IMF Official: Joe Biden’s Open Border Is Hurting Americans’ Wages - BUT THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF THE GLOBALISTS' OPEN BORDER AGENDA!
“Abundant labor coming across the border” is reducing the wages paid to American employees, said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
“Not everybody who crosses the border adds positively to the economy,” the Bulgarian-born Georgieva told the media at the IMF’s spring meeting, which was held with its sister organization, the World Bank, adding:
But that labor supply also gave to the United States [overall economy an] advantage: Wages are not pushing up, because there is no strong pressure because of lack of labor.
Not counting inflation, the annual growth in average hourly earnings has dropped to 4.1 percent in March 2024, down from 5.9 percent during the coronavirus turmoil on March 22, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But after counting inflation, wages in President Joe Biden’s migration-inflated economy have remained flat or dropped — especially for the many young Americans who are facing rising rents.
Migration also spurs inflation, chiefly by driving up housing prices amid Biden’s welcome for more than 7 million southern migrants and at least 2 million legal migrants. “Inflation is down but not gone,” Georgieva said at the meeting.
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@truthsetsufree369 via StoryfulBut cheap labor is also very good for employers, investors, government tax collectors, and bankers because it grows the number of revenue-generating workers, consumers, and taxpayers — even though Americans’ wages remain flat or decline. That way the overall economy, Wall Street values, and the size of government, all grow from migration — even when Americans’ wages drop.
The mismatch “creates a domestic political problem,” Georgieva admitted. Indeed, many polls that show the majority of Americans reject Biden’s high-migration, low-wage “Bidenomics” economy.
Many business leaders, government agencies, and academics admit that wages are reduced by migration. They include independent academics, the National Academies of Science, the Congressional Budget Office, executives, more academics, New York Times reporters, state officials, unions, more business executives, lobbyists, employees, the Wall Street Journal, federal economists, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs again, oil drillers, Wall Street analysts, fired professionals, legislators, construction workers, New York Times subscribers, Robert Rubin, and even by the Bank of Ireland.
Worse, the flood of cheap workers also drags down the productivity growth needed for growing middle-class wealth.
Migration allows companies to generate profits from low-productivity jobs, such as labor-intensive manufacturing, or restraint jobs.
The flood of cheap workers also reduces companies’ incentive to buy productivity-boosting machinery or to invest in risky ideas. Instead, they can profit by using their subsidized workers to operate old machinery that would otherwise be sold to companies in developing countries.
In contrast, China opposes immigration and is investing heavily in wage-boosting, high-tech factories.
Democrats help companies profit from migration by forcing local and federal taxpayers to pay the welfare and housing costs that keep the migrant workers from squalor. In April, Bloomberg reported on the economic difficulties facing Ukrainian parole migrants who cannot get city-paid housing:
“I couldn’t stretch my pay, not just for an apartment but even for a room,” said Marina Kostenko, a former teacher from Odesa who moved to New York in 2022.
The 52-year-old said she offered child-care services in exchange for housing, an arrangement that fell through on three different occasions, each time leaving her without a place to live.
The state of Massachusetts is using sales taxes to provide roughly $1 billion per year in housing subsidies for imported workers in 2024.
But the Democratic support for corporate migration also pushes many Americans out of major cities.
The flood of migrants inflates housing costs, pushing American families out of high-opportunity cities. WBH.org reported April 18:
A recent report by Boston Indicators found that Massachusetts lost a population about the size of Winchester. The staggering cost of housing in the Commonwealth is driving people out, and younger residents are feeling the squeeze.
“For younger buyers who want to get out of their rental apartment or maybe they’re starting a family, they need more space. …They’re going to look to communities where it’s more affordable,” said Boston Globe Business Columnist Shirley Leung on Boston Public Radio Thursday.
The concerning amount of people moving out across 2021 and 2022 — almost 23,000 — were between the ages 25 to 44. They were predominantly white, middle- and high-income earners and college-educated.
For decades, officials and lobbyists in New York City have used each new flood of migrants to suppress wages, spike rents, and push outspoken middle-class Americans out of the city.
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Annonymous Venezuelan Migrant“An international migration Ponzi scheme is the only thing that averts a demographic doom loop for cities like New York and San Francisco,” as Americans flee the Democrats’ huge and badly-run cities, urban studies expert Michael Lind wrote in the September 26 article for Compact Magazine.
The Berger Action Fund then poured $72 million into Democrat-aligned groups in 2021, more than $62 million of which went to groups running ads promoting Democrat candidates in the 2022 midterms and supporting President Biden’s agenda. Another $63 million followed in 2022.
Why?
UAW President Fain dines with billionaires, warmongers at White House reception for Japanese PM
As part of the state visit this week by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Biden held a lavish reception Wednesday at the White House.
The subject of the visit is incorporating Japan into American war plans against China, including integrating it into the AUKUS (Australia, UK, US) anti-China military pact. “The core of our global partnership is our bilateral defense and security cooperation under the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, which is stronger than ever,” an official US statement on the visit declared. “We affirm that our Alliance remains the cornerstone of peace, security, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.”
In plain language, two colonial powers, the US and Japan, which set the Asia-Pacific region ablaze in the 20th century, including through Japan’s invasion of China prior to and during WWII and the American wars in Korea and Vietnam, are now joining forces to reinforce their imperialist domination over the region, including against nuclear-armed China.
The imperialist aims of the visit was shown by the attendance at Wednesday’s reception. It consisted almost entirely of billionaires and warmongers. This included, in addition to leaders of the American military-intelligence apparatus, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Tim Cook of Apple …
… and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain.
Fain’s presence was the natural outcome of the role of both Fain personally and the trade union apparatus as a whole. This is in, fact, Fain’s fifth public appearance with Biden since last November, including his presence as a guest at the State of the Union Address last month, a warmongering speech where Biden acknowledged Fain as a “great friend and labor leader. ”
The Socialist Equality Party’s presidential candidate Joe Kishore wrote in a statement on Twitter/X:
Fain’s participation in the event expresses, through the ceremonial pomp of a state dinner, the Democrats’ strategy of “corporatism,” that is, the integration of the trade union apparatus into the corporate-state-military apparatus.
The immediate issue is the escalating conflict with China. As part of the preparation for war, Japan is set to join the AUKUS military pact between the US, Britain and Australia. Both the genocide in Gaza and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine are seen by the ruling class as part of a global war that includes, centrally, a confrontation with China.
The role of Fain & Co. in the union apparatus is to discipline the working class, suppress the class struggle and back the ruling class war policy. When the UAW endorsed Biden in January, UAW members protesting the genocide were dragged away by the Secret Service as Fain stood by.
Fain said to Biden that it was “time for us to go to war and put the power of the membership behind you.” The UAW president was in fact pledging to Biden to send workers to fight and die in wars on behalf of US imperialism.
The war abroad is at the same time a war on the working class at home. The massive sums allocated to the military must be paid for through intensified exploitation and the gutting of social programs and infrastructure.
In the months before the outbreak of World War II, Leon Trotsky once observed: “In periods of acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the trade unions aim to become masters of the mass movement in order to render it harmless. …In time of war or revolution, when the bourgeoisie is plunged into exceptional difficulties, trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers.”
Shawn Fain is one of the prominent representatives of this process today. His political star is rapidly rising, and a government position may well be in his near future.
But whatever the case may be, Fain has been, from the beginning, a creature of the state. A career official with no connection to the rank-and-file, he was first elevated to power under an unprecedented crisis in the UAW bureaucracy, which was both decimated by a series of corruption indictments and widely hated by the rank-and-file after decades of pro-company sellouts.
The government intervention into the UAW was designed to reinforce the control of the apparatus over the rank-and-file. Fain won election in a sham vote where more workers failed to receive ballots than actually voted, in an act of vote suppression designed to circumvent the membership and keep the election under the control of the bureaucracy.
Fain received the key support of pseudo-left groupings like the Democratic Socialists of America and Labor Notes, who promoted him as the beginning of a new era of democratic renewal within the bureaucracy. At the same time, they opposed the candidacy of Will Lehman, a socialist autoworker running on a platform of abolishing the apparatus.
The pseudo-left also rode Fain’s coattails into the apparatus. Labor Notes editor Jonah Furman was hired as Fain’s communications director, and several members of the Labor Notes-backed Unite All Workers for Democracy faction were elevated into the top leadership.
But Fain is only a representative of a broader process. In the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien was elevated to the presidency, likewise with the support of the pseudo-left. After pretending to prepare the membership for national strike action at UPS, his administration pushed through a contract last year which is now being used to lay off tens of thousands and close 200 facilities.
In one industry after another, Biden is joining forces with the union bureaucracy to impose sellout contracts, to limit or prevent strikes and to pave the way for mass layoffs. Where workers have rebelled against sellout contracts, such as in 2022 when railroaders rejected a Biden-brokered deal, he responded by banning strike action.
Meanwhile, in his speeches, Biden has increasingly referenced the so-called “Arsenal of Democracy”— in reality, the wartime alliance of US capitalism with the trade union officials to ban strikes during World War II, as the blueprint for his administration’s policies. In plain language, this means funneling money away from workers to the American war machine while placing workers under military-style discipline with the support of the bureaucracy.
The pseudo-left plays a critical role in this corporatist policy. Next weekend, Shawn Fain will travel to Chicago for Labor Notes’ biennial convention. Attendees will hear not only from Fain, but major Democratic Party politicians, such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
To confuse and disrupt opposition to war, especially to the genocide in Gaza, the pseudo-left has put forward “ceasefire” resolutions in the UAW and other trade unions. The aim is to present the union apparatus as a vehicle for the fight against war even when it rubs elbows with war criminals and billionaires while dining on prime rib at the White House.
Workers must draw the necessary conclusions. “The fight of workers against corporate exploitation requires the development of a rank-and-file rebellion against the apparatus,” Kishore wrote. “At the same time, the fight against war must be rooted in the industrial and political mobilization of the working class.”
The fight against war and the fight against exploitation at home, he continued, are “in reality, one war.” He continued: “In both fronts of this war, the union apparatus stands on the side of the corporations and the ruling class, against the workers.”
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Biden Calls for Increase in Taxes on the Rich
As President Joe Biden visited Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, he called for an increase in taxes on the rich.
“When I look at the economy, I don’t look at it through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago,” Biden said during his speech. “I look at it through the eyes of Scranton.”
Biden explained that he wanted to make the tax code fair, in order to allow regular American citizens to keep more money in their pockets.
In an attempt to make the tax code fairer, Biden suggested a 25% minimum tax rate for billionaires, while slamming former President Donald Trump for being a billionaire.
“Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values,” Biden said during his speech. “These are the competing visions for our economy that raise questions of fundamental fairness at the heart of this campaign.”
The upcoming 2024 presidential election will likely determine how much of the tax cuts established by Trump will remain in place, as many provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) are scheduled to expire by the end of 2025. Under the TCJA, individuals saw significant changes in their personal income taxes and estate taxes
t 1.4 million jobs would be added to the economy by 2025 as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Also included in the TCJA were provisions for small businesses, including a 20 percent pass-through-deduction and immediate expensing. Due to the tax cuts for many small businesses, many business owners were able to provide their employees with an increase in wages and bonuses.
Under the TCJA, wages increased by 4.9 percent in 2018 and 2019, workers in a lower income bracket experienced a 50 percent rise in their wages, and the median household income growth rose by $5,000, according to a report from Way and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO).
While Biden has vowed not to increase taxes on those making less than $400,000, a Biden victory would likely see taxes raised on middle-class Americans.