Tuesday, May 14, 2019

THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE - A FASCIST ARM OF WALL STREET'S BIGGEST CRIMINAL CORPORATIONS - What this means is that what is good for Main Street will not be good for Wall Street and Big Biz, at least not in the short run. What benefits the American worker -- fair trade policy and tight immigration control -- will initially hurt Big Biz and Wall Street.

"What this means is that what is good for Main Street will not 


be good for Wall Street and Big Biz, at least not in the short 


run. What benefits the American worker -- fair trade policy 


and tight immigration control -- will initially hurt Big Biz and 


Wall Street." PETER SKURKISS



The “mother of all caravans” is forming in Central America, and our border-enforcement system is at “the breaking point” — all because Democrats in Congress rejects any effort to plug the legal loopholes that drive the accelerating flood at the border. In effect, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are doing just what Cesar Chavez complained about 40 years ago: placating employers by allowing the unhindered importation of cheap labor to undermine the efforts of American workers to negotiate higher wages. MARK KRIKORIAN


THE CHAMBER HAS LONG FOUGHT FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS, AGAINST E-VERIFY AND ENFORCEMENT SIMPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. THEY ARE AS EVIL AS CONGRESS ITSELF!


MAGA vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce



By Peter Skurkiss
The general public typically equates the Chamber of Commerce with local Mom and Pop businesses in their area which meet for networking and mutual support in local chapters across the country. This is erroneous. According to theHill: 
While local chambers cater to the needs of car dealers and restaurant owners, the national Chamber operates as the lobbying arm of large corporations that have never met a big government program they did not like.
They are weapons dealers pushing billion-dollar battleships and telecommunication lobbyists protecting slow Internet at the world's highest prices. They are lobbyists for pharmaceutical companies, big banks, and Wall street traders who treat the American people as gullibles to be fleeced without mercy.
Even seasoned politicians are susceptible to having misconceptions about the Chamber. Former U.S. senator Jim Demint admits he naively thought it was lobbying for free enterprise and creating a better business environment for everybody. Now he says, "I pronounce them part of the swamp." Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich), a conservative, adds, "I believe in free markets and am against cronyism and corporate welfare, and they [the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] support those things."
So what is the USCC? It is a business lobbying group that represents 80% of the Fortune 100 companies and is by far the largest interest group in Washington. According the Wall Street Journal, the Chamber spent $125 million in lobbying in 2014 and $95 million last year. This dwarfs the spending of any other interest group. One tactic the Chamber uses to swell its revenue is to solicit money from big international companies to promote specific goals. Since donor names are not public, the Chamber can pursue controversial fights without identifying the firms behind the effort.
The Chamber of Commerce and its president Thomas Donohue came into conflict with Donald Trump and his America First platform very early on. For 18 months during the runup to the 2016 election, the Chamber spared no effort to demonize Trump. In doing so, the Chamber was carrying water for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Donohue and company figured they could better deal with Hillary than Trump in the Oval Office. In this, the Chamber was exactly right. 
The big hangups the Chamber and its client base had against Donald Trump involved immigration, trade, and tariffs. Adhering to its corporate masters’ call for a continuous supply of cheap labor, the Chamber lobbies for more immigration and resists tight border controls. Trade is much the same. Past trade pacts have allowed Wall Street to grow obscenely rich in the outsourcing of American jobs to third-world countries for sake of the bottom line of the multinationals. In the process, over a million ordinary Americans were left holding the bag. 
All this is still playing out today. The president is striving to adjust the unfair trading arrangements that the political class, in cahoots with the big money interests on Wall Street, have saddled the U.S. with.  But Trump and his trade team of Robert Lighthizer, Wilbur Ross, Steven Mnuchin, and Larry Kudlow are fighting not just China, but what is effectively a Fifth Column here at home. It's composed of the likes of the Chamber of Commerce and a sizable portion of the political establishment, which is used to dipping its beak in special-interest money. 
As to this latter point, just look at the breaking news of the dealings of Joe Biden's son, Hunter, with the Chinese government. Writing in the New YorkPost, Peter Schweizer outlines in detail the $1.5 private equity deal the younger Biden made with the Chinese while Biden was vice-president. And now, Joe Biden is out on the stump soft-peddling the damage China has done to the U.S. economy and downplaying its threat to us and pretending to be for the working man. You can't make this up.
It's important not to conflate Big Business (Wall Street) with small business (Main Street). Wall Street is the financial economy. It pushes paper around. For example, they write derivatives on real assets, say stocks, to the point where the value of derivatives traded is far greater than the assets they are based on.Investopedia says this: "The derivatives market is, in a word, gigantic -- often estimated at more than $1.2 quadrillion on the high end."
A quadrillion is 1,000 trillion. In dollar terms, a quadrillion is 15-times the GDP of the entire world.
Main Street actually makes and sells things. For over a generation or more, Big Biz has dominated Main Street. This is why the Midwest and other places across the U.S. are littered with closed factories and why middle-class wages stagnated. In many ways, the financial economy is parasitic on the real economy. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump represented Main Street while Clinton was in the pocket of the big money interests on Wall Street. 
What this means is that what is good for Main Street will not be good for Wall Street and Big Biz, at least not in the short run. What benefits the American worker -- fair trade policy and tight immigration control -- will initially hurt Big Biz and Wall Street. And the hurt will continue until the financial economy is scaled back to its proper size and is no longer allowed to the tail that wags the American economic dog. Until then, MAGA is at war with Big Biz and the bought-and-paid-for political establishment. And this explains much of the resistance to Trump's tariffs and trade position.
A closing observation says a lot. Thomas Donohue, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, is 80 years old. His board is pushing him to retire. The replacement they are looking at is former Congressman Paul Ryan. A perfect fit given the Chamber's agenda.


Graham & Kushner are the last people America needs crafting immigration laws

For National Release | May 14, 2019

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC.us) is rallying activists in all fifty states to fight against the Graham/Kushner Amnesty legislation expected to be filed in the US Senate on Wednesday.

ALIPAC believes that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is taking the lead on the Kushner immigration plan after the massive backlash against Trump's son-in-law, lifelong Democrat, scandal-ridden, Sr. White House advisor Jared Kushner. Kushner's and Graham's legislative agenda violates Trump's broken campaign promise that all illegals, incuding DACA Dreamer illegals, must return to their home nations.

Kushner supports Amnesty for millions of illegal aliens and appeared before a group of bankers shortly after Trump's election in 2016 to assure them Trump's harsh rhetoric on immigration issues would not become policy.

Senator Lindsey Graham is America's most notorious illegal alien Amnesty supporting Republican following the death of his friend Senator John McCain.

Nicknamed Senator Grahamnesty by his critics for supporting defeated immigration reform Amnesty bills in 2006 and 2007, Graham and McCain tried to lead Republicans to unite with Democrats and put millions of illegals on the path to becoming citizens and Democrat voters which would hand full control of the White House, Supreme Court, and Congress to Democrats forevermore.

Lindsey Graham worked with liberal Democratic Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) in an attempt to pass Dream Act Amnesty legislation in 2010 when ALIPAC activists revealed a hidden mass Amnesty provision for most illegals in the bill, which led to swift defeat of the legislation in December of 2010.

Senator Lindsey Graham then formed the Gang of Eight to create a bipartisan group of Republican and Democrat Senators dedicated to passing immigration reform Amnesty for millions of illegals in 2013. ALIPAC activists and the American public rose up once again to defeat Graham's Amnesty legislation titled the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013.

Senator Graham has been on Fox News promoting his new immigration reform legislation, claiming it will solve the current border crisis which is being caused by President Donald J. Trump's broken campaign promises, and President Trump's DACA Amnesty and catch and release presidential directives.

Graham has admitted that he wants to gain the votes of Democrats for his bill by offering them Amnesty, citizenship, and eventual voting rights for millions of DACA Dreamer illegal immigrants according to OAN News. (View Source) During the last Amnesty legislation battle of 2018, the White House and GOP Senators like Graham offered the Democrats Amnesty for up to 4 million illegals in an effort to pass Rep. Goodlatte's Amnesty deal bill HR 4760, which would have eventually thrown four million Trump voters under the buss permanently.

"We know that any immigration-related legislation coming from Senator Lindsey Graham and or Jared Kushner will contain nation destroying Amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, which will repeat the mistake of Reagan's 1986 Amnesty which caused today's crisis," explained William Gheen, President of ALIPAC. "The Kushner Graham Amnesty bills and plans are exactly what Americans voted to get away from by electing Donald J. Trump as President! We didn't vote to put Kushner in the White House nor did we vote to put Senator Grahamnesty in the lead on immigration bills. This is all a massive betrayal of the more than sixty million Americans who voted for Trump!"

ALIPAC.us activists have been hammering Jared Kushner's Amnesty plans for weeks and now have activists in all 50 states calling GOP Senators to warn them away from Senator Graham's Amnesty plans, which will either be included in the bill released tomorrow or sneakily slipped into the legislation before any vote!

ALIPAC has played a lead role in defeating Amnesty legislation in Washington, DC, 10 times since 2004 with the only Amnesty getting past the organization being the Amnesty for unaccompanied illegal alien minors, their sponsors, housemates, and potential sponsors President Trump signed into law in the secretive budget deal bill of February 15, 2019.

For more information about ALIPAC's efforts to defeat legislative Amnesty for millions of illegals for an 11th time, or to schedule interviews, please visit www.ALIPAC.us

###


White House Immigration Plan: Incomplete Without Some Reduction in Legal Numbers


Washington, D.C. (May 14, 2019) [From a National Review article by Mark Krikorian] – The White House immigration plan isn’t fully cooked yet, but its broad outlines are clear.

It won’t try to address everything “comprehensively,” focusing instead on enforcement and the legal immigration system. Enforcement measures will reportedly address the border crisis (a Flores fix, etc.), as well as mandate use of the E-Verify system. The legal-immigration portion include a narrowing of the family categories to limit chain migration, an end to the visa lottery, and an overhaul of the skills-based portion of the system.

While this is all positive, there’s a fundamental problem. The proposal will not include any reduction in the overall level of legal immigration, not even a symbolic one.

Read the full article: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/basket-of-deplorables-trump-administration-edition/

This is especially important because the proposal is not really a legislative vehicle; there’s no chance an immigration bill even remotely acceptable to Republicans can make it through this Congress. That means this proposal is more of a campaign platform, outlining the official Republican approach to immigration, which risks becoming a "Democrat-lite" platform.

Ever since this year’s State of the Union address, President Trump has been signaling his desire for an increase in immigration because of the low unemployment rate.

Of course, the idea that we’re running short of potential workers is absurd; as Jason Richwine noted in these pages recently, “[w]ith one in nine prime-age males still sitting idle, terms such as ‘full employment’ and ‘labor shortage’ ring hollow.”

So the president is wrong about this, but if he really wants to follow in the footsteps of the Bush and Obama administrations (and the stillborn Jeb and Hillary administrations) and push for increased immigration to please “our corporations,” he can make his case, gauge the pushback, and decide if he’s willing to pay the political price.

The plan hasn’t been formally unveiled yet, so there’s still time to repair this mistake. It’s not even particularly difficult, and requires no walk-back by the president. Just reallocate the green cards from the extended-family categories to the new merit system, thus admitting “more people than ever before” based on their skills, but eliminate the visa lottery and don’t relocate those numbers. It wouldn’t even amount to a 5 percent reduction in legal immigration, but would acknowledge that there are problems caused by mass legal immigration, even in a good economy.

Illegals surge, Trump builds, and House 


tries to shut down border wall construction


behind him



By Monica Showalter


With as many as four million migrants vowing to enter the U.S. illegally in 2019, nearly 100,000 apprehended in April alone, and 168,000 "families" released into the U.S. interior this year, the surge is on.
President Trump is working at breakneck speed to get some semblance of a wall built, particularly at the critical crossing areas.  According to a report from Townhall's Katie Pavlich, citing official Homeland Security releases, waivers are being issued to permit wall construction now.
The Department of Homeland Security announced the issuance of two waivers Wednesday morning in order to expedite the construction of new border wall in parts of California and Arizona. 
"The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued two waivers, which will ensure expeditious construction of new bollard wall within the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson and El Centro Sectors in Arizona and California, respectively. The projects covered by the waivers include up to approximately 78 miles of new bollard wall in place of dilapidated and outdated designs, in addition to road construction and improvement and lighting installation. The waivers were published in the Federal Register on May 15, 2019," DHS released. "While the waivers eliminate DHS’s obligation to comply with various laws with respect to covered projects, DHS remains committed to environmental stewardship. DHS has initiated consultation with other federal and state resource agencies to ensure that impacts to the environment, wildlife, and cultural and historic artifacts are analyzed and minimized, to the greatest extent possible."
A waiver was also issued to start construction on 15 miles of broken down fencing in Border Patrol's San Diego Sector. 
"The San Diego and El Centro Sectors are areas of high illegal entry and are experiencing large numbers of individuals and narcotics being smuggled into the country illegally. The construction of border infrastructure within these project areas will support DHS’s ability to impede and deny illegal border crossings and the drug and human smuggling activities of transnational criminal organizations," DHS stated.
They're trying to get something up, given the surge, given the national emergency, and red tape can wait.  Evidently, the Department of Homeland Security was thinking of places like this:
I wrote about this incident last February: apparently, the corrugated metal "fencing" made of repurposed military surplus dating from the Vietnam War was a cinch for cartels to ram down in order to smuggle their lucrative human (and possibly illegal drug) cargo into the States.  And it can't be the only ram-down of this Reynolds Wrap–style sheeting.
President Trump is to be commended for moving at breakneck speed as the surge rolls in.
But incredibly enough, the illegals surge is actually less important than what is going on in the House.
Democrats are moving to stop any border wall construction even as it becomes very clear that there is a crisis at the U.S. southern border.  According to Defense News:
WASHINGTON ― Key House Democrats are following through on a threat to limit the Pentagon's authority to reprogram funds in response to Pentagon leaders diverting military funding toward President Donald Trump's wall with Mexico.
A group of House Armed Services Committee Democrats led by Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.; HASC Chair Adam Smith, D-Wash., and HASC Readiness Subcommittee Chair John Garamendi, D-Calif., offered a bill Wednesday to cap national emergency military construction authority at $250 million per emergency. The legislation would tighten the ability to waive other provisions of law in carrying out the projects and mandate congressional notification and waiting periods for construction projects.
This marks the second time House Democrats in have offered legislation restricting the executive branch since the Pentagon unilaterally reprogrammed $1.5 billion in fiscal 2019 funds last week to support the wall―for more than $2 billion this year. On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on defense passed a 2020 Pentagon funding bill that slashes the amount of money the military can shift between accounts from $9.5 billion to $1.5 billion.
Illegals are surging in, and Democrats are literally trying to stop the construction of a wall.  No condemnation of the lawless surge, no criticism of the immense profits the drug cartels are making as a result of it, no effort to find ways to admit more people into the U.S. legally, no concern for the costs the migrant surge will bring to blue cities and states.  They're focused on just one thing: making sure that wall goes up.
And their motives are amazingly politicized, not crisis-oriented (emphasis mine): 
"Congress debated the issue of border security for a year-and-a-half and decided to spend $1.2 billion on more effective border security technologies than the President's vanity wall," Garamendi, whose panel oversees military construction, said in a statement.
"This crucial legislation will provide a vital check on the executive branch and prohibit the President from using the MILCON budget and other critical projects as a personal slush fund to fulfill a campaign promise."
 They're calling it a vanity wall, as if were a statue of himself or maybe a billboard, not an instrument to re-establish the definition of U.S. borders, strengthen rule of law, and re-asserting U.S. sovereignty.
They don't want any of that.
What's more, they seem to think there's something wrong with Trump keeping a campaign promise, something he is repeatedly in a habit of doing. What they are calculating in their small little minds is that if Trump fulfills this campaign promise, he'll get more popular.
Can't have that. It's a backhanded admission of sorts that the wall is necessary in the face of the surge and the idea remains popular, despite a slew of Democratic-linked push polls claiming otherwise. If the wall were as unpopular with the public as they say it is, we wouldn't be seeing action like this.
One can only feel sympathy for President Trump as the wall goes up at breakneck speed now. The president is actually fighting a two-front war, not just against the cartels who made immense profits on human smuggling on one side, which is where the media attention is, but against the Democrats who are playing wingman for cartel financial interests in zero borders as well as their own political interests in bringing in as many illegal immigrants as possible, the better to fatten their electoral seatings, get an army of political operatives, and get their votes to perpetrate their power. As the sponsorship of Rep. Gil Cisneros to these measures signals, the most fervent proponents of these measures to Stop Trump are in office through ballot-harvesting, and they've got illegals doing the ballot-harvesting to put them in power.
What a nasty pair of enemies the president is fighting at once. The wall will hold away one of them. Only the voters can get rid of the other. Until it happens, all he can do is build — racing the clock.  

Chamber of Commerce Demands More Immigration: ‘U.S. Is Out of People’




AP Photo/Alan Diaz
JOHN BINDER
 26 Apr 20194,424
4:12

The United States Chamber of Commerce is vowing to continue fighting President Trump’s shaping of the Republican Party into a pro-U.S. worker party of blue collar working and middle class Americans.

In an interview with the Washington Post, numerous Chamber of Commerce officials said the organization’s corporate lobbying efforts would soon attempt to court more elected Democrats to support their economic libertarian agenda of more free trade and increased legal immigration.
“The GOP’s drift toward protectionism, nativism, and isolationism since Donald Trump took over the party in 2016 is also at odds with the Chamber’s longtime support for expanding free trade, growing legal immigration and investing in infrastructure,” the Poststory details.
Specifically, Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donahue said the U.S. needed more legal immigration so that corporations and business secure a never-ending flow of cheaper labor, claiming the country is “out of people.”
And they’re still looking to work with Trump even on areas where they’re not really in agreement, such as immigration. The Chamber advocates for protecting the “dreamers” from deportation and expanding rates of legal immigration. “The fundamental issue is that the United States of America is out of people,” said Donohue. “We have the lowest unemployment we’ve had in 65 years. We have brought more people back into the workforce and still have the lowest unemployment.” [Emphasis added]
Despite Donahue’s claims, at least 12 million Americans who want full-time jobs remain on the sidelines of the workforce. This includes 6.2 million Americans who are unemployed that want a job, 4.5 million Americans who are underemployed working part-time jobs, and 1.4 million Americans who continue to be entirely out of the workforce though they want full-time employment.

More than 12 million Americans remain unemployed, underemployed, or out of the labor force but wanting a job. Tight labor market still has some slack. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/15/feds-12m-americans-remain-sidelined-out-of-the-workforce/ …

38

Feds: More Than 12M Americans Remain Sidelined Out of the Workforce



While millions remain on the sidelines of the workforce, the Chamber of Commerce has routinely advocated for increasing legal immigration levels as a boon to corporations while depressing job prospects and wages for America’s working and middle class. Already, about 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants are admitted to the country every year, to the detriment of U.S. wages.
The Chamber of Commerce’s push to increase legal immigration levels is vastly out of step with Republican voters and American voters as a whole. Last year, nearly two-out-threeU.S. voters said they supported reducing legal immigration, while most recently about 43 percent of Republican voters said immigration hurts the country.
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current mass legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.
Borjas has previously called the country’s legal immigration system the “largest anti-poverty program” in the world at the expense of blue-collar Americans and middle-class taxpayers.
Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one-percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.
In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by about 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent.
Likewise, every one-percent increase in the immigrant composition of low-skilled U.S. occupations reduces wages by about 0.8 percent. Should 15 percent of low-skilled jobs be held by foreign-born workers, it would reduce the wages of native-born American workers by perhaps 12 percent.
Though corporate interests and the open borders lobby have sought to sway Trump from his “America First” illegal and legal immigration agenda, senior advisor Jared Kushner recently said the president’s top priority in terms of the White House’s reform efforts is protecting Americans’ wages.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

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