How the Rich Use the Government and Both Major Political Parties to Redistribute Our Income to Themselves: New Data Shows H1-B Visa Workers Take US Jobs

“I had a wonderful job,” Craig DiAngelo said of his work in Hartford, Connecticut with Northeast Utilities, New England’s largest electricity and natural gas provider with over 3.4 million customers. “It was like family at work. I would have kept working there until I couldn’t work anymore. It was the best job I ever had.” Then in October 2013, Diangelo and his 219 fellow IT workers learned they were being replaced by less skillful, but cheaper, imported labor through a US program called the H1-B visa.

“The CIO (Chief Information Officer) came down from Boston,” Diangelo said, “and said that she would hold a town hall meeting to discuss the future of IT at our company which was then known as Northeast Utilities. We all got into the room, 220 of us. She proceeded to tell us that, ‘…well folks we are going to outsource IT infrastructure and IT development, and we have chosen two companies Infosys and Tata. And the reason that we’re doing this is because global workers can adjust to change a lot faster than the American worker.’” The CIO lied.

The idea that a worker from India is a global worker and a US worker is not is an absurdity in and of itself, which Diangelo realized immediately.

“Now when you take a look at this,” Diangelo said. “Isn’t the American worker also a global worker? Don’t we have some input into what we say, or what gets said of a global economy? We (the USA) are a very large market.”

The first H1-B visa workers began arriving in mid-December 2013. The soon-to-be-former employees trained their replacements, but management called this “knowledge transfer,” Diangelo said. “The people we trained didn’t have the skills to do our jobs. Management assumed the replacements could be trained in a few weeks, but the people from India were so unskilled the knowledge transfers lasted several months.”

Hundreds of thousands of US high tech workers have been replaced by poverty wage H1-B visa workers. Some estimates place the number of displaced US high tech workers in the low millions. The list of US corporations using this scam is long, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Xerox, Toys R Us, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and thousands of other companies.

The AFL-CIO reported in 2009 that as many as 25% of imported workers have fraudulent visas. Today, this translates to as many as 17.5 million foreign employees gaming the system.

The US government, which is controlled by the billionaires bankrolling both major political parties, use a number of ways to redistribute income from the 99 to the 1 percent. One of these ways is through the H1-B visa.

The H-1 temporary worker visa program was originally established in the 1950s to grant foreign individuals with “distinguished merit and ability” an opportunity to find legal employment inside the United States. It was amended by the Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT), a measure that added the specialty occupation requirement – which means the job must require a bachelor’s degree or higher, or equivalent work experience, in a specialized field – and the visa’s dual intent status, which allows petitioners to seek legal permanent residency (a green card) while petitioning for and holding their temporary resident status. With recommendations from industry leaders and academics, the act also established the 65,000-visa cap. The visa became known as the H1-B in 1990.

U.S. corporations use the visa to outsource US high tech jobs to poverty wage nations while some corporations import these temporary low wage workers into the US in order to displace their higher compensated US citizen-employees.

Proponents of the visa say 130,000 to 195,000 H1-B visa workers are necessary every year to meet the “market conditions” of the United States. This is a lie. Pure and simple. The real market conditions in the United States mean higher compensation to US workers, but the H1-B visa distorts salaries and benefits downward. Importing low wage workers via the H1-B visa means artificially increasing the supply of US labor. This is called “distorting the market.”

At any time there are millions of H1-B visa workers in the United States since these workers can apply for the three-year extensions, and then apply for permanent residency via green cards, all of which distorts the labor market of the United States in favor of the billionaire shareholders.

According to the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI), US employers pay their H1-B visa workers “up to 40 percent less” than the US employees they replace. The EPI report does not mention most H1-B visa workers do not receive any benefits for their work, and that is particularly true of the US jobs outsourced and taken over by H1-B visa workers in India and elsewhere. This suggests a great amount of H1-B visa workers receive less than 50 percent of the total compensation package US high tech workers earn.

The difference between the higher US employee compensation and the new poverty wages and salaries of the H1-B visa workers goes straight into the pockets of the 1 percent via higher corporate profits, surging share prices, and rising dividends.

The H1-B visa is one of the many perfect examples of how easily income and wealth have been redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via government actions. This, in itself, demonstrates how corrupt the US government is. No doubt, our current government is one of the most, if not the most, corrupt in the advanced economies of the world. So, too, are both major political parties.

The corporate press will always lie to you on this issue regardless of whether liberal or conservative. They will tell us the US has a shortage of high tech workers, and that we must import workers to fill jobs. The press will never tell you there are hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of US high tech workers unemployed in their field, like Craig DiAngelo, who are ready and raring to go.

As for Craig DiAngelo, he is now running for the US Congress as a Republican, and, as you might expect, one of his key issues has to do with the H1-B visa.

https://qz.com/1041506/new-data-on-h-1b-visas-show-how-it-outsourcers-are-short-changing-workers/?utm_source=YPL&yptr=yahoo

Top 10 H-1B employers are all IT offshore outsourcing firms, costing U.S. workers tens of thousands of jobs–Economic Policy Institute

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Trumpland: How Many United Technologies Carrier Jobs Did Trump Really Save?

Carrier Corporation is moving more production to Mexico, and laying off hundreds of workers in Indianapolis.

Donald Trump negotiated with United Technology (UT) officials to keep 1000 US jobs from being exported to Mexico. That means, however, that Trump failed to save 1100 other United Technology jobs from being exported to Mexico. Give Trump some credit. He negotiated and won some concessions.

Last year UT announced it would export 2100 jobs to Mexico, and Trump railed about how he would tax the products of any US jobs exporter that manufactured stuff overseas, and then exported their products to the USA. Trump was going to be tough on corporations like UT.

So when push came to shove, tough guy Trump backed down. Trump made a promise to save all of those jobs, and he backed far away. Give him credit, Trump wasn’t as weak-kneed on this issue as President Obama. He saved some of the jobs.

Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought.

Bernie Sanders wrote,

“Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad? In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.”

This sends a loud and clear signal that any corporation can threaten to export jobs and receive tax cuts that will be paid for by US workers.

Instead of being tough, Trump was pummeled into submission. United Technologies makes billions of US defense contracts. Instead of leveraging that, Trump offered them tax cuts. What a wimp! He had them by the financial scotum with those defense contracts, or through the use of selective tariffs, and Trump fell to his knees with a light verbal body blow. Apparently, taking a dive is Trump’s art of the deal.

So what needs to be done?

Sanders wrote, “If United Technologies or any other company wants to keep outsourcing decent-paying American jobs, those companies must pay an outsourcing tax equal to the amount of money it expects to save by moving factories to Mexico or other low-wage countries. They should not receive federal contracts or other forms of corporate welfare. They must pay back all of the tax breaks and other corporate welfare they have received from the federal government (and state governments, and with interest). And they must not be allowed to reward their executives with stock options, bonuses or golden parachutes for outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries. If Donald Trump won’t stand up for America’s working class, we must.”

For more on the story click the link below.

Bernie Sanders: United Technologies Executives Just Showed Corporations How To Beat Donald Trump-Washington Post

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Boycott Toys R Us: The Company is Exporting US Accounting Jobs to India

The New York Times recently reported that Toys R Us had exported 67 jobs from its headquarters to India via the H1B visa.

According to the Times,

“A temporary visa program known as H-1B allows American employers to hire foreign professionals with college degrees and “highly specialized knowledge,” mainly in science and technology, to meet their needs for particular skills. Employers, according to the federal guidelines, must sign a declaration that the foreign workers “will not adversely affect the working conditions” of Americans or lower their wages.

In recent years, however, global outsourcing and consulting firms have obtained thousands of temporary visas to bring in foreign workers who have taken over jobs that had been held by American workers. The Labor Department has opened an investigation of possible visa violations by contractors at the Walt Disney Company and at Southern California Edison, where immigrants replaced Americans in jobs they were doing in this country. Four former workers at Disney have filed discrimination complaints against the company. The companies say they have complied with all applicable laws.”

The problem with the H1-B visa are numerous. They are primarily used to reduce American wages and salaries, for starters. In addition, there must be a shortage of US workers in order for a US corporation to bring in H1-B workers, but there never is a shortage. The Times reports, “…in recent years, many jobs that American workers lost have been in accounting and back-office administration — although there is no shortage of Americans qualified to do that kind of work.”

Then the H1-B visa worker must have “exceptional skills,” but that is rare, especially in the case of Toys R Us. Toys R Us employees trained their replacements so their jobs could be more easily exported to India.

Christine Brigagliano, a lawyer in San Francisco with extensive experience advising American companies on obtaining visas, says “Those contractors are signing on the bottom line, saying we will not undercut the wages and working conditions of Americans. But, in fact, they are.”

Of course they are! That is the purpose of the H1-B visa, and always has been.

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More US Jobs Lost as US Taxpayer Dollars Are Being Exported to India Via Outsourcing

Computerworld reports that the University of California is outsourcing eighty IT jobs to an Indian corporation, HCL. US workers are now training their H1-B replacements. Note that H1-B visas are supposed to be given only when qualified Americans cannot be found to do a job in the USA.

The situation is really this; US citizens are qualified to train their H2-B replacements. This means the H1-B visa recipients are not qualified to do the job until they receive training from the US citizens they are replacing, who are sufficiently qualified to train their replacements.

In other words, the H1-B system is being used to undercut US wages and salaries. That is this program’s sole purpose. When a US worker has to train an H1-B visa worker to do their job it is the H1-B worker who is not qualified and the US worker who is.

One of the effected University of California employees wrote California US Senator Diane Feinstein, a person who was reported to be worth between $43 and $99 million in 2005. Her wealth and income has likely grown since then. Much of the growth is likely due to exporting jobs and outsourcing jobs to H1-B visa workers. When you push wages down, or export jobs overseas, the difference between the old higher pay and the new lower wages goes straight into the pockets of the rich via higher corporate profits, rising share prices and surging dividends.

Feinstein clearly has an incentive to say one thing in public and an opposite thing with private bankers.

Anyway, the US citizen IT worker wrote,

“The decision to move the University of California San Francisco datacenters from California to Washington was difficult to grasp. I saw several of my long time co-workers terminated, and my California tax dollars that go into the UC system being diverted to the state of Washington.

“The recent decision to outsource 17% of Information Technology to India based Company HCL has literally hit home. I am being asked to do knowledge transfer to a foreigner so they can take over my job in February of 2017.

“I am asking for your support in requesting an oversight with the Department of Labor in regards to the contract between HCL of India and University of California San Francisco. This contract will more than likely not save the University money, but it will definitely wipe out what is now a somewhat diverse workplace.”

According to Computerworld, “As a U.S. senator, Feinstein could have asked the U.S. Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to review the situation. She could have also asked California’s governor to take a look at the IT outsourcing or contact the University of California directly — a public institution that also receives federal dollars — to ask why a partially taxpayer-supported university is moving jobs to India.”

Instead Feinstein did nothing, except respond with a form letter.

For more on this story, click the following link to Computerworld. Outsourced Workers Ask Feinstein for Help and Get a Form Letter in Return–Computerworld

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The Verizon Strike: It’s About Saving the American Dream

At least 36,000 Verizon workers have been on strike since Wednesday of last week after failing to reach a new labor agreement. This strike is about lowering labor costs via exporting jobs and using low wage contractors in order to redistribute income from Verizon’s employees to rich shareholders via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and soaring share prices.

Here’s how the system is rigged by federal legislators.

Verizon earned, or overcharged their customers depending on your point of view, $39 billion over the last three years, and now management wants employees to make concessions in pay and benefits, as well as other things. Workers at Verizon have said enough is enough! Verizon made $19.3 billion in US pretax profits from 2008 to 2012, yet didn’t pay any federal income taxes during the period. Instead, it got $535 million in tax rebates. Verizon’s effective federal income tax rate was negative 2.8 percent from 2008 to 2012. Now the company wants to reduce employee compensation despite billions in profits.

As Verizon employee James Brugund said, “American companies want American profits, but they don’t want to pay American wages, and that should be stopped.”

Among the union’s complaints: the offshoring of thousands of jobs to workers abroad, and shifting work to low-wage, non-union contractors. But one of their chief complaints is about being forced to work in locations far from home for months at a time.

“Verizon lineman Ting Chin, who already commutes more than 80 miles from Poughkeepsie, NY, to Manhattan, said that several of his colleagues were sent to Buffalo, New York — almost 400 miles away — for a long-term job, a fate that he says he narrowly avoided.”

In addition, Verizon wants to shift 50 percent of its work to low wage contractors, via a new labor union contract. Other jobs that are no longer done by Verizon employees but are instead handed to lower-wage contractors from outside or inside the U.S. include:

* VZ Business Monitoring
* eService email, chat and offline
* Dispatch
* Digging work for copper plant and FiOS
* In-home installation and networking
* Door-to-door sales of FiOS
* Materials distribution work/delivery
* Smart Home technology installation/customer
* service and other specialized home services

The company is also negotiating to export more jobs overseas. The company has been in the process of exporting these jobs, mostly, it seems, to Manila, Philippines. Thousands of jobs have been exported in recent months.

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Come Join the Protest Against the Income and Political Power Redistribution Scams Known as Fast Track at Nike Headquarters

** BUS LEAVING AT 8:00AM FROM WESTMINSTER CHURCH IN PORTLAND, 1624 NE Hancock **

President Obama is visiting Oregon to push Fast Track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. This morning, May 8, he’ll be at Nike headquarters to discuss how the TPP will benefit rich shareholders and CEO’s of huge job exporters like Nike, but he won’t mention how many hundreds of thousands of jobs will be exported via the TPP in order to achieve this, at least not to the public.

Nike is exemplary of the race-to-the-bottom globalization that has plagued American manufacturing jobs and fostered the sweatshop labor industry abroad. In fact, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, even wrote his graduate school thesis on a business model based on low-wage foreign labor.

Nike is a perfect example of America’s lost jobs and low-wage future under the TPP. Join us at Nike to tell Obama, #JustDon’tDoit! Stop Fast Track and the TPP!

So join us either at the church listed above, or in front of Nike headquarters on Friday May 8, 2014

On the way back we’ll stop by Rep. Bonamici’s Beaverton office (12725 SW Millikan Way) to tell her: Don’t Walk Away From Jobs & the Environment! If you can, bring a pair of old shoes to leave at her office as a reminder! We’ll be back by 11:30am.

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Obama’s Incredible Trip to Nike Headquarters

(Reuters) – Nike makes all of its products overseas, mostly in Vietnam and China. It does not employ production workers in the United States. If the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is passed by congress, minimal US tariffs on goods imported from Vietnam will virtually vanish, and this means more profits for Nike, but it also means New Balance Shoes will need to export all of its jobs in Maine to Vietnam or China in order to stay competitive with Nike.
In what must be some sort of ridiculous joke, President Barack Obama will travel to outsourcer and jobs exporter Nike Inc headquarters in Oregon May 8 to argue that a 12-nation Pacific trade deal and the fast-track legislation needed to finalize the pact, and this is good for workers.
Obama faces tough opposition from his fellow Democrats in Congress over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, which they fear could hurt American jobs and the environment.
He will use the trip to the headquarters of Nike, a company once criticized for its use of “sweatshops,” to “discuss how workers will benefit from progressive, high-standards trade agreements that would open up new markets and support high-quality jobs,” the White House said in a statement.
Nike was targeted by labor activists in the early 1990s for contracting with factories in Asia where workers faced dangerous conditions and low pay. The criticism prompted the company to create a code of conduct for contractors and open factories for inspections.
Obama has made the TPP a key part of his effort to rebalance his foreign policy to Asia to counter China’s economic might.
He has argued that the deal would be the most “progressive” and transparent in history, with protections for labor and the environment.
But he has so far failed to sway allies in the labor and environmental movements.

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Stop the Train Wreck Known as the Trans Pacific Partnership

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is the largest income redistribution scam of all time, and it’s being perpetrated on the American public by the corporate news media, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street, and the 1 percent. Here’s a few ways it will impact you should it become law.

1. TPP will allow corporations to outsource even more jobs overseas.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, if the TPP is agreed to, the U.S. will lose more than 130,000 jobs to Vietnam and Japan alone. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Service Sector Jobs will be lost. At a time when corporations have already outsourced over 3 million service sector jobs in the U.S., TPP includes rules that will make it even easier for corporate America to outsource call centers; computer programming; engineering; accounting; and medical diagnostic jobs.

Manufacturing jobs will be lost. As a result of NAFTA, the U.S. lost nearly 700,000 jobs. As a result of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, the U.S. lost over 2.7 million jobs. As a result of the Korea Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. has lost 70,000 jobs. The TPP would make matters worse by providing special benefits to firms that offshore jobs and by reducing the risks associated with operating in low-wage countries.

2. U.S. sovereignty will be undermined by giving corporations the right to challenge our laws before international tribunals.

The TPP creates a special dispute resolution process that allows corporations to challenge any domestic laws that could adversely impact their “expected future profits.”

These challenges would be heard before UN and World Bank tribunals which could require taxpayer compensation to corporations. Those are going to be your tax dollars.

This process undermines our sovereignty and subverts democratically passed laws including those dealing with labor, health, and the environment. In other words, your state and local voting rights on these issues are being stolen, although it will be unconstitutional.

3. Wages, benefits, and collective bargaining will be threatened.

NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, and other free trade agreements have helped drive down the wages and benefits of American workers and have eroded collective bargaining rights.

The TPP will make the race to the bottom worse because it forces American workers to compete with desperate workers in Vietnam where the minimum wage is just 56 cents an hour.

4. Our ability to protect the environment will be undermined.

The TPP will allow corporations to challenge any law that would adversely impact their future profits. Pending claims worth over $14 billion have been filed based on similar language in other trade agreements. Most of these claims deal with challenges to environmental laws in a number of countries. The TPP will make matters even worse by giving corporations the right to sue any of the nations that sign onto the TPP. These lawsuits would be heard in international tribunals bypassing domestic courts.

5. Food Safety Standards will be threatened.

The TPP would make it easier for countries like Vietnam to export contaminated fish and seafood into the U.S. The FDA has already prevented hundreds of seafood imports from TPP countries because of salmonella, e-coli, methyl-mercury and drug residues. But the FDA only inspects 1-2 percent of food imports and will be overwhelmed by the vast expansion of these imports if the TPP is agreed to.

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The Trans-Pacific Trade (TPP) Agreement Must Be Defeated, or This Story Could Easily By Called “Why Wall Street Senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch, Most of the Republican Party, and President Obama Support The Trans Pacific Partnership, the Largest Income Redistribution Treaty of All Time

By Bernie Sanders, US Senator, Reader Supported News

03 January 15

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy. It will also negatively impact some of the poorest people in the world.

The TPP is a treaty that has been written behind closed doors by the corporate world. Incredibly, while Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and major media companies have full knowledge as to what is in this treaty, the American people and members of Congress do not. They have been locked out of the process.

Further, all Americans, regardless of political ideology, should be opposed to the “fast track” process which would deny Congress the right to amend the treaty and represent their constituents’ interests.

The TPP follows in the footsteps of other unfettered free trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA and the Permanent Normalized Trade Agreement with China (PNTR). These treaties have forced American workers to compete against desperate and low-wage labor around the world. The result has been massive job losses in the United States and the shutting down of tens of thousands of factories. These corporately backed trade agreements have significantly contributed to the race to the bottom, the collapse of the American middle class and increased wealth and income inequality. The TPP is more of the same, but even worse.

During my 23 years in Congress, I helped lead the fight against NAFTA and PNTR with China. During the coming session of Congress, I will be working with organized labor, environmentalists, religious organizations, Democrats, and Republicans against the secretive TPP trade deal.

Let’s be clear: the TPP is much more than a “free trade” agreement. It is part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large corporations and Wall Street by outsourcing jobs; undercutting worker rights; dismantling labor, environmental, health, food safety and financial laws; and allowing corporations to challenge our laws in international tribunals rather than our own court system. If TPP was such a good deal for America, the administration should have the courage to show the American people exactly what is in this deal, instead of keeping the content of the TPP a secret.

10 Ways that TPP would hurt Working Families

1. TPP will allow corporations to outsource even more jobs overseas.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, if the TPP is agreed to, the U.S. will lose more than 130,000 jobs to Vietnam and Japan alone. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Service Sector Jobs will be lost. At a time when corporations have already outsourced over 3 million service sector jobs in the U.S., TPP includes rules that will make it even easier for corporate America to outsource call centers; computer programming; engineering; accounting; and medical diagnostic jobs.

Manufacturing jobs will be lost. As a result of NAFTA, the U.S. lost nearly 700,000 jobs. As a result of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, the U.S. lost over 2.7 million jobs. As a result of the Korea Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. has lost 70,000 jobs. The TPP would make matters worse by providing special benefits to firms that offshore jobs and by reducing the risks associated with operating in low-wage countries.

2. U.S. sovereignty will be undermined by giving corporations the right to challenge our laws before international tribunals.

The TPP creates a special dispute resolution process that allows corporations to challenge any domestic laws that could adversely impact their “expected future profits.”

These challenges would be heard before UN and World Bank tribunals which could require taxpayer compensation to corporations.

This process undermines our sovereignty and subverts democratically passed laws including those dealing with labor, health, and the environment.

3. Wages, benefits, and collective bargaining will be threatened.

NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, and other free trade agreements have helped drive down the wages and benefits of American workers and have eroded collective bargaining rights.

The TPP will make the race to the bottom worse because it forces American workers to compete with desperate workers in Vietnam where the minimum wage is just 56 cents an hour.

4. Our ability to protect the environment will be undermined.

The TPP will allow corporations to challenge any law that would adversely impact their future profits. Pending claims worth over $14 billion have been filed based on similar language in other trade agreements. Most of these claims deal with challenges to environmental laws in a number of countries. The TPP will make matters even worse by giving corporations the right to sue any of the nations that sign onto the TPP. These lawsuits would be heard in international tribunals bypassing domestic courts.

5. Food Safety Standards will be threatened.

The TPP would make it easier for countries like Vietnam to export contaminated fish and seafood into the U.S. The FDA has already prevented hundreds of seafood imports from TPP countries because of salmonella, e-coli, methyl-mercury and drug residues. But the FDA only inspects 1-2 percent of food imports and will be overwhelmed by the vast expansion of these imports if the TPP is agreed to.

6. Buy America laws could come to an end.

The U.S. has several laws on the books that require the federal government to buy goods and services that are made in America or mostly made in this country. Under TPP, foreign corporations must be given equal access to compete for these government contracts with companies that make products in America. Under TPP, the U.S. could not even prevent companies that have horrible human rights records from receiving government contracts paid by U.S. taxpayers.

7. Prescription drug prices will increase, access to life saving drugs will decrease, and the profits of drug companies will go up.

Big pharmaceutical companies are working hard to ensure that the TPP extends the monopolies they have for prescription drugs by extending their patents (which currently can last 20 years or more). This would expand the profits of big drug companies, keep drug prices artificially high, and leave millions of people around the world without access to life saving drugs. Doctors without Borders stated that “the TPP agreement is on track to become the most harmful trade pact ever for ?ccess to medicines in developing countries.”

8. Wall Street would benefit at the expense of everyone else.

Under TPP, governments would be barred from imposing “capital controls” that have been successfully used to avoid financial crises. These controls range from establishing a financial speculation tax to limiting the massive flows of speculative capital flowing into and out of countries responsible for the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s. In other words, the TPP would expand the rights and power of the same Wall Street firms that nearly destroyed the world economy just five years ago and would create the conditions for more financial instability in the future.

Last year, I co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Harkin to create a Wall Street speculation tax of just 0.03 percent on trades of derivatives, credit default swaps, and large amounts of stock. If TPP were enacted, such a financial speculation tax may be in violation of this trade agreement.

9. The TPP would reward authoritarian regimes like Vietnam that systematically violate human rights.

The State Department, the U.S. Department of Labor, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all documented Vietnam’s widespread violations of basic international standards for human rights. Yet, the TPP would reward Vietnam’s bad behavior by giving it duty free access to the U.S. market.

10. The TPP has no expiration date, making it virtually impossible to repeal.

Once TPP is agreed to, it has no sunset date and could only be altered by a consensus of all of the countries that agreed to it. Other countries, like China, could be allowed to join in the future. For example, Canada and Mexico joined TPP negotiations in 2012 and Japan joined last year.

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Republished with permission from Readersupportednews.org

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Why is the Democratic Party Establishment Trying to Sound Like Real Democrats Since the November Elections?

After the Republicans shellacked the Democratic Party candidates in the November elections, the Corporate Democratic Establishment appears to have coordinated a series of attacks against the Republican Party, which it should have done a long time ago. So why is the Democratic Establishment doing this now?

The purpose for these attacks may not be to smear Republicans with their gruesome corruption; one can rightly suspect that it is to entice the growing number of grassroots Democrats who have abandoned the party into returning to the polls and voting for candidates of the Wall Street Democratic Party.

One can rightly suspect that the November elections showed the Democratic Establishment that its base was drifting away, and so the establishment is attempting to reestablish its credibility as a party of the people. These are a series of slick public relations stunts to fool its own base into returning to the polls and voting Democratic next time. Since the elections:

1. The Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the Bush torture system, excoriating the ex-president and his white house advisers as the war criminals thugs they are. Most of us knew this more than ten years ago.

2. The New York Times followed that up with an editorial demanding these people be brought to justice.

The establishment is trying to show its liberal base that there exists a difference between the completely bankrupt Republican Party and itself. In the matter of war crimes, however, there is virtually no difference between the two parties. During the first year of his presidency, President Obama squashed an attempt by a Spanish judge to prosecute war crimes against members of the Bush administration. In addition, if the Democratic Establishment and the Obama administration really wanted to prosecute members of the Bush administration for war crimes, which would include such top dogs as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the White House could order its justice department to prepare extradition hearings for those accused. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the head of the United Nations demanded the USA do precisely this. The Obama administration refuses to follow through despite the fact that the US is a signatory to international law governing war crimes and is required to do this.

3. President Obama signed a so-called executive order granting amnesty to an estimated 5 million undocumented immigrants. The big question here, if the president can constitutionally do this, which is debatable, why then does he not issue an executive order granting amnesty to the other 6 million undocumented immigrants in the USA, or those that cross the border illegally tomorrow or next year? This action, of course, will appeal to Hispanic voters, so the establishment hopes.

4. The president negotiated a treaty with the Chinese curbing CO2 emissions. The Establishment hopes this will appeal to its waning environmental base.

5. The president opened the door to normalize relations with Cuba. The establishment hopes those of the far left, which isn’t very far left of center during this contemporary period, will return to the party.

6. MSNB created a documentary broadcast via Rachel Maddox showing that oil and not weapons of mass destruction was the reason the President George W. Bush pursued war in Iraq. Most knowledgeable people knew this more than ten years ago. This should appeal to the disillusioned anti-war faction that has seen the Obama administration continue to wage war for profits throughout the world.

Here’s what the Establishment doesn’t want the grassroots to see. The problem is that more and more of the grassroots know what’s going on.

1. The Democratic Establishment is trying to pass the greatest income redistribution treaty of all time: the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). If the treaty passes through congress President Obama has promised to sign it. Trillions of dollars of income will be redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via this treaty.

The secretive TPP will grant investors of the 0.01 percent special privileges to challenge labeling and health and safety local laws and regulations of the 99 percent; which will effectively eliminate your votes on local and state levels for and against such things (which most people call voter suppression, but in this case it should be called voter elimination), outsource millions of jobs, offer new monopolies for Big Pharma to raise medicine prices they charge you (which redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent), limit food safety standards (which redistributes and transforms your health into the profits of the 1 percent), and block financial regulations aimed at preventing the next financial crisis (which will make it easier for Wall Street to redistribute your income and wealth to the 1 percent). It will also kill the remainder of the US textile industry, destroy millions of jobs in Latin America, drive millions of undocumented immigrants into the United States, and depress wages in both North and South America, all to the benefit of the 1 percent, and all at the expense of the 99 percent. And we can’t forget that it will increase the already massive US trade deficit with other nations, which is supposed to be a bad thing. In other words, this scam is the largest income redistribution treaty of all time from the 99 to the 1 percent. It’s an attack on the middle class.

2. President Obama and the Establishment have worked overtime to see that 95 percent of all income growth since 2009 has gone to the 1 percent.

3. The battle over the omnibus spending bill in December 2014 proves an important point.

Referring to the Democratic Party meltdown in allowing a provision sneakily put in the latest budget bill (by corrupt Wall Street Republican Congressman Kevin Yoder of Kansas) that allows Wall Street investment banks to gamble with taxpayer money and expect to be bailed out if their gamble fails, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine wrote on December 13;

“If the Democrats actually stood for anything other than sounding as progressive as possible without offending their financial backers, then they would do what Republicans always do in these situations: force a shutdown to save their legislation. How many times did Republicans hold the budget hostage to rescue the Bush tax cuts? But the Democrats won’t do that here, because they’re not a real (political) party. They’re a marketing phenomenon, a big chunk of oligarchical”…”single furiously-money-collecting/favor-churning oligarchical Beltway party…cleverly sold to voters as the more reasonable and less nakedly corrupt wing of a two-headed political establishment.”

4. The budget battle of December 2014 proved a particularly gruesome point; both political parties have been totally corrupted by big money unleashed by the Reagan tax cuts, as well as other tax cuts, and the politicians of the US government are absolutely corrupt, with few exceptions, such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, Alan Grayson, and perhaps David Vitter. That’s why the political and economic game is totally rigged against the 99 percent.

5. The White House coordinated the crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street.

The Democrats, exactly like the Republicans, are all about redistributing income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent.

That’s why the Democratic base is leaving the Democratic Party because the Party Establishment left the base behind two decades ago, and continues to favor the rich and powerful over working families, just like the Republican Party. In this respect there is no difference between the twin parties of corruption. And no slick public relations campaign is going to keep the grassroots in line.

More and more grassroots Democrats are leaving the rotted ship called the Democratic Party because the Establishment can no longer direct their attention away from economic issues by appealing to social issues, which is what the latest wave of Democratic Establishment actions are intended to do. These actions may be the last gasp of a sinking skip.

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