This Labor Day, Threats to the American Worker Lurk Behind Every Corner
Labor Day isn’t simply a long weekend to mark the closing days of summer. It’s a holiday intended to celebrate the foundation on which this country is built: the American worker. Luckily, these building blocks have benefited from the economic upswing of the past two years.
According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record number of Americans are participating in the labor force and, better yet, they’re enjoying rising wages. New data revisions reveal wages grew by 5.6 percent in 2018 — rising quicker than we originally thought and rising 50 percent faster than under President Obama. And so far in 2019, year-over-year wage growth has surpassed 3 percent every month.
Moreover, the unemployment rate remains near a five-decade low.
Newly released Job Creators Network Foundation/ScottRasmussen.com Weekly Pulse data provides further insight. The polling reveals that the number of Americans who say businesses in their area are likely to hire employees is twice as high as those who believe businesses are likely to lay them off. This is a welcomed barometer as it shows the health of Main Street businesses are strong.
Much of the uptick can be traced back to the policies pushed and supported by the Trump administration.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — legislation passed and signed into law in 2017 — has gifted millions of individuals and small businesses with financial relief. While critics of the legislation do have an outsized voice in the mainstream media, the reality couldn’t be clearer: A majority of working families have more money in their pockets and businesses are being incentivized to invest in themselves and expand. Even the New York Times was forced to publish the headline “Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax Cut.”
Significant policy improvements have also been made on the regulatory front. While conserving reasonable rules that protect employees and the public from nefarious business practices, the Trump administration has thinned other regulations that unduly cripple job creators — especially small ones — and their employees.
More specifically, a 2017 executive order imposed a rule that two regulations be eliminated for every new one added. And even this objective was exceeded in 2018 when a ratio of four-to-one regulations were wiped from the books.
However, the white-hot labor market sparking opportunity for workers and entrepreneurs alike is being threatened. The most recent ambush is resurrected from the past. 2020 presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, recently came out in favor of returning to an Obama-era labor regulation standard that was walked back under the Trump administration.
In short, Sanders supports expanding a labor definition — known as “joint employer” — which would negatively impact U.S. franchise businesses — a stronghold of American entrepreneurialism and job creation. The policy would shift liability from franchise operators to parent companies, a move that would limit the autonomy of what are currently considered independent businesses. If imposed, the franchise business model could face the chopping block.
Other policy threats on the horizon include proposals like Medicare for All — a health care framework that will restrict consumer choice and cost taxpayers trillions of dollars — and far-out ideas like the Green New Deal that will flip the economy on its head with unthinkable regulations applied to both businesses and individuals.
It’s evident that economic dangers lurk behind every corner.
As Thomas Jefferson said, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Similarly, if we want to continue the march of progress for American workers and the economy they fuel, we should internalize a similar mantra.
Elaine Parker is the President of the Job Creators Network Foundation.
While Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-MA) has vowed an economic nationalist-populist agenda, her plans to increase
foreign competition against American workers match the solutions routinely
offered by the nation’s donor-class and big business lobby.
USCIS Chief: Paul Ryan
Wanted Illegal Immigration, Ran a ‘Chamber of Commerce Congress’
President Donald Trump’s
citizenship director told a Texas business group that House Speaker Paul Ryan
“submarined” the best chance for immigration reform because he wanted illegal
immigration.
India Has
More than 630,000 Illegals in the United States | Breitbart
They want no borders, no allegiance to a nation state, no
citizenship classification connected to a single country. TOM TANCREDO
2020
Census Citizenship Controversy Exposes True Open Borders Agenda
It is important to understand that this
debate over the 2020 Census's citizen/noncitizen numbers is not a debate over
counting illegal immigrants residing in the United States. This controversy
goes deeper than the debate over whether the official U.S. Census estimate of
11.3 million illegal aliens resident in the country is accurate or woefully
inaccurate.
House Democrats, 39
Republicans Pass ‘Temporary’ Amnesty for Venezuelans
House Democrats and 39
Republicans passed a plan to provide asylum in the United States to potentially
millions of Venezuelans fleeing their socialist dictator.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors
are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand
a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of Republican and Democrat
lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million
illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s
proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
MAGA vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
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.
Chamber
of Commerce Demands More Immigration: ‘U.S. Is Out of People’
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.
Feds: More Than 12M
Americans Remain Sidelined Out of the Workforce
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups are considering
ways to challenge the new tariffs on goods imported from Mexico.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Sen. Cory Booker called for more low-skilled immigration Wednesday
night as he tried to cut down Joe Biden in the Democrats’ 2020 race.
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg Use Stealth to Push
Outsourcing Bill
Joe Biden: Illegal Immigration Bad, More Legal
immigration Good | Breitbart
Wages Climb Again in July, Says Paychex Survey of
Employers
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty
Images
27 Aug 20196
4:02
While Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-MA) has vowed an economic nationalist-populist agenda, her plans to increase
foreign competition against American workers match the solutions routinely
offered by the nation’s donor-class and big business lobby.
With a rise in the polls, Warren is doubling down on her
economic agenda, calling out multinational corporations for outsourcing and
offshoring American jobs for decades.
“There are a lot of giant companies who like to call themselves
‘American,'” Warren said in a new video out on Twitter. “But face it, they have
no loyalty or allegiance to America.”
“In a Warren administration, government policy will support
American workers,” Warren said. “I call it economic patriotism … this is not a
question of more government or less government. It’s about who government works
for.”
A
lot of giant companies refer to themselves as “American.” But let’s face it,
they only have one real loyalty: Their shareholders. A Warren administration
will halt the hollowing out of American cities and create good American jobs.
Here’s how.
Warren, however, has juxtapositioned her economic patriotist plan to crack down on
outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs by corporations against an agenda
to import additional foreign workers for those corporations.
In her immigration outline released last month, Warren promised
to “expand legal immigration” beyond current historically high legal
immigration levels, at which more than 1.2 million legal immigrants are
admitted to the U.S. every year. Part of this plan includes increasing the
process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens are
allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
America should welcome more legal immigration — done in the
right way and consistent with our principles … We should reflect our values,
which means expanding family reunification and making it easier for relatives
of citizens and green card holders to come to the United States,” Warren
writes.
Warren writes that her expansion of legal immigration will “grow
the economy,” the case often deployed by the donor class and big business lobby
to demand more foreign workers.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce executives, for example, told the Washington Post this year
that the country is “out of people” and thus more legal
immigration is necessary to grow the economy and provide an endless flow of
foreign workers to business.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s organization New American
Economy is wholey dedicated to lobbying for plans like Warren’s to be enacted
in order to grow the U.S. economy and GDP. The organization is headed by
Bloomberg and funded by a long list of billionaire donors,
including the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard, Delta Airlines, Time Warner Inc.,
Goldman Sachs, Quest Diagnostics, and Citigroup.
Warren’s plan is also supported by the editorial board of
billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington
Post, where they argued that the U.S. needs a constant stream of
low-skilled foreign workers to fill American jobs.
Meanwhile, America’s working and middle class have seen their wages crushed for decades just as a stream of illegal
and legal foreign workers have grown their share of various U.S. occupations.
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst
Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s current mass legal immigration
system 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.
Camarota’s research has found that for every one-percent
increase in the immigrant portion of American workers’ occupations, their
weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born
American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent.
Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” economic model, on the
other hand, has lifted wages for America’s blue-collar
and working-class by decreasing foreign competition in the labor market through
stricter immigration enforcement. Trump’s agenda has also shifted power from
corporations to U.S. workers where businesses now compete for workers
rather than the decades-long practice of workers competing for jobs at
businesses.
USCIS Chief: Paul Ryan
Wanted Illegal Immigration, Ran a ‘Chamber of Commerce Congress’
22 Aug 201988
5:38
President Donald Trump’s
citizenship director told a Texas business group that House Speaker Paul Ryan
“submarined” the best chance for immigration reform because he wanted illegal
immigration.
“Let’s not forget … when [Rep.] Paul
Ryan was the speaker, Paul Ryan submarined the best opportunity we had
legislatively when [judiciary chairman Rep.] Bob Goodlatte’s bill … came
through,” Ken Cuccinelli told the Texas Public Policy Foundation on August
22.
Cuccinelli, who is the acting
director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, said, “We had
leadership there that defended the status quo. They were the Chamber of
Commerce Congress. They wanted illegal immigration.”
In contrast, President Trump is
following through on his promises and is giving American voters a clear choice
in 2020, he said:
I actually think the 2020 election
can help solve that problem. I believe when you run on things, and people know
‘This is what I get if I vote for X, if this party becomes the majority, I get
this bill’ …. [then you get] good politics and good policy.
“Not enough people will challenge
their own leadership in the GOP to beat them down when they are wrong,” said
Cuccinelli, a populist conservative from Virginia.
Goodlatte retired from Congress in
2018. In December, he said that Ryan blocked his bill by dividing the
GOP votes between two reform bills: “That is just not a good strategy and I complained about it at the time.
I said ‘You’ve got to narrow this down to one bill and then work really hard to
get the members to vote for that one bill.’”
Ryan said in November 2018 that he
preferred a rival bill, sponsored by GOP Rep. Chris Curbelo, who was defeated
in the November election.
On
immigration, I really liked—I call it “the Curbelo bill,” it was Goodlatte II —
the immigration compromise bill that I put on the floor in July, which
satisfied the President’s four pillars.” he said.
“Our goal is to not cut legal
immigration,” Rep. Carlos Curbelo told RollCall.com on June 2018. The number of illegals who get
green cards from the amnesty should be “as high a number as possible,” he
said.
Curbelo repeated his demand,
telling TheHill.com that “some visas may be shifted towards
employment visas, but our goal is to not cut legal immigration.”
The Goodlatte bill would have cut legal immigration by ending
the visa lottery, provided a work permit amnesty to just the 700,000 illegals
who are registered in the DACA program, and ensured immigration cuts,
said Rosemary Jenks, policy director of NumbersUSA.
It also
included much careful language to hinder fraud and to prevent pro-migration
judges from hijacking the bill’s limited amnesty for their own goals, said
Jenks, who opposed the bigger Ryan bill.
Ryan’s
support for the Curbelo bill allowed 41 GOP legislators to vote no on the
Goodlatte bill when it came up for a June vote.
On June 14, the House blocked
Goodlatte’s H.R. 4760, the “Securing America’s Future Act,” with a vote tally of 193 to 231. No
Democrats voted for the reform.
“If it has
been the only bill offered, it might have passed,” Goodlatte said. “We
were 20, 21 votes short,” said Goodlatte. The [bill] would have passed “if we
had gotten half of [the GOP ‘no’ voters] to join with us, we would have gotten
there,” he said.
The US has a fast-growing population of roughly 630,000
illegal migrants from India, mixed among the temporary contract-work population
of at least 1.5 million Indians. That's great for business & govt's, but
bad for Americans' families & employees. http://bit.ly/2zfNggO
India Has
More than 630,000 Illegals in the United States | Breitbart
Immigration Numbers
Immigration
is a government economic strategy which seeks to stimulate economic growth and
stock prices by inflating the supply of labor and consumers.
Each year,
roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating
from high school or university. This total includes about 800,000
Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care,
engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the
federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and
refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa
workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — and
about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints out more
than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million
illegal workers, and rarely punishes companies for employing the hundreds of
thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their
legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the new
labor supply boosts stock values for investors by ensuring that employers do not have to
compete in a free market for American workers with offers of higher wages and
better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as
it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools
and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy
also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines
millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are
now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
They want no borders, no allegiance to a nation state, no
citizenship classification connected to a single country. TOM TANCREDO
2020
Census Citizenship Controversy Exposes True Open Borders Agenda
As usual, the dustup about the census
including a question about citizenship has nothing to do with what the loony
left claims as their motivation to exclude it. They say it’s all about being
sensitive to the hurt feelings and paranoia of people who are illegally present
in the U.S. And, by the way, asking the question it is not a Donald Trump trick
to ferret out those folks who are hiding under their blankets, afraid that the
next knock on the door will be the jackbooted ICE agents, come to drag them
from their beds and put them on boxcars headed for concentration camps.
A brief history lesson here. The
Constitution of the United States directs the President to conduct a Census
every ten years, and that has been done without controversy since 1790. And
with rare exceptions, the question on citizenship has been part of it from the
beginning. Yet, its inclusion in the 2020 Census has become controversial. The
reasons for the opposition to the citizenship question tell us a lot about the
declining health of our American constitutional republic.
The vehement opposition to the 2020 Census
question on citizenship is a symptom of a deep divide in the body politic, a
chasm that only grows wider and deeper as politicians postpone a decision over
the meaning of the Constitution's opening words, "We the People."
There is a chasm as wide as the Grand
Canyon separating individuals who believe that "We the People" means
we the citizens of the United States and those who believe it means, we the
global citizens who temporarily inhabit this territory. To one group having an
accurate count of both citizens and noncitizens resident in each state is vital
to the constitutional purposes of the Census, but to the "global citizen"
contingent that count is not only unnecessary, it is slanderous, racist and,
well -- undemocratic!
The political resistance to the
traditional citizenship question as part of the decennial Census derives its
passion and intensity from the ideological goal of transforming the nature of
political representation in our republic. In that world, an elected
representative in any city council, school board, county commission, state
legislature, Board of Regents, or the U. .Congress, is duty bound to represent
any resident of his or her district with the same passion and integrity whether
that resident be a citizen, a Chinese or German foreign student at a local
university, a legal resident alien born in Egypt or an illegal alien who swam
across the Rio Grande. Should foreign students at the University of Colorado
vote in Boulder city elections? Why not, if every "person" is
entitled to "equal representation"?
The population count produced by the 2020
Census will be the foundation for Congress' adoption of revised apportionment
of the 435 seats in Congress. Does a new apportionment based on new Census
numbers mean a count based on all persons, all citizens, or something else?
Such questions will be debated in Congress and litigated all the way to the
Supreme Court before we know the answers, but the debate must begin with an
accurate count in the Census. Will we get one?
When the national debate over illegal
immigration and border security was heating up back in 2005 and 2006 in
response to amnesty proposals in Congress, I was roundly criticized for
suggesting the opposition to amnesty was rooted in opposition to secure
borders. I was attacked by some prominent leaders
of the Republican Party for saying that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce saw
illegal aliens as cheap labor and the Democrat Party saw them as future
Democratic voters. I take
no pleasure in observing in 2019 that Democratic leaders in Congress are
aggressively advocating open borders as a path to a permanent Democratic
majority. And there is an even bigger picture that elitist leftists are trying
to paint for us all. They want no borders, no allegiance to a nation
state, no citizenship classification connected to a single country.
They want a kumbaya world of global
citizens that can be governed by people who “know better.” Think I am wrong?
Try to find a recent college or high school grad who can tell you what it means
to be an American other than by saying it means abiding in a place called
America. The members of what I call the Cult of Multiculturalism infect our
schools, our media, and pop culture. The philosophy permeates the West -- its
repercussions and can be seen playing out all over Europe.
Only a short decade ago, a world-famous
Harvard political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, wrote a landmark book aptly
titled Who Are We? America’s National Identity Crisis.
He believed that America's unprecedented achievements and unparalleled
prosperity had their foundation in our nation's European heritage, a heritage
under siege by the formidable forces of multiculturalism. So eliminating the
citizenship question in the Census is a just another step down the road to the
elitist utopia promised by Marx and Engels.
Eventually we will come to the step when
jackbooted government agents really will be pulling people out of their beds
and sending them off to “re-education” camps.” After
all, some people might resist the America that Barack Obama promised to thoroughly
transform.
Former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo
(R-CO), serves as Advisory Board Member for We Build The Wall. He was
author of the famous Bush Era book called In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America's Border and Security.
House Democrats, 39
Republicans Pass ‘Temporary’ Amnesty for Venezuelans
25 Jul 20191,586
5:09
House Democrats and 39
Republicans passed a plan to provide asylum in the United States to potentially
millions of Venezuelans fleeing their socialist dictator.
In a 272 to 158 House vote on Thursday, every Democrat and 39
Republicans voted to create a Temporary
Protected Status (TPS) program for Venezuela’s population — allowing nationals
who are already in the U.S. to remain and incentivizing more to migrate.
Officials with the Trump administration previously voiced their opposition to the
plan in an interview with Breitbart News.
“We would not want to open
the floodgates for them,” an official said in March.
The Republicans who voted
with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY),
and Rep. Ilhan Omar (R-MN) include:
- Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE)
- Rep. Michael Bost (R-IL)
- Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK)
- Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX)
- Rep. John Curtis (R-UT)
- Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
- Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI)
- Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA)
- Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
- Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI)
- Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH)
- Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA)
- Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO)
- Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA)
- Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA)
- Rep. French Hill (R-AR)
- Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX)
- Rep. David Joyce (R-OH)
- Rep. John Katko (R-NY)
- Rep. Peter King (R-NY)
- Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)
- Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL)
- Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)
- Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY)
- Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA)
- Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL)
- Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA)
- Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL)
- Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ)
- Rep. Ross Spano (R-FL)
- Rep. Elise Stefancik (R-NY)
- Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI)
- Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH)
- Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA)
- Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL)
- Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR)
- Rep. Rod Woodall (R-GA)
- Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL)
- Rep. Don Young (R-AK)
Leading the opposition
against giving TPS to Venezuela’s population, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) called the
plan an effort to continue current U.S. national immigration policy that acts
as “the world’s orphanage for children and adults alike.”
Brooks said:
This bill proposes a tsunami of people coming to
our country who are ill-equipped to support themselves. And, let’s put that into the perspective of where we are a
nation. We just blew through the $22 trillion debt mark earlier this
year. This year, we are looking at a roughly $900 billion deficit.
A deal that has been reached that will only increase our deficit by $2 trillion
over the next two years pushing our debt up to $22 trillion. This is
money we do not have, have to borrow to get, and cannot afford to pay back.
[Emphasis added]
How does that relate to H.R. 549? Well, let me share some numbers with you. Sixty
percent of households with a lawful immigrant in them are on welfare, living
off the hard work of others. Seventy percent of illegal alien households are on
welfare, living off the hard work of others here in the United States
of America. [Emphasis added]
The U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, a major donor the to the GOP establishment, urged
Republicans to join Democrats in helping to pass TPS for Venezuelans.
“The Chamber applauds
Representatives Soto and Diaz-Balart for leading the House effort to pass H.R.
549, which would allow many Venezuelans currently in the U.S. the opportunity
to legally remain and work in the U.S. while Venezuela is in a state of
crisis,” the Chamber’s Neil Bradley said in a statement. “The U.S. government
should make it clear that Venezuelan nationals who pose no risk to the safety
or security of the U.S. will not be sent back into harm’s way.”
TPS has become a quasi-amnesty
for otherwise illegal aliens created under the Immigration and Nationality Act
of 1990 (INA) that prevents the deportation of foreign nationals from countries
that have suffered through famine, war, or natural disasters. Since the Clinton
administration, TPS has been transformed into a de facto amnesty program as the
Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have continuously renewed the program
for a variety of countries.
TRUMP’S CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND
WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!
*
Only a complete fool would believe that
Trump is any more for American Legal workers than the Democrat Party for
Billionaires and Banksters!
*
“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled
American Workers.”
*
The
latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump
to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall
Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch
brothers.
*
Efforts
by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W.
Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would
likely crush the historic wage gains that
Trump has delivered for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.
*
Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley investors
are uniting with the Koch network’s consumer and industrial investors to demand
a huge DACA amnesty
*
A handful of Republican and Democrat
lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million
illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s
proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
MAGA vs. the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
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."
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.
Chamber
of Commerce Demands More Immigration: ‘U.S. Is Out of People’
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/ …
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.
///
Chamber of Commerce Considering Legal Action to Block
Mexico Tariffs
JOHN CARNEY
31 May 2019634
1:44
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups are considering
ways to challenge the new tariffs on goods imported from Mexico.
The
powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which advocates for cheap labor policies and
opposes American First trade initiatives, told reporters Friday that it is considering
all options, including legal challenges, to thwart the Trump administration’s
policy.
“We have no choice but to pursue
every option available to push back,” Neil Bradley, executive vice president
and chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Friday.
President Donald Trump said Thursday
that he will impose a 5 percent tariff on goods imported from Mexico if the
Mexican government does not stem the flow of illegal immigrants from Central
America.
Chamber
of Commerce President and chief executive Tom Donahue told the Washington Post in April
that the U.S. needed more legal immigration because the country is “out of
people.” The chamber has pushed for legal protection for so-called “Dreamers”
and led political resistance to efforts to deport more illegal border crossers.
The
chamber began 2019 by opposing legislation
that would have allowed President Donald Trump to impose reciprocal tariffs on
specific foreign imports.
“The bill would effectively give the
President unilateral authority to increase U.S. tariffs on imports from any
foreign country,” Bradley wrote in a letter sent to many lawmakers on Capitol
Hill. “The harm to Americans would be immediate: Tariffs are taxes, and they
are paid by American families and American businesses.”
Business Cheers
as Cory Booker Urges More Low-Skilled Immigration
1 Aug 2019152
6:55
Sen. Cory Booker called for more low-skilled immigration Wednesday
night as he tried to cut down Joe Biden in the Democrats’ 2020 race.
“I heard the
vice president say that if you got a PhD., you can come right into this
country,” Booker said, adding:
Well that’s
playing into what the Republicans want, to pit some immigrants against other
immigrants. We need to reform this whole immigration system and begin to be the
country that says everyone has worth and dignity and this should be a country
that honors everyone.
If
implemented, Booker’s call for more low-skilled immigration would increase
competition for blue-collar jobs and cheap apartments in New Jersey, so
imposing additional economic pain on lower-skilled Americans in Booker’s home
state. More migration would also add to the divide-and-rule diversity which
hinders Americans from periodically uniting to curb the elites’ self-serving
policies.
Republicans want to pit some immigrants against others.
But we need to reform this whole immigration system and begin to be the country
that says, “Everyone has worth and dignity, and this should be a country that
honors everyone.” #DemDebate
Booker’s call
for un-skilled immigration got plaudits from advocates for “diverse”
immigration into the United States.
“That was
solid immigration talk from Booker,” said Alex Merced, the “Latinx Vice Chair”
of the Libertarian Party. “Merit based immigration is condescending and
presumes government can determine our individual potential, I sure as hell
don’t trust government to do that.”
“Booker speaking
truth again on immigration,” tweeted Jonathan Capeheart, a
member of the Washington
Post‘s editorial board.
But Booker’s
call for more unskilled immigration also got him a shout-out from Todd Schulte,
who runs FWD.us, a cheap labor lobby shop for Mark Zuckerberg and other West Coast investors.
“Appreciate @CoryBooker,”
said a tweet from Schulte. “Pointing
out that this [immigration] section of the debate is being dominated by poor
assumptions, bad framing and a lack of focus on many of the most critical
aspects of immigration — not cutesy gotcha stuff that misses huge aspects of
the debate.”
Schulte’s
donors employ many foreign graduates, including both visa workers and
immigrants. But his donors also have coherent economic reasons to oppose any
cutbacks to the immigration of unskilled workers and family chain migrants, as
urged by President Donald Trump’s 2018 “Four Pillars” plan.
Unskilled
migrants serve as both cheap workers, extra consumers, and predictable renters.
Their multi-sided value for investors is spotlighted by FWD.us’ support for
DoorDash, which hires people to deliver food by auto, scooters, and bikes. In a
September 2018 statement, the FWD.us investors denounced Trump’s plan to cut
unskilled immigration into the United States, saying it would reduce immigrant-driven
economic growth:
Immigration
powers the American economy, and ensuring that immigrant families living here
today can thrive means greater benefits for all U.S. residents and our children
in the future. The earning potential of immigrants and their
contributions to the labor-force and economy grows over time and over
generations …
Tony Xu, the
founder of DoorDash, embodies this story … in 2013 Tony founded DoorDash, an
incredibly successful meal delivery service. Today, DoorDash is valued at $4 billion, using recent investment to
expand into 1,200 new cities and to hire 250 new employees, in addition to over 100,000 part-time gigs already created for
delivery drivers across the country.
DoorDash’s investors in FWD.us funders include Sequoia Capital, KPCB, SV
Angel, CRV, and Y Combinator. In June 2019, Schulte’s group also
helped persuade New York’s legislature to grant drivers’ licenses to illegals —
so freeing many to join the labor force of delivery drivers.
The demand by investors for endless migrant labor has
created a new thing: The US-India Outsourcing Economy. This no-regulation zone
redirects new wealth into a few cities & a small elite. Elites want to
expand it, so US college-grads get #HR1044. http://bit.ly/2LpqAmx
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg Use Stealth to Push
Outsourcing Bill
Booker’s
televised support for low-skilled immigration also sought to paint an elitist
gloss on Biden’s call for higher-skilled migration.
But there is
little or no evidence that a President Biden would want to reduce lower-skilled
immigration. During the TV debate, for example, Biden described Americans’ homeland
as “a country of immigrants.” He continued by crediting immigrants — not
skilled immigrants — with creating America, not Americans:
We should …
[and] I proposed, significantly increasing the number of legal immigrants who
are able to come. This country can tolerate a heck of a lot more people. And
the reason we’re the country we are is we’ve been able to cherry-pick from the
best of every culture. Immigrants built this country.
…
Some here
came against their will; others came because they in fact thought they could
fundamentally change their lives … That’s what made us great.
Also, Biden
strongly supported the 2013 “Gang of Eight” bill, which would have amnestied
all illegals. It would also have doubled legal immigration to two million a
year — or one migrant for every two American births. That resulting flood of
labor would have shifted more of the nation’s new wealth from employees
over to investors, according to a 2013 study of the bill by the Congressional
Budget Office. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on
labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two
decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact
of S. 744.”
Genial Joe Biden hides his elitist cheap-labor agenda
with the usual illegal-migration-bad/legal-migration-good schtick. Econ 101 =
inc. labor supply pushes down wages (usually, esp. in short term, etc.). That's
been the US economy since the 1990s. http://bit.ly/2yt4yqa
Joe Biden: Illegal Immigration Bad, More Legal
immigration Good | Breitbart
Immigration
Numbers
Each
year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after
graduating from high school or university. This total includes roughly
800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or healthcare,
engineering or science, software or statistics.
But
the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and
refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa
workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses —plus
roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The
government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners,
tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies
for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across
the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This
policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic
growth for investors because
it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to
compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working
conditions.
This
policy of flooding the
market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and
blue-collar labor also
shifts enormous wealth from young employees
towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth
gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state
and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The
cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans
away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans,
including many who are now struggling with
fentanyl addictions.
The
labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the
heartland to the coastal
cities, explodes rents
and housing
costs, shrivels real
estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating
low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
“If
there is a growing flood of foreign labor, the American middle class is no
longer going to exist, and Republicans will not have a constituency,” said
Hilarie Gamm, a co-cofounder of the American Workers Coalition.
Wages are climbing again. For unclear reasons,
blue-collars are gaining faster than college graduates. http://bit.ly/2Kew28v
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