Trump Mocks ‘Pro-Union’ Biden: ‘His Entire Career Has Been an Act of Economic Treason, Union Destruction’
Former President Donald Trump mocked President Joe Biden during a speech to auto workers in Macomb County, Michigan, for declaring himself the “most pro-union president” in American history despite a record of supporting job-killing free trade.
“For decades, you’ve watched rotten and crooked politicians like Biden treat American jobs as disposable and American workers as expendable,” Trump said. “They sat back and got rich by taking bribes and letting other countries rape and pillage our jobs and our wealth.”
“Joe Biden claims to be the most pro-union president in history. Nonsense. His entire career has been an act of economic treason and union destruction,” Trump continued. “He’s destroyed unions, shipping millions of American jobs overseas while personally taking money from foreign nations, hand over fist. Look at the money he got from China.”
Trump made a point to call out Biden’s record of backing free trade deals, including those that helped send millions of Americans’ jobs overseas:
He backed NAFTA, he backed China’s entering the World Trade Organization, he backed the horrendous Trans-Pacific Partnership which would have destroyed the American auto industry had I not stopped it … Biden also backed a gentleman by the name of Barack Hussein Obama and his atrocious Korean trade deal.
“Joe Biden has backed every single blood-sucking globalist attack on U.S. auto workers,” he continued before asking for the endorsement of the United Auto Workers (UAW) members, who are currently striking against General Motors (GM), Ford, and Stellantis.
RELATED — WOW! Trump to Auto Workers: Biden Conducting an “ASSASSINATION” of Your Jobs
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
THE BELOW WAS PERPETRATED BY GAMER LAWYER BRIAN DEESE WHO WORKED OUT OF THE BIDEN REGIME FOR BIDEN'S BIGGEST PAYMASTER BLACKROCK.
That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
Biden, long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
Why Biden supports the unionization of the Amazon workforce
On Sunday night, President Joe Biden issued a video statement fully backing the efforts of the Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionize workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Nearly 6,000 workers at the facility, which is located just outside of Birmingham, are currently voting on whether to join the RWDSU.
Biden clearly called on workers in Alabama to vote “yes” on the union drive, for which balloting concludes on March 29. “The National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say unions are allowed to exist,” he said. “It said we should encourage unions.”
He continued, “Today and over the next few days and weeks workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace. This is vitally important—a vitally important choice—as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis, and the reckoning of race—what it reveals about the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”
Biden’s intervention is historically unprecedented. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law in 1935, the leaders of the newly organized industrial unions declared that “The president wants you to join a union.” But FDR never actually said that.
In this case, Biden gave no indication of impartiality, all but calling on workers to vote the union in and accusing Amazon of intimidation. Biden is putting the entire prestige of the White House behind the vote. He would not have done this unless he felt that the direct support of his administration was both necessary to ensure a “yes” vote in Bessemer and strategically important.
The very fact that Biden has intervened so forcefully exposes the claims that what is involved in the unionization campaign at Amazon has anything to do with the interests of Amazon workers. Biden’s entire career in the Senate, from 1973 to 2009, coincides with the abandonment by the Democratic Party of any program of social reform and its accommodation to “Reaganomics.”
Long known as Delaware’s “senator from DuPont,” Biden served on committees that were most sensitive to the interests of the ruling class, including the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. He supported the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, a milestone in the deregulation of the banks, and other right-wing measures. After nearly four decades in the Senate, Biden became Obama’s vice president, helping to oversee the massive bailout of Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent restructuring of class relations to benefit the rich. That included the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, based on a 50 percent cut in the pay of all newly hired autoworkers.
In the 2020 elections, Biden won the Democratic Party nomination for president through the intervention of the party leadership on the basis of an explicit repudiation of any program of social reform. Biden was promoted as the right-wing alternative to Bernie Sanders.
Biden’s aggressive intervention on behalf of the unionization campaign at Amazon can only be interpreted as a strategic, and not merely tactical decision by a significant faction of the ruling class. What are the considerations motivating this policy?
First, the ruling class confronts an unprecedented crisis, which has been enormously intensified by the pandemic. As a result of the refusal of the ruling class to take the necessary measures to save lives, nearly 530,000 people have died from COVID-19 over the past year. The impact of mass death, combined with the disastrous social and economic situation, is having a profoundly radicalizing impact on the consciousness of workers and youth.
Trump has responded to this situation with the promotion of fascistic organizations that will be used as a spearhead against working class unrest. The Democrats are attempting to smother social opposition by utilizing the unions. This is combined with their relentless efforts to divide workers against each other through the promotion of the politics of racial and gender identity. Significantly, Biden framed his intervention at Amazon in racial terms, presenting unions as instruments for defending “especially Black and Brown workers.”
Second, the international situation is no less concerning to the ruling class, which is determined to maintain its global hegemonic position through the use of military force. The Biden administration is carrying out an increasingly confrontational policy toward Russia and, in particular, China. The logic of this policy leads to war. In the event of a major “great power conflict,” the pro-capitalist unions will be critical in promoting national chauvinism and suppressing the class struggle. War abroad requires a disciplined “labor movement” at home.
Biden’s intervention at Amazon is part of a broader strategy of promoting the unions and integrating them ever more directly into the state apparatus and corporate management. Prior to his inauguration in January, Biden pledged that he would be the most “pro-union” president ever.
In mid-November, shortly after the 2020 elections, Biden held a meeting with the leaders of all the major unions, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, along with corporate executives from General Motors, Microsoft, Target and other companies. Biden reportedly told the meeting that he is “a union guy,” but insisted “that’s not anti-business.” He added that “we’re in a pretty dark hole right now,” but “we [that is, the union executives, the corporate CEOs and the incoming Biden administration] all agree on common goals.”
The strategy Biden is pursuing is known as corporatism—that is, the integration of the government with the corporations and the unions on the basis of a defense of the capitalist system.
It has been decades since the AFL-CIO was associated in any way with the defense of workers’ interests against the corporations and the ruling class. Since the isolation and defeat of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981, the trade union movement has been completely integrated into the structures of corporate management. During the 1980s, the unions played a critical role in isolating and suppressing opposition to the ruling class counter-offensive spearheaded by the Reagan administration.
With the assistance of the unions, strike activity was almost entirely suppressed in the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century, facilitating an increase in social inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s.
In 2018, during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), a lawyer for AFSCME summed up the role of the unions by saying that the “agency fee”—the requirement that public service employees in some states pay the equivalent of dues even if they opt out of joining a union—“is the tradeoff for no strikes.” Without maintaining the financial security of the unions, he warned, “you can raise an untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”
The corporatist organizations like the AFL-CIO are still called “unions,” but their actual practice and role bear no relationship to the function traditionally associated with the term “union.” They are not workers’ organizations, but instruments of management and the state.
The ruling class, however, is extremely concerned with and sensitive to the growth of opposition in the working class, which has been concretized in the movement for rank-and-file committees, including among Amazon workers. The ruling class is, moreover, aware of the ability of workers in the US and internationally to utilize social media and other forms of communication to share information and organize outside of the control of the corporatist unions.
There is particular concern over the political radicalization of Amazon workers, who have become even more critical to the overall process of capitalist exploitation since the onset of the pandemic. The world’s fifth largest employer added 427,000 jobs in 2020, bringing its total to 1.3 million employees worldwide, including half a million in the US.
The promotion of the unions is aimed at countering the expanding movement of rank-and-file workers. It is aimed at subordinating workers to the array of laws that come into effect when the unions are established as the “sole legitimate” representative of the workers. In return, the union executives will be given access to the union dues that come from the institutionalization of these organizations in broader sections of industry.
The combination of aggressive backing by the government and anger and opposition among Amazon workers could produce a victory for the union drive in Bessemer. Whatever the outcome of the vote, the fight to establish and build rank-and-file committees must be developed and expanded. Workers cannot allow themselves to be disciplined by the pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist trade union apparatus.
This must be combined with a new political strategy to mobilize the working class in the US and internationally in the fight for socialist policies, including the expropriation of pandemic profiteers like Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and the transformation of Amazon and other logistics companies into public utilities, democratically controlled and collectively owned by the working class.
At its most fundamental level, the promotion of the unions by the ruling class is aimed at quarantining workers from socialism. The overriding fear of the ruling class is that the objective radicalization of the working class, intensified by the pandemic, will acquire a socialist leadership and political program. It is this fear that is behind Biden’s extraordinary intervention at Amazon.
Joe Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors, those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019 during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall, Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff Zients.
As Breitbart News reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000 that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
at @JxhnBinder
THERE IS NO GREATER DANGER TO
AMERICA THAN JOE BIDEN!
Too Big To Trust
REVIEW: 'American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence' by Gerard Baker
(Amazon)
September 24, 2023
If you're a working opinion journalist in America, you've probably spent some time in the past few years toying with a book idea about our national crisis. The atmospherics of the moment all but demand it. What was once quaintly thought of as the news cycle has become a continuous blur of despond. Political problems crossbreed with cultural ailments and split opinions along lines so fresh and inconsistent that the terms left and right lose shades of meaning with each new debate. Wild claims disseminate via digital firehose and service competing ideological camps that no longer share a base reality.
And that's before we get to the significant failings of our recent elected officials, the scandals of our billion-dollar corporations, the prejudices of our legacy media, or the lies proffered by our public and private institutions. In other words, before we can even approach our real-world challenges, Americans are faced with an impenetrable fog of interests and biases that all but precludes thoughtful contemplation.
It's no wonder we've lost trust in just about everything. According to all major polls, American trust is nosediving across the board. We don't trust government, media, education, big business, technology, or one another. And this isn't merely unpleasant background noise. Mistrust and distrust are active players in the political and cultural life of the country, shaping our days as surely as any lawmaker, lobbying group, or media behemoth.
We could really use a grand theory right about now—something ingeniously simple to capture how we got here and point us toward clear solutions. But as Gerard Baker argues in the traumatically brilliant American Breakdown, the origins of our national trust crisis are complex and compounded, and it won't be resolved in one stroke.
Baker, editor at large at the Wall Street Journal, contends that the problem began with the United States' objectively poor performance on a number of fronts. "It's not that Americans have suddenly, for no reason, started distrusting institutions that merit trust," he writes. "It is that the institutions themselves have become untrustworthy." Here Baker wisely resists the low-hanging fruit of Trump-age resentment as an explanation in itself. "To focus on the most extreme and hateful manifestations of public disillusionment is to miss the underlying cause," he writes. "It is the guided leadership of the last twenty years rather than the response to it that explains America's current plight."
The evidence is compelling. As Baker notes, long before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, the United States entered a long and dispiriting foreign war on the strength of bad intelligence, a collapse of the American financial system halved the average net worth of middle-class households, the increasing flow of illegal immigrants was serially ignored, Big Tech grew rich by trading in customers' personal data, and social mobility began to stall. As Baker puts it: "To suggest that [Trump] is the architect of collapsing faith in America would be to assign him the kind of power and influence only he thinks he really wields."
After Trump was elected, he pounded away on the entrenched political establishment as the source of these mishaps. And then the establishment did its best to prove him right with a new batch of bungling and flat-out deception: the false charge of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential election, the now hyper-partisan media's daily catastrophizing about conservatives, and the mistakes and misdirection of public health officials responding to the COVID pandemic. "Leading figures in public health across the country," writes Baker, "essentially inverted the scientific method," starting with answers and culling data to match. Americans noticed.
Baker adds to this run of failure the emergence of two complementary trends that were foisted on the public at the height of our national doubt: First, the rise of an "overclass that has more in common with its counterparts in London, Paris, or Singapore than it does with its compatriots in Louisville, Peoria, or Scranton." This is the Davos crowd, the influencers, institutionalists, and billionaires who disdain national identity and embrace climate change as religion. Baker's portrayal of the Davos set is peerless and one of the book's crowning delights. Consider his summary of Davos Speak: "Wander into a Davos session and you will catch stakeholders dialoguing and mainstreaming multifaceted metrics in a cross-platform environment before actioning toward implementation mode. It's English, Jim, but not as we know it."
These mainstreaming multifaceted muckety-mucks often find common cause with another emergent class that also speaks its own language: the radical ideologues of the campus left. What the globally minded Davos folks share with the identitarians and intersectionalists is a messianic disregard for the average American's well-being and, in some cases, a hostility toward his real concerns. Most important, the two elite forces pushed our culture and institutions in bizarre and damaging directions that do real harm to ordinary people. In something like ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) investing, we see clearly how the two groups merge to shortchange everyday Americans in the name of globally minded heroism. ESG-guided funds invest your hard-earned money only in companies that meet certain environmental and social criteria, but they generally underperform funds that are still stuck on the crazy idea that making money for shareholders is paramount. "Not only are [Americans] forced to watch as their corporate overlords use their powerful positions to pursue ideological goals many do not approve of," Baker writes, "but they are actually paying for the privilege of it."
Baker astutely dismantles a slew of ailing institutions, devoting a chapter each to politics, corporate America, news media, science, education, and technology. Each is a gem packed with insight and wit. Noting, for example, in his chapter on education that a recent survey showed 80 percent of Harvard faculty identified as "liberal" or "very liberal," 1 percent identified as "conservative," and zero said they were "very conservative," Baker observes inarguably, "These are North Korean levels of political conformity."
But the book's great strength is in resisting causal reductionism and daring to approach the trust fiasco in its combined magnitude. No single factor can begin to explain it. In his chapter on social trust, Baker considers the three main causes of mistrust cited in scholarly literature: corruption, economic inequality, and racial diversity. They all appear to play some role in our present crisis, but none dispositively. After all, as Baker points out, Transparency International still ranks the United States as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. And from 2011 to 2021, "on an income basis, the United States actually became a slightly more equal society, and yet, levels of social trust have continued to decline." Similarly, polls have shown a gargantuan shift away from bigotry in this country over the last half century, yet "Americans of all races seem to have become markedly more pessimistic about racial harmony in the very recent past."
Baker knows the problem is more massive than any individual grievance. Indeed, he writes movingly about the challenge of massiveness itself. "The vast scale of the institutions may be justified in terms of economies of scale, or by the larger purpose they are serving, but dealing with these Brobdingnagian entities induces a sense of smallness in us," he says. It's an underappreciated point, and it applies to our interaction with businesses, universities, and government. They've become, in some sense, too big to trust.
Baker is modest and uncharacteristically vague about offering solutions. But this is apt, as nothing elicits mistrust as surely as confidently proposed fixes. And grasping the size of our dilemma, he surely understands that the best we can hope at the moment is a good wish list. He'd like media companies and universities to be more ideologically diverse in their hiring. He suggests more transparency from technology platforms, more accountability from big business, and so on.
If there's good news here, it's that opinion writers can stop worrying about their possible books on the great American crack-up. Gerard Baker has beaten them to it with a definitive account of our complicated and uncertain times.
American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence
by Gerard Baker
Twelve, 288 pp., $30
Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of Commentary.
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