Capitalism -- and corporate-state capitalism
It is almost axiomatic for conservatives to passionately defend the cause of capitalism.
It is seen as integral to the founding of our nation and can even be seen in semi-religious terms.
However, it can be healthy to occasionally reexamine even sacred cows.
While capital can have a broad meaning (such as resources) it is convenient to just think of it as money. If a person saves his money and starts a business, he takes the risks and should have the rewards.
However, capital can also be aggregated through selling joint shares in a particular enterprise. As a result, there are two different types of capitalism, the individual and the collective.
My central thesis is that individual capitalism is deserving of all the sentiment and favor that the word 'capitalism' inspires.
However, collective or more specifically, corporate-state capitalism, sometimes known as corporatism, has appropriated this cloak of respectability and has over decades come to destroy individual capitalism. It is only now slowly revealing its collectivist nature.
Most communist countries are actually some form of socialist collective. As long as terms are being clarified, fascism needs to be put back in the category of socialism as they are just differing forms of collectivism. Fascism can be specifically defined as corporate-state governance.
For decades those with mom-and-pop-style enterprises, such as hardware stores, grocery stores, and drug stores (individual capitalism) were pointed at by Soviet-style governments as their enemy. They were "kulaks," "wreckers," and "hoarders."
However, as the dust is beginning to settle, corporate collectives appear to have been a graver threat to their personal survival than any Soviet commissar.
Corporations like Disney are beginning to show that there is an agenda that exceeds the mere greed that leftists attribute to capitalism.
Facebook seems implicated in funding 2000 Mules. Twitter seems to have found a way to merge economic objectives with political ones.
Perhaps the merging of big government with big (corporate) business was inevitable. The takeaway lesson here is that the collective will always be bigger than -- and beat -- the individual.
Individual collectives connect a business owner to a community and his customers. A corporate collective is supposed to be answerable to the shareholders
However, often the biggest shareholders are other corporate collectives. BlackRock (with $10 trillion in assets under management) makes no apologies for their social and political manipulations.
This is not just a single rogue player, but a picture of where economic collectivism always leads.
Mom and pop dairy farms with 100 cows have been replaced by dairy collectives with over 1,000 cows and 10-15 illegal immigrant workers. A push is being made to get 10,000-cow dairy operations worked with 50 illegals. If Walmart can be seen as plantation mercantilism, then the return of plantation agriculture is already under way.
Tim Froehlke can be contacted through christianpioneer.co
Donald Trump is America's poorest billionaire
Former President Donald Trump loses vast amounts of money. Yet he lives a gilded lifestyle and never runs short of the cash needed to pay lawyers perpetually defending him against charges large and small. How does he do it?
We’re gradually finding out, now that Congress has obtained six years’ of Trump’s tax returns from the IRS. Democrats investigating Trump’s finances haven’t yet released the full returns, but they’ve published two reports that provide an overview of Trump’s income and reveal how he keeps his tax bill remarkably low. Ordinary taxpayers might feel infuriated. Or envious.
From 2015 through 2020, Trump declared a positive income in two years and a negative income in four years. His losses heavily outweigh his gains. For the six years in total, Trump reported $52.6 million in negative income, or, in other words, $52.6 million in losses.
A typical worker can’t live on negative income. Yet Trump manages to do so. That’s because he uses business losses to offset real income and reduce the amount of taxes he owes. To a large extent, this is legal, given multiple provisions of the tax code that provide relief for business owners, and especially for real-estate developers such as Trump. The details of Trump’s complete tax returns will go a lot further toward explaining whether he cheats.
There’s considerable evidence that he does cheat. “Trump avoids paying taxes by creating a lot of losses, both real and fake,” tax lawyer Steve Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center said. “From a tax standpoint he’s often underwater, but that’s an artifact of the tax system and not so much real.” Rosenthal calls Trump’s financial statements “tax-aggressive.”
Two New York Times exposés, based on 20 years of Trump’s financial data leaked by his niece Mary Trump, detailed many possible instances of tax fraud. The New York State attorney general is suing Trump for a variety of “dubious tax schemes … including instances of outright fraud.” One practice under scrutiny is valuing properties sharply lower in tax filings than in other business documents. Tax experts studying the two Congressional reports point out several red flags suggesting fraud, including undocumented charitable donations and payments to family members that might actually be gifts.
Trump has repeatedly derided probes of his finances as politically motivated “witch hunts,” and described himself as “smart” for using tax breaks to boost his take-home pay. Yet he never released his tax returns, even though he pledged to do so many times. The Internal Revenue Service is supposed to audit the tax returns of every president, but it never finished an audit of Trump while he was president. There’s evidence Trump or his advisers pressured the IRS to back off.
Trump does earn substantial amounts of money, though the exact sources of his income aren’t defined in the two Congressional overview reports. From 2015 through 2020, for instance, Trump earned $59 million in interest and dividend payments, ranging from a low of $6.8 million in 2017 to a high of $11.4 million in 2019. Most of that income is from interest payments, though it’s not clear if that is simple interest on financial assets or something more complex.
From 2015 through 2019, Trump earned $86 million in capital gains. The source of these gains isn’t clear, but it’s well known that Trump makes a lot of money by licensing his name for use on commercial properties and other types of products. There’s no capital gain listed for 2020, for reasons unknown.
For most Americans, the main source of income is wages, otherwise known as the paycheck you earn for going to a job. Not Trump. His wage income was $14,141 in 2015 and a paltry $978 in 2016. Once he became president, his wage income jumped to nearly $400,000, because of his presidential salary. Trump said he didn’t need the money and would donate his presidential pay to various federal agencies.
Add it up, and Trump’s income from those sources was about $147 million for those six years, or $24.6 million per year. That would have placed Trump among the top 0.1% of earners and garnered a tax bill of millions each year.
Yet Trump paid just $1.8 million in income taxes, or $300,000 per year. As a percentage of those three income sources, that’s just 1.2%. In 2020, Trump paid no income tax. In 2016 and 2017, he paid just $750. President Joe Biden, by comparison, paid $150,000 on $568,000 in income in 2021, for an effective tax rate of 26%.
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Unlike most people, Trump uses massive losses to whittle his tax bill to nearly nothing. Offsetting his $147 million in income for those six years is $221 million in losses, for net income during those six years of -$52 million, or a loss of around $8.7 million per year. But Trump almost certainly does not end up $8.7 million poorer every year, as the numbers suggest. Instead, he spreads business losses across many years, as the tax code allows, to offset income in years when he may have endured no losses at all.
Some of those business losses are doubtless legit. Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel, for instance, reportedly lost $70 million during the four years he was president. Those losses could help offset Trump’s income for years into the future, keeping his tax bill low. Trump, who takes pride in his business acumen, says the report of losses is not accurate, but his company is private and doesn’t have to report its numbers publicly.
The biggest question regarding Trump’s taxes is whether he overstates or invents business losses to avoid paying taxes even more. There are many ways Trump could do this, such as inflating the cost of maintenance or other expenses at his properties or using loans as income and then defaulting on them. Trump’s finances are housed in a trust that includes more than 500 business entities, making his tax reporting extremely complex. Many tax experts say an underfunded IRS is woefully outgunned against wealthy filers like Trump whose lawyers and accountants can create endless streams of money to follow and simply exhaust IRS auditors.
One of the Congressional reports, by the Joint Committee on Taxation, raised a slew of questions about the IRS’s deferential handling of Trump’s tax filings while Trump was president. The committee criticized the IRS for accepting the accuracy of Trump’s filings without question and for failing to appoint specialists to examine unusual elements of Trump’s returns. The committee also listed several red-flag items the IRS should examine more closely, including the validity of a $105 million loss carried over from one year to another and unsubstantiated charitable deductions of at least $21 million.
The House Ways and Means Committee says it will soon release Trump’s complete returns for 2015 through 2020, which will give tax sleuths reams of information that will help piece together Trump’s broader tax strategy. Those returns will most likely list the sources for all of his claimed business losses, which will help establish whether they’re legitimate or not.
The publication of Trump’s tax returns, which took years and involved several court challenges, is a political bonanza for Democrats, who certainly don’t mind embarrassing Trump just as his political fortunes are dimming. But Trump’s tax controversies also highlight some gaps Congress could close if it chooses to act. One thing Congress could do is pass a law requiring the IRS to audit every president's tax returns, instead of merely abiding by internal policy that any given president could push back on. The House of Representatives quickly passed such a bill on Dec. 22, but the Senate is unlikely to get to it this year, which means a reboot for the measure in 2023. Trump’s taxes also revive important questions of tax fairness, such as the lower tax rates on capital gains that are the main source of income for many wealthy people than on the labor income middle-class workers rely on.
The Trump returns also make public the fact that Trump has probably enjoyed very favorable IRS treatment for years, probably well before he became president. That doesn’t mean anybody will necessarily prosecute Trump for tax fraud, but the IRS is now in the position of having to prove it’s not a lapdog that rolls over when an insistent president puts on the pressure. The IRS will now appoint all the specialists necessary to properly audit Trump’s complicated returns, which could cost Trump a lot of money if the agency disallows millions in deductions. Trump will never be poor, but he always knew that a public glimpse at his tax returns would make him less rich.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman
President Joe Biden has pulled at least 1.9 million additional wage-cutting workers from poor countries, more than reversing the temporary gain under President Donald Trump, according to government data reported by the Center for Immigration Studies
OPEN BORDERS IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES FOR LEGALS DEPRESSED. IS IT WORKING?
70% OF ALL SILICON VALLEY TECH WORKERS ARE FOREIGN BORN. TYPICALLY FROM INDIA. WHEN THESE WORKERS ARRIVE, THE FIRST THING THEY DO IS SEND FOR THEIR EXTENDED FAMILIES.
Data: Elites Use Migration to Replace Unwanted Americans
President Joe Biden has pulled at least 1.9 million additional wage-cutting workers from poor countries, more than reversing the temporary gain under President Donald Trump, according to government data reported by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Biden’s high-migration policies have also contributed to the loss of 2.1 million working Americans who have quit the workforce amid disease, inflation, low wages, bad working conditions, and government disregard, according to the December 21 report by CIS research director Steven Camarota.
The report noted:
In November 2022, there were 29.6 million immigrants (legal and illegal together) working in the United States — 1.9 million more than in November 2019, before the pandemic.
The 29.6 million immigrant workers in November of this year was one million above the long-term trend in the pre-Covid growth rate of immigrant workers — [so] immigrant workers are not “missing”.
In contrast to immigrants, there were 2.1 million fewer U.S.-born Americans working in November 2022 than in November 2019, before the pandemic.
…
In November of this year, there were 44.9 million working-age [emphasis added] U.S.-born Americans not in the labor force — nearly 10 million more than in 2000.
The U.S.-born working-age population has increased in size since 2000, but if their labor force participation rate was what it was in 2000, there would be 6.5 million more Americans in the labor force.
“The availability of immigrant labor allows us as a society to ignore the plight of all those [Americans] on the economic sidelines,” Camarota told Breitbart News:
There are all kinds of Americans who were working just until two years ago, that are sitting on the sidelines now. … Some of them are young, and they’ve just been out for a little bit. Some have been out for a long time and will never get back. For men, we’re not likely to get back to the labor-force participation rate of the 1960s or even the 1980s. But if it returned to what it was in in the 2000s, that would be six million more workers.
The flood of immigrant labor minimizes the economic pressure on government and business to get American men and women back to work, he added:
It seems extremely unlikely that we will undertake the difficult task of reforming the welfare and disability systems, of trying to retrain people, trying to re-instill the value of work, of trying to help people get off drugs and alcohol … as long as businesses are successful in bringing in foreign workers and foreign countries [such as Cuba and Venezuela] are so successful in … using immigration as a [political] safety valve.
It would be a problem [getting sidelined Americans back to work] because it involves everything from opioid addiction and obesity to people with criminal records, to people who are dependent on welfare and disability and so forth. Trying to reform all that is a Herculean task. It’s just easier to bring in foreign workers
“The left wing has made the word ‘replacement’ a bad word, he said. “All these people that are calling for more immigration are saying, in effect, ‘Look, we need to replace these American workers who are not in the labor force.'”
The “hire migrants” message is being pushed by Biden’s deputies, including labor secretary Marty Walsh and commerce secretary Gina Raimondo.
“The thing that’s underpinning inflation still — that’s driving inflation still — is this tight labor market” that allows Americans to bargain for higher wages, Raimondo told Axios.com on December 20. “Immigration is a [policy] lever … We’re down a million immigrants a year — that’s a workforce that we need.”
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo speaks during an address at Brown University, March 15, 2022, in Providence, Rhode Island (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
The message is also being pushed by influential elites. Camarota pointed to a December 19 article in the establishment outlet Foreign Affairs, where two activist professors at Harvard University and Dartmouth College called for more use of immigrants because they can help cut inflation by working for lower wages:
There is something else that U.S. policymakers could do to battle inflation, however. They could expand immigration for both skilled and less skilled workers to boost the supply capacity of the U.S. economy. More immigration would help meet today’s excess demand for labor, which over time would limit wage and price growth.
…
In addition to offsetting the long-term decline of U.S. birthrates, foreign-born workers have the virtue of being much more mobile than native-born workers. When job growth picks up in one region or drops off in another, workers born abroad are the first to respond, helping reduce regional misallocations in the U.S. labor supply.
The two Harvard and Dartmouth authors lament the Trump-era decline of the illegal population — and the resulting wage increases and improved workplace conditions for Americans. They argued:
By the end of 2021, the share of entertainment, accommodation, and food service workers who were foreign born had slipped to 18.4 percent — a drop of more than 3.5 percentage points. Meanwhile, the job vacancy rate in the hospitality industry has increased markedly; in October 2022, 9.2 percent of jobs in accommodation and food services were vacant, well above the economy-wide rate of 6.3 percent.
The authors uncritically accept business claims that they have “an astonishing 10.3 million job openings.” They called for an enormous increase in the supply of temporary foreign blue-collar labor and of indentured white-collar workers:
A much higher cap [for H-2B laborers], as much as ten times the current one, should be authorized for 2023 … Last academic year, there were 914,095 such international students in the United States. This coming spring, why not congratulate every one of these foreign-born students who graduates with the gift of a new H-1B visa?
The article downplays the inflow of roughly 1.5 million work-ready people through the southern border in 2022.
The professor’s article exemplifies the elites’ ruthless post-2016 divorce from ordinary Americans. The authors even reject the hope of moving Americans back into the labor force, saying in their subheadline, “Only Foreign Workers Can Alleviate U.S. Labor Shortages.”
“Expanding immigration could also be a political winner,” the two authors gushed, despite much contradictory evidence that politicians understand.
They even lament the gains for U.S. workers for Trump and complained his politics led to “an increasingly native [non-immigrant] workforce.”
The two wealthy authors also ignored the potential for automation, or trade with low-wage countries, and the many downsides of betting on indentured foreign workers for national security and economic growth.
Aided by the government’s migration programs, many U.S. sectors prefer to use cheap and disposable migrant workers instead of hiring well-paid Americans to operate labor-saving machines:
Foreign companies, however, are developing the productivity-boosting technology that U.S. investors ignore:
“Compared with their 1980–1982 level, non-college men’s relative earnings have followed a consistent downward trend over the last 40 years, despite periodic real earnings gains,” said a 2022 study by Pinghui Wu at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:
For many workers, a job not only offers financial security, it also affirms their status, which is tied to their position relative to their age peers and many social outcomes … the results indicate that changes in relative earnings account for 44 percent of the total growth in labor force exit among non-college men during the 1980–2019 period. This finding suggests that deteriorating social status is a plausible key factor driving prime-age men’s declining labor force participation.
Immigration “decouples [a nation’s economic] capital from its own country, from its own people,” Camarota noted, adding that the rush of new migrants is also imposing extra burdens on Americans’ schools, communities, and social services:
Those calling for more immigration to fill jobs must at least acknowledge that the number of legal and illegal immigrants is already at a record 48.4 million. One-in-seven U..S residents is now an immigrant, and that’s just slightly below the record set in 1890, 122 years ago. Those numbers have profound implications for the nation’s schools and healthcare and physical infrastructure, to say nothing of whether we can actually assimilate all of them.
“If you’re just thinking about immigration as an economic issue, you miss what’s happening in schools and across the host of social issues,: he added.
Extraction Migration
Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.
This policy floods the labor market and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to older investors, coastal billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.
Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.
This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.
Outside government, migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.
This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
But the progressive-backed, colonialism-like migration policy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.
Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and to the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
White House Creates New Migration Paths Without OK from Congress
President Joe Biden’s deputies are redirecting their chaotic flood of illegal economic migrants into quiet, quasi-legal pipelines while they lift the Title 42 border barrier, perhaps as early as Wednesday.
The plan could quickly deliver hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans into the U.S. economy, regardless of Congress’ annual caps on migration.
“How can we build a lawful pathway for individuals so that they don’t have to traverse dangerous terrain in the hands of smugglers, but rather, [so] we can prequalify them [for entry],” the Cuban-born border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, told the El Paso Matters newspaper on December 15. He continued:
We can vet and screen them beforehand [outside the United States], assess their eligibility, and then have them travel safely to the United States to ports of entry in the interior by plane, which is what we’ve seen in a tremendously successful program for [24,000] Venezuelans.
The administration is “trying to change the way immigration policy is made without consulting Congress,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Congress has set a limit of roughly one million immigrants each year, said Krikorian:
They are trying to see if they can get away with the kind of thing that the Executive [branch] got away with the [constitutional] war-making power. The [constitutional requirement of a] declaration of war is now an archaic thing like something of Edward Gibbon [1776 author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] … What they would like is to effect the same kind of de-facto constitutional change without having anybody actually vote on it.
Mayorkas is allowing “pseudo-legal immigration because he’s using the pretense that it is legal,” said Rosemary Jenks, the director of government affairs for NumbersUSA. “The sky’s the limit in Mayorkas’ mind because he’s an open-borders zealot,” she added.
Mayorkas’s new asylum and parole pipelines are already operational, likely illegal, and corrupt — and they also offer Americans little except lower wages and higher rents.
Since the 1990s, the federal government’s migration policy has forced down Americans’ wages. It has also boosted rents and housing prices, and it has reduced native-born Americans’ clout in local and national elections. The policy has also pushed many native-born Americans out of jobs and careers in a wide variety of fields — even as it has inflated corporate profits, real-estate values, and Wall Street.
Mayorkas and White House deputies have been briefing sympathetic reporters on their new strategy to convert illegal migration into quasi-legal pipelines.
The Wall Street Journal reported on December 19:
For migrants of some nationalities, the administration is planning to offer an alternative path into the U.S., allowing them to apply through an online portal for permission to fly to the U.S., where they can live on temporary humanitarian grounds and apply for asylum. The administration created such an immigration program for Venezuelan migrants in October, and it is expected to be expanded to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
Some migrants will also be permitted to apply for asylum at legal land border crossings, though the administration will likely require them to register for an appointment in advance by filling out their information on a mobile application called CBP1, according to people familiar with their thinking. It couldn’t be determined how many migrants would be permitted to enter the U.S. using either pathway.
In November, Mayorkas and his deputies shut down most border crossing by Venezuelans — but offered free “immigration parole” entry to 24,000 Venezuelans who apply at U.S. embassies.
ABC News reported on December 13:
The Biden administration is solidifying plans to slash the number of migrants who would qualify for asylum at the southern border while opening up new, narrow pathways for some would-be migrants to apply while still in their home countries, four sources familiar with the plan said.
Among the proposals under strong consideration are new programs for Haitians, Nicaraguans and Cubans to apply for humanitarian parole from their home countries, three U.S. officials said. The pathways for those migrants would be similar to a program launched this fall that admitted 24,000 Venezuelans who could prove they would be sponsored in the U.S. while denying entry to the vast majority of Venezuelans arriving at the border.
The Department of Homeland Security is also planning new training for asylum officers who interview migrants crossing the border, the three officials said. They would be instructed to let migrants enter the U.S. to pursue protections if they qualify under the international Convention Against Torture, a much higher bar than “credible fear”] previously required for asylum
Axios reported on December 12:
The new rule is still in the process of being finalized but would lead to people being considered ineligible for asylum (as was previously reported by Axios) unless they meet any of the following criteria:
Applied for legal pathways to the U.S. like refugee status or new parole processes, such as the one created for Venezuelans in October.
First sought protection in a country they had to travel through to get to the U.S.
Scheduled a meeting at a legal entry point ahead of time through an app run by border authorities — a brand new process.
Are facing extreme circumstances, such as a medical emergency or other immediate, severe harm.
The administration’s promised fixes are causing more of the problem. On December 5, for example, Mayorkas claimed his easy-migration policies are caused by the international migration that he accelerates:
Now, what we are experiencing at the border today is unique because of the fact that what we are experiencing is not something exclusive to our Southern border, it is not something exclusive to our great partner and friend to the south, Mexico; it is something that the entire hemisphere is experiencing. We are seeing migration that is unprecedented in scope.
Let me take Venezuela as an example, a country with a population of about 25 [million] to 27 million people. More than 7 million people have left Venezuela. Colombia is hosting approximately 2.4 million Venezuelans. Chile is hosting more than a million. Costa Rica, a small country, is hosting I think between 2 and 5 percent of its population is now Nicaraguan. We’re seeing a movement of people throughout the hemisphere and, quite frankly, around the world.
Venezuelan-born Jhopsef Stiven is just one of many migrants who quit their foreign jobs to migrate up to the United States because President Biden and Mayorkas opened the doors. The bookclubofchicago.org told his story in a December 7 report:
One day, that friend [in Chile] asked Stiven if he’d like to go with him to the United States to get a better job. Stiven worried the trip would be too difficult for just two people. And he was doing well in Chile., he thought. But his friend persisted and said they would be part of a larger group heading north, he remembered.
Stiven decided to go for it. From what he’d heard, there were opportunities in the United States for someone like him to find a job making enough to buy a car, a home and support a family, he said. With a suitcase and a bus ticket, Stiven started the six-week journey to America.
…
“When we were on the bus leaving Texas, I felt very happy. I had achieved my goal. And now that I was leaving Texas, I would have more opportunities in Chicago for work,” Stiven said.
…
Stiven said he’d like to save money for an apartment. For now, he is passing on what he knows to help other [migrants] at the shelter get settled — where to look for a job, where in the city folks speak Spanish.
Mayorkas and his progressive allies want more migrants, even though they are trying to suppress the cartels’ often-lethal migrant-smuggling business. So they are building a taxpayer-funded and multinational rival network that is intended to smuggle many migrants safely past the cartels and quietly past the majority of Americans who oppose the labor-smuggling policy established by the alliance of business elites and progressive ideologues.
The Mayorkas network first gets migrants into the United States via the parole and asylum pipelines and then distributes them around the country via emergency funding.
For example, Mayorkas’ officials are also leasing more buses and shelter spaces to quickly and quietly move many more migrants from the border into American workplaces and housing. This uncapped goal is hidden under Mayorkas’ “safe, orderly, and humane” slogan.
The Wall Street Journal reported on December 13:
Officials are planning for a worst-case scenario of up to 20,000 migrants crossing the border a day once the policy is lifted, according to people familiar with their thinking. Few officials expect a surge to grow that large, the people said, but the benchmark helps government agencies ensure they have enough people, buses and other equipment to care for and transport migrants once they are in government custody.
Mayorkas’ network then legalizes migrants with pro-migration judges and lax administration policies, such as the quick distribution of work permits and long-term visas, via the Temporary Protect Status program.
These taxpayer-funded operations are backed up by a huge and expensive network of shelters, lawyers, and training centers that are funded by business-backed donors.
But Mayorkas’ uses of the parole and asylum loopholes are likely illegal.
For example, the Biden administration has refused to detain economic migrants who simply claim they need asylum from oppression by foreign governments. The elite-touted policy allows huge numbers of asylum seekers to quickly get U.S. jobs, pay off smuggling debts, and establish themselves in the United States while they wait years for asylum hearings and potential legal appeals.
The Supreme Court heard a case in late November where elected GOP officials said the administration is violating federal law by not detailing all asylum seekers until their cases are decided. Biden’s deputies argued they do not have enough resources to detain the migrants — and one week later, asked Congress for another $3.5 billion to help catch and release the migrants into U.S. jobs.
Similarly, Mayorkas is using the immigration parole loophole to move hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States, even though the parole rule was created for occasional, individual emergencies. “They don’t even articulate any public benefit to this,” said Christopher Hajec, the director of litigation at the D.C.-based Immigration Law Reform Institute. “It’s got to be individualized [and show it] benefits the public … but they don’t articulate anything,” he told Breitbart News.
A lawsuit against the Mayorkas parole pipeline has been filed in Florida.
Mayorkas has also established a process that allows Mexico-based migrants to file requests to enter and work in the United States, with the help of U.S.-funded pro-migration advocates in Mexico.
The new program — which seems to use parole and the asylum loopholes — is being hidden by the administration, even though it may have allowed entry to 100,000 migrants, including many young men from Mexico. For Mayorkas, “it’s the ultimate silent way to accomplish his objectives … they’re not recorded as apprehensions,” said George Fishman, a former immigration law staffer in the House.
Theoretically, the process allows migrants to not pay the cartels’ border tax — dubbed the “Piso” But the migrants are reportedly been forced to pay for access to Mayorkas’ pipeline — or are allowed to buy their way to the front of the line. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on December 11:
Multiple sources have told the Union-Tribune about similar issues of extortion and corruption in the temporary program for processing some asylum seekers … None of them were willing to be named, citing serious safety concerns related to organized crime.
Mayorkas’ deputies downplay the corruption in favor of more migration:
“The most important thing is that there is accessibility to a legal pathway. That was closed for quite a while,” [San Ysidro Port Director Mariza Marin ] said. “It’s difficult for CBP [Customs and Border Protection agency], being a domestic agency, to change the threat picture and what goes on in Tijuana.”
The complex migration process helps to hide the scale of the post-1990 migration from ordinary Americans.
Since January 2021, for example, Mayoorkas’ variety of legal, illegal, and quasi-legal routes has added roughly 3 million migrants to the U.S. population. The 2023 inflow may be double the 3.6 million 2021 births in the United States.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Mayorkas and his allies want to protect Americans from the pocketbook damage caused by their cellphone-amplified welcome for millions of foreign economic migrants.
For example, Mayorkas announced in early December that he would welcome another 65,000 H-2B laborers into the economy even though he welcomes as 150,000 additional migrant workers each month. Also, the White House announced its support for a bill that would dramatically raise the incentive for employers to hire cheap foreign graduates for white-collar jobs.
Extraction Migration
Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. But officials want rapid results, so they also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.
This policy floods the labor market, and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to older investors, coastal billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.
Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.
This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take career risks by trying to grow exports to poor countries.
Outside government, migration also undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by Extraction Migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites and it alienates young people. It radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it gives a moral excuse for wealthy elites and progressives to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society, such as drug addicts.
This diversify-and-rule investor strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives. They wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into an economic empire of jealous identity groups overseen by progressive hall monitors. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Silicon Valley Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
But the progressive-backed, colonialism-like migration policy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.
Progressives hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that economic migrants are political victims, that migration helps migrants more than Americans, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, businesses, and GOP donors hide the pocketbook impact. They prefer to divert voters’ attention toward border chaos, welfare spending, terror-linked migrants, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
Study: Adult Children Still Rely on Parents for Financial Help as Cost of Living Skyrockets
The skyrocketing cost of living has caused adult children to rely on financial support from their parents, according to a study from the personal finance website Credit Karma.
The study, which was conducted by Qualtrics on behalf of the personal finance website, found that of 1,008 respondents, nearly one-third of parents (31 percent) still provide their adult children with financial support beyond the basics.
Of the 31 percent who provide support to their adult children, over half (51 percent) said they allowed their children, sometimes multiple, to live at home. Another 48 percent also paid some or all of the adult children’s monthly bills, such as cell phone, utilities, and car payments. Additionally, 24 percent of the parents who support their adult children will regularly give them allowance or checks.
“What used to be paying your kid’s cell phone bill every few months has now turned into a much more extensive set of expenses for many parents,” said Courtney Alev, consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma. “While this feels like a necessary and important expense, it’s essential that parents do what they can to first take care of themselves financially, before offering financial support to their adult children.”
Due to the parents offering support for their children, many of them feel the impact of supporting their children on their own finances. Of the parents who support their children, 81 percent said they feel the effect, such as on their own lifestyle (50 percent), which has made 49 percent of them need to cut back on living expenses.
In fact, roughly 40 percent said it had limited their retirement savings, while it is making 30 percent of the parents work longer and prolong their retirement, and 25 percent said they are taking on more debt.
Like with anything, make a budget for your income and expenses, factoring in savings, debt repayment, and, if possible, contributions to a retirement fund,” added. “Once you’ve done that work, see how much you have leftover to feasibly help your adult kid(s) and set that expectation with them.
Putting the burden of helping adult children caused 65 percent of the respondents to say the need to help has caused them mental stress, while it caused 69 percent to have financial stress.
Despite all of this, when the parents were asked why they continue to help, 45 percent said they would because it is their “duty” as parents, while 39 percent said it was due to inflation and the rising cost of living. Thirty-one percent said their children could not find sufficient employment, and 18 percent said the skyrocketing rent costs push them to help out their children financially.
Alev offered advice by stating, “You might even consider setting an expiration date to give your adult children a timeline for when they need to be back on their feet.”
The survey was conducted by Qualtrics in the United States for Credit Karma from October 26 to 31 among 1,008 adults ages 18 and older.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
Silicon Valley Waves White Flag on DACA Amnesty: ‘Extremely Unlikely’ to Pass in Lame Duck Congress
The lobbying arm of Silicon Valley’s tech investors, represented by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us, admits it is “extremely unlikely” that an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens can pass the lame-duck Congress.
For weeks, Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) have floated a plan that would give amnesty to at least two million illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program while also opening the labor market to more foreign competition.
The plan sought to trade illegal and legal immigration expansion provisions for big pay raises for the nation’s Border Patrol agents who have struggled in recent years to deal with record-breaking illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico border.
While Sinema’s local newspaper Arizona Central reported that the plan is “dead for now,” Big Tech’s lobbying arm — which sought to flip ten Senate Republicans — is surrendering on the issue, for now.
“Given the recent reports and developments, it seems extremely unlikely that Congress will pass protections for DACA recipients and Dreamers into law by the end of this year,” FWD.us President Todd Schulte wrote in a statement:
This is terrible, entirely unacceptable, and devastating — for our entire country, but more acutely for the two million people and their millions of family members who are being failed by this country. [Emphasis added]
…
We want to thank and commend Senators Sinema and Tillis for their serious commitment to trying to find a bipartisan compromise pairing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and border security that could secure enough votes to be signed into law. This was the closest we have come to passing meaningful legislation of this nature in recent years; to claim otherwise is wrong. [Emphasis added]
For years, Zuckerberg’s FWD.us has lobbied Washington, DC, lawmakers to pass an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens and expand legal immigration to help corporations bring in more foreign workers.
In 2013, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis stated that the “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan would “slightly” push down wages for American workers. Another CBO analysis, published in 2020, stated that “immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.”
Other research finds current legal immigration to the U.S. results in more than $530 billion worth of lost wages for Americans.
Every year, the U.S. gives green cards to more than a million foreign nationals who can eventually sponsor an unlimited number of foreign relatives for green cards — a process known as “chain migration.” In addition, more than a million are brought to the U.S. on temporary work visas to take American jobs, and millions of illegal aliens are arriving at the southern border annually. Many are being released into the U.S. interior where they can secure work permits.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Business, Progressives Stall Omnibus to Kill Title 42 Border Barrier
A business-backed coalition of progressive groups helped to stall the 2023 omnibus funding bill the night before the Friday deadline, rather than let Democratic Senators face a public vote on preserving the Title 42 border barrier.
The Title 42 barrier is set to be lifted in the new few days, so opening the U.S. border to a mass inflow of economic migrants.
“URGENT ACTION: The Senate is about to vote on Title 42, which has illegally prevented asylum seekers from seeking safety,” said an evening tweet by the pro-migration ACLU. “We all need to stop what we’re doing and tell our senators NOW: Vote NO. ”
The demand was backed up by Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, a group of West Coast investors who are leading and funding the progressive push for maximum migration into Americans’ workplaces and housing.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website. But copies exist at other sites. The 2013 founders included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and investors such as John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, Matt Cohler at Benchmark, and Breyer Capital CEO Jim Breyer.
The ACLU, as well as several groups backed by FWD.us, are part of the Welcome With Dignity coalition, which is also pushing for the removal of the Title 42 barrier. The coalition says “We envision a United States that welcomes all people seeking safety with dignity.”
The coalition released a telephone script for supporters to call Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has strongly supported the inflow of more cheap workers and shared-occupancy renters into New York City:
Currently, Senator [Mike] Lee [R-UT] is attempting to include an amendment (No. 6563) to the FY23 appropriations bill that would decimate the right to seek asylum at the border, by requiring the reinstatement of the mass expulsions policy that has resulted in widespread violence against refugees, like Title 42. This amendment is likely to get a vote at a 50-vote threshold and we need your help to not allow this amendment to get a vote.
The 2023 funding bill needs to be passed by Friday — or else Congress will have to vote to continue the 2022 budget until the disagreement over Title 42 is resolved in the new year by the GOP-led House and the Democrat-led Senate.
If Democrats had a solid caucus ready to vote against the Lee amendment, they could vote it down with the aid of Vice-President Kamala Harris.
But that vote would leave all Democrats facing attack ads in 2024 blaming them for the tsunami of poor job-seeking migrants that is expected once Biden and his deputies lift the Title 42 barrier.
The flood could deliver millions of migrants — or more than one migrant for every American child born in 2023. The wave of migrants would cut wages, spike rents, and crowd schools and local aid programs that are needed by tens of millions of Americans already suffering from high inflation.
So Schumer is trying to avoid a majority vote, or schedule a vote that would require a 60-vote margin to pass, so enabling several at-risk Democrats to fake support for the Title 42 barrier.
“Mike Lee wants approval of Title 42 amendment set at a 51-vote threshold,” said a tweet from CNN. Democrats “are worried he’d have the votes for adoption to omnibus. …. Schumer could shut down debate but that’d require 60 votes.”
The migrant flood is already rising because Biden’s border chief, the pro-migration, Cuban-born immigrant Alejandro Mayorkas, refuses to apply the Title 42 barriers to countries that still refuse to accept deported migrants.
Mayorkas has not released the migration numbers for November. But in October, he allowed 152,000 migrants to cross and used Title 42 to block only 78,000 migrants, or just one-third of the total. In addition, Mayorkas has done little to stop roughly 50,000 migrants from sneaking across the border each month.
Democrats complained about the voting dispute that delayed the passage of the 2023 omnibus bill. The bill includes little to protect the U.S. border — but at least $3 billion to move migrants to U.S. workplaces, and $45 billion to help Ukraine protect its border from Russian infantry.
Pro-migration advocates are hoping the GOP Senators will leave town, so allowing the Democrats to win a majority vote. One advocate attached his message to a fake Twitter account satirizing Sen. Mike Lee.
But many GOP Senators are speaking out against Biden’s refusal to protect American families from a flood of cheap migrant workers.
Sen. James Lankford (R-KS) pushed for a majority vote:
This call for a Title 42 vote is backed up by establishment Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT):
Immigration reformers, such as NumbersUSA, called for GOP Senators to fight for the Title 42 barrier:
House Republicans are also warning about a failure to preserve the Title 42 barrier:
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