JOE MANCHIN SAYS FUCK AMERICAN WORKERS IN WEST VIRGINIA!!! - WE NEED JOE BIDEN'S INVASION OF 'CHEAP' LABOR TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED

Inflation is Surging as Wages are Falling - People are Unprepared

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu9Ad7Y3SZE

Commentary
Biden’s Border Predicament

By Mark Krikorian
National Review, July 5, 2021
Excerpt: Asylum is the loophole that renders moot the entire body of immigration law. There is no possibility of regaining control over immigration without either detaining all asylum-seekers until they receive a decision, and deporting those who don’t qualify, or making them wait in Mexico for their hearing date. The Biden administration refuses to do either, and so the border crisis the president created by ending Trump’s Remain in Mexico program will continue.

Poll: Joe Manchin to Lose Support Among West Virginians If He Votes for Democrats’ Amnesty Plan

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

JOHN BINDER

14 Jul 202110

2:52

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) will lose support among West Virginians come re-election time if he votes for a Democrat budget, via filibuster-proof reconciliation, that includes amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, a poll provided to Breitbart News reveals.

On Wednesday, Manchin reportedly voiced support for giving amnesty to illegal aliens through a Democrat budget that would only be approved via reconciliation — a maneuver that allows Senate Democrats to pass a variety of agenda items with just 51 votes and no threat of a filibuster.

A poll provided to Breitbart News from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), conducted by Zogby Analytics, finds that should Manchin vote for the amnesty-filled budget, he will lose significant support from West Virginians.

About 55 percent of likely West Virginia voters said they would be less likely to support Manchin if he votes for the Democrats’ amnesty plan. Just 24 percent of likely West Virginia voters said they would be more likely to support Manchin if he votes for the plan.

Similarly, 52 percent of likely West Virginia voters said they oppose slipping an amnesty into a federal budget via reconciliation, whereas only 34 percent said they support the maneuver. Likewise, 52 percent said they oppose putting amnesty for illegal aliens into any infrastructure package while 34 percent said they support doing so.

Manchin’s support for amnesty via reconciliation is significant because he, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), is considered one of the most moderate Democrats in the Senate and has consistently opposed ending the filibuster.

In March, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the Democrats’ Dream and Promise Act amnesty plan would cost Americans more than $35 billion over the course of ten years. A report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) last month found that amnesty for illegal aliens would worsen the nation’s ongoing unemployment crisis where nearly 16 million Americans remain jobless.

“Allowing all illegal immigrants who came at younger ages or have TPS status to stay and giving them all legal status so they compete with legal immigrants and the native-born throughout the labor market will likely make it increasingly difficult to draw more Americans back into the labor market,” CIS researchers noted.

The FAIR/Zogby Analytics poll surveyed more than 400 likely West Virginia voters from July 9 to July 12 and has a margin of error of +/- 4.9 percent.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Red State Democrat Joe Manchin Throws Support Behind Amnesty for Illegal Aliens in Democrat Budget

Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

14 Jul 2021176

2:44

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is reportedly throwing his support behind a Democrat budget that includes providing amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the United States.

For months, House and Senate Democrats have plotted to slip amnesty for illegal aliens into a filibuster-proof budget through the little-known “reconciliation” process. Manchin’s support for such a measure is crucial as he is considered one of the Democrats’ most moderate Senators, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ).

According to Bloomberg News reporter Steven Dennis, Manchin has signaled his support for slipping an amnesty into the Democrat budget:

Manchin’s support for amnesty in a Democrat budget via reconciliation comes even as 5.5 percent of West Virginia’s residents are unemployed, all of whom want full-time jobs. Previous estimates have suggested that the Democrats’ amnesty will legalize about six million illegal aliens, setting them up to eventually apply for American citizenship.

Nationally, nearly 16 million Americans remain jobless but all want full-time employment. Another 4.6 million Americans are underemployed but want a full-time job. Their job prospects are diminished by massive influxes of cheaper, foreign workers that keep U.S. wages down so that businesses can expand their profit margins.

The amnesty effort is being backed by the left-wing Center for American Progress, former President George W. Bush, the billionaire Koch brothers, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, as well as corporate interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.

Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Zuckerberg’s Cheap Labor Group Praises Democrats’ Amnesty Plan

Graeme Jennings - Pool/Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

14 Jul 202138

3:56

Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group of investors is praising Senate Democrats’ proposed budget package which reportedly includes a massive amnesty to pack the United States labor market with newly legalized illegal aliens.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats said they have agreed to a $3.5 trillion budget package that includes provisions to spend billions of American taxpayer dollars on giving amnesty to millions of illegal aliens who would be immediately legalized and thus allowed to take jobs in the U.S. economy.

The amnesty push comes after a major lobbying effort by FWD.us, which seeks to pack the U.S. labor market with foreign workers to boost profit margins for multinational corporations such as Facebook, to slip the amnesty into a filibuster-proof “reconciliation” maneuver that would only need majority support in the Senate to pass.

“We are pleased to see meaningful efforts to fix our long-failed immigration system including a pathway to citizenship has been included in the Senate budget resolution package and has received support from the White House,” FWD.us President Todd Schulte said in a statement of the Democrats’ amnesty plan:

As bipartisan talks continue, we are encouraged by this dual-track effort to ensure that legalization providing an urgently-needed pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, TPS holders, farmworkers, and other essential workers passes as soon as possible. This is vital to our response and recovery from COVID-19 and to the long term success of our families, communities, and economy. [Emphasis added]

…

We expect all Members of Congress to use every ounce of their power and leverage all avenues available to pass meaningful reforms this year, including Democrats through reconciliation. This is permissible, it is urgent and it is the right thing to do. Lawmakers must act with urgency to protect immigrant families and strengthen our economy, and finally send this resolution to President Biden’s desk for signature. [Emphasis added]

In 2013, Zuckerberg joined with other billionaire investors to create the FWD.us lobby group as they tried to pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty. The bill was blocked by House and Senate Republicans.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) suggested this week that President Joe Biden is on board with slipping an amnesty through Congress via the filibuster-proof reconciliation maneuver:

Are they aware of my interest and my request? Absolutely. And I haven’t been told no. I believe the White House is supportive of both an ambitious infrastructure package, and as substantive immigration reform as you can achieve in any way possible.

Should Democrats try to sneak an amnesty into a budget via reconciliation, it will be up to Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough to halt the plan on the grounds that the measure is not budget-related but actually alters federal immigration law. MacDonough previously stopped Democrats from increasing the federal minimum wage visa reconciliation.

Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.

Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here. 

Open Borders Lobby Urges Joe Biden to Free Border Crossers into U.S. Without Monitoring Their Whereabouts

LOREN ELLIOTT/AFP via Getty Images

JOHN BINDER

12 Jul 202116

3:06

President Joe Biden’s administration ought to release all border crossers into the United States without monitoring their whereabouts, open borders activists urge.

Activists with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, as well as the groups Freedom for Immigrants and the Immigrant Defense Project, released a report this week that asks Biden to take his massive Catch and Release operation to new heights by dropping all monitoring of border crossers and illegal aliens who are released into the U.S. interior.

In many circumstances, when a border crosser is released into the U.S. interior, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will require them to wear a GPS tracking ankle monitor as part of the Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program.

This monitoring, the open borders groups claim, is “inhumane” and should be eliminated entirely by the Biden administration:

Immigrants and advocates have increasingly called to defund ICE and DHS, with the goal of ending deportation. A core component of the mass deportation system they aim to dismantle is the immigration detention system—both physical and virtual. We strongly urge the Biden-Harris administration to exercise the full extent of its authority to enact a plan to end the use of immigration detention completely including electronic shackling. This includes releasing immigrants who are detained and phasing out federal contracts with private prison companies, states, and localities for the purposes of immigration detention. Members of Congress, including Representative Ilhan Omar, have already petitioned the administration to issue an Executive Order announcing a plan to phase out contracts between ICE and state, county, and local jails and prisons. And advocates have continued to push the administration to live up to its campaign promise and end private prisons, not just in the criminal legal system, but also in the civil immigration detention context. [Emphasis added]

Deputy Executive Director of Freedom for Immigrants Layla Razavi said the ankle monitors are “an abusive and pervasive extension of the immigration detention system — a system that’s rooted in racism and xenophobia.”

Instead, the open borders groups suggest DHS should “completely” eliminate the use of ankle monitors for border crossers, provide taxpayer-funded attorneys to all illegal aliens in deportation proceedings, and award federal contracts to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to give border crossers “holistic medical and mental health care, housing, and language access support.”

The demands come as a House Democrat DHS budget revokes border wall funding, reduces funding for immigration enforcement, and expands ATD for illegal aliens that more easily allows detainees to be released into the U.S. interior.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.

It turns out Democrats want an open border only as to some refugees

By Andrea Widburg

If there’s one policy most closely associated with the Biden administration, it has to be the illegal open border policy. President Trump turned over to Biden a border that was remarkably well-controlled. The day after Biden entered the White House, that was all gone. We now effectively have no border and, if Americans dismayed by this fact complain, they’re told they’re cruel people who want the Latin Americans, sex offenders, and Islamists pouring unchecked over the border to suffer from poverty in their native countries.

On Tuesday, however, the Biden administration announced that there are limits to its welcome mat. If you’re Cuban or Haitian, don’t come here:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Tuesday that those fleeing Cuba or Haiti by sea would not be allowed into the U.S. -- and would either be returned or, if they were found to have a fear of persecution, referred to a third country.

“The time is never right to attempt migration by sea,” Mayorkas said at a press conference. “To those who risk their lives doing so, this risk is not worth taking.”

“Allow me to be clear. If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” he said.

The ostensible reason behind this announcement is to protect people from braving the Florida Straits. It’s for their own good that the Biden administration is leaving them in countries that are collapsing and in which deadly political witch hunts can soon be expected.

One might almost believe the administration’s sincerity were it not for the fact that it’s been utterly silent as people have died crossing the Southern border, with an uptick in deaths because of the summer heat. Even the mainstream media has been forced to acknowledge how dangerous the Southern crossing is. This is from PBS:

The bodies of an unusually large number of migrants who died in Arizona’s borderlands are being recovered this summer amid record temperatures in the sun-scorched desert and rugged mountains.

An increase in migrant deaths also has been noted in Texas, and rescues are up throughout the border with Mexico.

The nonprofit group Humane Borders, which maps the recoveries of bodies in Arizona using data from the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office in Tucson, said 43 sets of human remains were found in the state’s border region last month — the hottest June on record for Phoenix. Forecasters say highs in Phoenix, where temperatures last month regularly soared above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 Celsius), tend to be similar to those in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert north of Mexico.

That report doesn’t take into account the people who drown crossing the Rio Grande, the children tossed over walls, the women and children sexually trafficked, or the risks all Americans run from drugs and cartels, and terrorists crossing the border.

So what’s really going on here? I have a guess.

When it comes to the Cubans, who are genuine political refugees, their arrival would swell the number of Latin Americans who would never vote for socialism in any form, under any label. Moreover, to the extent that these Cubans will become a force in Spanish-speaking communities, even if they cannot vote, they will communicate their values to other Spanish-speaking voters. As it is, 2020 showed increased numbers of Hispanic voters abandoning the Democrats.

And what about those Haitians desperate to flee a country falling into anarchy? Haiti is a desperately poor, mismanaged country. The people there are the descendants of slaves whom the French brought and treated with unspeakable cruelty. Unlike slaves in America, there was no economic benefit to keeping Haitian slaves alive. It was cheaper to work them to death and replace them every two years.

In 1791, Toussaint Louverture led an uprising that ended with Haiti gaining sovereignty – and the slaves their liberty – in 1804. Since then, it’s been a country that’s bounced from one corrupt leader to another. It is consistently one of the world’s poorest countries.

However, those Haitians who come to America do very well, as is true for other Caribbean and African immigrants to America. Having another influx of successful Caribbean immigrants would put the lie to the Democrat claim that native-born Blacks are incapable of achieving success because of America’s long history and present practice of systemic racism. People may begin to suspect that their inability to thrive may not lie with skin color or racism; it may lie, instead, with the fact that too many American Blacks have embraced as their own the worst aspects of historic White Southern culture.

The truth behind Democrat immigrant policies is that they want malleable Latin Americans who will be cheap labor for rich people and the Chamber of Commerce and a pool of people likely to vote Democrat, whether they do so legally or not. Cubans and Haitians have no place in this plan.

IMAGE: Alejandro warns Haitians and Cubans to stay away (edited in Pixlr). YouTube screen grab.

 

Inflation is Surging as Wages are Falling - People are Unprepared

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu9Ad7Y3SZE

Biden's American Jobs Plan Is Devoid of Moral Values and Economic Realities

By Jonathan Verlin

The American Jobs Plan is premised chiefly upon investing $621 billion in America's crumbling transportation infrastructure.  The Biden administration claims, "Decades of declining public investment has left our roads, bridges, rail, and transit systems in poor condition, with a trillion-dollar backlog of needed repairs.  More than 35,000 people die in traffic crashes on U.S. roads each year, and millions more are seriously and often permanently injured."  These statistics related to infrastructure are misleading.  While traffic deaths have risen appreciably from 2020 despite fewer people driving, the preponderance were caused by aberrant behavior, not infrastructure.  National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics show that deaths resulting from impaired driving rose more than 9% since 2019, and failure to wear safety belts increased 15%.  There can be little doubt that the White House's distortion of the causes of death is based on ulterior motives.  

It is more likely that the vast investment in infrastructure is driven by the desire of progressives to consolidate economic and political power.  It can scarcely be called legitimate.  The most damning evidence for this view is that specific places and people that such projects are intended to help are strikingly absent.  Similarly, the costs for each of the (unnamed) projects are not supplied, nor are safeguards to control cost overruns included.  In fact, the Plan is alarming for anyone who typically asks, Why?  What?  Where?  When?

Another commentator has already noted a similar lack of specificity in Biden's so-called Fact Sheet on Domestic Terrorism.  The so-called jobs "Plan" provides a lot of vacuous generalities that serve the purpose of dramatically expanding the federal government but vacuously ignore specifics.

Economically, there is no long-term financial plan to pay for improvements without both raising taxes across the board and further increasing already burgeoning national debt.  Think of the fabulous expansion of railroads in the 19th century.  The government did not pay for the expansion of the railroads, but incentivized the railroads to invest in the project by providing land grants to the railroads for every mile of new track laid.  They found a way for the government to support the private sector to accomplish infrastructure goals.  

So many economic issues affecting the USA are ignored by this document.  Honest hardworking people are becoming increasingly alarmed about the loss of our energy independence, acerbated by the shutdown of the Keystone XL pipeline, resulting in higher fuel prices and transportation costs of goods to market.  More importantly, the shutdown led to the loss of thousands of jobs.  The shift away from natural gas– and oil-generated power in favor of electric power for cars, and solar power and windmills for homes, will lead to tremendous employment dislocation.  Yet these likely dislocations are not addressed in a meaningful way by the so-called Plan.  As a Plan, it is therefore strangely disconnected from the stated goals of the administration. 

The issue of job development cannot be properly addressed without seriously addressing inflation.  Despite the attempts of Janet Yellen to downplay the threat of inflation even as our national debt surges to unprecedented levels under the Democrat give-away-the-store public spending, this elephant in the room is not addressed in the Jobs Plan even in passing.  The consumer price index has already risen 1.4% in the past year.  Earnings have begun to stagnate while taxes reflexively will escalate to meet the rising demand for increased social services, which the administration is ready to offer to non-citizens as well as citizens.  These are portents of trouble.

When the many key issues of economics are not properly addressed by a document that is more propaganda and posturing than truly analytical and issue-oriented, many bad consequences are sure to follow.  Why?  The answer is simple: the fiscal and philosophical fundamentals have not changed.  The virulent evil of China's communist dictatorship and its footprint in our national economy must be reckoned with.  We must avoid becoming a command economy like China, but compete under free market strategies, meanwhile shrinking our reliance on government.  If we are to survive, we must shrink, not increase, our dependence on a government-driven and controlled economy.  If America is still to be the dominant economic powerhouse, our strategy must change.  So must our priorities.  

The moral dimension of jobs and work requires that we determine our own future through the classical dignities of work and self-reliance.  How ironic that we citizens are offered an American Jobs Plan while thousands of illegal so-called refugees are being admitted who will undermine our economy.  They will take jobs away from actual citizens, and they will depend upon social services that will drain and undermine the economic life of citizens through excessive taxation and a skyrocketing national debt.  The American Jobs Plan is for Americans, yet without borders, there is no country.  We control who comes here and how.  This does not make us racist, narrow-minded or xenophobic.  It is the rule of law, what makes us American.

We cannot endure as a country by leveraging large amounts of long-term debt and cultivating an inflationary economy.  American life is and should always be a renewal movement built upon the dignity of being an American — a living hope directed by discipline, virtue, and above all order.  It therefore takes time, energy, and courage.  Most of all, it requires character and a manifestation of moral truth to set the example.  We do not need the stream of ideological pap and "green" thinking that has been emanating from the Democrats.  We do not need a jobs plan that has no plans.  Moral realities combined with non-green economic realities must be embraced and put forward as an alternative to the bogus jobs plan of this administration.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

WSJ: Elite Schools Leave Grad Students Buried Under Mountains of Debt

AFP PHOTO/NOEL CELIS

ALANA MASTRANGELO

13 Jul 202172

0:33

Elite universities continue to push master’s programs that don’t pay off, as the jobs that graduates get with their degree from top institutions fail to generate enough income to pay down their six-figure federal loans, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Master’s students lured in by the idea of acquiring a degree from prestigious institutions have taken on debt beyond what their salary after graduation can support, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000, and two years after obtaining their degrees, half of the borrowers are earning less than $30,000 a year, the report added.

Columbia’s program is reportedly the most extreme example of how top universities have recently been awarding thousands of master’s degrees that don’t result in enough early career earnings for graduates to start paying down their massive student loans.

Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master’s program in the United States, the Journal reports.

Meanwhile, at New York University, graduates with a master’s degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000, and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after graduating, the report added.

At Northwestern University, half of the students who earned degrees in speech-language pathology reportedly borrowed $148,000 or more, and are earning a median income of $60,000 two years later.

As for University of Southern California’s marriage and family counseling program, graduates borrowed a median $124,000, and half earned $50,000 or less two years later.

While undergraduate students have been facing inflating loan balances for years, now it’s graduate students who are accumulating the most burdensome debts, reports the Journal.

And unlike undergraduate loans, the federal Grad Plus loan program has no fixed limit on how much graduate students can borrow. The limitless loans make master’s degrees a goldmine for universities, which have gone on to expand their graduate school offerings since the creation of the Grad Plus in 2005.

And now, for the first time ever, graduate students are on track to have borrowed as much as undergraduates in the 2020-2021 academic year, the report adds.

Zack Morrison, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in film from Columbia in 2018, told the Journal that his graduate school loan balance now stands at nearly $300,000, including accrued interest.

Morrison added that he has been making between $30,000 and $50,000 a year as a Hollywood assistant, and from side gigs working in commercial video production and photography.

“There’s always those 2 a.m. panic attacks where you’re thinking, ‘How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?'” he said.

It’s the taxpayers, however, who will end up being responsible for whatever is left unpaid by graduates who took out the staggering loans.

Combined US federal and state unemployment claims rose to 470,000 last week

Jacob Crosse

9 July 2021

The release Thursday of the Department of Labor’s (DOL) latest weekly unemployment claims report gives an indication of the economic and social crisis facing workers and their families more than 16 months into the coronavirus pandemic. According to the report, 373,000 jobless workers applied for state unemployment benefits, a slight increase over the previous week, and an additional 99,000 filed for assistance under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program.

The report was received with consternation within corporate boardrooms and both big business parties. They had hoped that the early termination of supplementary unemployment benefits by over half of the states would have forced more workers to accept dangerous and low-paying jobs, despite the new surge in COVID-19 infections fueled by the reopening of businesses and schools and the lifting of virtually all remaining social distancing and safety measures, carried out in the face of the spread of the virulent Delta variant.

Pedestrians wait in line to collect fresh produce and shelf-stable pantry items outside Barclays Center as Food Bank For New York City provides assistance to those in need due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

The DOL report also found that more than 14.2 million Americans were still receiving some form of unemployment payment through June 19. Meanwhile, economists estimate that there are some nine million job openings across the US, the majority centered in the low-paying service, retail and seasonal tourist industries.

The 472,000 combined state and federal claims filed for the week ending July 3, which is double the pre-pandemic average, came despite the fact that 26 states have announced plans or have already begun to eliminate the meager $300-a-week federal supplement included in the Biden administration’s “American Rescue Plan,” which was signed into law this past March.

Biden has already announced that he will not seek to extend the federal benefit when it expires on September 6, and the White House has explicitly endorsed the “right” of Republican-led state governments to turn down the federal funding and terminate the program prematurely, on the grounds that the extra $300 a week is a “disincentive” to work.

In plain English, this translates into: Either work for poverty wages and risk infection and possible death from COVID, or starve!

Economists estimate that cutting unemployment pay prematurely in the 26 states will force some four million jobless workers and their families to participate in what NBC News described last month as a “bold experiment” in compelling workers to fully resume pumping out corporate profits.

However, the “bold experiment” has to date fallen short of expectations. Economists with Morgan Stanley in a recent analysis reported by Forbes found that: “... generous [sic] unemployment benefits are likely no more of a factor than other impediments, including childcare, transportation and health concerns, to workplace re-entry.”

The same report found that states that eliminated benefits on June 19, including Alabama, Idaho, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming, had only slightly larger declines in continued unemployment claims through May compared to states that are eliminating benefits but have not yet done so—12 percent compared to 8.7 percent. States that have not announced plans to terminate benefits early saw a 4 percent decline in continued unemployment claims through May.

The group of economists, led by Sarah Wolfe and Ellen Zentner, wrote that they could find “only mixed evidence” that ending benefits early had an effect on workers seeking employment, adding: “Stripping out the disincentive effect of unemployment benefits on the labor market recovery is not simple.”

As the ruling class and the entire political establishment rush to fully “reopen” the economy, they are centrally concerned by the development of a tight labor market, which gives workers, particularly lower paid workers, a degree of leverage in seeking better-paying positions and, in general, pushing for wage increases after decades of stagnating or declining wages. This hinders the drive to utilize the pandemic to further cut wages and increase the exploitation of the working class.

The Biden administration’s response is three-pronged: Allow the pandemic-triggered relief to expire, support the corporatist trade unions in their efforts to suppress mounting working class militancy, and promote identity, and particularly racial, politics to divide and disorient the working class.

Even with the temporary $300-a-week federal supplement, the combined total of state and federal benefits falls far short of meeting the basic needs of working class families. In many states, the amount does not replace even half of a worker’s normal earnings.

Despite having control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, the Democratic Party has not lifted a finger to preserve the $300-a-week stipend, which is already a 50 percent cut from the $600-a-week supplement passed as part of last year’s CARES Act.

The coming expiration of federal unemployment benefits, coupled with the ending of the Centers for Disease Control eviction moratorium at the end of July, has pushed thousands of families into homeless shelters, tents or cramped living situations with friends or relatives.

This past week, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University made public data collected in conjunction with the Las Vegas Review-Journal over the past year showing that despite the moratorium, thousands of evictions have been processed in metro-Las Vegas, including 4,559 in November 2020 alone.

“The fact that in November filings were 50 percent above what they are normally—that’s not the case in really any of the other cities we track,” Jacob Hass, a research specialist at the Eviction Lab, told the newspaper. Haas noted that the November spike occurred after Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak allowed the state-wide moratorium to expire on October 15, before renewing it on December 14.

Overall, between March 15, 2020 and May 27, 2021 Clark County (Las Vegas) had an estimated 22,400 eviction filings, which is more than any other similarly sized area studied by the researchers. For comparison’s sake, Dallas County, Texas, which has a larger population than Clark County, had nearly 4,000 fewer evictions, 18,600, over the same time period. Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania recorded 5,200 evictions total.