Monday, May 4, 2020

REMEMBER GEORGE W BUSH? THE GUY THAT SPENDS HIS LIFE SUCKING OFF BIG TEXAS OIL AND BIG SAUDIS? THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS ARE THE ONES THAT PAID FOR BUSH'S PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY


HERE WE ARE IN DEPRESSION II AND ALL THIS FUCKER GEORGE W. BUSH, THE WALKING MORON CAN THINK ABOUT IS KEEPING AMERICAN FLOODED WITH CHEAP LABOR MEXICANS!



BUSH HAS ALWAYS BEEN AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED. HE EVEN MET WITH THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF NARCOMEX AND PROMISED WIDER OPEN BORDERS FOR THE INVADING MEXICANS IF MEX WOULD TURN OVER THEIR BIG OIL TO BUSH'S CRONIES FOR LOOTING. BUSH KEPT HIS PROMISE, NARCOMEX DID NOT. THE INVASION CONTINUES!


Bush Center Slams Trump: We Want More Migration

Former U.S. President George W. Bush speaks at a forum sponsored by the George W. Bush Institute in New York, Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
AP Photo/Seth Wenig
7:11

The economics director at President George W. Bush’s advocacy center slammed President Donald Trump’s popular, pro-American immigration policy.
The May 1 slam came just before Bush posted a May 2 video urging national unity in the coronavirus crash that has pushed more than 25 million Americans out of jobs.
“The most important thing to remember in this is that we don’t want [Trump’s] temporary policy to become permanent immigration policy,” economic director Laura Collins said a video posted on the center’s Twitter account. She continued:
We know immigrants are good for the economy. We know they’re good for our culture. We know they’re in this fight with us together, and we’re going to meet them working with us side by side in any recovery after the pandemic is over.
Trump’s April 22 immigration policy says the economic needs of American employees are more important than the immigration preferences of foreigners. His policy temporarily trims the annual inflow of legal immigrants and directs agencies to review visa worker programs in 30 days.
Polls show the public — including recent immigrants — is overwhelmingly aligned with Trump in prioritizing jobs for Americans over welcomes for legal immigrants.
The visa worker programs targeted by Trump are extremely important to the Fortune 500. In response, the companies’ lobbyists and progressives allies have quickly launched a hard-nosed lobbying campaign and a soft-focus PR campaign to protect the programs and mass migration.
The Bush center has joined the #AllofUS campaign.


Congress now accepts 1 million legal immigrants per year.
It also allows companies to keep roughly 2 million cheap and complaint foreign visa-workers in U.S. jobs. The 2 million workforce includes roughly 1.5 million foreign white-collar visa workers, plus roughly 400,000 foreign blue-collar guest workers, in professional or seasonal jobs needed by roughly 26 million unemployed Americans.
Collins touted the corporate PR campaign, dubbed #AllofUs, in her video slamming Trump’s pro-employee policy.

.@LVTCollins explains how it will take , immigrants and native-born Americans, to defeat COVID-19. And once our nation emerges from quarantine, it will take all of us working together to restart our economy.






Embedded video





“The stated objectives of this executive order were to preserve medical supplies in a pandemic for American immigrants already here and to preserve job openings in any recovery for American workers that can be first in line,” Collins said her video posted May 1.
She continued:
Unfortunately, this executive order is not going to accomplish either of those objectives.
First of all, the virus affects all of us equally. It doesn’t care who we are, or where we’re from. Current travel restrictions and quarantine protocols in place, protect us from viral spread regardless of where we’re from. And so there’s not really a need to prevent more people from coming in in terms of slowing down viral spread. We know the virus is here and it’s spreading. And what we’re doing is working.
However, Collins’ main focus is the economic worry that Trump’s reform may permanently reduce the unending inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and renters preferred by CEOs and investors. She said:
We know immigrants are good for the economy. We know immigrants don’t compete with native-born Americans for jobs. And we know that before the pandemic, there were millions of unfilled jobs in the United States.
If we assume that in any recovery, all those jobs come back, every American that wants a job will have the ability to fill the jobs that were there. We’re still going to have shortages and we’re going to need immigrants there to help fill those jobs.
We simply don’t have a labor force at full employment, big enough to fill all the jobs in the economy.
Immigrants — like the birth of Americans’ children — help grow the economy. They expand the labor force, boost retail sales, spike real estate values, fuel the stock market, and expand the number of companies. A growing economy can be good for all — but it is especially good for wealthy people who can invest in company stocks.
Yet every annual wave of immigrants also causes much economic harm to the roughly 220 million Americans (and recent legal immigrants) who work for a living, or who are educating themselves to take jobs in a few years.
Every new wave of legal immigrants and illegal migrants competes for existing jobs and force down Americans’ wages. The arrivals also expand poverty, reduce pressure on investors to buy productivity-boosting machines, drive up the price of good housing, and add congestion to K-12 schools and universities.
Immigrants, and especially visa workers, also push Americans out of careers and technological research, and they distort Americans’ politics by expanding cultural diversity and identity politics.
Over the last 30 years, since George Bush’s father signed a 1990 bill roughly doubling immigration, the government’s massive inflow of immigrants has kept Americans wages almost flat (until 2018) and so has turbocharged the U.S. stock market.
The establishment’s immigration policy has worked with free trade to shift much wealth from middle-class employees and the heartland states towards the stock market and the major coastal cities.
Trump was elected in 2016 to help reverse the establishment’s economic policy.
Since  2017, he has mostly stopped illegal migration, and he pushed wages up for blue-collars in 2018 and 2019. He has also trimmed legal immigration, and his April 22 policy sets the stage for incremental, significant reductions in the visa worker programs, such as the little-known B-1 and OPT visa programs.
Business lobbies strongly oppose reductions in immigration and visa workers.


Collins’ pro-migration views reflect George W. Bush’s pro-business leaning and his 2001 push to allow U.S. employers to bypass Americans and instead hire any willing workers from anywhere on the globe. The 2001 Twin Towers attack stopped Bush’s “Any Willing Worker” plan.
Collins insisted, “We know immigrants don’t compete with native-born Americans for jobs.”
But the Center for Immigration Studies reported in August 2018:
If immigrants “do jobs that Americans won’t do”, we should be able to identify occupations in which the workers are nearly all foreign-born. However, among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, we find only a handful of majority-immigrant occupations, and none completely dominated by immigrants (legal or illegal). Furthermore, in none of the 474 occupations do illegal immigrants constitute a majority of workers.
For example, companies provide the reward of green cards to roughly 50,000 foreign visa-workers each year after those foreign workers have taken technology jobs from Americans via the H-1B and other visa programs.


Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.

Lawsuit: Indian Managers Use H-1Bs to Discriminate Against Americans

Indian Workers Manish SwarupAP
Manish Swarup/AP
9:16
An Indian-run outsourcing company used Congress’s H-1B visa-worker program to systematically discriminate against American college graduates, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in New Jersey.
The company, named Wipro, “operates under a general policy of discrimination in favor of [imported] South Asians and against [American] individuals who are not South Asian and not Indian,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in New Jersey.
Wipro has about 22 offices and 15,000 employees in the United States. The company’s revenues come from Fortune 500 companies who rent Wipro’s gig workers for software programming and other middle-class skilled jobs. Wipro’s customers, according to the lawsuit, included Mastercard, FedEx, Capital One banking, and Atlantic Richfield Company, an international oil company.
Wipro did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
The lawsuit is asking for a judge’s approval to create a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Americans who were excluded from jobs, denied promotions, or were fired from Wipro.
Wipro is just one of many Indian firms that use H-1B, L-1, and B-1 visa workers to operate the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
The outsourcing economy keeps roughly 1.5 million foreign white-collar workers in the United States, mostly via the H-1B program. The foreign population includes roughly 270,000 Chinese graduates and one million Indian graduates, despite the coronavirus shock that has pushed many American graduates out of jobs.
The outsourcing economy generates some $80 billion in revenue for Indian companies, Indian’s ambassador said in 2019.
U.S. companies are eager to tout payroll savings, in part because every dollar cut from salaries adds at least $10 to the company’s value on Wall Street.
The lawsuit says:
First, Wipro’s practice of relying on visa workers to staff U.S. positions results in available positions overwhelmingly going to visa holding South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asian and non-Indian candidates. Second, Wipro’s employee allocation practices result in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians, who are then terminated at disproportionate rates. Third, Wipro’s appraisal and promotion process results in South Asians and Indians receiving more promotions. Fourth, Wipro’s benching and termination practices result in South Asians and Indians receiving positions more frequently, while non-South Asians and non-Indians remain on the bench for longer periods, resulting in diminished career prospects and disproportionate terminations for these individuals. Finally, Wipro’s hiring and staffing decision-making process, as a whole, results in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asians and Indians to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians.
The lawsuit cited the experience of four American professionals who were sidelined by the Indian managers in the United States:
in 2015, it became evident that Wipro was trying to get rid of Mr. [James] Gibbs. For instance, Mr. Rambhatla quadrupled Mr. Gibbs’ sales and margin quotas to levels that appeared unrealistic. Nevertheless, Mr. Gibbs was able to meet these quotas.
At the time he left Wipro, Mr. Gibbs was the only non-South Asian who reported directly to Mr. Rambhatla. Each of the other seven or eight non-South individuals who had previously reported to Mr. Rambhatla had been terminated or had quit. Each was replaced by a South Asian of Indian descent.
The lawsuit repeatedly notes that the favored Indian visa workers were far less skilled than the Americans, and sometimes hostile to American colleagues and customers:
For instance, Mr. [Ardeshir] Pezeshki observed that the vast majority of individuals selected for U.S. positions were South Asian. These individuals were often poorly skilled and unqualified for the positions, which created tension with Wipro’s clients. For example, based on Mr. Pezeshki’s observations, clients often had two complaints with Wipro: (1) a lack of skilled workers on projects and (2) poor quality of work. On one occasion, during a periodic sales conference, Mr. Pezeshki heard several South Asian individuals discussing a client who was upset with the lack of skilled resources on a project. One of the individuals, upon hearing about the client’s complaint, responded: “Fuck the Americans.”
Multiple lawsuits are being filed against the Indian companies for distribution, by lawyers at Kotchen & Low, and by James Otto. The federal and state governments have done very little to prevent Fortune 500 companies from using H-1Bs to sideline American graduates, aside from levying occasional fines.
However, President Donald Trump has directed his deputies to draft policies that would transfer jobs from visa workers back to Americans who have lost jobs in the coronavirus crash.
The outsourcing contracts to the Indians firms are often justified to Congress and to Wall Street experts as cost-saving measures. But the outsourcing contracts often contain hidden expenses, rewards wasteful featherbedding by Indian contractors, degrade software quality, and often alienate customers, U.S. managers and professionals tell Breitbart News.
U.S. executives strongly favor outsourcing because it makes work easier for CEOs and H.R. managers, the Americans say to Breitbart News. The Indian workforces are easy to hire and fire, they don’t complain to managers, they do not make professional arguments against executives’ decisions, and they allow kickbacks via India or ancillary U.S. businesses, the Americans say.
Indian managers have a hidden financial incentive to exclude Americans, Indian H-1B workers told Breitbart News.
Indian hiring managers will sell Americans’ jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, one Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,’ he said.
In contrast, mid-level American managers do not sell jobs, he said, adding, “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million. ”
The outsourcing business started in the 1990s, and it has helped push millions of American engineers, software programmers, and other experts out of their jobs and out of the task of developing the next generation of commercial, economy-boosting technology.
The bill for the investors’ outsourcing strategy is now being imposed on tens of millions of young Americans.
Silicon Valley CEOs are losing their fundamental competition against Chinese companies, said a February 27 article by Eric Schmidt, one of the former Silicon Valley chieftains who served as CEO of Google while the sector discarded its American professionals.
The Valley now needs a bailout from Washington, DC, he wrote in the New York Times — without noting the CEOs’ role in destroying innovation by hiring visa workers:
Important trends are not in our favor. America’s lead in artificial intelligence, for example, is precarious. A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. Leading the world in A.I. is essential to growing our economy and protecting our security. A recent study considering more than 100 metrics finds that the United States is well ahead of China today but will fall behind in five to 10 years. China also has almost twice as many supercomputers and about 15 times as many deployed 5G base stations as the United States. If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.
The establishment U.S. media has failed to follow the huge impact of colleg graduate outsourcing on the U.S. economy and technology development, just as it failed to follow the transfer of the U.S manufacturing sector to China.
For example, a Los Angeles Times’ immigration reporter recently wrote, “research shows that immigrants typically don’t compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs, or lower their wages,” even though the entire sector exists to replace Americans with cheaper foreign rivals. 
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.
48 Migrants Found in Two Tractor-Trailer Busts near Texas-Mexico Border
Laredo North Station Border Patrol agents apprehend 36 illegal aliens locked inside a tractor-trailer rig at the Interstate 35 immigration checkpoint. (Photo: Laredo Sector/U.S. Border Patrol)
Photo: Laredo Sector/U.S. Border Patrol
3:46

Laredo Sector Border Patrol agents stopped two human smuggling attempts involving tractor-trailer rigs at an interior immigration checkpoint near the Texas border with Mexico. The interactions led to the apprehension of 48 migrants and two U.S. citizens for an investigation related to human smuggling.
Laredo North Station agents assigned to the Interstate 35 immigration checkpoint on April 30 observed a white tractor-trailer rig approaching for inspection. The agents interviewed the driver and referred him to a secondary inspection station where a non-intrusive inspection revealed multiple people locked inside the trailer, according to information provided by Laredo Sector Border Patrol officials.
The agents cut the seal on the trailer and searched the trailer. The search led to the apprehension of 36 illegal immigrants, officials stated. The agents identified the migrants as citizens of Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.
Emergency medical technicians examined the migrants and determined they appeared to be in good health. None required immediate medical attention, officials stated. The agents placed the 36 under arrest for immigration violations and detained the U.S. citizen driver for further investigation.
During an interview with Breitbart Texas this week, Laredo Sector Chief Patrol Agent Felix Chavez said smuggling in tractor-trailers is up significantly this fiscal year.
During the first seven months of Fiscal Year 2020, which began on October 1, 2019, Laredo Sector agents apprehended 1,071 migrants in motor-vehicle related incidents. This is up from 669 during the same period in FY19, the chief said. The use of tractors increased by 38 percent when compared to the previous year.
“All of this comes as our agents face the dangers of the Coronavirus,” he explained. “As first responders, our agents have to make physical contact with people during rescues and while making apprehensions. The bravery and courage they display in carrying out their jobs impresses me every day.”
Chavez stressed that illegally crossing the border and the entire human smuggling process is very dangerous. He cited the callous treatment of migrants by the Mexican cartels and others engaged in the human smuggling process.
“They have no respect for human life,” the chief said, “even during the COVID-19 pandemic. To them, these people are nothing more than human cargo.”
Laredo North Station agents observed a black tractor-trailer approaching the Interstate 35 checkpoint the morning before the incident above. a non-intrusive inspection of the rig revealed another group of migrants locked inside the trailer. The agents conducted a physical inspection of the rig and found 12 Mexican nationals locked inside. The agents took 12 illegal immigrants and the U.S. citizen driver into custody for further investigation.
Border Patrol officials previously told Breitbart Texas the human smugglers lock the migrants inside these trailers where temperatures can get dangerously high. They said there is no air circulation or toilet facilities inside. The migrants can be locked for many hours and have even been abandoned in the past. The migrants have no means of escaping in the event of a crash or abandonment.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.




ONLY NANCY PELOSI HAS WORKED HARDER TO FLOOD AMERICAN WITH 'CHEAP' LABOR FOREIGNERS THAN TRUMP - KUSHNER!


Trump’s Self-Serving Immigration Ban
Trump closes the country to immigrants, except the ones he regularly hires and fires
By David Cay Johnston
Salon.com, April 26, 2020
. . .


The Sinister Logic of Trump’s Immigration Freeze
The White House is closing pathways to citizenship while maintaining a flow of exploitable immigrant labor.
By Adam Serwer
The Atlantic, April 29, 2020

. . .
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/trump-order-immigration/610822/


Trump Closed Doors to Legal Immigration as a Distraction From His failures During Coronavirus Pandemic








Lawsuit: Indian Managers Use H-1Bs to Discriminate Against Americans

Indian Workers Manish SwarupAP
Manish Swarup/AP
9:16

An Indian-run outsourcing company used Congress’s H-1B visa-worker program to systematically discriminate against American college graduates, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in New Jersey.
The company, named Wipro, “operates under a general policy of discrimination in favor of [imported] South Asians and against [American] individuals who are not South Asian and not Indian,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in New Jersey.
Wipro has about 22 offices and 15,000 employees in the United States. The company’s revenues come from Fortune 500 companies who rent Wipro’s gig workers for software programming and other middle-class skilled jobs. Wipro’s customers, according to the lawsuit, included Mastercard, FedEx, Capital One banking, and Atlantic Richfield Company, an international oil company.
Wipro did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
The lawsuit is asking for a judge’s approval to create a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Americans who were excluded from jobs, denied promotions, or were fired from Wipro.
Wipro is just one of many Indian firms that use H-1B, L-1, and B-1 visa workers to operate the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
The outsourcing economy keeps roughly 1.5 million foreign white-collar workers in the United States, mostly via the H-1B program. The foreign population includes roughly 270,000 Chinese graduates and one million Indian graduates, despite the coronavirus shock that has pushed many American graduates out of jobs.
The outsourcing economy generates some $80 billion in revenue for Indian companies, Indian’s ambassador said in 2019.
U.S. companies are eager to tout payroll savings, in part because every dollar cut from salaries adds at least $10 to the company’s value on Wall Street.
The lawsuit says:
First, Wipro’s practice of relying on visa workers to staff U.S. positions results in available positions overwhelmingly going to visa holding South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asian and non-Indian candidates. Second, Wipro’s employee allocation practices result in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians, who are then terminated at disproportionate rates. Third, Wipro’s appraisal and promotion process results in South Asians and Indians receiving more promotions. Fourth, Wipro’s benching and termination practices result in South Asians and Indians receiving positions more frequently, while non-South Asians and non-Indians remain on the bench for longer periods, resulting in diminished career prospects and disproportionate terminations for these individuals. Finally, Wipro’s hiring and staffing decision-making process, as a whole, results in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asians and Indians to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians.
The lawsuit cited the experience of four American professionals who were sidelined by the Indian managers in the United States:
in 2015, it became evident that Wipro was trying to get rid of Mr. [James] Gibbs. For instance, Mr. Rambhatla quadrupled Mr. Gibbs’ sales and margin quotas to levels that appeared unrealistic. Nevertheless, Mr. Gibbs was able to meet these quotas.
At the time he left Wipro, Mr. Gibbs was the only non-South Asian who reported directly to Mr. Rambhatla. Each of the other seven or eight non-South individuals who had previously reported to Mr. Rambhatla had been terminated or had quit. Each was replaced by a South Asian of Indian descent.
The lawsuit repeatedly notes that the favored Indian visa workers were far less skilled than the Americans, and sometimes hostile to American colleagues and customers:
For instance, Mr. [Ardeshir] Pezeshki observed that the vast majority of individuals selected for U.S. positions were South Asian. These individuals were often poorly skilled and unqualified for the positions, which created tension with Wipro’s clients. For example, based on Mr. Pezeshki’s observations, clients often had two complaints with Wipro: (1) a lack of skilled workers on projects and (2) poor quality of work. On one occasion, during a periodic sales conference, Mr. Pezeshki heard several South Asian individuals discussing a client who was upset with the lack of skilled resources on a project. One of the individuals, upon hearing about the client’s complaint, responded: “Fuck the Americans.”
Multiple lawsuits are being filed against the Indian companies for distribution, by lawyers at Kotchen & Low, and by James Otto. The federal and state governments have done very little to prevent Fortune 500 companies from using H-1Bs to sideline American graduates, aside from levying occasional fines.
However, President Donald Trump has directed his deputies to draft policies that would transfer jobs from visa workers back to Americans who have lost jobs in the coronavirus crash.
The outsourcing contracts to the Indians firms are often justified to Congress and to Wall Street experts as cost-saving measures. But the outsourcing contracts often contain hidden expenses, rewards wasteful featherbedding by Indian contractors, degrade software quality, and often alienate customers, U.S. managers and professionals tell Breitbart News.
U.S. executives strongly favor outsourcing because it makes work easier for CEOs and H.R. managers, the Americans say to Breitbart News. The Indian workforces are easy to hire and fire, they don’t complain to managers, they do not make professional arguments against executives’ decisions, and they allow kickbacks via India or ancillary U.S. businesses, the Americans say.
Indian managers have a hidden financial incentive to exclude Americans, Indian H-1B workers told Breitbart News.
Indian hiring managers will sell Americans’ jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, one Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,’ he said.
In contrast, mid-level American managers do not sell jobs, he said, adding, “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million. ”


The outsourcing business started in the 1990s, and it has helped push millions of American engineers, software programmers, and other experts out of their jobs and out of the task of developing the next generation of commercial, economy-boosting technology.
The bill for the investors’ outsourcing strategy is now being imposed on tens of millions of young Americans.
Silicon Valley CEOs are losing their fundamental competition against Chinese companies, said a February 27 article by Eric Schmidt, one of the former Silicon Valley chieftains who served as CEO of Google while the sector discarded its American professionals.
The Valley now needs a bailout from Washington, DC, he wrote in the New York Times — without noting the CEOs’ role in destroying innovation by hiring visa workers:
Important trends are not in our favor. America’s lead in artificial intelligence, for example, is precarious. A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. Leading the world in A.I. is essential to growing our economy and protecting our security. A recent study considering more than 100 metrics finds that the United States is well ahead of China today but will fall behind in five to 10 years. China also has almost twice as many supercomputers and about 15 times as many deployed 5G base stations as the United States. If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.
The establishment U.S. media has failed to follow the huge impact of colleg graduate outsourcing on the U.S. economy and technology development, just as it failed to follow the transfer of the U.S manufacturing sector to China.
For example, a Los Angeles Times’ immigration reporter recently wrote, “research shows that immigrants typically don’t compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs, or lower their wages,” even though the entire sector exists to replace Americans with cheaper foreign rivals. 

Trump gets 2:1 public support for his Americans-first shift on immigration.
Even 62% support from Dems who 'somewhat disapprove' of Trump.
Is strong evidence for a strategy of incrementalism vs. a big rush for a total victory.
But deadline is Nov 3https://bit.ly/3aDkl6B 





Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.





Great Depression, the Sequel

|
Posted: Apr 26, 2020 12:01 AM
It took President Donald Trump three years to build the world’s best economy with an unemployment rate of only 3.5 percent, rising wages, strong consumer confidence and a robust stock market. Sadly, it only took three weeks for that healthy economy to be destroyed and the longer the economy is closed for business, the harder it will be for our nation to recover.
The economic statistics are truly staggering. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the economy will shrink by 40 percent this quarter and that the unemployment rate will rise to 16 percent this year, before declining in the fourth quarter of this year and next year. For comparison, the nation’s all-time high unemployment rate reached 24.9 percent at the height of the Great Depression in 1933.
Since the shutdown began in mid-March, the nation has lost 26.5 million jobs. In Louisiana, there has been an astounding 5,677 percent increase in unemployment claims from last year. It has suffered the second highest percentage increase in unemployment, behind only Florida. These states and others that rely on retail sales, hospitality and tourism are suffering the worst. Other states like Vermont and Connecticut that have a greater number of high paying “white collar” jobs are doing much better.
Some health experts are arguing that the country cannot open the economy until there are almost no new COVID-19 cases. Such an argument is patently ridiculous. As noted by U.S. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) such a strategy will lead to the collapse of the economy. According to Kennedy, “I wish we could do that, but we will have burned down the village to save it.”
Economic realities are why some states are moving forward with a limited opening, despite opposition from President Trump. The most aggressive action was taken in Georgia by Republican Governor Brian Kemp. He signed an executive order allowing a variety of businesses to open, including theaters, restaurants and gyms. These businesses must maintain social distancing guidelines and restrictions. The order did not extend to nightclubs or bars.
Other states such as Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Alaska, Montana and Colorado are relaxing restrictions and allowing some businesses to reopen. This trend will surely accelerate in the days and weeks ahead. Our country cannot afford to wait any longer, as we have no viable choice. Economic collapse is not an option that most Americans will tolerate.
This health driven economic experiment has already been too costly. It is undoubtedly one of the reasons why we have never closed our economy before, even during the flu pandemics of 1918, 1957, 1968 or 2009.
It is never a good strategy to throw people out of work, give them government checks and then try to restart the economy on a limited basis months later. There is no historical precedent showing that such a strategy has succeeded, certainly not on a short-term basis.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been four stimulus packages already approved by Congress and signed into law by President Trump. These packages have cost over $2.8 trillion, boosting a federal debt that has already increased by $5 trillion during the Trump administration. The CBO report predicts the overall federal debt will approach $25 trillion this year with a budget deficit of $2.1 trillion next year. These debts are not sustainable as the federal government cannot print enough money to solve our self-imposed economic problems.  
In the view of U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), these actions bring the United States “closer and closer to a point of no return, a point at which the world loses confidence in the dollar. A point at which our debt becomes an existential threat to our security.” He said, “No amount of money, not all the money in China, will save us from ourselves. Our only hope of rescuing this great country is to reopen the economy.”
Of course, Senator Paul is correct. If we do not reopen the economy, we will face an economic Armageddon worse than the Great Depression. Even an establishment Republican like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell understands this reality. He warned his fellow Americans that “unless we get our economy up and running again there is not any way, we can spend enough to continue to prop up the country.”
President Trump claimed that the new relief package he signed on Friday will be “great for small businesses.” The reality is that a government loan is not “great,” but it is necessary assistance to allow many of these small businesses to remain open. True relief will not come until the economy is fully reopened and Americans can return to some semblance of normalcy.
Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and his award winning program, “Ringside Politics,” airs locally at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and at 10:00 p.m. Sundays on PBS affiliate WLAE-TV, Channel 32, and from 7-11 a.m. weekdays on WGSO 990-AM & www.Wgso.com. He is a political columnist, the author ofAmerica's Last Chanceand provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on www.JeffCrouere.com. For more information, email him at jeff@jeffcrouere.com


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