Over the past few Labor Days, we have pointed out that while Democrats once presented themselves as the party of the working guy; pro-union, pro-American manufacturing, pro-infrastructure and anti-communist, today’s Democratic Party looks nothing like the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy.
In the age of Donald Trump Democrats became, not the party of the American working man, but the party of get-out-of-jail-free cards for criminals, free stuff for young urban professionals and special rights for LGTQ++ and illegal aliens.
Rather than protect American workers from low wage illegal alien competition, Vice President Harris and President Biden have opened the southern border to a record number of illegal aliens.
In February 2024, the House Homeland Security Committee disclosed that Harris and Biden officially surpassed a shocking nine million border crossings nationwide, not including the more than 1.8 million gotaways.
With about two months left in the agency’s fiscal year, full-year arrests are expected to reach the 10 million mark.
And Kamala Harris, along with leading Democrats, such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have called for the abolition of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency – which would make the Harris - Biden de facto open borders policy a permanent reality.
Kamala Harris, along with Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has long-advocated debt-free college and the Democrats’ most influential members of Congress, such as New York Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made free college and Medicare for all, including illegal aliens, hallmarks of their legislative agenda.
Recognizing that taking such an unpopular vote would be a suicide pact for congressional Democrats Harris and Biden have tried to use presidential emergency powers to accomplish most of that agenda. Biden’s $10,000 student loan “forgiveness” order for college-educated debtors with incomes of up to $125,000, proposed to be accomplished without a vote in Congress, tramples the Constitution and spits in the eye of working Americans who chose not to go to college or who worked to pay their loans on time.
Even after the Supreme Court swatted down their plan Harris and Biden have persisted and defied the Nation’s highest court.
As our friend Stephen Moore explained in yesterday’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity Hotline, this is devastating political news for Kamala Harris as she accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for President and launches her campaign against former President Donald Trump:
As Steve Moore wrote, “One of the few areas that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been able to crow about since they took office has been employment.
Even as inflation has soared with prices up 20% and real incomes down by $2,100 per family on their watch, hiring has [allegedly] been strong and unemployment low - until recently.
“But now we learn that much of this was a statistical illusion. The new re-estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics find that the agency overcounted some 800,000 jobs. Over the last year, employment was nearly 30% lower than originally announced. Oops.
“It gets worse. The original headline numbers released each month have been revised DOWNWARD by another 300,000 in subsequent months. Add it all together and we have 1.1 million fewer Americans working than originally announced.”
And let’s not forget the Democrats’ war on energy jobs.
“Killing 10,000 jobs and taking $2.2 billion in payroll out of workers’ pockets is not what Americans need or want right now,” Andy Black, president and CEO of the Association of Oil Pipelines, said when Harris and Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline on day one of their administration.
The Laborers’ International Union of North America called Biden’s decision “both insulting and disappointing to the thousands of hard-working members who will lose good-paying, middle-class family-supporting jobs.” All-in-all some 839,000 jobs have been lost in the energy sector and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline alone cost 11,000 jobs, including 8,000 good paying union jobs.
On the national level Democrats have put stopping “climate change” ahead of jobs for coal miners – once the bedrock of the Democratic Party in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
The Biden - Harris administration proved Republicans right when announcing aggressive climate change executive actions in January 2021, with special climate envoy John Kerry using the timeworn line that “the same people can do those [green energy] jobs, but the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice.”
The problem is that no one is building new “green energy” facilities in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Southeastern Ohio and Wyoming coal country, leaving union miner and oil worker families little opportunity in their hometowns devastated by Democrat policies.
In almost every sector that has traditionally provided a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to America’s working families employment has plummeted.
But that shouldn’t really be a surprise, because as our friend Stephen Moore documented in an April 2021 column, to appease Democrat politicians, rank-and-file union workers are being sold out by their bosses:
Last week, the United Mine Workers of America endorsed Biden's Green New Deal. Yes, you read that right. The coal mining union bosses have embraced a proposal that outlaws coal mining.
This is about as dumb as the Pipefitters Union endorsing President Joe Biden. He repaid them with his first act as president: killing the Keystone pipeline. So, now we have the Pipefitters Union against pipelines and the coal miners union against coal.
Did anyone bother actually to ask the rank-and-file members what they thought? Can they get their union dues back?
They should. The livelihoods of more than 50,000 coal miners just got sold down the river by their union bosses.
And for what? So these miners can be given Biden welfare checks or so mining jobs, which typically pay $75,000 a year, can be replaced with solar panel installation? Ask any miner about that trade, as I have, and they will laugh in your face.
UMWA President Benedict Arnold (his real name is Cecil Roberts) conceded that his union members "may lose a few more jobs here." Still, he defended his capitulation to the Biden anti-coal radicals by saying, "We're trying to insert ourselves into this conversation because a lot of coal miners in this country and their families have suffered already some traumatic losses."
So, his solution is to make the trauma a whole lot worse thanks to the Neville Chamberlain appeasement with the green enemy fanatics of the industry.
To compound the problem, as noted above, Democrats have become the party of the illegal aliens and unlimited immigration that has suppressed the wages and destroyed the quality of life for millions of America’s working families.
Before the “revision” of the unemployment numbers cited above Harris was claiming that the United States has “the best economy in the world”, with a job market that the New York Times called “historically strong.”
Unfortunately, too many U.S.-born are missing out on the supposed “job-creation boom.” It is true that the country has added millions of jobs since the height of Covid. However, most of that employment growth has gone to immigrants, both legal and illegal. The government’s household survey shows that there were only 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019 prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million.
The labor force participation rate — the share working or looking for work — has declined dramatically among U.S.-born men since the 1960s, particularly for those without a bachelor’s degree. While labor force participation among these groups has roughly returned to pre-pandemic levels, the rate in 2024 remains at or near historical lows relative to other peaks in the business cycle. This is true even for U.S.-born men who are in the “prime” 25-54 age range for working.
Today, it is hard to identify who speaks for the working men and women of America because about the only union that has not fallen all over itself to encourage illegal immigration is the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), which, knowing what a Joe Biden-inspired 9 million-plus illegal alien surge at the border looks like, is fighting like hell to get Donald Trump elected.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party are not the workingman’s friend. However, in today’s American labor movement, it appears the spirit of the great labor leaders of the past who fought Big Business, and a hostile government, is well and truly dead.
We wonder what Samuel Gompers (the first and longest-serving president of the American Federation of Labor) John L. Lewis (early leader of the United Mine Workers and a founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations) Walter Reuther (United Autoworkers President and leading liberal Democrat of the post-WWII era) or Eugene V. Debs (labor leader and Socialist candidate for President) would think about scabs, like April Verrett, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who sellout their members by encouraging illegal immigration to get a pat on the head and an invitation to the meet with Kamala Harris at the White House.
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