Wednesday, May 27, 2020

WALL STREET REMINDS DONALD TRUMP WHO HE WORKS FOR - KEEP AMERICA FLOODED WITH 'CHEAP' LABOR!

Fortune 500 Lobby Tells Trump: Your Visa Worker Curbs May Cause Discrimination

Indian Workers Manish SwarupAP
Manish Swarup/AP
6:33

Even brief and temporary curbs on the use of imported contract workers may cause discrimination against “our personnel based on country of birth,” according to a letter sent by Fortune 500 lobbyists to President Donald Trump.
The letter was sent to warn Trump as he pushes forward with plans announced on April 22 to review the various visa programs. The programs provide a growing army of foreign contract workers to Fortune 500 firms, despite the coronavirus crash that is causing mass unemployment among swing-voting U.S. graduates.
The letter, signed by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many other companies, says:
We urge you to avoid outcomes, even for temporary periods, that restrict employment-authorization terms, conditions, or processing of L-1, H-1B, F-1, or H-4 [visa worker] nonimmigrants. Constraints on our human capital are likely to result in unintended consequences and may cause substantial economic uncertainty if we have to recalibrate our personnel based on country of birth.
Immigration reformers scoffed at the lobbyists’ hand-wringing.
“The ‘unintended consequences’ these cheap labor advocates fear if guest worker visas are curtailed are having to hire American workers at livable wages,” said Rosemary Jenks, government relations chief at NumbersUSA. Her group favors a national policy of lower immigration and higher wages
Livable wages are “a consequence we should not only support but demand,” she added.
“Every piece of data the government collects …. [show]  there are massive numbers of native-born Americans and legal immigrants already here not working,” said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Those out of work are of every type, from high school dropouts to the most educated.  President Trump has an obligation to do everything he can to help out of work Americans get jobs, including significantly reducing the flow of foreign workers into the country,” he said.
Trump’s April 22 announcement is giving Trump another opportunity to fulfill his March 2016 campaign trail promise: “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”
That promise helped Trump win many votes from swing-voting graduates. But Trump and his deputies have ignored that 2016 promise since his Inauguration day promise of “Hire American.”
This failure to curb the huge white-collar labor inflow came as Trump successfully stopped the flood of blue-collar migrants coming over the southern border, despite furious and emotional opposition from allied Democrats, progressives, and business groups. Trump’s border policies successfully pushed up blue-collar salaries, but white-collar salaries stalled as companies imported more foreign contract workers.
U.S. grassroots activists — and some GOP politicians — are increasingly protesting the visa worker programs, which transfer good jobs from Americans to foreign graduates. Amid the economic meltdown, several polls show the public strongly supports a job-for-Americans policy.
The May 21 response from the Fortune 500 companies includes an appendix that lists a series of economic studies to justify their reliance on imported labor. But most of the studies were conducted before China’s Wuhan virus crashed the U.S. economy and threw millions of swing voting U.S. graduates into the unemployment lines.
Breitbart has reported on some of the business-funded studies, nearly all of which promise faster economic growth for investors while ignoring the issue of Americans’ replacementproductivityanti-American discrimination, and average income.
Fortune 500 companies use many visa programs to keep an army of roughly 1.3 million white-collar foreign employees in a wide variety of U.S. jobs, including many starter jobs in third-tier subcontractors. These foreign employees accept lower wages and tough conditions in hope of winning the deferred bonus of green cards and citizenship for themselves and their descendants.
Roughly 750,000 foreigners — mostly Indians — are imported via the white-collar H-1B program. Another army of up to 500,000 foreign graduates is imported via U.S. universities under the Optional Practical Training and Curricular Practical Training programs. The J-1, L-1, TN, and H4EAD programs add hundreds of thousands of additional foreign employees.
Also, a growing number of foreign graduates are smuggled into U.S. office parks via fraud in the B-1, OPT, and H-1B programs, but few violators are penalized. “It happens all the time,” said Virkan from Texas, a former H-1B who described how major U.S. companies ignore large-scale fraud in the visa worker subcontracting process. The fraud diverts salaries slated for H-1B and OPT workers to the Indian owners of interlocking subcontracting firms, many of whom are based in Texas, he said. The money is hidden from investigators by passing it through families in India, said Vikram, who is now a citizen.

Amid the inflow, American graduates are increasingly being sidelined as U.S. executives hire and fire blocs of subcontracted visa workers, usually without complaint from the foreign worker or even notice by progressive reporters.
The visa workers are edging out Americans as they fill up starter jobs, mid-career jobs, and increasingly, in executive jobs — despite the growing list of corporate failures caused by the U.S. executives’ preference for outsourcing their workforces.
The imported contract workers also allow coastal investors and companies to ignore the growing number of trained U.S. graduates in lower-wage heartland states.
This gradual replacement of the U.S. professional class is masked behind a maze of complex contracts and by agency curbs on information — although U.S. graduates are increasingly mobilizing to protect their economic interests — and that of their children.
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.




Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.

US unemployment claims approach 40 million since March


22 May 2020
The United States Department of Labor reported on Thursday that more than 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance last week, bringing the total number of new claims to 38.6 million since mid-March, when social distancing measures and statewide stay-at-home orders were first implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Even with the push by the Trump administration since then to reopen the economy and the easing of lockdown orders in all 50 states—despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths—the US marked its ninth straight week in which more than 2 million workers filed for unemployment. While this is down from the peak at the end of March when 6.8 million applied for unemployment insurance, it still dwarfs the worst weeks of the Great Recession in 2008.
It is expected that the official unemployment rate for May, which is to be reported by the federal government in the first week of June, will approach 20 percent, up from 14.7 percent last month. This is a significant undercount, with millions of unemployed immigrants unable to apply for benefits, and many other workers who are not currently looking for work and therefore are not counted as unemployed.
A man looks at signs of a closed store due to COVID-19 in Niles, Ill., Thursday, May 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Fortune magazine estimates that real unemployment has already hit 22.5 percent, which is nearing the peak of unemployment reached during the Great Depression in 1933, when the rate rose above 25 percent. Millions more are expected to apply in the coming weeks, pushing the numbers beyond those seen during the country’s worst economic crisis.
But even these figures do not capture the extent of the crisis now unfolding across the country. Millions have been blocked for weeks from applying for unemployment compensation because of antiquated computer systems, and a significant share of those who have applied have been denied any payments. On top of this there are significant delays in processing applications in multiple states, including Indiana, Missouri, Wyoming and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Florida, which has some of the most stringent restrictions, has refused to extend its paltry three-month limit on payments for the few who manage to qualify.
Sparked by the pandemic, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s is already having a devastating impact on the millions who have seen their jobs suddenly disappear, while millions more will see wages, benefits and hours dramatically curtailed whenever they are able to return to work. Optimistic projections that the US economy would quickly bounce back once stay-at-home orders were lifted are now becoming much gloomier.
A University of Chicago analysis from earlier this month projects that 42 percent of lost jobs will be permanently eliminated. At the current record number, this will mean a destruction of 16.2 million jobs, nearly double the number of jobs which were lost during the Great Recession just over a decade ago.

“I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist and one of the co-authors of the study, told the New York Times.
A survey by the Census Bureau carried out at the end of April and beginning of this month found that 47 percent of adults had lost employment since March 13 or had someone in their household do so, and 39 percent expected that they or someone else in the home would lose their job in the next month. Nearly 11 percent reported that they had not paid their rent or mortgage on time and more than 21 percent had slight or no confidence that they would do so next month.
With millions missing their rent or mortgage payments, tens of thousands of families will be thrown out on the street in the coming weeks and months, leading to a dramatic rise in homelessness even as the coronavirus continues to spread. While many states took steps in March to place a moratorium on evictions, and eviction notices were unable to be filed due to court closures, those measures are now expiring and courts are reopening.
The Oklahoma County Sheriff announced Tuesday via their Twitter page that the department would resume enforcing evictions on May 26. Nearly 300 eviction cases were filed in Oklahoma City between Monday and Tuesday. This process is being repeated in cities and counties across the country. Evictions are also set to resume in Texas next week, where many families were ineligible for aid due to the undocumented status of one or another parent. The CARES Act provision, which blocks evictions from properties with federally subsidized mortgages, expires on July 25; in Texas this only accounts for one-third of homes.
Meanwhile, another wave of layoffs and furloughs is expected by the Congressional Budget Office at the end of June, when the multi-billion-dollar Payment Protection Program (PPP) expires. Sold as a bailout which would help small businesses keep workers on their payroll in the course of necessary shutdowns, the PPP was in fact a boondoggle for large corporations, their subsidiaries and those with connections to the Trump administration. Many small business owners have not seen any aid, and many do not qualify for loan forgiveness.
Amid historic levels of social misery in the working class, times have never been better for those at the heights of society, with America’s billionaires adding $434 billion to their total net worth since state lockdowns began. Financial markets have soared, underwritten by $80 billion per day from the Federal Reserve.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.

US unemployment claims approach 40 million since March


22 May 2020
The United States Department of Labor reported on Thursday that more than 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance last week, bringing the total number of new claims to 38.6 million since mid-March, when social distancing measures and statewide stay-at-home orders were first implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Even with the push by the Trump administration since then to reopen the economy and the easing of lockdown orders in all 50 states—despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths—the US marked its ninth straight week in which more than 2 million workers filed for unemployment. While this is down from the peak at the end of March when 6.8 million applied for unemployment insurance, it still dwarfs the worst weeks of the Great Recession in 2008.
It is expected that the official unemployment rate for May, which is to be reported by the federal government in the first week of June, will approach 20 percent, up from 14.7 percent last month. This is a significant undercount, with millions of unemployed immigrants unable to apply for benefits, and many other workers who are not currently looking for work and therefore are not counted as unemployed.
A man looks at signs of a closed store due to COVID-19 in Niles, Ill., Thursday, May 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Fortune magazine estimates that real unemployment has already hit 22.5 percent, which is nearing the peak of unemployment reached during the Great Depression in 1933, when the rate rose above 25 percent. Millions more are expected to apply in the coming weeks, pushing the numbers beyond those seen during the country’s worst economic crisis.
But even these figures do not capture the extent of the crisis now unfolding across the country. Millions have been blocked for weeks from applying for unemployment compensation because of antiquated computer systems, and a significant share of those who have applied have been denied any payments. On top of this there are significant delays in processing applications in multiple states, including Indiana, Missouri, Wyoming and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Florida, which has some of the most stringent restrictions, has refused to extend its paltry three-month limit on payments for the few who manage to qualify.
Sparked by the pandemic, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s is already having a devastating impact on the millions who have seen their jobs suddenly disappear, while millions more will see wages, benefits and hours dramatically curtailed whenever they are able to return to work. Optimistic projections that the US economy would quickly bounce back once stay-at-home orders were lifted are now becoming much gloomier.
A University of Chicago analysis from earlier this month projects that 42 percent of lost jobs will be permanently eliminated. At the current record number, this will mean a destruction of 16.2 million jobs, nearly double the number of jobs which were lost during the Great Recession just over a decade ago.

“I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist and one of the co-authors of the study, told the New York Times.
A survey by the Census Bureau carried out at the end of April and beginning of this month found that 47 percent of adults had lost employment since March 13 or had someone in their household do so, and 39 percent expected that they or someone else in the home would lose their job in the next month. Nearly 11 percent reported that they had not paid their rent or mortgage on time and more than 21 percent had slight or no confidence that they would do so next month.
With millions missing their rent or mortgage payments, tens of thousands of families will be thrown out on the street in the coming weeks and months, leading to a dramatic rise in homelessness even as the coronavirus continues to spread. While many states took steps in March to place a moratorium on evictions, and eviction notices were unable to be filed due to court closures, those measures are now expiring and courts are reopening.
The Oklahoma County Sheriff announced Tuesday via their Twitter page that the department would resume enforcing evictions on May 26. Nearly 300 eviction cases were filed in Oklahoma City between Monday and Tuesday. This process is being repeated in cities and counties across the country. Evictions are also set to resume in Texas next week, where many families were ineligible for aid due to the undocumented status of one or another parent. The CARES Act provision, which blocks evictions from properties with federally subsidized mortgages, expires on July 25; in Texas this only accounts for one-third of homes.
Meanwhile, another wave of layoffs and furloughs is expected by the Congressional Budget Office at the end of June, when the multi-billion-dollar Payment Protection Program (PPP) expires. Sold as a bailout which would help small businesses keep workers on their payroll in the course of necessary shutdowns, the PPP was in fact a boondoggle for large corporations, their subsidiaries and those with connections to the Trump administration. Many small business owners have not seen any aid, and many do not qualify for loan forgiveness.
Amid historic levels of social misery in the working class, times have never been better for those at the heights of society, with America’s billionaires adding $434 billion to their total net worth since state lockdowns began. Financial markets have soared, underwritten by $80 billion per day from the Federal Reserve.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.

Further details emerge on the extent of the mid-March financial crisis

By Nick Beams
22 May 2020
An article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) earlier this week provided further details on how close financial markets came to a meltdown in the middle of March.
Entitled “The Day Coronavirus Nearly Broke the Financial Markets,” the article recorded how markets in financial assets, usually regarded as being almost as good as cash, froze when “there were almost no buyers.”
“The financial system has endured numerous credit crunches and market crashes, and the memories of 1987 and 2008 crises set a high bar for marker dysfunction. But long-time investors … say mid-March of this year was far more severe in a short period. Moreover, the stresses to the financial system were broader than many had seen,” it said.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In testimony and interviews, US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has been at pains to emphasise that regulatory mechanisms and policies introduced after the 2008 crisis have strengthened the financial system.
In his interview on the CBS “60 Minutes” program last Sunday, for instance, Powell downplayed the threat of unemployment reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. In the 1930s, he said, the financial system had “really failed,” but that today “our financial system is strong [and] has been able to withstand this. And we spent ten years strengthening it after the last crisis. So that’s a big difference.”
In his interview on the CBS “60 Minutes” program last Sunday, for example, when asked about the prospect of US unemployment rising to levels not seen since the Great Depression, Powell stated that at that time the financial system “really failed.”
He claimed that in contrast to the 1930s, “Here, our financial system is strong [and] has been able to withstand this. And we spent ten years strengthening it after the last crisis. So that’s a big difference.”
In fact, Powell’s reassurances are contradicted by the Fed’s own Financial Stability Report issued last Friday. Focusing on the mid-March crisis, it noted: “While the financial regulatory reforms adopted have substantially increased the resilience of the financial sector, the financial system nonetheless amplified the shock, and financial sector vulnerabilities are likely to be significant in the near term.”
The events in mid-March revealed what has actually taken place. While the Fed has taken limited measures to try to curb some of the riskier activities of the banks that sparked the 2008 crash, the dangers have simply been shifted to other areas of the financial system.
The speculation of the banks may have been curtailed somewhat, but it is now being carried out by hedge funds and other financial operators. They are financed with ultra-cheap money provided by the Fed through its low-interest rate regime and market operations, such as quantitative easing and, more recently, its massive interventions into the overnight repo market.
The WSJ report, based on interviews with Wall Street operatives, provided some insights into how the financial system “amplified” the shock of the pandemic.
Ronald O’Hanley, CEO of the investor services and banking holding company State Street, recounted the situation that confronted him on the morning of Monday, March 16. On Sunday evening, before markets opened, the Fed had announced it was cutting its base rate to zero and was planning to buy $700 billion in bonds, but with no effect.
According to the report, a senior deputy told O’Hanley that “corporate treasurers and pension managers, panicked by the growing economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic, were pulling billions of dollars from certain money-market funds. This was forcing the funds to try to sell some of the bonds they held. But there were almost no buyers. Everybody was suddenly desperate for cash.”
The article noted that rather than take comfort from the Fed’s extraordinary Sunday evening actions, “many companies, governments, bankers and investors viewed the decision as reason to prepare for the worst possible outcome from the coronavirus pandemic.” The result was that a “downdraft in bonds was now a rout.”
It extended into what had been regarded as the most secure areas of the financial system.
The WSJ article continued: “Companies and pension managers have long-relied on money-market funds that invest in short-term corporate and municipal debt holdings considered safe and liquid enough to be classified as ‘cash equivalents.’ … But that Monday, investors no longer believed certain money funds were cash-like at all. As they pulled their money out, managers struggled to sell bonds to meet redemptions.”
So severe was the crisis that Prudential, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, was “also struggling with normally safe securities.”
The article provided a striking example of how, when a fundamentally dysfunctional and rotting system seeks to undertake a reform, it generally only exacerbates its underlying crisis. This phenomenon has been long-known in the field of politics, but the events of mid-March show it applies in finance as well.

On the Monday morning when the crisis broke, Vikram Rao, the head of the debt-trading desk at the investment firm Capital Group, contacted senior bank executives for an explanation as to why they were not trading and was met with the same answer.
“There was no room to buy bonds and other assets and still remain in compliance with tougher guidelines imposed by regulators after the previous financial crisis. In other words, capital rules intended to make the financial system safer were, at least in this instance, draining liquidity from the markets,” the WSJ report stated.
The crisis had a major impact on investors who had leveraged their activities with large amounts of debt—one of the chief means of accumulating financial profit in a low-interest rate regime.
According to the WSJ article: “The slump in mortgage bonds was so vast it crushed a group of investors that had borrowed from banks to juice their returns: real-estate investment funds.”
The Fed’s actions, have, at least temporarily, quelled the storm. But it has only done so by essentially becoming the backstop for all areas of the financial market—Treasury bonds, municipal debt, credit card and student loan debt, the repo market and corporate bonds, including those that have fallen from investment-grade to junk status.
And, as Powell made clear in his “60 Minutes” interview, the Fed plans to go even further if it considers that to be necessary.
“Well, there’s a lot more we can do,” he said. “I will say that we’re not out of ammunition by a long shot. No, there’s really no limit to what we can do with these lending programs that we have. So there’s a lot more we can do to support the economy, and we’re committed to doing everything we can as long as we need to.”
The claim the Fed is supporting the “economy” is a fiction. It functions not for the economy of millions of working people, but as the agency of Wall Street, ready to pull out all stops so that the siphoning of wealth to the financial oligarchy, which it has already promoted, can continue.
An indication of what “more” could involve is provided in the minutes of the Fed’s April 28–29 meeting.
There was a discussion on whether the Fed should organise its purchases of Treasury securities to cap the yield on short and medium-term bonds. This is a policy employed by the Bank of Japan that has also recently been adopted by the Reserve Bank of Australia.
No immediate decision was reached, but the issue is certain to be raised again. Over the next few months, the US Treasury will issue new bonds to finance the operation of the CARES Act that has provided trillions of dollars to prop up corporations while providing only limited relief to workers.
By itself, the issuing of new debt would lead to a fall in the prices of bonds because of the increase in their supply, leading to a rise of their yields (the two move in opposite directions) and promoting a general rise in interest rates—something the Fed wants to avoid at all costs in the interests of Wall Street.
The only way the Fed can counter this upward pressure is to intervene in the market to buy bonds, thereby keeping their yield down. This would formalise what is already de facto taking place, where one arm of the capitalist state, the US Treasury, issues debt while another arm, the Fed, buys it.
This would further heighten the mountain of fictitious capital which, as the events of mid-March so graphically revealed, has no intrinsic value and is worth essentially zero.
The ruling class cannot restore stability to the financial system by the endless creation of still more money at the press of a computer button. Real value must be pumped into financial assets through the further intensification of the exploitation of the working class and a deepening evisceration of social programs.
Financial crises are presented in the media and elsewhere as being about numbers. But behind the economic and financial data are the interests of two irreconcilably opposed social classes—the working class, the mass of society, and the ruling corporate and financial oligarchy whose interests are defended by the state of which the Fed is a crucial component.
As 2008 demonstrated, what emerges from a financial crisis is a deepening class polarisation. That will certainly be the outcome of the mid-March events. A massive social confrontation, already developing long before the pandemic arrived on the scene, is looming in which the working class will be confronted with the necessity to fight for political power in order to take the levers of the economy and financial system into its own hands.

US billionaires increase wealth by $280 billion since March, as millions are unable to get unemployment benefits

 
“Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel, former investment banker, Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Emanuel and Obama led the reorganization of class relations in the United States, cutting social services, education, health and pensions, and accelerating a shift to temporary and low-paid work. As a result they created the largest stock market boom in history.
Today, this catchphrase is once again on the lips of the ruling 
class. The largest financial and corporate 
powerholders are seeking to use the global 
health emergency to expand their wealth and 
increase the exploitation of the working class.
The billionaires in the United States have increased their wealth by $282 billion since the mid-March stock decline, according to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies. While more than one fifth of the American population is now unemployed, and millions are deprived of basic needs and confront an uncertain future, the fortunes of the ultra-rich have not only recovered, they are improving substantially.
Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool, File)
Jeff Bezos’s fortune increased by $25 billion 
between January 1 and April 15. Never in 
history has any individual made so much 
wealth so quickly. As the report noted, “this is 
larger than the Gross Domestic Product of 
Honduras, which was $23.9 billion in 2018.”
Eight billionaires, so-called “pandemic profiteers,” have increased their wealth, each, by over $1 billion during this time: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), MacKenzie Bezos (Amazon), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), John Albert Sobrato (Silicon Valley real estate), Elon Musk, Joshua Harris (Apollo, financial asset management) and Rocco Comisso (Mediacom, cable and internet).
Why, when 200,000 have died around the world and millions more lives are in jeopardy, are the ultra-rich profiting so fabulously?
First, the bailout package crafted and voted on unanimously by Republicans and Democrats has funneled wealth to the richest banks and corporations, while leaving peanuts for the working population.
The $2.2 trillion CARES Act gives only $550 billion to direct payments and extended unemployment, which most people have yet to receive. Of the remaining more than $1.7 trillion, $500 billion goes directly to bailing out major corporations. While $377 billion ostensibly goes to small businesses, most have not seen a penny, as the banks pocketed $10 billion in fees and larger companies largely consumed the available funds.
The CARES Act also contains within it an additional $173 billion in tax breaks to super-wealthy individuals and companies. For example, it allows households earning at least $500,000 a year to reduce their taxes by substantially increasing deductions from business losses and applying them to taxable money earned on the stock market.
All of this is on top of trillions being funneled 

into the financial markets and corporate 

coffers by the Federal Reserve.
Meanwhile, a study from the Pew Research Center finds that while over 10 million people applied for unemployment in March, only 29 percent of jobless Americans received any benefits that month. The report says that unemployed workers “face a hodgepodge of different state rules governing how they can qualify for benefits, how much they’ll get and how long they can collect them.”
Real unemployment has grown past 20 percent of the population. Over 26.5 million jobs have been lost, adding to the 7.1 million people who were already unemployed prior to the crisis.
Even when workers receive these benefits, they come, ultimately, at the expense of state and federal debt. Like in 2008, when state after state and city after city faced a budget crisis, so too, with COVID-19, will fiscal problems emerge. Who will pay when budgets are exceeded? As in Detroit, Michigan and Stockton, California in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the ruling class will once again say, “There is no money” for basic social services such as education and clean water. Meanwhile, trillions are funneled to the ultra-wealthy.
A second reason the pandemic has been a bonanza for the ultra-rich is that it has intensified corporate consolidation, part-time and temporary work, and digital and physical automation.
Bloomberg writes: “Big Business Has All the Advantages in the Pandemic.” While most small businesses are on the rocks--deprived by larger firms of the small funding that was theoretically given to them in the CARES Act--many large corporations, such as Amazon, are carrying out a massive hiring spree. Walmart plans to hire 150,000 people by May; Amazon, 100,000; and Dollar Store, 25,000.
Because larger firms are more likely to have the capital not only to weather the crisis, but to dominate internet-based commerce, they will come out of the crisis with even greater domination of their market. In particularly hard-hit industries, such as the oil and gas sector, the giant companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil see the crisis as an opportunity to purchase their smaller competitors.
The Financial Times likewise writes that “Covid-19 will only increase automation anxiety” as companies “pandemic-proof their operations.” Capitalism has a natural tendency toward automation, which in the long term breeds economic crises and joblessness. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says COVID-19 will spur a “surge of labour-replacing technology,” as automated cashiers, cars, logistic robots and automated assembly lines replace workers. Again, the largest companies will emerge on top because they are the ones that can afford this automated overhaul.
Capitalism’s fundamental trajectory—toward increasing automation, temporary and part-time work, corporate consolidation, ever increasing inequality and financial bubbles—will intensify. The result, in turn, will be an ever more staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.
The socialist response to the COVID-19 crisis demands that this mass of wealth be confiscated. The major companies which dominate our lives cannot be run for the private profit of a handful of billionaires who seek to squeeze the working class, literally, to death. They must be placed under the social and democratic control of the working class.



By David North

The whole process should be tightened up and made more expensive, if not suspended for the rest of the year. My point is that the system is currently designed in such a way that the layoffs of U.S. workers can be expected if both H-1B workers and U.S. workers are employed in the same firm.


Importing Doctors Is Not Necessary

Unemployment is up for all healthcare workers, including physicians





By Jason Richwine on May 19, 2020
Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler showed yesterday that the Cato Institute's estimate of 42,000 illegal alien doctors is implausibly high. They didn't address Cato's broader argument that immigration is essential to our healthcare system, so I'll do that here.
Legal or not, many immigrants certainly do work as healthcare professionals in the United States. That should not be surprising in a nation where 17 percent of the labor force is foreign-born. It is also not surprising that immigrants are overrepresented among doctors, given that we have selected for them through the H-1B and J-1 visas.
It does not follow, however, that we would have a terrible shortage of doctors in the absence of past immigration. For one thing, lower immigration would mean a smaller population, and smaller populations need fewer doctors. More to the point, no "shortage" of any workers should develop under a properly functioning labor market. With 280 million native-born individuals and a vast system of higher education, there is no reason that Americans would not have been able to meet the demand for doctors that immigrants gradually filled over the past decades.
Of course, the labor market takes time to adjust. A sudden pandemic could generate a spike in demand for doctors without an immediate supply response. That is the premise of the proposed Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act (S.3599), which would grant permanent residency to 25,000 nurses and 15,000 doctors, plus their families. It's a solution in search of a problem, however, because the spike in demand for healthcare workers has not materialized. On the contrary, demand appears to have fallen.
The table below shows that unemployment rates for healthcare workers have increased since February, which is the last month before Covid-19 hit. This trend is the opposite of what we would expect if there were a dire need for more workers.

Employment Trends for Healthcare Workers


Total
Employed


Unemployment
Rate


Sample
Size


Health Care
Occupation
FebruaryAprilFebruaryAprilFebruaryApril
Physicians605,222528,1230.4%1.4%224167
Registered Nurses3,180,8353,075,4490.9%4.3%1,2281,036
Licensed Practical/
Vocational Nurses
741,816636,1172.0%2.4%261189
Nursing Assistants1,501,7531,367,4403.1%7.8%542473
Medical Assistants624,489516,1401.7%13.6%212168

Source: Current Population Survey.
Occupations limited to sample sizes of at least 100.

At 1.4 percent, the unemployment rate for physicians is still low, but it's up from 0.4 percent, implying no shortage. Registered nurses have an unemployment rate of 4.3 percent, up from 0.9 percent. The less-skilled healthcare occupations have been hit even harder, with the unemployment rate for medical assistants rising from 1.7 percent to 13.6 percent. The decline in demand for health services unrelated to Covid-19 is the likely cause.
Under the Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act, it is unclear which jobs the new doctors and nurses would fill. Even if demand increases in the near future, the Americans who recently lost their jobs would be the obvious source of workers to draw from.

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