by Aaron Klein
ENSURING DEMOCRAT RULE
As noted earlier, mass amnesty for 10 to 20 million illegals would profoundly alter the American electorate. Many champions of amnesty have noted this openly, although the news media routinely neglect to report it. A good example is Eliseo Medina, the SEIU’s international secretary-treasurer, who was appointed in November 2008 to serve on Obama’s transition team committee for immigration.20 Medina made some very revealing, if largely unreported, remarks at the 2009 session of the annual progressive conference organized by Campaign for America’s Future. Medina said of Latino voters:
[W]hen they voted in November [2008], they voted overwhelmingly for progressive candidates. Barack Obama got two out of every three voters that showed up.21
Medina continued:
So I think there’s two things, very quickly, that matter for the progressive community.
Number one. If we are to expand this electorate to win, the progressive community needs to solidly be on the side of immigrants, then we’ll solidify and expand the progressive coalition for the future … When you are in the middle of a fight for your life you will remember who was there with you. And immigrants count on progressives to be able to do that.
Number two. We reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if we have, even the same ratio, two out of three? If we have eight million new voters that care about our [winning?] and be voting, we will be creating a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.22
Medina was boasting to a friendly audience that granting citizenship to millions of illegals would expand the progressive electorate and help ensure a Democrat governing coalition for the long term.
This is not mere rhetoric. We discovered specific, second-term plans for government agencies to immediately register as voters the new Americans who would receive amnesty. One such plan was outlined in a thirty-two-page report from the progressive think tank Demos—“From Citizenship to Voting: Improving Registration for New Americans.”23 In future chapters, we will show how Demos, like the CAP, has been highly influential in crafting White House policy. This particular Demos report was authored by Tova Andrea Wang, a senior fellow at both Demos, and at a group called the Century Foundation, which works closely with the Center for American Progress.
The Demos report calls for the United States Citizenship and Immigrant Services (USCIS) to fully implement a new policy to ensure “new Americans” are provided with a voter registration application at all administrative naturalization ceremonies. Ultimately, USCIS should be designated as a full voter registration agency under the National Voter Registration Act so that every newly naturalized American is automatically given the opportunity to register to vote. The report also wants state and local elections officials to be proactive in registering new citizens to vote by reaching out to their communities through every possible means.
4
A JOBS PLAN FOR AMERICA
PRESIDENT OBAMA ACTUALLY laid out much of his plan for a second administration in the final State of the Union address of his first. On the subject of jobs, the forty-fourth president’s broad outline was vague, but he telegraphed unspecified intentions by repeatedly invoking the theme of “fairness”:
No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.1
As we shall see, this progressive president’s “job fairness” agenda would never be the traditional American one of fairness of opportunity for all. Rather he seeks to implement the progressive socialists’ “fairness” of politically driven outcomes. Fortunately thus far—and in spite of record unemployment—the ruinous jobs agenda of the far left that we expose here has not won much support from the American people, nor in Congress, and has virtually no chance of being enacted—unless Obama is reelected to a second term.
In the fall of 2011, Obama was already nearly six months into reelection campaign mode. He was desperately trying to salvage his disastrous first term by pushing for nearly half a trillion dollars in new “jobs creation” spending. His memorable speech to a joint session of Congress, on September 8, found him demanding of those he’d assembled to just “pass this jobs bill”—a $447 billion package of tax cuts and a pork-barrel overflowing with new spending.2
Certainly most of Congress was not buying into yet another ruinous spending package. And the president surely had no expectation at that stage of their approval. (Rather, he is shrewdly campaigning on their recalcitrance.) But about one-sixth of the U.S. House today are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (with seventy-five members in the House, plus one in the U.S. Senate), who have complete allegiance to the so-called “fair jobs” agenda. The CPC’s own literature describes its fair jobs schemes as rooted in core principles embodied in its Progressive Promise—Fairness for All.3 The specific ways these core principles are translated into a tsunami of progressive policies and legislation, we detail here and throughout this book.
It is important to note that the Congressional Progressive Caucus was launched, in 1992, with the help of the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA is a full member of the Socialist International, a worldwide organization of 162 social democratic, socialist, and labor political parties and organizations.4 On its website, DSA laments that the “vision of socialism” has taken root everywhere in the world—except in the United States.5 For progressive socialists worldwide, a major goal is government-created jobs. As the DSA stated on its website in 2011, “We … have long been calling for jobs, good jobs, and lots of them,”6 but at the same time DSA was critical of the progressive president. “Obama has proposed creating jobs, but his program is too small, and most of it goes to tax incentives, not to direct job creation.”7 But the DSA and its progressive allies were working overtime to get their wish.
JOBS, BUT BAD JOBS
The same day as Obama’s jobs speech to the joint session of Congress, a far-left think tank called Demos issued its response. Based on the idea of wealth redistribution, Demos claims to be nonpartisan, and lobbies federal and state policymakers to address “economic insecurity and inequality” in American society. It advocates for a “more steeply progressive income-tax structure, on the premise that ‘the rich must pay their fair share if communities are to thrive.’”8
The authors of Help Wanted: American Needs a Better Jobs Plan are David Callahan and Tamara Draut, Demos’ co-founder and vice president, respectively. In response to the president’s speech, on behalf of Demos, they were only mildly impressed with Obama’s jobs plan, asserting it did not go far enough. In particular, the almost half-trillion dollars just proposed by the president was not nearly enough. Moreover, Obama’s speech failed to push for something Callahan and Draut characterized as an “urgent effort”—to ensure “better jobs.”9
The Demos officials referenced a paper—barely a week old—written for the group by Prof. Paul Osterman, of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Osterman believes “far too many jobs fall below the standard that most Americans would consider decent work.”10 Osterman’s co-author on a 2011 book is Beth Shulman, and together they assert that good jobs are those that “pay enough to support a family and provide decent, safe conditions.” They say that “many middle-class jobs have disappeared or deteriorated into low-wage ones that cause families to fall below the poverty line.”11 Here they are referring to the underemployed, meaning those employed below their abilities and ability to earn more. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, almost a half million people, as of October 2011, were underemployed.12
A month after the president’s speech to the Congressional joint session, two other Demos analysts published a report called Worth Working For: Strategies for Turning Bad Jobs into Quality Employment
. Just finding a job, “while critical,” is not enough, wrote Ben Peck and Amy Traub. Hard work should be rewarded with “more jobs capable of supporting a family with a decent standard of living.” “Millions of workers,” Peck and Traub asserted, were unable to achieve or remain in the middle class due to the recession, leading to an “earnings shortfall.” The majority of jobs lost were middle-income positions, they claimed, “yet the majority of jobs gained during the recovery have been in low-wage occupations.”13
Peck and Traub’s assertions about the state of the job market may or may not be accurate. These, as well as their questionable claim that there has actually been any economic “recovery,” are matters for experts to debate. One notable point is that Peck and Traub identified the cause of the purported underemployment malaise as … corporate greed.
Further, among the utopian solutions they advocate would be a family leave law such as the proposed Family Leave Insurance Act. The new bill, first introduced in the House of Representatives in 2005, builds upon the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. This measure afforded eligible workers unpaid family leave, while preserving a worker’s job or a comparable job upon return.14
But the new plan goes a giant step further—from job preservation to a new form of entitlement. It would provide twelve weeks of paid benefits to employees who need time off—to care for a new child, a sick family member, or their own illness. This would allegedly be financed through employees paying premiums into a trust fund, who would then be eligible through a tiered system after having paid into the trust for six months. Yet besides the cost of such a scheme, nowhere in their paper do the authors address the impact of the easily imaginable scenario of dozens of employees taking up to three months of paid leave simultaneously.
Peck and Traub also want to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to give workers the right to refuse overtime. It is hard to see how that squares with predictions by the Department of Labor that the largest job growth in the next decade will be in “low-paying occupations, such as home health aides, food service workers, and retail salespeople.” Workers in lower-paying jobs are often desirous of overtime and less likely to be looking for ways to get out of it. Conversely, employers need to be able to rely upon their workers to get the job done. Moreover, add this to the aforementioned three months of paid family leave, and it is easy to see how the two plans could virtually shut down a business’s operations. The silver lining Peck and Traub find here is that these low-paying jobs cannot be outsourced and will need to be filled by resident workers—if employers can stay in operation.
For Demos contributors Osterman and Shulman, a kind of shock therapy will be needed in order to inaugurate such changes:
The status quo overall will not change unless companies are subjected to an external “shock” that forces them to rethink the way they do business. [Such a shock] can come from laws enacted at the federal, state or local levels; from workers themselves organizing a union; or from the larger community demanding better quality jobs in exchange for some public benefit.15
SOLVE ECONOMIC INEQUALITY WITH UNION JOBS!
For Peck and Traub, nearly all of their prescriptions point to a familiar progressive constituency—unions. They remind us that “even manufacturing jobs were not ‘good jobs’ until employers, government and unions adopted strategies to improve them generations ago.” They observe that people working low-wage jobs do not have as much buying power as workers who are better paid, that many of them are struggling, overburdened, and have to juggle “rigid and unpredictable work schedules” which may keep them from participation with family obligations or other tasks. So they prescribe one remedy: a higher minimum wage that would “raise the floor for all employees.” In addition, non-wage benefits such as “sick leave, paid family leave, and more control over their work schedules” would be included.
Demos executives Callahan and Draut concur, adding that government “can and should play a vigorous role in encouraging employers to create good jobs—perhaps by providing tax incentives that require employers to pay a living wage.”16
The reference to a “living wage” comes straight from the pen of Karl Marx, author of the 1848 Communist Manifesto. In his book on the living wage, Donald R. Stabile, professor of economics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, wrote, “Marx believed that only under communism could he find support for his ultimate goal of a living wage, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’”17
Here is the real-world scenario of what a nationally mandated living wage could mean for America should Barack Obama win a second term. In the winter 2003 issue of City Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Steve Malanga wrote that for more than a decade,
“[a] savvy left-wing political movement, supported by radical economic groups, liberal foundations, and urban activists” had lobbied for a “government-guaranteed ‘living wage’ for low-income workers, considerably higher than the current minimum wage.”18
The living wage movement had succeeded in no fewer than eighty cities as of 2003. But as Malanga showed, this brought with it plenty of bad news:
The living wage poses a big threat to [the cities’] economic health, because the costs and restrictions it imposes on the private sector will destroy jobs—especially low-wage jobs—and send businesses fleeing to other locales. Worse still, the living-wage movement’s agenda doesn’t end with forcing private employers to increase wages. It includes opposing privatization schemes, strong-arming companies into unionizing, and other economic policies equally harmful to urban health.
Malanga cites Baltimore as exhibit number one. Baltimore embraced the living wage in the mid-1990s but failed to become a “workers’ paradise.” Instead, the city saw its economy “crash and burn” while 58,000 jobs disappeared at the same time other cities across Maryland added 120,000 jobs and “other cities across the country prospered.” Malanga stated that the living-wage bill was “just one expression of a fiercely anti-business climate that helped precipitate Baltimore’s economic collapse.”
While you might expect the Baltimore experience to serve as an example of what not to do, nothing could be farther from reality. Malanga wrote,
Baltimore “became the poster child for future activism,” where a “host of left-wing groups, including Ralph Nader’s Citizens Action and the Association for Community Reform Now, or ACORN, joined forces in 1995 in a national ‘Campaign for an America That Works,’ which made the living wage central to its demands.”
The impact, Malanga wrote, was national in scope as radicals took the “living wage” movement to “city after city.”
Central to this campaign was the anti-capitalist ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN was created around 1970 by former Students for a Democratic Society radical Wade Rathke. A 1960s colleague of Weatherman terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Rathke is also the founder of an SEIU Local in New Orleans. The ACORN People’s Platform of 1979 (updated in 1990) states:
[O]nly the people shall rule. Corporations shall have no role: producing jobs, providing products, paying taxes. No more, no less. They shall obey our wishes, respond to our needs, serve our communities.19
As for the role of government, ACORN states, it is a “public servant for our good, fast follower to our sure steps. No more, no less.”
In fact, Malanga wrote, following on its 2002 success in getting New Orleans—ACORN’s national headquarters—to enact living wage legislation, ACORN created a step-by-step manual, which “echoes” the coalition-building organizational techniques of influential radical theorist Saul Alinsky. The ACORN manual is a blueprint to everything one could want to know on how it was done and how it could be replicated elsewhere. Money is not a problem. Malanga discovered that ACORN had lots of it available to push the living-wage campaign. He cites two sources: the Tides Foundation, which had “given hundreds of thousands of dollars to local and national living-wage groups … [while] the Ford Foundation has been anoth
er big contributor.”
The Tides Foundation is a major legal money-laundering funding funnel for a myriad of progressive groups and causes. Rathke was a Tides founding board member along with Drummond Pike, has served as board chairman, and continues to serve as a senior adviser.20
Malanga draws a clear picture for us of how ACORN—which has now rebranded itself with a number of state organizations since being exposed a few years back for corruption21—and similar groups, will advance the “living wage” via a stealth campaign:22
Living-wage campaigns have repeatedly outflanked the business community by practicing what ACORN calls “legislative outmaneuver.” Local groups work behind the scenes for months before going public. They draft partisan economists to release timely studies on the prospective benefits of the living wage before opponents can come up with any countering data, and they try to keep any actual legislation off the table until the very last minute, so that there’s no fixed target for opponents to get a bead on.
THE ROLE OF “PARTISAN ECONOMISTS”
Demos is our exhibit number one for such “partisan economists.”
Demos officials Callahan and Draut contend that, because the U.S. economy is stuck in a downturn, that is reason enough to make it “easier” for workers to join unions and put more disposable income into their pockets.23 To prop up this straw man, the authors cite a separate contemporary report by Demos staffer Amy Traub, who asserts that “organized labor has traditionally played a crucial role in ensuring that working people—who make up most consumers—receive a larger share of the economy’s gains.” Taking this to its logical conclusion, Peck and Traub write that legislation should be drawn up that would “more effectively” protect the “right of workers to bargain collectively for improved wages and benefits.”24