Wednesday, January 22, 2020

CALIFORNIA GOV GAVIN URGES TRUMP TO HAND OVER MORE MONEY FOR HOMELESS EVEN AS CA HANDS ILLEGALS $50 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES

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.
According to a report in the Washington Times:
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.
California Governor Urges Trump 
Administration To Go Beyond Just 
Shelter For Homeless



California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) sent a letter to federal housing chief Ben Carson urging the Trump administration to address homelessness by providing more funding for affordable housing.
In his letter to the Housing and Urban Development secretary, Newsom thanked Carson for his “offer to provide resources to California” to address homelessness ― and also pushed for these resources to go toward initiatives that “go beyond temporary tent villages.” 
The California governor warned that if federal aid provided only temporary shelters and did not include “significant” resources for building more affordable housing, “we risk creating permanent homeless encampments on federal land.” 
“Emergency shelter solves sleep and we agree this is an urgent priority,” wrote the California governor. “But only housing and services solve homelessness.”
HuffPost did not immediately get a response from HUD to its request for comment. 
Amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis, California has one of the highest rates of homelessness. On any given day in January 2018, more than 500,000 people were homeless in the U.S. ― and nearly a quarter of those lived in California. 
President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Democratic officeholders in California over the high rates of homelessness. At one point last year, he said that people living on the streets were ruining the “prestige” of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Late last year, Trump’s head of federal homelessness policy at the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness said he was working on a new strategy to address homelessness but has yet to reveal details. Advocates have long recommended a “housing first” approach to tackling the issue, and some expressed worry that Trump may push cities to round up homeless people.

Tents where homeless residents sleep line a sidewalk near downtown Los Angeles on Jan. 8. (Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN via Getty Images)
Tents where homeless residents sleep line a sidewalk near downtown Los Angeles on Jan. 8. (Photo: FREDERIC J. BROWN via Getty Images)

Newsom’s letter advocated for additional housing vouchers from the federal government ― and pointed out the state had requested 50,000 more vouchers in letters to Trump last year. The governor also pointed to how California recently required state agencies to identify state land that local governments could use free to provide shelter and build housing for unhoused residents ― and he suggested the Trump administration do the same with surplus federal land. 
Homeless rates have worsened in California in recent years, with spikes in the number of homeless residents in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles specifically over the past two years.
Newsom’s letter thanked Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for leading efforts for “urgent solutions” to homelessness. Carson is reportedly meeting with Garcetti this week to discuss homelessness. HuffPost did not immediately get confirmation from HUD or Garcetti.
This week, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf also met with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) in Washington D.C., where Schaaf attended the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the two discussed homelessness and the need for additional federal resources to address it. 
The California governor’s proposed budget for 2020 includes over $1 billion to address homelessness.

NEO-FASCIST MARK ZUCKERBERG'S TOTALITARIAN REGIME AT FAKEBOOK - "More left-wing journalists are waking up to the fact that unaccountable Silicon Valley corporations are ranking Americans with a system that bears a growing resemblance to China’s totalitarian “social credit” system — almost a year after Breitbart Tech pointed out the same thing."


Bokhari: Leftists Are Learning that Big Tech Already Has a ‘Social Credit’ System

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg closeup
Anthony Quintano/Flickr
5:31

More left-wing journalists are waking up to the fact that unaccountable Silicon Valley corporations are ranking Americans with a system that bears a growing resemblance to China’s totalitarian “social credit” system — almost a year after Breitbart Tech pointed out the same thing.
China’s “social credit” system assigns citizens with a “score” based on good or bad behavior, which is in part determined by one’s compliance with Beijing’s totalitarian communist value system. Those who fall below a certain score are excluded from basic services. There’s no escape, either; to track everyone’s behavior, China subjects its citizens to mass surveillance, powered by a network of facial recognition cameras all across the country. Chinese citizens literally can’t escape their social credit score — low scores blocked 23 million Chinese citizens from traveling via train or airplane in less than one year, as reported by the Guardian.
In an article for Engadget, left-wing writer Violet Blue notes that big tech companies have developed a system that is remarkably similar to China’s, ranking the behavior of users — and arbitrarily kicking them off their services — according to Silicon Valley’s own set of subjective values, including what it considers to be “conscientious” and “open” behavior. She takes particular aim at Airbnb:
The Evening Standard reported on Airbnb’s patent for AI that crawls and scrapes everything it can find on you, “including social media for traits such as ‘conscientiousness and openness’ against the usual credit and identity checks and what it describes as ‘secure third-party databases’.”
Blue makes the connection to China, where similarly invasive surveillance is used to build a profile and a social credit score on every citizen:
The most famous social credit system in operation is that used by China’s government. It “monitors millions of individuals’ behavior (including social media and online shopping), determines how moral or immoral it is, and raises or lowers their “citizen score” accordingly,” reported Atlantic in 2018.
Trooly — nee Airbnb — is combining social credit scores with predictive policing. Tools like PredPol use AI that combines data points and historical events, factors like race and location, digital footprints and crime statistics, to predict likelihood of when and where crimes will occur (as well as victims and perpetrators). It’s no secret that predictive policing replicates and perpetuates discrimination.
Last August, Fast Company made the same observation, pointing out that Silicon Valley’s combination of invasive surveillance with arbitrary user policies meant that “a parallel system” to China’s is being created in the United States.
Breitbart News had, of course, made the connections months before they had. It’s almost as if conservatives were the first to feel the effects of big tech censorship!
Blue is upset because the same methods that have been used to monitor and blacklist conservatives and right-wingers (many of whom have been kicked off Airbnb for political reasons) are now being used to ban prostitutes, a profession championed by the intersectional left.
Combine this with companies like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and yes, Airbnb deciding what legal behaviors are acceptable for service, and now we’re looking at groups of historically marginalized people being denied involvement in mainstream economic, political, cultural and social activities — at scale.
This week AP reported that Facebook and Instagram are doing exactly that. “Activists, sex therapists, abuse survivors, artists and sex educators,” are being unfairly censored by both services. “And it’s no small matter for them. Artists can be suddenly left without their audience, businesses without access to their customers and vulnerable people without a support network … it means that a company in Silicon Valley, whose online platforms have become not only our town squares but diaries, magazines, art galleries and protest platforms, gets final say on matters of free speech and self-expression.”
Silicon Valley companies getting the final say on matters of free speech? Woah! Sound the alarms! Social media companies as the new town squares? That might be a groundbreaking argument, if PragerU hadn’t already made it three years ago. Unaccountable corporations, using their power to circumvent the democratic system and ban otherwise-legal behavior? It’s only something Breitbart Tech has been talking about for onetwothree, let’s say four years at a conservative estimate.
Given that Violet Blue takes issue with tech companies “deciding what legal behaviors are acceptable for service,” this means she will surely get behind political efforts to force social media companies to be strictly value-neutral in their approach to content. You know, like Rep. Louie Gohmert’s and Rep. Paul Gosar’s and Sen. Josh Hawley’s.
It’s only a matter of time, right?
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.

PERV TEACHER MOLESTS CHILD - FACES DEPORTATION - HOW DID SHE GET INTO THIS COUNTRY IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Teacher Accused of Molesting 13-Year-Old Student Faces Deportation

Rumah Byrapaka
Richmond County Sheriff's Office
1:52
A Georgia middle school teacher accused of molesting a 13-year-old student could face deportation because she is not a U.S. citizen.
Authorities arrested Rumah Byrapaka, 24, on Thursday for allegedly sending nude photos and racy messages to the 13-year-old, and is also accused of kissing and inappropriately touching the child, the Augusta Chronicle reported.
A judge granted Byrapaka a $15,000 bond for the child molestation charge and $10,000 bond for the charge of enticing a child for indecent purposes on Tuesday during her initial court appearance.
However, Byrapaka will be placed in a federal immigration detention facility on an immigration hold if she is released from custody because she only has a student visa, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Byrapaka is also expected to face additional charges on top of the child molestation and enticing a child for indecent purposes charge.
WRDW reported that Byrapaka, a physical science and social studies teacher at Hephzibah Middle School, has been placed on administrative leave.
“We will continue to cooperate with the [Richmond County Sheriff’s Office] as the investigation progresses,” a spokeswoman for the Richmond County School District told the station.
If Byrapaka posts bond and is released from federal detention, she is not allowed to have contact with anyone under the age of 18, including the alleged victim, and has to give up her passport to the district attorney’s office.
Byrapaka remains in custody in Richmond County on $27,700, according to online records obtained by the New York Post.

BLOOMBERG INCHES UP TO 4th PLACE - WALL STREET, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, THE SUPER RICH AND ILLEGALS VOW TO VOTE FOR HIM AND VOTE OFTEN



National Poll: Michael Bloomberg Hits 4th Place

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 17: Honoree Michael Bloomberg speaks onstage during the Hudson River Park Annual Gala at Cipriani South Street on October 17, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Hudson River Park)
Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Hudson River Park

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is now in fourth place among Democrat presidential primary candidates, according to a national poll released Wednesday.
The Monmouth University survey shows Bloomberg has nine percent support nationwide with Democratic voters — a four percent increase since respondents were asked about the candidate in December. The same poll found former Vice President Joe Biden is respondents’ top choice with 30 percent approval, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) placed second with 23 percent — a rise of two percent. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) fell 3 percent to 14 percent, putting her in third place, and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg placed fifth with 8 percent.
“With the exception of Bloomberg’s entry, this race looks pretty much like it did six months ago,” Patrick Murray, head of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a statement. “But that stability masks the potential for sizable swings once the first contests are held. Iowa and New Hampshire will play a major role in shaping national voter preferences.”
The poll was undertaken via telephone between January 16-20 with 847 respondents. The survey has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.4 percentage points.
Earlier Wednesday, a CNN poll found Bloomberg placing fifth with five percent support, nationally.
Bloomberg’s bump in the polls come as he continues to pour tens of millions of dollars in advertisements. Since entering the race, he’s dropped nearly $250 million on television spots across the country. The move has met sharp rebuke from his rival, who say he’s attempting to buy the White House.
“I’m disgusted by the idea that Michael Bloomberg or any other billionaire thinks they can circumvent the political process and spend tens of millions of dollars to buy our elections,” Sanders recently said of Bloomberg’s massive ad buys. “If you can’t build grassroots support for your candidacy, you have no business running for president. The American people are sick and tired of the power of billionaires, and I suspect they won’t react well to someone trying to buy an election.”
Warren has echoed Sanders’ criticism during several campaign stops in key primary states.
“I am here on day two of Michael Bloomberg’s $37 million ad buy,” Warren said in November before supporters in Ankeny, Iowa. “Michael Bloomberg is making a bet about democracy in 2020 — he doesn’t need people, he only needs bags and bags of money. I think Michael Bloomberg is wrong and that’s what we need to prove in this election.”
However, Bloomberg appears unfazed by the criticism, saying earlier this month that he’s dumping millions into his candidacy sole to defeat President Trump.
“Number one priority is to get rid of Donald Trump. I’m spending all my money to get rid of Trump. Do you want me to spend more or less? End of story,” the businessman told Reuters.



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

 13 Jan 20202,348
8:12
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.
According to a report in the Washington Times:
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.


Mike Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
7 Jan 20203,576
8:22
Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of Americans.
“This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper than Americans.’
“If business were able to hire without restrictions from anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings, whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because] Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.
Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’ value,” he said.
“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to immigration,” he added.
President Bush described his “any willing worker” cheap labor plan in 2004, saying:
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling. (Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane. And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First, America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.
In December 2018, departing House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Bush’s “any willing worker” goal, saying:
[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.
This “any willing worker” idea encouraged Ryan to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration groups.
Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad, but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people in legally.”

In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans — despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage increases.

Michael Bloomberg: Government Should Import ‘an Awful Lot More’ Immigrants
 26 Nov 201932
4:25
Democratic 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg says he will recruit “an awful lot more” immigrants “to take all the different kinds of jobs” in the U.S. economy.
The immigrants can “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy,” Bloomberg told reporters without naming the American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues that would be improved.
Bloomberg’s comments reflect the views of wealthy investors who gain stock market wealth when the government imports more workers, welfare-aided consumers, and extra renters into communities created by Americans and their children.
In his comments, Bloomberg echoed the 1960s claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country build by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg, who owns roughly $55 billion in assets, has long supported mass migration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians pushed for passage of the Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
In 2019, the group is pushing for the S.386 law that would help investors by encouraging many more Indian graduates to take white-collar jobs from American graduates.
Bloomberg’s group is also pushing for legislation that would provide an endless supply of H-2A visa workers to investors in the agriculture sector. The wage-capped workers would likely displace Americans, reduce pressure on investors to buy high-tech farm machinery, and convert many agriculture towns into “company towns” dominated by a single employer.



NC GOP @SenThomTillis wants to reward India's workers who take US jobs from American graduates. He's backing @SenMikeLee's @S386 bill which gives citizenship to Indians for taking Americans' jobs. Big subsidy for US investors, big loss for NC graduates. http://bit.ly/2rp19J3 






The U.S. already imports many immigrants — roughly one million per year, even as four million Americans turn 18 and prepare to join the workforce.
“We need an awful lot more immigrants rather than less,” Bloomberg told reporters after he filed the paperwork needed to join the Democratic Party’s primary in Arizona:
We have to go out and actually try to recruit immigrants to come here. We need immigrants to take all the different kinds of jobs that the country needs – improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy.
Bloomberg — who has a personal wealth of roughly $55 billion — then blasted President Donald Trump’s campaign to block the wave of Central American migrants sparked by the establishment’s tacit support for mass migration:
I think what Donald Trump has done, of ripping kids away from their [migrant] parents, is a disgrace. I think of what we’re done, where we don’t know who we’re taking in, and we don’t help people when we’re here, is a disgrace. I think talking about deporting 11 million people is so outrageous to try to explain to your kids what that was all about. Our immigration system is broken and we’re not doing anything to fix it.
In 2013, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
In contrast, Trump’s opposition to Central American migrants and to amnesty bills sought by the establishment has helped to nudge up wages for blue-collar Americans, especially in the midwest battleground states, according to a November 26 report posted by Bloomberg’s news service:
Personal income growth has been surging in some political U.S. battlegrounds, including a third of the counties in Pennsylvania — which Donald Trump narrowly flipped in 2016 and may need to win re-election next year.
In the president’s first two years in office, a total of 325 counties representing nearly 6% of the U.S. population experienced their best annualized income gains since at least 1992, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. And 127 of those are located in perennial swing states, including Ohio and Iowa.



Good news: GOP Reps. voted against wage-cuts and job outsourcing.
Bad news: GOP Reps only voted against the cuts b/c they were wrapped in a farmworker amnesty which would cut GOP jobs in 2026.
Good News: The same standoff is protecting US grads from #S386http://bit.ly/2s4Lf6I 








Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers

President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.

“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.
Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.
“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”

Record 44.5 Million Immigrants in 2017

Non-Mexico Latin American, Asian, and African populations grew most

By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler on September 15, 2018

Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center.

On September 13, the Census Bureau released some data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) that shows significant growth in the immigrant (legal and illegal) population living in the United States. The number of immigrants (legal and illegal) from Latin American countries other than Mexico, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa grew significantly, while the number from Mexico, Europe, and Canada stayed about the same or even declined since 2010. The Census Bureau refers to immigrants as the "foreign-born", which includes all those who were not U.S. citizens at birth. The Department of Homeland Security has previously estimated that 1.9 million immigrants are missed by the ACS, so the total number of immigrants in 2017 was likely 46.4 million.1
Among the findings in the new data:
·         The nation's immigrant population (legal and illegal) hit a record 44.5 million in July 2017, an increase of nearly 800,000 since 2016, 4.6 million since 2010, and 13.4 million since 2000.
·         It is worth noting that the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), released the same week but collected in March 2018, shows 45.4 million immigrants, an increase of 1.6 million over the prior year. While the CPS is smaller than the ACS, the newer survey may indicate the pace of growth has accelerated.
·         As a share of the U.S. population, the ACS (used in the remainder of this report) shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprised 13.7 percent or nearly one out of seven U.S. residents in 2017, the highest percentage in 107 years. As recently as 1980, just one out of 16 residents was foreign-born.
·         Between 2010 and 2017, 9.5 million new immigrants settled in the United States. New arrivals are offset by roughly 320,000 immigrants who return home each year and natural mortality of about 290,000 annually among the existing immigrant population.2 As a result, growth in the immigrant population was 4.6 million from 2010 to 2017.3
·         In addition to immigrants, there were 17.1 million U.S.-born minor children with an immigrant parent in 2017, for a total of 61.6 million immigrants and their children in the country — accounting for one in five U.S. residents.4
·         Of immigrants who have come since 2010, 13 percent or 1.2 million came from Mexico — by far the top sending country. However, because of return migration and natural mortality among the existing population, the overall Mexican-born population actually declined by 441,190.5
·         The sending regions with the largest numerical increases from 2016 to 2017 in the number of immigrants living in the United States were South America (up 233,696); East Asia (up 226,728); South Asia (up 216,495); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 149,846); the Caribbean (up 121,120); and Central America (up 71,720).6
·         Looking longer term, the regions with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were East Asia, (up 1,118,937); South Asia (up 1,106,373); the Caribbean (up 676,023); Sub-Saharan Africa (up 606,835); South America (up 483,356); Central America (up 474,504); and the Middle East (up 472,554).
·         The decline in Mexican immigrants masks, to some extent, the enormous growth of Latin American immigrants. If seen as one region, the number from Latin America (excluding Mexico) grew 426,536 in just the last year and 1.6 million since 2010 — significantly more than from any other part of the world.
·         The sending countries with the largest numerical increases in immigrants in the United States between 2010 and 2017 were India (up 830,215); China (up 677,312); the Dominican Republic (up 283,381); the Philippines (up 230,492); Cuba (up 207,124); El Salvador (up 187,783); Venezuela (up 167,105); Colombia (up 146,477); Honduras (up 132,781); Guatemala (up 128,018); Nigeria (up 125,670); Brazil (up 111,471); Vietnam (up 102,026); Bangladesh (up 95,005); Haiti (up 92,603); and Pakistan (up 92,395).
·         The sending countries with the largest percentage increases in immigrants since 2010 were Nepal (up 120 percent); Burma (up 95 percent); Venezuela (up 91 percent); Afghanistan (up 84 percent); Saudi Arabia (up 83 percent); Syria (up 75 percent); Bangladesh (up 62 percent); Nigeria (up 57 percent); Kenya (up 56 percent); India (up 47 percent); Iraq (up 45 percent); Ethiopia (up 44 percent); Egypt (up 34 percent); Brazil (up 33 percent); the Dominican Republic (up 32 percent); Ghana (up 32 percent); China (up 31 percent); Pakistan (up 31 percent); and Somalia (up 29 percent).
·         The states with the largest numerical increases since 2010 were Florida (up 721,298); Texas (up 712,109); California (up 502,985); New York (up 242,769); New Jersey (up 210,481); Washington (up 173,891); Massachusetts (up 172,908); Pennsylvania (up 154,701); Virginia (up 151,251); Maryland (up 124,241); Georgia (123,009); Michigan (up 116,059); North Carolina (up 110,279); and Minnesota (up 107,760).
·         The states with the largest percentage increases since 2010 were North Dakota (up 87 percent); Delaware (up 37 percent); West Virginia (up 33 percent); South Dakota (up 32 percent); Wyoming (up 30 percent); Minnesota (up 28 percent); Nebraska (up 28 percent); Pennsylvania (up 21 percent); Utah (up 21 percent); and Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, Washington, and Iowa (all up 20 percent).
Data Source. On September 13, 2018, the Census Bureau released some of the data from the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS). The survey reflects the U.S. population as of July 1, 2017. The ACS is by far the largest survey taken by the federal government each year and includes over two million households.7 The Census Bureau has posted some of the results from the ACS to its American FactFinder website.8 It has not released the public-use version of the ACS for researchers to download and analyze. However, a good deal of information can be found at FactFinder. Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this analysis comes directly from FactFinder.
The immigrant population, referred to as the "foreign-born" by the Census Bureau, is comprised of those individuals who were not U.S. citizens at birth. It includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents (green card holders), temporary workers, and foreign students. It does not include those born to immigrants in the United States, including to illegal immigrant parents, or those born in outlying U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico. Prior research by the Department of Homeland Security and others indicates that some 90 percent of illegal immigrants respond to the ACS. Thus all the figures reported above are for both legal and illegal immigrants.

Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more in taxes

 

Many of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bloomberg, the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a lock on the nomination.
The immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and Sanders.

The second event was Warren’s announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1 billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.
Neither of these taxes would be passed by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated and suppressed.
But the modern-day lords and ladies who inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.
They do not fear Warren, a self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.
The levels of wealth wasted on this parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:
It is very difficult to comprehend what a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.
And yet, there are 607 people in the United 
States with a net worth of over a billion 
dollars.
Bloomberg, a liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.
Last January he denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
Over the past several months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s Medicare plan.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,” complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms), said last week, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.
Hedge fund owner Leon Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s potential candidacy.
The New York Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel, he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and Chrysler workers.
But for fawning toward the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column by the Times ’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”
Calling for “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs… Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened, they want a strong leader.”
This is under conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’ share has tripled since the 1980s.
In their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in 2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since 1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half, dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.
The United States is not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.
The ferocious response of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the nomination.
There is no way to address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast majority of the population.
The corporations and banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized to meet human needs, not private profit.
This is a revolutionary task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a conscious political leadership.

Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers

Getty Images
 12 Nov 2019382
2:32

President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.

“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.
Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.
“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”