Monday, February 17, 2020

MIKE BLOOMBERG - NASTY LITTLE MAN!

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

Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will 

demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a 

“progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist 

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

Bloomberg’s billions and the politics of oligarchy
17 February 2020
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million on television and internet ads that present “Mike” as an up-from-poverty, self-made fighter for progress and decency, a friend of the common man.
The marketing of Bloomberg involves distortions so grotesque that one commentator recalled the massive advertising campaign by Ford Motor Company, in the early days of television, to promote an exciting new model named the Edsel, arguably the ugliest and most unsuccessful car ever produced.
The Bloomberg campaign is spending more than $1 million a day on average just on Facebook ads. In advance of the March 3 primaries dubbed “Super Tuesday,” when there will be voting in 14 states, Bloomberg has spent $40 million on television and internet advertising in California, $33 million in Texas, $9.5 million in North Carolina and $6 million in Massachusetts. He is the only candidate to air TV ads in Virginia and Alabama. Except for fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, no other Democratic candidate has thus far spent even $10 million in all 14 states combined.
Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston [Credit: AP Photo/David J. Phillip]
The electoral impact of Bloomberg’s vast expenditures—a drop in the bucket from his $60 billion fortune—is difficult to estimate in advance of the voting on “Super Tuesday.” March 3 will be the first time that the former mayor of New York City is on a primary ballot. Polls suggest that Bloomberg is close to the 15 percent mark required to win delegates to the Democratic convention. His aim, should he fail to win enough delegates to gain the nomination, is to combine with other “moderate” candidates to block a victory by the current front-runner, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Whatever the outcome of the primary 
campaign, it is clear already that 
Bloomberg’s spending exerts a vast influence 
on the Democratic Party establishment and 
on the corporate media (of which Bloomberg 
News, part of his empire, is a major 
component). It is safe to say that no other 
Democratic presidential hopeful could have 
survived last week’s series of press reports 
on Bloomberg’s support for “stop-and-frisk” 
police attacks on minority youth, his blaming 
the 2008 Wall Street crash on loans to 
minority borrowers, and his abusive 
treatment of female employees.
Last week, reports surfaced of Bloomberg’s 2015 comments on his policy as New York mayor of “stop-and-frisk,” in which he declared, “Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25.” He went on to add, “The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”
In response, the Bloomberg campaign immediately rolled out endorsements of his campaign by three African-American members of Congress.
Anticipating the crisis, Bloomberg had already met with a group of prominent black pastors who had been critical of “stop-and-frisk” but were willing to administer absolution if the billionaire candidate was sufficiently apologetic—and generous. As Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, put it, with revealing frankness, “He used his money, which is one of the reasons I continue to support him, to express his sincerity.”
As a 5,000-word profile in the New York Times Sunday edition detailed, Bloomberg, who spent $270 million on his three successful campaigns to buy the mayoralty of New York City (2002-2013), built “an empire of influence” through targeted donations to an array of liberal and pro-Democratic Party groups over the past decade. According to the Times account:
Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes. His personal fortune, built on a financial information and news company, is estimated at over $60 billion. It fuels an advocacy network that has directed policy in dozens of states and cities; mobilized movements to take on gun violence and climate change; rewritten election laws and health regulations; and elected scores of politicians to offices as modest as the school board and as lofty as the Senate.
This includes an estimated $270 million to gun control campaigns, largely through the Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety group. He has pumped large sums into the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, charter school advocacy groups and similar organizations, giving himself near-veto power over their campaigns.
In one incident described by the Times, the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party think tank, edited a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States to remove a chapter on New York City police spying on Muslim mosques and communities that had eight references to Bloomberg by name. Bloomberg gave nearly $2 million to the organization.
A longtime Democrat who adopted the Republican label in 2001 to run for mayor, then ran for reelection as a Republican in 2005 and as an “independent” in 2009, Bloomberg supported Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. He returned to the Democratic Party as an endorser only in 2016, when he backed Hillary Clinton. He later changed his registration to Democratic.
In 2018, Bloomberg spent more than $100 million supporting Democratic Party candidates for Congress through his personal super PAC, and he has pledged to spend $1 billion to elect Democrats this year, whether or not he wins the party nomination.
Among those now singing the praises of Bloomberg are dozens of current and former mayors, many of them African-American, from cities including Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, Tampa, Sacramento, Miami and Washington DC. This only demonstrates the completely corrupt and cynical character of identity politics, which a layer of the black upper-middle class has used to obtain a bigger share of the wealth and status of the top 10 percent, while the conditions of the vast majority of black workers and youth have continued to deteriorate.
In the wake of the “stop-and-frisk” controversy, an array of video and audio clips has surfaced documenting Bloomberg’s long record of racist and sexist comments.
The Associated Press reported last week that Bloomberg made comments in 2008 in which he blamed the collapse of the mortgage security market, which triggered the Wall Street crash, on efforts to restrict the practice of “redlining”—racial discrimination by bankers against predominately minority residential neighborhoods. A spokesman for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition called this “a billionaire defending other billionaires and placing the blame on lower-income homeowners.”
In a 2018 conversation with International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde, made public Sunday, Bloomberg can be heard opposing minimum wage laws and defending the finger printing of food-stamp recipients. He called the minimum wage one of “these impediments to job creation” that he favored eliminating.
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a 4,000-word profile of Bloomberg that documented a long series of allegations by female employees, largely about profane and sexist comments, many of them demeaning, some outright threatening. These were not #MeToo-style allegations of personal misconduct, but charges that Bloomberg encouraged a hostile work environment for women employees. These conditions generated dozens of lawsuits and numerous settlements in six and seven figures.
Any of these episodes would have destroyed another candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. But for Bloomberg and his media acolytes, it is a big “so what?” Being a right-wing, dictatorial, foul-mouthed, racist, sexist billionaire is not a problem for the Democratic Party establishment, as long as the billionaire’s money finds its way into their own pockets.
What dominates the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans under Trump, is the politics of oligarchy. It is naked and shameless.
The financial aristocrats, the multimillionaires 

and billionaires, control the two-party system 

and dictate the course of the stage-managed 

political events called “primaries,” 

“conventions” and “elections.”
Later this week, Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders are likely to appear on the same platform, if Bloomberg, as expected, qualifies for Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Sanders claims that his campaign is the means to transform the Democratic Party into an instrument of progressive reform, a weapon against the rule of the super-rich. Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a “progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist party, which does the bidding of Wall Street and the CIA.

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

 

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

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

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

Getty Images
 12 Nov 2019382
2:32

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

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

Bloomberg’s spending binge cannot hide 


that he’s a nasty bit of work



Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is currently trying to buy the Democrat nomination. His spending doesn't just buy recognition; it keeps him from having to appear in person, revealing how nasty he is.
In 1997, Sekiko Sakai Garrison sued Bloomberg for sexual harassment. She alleged that, when she told him she was pregnant, he told her “Kill it.” She also alleged racism towards blacks:
On another occasion when she expressed she was struggling to find childcare, Bloomberg told her to hire 'some black'.
'It's a f***ing baby! All it does is eat and s**t! It doesn't know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn't have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building,' Bloomberg said in July 1993.
Another employee corroborated the “kill it” comment, adding, “He talked kind of crudely about women all of the time.”
Bloomberg claimed Garrison had misunderstood him. Her allegations, though, are consistent with a 1990 booklet that admiring employees assembled: The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg: An Unauthorized Collection of Unauthorized Sayings.
The editor assures readers that the quotations in the booklet are accurate:
Yes, these are all actual quotes.
No, nothing has been embellished or exaggerated.
And yes, some things were too outrageous to include.
The booklet reveals an intelligent, cynical, calculating man with the cast-iron testicles needed to become a multibillionaire. It also reveals someone cruel, sexist, racist, homophobic, and vaguely anti-Semitic.
For Bloomberg, sexual analogies were constant and crude:
“Make the customer think he’s getting laid when he’s getting f***ed.”
“A good salesperson asks for the order. It’s like the guy who goes into a bar, and walks up to every gorgeous girl there, and says ‘Do you want to f***?’ He gets turned down a lot – but he gets f***ed a lot, too!”
He saw women, even famous women, in crude sexual terms:
“What do I want? I want an exclusive, 10-year contract, an automatic extension, and I want you to pay me. And I want a blow job from Jane Fonda. Have you seen Jane Fonda lately? Not bad for fifty.”
He was big on revenge and threats:
“Let me tell you something, buddy boy, I have picture of you and they’re not with your wife.”
He had harsh words for one competitor, showing a mean streak of homophobia:
“Cokehead, womanizing, fag.”
That revulsion to homosexuality reemerged when he spoke about the future of computers:
“You know why computers will never take the place of people? Because a computer would say that the sex of the person giving you a blow job doesn’t matter!”
And the homophobia, as well as the misogyny, again made their appearance when he talked about the British royal family:
“There’s only one queen in Buckingham Palace – the rest are in Trafalgar Square.”
“The Royal family – what a bunch of misfits – a gay, an architect, that horsey faced lesbian, and a kid who gave up Koo Stark for some fat broad.”
As the reference to both Koo Stark and Fergie shows, for Bloomberg, at least in 1990, women are stupid objects:
“If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s.”
“I only look.”
“I just like to look.”
“I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site [and] doesn’t get a whistle will turn around and walk past again and again until she does get one.’
However, he did proudly boast that “the Bloomberg” itself would give blowjobs – and in the same breath brutally demeaned the women to whom he was speaking:
“It will do everything, including give you a blowjob. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.”
Although he's never hidden his Jewishness, Bloomberg was, at the very least, ambivalent about being Jewish:
“The three biggest lies are: the check’s in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I’m glad I’m Jewish.”
The same casual racism Bloomberg showed when telling the employee who sued him that she should get “some black” to care for her baby showed up again in a nasty remark about both Hispanics and Jews:
“If Jesus was a Jew, why does he have a Puerto Rican first name?”
It’s also becoming clear that Bloomberg doesn’t believe in capitalism -- despite the booklet quoting him saying “I believe in the capitalist system and free enterprise.” If he really believed in capitalism and free enterprise, he would not have been caught on camera in 2011 stating that it was time to implement death panels:
Death panels, of course, are a fixture in socialized medicine.
And as a bonus, don't forget Bloomberg's utter contempt for farmers:
Bloomberg's words paint him as a mean, arrogant, 
self-centered man. While Trump ran for love of 
country, Bloomberg is running for love of 
Bloomberg.

BILLIONAIRE FOR OPEN BORDERS MIKE BLOOMBERG BADMOUTHS FARMERS - But would he if they were welfare sucking illegals???


Bloomberg caught badmouthing farmers

Standing there after having presumably eaten food, Michael Bloomberg would have you think that America's farmers are dumb.


Bloomberg on why farmers can’t work in information technology

MB: “I can teach anyone how to be a farmer 1 dig a hole 2 put a seed in 3 put dirt on top 4 add water 5 up comes the corn”

The skill 4information technology is completely different you need more grey matter

10.1K people are talking about this


Farmers can now stand in line behind black people, (branded criminals), poor people, (ordered taxed to keep them from spending their money on booze and cigarettes), women (maybe if they'd go to a library instead of Bloomingdale's) and babies in the womb (kill it), to collect their Bloomberg insult. Does this guy have any respect for anyone? His money seems to have activated his inner jerkwad - which isn't going to cut it for winning the presidency.
This insult was from 2016, and lot of this stuff keeps rolling out from his past.
This one was particularly obnoxious because farmers have always been targets of the left. Remember all the leftist abuse hurled at Rep. Devin Nunes for being "a dairy farmer"? Remember how the Obama administration used to spy on farmers and hand their data over to leftwing activists?
Farming is hard work. It's not putting a seed in the ground and letting nature take it from there - not even backyard gardening, which I do - is that simple. It's the country's most successful enterprise, in that American farmers feed the world, and that American farming has gotten so efficient over the centuries that very few people are needed to do it.
Having never farmed, Bloomberg seems to believe it's something simple:  “I could teach anybody in this room to be a farmer.
The other thing is that Mister Smarty Pants, so much brighter than America's farmers, see, thinks farmers not only don't know tech, they can't learn tech (Memo to Mike: They already have), or that tech always takes analytical skills - actually, it doesn't - much of it takes precision and an encyclopedic grasp of rules - which is often different from analyzing.
 The few farmers who remain in farming tend to be ultra-tech savvy, with knowledge of satellites, weather systems, fertilizer schedules, crop rotation, pesticides, regulations, commodity markets, and irrigation. 
As my old farmer aunt in western Michigan puts it: "Don't criticize farmers while you've got food in your mouth."
 In any case, Don Trump, Jr. stated the obvious about this one:




Elsewhere in the Twittersphere, there was nothing but opprobrium for Bloomberg's ignorant drivel, too:






Billionaire Bloomberg claims he "could teach anybody to be a farmer," even implying that farmers don't have the same level of "skillset" or "grey matter" as folks in tech jobs.

So demeaning, elitist, and out-of-touch it's appalling.

13K people are talking about this









Bloomberg on why farmers can’t work in information technology

MB: “I can teach anyone how to be a farmer 1 dig a hole 2 put a seed in 3 put dirt on top 4 add water 5 up comes the corn”

The skill 4information technology is completely different you need more grey matter
It's funny because the equipment makers have been charging farmers tons of cash to update their equipment so the farmers learned machine code & are patching their own gear. Bloomberg would have a difficult time with crop rotation & fertilization schedules I bet.

29 people are talking about this






What it shows is that this creep is so buried in his money he's completely out of touch. Not just out of touch with the feelings of ordinary people who end up being his targets, but with the actual doings of them, too. He believes he knows, and that makes it worse, because he literally knows nothing about what it means to be a farmer.
Imagine this guy now as president, issuing dictats based on his bizarre and ignorant (but confidently held) beliefs about farmers. It's proof in itself that Bloomberg is utterly unfit to be president.


BUY THE ILLEGALS’ ILLEGAL VOTES… WHO DOES IT BETTER THAN THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRE CLASS?

 

Bloomberg Pledges to Investigate ICE and End Trump Policies in Newly Unveiled Immigration Plan

By Jason Hopkins

Business and Politics Review
. . .

 

 

Mike Bloomberg Offers ’60 Million’ Latinos: $15 Per Hour Plus Mass Migration

Michael Bloomberg is making a pitch for Latino votes with an offer of $15 per hour wages — but also a flood of new Latino migrants eager to compete for jobs, apartments, and K-12 desks in Latino communities.
“I believe we can once again be a country that welcomes immigrants, values immigrants, respects immigrants, and empowers them to pursue the American Dream,” Bloomberg said in a January 30 tweet.
The conflicting policy offer reflects shared goals of the Democrat Party’s two main leadership factions: Bloomberg and other investors who are eager for imported consumers and workers, and progressives who are eager for imported pro-government voters.


I believe we can once again be a country that welcomes immigrants, values immigrants, respects immigrants, and empowers them to pursue the American Dream. https://mikebloom.bg/36ItgSn 
Embedded video

In contrast, President Donald Trump promised a low-immigration, “Hire American” policy on Inauguration Day, helping salaries rise for millions of blue-collar Americans, including Latinos. Unemployment rates for Latinos are now at a record low, and wages are at a record high. Half of the 21.5 million working Latinos earn above $712 a week, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median wage for Latinos is almost $18 per hour.
Bloomberg’s pitch offered a combination of government-engineered higher wages, more social status, and more opportunities for voters’ children:
Today, I’m releasing my plan to bring security and a new path forward to the 60 million Latinos who live in our country, Our path forward starts by improving economic security. By expanding the earned income tax credit, and by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
And we’ll make sure Latino American families have health insurance. No one should ever be denied access to care.
Just as pro-amnesty President George W. Bush did in 2002, Bloomberg is also promising to spur homeownership among Latinos:
We will also increase homeownership in the Latino community by providing down-payment assistance and increasing access to capital.
But Bloomberg’s pitch to “60 million” Latinos — including at least 11 million illegal immigrants — reflects his willingness to characterize Latinos by their ethnic group instead of their American nationality:
We’ll enact comprehensive immigration reform. We will create a path to legalization and citizenship for the 11 million people living in the shadows … We will get it done.
A vast majority of American Latinos — and many Latino migrants — oppose mass migration because it will make it difficult for them to earn good wages, buy decent houses, and get a good education for their kids.
But on his website, Bloomberg’s Latino policy offers:
Mike’s plan for Latinos in the U.S. (El Paso Adelante, The Path Forward) invests in Latino communities to boost prosperity and economic security. President Trump has vilified, dehumanized and hurt the Latino community. As president Mike Bloomberg will reverse that damage by addressing hate crimes and gun violence, closing the education, wealth, and health gap between Latinos and whites, and creating pathways to citizenship for millions of Latinos in the U.S.
Clear the naturalization backlog and create a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants.
His plan will provide permanent protections for Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders, shielding them from deportation and putting them on a pathway to citizenship. Additionally, the plan will expand immigration legal services.
Bloomberg has long supported an economic policy of stimulating Wall Street with a flood of imported consumers, renters, and workers. That flood will expand sales, raise real-estate prices, and flatline wages.
Those changes would spike stock values and transfer more of the nation’s new wealth and political power from family wage-earners to elderly stockholders, such as Bloomberg, whose estimated wealth is $60 billion.
The combination of a $15 minimum wage and the inflow of many healthy young migrants would also pressure U.S. employers to discard older, higher-paid Americans. If Bloomberg’s investor-driven visions were enacted, employers would race to sideline many employes who are older, or disabled, or uneducated, or who earn higher wages.
Like Bush, Bloomberg’s policy is focussed on the needs of investors and employers, not of American workers. “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.


Mike Bloomberg says employers & investors should be allowed to hire "the best" employees from around the world.
Usually, the best = cheapest.
After all, who believes immig laws should inconvenience investors?
PS. How many Bloomberg journos pass the test?
http://bit.ly/2T1suws 

Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire 'Best' Foreigners Instead of Americans



“We need an awful lot more immigrants rather than less,” Bloomberg told reporters in November 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’s immigration plan says:
“The grandson of immigrants, Mike believes in the power of the American Dream,” says Bloomberg immigration agenda. It continues:
Throughout his career, he has been a passionate advocate for welcoming immigrants and fixing the broken immigration system. Immigrants make our country stronger, and Mike is focused on reclaiming America’s role as the beacon of freedom and opportunity for people from around the world.
Mike formed the pro-immigration organization New American Economy, representing more than 500 mayors and CEOs from all 50 states who are highlighting the contributions of immigrants.
Bloomberg’s New American Economy group was formed in 2013 to push for passage of the “Gang of Eight” bill, which would have boosted stockholders and also flatlined wages for at least ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The bill provided an amnesty for all illegal aliens, doubled the annual inflow of legal immigrants to two million — even as four million Americans turned 18 each year — and allowed an unlimited inflow of foreign college graduates.
“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 CBO report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
“The legislation would particularly increase the number of workers with lower or higher skills but would have less effect on the number of workers with average skills. … The wages of lower- and higher-skilled workers would tend to be pushed downward slightly (by less than ½ percent) relative to the wages of workers with average skills,” said the CBO report.
Bloomberg’s NEA website tries to build support for amnesty and more immigration by producing many studies. For example, a January 2020 report boasted that “New Data Shows Immigrants Make Up More Than 60 Percent of Middlesex County’s STEM Workers and Nearly Half of Business Owners.”


Michael Bloomberg: Government Should Import ‘an Awful Lot More’ Immigrants
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 








Bloomberg Op-Ed: Immigrant Soldiers, Workers Needed for Geopolitical Power



Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
NEIL MUNRO
26 Mar 2019891
5:25

U.S. geopolitical power needs a steady supply of fresh immigrants to serve as soldiers and workers, according to a pro-migration op-ed in Bloomberg news.

“A large working-age population serves as a source of military manpower,” says the op-edby Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He continues:
… a relatively young, growing and well-educated population is a wellspring of the economic productivity that underlies other forms of international influence … countries with healthy demographic profiles can create wealth more easily than their competitors [and] can also can direct a larger share of that wealth to geopolitical projects as opposed to pensions and health care.
Brands acknowledges — but denounces — the reality that immigration is largely unpopular among the voters who suffer from the resulting diversity, elite disengagement, job theft, and wage loss. That turmoil helped outsider Donald Trump win the White House in 2016. Brands dismisses the public’s measured response as “draconian … xenophobia … race-based politics,” and says:
… if current trends are any indication, the U.S. could easily squander its demographic advantages [over China and Russia] by enacting draconian immigration restrictions or simply destroying its image as a country that welcomes ambitious newcomers. Conversely, if the proportion of immigrants continues to rise while the white population shrinks, xenophobia and race-based politics could become more common and more toxic.
After making these dire predictions, Brands declines to offer the public anything in exchange for the diversity, political divisions, taxpayer costs, and wage losses caused by the government policy of “refreshing the population”:
If the U.S. is to keep its demographic edge, it will have to find ways of reconciling two competing imperatives: refreshing the population through immigration while preserving social and political stability.
Brands dismisses the public’s expectation that their government serves citizens and their children, and he instead echoes the 1960s demand that Americans must give up their homeland to become a “nation of immigrants” to help beat Russian communism.
In an October 2018 article for Time magazine, Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy explained the government-boosting origin of the “Nation of Immigrants” claim:
Few felt it as deeply as President John F. Kennedy. In his 1964 book A Nation of Immigrants, recently re-released, my great-uncle outlines the compelling case for immigration, in economic, moral, and global terms. “The abundant resources of this land provided the foundation for a great nation,” he writes. “But only people could make the opportunity a reality. Immigration provided the human resources.”
Both Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush strongly favored this cheap labor, high growth policy. In 1990, the first President Bush signed a bill doubling legal immigration, and in 2006 and 2007, George W. Bush pushed for a bill that would have further increased immigration.
In March 2019, the George W. Bush center released a video which effectively wrote Americans out of their own nation, while urging more immigration to spur national economic growth by reducing wages. “America’s story is an immigrant story,” says the video. “Now as before, American is a nation of immigrants,” says the video which refers to 280 million Americans as the “population,” “labor force,” “workers,” and even “natives.”


George W. Bush's Bush Center posts pro-migration, pro-business video which writes Americans out of American history: 'America’s story is an immigrant story,' says the video, which even describes some Americans as immigrants. http://bit.ly/2TTxfsF 

George W. Bush Center: 'America's Story Is an Immigrant Story'



Brands’ pitch, however, ignores the recent report by President Donald Trump’s economic advisors which said the nation can continue to grow without an extra supply of foreign workers.
There are “plenty of [American] workers on the sidelines able to come off” and fill jobs in the growing economy, said Rich Burkhauser, a member of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors. Americans’ productivity is rising and more sidelined Americans are returning to the workforce as wages rise, said the report, titled, “Economic Report of the President.”
Investors and CEOs are increasingly desperate for an infusion of more foreign workers to lower the marketplace pressure for wage increases during 2019.


Goldman Sachs says Trump's tight labor-market policy (AKA 'Hire American') gave 4% raise to blue-collar/middle-class in 2018. But upper-income graduate salaries lagged - maybe b/c of 1.5 million visa-worker graduates who work for spaghettiOs & green cards http://bit.ly/2Fan4b0 

Goldman Sachs: Trump Raises Voters' Wages with Tight Labor Market



Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after high school or university. The federal government then imports roughly 1.1 million legal immigrants, refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar guest workers and roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers, and it also tolerates about eight million illegal workers.
In 2019, because of catch-and-release rules mandated by Congress and the courts, the federal government also will likely release at least 350,000 Central American laborers into the U.S. job market, even as at least 500,000 more migrants sneak past U.S. border defenses or overstay their visas.
Overall, in 2019, the U.S. government will allow at least two million new foreign workers into the United States to compete for the starter jobs sought by the latest wave of four million U.S. graduates. The new migrants also undermine the 24 million other Americans and the roughly three million legal immigrants who have joined the workforce since 2014.
This federal policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth for investors shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar graduates and blue-collar foreign labor.
This cheap labor economic policy forces Americans to compete even for low wage jobs, it widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Read the op-ed here. The comments are sharply critical.


Worried about Chinese hackers? Why bother? -- Congress allows Chinese gov't officials to get jobs in US companies & R&D centers by enrolling in the OPT visa worker program. They'll also get fast-track citizenship if Congress OKs H.R.1044 & S.386 @HR1044 http://bit.ly/2UtVAmg 

Chinese Hackers Raid U.S. Universities for Submarine Warfare Secrets




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.