequality.
Particularly since Warren released her “Medicare for all” plan last Friday, the outpouring of negative comments and warnings from corporate executives and media pundits has increased. In the plan, which Warren is well aware will never be passed by either big-business party, she calls for a 6 percent tax on all wealth over $1 billion to fund a government-paid and government-run universal health insurance program.
Dimon complained on the financial cable channel CNBC this week that Warren “uses some pretty harsh words” about the rich, which “some would say vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms) said Wednesday, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies—I do think you risk that.”
Last January, Bloomberg, whose net worth is $53 billion, said an earlier proposal by Warren to tax wealth above $50 million at two percent was “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s antisocialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
New York Times columnist and multimillionaire financier Steven Rattner published an op-ed piece this week headlined “The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way.” Defending the “free enterprise system,” he wrote: “Thanks for providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your surge in the polls… Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated.”
Rattner was appointed by Obama to head his Auto Task Force in 2009, where he imposed an across-the-board 50 percent pay cut on new-hires at GM and Chrysler, along with thousands of layoffs and cuts in retiree benefits. He was forced to leave his post on the auto panel when he was cited on corruption charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg’s political career has demonstrated the fundamental identity between the two corporate-controlled parties that comprise the US two-party system. He has changed parties almost like he changes business suits.
Bloomberg was a Democrat until 2001, when he reregistered as a Republican to run for mayor of New York City because he could not win the Democratic primary. He was reelected as a Republican in 2005, reregistered as an independent in 2007, and won reelection in 2009, in a campaign in which he spent $70 million, a staggering sum for a mayoral race. He remained an independent until October 2018, when he reregistered as a Democrat, although he endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and had a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.
Besides spending more than $200 million of his own money to get elected three times in New York, he poured over $110 million into the 2018 Democratic campaign to help the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, and he has pledged to spend $500 million in the 2020 elections.
A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of 2002.
Bloomberg viciously attacked city workers, imposing a five-year wage freeze after the 2008 financial crisis, demanding cuts in pensions and health care for retirees, eliminating more than 6,000 teaching positions, closing 20 fire companies and slashing youth programs, homeless services, elder-care programs, continuing education programs, libraries and cultural organizations.
He continued the brutal “stop and frisk” policing policy imposed by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and imposed concessions on school bus strikers who struck in 2013.
This is the man praised by Christopher Hahn, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” program. Hahn, now a “liberal” radio host, called Bloomberg an “excellent mayor for the city of New York,” and added that he “might be just what the doctor ordered to shake this thing up right now.”



Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires

3 Nov 2019184
4:31

The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”

While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican Cartels

AP Photo/Susan Walsh
 6 Nov 2019220
3:30

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that “enough is enough” and called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials and cartel members complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.

Hawley called for harsh retribution against the Mexican cartels complicit in ambushing and murdering nine American women and children near the New Mexico border.
In the wake of the attack on Americans, as well as the Mexican cartels’ complicity in Missouri’s meth crisis, the Missouri conservative called for the U.S. government to sanction the cartel members who are “openly slaughtering American citizens.”
“With Mexico, enough is enough. US government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing assets, who won’t confront cartels,” Hawley tweeted Wednesday. “Cartels are flooding MO [Missouri] w/ meth, trafficking children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the other way.”
Hawley said that just over the last 14 days, there had been over 40 drug overdoses coming from drugs across America’s southern border.
Hawley continued, “In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming across [the] southern border. Story is the same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for our own security, we cannot allow this to continue.”

 · 6h

With Mexico, enough is enough. US government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing assets, who won’t confront cartels. Cartels are flooding MO w/ meth, trafficking children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the other way

In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming across southern border. Story is the same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for our own security, we cannot allow this to continue


Hawley spent much of his August recess traveling across rural Missouri, learning what matters to the average Missourian.


This AM I had the great privilege of meeting Brittany Tune, a nurse, a mother of two, a follower of God, and a remarkable woman. Born & raised in rural Shannon Co., she has raised two kids on her own while putting herself through nursing school & dedicating her life to others




Brittany says meth is hammering this community. She has many friends & family members who have been touched by this epidemic. She worries about what it means for her own kids, ages 15 & 10. It’s much worse now than when she was growing up, she says





In an interview with Breitbart News in September, Hawley said that meth coming from Mexico is destroying local Missouri communities.
“Come with me to any town, any town in the state of Missouri of any size, and I will show you communities that are drowning in meth, drowning in it. It is literally killing people; it is destroying families it is destroying schools and whole communities,” he said.
“Missouri is a border state,” Hawley said, adding that “we have to got to secure the border to stop the meth” and “stop the flow of illegal immigration.”
Hawley’s remarks about the Mexican cartel attack on Americans mirrors that of President Donald Trump, who said Tuesday that the United States was ready for war against the drug cartels.
“This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” the president tweeted.
Trump has campaigned on cracking down on violence on the southern border as well as handling the drug cartels.
During an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Trump said he is “very seriously” thinking of designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).
“It’s psychological, but it’s also economic,” Trump told Breitbart News in March. “As terrorists — as terrorist organizations, the answer is yes. They are.”
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart News in May that he would back Trump’s potential designation of the Mexican cartels as FTOs and that seizing cartel leader El Chapo’s assets would build the wall and make the cartels pay for it. In a similar manner to Missouri, Daines told Breitbart News about how Montana has been ravaged by meth from Mexican cartels.
Daines said that by seizing “billions” of El Chapo’s assets, it “would absolutely fulfill President Trump’s promise to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. In this case, it would be a Mexican cartel paying for it would be an excellent idea.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.



Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans

The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.

For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate taxAnd they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018

 

(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.

 

 



PELOSI'S OPEN BORDERS - MORE THAN 100 ILLEGALS CAUGHT BY ICE IN MISSISSIPPI - YOU THOUGHT ONLY CALIFORNIA WAS OVERRUN BY MEXICO?

More Than 100 Illegal Aliens Charged in Mississippi ICE Raids

Bronson Stocking
|
Posted: Nov 07, 2019 3:45 PM
More Than 100 Illegal Aliens Charged in Mississippi ICE Raids
Source: Courtesy of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Back in August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained 680 illegal aliens during raids on seven food processing plants in Mississippi. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Mike Hurst announced on Thursday that 119 of those illegal aliens have been prosecuted with various crimes from reentering the United States after previous deportation, falsifying immigration papers, claiming to be U.S. citizens, and misusing the Social Security numbers of American citizens. The U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Mississippi announced the prosecutions in a press release
"To date, 47 of the 119 indicted illegal aliens have pled guilty, with a number of others indicating their intent to plead guilty. Of those who have already pled guilty, 26 admitted to fraudulently using the Social Security Number of an American citizen, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 408(a)(7)(B). The other 21 of these illegal aliens have pled guilty to unlawfully reentering the United States after having been previously deported or removed, in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326(a). The remaining have been charged with these same crimes, as well as some charged with falsely claiming to be a United States Citizen, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 911, and making false statements in immigration documents, in violated of 18 U.S.C. § 1546."
U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst says the actions of these foreign individuals have harmed U.S. citizens, "resulting in citizens not being able to get loans or credit cards, obtain health insurance, and perform other basic activities." Hurst says, "Turning a blind eye to their illegal acts would not be fair to our nation, their victims, or the millions of naturalized American citizens who waited years and meticulously followed the process by which to become an American."
The operation back in August involved nearly 600 agents. It was the largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history, according to officials. In a statement, ICE said staff was interviewing the foreign nationals after the raid to "record any potential mitigating humanitarian situations."