Sunday, March 15, 2020

TREASURY STEVE MNUCHIN SAYS AMERICA IS NOT HEADED FOR RECESSION! - BANKSTERS CAN EXPECT BILLIONS IN INTEREST FREE LOANS AND TRUMP TO CUT SOCIAL SECURITY TO MAKE AMERICA PLUNDERED AGAIN

U.S. is NOT headed for a recession says Steven Mnuchin – Treasury secretary makes extraordinary claim in the middle of coronavirus crisis after the worst week on Wall Street since the Great Recession, but admits a 'slowdown' is inevitable

  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Sunday morning that the U.S. will not go into a recession due to the economic fallout from coronavirus
  • 'I don't think so,' Mnuchin said when asked if a recession was likely
  • 'The real issue is not the economic situation today,' he insisted. 'This is a unique situation. We are going to have a slowdown'
  • The assertion came as markets experienced the worst since the 2008 crash
  • The biggest drop came Thursday morning after Trump's Oval Office address 
  • Coronavirus symptoms: what are they and should you see a doctor?
Steven Mnuchin said Sunday morning that the U.S. is not heading for a recession, despite his admission that the markets will experience a 'slowdown' from the fall out from the coronavirus outbreak.
'I don't think so,' Mnuchin told ABC This Week when asked if a recession was likely.
'The real issue is not the economic situation today,' the Treasury secretary insisted. 'This is a unique situation. We are going to have a slowdown. Later in the year economic activity will pick up as we confront this virus.'
He also asserted that Americans shouldn't focus on the daily ups and downs and 'mood' of the stock market.
The Dow saw a rocky few days, dropping thousands of points throughout the week, with a slight reprieve Tuesday as Trump promised a bipartisan economic stimulus package with a trip to Capitol Hill.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Sunday morning that the U.S. will not go into a recession due to the economic fallout from coronavirus
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Sunday morning that the U.S. will not go into a recession due to the economic fallout from coronavirus
'The real issue is not the economic situation today,' the Treasury secretary insisted. 'This is a unique situation. We are going to have a slowdown'
'The real issue is not the economic situation today,' the Treasury secretary insisted. 'This is a unique situation. We are going to have a slowdown'
Markets experienced the worst week since the 2008 economic crisis as the White House struggled to strike a bipartisan deal with lawmakers and confusion over the travel ban rocked investors
Markets experienced the worst week since the 2008 economic crisis as the White House struggled to strike a bipartisan deal with lawmakers and confusion over the travel ban rocked investors
Markets saw its biggest of the week on Thursday, plummeting 2,000 points the day after Donald Trump's Oval Office address, where he announced he was shutting down travel from Europe and mistakenly claimed that would affect cargo – which was interpreted by investors to mean trade goods between Europe and the U.S.
The 10 per cent plunge caused markets to see its worst close since 1987 – and the week was the worst since the recession following the 2008 crash.
Friday, however, the markets saw a major recovery nearly 2,000 points as Mnuchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's fruitful negotiations brought a bipartisan bill to the House floor.
'I think what you saw is the stock market reacting very positively to the bipartisan bill,' Mnuchin told ABC's Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl Sunday morning.
'The stock market is going to go up, it's going to go down. We can't focus on every day – the mood,' he said.
Trump expressed his support for the bipartisan measure on Friday in a tweet ahead of the House vote.
Mnuchin is part of the administration's coronavirus task force, and he headed the efforts to pass a bipartisan bill through Congress on Friday by engaging in talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week
Mnuchin is part of the administration's coronavirus task force, and he headed the efforts to pass a bipartisan bill through Congress on Friday by engaging in talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week
Mnuchin is a member of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force.
He and Pelosi have a close relationship and have struck bipartisan agreements in the past.
The two engaged in several conversations this week to reach an agreement on a bill after Trump continuously pushed for a payroll tax cut, which Democrats, and some Republicans, expressed disinterest in including in the package.
Mnuching also responded Sunday to confusion over the 'cargo' halt mentioned in Trump's speech.
'I don't think in an Oval Office address you can address every single issues as you're discussing it,' Mnuchin claimed.
'I don't think he got things wrong at all,' he continued. 'And we were very clear that people misinterpreted the comment on cargo. And we immediately put out a statement to clarify that.'

Trump’s budget proposal: A new offensive in the social counterrevolution

12 February 2020
Donald Trump’s proposed federal budget is an announcement that the American ruling class is deepening its offensive against the social rights and living conditions of the US and international working class.
The proposed cuts would transfer trillions of dollars from the masses of working people into the hands of the financial aristocracy and affluent upper-middle class, having devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of workers from cradle to grave and exposing the utter fraud of Trump’s claim to represent the “forgotten men and women.”
President Donald J. Trump talks to members of the press [Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian]
Trump proposes to cut $900 billion from Medicaid, $500 billion from Medicare, $24 billion from Social Security and billions more from after school programs for working class children, programs for homeless students, aid for impoverished rural schools, programs that subsidize federal student loans, food stamps and programs for impoverished infants and their mothers. It also places the US military on a war footing toward “great power” rivals Russia and China, including a $50 billion plan to modernize the US nuclear arsenal.
Trump’s proposed cuts to departments such as Education (8 percent), Interior (13.4 percent), Housing and Urban Development (15.2 percent), Health and Human Services (9 percent) and Environmental Protection (26.5 percent) are steps toward dismantling social programs and government regulation of corporate activity.
The announcement of the White House budget proposal begins the staged process in which the Democratic Party feigns indignation over the proposed cuts only to ultimately accede to many of the demands. Under conditions where the vast majority of Americans are demanding increased spending on social programs, higher taxes on the rich and a redistribution of wealth, the inevitable outcome of the bipartisan budget negotiations will be to shift the entire political establishment further to the right.
This was previewed by Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who, when asked last Thursday about Trump’s forthcoming budget, said:
I say to my members all the time, ‘There is no such thing as eternal animosity. There are eternal friendships, but you never know on what cause you may come together with someone you may perceive as your foe right now. Everybody is a possible ally in whatever comes next.’
This offer of friendship to Trump came less than 24 hours after the collapse of the Democratic Party’s impeachment effort, a process in which Pelosi and Democratic impeachment managers called Trump a “traitor” and stooge of Russia for withholding $391 million in military aid to the right-wing nationalist government in Ukraine, which provides money and arms to far-right paramilitary forces. Speaking the language of McCarthyism, the lead Democratic impeachment manager Adam Schiff said Trump was obstructing the US from arming Ukraine, an imperative that ensures “we can fight Russia over there so we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
The denunciations of Trump by the Democratic leadership on questions of imperialist foreign policy and the Democrats’ crusade for internet censorship contrast with their appeals to bipartisan friendship on social and domestic policy.
From the day Trump took office, the Democratic Party has facilitated Trump’s attack on living conditions and democratic rights, first by diverting and suppressing mass protests that erupted immediately following Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and in response to his travel ban and attacks on immigrants, and then, over the last three years, by voting for major elements of Trump’s agenda.
In June 2019, the Democrats voted overwhelmingly to support passage of Trump’s record $750 billion Pentagon budget, which allowed the government to continue to detain prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and provided $3.6 billion in “back-fill” funding for Trump’s border wall.
In June 2019, Democrats voted to provide Trump with $4.6 billion to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) despite massive opposition to family separation and the detention of immigrant children, ongoing issues which the Democratic Party and corporate media have essentially blacked out from national coverage.
These are only the most egregious examples. Trump’s corporate tax cut, which the proposed budget will extend, was initially proposed by the Obama White House. Obama slashed funding for food stamps, Medicare, and programs for impoverished children and other programs.
Today, some Democratic presidential candidates have used Trump’s budget proposal as an opportunity to demand further deficit reduction, verbally opposing his budget but focusing attacks on Bernie Sanders’ proposals to modestly increase social spending.
The Washington Post noted yesterday that after Trump’s budget was leaked in the Wall Street Journal, “Former vice president Joe Biden has warned Democrats not to embrace an agenda that calls for unrealistic social policy goals, and Buttigieg declared at a town hall event in Nashua, N.H. on Sunday that it was time to get serious about the rising deficit, even though ‘it’s not fashionable in progressive circles to talk too much about the debt.’”
The Democratic-aligned corporate media has greeted Trump’s budget with far less concern than the prospect that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will win the Democratic nomination.
In the lead-up to yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, television personality Chris Matthews claimed that socialists will carry out “executions in Central Park,” while Chuck Todd compared Sanders supporters to Nazi “brown shirts.”
This language shows that however serious their internal conflicts, both factions of the ruling class are allied in the existential struggle to protect the wealth of the financial aristocracy from the growing mood of social opposition from below. They do not fear Sanders, a longtime Washington insider and loyal Democratic caucus member. What they fear is the growing leftward movement among workers, youth and students reflected in the support for Sanders which the Vermont senator may not be able to control.
All factions of the ruling class view the mass demonstrations in France, Chile, Puerto Rico, Sudan and elsewhere as signs of what is to come.
Trump, having emerged victorious from the impeachment, is preparing for the class battles ahead by building a fascistic movement and threatening to stay in power regardless of the outcome of the 2020 elections.
Sections of the Democratic Party are using a different technique, elevating figures like Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to feed popular illusions that the Democratic Party can be reformed, that the ruling class can be pressured to enact progressive social policy and that no independent social struggle is required.
This is a hopeless utopia. Even if Sanders manages to win the nomination in the face of widespread corruption in the DNC, his entire program amounts to asking the network of generals and CEOs who run America to voluntarily part with trillions of dollars. In explaining the futility of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Leon Trotsky wrote that the New Dealers “wind up by appealing to the monopolists not to forget decency and the principles of democracy. Just how is this better than prayers for rain?”
The Socialist Equality Party’s candidates in the 2020 elections—Joseph Kishore for president and Norissa Santa Cruz for vice president—call on workers and youth to break with the two parties of American capitalism and harness their immense social power in the struggle for control of the commanding heights of the world economy.
The entire budget proposed by Trump totals $4.8 trillion—far less than the $27 trillion possessed by the world’s 2,170 billionaires. Redistributing the world’s wealth requires the building of a mass revolutionary movement to confiscate the wealth of the financial aristocracy and place the world’s productive forces under the democratic control of the international working class.


Trump outlines massive cuts in Medicaid and Medicare in 2021 budget plan

By Kevin Reed

President Trump is planning to release a 2021 budget on Monday that includes deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other mandatory and discretionary spending while also increasing funding for the military, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal report, based on information provided by a senior administration official, said that the $4.8 trillion budget “charts a path for a potential second term” by planning to raise military spending by 0.3 percent, to $740.5 billion, and lowering nondefense spending by 5 percent, to $590 billion, for the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2020. The cuts to social programs would be below the level Congress and the president agreed to in a two-year budget deal last summer.
Emboldened by his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial last Wednesday, Trump is making it clear that he is going on the offensive to attack the working class by proposing to cut essential programs and increase the military budget in preparation for future imperialist wars. The budget also calls for $2 billion in new funding for the southern US border wall that is a critical element of the Trump administration’s extreme right-wing racist campaign against immigrants.
President Donald Trump with Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, in 2019 [Credit: Evan Vucci/AP]
The new White House budget proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over ten years by reducing mandatory programs by $2 trillion. This includes $292 billion from safety-net programs by changing the work requirements to receive Medicaid and food stamps and $70 billion by restricting access to disability benefits.
The plan to attack Medicare in particular is an explicit repudiation of Trump’s campaign promises in 2016 that he would protect this program, which underwrites health care coverage for nearly all Americans aged 65 and older, and for many disabled people of all ages. Other reported cuts include a 21 percent reduction to State Department and foreign aid funding, a 26 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency and a 15 percent cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Press reports suggesting the Pentagon budget will rise only 0.3 percent, after three years of whopping increases, are likely a political smokescreen by the White House. Much of the increase in military spending comes in the form of an Overseas Contingency Operations fund that is not accounted for in the regular budget. Last year, the Trump administration proposed a similar dodge, but the increases were ultimately made in the regular Pentagon budget, not the OCO, and dutifully rubber-stamped by both the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House.
Besides direct Pentagon spending, there will be war-related increases in the Department of Veterans Affairs (13 percent), the Department of Homeland Security (3 percent) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (19 percent).
In order to fulfill his goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2024—which was presented as a major objective in his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Trump is also proposing a 12 percent increase in NASA funding next year.
There are two interconnected and overriding considerations in the 2021 budget plan. Together these amount to a significant acceleration of the wealth transfer from the working class to the top one percent that has been underway for the past four decades.
2021 budget categories proposed by the White House over the next decade
The first priority is the maintenance of the $1.5 trillion tax cuts—enacted in 2017 and set to expire in 2025—for corporations and the wealthy, which reduced government revenues and drove deficits up to 4.7 percent of GDP, significantly higher than the 2.7 percent average of the past 50 years. The second consideration is the drive to reduce and eventually eliminate the social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, on which the most vulnerable sections of the working class and poor depend.
The federal deficit is estimated at $1 trillion for 2020, more than double what the Trump administration claimed in the budget and tax cut proposals in 2017. The new plan claims the deficit will be reduced by a total of $4.6 trillion in the next decade and will be completely eliminated by 2035. During the 2016 election campaign, Trump promised to completely pay off the federal debt in eight years. Instead, it has rocketed upwards to $23 trillion, the largest of any country in the world.
Meanwhile, the plan assumes a pace of overall economic growth that is significantly higher than that which is predicted by most economists. The Trump budget plan projects an economic growth rate of 3.1 percent in the final quarter of fiscal 2020 and 3.0 percent in all of 2021 and the rest of the decade. The US economy has been growing at a quarterly average rate of approximately 2.2 percent throughout the Trump presidency. The Congressional Budget Office projects growth rates of between 1.6 and 1.7 percent over the next ten years.
Trump claimed he would accelerate US economic growth to four and even five percent, but this is impossible under capitalism, dominated by financial speculation, wage cutting, and militarism. The plan also makes the assumption that interest rates will remain at historic lows for another ten years.
The budget plan will have little immediate effect, since neither the Democratic-controlled House nor the Republican-controlled Senate would agree to such massive cuts on the eve of the elections. Instead, the document represents an assurance by Trump to corporate America of the general trajectory of his administration, assuming he remains in office.
As has been the case throughout the Trump presidency, including during the disastrously unsuccessful attempt to remove him from office, the Democrats are mouthing opposition while preparing to collaborate with the White House on the 2021 budget. Several provisions are designed for the purpose of providing a path for House Democrats to negotiate with Trump, such as the offer to carve $130 billion from Medicare prescription drug costs by forcing a drop in prices.
Typical of the posturing by Democrats was a statement released on Friday by the House Budget Committee majority that said it was on “high alert” for attempts by the administration to circumvent Congress. “If the budget is as destructive and irresponsible as the President’s previous proposals, House Democrats will do everything in our power to stop the cuts and policies from coming to pass,” they said.

THE REASON TRUMP IS NOT PROSECUTING EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!

 

More Americans Are Going on Strike

For decades, the decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity “surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked “the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway, and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform. People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate concepts.
Without a union, exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job, and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens, but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill intent.
The new BLS data reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

 

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.” 
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi


BERNIE SANDERS CALLS FOR CONSTRUCTION OF 'EMERGENCY HOUSING' BUT NOT FOR AMERICA'S MILLION HOMELESS

THE DEM POLS CAN'T OPEN THEIR MOUTHS WITHOUT SPEWING AMNESTY! AMNESTY! AMNESTY! GIVE OUR DEM VOTING ILLEGALS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO AND VOTE FOR MORE!

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 (BLOG: THE

NUMBER IS CLOSER TO 40 MILLION, NOW DO THE 

MATH), 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.



Bernie Sanders Calls for Construction of ‘Emergency Housing’ over Coronavirus

TOPSHOT - Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders addresses a primary election night rally in Carson, California, May 17, 2016. Sanders scored a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary in Oregon, boosting his argument for keeping his underdog campaign alive through the conclusion of the primary process. Several …
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty
2:10

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Saturday called for the construction of “emergency housing” as a means to address the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
“We need to construct emergency housing to make sure that the homeless, survivors of domestic violence, and college students quarantined off campus are able to receive the shelter, health care, and nutrition they need,” Sanders said on Saturday:

We need to construct emergency housing to make sure that the homeless, survivors of domestic violence, and college students quarantined off campus are able to receive the shelter, health care, and nutrition they need.


Sanders’ call follows President Trump’s decision to make an emergency declaration as local officials, organizations, and businesses across the United States take drastic steps –shutting down their operations, banning large gatherings, postponing elections, and suspending their events — in an effort to quell the effects of the novel coronavirus.
“To unleash the full power of the federal government for this effort, today I’m officially declaring a national emergency,” Trump said on Friday.
“The next eight weeks are critical. We can learn and we will turn a corner on this virus,” he continued. “Some of the doctors say it will wash through, it will flow through. Interesting terms. And very accurate, I think.”
Overall, the president stressed the “overriding goal” of stopping the spread of the virus and helping “all Americans impacted by this.”
Sanders, meanwhile, has been delivering near-daily updates on the coronavirus and using the opportunities to plug his vision for a universal health care system.
“Our country is at a severe disadvantage compared to every other major country on earth because we do not guarantee health care to all people as a right,” Sanders said on Thursday, making similar remarks on Friday.
“Poll after poll already shows us that the American people understand that we must do what every other major country on earth does, and that is to guarantee health care to all of our people as a human right, not a privilege,” he said on Friday.
“As we begin to see the failures and vulnerabilities of the current health care system, my guess is that those numbers, and the demand for universal health care, will only go up,” he added:
Bernie Sanders / YouTube
Volume 90%




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.

Many Guatemalans Aren't Seeking Asylum in US Over Violence, Political Persecution. They Want Giant Homes.

By Todd Bensman

Townhall.com, March 3, 2020



Comprehensive Immigration Reform Should be Renamed the “Overwhelm America Act"
How Sanders and radical Dems weaponize compassion to destroy America.
By Michael Cutler


Tom Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants

NEIL MUNRO
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.” NEIL MUNRO


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.

Biden, Sanders Face off in Debate Overshadowed by Virus

Biden, Sanders face off in debate overshadowed by virus
Washington (AFP) – Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders meet on Sunday for the first one-on-one debate of the Democratic presidential primary campaign, now overshadowed by the spread of the new coronavirus.
Both men have cancelled rallies and two state contests have been postponed in the wake of the outbreak, which has killed at least 57 Americans and upended daily life across the country.
Many states and cities have clamped down on large gatherings and closed schools, which are often used as polling places, to help contain the epidemic.
Frontrunner Biden and self-described “democratic socialist” Sanders are vying to replace President Donald Trump, who was on Saturday cleared of the COVID-19 illness by his physician after meeting with members of a Brazilian delegation who later tested positive.
They will face off for two hours from 8:00 pm (0000 GMT Monday), but Democratic officials have shifted the venue from Arizona to a TV studio in Washington DC with no live audience because of infection fears.
The debate comes ahead of key electoral contests on Tuesday in Florida, Ohio, Illinois and Arizona. Officials in all four states said they would work to make conditions safe for voters.
But Georgia delayed its primary election by nearly two months on Saturday, with state Democratic Party chairwoman Senator Nikema Williams warning that the ballot risked compromising the health and safety of voters.
A day earlier, Louisiana announced it would postpone its own primary vote by 11 weeks.
Both candidates have curtailed campaigning, cancelling rallies in Ohio, Illinois and elsewhere, and telling staffers to work from home.

Biden surge

Biden, who is reliant on the older demographic that is more at risk from the outbreak, has held online campaign events and has urged voters to look for alternative ways to cast their ballot.
“If voters are feeling healthy, not exhibiting symptoms, and don’t believe they’ve been exposed to COVID-19, please vote on Tuesday,” deputy campaign manager and communications director Kate Bedingfield said in a statement.
Sanders sounded more supportive about postponing primaries without explicitly calling for a delay.
Officials must “make sure that everybody who wants to vote has the right to vote, and that may not be the case today,” he said.
After a disastrous start, former vice president Biden has surged to the front of the race with a sweep of every state to vote in the American South so far.
Biden leads the overall race as well with 878 delegates over Sanders’ 725. To win the nomination, a candidate needs a majority of 1,991.
In a speech Wednesday, Sanders said he was winning the “ideological debate” but acknowledged that he was “losing the debate over electability” — that is, the all-important goal for many Democratic voters of finding the candidate best able to defeat Donald Trump.
The current consensus in the party points to Biden as the candidate best positioned to achieve that goal.