Friday, July 21, 2017

CUTS IN SOCIAL SECURITY TO OFFSET CUTS IN TAXES FOR THE SUPER RICH - THIS IS TRUMPERNOMICS FOR CRONIES

US House proposes over $5 trillion in cuts

By Daniel de Vries
20 July 2017
Republicans in the US House of Representatives unveiled a draconian budget plan Tuesday seeking to cut trillions in funding to programs that millions of Americans depend upon to meet basic social needs. The plan introduced in the Budget Committee takes aim at Medicaid and Medicare in particular, while siphoning off huge funding increases for the military and preparing tax breaks to pad the coffers of the super-rich.
All told, the long-term budget blueprint proposes to slash more than $5 trillion from social programs over the next decade, eviscerating what remains of the social safety net. Most provocatively, it calls for $4 trillion in reductions to “mandatory” spending programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, following public uproar over attempts to dismantle portions of these health care services under the guise of repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Connected to the funding cuts are proposals to transform these so-called entitlement programs into limited anti-poverty measures. The plan would introduce spending caps for Medicaid, effectively denying service for millions of poor and disabled people who depend on it for access to health care. Medicare would transition to a voucher-based scheme and apply a “means test” to determine the eligibility of seniors.
Other programs under the ax include $150 billion in funding for food stamps, reduced support for student loans and grants, and additional constraints on Social Security disability coverage. Welfare recipients would come up against additional work requirements. Federal workers would see their pensions gutted.
Alongside these deeply unpopular cuts to social programs are increases for the US military and other “defense” spending, which already outstrips the next seven largest national military budgets combined. Over the next decade, the plan calls for an additional $929 billion to prepare for war and social unrest.
The House Republicans’ plan mirrors in most respects President Trump’s budget proposal released this past spring. In certain areas, however, it is even more extreme. It goes further in boosting the military budget, for example, and proposes attacks not only on Medicaid but also on Medicare. The architect of Trump’s plan, Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, praised the House proposal, urging Congress to move it forward.
The House plan also contains a key element of Trump’s agenda in his first year: tax giveaways to the wealthy. If passed it would rewrite both corporate and personal tax codes, consolidating tax brackets and repealing the alternative minimum tax for individuals, while cutting the corporate tax rate and switching to a territorial tax system to only tax domestic income for business.
The inclusion of the tax plan is a procedural gimmick to allow the bill to become law with a simple majority in the Senate, thereby overcoming nominal opposition from the Democratic Party. But it also requires the tax changes to be revenue neutral. The current plan uses many of the same accounting tricks and optimistic growth assumptions as the president’s plan to arrive at that conclusion. However, Trump has favored even larger tax cuts, which add to the deficit despite the mathematical camouflage.
The prospects for the current budget proposal to survive a vote by the full House of Representatives remains uncertain. Already it has generated criticism from both hard-line right-wingers and Republican “centrists” as not going far enough or going too far, respectively. Democrats have denounced the plan. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called it a “toxic budget whose sole purpose is to hand tax breaks to billionaires on the backs of seniors and hardworking Americans.”
Nonetheless, the brutal austerity proposals prepare the way for a “compromise” to emerge that restores some of the cuts but still accelerates the dismantling of social programs. Together with the long-term concept of transferring to several trillion dollars to the wealthy, the plan contains short-term actions, including mandating $203 billion in cuts, to be determined by 11 different committees.
The general program of rolling back the social safety net and anti-poverty programs has in fact been a common one shared by both Democrats and Republicans. The current budget proposal is a somewhat more austere variation of the $4 trillion in cuts proposed by the Simpson-Bowles Commission convened by President Obama, or the $1.1 trillion sequestration cuts enacted by him.
Yet the ruling class sees now an opportunity to advance its agenda. “In past years, our proposals had little chance of becoming a reality,” House Budget Committee Chairman Diane Black said. “The time for talking is over, now is the time for action.”

"Between 2002 and 2015 annual earnings for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose by only 4.5 percent, while earnings for the top 1 percent grew by 22.7 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Under the Obama administration, more than 90 percent of income gains since the so-called “recovery” began have gone to the top one percent."

Study reveals gutting of health care and pensions for US workers

By Isaac Finn
21 July 2017
A recent study by the global risk management firm Willis Towers Watson, “Shifts in benefit allocations among U.S. employers,” details the results of the decades-long assault on workers’ retirement and medical benefits by Corporate America and both big business parties.
The study draws on a database of retirement and health care programs of over 500 companies with at least 200 employees from 2001 to 2015, as well as a survey of 4,721 full-time employees from 2015 to 2016.
The global risk management firm notes the precarious situation facing both older workers—who have little resources for retirement—and younger workers who have only recently become employed. The writers note, “Whether it’s the baby boomers behind on retirement savings or the millennials trying to keep up with student loan debts, sluggish wage growth is making their financial burdens heavier. Many employees are worried about paying today’s bill and about financing tomorrow’s retirement.”
Employers reduced their expenditures on retirement benefits by a staggering 25 percent between 2001 and 2015, the report notes. In addition to cutting retired and current workers’ benefits, corporations have essentially eliminated traditional employer-paid “defined benefit” retirement benefits for newly hired workers, replacing them with “defined contribution plans,” such as 401 (K) plans, which are funded by workers with set contributions from employers, with the final payout not “defined” but largely determined by the vagaries of the stock market. According to the study, the percentage of employers offering DB plans plummeted from 45 percent to just seven percent between 2001 and 2015.
To offset rising employee medical costs, the report notes, employers have reduced pension and post-retirement medical expenditures. This “reflects a seismic shift in the allocation of benefit dollars,” the report declares. “In 2001, active health care costs comprised about two-fifths of benefits while retirement benefits made up the remaining three-fifths. By 2015, the ratio had flipped, with active health care benefits accounting for slightly less than two-thirds of the costs and the retirement share dropping to slightly more than one-third.”
The rise in employer expenditures for current workers’ medical care has also spurred on the drive to force workers to pay higher deductibles and co-pays. This process was accelerated under Obama’s misnamed Affordable Care Act, which initially included a “Cadillac Tax” on corporations, which provided supposedly overgenerous health care packages.
The corporate and financial elite have long complained that workers are living too long after retirement and that the costs of “legacy workers”—i.e., retirees—has become unsustainable.
In 2005, then CEO of GM spin off Delphi parts maker declared, “We are witnessing the slow death of defined benefits as industrial compensation policy.” The “social contract inherent in defined-benefit programs perhaps made some economic sense when you worked for one employer till age 65 and then died at age 70,” Miller said. Now, he complained, “people can start work at age 20, retire at age 50, and expect full pensions and health care till age 90 or so.”
The Willis Towers Watson study shows the devastating results of this “social contract” being ripped up and the four-decade social counter-revolution waged by the capitalist class to return to the “good old days” when workers essentially labored until they dropped.
According to the study, “44% of older workers (age 55+) who are concerned about their future finances and 64% of those who are struggling financially expect to work to age 70 or later.”
Pew Research Center recently noted that the number of American aged 65 or over who are working jumped from 13 percent in 2000 to nearly 19 percent in 2016, and was expected to increase to 32 percent in the next five years.
Over 25 million Americans 60 years or older are economically insecure—living at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level or $29,425 a year for an individual—according to the National Council on Aging. This will only worsen as the Trump administration and the Democrats move to destroy Medicaid and prepare the way to slash Medicare and Social Security too.
Far from opposing the attack on pensions and post-retirement medical care, the unions—including the United Auto Workers, Teamsters, United Steelworkers and United Mine Workers—have colluded with management to cut these benefits in the name of boosting the “competitiveness” and profitability of US corporations. While looking the other way as corporations have looted retiree benefits to fund ever-higher dividend payouts, stock buybacks and mega-mergers and acquisitions, the union bureaucracy has increasingly benefit from management of multi-billion-dollar pension and retiree medical care trusts.
In exchange for agreeing to the halving of new hire wages, the expansion of part-time and temporary labor and the destruction of thousands of jobs, the Obama administration handed the UAW control of a massive Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association (VEBA) fund, valued at $50 billion. The UAW executives have a financial incentive to reduce benefits and accelerate the demise of hundreds of thousands of retirees and their dependents to keep their VEBA slush fund and investment vehicle thriving.
The number of impoverished senior citizens could potentially skyrocket this year as 22,600 retired coal miners and the United Mine Workers Health and Retirement Funds nears bankruptcy and the temporary federal fix ends. The Central States Pension fund, which covers 407,000 Teamster truck drivers and warehousemen in the Midwest and South, is also near bankruptcy.
Roughly one million workers are currently covered by multi-employer pension funds that are likely to run out of money in the next twenty years.
The survey of workers notes that since the financial crash of 2008, the desire for retirement guarantees has been rising steadily, up 17 percentage points since 2009. At the same time, only a third of respondents “would accept a smaller paycheck in exchange for more generous health benefits or lower, more predictable costs when using health care services.”
Many employees, the report notes, “appear to have reached the limit of how much they are willing or able to pay for health care benefits, which raises the question: Have we gone too far in cutting retirement support at a time when escalating health care costs—among other factors—are making it difficult to save more?”
The existence of employer paid pensions and retiree medical benefits was not the result of the beneficence of the industrialists and bankers. On the contrary, these social rights were won through fierce industrial battles of the working class in the 1940s and 1950s, and defended in struggles into the 1970s. The suppression of the class struggle by the unions, which reduced strike activity to historic lows during the eight years of the Obama administration, has allowed the ruling class to turn the clock backwards and send millions to an early grave.
The study by the London-based “global risk management” company is not primarily a celebration of the success in robbing workers of their retirements. Noting that survey results “suggest a disconnect between employees’ primary concerns, needs and preferences, and the reshuffling of employer dollars,” the report is also a warning that stagnating wages, impossibly high healthcare costs and working increasingly longer years is provoking enormous anger and that will inevitably find expression in a sharp escalation of the class struggle.

OPEN BORDERS.... IT'S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"The New York Times quoted a top executive at Manpower 
North America, who said: “We have not before seen 
unemployment drop, low participation rates and wages not 
move. That tells you something’s not right in the labor 
market."
Wages and Wall Street
15 July 2017
Despite mounting geo-political conflicts, economic stagnation and governmental crises in country after country, stock markets in the US and around the world continue their spectacular upward climb. On Friday, as new revelations in the Trump-Russia saga intensified the crisis facing the deeply unpopular US administration, Wall Street chalked up another banner day. The Dow and the S&P 500 closed at new record highs and the Nasdaq recorded its best week of the year. Since its post-2008 crisis low point in March of 2009, the Dow has risen by 340 percent.

The other persistent economic trend, particularly in the United States, is the stagnation and decline of wages. This is despite a nominal US unemployment rate of 4.4 percent, a low level by historical standards, and what the media characterizes as “robust” job-creation.

Last week’s US employment report for June, despite a better-than-anticipated growth in payrolls, sparked unease even in some bourgeois circles because wages rose a mere 2.4 percent from the year-earlier period, well below the 3 percent rate in the months preceding the 2008 financial meltdown. The New York Times quoted a top executive at Manpower North America, who said: “We have not before seen unemployment drop, low participation rates and wages not move. That tells you something’s not right in the labor market.”
According to the most recent “Real Wage Index,” posted earlier this month on the PayScale website, five of the 32 metro areas included in the index saw wage declines in the second quarter of this year. Four of the five were in Midwest regions hardest hit by decades of deindustrialization: Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago and Minneapolis.
Adjusting for inflation, real wages in the US have, according to this index, fallen by 7.5 percent since 2006. In real terms, average wages in the US peaked more than 40 years ago.
Unlike the 1929 stock market crash, which was followed in the US by social reform and a modest redistribution of wealth away from the rich, the 2008 Wall Street meltdown ushered in an intensification of attacks on the working class combined with a further enrichment of the financial aristocracy and a record rise on the stock market. Social inequality has accelerated and continues to climb.
The share of the US gross domestic product 
going to labor has fallen to the lowest level 
since the end of World War II, while the share
going to corporate profits has hit record 
highs.
How is this situation to be explained, and what is the relationship between the staggering rise on Wall Street and the decline in working class paychecks?
The Wall Street boom and profit bonanza for the rich are not the result of a growth in production or a new upward spiral of the productive forces. On the contrary, the International Monetary Fund has placed at the center of continuing economic and trade stagnation a persistent decline in productive investment and, related to that, a slump in productivity growth.
What has happened is that the process of 

financialization and the growth of parasitism 

that led to the 2008 crash—triggered by the 

outright criminality of the major banks and 

investment firms—have accelerated in its 

aftermath. Far from diverting a small portion of corporate profits to finance social reforms, governments and central banks have overseen an unprecedented plundering of the world economy to rescue the financial aristocracy and make it even richer, at the direct expense of the working class.
The US Federal Reserve has led the way. After the Bush and Obama administrations seized $700 billion in public funds to finance an initial bailout of the major Wall Street banks, the Fed set about buying trillions of dollars of worthless assets to remove them from the banks’ books (dubbed “quantitative easing”), resulting in a five-fold growth of its balance sheet. At the same time, it lowered interest rates to near-zero and kept them at ultra-low levels to pump liquidity into the financial markets and drive up stock prices.
The banks used their super-profits to provide a windfall for the financial aristocracy in the form of dividend increases, stock buybacks and corporate mergers. Just this month, the Fed gave the green light for banks to raise their payouts to big investors. Bank of America said it would increase its dividend by 60 percent and unveiled a $12 billion share repurchase plan.
This was accompanied, under Obama, with a policy of austerity and wage-cutting directed against the working class. This included the bailout of the auto corporations on the basis of an across-the-board 50 percent cut in the wages of newly hired workers, the gutting of health care for millions of workers in the form of Obamacare, and an assault on pensions signaled by the Detroit bankruptcy.
That this attack continues unabated was made clear last week when the state of Missouri cut the already derisory $10 minimum wage in St. Louis to the statewide starvation level of $7.70.
What has made this social counterrevolution possible is the nearly complete suppression of working class opposition. When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, the example of the Russian Revolution and the existence of the Soviet Union continued to haunt the bourgeoisie and inspire working class resistance internationally. The social reforms of the New Deal were not the result of beneficence on the part of Franklin Roosevelt, but the explosive eruption of working class struggle, particularly between 1934 and 1938, including general strikes that paralyzed entire cities and a wave of sit-down strikes in auto and other industries.
The current period is dominated by the opposite—the artificial suppression of the class struggle. The US Labor Department reports that over the past four decades major work stoppages declined 90 percent. The period from 2007 to 2016 was the lowest decade on record, averaging approximately 14 major work stoppages per year.
There are many signs of growing anger and militancy in the working class. But there is no basis for social struggle in any of the existing organizations. The Democratic Party has moved ever further to the right and today functions openly and directly as a party of Wall Street, war and the CIA.
The AFL-CIO and the rest of the unions—corporatist organizations of a corrupt and reactionary bureaucracy—devote their efforts to suppressing working class opposition to layoffs, wage cuts, speedup, casualization of labor and attacks on health care and pensions. They block strikes wherever possible and sabotage them when they break out.
The AFL-CIO web site reflects the organization’s indifference and contempt for the working class. On the issue of wages, it notes, as part of a few perfunctory paragraphs, that “Ninety percent of Americans’ wages are lower today than they were in 1997.” Its plan of action to confront this astonishing and damning fact? A petition addressed to Congress!
Wage stagnation and the ever-greater concentration of wealth at the very top will not be halted by appeals to the bribed stooges of Wall Street in Congress or any of the other institutions of the corporate-financial oligarchy. Only the renewal of working class struggle on the basis of an anti-capitalist and socialist program will change the situation.
The long and highly uncharacteristic period in which the class struggle in America has seemed to disappear is rapidly coming to an end. Anger is rising as is a desire to fight back. Last year’s Verizon strike was one of the longest and largest in many years. This growth of militancy is accompanied by a broad political radicalization and rise of anti-capitalist sentiment, which found an initial expression in the mass support for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, based on the misplaced belief that Sanders is really a socialist and opponent of the “billionaire class.”
The brutal attacks on social conditions and democratic rights by Trump’s government of oligarchs will provoke growing resistance among workers and young people. This emerging movement must, however, find a new organizational form and be guided by a conscious political perspective. It must not allow itself to be channeled behind the Democratic Party or sabotaged by the unions.

Global financial parasitism and the political strategy of the working class

By Nick Beams
10 July 2017
The statement authored by Joseph Kishore and David North on behalf of the Political Committee of the Socialist Equality Party (US) on June 13 (“Palace coup or class struggle: The political crisis in Washington and the strategy of the working class”) draws out the objective processes driving the class struggle in the United States and the strategy which must be adopted and fought for in the building of a mass socialist movement.


Their analysis is firmly grounded on a vitally important conception advanced by Marx. He explained that the revolutionary role of the working class was not determined by “what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and consequent upon that being, it will be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is irrevocably and obviously demonstrated in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today.” [1]

In its elaboration of the necessary political strategy of the American working class, the statement therefore outlines its “life situation”:

There are many signs of growing social anger among broad sections of the working class, for whom conditions of life are becoming intolerable. The old phrases used in the past to describe life in the United States—“the land of unlimited opportunity,” “the American Dream,” etc.—have become meaningless because they bear no relation to reality. It is becoming obvious to the great mass of working people that the existing society serves exclusively the interests of those who are already very wealthy. Access to the basic necessities of life, such as high-quality education, a safe environment, decent housing, secure employment, adequate leisure time and affordable medical care, is determined at birth—that is, by the class and economic status of the family into which an individual is born.

Changing what has to be changed—that is, the various ways in which the capitalist class and its defenders in every country seek to promote the society over which they preside as the best of all possible worlds—it is clear that the characterisation of the situation in the US applies internationally.


The rising social anger to which the statement points is likewise an international phenomenon, which is finding expression in the observations of some of the more perceptive political commentators.


Writing last month, the European economics commentator for the Financial Times, Wolfgang Munchau, pointed to the surprise results of the Italian referendum last year, called by the now ousted Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, the Brexit referendum called by the then-British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the outcome of the British election of June 8—all of which took place in opposition to what opinion polls had indicated.


Even more extreme was the outcome in France, where the electorate “managed to eradicate virtually the entire political establishment in a short sequence of elections.”


“In all these counties,” he continued, “the global financial crisis has become a historical turning point, caused by the effect of crisis resolution on income distribution and on the quality of the public sector.”


Reflecting a growing sense of bewilderment in sections of the ruling classes confronted with rising opposition from below, Munchau noted that the financial crisis had not only challenged long-held beliefs about economic policy and financial regulation, but also “how we think about politics.”


Previous economic and political models had broken down and the financial crisis had turned what seemed to be an outwardly stable political and financial environment into a “dynamical” system, the main characteristic of which is “radical uncertainty.” He could offer no prescription for the political establishment for which he speaks to resolve this situation, advising that the best that could be done was to “muddle through and keep your eyes wide open.”

But he had no doubt about some of the longer-term implications of the crisis, concluding: “Once we accept that our globalised world has characteristics of a dynamical system, many of our assumptions will fall like dominoes, and so will the political parties that cling to them.”

A comment published in the Financial Times of June 14 by Michael Power, a strategist with Investec Management, entitled “Has Western-style democracy become too expensive for capitalism?” pointed to some of the underlying economic trends fuelling rising social anger.

He cited the McKinsey report that found that almost 70 percent of households in the 25 most advanced economies, some 560 million people, had seen their real incomes fall or remain flat since 2005, and that in the US there had been a 12 percent decline in real median household income since 2000.

According to Power: “The central reason why Western democracy is in decline is that its capitalist bedfellow can no longer afford the financial demands that full-blown democracy is placing upon it.”

The political demands of democracy were able to cohabit with the economics of capitalism for a century because of the redistribution of income via taxes and a social welfare system in what Power called the subsidisation of those who fell behind.


“This persuaded those whose livelihoods required subsidisation to support this marriage of convenience. The rise of populism [the termed used by Power and many others for the social anger of the working class], the deepening divide between generations and the growth of anti-establishment political movements on both extremes of the political spectrum suggest this grand bargain may be losing its attraction. This cohabitation is threatened because the economic surpluses generated can no longer cover the level of political demands for subsidisation.”


Power is unable to answer the obvious question posed by his analysis: why is it that in the face of the enormous growth of the productive forces resulting from the development of technology, the social position of the working class is worsening?


We shall examine the reason for that in the course of this comment. But Power does point to some of its consequences. He holds out no prospect for any restoration of the “grand bargain” within the present economic framework, noting that in the US growth rates have declined from 3.5 percent to 2 percent.


Moreover, he points out, citing the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty, the economic rewards have flowed to the upper-income layers—the top 1 percent. A mutation of this logic is reflected in the “growing disenchantment of youth with this unequal arrangement, as most are being progressively shut out of decent job opportunities that were open to their parents’ generation.”


He continues: “The recent UK election—which saw the electorate start to swing towards the hard left on the back of an energised under-25s vote—and the fact that the youth of the US have made a socialist, Bernie Sanders, America’s most popular politician, are indications of this growing trend.”


The disquiet about the political consequences of post-2008 capitalism extends to major economic institutions.


In its annual jobs report, published in June, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) noted that while the number of people employed in the developed world had surpassed pre-crisis levels, there was a rising tide of social anger.

“While the Great Recession left deep scars in many countries, the economic discontent also centres on the perception that deeper international economic integration disadvantages many workers while offering the lion’s share of the benefits to large corporations and a cosmopolitan elite. The perception that the international economic system is ‘rigged’ clearly challenges the democratic legitimacy of current policies and needs to be taken seriously.”

It noted that between 1995 and 2015 what it called the middle-skill share of employment fell by 9.5 percentage points in the OECD area, and that this trend had been aggravated by a cumulative loss in output per capita since the 2008 crisis of around 50 percent.

The OECD, which has been notoriously in favour of “free market” economic policies, even offered something by way of a self-criticism. It was “important to assess whether labour market policy choices—including those consistent with OECD policy advice—have inadvertently contributed to a growth model that has not prevented a disproportionate share of the gains from economic growth to benefit already high-income segments of the population.”

However, reflecting the bankruptcy of the entire framework of bourgeois policy-making, the OECD report offered no way out. It said there had to be a focus on increasing skill level, as if oblivious to what has taken place over the past decade and more. Tens of millions of young people all over the world have sought to increase their qualifications and skill levels at universities and colleges only to find that when they graduate there are no positions available and they are saddled with massive student debts.


The descriptions of the deepening economic and social crisis of capitalism and its political consequences put forward by various bourgeois pundits and commentators point to the decisive role of the 2008 financial crisis. However, these descriptions are accompanied by the delusion that its transformative effects can somehow be overcome if only some kind of economic adjustment—usually nothing more than a call to governments to take some heed of social distress—is carried out within the framework of the capitalist system itself.


An altogether different conclusion arises—and this is decisive for the development of the political strategy of the working class—from a scientific analysis of the roots of the 2008 breakdown.


The immediate cause of the crisis was the criminal and semi-criminal activities resulting from financialisation. At its core, financialisation, the domination of the economy by banks, hedge funds, financial institutions and financial markets, involves the accumulation of profit in ways very different from the period in which the so-called “grand bargain” was struck.


In that period, profit accumulation arose in the main from expanded investment in production, leading to increased economic output and employment and an increase in wages and real living standards. That is no longer the dominant form. It has been replaced by the accumulation of vast wealth through financial operations.


It would, however, be the greatest mistake to think that this parasitism and its dominance over the economy as a whole are the result of the activities of some “evil serpent” that managed to slither into the Garden of Eden of the “free market,” and that the process can be reversed if only the serpent is scotched.


One of the most crucial advances made by Marx in the science of political economy was to draw the distinction between surplus value, extracted from the working class in the process of capitalist production, and its various forms of appearance as revenue flowing to the different property owners—as industrial profit, interest payments, rent and the gains acquired by share trading and other financial operations.


Surplus value is the ultimate basis for the expansion of capital. But it is divided up among the different property owners, whether or not they are directly involved in its extraction.


Financial activity by hedge funds, financial investors, speculators, bond market and currency traders, etc., involves the accumulation of massive profits. But these activities do not involve the extraction of surplus value. Rather, they are the way in which the holders of money and other forms of property, including, most importantly today, the owners of intellectual property in the high-tech and pharmaceutical industries, appropriate surplus value created elsewhere.


This process, in which money seems to simply beget money, is not somehow extraneous to the fundamental logic of capital itself—a kind of “bad side” that develops in opposition to the “good side” of real wealth-creation as such. It must always be remembered that the driving force of capital is not the production of real wealth—increased output, providing rising wages, jobs, social services, etc.—but the self-expansion of value in the form of money.


Marx drew out that the process of capital accumulation, the expansion of value, starts and finishes with money, its “independent and palpable form,” and, consequently, “the production process appears simply as an unavoidable middle term for the purpose of money making.”


And as Engels commented: “This explains why all nations characterized by the capitalist mode of production are periodically seized by fits of giddiness in which they try to accomplish the money-making without the mediation of the production process.” [2]


Over the past three decades and more, starting in the 1980s, rather than “fits of giddiness,” this form of accumulation has increasingly taken a central role in profit accumulation, above all in the US, but also in other major developed economies.


It was a period characterised by a series of mounting financial storms—the US savings and loans scandal of the late 1980s, the stock market crash of October 1987, the collapse of the Japanese stock market bubble of 1990-91, the bond market sell-off of 1994, the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 (prompting a rescue operation by the New York Federal Reserve Bank), the Enron bankruptcy and the bursting of the high-tech stock market bubble in 2000-200—leading to the financial meltdown of 2008.


At every point, the response of the financial authorities to these mounting storms was the same—to pump more money into the financial system to enable the orgy of speculation to continue.

There was, however, a qualitative leap in this process after September 2008. Now it was no longer a question of dealing with the collapse of a particular firm or a crisis in one sector of the financial markets, but preventing the collapse of the global financial system as a whole.


Rather than taking action to reverse the growth of financial parasitism, government and financial authorities have raised it to new heights by pumping ultra-cheap money into the financial system—the US Federal Reserve alone has expanded its balance from $800 billion to $4.5 trillion, a more than five-fold increase, through the purchase of financial assets since 2008.


The result has been the accumulation of wealth in the upper echelons of society on a previously unimaginable scale, to the point that eight billionaires now own and control more wealth than half of the world’s population combined.


At the same time as providing trillions of dollars to fuel wealth accumulation at the heights of society, governments, central banks and financial authorities have been engaged in a ferocious and unending assault on the social position of the working class.

These two processes—accumulation of fabulous wealth at one pole and ever-worsening wages and social conditions at the other—are organically connected. This is because however much capital tries to lift itself into a kind of financial heaven where money simply begets money, it cannot entirely escape its earthly roots and generates irresolvable contradictions.


To the extent that finance—capital in its essential form as money—turns to parasitism and away from productive investment, it is involved in a process, so to speak, of sawing off the branch of the tree on which it is sitting. Consequently, it actively intervenes and exercises its domination over the economy as a whole to ensure that this does not take place. While siphoning off surplus value in the form of financial wealth, it exerts a tremendous pressure to ensure that the mass of surplus value in other areas of the economy, on which it ultimately depends, is increased. This takes place in two ways.


It strives, in the first instance, to ensure that in every area of the economy the exploitation of the working class is intensified through the lowering of real wages, the destruction of working conditions, the introduction of new forms of labour contracts such as part-time work and casualization, zero contracts, and so on.

But in and of themselves these measures are not sufficient. At the same time, all the social conditions won by the working class in previous struggles—the provision of health services, education, social welfare measures, pensions, etc.—must also be eviscerated.

This is because these social facilities, which formed a key component of the so-called “grand bargain,” are, in the final analysis, a deduction from the mass of surplus value necessary for the self-expansion of capital. This is why, in every country, whatever the political colouration of the government of the day, the period since the 2008 financial crisis has seen an intensification of social attacks on the working class.


An examination of the political economy of parasitism, its essential logic and driving forces, underscores the necessity set out in the SEP (US) statement for the unification of the struggles of the working class in workplaces, communities, schools and colleges on a socialist program aimed at the conquest of political power. In every area, whatever the immediate form of social struggles, the working masses confront the same enemy.


Not a single economic, social, political or environmental problem confronting working people in America and the mass of humanity on a global scale can be resolved without the overthrow of the capitalist profit system, the depredations of which reach down into every corner and aspect of social and individual life.


And as the statement draws out, this struggle is, by its very essence, international in scope, because the working class in every country confronts the same powerful enemy—globally integrated and organised capital. It can be overturned only by an even more powerful force, the global working class, unified on the basis of an international socialist program.


To return to the point made by Marx cited at the beginning of this comment, a coherent political strategy for the working class, as outlined in the SEP statement, must be based not on the existing level of consciousness—that will undergo vast shifts in the course of the social struggles now unfolding and the even bigger explosions to come—but on its “life situation,” determined by the “whole organisation of bourgeois society,” and what it will be compelled to undertake.



SCORCHED EARTH BANKSTER PLUNDER 

AHEAD!

TRUMP VOWS OB AMA’S CRONY CAPITALISM THE PLUNDER OF OBAMA’S BANKSTERS IS NOT OVER

……….. It’s just begun!!!

“This amnesty for corporate bribery and criminality reveals the essence of the Trump administration’s scorched earth campaign against business regulations.”



“Under Obama, not a single leading banker was prosecuted for the 

criminal activities that led to the biggest financial disaster and 

deepest slump since the 1930s, destroying the jobs, life savings 

and living standards of tens of millions of workers in the US and 

around the world.”


 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, 


has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This

is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”

 ---- Karen  McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com



TRUMP SIGNALS OBAMA’S  CRONY 

BANKSTERS THAT BETTER LOOTING IS UP

AHEAD.


The chief motivating factor behind the rise on Wall Street is 

the understanding that the incoming Trump administration 

will not only carry out policies to benefit the financial elites, 

but that responsibility for implementing this agenda will be 

in the hands of some its foremost representatives.




"The economy has thus come to resemble a giant vacuum cleaner in which the real wealth produced by millions of workers is siphoned off to the semi-criminal and criminal elements (so clearly established by their activities that led to the financial crisis) who occupy the heights of society."

 “The passing grades on the Fed’s stress tests pave the way for banks to pay their largest dividends in almost a decade,” the newspaper reported. “The hands-down winners will be shareholders and bank executives, who could see their stock-based compensation packages advance even further.”

Fed stress test results unleash “party time” for US banks
By Nick Beams
8 July 2017
Anyone looking for conclusive evidence that the US financial system and more broadly the entire economy is run of, by and for the ultra-wealthy need go no further than the Federal Reserve decision to give all the major banks a pass on its stress tests at the end of June.
In what one financial analyst characterised as “party time,” the major banks responded by handing out billions of dollars to their super-rich shareholders in the form of dividends and other benefits.
The head of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, alone is expected to benefit to the tune of $1.6 billion as a result of bank share purchases he made following the global financial crisis in 2008–2009. With decades of experience in financial circles and knowledge of how government operates, he bet that the authorities would rescue the banks and payoff time would come.
As a result of the Fed decision, the market value of US banks is estimated to have risen by $40 billion, with the six largest banks increasing in value by $25 billion.
Stress tests were introduced in 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis. They are supposed to ensure that the banks have sufficient capital to meet adverse circumstances and do not again require a bailout from public funds.
According to the Fed’s calculations, the capital held by the largest American banks was nearly 14 percent of assets, weighted by risk at the end of 2016—deemed sufficient to meet any financial problems. But according to the New York Times, alternative definitions of capital, in line with international, rather than American, accounting standards, the capital ratio is only 6.3 percent.
“The passing grades on the Fed’s stress tests pave the way for banks to pay their largest dividends in almost a decade,” the newspaper reported. “The hands-down winners will be shareholders and bank executives, who could see their stock-based compensation packages advance even further.”
The amounts run into scores of billions of dollars, which are going to be handed out via dividends and stock buybacks to increase share valuations.
According to one estimate, the six largest US banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo—are set to return to shareholders between $95 billion and $97 billion over the next year. This is 50 percent more than they returned last year.
The inclusion of Wells Fargo in the pass list is particularly striking. It was found guilty last year of schemes that set out to defraud customers by collecting fees on two million unauthorized accounts in order to boost its bottom line and balance sheet. Now it has lifted its dividend on shares and announced an $11.5 billion share buyback scheme.
Bank of America said it would increase its dividend by 60 percent on each share and unveiled a $12 billion share repurchase plan.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein offered a measured, but obviously satisfied, response to the Fed decision, saying his bank was “well positioned to continue to return capital to shareholders while expanding our client franchise.” Blankfein once famously remarked that in the finance industry he was doing “God’s work.”
BLOG: DURING OBAMA'S BANKSTER REGIME, JP MORGAN VIRTUALLY LIVED IN THE WHITE HOUSE AS DOES GOLDMAN SACHS IN THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE.
At JPMorgan Chase, the payout to shareholders will be $27 billion over the next year. Citigroup, which almost went belly up in the financial crisis, will return $18.9 billion to shareholders, an 82 percent increase on the year before.
The stress tests, together with supposedly tighter regulations under the Dodd-Frank Act, were introduced to give the impression that the government and financial authorities were taking some action in response to the financial crisis, set off by the dubious and, in some cases, outright criminal activities of the banks.
But no one was charged, let alone jailed and the only penalties have been fines that the banks paid out of their profits as operating expenses. The Dodd-Frank measures have largely proved to be toothless, presenting only a minor inconvenience.
Even these measures are now set to be significantly watered down, if not scrapped outright. Last month, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said stress tests should be performed only every second year and banks that maintained a sufficient level of capital should be exempted altogether.
Capital Alpha Partners analyst Ian Katz expressed the sentiments circulating in bank boardroom and executive offices, but not usually voiced publicly. He said the Fed decision was “payout party time.” Katz forecast more to come, declaring: “The highly positive report card puts more wind at the backs of the Trump administration and others who want to soften Dodd-Frank era regulations.”
One slightly sour, but significant, note in the stress test assessment was the Fed’s decision to give the Capital One Financial Group only conditional approval to make payouts while it fixes “material weaknesses” in planning.
Capital One derives most of its revenue from credit card operations and the Fed referred to a “recent uptick in delinquency rates” in this financial area. This points to deep and growing problems in the US economy as working families and young people increasingly struggle to make ends meet under conditions of falling real wages and the replacement of full-time jobs with low-paying, part-time and casual positions.
Furthermore, there is a causal connection between the cash-rich banks and the deepening economic malaise of the working population.
In banking and finance, it appears as if profit comes almost out of thin air, as money begets still more money. But in the final analysis, all financial profits represent a claim on the surplus value extracted from wage workers.
Consequently, the period since the financial crisis has seen the development of two interconnected processes. While the banks and finance capital have been sustained and expanded by bailouts and the Fed’s provision of ultra-cheap money, workers, and especially young people, have been subjected to ever-lower wages and worsening working conditions.
At the same time, social facilities have been slashed on the grounds that there is no money.
The economy has thus come to resemble a giant vacuum cleaner in which the real wealth produced by millions of workers is siphoned off to the semi-criminal and criminal elements (so clearly established by their activities that led to the financial crisis) who occupy the heights of society.


Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested

 

administration!


BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!
 “Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-

President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset 

Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money 

to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest 

beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash 

in the form of a government stock  purchase, plus a $306 billion 

government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-

related assets.”

MUCH MORE HERE:


“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.”

“So when Clinton was hobnobbing with  

Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while  

investigations of wrongdoing by 

Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were 

still ongoing, she was consorting with a man 

who belonged in prison.”


BARACK OBAMA , HIS CRIMINAL 

BANKSTERS AND THE LA RAZA

MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….

There’s more than one way to destroy America’s white middle class!



HSBC laundered hundreds of millions 

and perhaps billions of dollars for drug 

cartels responsible for the deaths of tens 

of thousands of people over the past 

two decades. The bank transferred at least 

$881 million of known drug trafficking 

proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa 

Cartel in Mexico, which is known for 

dismembering its victims and publicly 

displaying their body parts.


CRONY BANKSTER LOOTING OF AMERICA 
THEIR GOLDEN AGE OF PLUNDER IS NOT OVER!


NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS NOR INFESTED HIS ADMIN WITH BANKSTER CRONIES MORE THAN OBAMA!

And while the Obama administration worked systematically 

to bail out the banks and make the financial oligarchy richer 

than ever, shielding the architects of the Great Recession 

from criminal prosecution, it did impose fines for some of 

the banks’ grossest swindles, including the sale of worthless 

subprime mortgage-backed securities, the rigging of key 

global interest rates such as the London Interbank Offered 

Rate (Libor), drug money laundering, illegal home 

foreclosures and other illicit activities.



BILLARY, HILLARY and the OBAMAS:

THEY FILLED THEIR BOTTOMLESS POCKETS WITH BRIBES AS THEY UNLEASHED THEIR CRONY BANKSTERS, ASSAULTED OUR BORDERS AND HANDED THE AMERICAN DREAM TO THE INVADING LA RAZA MEXICAN INVADERS AND HEROIN CARTELS




CAMPAIGN TO DESTROY AMERICA and take a THIRD TERM FOR LIFE….

Barack Obama’s 8 year sabotage of Homeland Security: His Crony Banksters, La Raza Drug Cartels and MS-13 are right behind his sabotage of U.S. borders!



The American oligarchy, steeped in criminality and parasitism, can produce only a government of war, social reaction and repression. In its blind avarice, it is creating the conditions for unprecedented social upheavals. It is hurtling toward its own revolutionary demise at the hands of the working class.

KAINE AND CLINTON-OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS…. Has their golden age of looting America only gotten brighter?
"Between 2009 and 2011, Kaine served as the head of the Democratic National Committee, the leadership body of the Democratic Party. He is close to Wall Street, having recently backed measures to deregulate banks."


 


WHY OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS WANT MORE OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS

           

“Clinton has also stepped up her efforts to woo billionaires 

who have traditionally supported Republican campaigns on 

the grounds that she will be a more effective “commander in 

chief” and defender of the interests of Wall Street.”



US House proposes over $5 trillion in cuts

By Daniel de Vries
20 July 2017
Republicans in the US House of Representatives unveiled a draconian budget plan Tuesday seeking to cut trillions in funding to programs that millions of Americans depend upon to meet basic social needs. The plan introduced in the Budget Committee takes aim at Medicaid and Medicare in particular, while siphoning off huge funding increases for the military and preparing tax breaks to pad the coffers of the super-rich.
All told, the long-term budget blueprint proposes to slash more than $5 trillion from social programs over the next decade, eviscerating what remains of the social safety net. Most provocatively, it calls for $4 trillion in reductions to “mandatory” spending programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, following public uproar over attempts to dismantle portions of these health care services under the guise of repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Connected to the funding cuts are proposals to transform these so-called entitlement programs into limited anti-poverty measures. The plan would introduce spending caps for Medicaid, effectively denying service for millions of poor and disabled people who depend on it for access to health care. Medicare would transition to a voucher-based scheme and apply a “means test” to determine the eligibility of seniors.
Other programs under the ax include $150 billion in funding for food stamps, reduced support for student loans and grants, and additional constraints on Social Security disability coverage. Welfare recipients would come up against additional work requirements. Federal workers would see their pensions gutted.
Alongside these deeply unpopular cuts to social programs are increases for the US military and other “defense” spending, which already outstrips the next seven largest national military budgets combined. Over the next decade, the plan calls for an additional $929 billion to prepare for war and social unrest.
The House Republicans’ plan mirrors in most respects President Trump’s budget proposal released this past spring. In certain areas, however, it is even more extreme. It goes further in boosting the military budget, for example, and proposes attacks not only on Medicaid but also on Medicare. The architect of Trump’s plan, Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, praised the House proposal, urging Congress to move it forward.
The House plan also contains a key element of Trump’s agenda in his first year: tax giveaways to the wealthy. If passed it would rewrite both corporate and personal tax codes, consolidating tax brackets and repealing the alternative minimum tax for individuals, while cutting the corporate tax rate and switching to a territorial tax system to only tax domestic income for business.
The inclusion of the tax plan is a procedural gimmick to allow the bill to become law with a simple majority in the Senate, thereby overcoming nominal opposition from the Democratic Party. But it also requires the tax changes to be revenue neutral. The current plan uses many of the same accounting tricks and optimistic growth assumptions as the president’s plan to arrive at that conclusion. However, Trump has favored even larger tax cuts, which add to the deficit despite the mathematical camouflage.
The prospects for the current budget proposal to survive a vote by the full House of Representatives remains uncertain. Already it has generated criticism from both hard-line right-wingers and Republican “centrists” as not going far enough or going too far, respectively. Democrats have denounced the plan. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called it a “toxic budget whose sole purpose is to hand tax breaks to billionaires on the backs of seniors and hardworking Americans.”
Nonetheless, the brutal austerity proposals prepare the way for a “compromise” to emerge that restores some of the cuts but still accelerates the dismantling of social programs. Together with the long-term concept of transferring to several trillion dollars to the wealthy, the plan contains short-term actions, including mandating $203 billion in cuts, to be determined by 11 different committees.
The general program of rolling back the social safety net and anti-poverty programs has in fact been a common one shared by both Democrats and Republicans. The current budget proposal is a somewhat more austere variation of the $4 trillion in cuts proposed by the Simpson-Bowles Commission convened by President Obama, or the $1.1 trillion sequestration cuts enacted by him.
Yet the ruling class sees now an opportunity to advance its agenda. “In past years, our proposals had little chance of becoming a reality,” House Budget Committee Chairman Diane Black said. “The time for talking is over, now is the time for action.”



TRUMPERNOMICS: IMPLEMENTING OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS
“CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WILL CONTINUE TO RULE AMERICA!”  Twitter Trumper
BUT WE KNOW WHERE THEY LIVE!
OBAMA-CLINTON-TRUMPERnomics: The Massive Transfer of Wealth to the Super Rich Ratcheted up!
 http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-goldman-sachs-regime-of-donald.html
 

BARACK OBAMA PLANS A THIRD TERM: HIS CRONY BANKSTERS, LA RAZA, MUSLIMS AND THOSE MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS HE FUNDED ARE BEHIND HIM…. Along with George Soros!

THE OBAMA COUP TO BE DICTATOR:
THE ARMY OF ILLEGALS TO BRING AMERICA DOWN AND FORM THE OBAMA MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP THAT WILL BE OPEN BORDERS AND PRO LA RAZA FASCIST SUPREMACY.
                                                  
Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY) “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was.”

“Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican  Party and the blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media.”

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY and the final collapse of AMERICA:

 

WALL STREET LOOTERS’ PROPAGANDA MACHINE TO KEEP LEGALS’ MOUTHS SHUT AND KEEP PAYING FOR THE BAILOUTS AND CORPORATE PLUNDERING OF AMERICA.

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-crony-bankster-democrat-party.html



TRUMP VOWS TO KEEP OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS LOOTING
MNUCHIN: 
 THE  FORECLOSURE  MACHINE!
The FDIC paid OneWest $1 billion, which Stein said went to “billionaire investors … to cover the close of foreclosing on working class, everyday American folks.”
“But the bank came under fire for its foreclosure practices as housing advocacy groups accused it of being too quick to foreclose on struggling homeowners. In 2011, dozens of demonstrators descended on Mnuchin's $26.5 million home in he wealthy Bel Air neighborhood to protest OneWest's eviction tactics, according to the Los Angeles Times.”
TRUMPERnomics:
AFTER OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS, THE LOOTING OF AMERICA BY THE RICH TO CONTINUE UNDER THEIR OWN, DONALD TRUMP
TRUMP FILLS THE “SWAMP” WITH CRONY BILLIONAIRES!

"Far from Trump’s demagogic claims that he would 'drain the swamp,' the corrupt nexus between Wall Street and Washington is tighter than ever."
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS is now the new TRUMPERnomics!
TRUMP VOWS TO SERVE THE RICH WITH SUPER OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS!
There is a vast chasm between this empty populist rhetoric and the personnel that Trump has selected to populate his government. The speech followed a series of cabinet picks, including billionaire asset strippers, Wall Street bankers, and dedicated opponents of financial and corporate regulations, public education and Medicare and Medicaid, to lead the Treasury, Commerce, Education and Health and Human Services departments.
TRUMP  IMPOSES  OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:  Cut Federal Pensions and Medicare to Cover Tax Cuts For the Super Rich
"Trump is not the initiator of this class war against working people. It has been underway for decades, beginning in earnest with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and continuing under every succeeding administration, including the eight-year tenures of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The colossal redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom to the top of American society reached record proportions under Obama, whose legacy of falling living standards and worsening economic crisis for tens of millions of workers was a decisive factor in the victory of the fascistic demagogue and con artist Trump."




THE DEMOCRAT PARTY



HELL BENT ON FINISHING OFF THE AMERICAN WORKER!






"At one point she hailed the “record profits” of the auto companies. She did not mention that these profits came at the expense of the jobs, wages and retirement benefits of thousands of auto workers, decimated under the terms of the auto bailout organized by the Obama administration."

TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH


"Between 2002 and 2015 annual earnings for the bottom 90 percent of Americans rose by only 4.5 percent, while earnings for the top 1 percent grew by 22.7 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Under the Obama administration, more than 90 percent of income gains since the so-called “recovery” began have gone to the top one percent."

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/11/comes-revolution-class-struggle-in-us.html
class-struggle-in-us.html



Jobs Americans Don’t Get to Do


Interactive Maps Show Local Impact of H-1B Guest Workers


WASHINGTON (July 12, 2017) – A new analysis of the H-2B visa program data by the Center for Immigration Studies shows the locations where jobs have been offered to guest workers, pay rates, and numbers of unemployed and available U.S. workers, with a particular focus on the less educated U.S. workers.  These jobs are supposed to be for seasonal or temporary non-agricultural work, and the visas are issued for up to three years at a time.  Three interactive maps show that U.S. companies are hiring H-2B guest workers in large numbers for jobs even in areas of high unemployment and with low labor force participation.

The first map shows where employers are hiring H-2B workers.  The top 10 states for H-2B hiring are (in order):  Texas, Florida, Colorado, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, and South Carolina.  Fifteen percent of all H-2B workers approved are certified for jobs in Texas (18,000 workers out of 119,000 approved in 2016).  Not all of these workers end up coming; in 2016, the State Department issued 84,600 H-2B visas. 

A second map shows the specific city or town in which the H-2B jobs were authorized.  The top individual locations with the most H-2B workers are in Alaska.  But jurisdictions with high numbers are found throughout the country: Phoenix, Arizona; in the resort island of Mackinac, Michigan; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and on the exclusive island of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

A third map shows where employers are located who were approved for 150 H-2B workers or more and the location of the H-2B jobs paying $25 an hour or more.  Silver Bay Seafoods in Sitka, Alaska is the employer approved for the most H-2B workers, with 971 guest workers certified.  The Mississippi employer Faith Forestry Service comes in second with 704 H-2B workers approved.  AJA Video Systems had the highest paid H-2B worker, at the rate of $68.45/hr for a job with no education requirement.



View maps at: 


https://cis.org/Immigration-Maps/2016-H2B-Workers-State-City


Jessica Vaughan, the Center’s director of policy studies, said, “The H-2B program was sold to Congress as a way to help employers fill short-term labor shortages of unskilled workers to do jobs that could not be filled by U.S. workers.  As has been the case in all guest worker programs, now a lucrative recruiting industry has become established that profits from the placement of foreign guest workers with employers who have become addicted to the workers year after year, and who are now a permanent fixture – even in areas with many available U.S. workers, especially many young workers.  And these are not necessarily low-paying jobs, but they are effectively off-limits to U.S. workers."

Some companies use the program to hire guest workers as landscapers, lifeguards, carnival workers, factory workers, cooks, maids and fishery workers.  But others were approved to bring in engineers, tax preparers, soccer coaches and occupational therapists – jobs that clearly are not unskilled and not so exotic that no Americans can be found to fill.  These cases suggest that the level of scrutiny for visa approval is inadequate and that employers may be using the program as a way around the rules of other guest worker programs.

More than 90 percent of the H-2B workers come from five countries:  Mexico, Jamaica, Guatemala, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

The Trump administration is under pressure from some members of Congress to dramatically expand the number of workers allowed to enter. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis is so determined to secure the entry of more H-2B workers that he is holding up the confirmation of the man chosen to lead USCIS, the agency that approves employer requests for guest workers, until DHS announces an increase in visas.

DHS has submitted its proposed increase to the Office of Management and Budget for review, and an announcement of the new total of H-2B visas allowed is expected any day.

Says Vaughan:  “The government’s own data shows that the responsible agencies have some work to do to ensure that this program is not abused and that it is not shutting out U.S. workers from opportunities. At the same time, members of Congress need to think about how this program may be working to foster employer dependency on these workers, and whether that may be disadvantaging U.S. workers, and especially American youths.  Why is the government allowing employers to bring in tens of thousands of unskilled workers when there are millions of people already here who can do this work?"
 
Further Reading on the H-1B Program

DURING  OBAMA'S EIGHT YEARS 75% OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL.

OBAMA, ERIC HOLDER AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY SABOTAGED HOMEELAND SECURITY, E-VERIFY AND THE AMERICAN WORKER TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FROM ENDLESS HORDES OF ILLEGALS JUMPING OUR BORDERS, JOBS AND VOTING BOOTHS!

The War on Work—and How to End It
An agenda to address joblessness, the great American domestic crisis of the twenty-first century



Economy, finance, and budgets

In 1967, 95 percent of “prime-age” men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. During the Great Recession, though, the share of jobless prime-age males rose above 20 percent. Even today, long after the recession officially ended, more than 15 percent of such men aren’t working. And in some locations, like Kentucky, the numbers are even higher: fewer than 70 percent of men lacking any college education go to work every day in that state.

The rise of joblessness—especially among men—is the great American domestic crisis of the twenty-first century. It is a crisis of spirit more than of resources. The jobless are far more prone to self-destructive behavior than are the working poor. Proposed solutions that focus solely on providing material benefits are a false path. Well-meaning social policies—from longer unemployment insurance to more generous disability diagnoses to higher minimum wages—have only worsened the problem; the futility of joblessness won’t be solved with a welfare check. The loss of work for so many also reflects the emergence of a modern labor market with little interest in less skilled job seekers. American wages were high in the 1960s and 1970s because of steady demand for unionized labor in Detroit and Allentown. Automation and globalization have destroyed many of those jobs, and the process is likely to continue. Technology gurus like Elon Musk believe that future innovations will make the human contribution to other economic sectors, including services, increasingly obsolete as well.

Yet every underemployed American represents a failure of entrepreneurial imagination. We can do better. Our educational system must improve the way it provides skills that bring higher earnings, and we need to experiment with new forms of vocational training. We should encourage entrepreneurial energies, including by making it easier for small businesses to get up and running in low-income areas. And social programs that deter employment should be reformed—and ideally replaced by a simple pro-work subsidy. It’s time to end the war on work.

Illustrations by The Heads of StateIllustrations by The Heads of State

America began as an oasis of plenty in a world of poverty. Farms from New Hampshire to Georgia offered any free man crossing the Atlantic the chance to exchange hard work for a full belly. In 1820, 78 percent of the American labor force farmed. While droughts and pestilence often threatened disaster, joblessness was no part of then-rural America. If you didn’t work, you starved, and there was always another patch of land to hoe and seed.

Unemployment arrived only when workers moved to cities. A vital strength of urban life is that it can connect people who want to work with people who have capital and ideas. But sometimes, those matches aren’t available. Almost half of America’s workers had left their farms by 1870, setting the stage for the recessions of the 1870s and 1890s. University of Florida economist J. R. Vernon estimates that the unemployment rate hit 8 percent in 1878 and may have exceeded 15 percent in the 1890s. In both downturns, financial crises had led to bank failures and massive firm bankruptcies. In 1894, the Pullman Strike disrupted the nation’s transportation network.

Yet as soon as the banking system recovered, American entrepreneurs resumed hiring cheap, usually unskilled, labor. Nominal wages actually fell over both the 1870s and the 1890s because workers had to accept low pay. With no government safety net, long-term unemployment meant deprivation—or even death.

By 1920, the U.S. had become a majority-urban nation. As urban industry replaced agriculture, the country got wealthier but also more vulnerable to economic dislocation. The Great Depression brought it with terrible force: the unemployment rate exceeded 15 percent in 1931, peaked at 24.9 percent in 1933, and remained above 14 percent as late as 1940. (These figures count those working on federal relief programs as unemployed; exclude these individuals, and the unemployment rate was down to 9.5 percent by the end of the decade.) Depression-era Americans endured long-term joblessness, then, but it was fundamentally different from the kind that afflicts us today. The U.S. economy was in disastrous shape throughout the 1930s, with real GDP and industrial output staying below 1929 levels for most of the decade. Whatever the reason—and debates remain lively—American industry recovered from the Depression with painful lethargy. Persistent unemployment mirrored an enduring economic crisis.

The New Deal saw the rise of public programs that worked against employment. Wage controls under the National Recovery Act made it difficult for wages to fall enough to equilibrate the labor market. The Wagner Act strengthened the hand of unions, which kept pay up and employment down. Relief efforts for the unemployed, including federal make-work jobs, eased the pressure on the jobless to find private-sector work.

The carnage of World War II ended both the Nazi regime and the American Depression. The peace augured in 30 years of remarkable growth and prosperity. America enjoyed technological preeminence and an enormous growth in human capital, thanks to policies like the GI Bill. Women surged into the labor force by the millions, yet demand for male work stayed robust. The empowered postwar unions shifted industrial employment to right-to-work states, as the classic work of Thomas Holmes illustrates, but they didn’t compromise the labor market as a whole.

From 1945 to 1968, only 5 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54—prime-age males—were out of work. But during the 1970s, something changed. The mild recession of 1969–70 produced a drop in the employment rate of this group, from 95 percent to 92.5 percent, and there was no rebound. The 1973–74 downturn dragged the employment rate below 90 percent, and after the 1979–82 slump, it would stay there throughout most of the 1980s. The recessions at the beginning and end of the 1990s caused further deterioration in the rate. Economic recovery failed to restore the earlier employment ratio in both instances.

The greatest fall, though, occurred in the Great Recession. In 2011, more than one in five prime-age men were out of work, a figure comparable with the Great Depression. But while employment came back after the Depression, it hasn’t today. The unemployment rate may be low, but many people have quit the labor force entirely and don’t show up in that number. As of December 2016, 15.2 percent of prime-age men were jobless—a figure worse than at any point between World War II and the Great Recession, except during the depths of the early 1980s recession.

The trend in the female employment ratio is more complicated because of the postwar rise in the number of women in the formal labor market. In 1955, 37 percent of prime-age women worked. By 2000, that number had increased to 75 percent—a historical high. Since then, the number has come down: it stood at 71.7 percent at the end of 2016. Interpreting these figures is tricky, since more women than men voluntarily leave the labor force, often finding meaningful work in the home. The American Time Survey found that nonemployed women spend more than six hours a day doing housework and caring for others. Nonemployed men spend less than three hours doing such tasks.

Joblessness is disproportionately a condition of the poorly educated. While 72 percent of college graduates over age 25 have jobs, only 41 percent of high school dropouts are working. The employment-rate gap between the most and least educated groups has widened from about 6 percent in 1977 to almost 15 percent today. The regional variation is also enormous. Kentucky’s 23 percent male jobless rate leads the nation; in Iowa, the rate is under 10 percent.

Graphs by Alberto MenaGraphs by Alberto Mena

Why, since 1970, has each new downturn added to the ranks of the permanently unemployed? Social science has not fully answered this question, but the best guess involves a combination of a generous social safety net, deindustrialization, and social change.

Both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson aggressively advanced a stronger safety net for American workers, and other administrations largely supported these efforts. The New Deal gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, which were expanded in the 1950s. National disability insurance debuted in 1956 and was made far more accessible to people with hard-to-diagnose conditions, like back pain, in 1984. The War on Poverty delivered Medicaid and food stamps. Richard Nixon gave us housing vouchers. During the Great Recession, the federal government temporarily doubled the maximum eligibility time for receiving unemployment insurance.

These various programs make joblessness more bearable, at least materially; they also reduce the incentives to find work. Consider disability insurance. Industrial work is hard, and plenty of workers experience back pain. Before 1984, however, that pain didn’t mean a disability check for American workers. After 1984, though, millions went on the disability rolls. And since disability payments vanish if the disabled person starts earning more than $1,170 per month, the disabled tend to stay disabled. The economists David Autor and Mark Duggan found that the share of adults aged 25–64 receiving disability insurance increased from 2.2 percent in 1985 to 4.1 percent 20 years later. Disability insurance alone doesn’t entirely explain the rise of long-term joblessness—only one-third or so of jobless males get such benefits. But it has surely played a role.

Other social-welfare programs operate in a similar way. Unemployment insurance stops completely when someone gets a job, which may explain why economist Bruce Meyer found that the unemployed tend to find jobs just as their insurance payments run out. Food-stamp and housing-voucher payments drop 30 percent when a recipient’s income rises past a set threshold by just $1. Elementary economics tells us that paying people to be or stay jobless will increase joblessness.

Scholars Olivier Blanchard and Justin Wolfers have explained Europe’s persistent unemployment, which they called “hysteresis,” by the interaction of adverse economic shocks and extremely generous welfare states. Twenty years ago, the more economically successful European nations, such as Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, reorganized their welfare states to emphasize work and witnessed positive results. Others, including France, Italy, and Spain, did not, and they have struggled. In a sense, the eurozone financial crisis of the past half-decade is the legacy of southern European countries that wouldn’t fix their failing welfare systems. The U.S. needs to decide if it wants to follow the path of Germany or of Spain.

Yet these programs didn’t immediately generate a crisis of joblessness in America. Manufacturing workers weren’t going to leave their well-paying union jobs in 1967 because of the existence of food stamps. But over the next half-century, things changed dramatically. As hundreds of studies have documented, wages for the best-educated and most-successful Americans have risen, while those for the least-educated and least-successful Americans have stagnated.

These developments result from tectonic movements in the economy. Globalization and technological change have steadily eroded—and continue to erode—the demand for American brawn. In 1966, American factories employed millions of industrial workers, making products that were shipped to far poorer places. As technology spread, the world’s lower-wage countries started manufacturing. Asia’s economic tigers initially thrived because of low labor costs, but these increasingly educated countries eventually achieved technological parity with—and sometimes became superior to—many American industries.

Manufacturing’s share of total American output has fallen from 25 percent in 1968 to 12 percent today. The number of manufacturing workers has shrunk from 19.5 million in 1979 to 12.2 million, which represents 8.8 percent of nonfarm employment. The fact that manufacturing today is a larger share of GDP than of employment underscores a shift toward technology-intensive production—another response to high U.S. labor costs. For millennia, men were valued for their muscles. Human strength was crucial to feudal farming and to Henry Ford’s assembly line. We still have some jobs that depend on strong backs, as in the building trades. But they are getting rarer because machines can do the work for us.

We’re not moving toward an entirely mechanized economy. Between 1980 and 2000, U.S. service-sector employment rose by 73 percent—a whopping 37 million new jobs. There remains commercial value in a friendly face and the charm of human interaction. But for millions of men, working in the service sector wasn’t a good option.

American joblessness reflects the social unraveling that Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart. A significant portion of the American heartland has moved from a norm of stable marriage and traditional religion to single-parent families and social dysfunction. A study by Raj Chetty and Nathan Hendren calculated mobility across America using income-tax records. Their data show that the share of single-parent families in an area is a particularly strong predictor of low upward mobility. Any parent knows that raising children is tough, even with two adults involved. When only one parent is around, that task gets even harder. Unsurprisingly, many kids from broken families lack the skills needed to get ahead in today’s competitive economy.

During World War II, the army taught millions of Americans how to behave effectively in a tough organization. Such skills may have helped returning veterans thrive in the industrial America of the 1950s. Yet that very success may also have enabled younger Americans to tolerate joblessness, as they wind up relying for extended periods on their parents’ (or grandparents’) help. Thirty percent of prime-age jobless men currently live with their parents.

The rise of joblessness among the young has been a particularly pernicious effect of the Great Recession. Job loss was extensive among 25–34-year-old men and 35–44-year-old men between 2007 and 2009. The 25–34-year-olds have substantially gone back to work, but the number of employed 35–44-year-olds, which dropped by 2 million at the start of the Great Recession, hasn’t recovered. The dislocated workers in this group seem to have left the labor force permanently.

https://www.city-journal.org/sites/cj/files/27_work-eg4.jpg

Unfortunately, policymakers seem intent on making the joblessness crisis worse. The past decade or so has seen a resurgent progressive focus on inequality—and little concern among progressives about the downsides of discouraging work. Advocates of a $15 minimum hourly wage, for example, don’t seem to mind, or believe, that such policies deter firms from hiring less skilled workers. The University of California–San Diego’s Jeffrey Clemens examined states where higher federal minimum wages raised the effective state-level minimum wage during the last decade. He found that the higher minimum “reduced employment among individuals ages 16 to 30 with less than a high school education by 5.6 percentage points,” which accounted for “43 percent of the sustained, 13 percentage point decline in this skill group’s employment rate.”

The decision to prioritize equality over employment is particularly puzzling, given that social scientists have repeatedly found that unemployment is the greater evil. Economists Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald have documented the huge drop in happiness associated with unemployment—about ten times larger than that associated with a reduction in earnings from the $50,000–$75,000 range to the $35,000–$50,000 bracket. One recent study estimated that unemployment leads to 45,000 suicides worldwide annually. Jobless husbands have a 50 percent higher divorce rate than employed husbands. The impact of lower income on suicide and divorce is much smaller. The negative effects of unemployment are magnified because it so often becomes a semipermanent state.

Time-use studies help us understand why the unemployed are so miserable. Jobless men don’t do a lot more socializing; they don’t spend much more time with their kids. They do spend an extra 100 minutes daily watching television, and they sleep more. The jobless also are more likely to use illegal drugs. While fewer than 10 percent of full-time workers have used an illegal substance in any given week, 18 percent of the unemployed have done drugs in the last seven days, according to a 2013 study by Alejandro Badel and Brian Greaney.

Joblessness and disability are also particularly associated with America’s deadly opioid epidemic. David Cutler and I examined the rise in opioid deaths between 1992 and 2012. The strongest correlate of those deaths is the share of the population on disability. That connection suggests a combination of the direct influence of being disabled, which generates a demand for painkillers; the availability of the drugs through the health-care system; and the psychological misery of having no economic future.

Increasing the benefits received by nonemployed persons may make their lives easier in a material sense but won’t help reattach them to the labor force. It won’t give them the sense of pride that comes from economic independence. It won’t give them the reassuring social interactions that come from workplace relationships. When societies sacrifice employment for a notion of income equality, they make the wrong choice.

Politicians, when they do focus on long-term unemployment, too often advance poorly targeted solutions, such as faster growth, more infrastructure investment, and less trade. More robust GDP growth is always a worthy aim, but it seems unlikely to get the chronically jobless back to work. The booms of the 1990s and early 2000s never came close to restoring the high employment rates last seen in the 1970s. Between 1976 and 2015, Nevada’s GDP grew the most and Michigan’s GDP grew the least among American states. Yet the two states had almost identical rises in the share of jobless prime-age men.

Infrastructure spending similarly seems poorly targeted to ease the problem. Contemporary infrastructure projects rely on skilled workers, typically with wages exceeding $25 per hour; most of today’s jobless lack such skills. Further, the current employment in highway, street, and bridge construction in the U.S. is only 316,000. Even if this number rose by 50 percent, it would still mean only a small reduction in the millions of jobless Americans. And the nation needs infrastructure most in areas with the highest population density; joblessness is most common outside metropolitan America. (See “If You Build It . . .,” Summer 2016.)

Finally, while it’s possible that the rise of American joblessness would have been slower if the U.S. had weaker trade ties to lower-wage countries like Mexico and China, American manufacturers have already adapted to a globalized world by mechanizing and outsourcing. We have little reason to be confident that restrictions on trade would bring the old jobs back. Trade wars would have an economic price, too. American exporters would cut back hiring. The cost of imported manufactured goods would rise, and U.S. consumers would pay more, in exchange for—at best—uncertain employment gains.

The techno-futurist narrative holds that machines will displace most workers, eventually. Social peace will be maintained only if the armies of the jobless are kept quiet with generous universal-income payments. This vision recalls John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which predicts a future world of leisure, in which his grandchildren would be able to satisfy their basic needs with a few hours of labor and then spend the rest of their waking hours edifying themselves with culture and fun.

But for many of us, technological progress has led to longer work hours, not playtime. Entrepreneurs conjured more products that generated more earnings. Almost no Americans today would be happy with the lifestyle of their ancestors in 1930. For many, work also became not only more remunerative but more interesting. No Pennsylvania miner was likely to show up for extra hours (without extra pay) voluntarily. Google employees do it all the time.

Joblessness is not foreordained, because entrepreneurs can always dream up new ways of making labor productive. Ten years ago, millions of Americans wanted inexpensive car service. Uber showed how underemployed workers could earn something providing that service. Prosperous, time-short Americans are desperate for a host of other services—they want not only drivers but also cooks for their dinners and nurses for their elderly parents and much more. There is no shortage of demand for the right kinds of labor, and entrepreneurial insight could multiply the number of new tasks that could be performed by the currently out-of-work. Yet over the last 30 years, entrepreneurial talent has focused far more on delivering new tools for the skilled than on employment for the unlucky. Whereas Henry Ford employed hundreds of thousands of Americans without college degrees, Mark Zuckerberg primarily hires highly educated programmers.

https://www.city-journal.org/sites/cj/files/27_work-eg5.jpg

What could change this dynamic? The first step is to improve Americans’ skills. The jobless rate is about 8 percent for prime-age men with a college degree or more but more than 22 percent for men with only a high school diploma or less. We have levers that can improve educational outcomes, like the very best early-childhood programs and charter schools. Such innovations should be expanded and made better through competition and evaluation.

We should also improve the way that we do vocational education. (See “Vocational Ed, Reborn,” page 36.) Many vocational schools, like Boston’s Madison Park High School, have long been troubled. The most ambitious students avoid getting tracked onto a vocational path, and they—and their parents—want schools that focus on college readiness. Consequently, less fortunate or struggling students often get segregated into these vocational centers. The conventional teachers in many vocational programs often lack the know-how for teaching either high-paying blue-collar trades, like plumbing, or cutting-edge fields, like computer programming.

A more effective approach might be to keep students in college-readiness-oriented schools and experiment with out-of-school vocational training. Kids could be taught after school, on weekends, and during the summer by programs specializing in particular occupations. These initiatives can be evaluated swiftly—you can readily determine if a program has produced, say, good carpenters. The superior training programs can then be scaled up and bad ones shut down. Adopting this structure would mean that anyone could potentially compete to run the programs—trade unions, private providers, nonprofits—increasing the chances that some programs will excel. We should also be open to initiatives like Cambridge, Massachusetts’s “The Possible Project,” which has been training youths, many from poorer backgrounds, to launch themselves in the start-up economy. (I am currently working on a randomized control trial for the project.)

Older workers present the toughest training problem. The extensive literature on retraining adults for new jobs has few success stories. We must keep trying; here, too, the more experimentation, the better.

Along with up-skilling workers, we should lower the regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. It’s a sad fact that America tends to regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor much more stringently than it does that of the rich. You can begin an Internet company in Silicon Valley with little regulatory oversight; you need more than ten permits to open a grocery store in the Bronx.

One-stop permitting would be a good step, especially in poorer areas. If new businesses had only a single regulatory office to satisfy, the obstacles to entrepreneurship would be less daunting. One-stop permitting would also make it easier to evaluate the regulator on its speed and the number of permits issued. Permitting shops could specialize in the languages and businesses most common in their areas.

Occupational licensing is another area crying out for reform. The University of Minnesota’s Morris Kleiner has found that the share of American workers who need an occupational license has increased from 5 percent in the 1950s to 29 percent in 2008. States now credential interior designers, tree trimmers, and even florists. In many cases, these requirements are merely means for protecting incumbents from competition. When we license basic service jobs, we make it tougher for the jobless to find something new to do.

https://www.city-journal.org/sites/cj/files/27_work-eg6.jpg

American entrepreneurs can solve our joblessness crisis only if the U.S. stops incentivizing joblessness. Consolidating social policies would be a crucial step. Struggling families now receive food stamps, housing vouchers, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and other assistance—all of which punish work. If the various programs were combined into a single cash benefit, that benefit could be designed so that the tax on earnings never went above 30 percent. We could follow the lead of Norway on unemployment and disability insurance, allowing the disabled to keep, say, 50 percent of their benefit above the $1,170 threshold, while tightening the requirements for being designated as disabled. Unemployment insurance could be structured so that payments were no longer contingent upon staying completely out of work.

Here, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) offers a design model, by providing funds that initially scale up with earnings, especially for lower-income families with children. Economists Nada Eissa and Jeffrey Liebman found that the credit’s introduction in 1986 increased labor-force participation significantly. The EITC was instituted during one of those rare moments in modern U.S. history when policymakers wanted to avoid rewarding joblessness.

We also need to make hiring workers less costly for employers. Temporarily cutting the payroll tax was one of the most constructive policies adopted during the Great Recession. We could enact a permanent payroll-tax reduction. The tax could be gradually phased in for workers once their hourly earnings went beyond a certain threshold. The payroll tax could be eliminated for workers who had been unemployed, at least for an initial period. The costs of reducing the payroll tax could be offset by raising the minimum retirement age for employees who hadn’t paid these taxes for enough years. Reducing mandated benefits, like health care, that employers must provide lower-income earners would help encourage work, too. Ideally, the reform of our health-care system will ensure that workers have health-care options that don’t unduly burden employers.

Making work pay needs one final, major policy initiative: wage support, which would replace the EITC. The EITC had the right overall idea, but it is cumbersome and indirect. Instead, the federal government could simply provide pay to increase the earnings of minimum-wage workers by a fixed amount—say, $3 per hour. Consequently, a worker paid $7.25 would take home $10.25 hourly, with the difference paid for by taxpayers. The subsidy could fall gradually as wages rise, and it could be targeted for specific groups—larger for returning veterans or the long-run jobless—and rise or fall with the level of aggregate unemployment. The phaseout might slightly slow private-sector wage growth, but the cost would be more than offset by the benefits of such a visible push toward employment. Such a program would be expensive, so it should be matched with spending reductions for other social services.

The rise in joblessness is not inexorable. But to solve this crisis, we must educate, reform social services, empower entrepreneurs, and even subsidize employment. That is an ambitious—but necessary—agenda for ending the war on work before it consumes another generation of Americans.

Edward L. Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard University, a City Journal contributing editor, and the author of Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.

AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE

FOR EIGHT YEARS BARACK OBAMA AND HIS HAREM OF CORRUPT


DEM POLS HAVE  SABOTAGED OUR BORDERS TO EASE TENS OF MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS. 



What is left for Legals is only the tax bills for La Raza's looting!







The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and


eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing,

selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY: MUCK AMERICA’S YOUTH…. WE’VE GOT OUR ILLEGALS CLIMBING THE BORDERS, JOBS AND VOTING BOOTHS!

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS pounds America’s youth as they build a border to border Mexican welfare state on our backs!

AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE
                                 
…… ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE… they also get our jobs!

The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.

AMERICA STUDENTS STARVE:
Report on the impact of OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS-TRUMPERNOMICS

THE  GIG JOB – In America, No Legal Need Apply
"Possibly most affected by this shift in the economy is the Millennial generation, those  aged 18-30. The report notes that more than half of those under age 25 participate in independent work, not just in the United States but throughout the European Union as well."

AMERICA’S BLUDGEONED YOUTH: Homeless, Hopeless and Addicted…. Will they start the revolution?


"Public education as a whole came under brutal attack as part of the Obama administration’s effort to shift the burden of the financial crisis onto the backs of the working class."
CLOSE THE BORDERS, SEND ILLEGALS PACKING, IMPOSE E-VERIFY AND END THE JOBS CRISIS IN AMERICA!

JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL

Here’s how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!
                                            
…. which one has it good under the Dems???


  

JOBLESS IN AMERICA




America began as an oasis of plenty in a world of poverty. Farms from New Hampshire to Georgia offered any free man crossing the Atlantic the chance to exchange hard work for a full belly. In 1820, 78 percent of the American labor force farmed. While droughts and pestilence often threatened disaster, joblessness was no part of then-rural America. If you didn’t work, you starved, and there was always another patch of land to hoe and seed.
Unemployment arrived only when workers moved to cities. A vital strength of urban life is that it can connect people who want to work with people who have capital and ideas. But sometimes, those matches aren’t available. Almost half of America’s workers had left their farms by 1870, setting the stage for the recessions of the 1870s and 1890s. University of Florida economist J. R. Vernon estimates that the unemployment rate hit 8 percent in 1878 and may have exceeded 15 percent in the 1890s. In both downturns, financial crises had led to bank failures and massive firm bankruptcies. In 1894, the Pullman Strike disrupted the nation’s transportation network.
Yet as soon as the banking system recovered, American entrepreneurs resumed hiring cheap, usually unskilled, labor. Nominal wages actually fell over both the 1870s and the 1890s because workers had to accept low pay. With no government safety net, long-term unemployment meant deprivation—or even death.
By 1920, the U.S. had become a majority-urban nation. As urban industry replaced agriculture, the country got wealthier but also more vulnerable to economic dislocation. The Great Depression brought it with terrible force: the unemployment rate exceeded 15 percent in 1931, peaked at 24.9 percent in 1933, and remained above 14 percent as late as 1940. (These figures count those working on federal relief programs as unemployed; exclude these individuals, and the unemployment rate was down to 9.5 percent by the end of the decade.) Depression-era Americans endured long-term joblessness, then, but it was fundamentally different from the kind that afflicts us today. The U.S. economy was in disastrous shape throughout the 1930s, with real GDP and industrial output staying below 1929 levels for most of the decade. Whatever the reason—and debates remain lively—American industry recovered from the Depression with painful lethargy. Persistent unemployment mirrored an enduring economic crisis.
The New Deal saw the rise of public programs that worked against employment. Wage controls under the National Recovery Act made it difficult for wages to fall enough to equilibrate the labor market. The Wagner Act strengthened the hand of unions, which kept pay up and employment down. Relief efforts for the unemployed, including federal make-work jobs, eased the pressure on the jobless to find private-sector work.
The carnage of World War II ended both the Nazi regime and the American Depression. The peace augured in 30 years of remarkable growth and prosperity. America enjoyed technological preeminence and an enormous growth in human capital, thanks to policies like the GI Bill. Women surged into the labor force by the millions, yet demand for male work stayed robust. The empowered postwar unions shifted industrial employment to right-to-work states, as the classic work of Thomas Holmes illustrates, but they didn’t compromise the labor market as a whole.
From 1945 to 1968, only 5 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54—prime-age males—were out of work. But during the 1970s, something changed. The mild recession of 1969–70 produced a drop in the employment rate of this group, from 95 percent to 92.5 percent, and there was no rebound. The 1973–74 downturn dragged the employment rate below 90 percent, and after the 1979–82 slump, it would stay there throughout most of the 1980s. The recessions at the beginning and end of the 1990s caused further deterioration in the rate. Economic recovery failed to restore the earlier employment ratio in both instances.
The greatest fall, though, occurred in the Great Recession. In 2011, more than one in five prime-age men were out of work, a figure comparable with the Great Depression. But while employment came back after the Depression, it hasn’t today. The unemployment rate may be low, but many people have quit the labor force entirely and don’t show up in that number. As of December 2016, 15.2 percent of prime-age men were jobless—a figure worse than at any point between World War II and the Great Recession, except during the depths of the early 1980s recession.
The trend in the female employment ratio is more complicated because of the postwar rise in the number of women in the formal labor market. In 1955, 37 percent of prime-age women worked. By 2000, that number had increased to 75 percent—a historical high. Since then, the number has come down: it stood at 71.7 percent at the end of 2016. Interpreting these figures is tricky, since more women than men voluntarily leave the labor force, often finding meaningful work in the home. The American Time Survey found that nonemployed women spend more than six hours a day doing housework and caring for others. Nonemployed men spend less than three hours doing such tasks.
Joblessness is disproportionately a condition of the poorly educated. While 72 percent of college graduates over age 25 have jobs, only 41 percent of high school dropouts are working. The employment-rate gap between the most and least educated groups has widened from about 6 percent in 1977 to almost 15 percent today. The regional variation is also enormous. Kentucky’s 23 percent male jobless rate leads the nation; in Iowa, the rate is under 10 percent.











Graphs by Alberto Mena
Graphs by Alberto Mena

Why, since 1970, has each new downturn added to the ranks of the permanently unemployed? Social science has not fully answered this question, but the best guess involves a combination of a generous social safety net, deindustrialization, and social change.
Both Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson aggressively advanced a stronger safety net for American workers, and other administrations largely supported these efforts. The New Deal gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, which were expanded in the 1950s. National disability insurance debuted in 1956 and was made far more accessible to people with hard-to-diagnose conditions, like back pain, in 1984. The War on Poverty delivered Medicaid and food stamps. Richard Nixon gave us housing vouchers. During the Great Recession, the federal government temporarily doubled the maximum eligibility time for receiving unemployment insurance.
These various programs make joblessness more bearable, at least materially; they also reduce the incentives to find work. Consider disability insurance. Industrial work is hard, and plenty of workers experience back pain. Before 1984, however, that pain didn’t mean a disability check for American workers. After 1984, though, millions went on the disability rolls. And since disability payments vanish if the disabled person starts earning more than $1,170 per month, the disabled tend to stay disabled. The economists David Autor and Mark Duggan found that the share of adults aged 25–64 receiving disability insurance increased from 2.2 percent in 1985 to 4.1 percent 20 years later. Disability insurance alone doesn’t entirely explain the rise of long-term joblessness—only one-third or so of jobless males get such benefits. But it has surely played a role.
Other social-welfare programs operate in a similar way. Unemployment insurance stops completely when someone gets a job, which may explain why economist Bruce Meyer found that the unemployed tend to find jobs just as their insurance payments run out. Food-stamp and housing-voucher payments drop 30 percent when a recipient’s income rises past a set threshold by just $1. Elementary economics tells us that paying people to be or stay jobless will increase joblessness.
Scholars Olivier Blanchard and Justin Wolfers have explained Europe’s persistent unemployment, which they called “hysteresis,” by the interaction of adverse economic shocks and extremely generous welfare states. Twenty years ago, the more economically successful European nations, such as Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, reorganized their welfare states to emphasize work and witnessed positive results. Others, including France, Italy, and Spain, did not, and they have struggled. In a sense, the eurozone financial crisis of the past half-decade is the legacy of southern European countries that wouldn’t fix their failing welfare systems. The U.S. needs to decide if it wants to follow the path of Germany or of Spain.
Yet these programs didn’t immediately generate a crisis of joblessness in America. Manufacturing workers weren’t going to leave their well-paying union jobs in 1967 because of the existence of food stamps. But over the next half-century, things changed dramatically. As hundreds of studies have documented, wages for the best-educated and most-successful Americans have risen, while those for the least-educated and least-successful Americans have stagnated.
These developments result from tectonic movements in the economy. Globalization and technological change have steadily eroded—and continue to erode—the demand for American brawn. In 1966, American factories employed millions of industrial workers, making products that were shipped to far poorer places. As technology spread, the world’s lower-wage countries started manufacturing. Asia’s economic tigers initially thrived because of low labor costs, but these increasingly educated countries eventually achieved technological parity with—and sometimes became superior to—many American industries.
Manufacturing’s share of total American output has fallen from 25 percent in 1968 to 12 percent today. The number of manufacturing workers has shrunk from 19.5 million in 1979 to 12.2 million, which represents 8.8 percent of nonfarm employment. The fact that manufacturing today is a larger share of GDP than of employment underscores a shift toward technology-intensive production—another response to high U.S. labor costs. For millennia, men were valued for their muscles. Human strength was crucial to feudal farming and to Henry Ford’s assembly line. We still have some jobs that depend on strong backs, as in the building trades. But they are getting rarer because machines can do the work for us.
We’re not moving toward an entirely mechanized economy. Between 1980 and 2000, U.S. service-sector employment rose by 73 percent—a whopping 37 million new jobs. There remains commercial value in a friendly face and the charm of human interaction. But for millions of men, working in the service sector wasn’t a good option.
American joblessness reflects the social unraveling that Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart. A significant portion of the American heartland has moved from a norm of stable marriage and traditional religion to single-parent families and social dysfunction. A study by Raj Chetty and Nathan Hendren calculated mobility across America using income-tax records. Their data show that the share of single-parent families in an area is a particularly strong predictor of low upward mobility. Any parent knows that raising children is tough, even with two adults involved. When only one parent is around, that task gets even harder. Unsurprisingly, many kids from broken families lack the skills needed to get ahead in today’s competitive economy.
During World War II, the army taught millions of Americans how to behave effectively in a tough organization. Such skills may have helped returning veterans thrive in the industrial America of the 1950s. Yet that very success may also have enabled younger Americans to tolerate joblessness, as they wind up relying for extended periods on their parents’ (or grandparents’) help. Thirty percent of prime-age jobless men currently live with their parents.
The rise of joblessness among the young has been a particularly pernicious effect of the Great Recession. Job loss was extensive among 25–34-year-old men and 35–44-year-old men between 2007 and 2009. The 25–34-year-olds have substantially gone back to work, but the number of employed 35–44-year-olds, which dropped by 2 million at the start of the Great Recession, hasn’t recovered. The dislocated workers in this group seem to have left the labor force permanently.












Unfortunately, policymakers seem intent on making the joblessness crisis worse. The past decade or so has seen a resurgent progressive focus on inequality—and little concern among progressives about the downsides of discouraging work. Advocates of a $15 minimum hourly wage, for example, don’t seem to mind, or believe, that such policies deter firms from hiring less skilled workers. The University of California–San Diego’s Jeffrey Clemens examined states where higher federal minimum wages raised the effective state-level minimum wage during the last decade. He found that the higher minimum “reduced employment among individuals ages 16 to 30 with less than a high school education by 5.6 percentage points,” which accounted for “43 percent of the sustained, 13 percentage point decline in this skill group’s employment rate.”
The decision to prioritize equality over employment is particularly puzzling, given that social scientists have repeatedly found that unemployment is the greater evil. Economists Andrew Clark and Andrew Oswald have documented the huge drop in happiness associated with unemployment—about ten times larger than that associated with a reduction in earnings from the $50,000–$75,000 range to the $35,000–$50,000 bracket. One recent study estimated that unemployment leads to 45,000 suicides worldwide annually. Jobless husbands have a 50 percent higher divorce rate than employed husbands. The impact of lower income on suicide and divorce is much smaller. The negative effects of unemployment are magnified because it so often becomes a semipermanent state.
Time-use studies help us understand why the unemployed are so miserable. Jobless men don’t do a lot more socializing; they don’t spend much more time with their kids. They do spend an extra 100 minutes daily watching television, and they sleep more. The jobless also are more likely to use illegal drugs. While fewer than 10 percent of full-time workers have used an illegal substance in any given week, 18 percent of the unemployed have done drugs in the last seven days, according to a 2013 study by Alejandro Badel and Brian Greaney.
Joblessness and disability are also particularly associated with America’s deadly opioid epidemic. David Cutler and I examined the rise in opioid deaths between 1992 and 2012. The strongest correlate of those deaths is the share of the population on disability. That connection suggests a combination of the direct influence of being disabled, which generates a demand for painkillers; the availability of the drugs through the health-care system; and the psychological misery of having no economic future.
Increasing the benefits received by nonemployed persons may make their lives easier in a material sense but won’t help reattach them to the labor force. It won’t give them the sense of pride that comes from economic independence. It won’t give them the reassuring social interactions that come from workplace relationships. When societies sacrifice employment for a notion of income equality, they make the wrong choice.
Politicians, when they do focus on long-term unemployment, too often advance poorly targeted solutions, such as faster growth, more infrastructure investment, and less trade. More robust GDP growth is always a worthy aim, but it seems unlikely to get the chronically jobless back to work. The booms of the 1990s and early 2000s never came close to restoring the high employment rates last seen in the 1970s. Between 1976 and 2015, Nevada’s GDP grew the most and Michigan’s GDP grew the least among American states. Yet the two states had almost identical rises in the share of jobless prime-age men.
Infrastructure spending similarly seems poorly targeted to ease the problem. Contemporary infrastructure projects rely on skilled workers, typically with wages exceeding $25 per hour; most of today’s jobless lack such skills. Further, the current employment in highway, street, and bridge construction in the U.S. is only 316,000. Even if this number rose by 50 percent, it would still mean only a small reduction in the millions of jobless Americans. And the nation needs infrastructure most in areas with the highest population density; joblessness is most common outside metropolitan America. (See “If You Build It . . .,” Summer 2016.)
Finally, while it’s possible that the rise of American joblessness would have been slower if the U.S. had weaker trade ties to lower-wage countries like Mexico and China, American manufacturers have already adapted to a globalized world by mechanizing and outsourcing. We have little reason to be confident that restrictions on trade would bring the old jobs back. Trade wars would have an economic price, too. American exporters would cut back hiring. The cost of imported manufactured goods would rise, and U.S. consumers would pay more, in exchange for—at best—uncertain employment gains.
The techno-futurist narrative holds that machines will displace most workers, eventually. Social peace will be maintained only if the armies of the jobless are kept quiet with generous universal-income payments. This vision recalls John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which predicts a future world of leisure, in which his grandchildren would be able to satisfy their basic needs with a few hours of labor and then spend the rest of their waking hours edifying themselves with culture and fun.
But for many of us, technological progress has led to longer work hours, not playtime. Entrepreneurs conjured more products that generated more earnings. Almost no Americans today would be happy with the lifestyle of their ancestors in 1930. For many, work also became not only more remunerative but more interesting. No Pennsylvania miner was likely to show up for extra hours (without extra pay) voluntarily. Google employees do it all the time.
Joblessness is not foreordained, because entrepreneurs can always dream up new ways of making labor productive. Ten years ago, millions of Americans wanted inexpensive car service. Uber showed how underemployed workers could earn something providing that service. Prosperous, time-short Americans are desperate for a host of other services—they want not only drivers but also cooks for their dinners and nurses for their elderly parents and much more. There is no shortage of demand for the right kinds of labor, and entrepreneurial insight could multiply the number of new tasks that could be performed by the currently out-of-work. Yet over the last 30 years, entrepreneurial talent has focused far more on delivering new tools for the skilled than on employment for the unlucky. Whereas Henry Ford employed hundreds of thousands of Americans without college degrees, Mark Zuckerberg primarily hires highly educated programmers.












What could change this dynamic? The first step is to improve Americans’ skills. The jobless rate is about 8 percent for prime-age men with a college degree or more but more than 22 percent for men with only a high school diploma or less. We have levers that can improve educational outcomes, like the very best early-childhood programs and charter schools. Such innovations should be expanded and made better through competition and evaluation.
We should also improve the way that we do vocational education. (See “Vocational Ed, Reborn,” page 36.) Many vocational schools, like Boston’s Madison Park High School, have long been troubled. The most ambitious students avoid getting tracked onto a vocational path, and they—and their parents—want schools that focus on college readiness. Consequently, less fortunate or struggling students often get segregated into these vocational centers. The conventional teachers in many vocational programs often lack the know-how for teaching either high-paying blue-collar trades, like plumbing, or cutting-edge fields, like computer programming.
A more effective approach might be to keep students in college-readiness-oriented schools and experiment with out-of-school vocational training. Kids could be taught after school, on weekends, and during the summer by programs specializing in particular occupations. These initiatives can be evaluated swiftly—you can readily determine if a program has produced, say, good carpenters. The superior training programs can then be scaled up and bad ones shut down. Adopting this structure would mean that anyone could potentially compete to run the programs—trade unions, private providers, nonprofits—increasing the chances that some programs will excel. We should also be open to initiatives like Cambridge, Massachusetts’s “The Possible Project,” which has been training youths, many from poorer backgrounds, to launch themselves in the start-up economy. (I am currently working on a randomized control trial for the project.)
Older workers present the toughest training problem. The extensive literature on retraining adults for new jobs has few success stories. We must keep trying; here, too, the more experimentation, the better.
Along with up-skilling workers, we should lower the regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. It’s a sad fact that America tends to regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor much more stringently than it does that of the rich. You can begin an Internet company in Silicon Valley with little regulatory oversight; you need more than ten permits to open a grocery store in the Bronx.
One-stop permitting would be a good step, especially in poorer areas. If new businesses had only a single regulatory office to satisfy, the obstacles to entrepreneurship would be less daunting. One-stop permitting would also make it easier to evaluate the regulator on its speed and the number of permits issued. Permitting shops could specialize in the languages and businesses most common in their areas.
Occupational licensing is another area crying out for reform. The University of Minnesota’s Morris Kleiner has found that the share of American workers who need an occupational license has increased from 5 percent in the 1950s to 29 percent in 2008. States now credential interior designers, tree trimmers, and even florists. In many cases, these requirements are merely means for protecting incumbents from competition. When we license basic service jobs, we make it tougher for the jobless to find something new to do.












American entrepreneurs can solve our joblessness crisis only if the U.S. stops incentivizing joblessness. Consolidating social policies would be a crucial step. Struggling families now receive food stamps, housing vouchers, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, and other assistance—all of which punish work. If the various programs were combined into a single cash benefit, that benefit could be designed so that the tax on earnings never went above 30 percent. We could follow the lead of Norway on unemployment and disability insurance, allowing the disabled to keep, say, 50 percent of their benefit above the $1,170 threshold, while tightening the requirements for being designated as disabled. Unemployment insurance could be structured so that payments were no longer contingent upon staying completely out of work.
Here, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) offers a design model, by providing funds that initially scale up with earnings, especially for lower-income families with children. Economists Nada Eissa and Jeffrey Liebman found that the credit’s introduction in 1986 increased labor-force participation significantly. The EITC was instituted during one of those rare moments in modern U.S. history when policymakers wanted to avoid rewarding joblessness.
We also need to make hiring workers less costly for employers. Temporarily cutting the payroll tax was one of the most constructive policies adopted during the Great Recession. We could enact a permanent payroll-tax reduction. The tax could be gradually phased in for workers once their hourly earnings went beyond a certain threshold. The payroll tax could be eliminated for workers who had been unemployed, at least for an initial period. The costs of reducing the payroll tax could be offset by raising the minimum retirement age for employees who hadn’t paid these taxes for enough years. Reducing mandated benefits, like health care, that employers must provide lower-income earners would help encourage work, too. Ideally, the reform of our health-care system will ensure that workers have health-care options that don’t unduly burden employers.
Making work pay needs one final, major policy initiative: wage support, which would replace the EITC. The EITC had the right overall idea, but it is cumbersome and indirect. Instead, the federal government could simply provide pay to increase the earnings of minimum-wage workers by a fixed amount—say, $3 per hour. Consequently, a worker paid $7.25 would take home $10.25 hourly, with the difference paid for by taxpayers. The subsidy could fall gradually as wages rise, and it could be targeted for specific groups—larger for returning veterans or the long-run jobless—and rise or fall with the level of aggregate unemployment. The phaseout might slightly slow private-sector wage growth, but the cost would be more than offset by the benefits of such a visible push toward employment. Such a program would be expensive, so it should be matched with spending reductions for other social services.
The rise in joblessness is not inexorable. But to solve this crisis, we must educate, reform social services, empower entrepreneurs, and even subsidize employment. That is an ambitious—but necessary—agenda for ending the war on work before it consumes another generation of Americans.
AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE
                                 
…… ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE… they also get our jobs!




The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.

"Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is 

holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the 

government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era 

surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem 

with MS-13 and other gangs."


AMERICA: WALL STREET, THE DEMOCRAT 

PARTY, THE GOP and LA RAZA SAY NO 

LEGAL NEED APPLY!

“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the 

U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the 

last four decades and while the U.S. represents 

just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 

20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according 

to a new report.”


Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.

Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground. 

Limiting Foreign Student Entries

in Sanctuary Jurisdictions


Potential Federal Government Response to California’s SB 54



WASHINGTON (June 22, 2017) – A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies examines the administration's option of limiting foreign student entries and immigration activities in "sanctuary" jurisdictions as a potential federal response to state and local obstruction of immigration enforcement. This could be especially important if California's SB54 – with its stringent anti-cooperation requirements – is passed and signed into law. SB54 has been approved by the Senate and is currently before the Assembly.

If SB54 blocks the Cal State and California Community College systems' required cooperation with ICE, DHS may be forced to decertify them for purposes of admitting foreign students.

Andrew Arthur, the Center's Resident Fellow in Law and Policy and author of the report, stated, "If the State of California prevents schools from satisfying their obligations under federal immigration law, then DHS needs to consider whether those schools should be allowed to maintain their certifications to accept foreign students."

View the entire report at: http://cis.org/Limiting-Foreign-Student-Visas-in-Sanctuaries

Foreign student visas are available only to people who will be attending schools certified by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), a component of the ICE National Security Investigations Division. By regulation, SEVP-certified schools must designate school officials to regularly provide information to ICE to verify that the foreign students are maintaining their status while in the country, and to notify ICE when those students are not.

This requirement ensures that the government has essential data on those students necessary for national security and immigration-enforcement purposes. This is especially important given the fact that, as DHS recently reported, almost three percent of all foreign students whose authorized status was supposed to end in FY 2016 are suspected of overstaying and illegally remaining in the United States.

Contact: Marguerite Telford
202-466-8185, mrt@cis.org


AMERICA’S BLUDGEONED YOUTH: 

Homeless, Hopeless and Addicted…. 

Will they start the revolution?


"Public education as a whole came under brutal attack as part

of the Obama administration’s effort to shift the burden of 

the financial crisis onto the backs of the working class."

AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE


FOR EIGHT YEARS BARACK OBAMA AND HIS HAREM OF CORRUPT DEM POLS HAVE  SABOTAGED OUR BORDERS TO EASE TENS OF MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS. 


What is left for Legals is only the tax bills for La Raza's looting!


The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and

eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing,

selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.



OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS pounds America’s youth as they build a border to border Mexican welfare state on our backs!

AMERICA’S YOUTH STARVE
                                 
…… ILLEGALS SUCK IN BILLIONS IN WELFARE… they also get our jobs!



The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.


AMERICA STUDENTS STARVE:

Report on the impact of OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS-TRUMPERNOMICS


THE  GIG JOB – In America, No Legal Need Apply

"Possibly most affected by this shift in the economy is the Millennial generation, those  aged 18-30. The report notes that more than half of those under age 25 participate in independent work, not just in the United States but throughout the European Union as well."

June 22, 2017

Government says 30% of children caught at border have ties to violent drug gangs


Government officials revealed during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that 30% of children captured at the border have ties to M-13 and other violent drug gangs.
The Obama administration knew of the problem but claimed by law, they had to admit the refugees regardless of their ties to violent criminal gangs.
Nearly 30 percent of the illegal immigrant children the U.S. is holding in its dormitories have ties to criminal gangs, the government revealed Wednesday, suggesting that the Obama-era surge of Central Americans has fed the country’s growing problem with MS-13 and other gangs.

Federal officials refused even to guess at the true scope of the problem, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that they can give only small snapshots of what they see. But they said the devastation on communities across the country is clear: killings and chaos, particularly among other immigrants — both legal and illegal.


The Border Patrol identified 160 teens who were known or suspected gang members when they first showed up at the border, but whom the Obama administration said it had to admit under U.S. law.

Meanwhile, a spot check this month of 138 teens being held by the federal Health and Human Services Department identified 39 with gang ties. Four of them were forced into cooperating with the gangs and 35 joined voluntarily, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“It is well-known that MS-13 actively targets and recruits children as young as 8 years old,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee who called Wednesday’s hearing.
“While their illegal status and Central American heritage are a key factor in MS-13’s targeting, without a doubt the failures of the current system for handling these children is also to blame,” he said. “The current system is fraught with abuse, systematic errors and a lack of effective cooperation.”
He was stunned that no agency could say how many “UAC,” as the government dubs unaccompanied alien children, have been recruited.
The agencies point to one another and to federal laws, saying their hands are tied.
Agencies are reviewing Obama-era interpretations of the law, but it seems incomprehensible that this loophole can exist. It seems clear that M-13 and other gangs are using the children and US policy on dealing with unaccompanied minors at the border to engage in gang activity on American soil.
Officials said MS-13 is involved in some drug dealing and does engage in human trafficking, but its real money-making operation is extortion. The gang threatens families — including American citizens — with violence against relatives back in Central America unless those in the U.S. pay them off.
Gang members in the U.S. take directions directly from gang commanders in El Salvador, authorities say.
Kenneth A. Blanco, acting assistant attorney general in the criminal division at the Justice Department, also said immigrants who fail to report crimes to local police are often not afraid of being deported by federal authorities, but rather fear retaliation from the gang members and other criminals who live in their neighborhoods.
He said witnesses’ names become public, making them targets for retribution.
“That really, in my 28 years, has been the fear they have of calling the police. Not so much the other way around,” he said. “They’re really scared of these people.”
That runs counter to the argument made by Democrats and some local police chiefs that illegal immigrants refuse to report crimes because they fear entanglement with federal deportation agents.
These kinds of "below the radar" policies cost lives. That should be the bottom line in creating and implementing any immigration and refugee policy regardless whether it affects adults or children. That 30% of children who we've been told only want to come to America to get away from gang violence, are themselves, engaged in gang activity is a clear and present danger to Americans and illegal immigrants alike. 
That the government has known of this problem for years and allowed it to continue is the height of stupidity and bureaucratic incompetence








Federal ‘OPT’ Program Rewards Companies For Hiring 330,000 Foreign College Grads in 2016




The federal government quietly helped and rewarded companies and universities which hired roughly 330,000 cheap foreign graduates in 2016 instead of hiring American graduates, many of whom are deep in debt.

The little-known “Optional Practical Training” program has grown from 91,140 new foreign job-seekers in 2009 to 329,158 new job-seekers in 2016, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. That is almost a four-fold increase in seven years — and the program is growing even larger in 2017.
There is no cap on the OPT program, which quietly and semi-automatically gives work permits lasting up to three years when requested by foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities and colleges. Companies are not required to even interview Americans before hiring OPT graduates — and they get tax breaks for hiring foreigners over Americans.
“The government is enticing employers to hire foreigners instead of Americans … it is ridiculous,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies. Even the middle-class Americans who have downplayed the impact of cheap-labor immigration on blue-collar Americans should be alarmed by the government’s discrimination against their own college-graduate children, he added.
In 2014, the OPT program provided work permits to 249,998 foreign graduates, according to the data provided to Breitbart News by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the program. Two years later, the number of new foreign graduates entering the program had risen by 32 percent up to 329,158.
The program provides a one-year work permit to all graduates. It also provides an extra one-year permit to graduates who work in a so-called high-tech “STEM” job. In 2016, officials working for former President Barack Obama extended the STEM permits from one year to two years. If only 20,000 of the 51,672 STEM workers from 2015 used Obama’s one-year extension, they would have increased the 2016 total from 329,158 up to 350,000.
That 350,000 estimate for 2016 means that the government is offering work permits to one foreign graduate for almost every two of the 800,000 young Americans who graduate from college each year with high-skilled degrees in business or medicine, science or software, math or physics.
The OPT program will likely grow to 500,000 foreign workers in 2020 unless it is killed by a pending lawsuit.
Under the new transparency rules established by DHS secretary John Kelly, DHS officials also provided Breitbart with the initial OPT numbers for 2017. That data showed the OPT program in the first half of 2017 by giving work permits to 255,412 foreign students, including 57,315 high-skill technology graduates. That half-year number for 2017 is larger than the 2014 total.
These high numbers likely understate the scale of the OPT outsourcing program, because the federal government also allows foreign students to get a one-year work permit via the “Curriculum Practical Training” program before they graduate into the OPT program. If 100,000 students used that CPT program in 2016, then the combined CPT and OPT programs delivered almost 450,000 white-collar American jobs to foreign students and graduates in 2016.
The annual inflow of new foreign OPT workers is now roughly three times larger than the annual inflow of 110,000 H-1B white-collar contract workers. However, the H-1B program offers longer visas to foreign workers, so it keeps a larger population of roughly 650,000 foreign white-collar workers in the United States, compared to roughly 35o,000 OPT workers.
The H-1B visas help companies hire foreign white-collar workers to take the place of the experienced American professionals who need decent salaries to help support and educate their children.
Who is impacted?
Many American college graduates are threatened by OPT, partly because the program allows foreign students to take any job, but also because the government grants three-year work permits to students who take “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math” jobs — but those STEM jobs are very expansively described. They include:
dairy science… horticultural science…  environmental studies … natural resources conservation … urban forestry … artificial intelligence … computer graphics … solar energy … naval science … cyber/electronic operations and warfare … nutrition sciences … sustainability studies … child psychology … archaeology … medical science … veterinary physiology … business statistics … management science.
The OPT program is also a threat to upward mobility because it is increasingly being used to outsource community college technician jobs — such as nursing — which are the primary upward path for Americans born into lower-income families. The DHS list of STEM jobs also includes more than 50 types of technical jobs, including:
Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering Technology/Technician … solar energy … welding … industrial production … quality control … automotive engineering … [and] biology.
College grads have done better than American blue-collar workers since the 2009 crash, but recruiters say graduates overestimate their market value, and researchers say salaries remain low in 2017:
Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the 2007-09 recession, according to an unpublished analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington using Census bureau figures. Young job-seekers appear to be the biggest losers … “It has been like this for the past five, six years now,” said Ban Cheah, a research professor at Georgetown who compiled the data. “It’s a little depressing.”

Liberty University, graduation 2017.
Many recent graduates were hurt long-term by the slump, according to a 2014 Pew rstudy:
In a recent report, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York went deeper and looked at underemployment among recent grads (defined as people aged 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree). The Fed researchers used data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine whether employed grads were in jobs that typically required a college degree, what those jobs paid, and whether they were working full- or part-time. They found that in 2012, about 44% of grads were working in jobs that didn’t require a college degree — a rate that, while about what it was in early 1990s, increased after the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions. Only 36% of that group were in what the researchers called “good non-college jobs” — those paying around $45,000 a year — down from around half in the 1990s. The share of underemployed recent grads in low-wage (below $25,000) jobs rose from about 15% in 1990 to more than 20%. About one-in-five (23%) underemployed recent grads were working part-time in 2011, up from 15% in 2000.
Other reports emphasize negative and positive prospects for recent college grads as the nation emerges from a decade-long slump.
Critically, the OPTs compete with new American graduates and nudge down the Americans’ starting salaries — which can have a huge impact on their lifetime earnings, say salary experts:
“Maximizing your first salary is really important because it determines your salary for the rest of your life,” says Matt Wallaert, chief scientist at GetRaised.com … “Your final salary is heavily dependent on your starting salary,” agrees Glenn Hiemstra, the founder of Futurist.com,
Moreover, many U.S. graduates are defaulting on college loan debts owed to the U.S. government because they cannot find well-paying jobs.
Joseph Palos, a high-tech graduate from Cornell University, formally objected to the OPT program in 2015. ”Companies don’t want to hire Americans and they abuse… OPT to hire cheap immobile labor instead of hiring anyone over the age of 35, especially in software or tech areas,” he wrote to a federal agency, according to a report in ComputerWorld.
Which companies hire OPTs?
Most universities and colleges hide useful data about their OPT programs from their American students, the tuition-paying parents and the voting public.
But a Breitbart search of the data revealed that Penn State posted a list of companies which hire OPT and other foreign graduates. The companies include accounting firms Deloitte & Touché LLP plus Ernst & Young, LLP, as well as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and the GE Global Research Center in New York. Other OPT employers included Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, Calif., Intel in Arizona, Motorola in Florida, Nokia in Texas,  and Microsoft in Washington State, plus Cadbury Schweppes in New Jersey, Glaxo Smith Kline in Philadelphia, Hyatt Hotels in Washington D.C., Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Penske Logistics in Ohio, and the Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands, Ca.
The Penn State list also includes many universities, many of which can keep cheap OPTs on the payroll for several years by converting them into H-1B employees. There are no limits on universities’ hiring of H-1Bs.
There’s not much reason to blame the companies for hiring OPTs, said Krikorian. By reducing employers’ taxes and subsidizing OPT employees’ pay with a chance to win green cards, “the government is encouraging these employers to hire foreign workers,” he said.
Who supports the OPT program?
Unsurprisingly, the semi-secret OPT program has intense behind-the-scenes support in Washington.
First, the OPT program — like the similar H-1B and H-2B programs — are strongly supported by business groups because they provide very cheap, compliant and disposable workers:
When a job is given to an OPT worker, neither the worker nor the employers have to pay Social Security or Medicare taxes. That tax break cuts the company’s salary costs for that foreign worker by roughly 23 percent.
When a foreign students seeks a job, Americans lose bargaining power to get decent wages for that jobs. Nationalwide, the extra inflow of immigrant labor annually transfers roughy $500 billion from employees to employers, accordin to data in the 2016 report on immigration by the National Acadeimes of Sciences.
The OPT jobs put the foreign graduates on the first step towards citizenship, which is a hugely valuable deferred bonus student studemt her overseas fmaily and their descedents in perpetuity. In effect, the federal government provides OPT workers a free lottery ticket for the prize of citizenship if they work for the pay and conditions set by the employer. But this is also a huge hidden subsidy for employers who hire foreigners instead of Americans because it allows employers to pay foreigners with hope of citizenship, while Americans must be paid in dollars.
Also, the OPT employers is heavily dependent on the employer to put him or her the next step on the path to citizenship, ensuring a compliant attitude despute low-pay and long hours. The next step is usually a H-1B visa, which requires the employer to ask the govrenment for the visa.
The OPT program adds a small but useful addition to the number of native-born and immigrant consumers who buy products in hte U.S. economy.
Universities strongly favor the OPT program because it allows them to effectively sell government-supplied, no-cost work permits to the foreign students who pay higher than normal tuition fees — providing there is no political pushback from their own indebted graduates and their worried parents.
The annual inflow of foreign students adds $2.8 billion in economic activity, and 400,000 jobs to the economy, says the NAFSA advocacy group, wich is led by university officials. Few politicians are willing to openly disagree with the universities in their district.
Universities market themselves to foreign customers as way-stations to citizenship. For example, Dartmouth University highlighted employment statistics for foreign graduates, saying 71 of 79 foreign graduates got work permits and jobs in 2015, and 79 of 86 got work permits and jobs in 2014.
A growing percentage of foreign students are using the OPT work permits. The percentage rose from 21.5 percent in 2014 up to 24.5 percent in 2016, according to DHS data.
The OPT and CPT programs allow a growing number low-grade “diploma mill” universities to provide work permits to foreign workers in exchange for tuition. The scale of the new industry was described by Buzzfeed in 2016: “With little fanfare and virtually overnight, Nothwestern Polytechnic has become one of the country’s largest importers of international students — 95% of whom are Indian. Last year, 9,026 foreign students had active visas to attend NPU, according to federal immigration data — that’s more students than the entire undergraduate population of Harvard, and an increase of 350% from two years earlier, when Northwestern had just 1,200 … Northwestern Polytechnic’s 9,026 foreign students would make up the ninth-largest body of international students in the country, according to IIE numbers — above Michigan State University and just below UCLA.”
Education-industry officials have downplayed the number of OPT approvals for several years. For example, the New York-based Institute of International Education estimated  67,804 OPT job-seekers in 2009, and 147,498 OPT seekers in 2016. In contrast, DHS estimated the numbers at 91,140 in 2009 and 329,158 in 2016.
Progressives strongly favor the OPT program, partly because it is backed by their prestigious allies in the Internet industry and by university groups, but also because it levels the status of foreigners and Americans.
In June 2017, a pro-immigration columnist for the New York Times, who formerly worked at the Wall Street Journal, argued that Americans rightly belongs to foreigners, not Americans, saying:
I’m the child of immigrants and grew up abroad, I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers — the people who strain hardest to become a part of it because they realize that it’s precious; and who do the most to remake it so that our ideas, and our appeal, may stay fresh.
That used to be a cliché, but in the Age of [President Donald] Trump it needs to be explained all over again. We’re a country of immigrants — by and for them, too. Americans who don’t get it should get out.
GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan backs programs that allow low-tech business to import cheap foreign workers instead of hiring U.S. workers. “We need to have an immigration system that is wired for what our economy needs … so let’s find out where those gaps in our labor markets are and have our immigration system wired for that,” Ryan said in 2016.
President Barack Obama declared in 2014 that Americans do not have the right to favor their fellow citizens over foreigners, saying:
Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently. And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration.  If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks’ — even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.
Under Obama’s lax border policies, roughly 550,000 additional illegal aliens flew or walked into the United States in 2016, while only a tiny percentage of the 11 million resident illegals were sent home.
This bipartisan open-border viewpoint is part of the law and played a large role in Obama’s policies. For example, from 2011 to 2016, Obama used a loophole in federal law to allow more than 300,000 unskilled migrants from Central American to live and work in the United States, despite the harmful impact on the kids’ schools and local crime rates.
Economic and Political Impact
These pro-immigration views held by progressives and business-minded Republicans means that the federal government now imports one million legal immigrants each year to compete for jobs against the 4 million Americans who graduate from schools or colleges each year.
The federal government also imports more than 1 million temporary contract workers, including roughly 110,000 H-1B workers per year. That rapid rise of the secret OPT program — plus likely rises in other semi-secret L and B-1 visas — suggest that the government allows companies and universities to keep an army of more than 1.6 million foreign contract-workers in the United States.
Most of those foreign contract workers are white-collar professionals, while fewer than 100,000 are legal temporary agricultural workers, according to the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute.
This flood of foreign labor spikes profits and stock values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees, drives up real estate prices, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and sidelines marginalized Americans and their families. The flood also fragments Americans’ civic society into competing identity groups, sometimes dubbed social “diversity.”
OPT
2017 graduation ceremonies at Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia.
This social conflict also distorts Americans’ politics, allowing the inauguration of New York real-estate magnate Donald Trump on January 20, 2017.
Since then, despite massive bipartisan pressure from politicians and industry groups eager for cheap labor, Trump has declared his policy to be “Buy American, Hire American.” He has scuttled the cheap-labor Trans-Pacific Partnership program, sharply reduced illegal immigration, slowed the growth of contract workers programs, started reforming the H-1B white-collar outsourcing program, and eliminated the ‘DAPA’ amnesty for four million illegals.
Because of pressure from progressives in the media and the Democratic Party, Trump has also preserved some of Obama’s open-borders rules, such as the 2012 ‘DACA’ policy which delivers work permits to roughly 765,000 younger illegals.
So far, Trump and his deputies have done little publicly to curb the fast-growing OPT program — even though it discriminates against the children of politically influential college-graduates. “You would think that when their own college-educated kids are being discriminated against, it would get attention,” said Krikorian.
However, in December 2016,  the Department of Education disbarred the accreditation organization which validated the NPU’s educational claims. In March 2017, Trump’s DHS stopping issuing OPT or H-1B approvals to foreign students from the diploma-mill colleges which rely on that accrediting organization.
However, Trump’s officials will soon need to deal with the legality of the “crony capitalist” OPT program, said lawyer John Miano, who is suing the federal government on behalf of the Washington Alliance of Tech Workers. His lawsuit shows how OPT was created by regulators in 1992 and then expanded in 2002 without any action by Congress or an agency regulatory process. The legal claim is strong, he said, because “we have the government making law via regulation… [what is] the largest guest worker program” in the nation.
But without strong public pressure on legislators, the corporate and university pressure for the OPT program will likely deter the Trump administration from accepting a courtroom defeat over OTP, Miano said. “I don’t expect the Trump administration to say ‘We can’t defend it’ … [but] we don’t know what they are planning to do.”

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com
Below are four images of the Penn State list of companies that hired OPT or “Academic Training” foreign graduatesMany of the companies and universities also hire H-1B workers. 
OPT
OPT




New education regulations will make colleges much more vulnerable financially and legally. Some colleges could be forced to shut down.

THE ENTIRE REASON WE HAVE OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

70% OF ALL ILLEGALS END UP ON WELFARE

The Seattle Minimum Wage Study Is Utter B.S.

http://fortune.com/2017/06/27/seattle-minimum-wage-study-results-impact-15-dollar-uw/

4:45 PM ET











For decades, conservative ideologues have insisted that raising the minimum wage will hurt, not help, low-wage workers. Mandating higher wages will cost jobs, the old canard goes, and the obvious solution is to let the free market function unfettered.
This argument received a significant bump from a recent study by the University of Washington (UW) looking at the impact of the minimum wage increase in Seattle, where in 2014 the city council voted to phase in a $15 wage over the next few years.
The UW study appeared to show that the 2015–2016 wage floor increase from $11 to $13 per hour, one phase on that journey to $15, caused low-wage workers’ annual pay to go down, not up, and overall low-wage jobs to also go down.
Free-market fanatics around the country flung praise at the study, and serious publications like the Washington Post deemed it “very credible.” But fortunately for working people, it turns out the study’s findings are far from that.
The research has significant flaws—most glaringly that its data excludes 40% of the Seattle workforce. It also stands in contrast to a massive trove of actually credible studies showing that raising the minimum wage is a boon for working class families and the communities they live in.
For instance, a team led by Michael Reich, an economics professor at University of California-Berkeley, looked at the impact of the Seattle wage increase on the food industry over the same period and found that wages did in fact go up for restaurant workers, and that employment wasn't affected. These findings were, they claim, “in line with the lion’s share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies.”
Reich and his colleagues have done a significant portion of this research , recently studying cities with the highest minimum wage laws in the country, including Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland. They've consistently found that higher wages boost worker pay and haven't led to either job loss or a slowdown in economic growth.
Employers see big benefits, too. Workers stay on the job longer, reducing turnover and training costs. They’re also significantly more productive, according to researchers studying wage increases in the United Kingdom.
There are big benefits for broader society as well. Poverty goes down, as does reliance on public assistance programs—one of the few things both Democrats and Republicans can agree is a net positive. Also improved are infant health and adult mental health outcomes, including a significant reduction in depression. (At a time when one in six Americans pops an anti-depressant every day, this seems particularly important.)
If so much research shows significantly raising the minimum wage has a major net-positive impact, what’s the story with the UW study?
One of the major limitations of the study, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out, is that the data it analyzed excluded business with multiple locations, such as chain restaurants and big box retailers. So the 40% of employees they left out work at places like McDonald'sBest Buy, and other stores that rely heavily on the low-wage workers who got the actual boost. That is a highly significant oversight.
The UW study also draws what the EPI calls "implausible findings." Since high-paying jobs went up during the period that low-paying jobs went down, the study implies that the minimum wage hike created better jobs for the rich at the expense of the poor. But this explanation fails to take into account the overall robustness and gentrification of Seattle's economy—a much more reasonable explanation for the disparity.
Given these flaws, it's no wonder that UW's findings diverge greatly from the broader body of research on this topic, much of which the UW researchers themselves cite.
Raising the minimum wage—at the city, state, or federal level, where it remains an unlivable $7.25 an hour—is still a reliable solution to the scourge of inequality. Research should continue to look critically at its impact, but so far the only credible research gives the policy a big thumps up.








GOP Sen. Tillis Blocks Donald Trump’s DHS Nominee To Get More H-2B Workers

9

North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis is demanding the Department of Homeland Security hand over more H-2B worker visas before he allows Senate approval of a top homeland security official.


President Donald Trump has appointed Lee Francis Cissna to serve as director of the DHS’s critical U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. The agency is responsible for screening arrivals and immigrants to prevent jihad attacks and other terrorism. Cissna has been approved by the Senate committee, but he won’t get a Senate approval vote soon because Tillis asked the GOP’s leader to put a so-called “hold” on the nomination.
Tillis put the hold in Cissna because he wants John Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security, to provide more H-2B work visas so employers can import thousands of additional blue-collar, low-wage foreign workers this summer, fall, and winter. The extra workers will allow the companies to minimize wages and training for Americans, including non-working Americans. 
The North Carolina Senator has repeatedly said he wants to let companies hire more cheap-labor contract workers. Before being elected in 2006, he worked as a manager at IBM and at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Both firms are heavily involved in the white-collar outsourcing business.
An April poll showed Tillis has roughly 39 percent approval in his home state, according to the McClathchy news service, but he does not face the voters until 2020. 
Each year, the federal government provide 66,000 new H-2B visas to foreign workers. The workers can stay up to three years, so experts estimate that about 115,000 H-2Bs are working in the United States for landscapers, resorts, hotels, seafood processors and other low-wage, blue-collar employers.  Tillis, backed by a group of other Senators, wants to import up to 70,000 additional H-2Bs every year. The extra inflow would likely ensure a resident population of roughly 200,000 foreign blue-collar workers, which will allow employers to cut more wages for part-time and full-time American workers. 
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Kelly has stated he is reluctant to provide the extra H-2B visas, partly because of the administration’s “Buy American, Hire American” strategy. He also knows that he will face more congressional pressure for yet more H-2Bs in 2018 if he approves any extra H-2B workers in 2017. But Kelly is under pressure from the Senators who control his agency’s budget and who also control the Senate approval of his top aides. 
Tillis’ office confirmed the hold on Cissna to the Washington Times, which reported:
“Several senators, including Sen. Tillis, have concerns with DHS’ timeline because it would negatively impact seasonal small businesses and American workers across the nation this summer,” said Daniel Keylin, a spokesman for the senator, in explaining his blockade. “The hold is in place while these concerns are being addressed with DHS.”
Pro-American immigration reformers denounced Tillis’ pressure tactics. “Senator Tillis’s decision to prevent Francis Cissna from becoming USCIS Director should remove any doubt that he is a shill for business interests,” said Robert Law, the government relations chief at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Law continued:
 Francis is eminently qualified but Senator Tillis is holding his nomination hostage until he gets more H-2B low skilled foreign workers. This brazen move to deprive USCIS of its leader and diminish the job prospects of blue collar Americans makes it clear that Thom Tillis is the cheap labor lobby’s favorite senator.

These are jobs that used to be held by college students. I certainly did it when I was in college @JessicaV_CIS http://ow.ly/p3J130dxqVy 



DHS spokesman David Lapan told Breitbart said the agency would deliver extra workers demanded by Tillis:
On the H-2B issue, the Department is working as quickly as it can, given the circumstances imposed by Congress — May passage of the legislation (rather than Sept. or Oct.), the requirement in the legislation for the Secretary to consult with the Dept. of Labor, and the requirement to follow the law related to regulatory changes – which is why we are where we are today.
Lapan also defended Cissna, saying:
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Francis Cissna is well-respected and highly qualified and Secretary Kelly looks forward to a confirmation vote by the Senate as soon as possible.  Mr. Cissna received overwhelming support from the Senate Judiciary committee.
Employers, the labor brokers who hire and lease H-2B workers, and their open-borders allies are working with Tillis to get their foreign workers:



No H-2B cap relief today and no notice that it will come tomorrow. Still monitoring. 



Employers say they can’t find enough diligent American employees, and they cannot persuade K-12 schools to train more Americans in blue-collar skills.
But there’s no marketplace evidence of labor shortages because there is no evidence in government data that wages are rising for H-2B employees, according to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies:
real wages (adjusted for inflation) increased little or actually declined from 2007 to 2015 for most of these [H2B] occupations. In fact, collectively in these eight occupations real wages were 1.3 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 2007. And for native-born born Americans in the eight occupations wages were 2.8 percent lower.
The occupation that did the best from 2007 to 2015 was maids and housekeepers; it saw roughly a 7.7 percent increase from 2007 to 2015, or 1 percent annual wage growth on average above inflation.
Without the extra H-2B workers sought by Tillis, employers are changing how they do business and are sometimes even raising wages to attract new Americans workers. According to a pro-employer report in the Boston Globe
In anticipation of the H-2B limits, Framingham immigration lawyer Keith Pabian helped connect his hospitality clients with foreign workers who were already working in the United States over the winter — at ski resorts and in Florida — and therefore did not have to reapply for a visa and are not subject to the cap. H-2B workers are allowed to stay for three years continuously on the same visa as long as they have jobs lined up.
Some of Pabian’s higher-end clients went on recruiting trips to winter resorts around the country and got in bidding wars with other companies in an attempt to attract workers who already have visas.
But dozens of smaller employers with fewer resources are still scrambling, including a resort on Lake Champlain in Vermont that considered buying a school bus to drive around the state and pick up workers who didn’t have a way to get there.
“That’s just the level of desperation in a lot of these organizations,” Pabian said.
H-2B workers have one big advantage for employers — they cannot quit to go work for another company at higher wages, but must stay with the same employer who got the H-2B visa.
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“H-2B workers, they’ll stay with you,” restaurant owner Todd Barry told a sympathetic Boston Globe reporter. “If they don’t [stay], they have to leave the country.”
The H-2B population of roughly 115,000 H-2Bs is just part of the growing population of outsourcing workers who now hold jobs in the United States, most of whom work in white-collar jobs. Their overall numbers may reach 2 million, including roughly 350,000 ‘OPT’college graduates and 650,000 H-1B professionals. For comparison, roughly 800,000 Americans graduate each year from four-year colleges with skilled degrees.
Trump gives employers more temporary visas to exploit immigrant workers
By Jake Dean
20 July 2017
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently announced it would be increasing the number of H-2B visas by 15,000 for the remainder of the fiscal year. The H-2B Temporary Non-Agricultural Workers Program allows US employers to hire foreign workers and subject them to the most grueling tasks with little pay and no benefits.
The H-2 visa program is a “guest worker” program that allows a worker to enter the US and work for a temporary time-period. The program is divided into two group, H-2A agricultural and H-2B non-agricultural.
Specifically, an H-2B visa is a temporary work visa for foreign workers typically reserved for seasonal, non-agricultural work. Workers are hired in places such as seafood-processing plants, logging companies, and resorts, and many end up as cooks, waiters and waitresses, gardeners, cleaners, and housekeepers. A CNN analysis published in April reported that Trump businesses sponsored 1,024 H-2B visas since 2000.
Trump’s decision to increase the H-2B visas underscores the cynical character of his “Buy American, Hire American” economic nationalism, which has been backed by the trade unions. Far from defending the interests of workers, it has always been a ploy to divide the working class and scape-goat immigrant workers for the relentless attack on jobs and living standards by Corporate America. When it comes to the needs of big business for highly exploited seasonal labor, however, the Trump administration delivers.
Under current law visas are capped at 66,000 a year, equally split between two halves of the fiscal year. The cap has already been reached this year, but new petitions for the newly allocated visas will run through September. The 45 percent increase is to offset the growing demand by employers for seasonal workers. According to the Department of Labor employers have already made more than 120,000 visas requests. Maine businesses alone requested 2,877 H-2B visas this year, but only 700 have been approved.
For a business to hire from abroad it must prove it will suffer “irreparable harm” and that there are “not enough US workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available to do the temporary work,” as stated by US Citizenship and Immigration Services. In practice employers are supposed to demonstrate that they exhausted all opportunities before they can begin hiring foreign workers.
In reality, companies go to extraordinary lengths not to hire workers already in the United States so they can take advantage and abuse immigrant workers under the H-2 program.
The H-2A program provides financial incentive for companies to take full advantage of the program. Agricultural workers, under the H-2A program, are exempt from payroll and unemployment tax. USAFARMLABOR, a labor broker, a little over a year ago stated on its site, “Our workers actually save you money each month in comparison with US workers.”
Under the program non-agricultural employers do not have to provide housing, but if the company so chooses to it can charge workers rent. In cities such as Miami, Dallas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where tourism is a large part of the economy, a worker’s rent may be higher than his or her monthly pay.
Many live at their job site, making them available to work at any given moment. Their visa prohibits them from taking any other job, leaving them at the mercy of their employers. Withholding overtime pay or charging additional fees is rampant and workers are threatened with abuse or deportation if they complain.
There is strong bipartisan support for the H-2B program, from the tourism industry in Miami, logging in Alaska and Washington, and ski resorts in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Colorado.
The increase in the H-2B visa program was approved as part of the budget deal in May to avoid a government shutdown. The deal gave Homeland Security chief, retired United States Marine Corps General John F. Kelly, the power to increase the number of foreign workers after consulting with the secretary of labor.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has been critical of the increase of the H-2B program. “A lot of the arguments for this kind of program boil down to this: No American worker will do that job,” Cotton said. “That is a lie. There is no job that Americans will no do.”
While arguing that corporations should be able to subject American workers to the same super-exploitation as immigrant workers laboring under the threat of deportation, Cotton’s real concern is that the state’s agri-businesses are being short-changed by the increase in non-agricultural visas. Arkansas is one of the largest states that requests H-2A workers, more so than California.

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