by George Rasley
Democrats once passed themselves off as the party of the working guy; pro-union, pro-American manufacturing, pro-infrastructure and anti-communist, but today’s Democratic Party looks nothing like the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy.
In the age of Donald Trump Democrats have become, not the party of the American working man, but the party of free stuff and illegal aliens.
Leading Democrats, such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio have called for the abolition of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency – which would in effect open America’s borders to the entire world.
Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has long-advocated debt-free college and the Democrats’ marquee congressional candidate, New York Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made free college and Medicare for all hallmarks of her campaign.
Just this week the Democratic Party in Florida nominated Far Left Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum for Governor.
Gillum, an outspokenly progressive African-American, is the candidate of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Far-Left billionaire Tom Steyer, founder of the “Need to Impeach” super PAC.
According to reporting by The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Gillum’s campaign platform calls for a steep corporate-tax increase to pay for a billion-dollar boost in public-education spending, a repeal of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, Medicare for all, and a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the impeachment of the President.
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.
And they’ve joined “Not In My Backyard” wealthy urban elites and back-to-nature whackos in campaigning against the Keystone XL pipeline and other infrastructure projects that would bring thousands of jobs to people working in the welding, construction, pipeline operations and other trades.
Perhaps worst of all, 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.
As Karen Zeigler and Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies noted in a 2015 paper, “Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal).”
This is remarkable, concluded Zeigler and Camarota, “given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population.”
Now here’s the key takeaway from Zeigler and Camarota’s study: “Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.” (Emphasis ours)
According to research by Forbes contributor Chuck Jones, in the first half of this year, there have been 174,000 manufacturing jobs added to the US economy. This is almost as many as any full year over the past decade and should easily surpass any added during Obama’s administration as the economy recovered from the Great Recession.
CNBC analyzed the cumulative job growth in each industry since the president’s November 2016 election to help gauge which industries are growing at the fastest pace.
At the top of the list, jobs in the mining and logging industry are up 13.5 percent since the election, well above the gains in construction and transportation, which made second and third place, respectively. Job growth in oil and gas extraction — which are included in the category — typically provide a boost to the headline number.
In the No. 2 spot, the construction industry is one of the hottest in the American economy in terms of employment and has been explicitly cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as an area of better-than-average growth.
Jobs in the trucking industry have climbed 4.6 percent since Trump’s election.
This Labor Day, as TV commentators and newspaper editors cast about for heroes of the American labor movement to honor they should forget 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) and honor President Donald J. Trump for putting Americans back to work.
I was not around for FDR but I certainly remember JFK. The current Democratic Party is clearly off the rails but JFK was the leading edge of the deterioration of the party.