Barack Obama

Trinity United Church of Christ’s AKIBA BOOKSTORE

Published by Papa Giorgio

(This post has been updated today) Take note that when the Reverend Wright left Trinity United Church of Christ, the book store was redone. Many of the questionable books were removed… but I was able to grab some “WAYBACK MACHINE” pics when I realized this many years later.

  • THE POINT IS THIS, that when Obama attended the church, the below thinking was prevalent

(This section was updated 11-17-2018, see below the links for the update)

The churches bookstore has been sanitized since this was written. I managed to grab a couple of cached pages. Not nearly what it was, but the few I could find are here: PAGE 1, PAGE 2, PAGE 3. On page three for instance there are some resources for women, one of the books, “Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect” ~ by Rosemary Radford Ruether, has this review: “it is a collection of academic papers and perspectives from a feminist conference…. Some essays are clearly stronger than others – particularly on Islam.” Strong on Islam? This author has written books on Gaia and God, pro Palestinian (anti-Israel) books, and books on “Goddesses and the Divine,” as well as radically left leaning feminist theology.

E.g., not a Christian book or author[s] at all. More Marxist and Islamic in reality.

Here are my two posts detailing the racial radicalism surrounding Obama’s views  with an example/analogy (Taken from my THE DEMOCRATS LURCH MORE ANTISEMITIC):

…I will use Trump in my analogy. Let us say for twenty years Trump attended a church that twice prominently displayed David Dukes likeness on the cover of their church’s magazine which reaches 20,000 homes, and a third time alongside Barry Mills (the co-founder of the Aryan Brotherhood). Even inviting David Duke to the pulpit to receive a “lifetime achievement award.” Even selling sermons by David Duke in the church’s book store. Authors of sermons sold in Trump’s church’s bookstore teach in accordance with Christian Identity’s view that Jews and blacks are offspring of Satan and Eve via a sexual encounter in the Garden of Eden. In the church’s bookstore, the entire time Trump attended, books like Mein Kampf (Hitler) and My Awakening (David Duke), and other blatantly racist books were sold. Even members of the Aryan Brotherhood felt comfortable enough to sit in the pews at times… being that the pastor of Trump’s church was once a reverend for the group.

…if Trump had gone to a church like that I would walk arm-n-arm with my Democratic comrades in making sure he would never be President. Wouldn’t this be expected of me?

Here is the “not”-analogy of Obama:

Obama’s pastor not only was a minister in The Nation of Islam, an anti-Semitic/racist group, but the church’s book store sells sermons by Louise Farrakhan, who teaches that the white man was created on the Island of Cyprus by a mad scientist, Yakub. (Mr. Farrakhan also believes he was taken up on a UFO to meet God, and was told he was a little messiah, take note also that he was directly involved in the deaths of police officers as well.) Louise Farrakhan was featured twice on the church’s magazine which reach 20,000[plus] homes in the Chicago area. Even placing on the cover with Louise Farrakhan a third time the founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. Elijah Muhammad likewise taught that the white man was created by Yakub 6,600 years ago. Walter, Louise Farrakhan teaches that the Jews in Israel do not belong there, and that the true Jews are the black people. Louise Farrakhan was invited into Obama’s church, to the pulpit and given a “lifetime achievement award.” In fact, the New Black Panthers and members of the Nation of Islam often times sat in the pews for sermons by Rev. Wright, whom Obama called a mentor. Not to mention Obama’s wife pictured with racist, anti-Semetic, UFO cult members.

So I expect you, [insert Leftist name], to join arm-and-arm with me on finding out why the media, and Democrats who are so concerned about racism let such a man into office, when, if the tables were turned, I wouldn’t want in office.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ is correct when he says “that any Democrat who meets with the ‘bigot’ Louis Farrakhan should resign from office, and said there should be no tolerance for any association with the Nation of Islam leader.” Continuing he notes,

“Farrakhan is a bigot,” Dershowitz said on Fox News. “He is far worse than David Duke. Why? Because Farrakhan has a large following, David Duke is a joke.”

“He ought to be treated the way we treat David Duke,” he said. “If any Republican dared to meet with David Duke, that would be the end of their career.”

“It should be the end of the career of any Democrat who has any association with this bigot Farrakhan,” Dershowitz added.

Keith Ellison, the No. 2 Democrat at the Democratic National Committee, had said he stopped meeting with Farrakhan before 2006, but it was later confirmed he was at a private meeting with Farrakhan in 2015.

Washington Post gave Ellison FOUR PINNOCHIOS for lying when he said his relationship with Farrakhan ended more than a decade ago.

“This is the leadership of the Democratic Party,” Dershowitz said…….

See much more here:

About Time. We know from a long-time aid to the racist UFO black nationalist anti-Semitic cop killing cult leader that Obama and Farrakhan were close. And we have photos of Michelle Obama with this racist UFO black nationalist cop killing cult leader’s wife.

And we know this racist UFO black nationalist cop killing cult leader was brought into Obama’s church for an award one Sunday, and we also know that this racist UFO black nationalist cop killing cult leader’s personage was placed on Obama’s church’s magazine cover not once, but three times. We also know that some of this racist UFO black nationalist cop killing cult leader’s sermons/speeches were sold in Obama’s church’s book store during his tenure, as well as these outright racist books:

  • A Black Theology of Liberation;
  • Black Theology & Black Power

(I purchased these and other books myself from Trinity United Church of Christ’s book store online, which was called – Akiba Bookstore)

Here is Farrakhan’s (one of them) UFO sermon where black “god’s” come back and kill white people:

QUOTES

from book purchased via

AKIBA BOOKSTORE

Below are quotes from James H. Cone, “A Black Theology of Liberation” — a book sold in Obama’s church’s bookstore the entire 20-years he attended.

FOR THE THEOLOGIAN

BORN AGAIN: “They [white people] would destroy themselves and be born again as beautiful black persons.” (103);

SIN: “This means that whites, despite their self-proclaimed religiousness, are rendered incapable of making valid judgments on the character of sin…. In a word, sin is whiteness…” (106, 108);

SALVATION: “Salvation, then, primarily has to do with earthly reality and the injustice inflicted on those who are helpless and poor. To see the salvation of God is to see this people rise up against its oppressors, demanding that justice become a reality now, not tomorrow.” (128)

“It is dangerous because the true prophet of the gospel of God must become both ‘anti-Christian’ and ‘unpatriotic.’ (55) …. Because whiteness by its very nature is against blackness, the black prophet is a prophet of national doom. He proclaims the end of the ‘American Way…‘” (56)

“But this does not mean that religion is irrelevant altogether; it only means that religion unrelated to black liberation is irrelevant.” (58-59)

“… it is that whites are incapable of making any valid judgment about human existence. The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods. The God of black liberation will not be confused with a blood’ thirsty white idol. Black theology must show that the black God has nothing to do with the God worshiped in white churches whose primary purpose is to sanctify the racism of whites and to daub the wounds of blacks. Putting new wine in new wineskins means that the black theology view of God has nothing in common with those who prayed for an American victory in Vietnam or who pray for a “cool” summer in the ghetto…. There is no place in black theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color. The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism…. Because God has made the goal of blacks God’s own goal, black theology believes that it is not only appropriate but necessary to begin the doctrine of God with an insistence on God’s blackness.” (62-63)

“White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality.” (64)

“In contrast to this racist view of God, black theology proclaims God’s blackness. Those who want to know who God is and what God is doing must know who black persons are and what they are doing. ” (65)

“God comes to us in God’s blackness, which is wholly unlike white¬ness. To receive God’s revelation is to become black with God by joining God in the work of liberation…. Becoming one of God’s disciples means rejecting whiteness and accepting themselves as they are in all their physical blackness.” (66)

“Black theology cannot accept a view of God which does not represent God as being for oppressed blacks and thus against white oppressors. Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God. The brutalities are too great and the pain too severe, and this means we must know where God is and what God is doing in the revolution…. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power, which is the power of blacks to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject God’s love.” (70)

“God is black because God loves us; and God loves us because we are black. Righteousness is that side of God which expresses itself through black liberation. God makes black what humans have made white…. Love is a refusal to accept whiteness.” (73-74)

“If creation ‘involves a bringing into existence of something that did not exist before,’ then to say God is creator means that my being finds its source in God. I am black because God is black! God as creator is the ground of my blackness (being), the point of reference for meaning and purpose in the universe…. Rather it is incumbent upon me by the freedom granted by the creator to deny whiteness and affirm blackness as the essence of God. That is why it is necessary to speak of the black revolution rather than reformation. The idea of reformation suggests that there is still something ‘good’ in the system itself, which needs only to be cleaned up a bit. This is a false perception of reality. The system is based on whiteness, and what is necessary is a replacement of whiteness with blackness.” (75-76)

“Being white excludes them from the black community and thus whatever concern they have for blacks will invariably work against black freedom…. Certainly if whites expect to be able to say anything relevant to the self-determination of the black community, it will be necessary for them to destroy their whiteness by becoming members of an oppressed community. Whites will be free only when they become new persons—when their white being has passed away and they are created anew in black being. When this happens, they are no longer white but free, and thus capable of making decisions about the destiny of the black community.” (97)

Presidential Death Threats | Michael Brown | “Good Nazi’s”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder dispatches quickly the idea that Obama received an abnormal amount of death threats:

He also discusses *Michael Brown and some of the candidates for the 2020 race saying he was murdered. Then I add-in Larry’s montage of media and Democrats saying Trump said “there were good Nazis.” (See more here: “Trump Is Right – Good People On Both Sides“) That begins at the 5:03 mark of the audio. More here. Enjoy:

*

* Here are other audios I have uploaded to my site on the topic:

Obama vs Trump’s Blame for Mass Shooting

Published by Papa Giorgio

In the aftermath of the El Paso and the Dayton shootings, Democratic politicians were quick to place blame on President Trump. Larry points out the hypocrisy on the Democrats part during Obama’s presidency and how no one blamed him for the mass shootings that occurred during his tenure. Larry further dives into the illogic of the left and their calls to restrict firearms ownership under a President they consider to be tyrannical.

Is Trump “At Odds” With The Intelligence Community?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder exemplifies the current media bias that encapsulates President Trump supposedly “at odds” with his intelligence community. FIRST, this just is not the case. SECONDLY, “The Sage” adeptly points out that if we were to quantify a recent President being “at odds” with his advisers and intel “community,” President Obama fits the bill perfectly. However, you would never know it because the media was deathly silent. As always, there is information you can take right into real conversations. Enjoy. (See more at FOX NEWS SPECIAL REPORT)

Crisis? Or No Crisis?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is a list of Democrats who said there was a “border crisis” before they said there wasn’t — via TOWNHALL

INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY has a great article on the border topic:

…Border Crossings Climbing

NPR’s “fact check” — like countless others — dismissed Trump’s claim as false because “illegal border crossings in the most recent fiscal year (ending in September 2018) were actually lower than in either 2016 or 2014.”

What they aren’t telling you is border patrol agents apprehended more than 100,000 people trying to enter the country illegally in just October and November of last year. Or that that number is way up from the same two months the year before.

Nor do they mention that last year, the border patrol apprehended more than half a million people trying to get into the country illegally. And that number, too, is up from the year before.

Downplaying Number Of Illegals

Trump’s critics certainly don’t bother to mention that those figures only count illegals the border patrol caught. It does not count the ones who eluded border patrol agents and got into the country.

The Department of Homeland Security claims that about 20% of illegal border crossers make it into the country. Other studies, however, say border agents fail to apprehend as much as 50% of illegal crossers.

Even at the lower percentage, that means that 104,000 illegals made it into the country in 2018 alone.

Is that not a crisis at the border?

Massive Illegal Population

Pelosi and company also don’t bother to mention the fact that there are already between 12 million and 22 million illegals — depending on which study you use — in the country today.

Let’s put that number in perspective.

At the high end, it means that the illegal population in the U.S. is larger than the entire population of countries like Syria, Chile, the Netherlands and Ecuador. Even if the number is just 12 million, that’s still more than the entire population of Sweden, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Ireland and New Zealand.

It is, in short, a massive number.

[….]

Illegals and Crime

Critics also complain that Trump overstated the risk of illegal immigrants committing crimes. They all point to a report from the Cato Institute, a pro-immigration libertarian think tank. Cato did a statistical analysis of census data and concluded that incarceration rates for Hispanic illegals were slightly lower than those of the native-born.

But the Center for Immigration Studies looked at federal crime statistics. It found that noncitizens accounted for more than 20% of federal convictions, even though they make up just 8.4% of the population.

“It is almost certain that a majority of noncitizens convicted of federal crimes are illegal immigrants,” said Steven Camarota of the CIS.

Texas also has been monitoring crimes committed by illegals. It reports that from 2011 to 2018, it booked 186,000 illegal aliens. Police charged them with a total of 292,000 crimes. Those included 539 murders, 32,000 assaults, 3,426 sexual assaults, and almost 3,000 weapons charges.

Even if Cato is right that the crime rate among Hispanic illegals is a bit lower than for natives, that’s cold comfort to victims of these crimes, which would not have happened had the border been more secure. They would likely agree with Trump about their being a crisis at the border…..

Self-Incoherent Border Positions (Blue Collar Logic)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(MOONBATTERY h-t) The Democrat talking points that the urgently needed wall would be ineffective, immoral, unnecessary, and excessively expensive do not pass the laugh test.

(Ann Coulter) …The Democrats’ latest idea is to call a wall “immoral, ineffective and expensive.”

If they think a wall is “immoral,” then they’re admitting it’s effective. An ineffective wall would merely be a place for illegals to stop and get a little shade before continuing their march into the United States….

(DAILY CALLER)

BTW, just so Jim Acosta knows… an hour away from the video Acosta made, in an unwalled border town in the rio grande valley, a pile of dead bodies was found (BIG LEAGUE POLITICS)

This Is What REAL Treason Looks Like

Published by Papa Giorgio

(JUMP TO ADDED ARTICLE LINK) You just can’t make this stuff up!

NEWSBUSTERS hilariously notes…

…First, the Clinton Campaign made use of the same law firm during the 2016 election! Yes, Hillary Clinton, in fact, hired James Hamilton, a partner at Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius and a well-know DC attorney who also previously worked for Al Gore, John Kerry, and even Barack Obama!

Second,the law firm founded by Howard Dean received the same Russian Law Firm of the Year Award in, get ready, 2013, 2014, and 2016!…

If you need any reminding, the Democrats have a long history of “coziness” with the Russians, you need to look no further than the “Lion of the Senate” (Ted Kennedy) to see what REAL treason looks like:

…If these progressives want to know what actual treason looks like, they should consult liberal lion Ted Kennedy, who not only allegedly sent secret messages to the Soviets in the midst of the cold war, he also begged them to intervene in a U.S. presidential election in order to unseat President Ronald Reagan. That’s no exaggeration.

According to Soviet documents unearthed in the early 1990’s, Kennedy literally asked the Soviets, avowed enemies of the U.S., to intervene on behalf of the Democratic party in the 1984 elections. Kennedy’s communist communique was so secret that it was not discovered until 1991, eight years after Kennedy had initiated his Soviet gambit:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

(More at The Federalist Papers)

Let’s not forget this episode:

Also note the “coziness” of Bill Clinton via his wife’s Secretary of State position, detailed well in the documentary found HERE. But a quick reminder via NATIONAL REVIEW seems in order:

The Democrats and old-guard news media (forgive the redundancy) are pathologically obsessed with the hypothesis that Team Trump and Russia rigged last November’s presidential election. If Donald J. Trump so much as played Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav on his stereo, these leftists deduce, he was in cahoots with the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the same folks who spy a KGB agent behind every filing cabinet in Trump’s White House are aggressively apathetic about Hillary and Bill Clinton’s policies, decisions, and actions that gave aid and comfort to Russia.

Hillary’s much-mocked “Russian reset” established the tone for the Clintons’ coziness with the Kremlin. On March 6, 2009, during a trip to Geneva, she presented Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov a small, red button. Hillary thought it was emblazoned with the Russian word for “reset.” Her team mistranslated and the button actually read “overload.” Nonetheless, Clinton and Lavrov jointly pressed the symbolic button. And a new era in U.S.–Russian relations erupted.

While visiting Moscow on March 24, 2010, Hillary explained the Reset’s purpose: “Our goal is to help strengthen Russia.”

[Video at National Review]

Hillary said this in an interview with veteran broadcaster Vladimir Pozner of Russia’s First Channel TV network. Pozner is a Soviet-era relic who still communicates in barely accented English. During the Cold War, he popped up on American TV and radio programs and presented the views of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Pozner’s pleasantries made him and his totalitarian bosses seem blandly benign.

The shadiest deal that the Clintons hatched with Russia is called Uranium One. This outrage should mushroom into Hillary and Bill’s radioactive Whitewater scandal.

Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining mogul and major Clinton Foundation donor, led a group of investors in an enterprise called Uranium One. On June 8, 2010, Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, announced plans to purchase a 51.4 percent stake in the Canadian company, whose international assets included some 20 percent of America’s uranium capacity.

Because this active ingredient in atomic reactors and nuclear weapons is a strategic commodity, this $1.3 billion deal required the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Secretary of State Clinton was one of nine federal department and agency heads on that secretive panel.

On June 29, 2010, three weeks after Rosatom proposed to Uranium One, Bill Clinton keynoted a seminar staged by Renaissance Capital in Moscow, a reputedly Kremlin-controlled investment bank that promoted this transaction. Renaissance Capital paid Clinton $500,000 for his one-hour speech.

While CFIUS evaluated Rosatom’s offer, Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer observed, “a spontaneous outbreak of philanthropy among eight shareholders in Uranium One” began. “These Canadian mining magnates decide now would be a great time to donate tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.”…

(Read It All)

I just wanted to add this updated article that is actually older (new to this particular post). Here is the intro of the reprinted article at FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE:

Editors’ note: In light of the Left’s deranged hysteria in response to President Trump’s recent press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, marked by pathological accusations that Trump has engaged in “treason,” Frontpage has deemed it important to bring attention to a forgotten story of verifiable scheming with the Kremlin — by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy against President Ronald Reagan. We are reprinting below Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s 2008 interview with Dr. Paul Kengor, who unearthed documentation detailing Kennedy’s outreach to the KGB and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov during the height of the Cold War, in which the Democratic Senator offered to collude with the Soviets to undermine President Reagan. There were no screams of moral indignation, or accusations of treason, about this matter from the Left at that time — nor since.

Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration (Prager | Zmirak)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is the full interview… followed by links to the topical breakdown of it:

Dennis Prager interviews John Zmirak, who is the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.” This was quite an interview. I will be splitting some of this up into topical segments in a bit. But Mr. Zmirak is a guy I would love to sit and have a beer with (a few of em’).

Here are the edited portions:

 

Facebook Was FOR Data Mining BEFORE They Were Against It

Published by Papa Giorgio

Just so we are clear on the numbers (GP):

  • Facebook announced in early April that the data of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with a political consulting firm connected to President Trump during the 2016 election.
  • But in 2012 the Obama campaign harvested data from 190 million Facebook users.

The media cheered in 2012 the sheer brilliance of the Obama campaign. Data used for similar GOP “mining”? Not so much.

TIME (11/20/2012):

…But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”…

Another interesting article that links to Obama’s campaign managers Twitter is this one at THE DAILY MAIL:

‘They were on our side’: Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED them to mine American users’ profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of the Democrats

  • Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America, claimed Obama campaign mined millions of people’s information from Facebook
  • She said that Facebook was surprised at the ease with which they were able to ‘suck out the whole social graph’
  • But the firm never tried to stop them when they realized what was doing, and even told them they’d made a special exception for them
  • They ‘were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,’ she tweeted
  • Davidsen said that she felt the project was ‘creepy’ – ‘even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data’
  • Davidsen posted this in the wake of the uproar over Cambridge Analytica, and their mining of information for the Trump campaign

[….]

Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America and has spoken about this in the past, explained on Twitter that she and her team were able to ingest massive amounts of information from the social network after getting permission from Facebook users to access their list of friends.

‘Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,’ wrote Davidsen.

She wrote that, not only did Facebook not try to stop them, but the company said they’d made a special exception for them. 

‘They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,’ she tweeted.

Davidsen was then careful to note: ‘I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.’ ….

Also, remember this?

BEFORE IT’S NEWS has the transcript:

“The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday.

“That’s going to be very, very powerful,” Waters said. “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.”

Obama and Krugman Held White Supremacist Views

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here are some portions of the LARGE and EXCELLENT article at THE ATLANTIC JOURNAL:

…In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.

Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”

Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.

“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?

[….]

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”

[….]

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”

Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.

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