Michael Bloomberg: Government Should
Import ‘an Awful Lot More’ Immigrants
26 Nov 201932
4:25
Democratic 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg says he will
recruit “an awful lot more” immigrants “to take all the different kinds of
jobs” in the U.S. economy.
The immigrants can “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion,
our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy,” Bloomberg told reporters
without naming the American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues that
would be improved.
Bloomberg’s comments reflect the views of wealthy investors who
gain stock market wealth when the government imports more workers,
welfare-aided consumers, and extra renters into communities created by
Americans and their children.
In his comments, Bloomberg echoed the 1960s claim that the
U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country build by
similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,”
Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg, who owns roughly $55 billion in assets, has long
supported mass migration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert
Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of
investors and politicians pushed for passage of the Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
In 2019, the group is pushing for the S.386 law that would help investors by encouraging many more Indian graduates to take white-collar jobs from
American graduates.
Bloomberg’s group is also pushing for legislation that would provide an endless supply of
H-2A visa workers to investors in the agriculture sector. The wage-capped
workers would likely displace Americans, reduce pressure on investors to buy high-tech
farm machinery, and convert many agriculture towns into “company towns”
dominated by a single employer.
NC GOP @SenThomTillis wants to reward India's workers who take
US jobs from American graduates. He's backing @SenMikeLee's @S386 bill which gives citizenship to Indians
for taking Americans' jobs. Big subsidy for US investors, big loss for NC
graduates. http://bit.ly/2rp19J3
The U.S. already imports many immigrants — roughly one million
per year, even as four million Americans turn 18 and prepare to join the workforce.
“We need an awful lot more immigrants rather than less,”
Bloomberg told reporters after he filed the paperwork needed to join the
Democratic Party’s primary in Arizona:
We have to go out and actually try to recruit immigrants to come
here. We need immigrants to take all the different kinds of jobs that the
country needs – improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue,
and certainly improve our economy.
Bloomberg — who has a personal wealth of roughly $55 billion —
then blasted President Donald Trump’s campaign to block the wave of Central
American migrants sparked by the establishment’s tacit support for mass
migration:
I think what Donald Trump has done, of ripping kids away from
their [migrant] parents, is a disgrace. I think of what we’re done, where we
don’t know who we’re taking in, and we don’t help people when we’re here, is a
disgrace. I think talking about deporting 11 million people is so outrageous to
try to explain to your kids what that was all about. Our immigration system is
broken and we’re not doing anything to fix it.
In 2013, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of
the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would
cause Americans wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would
increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held
down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock
market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than
on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two
decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
In contrast, Trump’s opposition to Central American migrants and
to amnesty bills sought by the establishment has helped to nudge up wages for
blue-collar Americans, especially in the midwest battleground states, according
to a November 26 report posted by Bloomberg’s news service:
Personal income growth has been surging in some political U.S.
battlegrounds, including a third of the counties in Pennsylvania — which Donald
Trump narrowly flipped in 2016 and may need to win re-election next year.
In the president’s first two years in office, a total of 325
counties representing nearly 6% of the U.S. population experienced their best
annualized income gains since at least 1992, according to data compiled by
Bloomberg News. And 127 of those are located in perennial swing states,
including Ohio and Iowa.
Good news: GOP Reps. voted against wage-cuts and job
outsourcing.
Bad news: GOP Reps only voted against the cuts b/c they
were wrapped in a farmworker amnesty which would cut GOP jobs in 2026.
Trump: Open Borders Threatens the
Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers
President Donald
Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding
that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those
gains.
“Since
the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American
worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But
for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never
happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage
gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been
particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings
rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier,
according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor
Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages
grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may
mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you
know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk
about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The
so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks
and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record
last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit
record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in
November.
Trump
gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and
employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would
threaten those gains, he added.
“Our
tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in
Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders,
flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans.
And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic
studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that
companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage
trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the
number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of
that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has
written. “But
because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is
low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have
suffered most from this wage dip.”
Record 44.5 Million
Immigrants in 2017
Non-Mexico Latin American,
Asian, and African populations grew most
Steven A. Camarota is the director of
research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center.
On September 13, the Census Bureau
released some data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) that shows
significant growth in the immigrant (legal and illegal) population living in
the United States. The number of immigrants (legal and illegal) from Latin
American countries other than Mexico, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa grew
significantly, while the number from Mexico, Europe, and Canada stayed about
the same or even declined since 2010. The Census Bureau refers to immigrants as
the "foreign-born", which includes all those who were not U.S.
citizens at birth. The Department of Homeland Security has previously estimated
that 1.9 million immigrants are missed by the ACS, so the total number of
immigrants in 2017 was likely 46.4 million.1
Among the findings in the new data:
·
The
nation's immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 44.5 million in
July 2017, an increase of nearly 800,000 since 2016, 4.6 million since 2010,
and 13.4 million since 2000.
·
It
is worth noting that the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS),
released the same week but collected in March 2018, shows 45.4 million
immigrants, an increase of 1.6 million over the prior year. While the CPS is
smaller than the ACS, the newer survey may indicate the pace of growth has
accelerated.
·
As
a share of the U.S. population, the ACS (used in the remainder of this report)
shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprised 13.7 percent or nearly one
out of seven U.S. residents in 2017, the highest percentage in 107 years. As
recently as 1980, just one out of 16 residents was foreign-born.
·
Between
2010 and 2017, 9.5 million new immigrants settled in the United States. New
arrivals are offset by roughly 320,000 immigrants who return home each year and
natural mortality of about 290,000 annually among the existing immigrant
population.2 As a result, growth in the immigrant
population was 4.6 million from 2010 to 2017.3
·
In
addition to immigrants, there were 17.1 million U.S.-born minor children with
an immigrant parent in 2017, for a total of 61.6 million immigrants and their
children in the country — accounting for one in five U.S. residents.4
·
Of
immigrants who have come since 2010, 13 percent or 1.2 million came from Mexico
— by far the top sending country. However, because of return migration and natural
mortality among the existing population, the overall Mexican-born population
actually declined by 441,190.5
·
The
sending regions with the largest numerical increases from 2016 to 2017 in the
number of immigrants living in the United States were South America (up
233,696); East Asia (up 226,728); South Asia (up 216,495); Sub-Saharan Africa
(up 149,846); the Caribbean (up 121,120); and Central America (up 71,720).6
·
Looking
longer term, the regions with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were
East Asia, (up 1,118,937); South Asia (up 1,106,373); the Caribbean (up
676,023); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 606,835); South America (up 483,356); Central
America (up 474,504); and the Middle East (up 472,554).
·
The
decline in Mexican immigrants masks, to some extent, the enormous growth of
Latin American immigrants. If seen as one region, the number from Latin America
(excluding Mexico) grew 426,536 in just the last year and 1.6 million since
2010 — significantly more than from any other part of the world.
·
The
sending countries with the largest numerical increases in
immigrants in the United States between 2010 and 2017 were India (up 830,215);
China (up 677,312); the Dominican Republic (up 283,381); the Philippines (up
230,492); Cuba (up 207,124); El Salvador (up 187,783); Venezuela (up 167,105);
Colombia (up 146,477); Honduras (up 132,781); Guatemala (up 128,018); Nigeria
(up 125,670); Brazil (up 111,471); Vietnam (up 102,026); Bangladesh (up
95,005); Haiti (up 92,603); and Pakistan (up 92,395).
·
The
sending countries with the largest percentage increases in
immigrants since 2010 were Nepal (up 120 percent); Burma (up 95 percent);
Venezuela (up 91 percent); Afghanistan (up 84 percent); Saudi Arabia (up 83
percent); Syria (up 75 percent); Bangladesh (up 62 percent); Nigeria (up 57
percent); Kenya (up 56 percent); India (up 47 percent); Iraq (up 45 percent);
Ethiopia (up 44 percent); Egypt (up 34 percent); Brazil (up 33 percent); the
Dominican Republic (up 32 percent); Ghana (up 32 percent); China (up 31
percent); Pakistan (up 31 percent); and Somalia (up 29 percent).
·
The
states with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were
Florida (up 721,298); Texas (up 712,109); California (up 502,985); New York (up
242,769); New Jersey (up 210,481); Washington (up 173,891); Massachusetts (up
172,908); Pennsylvania (up 154,701); Virginia (up 151,251); Maryland (up
124,241); Georgia (123,009); Michigan (up 116,059); North Carolina (up
110,279); and Minnesota (up 107,760).
·
The
states with the largest percentage increases since 2010 were
North Dakota (up 87 percent); Delaware (up 37 percent); West Virginia (up 33
percent); South Dakota (up 32 percent); Wyoming (up 30 percent); Minnesota (up
28 percent); Nebraska (up 28 percent); Pennsylvania (up 21 percent); Utah (up
21 percent); and Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, Washington, and Iowa
(all up 20 percent).
Data Source. On September 13, 2018, the
Census Bureau released some of the data from the 2017 American Community Survey
(ACS). The survey reflects the U.S. population as of July 1, 2017. The ACS is
by far the largest survey taken by the federal government each year and
includes over two million households.7 The Census Bureau has posted some of
the results from the ACS to its American FactFinder website.8 It has not released the public-use
version of the ACS for researchers to download and analyze. However, a good
deal of information can be found at FactFinder. Unless otherwise indicated, the
information in this analysis comes directly from FactFinder.
The immigrant population, referred to
as the "foreign-born" by the Census Bureau, is comprised of those
individuals who were not U.S. citizens at birth. It includes naturalized
citizens, legal permanent residents (green card holders), temporary workers,
and foreign students. It does not include those born to immigrants in the
United States, including to illegal immigrant parents, or those born in
outlying U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico. Prior research by the
Department of Homeland Security and others indicates that some 90 percent of
illegal immigrants respond to the ACS. Thus all the figures reported above are
for both legal and illegal immigrants.
Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more
in taxes
Many
of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied
behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential
run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bloomberg,
the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is
himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of
wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the
race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March
that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a
lock on the nomination.
The
immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the
polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by
the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of
candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and
New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and
Sanders.
The second event was Warren’s
announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1
billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a
previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.
Neither of these taxes would be passed
by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is
true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in
part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in
populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and
anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated
and suppressed.
But the modern-day lords and ladies who
inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of
having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health
care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at
the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social
inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.
They do not fear Warren, a
self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic
Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging
social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the
issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.
The levels of wealth wasted on this
parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko
Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:
It is very difficult to comprehend what
a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside
the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity
it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount
indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and
that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run
through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is,
the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the
second case.
And yet, there are 607 people in the United
States with a net worth of over a billion
dollars.
Bloomberg, a liberal on
so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a
vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he
attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and
presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall
Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy
that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.
Last January he
denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably
unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist 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.”
Over the past several
months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a
wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s
Medicare plan.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie
Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,”
complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft founder 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 last week, “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.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban
tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from
reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.
Hedge fund owner Leon
Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t
need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and
Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and
socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s
potential candidacy.
The New York
Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number
of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall
Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and
Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption
charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel,
he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and
Chrysler workers.
But for fawning toward
the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an
authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column
by the Times ’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”
Calling for
“celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I
want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one
who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs…
Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of
job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a
candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened,
they want a strong leader.”
This is under
conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of
social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the
richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million
adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’
share has tripled since the 1980s.
In their new
book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in
2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower
tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since
1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half,
dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.
The United States is
not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically
and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.
The ferocious response
of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut
into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting
serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the
pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and
Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders
bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the
nomination.
There is no way to
address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment
and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by
the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put
toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast
majority of the population.
The corporations and
banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned
utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the
production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized
to meet human needs, not private profit.
This is a revolutionary
task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle
in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a
conscious political leadership.
Trump: Open Borders Threatens the
Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers
Getty Images
12 Nov 2019382
2:32
President Donald
Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding
that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those
gains.
“Since
the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American
worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But
for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never
happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage
gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been
particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings
rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier,
according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor
Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages
grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may
mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you
know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk
about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The
so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks
and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record
last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit
record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in
November.
Trump
gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and
employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would
threaten those gains, he added.
“Our
tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in
Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders,
flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans.
And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic
studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that
companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage
trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the
number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of
that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate
percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers,
including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage
dip.”
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.”
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