Wednesday, February 19, 2020

THE BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES-OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR WALL STREET DECLARES WAR ON BERNIE SANDERS!

Sanders’ surge in the polls triggers new provocations by media, Democratic establishment

Polls indicate that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is increasing his lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. A nationwide poll of Democratic voters released Tuesday by National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour and Marist University showed Sanders increasing his support to 31 percent, a rise of nine points since the last poll in December. He holds a double-digit lead over his nearest rival.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, speaks at a campaign event in Tacoma, Washington, February 17, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren]
Other polls show him winning this Saturday’s Nevada caucuses with 35 percent of the vote. The NPR/Marist poll, moreover, shows Sanders with broad support across many demographics. Besides leading among those under 45, among city voters and those without college degrees, he also leads among women, college graduates and both suburban and rural residents. He comes in second to former Vice President Joe Biden among black voters, within the margin of error.
In recent days, Sanders has held rallies that attracted thousands of supporters, including a turnout of 17,000 in Tacoma, Washington; 6,000 in Richmond, California, 11,000 in Denver, Colorado and over 5,000 in Mesquite, Texas.
The poll showed Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, who has thus far spent $418 million on campaign ads, rising 15 points to 19 percent, supplanting former Vice President Joe Biden in second place. Bloomberg is skipping the first four primary contests and using his estimated $60 billion fortune to blanket the airwaves with ads before he competes in the March 3 “Super Tuesday” contests in 14 states, which will award two-thirds of the 1,990 delegates needed to win the nomination.
Over 17,000 attend Sanders’ rally in Tacoma [Credit: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren]
Biden, who finished a dismal fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in last week’s New Hampshire primary, is at 15 percent, a decline of nine points from December.
Elizabeth Warren is at 12 percent, a decline of five points. She is matched by Amy Klobuchar, whose support rose by 5 points since the last NPR/Marist poll. Significantly, former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who has been heavily promoted by the media and the party establishment after essentially tying with Sanders in Iowa and narrowly losing to him in New Hampshire, registered only 8 percent, a five-point decline since December.
There are growing concerns within the party apparatus and much of the corporate elite that wins for Sanders in Nevada and South Carolina could set him up for victories on Super Tuesday that would make his nomination unstoppable. The response of the corporate media and the party establishment has been twofold: to promote the candidacy of Bloomberg and launch new political provocations aimed at derailing the Sanders campaign.
Because the Democratic National Committee (DNC) changed the criteria for qualifying for the nationally televised debates in order to accommodate Bloomberg, the pro-war, pro-corporate billionaire will participate in tonight’s event, marking his first appearance alongside his rivals. He was assured a place in the debate, to be broadcast by NBC from Las Vegas, by his poll numbers in Tuesday’s NPR/Marist poll.
Bloomberg is increasingly being promoted by the media and sections of the Democratic Party as the best hope for denying the nomination to Sanders, given the virtual collapse of the Biden campaign. This is despite the emergence last week of tapes and newspaper accounts documenting his racist defense of the “stop and frisk” policy he employed during his twelve-year stint as mayor of New York to terrorize mostly minority workers and youth. Also made public was his statement from 2008 that the ending of the racist “redlining” policy of the banks led to the Wall Street crash of that year, and the fact that he has been accused by a large number of female employees of making sexist and profane remarks and encouraging a hostile work environment for women.
The “mainstream” media has by and large downplayed these damning revelations and boosted his claim to be the best candidate to defeat Trump and “get things done” as president.
Simultaneously, a new political provocation has been unleashed against Sanders, following last month’s attacks by Hillary Clinton and the smear campaign organized by CNN and Elizabeth Warren at the time of the Iowa debate to brand Sanders as a male chauvinist who does not believe a woman can win the presidency.
The timeline of events strongly suggests that the latest scandal has been coordinated between the corporate media, the Democratic National Committee, the Biden campaign and a section of the trade union bureaucracy in an effort to blunt Sanders’ margin of victory in Nevada.
The smear campaign was launched on February 11 during MSNBC’s coverage of the New Hampshire primary, when commentator Chuck Todd quoted a diatribe against the senator that compared his online supporters to a “digital brown shirt brigade.”
This was followed the next day by a statement by Culinary Workers Union Secretary Treasurer Geoconda Argüello-Kline claiming that Sanders supporters had “viciously attacked the union and working families in Nevada” on social media after the union distributed a leaflet to members saying Sanders would “end Culinary Healthcare” if elected president. The union controls a health care trust providing insurance for 130,000 members and is adamantly opposed to Sanders’ call for “Medicare for All.”
On Saturday, February 15, the New York Times published an “Editorial Observer” comment by Michelle Cottle, who called Sanders supporters “rabid” and added, “The so-called Bernie Bros have a nasty reputation on social media for abusing those who dare to criticize their guy, spewing invective and issuing threats against offending organizations and individuals.”
The same day, Biden, speaking in Las Vegas, denounced Sanders for his followers’ alleged online threats against the Culinary Workers Union. He repeated the same attacks in television interviews on Sunday and Monday.
The Bloomberg campaign took the operation to a new low on Monday, releasing an ad that makes an amalgam between Sanders and Trump, flashing a series of tweets from apparent Sanders supporters. One tweet condemned by the Bloomberg campaign as “unacceptable” is from the Sanders campaign’s national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, in which she called the former New York City mayor a “racist authoritarian.”
The surging support for Sanders reflects a broad movement to the left among workers, students and young people, who are disgusted with the political establishment and attracted by Sanders’ talk of “democratic socialism” and his promises to address social inequality and the political domination of the “billionaire class.”
This has frightened the Democratic Party establishment. It does not so much fear Sanders himself—a longtime political ally of the Democrats and defender of American imperialism, whose function is to corral the growth of social opposition into the safe confines of the Democratic Party—but rather the growth of anti-capitalist sentiment and the class struggle that is fueling his popular support.

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
"This week the Washington Post reported that the US retail giant Walmart is planning to cut jobs as part of a restructuring to develop online sales to compete with Amazon. In the brutal language of the corporate world, it said store managers should follow “standard termination procedures” for any “active associate who has not been selected for another position in the company.” This edict will potentially affect thousands of workers, sometimes with decades of service."

Markets soar as companies announce mass layoffs

19 February 2020
As stock markets around the planet, led by 
Wall Street, climb to record highs, increasing 
the wealth of the ultra-rich by billions of 
dollars every day, growth in the world 
economy is falling to its lowest levels since 
the global financial crisis of 2008. Once again,
the working class is being made to pay, with
announcements of major job cuts.
Economic data from the major capitalist economies point to an accelerating downturn. In the US, the world largest economy, growth is little more than 2 percent. This is the lowest for any “recovery” in the post-war period, despite President Donald Trump’s claims of the greatest boom in history.
The closed Bayou Steel Group factory in LaPlace, October 2019. The Louisiana steel mill unexpectedly laid off 376 employees and says the factory will shut down in November [Credit: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert]
China, the world’s second largest economy, experienced its lowest growth rate for 30 years in 2019. Large areas of the economy are still in lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak, with estimates for first-quarter growth being slashed, in some cases to zero.
Japan, the world’s third largest economy, has been delivered a shock by the announcement that it contracted at an annual rate of 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019. While this was mainly the result of an increase in sales taxes, the hit was far larger than expected and the downturn is set to continue, due to the effects of the coronavirus.
Growth in Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has flat-lined, with predictions that it could enter a recession, dragging down the rest of the Eurozone, which showed growth of just 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter last year.
In South Korea, one of the world’s major manufacturing centres, the government has called for “emergency” measures because of the downturn in China and Japan. Australia, the world’s 12th largest economy, looks set to end its 28-year run without a recession.
The class logic of the process underway 
stands out in stark relief. As the wealth of the 
financial elites is boosted by the rise of the 
stock markets, fueled by the provision of 
trillions of dollars from the world’s central 
banks, and the promise of still more to come, 
the working class is being made to bear the 
burden.
Job cuts are sweeping through manufacturing industry, particularly auto production. Every week brings new announcements. Last week, French car producer Renault unveiled a $2.2 billion cost-cutting program to include job cuts. Last month, Volkswagen pledged to slaughter “sacred cows” as it announced 20,000 job cuts in Germany alone.
By the latest estimates, around 100,000 jobs will be eliminated in the global auto industry in 2020. This is on top of more than 500,000 job cuts in auto-related industries around the world last year. In India, there are warnings that as many as 1 million of the country’s 5 million auto parts industry jobs could be at risk.
This worldwide job massacre is being driven by two processes: the fall in the market for cars, as a result of lower growth and falling demand, due not least to the stagnation of wages around the world and sweeping changes in technology. Companies are preparing for a future of electric cars and self-driving vehicles by slashing costs in order to try to remain competitive in the new conditions.
BLOG: IN THE NEW CAPITALISM PROFITS ARE MADE BY USING "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS. THE TRUE COST OF THEIR WELFARE AND CRIME WAVE IS PASSED ALONG TO MIDDLE AMERICA IN THE FORM OF TAXES. CALIFORNIA HAS THE LARGEST NUMBER OF ILLEGALS, AND HANDS OUT $40 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES. 
Karl Marx laid out the essential logic of this process more than 170 years ago. The industrial war of the capitalists, he wrote, “has the peculiarity that its battles are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of labour” as the generals “compete with one another as to who can discharge most soldiers of labour.”
This process is not confined to auto production but is sweeping through all sections of the economy.
This week the London-based Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) said it would reduce its workforce by 35,000 in the coming period as part of what its chief executive Noel Quinn called one of the “deepest restructurings” in the global bank’s 155-year history—which his management team was “committed to executing at pace.”
The HSBC announcement followed last year’s decision by Germany’s Deutsche Bank to slash 18,000 jobs as part of a restructuring process.
The retail industry is likewise being devastated. Tens of thousands of so-called brick-and-mortar stores in the US and around the world have been shut down, with more job cuts to come.
This week the Washington Post reported that the US retail giant Walmart is planning to cut jobs as part of a restructuring to develop online sales to compete with Amazon. In the brutal language of the corporate world, it said store managers should follow “standard termination procedures” for any “active associate who has not been selected for another position in the company.” This edict will potentially affect thousands of workers, sometimes with decades of service.
The contrast between the situation confronting the working class and the accumulation of wealth on the heights of society is exemplified by the dizzying enrichment of Elon Musk, the owner of the electric car company Tesla.
Due to a spectacular surge in Tesla’s share 
price this month, Musk’s net worth rose by 
$4.5 billion in just one day, making him the 
fastest-rising global billionaire. Over just six 
weeks his wealth has risen by $13.9 billion—
$316 million every day so far this year. There 
are even predictions that Musk could overtake
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos as the richest 
man in the world.
The devastation of working-class jobs and conditions is not some unfortunate or accidental outcome of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a rapacious financial oligarchy. There is a causal connection.
BLOG: IN THE NEW CAPITALISM PROFITS ARE MADE BY USING "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS. THE TRUE COST OF THEIR WELFARE AND CRIME WAVE IS PASSED ALONG TO MIDDLE AMERICA IN THE FORM OF TAXES. CALIFORNIA HAS THE LARGEST NUMBER OF ILLEGALS, AND HANDS OUT $40 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES. 
The stock price of major corporations, from which the elites derive their fortunes, depends on the extent to which the financial markets judge they are successful in reducing costs by gutting their workforces and intensifying the exploitation of the remaining workers. The stock market and the entire financial system function as an institutionalised mechanism for siphoning up wealth.
Vast new developments in technology, associated with the advance of artificial intelligence and its use via the Internet, increase productivity and have the capacity to lift the social and economic conditions of the mass of the population. Instead, through the operations of the capitalist profit system, they are being utilised to concentrate socially produced wealth in the hands of a tiny minority.
There is no cure for this ever-worsening social disease through patchwork reforms or band-aids. It must be tackled at its source and overcome through the unified struggle of the international working class to establish a higher and necessary socioeconomic system. That is international socialism, in which the productive forces, created by the labour of the world’s producers, are publicly owned and used for the benefit of all.





Bernie Sanders Says Mike Bloomberg Stands for ‘Oligarchy, Not Democracy’

Joel B. Pollak
Volume 90%
3:29

RENO, Nevada — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) attacked billionaire oligarch Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, directly in an address at the University of Reno, Nevada on Tuesday morning.
Sanders took direct aim at Bloomberg, saying that “we have a corrupt political system which allows billionaires to buy elections.” The crowd booed.
“People who have enormous amounts of money can make incredible contributions. They can contribute hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process to elect candidates who represent the rich and the powerful,” he continued.
“And in [some] cases, they can even run for office themselves!”
He continued: “Anybody here worth 60 billion dollars? You can run for president, and you can buy the airwaves.” The crowd booed again.
“My friends, that is called oligarchy, not democracy.”
Bloomberg is currently running second or third behind Sanders in the latest national polls, and will appear with Sanders onstage at the Democrat debate on Wednesday evening in Las Vegas.
Sanders spoke to roughly 200 people in a hall on campus. Supporters came from the local community and from neighboring states.
Becca, from Nevada City, California, told Breitbart News that she supports Sanders because of “consistency over time, seeing someone who has a vision and following it over time.”
“Integrity,” chimed in her friend, Bethany, also from Nevada City.
A local Sanders precinct captain, Laurel, confided that she would vote for Bernie but would also consider alternatives.
She was nervous, she said, about whether Sanders could win the general election.
“We need to get ’45; and fascism out of the White House,” she said.
“I’m a former philosophy instructor, so truth is important to me,” she explained, adding that the country needed an alternative to what she saw as Trump’s climate of “fear” and “ignorance.”
Asked whom she might be considering as an alternative, she said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
“She has a lot of the same positive energy, but would actually speak to the middle in ways [Sanders] will not,” she said.
Part of problem, Laurel said, was the “socialism piece — even just calling himself that.”
Her 9-year-old son, however, who was attending his first political event, had no doubt that Sanders was the strongest Democratic candidate to defeat Trump.
After his speech, Sanders led supporters on a march to a polling place at the university’s student union, where the last day of early voting was being held.
Joel B. Pollak
Volume 90%
The actual caucuses will be held at noon on Saturday, Feb. 22
The debate will be held at the Paris Theater in Las Vegas at 6:00 p.m. PT / 9:00 p.m. ET, and will be hosted by MSNBC.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Washington Post Op-ed: ‘Give the Elites a Bigger Say in Choosing the President’

CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos (R) gestures as he addresses the Amazon's annual Smbhav event in New Delhi on January 15, 2020. - Bezos, whose worth has been estimated at more than $110 billion, is officially in India for a meeting of business leaders in New Delhi. (Photo by Sajjad …
SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images
3:26
The Washington Post is taking criticism for an op-ed published Tuesday by Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari, titled: “It’s time to give the elites a bigger say in choosing the president.”
Citing the “rocky start” to the Democratic Party’s presidential primary, Azari suggests that the process of choosing the nominee be taken from the people and returned to the politicians:
The current process is clearly flawed, but what would be better? … A better primary system would empower elites to bargain and make decisions, instructed by voters.
One lesson from the 2020 and 2016 election cycles is that a lot of candidates, many of whom are highly qualified and attract substantial followings, will inevitably enter the race. The system as it works now — with a long informal primary, lots of attention to early contests and sequential primary season that unfolds over several months — is great at testing candidates to see whether they have the skills to run for president. What it’s not great at is choosing among the many candidates who clear that bar, or bringing their different ideological factions together, or reconciling competing priorities. A process in which intermediate representatives — elected delegates who understand the priorities of their constituents — can bargain without being bound to specific candidates might actually produce nominees that better reflect what voters want.
Azari suggests that the parties should use what she calls “preference primaries,” which would “allow voters to rank their choices among candidates, as well as to register opinions about their issue priorities.”
After a perfunctory voting process, wlites would be able to choose a nominee based on information about what the voters want.
She acknowledges that the idea is “labor-intensive and a little risky.”
The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who is the world’s richest man. The paper’s slogan, adopted as an intended rebuke to President Donald Trump, is “Democracy dies in darkness.”
That phrase was trending on Twitter on Wednesday morning as readers reacted ironically to the op-ed.

Opinion | It’s time to give the elites a bigger say in choosing the president

Azari’s article appears to anticipate the possibility of a “brokered convention” among Democrats this summer. Currently, no candidate is projected to win a majority of delegates before they gather in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — near Professor Azari’s university — at the Democratic National Convention.

Who Will Win The 2020 Democratic Primary?

If no candidate wins on the first ballot, there will be a second — at which point committed delegates will be free to choose other candidates, and the party elites, known as “superdelegates,” will be able to vote.
Also on Tuesday, billionaire oligarch Mike Bloomberg, who once changed the rules to run for a third term as mayor of New York City, qualified for the Democrat debate in Nevada on Wednesday evening.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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