THERE IS NO BILLIONAIRE THAT DOES NOT WANT AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS FOR ENDLESS HORDES OF "CHEAP" LABOR THE REST OF US END UP PAYING FOR!
The Most Important Story of the Week: As Michael Bloomberg continues his ascent to the upper tier of Democratic presidential candidates, he has finally begun to find his record under the microscope. But as Zak Cheney-Rice writes in “Why ‘Stop and Frisk’ Hasn’t Arrested Bloomberg’s Rise,” that scrutiny doesn’t ensure Bloomberg’s fall. Not when there’s still “no consensus that trying to terrorize poor black and brown people into submission is bad.” Sarah Jones writes in “Michael Bloomberg Defended Fingerprinting Food-Stamp Recipients in 2018 Interview” that, just two years ago, the billionaire was supporting policies that make life harder on poor and working people. Add his troubling history to his brazen attempt to to buy the Democratic nomination and it’s clear, Eric Levtiz writes, that “The Price of a Bloomberg Nomination Is Too Damn High.”
Bloomberg’s money sowing the seeds of destruction of the Democrat party
Right before our eyes, a mega-billionaire is buying the presidential nomination of a political party, and oddly enough, it is the party that decries inequality of wealth and whose leading lights debate taxing billionaires out of existence.
This will not end well for the Democrats. Bloomberg is luring the party’s elites into visibly betraying the principles most of its rank-and-file hold dear and identifying themselves as sellouts who can be bought by sheer force of lucre. A bitter split will be hard to avoid.
Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal gets right to the point in his headline” “Bloomberg buys the Democratic elite.” It is not the rank and file getting rich off of Bloomberg, but rather the ostensible leadership class, and therein lie the seeds of destruction for the party that purports to be about the common man, woman, and nonbinary individual.
He’s distorting the incentives of activists, officials and campaign fixers who suddenly are thinking less about a presidential victory and more about the Bloomberg gravy train.
Jenkins cites these examples of leaders betraying their people and their principles:
When a recording leaked of Mr. Bloomberg defending stop-and-frisk in New York, Andre Fields of the liberal voting-rights group Fair Fight Action rushed out a tweet hitting him as a “true terrorist” but promptly deleted it. Fair Fight Action had received $5 million in funding from Mr. Bloomberg.
At a historic moment when “quid pro quo” is a talking point on the left, this looks awfully bad. It is far from unique, though. Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policies as New York mayor, and his surprisingly frank discussion of criminality and race in Aspen, including his callous reference to throwing young African Americans “against the wall,” directly speak to trigger issues hyped by the Democrats for the last several years. Yet, some prominent black political leaders are endorsing him:
Three members of the Congressional Black Caucus helped out with timely endorsements of a man who spent at least $90 million on House Democratic races in the last 19 months.
Opinion leaders are also compromised:
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on Wednesday joined in with 1,500 words implying that other Democratic candidates should make way for Mr. Bloomberg. He ended his piece with a disclosure that his wife’s charity was supported with Bloomberg donations.
Jenkins makes a strong case that Bloomberg cannot be elected and that his money is destroying the chances of candidates with a better shot at victory, pointing out that his massive purchases of broadcast airtime is driving up the cost for other candidates to get their messages out. The substantial share of the Democrat base that is hard left will never turnout and vote for him. With supporters of Bernie Sanders already convinced (with evidence) that the 2016 nomination was stolen from him, the chances are nil that they will vote in large numbers for the man who has bought support from some of their party leaders. Instead, there is a decent chance that they will either stay home or support a splinter or small party radical leftist candidate.
To Jenkins’s observation that “ads have sharply diminishing returns,” I would add that they become annoying and anger-inducing past a certain point. Already in California, we are being saturated, and there are still 8 and a half months of TV and radio annoyance to come.
The Democrats have always been simultaneously the party of the elites and the party of the dependent classes, pretending to protect the latter while enriching the former. At the precise moment when left wing radicals sincerely aiming at taxing and regulating the wealthy out of their financial perch are daring to speak openly of confiscating wealth, along comes a man who laughs in their faces and proves that many of their ostensible leaders will sell them out.
At some point, as the anger intensifies, expect cries to be heard that Bloomberg is a Republican plant, deliberately sent to destroy the Democrat party, perhaps at the instigation of his former golf companion, Donald Trump, who is now the fount of all evil:
One person who gets it is President Trump:"Yeah, he's got money, but you know, they've spent $2 billion on me, Hillary Clinton, on mostly negative adds, and I won. And I won really easily if you look it. You know, the Electoral College, I won some states that were — I won by massive numbers. She spent $2 billion, they had a $2 billion campaign. He won't have that much and frankly, he's so deficient in so many ways that I think he'd be easier than Bernie. Bernie has a — and I also think this. If a guy came in and bought the election, if they bought the Democratic nomination, I really think you'd have a revolution within the Democrat Party. You had a mini-revolution last time, right, but you would have a real — because they took it away from him the last time, or at least it was perceived. She actually — you know, she got more votes than him and everything else, so I view that a little bit differently. But a lot of people perceive that they took it away from him. But this time they would be taking it away. If a guy came in to buy it and took it away from Bernie, I think you'd have a revolution within that party."
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.”
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.
Bloomberg
Pledges to Investigate ICE and End Trump Policies in Newly Unveiled Immigration
Plan
By Jason Hopkins
Business and Politics Review
THERE IS A REASON WHY ALL
BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS AND WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS AMNESTY AND NO E-VERIY!
The state of California is home to more
illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five
illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4
million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows
illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek
welfare and food stamp benefits.
Tom
Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants
Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor
and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans to provide cheap housing to
illegal immigrants.
“A Steyer Administration will …
ensure that all undocumented communities have access to affordable and safe
housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s offer of housing is
combined with promises to provide illegals with free healthcare, plus workplace
training and cultural celebrations:
A Steyer administration … [will]
provide a safe platform for immigrants to share their culture and celebrate
their heritage, foster opportunities for public service that support new
Americans, and coordinate with Federal agencies and the private sector in order
to build workforce training and fellowship opportunities for immigrants with
professional qualifications from their home nation to help them leverage their
specialized skills in the American marketplace.
Steyer made his promise of cheap
housing to illegals even though housing costs for many Americans forces them to
rent or buy cheaper housing far from work and friends, and are being forced to
give up hopes for larger families.
But those housing costs are high
partly because the federal government welcomes one million new legal immigrants
into the nation’s cities, neighborhoods, and schools. That is a huge inflow —
four million young Americans turn 18 each year.
But Steyer is a billionaire
investor, so illegal migrants will not be moving into his very expensive and
well policed neighborhood. The New Yorker magazine described his
house in 2013:
President [barack Obama] flew to San
Francisco on April 3rd for a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a
cocktail reception hosted by Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire,
former hedge-fund manager, and major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer
lives in the city’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden
Gate Bridge.
Any inflow of migrants will be a
boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from the extra workers, consumers,
and renters. For example, one gauge of real estate investments shows a 50 percent
gain since 2015, even as Americans’
wages and salaries rose by only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile, Steyer’s home state is
experiencing record housing prices and record homelessness as today’s illegals
enjoy the state government’s offer of sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal
housing agency reported January 7 the
state has about 108,000 homeless:
This year’s report shows that there
was a small increase in the one-night estimates of people experiencing
homelessness across the nation between 2018 and 2019 (three percent), which
reflects a 16 percent increase in California, and offsets a marked decrease
across many other states.
…
In terms of absolute numbers,
California has more than half of all unsheltered homeless people in the country
(53 percent or 108,432), with nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as
the state with the next highest number, Florida (six percent or 12,476),
despite California’s population being only twice that of Florida.
In September Breitbart News reported the Census
Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are pushing Americans into poverty:
The September 10 study shows 18.2
percent of California’s population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty
rate in Arkansas, 16 percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West
Virginia.
…
By 2017, for example, the government’s
pro-migration policies had added 11 million people to the state’s native
population of 29 million people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four
residents are immigrants.
Numerous studies have shown many
millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’ society. For example,
another five million Central American residents want to migrate into the
United States, according to a Gallup survey published
right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup also noted “three percent of
the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move
to the U.S.”
California's poverty rate is worse than
Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge
change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages --
and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW
California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs
Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals
is echoed by the other investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make
illegals comfortable with Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well, it’s a no brainer. You give
[a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people. We’re not going to deport them
anyways, it’s outrageous. If you look in New York City, we make sure that
people felt comfortable, regardless of their immigration status, to come and
get city services. I was always determined that they would not be afraid to
come. Somebody could need like life-threatening things and does not get medical
care. This is not a game. You’ve got to make sure that they’re okay.
Housing costs in Bloomberg’s New
York are very high because it has huge
populations of illegal and legal
immigrants. The result is that it has a homeless population of roughly 92,000,
and also the nation’s highest
rate of homelessness, at 46
homeless for every 10,000 people.
High housing costs also make it
difficult for Americans to move into towns and cities that have better-paying
jobs, according to a 2017 study about the
rising wealth gap in the United States. Americans “are frozen where
they live,” said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a
January 9 meeting.
But nearly all of the Democrats in
the 2020 election have called for more migrants — without showing any concern
for the impact on Americans’ housing costs.
“We could afford to take in a
heartbeat another two million people,” Joe Biden told Democrats at an August
event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea that a country of 330 million people
is cannot absorb people who are in desperate need … is absolutely
bizarre … I would also move to increase the total number of
immigrants able to come to the United States.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s
immigration plan, for example, is titled “A
Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We need expanded legal immigration
that will grow our economy, reunite families, and meet our labor market demands
… s president, I will immediately issue guidance to end criminal
prosecutions for simple administrative immigration violations … As
President, I’ll issue guidance ensuring that detention is only used where it is
actually necessary because an individual poses a flight or safety risk
… I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees in my first year, and ramping up to at
least 175,000 refugees per year by the end of my first term.
The impact of federal immigration
policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among establishment reporters. But
those costs were touted by a group of investors lobbying Congress to raise
housing prices by importing more immigrants. A booklet by the Economic
Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population
growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing,
and fewer people means less demand … As a result, a shrinking population will
lead to falling prices and a deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that
may take generations to clear
…
The potential for skilled immigrants
to boost local housing markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007)
found a 1% increase in population from immigration causes housing rents and
house prices in U.S. cities to rise commensurately, by 1%
On January 9, Donohue noted New
Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city government to build a new
corporate headquarters in the city. The residents protested the development plan
partly because it would have driven up rents and housing costs, said Donohue.
“It is a very potent issue,” he observed.
A lobbying group for investors admits mass
migration helps investors in major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in
heartland & rural towns. So it urges less immigration? No - it urges more
migration to spike family housing prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt
NYT Boosts Investors' Campaign for More
Immigrant Workers, Consumers
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Want
some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless
encampments hovering around?
Try the
reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the
U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely
unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier.
Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold
awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the
tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in
blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San
Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum,
it's worth looking at.
The Trump
administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying
to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this
year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era
regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for
assistance
without having to disclose their
status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only
would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person,
but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien
Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to
weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would
have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time
and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal
aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many
of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re
sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the
taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times
notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant
families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the
U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S.
in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along
with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants
would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The
problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the
subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The
fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal
immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the
hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from
others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not
a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable
ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly
celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S.
out cold.
The Trump
administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't
imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories,
the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in
Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3
billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That figure
amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox
News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens
than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens
lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal
immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant
parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp
benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from
the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare
and food stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in
2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of
2017, more than 60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in
benefits in 2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million
in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who
studies poverty and illegal
immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector
said. It can cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay
for things like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed
a resolution making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new
legal protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing
policies.
In October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown
signed SB
54 into law. This bill made California, in
Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice Department filed a
lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A federal
judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
According
to Center for Immigration Studies, “The new law does many things:
It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars
any law enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program,
and it prevents state and local police from inquiring about individuals’
immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its
implementation and joined the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the
state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to
illegal immigrants did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His
successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as Brown in funding programs
for illegal residents at the expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually
to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all
aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public
universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on
United States Taxpayers 2017
report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants
living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on
the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion
in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S.
AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY
ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO
DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than
22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.
Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More
Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
3:19
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of
the Universe” want more legal immigration to the United States to further
diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said
recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to
compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations
to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we
ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working
in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where
wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are
artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re
artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I
respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into
America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least
amounts, would be better to take care of
their own families and less likely to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is
centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the
U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and
becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a
permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of
Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to
do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal
aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they
bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to
vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis
added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare …
plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial
divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the
big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much
foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and
importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants
annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly
naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next
two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15
million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in
the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring
an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart
News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125
from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific).
The Price of a Bloomberg Nomination Is Too Damn High
This is what plutocracy looks like. Photo: Melissa Gerrits/Getty Images
In the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, Democrats made a concerted effort to fortify their party’s pro-democracy and anti-corruption bona fides. Their opening salvo in the 2018 midterm campaign was the “Better Deal Agenda,” a suite of policies aimed at combating concentrated corporate power and the “armies of lobbyists” that had given big money a “stranglehold on Washington.” The first bill Nancy Pelosi’s majority passed upon taking the House was a package of voting-rights expansions and campaign-finance reforms designed to ensure that our “government works for the public interest, the people’s interest, not the special interest.” And throughout the Trump era, Democrats have hammered the president for helping the superrich translate their economic power into the political variety.
But the party may let a megabillionaire openly purchase its 2020 nomination anyway.
Mike Bloomberg has offered blue America a Faustian bargain: Forfeit all credibility on the issues of money in politics and democratic reform, and he will spend whatever it takes to make the bad man in the White House go away. The market for what Bloomberg is selling is large and growing, thanks in no small part to the $300 million he’s already spent advertising it. Many rank-and-file Democrats — like so many disillusioned voters in democracies the world over — like the idea of hiring a no-nonsense, post-political businessman to fix their broken government (just, you know, a less ostentatiously racist one than America’s current CEO). Meanwhile, many Democratic elites see Bloomberg as a (slightly unsavory) savior who can single-handedly stop the party from nominating a supposedly unelectable socialist, provide its vulnerable first-term suburban House members with an ideal standard-bearer, and liberate the party from all resource constraints and fundraising headaches as it rides a rising tide of billionaire bucks back into power.
But Democrats would be fools to accept Bloomberg’s indecent proposal.
I’m not an anti-big-dollar-donor purist. Removing an increasingly lawless, openly racist president from power is more integral to realizing our nation’s democratic promise than keeping our side’s FEC records pristine (as even Bernie Sanders seems to understand). Bloomberg has said that he’s willing to put his well-heeled campaign operation behind the Democratic nominee this fall, even if that nominee proves to be a self-avowed socialist. If the former mayor is telling the truth — if he is truly willing to choose social democracy over barbarism, and bankroll a Democratic candidate who is openly hostile to the billionaire class — then Democrats should probably take his money and run.
But accepting a plutocrat’s patronage and letting your party serve as a vehicle for him to amass direct, personal power over our government are two very different propositions.
As a political matter, allowing a Wall Street tycoon to win the Democratic nomination by leveraging his personal fortune to outbid all of his rivals (and many state and local Democratic Party organizations) for top-shelf campaign staff, and inundate the airwaves with an unprecedentedly exorbitant blitzkrieg of paid messaging, would deprive Democrats of what has long been their chief electoral asset: the perception that their party is less beholden to the rich than the GOP.
Every presidential election cycle, the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey offers respondents the opportunity to say, in their own words, what they like or dislike about the two major parties and their presidential candidates. When Boston University political scientist Spencer Piston examined the results the 2008 ANES, he found that one of voters’ most commonly cited reasons for liking Barack Obama — and disliking John McCain — was the belief that Democrats cared about the poor (who get less than they deserve from our government), while Republicans cared too much about the rich (who already get more than their fair share). Across the voters’ responses, Piston found 263 mentions of “the rich” or synonyms for the rich. Only six of those mentions were favorable.
In subsequent research, Piston found that this “resentment of the rich” played a key role in Obama’s 2012 reelection. Using data from the ANES 2013 “recontact survey,” he demonstrated that believing the wealthy have more than they deserve strongly correlated with support for Obama, even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, attitudes toward income inequality, and demographic characteristics. Which is to say, a white “moderate” swing voter who evinced strong resentment of the rich was significantly more likely to vote for the incumbent Democrat than one who lacked such class animosity. All told, resentment of the rich was “associated with an increase in the probability of voting for Obama of 11 percentage points.”
Many other surveys have confirmed that Republicans pay an electoral penalty for their perceived fealty to the wealthy. It is hard to believe that Democrats could nominate a Wall Street tycoon without eroding this vital source of partisan advantage. Hillary Clinton’s mere perceived coziness with such fat cats, combined with her decision to largely elide class-based appeals in paid messaging, was (ostensibly) sufficient to undermine the Democrats’ populist edge four years ago; according to Piston’s analysis, “resentment of the rich” ceased to be predictive of partisan preference in 2016.
Photo: PEW Research Center
Some may regard this as a price worth paying. Given the Democrats’ growing reliance on affluent suburbanites, and the GOP’s growing margins with white non-college-educated voters, you might regard the Donkey Party’s fading populist credibility as a fait accompli. But nominating Bloomberg wouldn’t just confirm the right’s caricature of liberal hypocrisy on the small matter of creeping plutocracy; it would also make Democrats look like raging hypocrites on just about every major article of the party’s putative faith.
In the Trump era, Democrats have mined grassroots activism and moral purpose from the Me Too movement. The party’s 2018 triumph owed a great deal to college-educated women who’d been radicalized by the pussy-grabber-in-chief’s election, and mobilized by the realization that the routine misogyny that had shadowed their working lives was a political problem with a political solution. What message would the Democratic Party be sending to that constituency if they nominated a man with this record:
From 1996 to 1997, four women filed sexual-harassment or discrimination suits against Bloomberg the company. One of the suits included the following allegation: When Sekiko Sakai Garrison, a sales representative at the company, told Mike Bloomberg she was pregnant, he replied, “Kill it!” (Bloomberg went on, she alleged, to mutter, “Great, No. 16”—a reference, her complaint said, to the 16 women at the company who were then pregnant.) To these allegations, Garrison added another one: Even prior to her pregnancy, she claimed, Bloomberg had antagonized her by making disparaging comments about her appearance and sexual desirability. “What, is the guy dumb and blind?” he is alleged to have said upon seeing her wearing an engagement ring. “What the hell is he marrying you for?”Bloomberg denied having made those comments, claiming that he passed a lie-detector test validating the denial but declining to release the results. (He also reportedly left Garrison a voicemail upon hearing that she’d been upset by the comments about her pregnancy: “I didn’t say it, but if I said it, I didn’t mean it.”) What Bloomberg reportedly did concede is that he had said of Garrison and other women, “I’d do her.” In making the concession, however, he insisted that he had believed that to “do” someone meant merely “to have a personal relationship” with them.That suit was settled in 2000; its terms were not disclosed. Other suits made similar claims. In a 1998 filing, Mary Ann Olszewski reported that “male employees from Mr. Bloomberg on down” routinely belittled women at the company—a pattern of harassment, she said, that culminated in her being raped in a Chicago hotel room by a Bloomberg executive who was also her direct superior. The case was dismissed (not, apparently, on its merits, but rather because Olszewski’s attorney had missed the deadlines to respond to a motion to end the case). Before it was, though, in a deposition relating to the suit, Bloomberg testified that he wouldn’t consider Olszewski’s rape allegation to be genuine unless there were “an unimpeachable third-party witness” to corroborate her claims. (Asked by a lawyer how such a person might happen to witness a rape, Bloomberg replied, “There are times when three people are together.”)
Some details of Bloomberg’s mistreatment of his female subordinates remain disputed, with the allegations sheltered from public view by nondisclosure agreements that the candidate refuses to waive. But there is no debate about whether Bloomberg routinely subjected the women at his companies to misogynistic “banter” (one of the mogul’s favorite workplace jokes: “If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of Bloomingdale’s”). The billionaire acknowledged and apologized for this habit shortly after launching his campaign.
Democrats fancy themselves the party of civil rights and racial justice. Conservatives counter that liberals’ avowed anti-racism is largely opportunistic, rooted less in concern for the well-being of minority groups than the utility of the “race card” as a political weapon. How much harder will it be for Democrats to rebut that (mendacious) charge, if we decide to nominate a man who:
• Argued that the rollback of racially discriminatory housing policies was largely to blame for the 2008 financial crisis.
• Forthrightly championed a method of policing that he proudly described as racially discriminatory, and which a federal judge declared unconstitutional (a fact Trump’s reelection campaign is already eagerly spotlighting).
• Subjected entire Muslim communities to state surveillance on the basis of nothing beyond their religious faith.
If Bloomberg is telling the truth — if Democrats will have his financial backing no matter whom they nominate — why on Earth would the party accept these liabilities? Because they can’t win without Bloomberg’s raw animal magnetism?
Alternatively, if Bloomberg is bluffing to curry favor with Democratic primary voters and would withhold resources if the party nominates a candidate he dislikes, then Democrats cannot trust him with the presidency anyway. The same personal fortune that would free the Democratic Party from cash constraints this fall would also liberate a President Bloomberg from partisan constraints once in office. If the plutocratic president decides to find common ground with a Republican Senate on Social Security cuts, what leverage will the Democratic Party have over “their” White House? The party will always need Bloomberg’s fundraising prowess more than he will need theirs.
Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Amy Klobuchar are not on my wavelength ideologically. I find much of the former South Bend mayor’s rhetoric vacuous, the former vice-president’s oratory unnervingly incoherent, and the Minnesota senator’s history of abusing her staff unacceptable. But none of them are running campaigns that make an open mockery of our nation’s democratic aspirations, or the Democratic Party’s purported opposition to plutocracy. And none of them could substitute personal wealth for the support of the Democratic coalition upon taking power. The AFL-CIO will have influence over a Klobuchar administration’s labor regulations and NLRB appointments because Amy Klobuchar will need its support when she runs for reelection. The ACLU and Movement for Black Lives will have some voice in a Buttigieg White House because the former small-town mayor will not be able to afford forfeiting the backing of any part of his party’s base. The reason to “vote blue, no matter who” is that you are not just electing a candidate, but a coalition. A Bernie Sanders administration will surely do many important things differently than a Joe Biden one. But they would also do many things similarly, because they will be dependent on the support of almost all of the same constituencies. That won’t necessarily be true of President Bloomberg.
Michael Bloomberg is not a monster. By the standards set by other megabillionaires, he’s probably closer to a saint. While his fellow plutocrats have concentrated their political investments on accelerating the upward redistribution of wealth, Bloomberg has supplied ample resources to combating gun violence, checking Donald Trump’s power, and averting catastrophic climate change. His work on the latter issue has been especially valuable. If he would like to continue making recompense for the uglier aspects of his record by bankrolling the resistance to authoritarian ethno-nationalism in the U.S., Democrats should let him purchase their indulgences. But they must keep their party’s soul out of his price range.
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