The Mexican Invasion and Occupation: Mexico & Dems Build the LA RAZA UNIDOus Mex Welfare State

When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!

Monday, February 17, 2020

MIKE BLOOMBERG - NASTY LITTLE MAN!

BLOOMBERG AND WOMEN:
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a 4,000-word profile of Bloomberg that documented a long series of allegations by female employees, largely about profane and sexist comments, many of them demeaning, some outright threatening. These were not #MeToo-style allegations of personal misconduct, but charges that Bloomberg encouraged a hostile work environment for women employees. These conditions generated dozens of lawsuits and numerous settlements in six and seven figures.

Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will

demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a

“progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist

party, which does the bidding of Wall Street and the CIA.

Bloomberg’s billions and the politics of oligarchy

17 February 2020

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million on television and internet ads that present “Mike” as an up-from-poverty, self-made fighter for progress and decency, a friend of the common man.

The marketing of Bloomberg involves distortions so grotesque that one commentator recalled the massive advertising campaign by Ford Motor Company, in the early days of television, to promote an exciting new model named the Edsel, arguably the ugliest and most unsuccessful car ever produced.

The Bloomberg campaign is spending more than $1 million a day on average just on Facebook ads. In advance of the March 3 primaries dubbed “Super Tuesday,” when there will be voting in 14 states, Bloomberg has spent $40 million on television and internet advertising in California, $33 million in Texas, $9.5 million in North Carolina and $6 million in Massachusetts. He is the only candidate to air TV ads in Virginia and Alabama. Except for fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, no other Democratic candidate has thus far spent even $10 million in all 14 states combined.

Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston [Credit: AP Photo/David J. Phillip]

The electoral impact of Bloomberg’s vast expenditures—a drop in the bucket from his $60 billion fortune—is difficult to estimate in advance of the voting on “Super Tuesday.” March 3 will be the first time that the former mayor of New York City is on a primary ballot. Polls suggest that Bloomberg is close to the 15 percent mark required to win delegates to the Democratic convention. His aim, should he fail to win enough delegates to gain the nomination, is to combine with other “moderate” candidates to block a victory by the current front-runner, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Whatever the outcome of the primary

campaign, it is clear already that

Bloomberg’s spending exerts a vast influence

on the Democratic Party establishment and

on the corporate media (of which Bloomberg

News, part of his empire, is a major

component). It is safe to say that no other

Democratic presidential hopeful could have

survived last week’s series of press reports

on Bloomberg’s support for “stop-and-frisk”

police attacks on minority youth, his blaming

the 2008 Wall Street crash on loans to

minority borrowers, and his abusive

treatment of female employees.

Last week, reports surfaced of Bloomberg’s 2015 comments on his policy as New York mayor of “stop-and-frisk,” in which he declared, “Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25.” He went on to add, “The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”

In response, the Bloomberg campaign immediately rolled out endorsements of his campaign by three African-American members of Congress.

Anticipating the crisis, Bloomberg had already met with a group of prominent black pastors who had been critical of “stop-and-frisk” but were willing to administer absolution if the billionaire candidate was sufficiently apologetic—and generous. As Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, put it, with revealing frankness, “He used his money, which is one of the reasons I continue to support him, to express his sincerity.”

As a 5,000-word profile in the New York Times Sunday edition detailed, Bloomberg, who spent $270 million on his three successful campaigns to buy the mayoralty of New York City (2002-2013), built “an empire of influence” through targeted donations to an array of liberal and pro-Democratic Party groups over the past decade. According to the Times account:

Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes. His personal fortune, built on a financial information and news company, is estimated at over $60 billion. It fuels an advocacy network that has directed policy in dozens of states and cities; mobilized movements to take on gun violence and climate change; rewritten election laws and health regulations; and elected scores of politicians to offices as modest as the school board and as lofty as the Senate.

This includes an estimated $270 million to gun control campaigns, largely through the Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety group. He has pumped large sums into the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, charter school advocacy groups and similar organizations, giving himself near-veto power over their campaigns.

In one incident described by the Times, the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party think tank, edited a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States to remove a chapter on New York City police spying on Muslim mosques and communities that had eight references to Bloomberg by name. Bloomberg gave nearly $2 million to the organization.

A longtime Democrat who adopted the Republican label in 2001 to run for mayor, then ran for reelection as a Republican in 2005 and as an “independent” in 2009, Bloomberg supported Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. He returned to the Democratic Party as an endorser only in 2016, when he backed Hillary Clinton. He later changed his registration to Democratic.

In 2018, Bloomberg spent more than $100 million supporting Democratic Party candidates for Congress through his personal super PAC, and he has pledged to spend $1 billion to elect Democrats this year, whether or not he wins the party nomination.

Among those now singing the praises of Bloomberg are dozens of current and former mayors, many of them African-American, from cities including Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, Tampa, Sacramento, Miami and Washington DC. This only demonstrates the completely corrupt and cynical character of identity politics, which a layer of the black upper-middle class has used to obtain a bigger share of the wealth and status of the top 10 percent, while the conditions of the vast majority of black workers and youth have continued to deteriorate.

In the wake of the “stop-and-frisk” controversy, an array of video and audio clips has surfaced documenting Bloomberg’s long record of racist and sexist comments.

The Associated Press reported last week that Bloomberg made comments in 2008 in which he blamed the collapse of the mortgage security market, which triggered the Wall Street crash, on efforts to restrict the practice of “redlining”—racial discrimination by bankers against predominately minority residential neighborhoods. A spokesman for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition called this “a billionaire defending other billionaires and placing the blame on lower-income homeowners.”

In a 2018 conversation with International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde, made public Sunday, Bloomberg can be heard opposing minimum wage laws and defending the finger printing of food-stamp recipients. He called the minimum wage one of “these impediments to job creation” that he favored eliminating.

On Sunday, the Washington Post published a 4,000-word profile of Bloomberg that documented a long series of allegations by female employees, largely about profane and sexist comments, many of them demeaning, some outright threatening. These were not #MeToo-style allegations of personal misconduct, but charges that Bloomberg encouraged a hostile work environment for women employees. These conditions generated dozens of lawsuits and numerous settlements in six and seven figures.

Any of these episodes would have destroyed another candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. But for Bloomberg and his media acolytes, it is a big “so what?” Being a right-wing, dictatorial, foul-mouthed, racist, sexist billionaire is not a problem for the Democratic Party establishment, as long as the billionaire’s money finds its way into their own pockets.

What dominates the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans under Trump, is the politics of oligarchy. It is naked and shameless.

The financial aristocrats, the multimillionaires

and billionaires, control the two-party system

and dictate the course of the stage-managed

political events called “primaries,”

“conventions” and “elections.”

Later this week, Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders are likely to appear on the same platform, if Bloomberg, as expected, qualifies for Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sanders claims that his campaign is the means to transform the Democratic Party into an instrument of progressive reform, a weapon against the rule of the super-rich. Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a “progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist party, which does the bidding of Wall Street and the CIA.

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

JOHN CARNEY

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.”

Bloomberg’s spending binge cannot hide

that he’s a nasty bit of work

By Andrea Widburg

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is currently trying to buy the Democrat nomination. His spending doesn't just buy recognition; it keeps him from having to appear in person, revealing how nasty he is.

In 1997, Sekiko Sakai Garrison sued Bloomberg for sexual harassment. She alleged that, when she told him she was pregnant, he told her “Kill it.” She also alleged racism towards blacks:

On another occasion when she expressed she was struggling to find childcare, Bloomberg told her to hire 'some black'.

'It's a f***ing baby! All it does is eat and s**t! It doesn't know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn't have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building,' Bloomberg said in July 1993.

Another employee corroborated the “kill it” comment, adding, “He talked kind of crudely about women all of the time.”

Bloomberg claimed Garrison had misunderstood him. Her allegations, though, are consistent with a 1990 booklet that admiring employees assembled: The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg: An Unauthorized Collection of Unauthorized Sayings.

The editor assures readers that the quotations in the booklet are accurate:

Yes, these are all actual quotes.

No, nothing has been embellished or exaggerated.

And yes, some things were too outrageous to include.

The booklet reveals an intelligent, cynical, calculating man with the cast-iron testicles needed to become a multibillionaire. It also reveals someone cruel, sexist, racist, homophobic, and vaguely anti-Semitic.

For Bloomberg, sexual analogies were constant and crude:

“Make the customer think he’s getting laid when he’s getting f***ed.”

“A good salesperson asks for the order. It’s like the guy who goes into a bar, and walks up to every gorgeous girl there, and says ‘Do you want to f***?’ He gets turned down a lot – but he gets f***ed a lot, too!”

He saw women, even famous women, in crude sexual terms:

“What do I want? I want an exclusive, 10-year contract, an automatic extension, and I want you to pay me. And I want a blow job from Jane Fonda. Have you seen Jane Fonda lately? Not bad for fifty.”

He was big on revenge and threats:

“Let me tell you something, buddy boy, I have picture of you and they’re not with your wife.”

He had harsh words for one competitor, showing a mean streak of homophobia:

“Cokehead, womanizing, fag.”

That revulsion to homosexuality reemerged when he spoke about the future of computers:

“You know why computers will never take the place of people? Because a computer would say that the sex of the person giving you a blow job doesn’t matter!”

And the homophobia, as well as the misogyny, again made their appearance when he talked about the British royal family:

“There’s only one queen in Buckingham Palace – the rest are in Trafalgar Square.”

“The Royal family – what a bunch of misfits – a gay, an architect, that horsey faced lesbian, and a kid who gave up Koo Stark for some fat broad.”

As the reference to both Koo Stark and Fergie shows, for Bloomberg, at least in 1990, women are stupid objects:

“If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s.”

“I only look.”

“I just like to look.”

“I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site [and] doesn’t get a whistle will turn around and walk past again and again until she does get one.’

However, he did proudly boast that “the Bloomberg” itself would give blowjobs – and in the same breath brutally demeaned the women to whom he was speaking:

“It will do everything, including give you a blowjob. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.”

Although he's never hidden his Jewishness, Bloomberg was, at the very least, ambivalent about being Jewish:

“The three biggest lies are: the check’s in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I’m glad I’m Jewish.”

The same casual racism Bloomberg showed when telling the employee who sued him that she should get “some black” to care for her baby showed up again in a nasty remark about both Hispanics and Jews:

“If Jesus was a Jew, why does he have a Puerto Rican first name?”

It’s also becoming clear that Bloomberg doesn’t believe in capitalism -- despite the booklet quoting him saying “I believe in the capitalist system and free enterprise.” If he really believed in capitalism and free enterprise, he would not have been caught on camera in 2011 stating that it was time to implement death panels: