When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Friday, July 13, 2018
KEVIN McCARTHY - FOR THEIR GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRE PAYMASTERS, DEMS WILL VOTE TO ABOLISH ALL IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND FLOOD THE COUNTRY WITH ILLEGALS.... Isn't it already overrun by Mexico?
"Chairman of the DNC Keith Ellison was even spotted
wearing a shirt stating, "I don't believe in borders" written
in Spanish.
According to a new CBS news poll, 63 percent of Americans
in competitive congressional districts think those crossing
illegally should be immediately deported or arrested. This is
undoubtedly contrary to the views expressed by the
Democratic Party.
Their endgame is open borders, which has become evident
over the last eight years. Don't for one second let them
convince you otherwise." Evan Berryhill Twitter @EvBerryhill.
Kevin McCarthy: Dems Will Get to Vote to Abolish All Immigration Enforcement Before Midterms
GOP House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy says the Democrats will get to vote to abolish all interior immigration enforcement before the 2018 midterm elections.
As Breitbart News reported, House Democrats have crafted legislation that would abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency — the sole law enforcement unit tasked with arresting and deporting criminal illegal aliens.
If Democrats had their way and ICE had been abolished five years ago, back in 2013, there would have been at least 1.64 million illegal aliens — many of whom are convicted criminals — released into U.S. neighborhoods and communities rather than being deported, as Breitbart News reported.
On Thursday, McCarthy confirmed to NBC News that he will put the Democrats’ “abolish ICE” legislation up for a vote in the House before Congress’s August recess.
Though House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has not endorsed the abolish ICE bill, every Senate Democrat has already signed onto legislation that would end all border and immigration enforcement in a rebuke to President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Americans — even Democrat voters — are by a vast majority opposed to abolishing ICE. In the latest Harvard/Harris Poll, 3-in-4 swing voters said they opposed the Democrats’ plan to end all immigration enforcement across the U.S.
Likewise, nearly 60 percent of Democrats said they do not want ICE to be disbanded.
Meanwhile, ahead of the midterm elections, a majority of white, black, and Hispanic Americans say the U.S. needs stricter immigration enforcement as Trump has implemented.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. Chadwick Moore — Left for Dead in Danville: How Globalism Is Killing Working Class America
The city of Danville, Virginia sits in the bellybutton of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a hat-toss over the North Carolina border and about 85 miles northwest of Raleigh. It’s low hill country and Danville straddles the frothy, chocolate-milk waters of the Dan River. Downtown, once a booming trade district, today is a decomposed industrial husk, a tidy cluster of silent rectangles ensnared by broad, ghostly thoroughfares built for a time in the not-so-distant past when people and goods poured in and out of town.
Those days are gone, perhaps never to return.
The story of Danville is one echoed in countless communities across the country, a gutted middle class left for dead in the wake of sweeping international trade deals in Washington, applauded by liberal economists and a lockstep media portraying such policies as inevitable, ultimately good, and a win for the American consumer–a narrative usually coupled with condescending and disdainful attitudes toward displaced workers for a perceived inability to sprint ahead with the times.
Empty storefronts in the once-bustling downtown Danville, Virginia. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
As recently as the early 2000s, Danville’s top employer, textile manufacturer Dan River Mills, which specialized in bedding, sold 33 percent of production to Wal-Mart stores–the highest number federal law allows a retailer to buy from a single manufacturer–and held other lucrative contracts with K-Mart, producing Martha Stewart’s textile line.
It was an iconic American company. Within 20 years of incorporation, in 1882, Dan River Mills was the largest textile manufacturer in the South, and by 1909 produced annually 78 million yards of cloth.
“My parents raised four children working at the Dan River mill,” says Sonya Lewis, whose grandparents also worked for Dan River, on a recent Saturday evening while attending a memorial service for a friend at a Mexican restaurant in Danville.
“Growing up here, it was booming. It was a great place. I remember that everybody worked, everybody I went to school with, their parents worked,” she says.
Empty streets in downtown Danville on a Saturday afternoon. Before textile manufacturing defined the city’s economy, it was a hub of the tobacco trade. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
When Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993, business was so good that, even with technological innovations in manufacturing, Dan River Mills still had a labor shortage. The company acquired seven other manufacturing facilities in the area, employing 6,500 workers, according to Owen Voss, a former employee in Dan River’s corporate offices.
But Voss saw the writing on the wall when Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, a deal drafted by his predecessor, President George H.W. Bush. The following year the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a 50-year-old trade agreement aimed at reducing tariffs, was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO), which then included 125 nations and governed 90 percent of global trade.
“Bill Clinton killed manufacturing in the United States,” Voss, a gentle, soft-spoken middle-aged man and motorcycle enthusiast, says.“Dan River is a perfect example. It built this town, and NAFTA killed it.”
President Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at the White House on September 14, 1993. Behind him (left to right) is President Gerald Ford, House Speaker Thomas Foley of Washington, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, former President Jimmy Carter, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, former President George Bush, House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois, and Vice President Al Gore. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)
Since 2000, the year that China joined the WTO and six years after the NAFTA agreement was signed, the U.S. has lost an estimated 5 million manufacturing sector jobs, with 900,000 of those from the textile industry. Only one in five job losses in domestic textiles has been attributed to technological advancements in automation. Between 1997 and 2009, 650 textile plants, mostly in the South, have closed in the U.S.
Voss recalls the then-CEO of Dan River, Joseph Lanier Jr., passed around a petition to block NAFTA that was later sent to Clinton’s White House.
“My life, like everyone else’s, took a big dip,” says Voss. “The murder rate has tripled, gang activity is everywhere, suicides are up. My cousin committed suicide in 2010. He was laid off from Dan River and unable to find work and got into drugs. My nephew was murdered that same year, it had to do with drugs. He was 28. You couldn’t imagine any of this happening in the 90s. The middle class has moved to the lower class. What used to be a middle class neighborhood is now ‘the hood,’” he says.
A home on Danville’s north side, once a thriving suburban community where mill workers lived. Now, there are entire blocks of abandoned or unsound structures. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
In 2015, Danville’s median household income stood at $32,935, well below Virginia’s statewide average of $66,262. In 1990, the average income of Danville was $44,357 per household, when adjusted for inflation.
According to statistics from the Federal Reserve, as the population decreased by almost 20 percent between 1990 and 2014, the number of food stamp recipients in Danville nearly tripled from less than 5,000 in 1989 to nearly 13,000 today. That is more than a quarter of the population.
With the economic collapse, racial tensions are on the rise, an ugly development in a town that is 47 percent white and 48 percent black, where many recall the prosperous years of a harmonious, multi-racial middle class entwined in the same industry. Last year, the Ku Klux Klan announced a rally in Danville. It never materialized save for counter-protesters who showed up in response. This year, flyers for the KKK were seen circulating around town.
Danville sits in Virginia’s 5th Congressional district, a chunk of the state larger in area than New Jersey. Future president James Madison was the district’s first representative in Congress. The city, which by the 1800s was a prosperous tobacco trading center, would go down in history as the last capital of the Confederacy when Jefferson Davis fled here after the fall of Richmond and set up a temporary White House where, soon after, he surrendered to the Union.
A strip of boarded-up industrial spaces in downtown Danville, Virginia. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
In 1994, NAFTA passed with overwhelming support in Congress (mostly from Republicans) with both Virginia Senators and the 5th district’s Democratic Congressman, Lewis Payne, voting for the trade agreement. (Payne was re-elected the following year, but died in 1997). Virginia’s 5th has sent a Democrat representative to Congress each year since the 1880s, but flipped Republican in 2012, where it has remained since.
In 2006, after hemorrhaging jobs for years under the pressure from retailers to compete with cheap foreign products, the White Mill–Dan River’s main production facility–closed its doors for good. The company was acquired by Gujarat Heavy Chemicals, of India, and the remaining 500 workers were terminated. The 650,000 square foot gothic-revival structure had been in continual operation since opening in 1921, towering for generations over the landscape like a citadel.
The White Mill facility, the base of Dan River Mills’ operations, closed its doors in 2006 after hemorrhaging jobs for decades. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
Michael Stumo, the CEO of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nonprofit trade policy think tank, describes the myth that so-called free trade agreements are universally beneficial as having completely fallen apart in recent years.
“There’s a lot more losers than we thought. It’s starting to look like it might be a majority of losers if you’re not in New York City, San Francisco, and the like,” Stumo says. “Everything in between is being economically carpet-bombed.”
He calls NAFTA the model for several free trade agreements that have followed, particularly with China, which, despite the Washington and New York narrative of such deals being a sublime realization of true free market capitalism, are in reality anything but.
“When you have China, for example, subsidizing energy, free land, subsidized employment, low cost or free credit loans that become grants and can undercut you by half, that’s really big. It’s an unearned advantage because of subsidies.”
Sumo cites the formation of the WTO in 1995, which formalized previous trade parameters and deepened the globalist model of dissolving borders and displacing national sovereignty, as a follow-up to NAFTA.
“When China joined the WTO in 2000 with 1.3 billion people underemployed, it began pulling them out of the rice paddies, the farms, and rural areas, and putting them to work. The Chinese under-consume. They produce more than they consume, [in] a country that’s four and a half times as big as ours and relying on the American consumer to fund their path to wealth and doing so with a state-directed economy, which is different than communist, it’s a strategic mix of state capitalism with a little bit of private sector in it. We always thought communism would fail, but China found central planning 2.0 and is pretty good at it,” he says.
Today, somewhere between 70 percent and 80 percent of all products sold in U.S. Wal-Mart stores are from China. Following such deals to their eventual end reveals an even more grim future for the American middle class if trade borders continue to dissolve.
If the U.S. and China, for example, were to enter into a single labor and goods market, wages would then converge. Whereas a factory worker in China was making, say, $3 an hour and a comparable worker in the U.S. made $30 an hour; the Chinese worker shoots up to about $15 an hour, and the American worker’s wages collapse to the same. In China, everyone is happy and rich. In the U.S., the government would be overthrown.
“We have free trade within the 50 states,” Stumo says. “By impoverishing our middle class with this offshoring driven by free trade policy, you’re killing the U.S. consumer market, which drives growth, because they have no money. Five or ten percent cheaper prices is overwhelmed in this stage by lack of production and stagnant wages,” he says. “The U.S. middle class cannot afford to fund the rise of other countries anymore.
“Industry doesn’t stand still; industry is always incubating–you give up the jobs, the wealth creation, the supply chain clusters in communities, and that affects the service sector around them,” Stumo says. “You pull those plants out, and a lot of people are out of work, and then the whole general wage level drops because burger-flipping isn’t an upward pressure on wages, but production is.”
Alexander Hamilton composed the first report on manufacturing in the U.S. in 1789. “Hamilton knew we had to produce in order to become wealthy,” Stumo says. “We certainly over-consume and under-produce. Germany, China, Japan, and South Korea have a strategy of overproducing and under-consuming. They basically export their unemployment to us. And that’s not how free markets are supposed to work. They’re supposed to be balanced. It’s a balance versus imbalance issue in production versus consumption.”
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump kept to a campaign promise and withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was at the heart of Obama’s Asia policy. And following blustery language on the campaign trail regarding the U.S.’s trade deficit with China–which reached $309.6 billion in 2016–President Trump received an unprecedented welcome there on his recent Asia trip. Throngs of cheering fans were photographed welcoming the president, who is the first foreign leader to ever be invited to dine in China’s Forbidden City.
Speaking at a summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, President Trump remarked, “I will make bilateral trade agreements with any Indo-Pacific nation that wants to be our partner and that will abide by the principles of fair and reciprocal trade. What we will no longer do is enter into large agreements that tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty, and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible.”
When the jobs left, Danville’s crime rate skyrocketed. And even after a slow decline over the ensuing years, in 2015, Danville still ranked as the second most crime-riddled municipality in the state of Virginia, with violent crimes 211 percent higher than the state average and all crimes 66 percent higher than the national average. In recent years, drug addiction, particularly opioids, have plagued the community, and youth suicide rates have spiked nearly 50 percent above the state average.
An “Open” sign hangs on the door of a long abandoned storefront just north of the Dan River. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
These days, nearly everyone in town has a story to tell about the untimely death of a loved one. Two years ago, Dwayne Martin’s best friend committed suicide. At an early age, Martin, a 32-year-old Danville native and restaurant cook, saw himself getting into trouble. There were drugs around, and his classmates were committing robberies around town. There were no jobs, and Martin left town to attend culinary school.
“Dan River Mills used to sponsor a lot of stuff for the youth to do,” Martin recalls over beers at a local restaurant. The youngest of 11, he says he returned to Danville realizing his nieces and nephews might fall into the same traps he nearly did, and wanted to be a strong role model for them. It was just before coming back he learned of his friend’s suicide.
“He was big into a lot of different activities that got cut out because of funding. He was stressed out about having nothing to do, there’s no jobs around, and he was depressed,” Martin says.
A row of empty storefronts on Danville’s north side, across the river from the White Mill. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
Danvillians are also dying faster in other ways. A report this year from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found Danville ranked 127 out of 133 localities in the state for the overall health of its citizens. The report identified unemployment and childhood poverty as the cause of higher than average rates of adult smoking, obesity, infant mortality, physical inactivity, teenage pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases.
“That’s the story of wage stagnation and off-shoring and this gradual dissolution of the borders,” Stumo told me. “That’s causing this drug addiction, this breakdown of the family, and the like. You have to have rational nationalism. You have to take care of the people in your own border.”
Cautious optimism spread through town a couple years ago. Rumor had it a national security contractor was moving into the White Mill facility, bringing hundreds of jobs with it. That never happened. The city then toyed with turning it into a shopping mall. That also failed. Last year, the city of Danville bought the property for $1.5 million, with no plans for what to do with the space.
The city of Danville recently paid millions to purchase the empty White Mill facility. But plans to turn it into a shopping mall were abandoned. Hope floated as a national security firm considered moving into the space, before also pulling out. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
The city also committed $14.5 million to revitalizing downtown, which as recently as five years ago was a blighted ghost town. Today, downtown has been significantly cleaned up, even if a fresh coat of paint and repaired broken windows only accentuate the fact that, like a Hollywood soundstage, many of the structures are empty props.
On a rainy April late afternoon, I left my budget hotel on Riverside Drive to get something to eat. There is a group of men in dusty workwear who sit outside the entrance each day drinking beer from a cooler and amassing a small pyramid of cigarette butts in the ashtray near the door. At night, women wander the halls. Coquettish shrieks reverberate from the rooms at all hours.
I stopped by Hamm’s, a popular restaurant and bar. The sky had been pregnant and moody all afternoon, the occasional god-light bursting through clouds of rolling blue-grey. From the highway, long dead smokestacks perch ominously on the horizon like the once revered stone deities of a bygone civilization. In the foreground, along Riverside Drive, steam trails from the tops of lesser buildings, fast food restaurants, lined up like minutemen, where the only semblance of an assembly line left in Danville seemed to be the procession of cars inching along the drive-thrus.
In the car over, National Public Radio is running a segment on Janesville, Wisconsin, House Speak Paul Ryan’s hometown. His family has been there for five generations.
Janesville had been making Chevrolets for 85 years. In 2008, Ryan, then a congressman, received a phone call from the chairman and CEO of General Motors informing him that the company would cease all production of Chevrolets at its 4.8 million square foot facility.
What followed there was the same collapse seen in Danville; when GM left, the economy in this Wisconsin community of 60,000 toppled like dominos. Nearby suppliers shut down. Wages collapsed. Marriage rates fell, drug addiction increased, and political partisanship exploded in a once concordant Midwestern, Democrat-leaning town. Wisconsin went for Trump in the 2016 election, the first time the state voted for a Republican in 30 years.
A fence surrounds the shuttered GM assembly plant on May 4, 2009, in Janesville, Wisconsin. Production of GM products at the plant ended in December 2008, eliminating all but a few of the 1,200 remaining jobs which once numbered over 5,000. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
On the NPR show, a caller rings in from Portsmouth, Ohio, to recount a similar story from her community. Heroin is everywhere now, she says.
Curiously absent from the NPR segment and from a book about Janesville released last year, is any mention of globalization, NAFTA, and outsourced jobs overseas. The show’s host and journalists hold the hand of suffering working class Midwesterners, exploiting the fallout with no reference to the cause.
I am from a GM town–Columbia, Tennessee, a small, hilly, lush city about 45-minutes south of Nashville in the heart of Jack Daniels country. It’s known as Muletown, U.S.A. for the annual Mule Day celebration in April. A sign at the entrance to town proclaims Columbia is “Where the Old South Meets the New South.” Grand plantations sweep the landscape amid trailer parks and derelict little homesteads. GM keeps the middle class just above water here, even as the wealthy suburbs of Nashville encroach and bring with them generic strip malls and a more cosmopolitan set of people. Celebrities, including musician Sheryl Crow, have begun buying land in the area.
In September 2017, GM announced it would be cutting 680 jobs at the Spring Hill facility next to Columbia. Built in the 1980s to manufacture GM’s now-discontinued Saturn line, the plant has been plagued by incremental layoffs for years, coinciding with soaring crime rates and drug addiction.
Days after GM’s announcement, subcontractor Ryder Supply Chain Solutions announced it will cut an additional 361 jobs at the Spring Hill facility, a stark reversal from two years ago when the company said it planned to create 600 new jobs in the area.
It is karaoke night at Hamm’s in Danville and the crowd is in good spirits. I sparked conversation with David Thaxton, a high school math teacher.
“I have students who can’t learn because they haven’t had a meal in 24 hours, so I bring food to school to feed my kids so they can learn,” Thaxton, a tall, lanky man in his 30s, tells me.
“Many people in this town are now unemployable,” he says. “There are a lot of people who can’t pass a drug test. That has to do with ten years of economic depression.”
The next morning at House of Hope, a homeless shelter in downtown Danville, a 56-year-old father of five named James tells me he has occupied a bed here for two weeks. He is a former Dan River employee unable to find steady employment in the last few years.
“There was a lot of jobs back then,” he says, sitting in a sunny window of the 16 bed facility that opened in 2008. In the next room, a handful of men are sunk into the sofas in a common area watching television. “There were a lot of factories that were open. I can’t even name half of them.You had so many factories that were open and people mostly had jobs.”
James recently kicked cocaine and alcohol addiction and paid off hefty fines to reinstate his driver’s license.
“Danville always to me been somewhere that was laid back, if you wanted to retire it was good for that. It had a good atmosphere and not too much crime going on. Now the majority of the people I know have left to seek employment. Now it seems the city can only employ about a third of the people who are here. Most the people here are senior citizens, on disability, and not working,” he says.
This year, citing demand, the city of Danville announced plans to open a second homeless shelter. The city’s population, at 41,000, has been in freefall since NAFTA, with 10,000 fewer residents today than in the mid-90s, and many of those who’ve remained were only able to do so because of retirement packages from Dan River Mills.
A row of dilapidated homes in downtown Danville, Virginia. (Chadwick Moore/Breitbart News)
Tim Kaine, current Virginia senator, former governor, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, is a staunch proponent of free trade agreements and was an early fan of NAFTA and later President Obama’s 2015 renewal of the Trade Promotion Authority (or “fast track”), expanding executive power over trade negotiations.
As recently as July 2016, the month of the Democratic Convention, Kaine called the Trans Pacific Partnership, an Obama free trade proposal with Asia reviled by both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump supporters, “an improvement of the status quo.” Only after Sanders’s supporters pressured the party to alter its platform later that month to go against TPP, Kaine said he no longer supported the policy in its current form.
As a state elected official, Kaine has made multiple face-saving trips to Danville, most recently last April. In 2014, Kaine began his keynote address to the Danville Economic Development Summit by telling attendees, “When you talk about issues of globalism and global trade, it’s natural in Danville to think about what we lose in globalism, what jobs might have gone, what manufacturing opportunities might have left. And there is a reality to that that we have to grapple with. And we’re talking about new free trade agreements right now, and we have to talk about what happened when NAFTA was passed since, and analyze what was good and what was bad.”
“This is an area that’s had economic challenges due to the transition from one industry to another industry,” Kaine, who is up for reelection to the senate this year, said, perhaps suggesting that Danville’s welfare system is a type of “industry” on par with manufacturing.
“The global economy, like it or not, that’s where we are. And you’re going to be more likely to succeed if you’re out there aggressively battling,” he said to a chilly audience through his folksy, Joker-grin.
The 2016 election ignited the long-simmering discontent of Americans on the received-end of lectures from politicians like Kaine. As they saw it, the last twenty years was a cycle of betrayal, abandonment, and deceit. First, America’s governing and financial elites stole their livelihoods with destructive trade deals, then lectured them about how great free trade has really been for them, then they ignored communities like Danville as they sunk deeper into decline. Finally—when these “deplorable” Americans chose candidate Donald Trump over the advice of their betters on the political right and the left—they were told, in the words of National Review’s Kevin Williamson, that their broken communities “deserve to die.”
Six months after assuming office, President Trump, speaking from the Rose Garden on his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, told reporters, “I was elected to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Seven months after that, Trump turned his attention sharply to the steel industry. While speaking to members of Congress in February, he calling out Chinese steel dumping into the U.S. market, saying “You see what’s happened with our steel and aluminum industries. They are being decimated by dumping from many countries—in particular one, but many countries.”
Cheap Chinese steel is produced below cost by state-owned entities propped up with heavy government subsidies. China’s economic industrialization began with reforms by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. By 1999, China produced around 123 million metric tons of steel a year. By 2011, just ten years after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, China produced 45 percent of the world’s steel, at 683 million metric tons a year.
In the U.S., steel production peaked in the 1970s at roughly 140 million metric tons, but by 2014 domestic steel production had plummeted by nearly 40 percent, to 88 million metric tons. Behind China and Japan, the U.S. is now the third largest producer of raw steel in the world.
Twenty days after his meeting with congressmen, President Trump signed increased tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum into law.
The move was met with mostly derision from the media. “Trump Misleads The Public On Steel Tariffs,” read the headline at Forbes. “Trump steel tariffs may leave these U.S. steelworkers jobless,” wrote Reuters. “The Real Danger of Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs,” blasted the New Yorker. “U.S. allies see Trump’s steel tariffs as an insult,” wrote the Washington Post.
At the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump was surrounded by steel and aluminum workers who then asked the president to autograph their hardhats. Almost immediately after news spread, citing the tariffs, Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel announced it would re-open an idle plant in Granite City, Illinois, and hire 500 new workers.
Surrounded by applauding steel and aluminum workers, President Trump holds up the “Section 232 Proclamations” on steel imports that he signed in Roosevelt Room of the White House on March 8, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Chadwick Moore is a journalist and conservative political commentator who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow him on Twitter @Chadwick_Moore.
The Imaginary Labor Shortage: Wage Growth Again Too Sluggish to Keep Up With Inflation
While businessmen have been complaining loudly about labor shortages for months, data from the government Thursday showed that wage gains trailed consumer prices in June.
The consumer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1 percent in June compared with May. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.2 percent, the Labor Department said Thursday.
Economists had expected both measures to rise by 0.2 percent. The lower-than-expected core inflation reflects the fact that the headline number was driven by higher energy prices, while the core figure was dragged down by price declines in furniture, clothing, and tobacco. Prices of hotel rooms fell 3.7 percent from the previous month. Oil prices have been up sharply.
Compared with a year ago, consumer prices are up 2.9%, the largest gain since February 2012. Core inflation rose a more modest 2.3% in June from a year ago.
Average hourly earnings were up 2.7% in June compared with a year earlier. As a result, average inflation-adjusted wages were about flat for the second month in a row.
Prices are unlikely to keep outpacing wage growth. If wage growth remains low, consumer spending will likely drag, slowing economic growth.
The slow pace of wage growth undermines the case many business leaders have been making for increased immigration to offset the alleged labor shortage. If anything, adding new workers is likely to slow wage growth even more, making a broader economic slowdown more likely.
The lower than expected core-inflation figure also implies that U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum have not driven prices higher, as many critics of the Trump administration’s policies had predicted.
"In other words, the boom in corporate profits has depended on the suppression of wages and the intensified exploitation of the working class."
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."
Washington, D.C. (July 12, 2018) – A new report published by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals an “occupational mismatch” among highly educated immigrants, those who arrive in the United States with a college degree or more. The report calls into question how much paper education credentials should play in a merit-based immigration system.
Highly educated immigrants often hold jobs for which they appear over-qualified on paper; only 22 percent of immigrants with at least a college degree have an elite-skill occupation. These immigrants’ skills often do not fully transfer to the U.S. labor market, and just as importantly, the value of their higher education varies depending on their sending country.
Jason Richwine, an independent public policy analyst and author of the report, cautions lawmakers on their approach to high-skill immigration policy. Richwine points out that “Highly educated immigrants certainly offer more economic benefits than less-educated immigrants, but paper credentials are not necessarily a reliable predictor of employment or income success.”
• Among immigrants with a college degree, 20 percent have a low-skill (bottom third) occupation, compared to 7 percent of natives.
• Nearly 30 percent of Mexican immigrants with a college degree have a low-skill occupation, as do 35 percent of Central American immigrants.
• About 85 percent of Canadian immigrants with at least a college degree have a high-skill (top third) occupation, compared to 73 percent of natives and 53 percent of Mexican immigrants.
• Among immigrants with an advanced degree, 37 percent have an elite-skill (top tenth) occupation, compared to 50 percent of natives.
• Length of U.S. residency is not strongly correlated with occupational skill level.
College-Grad Salaries Eroded by Hidden Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers
Every CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.
In an article titled “Workers Welcome Wage Gains, But Companies Feel Squeeze,” the voice of corporate America, the Wall Street Journal, warns that workers’ demands for increased wages are threatening to bring the stock market bonanza to an end.
The article acknowledges that the striving of workers to reverse years of stagnating and declining wages is in conflict with the profit drive of corporate America. It thereby implicitly admits that the working class and the capitalist class are engaged in a zero-sum class war.
“Rising wages are beginning to eat into the profits of some US companies,” the article begins. “Businesses from dollar stores to hotel operators to fast food chains have warned in recent months that higher labor costs have been a drag on their profits—a potential headwind for the nine-year stock market rally as it struggles for momentum ahead of the second-quarter earnings season.”
Workers know that the average wage growth of 2.5 percent over the last 16 months is not enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. But as far as the Wall Street Journal is concerned, this slight increase is a “threat.”
The article cites a Goldman Sachs report noting that a one percent increase in labor costs decreases corporate earnings by 0.8 percent. In other words, the boom in corporate profits has depended on the suppression of wages and the intensified exploitation of the working class.
The article follows the release of the minutes from the June meeting of the US Federal Reserve, showing that the central concern of the country’s central bankers is the danger of a surge in inflation, by which they mean, above all, wages. The Journal reported Wednesday that a majority of the regional Fed bank chiefs are now in favor of raising interest rates at a faster clip. The purpose of this shift in policy is to slow down economic growth and the rate of hiring in order to undercut signs of a wages push by the American working class.
In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s.
While corporate profits climb to new heights, the reality of life for tens of millions of workers is defined by increases in the indices of social misery: growing opioid abuse, increasing maternal death rates, exhausting and dangerous workplace conditions, declining life expectancy, crumbling infrastructure and mountains of student loan debt.
This is an international phenomenon. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently published its 2018 Global Employment Outlook Report, which noted: “At the end of 2017, nominal wage growth in the OECD area was only half of what it was just before the Great Recession for comparable levels of unemployment.” As a result, “poverty has grown among the working-age population.”
Not only have wages failed to keep up with rising corporate earnings, they have also fallen behind increases in productivity. The OECD report notes, “If real median wages had perfectly tracked productivity growth over 1995-2014, they would have been 13 percent higher at the end of the period.”
The ruling classes of the US and Europe took advantage of the financial crisis and resulting mass unemployment to suppress wages, boost corporate profits and intensify exploitation. This has continued in the most recent period despite nominally lower unemployment rates.
From 1995 to 2013, aggregate labor’s share of gross domestic product across the OECD fell 3.5 percentage points—a figure that represents a wealth transfer equal to roughly $1.89 trillion per year by the end of this period.
In the United States, the labor share of nonfarm national income fell from 66.4 percent in 2000 to 58.9 percent in 2018—a transfer of wealth that will equal $1.4 trillion in 2018 alone.
These massive shifts are not the product of “accidental” economic processes, but of deliberate policies enacted by the ruling classes of the major financial powers in the US and Europe. Beginning in 2008, the US Federal Reserve began pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the vaults of the banks and corporations, keeping interest rates at or near zero and inflating the stock market.
The Obama administration, after working with the Bush administration to oversee the bank bailout, implemented a strategy to slash workers’ wages and benefits. In the 2009 auto bailout, the Obama White House, with the full support of the United Auto Workers union, imposed a blanket 50 percent wage cut on all new-hires.
With the passage of Obamacare in 2010, the Democrats provided incentives for companies to raise workers’ out-of-pocket health care costs and cut benefits, or eliminate employer-provided health care altogether. The 2013-2014 Detroit bankruptcy was a milestone in the assault on public employee pensions and health benefits.
The jobs that were added after the market crash were overwhelmingly part-time and low paying. As the San Francisco Federal Reserve acknowledged last week, “high rates of involuntary part-time work are here to stay.” Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population.
What made this social counterrevolution possible was the suppression of the class struggle, in which the trade unions played the decisive role. The level of US strike activity over the previous decade was the lowest since the government began keeping records in 1947.
The surge in strike activity this year, led by the teachers’ walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, and above all the fact that the walkouts were launched on the initiative of rank-and-file teachers, not the unions, have filled the ruling class with dread, prompting it to take economic measures to undermine workers’ militancy.
The social counterrevolution is worldwide. Across Europe, governments are racing to implement policies aimed at eliminating whatever is left of their social safety nets: the cuts to the National Health Service and public housing in Great Britain, the passage of punitive labor laws and the attacks on rail workers in France, new austerity measures in Germany, and the EU-dictated austerity regimes in Spain, Italy and Greece.
Workers all over the world, increasingly connected by international communications and supply lines, are advancing demands for substantial wage increases. In the US, teachers in Arizona asked for $20,000 wage increases. In Germany, metalworkers demanded a 6 percent wage increase for 3.9 million workers. In France, rail workers remain on strike against attacks on wages and benefits. Norwegian oil workers went on strike Tuesday demanding an 8 percent wage hike.
In Brazil and China, truck drivers have struck for a large wage increase, while in Argentina truckers have demanded 30 percent raises. In South Africa, thousands of public utility workers voted Friday to reject an offer from their employer, Eskom, of a 7 percent wage increase. Garment workers in Bangladesh are engaging in protests demanding payment of the minimum wage.
The Wall Street Journal’s concern is that any wages push will bring down the stock market like a house of cards. But with each strike and protest, the fundamental question posed to the working class is: Who controls how the world’s wealth is allocated?
The immense economic and technological capacities presently used to exploit workers and increase the wealth of the financial oligarchy must be transformed into tools for the reorganization of the world economy to meet human need. The trillions of dollars taken from wages and benefits and funneled into the stock market must be redirected into public works program to provide housing, health care, education, proper nutrition, clean water and access to culture for billions of people worldwide.
Eric London
College-Grad Salaries Eroded by Hidden Army of 1.5 Million Visa-Workers
Every CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.
"The kind of people needed for violent change these days are living in off-the-grid rural compounds, or the “gangster paradise” where the businesses of drugs, guns, and prostitution are much more lucrative than “transforming” America along Cuban lines." BRUCE THORNTON
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There can be no resolution to any social problem confronting the population in the United States and internationally outside of a frontal assault on the wealth of the financial elite.
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The political system is controlled by this social layer, which uses a portion of its economic plunder to bribe politicians and government officials, whether Democratic or Republican.
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THE INVITED INVADING HORDES: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."
Mark Levin:
‘Unbridled Immigration, Legal and Illegal, Is Taking the Country Down’
This annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border crosser.
A study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
This annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border crosser.
A study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
AMERICA: NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the last four decades and while the U.S. represents just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according to a new report.”
Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.
Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground.
“Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country through the process known as “chain migration” whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of relatives to the U.S. In the next 20 years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import 15 million new foreign-born voters. Between 7 and 8 million of those foreign-born voters will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.” JOHN BINDER
THE SECRET REPORT ON ILLEGALS TAKING MIDDLE AND HIGH END JOBS…. What? You thought they only took the sh//// -it jobs?
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